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1. Stephen Crane’s Abilities
- University of Minnesota Press
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· 35 ·· CHAPTER 1 · Stephen Crane’s Abilities I cannot help vanishing and disappearing and dissolving. It is my foremost trait. —Stephen Crane, letter to Ripley Hitchcock, March 15, 1896 Stephen Crane has long been hard to place within a specific literary tradition or period. His commitment to portraying social types and typical events in his fiction, his interest in embodied cognition, his preoccupation with problems of faith and skepticism, and his drive to experience the “strenuous life” all place him firmly within the canon of the realists and naturalists. Yet his impressionistic style, so redolent of film and photography, along with his fascination with the mediated nature of perception and with the shocks administered by war, have made him, for many, a herald of the international modernist movement in literature and the arts that arose during and after World War I. One solution to this problem is to understand Crane as a radical empiricist and his fiction as an illustration of ideas that have much in common with those of C. S. Peirce and William James—a long-neglected parallel that I emphasize in the final section of this chapter. Ultimately, however, in the pages that follow, I show that Crane turns to a poetics of the virtual—and in particular to a poetics of color—to gain a critical purchase on forms of technological alienation that the philosophers of “virtual experience” remained unable to address. One of the most commonly reported facts about Crane, whose signature subject was the experience of war, is that before writing his most acclaimed novel, The Red Badge of Courage, he had never seen a war. Contemporaneous reviewers nearly always commented on Crane’s inexperience , either praising his amazing capacity for imagining how war feels or condemning him for being only a “theoretical soldier.”1 Crane’s mentor, William Dean Howells, tended to take the latter view. Howells, the most influential critic of the day and a champion of the realist novel, was to note 36 STEPHEN CRANE’S ABILITIES (after Crane’s death) that in writing Red Badge, his protégé had “lost himself in a whirl of wild guesses at the fact from the ground of insufficient witness . . . though it was what the public counted a success.”2 Criticisms like these evidently had an effect on Crane, who only grudgingly produced further war stories on demand and avidly sought to become a war correspondent following Red Badge’s publication, first in the Greco–Turkish War of 1897, and then in the Spanish–American War. Yet even in the context of war reporting, Crane’s lack of direct experience continued to be the most salient fact about him for others. His well-known ability to convincingly depict an experience of battle without having seen one led editors to market him as a striking witness to the “reality” of war. “That Was the ROMANCE: ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’ This is the REALITY: A Battle of To-Day in Greece. By STEPHEN CRANE,” the San Francisco Examiner trumpeted in 1897.3 Crane’s ability to depict war without having seen one has often been creditedbycontemporarycriticstohisfacilityatthematicallyandformally incorporating media images of war into his writing, particularly since the Spanish–American and Philippine conflicts were arguably the first “media wars” in American history. Bill Brown has documented Crane’s many references to war imagery and has argued that Crane’s texts show the ways in which, during wartime, the public sphere became less a site for the exercise of deliberative reason than for a “mass subject” to be “produced by, by bearing witness to, an image ubiquitously reproduced.”4 Amy Kaplan has argued that Crane deliberately presented war as a mediated spectacle or image to be consumed in Red Badge in order to challenge rampant discourses of U.S. imperialism in the 1890s.5 In a highly influential reading, Michael Fried has argued that the metaphors of violent writing running throughout Crane’s texts allegorize the material work of his own writing, and by extension that of the photographic treatment of reality to which both journalism and realist fiction aspire.6 Such readers emphasize the ways in which technology and spectacle in Crane’s work disclose the alterity of the self and its reliance on the materiality of writing and representation . They position Crane as moving away from realism and toward a new set of literary aspirations and abilities that might be more properly described as modernist or avant-garde. Yet Crane’s embrace of such aspirations...