While the covert progression in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” has much to do with the unreliability of the character narrator, in Stephen Crane’s “An Episode of War,” the narration is extradiegetic and the narrator is a reliable mouthpiece of the implied author. To discover the covert progression in such a narrative, instead of exploring various hidden gaps between the narrator’s words and the fictional facts, we try to find out how the author creates an undercurrent through reliable stylistic and structural choices for certain ethical purposes. In “An Episode of War,” behind the (non-satirical) realist plot development, there is created a satirical emasculating undercurrent against war and traditional notions of heroism.
Regarded as a “best” or an “archetypal” Crane story (Wolford 1989: 68; Stallman 1976: 373; Nagel 1975: 11), “An Episode of War” has attracted much critical attention. Critics tend to treat it as a (non-satirical) realistic or naturalistic narrative (see the Introduction for a summary of the overt plot development).1 Challenging existing criticisms which “have consistently viewed ‘An Episode of War’ as a narrative whose sole purpose is to describe war realistically,” Mary Shaw offers a reading that sees the tale as a satirical narrative, “whose primary purpose is not simply to present commendable, realistic portrayals of traditional heroism, but to comment or criticize” since it confronts “portrayals of idealized heroic attitudes” with “dramatizations of actual repercussions of the fruition of these attitudes [referring to the protagonist’s amputation in the end]” (1991: 26–30). Critics on both sides have overlooked a covert satirical progression, which Crane creates primarily through subtle stylistic choices, to subvert implicitly “idealized heroic attitudes” or “commendable, realistic portrayals of traditional heroism” from the beginning to the end of the textual movement. In terms of the covert progression, Crane implicitly invites very different judgments from his readers. Interpretively, Crane unobtrusively asks readers to judge the protagonist and other army men as emasculated figures (who, as victims of war, also invite readers’ compassion), made weak and powerless, which goes against romanticized notions of heroism. Ethically, Crane secretly calls for readers to share his negative judgment on war. Aesthetically, Crane invites readers to appreciate his verbal and structural devices that satirize war and contemporary heroics in a highly artistic way.
The narrative begins with the protagonist’s rationing out his company’s supply of coffee:
The lieutenant’s rubber blanket lay on the ground, and upon it he had poured the company’s supply of coffee. Corporals and other representatives of the grimy and hot-throated men who lined the breastwork had come for each squad’s portion.
The lieutenant was frowning and serious at this task of division [compare: serious at the division]. His lips pursed as he drew with his sword various crevices in the heap, until brown squares of coffee, astoundingly equal in size, appeared on the blanket. He was on the verge of a great triumph in mathematics [compare: He was about to finish his very precise division], and the corporals were thronging forward, each to reap a little square [compare: and the corporals were just going to get their portions], when suddenly the lieutenant cried out and looked quickly at a man near him as if he suspected it was a case of personal assault. The others cried out also when they saw blood upon the lieutenant’s sleeve.2
As regards referring expressions, the nominal phrase “the lieutenant,” which refers to the protagonist, appears three times without naming the person involved. Significantly, the lieutenant, the corporals and all the other military persons are kept anonymous throughout the narrative. By means of anonymity in referring to the characters, the military ranks are foregrounded, leading us to expect a fierce battle, an expectation initially aroused by the title “An Episode of War.” The words “task,” “triumph,” and “assault” in a military context are usually associated with fighting against the enemy. But such conventional expectations are defeated by the transitivity patterning.3 The lieutenant uses his sword—the only weapon of his described in the narrative—not to fight against the enemy, but to divide coffee, and he is very “serious” at this so-called “task.” Similarly, instead of referring to a remarkable war victory, “a great triumph” is used to refer to the protagonist’s precision in dividing coffee, a precision that has no connection with any military activity in the narrative, thus appearing digressive and irrelevant to “an episode of war.” And the corporals, instead of charging against the enemy, are thronging forward only to “reap a little square of coffee.” When the lieutenant is hit by a bullet, he does not suspect it to be from the enemy, but a “personal” assault from a fellow soldier. Moreover, instead of showing bravery and endurance, both the lieutenant (as an experienced soldier) and the corporals “cried out” at the result of the sniper’s shot. That is to say, the pattern of transitivity, or the realized action, mental, relational and behavioral processes, conflicts with what is conventionally expected of military men in such a situational context, producing much textual tension and ironic effect.
This narrative was originally entitled “The Loss of an Arm,”4 an unpublished title that tallies perfectly with the narrator’s summary at the ending of the published text: “And this is the story of how the lieutenant lost his arm” (272). When the narrative was published, the title was changed to “An Episode of War.” This title leads readers to expect the plot to center on a fighting scene, but at the opening of this short narrative, Crane unexpectedly focuses our attention on the protagonist’s dividing coffee for the company. Here we can get a glimpse of how discoursal stylistic choices “work on” story events and change their effects. With the original title “The Loss of an Arm,” there is hardly any satirical effect in reading the protagonist’s dividing coffee (when he gets wounded), but with the title “An Episode of War,” a certain amount of tension and satirical effect may arise from the clash between readers’ expectations for a fighting scene and the story facts Crane has selected to present (see below for why the title is changed to a more satirical one in the published text). And Crane’s other stylistic choices implicitly reinforce the satirical effect, which will gradually increase through Crane’s skilful choice of story facts and stylistic techniques in the later textual movement. Not surprisingly, the thematic function of such textual elements, which appear to be unimportant or digressive to the plot development, tends to elude critical attention unless we make a conscious effort to explore a possible hidden dynamic.
