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

Reviews 161 Mark Twain’s Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images. By Susan K. Harris. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. 169 pages, index, $16.00.) In crafting a study which once again attempts to unify and methodize Mark Twain’s various works (an undertaking which has caused a number to smash their scholarly thumbs), Susan K. Harris has hammered together a surprisingly sound Procrustean bed which is not only fitly framed, but is almost comfortable. Building her thesis on a frame derived from phenomeno­ logical blueprints drafted by Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Harris has skillfully used Bachelard’s concept of “preferred images” to illumi­ nate the troubled and troubling metaphysical speculations of Twain’s later works. Harris builds her study carefully, writing in a style which plods but communicates, though it does not sing. She demonstrates convincingly that Twain’s repeated use of images of water, space, childhood and good women enabled him and his characters to escape from a “psychological loneliness” inspired by emotional responses to moral issues. She asserts that the lonely and alienated narrator of Joan of Arc, “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Adventures of Huckle­ berry Finn seek respite from anguish wrought by their “spiritual independ­ ence” in finding an “ideal place,” finding situations fostered through these preferred images. Such images, she urges, enable Twain and his characters to transcend the crush of time and materialism, through philosophical meditation while afloat on water or in space, through creating an eternal present by evoking the idylls of childhood, or through securing peace and stability through portraying strong, stable, and good women (modeled on his wife, Livy). Harris draws on characters and situations from the entire Twain corpus to underscore her position, though a number of Twain scholars will be troubled by the omission of Roxy, the heroine of The Tragedy of Puddn’head Wilson and Twain’s most dynamic and believable female character — and a good example of Harris’s thesis. Through the use of such transcending images Twain created “an ideal alternative life divorced from concrete time” and thus shaped, she asserts, a metaphysics of creativity, a solipsism which serves Twain as a “private counterweight to his public expression of belief in materialistic determinism,” and is thus a key to the puzzle of his own creativity, especially in the last years. Seeing his craft, then, as an altered state of consciousness, Twain was enabled to escape his hopeless and binding determinism in creating a world of his own words which became, for him and his characters, “the source of spiritual salvation.” Harris concludes with a refreshing assertion — that Twain’s withdrawal, in those apparently dark last years, was made in order to conduct a private exploration of his “creative omnipotence.” And though he found his limita­ tions, Harris shows that much of the writing of that period suggests that Twain 162 Western American Literature was indeed able to “collapse time and space and live in an eternity of creative freedom.” The knothole in her otherwise sound framework lies in the questions which such methodological pigeonholing generally raise, questions regarding the selection of evidence and the inevitable distortions which arise through such selection. Not only does her thesis raise questions about the reasons for the fragmented and uneven quality of uncited work from Twain’s last period of supposed “creative freedom,” but also about the state of reconciliation allegedly achieved by the narrators she selects — the Sieur Le Conte, August Feldner, Hank Morgan, and Huck Finn. One wonders if Harris has not too readily overlooked the unhappy realities of their supposedly unified and recon­ ciled states, surrounded as those narrators are by inquisitions, torture, horrible deaths, bloody and senseless battle, and wicked hypocrites and scoundrels. Nonetheless, Harris, obviously a respectable scholar, has crafted well. Her lengthy footnotes, full of appreciative summaries of scholarly positions as well as gentle demurrers and wholehearted approvals, are interesting and helpful — which cannot often be said of scholarly paraphernalia. In short, though the frame creaks a bit, it stands and serves, and Harris’s study is one to be reckoned with, a solid contribution to Twain scholarship...