Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

In March 1894, Stephen Crane, at that time an ill-nourished and as yet little-known author, visited the Harlem apartment that Hamlin Garland shared with his brother and displayed what to Garland seemed an astonishing parlor trick: he wrote out several poems as Garland watched. As Garland later recalled, he then asked, “Have you any more?” To this, “Crane, pointing to his temple, replied, ‘I have four or five up here . . . all in a little row. . . . That's the way they come—in little rows, all ready to be put down on paper.’”1 That Crane conceived of poetry, usually a medium based in sound, in visual terms accords with the long-noted presence of visual imagery and color in his works, most notably The Red Badge of Courage. According to his biographer Paul Sorrentino, Crane was “endowed with synesthesia,” explaining to his friend Willis Brooks Hawkins that “every sound evoked in him the sight of a color.”2 In part because of his use of color, Crane was called an impressionist by his contemporaries as well as by later critics.3 Crane's contemporary Frank Norris likewise thought in terms of impressionism: a visual artist who trained at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1887–1889,4 Norris was a “verbal Impressionist” whose “[i]mpressionism extends to the aural” and olfactory, traits that further link him with Crane.5As part of their orientation toward the visual arts, Norris and Crane adopted fictional techniques that parallel and anticipate the techniques of early cinema, including their handling of multiple perspectives and points of view, close-ups of significant details, and evocative intercutting among scenes and episodes.6 In several of their city sketches, Crane and Norris focus on short episodes that might be called “falling stories,” scenes of persons falling into helplessness or uncontrolled actions in the presence of a crowd of spectators that witness but do not aid the stricken individual. What the falling stories record is the crowd's response to a private act that disorders public space by blurring the boundaries between public and private. The falling story occasioned by sudden disability upsets the implicit social contract that in the nineteenth century defined those with disabilities as possessing not only fewer implicit rights to be in the public sphere but also fewer explicit legal rights to be visible there. By returning the gaze, the person who has fallen challenges the strict demarcation between public and private, visible and hidden, and physical health and disability.Falling stories signify larger naturalistic issues of human agency and the powerful forces aligned against the individual, yet the visual exchange between spectators and the fallen subject more specifically raises the issue of disability in naturalism, a literary form that traditionally valorizes strength. In Norris’ falling stories, such as “Little Dramas of the Curbstone,” the narrator exhibits what Christophe Den Tandt has called the “hypnotic fascination” of “the untotalizable urban scene,” a mesmeric state that “acts as an exacerbated avatar of the flâneur's gaze, as Walter Benjamin describes it.”7 Transfixed by the spectacle, the narrator does not act on the violent impulses that the state of helpless victims evokes in him but is in turn paralyzed by his fantasies. Moving past the “hypnotic fascination,” characters in “The Associated Un-Charities” and Vandover and the Brute (1914) find amusement by inflicting humiliation on their unresisting victims, actions that reinscribe their performance of white male masculinity as normative.In contrast, Crane's sketches “In the Depths of a Coal Mine,” “The Men in the Storm,” “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers,” and “An Eloquence of Grief” mark the critical break between the ordinary and extraordinary that occurs when a person falls, thus dividing a public space between a spectacle of disability and a crowd of spectators. Crane's critique of spectatorship enters the picture when crowds become destabilized at the sight of the disabled body, often a person differentiated by race, ethnicity, or gender from the presumably white male narrative persona or camera eye. The sudden collapse renders the human being as a threat to the crowd, since the supine body cannot assume what spectators consider its proper position in public spaces. Crane focuses on the disordering of public space caused not by the one who has fallen but by the spectators fighting for the chance to view the scene before them. Like the cinematic use of multiple points of view in Crane's short sketches and fiction, the victim's resistance to the cultural and visual dynamics of the crowd renders questions of control and agency as more fluidly than deterministically conceived, opening a space for a more complex consideration of disability in naturalism.As early as the 1890s Crane's work had been recognized as cinematic by his contemporaries, who were writing at a time when film was