by William Crisman Stephen Crane's career as a war correspondent in the Spanish/Cuban-American War and the body of fiction that came from it have often been taken as an apologetic compensation for Crane's method of composing The Red Badge of Courage. (1) Though at time of publication mistaken for a Civil War veteran's first-hand account, that seminal modern war novel was wholly imaginary; Crane in fact sometimes recalled that what interviewing he did to construct his story was worthless. His real reporting in newspaper and fiction during the Spanish/Cuban-American War, then, becomes in the minds of many readers an attempt to discover in reality what Crane had invented in the imagination, a personal, expiatory quest that produced at best only slight art apart from "The Open Boat." This view might change, however, if critics shifted its initial assumption. Dropping the emphasis on any attempt on Crane's part to "make up" for not being in the Civil War might illuminate a different intent and expose a different subject matter in his Cuban war fiction. This fiction is "journalistic" in much more than the usually intended sense of being "mere sketches" jotted down by Crane as reporter. In all but two of Crane's Cuban war stories ("The Price of the Harness" and "The Sergeant's Private Madhouse"), journalists or journalism become objects of the fiction as well, and even in "The Sergeant's Private Madhouse" the characters have been charged with being infected by journalism. (2) Additionally, as Willa Cather pointed out, most of the Cuban stories do not merely present cliche journalism "much tainted by the war correspondent idiom of the times." (3) The craft of reporting itself, rendering event into language, gains center attention. In three of Crane's Cuban war stories, the tales are narrated by a reporter. Sometimes this narration draws emphatic attention to itself. In "An Illusion in Red and White," the reader encounters nothing but a quoted narrative by a reporter to another reporter. Sometimes the reporter-narrator is more elusive, and thereby in his own way perhaps even more obtrusive. The reader is surprised to learn, for instance, that the "narrator" of "This Majestic Lie" is not only a reporter but an indefinite group of reporters that, like some journalistic colonial animal, calls itself "we" and gathers "our" dispatches (742). (4) In a third variation on this pattern, the narrator of "Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo" never makes his profession clear but simply makes known that he is a non-soldier among soldiers, leaving his identity as a reporter a ghostly, unstated given. When Crane's Cuban tales lack a journalistic narrator, they sometimes have a journalistic main character. Most famously, in the one universally acknowledged fictional masterpiece of the Cuban war, "the correspondent" becomes something of the hero in "The Open Boat." The main central reporter can, conversely, be a comic buffoon, like the title character in "The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins," or a callous, unsympathetic "madman for the purpose of distributing the news" like the journalist Shackles ("The Revenge of the Adolphus," 573; Shackles also appears in this character in "Virtue in War" and "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen"). Indeed, Thomas A. Gullason suggests that William B. Perkins is not only a journalist but also the representative journalist as Pulitzer and Hearst created him. (5) A final group of stories projects no journalist figure but rather journalism itself as a shadowy background force. In "The Clan of No-Name", for instance, the Spanish colonel is finally motivated only by how he will appear in "the official report" (536), just as the opposing, insurgent, leader in "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" is highly sensitive to his image "in the newspapers" (370). The purpose of this catalogue is not simply to demonstrate how often journalism is an object in Crane's war tales but also to indicate the variety with which it appears, having almost never the same form twice. Crane plainly takes journalism not merely as a topic but also as an aesthetic element to be varied and integrated into his fiction in multiple ways. If journalism becomes so thoroughly involved in the process of fiction, the suspicion arises that Crane is using it as a way of thinking about fiction. As Michael Fried says, journalism in these stories becomes "exemplary for literary writing as such." (6) "Reporting", the uses of "reporting," and problems with "reporting" overlap quite naturally between journalism and fiction writing. When such reporting concerns the act of communicating itself, as it does in "Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo," one can hardly avoid Christopher Benfey's conclusion that Crane is interested in journalists and fiction writers as alike in being "trafficker[s] in codes and signals." (7) This overlap is most apparent in "An Illusion in Red and White," the tale in which the journalist narrator is most explicit. The "gentle tale" that the "brightening star of New York journalism" tells his fellow reporter on a dispatch boat off Cuba had been the result of a "murder assignment" from his "city editor"; yet the reporter-listener suspects the story is "more" than the truth, and indeed the reporter-speaker says he is telling the murder story as "I imagine it was done," complete with notorious invented quotations (727). The boundary obviously blurs between newspaper and imaginative writing, even in the story's title. "An Illusion in Red and White" refers on the one hand to the murder plot in which a wife killer brainwashes his children into believing a stranger with red hair and white hands murdered their mother, even though they saw their father do it. However, the title also recalls Crane's remark elsewhere on sensational battle reports "which in a nation's history stand out in crimson letters, becoming tales of blood" ("The Price of the Harness," 514). "In red and white," then, suggests a play on "in black and white," the appearance of print on the page. These journalistic reports are again in the process of becoming "tales"--an "illusion"--as the content of the story itself represents a fictionalizing of reality. There was no man with red hair and white hands, yet the story of him comes obsessively to supplant the testimony of the children's own senses. The slide from reporting into fiction, as in the "red" report that becomes "tales of blood," recalls another connection between journalism and fiction writing that is familiar and that goes beyond speculative lie-swapping between two reporters. Headlines produce national fictions at multiple levels. For the callow anti-hero of "The Second Generation," "reading war rumors" in the paper makes the "air ... blue and gold with pomp of soldiering," while across the nation "in every ear rang the music of military glory" (636). In "The Revenge of the Adolphus," "newspapers" are filled with bombast about the "grand daring" of the story's sad, minor sea battle (583); and in "This Magnificent