BOOK REVIEW

Copyright (c) Mark Twain Forum, 1994.  This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


        _Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays_.  Edited By Eric J.
        Sundquist.  (New Century Views) Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
        1994.  Pp. vi, 204.  Paper.  $12.95.  ISBN 0-13-564170-5.


Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by
        Joseph A. Alvarez
        Central Piedmont Community College
        <[log in to unmask]>



Contents:

Introduction                                            Eric J. Sundquist
A Hero with Changing Faces                              Louis J. Budd
The Writer's Secret Life: Twain and the Art of Authorship
                                                        Susan K. Gillman
Ants at the Picnic: _The Innocents Abroad_              Richard Bridgman
What's in a Name: Sounding the Depths of _Tom Sawyer_   John Seelye
_Life on the Mississippi_ Revisited                     James M. Cox
A "Raft of Trouble": Word and Deed in _Huckleberry Finn_
                                                        Lawrence B. Holland
Huck, Jim, and American Racial Discourse                David L. Smith
_Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ and Afro-American Literature
                                                        Arnold Rampersad
Mark Twain's Frontier, Hank Morgan's Last Stand         Richard Slotkin
Armies and Factories: _A Connecticut Yankee_            Walter Benn Michaels
Hank Morgan and the Colonization of Utopia              David R. Sewell
Roxana's Plot                                           Carolyn Porter
Mark Twain and Homer Plessy                             Eric J. Sundquist
The Lie of Silent Assertion: Late Twain                 Forrest G. Robinson
Chronology of Important Dates
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography


        One of the first volumes of the Prentice-Hall New Century Views
Series, Eric J. Sundquist's new collection of essays and book excerpts
from the 1980s augments (but does not entirely supersede) Henry Nash
Smith's _Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays_ (1963), the
"Twentieth Century Views" series analog predecessor from the same
publisher.  Both belong in any library (college, high school, public) to
which students go for either research in or comprehension of Mark Twain
and his works.  Researchers can compare these two volumes for a simplified
view of trends in Twain scholarship over the last thirty years.

        For example, a quick comparison of the older Twentieth Century
Views collection to the New Century Views under consideration shows
Smith's collection emphasizes _Roughing It_ over Sundquist's emphasis on
_Innocents Abroad_.  They compare almost exactly on the quantity of
general material (Twain as "classic" writer) and on _Tom Sawyer_ and _Life
on the Mississippi_, each of the latter two having one essay in each
collection.  They both treat _Huckleberry Finn_ quantitatively equally
with three selections, but Sundquist's collection emphasizes both
_Connecticut Yankee_ (three essays) and _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ (two essays)
over the coverage of those two works in Smith's volume (one essay each).
Bernard DeVoto's essay in Smith on the "Late Twain" is biographical, as
is, to some extent, Forrest Robinson's analogous selection in Sundquist.

        As editor, Sundquist not only chose well-known Twain scholars
(e.g., Louis J. Budd and James M. Cox), but also included other
well-known scholars (e.g., African-American biographer Arnold Rampersad).
The New Century Views series (as was its predecessor) appears to be aimed
at undergraduates and advanced high school students; however, some of the
selections in this volume may cast their gaze--or rather, their
vocabulary--slightly above that level.  In other words, the selections do
pique interest and do provide relatively "new views," but students and
public library patrons will have to work a bit harder than graduate
students or academics at comprehension with some of the essays.  These
works do not plumb the depths of postmodern theoretical critical density,
although some of that discourse, which does appear, may be new to some of
these readers.  As one example stated to suggest positive use of those
theories, consider James Cox's concluding remarks about the present
generation of critics and their "problematics, their presences-
become-absences, and their aporias."

        Nonetheless, college or high school Mark Twain teachers who have
not been keeping up with the "Mark Twain Industry," which hums along more
reliably than either the Paige typesetter or Hank Morgan's man factories,
would do well to acquire this collection to enhance their knowledge and to
supplement their teaching.  Those who have followed Twain research could
also find this volume useful.