A later description goes: “At the roadside a brigade was making coffee and buzzing with talk like a girl’s boarding school” (271). According to the traditional division of labor between the two genders, dividing coffee or making coffee is a feminine task. But of course army men at the front can only rely on themselves, and Hemingway’s narratives of men doing manly things also at times turn to coffee-making. However, it is significant that Crane gives unusual prominence to the soldiers’ performing this traditionally feminine task within the limited space of this short narrative: Not only opening the story with the protagonist’s dividing coffee, making his getting wounded while dividing coffee the title event of the story, but also depicting a brigade’s making coffee and explicitly comparing the army men to “girls” in authorial commentary. Since the explicit comment “like a girl’s boarding school” drastically goes against readers’ expectations of male soldiers, the stylistic choices have the function of highlighting the related story fact of the soldiers’ “making coffee.”
On a wider scope, according to traditional conception of heroic male soldiers, they are typically brave, active, calm, broad-minded, and physically strong. Significantly, manliness as such forms the very foundation of traditional heroism, and fictional narratives in favor of heroism characteristically depict a protagonist as full of such manhood. A careful examination of the stylistic choices among other techniques in “An Episode of War” reveals that, behind the appearance of presenting “commendable, realistic portrayals of traditional heroism,” there is an undercurrent that goes in the opposite direction—it continuously deprives the protagonist and other soldiers of manhood.
In the following passage, Crane shows the army men’s passivity or inaction with various choices of transitivity. The wounded lieutenant “looked sadly, mystically, over the breastwork at the green face of a wood” where the bullet has come and “the men about him gazed statue-like and silent, astonished and awed by this catastrophe” (268, italics added). In the traditional conception, heroic soldiers, in contrast with ordinary guys, would treat a wound in the arm just as an injury rather than a “catastrophe,” and would face it calmly and bravely rather than being “astonished and awed” into helplessness and incapacity to act. Crane spares no ink in foregrounding the army men’s passivity or inaction: “As the lieutenant stared at the wood, [his comrades] too swung their heads, so that for another instant all hands, still silent, contemplated the distant forest” (268) and when the lieutenant is departing for the hospital, “the men in silence stared at the woods, then at the departing lieutenant; then at the wood, then at the lieutenant” (270, italics added). The consistent choice of mental processes, the repetition of “then at” (conveying a sense of mechanicalness), and the circumstantial elements showing the army men’s sadness and inactivity interact to deprive the army men of any heroic quality. What is more, the stylistically wrought undercurrent also conveys the protagonist’s utmost physical weakness and helplessness:
The orderly-sergeant took the sword and tenderly placed it in the scabbard. At the time, he leaned nervously backward, and did not allow even his finger to brush the body of the lieutenant. A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from his new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded man’s hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence—the meaning of ants, potentates, wars, cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird’s wing; and the power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form, and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are little. His comrades look at him with large eyes thoughtfully. Moreover, they fear vaguely that the weight of a finger upon him might send him headlong, precipitate the tragedy, hurl him at once into the dim, gray unknown. And so the orderly-sergeant, while sheathing the sword, leaned nervously backward.
There were others who proffered assistance. One timidly presented his shoulder and asked the lieutenant if he cared to lean upon it, but the latter waved him away mournfully. He wore the look of one who knows he is the victim of a terrible disease and understands his helplessness. He again stared over the breastwork at the forest, and then, turning, went slowly rearward. He held his right wrist tenderly in his left hand as if the wounded arm was made of brittle glass. (269–70, italics added)
Many critics treat the description as investing the protagonist with dignity or glory.5 Shaw shares this view but takes it that the description that attributes “strange dignity” to the protagonist “solely reflects the point of view of the soldiers, who are still deluded by the romantic notion of war” (1985: 96).6 This kind of reading is supported by the noticeable words like “dignity,” “majesty,” “the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence,” “power,” “radiance.” But if we examine Crane’s stylistic choices very carefully, we may discover that, behind the dignified, “romantic” picture, there is an ironic undercurrent where the lieutenant’s wound is used both as a vehicle to convey Crane’s nihilistic view of the world and as a means to dramatize the lieutenant as an extremely weak and vulnerable person. Superficially, the lieutenant is dignified by “majesty,” but in what precedes, Crane puts “a trident” on a par with “a spade” (269) and at the present stage, he juxtaposes “potentates” with “ants” and “a feather dropped from a bird’s wing,” thereby rendering the former as unimportant as the latter. These stylistic arrangements subtly undermine the significance of “majesty,” a word ironically modified by “terrible” just as “dignity” by “strange.” In a similar fashion, the fact that the power of “the revelations of [the insignificance of] all existence” “sheds radiance upon” the lieutenant’s “bloody form” only makes his comrades understand the insignificance and meaninglessness of all human beings (and of course of all wars).
Particularly worth noticing is the verbatim repetition of the orderly-sergeant’s “lean[ing] nervously backward.” At the former appearance of the expression, we are given the impression that the leaning backward is due to the lieutenant’s having acquired “strange dignity,” but this impression turns out to be false with the appearance of the conjunction “so” (“And so the orderly-sergeant, while sheathing the sword, leaned nervously backward”), which indicates to the careful reader that actually it is the lieutenant’s utmost vulnerability that makes the orderly-sergeant “lean nervously backward.” Significantly, the orderly-sergeant’s not allowing “even his finger to brush the body of the lieutenant,” which caricatures the lieutenant’s vulnerability, is reinforced by his comrades’ not allowing “the weight of a finger” upon the lieutenant for fear that it may “send him headlong” and “hurl him” immediately into death. The deplorable weakness of the lieutenant is further dramatized in the following paragraph. Although when one of the soldiers offered the wounded lieutenant a shoulder to lean on, “the latter waved him away,” the action is modified by “mournfully.” And the following sentence continues to present a woeful picture of the lieutenant who wears “the look of one who knows he is the victim of a terrible disease and understands his helplessness.”
