Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic

1 Domesticating the Exceptional: Those Extraordinary Twins and the Limits of American Individualism

1 / Domesticating the Exceptional: Those Extraordinary Twins and the Limits of American Individualism One of the richest moments in Mark Twain’s fiction comes in the opening pages of Pudd’nhead Wilson with the “fatal” half-a-dog joke. On his first day in Dawson’s Landing, David Wilson joins a “group of citizens” and offers the remark that will transform him instantly and for twenty years into a pudd’nhead. While standing together, the group hears “an invisible dog” barking, yelping, and disrupting the sleepy peace of the town. Wilson remarks, “I wished I owned half of that dog.” Why? “Because , I would kill my half” (6). This early scene resonates with many of the major thematic concerns of the novel as a whole, such that the joke and its aftermath stand as a symbol for anxieties about personal and racial identity, local governance, and violence. In addition to discovering Twain’s most explicit concerns in the scene, critics have bound the joke to more subtle readings of the novel, linking the desire to own half a dog to a critique of the nineteenth-century economy of speculation or seeing the joke as an exposure of reified and arbitrary social conventions.1 In my own analysis, this scene encapsulates a trio of enmeshed problems at the center of embodied citizenship: a challenge to conventional identity categories, the management of strangeness among a citizenry, and the reliance upon legibility for ideological classification. Like the half-a-dog joke, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins undermine and reveal the slips of any ideological security attached to individuality. The excessively literal mind-set of the townspeople prompts confusion over Wilson’s statement—“What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half?” (6). While they 24 / domesticating the exceptional congratulate themselves on locating the ridiculous in Wilson alone, the townspeople mask the fact that their economy and citizenry rely upon asserting equally impossible divisions. The action of Pudd’nhead Wilson is set into motion by Roxy, the engineer of the novel’s baby-switching plot. We are introduced to Roxy first through her use of black dialect, visually and orally marked off in the text with truncated letters, and repeated terms like “dat” or “sho.” The narrative eye then follows Wilson’s perspective, peering out the window with him to discover the source of this speech. The narrative interest in the problem of parts and division emerges in Twain’s description of this first vision of Roxy’s light skin: “Only one-sixteenth of her was black, and that sixteenth did not show” (9). As a parallel to the “invisible dog” that offers no optic proof of its identity but announces itself through barking, Roxy’s “invisible” blackness becomes manifest in her language. According to the narrator’s logic, Roxy both is and is not black. In the slave economy of Dawson’s Landing and its antebellum setting, however, the complexities of racial identity must be collapsed into the extensively legislated fiction of a uniform black subject. Following the “one-drop” rule of American racial classification, Dawson’s Landing enacts Wilson’s now-tragic joke, asserting its repressive ownership of Roxy’s black “part.” Where Pudd’nhead Wilson centers on Roxy and the problems of locating racial identity in the body, its companion text, Those Extraordinary Twins, showcases conjoined twins as an embodied failure of individualism . Instead of the minute focus on locating identity in ever-retreating “parts,” Angelo and Luigi Cappello embody the challenge to unity residing in an excess of parts—in this case, two heads, four arms, one body, and two legs (130). The two texts themselves form a kind of conjoined pair, published together in a single volume, each revealing traces of or dependencies upon the other. Although Twain began writing the story of the twins first, he tells readers in the preface that he performed “a kind of literary Caesarian operation” (125), pulling Those Extraordinary Twins out of the now complete novel. Twain followed his serial publication of Pudd’nhead Wilson with an 1894 volume that included both stories. Bracketed asides in the twins’ text offer instructions for how the action of that story weaves into the plot of Pudd’nhead, in which the Italian twins have been domesticated as separated brothers. The novels’ meditation on parts and wholes permeates everything from moments like the half-a-dog joke, to Roxy and the twins, to the form of the text itself...