In the antebellum slave market that was rigorously conducted on and along the Mississippi River, Mark Twain recognized a fundamental plot that he found still visible in his own post-frontier United States, where the promise of a free, unbounded space of nationalist imagining had finally dried up. The fundamental national plot Twain noted in the antebellum Mississippi's volatile market culture involved selling something that does not belong to you, the misappropriation of others' labor and sentience. Since the late eighteenth century, the river had been a primary conductor of commercial traffic, carrying, among more innocent commodities, slaves and slave-grown cotton. Imagining the great river highway, Twain identified our American pleasure with a commercial imperialism which perpetuated the piracy and slaving that had characterized the era of mercantile capitalism; in his Mississippi River fictions, he reproduces in miniature the volatile commercial space of the early modern oceans. For Twain, the North American West had not been about the political disinterest, domestic economy, and republican virtue long associated with agricultural settlement, from eighteenth-century European agrarian philosophy through Thomas Jefferson. The Mississippi River was the West that Twain returned to, again and again, because it was water and not land that could ever be settled. The river was a carrier

In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain's America.

Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi

Mark Twain's life-long interests in language and technology were strongly influenced by his engagement with the German language and the burgeoning science of philology. Drawing from many texts and resources not before studied, this article argues that Twain had a profoundly critical perspective on philology. Consistently in his works philology is presented as both as true science and as a means for imposture and fakery. Thus Twain's critique of philology both exemplifies and exposes a fundamental epistemological quandary of our relation to the past, as well as the violence that results for our desire to give ourselves a "better" history.

Mark twain and the critique of philology

I OMMENTARY on the \"raftsmen's passage\" section of Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) usually centers on the conundrum of whether or not to include it as part of the text of the novel's chapter 16. Twain scholarship has reached no consensus on how the passage should be handled editorially, much less on the meaning of the passage for the novel as a whole. In many ways, the raftsmen's passage is a bit like Huck Finn himself, a kind of outcast child of the parental body of the book.1 The relative neglect of the raftsmen's passage in Huckleberry Finn commentary is surprising when we consider the traumatic heart of the episode. After the raftsmen's boasts and story-telling are finished, Huck is accidentally found hiding in a woodpile at the far edge of the raft at the edge of the firelight; he is roughly pulled from his hiding place and, while naked, intetrogated and threatened. He begins crying, though it is questionable whether Huck's tears are involuntary or a ploy for sympathy, and when made to identify himself he chooses the name of the murdered child in a ghost story that he has just overheard. The best interpreter of the passage, Peter G. Beidler, long ago suggested that Huck

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The "Raftsmen's Passage", Huck's Crisis Of Whiteness, And "Huckleberry Finn" In U.S. Literary History

Perhaps no other work better reveals the double-minded impulse in Mark Twain than does Pudd’nhead Wilson. Not only do twins make up the structural core of the tale, but the composition history of the novel is a case study in Twain’s narrative double-play. Beginning as Those Extraordinary Twins, a short piece centered around Italian-born Siamese twins, the project quickly developed into something more than Twain thought he could handle. What had originally started as a farce soon turned into a tragedy—“a most embarrassing circumstance,” according to its author (Pudd’nhead, 229). It was not one separate story, but two intertwined tales that “obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and annoyance,” leaving Twain with a literary task of surgical proportions: “I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other one—a kind of literary Caesarean operation” (229–30). Twain concludes his history of “jack-leg” composition by stating that the twins’ “story was one story, the new people’s story was another story, and there was no connection between them, no interdependence, no kinship” (303). This last remark appears too emphatically dismissive to be dismissed, and if we were to take the author at his word, our reading of Pudd’nhead Wilson would be tragically abortive. If the tales of the twins— the Capellos in the farce as well as Tom Driscoll and Valet de Chambers in the tragedy—suggest anything, it is the impossibility of an autonomous identity. The two individual stories may have progressed along separate trajectories, but they nonetheless share a favorite Twain theme: twinning. The literal twins in Those Extraordinary Twins evolved into a series of thematic twins in Pudd’nhead Wilson, including Luigi and Angelo, Tom and Chambers, Tom and Roxy, Roxy and Wilson, Wilson and Judge Driscoll, and Wilson and Tom. But one of the most significant acts of twinning in the novel occurs within the single character of David Wilson. He embodies the two conflicting impulses of power that seem to permeate Twain’s later writings: the will to emancipate and the will to manipulate. As the

The Clinician as Enslaver: Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Rationalization of Identity

C judith shklar insists , is the most hateful of human vices.1 It follows that self-deception cannot be far behind, for the perpetrators of cruelty almost invariably strain to forget their misdoings, or to construe them as a species of virtue. But self-deception is a froward vice, and the state of mind from which it draws back is that of being un-deceived. This inward yoking of selfdeception with intimations of morally intolerable knowledge produces intermittent assaults of guilt that are likely to persist so long as their origins remain ambiguous and unaddressed. No sooner has Injun Joe—the dread half-breed who terrorizes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—been found dead in McDougal’s cave than the community petitions the Governor for his pardon. “Many tearful and eloquent meetings had been held,” Clemens writes with evident scorn, “and a committee of sappy women [had] been appointed to go in deep mourning and wail around the governor, and implore him to be a merciful ass and trample his duty under foot. Injun Joe was believed to have killed five citizens of the village, but what of that?” (255). Neither the author nor his fictional actors seem to recognize that this baffling behavior is the reflex of unacknowledged guilt for the myriad acts of cruelty that produced the monster in their midst. Over time, Clemens approached more nearly to a conscious reckoning with the vexed memories of racial injustice that surfaced with increasing regularity in his work. “I wonder why we hate the past so,” his good friend William Dean Howells once asked him. “It’s so damned

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In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain's America.

Citations

Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi

Mark twain and the critique of philology

The "Raftsmen's Passage", Huck's Crisis Of Whiteness, And "Huckleberry Finn" In U.S. Literary History

The Clinician as Enslaver: Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Rationalization of Identity

Deliver Us From Evil: Clemens, Grass, and the Past that Refuses to Become History