You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author wisely departs from Ovid who is quoted as stating that in literary criticism it pays to neglect the artist in considering his work. In this psychological study of Stephen Crane and his fiction Weiss finds a remarkable resemblance to Hemingway. Both men had a thirst for abstract danger that led to becoming involved, as correspondents, in warfare. Both never quite got over the death of
the father, rebelled against their families, and had a childhood marred by violence. Both knew the psychology of the soldier and its relation to Oedipal and adolescent struggles. The soldier, in some cases, regresses in his military group to an oceanic reunion with an omnipotent mother. to become a combat veteran, the soldier starts out believing he cannot be killed, gets scared, is wounded, and becomes hardened (dehumanized?). Then 'comes the second crack' and he begins doing good deeds as if in a football game. This is the formula in both Crane and Hemingway. The author compares Crane to the man who rescues older women and defeats the rival in Freud's A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men.
Weiss falters in puzzlement over how the father of Stephen Crane, a mild, benign clergyman (only second to God in power?), could be transformed in Oedipal fantasy into a black murderer.