Lie," Havana is in an uproar over Spanish newspaper lies of Spanish forces overrunning Boston and Philadelphia (740). To investigate journalism is to investigate fiction production. Crane's object in the "mere sketches" that marked the end of his career is to investigate the origin and implication of his own fictive art. The setting and action of the Spanish/Cuban-American War stories abstractly parallel "reportage" in both journalism and fiction. If the intent of reporting is to convey, the very environment of these stories seems conveyant. "A murmur arose from the ... grass" in "The Price of the Harness" (508), while "from the ground ... came a low chuckle of ironical comment" (509). The men meanwhile talk back to the grass. "Putting his lips close to a tuft of grass," one soldier "formulated oaths" (508), while, dying, another "was holding an argument on the condition of the turf" (519). "The whole scene would have spoken to the ... soldiers" (509). In another story "a voice spoke from the sky" ("Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure," 372), while in another "the sea talked" ("God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen," 542). If the natural world seems out to talk, so does the manufactured world of war. The War Department is full of "small caliber vociferation" ("The Second Generation," 644). In the field, "bullets seemed ... to speak their wish to kill" ("The Clan of No-Name," 532), or "a field gun spoke" ("The Charge of William B Perkins," 556). Under such conditions, the familiar expression "report of the guns" takes on the status of pun, and Crane never lets his reader forget that journalistic "reporting" itself has a kind of sound: because of "the newspapers," "whenever on a quiet night the President put his head out of the White House he could hear the distant vast commonwealth humming" ("Virtue in War," 617). Seen in the context of interlocking public articulations, the language of nature has implications more ominous than what Frank Bergon takes as Crane's attempt to "humanize what is humanly incomprehensible." (8) Especially in stories without reporters as narrators or characters, this tendency for setting to speak is joined by actions of conveyance and transmission, analogous to conveying through language. If Joseph Church is right that elsewhere in Crane "fishing serves as an especially apt allegory for reading, for it involves lines, surfaces, depths," how much more so is war allegorical of all interchange, with its "lines of communication" that allow the "report" of the guns. (9) These are not stories of bravery (or cowardice) and battle pure and simple, but narratives about trying to get something into or out of Cuba. Actual troop delivery is the occasion of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," an event that makes an accompanying reporter "shriek ... Army Lands Near Santiago! Special Type! Half the front page!" (543); and the enterprise in "The Price of the Harness" is road building, recalling figurative in-roads, the attempt to reach, transport, deliver, convey, in a story that Eric Solomon says has "the pathos of [events] reported in the morning paper." (10) Indeed, the symbolic importance of road building in "The Price of the Harness" has gone almost universally unnoticed among critics, and yet this motif is primary to the story from the first sentence on: "Twenty-five men were making a road out of a path up the hillside" (1). (11) The distinction of "road," which allows important ingress, and "path" becomes crucial in a tale where soldiers are ambushed "on the narrow weed paths" or "a path through a jungle" (8f. and 12), and where advancing infantry have to wear "a path through the tall grass" (19). Martin cannot at first get to medical attention because a "fence was there, it stopped his progress" (18), and Grierson is discovered "biting madly with his pincers at a barbed-wire fence" (27). Roads that narrow to paths only to disappear or be blocked by fences create a correlative to the project of communication as symbolized in war, to reach from "here" to "there." Among Crane's important metaphors for transmitting sense through language are the two major convoys of war: the commissariat, which transports food to the troops, and materiel supply, which conveys their weapons and ammunition. Both readily become correlatives to verbal transmission. Straggling for and receiving a commission because of the newspapers he has read, Caspar in "The Second Generation" finds himself a commissary officer. Hopes for incoming food are common in "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and "The Price of the Harness," and trafficking in food becomes as much an obsession as arms trafficking in other stories. Again, the characters' effort is to find some inroad, this time through what Spanish newspapers dubbed the U.S. Navy's "grocery blockade"; in fact, the builders of the literal in-road in "The Price of the Harness" are portrayed as "work[ing] like gardeners," joining motifs of road construction to food procurement (507). And again Crane portrays this in-road as attempting a conveyance or transmission parallel to that of communication. In "This Majestic Lie," the woman who finally brings scarce food through to Johnnie is known to the police as "a tongue! One vast tongue!" for her incessant talking (747). Johnnie himself had been in agricultural commerce and is now a spy trying to send back "several pounds of useful information" back to the U.S. Navy (754), as if the information itself were itself some sack of potatoes. Conveying food is a noticably uncertain business in Crane's war tales. Exchange for food fails initially in "This Majestic Lie" when the owner of a Cuban cafe threatens Johnnie into paying a fortune for a meager meal he never receives, after which he obtains his food only through a devious black-market connection. Food itself, for all of its naturally positive associations, appears almost a debased object in this and other of the war-journalism tales, in ways suggesting bad communication. The selfish commissary officer in "The Second Generation," Caspar, out to eat the food himself, is thwarted by superior officers who steal the food themselves. Stuffing their faces with Spam, the officers can barely express their contempt for the commissary thief through crumbs and spittle: "`Mush be selfish young pig,' said one of the colonels, with his mouth full" (640). "This Majestic Lie's.... vast tongue"-the blackmarketeer in food--sounds little different, in her sobbing for "bread ... Br-e-a-d" (751), from the dying man in "The Price of the Harness" who, "shot in the head," keeps wailing "Bread! Bread! Oh, God, can't you give me bread? Bread!" (515). (12) The gibberish from the fatal head wound and the wailing for bread in Havana collapse into one meaningless sound, which--in Havana--leads Johnnie to command "Don't speak to me!" (750). The appropriate irony of his impatience with transmitted food is that his own dream of "several pounds of information" transmitted through espionage may as well be gibberish. He collects careful information