Stephen Crane’s Artistry by Frank Bergon

Abstract

Reviews 335 Alberts’ life to him, a life carefully recorded on a pervasive world of tapes. Everything, almost, is planned, brought about, known, by “them” ; we can­ not escape. And yet, perversely, Alberts will, this time. He is allowed to call Irene and, in a comic upbeat, they plan, as soon as he returns, to have a baby. Perhaps the life force does surpass the machine. Or sometimes the machine relents. Or something. L. E. LEE, Western Washington University Stephen Crane’s Artistry. By Frank Bergon. (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 1975. 174 pages, $10.00.) This is a well-written, knowledgeable book on the subject of Stephen Crane’s artistry. It is not a well-argued or an entirely successful book. And it is a book which tends to restrict rather than to enrich our under­ standing of Stephen Crane and the art he created. The chief difficulty with Mr. Bergon’s approach is that in focusing exclusively upon Crane’s artistry he loses sight of, or willfully ignores, other important questions — such as the possibility that Crane’s art is not a monolithic whole or that Stephen Crane the man changed in his stance toward life. I certainly agree that Crane’s art is characterized by a concen­ tration upon intense moments (Mr. Bergon repeatedly insists that these moments are “unearthly” and “apparitional”), but I do not find it really helpful, or even logical, to view Crane from only this perspective. For despite Mr. Bergon’s rejection of thematic, social, or biographical approaches to Crane and his art (he thinks it “smug” to talk of Crane in social or moral terms), his book is as thesis-ridden as any of the other studies which have seen Crane from a single philosophic and/or artistic perspective (Naturalism, Impressionism, Existentialism, etc.). The first two chapters of Stephen Crane’s Artistry — in which Mr. Bergon focuses specifically upon Crane’s prose style and his habit of imagina­ tion — are the better part, by far, of the book. In these chapters Mr. Bergon clearly shows that Crane was characteristically concerned with the elusive quality of immediate experience, that his prose accordingly concentrates upon intense moments and incidents which dramatize his “central vision of reality as something that may be apprehended but never adequately comprehended.” But in Chapter Three the book begins to falter. The purpose of Chapter Three is to show that Crane’s “Sense of Story” is deter­ mined by his artistic preconceptions. Mr. Bergon rightly contends that 336 Western American Literature Crane’s obsession with the elusive quality of experience is evinced by his non-traditional, intensely episodic narrative structures. But this aspect of Crane’s artistry is too well known to need much comment. Mr. Bergon’s analyses of Maggie, The Red Badge, and “The Open Boat” are overly long and contain little that is new. This chapter would have been stronger if Mr. Bergon had chosen to examine works that have not already been the subject of so much structural analysis. The basic failure of this book lies, however, in Chapter Four, which is titled “A Suitable Subject: the West and the Westerner.” Following what seems to be a tradition in Crane studies to deny or to ignore the importance of Stephen Crane’s own Western experience, to see his admiration for the West and for Westerners as mere “posturing” (as something he “facetiously assumed”), Mr. Bergon proceeds to distort the real meaning of the West in Crane’s life and fiction. According to Mr. Bergon’s argument, the West was for Crane “A Suitable Subject” — and nothing else. There is an assumption here that the West was something that Crane “found” rather than experienced and something that he wrote about only because it suited his prose style. The possibility that Crane’s Western experience changed both his vision and his fiction is ignored — ignored, I suppose, because that possibility will not fit Mr. Bergon’s “suitable subject” thesis. Curiously, though, there is a very real sense in which much of what Mr. Bergon says about Crane and the West contradicts his argument that the West was only a suitable subject for Crane’s style. For example...