In my continuing fascination with Stephen Crane, I recently read the section in his Library of America Volume entitled “The West and Mexico.” This is a series of short pieces (mostly short stories, but some non-fiction) written between 1894 and 1900.
This section contains “The Blue Hotel,” which Mencken said was the greatest short story ever written. I am not sure it is the greatest—but, then again, I have no idea which short story I would rate as the greatest, so maybe this is it—but, whether it is the Greatest or not, it’s really good. Beautifully told, with a perfect punch line at the end. I’m surprised I wasn’t forced to read it in high school—it comes with a ready-made high school paper topic. It’s well worth a few minutes of your time to read this story.
The other stories in the section are also quite good. The same thing that enables Crane to craft nice little poems, gives him the ability to craft an entire world in a short story. The non-fiction bits were OK. However it was pretty obvious reading the section as a whole, that Crane was using the non-fiction journalistic writing as a warm-up for the short stories.
The underlying theme is the question of fate. How much of life is chance, how much is dictated by the actions of others and how much is in our control? I haven’t read all of Crane, but it sure seems to me that there is a latent Calvinism underlying his work—we think we are acting, but we aren’t. We think we are heading for a big showdown, but it doesn’t materialize. We think we are passively observing events as they unfold, but we suddenly find our actions forming part of the narrative leading inexorably to conclusion.
How does one Act in the face of a current whose shape cannot be determined until after the fact? Crane doesn’t seem to have much to say on that topic. While it sure seems that action and inaction should lead to different outcomes, it isn’t at all clear in Crane that we have much of a say in the matter. We act or don’t act, and then the result seems like it was a foregone conclusion before we ever thought about the problem.
Yet, somehow, Crane doesn’t seem fatalistic. I haven't solved the problem of Crane, yet—but I still have several more novels and a lot of short stories to go.
Since that isn’t a very satisfying conclusion, I figured I would add a video. I mentioned some months ago, I had bought Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, but I wasn’t sure if I liked it. After listening to it quite a bit, I am now happy to report, it’s a good album. Here is the title song, which has an ambiguity suitable to the present post.
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