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3. Nature as Protagonist in “The Open Boat” Anthony Channell Hilfer

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 2012, pp. 248-257 (Article)

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https://doi.org/10.1353/tsl.2012.0012

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/476402

Anthony Channell Hilfer248

3. Nature as Protagonist in “The Open Boat”

The bottom of the sea is cruel. —Hart Crane, “Voyages”

As many critics have argued, questions of perspective and epistemology are central to Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (Kent; Hutchinson). The story’s first sentence famously clues us to this: “None of them knew the color of the sky” (68). But behind the uncertainties of perspective is a determinable ontology, a presence, or rather, I shall argue, a sort of presence, the existence of which implies a rectified aesthetic response. This response emerges, how- ever, from negations, denials, and occultations: what is not seen, who is not there, and what does not happen.3 Here again, when we look at nature we behold things that are not there and miss “the nothing that is.” Fully as much as Stevens in “The Snow Man,” Crane is concerned with certain conventions of representation: personification, the pictur- esque, the American sublime, and the melodramatic, which although it does not inform “The Snow Man” is played on in Stevens’s “The Ameri- can Sublime.” Crane’s story is intertextual with nature poetry, sentimental poetry, hymns, and landscape art, as well as with Darwinism, theological clichés, and, less obviously, theological actualities. For the most part these conventions add up to what the Stevens poem declares is “not there.” To get to “the nothing that is” we must first traverse this ocean of error. Doing so helps keep our perspective not on the men in the boat but on the “real” (with the scare quotes actually meant to be scary) ocean. If the story is at least as much about Nature as about men in nature, if nature is a central character in the story, then one of the story’s central questions is how to see nature from a natural rather than human perspective. In a passage in section 1 of “The Open Boat” the sea is depicted in an orgy of hyperbolic personifications:

A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. 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. As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut out all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water. (69)

Nature here has malign intent, being “nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.” Nature has more agency, and an

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agency more primary, than that of the men in the boat, who are merely in a reactive relation to the waves. In the final section of the story the cor- respondent is shown in an ironically passive relation to his own survival:

Then the correspondent performed his one little marvel of the voyage. A large wave caught him and flung him with ease and supreme speed completely over the boat and far beyond it. It struck him even then as an event in gymnastics and a true miracle of the sea. An overturned boat in the surf is not a plaything to a swimming man. (91)

As J. C. Levenson precisely observes, “Though the correspondent may be said ambiguously to have performed his little marvel, the wave and not the man has controlled the event” (lxv). In the men’s apprehension the waves are making an “effort” to kill them, threateningly “snarling” at them, the water “grim” in its resolve (69). Yet the heightened emotions attributed to Nature are rhetorically offset by the understated, calcula- tedly stilted, legalistic language of “a singular disadvantage” and “do something effective in the way of.” Crane is squaring the circle, on the one hand showing Nature as an effective presence and agency and on the other mocking the all-too-human tendency to personify nature by means of the pathetic fallacy. In effect, nature has presence and agency, but when we attempt to describe it, we fall into a ludicrous anthropocen- trism. And, finally, Crane is raising the question of justice—is Nature’s ascribed malice actionable? Earlier in section 1 we were told that “these waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall [. . .]” (68). In section 4, as the men are within sight of the shore, their anger turns against the lifesaving stations they mistakenly suppose to be along the shore: “To their sharpened minds it was easy to conjure pictures of all kinds of incompetence and blindness and, indeed, cowardice” (76). They need an agent to blame.4 The lifesaving stations, which do not exist, cannot be blamed for the predicament itself, and to blame the ocean is self- evidently nonsensical, so the narrative voice speculates that men’s collec- tive mind progresses from personification to myth, going from wrongful and barbarous waves to “the seven mad gods who rule the sea” to the more consolidated figure of “this old ninny-woman, Fate,” who if she “cannot do better than this [. . .] should be deprived of the management of men’s fortunes.” Intention is again assumed, or rather a blameful absence of it: “She is an old hen who knows not her intention.” Here the complaint becomes one of incompetence even more than malice:

