The Red Badge of Courage

Introduction: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) tells about an American Civil War recruit named Henry Fleming who leaves his mother to join the Union army. Henry, called “the youth” through most of the novel, struggles throughout the novel against his own cowardice while trying to preserve his honor and survive the Battle of Chancellorsville.

Context: Crane was born after the war and had never seen battle himself. Writing the novel around 1895, Crane had access to veterans of the war and other primary source documents, even though Crane himself lived first in New Jersey and later New York, and worked as a reporter of slum life in New York City.

About: The second sentence in the wikipedia entry for the novel is, “The story is about the meaning of courage.” To me, this is an excellent example of how to avoid getting caught up on the faults of wikipedia. There is no hyperlink at that sentence, or even paragraph, linking it to a critical article that would say “The story is about the meaning of courage.”

The Red Badge of Courage might very well be about “the meaning of courage,” but if it is, it is in an inclusive way, not exclusively. The best short description I could come up with of Crane’s novel I provided in the introduction.

In Place of an Introduction: I’ve often felt that one of the reasons I have always had a hard time liking The Great Gatsby was because I made the mistake of reading the introduction to the book. Despite what many of the people who write introductions to books seem to think, some people a) might actually like to be introduced to the book, and b) like reading books cover to cover, not slogging through a heap of steaming, shit-covered crticism that belongs in Hell.

My version comes with an introduction by Donald Gibson, professor at Rutgers at time of publication (my copy - 1996). Gibson makes no attempt to hide the fact that he’s aiming the book at middle and high school “required reading” students: “Every story has to be told by someone and from someone’s point of view,” Gibson tells us, leaving us astounded by his overwhelming capacities of observation, “Crane chooses to tell his story from what is called the third person limited point of view.” Wow, Mr. Gibson, tell me more! I’ve never heard of this breath-taking new concept, “the third person limited point of view.”

But even by those standards, Gibson’s introduction is offensively bad at several points. Introductions like Gibson’s are so bad that they actually leave a profound and personal impact on me: should I actually go to grad school if it means dealing with professors at universities who think this is good enough to be an introduction? Or on the other hand, should I instead endeavor even more to go to grad school, to make it my personal quest to make sure that introductions this bad are never published again?

I’m being hyperbolic, but I would like to discuss some of the ways that Gibson’s introduction fails, because I think it fails in ways that can be informative to some people working on papers and whatnot. But I want to emphasize that Gibson’s cumbersome introduction holds far more problems than I can possibly list here right now; indeed, my objections to it range from the first sentence of his introduction to the last.

For instance, Gibson hijacks his own introduction with a paragraph starting, “Given Crane’s inclination to question convention, it is no wonder that he was heavily influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.” Gibson spends no time after this linking Darwin and Crane directly, or explaining how Darwin’s specific ideas influenced specific parts of the work. Instead, he uses this page-long paragraph to link lead into an even more obtuse discussion of animals in the book. I can see how an argument might be made that Darwin’s work could be significant to understanding Crane—after all, Crane was raised by Methodist minister. But that sort of nuanced discussion has no place in an introduction, and Gibson’s discussion is anything but nuanced.

Further, Gibson has a habit of making tedious points, especially considering he’s supposed to be writing an introduction. For instance, Gibson tries to argue, “Crane’s language challenged the traditional distinction between the language of poetry and the language of literary prose.” Even if this point was worth making, I’m not even entirely sure that it’s true. Yes, Crane uses colloquial English for his dialogue, and that is remarkable, but language is always steeped in metaphor and other figurative language. Gibson makes as if there was some epic wall between poetry and prose with armed guards making sure nothing crossed between. To me, Gibson’s stance borders on lunacy.

To prove his point, Gibson points to a block quote at the end of Chapter 17 of Crane’s novel.

The block quote: “The forest still bore its burden of clamor. From off under the trees came the rolling clatter of the musketry. Each distant thicket seemed a strange porcupine with quills of flame. A cloud of dark smoke, as from smoldering ruins, went up toward the sun now bright and gay in the blue, enamled sky.

