Mark Twain's Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images by Susan K. Harris (review)

252Reviews Harris, Susan K. Mark Twain's Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1982. 169 pp. Cloth: $16.00. Mark Twain's life and work provides us with many puzzles, not least of which is how the cheerful humorist of the early years, who could touch the universal funny-bone so effortlessly, became in his last decade or so the misanthrope yearning for easeful death. A number of studies in recent years have focused on this late period, aided by the increased availability of Twain's manuscripts and other material previously slighted or ignored because of its relative unattractiveness. Harris' book attempts to grapple with some of the problems of this period of Twain's life and certain of his works related to them. Her book deals with Twain's alienation from his society and the various means of escape from temporality and the human condition that he devised for himself. It is a study of the imagery of some works according to Gaston Bachelard's concept of "preferred images," the object being "to examine the way Mark Twain's lyrical modes furnished him with a third alternative [to humor and satire]: an imaginative escape from despair" (p. 3). The images discussed are water, space, childhood, and "good" women, all of which Twain used "to escape the psychological loneliness his emotional response to moral issues inspired" (p. 3). To say, however, that this book is an image study does not do it full justice, for its author also seeks to combine "historical and rhetorical criticism with phenomenological consideration of the generative power of poetic figures" (p. 12). Quite rightly, she cautions that "if we do not fuse these [phenomenological] insights to traditional rhetorical analysis, and ground that analysis in some sense of Twain's historical context, we risk missing the brilliance of this particular writer" (p. 13) whose primary gift to us, after all, is his language. The first section of the book contains some of its most suggestive work, chapterlength readings of four Twain books that use a first-person narrator: Joan of Arc, "#44, The Mysterious Stranger," A Connecticut Yankee, and Huckleberry Finn. Each uses a narrator morally alienated from the society in which he finds himself in the sense of being a "psychological" outsider. Yet, each narrator is ultimately furnished with a spiritual refuge: in Joan, a myth of innocence; in "#44" a vision of freedom from corporeality; in the Yankee, an association with a woman and child; and in Huck Finn, the plenitude of nature. Harris' readings here are so interesting that one is unexpectedly impressed by Twain's technical skill. Particularly notable is her discussion oí Joan ofArc, a notoriously dull book which she somehow makes seem worth re-reading. Three chapters then analyze images. Water images in the earlier Twain gradually give way to images of space in his later years. Yet both "illustrate the author's wish to destroy temporal horizons and both are presented in language so lyrical as to approach the ecstatic" (p. 75). The chapter on childhood imagery is full of useful insights, especially in its contrast between the narrative points of view of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In these books, Twain represented "two kinds of childhood, one justifying the process whereby a child is taught how to become a member of his community, the other justifying the process whereby a child escapes the community's confines" (p. 98). Third-person narrators generally represent the former; first-person narrators the latter. And in the latter, the solitary child can discover that "his kinship to the organic world is spiritually more important than his ties to the human community" (p. 98). The third group of images is that of "good" women. Based on his relationship with his wife, Livy, and on conventional notions of Victorian marriage, Twain believed that the functon of women was to guide men, to provide stability in a world of flux and Studies in American Fiction253 corruption, and to furnish a "home" of loving normality to help men retain their sanity. Symbols of spiritual respite, they also provided a sense of reality, helping the man "create order out...