An intertextual comparison with Crane’s “A Mystery of Heroism” (1895) and “The Open Boat” (1898) may shed much light on Crane’s emasculating stylistic choices in “An Episode of War.” In “A Mystery of Heroism,” there is also a description of a wounded lieutenant:
A lieutenant of the battery rode down and passed them, holding his right arm carefully in his left hand. And it was as if this arm was not at all a part of him, but belonged to another man. His sober and reflective charger went slowly. The officer’s face was grimy and perspiring, and his uniform was tousled as if he had been in direct grapple with an enemy. He smiled grimly when the men stared at him. He turned his horse toward the meadow. (Crane 1965: 260)
The following diagram may help clarify the picture:
| “A Mystery of Heroism” | “An Episode of War” |
| as if he had been in direct grapple with an enemy | a case of personal assault; |
| smiled grimly; | sadly; mournfully; helplessness; |
| carefully; the officer’s face was grimy and perspiring | tenderly; the victim of a terrible disease |
| as if this arm…belonged to another man | as if the wounded arm was made of brittle glass; the weight of a finger upon him might…hurl him at once into the dim, gray unknown |
While in “A Mystery of Heroism,” the stylistic choices suggest that the lieutenant may have grappled bravely with an enemy, in “An Episode of War” the lieutenant suspects the enemy’s assault to be from his own comrade. Further, the stylistic choices in “A Mystery of Heroism” depict a manly lieutenant, who remains calm and active after getting wounded. By contrast, in “An Episode of War,” the stylistic choices put the wounded lieutenant in an extremely passive and deplorable position. Notice the contrast between the adverbs “carefully” and “grimly” in “A Mystery of Heroism” and the more or less emasculating adverbs “tenderly,” “sadly,” and “timidly” (describing a fellow soldier) in “An Episode of War.” In terms of the wounded arm, we also have the contrast between “belonged to another man” and the emasculating “made of brittle glass,” which dramatizes the lieutenant as being extremely weak. The lieutenant in “An Episode of War” is only in the position of the goal, and the actor is either “a terrible disease” or “a finger.” A finger upon him can immediately cause his death, which caricatures his being deplorably weak. Such intertextual comparison helps us perceive the hidden satirical dynamic in “An Episode of War,” and to see that the implied authors of the two narratives actually hold contrastive ethical stances towards, and invite readers’ different judgments on, war and heroism (see below).
In Crane’s “The Open Boat,” the captain is also injured, but like the case in “A Mystery of Heroism,” the picture is very different from that in “An Episode of War”:
The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. The mind of the master of a vessel is rooted deep in the timbers of her, though he command for a day or a decade, and this captain had on him the stern impression of a scene in the grays of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a stump of a top-mast with a white ball on it that slashed to and fro at the waves, went low and lower, and down. Thereafter there was something strange in his voice. Although steady, it was deep with mourning, and of a quality beyond oration or tears.
“Keep’er a little more south, Billie,” said he.
“‘A little more south,’ sir,” said the oiler in the stern. (Crane 1984: 885–86)
This is the initial description of the injured captain. Although he is having “that profound dejection,” the sadness or depression does not have to do with his injury but with the loss of his ship (the “mind of the master of a vessel is rooted deep in the timbers of her”). It is a professional loss (“the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down”) that “even the bravest and most enduring” man with professional dedication or sense of responsibility would find difficult to bear. It is true that the captain’s voice is “deep with mourning,” but in contrast with the lieutenant in “An Episode of War,” his mourning is not associated with his own injury, but with the death of his fellow crewmen and the sinking of his ship. The captain remains calm, continuing to give professional orders in a “steady” voice. Besides, the captain remains amiable:
Then the captain, in the bow, chuckled in a way that expressed humor, contempt, tragedy, all in one. “Do you think we’ve got much of a show, now, boys?” said he.
Whereupon the three were silent, save for a trifle of hemming and hawing. To express any particular optimism at this time they felt to be childish and stupi d…. On the other hand, the ethics of their condition was decidedly against any open suggestion of hopelessness. So they were silent.
“On, Well,” said the captain, soothing his children, “we’ll get ashore all right.” … The hurt captain, lying against the water-jar in the bow, spoke always in a low voice and calmly, but he could never command a more ready and swiftly obedient crew than the motley three of the dingey. (1984: 887–88, italics added)
Like the lieutenant and other soldiers in “An Episode of War,” the captain and his crew in “The Open Boat” remain anonymous, and so their professional identity is made prominent. But while the injured captain and the motley crew of the dinghy behave in a calm and brave sailorly manner in the face of great danger, the injured lieutenant and his comrades are satirically depicted as being unsoldierly, with the lieutenant showing uttermost fragility and “helplessness,” like “the victim of a terrible disease.” For the authorial reader of “An Episode of War,” the process of descrying the satirical undercurrent is a process of gaining increasing interpretive delight, growing negative ethical judgment on war, and increasing aesthetic appreciation of Crane’s stylistic techniques.
At a later stage of the textual movement, Crane uses the device of what we may call “childization” in portraying the protagonist as a way to reinforce the overall emasculating undercurrent. Before reaching the hospital, the lieutenant meets an officer who “appropriated the lieutenant and the lieutenant’s wound” (271). Crane’s ingenious technique of putting both the lieutenant and his wound in the “goal” position of the officer’s action process “appropriate” functions to deprive the lieutenant of both his dignity and subjectivity. The officer binds up the lieutenant’s wound, “scolding away in the meantime,” his tone suggesting that the lieutenant is “in the habit of being wounded every day” (271). The adjunct “in the habit of being wounded every day” both depreciates the wound to a trivial daily fault and attributes the “fault” to the lieutenant’s own inclination. Under the officer’s “parental” treatment, the lieutenant “hung his head, feeling, in this presence, that he did not know how to be correctly wounded” (271), which somewhat ascribes the wound to the lieutenant’s ignorance, reinforcing the stylistic strategy of making the injury appear as a fault of the lieutenant himself. With such expressions bordering on caricature, Crane implicitly invites us to see the lieutenant as a timid and naïve child. This forms a striking contrast with the picture in “The Open Boat” as quoted above, where the captain, who remains calm and dignified after getting hurt, treats his crew like a loving father (“soothing his children”) and the crewmen themselves consciously guard against “childish and stupid” behavior.
