3. Nature as Protagonist in “The Open Boat”

The bottom of the sea is cruel.

—Hart Crane, “Voyages”

As many critics have argued, questions of perspective and epistemology are central to Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (Kent; Hutchinson). The story’s first sentence famously clues us to this: “None of them knew the color of the sky” (68). But behind the uncertainties of perspective is a determinable ontology, a presence, or rather, I shall argue, a sort of presence, the existence of which implies a rectified aesthetic response. This response emerges, however, from negations, denials, and occultations: what is not seen, who is not there, and what does not happen.³ Here again, when we look at nature we behold things that are not there and miss “the nothing that is.”

Fully as much as Stevens in “The Snow Man,” Crane is concerned with certain conventions of representation: personification, the picturesque, the American sublime, and the melodramatic, which although it does not inform “The Snow Man” is played on in Stevens’s “The American Sublime.” Crane’s story is intertextual with nature poetry, sentimental poetry, hymns, and landscape art, as well as with Darwinism, theological clichés, and, less obviously, theological actualities. For the most part these conventions add up to what the Stevens poem declares is “not there.” To get to “the nothing that is” we must first traverse this ocean of error. Doing so helps keep our perspective not on the men in the boat but on the “real” (with the scare quotes actually meant to be scary) ocean. If the story is at least as much about Nature as about men in nature, if nature is a central character in the story, then one of the story’s central questions is how to see nature from a natural rather than human perspective.

In a passage in section 1 of “The Open Boat” the sea is depicted in an orgy of hyperbolic personifications:

A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dinghy one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average experience, which is never at sea in a dinghy. As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut out all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water.

(69)

Nature here has malign intent, being “nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.” Nature has more agency, and an agency more primary, than that of the men in the boat, who are merely in a reactive relation to the waves. In the final section of the story the correspondent is shown in an ironically passive relation to his own survival:

Then the correspondent performed his one little marvel of the voyage. A large wave caught him and flung him with ease and supreme speed completely over the boat and far beyond it. It struck him even then as an event in gymnastics and a true miracle of the sea. An overturned boat in the surf is not a plaything to a swimming man.

(91)

As J. C. Levenson precisely observes, “Though the correspondent may be said ambiguously to have performed his little marvel, the wave and not the man has controlled the event” (lxv). In the men’s apprehension the waves are making an “effort” to kill them, threateningly “snarling” at them, the water “grim” in its resolve (69). Yet the heightened emotions attributed to Nature are rhetorically offset by the understated, calculatedly stilted, legalistic language of “a singular disadvantage” and “do something effective in the way of.” Crane is squaring the circle, on the one hand showing Nature as an effective presence and agency and on the other mocking the all-too-human tendency to personify nature...