Mark Twain, William James, and the Funding of Freedom in Joan of Arc
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Notes
1. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), p. 101. The first edition of James's Pragmatism was published in 1907 as a collection of his Columbia lectures given a year earlier. It seems probable that Twain attended these lectures, since he and other friends of James's were to celebrate their success at a dinner given in James's honor. Subsequent references to James's Pragmatism will appear parenthetically in the text.
2. For a telling survey of the political, religious, and historical revisioning of Joan of Arc, see Frances Gies, Joan of Arc: The Legend and the Reality (New York: Harpers, 1959). While Gies's book builds its own portrait of Joan through a synthesis of known fact and written accounts, it nonetheless reveals how in English accounts Joan's message was muffled and maligned through a hostile literary and historical treatment. At the same time, the French document a virtuous Joan whose words crossed centuries as heroic deeds. The Church that burned her ironically kept this image alive, eventually ordaining it and Joan's word as worthy of belief. See especially Gies's chapter on "Five and a Half Centuries of Joan of Arc."
3. Mark Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 2 vols., The Writings of Mark Twain, Hillcrest Edition (1896; repr. New York: Harper, 1906). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
4. Henry Alden, an editor at Harper's, had refused to publish Twain's satire of Samuel Royston's The Enemy Conquered, or, Love Triumphant, because Twain had included Royston's entire novelette in an article meant to reveal its literary failings first-hand. Twain's use of Alden as translator along with his list of examined authorities may be a sarcastic reminder to Harper's that Twain can distinguish his own work from that of another.
5. See Wilfred T. Jewkes, Joan of Arc: Fact, Legend, and Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1964), pp. 66-67. Jewkes provides a selection of testimonies given at both Joan's trial and rehabilitation process as well as a few selections from the early "chronicles" pertaining to Joan's military accomplishments.
6. To complicate matters further, Twain's narrator shares his initials with Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
7. Thanks to Alan Gribben's Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), we now know that Twain owned these texts and quite a few others—twenty-seven in all—concerning the life of Joan of Arc. These eleven in particular, with their interlinear markings and marginalia, point to Twain's careful and critical reading of them.
8. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York: Harper, 1912), 3:958-59.
9. As quoted in Albert E. Stone, The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain's Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), p. 210.
10. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 73-74, 80. While arguing for the contingency of language and truth in his Joan of Arc, Twain would never limit the imagination nor its part in realizing one's freedom to the confines of language. His description of Joan's religious experiences suggests the possibility of an understanding beyond the margins of verbal awareness.
11. Rorty, pp. 79-80.
12. Stone, p. 213. As Stone points out, this double perspective worked well for Twain in his earlier apprenticeship works such as Roughing It and "Old Times on the Mississippi." As an old man recalling his adventures with Joan, De Conte can speak as both a naive youth, full of hope and faith, and as a weathered cynic, embittered by experience.
13. Stone, pp. 211, 13.
14. Christina Zwarg, "Woman as Force in Twain's Joan of Arc: The Unwordable Fascination," Criticism 27 (1985), 57-72.
15. Jewkes, pp. 12-13.
16. The source is Monseigneur Ricard's Jeanne d'Arc la Venerable, p. 23, Mark Twain Papers. Twain's deistic beliefs are set forth in what Paul Baender...