The lieutenant in “An Episode of War” then meets the doctor who operates on him. The doctor also treats him like a dominating parent, in whose presence the lieutenant at first remains “very meek” (272). When the doctor asks him to come along for the operation, his face “flushed,” saying “I guess I won’t have it amputated” (272). The doctor reacts rudely:
“Nonsense, man! Nonsense! Nonsense!” cried the doctor. “Come along, now. I won’t amputate it. Come along. Don’t be a baby.”
“Let go of me,” said the lieutenant, holding back wrathfully, his glance fixed upon the door of the old school house, as sinister to him as the portals of death.
And 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. “Oh, well,’ he said, standing shamefaced amid these tears, “I don’t suppose it matters so much as all that.” (272, italics added)
This is the very end of the narrative. The rhetorical strategy of “childization” is made explicit with the doctor’s asking the lieutenant not to behave like “a baby” and the doctor fools the lieutenant into amputation like a parent fools a child for medical treatment. Earlier in the textual movement, when the lieutenant first meets the doctor, Crane goes even further in humiliating him through the use of narratorial comment, treating him as an offender for getting wounded:
“Good-morning,” [the doctor] said, with a friendly smile. Then he caught sight of the lieutenant’s arm, and his face at once changed. “Well, let’s have a look at it.” He seemed possessed suddenly of a great contempt for the lieutenant. This wound evidently placed the latter on a very low social plane…. When the wound was disclosed the doctor fingered it disdainfully. “Humph,” He said. “You come along with me and I’ll tend to you.” His voice contained the same scorn as if he were saying: “You will have to go to jail.” (271–72)
While in romantic notions of heroism, getting wounded is glorious (with “gloriously wounded” as a set phrase), Crane, through the joint function of the doctor’s change in attitude and the narrator’s conjectural comments (“seemed,” “evidently,” “as if”), makes it appear as a criminal offence, thereby scathingly satirizing contemporary heroics. Although the authorial reader will not go so far as to place the lieutenant “on a very low social plane,” judging him “disdainfully” or with “great contempt” like the doctor, there is no doubt that the authorial reader will not see the protagonist as “commendable” since the interaction between story facts and stylistic techniques has implicitly placed him into the position of a deplorable butt of satire. Of course the real target of Crane’s satire is not the protagonist himself, but war and romanticized notions of heroism. And Crane invites his readers to cherish a certain degree of compassion for the protagonist as a victim of war through depicting his extreme physical weakness and his losing one arm. Indeed, as quoted above, Crane depicts the wounded lieutenant as “the victim of a terrible disease,” who “understands his helplessness.”
Some critics take it that the protagonist’s last utterance “I don’t suppose it matters so much as all that” manifests his courage and fortitude (see, for instance, Nagel 1975: 11, Knapp 1987: 169–70). However, behind this superficially courageous picture, there in effect exists a continuation of the satirical undercurrent. It is significant that Crane uses the word “shamefaced” to qualify the protagonist’s behavior (“he said, standing shamefaced amid these tears”). Before the amputation, the protagonist, like a child, is marked by excessive fear, viewing the door of the hospital “as the portals of death.” But the amputation is after all not that horrible and the protagonist is now ashamed of his earlier childish fear, which is set off by the narrator’s placid summary “And this is the story of how the lieutenant lost his arm.” But of course the last utterance of the protagonist has other implications, such as reflecting the indifference of war (Nagel 1975: 13; Wolford 1989: 68), or indicating the insignificance of human beings (Gibson 1968: 96; LaFrance 1971: 103). But a careful consideration of the subtle stylistic choices enables us to discern that the last part of the narrative forms the final phase of the satirical undercurrent that, from the very beginning of the narrative, continuously emasculates the protagonist among other soldiers behind the realistic overt plot development.
The fact that the overall emasculating undercurrent has eluded generations of critics may be accounted for by the following factors. First, as far as prose fiction is concerned, although critics do often try to find out various kinds of deeper meaning concerning the instabilities in the main line of action, the critical tradition tends to neglect an undercurrent that appears to be digressive or unimportant to the main line of action. This can easily lead to the neglect of covert strategies like Crane’s emasculating devices that lie peripheral to or outside of the main line of action. Second, there is a lack of attention to the interaction among related textual elements in different parts of the text. The protagonist’s dividing coffee with his sword becomes an important emasculating device only in relation to various other emasculating devices permeating the textual movement (including the explicit comparison of army men to girls). It is significant that, in this narrative, there is no description of the protagonist’s fighting with the enemy, and his dividing coffee is the only place he is seen as using his weapon—his only weapon mentioned in the narrative.
Moreover, to descry the emasculating undercurrent in “An Episode of War,” we also need to break free from the bondage of certain interpretive frames concerning Crane’s literary creation. H. S. S. Bais says that “assertion of manhood is one of the most important themes in the novels of Stephen Crane” (1988: 23) and Hoffman observes that Crane’s “theme of grace under pressure in a masculine world of conflict provided Hemingway with a model” (1979: 290). Such observations apply to Crane’s narratives like “A Mystery of Heroism” and “The Open Boat” but do not apply to “An Episode of War.” But such views tend to form more or less fixed interpretive frames that can easily lead to the neglect of Crane’s emasculating strategy, including that of “childization” (not to mention “criminalization”) in “An Episode of War.” Stanley Wertheim, for instance, goes no further than seeing that “the lieutenant of ‘An Episode of War’ resembles Hemingway’s shattered heroes, who can never recover from their physical and emotional wounds” (1997: 190–91). As I will emphasize in Chapter 3, in writing different fictional narratives, the same writer may hold contrastive stances and depict drastically different characters. Far from contributing to the “theme of grace under pressure in a masculine world of conflict,” the protagonist of “An Episode of War” very much goes in the opposite direction according to this narrative’s rhetorical design.
