Twain

Were you to set up the reading list, which Twain would you choose? I suppose Huck Finn's de rigeur, given its place in the history of narrative voice, its social contexts, its history of being banned here and there. None of the other novels seem necessary in the same way, and I'd be tempted to go to short stories and essays.

In his forward to Pudd'nhead Wilson, he describes his creative process in a way that reminds me of Frank O'Hara's poem about his painter friend and the oranges, or Henry Miller's "The Angel is my Watermark;" that is, he describes a process in which the finished work springs dynamically from the author's experience of his materials, and the results little resemble the initial conception. This is a valuable statement in itself. Twain presented it as though it were a weakness of process, but in a way such that one expects that he knew full well it was not.

He had intended Wilson as a short story, and it's interesting to imagine how it must have expanded. The key theme, of course, is another of Twain's little identity reversals, launched once again to level another pretentious class division. It's not surprising that Twain should have originally conceived this piece as a short story. One can imagine the idea expressed -- and for a 21st century American, probably adequately expressed -- in a line or two. It's a snapshot, if a revealing one and relevant to its day; all the author had to do was set the snapshot up to show us what we were looking at.

But that setting-up took some work.

Wilson himself must have been necessary at first simply to provide some excuse for having fingerprinted a little African-American child in the antebellum South. The embellishments of his personality and the cartoon-hick dismissal of his education by the townsfolk set this up. Twain's gloriously expansive trial scene, with Wilson outdoing unborn generations of TV and movie barristers, was probably motivated by his own original audience's imperfect acceptance of fingerprinting as firm evidence.

Given both of these as necessary, the text had to have body. Narrative convention needed a concatenation of scenes establishing Roxy's maternity to set up the cruelty of her son's racially based dismissal of her. As is, son seems almost from the first unnecessarily and wantonly cruel in ways that don't get explained. I thought we'd get some insight into this when so-called Tom responded to his mother's revelation of his African ancestry with an "I know." I thought we'd get an examination of some phobia of discovery or some recognition of having been given away, and an obsessive cruelty derived from that. But no, so-called Tom's cussedness goes so unexplained that at time's one's tempted to take Roxy's crude "It's the n----- in you," for Twain's own explanation, far from Twain's expressed opinions as it is. The narrative is still being used to set up the single photo-perfect scene, and does not explore as far as it might.

Twain's good for plenty of fun along the way, of course, but set beside Huck Finn, for instance, Wilson suffers badly for scale. For all Twain's ear for dialect, the characters seem cut-out because they don't violate stereotype or category. Judge Driscoll remains the pompous ass he is at the start of the story, a man too stupid to realize when a child he's charged with is switched for another, then inane enough to fight a duel with a man he barely knows because he thinks the man has kicked said charge. One needn't imagine that Twain, of all people, would ascribe to such a man any sense. Not even Roxy or so-called Tom show much more nuance. No, Twain's got what he needs for his point without that. As he shows so-called Tom beside so-called Chambers, and the manners each have because of Roxy's social improvisations, one can easily conclude that all such class distinction constitutes usurpation -- the point of each and all of Twain's switched-identity novels: Wilson, Yankee, The Prince and the Pauper.

I wonder whether the sort of picaresque form of Huck Finn wasn't ideal for Twain on this basis. It seems the picture he must have had of Huck slowly enlightened by the nature of his partner must have bore more nuance and process from the beginning, since it requires in some form the passage of time and, since his observations and not his journey are the central focus, suggests Huck as the narrator -- really, with the return to picaresco, the innovation of this text. Then the phsysical resemblance of the Missiissippi itself to the plot -- Huck floats down river into the deep South a bit like Conrad's Marlow sails up the Congo -- lends both an episodicity and a sort of odd teleology to the text. One knows that as Huck wanders from home, Jim wanders towards a deeper and deeper culture of slavery. In all, the text makes happy use of the confluence of the Mississippi.

But I think in general Twain's strongest for the pithy comment, that his poetics leans towards rhetoric and polemic when he's not in a yarn, and that I'd like to make a good list of his essays and shorts, and largely teach from the highlights.