Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (review)

Studies in American Fiction281 multitoned inclusiveness of the poetic sequences, precisely the texture he sees so clearly in the novels. The next two chapters are the book's best. Beyond the fact that the whole is a fine introduction to Warren's work, these are its major contribution to Warren scholarship. Chapter 8 explores Warren's concern with significant rural setting in The Cave, Flood, and Afeer Me in the Green Glen and, in ways too rich for summary here, often brilliantly, even conclusively, defends all three against past misreadings. Chapter 9 is an extended and satisfying study of Warren's most recent novel, A Place to Come To, showing its autobiographical elements and its narrative relation to AU the King's Men, analyzing its life and art version of Warren's long obsession with the themes of experience and idea, fact and vision, naturalism and man's active resistance to it, and judging it a novel approaching All the King's Men in stature. In recent years, Warren's critical repute as novelist has fallen as his poetic reputation soared. These chapters force rethinking the former process. Walker's book ends with a summarizing chapter, a 1969 interview of Warren by the author, and selective bibliographies. I carped above that his method necessitated slightings of context. His conclusion partly remedies this flaw. It generalizes suggestively not only about Warren's style and themes, his realistic uses of melodrama, and his "Southernness ," but also about his relations to Conrad, to American literature, to the current unease with the novel as story, and to Christian thought. Most impressively, it asserts the philosophical and ethical attitudes that center and unify Warren's work, demonstrate his essential contemporaneity, and explicitly justify the subtitle implicitly justified throughout the book: a vision earned. Referring to Bernard Bergonzi's remark that Warren gives successive insights into the unfolding of a mind rather than "a series of icons," Walker summarizes Warren's creation of a literature of process rather than product, of fact and idea, and concludes with his own earned vision of Warren's major and continuing achievement: "It is Warren's profound and realistic sense of the obligation upon us to earn our dreams by demanding that they work in a world of prose and imperfection that gives his works their fundamental distinction, making them ever more rewardingly a place to come to. He is a writer by whom all our biographies may be immeasurably enriched" (p. 239). Northeastern UniversityGuy Rotella Nagel, James. Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980. 190 pp. Cloth: $16.50. Stephen Crane has been linked with Impressionism since reviewers in the midnineties attempted to describe the innovative style of Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage in terms of painting. In Crane's lifetime Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad commented perceptively and appreciatively on his Impressionism, and H. G. Wells and Edward Garnett described the new style brilliantly, better in fact than most academic critics of later years, who were often handicapped by the critical inadequacy of such terms as Realism, Naturalism, and Romanticism, which largely determined the principles and shape of our standard literary histories. As a result the issues of Crane's debt to Impressionist aesthetics and of his relation to other literary movements have been long clouded by confusion, irrelevancy, and inconsistency. Professor Nagel's aim in this ex- 282Reviews cellent study is to review these issues in a full and formal analysis of Crane's art in the context of other nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional styles. In this aim Professor Nagel succeeds admirably. The first chapter of the book is concerned chiefly with backgrounds and general definitions. It reviews facts and conjectures about Crane's knowledge of Impressionist aesthetics and sets forth a full and notably precise analysis of its basic philosophical premises. The second chapter demonstrates the relation of Crane's narrative methods and devices to these principles, a thorough and discriminating essay on his artful use of the limited narrator, multiple narrative perspectives, uninterpreted sensory apprehensions by the central intelligence, and other such narrative devices and techniques. Chapter III shows how the idea of...