Gibson’s gloss: “The personification of the forest, the reference to it as though it were a person, the highly colorful and original reference to gunfire as ‘rolling clatter,’ the metaphors likening burning bushes to ‘porcupine[s] with quills of flame’ and describing the blue sky as ‘enameled,’ all reflect characteristics more commonly belonging to poetry than to prose.”

First of all, shame on Gibson for block quoting the book he’s introducing! More than that, Gibson’s entire interpretation is if not outright false at least clunky and poor scholarship.

“The personification of the forest,” Gibson says. Is the forest personified? “Burden” is not a word that presumes humanity. Consider this, the first entry at dictionary.com for “burden”: “that which is carried; load: a horse's burden of rider and pack.” In nautical usage, burden can refer to the carrying capacity of a ship. Although Gibson might say that the nautical usage is also personification, that still would not explain Gibson’s second clause where he says, “the reference to it as though it were a person.” I see no explicit reference to the forest as a person. I might agree that what seperates a burden from weight is the sense that it is “difficult to carry,” I nevertheless am left with the impression that Gibson doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

Now, even if I agreed that referring to gunfire as “rolling clatter” was “highly colorful” and “original” [note: I don’t], it nevertheless makes me wonder why Gibson called it a “reference to.” Possibly because he didn’t know what to make of it. I am tempted to label it synesthesia (the figurative trope, not the neural condition). (Alternatively, you might argue it’s a dead or submerged metaphor—calling it a submerged metaphor might actually be a better description than synesthesia.) However, I would hardly describe it as revolutionary; “rolling thunder” as a phrase had been in use for, at bare minimum, decades before Crane’s work was published. (A speech by Frances Gage in 1851 includes the phrase, “her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder”. I suspect earlier examples can be found.)

Next Gibson mentions “the metaphors likening burning bushes to ‘porcupine[s] with quills of flame’”. There’s only one, no need for the plural. Further, is something even a metaphor if something (the burning bushes) “seems” to be something else (porcupines with quills of flame) as opposed to actually being them? What does it mean, from a figurative perspective, for something to seem to be something else? This has always bothered me. Of course the easy answer is to just accept it as a metaphor (since most figurative language is rooted in the concept of the metaphor). What is interesting about Crane’s method, what he does with the “seeming” here, is that it roots the metaphor under the guise of being a realistic, literal description rooted in Crane’s 3rd person POV. It is a metaphor, but it’s a metaphor to the character as well as the audience; thus, Crane underscores how central the metaphor is not only to the audience but also to the characters within the world he describes, giving them a richer psychological depth.

Gibson treats his audience as middle schoolers; no, wait, I might be detracting from the average middle schooler’s literary understanding. It might very well be that he’s aiming his introduction to 4th graders. I appreciate that presenting an introduction for a book that may very well be sold to young readers, but that still is far from justifying Gibson’s introduction.

Episodes and Techniques:

“He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.” I’m still wondering what formula Henry would use to try to pull off this mathematic equation.

Crane uses descriptive naming; the same essential method Disney uses in many of its motion features (taken to dramatic extremes in Snow White where the description of the character is regarded as their actual name). In Crane’s case (as it would be for many future American writers), he gives them single qualifiers. “the youth”, “his tall comrade”, etc.

"He had pictured red letters of curious revenge."

Stepping Back: Using Crane as a Learning Resource: Cane’s novel is problematic. The discussion of courage is central to the book, but even it is clouded by the fact that it discusses courage in the face of military action; yet, that military action is detatched from the domain of causality. The war in Crane’s novel is a spectacle.

What Crane explores is dwarfed by what Crane omits. The novel is about the American Civil War yet slavery is not discussed, nor mentioned at all. If Gibson makes one poignant comment, it’s this: “Neither the author nor any character in the book expresses attitudes about politics or about any social issues.” It might be argued that although the novel appears to be historical fiction, the civil war is a venue. In fact, that may very well be my main critique of the novel.

