Fascinating discussion.
I am reminded of Twain's comment at the beginning of Roughing It:
"...Its object is rather to help theresting reader while away an idle hour  
than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. . . ."
 

 
 
In a message dated 4/22/2012 7:23:57 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
[log in to unmask] writes:

J E  Boles wrote:  A journalist, as Mark Twain had been, has in his  
experience the observation of enormous reader fear and reaction to the  
printed word.  He has likely noted the occasional piece of writing  which 
does turn around some social reality and make real change.  Any  former 
journalist writing fiction might reasonably hope for such change as  a 
result of his works. Indeed, Twain's works are still making change  today

But for academics to declare a century and more later that  Twain's works 
were in any sense failures or flawed is ridiculous.   Academic 
declarations are not significant, compared to the overwhelming  voice of 
a whole people's continuous attention to a work of fiction.  Twain's 
characters and fictional events are permanently embedded in the  entire 
culture of the Western World, and always will be so.  There  can be no 
greater achievement than that for a writer.  The academic  voice is 
rarely heard, and seldom remembered, in contrast.


On  4/21/2012 3:45 PM, Lawrence Howe wrote:
> Dear forum--
>
>  I've really enjoyed the exchange that has been unfolding from Scott 
Holmes  =
> observation.  Since my name and work was invoked at the  beginning of 
this t=
> hread, I feel obligated to qualify the basis of  my characterization of 
Twai=
> n's texts as failures.  My position  was influenced by Jim Cox's work, 
but I=
>   can't speak for  him, so I'll offer only a clarification of my 
position. =20
>
> I  have never suggested that his works are failures of literary art.  I  
woul=
> dn't return to them as often as I do if that were the case. I  have 
little i=
> nterest in the finding fault with the structural flaws  that many early 
crit=
> ics cited.  I very deliberately avoid the  questions of formal unity and 
str=
> uctural consistency that New  Criticism often hung its hat on because it 
thi=
> nk those expectations  are inappropriate criteria for a writer who 
processed=
>   his  work as Twain did.  To do so is akin to dismissing Picasso because 
no  =
> actual person has two eyes on one side of one's face.    =20
>
> Rather, my argument is rooted in narrative theories that  posit the 
novel's =
> existence as a social genre, one committed to  subverting the status quo 
(an=
> d note that, from this theoretical  perspective, not all narrative 
fiction i=
> n book length qualifies  generically as a novel). But in this regard, not 
on=
> ly Twain's novels  but all novels are failures.  Now it might seem rather 
ab=
> surd  to think that a story about a fictional character could motivate  
anyon=
> e to attempt to change the world.  But novelists have  often expressed 
their=
>   sense of having failed to achieve  pretty big changes.  =20
>
> This does not mean that novels  have absolutely no social impact.  One 
examp=
> le of a novel that  did achieve real change is  _the Jungle_, but even 
when =
> that  example is raised, we must acknowledge that Sinclair himself judged 
 it=
>   a failure:  he was trying to bring down  capitalism but the result of 
his e=
> fforts was the FDA.  Doris  Lessing is another novelist who aimed for 
large =
> social impact, and  she dismissed her acclaimed  _The Golden Notebooks_ 
as  a=
>   failure because it did not achieve the kind of feminist  structural 
changes=
>   that she expected.  The one  example that often comes up as a challenge 
to =
> my point is _Uncle  Tom's Cabin_, which even Lincoln is said to have 
cited a=
> s the cause  of the Civil War.  If Lincoln ever said that, I assume that 
he =
>  was being ironic.  But Lincoln aside, I find it incredibly unsettling to 
 th=
> ink that it took a story about someone who never existed, who was  
nothing m=
> ore than marks on a page, to inspire the sympathy of people  who couldn't 
ge=
> t worked up by narratives written by actual fugitive  slaves.  While the 
tra=
> dition of sentimental philosophy cited  the emotional affinity that a 
reader=
>   might feel for a  character as a mark of that reader's sentimental 
pedigree=
> , I find it  more troubling that a character--an artifice--would generate 
sy=
>  mpathy where flesh and blood humans could not do so. Richard Wright  
apparen=
> tly felt similarly because it was the fact that banker's  daughters cried 
up=
> on reading Richard Wright's collection of  novellas, _Uncle Tom's 
Children, =
> that goaded him to compose _Native  Son_, a text that he was determined 
woul=
> d shock those readers rather  than move them to tears.
>
> What is most intriguing about Twain  is that even when his books were 
popula=
> r or critically praised, he  signaled his sense of disappointment about 
them=
>   along the  lines that I'm describing.  But even more intriguing, and 
satisf=