he is never able to deliver, about a city the navy never intended to attack anyway. Transporting weapons, a more famous theme of war-time conveyance because of the stature of "The Open Boat," also usually fails in Crane's war fiction, or almost does. The Commodore in "The Open Boat" goes down with all its guns long before reaching Cuba; the ship in "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" barely deposits its guns before going down itself; and "The Clan of No-Name" follows delivery of filibustered guns across the human countryside, but at great human cost. A special etymological richness is built into the term "filibuster" that is relevant for treating Crane's exploration of gun-smuggling as an analogue more generally for communication. In American English, the word has a double sense that Crane's contemporaries would certainly have recognized. "Filibustering" is the (especially) Senatorial practice of eating up time with pointless talk, a practice only somewhat curtailed by rules of cloture in 1917. Crane is clearly aware of this meaning, as his reference to such misbehavior on the Senate floor in "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" suggests (363). The additional--and, in Crane's usage, primary--sense is that of mercenary adventuring in foreign countries. At root of both senses, the word is a Spanish corruption of Dutch "vrijbuiter," and English "freebooter," or pirate. Crane's use of the word is revealing in several regards, and the first derives from a reversal of the word's root. "Filibuster" means to pirate, or steal; as the Cuban insurgent reminds the captain in "Flanagan," "you are like the captain of a pirate ship." Crane's "filibustering" adventures, in contrast, like the adventures of his commissaries, are ostensibly out to give. Whatever may have been tree for gunrunners in reality, in Crane's war fiction the furor to transmit arms obscures any desire for monetary gain. Flanagan at worst serves his "pride" (365); the young lieutenant operates out of "dignity" in the "The Clan of No-Name" (535); and the purpose of the Commodore in "The Open Boat" remains eerily unstated, even though a news dispatch calls the ship a "Cuban filibuster" carrying "enough arms and ammunition to blow up the island of Cuba." (13) No reference whatever to material gain appears in these stories, and the piracy motif appears converted to an attempt at difficult, nearly selfless gift-giving. Attached try--and crossing over--this reversed, gift-giving piracy is the Senatorial meaning of "filibuster." Like the filibustering Senator, the gunrunner belongs to an "industry flourishing now in the United States." In "Flanagan," the incentive to gunrunning is a boastful "curse of the swinging tongue" (365). Institutionalized, pointless talking parallels gifts that never arrive, or perilously almost never arrive. The common denominator is transmission: giving something, be it a bullet or a boastful work. Such transmission ought to accomplish something, as should fiction and newspaper writing. Crane's double use of the "filibuster" motif makes fairly clear that he invokes this aspect of national life during the Spanish/Cuban-American War as a general metaphor for the equally institutionalized art of fiction or newspaper writing, just as he invokes conveying food as such a metaphor. Gunrunning and transmitting words have become coterminous, but the metaphorical connection remains suspicious at both ends: no matter how suppressed the piracy becomes, "filibuster"-the-act is piracy, and "filibuster"--the-speech is a selfish, inexpressive theft of people's time with pointless, empty talk. The enterprise of writing is perilous and urgent for Crane, and all the more perilous and urgent because the outcome is from the outset questionable. "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" provides a starting point for investigating the link between gunrunning and communicating. As suggested earlier, it is the one of the filibustering tales that plays on both senses of the word "filibuster." The story also fairly plainly provides an intertextual comment on "The Open Boat. (14) Published within a month of the canonical tale, "Flanagan" is the inverse of "The Open Boat" in several ways. It is honest about the "industry" that "The Open Boat" simply suppresses, and it presents a different balance of successes and failures. "Flanagan" is a success story in that the arms get delivered, whereas they go down with the ship in "The Open Boat"; contrarily, "Flanagan" is a failure story in that the entire crew is lost in the process, whereas "The Open Boat" has easily been taken by some readers as a heroic survival story in the face of "tragic" circumstances (357). "Flanagan" emphasizes the cost of gunrunning success and thereby provides a bleak commentary on what the voyage of the Commodore might have meant to Crane if it had successfully transmitted arms. In this capacity as commentary on "The Open Boat," "Flanagan" also clearly tells a story about difficult communication at multiple levels. As an "industry," filibustering depends on "tongues hung lightly" with empty boasting, while the trade is best plied by "men with steel clamps on their mouths," "whose names are not display-typed and blathered from one end of the country to another." That is: gunrunning depends on a form of boastful, empty speech to maintain the glamour of the enterprise, but also on silence as a means to virtuoso practice. Even in recruitment, the recruiter of gunrunners "liked to lean back in his chair ... and let the other fellow talk." The field is dominated either by language that lacks significance or by practice that lacks language--in the words of the expert, "old filibuster," a reflection of "holes in [the] head where memory ought to be" (365), recalling the gibberish caused by literal holes in the head in "The Price of the Harness." This unhappy blend of empty public rumor and silence recurs in the Cuban insurgent's concern with the captain's treatment of scuffling stokers. "Unless we are so very gentle with them," he says, "they will make many troubles afterward for us in the newspapers and then in court" (370). The emphasis is on linked institutions of communicating, and the reader is reminded that the gunrunner recruiter himself is an "attorney" (366). Courts, court reporting newspapers, rumor, and national reputation exist in one complex of institutionalized miscommunication and verbal subterfuge. (At the time of writing many of the Cuban tales, Crane himself was infamously hard to communicate with. (15)) This complex finds a dramatized analogue on the gunrunning ship itself. Captain Flanagan would rather be in command of "the great ... steamer Thunder Voice," but instead of piloting this fairy obvious symbol of God's transparent language, he is in charge of the Foundling, itself a "foundering ship." The games that language plays phonetically (albeit unetymologically) in associating "foundling" and "foundering" prepare the reader for the grim state of communication among the crew. When the captain gave commands, he "yelled some