Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane’s City Sketches

In March 1894, Stephen Crane, at that time an ill-nourished and as yet little-known author, visited the Harlem apartment that Hamlin Garland shared with his brother and displayed what to Garland seemed an astonishing parlor trick: he wrote out several poems as Garland watched. As Garland later recalled, he then asked, “Have you any more?” To this, “Crane, pointing to his temple, replied, ‘I have four or five up here . . . all in a little row. . . . That’s the way they come—in little rows, all ready to be put down on paper.’”¹ That Crane conceived of poetry, usually a medium based in sound, in visual terms accords with the long-noted presence of visual imagery and color in his works, most notably The Red Badge of Courage. According to his biographer Paul Sorrentino, Crane was “endowed with synesthesia,” explaining to his friend Willis Brooks Hawkins that “every sound evoked in him the sight of a color.”² In part because of his use of color, Crane was called an impressionist by his contemporaries as well as by later critics.³ Crane’s contemporary Frank Norris likewise thought in terms of impressionism: a visual artist who trained at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1887–1889,⁴ Norris was a “verbal Impressionist” whose “[i]mpressionism extends to the aural” and olfactory, traits that further link him with Crane.⁵

As part of their orientation toward the visual arts, Norris and Crane adopted fictional techniques that parallel and anticipate the techniques of early cinema, including their handling of multiple perspectives and points of view, close-ups of significant details, and evocative intercutting among scenes and episodes.⁶ In several of their city sketches, Crane and Norris focus on short episodes that might be called “falling stories,” scenes of persons falling into helplessness or uncontrolled actions in the presence of a crowd of spectators that witness but do not aid the stricken individual. What the falling stories record is the crowd’s response to a private act that disorders public space by blurring the boundaries between public and private. The falling story occasioned by sudden disability upsets the implicit social contract that in the nineteenth century defined those with disabilities as possessing not only fewer implicit rights to be in the public sphere but also fewer explicit legal rights to be visible there. By returning the gaze, the person who has fallen challenges the strict demarcation between public and private, visible and hidden, and physical health and disability.

Falling stories signify larger naturalistic issues of human agency and the powerful forces aligned against the individual, yet the visual exchange between spectators and the fallen subject more specifically raises the issue of disability in naturalism, a literary form that traditionally valorizes strength. In Norris’ falling stories, such as “Little Dramas of the Curbstone,” the narrator exhibits what Christophe Den Tandt has called the “hypnotic fascination” of “the untotalizable urban scene,” a mesmeric state that “acts as an exacerbated avatar of the flâneur’s gaze, as Walter Benjamin describes it.”⁷ Transfixed by the spectacle, the narrator does not act on the violent impulses that the state of helpless victims evokes in him but is in turn paralyzed by his fantasies. Moving past the “hypnotic fascination,” characters in “The Associated Un-Charities” and Vandover and the Brute (1914) find amusement by inflicting humiliation on their unresisting victims, actions that reinscribe their performance of white male masculinity as normative.

In contrast, Crane’s sketches “In the Depths of a Coal Mine,” “The Men in the Storm,” “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers,” and “An Eloquence of Grief” mark the critical break between the ordinary and extraordinary that occurs when a person falls, thus dividing a public space between a spectacle of disability and a crowd of spectators. Crane’s critique of spectatorship enters the picture when crowds become destabilized at the sight of the disabled body, often a person differentiated by race, ethnicity, or gender from the presumably white male narrative persona or camera eye. The sudden collapse renders the...