RAYMOND CARNEY
Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier. He lay
upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward
suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his
shoes had been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a
great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as
if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his ene–
mies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from
his friends.
The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnera–
ble dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly
at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as
if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around
and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to
read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.
469
Fried discusses this passage in conjunction with two similar
ones from Crane's short stories and uses it to launch an argument
that parallels the one he makes about Eakins, involving the work of
art as a site for a drama enacted between writing and the artist's
revulsion from writing. His observations about it follow:
... in the production of these paradigmatic texts by Crane an
implicit contrast between the respective "spaces" of reality and of
literary representation-of writing (and in a sense, as we shall
see, of writing/drawing) - required that a human character, or–
dinarily upright and so to speak forward-looking, be rendered
horizontal and upward-facing so as to match the horizontality
and upward-facingness of the blank page on which the action of
inscription was taking place. Understood in these terms , Crane's
upturned faces are at once synecdoches for the bodies of these
characters and singularly concentrated metaphors for the sheets
of writing paper that the author had before him, as is spelled out,
by means of a displacement from one end of the body to the
other, by the surprising description of the worn-down soles of the
dead soldier's shoes in the passage from
The Red Badge.
(The
displacement is retroactively signaled by the allusion to reading
in the last sentence of the second paragraph.)
Thus for example the size and proportions of a human face
and that of an ordinary piece of writing paper are roughly com–
parable . An original coloristic disfiguration ... by death mak–
ing [the dead soldier's face] ashen . .. may be taken as evoking
the special blankness of the as yet unwritten page .. . . [Addi–
tionally , the] further disfiguration [of the features of the face
J,
by
the wind that is said to have raised the soldier's tawny beard (in
