The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Ann Ryan.

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BOOK REVIEW

_Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger_.
Edited by Joseph Csicsila and Chad Rohman; Introduction by Joseph Csicsila
and Chad Rohman; Afterword, Index; University of Missouri Press, 2009. Pp.
304. Afterword, Bibliography, Index; Hardcover, $42.50; ISBN
978-0-8262-1841-4.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum
by Ann M. Ryan
Le Moyne College

Copyright (c) 2010 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

On a lovely fall weekend in October of 2008, Joseph Csicsila and Chad Rohman
co-chaired a symposium celebrating the centennial of Mark Twain's
_Mysterious Stranger_ manuscripts. The event was hosted by the Center for
Mark Twain Studies in Elmira, N.Y. and featured prominent Twain scholars,
all of whom presented papers celebrating, exploring, critiquing, and
contextualizing Twain's final fiction. What was so wonderful--and
unique--about this event was the way in which the participants spoke to each
other rather than past each other. Unlike so many academic conferences,
where the papers seem to descend into anachronism or inflate into
performance, the _Mysterious Stranger_ Symposium generated the rarest of all
conference events: original ideas and productive conversations. While
reading the essays contained in _Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's No.
44, The Mysterious Stranger_, edited by Joe Cscicsila and Chad Rohman, one
feels similarly caught up in a provocative and illuminating exchange of
ideas. Not only is this volume essential for any student or scholar who
seeks to understand the _Mysterious Stranger_ manuscripts, it's an essential
collection for anyone interested in Mark Twain's final years and his
continued evolution as a writer and a philosopher.

Previous generations of scholars, first and most notably John S. Tuckey and
William Gibson, concentrated their efforts on recovering Twain's authentic
text and distinguishing it from the bastardized version published by Albert
Bigelow Paine and Frederick Duneka in 1916. Sholom Kahn continued to map out
the perimeters of the text in his 1978 study of the work. However, as
Csicsila and Rohman point out in their introduction, in the past thirty
years our perception of Twain's _Mysterious Stranger_, in both its literary
merit and its philosophical import, has changed greatly. Beyond simply
punctuating the centennial anniversary of the text, this volume demonstrates
the progress in scholarly thinking about this work. With the exception of
David Sloane's essay, which mourns the quality of the humor in _No. 44_, the
essays collected here do not assume that the text needs defending or that
there is anything slight or flawed in its composition. As the editors
explain, critics have traditionally ghettoized _No. 44_ along with other
"experimental works" like "The Great Dark" and "3,000 years among the
Microbes," "as obscure and radically different from the texts he wrote
earlier in his career. But despite their largely unconventional plots and
sometimes peculiar narrative designs, 'experimental works' like _No. 44, The
Mysterious Stranger_ actually possess many of the most fundamental elements
of Twain's literary art" (2). The scholars represented in this volume
overwhelmingly agree.

Within the confused process of _No. 44_'s production and at times
hysterical--and I use that term in its Freudian sense--narrative that
results, the contributors locate the most profound themes in Twain's canon.
Certainly none of them make the claim that the _Mysterious Stranger_ texts
are flawless works of art; however, neither do they marginalize these
troubling fictions by casting them as simple by-products of Twain's grief or
old age. For example, in the case of Michael Kiskis's essay which turns upon
the biographical facts of Twain's many losses, Kiskis lyrically portrays
Twain's grief as a frame for the subsequent intellectual inquiry--a Job-like
rhetorical combat with "the inscrutable"--which it fuels. According to
Kiskis, the several (and sometimes fragmentary) iterations of the
_Mysterious Stranger_ narrative, "riff on the trials and lessons of Job and
chart a trajectory of an awareness of human suffering and a challenge to
God's caprice" (114). The circumstance of Twain's grief becomes the occasion
for his intellectual and theological exploration of the arbitrary nature of
human suffering, paired with its often spectacular synchronicity and irony.
Kiskis reveals the way Twain expands his own highly personal accusation of
the deity, "Why Me? Why Now," into a narrative exploration of the meaning of
suffering and the inscrutability of any God/Truth. At the end of "The
Chronicle of Young Satan," according to Kiskis, Twain redeems the seemingly
demonic urge to do battle with a whimsical God, to laugh at the voice in the
whirlwind. However, Kiskis argues that by the time he writes _No. 44_, Twain
has lost even this consolation, "In the end, in the face of aloneness and
grief, Clemens turned from laughter and recognized that there was no
universe to challenge" (124).

