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  • At the Margins of Taste and the Center of Modernity: Mark Twain’s “Cannibalism in the Cars”
  • Adam Brooke Davis (bio) and Gerd Hurm (bio)

I. Introduction

Mark Twain’s “Cannibalism in the Cars” (1868) is a short piece, little studied, in several ways a marginal work. 1 It makes use of various boundaries—geographical, literary, and philosophical—to forward a dark and disturbing vision of the America Twain saw developing at the time. The tale offers insight as well on central political, aesthetic, and ideological questions for Twain scholarship and cultural studies in general. By placing the yarn on the margins of nineteenth-century topography, taste, and morals, Twain approached issues that would develop into fundamental concerns for modernity. However, a supposedly “repulsive humor” 2 and a superficially simple burlesque pattern have delayed recognition of the complexities in this crucial early work. Yet Twain himself showed attachment to the piece; he included it as one of his own contributions to Mark Twain’s Library of Humor. 3 One of the oddities of literary study as it serves historical research is that the light tale may be as revealing of deeper currents as the idle and unreflective remark may be to the psychologist.

Briefly put, the tale presents a pleasant and somewhat stupid narrator, who is closeted in a railroad compartment with a man who claims to have been snowbound on a train some fifteen years previously, and who survived the ordeal by cooperating with systematic, even polite, murder and cannibalism. When the “stranger” finishes his yarn and departs, the conductor explains (to the gentleman-narrator’s relief) that the “cannibal” is in fact a harmless obsessive, and his narrative (it is implied) wholly fictional. This frame tale of stranded railroad passengers forced to resort to the last expedient is significantly set in a sort of cultural-geographical no-man’s-land, what would become the heartland of American civilization, but which is also the crack through which the civilized person can easily fall. Presented with a residuum of oral narrative technique, the tale builds in central features of what Jan Brunvand has identified as an important folk genre, the “modern urban legend.” 4 It draws upon [End Page 47] resources of popular culture in order to convey the deep social and political anxieties of the United States after mid-century reunification. Furthermore, its willed exclusion of women from the main story, just at a period when Twain came to think about nothing but “Livy, Livy, Livy, Livy,” 5 points out a conspicuous absence in this all-male laboratory experiment. Thus, generally, in its tickling of taboos, its discussion of civilization and nature, and its quasi-scientific arrangement, the story suggests the need for refinements in standard views that see Twain’s work in this period as still discernibly beholden to the Southwest Humor tradition, delaying the inception of naturalist tendencies, and attributing the dark, misanthropic fantasies to the later years. The tale and its teller are a particle in a larger wave, and the wave part of a greater current which is itself the cultural history of America in the nineteenth century.

II. The Frame: Popular and Generic Expectations

“Cannibalism in the Cars” is interwoven with one of the major strands of traditional nineteenth-century American storytelling. The most commonly identified characteristics of stories in the Southwest Humor tradition, or “Big Bear” school, are the narrative frame (enabling, among other things, a deadpan delivery), rapid-fire dialogue (connected with the electioneering tradition), and dialect humor, to which standard list we would add fictionalized orality and the pristine oral characteristic of adversative verbal display. 6 It will be part of our purpose to explore the deeper implications of these superficially technical features.

The use of the familiar frame here does considerably more than in the usual story from the Southwest Humor tradition, and, pace James D. Wilson, much more than “establish its fable qualities” (RG 18). The narrative frame, which one sees represented for example by the presence of a gentleman-reporter in Thorpe’s tradition-defining sketch, here consists of a genteel traveler underway from Terre Haute to St. Louis, who finds himself confined with a “mild, benevolent-looking...

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