Read an Excerpt
Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson
Race, Conflict, and Culture
By Susan Gillman, Forrest G. Robinson Duke University Press
Copyright © 1990 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8162-4
CHAPTER 1
JAMES M.COX
Pudd'nhead Wilson Revisited
Of all our writers, Mark Twain seems most American, as if he, like race, slavery, and the nation itself were referents that couldn't be deconstructed by language. Of course, a deep irony runs right here. Mark Twain is, after all, a pen name, signifying, if it signifies anything, that Mark Twain is all writing and nothing but writing. Then too, slavery itself was a fiction—a fiction of law and custom, as Mark Twain reminds us in, and Evan Carton has reminded us about, Pudd'nhead Wilson. Beyond that, this nation was itself a text intruded into history, and a text not even in its "own" language but in the language of the parent nation against which it was rebelling. That leaves race—something different altogether, in that it signifies both the unity and the separation of the human species. As a word in English, the mother tongue yet not the native language of Nature's Nation, race refers at once to the most dynamic activity of humanity—as in the race for the Pacific, or the race to arrive on the moon, or the arms race—and most inertial essence of the human species: the races of the human family.
Even such a scansion of the terms reveals how culturally loaded they are. Equally important, they are morally loaded, even overloaded. It is impossible for an American to think about race and slavery without feeling a strong moral charge running like an electric current right through the thought, and running strong enough to color it. These volatile subjects do not admit of pure thought, if there is such a thing. If slavery was an absolute contradiction in a free country, its abolition left the issue of race, with which it had been as inextricably bound as one Siamese twin to another, not dead but vividly living as a moral, social, and legal issue. It took a hundred years after the abolition of slavery to settle the legal issues surrounding race, and there is no end in sight for the moral, psychological, and social issues of race and racism. My figure of race and slavery as Siamese twins is not taken lightly (the fatal pun in that last word, coming so unintentionally to hand, should remind us all of the tyranny of language in all matters and particularly so in this one). George Fredrickson has shown us how inexorably attendant upon antislavery arguments was the complementary desire to remove blacks from the country. That wish had been part of Jefferson's vision for getting rid of slavery; it remained part of Lincoln's vision, and Grant's too—even as late as the 1880s; and it dogs liberal rhetoric to this day— as when we are exhorted to be color blind. A black leader in Atlanta was on the mark when he said that to be color blind is to see only white.
If the Old Republic had freed itself from tyranny by force, the New Union, having freed itself from slavery by force, incorporated antislavery rhetoric into an increasingly imperialist foreign policy forever bent on extending the perimeters of the free world. The expansion, begun as a European vision more of acquisition than of freedom until the arrival of the Puritans with their ideology of religious freedom, eventuated in a vision of freedom sufficiently grand to whelm the Puritan and evangelical extensions of religious freedom: the Enlightenment a loaded term in the context of this discussion. The Enlightenment prevailed because it promised freedom from tyranny—the tyranny of government and the tyranny of religion. In the international competition for North America, it was the English who prevailed, and their language along with them (or did the language prevail and they along with it?). In any event, the country was both conceived in the English Enlightenment and born through it. Yet the enlightened country could not free itself from slavery. Even as the Indians, near extinction, continued to be driven west, black slaves continued to be imported. Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia could recognize the sadness of the extinction and feel the fear of the importation, could see that the Indians were being reduced to archaeology even as, in the face of expanding slavery, he could tremble for his country when he reflected that God was just. Removal of the Indians accompanied the consolidation of slavery right up to the eve of Civil War. These were the disconcerting terms of both the white man's and the white philosopher's free country.
Sometimes I want to be guilty about this history; sometimes I am less sure. My grandfather, as near as I can make out, owned three slaves, was a captain in the Confederate army, was wounded at the battle of Gauley Bridge in West Virginia, and was brought home by wagon over almost two hundred miles of rutted roads to live out a semiparaplegic life, yet begot eleven children. I don't know whether I should be guilty about that, although a colleague once told me that I should. The slaves, freed by both proclamation and war, are buried in the graveyard I can see from my kitchen window. Stones, unmarked and uninscribed—save for one marble slab for Edmund Cox—mark their graves, and could, for all I have been able to discover, mark the graves of early white settlers. I am that close to slavery, which yet seems far away. How much closer it must seem to blacks I find myself imagining, yet cannot know. I mention these facts not so much to reveal them as to provide a transition from the larger context of race, slavery, and America to the author and the text under discussion.