beginning to emerge as a popular art form. For example, in a review of The Red Badge of Courage, his friend and fellow novelist Harold Frederic compared Crane's realistic description of “photographic revelation” as of an “instantaneous camera”8 with Eadward Muybridge's famous studies of horses in motion, and Joseph Conrad saw himself and Crane as “unconsciously penetrated by a prophetic sense of the technique and of the very spirit of the film-plays of which even the name was unknown to the world.”9 More directly, Norris introduced early cinema as a prominent feature of the vaudeville show that McTeague, Trina, Mrs. Sieppe, and Owgooste attend early in McTeague. Early films, like Crane's and Norris’ city sketches, seem transfixed by the spectacle of seeing, for both repeatedly portray the viewer's bearing witness to acts of violence or spectacles of disability or disembodiment, sometimes played for humor, as in The Thieving Hand (1908). For example, Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets reveals the incessant violence of the environment through the eyes of Maggie, the baby Tommy, and her brother Jimmie, while Norris’ McTeague first reveals the murder of Trina through the perspective of a cat, “wildly terrified, his eyes bulging like brass knobs.”10In the early days of film, privacy, and with it subjectivity, was lost as the image of the self could be captured by the moving picture camera and infinitely replicated for the amusement of the masses. This was especially true in naturalism, traditionally focused on impoverished bodies and lives. Treated as part of the catalogues of refuse and discarded objects that pervade urban naturalist novels, persons caught in the narrative mediation between exploitation and sympathy complicate the documentary promise of what Zola called the “transparent screen” that constitutes the “naturalist's view of the world.”11 Poverty provided filmmakers and naturalist writers with a subject matter at once compelling and deeply troubling in its implications for modern notions of invasion of privacy and exploitation, as portraits of impoverished human beings were served up as visual entertainment for the middle classes. Noting the popularity of books illustrating the lives of those living in poverty in nineteenth-century England, Nancy Armstrong explains that photography had sought to make poverty “picturesque” by “setting the poor apart from prosperous people” both in time, which made poor people seem “primitive,” and space, in that their homes could be “penetrated by the tourist and the sociologist, as well as the photographer.”12 Sentiment and sympathy combined to create a cultural tourism that prized misery as an index of authenticity of feeling. Both the documents of picturesque poverty and the practice of slumming provided an affective charge of unacknowledged Schadenfreude mingled with ostentatious pity to middle-class viewers while guaranteeing a comfortable distance from which to experience the life of the city streets. But as Seth Koven observes, “Slumming, the word and the activities associated with it, was distinguished historically by a persistent pattern of disavowal. . . . As a form of urban social exploration, it bore the obloquy of sensationalism, sexual transgression, and self-seeking gratification, not sober inquiry and self-denying service to others.”13Norris and Crane identified themselves as objective reporters and recorders of the urban scene, not slummers; based on the categories Mark Pittenger identifies as those of the later “hobo sociologist,” Nels Anderson, they would appear to be neither “crusading” nor slumming but the “‘realist’ journalist” of whom Anderson approved.14 Yet their involvement inherently changes the dynamic between observer and observed, for the naturalists’ philosophy of scientific objectivity in the face of witnessing poverty and violence is itself a form of feeding on the misery of others.15 In Crane's sketches, the reflexive glance that the fallen subject directs toward the observer suggests that exploitation, as do visual analogues in photographs and film. For example, the visual conventions of representing poverty, as exemplified in Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Jack London's The People of the Abyss (1903), emphasize this exploitation photographically through certain visual tropes. These include portraits of human beings indistinguishable from their cluttered backgrounds; portraits of individuals staged with trash or waste containers prominently in the picture; and babies pictured either as part of cramped but orderly backgrounds or alone as if they have been discarded as excess by parents too hard-pressed to keep them. A photograph from London's The People of the Abyss, ironically titled “A Descendant of the Sea Kings,” juxtaposes a two-year-old child sitting on a step with a barrel of waste to emphasize his position, a degradation from England's past glory, and the negligible value that his culture places upon him, a fact clear from the child's