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Epoch-Eclipse and Apocalypse: Special “Effects” in A Connecticut Yankee

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

David Ketterer
David Ketterer*
Affiliation:
Sir George Williams University, Montreal, Canada
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Extract

HANK MORGAN'S USE of a solar eclipse to impress upon King Arthur and his court that a magician superior to Merlin stands before them is, undoubtedly, the most impressive episode in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain's time-travel version of the international novel. Arthur is at least as affected as the reader and, as a consequence, Hank istransformed from being a prisoner into being the Boss. But perhaps the reader does not appreciate that on a symbolic level, this blotting out and temporary displacement of one heavenly body by another parallels the “transposition of epochs—and bodies [human and stellar]” (p. 18) which is the donnée of the novel—the displacement of nineteenth-century America by sixth-century Britain and, subsequently, the displacement, first tentative then total, of sixth-century Britain by nineteenth-century America.1 By equating this “epoch-eclipse” with the apparent extinction of the sun, Twain is implying that the posited world transformation is an event of apocalyptic proportions. In the Revelation of John the Divine, as in traditional symbology, fire is the instrument of apocalypse and, thus, Twain's use of the sun in this context is most appropriate.2

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 5 , October 1973 , pp. 1104 - 1114
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 All parenthetical references are to the Chandler Facsimile Edition of Samuel Langhorne Clemens A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, ed. Hamlin Hill (San Francisco: Chandler, 1963).

2 Cf. the symbolic vision of an eclipsed and dying sun in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and the ambiguous use of an eclipse in the film Pharaoh, ambiguous because there is no verification as to whether it is temporary or terminal. See also Revelation viii.12 where a variety of eclipses occur. “And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise.”

3 It is possible, of course, that the obsession with fire in A Connecticut Yankee and in The Mysterious Stranger is not without a biographical foundation. According to Dixon Wector in his Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston : Houghton, 1952), Twain's recurrent concern with death by fire is to be associated with a guilt feeling about his brother Henry who died in a steamboat explosion and about the drunk who burned up in jail because Twain had given him matches, pp.253–56.

4 See James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), p. 205, Ch.ix, “Yankee Slang,” et passim.

5 Henry Nash Smith notes an additional connection between the two events in that the thunderstorm Hank requires “to ignite his charges” “appears as fortuitously as the eclipse.” See Mark Twain's Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in A Connecticut Yankee (New Brunswick, N. J. : Rutgers Univ. Press, 1964), p. 53 ; see also p. 86.

6 According to Juliette A. Trainor in her note, “Sym bolism in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” MLN, 66 (June 1951), 382–85, Hank's strongest antago nists, the church and the monarchy, are represented by the two giants killed by Lancelot in the Malory account which the narrator is reading prior to Hank's entrance.

7 See Ch. vi, “The Fall of Prometheus,” in Twain and the Image of History (New Haven, Conn. : Yale Univ. Press, 1961).

8 Hank is quite specific in his information “that the only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the sixth century occurred on the 21st of June, A.D. 528, O.S. [presumably Old System hence the Julian Calendar], and began at 3 minutes after 12 noon” (p. 36). Because Twain has sym bolic reasons for the particular day and time, historical accuracy is not to be expected. However, given that Theodor Ritter Von Oppolzer's Canon of Eclipses (Vienna, 1887), which remains the standard work on the subject, was, coincidentally, published during the 5 years from Dec. 1884 to May 1889 when Twain was working intermittently on A Connecticut Yankee, it might be expected that he would have checked for a year in the early 6th century in which a total eclipse of the sun was visible from Britain. But not so, apparently. In A.D. 528, O.S. the 4 eclipses that occurred, on 6 Feb., 6 March, 1 Aug., and 30 Aug., were all partial. An eclipse of the sun that was total and the nearest such to Twain's year did occur, according to the Canon of Eclipses on 1 Sept. in A.D. 538, O.S. Nevertheless, whether or not Twain checked this matter still cannot be verified because, as the later portion of my argument indicates, it is most appropriate that the eclipse cannot be anchored to “reality.”

9 Tony Tanner makes this point in his “The Lost America—The Despair of Henry Adams and Mark Twain.” He also notes that the Round Table “comes to have an un canny resemblance to the stock exchange and the final civil war is precipitated by a shady deal reminiscent of the rail road frauds of the Seventies.” See the reprinted version in Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Henry Nash Smith (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 162. And Smith in Mark Twain: The Development of ét Writer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962) demonstrates that the words and images used to describe the British landscape are identical to those used later by Twain to describe, in his Autobiography, Quarles Farm near Hannibal, pp. 174–75.

10 As Robert Regan argues in his Unpromising Heroes: Mark Twain and His Characters (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), many of Hank's problems arise because, for much of the novel, he does insist on a moral distinction. In Regan's terms, he makes the mistake of distinguishing morally between two father figures, Arthur and Merlin, who are actually identical, pp. 168–84. However, in the context of my argument that A Connecticut Yankee proposes an essential lack of distinction between people, Regan's structural complaint that, toward the end of the book, interest shifts from Hank to Arthur, loses much of its force.

11 See Edmund Reiss's “Afterword” to the Signet Edition of A Connecticut Yankee (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 325.

12 There is an additional leveling tendency to relate everybody in terms of the child metaphor. See Albert E. Stone, The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain's Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 167–73.

13 I am grateful to James M. Cox for this portion of my argument.

14 As James M. Cox aptly puts it, in his earlier treatment “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: The Ma chinery of Self-Preservation,” “just as Morgan has put a bullet hole through the antique armor which the narrator is nostalgically examining in Warwick Castle, he punctures the sentimental dream of the past” when he interrupts the narrator's reverie to proclaim his responsibility. See the reprinted version in Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 121. Cox, then, sees the narrator as an antimask of Hank. However, if, as I have suggested, Twain is arguing that distinctions between people are illusory anyway, the point is pretty much a quibble.

15 Notebook 18, 24 Oct. 1884–4 April 1885, TS, p. 11, Mark Twain Papers, Univ. of California, Berkeley.

16 See Mark Twain's Which Was the Dream ? and OtherSymbolic Writings of the Later Years, ed. John S. Tuckey (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967). As H. Bruce Franklin indicates in his Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford Univ.Press, 1966), there is the further connection that, in A Connecticut Yankee and that late symbolic unfinished work, The Great Dark, Twain has broken into the genre of scienceiction, pp. 375–78.