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Special Section: Blue Short Stories

“They took the boat farther out to sea”: Seamanship and Agency in “The Open Boat”

Guillaume Tanguy
p. 27-45

Résumés

« Le bateau ouvert », de Stephen Crane, décrit l’épreuve de quatre hommes en mer, à bord d’un canot, après le naufrage du steamer Commodore. Trois d’entre eux survivent, mais le graisseur périt. À la différence des récits déterministes de Crane, où des facteurs socio-historiques réduisent à néant les efforts des personnages, le « correspondant » (avatar fictionnel de l’auteur) acquiert une réelle agentivité grâce à sa découverte de savoirs et techniques de la navigation traditionnelle. En s’inspirant des travaux des humanités bleues, cet article s’efforce de mettre au jour – notamment grâce à une analyse détaillée de l’épisode du requin, trop souvent négligé par la critique –, les diverses formes d’interaction entre l’humain, l’objet, et la mer, d’où le concept de « sea-man-ship ». Il démontre que, dans ce récit de survie, deux formes d’activités se révèlent essentielles, la praxis et la theoria. La theoria (contemplation) permet au protagoniste de vivre une épiphanie éthique et esthétique, de retrouver une capacité d’émerveillement, et d’adopter une vision décentrée, non anthropocentrique, de la mer.

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1In an 1893 essay entitled “About All Kinds of Ships,” Mark Twain expresses his disenchanted view of modernity. Progress in maritime technology, typified by steam navigation, has made human agency irrelevant:

One curious thing which is at once noticeable in the great modern ship is the absence of hubbub, clatter, rush of feet, roaring of orders. That is all gone by. The elaborate maneuvers necessary in working the vessel into her dock are conducted without sound; one sees nothing of the processes, hears no commands. A Sabbath stillness and solemnity reigns, in place of the turmoil and racket of the earlier days. . . . From the bridge the ship is steered, and also handled. The handling is not done by shout or whistle, but by signalling with patent automatic gongs. . . . The officer who is astern is out of sight, and . . . the ship seems to land herself without human help. . . . The iron-clad, with her unsentimental aspect and frigid attention to business, has banished romance from the war-marine, and the unsentimental steamer has banished it from the commercial marine. (185-88)

  • 1 This summary appears on various websites.

This excerpt illustrates what Steve Mentz calls “sailor-centric nostalgia” (Ocean 62) as it harks back to a vibrant sailor culture. Gone is the excitement of “earlier days” which derived from the interactions between officers and sailors as well as between human beings and maritime equipment, reminding us that sailors are “cyborgs,” “human bodies [entwined] with nonhuman tools” (55-56). The modern ship has made human agency superfluous, as underlined by the many passive forms. A few years after Twain and in a similar vein, Joseph Conrad was to lament “the displacement of the sailing ship by . . . steam [as] the loss of a peculiarly beautiful practice” (qtd. in Mentz, Ocean 63). These remarks on the interaction between the sea, technology, and the role of men provide a helpful prelude to the study of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” published in 1897. The story’s biographical background is a familiar one. On December 31, 1896, Crane sailed as a war correspondent to Cuba, on a filibustering steamship carrying ammunition for the Cuban insurgents. “Crane was stranded at sea for thirty hours when his ship, the SS Commodore, sank after hitting a sandbar. He and three other men were forced to navigate their way to shore in a small boat; one of the men, an oiler named Billie Higgins, drowned after the boat overturned.”1 The Commodore experience inspired three texts, published in 1897: a factual account, “Stephen Crane’s Own Story,” a hastily written potboiler, “Flanagan’s Short Filibustering Adventure,” and a classic short story. Whilst the first two are narratives of shipwreck and human failure, “The Open Boat” is a shipwreck and survival narrative that concludes with the “achievement of safety,” however “flawed” (Adams 421). Unlike the crewmembers of the Commodore, the four men on their ten-foot dinghy recapture a significant amount of agency by reconnecting with traditional seamanship. Their ability to reverse the “loss of traditional knowledge” caused by the advent of steam is the crux of the narrative and reveals Crane’s “attachment to a more ‘natural’ form of sailing” (Schober 77). Yet it would be a misreading to approach the text through the lens of sailor-centric nostalgia. Crane was writing on the cusp of modernity, and did not “pursue the dream of a simpler past” (Bender 69). The return to the past symbolized by the open boat is temporary and, ultimately, enables the men to regain the shore and find meaning on it after having acquired a sense of empowerment at sea.

  • 2 I am taking the liberty of playing on words and will take the suffix -ship to refer to a vessel, in (...)

2Like all traditional sea fiction, “The Open Boat” includes “three elements: the sea, the sailor, and the ship” (Bender 6). The aim of this article is to explore the agency of and interaction between the natural nonhuman (sea), the human (man), and the material nonhuman (ship),2 or sea-man-ship. Within these three entities, the reader will often detect a predominant dyad. Thus, in the first four parts of the narrative, the emphasis is on the practical relationship between the men and their equipment, hence (sea-)manship and the need to envisage the man as a “cyborg,” a concept defined by Donna J. Haraway. By contrast, in parts V-VII, the sea-man dyad seems predominant as the water becomes an object of contemplation and/or an element to swim in, leading to the development (except for the oiler) of a “water-feeling” (Mentz, Ocean 128) or “new ways of interacting and thinking with water” (Oppermann 4), hence seaman(-ship).

3To support this reading, my analysis will first focus on practical agency and empowerment through the use of man-made objects, maritime skills, and the embodied relationship with water. However, the vision of the shark, around which the narrative revolves, indicates the need for the protagonist to develop a contemplative connection with the ocean that decenters him from his anthropocentric moorings. The men “[take] the boat farther out to sea” (Crane, “Open Boat” 904)—but also to see. Finally, the unexpected demise of Billie, the oiler, will help to shore up my contention that agency cannot be dissociated from vision. What needs empowering is not just the body, but also the eye.

