Examine how nature is discussed throughout The Open Boat.” Loo.docx

Examine how nature is discussed throughout “The Open Boat.”
Look at the literary critical piece by Anthony Channell Hilfer.
Once you have established your own ideas, consider how Hilfer
discusses nature in the short story and analyze the following
questions: What does nature mean to the men aboard the boat?
or Do their perceptions of nature shift throughout the story?
Why or why not?
Do their perceptions of nature shift throughout the story? Why
or why not?
Write down a loose response about what I think of the question
and what I remember of the story.
ICE method.
I introduce the citation
C the citation itself
E explain its meaning to your argument.
The scenes shift with no discernable rhyme or reason. Crane
invites every reader in. Critic Anthony Channell Hilfer
disagrees with point, saying, “Crane’s image is an accusation of
the putative picturesque spectators” (Hilfer 254). Hilfer’s
challenge goes against what Crane is trying to do, by making
nature a copilot through the reading.
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)
Published by University of Texas Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
[ Access provided at 9 Apr 2020 17:36 GMT from Marymount
University & (Viva) ]
https://doi.org/10.1353/tsl.2012.0012
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/476402
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
249Representations of Nature in American Writing
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
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)
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
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

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.”
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
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

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
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.

Examine how nature is discussed throughout The Open Boat.” Loo.docx

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