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.For example, Harvey Gross has shown the extentto which the intelligibility of Crane s poems depends upon verse form andparticularly meter to mitigate uncertain, almost haphazard syntacticalprogression. 11 Gross s insight is borne out by the poem at hand to the extentthat the multiple figures in the second stanza s substitutive chain (wreckscalyx chapter hieroglyph portent) are organized as a chain and not as arandom series less by logic or grammatical relation than by the catena ofpentameter.This is frequently the state of affairs in Crane s poems, wheremeter takes over the work of grammar in the construction of an elaborateapostrophe or an extended series of appositive phrases.Yet even metricalorder, however necessary to intelligibility, remained for Crane a compromiseof his intentions. Poetic structure, whether the phantom modernism of TheBridge or the nineteenth-century French formality of The Broken Tower,was unaccommodated to [Crane s] meaning because no structure, thefunction of which is to bear meaning into the world of appearance, is freefrom the finitizations that are the sufficient condition of appearing at all (Grossman, Crane s Intense Poetics, 239).In The Broken Tower, Crane represents the costs of thiscompromise, of the finitizations attendant on poetic structure, as anengraving of Membrane through marrow, which recalls the inscription of numbers on the dice of drowned men s bones. The scattered chapter that these bones constitute returns, in the same stanza of The BrokenTower, as my long-scattered score / Of broken intervals (Crane, Poems,160).This is, in Crane s final poem, a retrospective reflection on the shapeof Crane s career, an embittered comment on the intermittency of writing.But it also describes the disseminative violence that Crane s poems, from thebeginning, participate in and celebrate.For Crane, the entrance into poetryis imagined as a breaking or scattering of the whole of his desire, ambition,identity; it is a passage into structure that is, paradoxically, destructuring.Verse form, understood here both as abstract pattern and concrete instance,fragments Crane s utterance at the same time that it shapes and upholds it.12This is fundamentally the paradox of a discourse a homosexual discoursefor Crane in which to speak is to be silenced.The point of the poet sappearance is also that of his disappearance, and the message of the drownedis communicated in the moment it is obscured. The dice of drowned men s bones might be regarded, then, asemblems of Crane s own quatrains, which are forms fashioned in the tensionbetween structure and flux, necessity and chance, and which present the 291Dice of Drowned Men s Bonesreader with a livid hieroglyph. They are the decipherable but complexlyencoded, complexly burdened parts of an inaccessible self, the fragments ofa mutilated because unrepresentable whole.The question is: How didCrane find hope in this sea change? How does the fragmentation of wordand self in At Melville s Tomb differ from the song of minor, brokenstrain in C 33 ? How could the mutilation of the body possibly anticipateits restoration?In American Hieroglyphics, John Irwin suggests one answer to thesequestions when he calls attention to the way in which the drowning ofBulkington, in The Lee Shore chapter of Moby-Dick, functionssynecdochically to describe the work of synecdoche in Melville s novel as awhole.Bulkington, a handsome sailor in a line running beyond Billy Budd toPhlebas and Crane s Melville, gives one glimpses.of that mortallyintolerable truth that the natural elements of the air and sea always driveany deep, earnest thinking back upon the treacherous, slavish shore. Melville s Ishmael continues: But as in landlessness alone resides the highesttruth, shoreless, indefinite as God so, better is it to perish in that howlinginfinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!.O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing straight up, leaps thy apotheosis! (Melville, Writings of Melville,Vol.6, Moby-Dick, 107).The six-inch chapter of The Lee Shore, Ishmaeltells us, is itself the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Irwin, who interpretsthis epitaph as a prefiguration of the wreck of the Pequod, writes: What leapsup from the spray of his ocean perishing is the phallic coffin/lifepreserver/book the part-whole relation of the phallic six-inch chapter tothe body of the text prefiguring the symbolic relationship of the book to theself. 13 The relation of the chapter to the whole of the book, like that ofCrane s own scattered chapter to any complete record of the recent shipand her crew (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Letters, 239), is a relationof survival through dismemberment, of the whole persisting in its parts.Bythe end of the novel, Bulkington is returned whole, even as the Pequod itselfis lost, when Ishmael rises from is cast up by the vortex of its grave,buoyed by the phallic coffin/life preserver/book. Ishmael, at the same time,survives the unsurvivable voyage not by renouncing but by reaffirming themoral imperative of the quest, allowing us to identify character and narratorin a way we could not in the case of modernist narratives like The Waste Landor A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.The structure of Melville s novel presents a narrative unfolding ofCrane s desired union of author and hero, self and text.As Irwin indicates inhis comments on The Lee Shore, the English word chapter derives, like 292Langdon Hammer capital, the architectural term for the crown of a column, from the Latincaput for head. It is possible, with this etymology in mind, to read Crane s scattered chapter as a simple restatement of the initial figure of the diceof drowned men s bones, and to see both phrases as early versions of thearchitectural collapse announced in the title of The Broken Tower. In eachof these phrases, the dismembering of the body, conceived of as structure,instrument, or vehicle, is identified with the dismembering of texts, becauseword and flesh are fractured under the pressure of Crane s effort to lift andconnect them, to turn each one into the other.It is not at all an admission offailure, therefore, when a petulant Crane tells Monroe that she should expect about as much definite knowledge to be had from a scattered chapter and livid hieroglyph as anyone might gain from the roar of his own veins,which is easily heard (haven t you ever done it?) by holding a shell close toone s ear (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Prose, 239)
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