Mark Twain and Human Nature (review)

It must be inevitable that as scholarship on a major author accumulates over time, the canvas on which critics depict their subject becomes smaller, the focus of each new contribution more constricted. The number of pixels also increases as scholars zoom their critical lenses, refining the image the way Google Earth draws us in from a view of the planet to a miraculously legible snapshot of the backyard. Thus after the first wave of Twain scholars took a planetary view of such indistinct landmarks as Mark Twain's America, a new generation sharpened its focus on Twain's art and technique—though the horizon must still have seemed a long way off to the critics who gave their books such expansive subtitles as The Fate of Humor and The Development of a Writer. Twain scholarship continues to thrive, but recent contributions understandably tend to be more modest in scope, often signaling their use of the zoom lens by adopting the fashionable titular formulation "Mark Twain and X," where X equals an ever smaller appendage of the author's art and identity. Lest I be misunderstood as disparaging this tendency, I offer my own Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale as a prime example of the shrinking critical gaze; other recent examples, all of them important contributions to scholarship, might include Mark Twain and Modern Authorship, Mark Twain and the American West, Mark Twain and West Point, Mark Twain and Metaphor, Mark Twain and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and William James, and Mark Twain and Orion Clemens.

With its modestly formulaic title, Tom Quirk's Mark Twain and Human Nature might seem like the latest micro-critical addition to the scholarly oeuvre, and yet this book is really a throwback to a more ambitious era in Twain scholarship, an era of long views and large canvases. W. D. Howells put his finger on a special, not quite definable, quality that he believed set Mark Twain apart from the other funny men of his generation when he said of The Innocents Abroad: "There is an amount of pure human nature in the book that rarely gets into literature." At the other end of his epic career, Twain's obituaries returned to the same point: "How keen he was in his knowledge of human nature"; he had "a deep knowledge of human nature"; his writings "go to the very heart of human nature." While most scholars today cringe at the ideologically suspect notion of a "pure human nature," Quirk is bold enough—and philosophically astute enough—to resurrect this relic of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century literary-critical vocabulary in order to test its theoretical and interpretive possibilities. And the results are striking. As his contemporaries were convinced, and as Quirk helps us understand in our own terms, Mark Twain's books are full of human nature. This is most plainly true of the late writings, in which Twain sought to systematize his increasingly deterministic view of human beings, but it is equally true of his earliest efforts to make readers laugh, in which an implied concept of shared humanity operates as a benchmark against which to measure idiosyncrasy, deviancy, and pretentiousness. In mapping Twain's various deployments of the elusive and problematic concept of human nature throughout his career, Quirk has given us the most ambitious and illuminating study of Mark Twain to be published in years.

Part of the freshness of Mark Twain and Human Nature is methodological. The story of Twain's intellectual development is usually narrated as a series of watershed moments that transformed him from the "vagabondizing" bachelor of his western years into an upstanding Victorian gentleman and finally into the misanthropic author of What Is Man? and other late pronouncements on the "damned human race." Twain's engagement with the concept of human nature has traditionally been treated this way, as fallout from a series of seismic events (migration west, sudden fame, migration east, travel abroad, marriage, exposure to...