Although Shaw tries to reveal the satirical nature of the narrative, due to the lack of attention to a possible undercurrent, as well as insufficient attention to the interaction among subtle stylistic devices in different parts of the text, she fails to discern the satirical emasculating undercurrent and still sees the lieutenant as a “representative of traditional heroism” (1985: 100) or as “an embodiment of contemporary heroics” (1991: 26), thus still misunderstanding the ethical import of the tale and missing a large part of Crane’s masterful technique.7
As mentioned above, the protagonist and other characters in this tale remain anonymous, only referred to in terms of their military ranks or identities, and there is no specification as to when and where the events take place. Many critics hold that the narrative depicts an episode of the American Civil War (see, for instance, Geismar 1953: 131; Wolford 1989: 61; Schaefer 1996: 115), but there is no textual clue as to which war is depicted. One may argue that Crane used “blue” to refer to the color of the uniform of an infantry, but in Crane’s “The Kicking Twelfth” (1900) published at about the same time, the army of the imaginary Spitzenberg empire is also in blue uniform, so the color of the uniform alone cannot function as hard evidence. Thus, in contrast with Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War, “An Episode of War” may represent an episode of any war from the early or middle nineteenth century when long-distance sharpshooting was developed, and the anonymous characters may represent army men in general. It is in this somewhat allegorical narrative that Crane creates the emasculating undercurrent, which therefore takes on a wider relevance, inviting readers to see war as meaningless and romanticized notions of heroism as illusory in general.
If the emasculating undercurrent functions to undermine the most important cornerstone of heroism, Crane subtly reinforces the ethical import by creating a subsidiary undercurrent that centers on internal conflicts as a satirical replacement for fighting against the enemy—a related cornerstone. The whole textual movement of the narrative, which goes in a chronological way, roughly falls into four phases: first, the protagonist’s getting wounded; second, his going to the field hospital; third, his arrival at the field hospital; and finally, his returning home. If we examine the stylistic choices carefully, we shall discover that, except for the very short last phase comprising only two sentences, all the preceding three phases of the textual movement contain internal conflicts that appear digressive or peripheral to the main line of action and that implicitly and satirically take the place of fighting against the enemy.
At the beginning of the narrative, upon being hit by a bullet, the protagonist does not look in the direction of the enemy, but at one of his own comrades, and the epithet “personal” in “as if he suspected it was a case of personal assault” explicitly invites readers to see the conflict between the two warring sides as a case of internal strife. More importantly, Crane makes the wounded protagonist appear as only struggling with his own weapon:
[the wounded] officer had, of course, been compelled to take his sword into his left hand. He did not hold it by the hilt. He gripped it at the middle of the blade, awkwardly. Turning his eyes from the hostile wood, he looked at the sword as he held it there, and seemed puzzled as to what to do with it. In short, this weapon had of a sudden become a strange thing to him. He looked at it in a kind of stupefaction, as if he had been endowed with a trident, a scepter, or a spade.
Finally he tried to sheathe it. To sheathe a sword held by the left hand, at the middle of the blade, in a scabbard hung at the left hip, is a feat worthy of a sawdust ring. This wounded officer engaged in a desperate struggle with the sword and the wobbling scabbard, and during the time of it he breathed like a wrestler. (269, italics added)
It is not fortuitous that in this short narrative, Crane devotes two paragraphs to the protagonist’s sheathing his sword, his only weapon mentioned in the whole text. As we know, the “sword” is a traditional synecdoche for the military, and traditionally a soldier is supposed to be most familiar with his sword. The protagonist, as a lieutenant, is an experienced soldier, and the wound in his right arm cannot really justify his estrangement from his sword to such a degree that he looks “at it in a kind of stupefaction as if he had been endowed with a trident, a scepter, or a spade.” This is radical defamiliarization for a satirical rhetorical purpose. In Crane’s time, a trident can only catch fish, and a scepter or a spade is also not a military weapon. In the authorial comment led by “as if,” the protagonist’s sword is compared to these non-military items, and, further, the tongue-in-cheek syntactic juxtaposition of these items involves an antithetical movement from elevation (“trident” → “scepter”) to debasement (“scepter” → “spade”), thereby unobtrusively yet mockingly deconstructing the military function of the sword. More significantly and satirically, the protagonist is “engaged in a desperate struggle with” his own weapon, which is the only “struggle” he carries out in the whole narrative. It is surely for the sake of satire that Crane makes the protagonist grip his sword “at the middle of the blade” and engage in “a desperate struggle” with it. As regards the attribute of the relational process “was a feat worthy of a sawdust ring,” the head noun “feat” in the war context usually refers to the heroic feat of defeating the enemy, but the post-modifier “worthy of a sawdust ring” turns it into a feat of a non-military circus show and somewhat reduces the protagonist to a clown.
Viewing the description non-satirically, James Nagel observes that the protagonist “at the opening, is very much a creature of his status as soldier,” able to handle his weapon “with appropriate dexterity, dividing the coffee into heaps ‘astoundingly equal in size,’” but after being wounded “he undergoes a change of role, no longer displaying his prowess of swordsmanship” (Nagel 1980: 11; see also Holton 1972: 144; Gibson 1968: 95). In fact, behind this overt textual movement, there exists a satirical under-current. Indeed, if the “prowess of swordsmanship” of a “soldier” lies at the root of traditional heroism, it is precisely what Crane aims at satirizing both by making the sound protagonist use his sword merely to divide coffee and by making the wounded protagonist struggle with his sword instead of fighting against the enemy. Many other critics also take a non-satirical view. Stanley Wertheim, for instance, comments that after the protagonist is wounded, the “sword becomes an encumbrance that he transfers awkwardly to his left hand and that someone else must sheath for him. It is a symbol of his transformation from competence and mastery to ineffectuality and dependence” (1997: 95). Such views make sense but are confined to the surface textual movement, failing to see the covert satirical progression underneath.