Praxis: Steamer, Sailor, Swimmer

4To what extent do “Stephen Crane’s Own Story” and “Flanagan” illustrate failure? In both texts, the unfolding of events defeats the men’s yearning for heroic adventure. The writer-narrator’s hope of becoming a filibuster is dashed when the ship runs aground and remains “in this ignominious position” until daybreak: “We were now no longer filibusters. We were men on a ship stuck in the mud” (Crane, “Own Story” 876, emphasis added). The men lose their agency, as underlined by the assonance, the notion of stasis (the prepositions “on” and “in”) and the monosyllabic rhythm—rhetorical strategies suggesting both passivity and disenchantment. No sooner does the Commodore sail into the open sea than another problem, “of a mechanical kind” (879), is reported, resulting in the “general and sudden ruin [of] the engine-room” (879). As Stephen Crane and three other men row away in a lifeboat filled to capacity, they realize that some crewmembers have remained on the stern of the sinking ship. These men cannot be rescued and are “swallowed by this frightful maw of the ocean” (883). “Flanagan” follows a similar pattern: a problem in the “stoke-room” (Crane, “Flanagan” 914), leads to shipwreck and drowning. In these narratives of failure, the presence of technology incapacitates not only the characters but also the author’s creative imagination. The modern ship is devoid of any aesthetic value. The color red, used to describe the engine-room, has negative connotations. Red, as is often the case in Cranian writings, suggests “Fear” (Bloom 7) or “choleric extremes” (Halliburton 60). The pistons resemble “many steel animals, for the most part painted red and . . . bewildering, complex, incomprehensible” (Crane, “Own Story” 913), and the engine-room is compared to “Hades.” The only positive color, the Commodore’s “flaming path of blue and silver phosphorescence,” vanishes in the “deadly black sea” (877-80, emphasis added). The modern steamship, with its “abominable fire-room” (879) can never fire the men’s or the writer’s imagination.

5“The Open Boat” can be read as a shipwreck narrative which breaks up linear narratives of progress through the use of a disruptive temporal structure. As such, it illustrates Mentz’s remark: “As narratives of interruption, shipwreck stories replace the linear progress of Providential or Hegelian histories with uneven, chaotic episodes of disaster . . . [T]he stories told by shipwreck are disruptive” (Shipwreck 9-10). The text describes a journey to knowledge and “capacitation” (Halliburton 246) which takes the men away from technological mastery, associated with two locations, the “sunk steamer Commodore” (Crane, “Open Boat” 885) and the shore, with its “winter resort hotel” and “omnibus” which “don’t mean anything” (897, 905). It takes the men to the open sea, on the dinghy, which constitutes a site of learning and empowerment. The fundamental structure of “The Open Boat” can be summarized as follows: steamer-wreck-sailor-wreck-swimmer. The story starts in the era of steam navigation, reconnects the men with traditional maritime skills (rowing and sailing), then takes them further into the past towards a timeless epoch when swimming was the only “survival tactic” at sea (Mentz, Ocean 62). This return to the past is not nostalgic but heuristic as it enables the men to return to shore and find “sacred” meaning (Crane, “Open Boat” 909). Furthermore, a back-and-forth movement can be detected within this structure: the men row towards the shore but, when they approach the dangerous surf, they take the boat “out to sea again” or “seaward,” an action which occurs at least four times (894, 903, 904, 904), thus creating a “wavelike” pattern: “In the end I believe all who study the story will concede that it is itself wavelike in form. The reader’s sympathy [for the men] is carried by hope to the crest of an emotional wave only to tumble into the trough of despair as some new hostile element enters” (Munson 241). This pattern, which imitates the movement of the sea, further disrupts narratives of progress. Each epoch is separated from the next by a wreck, which constitutes a moment of “fracture” (Mentz, Shipwreck 10).

6A large part of the narrative is devoted to “the management of the boat” (Crane, “Open Boat” 892) and describes praxis, the ability to put a skill into practice. The dinghy dramatizes the notion of (sea-)manship by allowing the men to reconnect with what Haraway calls a “cyborg identity”: “The cyborg identity of mariners . . . matches [Haraway’s] calls for ‘couplings between organism and machine’ . . . Sailors love boats and rigging, and the culture of maritime labour embraces a powerful romance between humans and technology” (Mentz, Ocean 56). The men achieve (partial) survival by interacting with objects or performing important tasks. The cook, who is “incapacitated” by the fact that he is “no longer able to perform his role of food preparer” (Halliburton 246), is given a new essential function in the “conflict between the wet and the dry” (Mentz, Shipwreck 1): he keeps “bailing” the boat. The living pump that he seems to have become far exceeds the Commodore’s dysfunctional “pumps.” The captain is closely associated with the boat itself. When he waves away a seagull, he does so “gently and carefully,” avoiding gestures that “would have capsized this freighted boat” (Crane, “Open Boat” 888). His example teaches the oiler and the correspondent to use similar caution, which is underlined by a diacope: when they change seats, they move “with care, . . . with the most extraordinary care” (889). The captain’s attachment to his boat is indicated by his personification of the dinghy (“‘Keep her head up!’” [898]), and by his body language, when he finally “cling[s] with one hand to the keel” (908) of the overturned boat. Another object is the water-jar, mentioned six times. This jar, which he uses to distribute water to “[e]verybody” (893), serves as a symbol of justice. Thanks to the captain’s moral authority, a “subtle brotherhood of men was here established on the seas. . . . [T]hey were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common” (890). The “subtle brotherhood” is highlighted by the use of anadiplosis and by the “iron” metaphor, which establishes a contrast with the literal iron of the steamer Commodore and of Twain’s “iron-clad.” Only by returning to a traditional type of craft can the men recapture the “democratic” promise of America (Bender 69).

  • 3 “Bath-tub” is the first noun used to describe the open boat, hence its importance. The word has bee (...)