Samuel Clemens lived the first twenty-five years of his life not merely in the Old Republic but in a slave state. He resigned, as he referred to his desertion, from the Confederate army, and so he was both a traitor and a deserter, a capital criminal. Mark Twain was born, as far as we can be sure, in 1863 in Virginia City, Nevada Territory. It was Samuel Clemens's sixth pseudonym, and it stuck. He had tried Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Quintus Curtius Snodgrass, Sergeant Fathom, Josh, and W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab. Thirty years later, he would be writing Pudd'nhead Wilson. Forty-seven years and a few months later he would be dead. Samuel Clemens, born in 1835, came in with Halley's Comet and went out with it, as he once promised he would. If he liked the analogy of his own red hair to the fiery hair of the comet, he no doubt liked equally well the fact that, although this comet was predictable, it was nonetheless a far-ranging cosmic traveler. Mark Twain's full success as a writer came with a publisher named Bliss; he went bankrupt investing in a typesetter made by an inventor named Paige; he spent the last years of his life dictating his autobiography to a man named Paine; the stenographer who recorded the dictation was a woman named Lyon. Launched with Bliss, ruined (or so he contended) by Paige, and giving his life to Paine with Lyon as recorder: these are facts that I cannot believe were lost on Mark Twain, and I like to think that he made what he could of them.
The fact of Mark Twain's having dictated his life to Paine should remind us of how much talk had been vital for this writer. Not only had he lectured to audiences almost from the beginning of his career, but he also periodically returned to the platform—was, indeed, to make a round-the-world lecture trip to pay the creditors of his bankrupt machine and publishing enterprises. Talk had, for Mark Twain, a primacy that lay behind writing, and he often felt, or said he felt, that writing could not capture that primacy, as if the voice were the soul of language that was always at the point of being lost in the body of writing. As a lecturer, a performer, Mark Twain sought absolute control of his audiences. Howells, remarking in a letter about Mark Twain's mastery in a Boston performance, observed that "you held the audience in the palm of your hand and tickled it." This desire for complete mastery had its other side. Eagerly as Mark Twain sought control, he was at the same time utterly dependent on the audience, desperately requiring its response. Because he was a humorist, that response was laughter. The response was nothing less than the voice of the other—a vocal yet nonverbal communication not at the end of a performance but all through it, as if the monologue were actually a dialogue. That dialogic relationship with an audience is the drama of the humorist's performance, making it vastly different from a "reading." The audience is from the beginning expecting to be amused, to participate, and to cooperate. More important, the humorist must have the strength to convert the agreeable willingness into a wild and helpless contagion, until the entire audience is literally infected, or, to change the figure, swept up and swept along in the reductive current of helpless laughter. Throughout the performance the humorist maintains a gravity, a deadpan reflecting an almost stupid and unconscious composure—at least he does if he is Mark Twain. His drawl consumes time, slowing both pace and movement, and his hesitation often extends itself into such long pauses that words are poised against silence until silence itself becomes the ultimate compression of humor.
Yet Mark Twain was a writer, his very name a nom de plume, or, as he occasionally and justifiably referred to it, a nom de guerre. Appearing in the middle of Civil War one month after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the pen name exposed rather than concealed Samuel Clemens and at the same time suggested the possibility of a double identity residing in a single person. Beyond that, it signified Samuel Clemens's past, referring as it did to the steamboat leadsman's call of two fathoms, which in turn referred either to safe or precarious water, depending on whether the steamboat was entering or leaving dangerous shallows. That was not all. Paul Fatout has contended that the name may have been applied to the Samuel Clemens who habitually ordered two drinks on credit at a Virginia City bar. Putting these two origins of the name together, we have an authorial identity rooted first in independence. Not only did it appear at almost the moment the nation declared itself free from slavery, but Samuel Clemens invariably insisted that the steamboat pilot was the most independent man alive. The name was rooted second in drunkenness, which was different but nonetheless a significant type of both slavery and freedom, suggesting as it did both helpless addiction and comic irresponsibility.
These aspects of "Mark Twain" taken together suggest a sense of his identity. He is at once the invention and the author of Samuel Clemens. As invention, he marks both his separation from and identity with the man who had lived almost twenty-eight years not only in a country where slavery was constitutional but also in a part of the country that was defending it, yet he is born in a free country and thus marks the difference between the new union and the Old Republic, between the new law and the old, between north and south. At the same time he is a western humorist at the threshold of heading east, and, as the Wild Humorist from the Pacific Slope, he marks the difference between territory and settlement, between low and high literature, between popular and genteel culture, between humor and high seriousness, between west and east.
