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I INTRODUCTION The Essays: Form and Content What eludes [us) ... in his gaze? -Wright Morris of Pudd'nhead Wilson1 Science has found a treatment which inhibits one form of cancer, while it simultaneously induces the growth of another. -a recent issue of Time Magazine These essays attempt to show how Mark Twain organized his fictions and, in tum, was himself reorganized in the process of creating them. Seeking an answer to Wright Morris's question (what were those sad, cold eyes looking at?), the essays arrive ineluctably at the conclusion that, over and over, they were focused upon the bitter realization, the vision of a complete moral and social futility, which is embodied in Time's sardonic commentary upon one example of modem medical research. In demonstration, issues are raised about the narratives , and much indebted to criticism that has gone before, I try to supply resolutions that will seem both fresh and plausible. Some of the issues are old hat: what were Simon Wheeler's motives? how do we explain the melancholyand more to the point, the oddly parallel-endings of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? Others take a more original tack: why is the ultimate accolade paid to Horace Bixby ('''he's a lightning pilot"') accompanied with the sobering thought that he is this by virtue of being"'the Shadow of Death"'?; in "A Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," where someone dies and someone else survives, which is which?; why must InjunJoe die so needlessly and absurdly in McDougals Cave?; while he was agreeing to foreshorten the manuscript, why at almost the last minute did Mark Twain add two and a half new chapters to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?; what is the true relationship between the Italian twins and the outcome of Pudd'nhead Wilson?; who is the stranger who "corrupts" Hadleyburg (and what, in context, does "corrupt" signify)?; why, profeSSing to despise everything Poe wrote, was 2 Introduction Mark Twain drawn steadily toward Poe's gothic effects, so that in virtually the last thing he wrote, he constructs a haunted castle, and in the manner of "House of Usher" discerns the crack that will presently bring it down in ruins? Underlying all the questions, whether conventional, or ones that seem to have dropped through the cracks of prior analysis, are two yet more fundamental matters, invariably posed by students of Mark Twain, yet often forgotten along the way so that they are not so invariably answered. Why is he funny? How is it that, focusing upon the bitter and the meaningless, he can conSistently cause us to laugh at this spectacle? Strictly speaking they are essays, not chapters in a book. Each develops its own argument, is self-contained, and can be read independently of the others. It may as well be added that the material proved somewhat less tractable when I sought to reshape it as chapters, under a more informative and engaging title. Yet quite as if they were chapters, the essays are meant to be taken in consecutively , and hence seen as stepping stones or building blocks toward the development of a sustained and coherent thesis. The terms of the thesis are fourfold : I shall call them The Comic Impulse; The Creation of Caricatures; The Twin Faces of Reality; and Philosophical Speculations about Reality. My methods as an essayist will be clarified, I think, if I list the four in tabular form, undertake a brief definition of each, and suggest in a very preliminary way complications that can arise from assembling them as they were regularly assembled in Mark Twain's imagination. The Comic Impulse. Mark Twain yearned to regard life, and the literature he based on life, comically. The pattern he would gladly have brought to his work is that of Shakespeare in the romantic comedies (particularly Much Ado About Nothing and A Comedy of Errors), of Dickens in David Copperfield, and, still closer at hand, the one Howells utilized for The Rise of Silas Lapham. Outrageous things occur; life seems all but overwhelmed by the sudden intrusion of dark and complex vicissitudes; the identity and other precious and personal entitlements are lost or stolen. But because the outrages happen, major figures work through them, or are moved through them, or both work and are moved toward the achievement of a comic resolution. Mark Twain had little taste for the wedding vows which seal and sanctify the happy ending in Shakespeare and Dickens (neither, for...

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