Yours truly, Mark Twain: The signature in the works

College Literature, Spring 1998 by Briden, Earl F

Baetzhold, Howard B., and Joseph B. McCullough, eds. 1995. The Bible according to Mark Twain: Writings on heaven, Eden, and the flood. Athens: University of Georgia Press. $29.95 hc. $14.08 sc. xxiv 384 pp.

Florence, Don. 1995. Persona and humor in Mark Twain's early writings. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. $34.95 hc. ix 166 pp.

Knoper, Randall. 1995. Acting naturally: Mark Twain in the culture of performance. Berkeley: University of California Press. $35.00 hc. ix 240 pp. Michelson, Bruce. 1995. Mark Twain on the loose: A comic writer and the American self. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. $45.00 hc. $16.95 sc. ix 269 pp.

In his influential study of Mark Twain's humor, James M. Cox proposes that critical discussion of Twain logically begins not with his first story or book but rather with "the signature itself," the pseudonymous comic identity that Samuel Clemens created early in 1863. According to Cox, this signature "constitutes the first distinct work" in the Twain corpus; it also represents the tentative first step in the development of the writer'sand America's-greatest comic invention, "Mark Twain," a figure who would ultimately take on mythic proportions (1966, 4). The idea of Mark Twain as comic artifact and project underlies these four books. Together, they emphasize the view that, far from designating simply a pen-name or mask, "Mark Twain" signifies a complex, evolving and expanding and yet consistent comic style, perspective, and presence; and each in its own way helps us in the process of rediscovering or reinventing Mark Twain by engaging our questions about where this figure came from, what forces shaped him, what he means, and why he speaks to and for Americans especially.

Reinventing Mark Twain is difficult since he comes to most of us, as Fredric Jameson would say, "always-already-read," apprehended "through sedimented layers of previous interpretations" (1981, 9). Ironically, many of the interpretive habits that constrain the way we read him find support in his own writing. There is, for example, the remark in his autobiography that his fame outlasted that of his fellow comedians because they were "merely" humorists, whereas he "always preached": "If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited, I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor" but vice versa (Twain 1966, 297-98). The implication, inimical to the expansive reading encouraged by the books under review here, is that Twain's humor and morality are categorically distinct and, worse, that his humor is essentially a secondary, value-neutral matter. Then there are Twain's numerous references to his experiential sources, his noting, for example, that "MOST of the adventures recorded in [The Adventures of Tom Sawyer] really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine" (1966, 33). Here we are encouraged in the reductive habit of apprehending "Mark Twain" as a comic lens through which the "reality" of Sam Clemens's life is filtered. But as these four books suggest, Twainian humor constitutes a compelling reality of its own, and reading Twain often means an exhilarating loss of contact with the safe, conventional meanings to which much academic criticism habituates us.

Each of these books reinvents Mark Twain by situating him in a definitive context and focusing attention upon a distinctive dimension of his humor. In Persona and Humor in Mark Twain's Early Writings, Don Florence investigates the formative years, the period 1861-1872, when Twain developed the fluidity of voice and perspective that would characterize his writing for the rest of his career. For Florence, Twain's literary personality is a product of the two sustained confrontations of these early years: first, with the American West, then with the Old World of Europe and the Holy Land. In Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self, Bruce Michelson finds a rule-shattering, category-subverting humor running throughout Twain's work, which thus echoes the general intellectual and cultural turmoil-the nihilism, anarchism, dadaism-of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Randall Knoper's Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance invokes a context that Twain studies have generally overlooked, late nineteenth-century America's obsession with theatrical display, expressed through a range of performance conventions, practices, and theories. As writer and performer, Twain embodies and enacts the anxieties of this culture, particularly, Knoper claims, in his "realist" concerns about the authenticity and representation of the self. The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood brings together forty years of Twain's writings on biblical figures and themes, exhibiting the heretical skepticism at the heart of his humor and placing him squarely in the context of the most hotly disputed issue of his time, the relationship between traditional religious beliefs and the findings of the sciences.