Shock & Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by William V. Spanos (review)

Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), the story of nineteenth-century Hartford resident Hank Morgan who suffers a blow to his head and awakens in the sixth-century England of King Arthur, is a seminal book in the American literary canon. Over the years, it has been read many ways: as a ‘contrast’ between Arthurian times and the present (to use Twain’s own word), as a brilliant satire and social critique, as a burlesque, as a political commentary, as a foundational work in the science fiction subgenre of time travel, and, of course, as a masterpiece of American Arthuriana.

William V. Spanos’ study Shock & Awe proposes a new and provocative reading of Twain’s landmark novel. Inspired by the foreign policy entanglements of recent years, Spanos offers a fresh assessment of the place of a global America in the American imaginary. He argues that Twain identifies with the character of Hank Morgan, particularly in his defining use of spectacle, and therefore with an American exceptionalism that anticipates the George W. Bush administration’s normalization of the state of exception and the imperial policy of ‘preemptive war,’ unilateral ‘regime change,’ and ‘shock and awe’ tactics.

In his initial chapters, Spanos outlines his study and offers an overview of both his argument and his methodology. He establishes the ‘ideological context’ for reading the literary criticism on Connecticut Yankee ‘by undertaking a genealogy of the American exceptionalism’ that he believes is at the ‘thematic heart of the novel’; and he provides the ‘historical context—the particular techno-scientific avatar of the American exceptionalist ethos—at the time of the closing of the American frontier at the end of nineteenth century, when Twain was writing the novel.’ A more detailed critical analysis of the dominant representations of Connecticut Yankee follows and is divided into several parts: ‘the early representations, contemporary with Twain, which interpret the novel as a celebration of the exceptionalism of the American nation at the end of the nineteenth century (phase 1); the later, Cold-War ones, which, troubled by the contradictory excessive violence of the climactic Battle of the Sand Belt, read the novel as a noble failure (phase 2); and the latest ones, encompassing the period between the Vietnam War and the “War on Terror” in the wake of September 11, 2001, which categorically—without commenting on the anxieties expressed in phase 2—distinguish an anti-imperialist Twain from his protagonist’s techno-capitalist-republican-imperial project on feudal England (phases 3 and 4)’ (p. xiii).

In his close contrapuntal reading of Twain’s novel, Spanos looks to the directives of Edward Said (who argues for a politically and ethically responsible way of interpreting texts in the transmodern world that necessarily involves questions of power and the relationship of knowledge to power) in order to ‘avow what this eminently American text disavows.’ Spanos attempts to show that precisely because the narrative of Connecticut Yankee, ‘despite its flaws, unerringly follows the forwarding logic of the American exceptionalist calling…, it is capable of disclosing more about the contemporary national vocation that determines the present domestic, and especially foreign, policies of the United States…than any other text in the American literary canon’ (p. 99). His study culminates in a reconstellation of the novel ‘into the contemporary global context’ that ‘demonstrates how uncannily proleptic the Connecticut Yankee’s American spectacle-oriented exceptionalist errand in Arthurian Britain was to America’s errand in the post-Cold-War, particularly post-9/11 era’ (p. xiv).

A pioneering work in the area of transnational studies, Spanos’ Shock & Awe offers a sophisticated and provocative alternative approach to a familiar novel. Some readers will...