If I am going to be drowned [. . .] why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contem- plate land and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely

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to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life? It is preposterous. (77)

Then:

“If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the begin- ning and save me all this trouble? The whole affair is absurd. . . . But no; she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work.” Afterward the man might have had the impulse to shake his fist at the clouds. “Just you drown me, now, and then hear what I call you!” (77)

The preposterousness of this denunciation is quite marvelous. Inten- tion is posited where it does not exist, and that the men have worked so hard is presented as a moral claim to a dubious divinity, Fate. Clearly the men were not “allowed” to come this near land but did so through their own efforts and good luck. That they cannot get ashore is the result not of malice but of heavy surf and bad luck. It is too unbearable for them to envision their predicament as mere accident, so they turn to a mythicized deity and indict it in a kind of inverted prayer.5 In a similarly desperate situation Job calls God to an accounting, one in which God justifies himself not morally but by an appeal to his creative power or, as we might say, to an aesthetics of the sublime. Before we return to the sublime let us first witness the grandiose buildup and breakdown of the moral claim in the great passage in section 6:

During this dismal night, it may be remarked that a man would con- clude that it was really the intention of the seven mad gods of the sea to drown him despite the abominable injustice of it. For it was certainly an abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard. The man felt it would be a crime most unnatural. Other people had drowned at sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails, but still— When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as impor- tant, and that she does not feel that she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be targeted with his jeers. Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot, he feels, perhaps, the de- sire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying, “Yes, but I love myself.” A high cold star on a winter’s night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation. (84–85)

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The extended ellipsis of “but still—” indicates the absurdity of asking for an exemption from a routine hazard. The greatest joke of the passage is the pun “a crime most unnatural,” as if large waves and heavy surf were un-natural impositions. The discomfiting thing about nature is that though we can ad- dress it, our messages can only come back stamped with “return to sender.” The men do, however, receive a kind of sign, the “high cold star on a winter’s night.” This sign resembles that which Stevens’s Snow Man perceives, and also what another Snow Man, Robert Frost, recognizes in “Desert Places”:

And lonely as it is that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less— A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. (386)

Nature’s non-expressiveness is, naturally, its ultimate expression, “the word he feels that she says to him.” Why is this so hard to accept? Human egocentricity, an egocentricity on a cosmic scale, is reinforced, at least in the West, by the Christian doctrine of man’s deserved transcen- dence over nature. As the Christian aspect of this belief weakened, it was replaced with technological domination, yet the shadow of divinity still hung over it. That is why it is such a shock, even an affront, that nature does not regard a man as important and does not feel that she would maim the universe by disposing of him: “Perhaps an individual must consider his own death to be the final phenomenon of nature” (91). Nature as a placeholder for the absconded God is woefully lacking in one of His most appealing attributes: providential care. Therefore the comfort of implor- ing or defying becomes irrelevant. There is nobody about to keep his eye on the sparrow. J. C. Levenson has it right in his commonsense reading of the first line of “The Open Boat”: “The famous opening sentence—‘None of them knew the color of the sky’—is the simplest possible rendering of direct experience” (lxii). While the primary meaning is that the men must keep their eyes on the next wave that is so “nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats,” there may also be the intimation that the men cannot share in the reassurance from the heavens of William Cullen Bryant’s allegorical waterfowl:

There is a Power whose care Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, The desert and illimitable air, Lone wandering, but not lost. (125)

Signs in the sky—of a providential God or of God’s protected species of sparrows and waterfowls—are not evident in Crane’s story. As George

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Monteiro has demonstrated, “The Open Boat” is intertextual with a tradi- tional line of hymns that evoke God’s providential rescue of those in peril at sea. Noting that the lifeboat itself becomes a danger to the men in their final attempt to reach the shore, Monteiro shows how Crane deconstructed the tropes of such hymns as William Bliss’s “The Life-Boat”:

