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  • Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
  • Michael S. Martin
Csicisila, Joseph and Chad Rohman, ed. Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2009. 290 pp. $42.50.

One of Mark Twain's final writings, his posthumously published The Mysterious Stranger has proven to be an enigma for literary scholars. The "original" manuscript, of which there are three versions, was unknowingly manipulated by its original editors, Albert Paine and F.A. Paine, upon its publication in 1916. Not until William M. Gibson and John S. Tuckey's work in the 1960s with Twain's original manuscripts did the edition get amended to Twain's original intentions. Hence, scholarship on The Mysterious Stranger manuscripts has rightly focused on textual criticism during much of the last part of the twentieth century. According to Alan Gribben in his "Afterword" to Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, "once the central questions regarding its textual composition were ostensibly settled, Twain's Mysterious Stranger manuscripts elicited ingenious and instructive critical insights regarding biographical connections, literary sources, historical allusions, thematic ideas, dream theories, and ontological or epistemological implications" (243). [End Page 510]

One of the first books of criticism focused solely on The Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger is a collection of thirteen specially commissioned essays on this difficult, philosophical, experimental work of fiction. The essayists' critical methodologies vary from new historicism (what and how Twain was reading at the time of composition) to psychoanalysis (the role of dream narratives and the unconscious) to religious readings (how the stranger functioned as religious prophet and how Twain the person was analogized as the biblical Job) and more.

The collection is divided thematically into three sections, the first being "Cross-Cultural and Transnational Mappings." Sharon D. McCoy's "The Minstrel Mask as Alter Ego" begins the collection and provides a fresh reading of the oddly anachronistic minstrel appearance—The Mysterious Stranger is set in late-fifteenth-century Austria—in terms of European class relations and minstrelsy as a nineteenth-century practice. McCoy argues that blackface song, as a cultural practice, came from the significance of the racial expression beneath the blackface mask. Yet this context "is firmly denied" in Twain's work because the minstrel performance never reveals the singer's actual face, and the vision of the performance quickly fades away for the protagonist, just as "the possibility for cultural synthesis fades as well" (33). Henry B. Wonham's "Mark Twain's Last Cakewalk" makes a similar argument on nineteenth-century minstrel songs, particularly the cakewalk part of that performance, a concluding "authentic" dance that illustrates the racial "otherness" of such a performer. Wonham argues that the minstrel song in The Mysterious Stranger is reflective of the conflict between "the original self and its burlesque representation" (49). Forty-Four's racial identity remains conflicted, as does August Feldner's dual identities, what Twain calls the "dream-self" and "the working self" in the novel.

The next essay, Peter Messent's "'The Chronicle of Young Satan' and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger: A Transnationalist Reading," suggests that Twain uses the European setting partly to critique American culture and ideology, including race relations, American imperialism, and labor practices. Messent concludes that Twain's later works reveal "a transnational consciousness at play" (67), one that moves beyond the constraints of a mere national identity and localized history. The final essay in the first section, Horst Kruse's "Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl and Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger," finds a German literary precedent for Twain's No. 44 within Chamisso's work, which Kruse proves Twain had read and even shared with his family during a European stay. The literary parallels, however, rather than biographical ones that Kruse establishes are his strongest points of evidence for a shared affinity between the works.

The first essay in the second section, "Prophecy, Pleasure, Pain and Redemption in the Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts," is Harold K. Bush's piece, "The Prophetic Imagination, the Liberal Self, and the Ending of No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger...

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