sudden language at the deck" (366). Fights break out because sailors call each other "a weird name." The fight's consequence is "a broken jaw" (370). Some name the reader does not hear produces an injury prohibiting speech. Gaming with a deflated godly language occurs elsewhere in Crane's Cuban stories. In "The Sergeant's Private Madhouse," for instance, the fear-crazed Dryden saves his company from attackers by starting to sing "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night," that is, by musically narrating the angelic announcement of Christ's birth. The song brings that attack to a stop, but one has to assume the words themselves have nothing to do with this effect, either among the Spanish attackers, who cannot understand them, or among the U.S. soldiers, since Dryden mixes up the Christmas song with bits of other songs. Dryden's crooning is no more the angelic song of Good Tidings than the ship Thunder Voice is the Thunder Voice. Aggravating this breakdown in speech are the Cuban insurgents, who add their "bad English" and "chatter" to the mix (369, 371), and the pursuit by the Spanish gunboat. As the gunrunning industry thrives both on prideful rumor and on silence, so the sailors either "used no words" (371) or broke into "panic shouts [and] hoarse orders." This "roar[ing]" and "bellowing" is in practice no different from silence, since it produces from the sailors a "supreme oath ... unheard by their own ears" (373). The sailors' "supreme oath" recalls the theological Thunder Voice that Flanagan wishes he could command, as well as the "so help me God" of the courtroom the Cuban insurgent wants to avoid. The desire for a godly, transparent language is everywhere present in the tale. When the "news" of the Spanish gunboat arrives, "a voice spoke [it] from the sky," but the speaker is merely a confusion producing "man at the masthead" (372). Crane leaves little doubt that he imagines the sailors in a state not merely of verbal imperfection but also of verbal hell. "Hades!" shouts the captain (368), echoing himself twice with "Hell!" (369, 374), while the "corpse" of the ship gleams an "unholy red light" from the "inferno" of its engine room--a fitting locus of language concerns, since it is accessible only either by "bellowing through the tube" or by circuitously "sending word" by messenger (373). In "The Sergeant's Private Madhouse," Dryden's sergeant, too, responds to Dryden's "angelic" song with "Who the hell is that?" and "Be quiet, you devil" (148). The carry-over of this hellish language state to Crane's own reflections on fiction and journalism is clear. His narrator presents a metaphor to the reader only after inquiring "if one may be allowed to speak in that way" (371); and, in fact, some of the metaphors in "Flanagan" seem pointedly mischosen, "intrinsically falsifying" as Charles Swann says about figurative language in other Crane tales. (16) This desperate voyage to everyone's death is made "over a blazing bright meadow of an ocean whereon the white foam was like flowers" (369), and, as the ship dies, the water "howl[s]" over the deck "with beautiful phosphorescent glamour" (374). Although the circumstance is hellish, the language for describing it is edenic; the voice "from the sky" is either the voice from the depths or, more ominously, the voice from nowhere at all. "The situation simply required a voice," the narrator says near the story's end, but clearly nothing is "simple" about this need for a voice after the "stillness had been so unearthly" (376), a silence recalling that Michael Robertson documents as at the center of "War Memories." (17) "The Clan of No-Name" underscores this troublesome symbolic bond between gunrunning and communication by dramatizing the receiving end of the filibustering transmission. Interestingly, Michael W. Schaefer connects this tale to "Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo," Crane's most conscious presentation of communication as dramatized event. (18) The relationship between this tale of "arms [that had landed] from the United States" (528) and the sea stories of actually transporting arms becomes clear in the dedicatory poem, in which "The hard waves see an arm flung high," providing a link to the drowning or near-drowning in transport that the other stories portray. (19) The dedicatory poem and title also establish a link to the theme of broken communication: the title delivers "No-Name," and the dedication promises a "riddle" (526). In fact, the story delivers the "riddle" it promises, presenting the tale of Margharita in Tampa, beloved of the insurgent Manolo Prat in Cuba, who communicates with him through some undisclosed, mysterious network that the reader finally cannot understand, just as the reader cannot understand what this network is communicating. At the beginning and end of the story, Margharita has received her own photograph from the body of her lover, dead in the field; in exchange she herself gives a photograph, but the reader never learns of what it is or to whom she gives it. The inscription on the back of the photo she receives says "One lesson in English I will give you--this: I love you. Margharita." As Margharita gives only a minimal "lesson" across languages, so the story gives only a minimal lesson in its own plot. The answer to its opening and closing riddles, Chester L. Wolford says, "is `absurdity' or `meaninglessness.'" (20) Within this plot, the action of transporting the guns builds outward in "deep silence," "without a word," in which the agents "betrayed no sign of their own existence" (529). Alternatively, words or symbols mean too much, on either coast in the Caribbean. When Margharita receives her picture back, "she ... simply took it in a way that meant everything" (526), just as in Cuba from "a series of sounds" the soldiers "knew what the new sound meant" (531); the young lieutenant feels the "bullets seemed to know him and speak their wish to kill him" (532), while he acts foolishly "to be called a brave man" (533, emphasis added). The figures are caught between a "hard ... lack of information" (532) and gestures that "inform" too much, just as gunrunning itself is caught between the over-publicized and the under-spoken. For the press, "the importance [of the gunrunning battle in which Manolo dies] lay not so much in the truthful account of the action as it did in the heroic prose of the official report" (536); Margharita's response to his death merely shows that "polite people always babbled at each other like ... brooks" (538). Again, the war stories' precarious imbalance between over-information and under-information seems to reflect on fiction and journalistic writing. The gunrunning skirmish, the narrator says, is a "simple datum" (527), but in this world of supposedly primal "data," metaphor obtrudes. "The blockhouse [at the center of the skirmish] stood always for some big, clumsy, and rather incompetent animal" (530). Such an eternal ("always") hypostasis intrudes on the virtual blockhouse, presided over by a man dressed in "something related to what we call bed ticking" (527). The