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The Empirical and the Ideal in Mark Twain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jeffrey L. Duncan
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Abstract

As a literary realist Twain was a practicing empiricist; as a humorist he was a practicing philosophical idealist. Often the two intellectual postures existed side by side within the same work—in A Tramp Abroad, for instance—but they did not enjoy a peaceful coexistence. As a consequence his career took on a pattern of great significance. In Huckleberry Finn he carried commonsense empiricism as far as it could go. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a genuinely pivotal work, he discovered, and contended with, not only empiricism’s radical limits but its inherent contradictions as well. Hence he evolved his peculiar (and perverse) form of idealism, of which The Mysterious Stranger is the (unfinished) consummation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 2 , March 1980 , pp. 201 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 A Tramp Abroad (New York: Harper, 1921), II, 84; hereafter cited in the text.

2 Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p. 19; Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 79.

3 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 333–34.

4 The definitive treatment of Twain as humorist is James M. Cox's Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966).

5 The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Naider (New York: Harper, 1959). p. 4; hereafter cited in the text. The episode with the little girl is a revision of Twain's original account: Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, It, ed. Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), pp. 160–61. A comparison of the two demonstrates the empirical problem.

6 Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1965), p. 126; Gerber, “The Relation between Point of View and Style in the Works of Mark Twain,” in Style in Prose Fiction, ed. Harold C. Martin, English Institute Essays (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), p. 181; and DeVoto, Mark Twain's America and Mark Twain at Work (Boston: Houghton, 1967), p. 100.

7 In essays such as “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” and “The Concept of Character in Fiction,” both in Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Random. 1971 ).

8 Huckleberry Finn, ed. Wallace Stegner (New York: Dell, 1974), p. 25; hereafter cited in the text.

9 Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon. 1966), p. 197.

10 The Poetics of Reverie, trans. Daniel Russell (New York: Orion, 1969), pp. 118–19.

11 A Tramp Abroad, Mississippi ed. (New York: Harper, 1924), ii 246.

12 The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress, Mississippi ed. (New York: Harper, 1924), pp. 318 and 325 respectively.

13 For a provocative essay that argues the contrary, see Jane J. Benardete's “Huckleberry Finn and the Nature of Fiction,” Massachusetts Review, 9 (1968), 209–26. An important essay dealing with the relation of Huck and Twain in the narration of Huck Finn is Alan Trachtenberg's “The Form of Freedom in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Southern Review, 6 (1970), 954–71.

14 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Signet ed. (New York: New American Library, 1963), pp. 15–16, 33; hereafter cited in the text.

15 David Detterer makes a similar point: “Epoch-Eclipse and Apocalypse: Special ‘Effects’ in A Connecticut Yankee,” PMLA, 88 (1973), 1111–13. See also Charles S. Holmes, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: Mark Twain's Fable of Uncertainty,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 61 (1962), 471.

16 Gerald Allen touches on this scene in “Mark Twain's Yankee,” New England Quarterly, 39 (1966), 440.

17 Sukenick, “Twelve Digressions toward a Study of Composition,” New Literary History, 6 (1975), 429; Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, rev. ed. (New York: Random, 1961), pp. 6–7.

18 For an opposite interpretation of the significance of conscience, see Leo B. Levy's “Society and Conscience in Huckleberry Finn,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 18 (1964), 389–91.

19 Twain, Following the Equator (New York: Harper, 1925), i, 101; hereafter cited in text as Equator.

20 A point nicely documented by Gerber: “The Relation between Point of View and Style,” pp. 166–71.

21 Mark Twain-Howells Letters, ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 610–11.

22 For an opposite interpretation see Judith Fetterley, “Yankee Showman and Reformer: The Character of Mark Twain's Hank Morgan,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 14 (1973), 678.

23 For the story of the composition of The Mysterious Stranger see John S. Tuckey, Mark Twain and Little Satan: The Writing of The Mysterious Stranger, Purdue Univ. Studies (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Univ., 1963), and William M. Gibson's introduction to his edition of The Mysterious Stranger (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969). The Mysterious Stranger is hereafter cited in the text.

24 There are a number of good discussions of the sources of Twain's Satan: William M. Gibson, The Art of Mark Twain (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976). p. 191; Albert E. Stone, Jr., The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain's Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 233–34; and Coleman Parson's two essays, “The Background of The Mysterious Stranger,” American Literature, 32 (1960), 55–74, and “The Devil and Samuel Clemens,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 23 (1947), 582–606. John R. May describes Satan as “a kind of anti-Gospel”: “The Gospel According to Philip Traum: Structural Unity in The Mysterious Stranger,” Studies in Short Fiction, 8 (1971), 413.

25 See Gibson, Introd. The Mysterious Stranger, pp. 30–31.

26 Robert A. Wiggins has also ascribed the literary decline (relative to his better years) of Twain's later years to his inability to find adequate substitutes for his earlier realistic assumptions: Mark Twain: Jackleg Novelist (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1964), pp. 31–32.

27 This essay was written during a sabbatical granted by the board of regents of Eastern Michigan University.