        One of Sundquist's noticeable strengths is his comprehensive
introductory essay, in which he (re)constructs Twain in an ironic way.
For example, Sundquist notes Twain's "rhetorical puncturing of Old World
artistic or intellectual sublimity" in _Innocents Abroad_.  Sundquist also
remarks that Twain "characteristically declared the lessons of the 'old
masters' bankrupt" while pointing out the irony that Twain himself has
become for many contemporary readers one of the (new?) "old masters."
Sundquist's introduction contextualizes the remaining essays, and
conflates ideas in Twain's work and in Twain himself with insightful
comments such as the following:

        Grounded in theories of Anglo-Saxon manifest destiny and
        popularized in the real life of Theodore Roosevelt, as well
        as the fictive hero's lives drawn by Owen Wister, Richard
        Harding Davis, and numerous dime novelists, imperial
        adventure, Twain maintained, was analogous to slavery in
        the moral burden that it imposed upon the nation and the
        sacrifice of humanity it made under the banner of American
        freedom.  Not that Twain himself stood outside
        responsibility for that sacrifice: nothing is more clear than
        his recognition of authorial complicity in virtually every
        crime and frailty his essays and books condemn.

        In other words, Twain tried to have it both ways, as we can
readily see by the apparent paradoxical personal (especially financial)
behavior versus his authorial voice.  One need only think of how much
Twain relied on Henry Rogers (and indirectly the Standard Oil Company) to
clear the path through the complicated financial aftermath of his personal
and corporate bankruptcy toward the end of the Gilded Age.  About the time
Twain emerged from the bankruptcy, he condemned American imperialism in
_Following the Equator_ (1897) and, later, in more strident attacks on
America's Pacific and Caribbean territorial acquisitions.  Is Twain
hypocritical like the rest of the "damned human race," to which he also
claimed membership?  In a word, and to some extent, yes.  Sundquist aptly
likens Twain's personal case to the nation's economy with "cycles of debt,
prosperity, inflation, and collapse."  Twain's desire to live an
upper-middle class, if not an American aristocratic, life is well known to
anyone who reads into Twain's biographies, even his autobiographies.

        The table of contents reveals the range of the essays: from
_Innocents Abroad_ to "Late Twain."  Noticeably missing, however, is much
discussion of the tales, sketches, speeches, and essays before the
so-called "late" (dark?) Twain period (prior to the 1890s).  And while
Forrest Robinson's concluding essay does help link the late writings to
some of the earlier ones, again, the collection would have fared better
had it included more on pre-_Pudd'nhead Wilson_ short works and
post-_Pudd'nhead Wilson_ works like _Following the Equator_ and _The
Mysterious Stranger_.  The later works, as most Twainians know, have
become the object of intense scholarship over the last few years.
Publication of the 2-volume Library of America's _Collected Tales,
Sketches, Speeches, and Essays_ (1992), edited by Louis Budd, has also
helped spur scholarly interest in those shorter works--early and late.
Granted, it is most likely that teaching Twain's work centers on the "big
books" more than on the lesser well-known ones and on the shorter works;
and this collection reflects that probable scenario.  However, most of the
American Literature anthologies commonly used in college courses include
such famous short pieces as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County," "The Whittier Birthday Speech," and "Fenimore Cooper's Literary
Offenses."  It is difficult to assert as indisputable fact that most
college and high school teachers focus on canonical texts like _Huck Finn_
and _Connecticut Yankee_, but that certainly is my sense of it.

        Let us now turn to a tour through some of the essays themselves.
Review space limits the commentary here, but I will emphasize the
important features of several of the essays in order to characterize the
value of the whole collection.

