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HENRY B. WONHAM Getting to the Bottom of Pudd'nhead Wilson; or, a Critical Vision Focused (Too Well?) for Irony , N January 2, 1 893 , as a typist transcribed the holograph document that has come to be known as the Morgan Manuscript of Pudd'nhead Wihon, Mark Twain wrote to Laurence Hutton from Italy: "I've finished that book and revised it. The book didn't cost me any fatigue, but revising it nearly killed me. Revising books is a mistake."1 The self-professed "jackleg" author who compares himselfto Dante in a prefatory note had in fact done a good deal of patching and filling but very little ofwhat most writers call revision on the Morgan Manuscript, an early version ofPudd'nhead Wihon that includes the dizzying coincidence of three major plots: a farcical story about Siamese twins from Italy, a fingerprinting detective story featuring an eccentric lawyer, and a changeling-miscegenation plot instigated by the slave Roxana. With his new manuscript in hand, Twain traveled to New York that spring, where his publisher, James Hall, persuaded him that the story's unsettling sequence ofmiscegenation, murder, and situation comedy required at least one more set of revisions. On May 13 the author departed for Europe, still convinced that "revising books is a mistake," but resigned to Hall's opinion that on this occasion further revision constituted a necessary hardship. Leslie Fiedler lamented that Twain "lost his nerve" when he failed to override Hall's fiscal concerns in order to publish "the really great and Arizona Quarterly Volume 50, Number 3, Autumn 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board ofRegenrs ISSN 0004-1610 112Henry B. Wonham monstrous poem on duplicity that was within his grasp," but Fiedler had not read the Morgan Manuscript, and he therefore had no idea just how monstrous the intended "poem" really was.2 In fact, Twain made a number ofambitious revisions during this last phase ofwork on Pudd'nhead Wilson, undertaken between mid-May and late July of 1893. On July 30 he wrote to Hall excitedly from Europe: This time "Pudd'nhead Wilson" is a success! ... I have pulled the twins apart and made two individuals of them; I have sunk them out of sight, they are mere flitting shadows, now, and of no importance; their story has disappeared from the book. . . . The whole story is centered on the murder and the trial. . . . There's no weather in, and no scenery—the story is stripped for flight!3 Fiedler ought to have been satisfied, for Twain's reworking of the Morgan Manuscript produced yet another monstrosity, albeit on a slightly smaller scale. The twins are indeed separate individuals in Pudd 'nhead, thanks to the celebrated "literary Caesarean" Twain performed on the novel during the summer of 1893, but their shadowy presence is an uncomfortable reminder ofthe comic idea that inspired the novel in the first place: the idea that volition and responsibility become comically absurd when two individuals inhabit the same body.4 In stripping his story for flight, Twain removed the physical parable ofundifferentiated identity, but the comic impulse behind Twain's irreverent critique of an absurdly rigid legal apparatus, embodied in Dawson's Landing's reductive approach to questions of naming and identity, remained at the heart of his monstrous novel. That comic impulse makes an early and paradoxical appearance in the opening scene ofthe published version ofPudd'nhead, where David Wilson challenges his new neighbors to an interpretive showdown that bears important consequences, both for Wilson's future and for the novel's ambiguous thematic development. After arriving from the East with "a covert twinkle of a pleasant sort" in his "intelligent blue eye," Wilson reacts to a barking dog by uttering the "fatal remark" that brands him as a pudd'nhead: "I wish I owned halfof that dog." "Why?" "Because, I would kill my half." (5) Pudd'ndhead Wilson113 Wilson's audience searches his face with curiosity, "with anxiety even," but finds "no light there, no expression they could read" (5). After the citizens have conferred in private, a spokesman employs legal jargon to deliver the town's mistaken verdict: "Ifhe ain't a pudd'nhead, I ain't no judge...

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