9. Post-structuralism II: Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”

Question 1

The Sublime and Deconstruction: Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”

Answer 1

• In another essay, Lyotard argues that artworks would have to have been postmodern even before they were modern.
• They constitute so-called treshold-works or texts which, between two eras, unveil the implications of the paradigm-shift that is taking place.
• Combining Derrida and Lyotard, one could argue that Stephen Crane’s ”The Open Boat” is such a threshold text which, when deconstructed – or being made to deconstruct itself – shows the gaps and slippages that characterize any masternarrative; in this case, the master narrative of Naturalism.

Question 2

Naturalism

Answer 2

• Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” has always been interpreted as exemplary for the literary era which it heralded: that of Naturalism.
• One of the central characteristics of naturalist philosophy is the assumption that (wo)man is determined by – and at the mercy of – external forces that s/he cannot control, let alone overcome, be they nature or society.
• Strongly influenced by Darwin and the social Darwinism of Spencer, naturalist story usually feature heroes – and sometimes outright anti-heroes – who are shown to be play-balls of external circumstances.
• Considering the bleakness of the naturalist’s outlook, the only literary strategy to insure some kind of commonality (and the only legitimation for literature itself) is – empathy.

Question 3

Naturalism, the Sublime, and Authenticity

Answer 3

• As the external forces determining man’s fate are enormous, the concept of the sublime plays a central role, since representing the exposure to them – or rather, the unrepresentability of this exposure – is what the sublime is all about.
• On the other hand, the naturalists aim at an authentic representation of facts, as they want to leave romanticism, and its improbable stories and heroes, behind.
• Wrote Crane: “‘But to get the real thing!’ … ‘It seems impossible!’ … ‘We can never tell life, one to another, although sometimes we think we can’”

Question 4

”The Open Boat”

Answer 4

• At first view, Crane’s short story seems a perfect illustration of naturalism’s philosophy and agenda.
• The men in the dinghy are completely at the mercy of an overpowering and totally unmindful nature.
• Strangely enough, however, the reluctant, contained style of representation in the story does not seem to do justice to the existential crisis that the men in the boat experience – being, as they are, exposed to a life-threatening confrontation with what has been a standard topos of the sublime since its inception: an endless, storm-ridden ocean with “waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks” (1).

-We have to keep in mind first of all that Crane indeed experienced this ship-wreck himself.
He would thus be the most suitable candidate to convey this experience first-hand and authentically.

-However, already the subtitle should gives us reason to pause: ”A Tale Intended To Be After The Fact”
”After” here designates on the one hand ”according to” the facts, but also implies a temporal delay – and thus strongly evokes the concept of difference as both differing and deferred.

• And why is it ”intended to be” after the fact(s), and not simply according to them?
• If Crane has experienced such a ship-wreck, why does he not chose an I-narrator, as this would certainly provide more dramatic possibilities, more possibilities of identification, as well as a form of ‘authentification’ for the story.
• Moreover, the entire tone of the story is strangely subdued, not taking any advantage of the rich melodramatic possibilities such a story offers (comp. the movie Titanic!)
• And why are these questions even intensified by passages such as the following:
• “In the wan light the faces of the men must have been grey. Their eyes must have glinted in strange ways as they gazed steadily astern. Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque. But the men in the boat had no time to see it, and if they had had leisure there were other things to occupy their minds” (2; italics mine).
• Wouldn’t Crane be the one to know? And aren’t we, the readers, doing just that: watching it from a balcony and at a safe distance?

Question 5

The Sublime Reloaded

Answer 5

• What characterizes the sublime in art is, according to Kant and other theorists of the sublime, such as Edmund Burke or Theodor W. Adorno, a certain amount of distance.
• Only when we are in safe distance to the imminent danger can we indulge in the pleasure of this langorous shudder that the sublime ignites: we see the threat, we might try to represent it, but we are not in immediate danger from it.
• There must be, then, an amount of distance between the perceiving subject and the immediate threat.

