The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [15]
At the other extreme, Naturalism also postulates that outside forces simultaneously govern human actions. In the great scheme of cosmic design, man becomes an isolated figure, hugely dwarfed by the environmental forces that surround him. He must travel along with society as it inexorably hurtles along a random path through time, or else he must be crushed by it.The “blue demonstration,” whose metaphorical consequences change throughout the novel, limits Fleming’s options time and again. For instance, after finally taking a Confederate position at an appalling human cost for both sides, Fleming’s regiment is forced to abandon its hard-won gain. During the course of the final battle, the soldiers learn that their charge was just a diversion; elsewhere, the main body of Union forces had failed in its mission. When computed as part of the combined efforts of the entire Army of the Potomac, the achievements of the 304th New York and of Fleming himself mean very little. Consequently, he must follow society, as represented by the Union army, as it strategically retreats from Chancellorsville and from its cumulative failure. If nothing else, Naturalist premises fit neatly into Crane’s developing view of a universe indifferent to individual presences.
Also opposing strict Realism, another aesthetic trend that emerged in American letters during the 1890s was literary Impressionism, which among other traits valued the psychological makeup of the artist in his or her rendering of a subject. Thus, the perspective of the artist should occupy the center of any interpretation of the work, whether it be a painting, a poem, or a novel. The artist pinpoints and depicts a small moment pregnant with meaning. Through the eyes of a barmaid working at the Folies-Bergère, Édouard Manet captures in paint an instant of ennui that speaks volumes about her life. On an Edgar Degas canvas, we witness a quiet and private moment when a ballerina perfects her position in an exercise. Crane’s friend and mentor Hamlin Garland had intently studied the works and philosophy of the French Impressionists. He began to advocate that American literature ought to adopt some of their principles, which he renamed “veritism” in his 1894 book-length essay Crumbling Idols.
In Red Badge, Crane’s psyche figures prominently at the center of many passages. One Impressionistic moment that is quintessentially Crane’s comes during one of the 304th New York’s unsuccessful advances. Through devices idiosyncratic to his prose technique, Crane dilates time itself. Throughout the battle scene, Fleming becomes the nexus of an apparent chaos of images, which are really all carefully orchestrated to recreate a terrified intellect coping with the most horrific of battle experiences. Afterward, Fleming marvels:
They turned when they arrived at their old position to regard the ground over which they had charged.
The youth in this contemplation was smitten with a large astonishment. He discovered that the distances, as compared with the brilliant measurings of his mind, were trivial and ridiculous. The stolid trees, where much had taken place, seemed incredibly near. The time, too, now that he reflected, he saw to have been short. He wondered at the number of emotions and events that had been crowded into such little spaces. Elfin thoughts must have exaggerated and enlarged everything, he said (p. 113).
Like a good Impressionist Crane had distilled the attar of a defining moment. (In Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism, James Nagel offers an authoritative overview of Crane’s relationship with Impressionism.)
Aesthetically aligned with Impressionism is French Symbolism, a loose poetic school that flourished during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Both movements have some origins with the poet Charles Baudelaire, whose essays about the paintings of Eugène Delacroix and others