David Lionel Smith is also interested in the nature of the laughter that
Twain references in the text. Smith gracefully connects the Clemens/Twain
duality to the doubling, redoubling, and duplications of _No. 44_. Rather
than representing _The Mysterious Stranger_ as an expression of Twain's
despair at the end of his life, Smith argues that, "In literary terms he had
achieved all that a writer could dream of achieving. In essence, he had
become uniquely free to do as he pleased with his writing" (188). According
to Smith, in _No. 44_ Twain multiplies and divides identity until the many
binaries that had defined his work  (Huck and Tom,  Tom and Chambers, Adam
and Eve, Satan and God, Sam and Mark) are dissolved and then resolved, just
as No.44 "is burned to an ash, only to rise again, laughing" (195). At the
end of the novel, according to Smith, Twain has abandoned binary thinking:
"Sam Clemens banishes his alter-ego.August without Forty-Four is Sam Clemens
without Mark Twain" (197).

Peter Messent traces Twain's transnational identity, and the powerful
occasion for satire that it affords, by comparing "The Chronicle of Young
Satan" with its textual progeny, _No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger_. Yet for
Messent, unlike Smith, Twain's "own affinity to Forty-Four, and to August"
threatens the author's satiric voice rather than unleashing it. In this
detailed study, Messent contrasts the active critique of American
exceptionalism which Philip Traum's arrival in Esledorf makes possible with
Forty-four's "'scientifically' objective perspective" (64). Messent is lucid
and convincing as he maps Twain's ambivalence to the very social critiques
he initiates, particularly regarding the problems of labor and the claims of
the moneyed class. Finally, Messent argues that "Twain's transnational
vision…is first canceled out by a sense of historical determinism, then
swallowed up in a spiraling sense of relativism, and finally completely
undermined by his solipsistic ending... the very point of [such]
transnational comparisons is lost" (66). In a more focused study of Twain's
life as citizen of the world, Horst Kruse documents Twain's investment in
German literary culture. He suggests an early source for _No. 44_ in
Adelbart von Chamisso's _The Shadowless Man; or, The Wonderful History of
Peter Schlemihl_, 1814. In addition to Goethe's _Faust_ (1808, 1831), and
Fouque's _Undine_ (1811), Kruse claims that the story of Peter Schlemihl
inspires "the process of conceiving and constructing a transcendent figure
not burdened with the moral sense to serve as a persona to proclaim the
author's views of Man" (85).

Csicsila and Rohman masterfully arrange the fourteen essays in this volume,
including Alan Gribben's comprehensive afterword, to highlight the echoes,
contentions, and dialogues created by these multiple readings of _No. 44_.
For example, Hal Bush sees Twain as a working within the tradition of an
American prophetic imagination; unlike Michael Kiskis, he positions Twain on
the other side of Job's whirlwind, inquiring after the ways of man, not the
caprice of God. In this provocative essay, Bush clearly represents Twain as
a subtle reader of both American liberalism and biblical prophesy. In _No.
44, The Mysterious Stranger_, Bush describes Twain as laying bare--like
Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones--the cultural and moral fissures created
by the newly liberated, secular self, "Additionally, God's plan is set
against the unfolding of individual will and volition. Without naming them
as such, Twain invokes the coming revolutions of human thought that would
eventuate in the en!
 lightenment and the Romantic age" (95). In this essay, Bush goes a long way
toward converting readers who have accepted Twain's atheism--or at least his
rejection of Christianity--as an unchallenged fact.

In an equally rich pairing, Gregg Camfield and Randall Knoper consider
Twain's effort to resolve the tension between a deterministic materialism
and the world of spirit and consciousness. For both Camfield and Knoper,
_No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger_, reveals some of Twain's most complicated
readings of the developing field of psychology and the physiological and
theological reflections they precipitate. Camfield focuses our attention on
_No. 44_'s farcical love plot and discovers in these scenes Twain's anxious
fascination with transcendence. If, on the one hand, Twain has disavowed a
Christian world view and likewise rejected the claims of spiritualism,
Camfield claims that he is, nonetheless, drawn to John Adams's reading of
Herbartian psychology which affirms some manifestation of the ideal. In a
rousing conclusion, however, Camfield traces Twain back to his roots: to the
pleasures of the body and the freedom of the child, "Thus, _No. 44_ finally
argues that it is better to have sex than to be lonely, to eat good food and
drink exhilarating drink than to not need it, to play music and cry over it
and to dance and laugh over it than merely to be able to imagine such
things" (140). Randall Knoper begins his essay--a kind of Twain-like
duplicate of Camfield's interests-- with an impressive review of
nineteenth-century developments in the field of psychology and physiological
psychology, including the work of William James, the writings of Oliver
Wendall Holmes, and John Adams's reading of Johann Fredrich Herbart.
According to Knoper, in _No.44, The Mysterious Stranger_ Twain "applies
conceptions of this newer materialist psychology to the noumenal realm,
ultimately ascribing to the divine creator a variety of unconscious neural
processes that issue in a nightmarish, 'hysterical' universe" (146). If
Camfield leaves Twain in a materialist heaven, Knoper reads the ending of
_No. 44_ as affirming a terrifying idealism, one in which the divine
consciousness is essentially schizophrenic: "The originating thought is
a multiplex consciousness, dreaming dreams it cannot control, thinking
thoughts beyond its ken, unconsciously harboring multiple apperception
masses, unaware that it is the source of all it sees" (154).

