PART I
Stephen Crane:
Metaphysical, Epistemological,
and Ethical Pluralism
1
Spectators and/or Participants
Crane on Epistemological Privilege
A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it.
âStephen Crane
Artistically, Stephen Craneâs quest was capturing experience, mostly human experience and experiencers. But his genius also disclosed the lived worlds of animals. âExperienceâ customarily refers to the obvious and ordinary stuff of consciousness, but as we shall see, Craneâs notion of experience was more complex and sophisticated. Philosophically, the upshot of his work amounts to an epistemological and a metaphysical shakedown. Although common sense has us believe that we have a reliable grasp of what is out there (in reality) and what is inside (within consciousness), Crane was more attentive and sensitive and therefore more suspicious. He noticed that the contents and status of the inner and outer worlds are problematic and that the borderline between them is permeable. He also explored situations in which experiencers have the epistemological advantage over observers and, strikingly, the oppositeâoccasions wherein onlookers are in a better position to understand and assess what happens to those who undergo an experience. And so as Craneâs artistic sensitivity uncovered the mystery of experience, his philosophical legacy earned him a place in a distinguished company of thinkers, beginning with Plato, who believed that wonder is the beginning of wisdom.
âWonderâ is too weak a word for Craneâs artistic and philosophical accomplishment; âsurpriseâ comes closer. His objective was not to create doubt, neither the comprehensive and corrosive upheaval wrought by Descartesâ methodic doubt nor the beneficial, though unsettling, irritation of doubt that is central to the thought of Craneâs American contemporary, the scientist and philosopher C. S. Peirce. Nor was it Craneâs goal to address the epistemological panic that haunts postmodern theorists and deconstructionist critics. Instead, his goals were positive: to foster awareness and to cultivate openness to experience.
Scott Slovic recommends the works of Annie Dillard as an anecdote to the âanesthesia of routinenessâ (1992, 65). But whereas Dillardâs artful and leisurely paced essays gently wake us, Craneâs potent prose and poetry startle us with shocks of recognition. How powerful, how unpredictable, how disorienting it is to let Crane control oneâs stream of thought! His prose is so highly charged that the ozone smell of a cracking thunderstorm still lingers. A surge protector, or at least a transformer, is needed to buffer the excessive voltage of Craneâs writing. Forewarned and even shielded, readers of Crane continue to discover that neither the external world nor the internal world is as it seems. For Crane, human experience is an epiphany to be explored. With Crane as tour guide and commentator, richness, complexity, wonderful surprises, and unsettling questions supplant the obvious and everyday world we ordinary mortals are used to.
A brief explanation of the term âexperienceâ is in order. Craneâs contemporaries, the American pragmatists C. S. Peirce, William James, and later John Dewey, sought to overcome the subject/object duality and the commonsense spectator view of knowledge. William James, in his Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), argued that a neutral stuff, pure experience, is epistemologically and metaphysically basic.1. James proposed that a bit of pure experience can be both public (out there) and private (within consciousness). Such bits of experience exist in separate but compatible historiesâas an experiencerâs mental biography and as an experienced fact in the world. James insisted that we cannot and do not deal with the world as detached observers. Instead, we interact and interfere with an environment. John Dewey suggested that the terms âsensation,â âperception,â âapprehension,â and âknowledgeâ be replaced with more active and interactive notions. He insisted that cognition is not an affair of getting an accurate account of what is external to a disembodied knower: rather, knowledge is a process better characterized as a transaction or a negotiation that remakes the neutral stuff that is prior to both the known and the knower.2. In this proposed renovation of our notions of both truth and reality, veracious ideas are not static, accurate mental duplicates, but road maps that prompt fruitful (or faulty) behavioral incursions. âThe truth of an idea,â writes James, âis not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ationâ (1907, 97).