troubled expression.16 (Figure 1)Early films likewise questioned the exploitation inherent in such image-making and encouraged an uneasy response by reversing the positions of spectator and subject. In a famous film frame from D. W. Griffith's early poverty-and-crime picture The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), for example, narrative attention focuses not only on the intense gaze between the subjects at the center of the frame—sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish, playing sullen strangers who pass on the street—but also on the girl in the doorway who gazes out at the spectator, a move that replicates the returning stare from so many of London's and Riis’ portraits. (Figure 2) Present in only the very earliest silent films, and thereafter considered as much a filmmaking gaffe as an unintentional glance into the camera would be today, this gaze that breaks the “fourth wall” is one that Griffith uses repeatedly throughout The Musketeers of Pig Alley.17 In the case of the girl, it functions as the accusatory, reproachful gaze of poverty. At other points in the film, it is sometimes a menacing stare, as in an off-center close-up of a gangster. (Figure 3) Griffith also replicates the visually constricted framing through architectural details employed by Riis’ 1888 photograph “Bandit's Roost,” with the narrowed walls of the alleyway signifying the narrowed choices and lives of the city's impoverished inhabitants. In film and in text, cinematic naturalism deploys Zola's “transparent screen” through scenes shot through doors and windows that signify equally the visual frame of the camera and the conceptual frame that marks persons with disabilities as immobile or helpless, literally framed or boxed in by their visual positioning in a description or a picture.18Norris presents disability as visibly provocative, disorienting, and irrevocable in his city sketches “Little Dramas of the Curbstone” (Wave, 16 June 1897) and “The Associated Un-Charities” (Wave, 30 October 1897). As Tobin Siebers suggests, the representation of disability is almost mandatory for late-nineteenth-century authors such as Norris. Since “broken bodies and things are more real than anything else, [t]he discourse of literary realism began in the nineteenth century to privilege representations of trash, fragments, and imperfect bodies,” a discourse that Norris amplifies with the unmediated primitive emotions that he believes disabilities evoke in spectators.19 With their denigration of reform impulses, these stories challenge contemporary reform novels such as Emma Pow Bauder's Ruth and Marie (1895), which Nina Baym describes as “merging melodrama with sermonizing about temperance, labor, women's property, and women's suffrage.”20 Both Bauder and Norris respond directly to a particular moment in the history of reform in San Francisco: the establishment of the Associated Charities in 1889, “the first general, nonsectarian relief organization in San Francisco,” led by twenty-eight-year-old Katherine Fenton, who from 1902 to 1908 instituted an integrated approach to care that included prison reform, a foster care system, and, after the earthquake of 1906, a shift from advocacy to direct service to the poor.21 “Little Dramas of the Curbstone” and “The Associated Un-Charities,” a title that plays on the name of Fenton's organization, reveal a surface-level cynicism about San Francisco reform efforts, yet Norris’ depiction of the subordinate position of women, ethnic others, and persons with disabilities in his stories suggests deeper anxieties about the relationships between ethnicity, disability, and citizenship.In “Little Dramas of the Curbstone” the first-person narrator sees three successive scenes of mothers and children. In the first, the narrator recoils in panic because he sees a child who is “blind and an idiot” because, as a medical student explains, his father was “a degenerate; exhausted race; drank himself into a sanitarium.”22 In the second episode, a gray-haired mother half drags, half carries “a paralytic little girl” along the street as the child falls. The mother tries “to appear indifferent to the crowd” (4) as the narrator thinks about the girl's absent father, reflecting that “none of them would ever see him again, but that he was alive for all that.” The significant omission of the nature of the girl's illness and reasons for the father's absence, though he is still alive, strongly suggests hereditary syphilis or another sexually transmitted disease. As Stephanie Bower has shown, Norris’ stories of the period and Vandover and the Brute teem with anxiety over an imagined Anglo-Saxon degeneration and loss of masculinity inflicted by real diseases transmitted through sexual contact with a racial other.23 In the third episode, reminiscent of Crane's George's Mother, a young man, Jimmy, prefers to go to jail than to return home with his mother. The narrator concludes that in all three “Little Dramas,” “the chief actor”—the child's father—has