>  ying, is the fact that he didn't just abandon novels given what he'd  
experi=
> enced.  He continued to push the edges of the genre to  see if he could 
achi=
> eve a social impact (I can see no other way to  explain _CY_) or to 
expose t=
> he unfulfillable promise of the genre of  the novel itself. =20
>
> So I hope I've made the terms of my  argument somewhat clearer.  When I 
use =
> the term "failure," I  don't mean it in the sense that Hemingway did when 
he=
>    discounted the ending of HF_ (rather stupidly in my view, for without  
that=
>   ending the satirical and novelistic purpose of the  narrative 
evaporates). =
>   Twain produced remarkably  engaging, deceptively complex, and 
profoundly pr=
> ovocative narrative  literature.  By that measure his career is a genuine 
tr=
>  iumph.  But he also worked in a form that imposes rather lofty 
ambitions;  a=
> nd what his remarkably adept writing shows is that the genre of the  
novel t=
> antalizes its practitioners into chasing its promise: that a  truly 
successf=
> ul novel can re-make the world.  And that promise  is more like a 
confidence=
>   game, as Melville suggests, or  a Catch 22, as Heller does. =20
>
> --Larry Howe  =20
>  ________________________________________
> From: Mark Twain Forum  [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mark Dawidziak 
[hlgr=
>  [log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2012 4:38 PM
> To:  [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Failures in the works of Mark  Twain
>
>       Just a thought tossed into  what's already an extremely thoughtful
> mix: there's a monumental  difference between "flawed" and "failure." It
> certainly could be  argued that "Huckleberry Finn" and "Connecticut
> Yankee" are  structurally flawed. I'm trying to wrap my brain around the
> notion  that either of these books would be classified as failures. If
> this be  failure, please, let me write something 1/100th as good.
>     But flawed? Is there a work of art that isn't flawed in some  way?
> And just because something is flawed doesn't mean it's not  a
> masterpiece. In his introduction to an annotated edition of  Bram
> Stoker's "Dracula," scholar Leonard Wolf writes, "Let me say at  once
> that we have a complete masterpiece, flawed here and there, as  the
> Chinese insist masterpieces should be, but, nevertheless, the real  
thing."
>       Seems to me the same might be said  of "Huckleberry Finn,"
> "Connecticut Yankee" and many other Twain  works. Which isn't to say
> there are not failures within these works --  flaws, if you will. Even
> the last third of "Huckleberry Finn" is now  viewed in a vastly different
> light, thanks to the scholarship of Vic  Doyno and others. The appraisal
> presented by William M. Gibson and  others, if hardly overturned, has
> been treated to a substantive  alternate interpretation. Whatever the
> view of this ending, or  "Connecticut Yankee," for that matter, I'm
> guessing that most of us  would contend that we are in the presence of
> the real  thing.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Scott  Holmes
> <[log in to unmask]>  To:  TWAIN-L<[log in to unmask]>  Sent: Fri,
> Apr 20, 2012 6:44 pm  Subject: Failures in the works of Mark Twain I've
> been aware for some  time now that there has been dissatisfaction with
> the concluding  portion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but not until
> this last  year have I become aware of what seems to be a sense of
> failure in  much of his work. =3D20 A few weeks back I mentioned I was
> reading  Cox's Mark Twain The Fate of Humor and I was surprised at the
> thought  that Connecticut Yankee and/or The Prince and the Pauper were
>  failures. Upon finishing this book it seems to me that Cox felt most  of
> Twains work were failures. And this surprised me greatly  especially
> sense he seems to be so well informed on the topic. =3D20 I  started today
> on Lawrence Howe's Mark Twain and the Novel. This  appears to argue that
> the failures were not Twain's but are  structural. Nevertheless, the idea
> that there are failures or faults  in these works surprises me. In fact
> it disturbs me. I suppose this is  because I am not a literary critic or
> even academically trained in  English (my degrees are in Geography). In
> my mind, a book, in this  case a novel, is a failure only if it fails to
> interest the reader  and/or proves to be unreadable. This is not the case
> with any of  Twain's works in my experience.=3D20 On further searching for
> why this  sense of failure exists I came upon a review of Cox's book by
> Kristin  Brown. It would seem that Mark Twain IS a Humorist and must
> write  humorous material, otherwise "Twain had attempted to suppress his
>  genius". This is the crux of my problem with the idea that there are
>  failures. This strikes me very much like the argument that Miles Davis
>  was a failure after he progressed beyond Bebop. An artist is not  allowed
> to venture away from their established genre. Humor might have  been his
> "strongest suit" but by no means need it be his only suit.  Thoughts?
>
>