If we look at Samuel Clemens in 1892 and 1893, when he was writing Pudd'nhead Wilson, he was fifty-seven years old, had lived with Mark Twain for more than half his life, had experienced enormous financial success, yet was facing financial failure in his two major investments: a publishing house in which he was senior partner, and a typesetter in which he was chief investor. Even as he was writing Pudd'nhead, he made hurried trips to America from Italy, where he had established a residence in Florence partly to economize his diminishing capital. He had lived the first half of his life without the identity of Mark Twain in a world where slavery was legal, and the second half with Mark Twain in a world where it was abolished. Under the signature—we might say in the handwriting—of Mark Twain he had not only become a world traveler and travel writer, but also had managed a reconstruction of his past that carried him into the world of childhood on the great Mississippi. In Huckleberry Finn, he had worked a remarkable conversion of nineteenth-century romanticism into the form of the realistic novel. Locating the poetic myth of childhood upon a raft drifting ever deeper into the slavery of the historically invalidated antebellum South, he made Huck's drifting journey seem a courageous confrontation with the slavery in which he had his historical being. Thus, Huck's "development" is an expression of the historical progress from slavery to freedom. At the same time, the Wordsworthian romantic poetic vision remains very much intact—the vision that childhood's free relation with nature will die into the oppressive conformity of adult society. To negotiate this double vision, Mark Twain (or was it Samuel Clemens?) threw himself out of the book to release Huck Finn's deviant current of language—a vernacular embodying a seemingly clear and realistic Sancho Panza vision of human life charged with a romantic quest for freedom.
Without becoming embroiled in an interpretation or resolution of the double vision in Huckleberry Finn, I do want to emphasize how much slavery and freedom are interfused in the novel. Huck and Jim both live in a world of slavery: Huck is free, Jim is a slave. The river, the natural and seemingly free force in the book, making the raft upon its drifting current seem a free place, is yet naturally determined by the law of gravity and is drifting both free boy and slave man deeper into slavery. The current of language seems free, asserting itself against the correct and oppressive rules of civilized or formal adult discourse irrespective of pre- or post-Civil War society. Thus Huck is helplessly rebelling against the law of his own society at the same time that he is violating the rules of genteel propriety. The point to remember here is that he is helpless; he can't help his language and he can't help being for Jim: he is naturally deviant and must then rely on deviousness to help himself. Because he is helplessly, or we could say naturally, against the law of his own society he is consciously a fugitive, even a criminal. His justification of his actions—and he must justify himself because he has internalized both the law of the society as well as his feeling of responsibility to Jim—is animated by a twinned or double conscience that charges him with fear of the slave law on the one hand and with guilt of betraying his friend on the other. This doubled conscience, likened to a "yaller dog," dogs him the deeper he moves downstream, forever threatening the ease and comfort he seeks.
The larger deviousness of Huckleberry Finn lies in its relation to an audience in a constitutionally free rather than a slave world. Whereas Huck is a fugitive in the world of slavery, he is the appealing and good-hearted free child to an audience of free secular adults whose moral sense at once approves and is comforted by his involvement in helping a runaway slave. Huck's narrative—written and not spoken—plays upon a secret agreement between writer and reader, the agreement that the white boy's relation of his friendship with and aid to a runaway slave, illegal and disapproved in his own society, will be utterly legal and righteously approved in the free society of Huck's readers. Of all the confidence games played in the book, that act of confidence lies at the heart of Mark Twain's conception of Huck as author of the book. Displacing himself as writer with Huck's "free" and "natural" vernacular, Mark Twain actually divides the will of the book between Huck the writer of a letter signed "Yours truly" and an unnamed, unsignified reader. The letter, not scarlet but black and white, even as it comes across the gulf dividing the historically, legally, and morally invalid slave society from our own legally, morally, and presently constituted world of freedom, is in its language so possessed of a semblance of freedom as to emphasize the psychological presence of slavery in a free adult society. As a result of having removed himself from his own fiction, Mark Twain frees his readers, his audience in a free society, to "right" Huck's wrong vision of his actions and provide a positive affirmation over and above Huck's negative relation to the morality of his own society. This inversion is nothing less than the audience's active will, operating not only as a double of the outcast author's inferred intentions but also as a double of Huck's implicit appeal for understanding in all the tight places in which he finds himself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson by Susan Gillman, Forrest G. Robinson. Copyright © 1990 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