7The most dynamic figures in the dinghy are undoubtedly the correspondent and the oiler, who are associated with an emblematic tool, the oar. The correspondent, at first adverse to rowing, emulates the oiler’s selflessness, ignoring his own “aches and pains” (895). The oarsman’s heroic dimension is underlined by the syntax which singles him out (“All save the oarsman . . .  As for him . . .” [898]). He faces “the particular violence of the sea” alone, when the others sleep like “babes of the sea” (900), and faces the stern—the symbol of danger and death. Heroism, as is often the case in Cranian writings, requires the erasure of identity. The “oarsman” is usually unidentified. At the end of part VI, the two men keep “spell[ing]” each other, suggesting that they have become interchangeable (“spell” can be read as a pun): they are “men-in-general” (Hilfer 253). In the performance of maritime labor, namelessness is a badge of courage. By reconnecting the men to an agentic sailor-centric world, the wooden oar “capacitates” the protagonists. The “contact with machine-tools [is] replaced by the contact with a more elemental tool, the oar” (Halliburton 246), resulting in an “alliance between human and wooden bodies” (Mentz, Shipwreck xxii). Thus, what the sailors in their “bath-tub” (Crane, “Open Boat” 885)3 seem to have reinvented is something very much like the Phoenician galley, a word derived from gaulos, meaning “tub” in Greek (Lavery 20). The way the two men row, using now one oar now “both oars” (Crane, “Open Boat” 889), brings to mind the bireme invented by the Phoenicians, as well as the heroic galleys mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey (Lavery 20).

8Besides praxis, the men rely on poiesis, the creation of an object which is distinct from its creator. In the oceanic context, poiesis takes the shape of “tinkering,” which is typical of sailor-culture (Mentz, Ocean 62). Tinkering may be understood as skilled resourcefulness, or the ability to turn limited resources into essential equipment. It manifests itself as a form of mixed agency, an interaction between the human and nonhuman, leading to the production of what Bruno Latour calls “quasi-objects” or “hybrids” (13-14), and blurring the anthropocentric nature-culture dichotomy. Tinkering first occurs when the captain suggests sailing instead of rowing. His speech is performative:

“I wish we had a sail,” remarked the captain. “We might try my overcoat on the end of an oar and give you two boys a chance to rest.” So the cook and the correspondent held the mast and spread wide the overcoat. The oiler steered, and the little boat made good way with her new rig. . . . sailing was a success. (Crane, “Open Boat” 890)

The sailors create a makeshift rigging by assembling a garment, meant to cover the human body, and an oar, meant to be in the sea. They depend on rudimentary tools, “sailcloth” and “rope” (Mentz, Ocean 56), to re-invent, as it were, the basics of sailing. Tinkering produces another makeshift object, a flag, which is used to try and communicate with the shore: “The captain saw a floating stick and they rowed to it. A bath-towel was by some weird chance in the boat, and, tying this on the stick, the captain waved it” (Crane, “Open Boat” 896). The flag is a hybrid which entwines the maritime with the terrestrial. The open boat empowers the men by allowing them to interact creatively with the sea.

9Another essential seafaring skill is the ability to observe the sea. “Reading water” as Tristan Gooley writes, is the ability to interpret “the signs in the water” and anticipate “water behaviour” (10). Reading water is critical when the men approach the surf (Crane, “Open Boat” 892, 894, 905). One effect of their ordeal at sea is that their senses have been “sharpened” (893). To detect the surf, eyesight and hearing are paramount. The men both “listen[]” to the surf and “scan[]” the “turmoil of foam” (894) which is associated with the color “white” (906). So loud is its “thunder” (892) that the captain decides to steer away from it. Maritime expertise is passed on to the correspondent who, in part VI, learns to row away from danger: “he turned the craft seaward then and rowed harder” (903). Reading water also helps the men to determine their position. As the height of the waves blocks the horizon, the men can only see the surface of the sea. The “brown mats of sea-weed . . . informed the men in the boat that it was making progress slowly toward the land” (889). The sentence illustrates the interaction between two forms of agencies: the verb “inform” personifies the seaweed and makes it the grammatical subject, but it is thanks to the men’s maritime knowledge that this sign can be interpreted. Shortly afterwards, the sighting of a lighthouse occurs, but how exactly is it achieved? The captain is the first to spot “the light-house at Mosquito Inlet” because he is an expert at “scouring” the horizon (889). As Gooley explains, visibility is proportional to one’s height above sea level. The higher one is, the further one can see:

The height of our eyes above sea level will have a massive impact on how far we can see. [If you climbed] a small hill that was only 25 meters high, the distance you can see out to sea shoots up from only 5 to more than 18 kilometres. [Visibility is] a vital part of both life at sea and the experience of looking out to sea… (201-02)

Since he is no longer on a steamer but only a few “inches” above water (Crane, “Open Boat” 885), the captain has to stand up in order to scan the horizon, but as this is not enough, he waits until the dinghy has “soared on a great swell” in order to do so (889). Anticipating water behavior is critical to determining the right time, or kairos, for observing the shore, as underlined by the numerous temporal markers (“after,” “at last,” “when,” “At the top of another wave”):

The captain, rearing cautiously in the bow, after the dingey soared on a great swell, said that he had seen the lighthouse at Mosquito Inlet. Presently the cook remarked that he had seen it. The correspondent was at the oars, then, and for some reason he too wished to look at the lighthouse . . . . [A]t last there came a wave more gentle than the others, and when at the crest of it he swiftly scoured the western horizon.

“See it?” said the captain. . . . He pointed. “It’s exactly in that direction.”

At the top of another wave, the correspondent did as he was bid, and this time his eyes chanced on a small still thing on the edge of the swaying horizon. It was precisely like the point of a pin. It took an anxious eye to find a light-house so tiny. (889)

The correspondent too learns to observe the coast, putting the captain’s advice into practice by using the movement of the waves. His “anxious eye” contrasts with the “incompetency and blindness” of the men on shore (893). The “hill,” which had first been used as a metaphor in part II (887), becomes a concrete reality which increases their chance of survival. Thus, human agency is enhanced by marine agency, and the boat becomes a site of learning where sailor-culture is and passed on.

