constructing pathways to translation - Higher Education Commission

iographical figure and as literary artist. The problematic issues can be probed by
considering the biographical, historical and textual perspective of the novel.
6.2 THE NOVEL : ‘THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE’
The textual history of ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ is obscure and complicated. Crane
started work on the novel in 1893. After completing nearly one third of a draft, he
started over, this time (for lack of paper) writing on the unused sides of his first pages.
By December 1893, he seems to have completed a novel of twenty five chapters and
some 55,000 words and spent nine months vainly trying to convince publishers to accept.
Finally he took the manuscript to the Bachellor Johnson news syndicate, which offered
to serialize an abbreviated version of 18,000 words. The novel first appeared in the form
in December 1894 in the New York Press, the Philadelphia Press, and hundreds of other
papers throughout the country. The major and continuing problems with establishing a
reliable text begins with the manuscript, since the reasons Crane had for cutting material
remain unclear (Mitchell,1986: ix).
Crane defied fictional conventions that traditionally made a story a story. Plot
disappeared in the same way that social organizations seem to be forgotten, and character
in the novel is made to appear less fixed psychological entity. By abandoning familiar
novelist plays, Crane achieved a more vivid dramatization of impressions. And by
highlighting the power of language, he exposed sheer vacuity of popular story telling
assumptions. Crane’s fiction unsettles the customary associations between external
conditions and emotional response, and in the process tests the ability of consciousness
to accommodate experience. Moreover, in order to intensify the vivid effect of the
battlefield itself, there is no shift of the narrative focus away from its cultural situations
in the ‘Red Badge of Courage’. Crane’s was, in fact, the first novel which did not attract
attention through sub-plots and comic relief, and was completely devoted to the
experience of war.
The absence of labels and dates makes the narrative more, not less, effective by shifting
attention away from either historical patterns or local meanings. Instead, the novel
concentrates on the emotional violence of actual battle and between two armies in any
war.
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