EXPLORING THE JOKE OF JOKES: THE NATURE O F RELIGIOUS BELIEF

“Place yourself at the centre of a man's philosophic vision, ” William James counseled, “and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build the philosophy out of simple phrases, first taking one and then another in seeking to make them fit and of course you fail. You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. ” Unfortunately, the critic cannot wholly disregard the “postmortem ” method, and so it is inevitable that “inconsistencies ” - even radical contradictions - will frustrate any attempt to find that satisfying artistic wholeness or philosophical unity we seek - or sometimes never suspect exists - in a writer of Mark Twain's complexity and stature. This does not mean that the critical struggle to place ourselves at the “centre ” can be dispensed with; rather, we must pursue the task in the expectation that any judgment we make of what that “centre ” finally is will at least yield us a measure of consistency in all the inconsistencies we are bound to discover.