10When the dinghy is finally “swallowed” by a wave in part VII, “the men tumble[] into the sea” and morph into swimmers, leading to a new configuration, seaman(-ship), where the sea-man dyad becomes predominant. What takes place is a “shift from mechanical alliance to physical immersion,” where the characters revert to an “embodied” (Mentz, Ocean 62) relationship with the ocean. The shift from sailor to swimmer is inevitable for an extrinsic and intrinsic reason. When the dinghy overturns, it becomes a danger for the men, who must “get well clear of” it (Crane, “Open Boat” 906). On a symbolic level, it is only by leaving their protective “bath-tub” that the men can assert their fundamental agency—the ability to survive, or not. All life, as Mentz has pointed out, needs to burst out of its womb or “container” in order to develop:

From womb to coffins, human bodies need containers. . . . [H]uman selves only develop by seeking out containment and the temporary stability it produces. [However,] like soap bubbles, all containers eventually break. Moments of rupture represent transitions: ‘All amniotic sacs, organic models of autogenous vessels, live towards their bursting . . . ’ (Ocean 105-06)

The image of the amniotic sac is extremely relevant. The men, who sleep in their “sea-water couch in the bottom of the boat” (Crane, “Open Boat” 899), resemble “babes of the sea” (900). The boat may be “open,” but it is still a container, and the sailors need to experience “wet entanglements” (Mentz, Shipwreck xxiii). How does the shift from the dry to the wet manifest itself? In the text, sea-man separation is enacted metonymically by the gunwale. From the outset, the gunwale—the upper edge on the side of the boat, originally meant to support guns—is depicted as precarious (“six inches of gunwale”). As the water keeps “swirl[ing]” in (Crane, “Open Boat” 885), the men get wetter and wetter, and when the boat enters the “white water” of the surf, the gunwale is submerged: “Water swarmed in from all sides. The correspondent had his hands on the gunwale at this time, and when the water entered at that place he swiftly withdrew his fingers, as if he objected to wetting them” (906). As Mentz puts it, “Wetness no longer seeps in but floods,” leading to the “shock of immersion” (Shipwreck xx, 1): “When a human body submerges itself in water, we feel disorientation and buoyancy, which transform themselves into resilience and vulnerability” (Mentz, Ocean 129). What Mentz describes is a tension between activity and passivity, which is vividly illustrated in the last pages of Crane’s story, where agencies become entangled. At this point in the narrative, the correspondent has become a proactive seaman. Before the boat capsizes, he grabs “a piece of lifebelt” and holds it “to his chest with his left hand.” He also heeds the captain’s warning not to “spend” himself (Crane, “Open Boat” 892) and “paddle[s] leisurely” (907), unlike the unwise oiler who swims “strongly and rapidly.”

  • 4 The comic is central to a text where “tonal modulation” is key, as Schirmer has shown (Schirmer 224 (...)
  • 5 Mark Twain was one of the earliest American authors to describe surfing: “The emergence of a focuse (...)

11A complication arises when the correspondent is caught in a current which halts his “progress,” causing him to become passive and drop behind the other swimmers. Luckily, he is saved by a deus ex machina wave which “perhaps whirl[s] him out of this deadly current” and allows him to resume his “progress towards the shore” (908): “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” (908-09). Human and nonhuman agencies are entangled to such an extent that they become virtually indistinguishable. The wave perhaps saves the correspondent, but agency seems to be reversed when the correspondent performs a “marvel,” although this is clearly not the case as the “marvel” ought to be attributed to the wave. The reader is led to wonder: who or what is agentic? However, he/she soon realizes that Crane’s purpose is precisely to blur such binary dichotomies. Finally, to survive in the “icy” January water (907), the swimmers must interact with objects, which creates complex forms of sea-man-ship hybridity and turns them into slightly comic figures.4 The cook, who had previously been compared to an object—a “stove” (900)—on account of the warmth of his cork life-belt, now resembles a strange creature whose “great white corked back bulge[s] out of the water” (907). He subsequently appears to morph into a boat when, turning on his back, he starts “paddling with an oar, . . . as if he were a canoe” (907). As for the correspondent, he resembles a kind of surfer, “whirl[ing] down the incline of a wave as if he was on a hand-sled” (907),5 before being symbolically replaced by the water-jar, which “bounces gaily” after the other swimmers while he is in the current (908). Finally, the captain “appear[s] like a man raising himself to look over a board fence” (908). As he hangs “with his one good hand to the keel of the overturned dingey,” he seems to be holding the dorsal fin of a large fish. Indeed, all three men appear as comic avatars of the shark, which they have seen, and all three are described through the use of a simile. The capsizing of the dingey has not only “dash[ed] early modern European triumphalism onto the rocks and [told] a new story of cultural transformation” (Mentz, Shipwreck 10), but also generated a trio of hybrids. Sailors have morphed into human flotsam which, for want of a better word, one might term “thallacyborgs.”

Theoria, or Seeing the Sea: “like blue flame… on the black waters”

12Until now, the focus has been on the management of the boat through praxis or poiesis. What is at stake for the men, however, is not mere survival but the possibility of becoming “interpreters” (909). Thus, the characters, and more specifically the correspondent, must enter into a more profound relationship with the sea where vision supersedes visibility: “the novel is a perspective” (Crane, “Howells” 616). For vision to be redefined, the character must no longer view the sea from an anthropocentric perspective, as an obstacle, but as a transcendent power endowed with a spiritual, aesthetic dimension. In other words, he must engage in theoria. In Greek philosophy, theoria (etymologically, “contemplation”) was the highest form of activity, an idea which also inspired Martin Heidegger in his critique of modern technology. Heidegger sees technology as a dangerous “revealing” of the world from a coldly utilitarian perspective whereby nature is reduced to a “standing-reserve” whose resources need to be optimized. To avert this danger, humankind must engage in practices which resist efficiency. Theoria can enable human beings to “enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth” (Heidegger, Question 20-28):

For the Greeks, bios theoretikos, the contemplative life—especially in its purest form, thought—is the highest activity. Theoria is the fulfilled form of human existence. For theory allows the presence of the gods to shine forth. (Heidegger, Essais 58-59, my translation)

  • 6 “To begin with, Heidegger holds that we must learn to appreciate marginal practices [which] resist (...)