been “left out of the programme” (5), each having failed his child through degeneracy, a heritable disease, or simple absence, respectively.Each of the “Little Dramas” refuses the redemptive returning gaze that Crane employs in his falling stories. In the first and most disturbing of the vignettes, Norris conveys the narrator's horror by piling on the descriptions of the boy as an evolutionary throwback, “an excrescence; a parasitic fungus in the form of a man; a creature far below the brute” who has eyes “filmy, like those of a fish.” On being told that the boy is brought regularly to the clinic “so that the lecturer might experiment upon his brain, stimulating it with electricity,” the narrator does not respond with empathy. Instead, like the narrator of Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he is overcome with an instinctive urge to “club [the boy] down to the pavement and . . . batter in that face.” Disability for Norris represents the inability to deny the spectator's gaze: the boy's “fixed” and “filmy” eyes (2) see nothing and fail to shame the observer into charitable action. In the second vignette, the mother of the fallen girl looks longingly at a streetcar but refuses to meet the gaze of the indifferent crowd and narrator, whom she correctly assumes will not assist her. The enigmatic mother-and-son drama of the third “Little Drama” concludes with the son's refusal to return home, and since his “No!” is the last word spoken in the vignette, he does not return the crowd's gaze and preserves the mystery of “those things that are not meant to be seen” (5). In all three “Little Dramas,” the objects of the spectacle have no agency in terms of mediating the crowd's gaze, for they are, in naturalistic terms, merely experimental subjects under the scientist's microscope, as the indifference of the medical student to the boy's suffering attests. As in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator's brutality shifts the focus, figuratively the narrative gaze, from the scene itself to the reader, whose affective response now becomes the object of attention.In “The Associated Un-Charities” Norris again presents distanced cruelty, not empathy, as the unbidden response to visible disability. Set “in the valley between Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill,” the story follows the narrator and a friend, Leander, as they accompany their friend Cluness, who is “connected with some sort of a charitable institution.”24 As Cluness visits one of his cases, Leander and the narrator sit in a tavern watching three blind men of different nationalities—a German or “Dutchman,” an Indian, and a lavender-seller, Mr. Bates, who were actual “historical figures on the San Francisco streets”25—ordering drinks from a “Kanaka woman” at the “tallest and dirtiest” of the Seven Houses. Saying that he hates “the charity that means only medicines, clean sheets, new shoes and sewerage,”26 Leander says he will give them a five-dollar gold piece so that they can order a lavish dinner. He tells each of them that he has given the coin to one of the others, and Leander and the narrator watch with glee as the three blind men fight with one another over the check and the missing gold piece that was to have paid for it. After the three have been dragged off to the police station, Cluness returns, oblivious to what has happened, and he praises Leander's charitable deed, saying that “those three fellows will never forget that night.”27The story contains two pointed jokes at the expense of organized charity: the hoodwinking of Cluness, whose commitment to charity work renders him a foolish figure and whose declaration about the night that the men will never forget is rendered ironic by his ignorance of what has transpired; and the vicious prank of tricking the blind men whose manner, the narrator notes, changes as Leander approaches them with what they assume to be alms. Their initial performance of humility in Leander's presence, in contrast to their convivial camaraderie when they are by themselves, suggests that the tavern is the “shammers’ den” where those pretending to be disabled meet to put aside their props for begging.28 Deprived of the promised money, each reverts to his own language and enacts his own forms of ethnic brutishness during the fight as the Indian begins to “rail and howl in his own language” and the Dutchman “lapse[s] into the vernacular.”29 As framed in the story, Leander's trick suggests that all that charity may be a con game. Yet the men are not shamming, and the way in which a trio of men marked by ethnicity and disability, and the do-gooder Cluness, figure as pawns in Leander's game suggests that their underlying function is to reinforce the streetwise white masculinity of observers such as Leander and the narrator.Written in the same 1895–1898 period as Norris’ city sketches for the Wave but published only posthumously in 1914, Vandover and the Brute incorporates scenes of alcoholic degeneration that provide a continuum between