Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority (review)

Lawrence Howe is not the first to notice “something wrong” with Twain’s fiction; nor is he the first to find that something “worth investigating.” And, like many previous readers, he diagnoses this “something” as the trace of an abiding ambivalence: “Twain was both drawn to and suspicious of authority”; thus his writings “are complex expressions of a desire for power” (1–2). Nor was Twain alone in his ambivalence: his wrongness is not only symptomatic of the American novel—a genre that both reaches for and subverts authority—it also frames an essential “Americanness” torn between individualism and social control.

Howe pursues this reasoning in decidedly narratological terms. Twain’s writing career, he argues, is best understood as an extended dialectical struggle—all thesis and antithesis with little synthesis. Howe makes this point by reading Twain’s texts as pairs. The first text in each pair tends to enact a romantic, if compromised, subversion of social power, only to recoil “to a conservatism that accommodates traditional authority” (119). The second seeks to critically engage and extend the first, only to collapse under the weight of their formal and ideological contradictions.

Thus the oedipal struggle for authorial maturity in “Old Times on the Mississippi,” Twain’s reminiscence of his steamboat days, is negated in Book 2 of Life on the Mississippi by the more digressive and multivocal voice (Bakhtin looms large here) of the professional author, who is nonetheless unable to seize the opportunity for a radical critique of American life. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, of course, are similarly linked: the romance of youthful escape in the earlier text is confounded by Huck’s dark struggles with a “sivilizing” neither Huck nor his maker can quite escape. Twain’s discovery, in composing The Prince and the Pauper, of the novel’s potential to overcome the weight of history (embodied for him in the South’s “Sir Walter [Scott] disease”) comes to fruition in Connecticut Yankee. It is this novel that most “epitomizes novelistic discourse” (155), anticipating in its bitter ending “the Frankfurt School critique of the Enlightenment as a flawed dialectic of freedom and control that generates totalitarianism” (164). Finally, The American Claimant and Pudd’nhead Wilson stage a dialog over the relationship between literary and social authority.

Howe’s approach allows him to tease out the narrative logics and inconsistencies that abound in Twain’s writing, though his readings can be too schematic to convince. And his occasional links between works, for instance, Life on the Mississippi and Freud’s Totem and Taboo, are suggestive. His narratology, however, serves him less well when used to situate Twain in literary history. The “crucial term” for Twain may well be “authority,” but Howe’s formalism reifies the term into an abstract mantra: on two pages almost at random he repeats the term twenty times (36–37). One needn’t be a cultural materialist to want to know more. What authority did Twain not trust? What did he embrace? Who wielded that authority? Under what conditions? To what ends? We must look elsewhere for answers to these important questions.