Thus, Heidegger opposes meditative thinking to calculative thinking: “Calculative thinking computes. . . . Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Meditative thinking contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.” He holds that theoria opens human beings to the incommensurable: “That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery” (Heidegger, Discourse 46, 55). This openness corresponds to what Hubert Dreyfus calls “marginal practices” (310).6 The need for a decentering and an opening up to mystery leads us to invoke another concept, that of wonder. Crane’s story illustrates Tony Tanner’s thesis that the experience of wonder is central to American literature:

Wonder is a passive state of admiration which requires the “sleep of reason” and a “disinclination to interfere with nature by mental inquiry. . . ”. It was Thomas Carlyle who argued that wonder ought to be viewed as a definite mode of philosophic understanding to be set up against analysis, that is to say against science or mere rationality, which he compared to “a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye.” The truly Philosophic Eye is the wondering Eye, for that alone is capable of seeing Nature not as an “aggregate” but as “a Whole.” (5-6)

Wonder can help to explain the correspondent’s new perception of the environment in the second half of the story. The religious dimension of “The Open Boat” has been highlighted by some critics and negated by others. Bert Bender belongs to the first category. According to him, the story “proceeds as a traditional sea journey to knowledge, and the knowledge it attains is . . . mysterious or religious . . . . [I]t dramatizes an experience like those William James would describe two years after Crane’s death in The Varieties of Religious Experience” (74). The correspondent experiences an epiphany when he “feels” nature’s “word to him” in the “high cold star on a winter’s night” (80). However, Bender fails to mention an essential element: the shark. By contrast, Oliver Billingslea is one of the few critics to have explored the function of the shark and its relation with the oiler’s death. His analysis is very enlightening, even if one may differ with the absurdist interpretation, which invalidates the correspondent’s epiphany and concludes on the “the failure of the imagination” (37-39). My contention is that the relevance of theoria and wonder to “The Open Boat” is borne out by the tension between “muscles” and “thinking” at work in the text (Crane, “Open Boat” 893, 906). In part V, contemplation becomes the correspondent’s main concern, thus illustrating Mentz’s remark: “‘To see, to see!—This is the craving of the sailor, as of the rest of blind humanity.’ In the English pun between see and sea, non-native speaker Conrad defines his most lofty ambition” (Mentz, Ocean 108). What is at stake is no longer negotiating the waves, but learning how to see the sea from a decentered perspective. I would argue that the experience of transcendence is crucial and can be connected to the vision of the shark and its aftermath. At the end of part V, the correspondent sees a “roving shark” (Munson 242). The passage begins under the sign of passivity. The correspondent feels vulnerable, thinking that he is “the one man afloat on all the oceans” (Crane, “Open Boat” 900). The “land ha[s] vanished” (898) because of “the all-merging darkness,” which causes him to relinquish his anthropocentric worldview. This is made easier by the fact that the representative of technology, the oiler, is asleep, which may symbolize “The Sleep of Reason” (Tanner 1). Equally noteworthy is the correspondent’s physical inaction. While there are hardly any references to praxis, the lexical field of vision and emotion permeates the text (“looked,” “saw,” “admired,” “motion,” “sorry” [Crane, “Open Boat” 901-03]). This passivity is conducive to a “visionary state” (Tanner 5). Interestingly, the vocabulary of praxis reappears only after the shark has gone away.

13This vision of the shark constitutes a sublime moment which elicits awe and terror when the correspondent sees “an enormous fin speed[ing] like a shadow through the water” (Crane, “Open Boat” 901), but also wonder. It is the shark which introduces color into what had hitherto been described as a “dismal night” (901). Blue—probably the color of transcendence—is used for the first time in the whole text (“bluish gleam,” “blue flame,” “bluish light” 899-901), creating a contrast with earlier sections where the sea was perceived through a terrestrial lens, as “slaty,” “emerald-green,” “streaked with amber lights,” “like tumbling snow,” or as “brown mats of sea-weed” (886-89). As Paul Sorrentino notes, “Crane’s use of blue . . . often represents the unknowable as well as one’s insignificance in a naturalistic universe” (94-95). In part V, significantly, the colors associated with the land (brown, green, carmine) disappear, whilst blue becomes dominant. Sorrentino’s remark thus points to a connection between the oceanic and the numinous. The shark elicits awe—but not the “horror” that a “picknicker” (Crane, “Open Boat” 901) might have felt—suggesting an initiation into oceanic mystery. When the correspondent swears “softly into the sea,” his tone of voice indicates a “special intimacy with nature” that contrasts with the hostile attitude towards the seagull in part II (Tanner 1). The sublime is conveyed by a poetic prose through the use of binary and ternary rhythms, assonance and alliteration, subject-verb inversion, and a focus on visual and auditory perceptions: “Ahead or astern, on one side or the other, at intervals long or short, fled the long sparkling streak, and there was to be heard the whiroo of the dark fin” (Crane, “Open Boat” 901). Crane also uses an “onomatopoeia . . . ‘whiroo’” (Halliburton 250) and a periphrasis, as the shark at this stage is only referred to as “the thing,” suggesting that it belongs to a nonhuman “inarticulate world” (Halliburton 251). This climactic experience alters the correspondent’s vision. He is no longer a “landlubber” (Bender 74) but becomes an “interprete[r]” (Crane, “Open Boat” 909), attuned to the mystery of the sea. He acquires a blue perception, and “develop[s] a ‘blue’ corrective to ‘green’” thinking (Mentz, Shipwreck xxix).

