Dear Friends,
I’m sharing some reflections on Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. He’s an important writer for me and I think I’ll do another post on him soon. At the partner site
, spotlights Will Kemp’s art.Best,
Sam
STEPHEN CRANE’S THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
The underlying theory I have — which runs through everything on this Substack (and which I’m sure I’ll discuss more at some point) — is that cultures have an internal mental coherence that’s built around an ‘ideal type’; that, in theory, there are almost infinitely different ways for cultures to comport themselves; but, in practice, there are a few guiding threads. The history of the West is the transition — or mutation — from one set of systems to another. And the history of ideas is about teasing out these different systems — how they can overlap sometimes in the mind of the same individual at the same moment, how individuals learn to prioritize one system over another.
It’s more complicated than this but a simple way to demarcate these systems, in the West, is 1.Pagan; 2.Christian; 3.Modern, by which ‘pagan’ means adherence to a self-constituted tribe with divinity entering into the life-blood of the community particularly at moments of great courage or heightened emotion; ‘Christian’ means the triangulation of ethical questions to an unseeable, unknowable ‘Absolute,’ with divinity formulated as that which is not of this world; and ‘modern’ means a valorization of the multi-faceted, infinite individual, with divinity conceived of as the individual’s authentic self-expression.
Much of what’s fascinating to me about Stephen Crane is that he seems to intuit everything about the conceptual framework I’m describing and his fiction depicts, acutely, vividly, how individuals’ self-conceptions move freely between one of these systems and another, how people find themselves becoming ‘modern.’
This is done very simply and cogently in the short story ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.’ The Red Badge of Courage is a slightly more complicated distillation of the same thesis. There is a first movement that is in the background and is elided quickly over — that is the transformation of a good-natured farm boy, of an essentially Christian nature, into a cold-blooded killer, of a ‘pagan’ disposition.. This is what Henry, the main character, expects war to be: “The youth had been taught that a man becomes another thing in a battle. He saw his salvation in such a change.”
And this change plays itself out at different points in the novel — in the ‘false consciousness’ of Henry’s heroism in battle, in which, on the second day of fighting, he becomes a “war devil,” charging forward holding the regimental flag aloft and earning the commendations of the officers. At different moments Henry is convinced that this is all that’s achievable for him, that this is the height of his consciousness. “He was a devotee of a mad religion, blood-sucking, muscle-wrenching, bone-crushing,” he thinks at one point; and, at another, “it was revealed to him that he was a barbarian, a beast, he fought like a pagan who defends his religion.” These reflections stamp on him a particular understanding of himself in juxtaposition to an ideal self. Thinking of his undiscovered desertion of the day before, he reflects, “he had performed his mistakes in the dark so we was still a man”; and of his horror at the carnage of the day before, “he was a novice who did not comprehend, he had been a mere man railing at a condition but now he was out of it and could see that it had been very proper and just.”
But this is — Henry begins to dimly suspect — not the entire truth of himself or of the experience that he is undergoing. It’s his desertion on the first day of the battle — his fleeing from an enemy charge — that is the real heart of the novel and of his complex sense of selfhood. After fleeing — after having broken free of the confinement of his regiment, “the iron laws of tradition and law,” the sense of being “in a moving box” — he finds himself suddenly in a very different, enchanted landscape. He is in the woods, which he had never properly taken in before, and he finds that “This landscape gave him assurance. A fair field holding life. It was the religion of peace.”
That sense is brought to him by his further perambulations, the discovery of a place in the woods where “the high arching boughs made a chapel,” the encounter of a column of wounded men, solicitous of and tender towards one another in a way that would have seemed impossible for the hard-bitten soldiers of the morning. Henry has a glimpse of how combat — the chaotic truth of combat as it’s actually experienced as opposed to how it’s imagined — can effect this transformation in people when, returning to his regiment, he encounters a braggadocious soldier who seems suddenly to have “new eyes,” a fresh and very distinct humility. “And the youth saw that ever after it would be easier to live in his friend’s neighborhood.”
Henry attains something of this knowledge for himself at the end of the second day — at the novel’s conclusion. Steeped in the false consciousness of his heroism, he finds himself reflecting on the peculiar adventures of his desertion and realizes that they, just as much as anything that he could possibly be decorated for, give shape to his being.
“So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed,” Crane writes. “He would be taught to deal gently and with care. He would be a man. And at last his eyes seemed to open to some new ways. He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of the earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them….With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of a strong and steady blood.”
What opens with Henry’s transformation, and epiphany, is a portal into a different way of being, the sensibility of the ‘modern.’ The trick to it is an acceptance of cowardice as a perfectly viable mode of expression — a deep truth of the psyche. This is unacceptable in the glory-ridden ‘pagan’ sensibility or in the honor-bound perspective that accompanies religions with a sense of the Absolute, but Henry in the course of a confused battle finds that these modes of existence are inadequate to capturing the truth of what is really happening around him. At the first encounter of rifle-fire, Henry is struck by “the singular absence of heroic poses, the men bending and surging in their haste were in every impossible attitude”; and much later the regiment, returning from a brave and bloody but somehow inadequate charge, “trudge with sudden heaviness as if they bore upon their bended shoulders the coffin of their honor.” But all of these conceptions — the presence or absence of “heroic poses”; the bestowing and removal of “honor” — do not convey the actual overwhelming intensity of the experience. As Henry realizes, cowardice is very much a part of it, as are all the whirling, contradictory views of himself that beset him throughout the two days of the engagement. It simply becomes impossible to situate himself within any available social categories, to view himself along axes related to glory or honor. He ‘contains multitudes’ and everything in the battle — the desertions just as much as the charges, the clanging non-sequiturs of his thoughts — form the picture of who he is.
That’s what I would think of as the ‘modern’ sensibility and it’s startling to see it so clearly formulated in Crane, just as much as in Whitman.
I like the Pagan --> Christian --> Modern formulation. But I'd add that Crane was one of the standard-bearers for literary naturalism, which was itself heavily influenced by Darwinism. Not all modernists were naturalists, but quite a few were. Those who were did not buy into the supremacy of the individual at all. In fact, they believed (as M.H. Abrams memorably put it) that the individual was the victim of "glandular secretions within and sociological pressures without." London's "South of the Slot" shows this beautifully in the character of Freddie Drummond, who morphs into Big Bill Totts quite involuntarily. So I think understanding RED BADGE or "The Open Boat" requires some attention to the Darwinian idea of the individual not as a self-made survivor, but as the product of chance -- helpless in the face of the massive biological and economic forces in the world.
I read this novel The Red Badge of Courage and taught it long ago. You take me back with this insightful essay. Oddly, what you've written makes me think of this poem by Bill Matthews, much loved poet who died young:
Meticulous
"I have passed the age of boredom and I left part of myself with
it."--Flaubert
The blare of blank paper: the solace
of making lists, tracking fresh snow.
The list grows. How busy I must be.
To have planned a day is almost
to have lived it. HERE, I stab it
again, where I crossed out a near
disaster, and I let my voice
trail off, three dots, the last bootprints . . .
What became of him, I wonder,
rapt and lost, who was almost me?