        In "A Hero with Changing Faces" (from his 1983 book _Our Mark
Twain: The Making of His Public Personality_), Louis J. Budd explores the
related concepts of Twain as hero and celebrity, grounding his discussion
in theories of humor and popular culture.  Budd enunciates four problems
in judging the authority of "alleged culture-heroes" upon which he bases
much of his discussion, the last of which I will elucidate.  "The fourth
problem is unique to Twain. . . because a sizable part of his late
constituency had read little, if any, of his writing," and had never heard
his lectures or speeches.  From these problems, Budd proceeds to show that
Twain bridged high and low culture to the point that he was hero-celebrity
in both cultural spheres.  Budd's amusing opening anecdotes prefigure this
part of his discussion by exemplifying just that sense of celebrity across
"cultures."  Budd dwells on what he calls Twain's "dominant quality":
irreverence, which Budd claims "worked through comedy and gained
privileges of frankness from it."

        As Budd concludes, however, he states that "the most important
social fact about Twain was not humor but Twain as humorist, a likable
personality who expanded into a comic hero."  Twain accomplished
"herohood," Budd asserts, essentially by working at it with "shrewdness,
courage, toughness, and perseverance."

        Susan Gillman's "The Writer's Secret Life: Twain and the Art of
Authorship" (from her 1989 _Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark
Twain's America_) examines Twain's differing claims about his "authorial
control."  Twain likened himself as author to a "passive amanuensis/
unconscious plagiarist [on the grounds that 'all ideas are second-hand']/
. . .unwilling midwife/ proprietor/ father, and finally as the
unconscious."  Gillman's excerpt touches on most of the Twain oeuvre and
asserts that he seemed to settle for an authorial persona that reflects
the author's self in the book, but is itself an "alien other, . . .
including self-knowledge of which even the self is unconscious."

        She proceeds to note Twain's long-term interest in dream analysis,
taking "My Platonic Sweetheart" for her text to "[confirm] Twain's habit
of articulating perception in binary terms."  Gillman applies that notion
of duality to assert that "Twain's inquiry into identity. . . [moved]
toward the. . . metaphysical. . . and speculative.  That is. . .the
double conceived as a character gives way to a structural conception of
narrative doubling."  Discussion of a January 1898 dream Twain recorded in
his notebook involving "a negro wench" who propositions (?) the author and
vanishes before he can respond with other than a rising stomach concludes
Gillman's analysis of identity and authorial control.  The entry and
Twain's "hierarchy of selves" are "so confused and confusing" that they
question epistemological order and "leave open the question posed by the
title of one of [his fictional dream tales], 'Which Was the Dream?'. . ."

        John Seelye (who wrote the 1970 novel _The True Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn_) designates Tom Sawyer as "a subliminal projection of
Sam Clemens" in the role of the Lord of Misrule.  Seelye also describes
Tom as a Puck-ish character who plays off the Thomas Aldrich Bailey
character of the bad boy (_The Story of the Bad Boy_, 1869) to become the
"Good Bad Boy. . .[who] may thenceforth become a Playboy, which is indeed
what he does."  Seelye's essay in this collection, originally published in
_Sewanee Review_, "What's in a Name: Sounding the Depths of _Tom Sawyer_"
(1982), has also served as the introduction to the Penguin Classics _Tom
Sawyer_.  As such, it covers the territory from St. Petersburg to
McDougal's Cave, while pointing out that the sequel to the book outshines
the original; but (like the book) Tom, "bears careful consideration.  Like
Hamlet he deserves studying."

        Seelye notes that the novel acts like a drama: "of all Mark
Twain's books for children [it] most resembles a play."  The anomaly, of
course, lies in the strict control of action in dramatic form while
celebrating "boyhood's free spirit."  Seelye identifies as one of the
several ironies of both _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huck Finn_ their use of "episodes
clearly derived from the adventures concocted by those masters of the
historical romance" (Cooper and Scott) whose "literary offenses" Twain
recorded in a rather harsh comic castigation.

        James Cox's "_Life on the Mississippi_ Revisited" (1984)
reinforces Louis Budd's comments about Twain as celebrity by asserting
that "It is rather a book in which the life of Samuel Clemens is both
converted and enlarged into the myth of Mark Twain."  Cox's essay,
reprinted from a collection of essays titled _The Mythologizing of Mark
Twain_, develops that assertion by first noting how both the popular
audience and the academic or literary audience have celebrated "Twain as a
native literary genius."  Cox sees this division of audience as an
"initial; or 'master' division," the "index to a host of divisions Mark
Twain has both represented and excited."  Cox suggests the pen name serves
as entry point into the divisions and states the books "were made to
_enlarge_ him precisely because they could not contain him."