14This aesthetic experience leads to a spiritual revelation, that of nature’s indifference (the “high cold star”), as well as to a moral epiphany: “a verse mysteriously enter[s] the correspondent’s head,” and he imagines that he can see the “soldier of the Legion . . . dying in Algiers” (Crane, “Open Boat” 902). The dying soldier no longer appears as a figment, “a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet,” but as “an actuality—stern, mournful, and fine” (903). The correspondent can now bestow upon the imaginary soldier the “sympathy” of which he himself had been “bereft” (901) during his solitary vision of the shark. The correlation between this new, caring attitude, and the vision of the shark is indicated by the use of similar wording, which produces an echo (“nature does not regard him as important,” “he had never regarded it as important” [902]). However, the echo underlines a fundamental difference: it is precisely when he learns that nature is “flatly indifferent” (905) that he ceases to be “perfectly indifferent” (902) to his fellowman: “The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers” (903). A poetic parallel is established between the regular movement of the oarsman (life) and the dwindling movement of the soldier’s lips (death), and the syntax, as well as the possible pun on “moved,” show that the marginal practice of dreaming supersedes rowing. Another important fact is that time seems to be abolished. The verse, which the correspondent had learnt in the past (“childhood” [902]), is remembered in the present (“Now” [903]), and “prefigures” (Bender 74) the oiler’s imminent death. This collapsing of time creates an “‘everlasting now’” that is conducive to wonder (Tanner 7).

The Oiler’s Death, or praxis without theoria

  • 7 The noise of the Commodore’s engine was described as “the rhythmical and mighty pounding of the eng (...)
  • 8 The phrase is used ironically in “Flanagan” (913).
  • 9 According to Heidegger, as Dreyfus explains, it is only by reorienting itself and recovering the se (...)

15The death of Billie, the oiler, is a much-debated question in Crane scholarship. It has been regarded as “arbitrary” (Shulman 459) and ironic (Hilfer 253). One of the most enlightening analyses is that of Billingslea, even if I differ with his absurdist reading of the short story. The oiler’s death may come as a surprise to the reader, as his “splendid manhood” is extolled in “Stephen Crane’s Own Story” (883-84). On the open boat, the oiler is probably the fittest and most competent sailor; he is also very selfless and rows diligently, ensuring “the common safety” (Crane, “Open Boat” 890). For this reason, some critics have regarded him as a sacrificial figure (Colvert 41). However, I would argue that the oiler’s practical skills, thanks to which he saves the boat “by a series of quick miracles,” are also his tragic flaw. To the numerous explanations for the oiler’s death proposed by Billingslea, including an orthographic one—among the cook, the captain and the correspondent, the oiler is the “odd-man out” (Billingslea 28)—, one can add the fact that the oiler is inextricably linked to modern technology. Although the Commodore has sunk, Billie remains symbolically connected to the machine (as well as semantically: he is an oiler) which, as mentioned earlier, tends to incapacitate human beings. The steamer’s physical impact on him can still be felt. He is “weary-faced” (Crane, “Open Boat” 891) because “[p]reviously to the foundering, by the way, the oiler had worked double-watch in the engine-room of the ship” (891). The first adjective used in the story to describe him—“busy” (887)—encapsulates his very essence. This man works efficiently, but too efficiently, as if his proximity with the “engine-room” had turned him into an engine. Heedless of the captain’s warning that human beings need to save their “strength” (892), he overworks himself and reaches “the last stages of exhaustion” (904), which must contribute to his death. Thus, his death may illustrate the “danger” of technology which, as Martin Heidegger has shown, tends to instrumentalize not only natural resources and but also human beings themselves. Instead of resisting efficiency, the oiler worships it blindly. Throughout the story, the oiler’s behavior points to a fundamental flaw. He believes that, by means of rational knowledge, technology, or power, man can use and dominate the nonhuman environment. His is an anthropocentric worldview. After the dinghy has swamped, he swims away on his own. “The oiler was ahead in the race. He was swimming strongly and rapidly” (907). The adverbs underline his attempt to dominate the water as if he was a ship ploughing the seas, and the repetition of the suffix -ly evokes the repetitive pounding of an engine.7 Swimming, for the oiler, does not involve a wet entanglement but a “race” (907)—a concept which Heidegger associates with calculative thinking—, an attempt to get out of the water as fast as possible. The attempt to impose his “technological domination” over nature is a clear sign of “human egocentricity” (Hilfer 249-51). That this belief is illusory is suggested by a parallel between the fourth paragraph of the story and the fourth paragraph before the end: “The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the stern” (Crane, “Open Boat” 885, my emphasis). And: “In the shallows, face downward, lay the oiler. His forehead touched sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea” (909, my emphasis). The symbolic causality at work in the story ironically defeats the oiler’s anthropocentric belief that he can “raise” himself above the water and dominate it either through “mechanical excellence”8 (oiling) or physical prowess (swimming). In the story’s symbolic causality, failure to engage in bios theoretikos is fatal. The oiler dies because he remains firmly anchored in anthropocentric praxis. Unlike the correspondent, who from the outset “watche[s] the waves” (885), he is more prosaically concerned with the solidity of the “thin little oar” (885). He never contemplates the only thing which can “save”9 him—the nontechnological: “Of the four men in the boat, it is the oiler alone who misses seeing the shark” (Billingslea 30). When he does “sca(n) the surf” (Crane, “Open Boat” 905), he does so “over his shoulder” (906), and what he sees is not the sublime “blue flame” but the “tumbling boiling flood of white water” (906, my emphasis). His “quick miracles” (894) are anthropocentric “miracles,” unlike the correspondent’s truly miraculous entanglement with the waves.