fort that "stands for" an animal is manned by people dressed in "something ... we call" X or Y. A suspicion arises that "we" are confronting merely a terrible event that occurs because of what "we call.... something." Perhaps, as Donna Gerstenberger observes of "The Open Boat," "experience, like perception, is betrayed by the language by which it is conceptualized." (21) As suggested earlier, "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" and "The Clan of No-Name" have direct, intertextual bearing on "The Open Boat," indeed to the point of stating matters that "The Open Boat" itself suppresses. The job of the Commodore is to transmit arms, whether the narrator says so or not; and the suppressed nature of this mission influences the story in a way that might remain hidden without recourse to the other filibustering tales that surround it. Of course, the suppressing itself fits into the theme of materiel and verbal transmission and contributes to the canonical story's style. The four figures in "The Open Boat" experience either too much or too little talk. Sometimes "no one said ... [or] mentioned" anything (340), while "others silently acquiesced" to the captain's reasoning about the shore (355). The captain himself is so quiet on the first encounter with the shark that the correspondent says, "wish I had known you were awake" (354). On the other hand, too much figurative talk goes on, as it does with the empty boasting about filibustering in other stories. "The wind had a voice as it came over the waves" (352), and the external talk of nature finds an internal parallel: as the men row, "the muscles said they did not care" (356). This compounding of saying too much and too little produces one of the tale's most mysterious images: that of the "fellow" on the shore waving something-or-other because "he must think we like to see him do that. Why don't he quit it. It don't mean anything" (349). This hope-raising and hope-deflating gesturing of the man on the beach takes a long time, and in fact the reader never learns what the gesticulation is about. At this point of drawing the reader into its mystery, "The Open Boat" parallels the other two filibustering stories by implicating narration as a form. Just as "there was something strange in [the captain's] voice" (340), so the narrator falters in his ability to tell. The crew's "eyes must have glinted." The prospect was "probably splendid. It was probably glorious" (341). Was it, or was it not, or do "we" have to guess? Most indicative of this tendency toward surrendering narrative authority is the exchange of vague pronoun references about the light house, or coastline, or who knows what: | |
"See it?" said the captain. "No," said the correspondent slowly, "I didn't
see anything." "Look again," said the captain. He pointed. "It's exactly in
that direction." "Think we'll make it, Captain?" (343) | | The passage continues in virtuoso form, with colorless "it" turning into colorless "it," but almost changing meaning by the end of the interchange. The "it" in "See it?" surely means something different from the "it" in "Think we'll make it?" (22) Materiel transport joins commissary work as extended metaphors for the subject Crane is exploring through the journalism that pervades the Spanish/Cuban-American War tales: the nature of fiction writing in its connection to the possibility of a transparent language. When Flanagan says of filibustering that it provides "a dead sure connection" (369), the expression cuts ironically across all fields of transmission and "connection." Noticeably, its "dead" surety also carries bleak implications for communicating, as previous examples have suggested. The extent to which Crane associates journalism with a basic inquiry into all language emerges from a close reading of "The Revenge of the Adolphus," which of all of these often ignored stories frequently receives the most critical scorn. Milne Holton calls it "inferior work," "with hardly discernible form or theme"; R. W. Stallman judges it one of Crane's "least interesting pieces" because it "lack[s] the ingredient of thematic import by which a short story ... transcends mere reporting." (23) Taking the reporter's task as a symbolic activity can certainly provide the story with a "theme"; if language use is a topic of metaphysical moment, perhaps this symbolic activity can also provide the "transcendence" Stallman misses. Suggesting the extent to which Crane considers the reporter' s project an important theme, the story's organization elaborately embeds reporters within larger groups of reporters in a journalistic Chinese box, a variation on what is often called in "The Clan of No Name" Crane's "envelope technique." (24) The outermost reporter, of course, is the narrator himself, in whose account the entire story is embedded. Within this outer shell is the structure of the War Department--the story ends as "the Secretary of the Navy ... read the report" (583)--and the War Department supports the next layer of national newspaper circulation. The officers in the story's battle themselves have to read in "newspapers" "days afterwards" an authorized and jingoistic account of their own encounter (582). These officers and their crews constitute yet a lower layer of reporters waiting for news across the water through "the intercession of the blessed megaphone" (576) and "the spread of [signal] flags" (578). Paralleling the War Department's patronage of the national press, one of these ships, the Adolphus, is a dispatch boat containing a group of reporters "brazenly waiting for news" (580), a physical analogue to the Navy's press relations nationally. Finally, at the bottom layer, within this group of reporters is one fanatical reporter, Shackles, "a madman for the purpose of distributing the news" (573). Crane uses this organization of embedded reporters within reporters to study journalism as a counterpart to narration and referential language generally. At the story's lowest reportorial and observational level, Shackles is on the one hand a model of reporting as purest imitation. The story's first words--his command that the other reporters "stand by"--have become his "pet phrase" "ever since he heard the men of the Navy directing each other to stand by." Shackle' s brain and vocabulary have become a kind of plasticene, taking on a perfect impression of what he hears, so that it appears almost imprinted on his flesh: when he tells his fellow reporters about the pursuing Spanish gunboats, the reporters "were almost sure that they saw the truth written upon his countenance" (570). Accordingly, when he informally recounts his discussion with the captain, he "detailed his talk" complete with direct quotations and described pauses (571). In this sense, he records an interview with meticulous, objective precision; in Fried's terms, Shackles is a "journalist," not an "aesthete," a recorder, not a distanced observer. (25) On the other hand, this instinct to recount precisely what others have said betrays a lack of original observational skill. Announcing the approach of the American cruiser