On his way to the hospital, the wounded protagonist perceives the activity of a battery, which, as we shall see in the following section, also implicitly conveys internal conflict. When the protagonist arrives at the hospital, what comes into his sight is a scene of internal strife:
The low white tents of the hospital were grouped around an old schoolhouse. There was here a singular commotion. In the foreground two ambulances interlocked wheels in the deep mud. The drivers were tossing the blame of it back and forth, gesticulating and berating, while from the ambulances, both crammed with wounded, there came an occasional groan. An interminable crowd of bandaged men were coming and going. Great numbers sat under the trees nursing heads or arms or legs. There was a dispute of some kind raging on the steps of the schoolhouse. (271, italics added)
After the accident happens, the drivers should work together to solve the problem in order to save the wounded. But from Crane’s satirical pen, the drivers are only engaged in fighting selfishly and narrow-mindedly against each other with words and gestures, to the neglect of the pain and danger of the wounded crammed in the ambulances. As we know, the field hospital is a place to cure the wounded and to save lives, where, of course, quarrels and disputes sometimes may also occur. But through the stylistic repetition of “There was …” among other means, Crane more or less focuses the reader’s attention on the “commotion” and the “dispute,” the former taking place “in the foreground” and the latter “raging” on the steps of the schoolhouse as the centre of the hospital (the tents are grouped around this building where the protagonist undergoes amputation).8 For the rhetorical purpose of satirizing war, Crane foregrounds the internal strife, making what is peripheral occupy the center of the stage. This case well shows how the author’s stylistic choices may function to shape the story, changing to a certain extent the nature of the entity involved. The focus on the internal conflicts is indeed implicitly satirical since there is no close-distance description of any fighting against the enemy in the whole narrative. However, as far as the main line of action is concerned, the cases of internal strife that Crane subtly foregrounds only appear to be insignificant or digressive details in the war setting. Not surprisingly, like the main emasculating undercurrent, the subsidiary undercurrent of replacing fighting against the enemy with internal conflicts has also eluded generations of critics. This critical neglect is also primarily to be attributed to the critical tradition of concentrating on the plot development, a tradition that also underlies misinterpretations of the following battle scene.
The only battle against the enemy is a scene the protagonist watches in the distance on his way to the hospital:
As 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 him. He saw a general on a black horse gazing over the lines of blue infantry at the green woods which veiled his problems. An aide galloped furiously, dragged his horse suddenly to a halt, saluted, and presented a paper. It was, for a wonder, precisely like an historical painting.
To the rear of the general and his staff a group, composed of a bugler, two or three orderlies, and the bearer of the corps standard, all upon maniacal horses, were working like slaves to hold their ground, preserve their respectful interval, while the shells boomed in the air about them, and caused their chargers to make furious quivering leaps.
A battery, a tumultuous and shining mass, was swirling toward the right. The wild thud of hoofs, the cries of the riders, shouting blame and praise, menace and encouragement, and, last, the roar of the wheels, the slant of the glistening guns, brought the lieutenant to an intent pause. The battery swept in curves that stirred the heart; it made halts as dramatic as the crash of a wave on the rocks, and when it fled onward this aggregation of wheels, levers, motors had a beautiful unity, as if it were a missile. The sound of it was a war-chorus that reached into the depths of man’s emotion.
The lieutenant, still holding his arm as if it were of glass, stood watching this battery until all detail of it were lost, save the figures of the riders, which rose and fell and waved lashes over the black mass.
Later, he turned his eyes toward the battle, where the shooting sometimes crackled like bush-fires, sometimes sputtered with exasperating irregularity, and sometimes reverberated like the thunder. He saw the smoke rolling upward and saw crowds of men who ran and cheered, or stood and blazed away at the inscrutable distance. (270, italics added)
What first comes into the protagonist’s sight is a general who gazes at the green woods “which veiled his problems.” Crane’s stylistic choice of “his problems,” which sounds personal and vague, is devoid of any suggestion of a heroic or patriotic battle. As for the bugler and the bearer of the corps standard, they are traditionally symbolic of glory and valor, leading and encouraging the army to charge forward at the enemy. But from Crane’s satirical pen, they work “like slaves” only to preserve their respectful interval from their own general. In this way, Crane subtly invites us to see the simile “like an historical painting” in an ironic light.
The third paragraph focuses on a battery, which some critics take to be “in an exchange with an unseen enemy” (Nagel 1980: 101). But a close examination of the adjuncts in this paragraph in relation to those in the fifth reveals that the battery, instead of being engaged in fighting, is moving away from the battle (“A battery … was swirling toward the right…. The lieutenant … stood watching this battery until all detail of it were lost…. Later, he turned his eyes toward the battle”). The battle is taking place in front of the protagonist, but the battery is “swirling toward the right,” away from the battle. Moreover, Crane’s masterful stylistic arrangement foregrounds the incongruity of the cries of the riders while moving away—“shouting blame and praise, menace and encouragement.” The deliberately arranged antitheses contribute subtly to the undercurrent of replacing fighting against the enemy with internal conflicts. The “blame” and “menace” also seem to echo the scolding and threatening of the protagonist by the officer and the doctor as quoted above. In the present phase, we can see another dimension of the internal conflict if we consider the third and fourth paragraphs together: “A battery, a tumultuous and shining mass…. [the riders] waved lashes over the black mass,” where Crane’s stylistic repetition of the term “mass” gives us the impression that the riders are waving lashes over their own battery.