the disabled body and the alcoholic one.30 Like Norris’ autobiographical counterpart Blix (1899), it is a cautionary tale reminiscent of temperance novels like Ruth and Marie, for Vandover, an artist, repeatedly chooses drinking and playing poker with his friends over the hard work of dedicating himself to his art. Unlike Condy Rivers in Blix, who arrests his course through the love and comradeship of a woman, over the course of the novel Vandover gradually abandons his art after the suicide of a woman he had seduced and thereafter recommits to the excesses that lead to his downfall. Vandover's principal foils and companions include the uber-capitalist Charlie Geary, the sensitive Dolliver “Dolly” Haight, the insurance clerk Bancroft “Bandy” Ellis, who has a “curious passion for facts and statistics” and Ellis’ friend, a young man called “the Dummy,” who is “stone deaf” and cannot speak (42). The man's real name is never revealed, so that as in Norris’ other portraits of disability, the person becomes identified solely by his physical condition.Associated with Vandover's forays into and eventual passion for drinking and gambling, Ellis and the Dummy reenact and intensify the dynamic in “Little Dramas of the Curbstone,” unleashing the cruelty that Norris’ narrator had suppressed in the earlier sketch. In an early chapter, Ellis drinks until “the skin around his eyes was purple and swollen [and] the pupils themselves were contracted,” which signals his drunken fury, as in McTeague when McTeague's “eyes [were] drawn to two fine twinkling points” before he beats Trina to death (525). In his swift descent into drunkenness, Ellis reveals his false pretensions to the upper-middle class status of Vandover, Geary, and Haight and presages Vandover's more gradual descent into degeneration. At the end of a night of drinking, Ellis knocks down the waiter and, when Vandover and the Dummy try to stop him, he “turn[s] on the Dummy in a silent frenzy of rage and brought his knuckles down upon his head again and again.” Ellis, now “blind, dumb, fighting drunk,” unfairly beats the weaker man, his lower-class brutishness emerging during his “fighting [that] was not the fighting of Vandover” (43), the unfair fighting and willingness to beat a weaker opponent that the higher-status Vandover innately shuns.In a later chapter, Vandover and his friend Ellis repeatedly try to incite the Dummy to make a spectacle of himself, to abandon his dignity and perform his disability. They “get him so drunk he could talk” and badger him until he furiously tries to denounce them: “He uttered a series of peculiar cries very faint and shrill, like the sounds of a voice heard through a telephone,” “a stream of little ineffectual birdlike twitterings” that Vandover and Ellis regard with amusement. In this case, speech becomes the means of the Dummy's humiliation, a far cry from his usual communication method of writing on a piece of paper. His speech is rendered as animalistic or mechanical in the ears of his listeners, a set of descriptors that denies the possibility of authentic utterance. Yet in a reversal of the usual temperance novel, the person afflicted with a disability finds more powers rather than fewer ones in drink, and the Dummy begins to sing with the rest as he “mutters incessantly to himself” as if “delighted at having found his tongue.” His attempts at song turn the others into beasts: Ellis “pretend[s] to howl at it like a little dog overcome by mournful music” (220) and Vandover, at the urging of others, begins to perform his “dog-act” of running on all fours and howling like a wolf. To ingratiate himself as part of the group, the Dummy must aspire to, and fail to achieve, his friends’ vision of normality, which deprives him of all dignity through the form of animal mimicry (“twitterings”). The mockery of disability functions to confirm the men's self-invented normality and as a means to distance themselves from the anxiety that disability provokes in them, much as in the “Little Dramas” sketch. As the dominant force in the friends’ social group, Vandover invents the “dog-act” as a contrast to his white masculinity, a performance of animality that confirms his control over self as well as animals, and, by the racial logic of the day, racial others. As in other popular transformation stories, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), however, alcoholic repetition renders the performance of the brute involuntary and habitual, the outward sign of the “Lycanthropy-Pathesis” that afflicts him (205) and that expresses fully the fear of his able-bodied friends of falling into disability and racial contamination.31In Crane's city sketches, the fallen or disabled body signifies the impoverished subject's lack of agency, yet Crane's fallen figures restores their sense of self, either visually by returning the gaze, as in “In the Depths of a Coal Mine,” “The Men in the Storm” and “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers” or through the auditory means of a