In Twain's Times

SUSAN GILLMAN In Twain's Times It's always dangerous (not to say politically incorrect in these politically correct times) to try to account for the greatness of the "great man." In my work on Mark Twain, I've even shied away from the iconic texts, not to mention the icon himself. So far, I've chosen to concentrate instead on the so-called minor or lesser works as a way of rethinking the divide in Mark Twain studies between the personal and literary successes of his early and middle age and the later "failures." It's a periodization that's still largely (erroneously, unfairly, and, to me, inexplicably ) assumed in academia and popularly purveyed. (The recent Ken Burns documentary is only one such example.) To speak of Twain's career in terms of the fate of humor, as James Cox did so movingly and persuasively, is surely not wrong but the biographical dominance of the court-jester become sad, white-maned, old man seems to me a terrible disservice: that image sanitizes, neutralizes, contains Mark Twain, frozen in an interminable moment. He is a national icon with various imperfections reduced to one great wart: not only farcical but also tragic. Such an ultimately dismissive view does serious harm to the canonical figure and the canonical texts, not to mention the rest of Twain's life and the writings of these years, the outpouring of his arguably most politically engaged period: the time when Twain most clearly saw the shadow ofUS race history refracted globally on what he called, in Following the Equator, the "hot belt of the equator" (5). In arguing that Twain's late writings return to the familiar subject of race, I am going back over the literary terrain of the dream tales that I have already described (via the concepts of duality and the "racial occult ") both as broadly historicized and escapist: immersed in the contexts of the New Psychology and global empire, the texts are divided Arizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number i, Spring 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-16 10 8 Susan Gillman between the twin impulses to acknowledge racial issues and to turn away from them. But Twain goes much farther here in his engagement with contemporary politics than I first recognized. The question of genre, as well as that of context, is another key to reading this group of late writings, for, as so many readers, following Twain's lead, have recognized , the series of unfinished manuscripts that he left largely unpublished at his death reflect repeated efforts to find a form adequate to his later vision—to what he called his "pen warmed up in hell."1 In this respect , too, my own earlier reading of these texts failed fully to appreciate the high stakes for Twain in the writing of history, in the content of the historical form, as it were. Although an interest in history, primarily that of his own boyhood, the era of Southern slavery, is generally taken for granted as a fixture of the Mark Twain persona and canon, all of his work features a more expansive and anomalous historical consciousness that goes beyond the realm of representing acceptable historical subjects—even such unconventional representations as Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson. Instead of concluding, then, as I just did (much too hastily) in Blood Talk, that the most intriguing examples of Twain's history-writing are neither his classics set in the antebellum South nor the more conventional historical novels (The Prince and the Pauper, Joan of Arc) but rather the fragmentary, fantastic and parodie fictional histories of his later years, I propose to take an alternate route here. It is alternative to my own Twain reading habits as well as those of others. To read the classic Mark Twain works backwards, or in reverse chronology, through those subsequent, late "failures," is to shed light on the former while also, and perhaps more importantly, to establish Twain's credentials not just as a novelist but as a theorist of history. Of our major U.S. authors of the late-nineteenth century, none is more identified with the struggle to claim the national...