It is also significant that Crane uses “levers” instead of “barrels” and describes the whole battery as an “aggregation of wheels, levers, motors” as if it were a transport team. In this context, many words take on an ironic ring: the stirring “war-chorus” only consists of the “tumultuous” sound of the battery’s swirling away from the battle; the battery’s “fle[eing] onward” is not a movement towards the enemy, but “toward the right” away from the enemy (thus the verb “flee” may be taken in its primary sense of escaping); the “beautiful unity” only manifests the transporting rather than the battling function of the battery (perhaps a subtle way to emasculate the battery); and the “missile” is not aimed at killing the enemy in the front, but fleeing towards the right, away from the battle. To see Crane’s satire in a clearer light, let’s take a look at his poem “War is Kind”:
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the Battle-God, great, and his Kingdom—
A field where a thousand corpses lie.
…
Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.9
From Crane’s satirical pen, words like “kind,” “glory,” “great,” “blazing,” “virtue,” “excellence,” and “splendid” mean just the opposite to their conventional senses, which alerts us to the fact that we cannot take Crane’s words at face value and must try to find out what they really mean in the Cranean context. If Crane is here unequivocally tongue-in-cheek, his satire is very much veiled and only forms a covert progression in “An Episode of War.” But both similarly call for readers to see through the superficial senses of words for what the author really means and judges underneath.
In the fifth paragraph of the above quoted passage taken from “An Episode of War,” Crane describes a direct exchange with the enemy for the first and only time in the narrative. From the protagonist’s perspective, we cannot see any glory or significance of the battle, not even the borderline between the warring sides. The “smoke rolling upward” should be a result of shelling, but we do not know which side is doing the shelling. And since the fighting is going on, the battery’s moving away like a transport team in the previous paragraphs appears more ironic. Interestingly, what is “exasperating” is not a setback on the protagonist’s side, but the irregularity of the shooting itself, as if it were a game rather than a battle. The protagonist perceives “crowds of men who ran and cheered, or stood and blazed away at the inscrutable distance.” The actions of the “crowds” are incongruous: “ran” versus “stood;” “cheered” versus “blazed away,” resulting in a sort of chaos and inconsequence, and the shooting is not at the enemy but at “the inscrutable distance,” a masterful choice of referring expression that unobtrusively functions to undermine heroism. In sum, after the protagonist passes “from the line of battle,” he is enabled to see the meaningless nature of war. Again, primarily through subtle stylistic choices, Crane invites us to subvert from a specific angle the meaning of war and romantic notions of heroism.
Many critics take the conventionally commendatory words in this passage at their face value. Eric Solomon focuses on the “lyricism” of the depiction, taking it that Crane was moved by “the sheer beauty of war” (1966: 124); Bettina Knapp is impressed by “the melodic and visual beauty” of the description, which, in his view, renders war “as a glorious but viciously cruel experience” (1987: 169); Robert Stallman sets store by the scene’s appearing “like something in ‘a historical painting,’ or fixed and statue-like” (1952: 262). Milne Holton makes a comparison between this description, which he takes to be representing the positive side of war, and the description of the hospital (e.g. an “interminable crowd of bandaged men”), which he takes to be embodying the negative side (1972: 145). Such readings of the passage are a result of the interaction of conventional interpretive frames and impressions of the surface details, overlooking Crane’s satire underneath. Shaw also fails to perceive the disparity between the superficial meaning of the commendatory words and what Crane really intends them to convey in the undercurrent of the text. As a result, she only comes up with the unconvincing assertion that “this carefully contrived, idealized picture must be recognized as manifest fiction if the reader is to identify the satiric nature of this narrative” (1985: 94). In effect, what Crane offers to his readers on a deeper level is far from an idealized picture but is in itself a satirical picture with the commendatory words actually playing the function of deflating contemporary heroics.
It should have become clear that, behind the overt plot development, Crane has created an undercurrent to emasculate the soldiers. The satirical effect is reinforced by the subsidiary undercurrent to replace fighting against the enemy with internal conflicts, as well as by a related description of a meaningless battle scene. The three forces join hands to form an overall satirical covert progression against war and romantic notions of heroism.
As we know, Crane had no experience of war until 1897, and the war narratives published earlier like The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (1895) and “A Mystery of Heroism” were based on his reading relevant materials, interviewing veterans and on his own imagination. In 1897 Crane went to Greece to report on the Greco-Turkish war, and in 1898 to Cuba to report on the Spanish-American war. These experiences “allowed him personally to see behind war’s romantic, imperialistic façade” (Shaw 1991: 29). Starting from the battle of Velestino in the Greek war, Crane was intent upon reporting the “true face” of war, whose “real product” was “the mutilation of human bodies” (Benfey 1992: 209). He also tried to define the product of war by a wounded soldier on the road to Volo: “Behind him was the noise of the battle: the roar and rumble of an enormous factory. This was the product. This was the product, not so well finished as some, but sufficient to express the plan of the machine. This wounded soldier explained the distinct roar. He defined it” (quoted in Benfey 1992: 210). Crane cherished sympathy for the youth deluded by romanticized notions of heroism, saying that “if from time to time he is made to look ridiculous, it is not his fault at all. It is the fault of the public” (Crane 1971: 173). He wrote in a self-mocking fashion, “We are as a people a great collection of the most arrant kids about anything that concerns war, and if we can get a chance to perform absurdly we usually seize it” (ibid.). And he goes on to say:
I know of one newspaper whose continual cabled instructions to its men in Cuba were composed of interrogations as to the doings and appearance of various unhappy society young men who were decently and quietly doing their duty along o’Nolan [a private shot dead] and the others. The correspondents of this paper, being already impregnated with soldierly feeling, finally arose and said they’d be lamed if they would stand it. (Crane 1971: 173)
Significantly, Crane’s war reporting was “a sustained and startling exception” since it moved away from conventional patriotic claims and the usual description of “victories and reverses, courage and cowardice” towards the “unmasking of war” as it is, “forever issuing correctives” on people’s romanticized notions of war (Benfey 1992: 209–11). Indeed, long before anti-war writers like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves, Crane “had confronted the chauvinism, the imperialism, the patriotic humbug of a bellicose decade that gloried in the honor and self-sacrifice of war” (Beaver 1982: 191). Thomas Gullason asserts that “none was a more ardent anti-imperialist, a more serious, defiant, sincere humanitarian than Stephen Crane” (1958: 237).