piercing cry, in “An Eloquence of Grief.” Unlike Norris, Crane focuses on the disordering of public space caused not by the one who has fallen but by the spectators fighting for the chance to view the scene before them. Returning the gaze recurs as an organizing principle throughout Crane's work, even when the state of being fallen is more metaphoric than actual, as in “In the Depths of a Coal Mine.” First syndicated on 22 July 1894 and then published in McClure's in August, “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” opens with a descent into a dehumanized mechanical hell as Crane describes the “infernal regions” of an underground world, with boys as slate-pickers transformed into blackened “imps” in a place of “infernal dins.”32 He affirms their humanity by noting their fondness for playing baseball, and then forecloses on the possibility of individual agency by noting their hopes extend only to the lock-step process of becoming first “door-boys,” then “laborers and helpers,” and then “miners.” Crane describes the later figures in this process, the black-clad and grimy miners, as bent double in the cramped rooms of the mines, differing from their surroundings only by their eyes and mouths: in one group, “their eye-balls and teeth shone white as bleached bones” (609), while others reveal “strangely satanic smiles and eye-balls wild and glittering in the pale glow of the lamps” (610). The white faces covered by blackness, rendered as white only by their “eye-balls” and “teeth” suggests the infernal regions and also minstrel shows, a gaze out of dehumanizing blackness that constitutes the refrain in Crane's critique. (Figure 4)The literal embodiment of the fallen victim rising to face the gaze of the crowd, the group of men “slowly uprose to gaze” at the narrator in a movement that “resembled a resurrection,” with “the swift flashes of the steel-gleaming eyes . . . upon our faces” (610). In addition to its effective internal rhyme, the striking image of flashes from “steel-gleaming eyes” suggests both their blue or gray color and the weaponlike (“steel”) material turned back unexpectedly (“swift flashes”) upon the observer as if emitting a light and a threat of their own (577).33 In contrast to the stoical, laconic miners are the mules that live out their lives underground, to which Crane devotes equal time. The mules express all the emotions that the men are reluctant to own: “long-eared slaves,” they “tremble at the earth, radiant in the sunshine” when brought to the surface, “have piteous fears of being left in the dead darkness,” and perhaps dream of “a lost paradise.” A miner tells the narrator of a mule whose “memory of a black existence” caused him to refuse to return to the mines, after which he was given his freedom, an act that the men, with their need to collect their “three dollars per day,” dare not emulate (612–13). Trapped in “the implacable grasp of nature,” the miners can reclaim a sense of agency, in Crane's report at least, primarily by turning their gaze back on the spectators.First published in the Arena (October 1894), “The Men in the Storm” echoes “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” in its representation of human beings figuratively fallen and huddled together, and it anticipates film technique in its shifting point of view. The sketch moves from a street-level vision of men who “huddled their necks closely” beneath the El “to one who looked from a window” with muffled sound.34 The perspective or vantage point of the narrator, always crucial in Crane's writing, here echoes the perspective of the person watching or creating a silent film, since looking from a window or scenes of looking more generally were often read as analogous to the camera's eye or to the experience of watching a film.35 The narrator's vision of “black figures of men busily shoveling the white drifts from the walks” (577) mimics the effect of the black and white figures of the silent film in a world reduced to monochrome. Similarly, the tonal palate of the “clatter of the street . . . softened by the masses that lay upon the cobbles” and the “melody of life” that results from “the dreariness of the pitiless beat and sweep of the story” reflects a medium in which the sound must be more imagined than heard.Crane's point of view moves the reader much as a camera would, panning from the street-level misery of those hurrying home to the observer above. The camera then shifts to the real men in the storm, whom the point of view camera follows in a tracking shot as they are driven by the whirling snows “as [by] men with whips” into doorways and down stairs. The men are of two types, some fallen into “ill-fortune” and “others of the shifting, Bowery lodging-house element” (579). Before long both types have blended together and devolved from human beings to lesser forms—from upright “statues of patience” to animals blown about by the wind, “sheep in a winter's gale,” and finally to a nearly inanimate thing moved by wind and emotion, a “heap of