As I will now show, such a concept of experience (as well as similar concepts of truth and reality) function vividly in Craneâs accounts of the experiences of wounds and being wounded in three short stories: âAn Episode of War,â âThe Price of the Harness,â and âThe Mystery of Heroism: A Detail of an American Battle.â
As it turns out, a wide range of expectations about pain and being wounded are overturned in these accounts. However, not only readers but also Craneâs own fictional characters themselves discover that very little of what they expect to happen ever happens. Further, through a subtle enfolding, the reader becomes both spectator and participant. So, too, Craneâs fictional characters both observe and constitute the experiences that occur. As a result, neither the spectatorâs nor participantâs vantage point is epistemologically privileged.3. Accordingly, at both extremes of the continuum, both being an onlooker and being a sufferer involve serious liabilities as well as significant advantages; moreover, as noted above, the ârealâ event that occurs is a tertium quid that is both public and private and is thus both shareable and idiosyncratic.
For Crane, perhaps the most surprising misinformation regarding wounds has to do with pain. Pain is not always agonizing. It can be an intriguing, revelatory experience. I am reminded of my own experience of twice being in shock. Both times everyone who watched grimaced and/or averted their glances, but I did neither because I was not suffering excruciating pain. Some pain can also be pleasurable. Consider this passage from Edward Abbeyâs journal, Confessions of a Barbarian: âMy lips are stiff and chapped, with a small crack in my upper lip, a reliable source of a kind of interesting tiny, dry pain which I take continual delight in experiencingâ (1994, 32). And I recall a provocative article in Sports Illustrated on athletes and pain that I read more than twenty-five years ago. In âThe Face of Pain,â Mark Kram relates how Los Angles Rams star (now sportscaster and actor) Merlin Olsen thought of pain as an opportunity for mental gymnastics: âPain is an interesting thing.⊠Man is an adaptable creature, ⊠and one finds out what you can or cannot do. Itâs like walking into a barnyard. The first thing you smell is manure. Stand there for about five minutes and you donât smell it anymore. The same thing is true of a knee. You hurt that knee. Youâre conscious of it. But then you start to play at a different level.â Kram comments that Olsen âlooks upon pain as an interesting companion, as something which arouses his contempt and inexhaustible taste for pragmatismâ (1976, 62). For Crane, too, pain brings illumination and insight along with suffering.4.
The wounding of the lieutenant in âAn Episode of Warâ is first described as an irritating, random occurrence that disturbs a mundane routine. âThe others cried out when they saw blood upon the lieutenantâs sleeveâ (Crane 1984, 671). They cannot see the wound, only the blood on his uniform, though they notice that their superior âwinced like a man stungâ (671). But Crane does not focus upon the painâactually very little is made of the wound suffererâs suffering. Instead he stresses the ways in which the gunshot debilitates the officer. He can no longer sheath his sword; he cannot use his right arm but must carry it. That part of his body becomes an alien thing: âHe held his right wrist tenderly in his left hand, as if the wounded arm was made of very brittle glassâ (672).
The irony, of course, is that while pain can enfeeble, more importantly, in this case it capacitates the lieutenant. The remainder of the story dramatizes how, âas the wounded officer passed from the line of battle, he was enabled to see many things which as a participant in the fight were unknown to himâ (672). The image Crane uses to capture the strangely ambiguous power of pain to innervate and empower is one of his favorites: a curtain.5. âA wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from this new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded manâs hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence.⊠The power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are littleâ (672).
Among the things that being wounded makes possible is the lieutenantâs realization that, even as a frontline combatant, his understanding of battle is faulty. Indeed, the farther he removes himself from participating and the more distant and spectator-like he becomes, the more accurate are his (and othersâ) observations: âHe came upon some stragglers and they told him how to find the field hospital. They described its exact location. In fact these men, no longer having part in the battle, knew more of it than others. They told the performance of every corps, every division, the opinion of every general. The lieutenant, carrying his wounded arm rearward, looked upon them with wonderâ (673).
More participant/spectator reorientations are in store. Even the sufferer of an injury does not automatically grasp its seriousness or significance; under the influence of shock, the patient does not feel the real damage of an injury. Further, in the lieutenantâs case a rearward officer corrects the lieutenantâs appreciation of his own injury. ââWhy man, thatâs no way to do it. You want to fix that thing.â He appropriated the lieutenant and the lieutenantâs wound.⊠His tone allowed one to think that he was in the habit of being wounded every day. The lieutenant hung his head, feeling, in this presence, that he did not know how to be correctly woundedâ (673â74).
Interestingly, the term âappropriateâ is apt for describing our dealings with things (instead of persons). As noted earlier, the arm had become an alien object to the lieutenant; in fact, both the soldier and his arm have been reified.