He matched his personal experiences of shipwreck against the es- sentialist, allegorical teachings of nineteenth-century Protestantism as he knew them, and he found their optimism decidedly wrong- headed. While the hymns talk of Christianity as the life-boat which in itself provides safety and salvation, Crane’s story tells of a dinghy which at the last becomes as dangerous to human life as the sea itself. (“Logic” 334–35)

The men are angry at Providence for not being there. There are, in fact, signs galore throughout “The Open Boat,” but they are signs of insignificance, functioning usually as ironic denials of reas- surance: “There was the shore of the populous land, and it was bitter and bitter to them that from it came no sign” (76). The gull that tries to land on the captain’s head seems an ironic inversion of Coleridge’s benign albatross: “After it had been discouraged from the pursuit the captain breathed easier on account of his hair, and others breathed easier because the bird struck their minds at this time as being somehow grewsome and ominous” (71–72). The man on the shore waving his coat “don’t mean anything” (80). If the men on the boat cannot communicate with a man on shore, how much the more is their difficulty in making sense out of the speechless phenomena of the natural world. Signs in Crane’s story either fail to signify or are interpreted by the men to signify natural ma- levolence, or at least indifference. Crane has put the last nail in the coffin of Emerson’s transcendentally idealist concept of nature. In Crane’s story, words are signs of unadorned natural facts—“these waves were of the hue of slate” (68)—except, just as frequently, when words serve as egocentric complaints or pleas. These natural facts are signs of spiritual facts only if there is a spiritual force in nature that does not serve human desires. Final- ly, if nature is the symbol of spirit, then what it symbolizes is, as with the bird, “ominous.” Emerson resonantly declared that “the world is emblem- atic” and that “a Fact is the end or last issue of spirit” (24–25). What then to make of our last view of Billie, possibly the best of the men in the boat: “The welcome of the land to the men of the sea was warm and generous, but a still and dripping shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land’s welcome for it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave” (92). This seems an answer to which sign, exactly, the men are interpreting in the last passage in the story: “When it came night, the white

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waves paced to and fro in the moonlight and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt they could then be interpreters” (92). What they interpret remains unstated and is doubly qualified by being what they “felt [. . .] then.” In yet another Crane irony, the last word in the story is “interpreters.” Although Crane is rigorously ironic about the men’s egocentric re- sponse to natural facts, it should be emphasized that this egoism is generic rather than unusual or individual. Thus, except for the oiler, Billie, the men in the boat are not named. These men-in-general are, if anything, better than most. Men tend to be provincial in the face of nature and find it difficult to keep it in mind that nature does not equate to nurture. But Billie’s death is an irony doubly directed at both Christian and Darwinian providence, given that he seems not only the most altruistic of the men in the boat, the one for whom divine providence should look out, but also the fittest who should come out ahead in what Darwin called “the great and complex battle of life” (91). Crane dealt with benign providence directly and rather crudely in another sea story, “Flanagan,” in which a storm deals out inverse rewards: “The first mate was a fine officer, and so a wave crashed him into the deck-house and broke his arm. The cook was a good cook, and so the heave of the ship flung him heels over head with a pot of boiling water and caused him to lose interest in anything save his legs” (97). Darwinian providence does no better. In the last section of “The Open Boat,” Crane sets us up with the correspondent’s observation that “the oiler was ahead in the race. He was swimming strongly” (90). Yet he alone fails to survive. But, paradoxically though it may seem, Calvin as well as Darwin stand behind Crane’s ironies. As John Berryman shrewdly observed, “Among [Crane’s] rebellions, one hears something, however, Calvinist” (115). To be sure, Crane did not believe in God, but the God he did not believe in was the Calvinist God, and Crane is nearly as fierce about human pride and vanity as was Calvin, who noted, “So long as we do not look beyond the earth, we are quite pleased with our righteousness, wisdom, and virtue; we address ourselves in the most flattering terms, and seem only less than demigods” (38). Edward Garnett commented on Crane’s “irony deriding the swelling emotions of the self” (213), and indeed these are his main tar- gets: “His work is a continual examination of pretension—an attempt to cast overboard, as it were, impediments to our salvation” (Berryman 279). Theodor Adorno’s philosophical reflection on nature suggests that it is a corrective for our pretensions: “Natural grandeur reveals another aspect to its beholder: that aspect in which human domination has its limits and that calls to mind the powerlessness of human bustle” (70). The men in the boat do finally find their pride pared down to an irreducible minimum: “Yes, but I love myself.”