What is perhaps most valuable in this impressive collection of essays is how
effectively the contributors contextualize _No. 44_. James Leonard, for
example, places _No. 44_ at the advent of literary naturalism, a fitting
predecessor to Dreiser's _An American Tragedy_ and Crane's "The Open Boat."
Such a reading, according to Leonard, "makes _No. 44, The Mysterious
Stranger_ a reflection of a dominant ideology rather than the efflux of a
psychological pathology" (163). In this illuminating essay, Jim Leonard
demystifies Twain's mysterious text by emphasizing his investment in the
literary culture of the early twentieth century. According to Leonard, Mark
Twain's text is a corrective to the nineteenth-century mania for figures
like Sherlock Holmes--a detective who can reveal identities and penetrate
mysteries: "Forty-four is, in fact, a concretization--a specifically
contrived literary symbol not just of a momentary uncertainty, but of the
defining uncertainty of human existence. He is the unreachableness of the
Truth itself, and whether that Truth be benign, malicious, or indifferent,
what Twain sees, or believes he sees, and embodies in the protean form of
Forty-Four is that inaccessibility of Truth for human beings" (165).

Sharon McCoy and Henry Wonham concentrate upon the minstrel show
"intrusions" into the text, and like Leonard and Kruse, find cultural
sources to make sense of them. McCoy draws upon her commanding knowledge of
the American minstrel show to illustrate the way racialized performances
allow August and Forty-four to circumvent history and the claims of "the
Other." McCoy argues that the "possibility for fusion"--of cultures, of
identities, and alter-egos--"is firmly denied…At the song's end, the
minstrel does not look out from behind the mask and identify himself as
Forty-Four, nor does he scrub the burnt cork from his skin, actions that
would force August to recognize and acknowledge the fusion, the dual of
identity of mask and man, of body and soul. Instead the vision passes away,
fading, 'like a dream,' (33). For Henry Wonham the issues of authenticity
and identity that permeate _No. 44_ are similarly racialized, as if Twain
inflects the mystery of Forty-Four's identity in Jim's cadence, "Who Dah?"
Wonham writes, "Blackface performance, with its endless cycle of
re-representations, is the novel's far more effective shorthand for
suggesting, through images of incessant mediation, the idea of an unmediated
self" (48). Unlike previous critics who have tended to gloss Twain's
fascination with the minstrel show as a nostalgic yearning for authenticity,
Wonham credits Twain with a more nuanced reading of the blackface
performance. Wonham sees Twain as embodying the absolute instability of all
identity in the minstrel show performer: "Twain relished minstrelsy for its
ability to set in motion an uncertain relationship between reality and
representation, authenticity and imitation, the 'genuine' subject and its
'extravagant' representation" (48). Combined, these extraordinarily fine
essays argue for the centrality of racial identity as both a subject and a
metaphor within _No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger_.

The two essays that complete this volume argue for the inventiveness of
Twain's final fiction. John Bird convincingly suggests that Twain
"prefigures Lacan's idea of the ego" (206). There's nothing fashionable or
simply clever in this association of Twain with Lacan. In fact, Bird's
careful reading of Twain's dream-work, and the association with Lacanian
psychology, makes the case that _No. 44_ is an "artistic triumph…part of
Twain's heroic battle to come to terms with his own unconscious" (205): "By
naming himself with two names, he dramatized the Lacanian split, and then
with his dream narratives, he lit out for the territory of the
unconscious--and as usual, ahead of the rest" (207). If Bird discovers Twain
in the work of an early post-structuralist, Bruce Michelson positions Twain
in the midst of the twenty-first century, post-textual world, where the
identity of the author may be as artificial as all other identities. Drawing
on the work of cognitive researchers such as Daniel Dennett and Antonio
Damasio, Michelson makes the provocative claim that _No. 44_ is essentially
a story about the interconnected processes of making stories and making
selves, and these are processes that are necessarily fragmentary and
on-going. Or, as Michelson summarizes with his characteristic wit: "Drafts,
narratives--not just to polish a holograph text, but to sustain personal
identity--I revise; therefore I am" (223). The text that emerges from
Michelson's essay is as vibrant as it is--or perhaps because it
is--unstable.

As the length of this review suggests, I found it hard to let go of
_Centenary Reflections_. The complex renderings of Twain's _Mysterious
Stranger_ manuscripts form a tapestry effect, revealing the complexity and
the coherence of the text. Collectively, these essays develop connections,
echoes, contexts, and counterpoints that enliven our understanding of _No.
44_. Short of sitting with the contributors on the porch of Quarry Farm and
discussing--and debating--their insights, reading the book is the next best
thing. Joseph Csicsila and Chad Rohman have produced a volume that will be a
landmark study when the next generation of scholars takes up the problem of
_No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger_.