16The correspondent’s ability to survive offers insight into the oiler’s failure to do so. At the end of part VI, the two men were almost interchangeable, but once immersed in the sea in part VII, they become dissimilar. The oiler aims directly for the shore without interacting with the element, whereas the correspondent is caught in a current before reaching the shore. Yet, this detour is a vital learning experience: it constitutes an experiment in vision where the “enemy” is the “deadly current” of anthropocentrism (907). How exactly does Crane enable the protagonist to jettison anthropocentrism and redefine his vision? The structure of the excerpt can be described once again as “wavelike” (Munson 241), insofar as the correspondent’s vision is initially distorted then “sharpened,” the “Pair of Spectacles becomes an Eye” (Carlyle, qtd. in Tanner 5-6). The current is mentioned three times:

[1°] But finally he arrived at a place in the sea where travel was beset with difficulty. He did not pause swimming to inquire what manner of current had caught him, but there his progress ceased. The shore was set before him like a bit of scenery on a stage, and he looked at it and understood with his eyes each detail of it. (Crane, “Open Boat” 907)

[2°] The correspondent remained in the grip of this strange new enemy—a current. 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. (908)

[3°] But later a wave perhaps whirled him out of this small deadly current, for he found suddenly that he could again make progress toward the shore. . . .  Presently he saw a man running along the shore. He was undressing with most remarkable speed. Coat, trousers, shirt, everything flew magically off him. . . .  It seems that instantly the beach was populated with men with blankets, clothes, and flasks, and women with coffee-pots and all the remedies sacred to their minds. (908-09)

  • 10 Anthony Hilfer has pointed out the connection between the picturesque and anthropocentrism: “Crane (...)

The correspondent’s near-death experience with the current serves as counterpoint to his sublime vision. Whilst the shark had decentered him from his ridiculous anthropocentrism—“shak[ing] his fist at the clouds” (894)—, the current does the reverse by reintroducing the picturesque,10 understood as the deceptive vision of a perfectly controlled nature. The illusory character of such a vision is highlighted by the lexical field of make-believe (“scenery,” “stage,” “picture,” “gallery” [908]). In the first two quotations, the current is likened to an enemy that halts the correspondent’s “progress . . . progress” (907-08), which brings to mind the Slough of Despond chapter in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. These quotations connect a faulty vision to the risk of “drowning” (908). In the third excerpt, the correspondent overcomes his illusions and acquires a perception of the shore which is at once realistic, with its mention of blankets and coffee-pots, and reenchanted, as it includes a “saint”-like man and “sacred” remedies. By contrast, the oiler, who failed to engage in contemplation, succumbs, as it seems, to his human egocentricity. In the story’s symbolic causality, survival also depends upon vision.

*

17Crane’s great sea story offers an inspiring reflection on the possibility of reconnecting with traditional skills and reverting to an immersive relationship with the ocean. In the same way as the notions of “steam,” “sail” and “swim” have enabled the reader to chart the men’s journey away from and back to the land, three quotes from the text can help to condense the story’s main insights. First, “they took the boat farther out to sea” (904) suggests that the men’s ability to act upon man-made objects and avoid the dangerous surf can “capacitate” them and increase their chances of survival. Human agency is insufficient if it does not interact with other agencies, creating dyadic or even triadic alliances. That the hybrid forms thus generated are treated on the comic mode does not diminish their importance, but on the contrary suggest a viable alternative to hubristic egocentrism. Secondly, the poetic comparison of the shark’s gleaming trail to a “blue flame . . . on the black waters” shows the need for the protagonists to retrieve a sense of wonder. It is by relinquishing their belief in mastery that human beings can find meaning. The experience of re-enchantment allows the correspondent to become truly fraternal and return to a shore no longer perceived as absurd but “sacred.” The final and most memorable quote, unsurprisingly, is the title itself, “The Open Boat.” This ten-foot dinghy, no bigger than a “bath-tub,” enables the men symbolically to reinvent sailing and a way of seeing the sea. The main protagonist, the co-respondent has learnt to respond practically to nonhuman agencies—be they material or oceanic—, and theoretically to the “loud swishing” of “the thing.”

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Bibliographie

Adams, Richard P. “Naturalistic Fiction: ‘The Open Boat.’” Stephen Crane’s Career: Perspectives and Evaluations. Ed. Thomas A. Gullason. New York: New York UP, 1972. 421-29. Print.

Bender, Bert. Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea-Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present. Philadelphia: The U of Pennsylvania P, 1988. Print.

Billingslea, Oliver. “Why Does the Oiler ‘Drown’? Perception and Cosmic Chill in ‘The Open Boat.’” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 27.1 (1994): 23-41. Print.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Stephen Crane. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Print.

Colvert, James B. “Style and Meaning in Stephen Crane: ‘The Open Boat.’” Texas Studies in English 37 (1958): 34-45. Print.

Crane, Stephen. “Howells Fears the Realists Must Wait.” 1894. Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry. Ed. J. C. Levenson. 1984. New York: The Library of America, 1996. 615-18. Print.

Crane, Stephen. “Stephen Crane’s Own Story.” 1897. Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry. Ed. J. C. Levenson. 1984. New York: The Library of America, 1996. 875-84. Print.

Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat.” 1897. Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry. Ed. J. C. Levenson. 1984. New York: The Library of America, 1996. 885-909. Print.

Crane, Stephen. “Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure.” 1897. Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry. Ed. J. C. Levenson. 1984. New York: The Library of America, 1996. 910-25. Print.

Dreyfus Hubert L. “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics.” The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Ed. Charles B. Guignon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 289-316. Print.

Gooley, Tristan. How to Read Water: Clues & Patterns from Puddles to the Sea. 2016. London: Sceptre, 2017. Print.

Gullason, Thomas A., ed. Stephen Crane’s Career: Perspectives and Evaluations. New York: New York UP, 1972. Print.