Not surprisingly, Crane’s narratives about war written after he had personally experienced it tend to be more scathing in satire than those created earlier. “An Episode of War” is surely more satirical than The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War, but scholars differ as to the dates of creation and publication of this narrative. Some hold the view that “An Episode of War” was written in 1899 and was published in England in Last Words in 1902.10 But a more convincing account by some other scholars is that the narrative was created during 1895 to 1896, but for various reasons was not published until 1899 (Schaefer 1996: 114; Wertheim 1997: 143). In any case, one point is beyond dispute, that is, “An Episode of War” was in print not earlier than 1899. As indicated above, Crane in the 1897 inventory designated the narrative as “The Loss of an Arm,” but in the published version, the title is changed to the much more satirical “An Episode of War.” We have good reason to infer that after having experienced war personally, when revising the narrative for publication, Crane replaced the original title with a more satirical one and may have made other changes in the same direction.
Mary Shaw observes that a “comparison of Crane’s treatment of romanticized traditional heroism in earlier works, such as ‘A Mystery of Heroism’ and ‘An Episode of War,’ to later works, such as ‘The Upturned Face’ and ‘The Kicking Twelfth,’ reveals that Crane’s attack on idealized heroism is much more direct and severe in Crane’s later works” (Shaw, 1991: 29). As for the similarity between “A Mystery of Heroism” and “An Episode of War,” Shaw only mentions Crane’s suggestion of the meaninglessness of idealized heroism “by the empty bucket in ‘A Mystery of Heroism’ and by the lieutenant’s amputated arm in ‘An Episode of War’” (ibid.). But as analyzed above, in “An Episode of War,” Crane invites readers to see the lieutenant’s amputated arm in relation to the satirical undercurrent throughout the narrative, which renders the satire much more scathing. We have already seen the contrast between Crane’s depiction of a manly lieutenant in “A Mystery of Heroism” and that of an emasculated lieutenant in “An Episode of War.” Let us now compare the description of the battery in “An Episode of War” as quoted above with a corresponding description in “A Mystery of Heroism”:
The battery on the hill presently engaged in a frightful duel. The white legs of the gunners scampered this way and that way, and the officers redoubled their shouts. The guns, with their demeanours of stolidity and courage, were typical of something infinitely self-possessed in this clamour of death that swirled around the hill. (Crane 1965: 260)
In describing a battery, the implied authors of the two Crane texts use very different stylistic choices. In “A Mystery of Heroism,” the stylistic choices show a somewhat heroic battery engaged in a fierce fighting against the enemy with “stolidity and courage,” while those in “An Episode of War” implicitly represent a battery that is marked by internal strife and that rapidly retreats from the battle like a transport team.
It is worth mentioning that in its satirical undercurrent that replaces fighting against the enemy with internal conflicts, “An Episode of War” comes quite close to “The Upturned Face” (1900), which similarly focuses on the internal tension and strife involved in burying the body of a comrade (with the shooting between the opposing troops merely forming the background), thus also subverting romanticized heroics. But the subversion is more noticeable in “The Upturned Face,” whose title explicitly refers to the “chalk-blue face” of the corpse and whose overt plot development centers on burying the corpse. Crane’s “The Kicking Twelfth” also presents an overt subversion of heroics with its ironic title and an overt plot development marked by satirical contrasts similar to what we have seen in Crane’s “War is Kind.” The following passage is a case in point:
It could be said that there were only two prominent points of view expressed by the men after their victorious arrival on the crest. One was defined in the exulting use of the corps’ cry [“Kim up the Kickers”]. The other was a grief-stricken murmur which is invariably heard after a hard fight: “My God, we’re all cut to pieces!” … It was the moment of despair, the moment of the heroism which comes to the chosen of the war god. (50–51)
In the last sentence, Crane, through the juxtaposition of the repeated “the moment of,” deridingly or dialectically equates “despair” with “heroism,” thus reinforcing the preceding satirical device of putting exultation on a par with a grief-stricken state. Moreover, similar to the emasculation in “An Episode of War” but in a much less subtle way, Crane uses what we may call “clownization” to deprive the army men of their dignity in “The Kicking Twelfth,” where we find many explicitly ridiculing descriptions, such as “A maddened and badly frightened mob of Kickers came tumbling into the trench and shot at the backs of fleeing men. And at that very moment the action was won, and won by the Kickers…. a hammered and thin and dirty line of figures which was His Majesty’s Twelfth Regiment of the Line…. [The protagonist] presented himself directly [at the ending], his face covered with disgraceful smudges, and he had also torn his breeches” (51). Compared with the covert emasculation, such overt “clownization” more directly subverts the heroic images of soldiers in traditional romanticized notions. It is not surprising that, Mary Shaw, with an eye for satire, readily perceives the severe satire on the textual surface of “The Kicking Twelfth” and “The Upturned Face,” but still overlooks, like other critics, the severely satirical undercurrent in “An Episode of War.”
In this chapter, we have seen how stylistic choices, among other textual elements, subtly and continuously interact in “An Episode of War” to build up, behind the overt plot development, a sustained undercurrent to convey the meaninglessness of war and the illusory nature of romanticized heroism. The undercurrent can easily be overlooked, since it is not a deeper level of meaning of the main line of action but is composed mainly of textual elements that appear to be peripheral or digressive to the main line of action. It should have become clear that overlooking the satirical undercurrent may result in a distorted picture of the ethical import of the text, a partial appreciation of the aesthetic techniques, and a wrong inference of the implied author’s rhetorical purposes. This is a point that will be further shown, though from different angles, by the later chapters exploring more or less subversive covert progressions.