Soon after the lieutenant learns how to be âcorrectly wounded,â he sees a man who is dying but who apparently does not realize it. He wonders if he should alert the dying man about his condition. âSitting with his back against a tree a man with a face as grey as a new army blanket was serenely smoking a corn-cob pipe. The lieutenant wished to rush forward and inform him that he was dyingâ (674). Two additional perspectives on wounds can be found in âAn Episode of War.â The surgeon who tends to him treats him with âgreat contemptâ because the doctor views the wound as having âplaced [him] on a very low social planeâ (674). This stands in stark contrast to the âstrange dignityâ with which his wound was invested by those formerly under his command. Finally, by Craneâs radical questioning of the privileged or compromised positions of participants and spectators in understanding pain, the significance of an injury and the lasting impact of a wound bring the story to its pungent conclusion. âAnd this is the story of how the lieutenant lost his arm. When he reached home his sisters, his mother, his wife, sobbed for a long time at the sight of the flat sleeve. âOh, well,â he said, standing shamefaced amid these tears, âI donât suppose it matters so much as all thatââ (675).
Really? When the head of a household loses an arm, who are the observers and who are the participants? Craneâs ending is as problematic as it is poignant.
In âThe Price of the Harness,â Crane again uses the curtain imageââthe steep mountain range on the right turned blue and as without detail as a curtainâ (1016)âfor his exploration of the complex and confusing experience of battle. This story, one of Craneâs longer short stories, examines all sorts of misapprehensions and mistakes made both by participants and observers. In Craneâs American Civil War storiesâfor instance, in âAn Episode of Warââdistance from the battle is the coefficient of clarity; in his Spanish-American War stories, detachment and spectator neutrality often have the opposite effect. The drawback that comes from being too remote is symbolized by a military reconnaissance balloon that does not provide reliable intelligence but only gives away the troopsâ position, drawing both friendly and hostile fire. In âThe Price of the Harnessâ the balloon is shot down, and all witness its demise: âThe balloon was dying, dying a gigantic and public death before the eyes of two armiesâ (1022).6. Apparently those on the ground involved in the battle are sometimes, but not always, closer to the truth. In exploring the perspective of the infantry, Crane uses a technique later exploited by Alfred Hitchcock and more recently by Steven Spielberg in Jaws. First false suspense is created when the men sense danger but they are safe; then false security follows when the men feel safe but are truly in mortal danger. And so, Crane explains, after a long, tense wait, when the troops are finally able to return gunfire, âa new sense of safety was rightfully upon themâ (1029). Of course, then the real carnage begins.
âThe Price of the Harnessâ tallies up the costs of war: death, destruction, wounds, and pain. Crane depicts a variety of wounded men. Some are in shock, walking rearward, looking back whence they had fought. âThe wounded paused to look impassively upon this struggle. They were always like men who could not be aroused by anything furtherâ (1028).
Others suffer terribly on the field and in the hospital. In particular, Martin (whom Crane follows for the first half of the story) is badly wounded. As in âAn Episode in War,â Martin shuns the surgeonsâ comfort and care, choosing instead to rest against a tree: âMartin saw a busy person with a book and a pencil, but he did not approach him to become officially a member of the hospital. All he desired was rest and immunity from nagging. He took seat painfully under a bush and leaned his back upon the trunk. There he remained thinking, his face woodenâ (1028).
The climax of âPrice of the Harness,â perhaps even more emotionally wrenching than the close of âAn Episode of War,â concerns a soldier who is wounded and dying but does not realize it. Again the epistemological advantages and handicaps that one assumes accrue to participants and observers are undercut in Craneâs account of experience. James Nolan has suffered a fatal stomach wound but believes his wound is minor. His only complaints are that he is cold and that the ground he is lying on is wet. The ground is not damp, his comrades insist. Nolan will not be persuaded:
âJust put your hand under my back and see how wet the ground is,â he said.
Grierson seemed to be afraid of Nolanâs agitation, and so he slipped a hand under the prostate man, and presently withdrew it covered with blood. âYes,â he said hiding his hand carefully from Nolanâs eyes, âyou were right, Jimmie.â
âOf course I was,â said Nolan, contente...