BOOK REVIEW

     Messent, Peter. _Mark Twain_.  Modern Novelists.  New
     York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.  Pp. 235.  Cloth.  Notes,
     bibliography, index. $29.95.  ISBN: 0-312-16479-3.

     Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by Jim Zwick
     <[log in to unmask]>, Syracuse University.

     Copyright (c) Mark Twain Forum, 1997.  This review may not be
     published or redistributed in any medium without permission.


In his new book, _Mark Twain_, published in the Modern Novelists
series, Peter Messent addresses a problem that has been around for as
long as Twain's books: How do you interpret the writings of an author
who excelled at projecting multiple and often contradictory images of
himself while being able to masterfully clothe the most serious social
commentary within a joke?  In 1907, during his trip to England to
receive an honorary degree from Oxford University, Twain ran into
George Bernard Shaw who was at the London train station to meet
someone else. "Do you know, these pressmen were asking me before the
train came in if I thought you were really serious in writing `The
Jumping Frog,'" Shaw told Twain after they were introduced.  They both
"laughed heartily," according to the Westminster _Gazette_,  but the
difficulty of interpreting Twain that the reporters faced has not
diminished through the years.

Although _Mark Twain_ is primarily organized chronologically, Messent
deviates from that organization to present an array of readings of
"The Stolen White Elephant" in the first chapter.  He does this to
demonstrate the difficulty of pinning Twain down: "The relationship
here between the obvious and the hidden is peculiarly unstable.  I
would argue that the stress in this text on such instability,
incongruity, and shifting perspective, provides a paradigm for Twain's
work as a whole" (2).  In concluding this introductory chapter,
Messent states his purpose to discuss "the generic instabilities in
Twain's texts, the anxieties about the status of the self in his
writing, and (a related subject) the way in which this writing engages
the cultural dialogues of its times....  I pay particular attention to
Twain's representation of race, of capitalist processes and
assumptions, and of the larger impact of modernisation" (19).

Before reviewing how Messent does this, it is important to note the
stated purpose of the Modern Novelists series (published in the U.K.
by Macmillan and by St. Martin's Press in the United States).  In his
"General Editor's Preface," Norman Page states that the series is
designed for use by people who are not intimately familiar with the
author's entire works and their background, and that while "essential"
information about the author's life is to be expected, "the emphasis
is not upon `background' or generalisations but upon close examination
of important texts" selected to convey the overall nature of the
author's work (ix).

Messent's _Mark Twain_, then, is intended to use close readings of
selected texts to introduce the author, his works, and his importance
rather than providing a thorough overview of Twain's life, times, and
writings.  The book is intended to be neither a comprehensive
literary biography nor even a complete critical review of all of his
writings.  Although some might question the relative scarcity of
short stories and essays in the works Messent chose to include, his
selections do include what most would consider "the major works," and
his close analysis of them develops several arguments that make this
book worthwhile reading for the Twain specialist as well as its
intended introductory audience.  Messent successfully addresses both
audiences by relying upon jargon-free language and clear prose, by
introducing literary theory where it is most helpful in understanding
specific texts, and by carefully cross-referencing specific points
developed in discussions of various texts.

While reading the first chapter on "The Stolen White Elephant," I kept
remembering the encounter between Twain and Shaw and the reporters'
question, and thinking how useful the chapter would be with a class of
students wanting to know what Twain "really meant."  Messent presents
convincing but conflicting readings of various elements of the story
to show the difficulty of assigning authorial intent and of using
standard (theoretical) assumptions about the relationship, for
example, between humor and social conventions.  What _is_ the white
elephant?  What does it mean -- especially when situated in a country
in which it doesn't belong, but where it can't be found even though
its size should make it stand out to anyone?  Messent demonstrates how
Twain "leaves us unsure of the base from which we are meant to be
operating  --  unsure of _our_ ground" (15-16).  Like the reporters in
1907, we are left wondering if we've interpreted the work correctly,
if we got the joke or if the joke was on us. This chapter works very
well as an introduction by presenting the problem of interpretation
very concretely, by demonstrating why it is necessary to "keep both
eyes open" when reading Mark Twain.