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As against even this minimal remnant of egocentricity, nature, the shad- ow of the Calvinist God, has its claims. These claims are expressed in the pictorial mode in terms of three opposing visions of landscape painting: the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime. Crane explicitly invokes the picturesque: “In the wan light the faces of the men must have been gray. Their eyes must have glinted in strange ways as they gazed steadily astern. Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtless have been weirdly picturesque” (69). Crane is writing against the picturesque aesthetic and its prescribed, anthropomorphic expectations. The ecocritic Jonathan Bate makes the case against the picturesque as a mode of apprehending nature:

The very word “landscape” makes the point. A land-scape means land as shaped, as arranged by a viewer. The point of view is that of a human observer, not the land itself. The classic picturesque view is seen from a “station,” a raised promontory in which the spectator stands above the earth, looking down over it in attitude of enlighten- ment mastery. Landscape was originally a technical term in painting; it denoted an artistic genre, not something in nature. Hence the term “picturesque”: a stretch of land that resembles a painting. (132)

Charles Wright remarks that “landscape is something you determine and dominate. Nature is something that determines and dominates you” (qtd. in Costello 3), as good a distinction between the picturesque and sublime as any I know. Crane’s image is an accusation of the putative picturesque spectators. It seems possible that the balcony from which these spectators view is that of a theater, thus demeaning the position of the men in the boat to figures in a melodrama. One could even envision a melodramatic adaptation of “The Open Boat” along the lines of the following scene, from a nineteenth-century stage adaptation of Nick of the Woods:

Savages pursue Roland and his fiancée, who are stopped in their flight by a raging river below a waterfall. Suddenly, “the Jibbenainosay” [the name the Indians give to the revenger hero who pursues them] is precipitated down the cataract in a canoe of fire. The Indians all utter a yell of horror and fall on their faces. Near the end of Nick, the prophet-avenger reveals his true identity to his band of settler follow- ers, a revelation of revenge which presages the revelation of divine wrath at the climax of the action. (McConachie 137)

The aesthetic of the melodrama, like that of the picturesque, has built into it the comfort of the spectator in a divinely ordered, providential cos- mos, a comfort shared by the reader looking down at the page. Even the

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danger present in melodrama evokes self-pity rather than tragic clarity, turning in toward the ego rather than transcending it. Crane plays this out by introducing the notorious soldier of the legion who lay dying in Algiers:

A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was dearth of woman’s tears; [. . .] (85)

Though the correspondent suddenly feels an intense sorrow for the soldier not unlike the pangs one feels at a splendidly manipulative pop song (“The Leader of the Pack,” say, or “Teen Angel”), Crane satirically targets the writ- er and, by implication, the reader: “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 [. . .]” (85).6 This imaginary danger has no real stakes for the reader or even the excessively safe and comfortable writer—as contrasted with Crane, whose story was based on his actual experience of shipwreck. The singsong rhymes of the poem emphasize its conventionality and gen- erate the correspondent’s displaced, and, despite the straits he is in, rather luxurious self-pity. As John Conron notes in American Picturesque, Crane was one of the writers of the 1890s who “had begun to critique the picturesque both explicitly and implicitly by means of irony” (310–11). In a final twist, the correspondent, swimming for his life, finds himself envisioning the shore, the place of comfort, as a genre painting in an art gallery: “The shore, with its white slope of sand and its green bluff, topped with little silent cottages, was spread like a picture before him. It was very near to him then, but he was impressed as one who in a gallery looks at a scene from Brittany or Holland” (91). Here the aesthetic is neither pictur- esque nor sublime but beautiful, a landscape redolent of tranquility. Against the comforts of the beautiful, the picturesque, and the melo- dramatic, Crane poises a notably severe version of the sublime. The sublime serves the double office of restoring to nature a respect for its otherness while humbling the pride of human figures dwarfed in natu- ral immensities. J. C. Levenson interestingly argued that Crane’s “famous irony was the necessary instrument of an intelligence which had so little on which to work” (“Stephen Crane” 384). Levenson notes that this irony was derived from a loss of faith in Emersonian transcendent meaning:

