Fiction and Belief

fiction and Belief Marston La France, A Reading of Stephen Crane. Oxford University Press. 1971. $9.50. 272 pp. Peter Buitenhuis, The Grasping Imagination: The American Writings of Henry James. University of Toronto Press. 1970. $12.50. 288 pp. MAX WESTBROOK In an important book called Art and Illusion, E. H. Gombrich shows convincingly that we cannot capture that exact stroke which turns lines into a picture. The trick or illusion by which paint dabs and brush strokes become representational always escapes us. Up close, a portrait is meaningless color. At a proper distance, the blotches of meaningless color vanish, and a portrait or landscape appears. Gombrich says "we cannot, strictly speaking, watch ourselves having an illusion." We "cannot make use of an illusion and watch it." Gombrich is writing about art., but what he says is intriguingly relevant to literary criticism. What, for example, is the trick or illusion by which a novelist makes an idea stop being an idea and become whatever it is we have in mind when we say that Moby Dick is profound and Typee a lesser work of Melville's apprenticeship, that Huckleberry Finn is a major novel and Tom Sawyer a minor novel? If we talk about style, imagery, structure, or drama, we feel comfortable; but if our analysis of what we think of as aesthetic qualities becomes substantive, then our analysis also falls over into the realm of ideas. And once again the novelist has tricked us. We have missed the brush stroke of image or story, or something else, which enables the novel to be a novel and not a piece ofprose with make-believe anecdotes to serve as illustrations. Two recent and important books of literary criticism which are a part of our most fruitful efforts to deal with this problem are Marston La France's A Reading of Stephen Crane and Peter Buitenhuis's The Grasping Imagination: The American Writings of Henry James. Both books are excellent, and I recommend them highly. Both combine a pre-formalist concern for themes and sources with a post-formalist concern for sensitive analysis of language and structure. And both study those ineluctable brush strokes by which Crane and James affirm ethical values while seeming to deny any possible basis for belief. La France's book is what the title says it is, a nreading" of Stephen Crane, that is, an interpretation based on the poetry and fiction of Crane THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. III, NO. 1 1 SPRING 1972 and not on an external purchase in the times or in some non-literary discipline. The approach suggests the formalist's determination to avoid preconceptions. But La France uses also the methods of the literary historian , and he does have a thesis: in Crane's world, events are accidental and without purpose. Man is the sole proprietor of morality. It follows that "the separation between the physical world and man's moral world is absolute." Belief in this separation, La France concludes, 1 'underlies everything Crane wrote." La France calls this "stoic humanism/' the belief that it is man's responsibility to assert moral energy in order to give a humanistic direction to what are otherwise purposeless events. That's a very good thesis. And when it breaks down, in the analysis of "The Upturned Face" for example , I think the flaw is probably in the application and not in the thesis itself. "The Upturned Face" is about two young officers in the Civil War who are in charge of a burial detail. Bill, the dead soldier, is a personal friend, bullets are flying, an enlisted man on the detail is hit by rifle fire, and the two young officers are close to hysteria. Bullets continue to snip in the air, and the dead friend, who has been placed on his back in a shallow grave, must be covered with dirt. The young officers stare at his dead face. According to La France, the two officers "refuse to accept the fact of death even though this fact is harshly forced upon them by the necessity of an immediate burial before they can withdraw and save their own lives." Their fear...