It comes across as sightseeing fiction. In part, this is an element of realism. Henry joins because he wants to win in combat. He wants prestige and glory. When combat is over, it is a nightmare that he has escaped from, or a sickness that he has recovered from. And as a result, he leaves wanting images of tranquil skies. He never really invested himself in understanding the larger context of the events he engaged himself in or the world around him.

Crane is argued to succeed because of the power of the images he evokes. Like the war he describes, Crane’s novel itself is a spectacle. Crane is not a theoretician; Crane is no Tolstoy. It’s as though he regards history as boring. This makes the novel difficult to teach, and quite frankly, difficult to become fully immersed in.
The positive side of Crane’s ambiguity about events and terrain is that it means he does not use proper nouns and official dates as crutches to avoid or ignore the need for prose description. Crane has to describe the conditions of roads that are travelled on. For one chapter, the major threat is not the enemy, but the risk of a soldier falling in the road and being crushed by the wagons behind him. This is realism, and it’s gripping—but it’s also a superficial problem, with little to be said about it.

I am a firm believer that approaching a text with the assumption or even impression that it’s a masterpiece is always a mistake. In a classroom setting, I get the impression that teachers feel compelled to defend novels as masterpieces; after all, they’ve devoted themselves to studying the text and therefore don’t want to appear to have wasted their time. Professors of science teach the periodic table because it is a useful tool; yet, combined with this truth, is the fact that they are aware that the periodic table may on any given day be revised due to a new element being discovered. The periodic table is always open to refinement and improvement.

One of the reasons the humanities are starving (and the humanities are starving) is the tendency among teachers and professors to defend as text as though it is flawless. Yet, the opposite problem can also be the case, often even more so. If a professor admits that they do not regard a work as flawless, or that they do not like a book, they become uninterested in it. They don’t engage with it on anywhere near the same level that they would otherwise.

I think that the difficulty of teaching Stephen Crane is easily and perfectly reversed if the teacher takes the time to differentiate the qualities that make good fiction good from the qualities that make other forms of writing effective.

I’m going to take it as an a priori fact that people learn by imitation. As such, people model their writing on their reading. The problem with assigning Crane as an author is that the reader might actually like him. If the reader has to turn around and write an essay, they might not realize that the best thing they can do is forget how Crane writes. This is particularly problematic because idiotic English professors like Gibson are so busy lauding how beautiful Crane’s language is.

Teaching Crane is a problematic task because Crane’s novel is not streamlined; it is meandering and episodic. Cowardice and fear are central to the novel, perhaps, and those subjects are easier to write about than anything else. But, beyond that, certain considerations have to be kept in mind: When Crane published his novel, there were many living veterans of the American Civil War. Crane’s audience, if they were not veterans themselves, may very well know a veteran. The American social consciousness was aware of the American Civil war. Those who did not participate might feel enchanted by Crane’s evocative description.

Today’s evocative description is often overpowered by the sight and sound of theater. Films about the American Civil war now dominate the public imagination of the civil war. I think it might be an interesting experiment to have a class read The Red Badge of Courage directly following Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In Morrison’s text, the white man is nothing but evil. In Crane’s text, the black race is omitted. A civil war text published today without mention or awareness of slavery would be blasphemy.

Certainly there is no rule that anything with the Civil War must always and only discuss slavery. But, imagine as a teacher you give the following assignment to your class: Pretend you’re Stephen Crane trying to submit the novel to a publisher today. Why is now the time to publish this text? It would be a cruel test, because Crane’s text, despite being a “masterpiece,” would be self-published today just as Crane’s first novel was self-published in 1893.

The passive voice of the book, the awkward metaphors and synesthesia, and the unclear "purpose" of the book can make it a frustrating read. Link to the facebook group for hating the book: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2212989754