The tacit assumption from which [Emerson] argued was this: that the unembellished facts could convey meaning because by themselves they had meaning in an implicit universal order. With an agnostic like Crane, however, for whom the vision of chaos was constant and glimpses of order were rare, the meaning of an event came less from its fitting a general pattern than from its not fitting the preconceptions

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with which society prepared him. Take metaphysical belief away, change certainty for ambiguity, and irony becomes the method for finding meaning. (393)

In other words, Crane’s writing is Adorno’s negative dialectics avant la lettre. Via irony and parody, Crane deflects a betraying language into at least an intimation of what nature is not, a strategy similar to Stevens’s Snow Man. What both address is the “permanent reductio ad hominem of all appearance” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 387), a state we are rapidly approaching in our age of simulacra. But pare down to “nothing that is not there,” and you have at least cleared the ground for “the nothing that is,” a nature that marginalizes man and negates God. Stevens’s “The Snow Man” and Crane’s “The Open Boat” are determined attempts to approach, if they can never arrive at, the zero-degree sublimity of nature, a perfect inhumanism. Crane gives us a nature that has agency without intention or person- ality, a nature that is visible without being intelligible, and he does so in language that flourishes signs warning against being taken for the thing they signify. But to the narrator, if not the men in the boat, nature has awe- inspiring attributes: “It was probably splendid, it was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber” (70). Is the qualification, the doubly stressed “probably,” a sign of general indeterminacy or of the uncertainties involved in differing human per- spectives? The correspondent does seem to have a momentary epiphany of an impersonal natural, sublime in his apprehension of the unnamed “thing” (clearly a shark but unnamed as certain dread divinities are):

But the thing did not then leave the vicinity of the boat. Ahead or astern, on one side or the other, at intervals long or short, fled the sparkling streak, and there was to be heard the whiroo of the dark fin. The speed and the power of the thing was greatly to be admired. It cut the water like a gigantic and keen projectile. (84)

Even here the admiration is in the passive case and is not necessarily the correspondent’s. From a strict Darwinian point of view, wherein by nature is meant “only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws” (92), Crane personifies throughout the story, as in “the play of the free sea” and the sublime power of the shark. Could these passages then be a more ironic play on our tendency to personify? We know from the beginning that the men in the boat do not have the luxury of aesthetic contemplation. So where are these views coming from? Not from the men, not from the (theater?) balcony. It is the view from nowhere and this is the ground of its authority, its lack of interested partiality. It is, so to speak, the sound of

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the tree falling in the forest even when Bishop Berkeley is not there to hear it. Earlier we were shown an unqualified oceanic sublimity: “There was a terrible grace in the move of the waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests” (69). “There was” is an ontological rather than epistemological claim. Crane ultimately affirms Nature with a capital N, but like Stevens’s Snow Man and unlike most nineteenth-century versions (Melville obviously excepted), it is not a Nature that cares for us. The cor- respondent comes to realize this in his response to yet another sign, a tall wind tower on the shore:

The tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual—nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent. (88)

Though indifference is, of course, a humanizing trait, and nature is assigned a gender in the passage, Crane, in negatively and theologically dialectical terms, in self-canceling language, has come near to outflanking the human- ization of nature without giving up on its sublimity. One thinks of Stevens’s evocation of the cry “Inhuman, of the veritable ocean” (97) in “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Behind all the anthropomorphic or egoistic or conven- tional or comfortable perspectives on nature is the veritable ocean.