Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain (review)

There are at least two Holy Grails in current Twain studies: to recover a recording of Twain’s voice, which is known to have existed but is lost or likely destroyed (lacking it, most assume he sounded like an aged Hal Holbrook) and, more important, to discover a unified philosophical vision in his oeuvre. In Heretical Fictions, Lawrence I. Berkove and Joseph Csicsila ably seek the latter boon. Using convincing primary and secondary evidence, they argue Twain’s works are subtle yet sustained and serious reactions to his lifelong Calvinism; in them, close readers find his implicit “countertheology”: “that because of God’s malice life is deceitful and humans are not meant to achieve in it their dearest goals of freedom, happiness, and fulfillment” (2).

A valuable addition to recent Twain scholarship, Heretical Fictions shows Mark Twain’s skill and, now, his apparent philosophical steadfastness. Its provocative thesis will spark continued debate about his works’ literary aims, especially their alleged dark and despairing theological dimensions. Taking a both/and approach, the authors argue Twain’s underlying philosophical agenda results in provocative dialogical tensions: heretic and Calvinist; ironist and tragedian; preacher and teacher; artist and philosopher; pessimist and dreamer; rebel and prophet. Because Twain was both a Calvinist and one who despised “those same tragic truths,” his purposeful humor acts as a mask under which he preaches his heretical philosophy and through which he creatively explores lifelong intellectual tensions that seep into his fiction, beginning with some of his earliest works (17).

Posing as a hilarious travel book comprised of ostensibly detached set-pieces rendering Twain’s travels west with his older brother, Orion, Roughing It (1872) is neither hilarious for its own sake nor necessarily detached in its form, according to Berkove and Csicsila; in fact, the work is best read as a novel rife with serious undertones. In the chapter “Roughing It: The Dream of the Good Life,” the authors confidently stake their claim: “The entire book leads up to, enlarges, and ends with the idea that it is futile to try to escape God’s doom for humanity” (38). Fans of the Scotty Briggs episode may be perplexed. But patient readers of Heretical Fictions may be ultimately swayed, believing Twain was both a serious writer and a crafty salesman who, “while he was still anxious to ensure that his books sold well, … was more devious and circumspect about hiding his targets and beliefs beneath dark hints and veiled clues” (55).

In their analyses of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1969), Berkove and Csicsila thoroughly test their dark thesis that “Twain’s main theme is not an affirmation of freedom but rather its opposite: a tragic denial of any hope for freedom in human life” (82). Especially rewarding are their close readings of Twain’s best works. Dealing with the “somber designs” of Tom Sawyer’s St. Petersburg (62), variations of impersonation, romance, and hoax in Huckleberry Finn, questions of authority and freedom in Hank’s exploits in Arthurian England, and August Feldner’s “psychic quest” in No. 44 (170), the authors provide well-researched and fully explicated defenses of these works’ most notoriously alleged thematic flaws and formal tensions: Tom’s boyish romantic adventures become only “romantic delusion” (72); the so-called evasion chapters in Huckleberry Finn become an essential continuation of the novel’s main theme (illusory freedom), highlighting the ironically misnamed post-Reconstruction free man of color (f.m.c.); the horrific slaughter at the Battle of the Sand-Belt in Yankee becomes a despairing fulfillment of the work’s indictment of humankind’s idolatry of material progress, just another “step deeper into the hell of humankind’s age-old abuse of knowledge” (114); and the mysterious stranger’s startling command to August to dream better dreams becomes only an ironic nightmare...