        One of Cox's interesting points relates to the alleged "safety"
signified by the call "Mark Twain" when used on the steamboats.  Far from
being only the safe water level, Cox points out the equivalent of the
"half-full, half-empty glass": the call could indicate entry into
shallower water or passage into deeper water.  Cox relates how master
pilot Horace Bixby arranged a lesson in humility for the apprentice pilot
Sam Clemens in which the call "Mark Twain" rings out in water Clemens
thought safe.  His reaction causes "a gale of humiliating laughter" to
peel forth from Bixby and other witnesses.  Thus, Cox claims, we

        can begin to see the dimensions of the world Samuel
        Clemens was inventing under the signature of Mark Twain.
        It was a world where art was a guild of master and
        apprentice come into the industrial age of steam; it
        involved both experience and memory (the master
        artist and pilot, Bixby, had both to know the river and to
        remember it); and it was art as a performance before an
        audience--in other words, public art, or at least art
        performed in public.

Through a tour de force like this and others in this essay, the
master American literature critic turns out a sensitive and sensible
performance reifying the importance of _Life on the Mississippi_ on its
own (not just as memory refresher for and precursor of _Huck Finn_).

        Of the three essays on Twain's masterpiece, Arnold Rampersad's
"_Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ and Afro-American Literature"
(originally published in the _Mark Twain Journal_ in 1984) most
interestingly situates the novel within the context of Ernest Hemingway's
famous praise for it in 1935.  Rampersad takes the quote through the
"cheating" part as well as the more often quoted "All modern American
literature comes from one book. . . ."  He then inquires if the novel
serves that purpose for "black American fiction."  Rampersad identifies two
ways in which _Huck Finn_ differs from "the bulk of black American
fiction": the use of the first-person narrator and the "unbroken
relationship. . .between autobiography and dialect."  He notes that
"countrified speech" liberates Huck's "poetic sensibility" and that few
black writers have entrusted their narration "to members of the black folk
or the black masses."

        Rampersad's essay surveys black fiction as much as it traces the
influence of Twain's work.  One of his observations about children not
being legible in black fiction he relates to the "social reality"
described therein as restricting its writers from depicting "young lives
relatively free from pain."  Another aspect of both black and white
American fiction, male bonding, Rampersad declares as negative in "most
male black fiction" because of its "antifeminine behavior and values."  A
third observation concerns comedy in a racial context, of which he notes
the dearth in black fiction until _Invisible Man_.  In all these areas, he
asserts, _Huck Finn_ "clearly anticipate[s] eventual trends in black
fiction."

        Its most important prediction of "later black fiction," Rampersad
concludes, "is in Mark Twain's depiction of a moral dilemma, or moral
inversion, as being at the heart of southern, and by inference American,
society."  He relates the dilemma to W. E. B. Du Bois's _The Souls of
Black Folk_, constructing it as the fountainhead of black fiction
analogous to the place of _Huck Finn_ in Hemingway's appropriately brief
and quixotic view of American literary history.  But he also places Twain
in _Huck Finn_ very near to Du Bois in their affinity, if not in direct
influence.

        I commend the selections on _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
Court_ and on the "late" writings (Forrest Robinson's "The Lie of Silent
Assertion: Late Twain"), as well as the other essays in the collection.
However, I will conclude the analysis of the individual selections with a
close look at Carolyn Porter's 1990 feminist reading of _Pudd'nhead
Wilson_, "Roxana's Plot," one of two intriguing essays on that book (the
second: Sundquist's "Mark Twain and Homer Plessy").

