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Mark Twain'S Use of the Comic Pose

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John C. Gerber
John C. Gerber*
Affiliation:
State University of Iowa, Iowa City
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Extract

Mark twain's range in point of view is readily apparent in those works in which he uses fictional narrators. To reassure oneself on this point it is necessary only to recall some of his more famous narrators: Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Huckleberry Finn, Hank Morgan, Sieur Louis de Conte, King Leopold, and Captain Ben Stormfield, not to mention Adam, Eve, a horse, and a dog. What is not so readily apparent, however, is that an analogous range in point of view exists in those works narrated not by personae but by “Mark Twain”—such works as the travel letters and books, “Old Times on the Mississippi,” “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” and the bulk of the short newspaper and magazine sketches. In some of these Twain played it straight; that is, he employed in them a point of view that was essentially his own. In others he assumed a pose, a point of view other than his own. And in still others, especially in the longer works, he alternated between real and assumed points of view. My concern in this essay is with the nature and range of these assumed points of view.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , June 1962 , pp. 297 - 304
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

Note 1 in page 297 The implication here that “Mark Twain” is not a persona for Samuel L. Clemens is intentional. Except in a few short works like “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” the pseudonym fails to operate with anything like the aesthetic force and consistency expected of a persona. It does not exert substantial control over the point of view, the material, the style, or the literal values. The most that can be said for Clemens' famous pseudonym in this regard, it seems to me, is that it serves as a sign of a comic sensibility at work. To insist on more than this is to indulge in oversimplification that obscures the intricate and successful uses Twain does make of the comic pose or mask while narrating as “Mark Twain.” I take issue, therefore, with a scholar like Kenneth S. Lynn, who in parts of his Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston, 1959) tries to treat “Mark Twain” as a stable and self-consistent character.

Note 2 in page 297 In his Horse Sense in American Humor (Chicago, 1942), Walter Blair was the first to show substantially how in a work like Innocents Abroad Twain is for several paragraphs the silly ass, then for several paragraphs the serious commentator, and so on (pp. 195–202). More recently, Franklin R. Rogers has called this alternation of the humorous and the serious one of Twain's three “major and distinctive structural devices.” Mark Twain's Burlesque Patterns (Dallas, Texas, 1960), p. 26.

Note 3 in page 297 Mark Twain of the Enterprise, ed. Henry Nash Smith (Berkeley, Calif., 1957), p. 50.

Note 4 in page 298 The Works of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition (New York, 1922), vii, 17. Hereafter this edition will be indicated simply as Works.

Note 5 in page 298 For the influence of other travel-burlesques on Twain's travel letters and books, see Franklin R. Rogers, op. cit., especially pp. 30–36.

Note 6 in page 298 Walter F. Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii (Chicago, 1947), p. 355.

Note 7 in page 298 Frear, pp. 277–278.

Note 8 in page 298 Frear, pp. 367–368.

Note 9 in page 298 Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown, eds. Franklin Walker and G. Ezra Dane (New York, 1940), p. 41.

Note 10 in page 300 Mark Twain of the Enterprise, pp. 73–75; Works, vii, 63–67, 35–43.

Note 11 in page 301 Works, iii, 108, 146, 147; iv, 261.

Note 12 in page 301 Henry Nash Smith, “Mark Twain as an Interpreter of the Far West: The Structure of Roughing It,” The Frontier in Perspective (Madison, Wis., 1957), p. 214. Professor Smith feels that the old-timer as well as the tenderfoot is an assumed point of view. While agreeing with Professor Smith's major argument about the movement in Roughing It, I am inclined to feel that the point of view of the old-timer is not an assumed one but the point of view of the real S. L. Clemens as he wrote the book.

Note 13 in page 302 Works, xii, 74–75. In the treatments here of “Old Times” and “The Private History” I am drawing somewhat on more detailed discussions I attempted in “The Relation between Point of View and Style in the Works of Mark Twain,” Style in Prose Fiction: English Institute Essays, 1958 (New York, 1959), and “Mark Twain's ‘Private Campaign’,” Civil War History, i, (March 1955), pp. 37–45.