Halliburton, David. The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane. 1989. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 3-35. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. “Science et méditation.” Essais et conférences. 1954. Trans. André Préau. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. 49-79. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. 1959. Trans. John M. Anderson, and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers. 1966. Print.

Hilfer, Anthony Channell. “‘The Nothing That Is:’ Representations of Nature in American Writing.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 54.2 (2012): 219-97. Print.

Latour, Bruno. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte, 1991. Print.

Lavery, Brian. A Short History of Seafaring. 2013. London: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2019. Print.

Meeker, Joseph W. The Comedy of Survival: In Search of an Environmental Ethic. Los Angeles: Guild of Tutors Press, 1972. Print.

Meeker, Joseph W. “The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology.” Leonardo 9.4 (1976): 352. Print.

Mentz, Steve. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. Print.

Mentz, Steve. Ocean. 2020. New York: Bloomsbury, 2023. Print.

Munson, Gorham B. “The Importance of Tone in Stephen Crane’s Fiction.” Stephen Crane’s Career: Perspectives and Evaluations. Ed. Thomas A. Gullason. New York: New York UP, 1972. 239-42. Print.

Oppermann, Serpil. Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2023. Print.

Schirmer, Gregory A. “Becoming Interpreters: The Importance of Tone in Crane’s ‘The Open Boat.’” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 15.2 (1982): 221-31. Print.

Schober, Regina. “‘A Problem in Small Boat Navigation’: Ocean Metaphors and Emerging Data Epistemology in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Open Boat’ and Jack London’s ‘The Heathen.’” Studies in American Naturalism 12.1 (2017): 70-88. Print.

Shulman, Robert. “Community, Perception, and the Development of Stephen Crane: From The Red Badge to ‘The Open Boat.’” American Literature 50.3 (1978): 441-60. Print.

Sorrentino, Paul M. Student Companion to Stephen Crane. Westport: Greenwood, 2005. Print.

Swartwood, Jeffrey. “Surfing’s Early Short Stories by Mark Twain and Jack London: Autofictional Constructions and the Origins of a Genre.” Journal of the Short Story in English 79 (2022): 271-90. Print.

Tanner, Tony. The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature. 1965. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Print.

Twain, Mark. “About All Kinds of Ships.” 1893. The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Ed. Eric Paul Roorda. Durham: Duke UP, 2020. 180-88. Print.

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Notes

1 This summary appears on various websites.

2 I am taking the liberty of playing on words and will take the suffix -ship to refer to a vessel, instead of a skill. Wordplay seems justified in a story where nouns such as “stern” and “spell,” among others, are polysemic.

3 “Bath-tub” is the first noun used to describe the open boat, hence its importance. The word has been interpreted in different ways. Gregory Schirmer, for example, reads it as an expression of “the distanced and ironic tone of the narrator” (3).

4 The comic is central to a text where “tonal modulation” is key, as Schirmer has shown (Schirmer 224). The captain’s “chuckle” (887)—which contrasts with the oiler’s stern pessimism—epitomizes his ability to express “humor” as well as “tragedy” (887), even in the midst of the crew’s predicament. This comic sensibility can be said to contribute to survival as it “is a mode of thought and action designed for . . . the harmonious integration of human and other forms of life” (Meeker, “The Comedy of Survival” 352). Indeed, as Meeker argues, “comedy and ecology are systems designed to accommodate necessity and to encourage acceptance of it, while tragedy seeks to avoid or to transcend the necessary in order to accomplish the impossible. . . . If the lesson of ecology is balance and equilibrium, the lesson of comedy is humility and endurance. . . . Comedy illustrates that survival depends upon our ability to change ourselves rather than our environment, and upon our ability to accept limitations rather than to curse fate for limiting us” (The Comedy of Survival 44-9).

5 Mark Twain was one of the earliest American authors to describe surfing: “The emergence of a focused, surf-specific storytelling (outside of the rich Native Hawaiian tradition, of course) really begins with Twain’s four-month visit to the islands in 1866. He authored a series of sketches of island life collected in a volume entitled Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands” (Swartwood 270).

6 “To begin with, Heidegger holds that we must learn to appreciate marginal practices [which] resist efficiency” (310).

7 The noise of the Commodore’s engine was described as “the rhythmical and mighty pounding of the engines” (Crane, “Own Story” 877).

8 The phrase is used ironically in “Flanagan” (913).

9 According to Heidegger, as Dreyfus explains, it is only by reorienting itself and recovering the sense of mystery that humanity can find meaning. “‘The issue is the saving of man’s essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive.’ . . . ‘Only a god can save us now.’ . . . Heidegger holds that we must learn to appreciate marginal practices. . . . All these practices remain marginal precisely because they resist efficiency” (309-10).

10 Anthony Hilfer has pointed out the connection between the picturesque and anthropocentrism: “Crane is writing against the picturesque aesthetic and its prescribed, anthropomorphic expectations. The critic Jonathan Bate makes the case against the picturesque as a mode of apprehending nature: ‘ . . . land-scape means land as shaped, as arranged by a viewer.’ . . . Charles Wright remarks that ‘landscape is something you determine and dominate’” (254).

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Guillaume Tanguy, « “They took the boat farther out to sea”: Seamanship and Agency in “The Open Boat” »Journal of the Short Story in English, 85 | 2025, 27-45.

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Guillaume Tanguy, « “They took the boat farther out to sea”: Seamanship and Agency in “The Open Boat” »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 85 | Automn 2025, mis en ligne le 05 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4775

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Auteur

Guillaume Tanguy

Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry

Guillaume Tanguy is Lecturer of English at the Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry and a member of EMMA EA741 (Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone). He wrote his PhD dissertation on William Dean Howells and specializes in nineteenth-century American realism and naturalism. He is the editor of William Dean Howells (Profils américains 21, 2009) and co-editor of The Ecopoetics of War (Routledge, 2025). He has published articles on Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, Robert Frost, and Henry James whose story “The Real Thing” he has also translated.

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