Chancellorville, the captain has to coax first "See 'er?," then instruct Shackles, "Take the glass," and then finally decode for Shackles what he has seen: "See her ensign?" At this point, Shackles' perfect reporting of what is said verges on a bullying plagiarism as he remonstrates with his fellow reporters: "Are you blind? Can't you see her? ... You blind mice!" (573). Saying precisely indicates a preliminary inability to see; perfect reportage becomes parroting communication in a "childish" mode, as Bernard Weinstein says of Shackles in this story. (26) When Shackles finally insists that "We must see" the story's battle, he does so after the fact. The captain of the Adolphus has "already" set course for the fight (574). This aptitude for molding oneself into a situation, an ability that otherwise would be an ideal of observation, becomes for Shackles an emptiness: imitating "the spirit of revenge" he is "moved ... to yell taunts futilely" at the retreating Spanish gunboats (575). Shackles is finally a "madman for purposes of delivering the news," and he remains a disturbing figure precisely because of his "mad" surface resemblance to an ideal of perfect reporting. If his name, "Shackles," is significant, it is so because he is "shackled" to a surface of perfect but unimportant impressions. (27) The group of reporters in which Shackles is embedded as a conspicuous "madman" is likewise disqualified. Told of the pursuing Spanish gunships, a reporter asks, "Where's my glasses?" (570), his concern for his sight indicating a general anxiety about observation. The observation that comes, however, is like Shackles', a rote, automatic, and unoriginal impression: "The ... correspondents hastily and in perfect time ... fastened their gaze" (571). When the captain speaks, "the listening correspondents" hear him, one of whom is "re-gifted with speech," but all of whom are merely "garrulous" (572). If sight and hearing are rote, speech is no good, and as artillery fire starts, the reporters "eliminated themselves" (578), becoming noticeable by their absence. Once back on shore, the reporters "fled ... to drink, much drink," and even the "mad" Shackles' dash to post his report is portrayed as flight from his object of reporting: he "fled to file the telegrams" (582). Containing this group of absent and ineffectual reporters, the various captains and crews also express an ideal of instant communication, even in physical terms. A signal through "an electric bell" makes a marine report to the Chancellorville's captain (576). When he "arose" he was "indicating that [his] conference was at an end" (577). Electrical signals and bodily movements should render instant report? On one of the smaller gunboats, the sailors "watch [the captain' s] eye in bright anticipation of his orders," which they "obey ... with ... rapidity" (581). Eyes watching eyes--the means of observation watching the means of observation--provide instant information and produce instant results. Looking at the assaulted shore "through his glasses," the captain of one gunboat sees "every detail ... plain" (579). As the Chancellorville cruises by, she is "watched by every eye" of the smaller boats (577). Auditorily, the sailors make sure they "listened with all their ears" (582). Suggestions multiply, however, that this world of instantaneous and instinctive reportage and information is flawed. On the dispatch boat carrying the reporters, for instance, "the pilothouse was so arranged that [the captain] could not see astern," the direction from which the Spanish gunboats appear. When the captain speaks to his mate, he does so "without looking at him" (571). Although the mate responds "with alacrity," his verbal precision is undercut by the captain's not seeing. Conversely, while the captain occasionally delivers verbal information, the reporters "marvel" when "the captain had actually explained his point of view to another human being" (572). The captain either has no viewpoint in the literal sense of not being able to see, or usually cuts himself off from expressing one. Nor does this condition belong to the captain of the Adolphus alone. Having declared he had "made up his mind" on a battle plan, the captain of the Chancellorville makes his officers wait "in expectant silence for three minutes while he stared at the bulkhead," seeing nothing while the others hear nothing (569). So when the Chancellorville passes the dispatch boat filled with reporters, it "did not see" the Adolphus (574). Further up the news hierarchy, when the "newspapers" reach the naval officers, they "looked at each other somewhat dejectedly," presumably because the authorized bombast about the "grand dating" of the battle is not adequate to describe the experience of the battle itself. At the highest level of reportorial command within the fiction, the Secretary of the Navy has difficulty "remember[ing] that anything at all ... had occurred" (583). Sighting and reporting what was seen have lost validity and force. The ultimate extension of this problem in reporting appears in the narrator's own account. On the one hand, the narrator is compulsive about relying on direct sense impressions, to the point at which the story's actions are often linked one-on-one with the senses. The American cruiser appears "listening" to the battle as the guns "boomed to the ears" of its sailors (580). Shelling the Spanish positions is a matter of "keep[ing] the air singing around the ears of the battery" (576). Meanwhile, one gunboat "took into her nostrils" the "odor" of battle (580). Knowing appears usually in the form of seeing, as when the Chancellorville "sometimes could see into the bay," or when Captain Pent is embarrassed by "seeing his vessel outstripped." Captain Reigate "saw through his glasses ... every detail of the shore," while Pent "could see clearly" what his role in the battle will be (578). Toward the end of the engagement, "the eyes of [a wounded] man ... were looking from out his ghastly face" (581). After the engagement, an upbraided sailor "did not raise his eyes from the deck" (582). This compulsion to describe action in terms of perceptual organs or the mode in which the action is perceived extends into the narrator' s own storytelling practice. Very often, the narrator will not report any physical occurrence he has not actually observed. In the communication between the Chancellorville and the Adolphus, the narrator scrupulously says that "suddenly a megaphone gaped over the rail of [the Chancellorville' si bridge and a voice was heard" (574), the report containing only what might be heard or seen on the spot. Just as the narrator does not mention the person holding the megaphone--a figure apparently not visible--so he does not see the boatswain later as "a bird-like whistle stirred the decks" (577). Similarly, the account of the artillery battle describes "white smoke" whose attendant report "presently ... came to the ears on board the Adolphus" (575). Reporting by giving only the data of sense seems part of the story's reportorial ideal. Later, all the narrator feels confident to