278 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900intimation is, is “tiny but not inconsequent,” he can achieve some moral agency in
and through an accurate vision of where he stands, as a soldier and a man. He takes
the path of realism, understanding, and humility of attitude. As a result, “the red
badge of courage” of the title assumes meanings that are both ironic and serious, for
him and his creator. It measures the gap between false courage, heroic illusion, and
reality, but it also rehearses the true courage that Fleming, and any human being, can
achieve: the courage of knowing and accepting oneself and situation for what they are.
In The Red Badge of Courage Crane wrote of the way of humility. In his story “The
Open Boat” he wrote of community. Based on his own experience of shipwreck in
1896, when he spent nearly three days in an open boat at sea, the story draws a
contrast between the empty, undifferentiated vastness of the ocean and the
companionship of the shipwrecked, as they struggle to survive in body and in mind.
“It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here
established on the seas,” the narrator confides. “No one said that it was so. No one
mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him.” Anticipating
Hemingway, and after him Albert Camus – and, perhaps, recalling the work of his
friend Conrad – Crane proposes the experience of men working together as a
prototype of human connectedness, a frail defense against the world in which we
find ourselves exiled. Other, later writers were to call this absurdism or existentialism.
Crane, typically, preferred a simpler word. “Most of my prose writings,” he declared,
“have been toward the goal partially described by that misunderstood and abused
word, realism.” That word would not have been rejected, either, by Jack London who,
like Norris and Crane, saw reality as a naturalistic struggle for existence, dominated
by what he termed – in one of his most famous stories, The Call of the Wild (1903) –
the “law of club and fang.” For London, even more ruthlessly than for Crane or even
perhaps Norris, life was a battle for power. “The ultimate unit of matter and the
ultimate unit of force were the same,” the reader is informed in The Iron Heel (1908).
“Power will be the arbiter,” the hero of that novel declares. “It is a struggle of classes.
Just as your class dragged down the old feudal nobility, so shall it be dragged down
by my class, the working class.”
Ernest Everhard, the hero of The Iron Heel, is addressing his remarks to a member
of The Oligarchy, a defensive, proto-fascist conglomeration of major trusts and
their private militias. The story is set in the years 1911–1932 and is supposedly a
transcription of a manuscript written at the time by Avis Cunningham, the wife of
Everhard and fellow revolutionary, and edited seven hundred years later by Anthony
Meredith, who lives in what is called the fourth century of the Brotherhood of Man.
It describes a violent revolutionary struggle against the iron heel of totalitarian
capitalism that ends disastrously: Everhard is killed, Avis is apparently executed, and
the revolution is crushed. The descriptive frame, however, offers not just hope but
the fulfillment of the hero’s prophecy: since the reader is told that the iron heel was
finally overthrown some three hundred years after the events related in what is called
the “Everhard Manuscript.” Like The Octopus, The Iron Heel places the specifics of
political defeat within a visionary framework that proposes eventual redemption,
the triumph of the people emerging out of a potentially endless struggle for power.GGray_c03.indd 278ray_c 03 .indd 278 8 8/1/2011 7:54:22 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 22 AM