Question 6

Stages of Distance

Answer 6

• “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” (2; italics mine).
• A first doubt as to the compatibility – and thus communicability – of the real and the “average” experience of sublime nature is introduced.
• From a safe spectator’s point of view – one with “average experience,” one might add – the whole affair might partake of the “picturesque”; a term that covers aspects of both the sublime and the beautiful. This sort of contemplative attitude is what the average reader enjoys, but also one that Crane himself takes when looking back on the scene and writing about it.
• The difference is that he is no “average reader.” He has been among the men in the boat who had no time to contemplate sublime nature’s picturesque aspects, being immediately exposed to its powers.
• The irony of the story is that it is not in spite, but because of Crane’s personal involvement in the story that the representational crisis arises. He both knows what he is talking about – that is, he has himself experienced it – but is also aware that his experience is incommunicable.
• Crane never gives up the skeptical (di)stance toward representation. This skepticism is brilliantly captured in the following quotation:
• “The crest of each of these waves was a hill, from the top of which the men surveyed for a moment a broad tumultuous expanse, shining and wind-riven. It was probably splendid, it was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber” (3; italics mine). Even he himself cannot be sure as a retrospective reader, as he simply didn’t have the occasion to contemplate this ’glory’.

Question 7

empathy

Answer 7

• Interestingly, the reader learns only one of the names of the men in the boat: that of Billy, the oiler, the strongest one on the boat – and the one who is going to die.
• As if to prevent any kind of empathy at all costs, Crane suddenly (and only once) leaves his narrator’s point of view – a restricted third person’s one – in order to announce that “[i]t is fair to say that there was not a life-saving station within twenty miles in either direction, but the men did not know this fact” (8).
• In part VI, Crane introduces a mise en abîme that in a delicate frame structure reflects upon the problems of reading, empathy, and identification.
• “To chime the notes of his emotion, a verse mysteriously entered the correspondent’s head. He had even forgotten that he had forgotten this verse, but it suddenly was in his mind.

   A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,
   There was lack of woman's nursing, there was dearth of woman's tears;
   But a comrade stood beside him, and he took that comrade's hand
   And he said, "I never more shall see my own, my native land."

• In his childhood, the correspondent had been made acquainted with the fact that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, but he had never regarded the fact as important. Myriads of his school-fellows had informed him of the soldier’s plight, but the dinning had naturally ended by making him perfectly indifferent. He had never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it appeared to him as a matter for sorrow. It was less to him than the breaking of a pencil’s point.
• Now, however, it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing. It was no longer merely a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet, meanwhile drinking tea and warming his feet at the grate; it was actuality – stern, mournful, and fine… The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers” (17/8).
• As he now is an initiated reader, the fate of the dying soldier in Algiers suddenly has become “his affair.” In the midst of and through experiencing life-threatening nature, he becomes a reader himself. But he does so only to implicitly insist that, as the correspondent before his initiation, the reader of the story will not “profoundly and impersonally understand” before having encountered reality itself.

-Thus the narrator – and Crane himself – harbor a justified doubt whether their own story will be perceived as more than “the picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet” by readers who, reading the story, will drink tea and warm their feet at the grate. In fact, it cannot be otherwise.
This is, then, what the story is all about: the impossibility to comprehend and represent the very experience he is nevertheless trying to represent. Such an endeavor indeed comes surprisingly close to Lyotard’s definition of the (postmodern) sublime as trying to represent the unrepresentable.

-Crane’s naturalistic story is, consequently, a self-effacing story about the impossibility to write a naturalistic story.

Question 8

Interpretation and the Sublime

Answer 8

• “When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on the shore, and they felt that they could be interpreters” (OB 24).
• We as readers will never be, due to the double distanciation that art introduces – first between Crane as the one who experiences the ship-wreck and Crane as the author looking back on it, and then between him and us looking back at his story.
• These levels of distanciation make anything like empathy impossible – we will never get close to what happened, never will be able to put ourselves “in his shoes.”
• The story thus features an enormous amount of self-reflexivity, that could almost qualify it as – postmodern.