The Bridge, by Hart Crane, section “The Tunnel”


We began by considering whether “The Tunnel” is an appropriate text for consideration in a “Literature and the Environment” course and we engaged with the assumptions embedded within the basic question itself: what kinds of texts constitute the canon of “environmental literature”? Is that even what we are studying? We looked again at Lawrence Buell’s criteria for determining whether a text is an “ecologically orientated work,” chief among them the requirement that a text take as its central focus a “nonhuman environment.” Buell also indicated that such texts must have an “ethical orientation” and retain a sense that the environment is a “process rather than . . . a constant.”

Crane’s “The Tunnel,” a part of the larger work The Bridge, emerged at an interesting moment in American literary history, given the long shadows cast by influential works of the previous century (Leave of Grass, first published in 1855, was one of them, as was The Waste Land, of 1922) and the developments of “modernism” in visual and literary arts. Crane was interested in offering Americans a new kind of poetic epic, which would describe America (in the words of critic Eric J. Sundquist) “as a proper mythical and historical ‘home’” (377).

A home can certainly be a built place (like one’s house) but it can also be a larger expanse, a nation, for example. Americans have long thought of the American nation as a new version of Eden, and in Crane’s “The Tunnel” we see what has become of this Eden through the growth of cities, the entrance of populations of immigrants, and the increasing technologization of Americans’ day-to-day lives. If we ask whether “The Tunnel” has an “ethical orientation,” and whether it is thus appropriate for consideration as a piece of “environmental literature,” we can begin by asking – as we did in class – what kind of environment it is that Crane presents.

On a basic level, Crane gives an account of a ride by subway under the East River. He offers many “natural” allusions in the poem, as we considered in class, and suggests that these devices of technology – a tunnel and a train (and revolving doors and turnstiles, etc.)—emulate but perhaps pervert natural processes. One could walk above ground, outside, Crane begins the poem by writing, but “the subway yawns the quickest promise home” (line 13). To descend into the subway tunnel is to descend from a version of a garden (an Edenic place, in effect), but to where does one descend? Crane is a bit ambivalent here. While the depths of the subway tunnel, and the subway car itself during a ride, seem a place of chaos (as his scatter of pieces of conversations expresses), there is still a sense of nature, as it were, about the subway space. The subway tunnels, he writes, are “rivered under streets / and rivers” (lines 33-34). These tunnels function, as we talked about class, as rivers, because rivers do, as you all mentioned, function in various capacities, some of which we can see as similar to those of a subway tunnel. Recall what we mentioned about the behaviors of and uses for rivers.

A favorite line of mine, which I think furthers the above point and which I mentioned in class, is one Crane uses to describe the train and tunnel’s final plunge below the river on its way to Brooklyn. The train car “Lets go . . . Toward corners of the floor / Newspapers wing, revolve and wing” (lines 97-98). As the train, anthropomorphized as it is, “lets go,” other inanimate objects take on “natural” behaviors, as the newspapers lift in the air, spin in the corners of the car, and “revolve and wing” like birds. These phrases of Crane’s indicate that the choices of the early-twentieth-century person were not between two sides (nature and technology), but rather that these “forces” do, in the end, mutually invade each other, in essence. “Invade” is perhaps too heavy a word here, but the kind of uncontainable freedom of a bird alighting or a newspaper “winging” up reveals the persistence of natural action, despite human contrivances (amazing ones that Crane admires, like the Brooklyn Bridge, or about which he is less sure, like a subterranean transit tunnel).

Stanley Coffman, in 1951, wrote of The Bridge that in it, Crane “goes beyond the universal language of geometry to show the unity between science and nature” (68). Coffman provides examples from sections throughout the work that Crane strives to indicate “the process by which the world of nature and the world of science and industry become interchangeable” (68). Coffman argues that in “The Tunnel,” efforts to see “machine” as somehow “human” become horrible efforts, despite Crane’s seeming commitment to indicate interchangeability – and this is what I meant by Crane’s ambivalence, above. In the end, as Crane reveals over and over in his work, there are two ways to see many things (like, as Coffman reminds us, in Crane’s reference to the dawn as a promise or as a curse, as something that “slaughters”) (70).

Because there are so many ways to interpret aspects of The Bridge (as I said in class, within certain reasonable “horizons of meaning”), we can again ask whether it is appropriate for us to examine it with an “ecocritical” lens. As Kalynn pointed out, on the basis of “The Tunnel”’s concern with a specific environment, we might thus call it “environmental.” But, when we look at the poem more in alignment with accepted approaches to environmental literature, I think we will find ourselves justified in reading it as we have, and asking the question of it that we did. As I mentioned in class, Greg Garrard establishes Carson’s Silent Spring as the initial text of modern environmentalism and points out its reliance on the literary genres of “pastoral and apocalypse.” When we think of “The Tunnel” after reading a statement such as this, we see that Crane too relies on these literary genres, using frequent pastoral images and offering disturbing apocalyptic ones.

While “The Tunnel,” and The Bridge, might not be “avowedly political” (in Garrard’s phrase) or might not offer a specifically recognizable “ethical” message on the behalf of a damaged or vulnerable environment (one of Buell’s criteria), the poem nevertheless meets some of the criteria critics have established as helpful when determining whether a text is a piece of “environmental literature” or simply a text in which “the environment” is a mere setting for human dramas. Certainly the dramas of built space and “natural” space –often independent of attention to humans--are of central concern to Crane in The Bridge.