Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority by Lawrence Howe (review)

BOOK REVIEW S Spanning both the entire life of Samuel Clemens and the full career of Mark Twain, Proper Mark Twain reveals both the considerable depth and breadth of Krauth’s immersion in Twain studies. As such, this book will be use­ ful for committed Twainians and novices alike. While Krauth’s claim that Mark Twain was thoroughly a product of his culture, along with his measured responses to other critics, might suggest that there isn’t much new in Proper Mark Twain, on the contrary, this book subtly challenges many cherished beliefs about Twain’s writing. This is especially true for Twain’s writing about the West. Krauth tracks Mark Twain’s western sojourn, finding that “[fjaced with the openness of the West, he had two divergent responses: he turned bohemian, defying the strictures of class respectability, and he played the gen­ tleman, honoring the standards of proper society” (19). Krauth traces these competing strands in Twain’s journalistic output but finds that in recalling his days in the West for Roughing It, Mark Twain creates a “palimpsest”: “Over the actualities of his western life, recorded with varying authenticity in the letters and early writings, Twain inscribes a newer version” (41). In Roughing It, the drunkenness, violence, and sex in Clemens’s past have been expunged, often replaced by the observations of Twain in the voice of a genteel traveler. Krauth finds the western Twain to be racist, sexist, and elitist whose dream of success in the text is “finally a dream of bourgeois comfort and pleasure” (50). In find­ ing that Twain has covered over one version of the West with a “posture of propriety,” Krauth’s reading encourages us to look again at Twain’s version of the “wild West” and the way it conspires in imagining a West that fulfills its destiny only to the degree it can match dreams of “bourgeois comfort” for white gentlemen (44). Leland Krauth’s book won’t make big waves in American literary studies or Mark Twain studies, for it is much too subtle for that. However, Krauth’s careful and sometimes elegant argument should provoke discussions about why so many scholars want to find in Twain a subversive writer and an authentic spokesman for what we perceive to be the ills and shortcomings of his time. Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority. By Lawrence Howe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 265 pages, $54.95. Reviewed by A lan Gribben Auburn University Montgomery, Alabama First things first. Presumably most readers would want the book’s compli­ cated subtitle deciphered. Lawrence Howe contends that Mark Twain was attracted to the novel as an artistic form because he instinctively recognized it “as a genre that is inherently critical of authority” (2). Nevertheless, as Twain would discover, the novel also “signals its critical skepticism about the authority of the literary enterprise itself” (6). Howe refers to the novel’s self-consciousness 1 8 2 WAL 3 6 . 2 S U M M E R 2 0 0 1 of its own limitations as “the double-cross of novelistic discourse.” This con­ cept involves a “sense of swindle.... The novel holds out a tantalizing promise of authority that it finally cannot deliver” (7). Inspired by critic Edward Said’s theories about a novel’s typical “double-cross,” Howe deduces that “the novel’s promise of freedom to the writer who will control the fictive world goes unful­ filled, . .. because this social genre runs head-on into its own impotence: insti­ tutions, ideologies, and historical realities do not respond to and are not threatened by challenges made in fiction” (8). As one result, Twain’s “ vexed sense of authority made generating and sus­ taining narratives a formidable task” (3); this explained why he would grow impatient and shelve unfinished manuscripts, hoping that another project would come into focus more readily. Usually, however, his groping for a new topic merely led him to yet another version of the original issue, which accounts for the numerous paired narratives. The first pair of these narratives Howe discusses is “Old Times on the Mississippi” and Life on the Mississippi. The longer text about the same...