The Introspective Art of Mark Twain by Douglas Anderson (review)

In The Introspective Art of Mark Twain, Douglas Anderson analyzes Twain's internal creative process, mobilized by the belief that an "introspective focus lies at the heart of his artistic legacy," which can be examined "by tracing its inward excursions." Working backward from the end of Twain's career to its beginning, Anderson focuses on the way that Twain formulates his flow of mental experience into text by exploring a tension between the inner cerebral and outer physical experience of the world. Twain's late essay What is Man? provides Anderson with a mechanistic philosophy, one in which the mind produces creativity based on what it consumes, which acts as a lens for analyzing introspection in the author's earlier writing. The book demonstrates that Twain's continually developing awareness of this philosophy influences not only the genesis of his ideas, but also psychology of the characters that populate his work.

Anderson begins with an exploration of Twain's autobiography—the author's attempt to give literary form to the "stream of sensations" that made up his life and "reconstitute the emotional flux that lay at the center of his artistic consciousness." This process does not involve a clean flow of originality, but rather an uncontrolled tumult of ideas and memories that reframe previous experience to produce art. Chapter two demonstrates how "interest," the mind's act of choosing between stimuli, regulates and organizes these disorderly ideas in texts like The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. Anderson emphasizes Twain's belief in "the mind's exquisite sensitivity to the blend of outer and inner attractions that compose its world" and how this is embedded into the psychological makeup of his characters. Later chapters expand this exploration of these inner and outer worlds, studying how structures of awareness and subjective perception create for Twain a mental life richer than scientific objectivity. Anderson argues that in texts like A Tramp Abroad "diminished actualities—like the constraints of what one knows—give way to the boundless allure of the inner world." Analysis of symbols in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and sensory experiences in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court reveal how many of Twain's characters draw upon an intense interior dimension to facilitate personal growth.

Throughout his study, Anderson builds a rich context by referencing some of Twain's most influential contemporaries, such as William James and W. D. Howells. While this approach presents a solid framework for understanding Twain's thought processes, parts of the book could have benefitted from a fuller engagement with Twain criticism. Some readers may therefore be disoriented by the absence of a strong central argument explicitly stated in relation to other scholarship, despite the book's clear central theme. Nevertheless, Anderson's study of the primary texts is thorough and wide-ranging, providing a sense of the intense mental spaces layered beneath much of Twain's writing. The Introspective Art of Mark Twain will be of use to critics to understand the psychology of Twain and his creative process as it developed through his career.