Beginning with the next chapter on _The Innocents Abroad_, Messent
uses readings of major texts to introduce Twain's use of genre (travel
writings, realism, adventure, fantasy), the historical contexts and
historical importance of the books, and the many tensions and
contradictions within them.  In each chapter, he develops arguments
about the specific texts by placing them within their historical
contexts and by presenting both his own and alternative
interpretations.  This underscores the opening chapter's point about
the "instability, incongruity, and shifting perspective" in Twain's
works while at the same time providing a useful overview of the
critical literatures that have developed about the books themselves.
Not only does he cite a diverse array of recent major and minor
studies of Twain and his works, but numerous books that have made
notable contributions to our theoretical understanding of nineteenth
and early twentieth century literature.

Theoretical perspectives are introduced so smoothly that I expect that
even the least prepared students will have no trouble understanding
them.  In the first chapter, for example, Marcel Gutwirth's _Laughing
Matter: An Essay on the Comic_ (1993) is used extensively to provide
theoretical perspectives on comic elements of the story.  Rather than
devoting the opening section of the chapter to theory, though, these
are introduced throughout, almost transparently, as they relate to
specific passages or interpretations of the story.  In the chapter on
_A Connecticut Yankee_, Martha Banta's _Taylored Lives: Narrative
Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford_ (1993) is used as
the basis for a more prolonged discussion of representations of
capitalism, industrial organization and machines.  Here, too,
sufficient background is provided and the relevance to the text is
clear.

Throughout the book Messent examines how Twain was influenced by and
addressed the processes of capitalist modernization that were taking
place worldwide at an accelerated pace during the late 1800s and early
1900s; and Twain's confrontations with issues of race are examined in
the chapters on _Roughing It_, _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Puddn'head
Wilson_ (while noting that Twain deliberately avoided the subject in
_Tom Sawyer_).  Because he is sensitive to the multiplicity of
possible readings of Twain's works, what emerges by the end of the
book is a carefully developed and nuanced interpretation of Twain's
relationship to the historical and cultural developments of his times.
 We get the sense that the "instability, incongruity, and shifting
perspective" of Twain's books was the product of an author whose own
ideas were often just as unstable and conflicting.  He critiqued an
economic system that he wanted to be successful within, and he looked
back to the golden years of childhood while recognizing (and exposing)
the racial oppression that made that life what it was.  By focusing on
these issues throughout the course of the book, Messent shows how
Twain's ideas evolved and how he experimented with different genres to
find one best suited to their expression.  He interprets the later
writings as symptomatic of growing contradictions in Twain's ideas
about society and human agency.  What had earlier produced
instabilities and contradictions within the texts now made them
unfinishable as he was "caught between themes and philosophies" (174)
that could not be reconciled.

This final chapter on the later writings also serves as the conclusion
for the book as a whole.  Messent uses it to show how the tensions
within the earlier writings culminated after the mid-1890s, but I
would have appreciated a more formal concluding chapter with a
broader, less text-specific perspective on the development of Twain's
works.  At the end of the introductory chapter, Messent writes, "I
argue that the anxieties about fictional form, and about the status of
the self, the workings of society, and the patternings of history,
which [Twain's] texts reveal, make his writing  --  and the direction
it came to take  --  central to any consideration of this period"
(21).  His examinations of capitalist processes, modernization, and
race are insightful and intriguing, and by placing Twain's writings
within their historical contexts Messent does an admirable job of
developing that argument, but it seems to be left hanging at the end
without a summary assessment of their influence on Twain's career as a
whole.  While individual works are shown to be central to the periods
in which they were written, a separate concluding chapter might have
more fully developed that final point about Twain's career as a whole.

I expect that this book will be very useful in the classroom, both for
the overview of Twain's works that it provides and the method of the
presentation itself.  While it is an obvious book to consider for
seminars on Twain, I also highly recommend that selected chapters be
considered for other classes.  The first chapter on the problems of
interpreting "The Stolen White Elephant," for example, would be an
ideal essay for many introductory classes and mid-level writing
seminars, and the chapter on _A Connecticut Yankee_, with its
discussion of Taylorism, would be useful in classes on literatures of
industrialization and/or the Gilded Age.


CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
General Editor's Preface
1.  Keeping Both Eyes Open: "The Stolen White Elephant"
2.  Old World Travel: _The Innocents Abroad_
3.  _Roughing It_ and the American West
4.  _Tom Sawyer_ and American Cultural Life: Anxieties and
Accomodations
5.  Racial Politics in _Huckleberry Finn_
6.  Fantasy and _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_
7.  Severed Connections: _Puddn'head Wilson and Those Extraordinary
Twins_
8.  The Late Works: Incompletion, Instability, Contradiction
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Jim Zwick
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http://www.accinet.net/~fjzwick/
http://marktwain.miningco.com/