say is that "the roar of a gun came along the water." Having not seen the guns, the narrator-as-reporter is not willing to say "The guns fired" and resists speculating about what he cannot see when the cruiser he watches is "quite hidden in her own smoke." He insists equally on restricting others to their perceptions. The muzzle flashes from shore appear as minuscule as they would "to ... watchers at sea" (577). Although the narrator seems able to shift his viewpoint from ship to ship, once aboard a craft he usually sticks to that perspective, describing Spanish soldiers on shore, for instance, as "some little men" with "tiny faces" (579). In spite of this ideal of perfect reporting, however, the narrator himself gives signs of imperfection. One such sign is his contrary impulse to describe material to which he has least access, namely the thoughts of others, a task James Nagel documents elsewhere in Crane. (29) He tells the reader that he knows "undoubtedly" what the "spirit" of the sailors is (580) and unconsciously gives revealing clues that the mental material he is reporting is practically unobservable. If the fictional reporters judge an attitude by what is "written on [someone's] face," the narrator often proceeds without physical or physiognomic clues. He tells what is happening inside Captain Pent "privately" and "secretly" (581) and describes the officers' "furtive affections" (577). The narrator's instinct almost to confess to having no basis for his claims builds to a full admission during his observations of Pent: | |
Perhaps Pent did not think all this during the battle. Perhaps he thought
it so soon after the battle that his full mind became confused as to the
time. At any rate, it stands as an expression of his feeling. (581) | | The language here is reminiscent of the infamous appeals court ruling in our own time that reporters may invent quotations as long as they do not "alter the substantive content" of what the quoted person might have said: as the narrator says, his account "stands as an expression of [Pent's] feeling," whether or not Pent had precisely the thoughts that the narrator-reporter has rendered. Most amazingly, the second sentence of this passage makes a "confusion" on Pent's part responsible for attributing the thoughts to the battle, whereas the repetition of "perhaps" make plain that the narrator himself is responsible for the attribution. Having played loosely with the thoughts of his telepathic "source," the narrator wants to shift blame from himself to the source. In this sense the narrator is Shackles' shadowy opposite: he does not mold himself to the quoted thought but assumes a license to reconstruct it. This shadiness of accounting eventuates in a narration that, for all its observational ideals, confuses the roles of reporter, columnist, and editor. In a strange turn of phrase, the narrator presents the "main point" of the two unusual gunboats (575), as if they were not boats but statements to be interpreted for the reader. In addition, the account shifts between two modes of editorializing. On the one hand, the narrator rails ironically against the "imbecility of a hayseed [U.S.] government" (581). On the other hand, he seems genuinely intent on mythologizing the action, which takes place as the sun's "rays dealt titanic blows" (572), while the American cruiser is "bulging and growing from the sea," a "living thing" (574) like Minos' sea-born bull. In this second sort of editorializing, the narrator approaches the jingoism of the national press in its celebration of the "heroic assault" (583). Though the narrator expresses himself more evocatively, he is plainly also in the business of creating the "heroic" on a "grand" scale. "Life itself," as Joseph J. Kwiatt says, has to "appear to be more colorful and interesting than was indicated by the bare facts." (30) The highest level of reportage is ultimately no better than the rest. As the narrator unconsciously betrays, he too begins with a report "so to speak" (570) and ends by describing events "so to speak" (581). Almost certainly the critical inattention or disdainful attention that Crane's Cuban stories receive comes from a sense of what subject matter ought to be appropriate to them as "war stories." Milne Holton, for instance, faults most of them for not engaging enough the "absurdity" the individual confronts in war; Eric Solomon finds they do not pursue "the meaning of courage and fear in war." (31) My question is whether it is appropriate to judge these stories within such conventional proprieties of war fiction, even of Crane's earlier war fiction. Michael W. Schaefer's caution seems appropriate; he suggests that the Cuban war stories "take place within a larger historical, social context; rather than concentrating solely on the battlefield, they touch on issues that impel men to go to war in the first place and that broadly affect their attitudes." (32) Language is certainly within the "larger context" of forces that control "broad attitudes," and critique of language becomes central to Crane's Cuban tales. Notes (1) Michael Robertson sifts interpretations of Crane's Cuban war experiences as an attempt to "make up for" Crane's lack of war experience at the time of his writing the Red Badge. Crane, he suggests, "presumably felt a need to authenticate his novel". Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 139-41. The ease of mocking Crane on the grounds of his not being "borne in arms" when Henry Fleming was bearing arms appears from Charles Loomis' contemporary parody reprinted in E. R. Hagemann, "`Correspondents Three' in the Graeco-Turkish War," American Literature 30 (1958), 342.
(2) Bernard Weinstein claims that the terrified soldier in "The Sergeant's Privade Mad house" has been "rendered ineffectual by excessive imagination" from journalism. "Stephen Crane: Journalist," Stephen Crane in Transition: Centenary Essays, ed. Joseph Katz (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1972), 30.
(3) Willa Cather, Introduction to Vol. 9 of The Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Wilson Follett (New York: Knopf, 1926), quoted here from Readings on Stephen Crane, ed. Bonnie Szumski (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998), 53. Edwin Cady oddly reverses, and hence misrepresents, Cather's point in "Stephen Crane and the Strenuous Life," English Literary History 28 (1961), 381.
(4) The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane, ed. Thomas A. Gullason (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963); hereafter cited parenthetically.
(5) Thomas A. Gullason, "Stephen Crane's Private War on Yellow Journalism," Huntington Library Quarterly 22 (1958), 206.
(6) Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), 108.
(7) Christopher Benfey, The Double Life of Stephen Crane (New York: Knopf, 1992), 248.
(8) Frank Bergon, Stephen Crane's Artistry (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1975), 12. Recognizing the unmissable talking that appears everywhere in Crane, Bergon says, "the sound of a human voice becomes a point of reference."