        Porter contends that traditional readings of _Pudd'nhead Wilson_
(such as James Cox's) have accounted for the patriarchal repression
embodied in Wilson's discovery of the murderer and in his role thereby as
restorer of the status quo ante.  But they have failed to account for
Roxy's role as creator of her own plot and its eventual tragic (for her)
reversal.  Porter addresses Roxy's plot through both the reality and the
trope of motherhood, especially slave maternity.  Acknowledging the
influence of the binary oppositions contained in southern black women's
stereotypical roles of "Jezebel" and "Mammy," and the literary conventions
contained within the "tragic mulatt[o]" story, Porter nevertheless claims
that Roxy creates her own dynamic in the form of her plot to reconstruct
her own son as white and wealthy.  "In other words," as Porter states,
"_Pudd'nhead Wilson_ is the scene of conflict between a repressive
paternal plot and a subversive maternal one."

        Quoting Orlando Patterson's idea that slavery is a form of social
death, Porter shows that Roxy "imitates the slaveholder's dominant
position as commutator of a death sentence that he can always revoke" by
switching babies.  However, Roxy does not actually have the power to
enforce the threat of exposing "Tom Driscoll."  Porter concludes her essay
by stating that Roxy's plot "drives in two directions at once."  One
direction subverts the white patriarchy (by erasing the name of the
[white] father).  The other direction "that makes Roxana a powerful weapon
in Twain's arsenal" involves the reinscription of "matrilineal rule of
descent. . .on the mulatto mother."  Roxy's plot, then both drives home the
"moral idiocy" of slavery and "exposes the similarity in [the] fates" of
the two sons.

        An overall negative point of criticism about this collection
applies generally to publication of academic research: no doubt because of
the time between conception of the ideas and their "birth" into printed
books, new research blossoms.  Indeed, some of the most exciting
scholarship about Twain has been published just before, or nearly
coincident with, this collection.  I refer most pointedly to Shelley
Fisher Fishkin's contested groundbreaking ideas about the influence of
African-American voices in American culture, particularly on Twain's
composition of _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ (in _Was Huck Black?  Mark
Twain and African American Voices_, 1993).  Victor Doyno's revision of his
_Writing Huck Finn_ (1991) based on the rediscovered manuscript pages
missing for about sixty years will come out later this year or early next
year.  The work of these scholars merits attention in any comprehensive
collection of "new" views on Mark Twain.  True, Sundquist's introduction
does praise Fishkin's work as a "brilliant and innovative argument" that
"has raised a striking set of questions for Twain scholars."  And even
though both Fishkin's and Doyno's books are listed in the bibliography,
one could hope for more than a taste of their views.  Legal restrictions
concerning publication of the manuscript excerpts and acquisition of
rights from other publishers may have influenced the book's final shape in
these two cases more than did the editor's judgment.  I would also
speculate that either the timing of the actual collecting of the essays or
the publisher's apparent budget restrictions contribute more to these
omissions than does the editor.

        A second, minor, complaint about the collection also pertains to
the publisher: the lack of an index, a sin of omission rather than
commission.  Collections of essays like this one (including those from
other publishers) frequently omit an index, making them rather difficult
for researchers to find a specific reference with ease.  As a teacher of
the research process to students and also a researcher, I rely heavily on
indices for helping to locate information efficiently.  (Often errors in
the index undermine their usefulness, but that varies from one book to the
next.)  Other volumes in this series (indeed, in the earlier Twentieth
Century Views series as well) lack this valuable research tool.  It is
clearly the publisher's design, then.  Fortunately, the titles of the
essays in the Twain collection are not cloyingly deceptive; they do give
us clear signals about content.

        Despite these quibbles, Sundquist did select a number of fine
essays that will bring "new views" into play for American Studies and
Literature teachers, especially for those who are not Twain scholars, and
for students.  A reasonably short collection like this one compares
favorably to the slightly broader _On Mark Twain: The Best from American
Literature_, edited by Edwin Cady and Louis J. Budd (1987).  Finally, I
would recommend the book for all college libraries and for those high
school and public libraries with a need for good, compact materials for
students and others interested in Mark Twain and his works.