Mark Twain and Metaphor (review)

As Mark Twain's readers have always appreciated, his works—like the slang of Jim Baker's infamous blue jays—are "bristling with metaphor … just bristling!" Yet Twain's critics have never offered a systematic and theoretically informed explanation of just what, if anything, his metaphors reveal about his art. At least, no literary critic has been foolish enough to undertake such a daunting task until very recently. While acknowledging the paradox inherent to such an inquiry—the paradox neatly summarized in Paul Ricoeur's comment that "it is impossible to talk about metaphor non-metaphorically"—John Bird has taken the assignment in Mark Twain and Metaphor, a book that bristles with insight and boils over with suggestion. In four lucidly-written chapters that span Twain's entire career and a coda that explores patterns of metaphorical usage among Twain's critics, Bird more than delivers on his promise to "open new ground" in Twain studies. This is a book all students of Mark Twain should read.

Bird is sensitive to the theoretical complexity of his project, and it is among the many virtues of Mark Twain and Metaphor that he is willing to take guidance wherever he can find it. Freud and Lacan are thus always in the background, reminding us that metaphors operate much like dreams, and the discussion also features regular cameo appearances by Ricoeur, Roman Jakobson, Kenneth Burke, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, I. A. Richards, Wayne Booth, Murray Kreiger, Walter Ong, J. R. Searle, and Colin Turbayne. Each of the paradigms suggested by this roll-call of pioneering metaphor theorists contributes something useful to Bird's analysis, but no thinker is more central to his project than Gerard Genette, who writes that "metaphor is not an ornament, but the necessary instrument for a recovery, through style, of the vision of essences, because it is the stylistic equivalent of the psychological experience of involuntary memory, which alone, by bringing together two sensations separated in time, is able to release their common essence through the miracle of an analogy—though metaphor has an added advantage over reminiscence, in that the latter is a fleeting contemplation of eternity, while the former enjoys the permanence of the work of art."

Guided by Genette's understanding that metaphor is the stylistic equivalent of involuntary memory and that figurative writing is analogous to Freudian dreamwork, Bird undertakes the task of reading Mark Twain's copious metaphors. He begins with early works such as "The Jumping Frog," reading the story through lenses provided by Lakoff and Johnson's The Metaphors We Live By. After a provocative discussion of Roughing It, the first chapter culminates with a highly suggestive account of Twain's developing persona as its own kind of metaphor, one that conveys "a sense of both unity and doubleness." The second chapter describes Twain's various efforts to "figure the river" in "Old Times on the Mississippi," The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel Bird returns to in chapter three with an important analysis of textual revisions that sharpened Huck's non-figurative narrative voice. Chapter four, "Figuring the End," uses Freud's theory of jokes to explore the dark writings of Twain's final years, demonstrating that jokes, like metaphors, often express violent "rebelliousness against the restraints of rationality." The book's coda encourages Twain's critics to recognize that their own metaphors often go unnoticed as such and thus compromise—or "victimize," to borrow Turbayne's stronger term—critical judgment in surprising ways.

Although psychoanalysis provides the game-plan for Bird's readings, it should be noted to his credit that Mark Twain and Metaphor is finally very cautious about what metaphors can actually tell us about the content of Twain's repressed unconsciousness. This might be taken as a failing, but it should not be, for Bird has done what any honest and learned critic can have been expected to do. It is true that he wants metaphors to guide us down Freud...