(9) Joseph Church, "Reading, Writing, and the Risk of Entanglement in Crane's `Octopush,'" Studies in Short Fiction 29 (1992), 343. Fried is right that the word "line" appears "with surprising frequency" in Crane and almost certainly as a pun for line of writing (Fried, 100). Church, who cites Fried approvingly, and Fried see Crane's texts as an "allegory of the writer at work" (Church, 341), a mimesis of "the act of producing the very text we read" (Fried, 104). (Church differs interestingly from Fried in the prominence he gives the reader in the process.) Where such readings become overinterpretations is up to the reader. Is Church right that in "The Blue Hotel" the "gambler resembles Crane, who makes his living beguiling both the wise and the ignorant"? Joseph Church, "The Determined Stranger in Stephen Crane's `Blue Hotel,'" Studies in the Humanities 16 (1989), 105.
(10) Eric Solomon, "Stephen Crane's War Stories," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 3 (1961), 77.
(11) Indeed, James Nagel oddly suggests that "the building of a road" is merely a negligible accident in the story. "Stephen Crane's Stories of War: A Study of Art and Theme," North Dakota Quarterly 43 (1975), 13.
(12) The concern with bread, and food in general, R. W. Stallman famously takes else where in Crane as signifying Holy Communion. See Stephen Crane: An Omnibus (New York: Knopf, 1952), 323. As Stanley B. Greenfield points out, such associations need to be approached, passage by passage, with caution. "The Unmistakable Stephen Crane," PMLA 73 (1958), 565.
(13) The War Dispatches of Stephen Crane, ed. R. W. Stallman and E. R. Hagemann (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), 243.
(14) For a summary of various understandings and judgments of the relation between "Flanagan" and "The Open Boat," see Michael W. Schaefer, A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Stephen Crane (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 158-62.
(15) Ames W. Williams, "Stephen Crane: War Correspondent," New Colophon 1 (1948), 121.
(16) Charles Swann, "Stephen Crane and a Problem of Interpretation," Literature and History 7 (1983), 116. Swann thinks Crane sees metaphor generally and pessimistically as a "bar to communication" (110).
(17) Robertson, 172.
(18) Schaefer, 90.
(19) For readers who try to untangle the riddle, the synedoche of the drowning man is troublesome because, as Neal J. Osborn remarks, there are "no exact terminological correlations within the story (i.e., no drowning man)." "The Riddle in `The Clan': A Key to Crane's Major Fiction?" Bulletin of the New York Public Library 69 (1965), 247. Recalling that the weapons Manolo is transporting arrive dangerously by sea helps solve this problem. Perhaps a pun even exists between the arms sent from the U.S. and the "arm flung high."
(20) Chester L. Wolford, Stephen Crane: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 71. (21) Donna Gerstenberger, "`The Open Boat': An Additional Perspective," Modern Fiction Studies 17 (1971-72), 560.
(22) A sturdy gloss on knowledge theory and the story appears in Thomas L. Kent, "The Problem of Knowledge in `The Open Boat' and `The Blue Hotel,'" American Literary Realism 14 (1981), 262-64.
(23) Milne Holton, Cylinder of Vision: The Fiction and Journalistic Writing of Stephen Crane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1972), 257; R. W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A Biography (New York: Braziller, 1968), 452 and 614, n. 9.
(24) For a summary of the various "envelope" or bracketing techniques detected in the story, see Schaefer, 96-98. The "envelope" technique of "The Clan" is often mentioned as unusual in Crane, but "Revenge of the Adolphus" shows that embedding techniques are not.
(25) Fried makes this distinction (115). Only Shackles' denseness saves him from the "horror" Fired predicts for the bright journalist confronting the "sheer multiplicity of appearances."
(26) Weinstein, 10.
(27) Of those who discuss "Shackles" as a significant name, John Berryman proposes deriving it from Crane's sometimes friend Acton Davies, a hint that Fried picks up. Berryman, Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography (1950, revised New York: Meridian, 1962), 309; Fried, 149. Besides the difficulty even of hearing the similarity of the names (the "ack" sound in both names is supposedly alike), the observation ignores the obvious common noun "shackles."
(28) In his correspondence about the story with Commander J .C. Colwell, Crane was apparently interested in and receptive to Colwell's account of non-verbal communication aboard ship. See Schaefer, 372.
(29) James Nagel, Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 1980), 77. Reading thoughts, Nagel suggests, is the opposite of "the `objective' pole of Impressionist narration." Nagel agrees, however, that the data of sensation are also "characteristically problematic" (93). The relative strength of vision in objectivity has been a topic in discussing Crane's "Impressionism," since the movement in art is usually linked with seeing. See Joseph Kwiatt, "Stephen Crane and Seeing," American Quarterly 4 (1952), 333. Sight, however, sometimes appears as "mere" impressionism. Holton, for instance, suggests a hierarchy in which hearing is brainier than seeing, and recording thoughts is the brainiest of all (Holton, 263). Some order of these faculties is traditional, but my argument here takes no stand on the relative worth' of sight and sound, and preserves Nagel's well-documented, also traditional, skepticism about narrating other people's thoughts.
(30) Joseph J. Kwiatt, "The Newspaper Experience: Crane, Norris, and Dreiser," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 8 (1953), 102.
(31) Holton, 263; Eric Solomon, Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), 75.
(32) Michael W. Schaefer, "Life during Wartime--and After: Some Thoughts on Stephen Crane's Spitzbergen Tales," Publications of the Arkansas Philological Society 22 (1996), 62. On March 4, 2002, Dr. William Crisman died after a long illness. A specialist in German and English Romantic literature and modern American fiction, Bill published over two dozen scholarly articles and a well-received monograph entitled The Crises of "Language and Dead Signs" in Ludwig Tieck's Prose Fiction (South Carolina: Camden Press, 1996). He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982 and spent most of his career at Penn State Altoona. A genial colleague noted for his dry wit, Bill will be sorely missed by all those who had the privilege of knowing him. |
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