Mark Twain, The Tall Tale & Local Color PDF

# 12 Mark Twain, the Tall Tale, & Local Color ## Introduction The beginnings of American regionalism are not regional at all, lest we consider the frontier a region. However, this is hardly possible, since the frontier was shifting all the time and ran through many landscapes and territories. Moreo...

# 12 Mark Twain, the Tall Tale, & Local Color ## Introduction The beginnings of American regionalism are not regional at all, lest we consider the frontier a region. However, this is hardly possible, since the frontier was shifting all the time and ran through many landscapes and territories. Moreover, American notions of the frontier in the early eighteenth century differ greatly from ideas current a century later. While in the pre-Revolutionary times the backwoods of Virginia or the forests of what later became New York State were the actual location of the frontier, after the Louisiana Purchase (1803) the frontier seemed gradually to disappear. The new territory was spreading to infinite distances and its outer rim (the Rocky Mountains and the basin behind them) had to be explored by special expeditions organized and financed by the government. As a consequence, the actual location of the frontier was no longer important: what became significant were myths or tales giving meaning to the new expansion of the Americans to the West. One of the most important myths is 'Manifest Destiny,' the permanent progress of civilization across the continent caused directly by Divine Providence. This gave the tales of western expansion a necessary form (Smith 1986: 23). Another significant myth of the new territories is, from the time of James Fenimore Cooper, the pioneer: a lone, intrepid, and noble individualist 'paving the path for civilization and national prosperity' (25). These words were uttered by no one less than the greatest hero of the Wild West, William F. Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill (1846–1917), in response to the congratulations of Senator John Thurston. The senator called the famous gunman and owner of the Wild West Show 'a great national and international educator' (25). What happened in the period of the expansion to the West can be called the dislocation, or rather deterritorialization of the frontier. The frontier was identified with a new, religious as well as technological, form of the American Dream. It even began to lose its traditional aspect of wilderness. Despite the fact that many people in the first half of the nineteenth century had been skeptical about the colonization of the West (Stephen H. Long of the US Army Engineers named it the Great American Desert and considered it 'unfit for cultivation and [...] uninhabitable'), the stony deserts of the Great Basin were mostly represented as future paradises that can be created by irrigation (there were conjectures about the existence of immense underground water supplies), and new farming methods. As a result, the language of the frontier became laden with utopian images of abundance, plenitude, and exotic varieties of life. This is especially typical of what Daniel Boorstin called booster talk: 'giving noble names to insignificant places and things' (1965: 296). 'Boosters' were the settlers whose aim was to develop the place by their own enterprise and to attract more people to it. Therefore they not only built hotels and railroads but were also introducing a new language of success, cultural values, tradition and prosperity. They used noble names (Athens, Alexandria, Rome) for towns which often soon decayed into 'ghost towns' depopulated and ruinous settlements. They also gave exotic, evocative names to uninhabitable, dreary territories. Thus, a considerable desert area of the Great Basin was named Nevada according to the snowy peaks of Sierra Nevada, which is actually in California. Named in noble ways, and packaged in geographical myths (e.g., the desert belt being the location of the most advanced ancient civilizations- such as Egypt, Babylon, or Carthage, and the settlement of the Great Basin recreating the glory of these civilizations) the land almost lost its actual presence. It was swallowed by aggressive booster talk, similar to the language of modern advertising. ## Tall Talk A different way of speaking was called tall talk. This was not a language of business and advertisement used by boosters. Though based on the same principle of overstatement, it was a language of jokes, blurred, ambiguous meaning, humor, and irony. It was used mostly by gold miners and ordinary colonists for entertainment and also in order to avoid topics directly referring to the harshness and dangers of their everyday life. The most important features of tall talk are comical or grotesque metaphors and similes, often gradated into hyperboles (e.g., 'He walks through a fence like a falling tree through a cobweb.' or 'She slings the nastiest ankle in old Kentucky'-i.e., she dances brilliantly with sex-appeal), and vague or ambiguous use of quantifiers ('pretty considerable better'). Tall talk is the yarn from which tall tale is woven, a folk genre of the frontier anecdote characterized by hyperboles or violent understatement (which often takes the form of black humor). It blurs the distinction between the fictitious and the real: the 'realistic' features only enhance the absurd and grotesque effect, as for instance in this passage from Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872): they settled in Morgan County, and he got nipped by the machinery in the carpet factory and went through in less than a quarter of a minute; his widder [widow] bought the piece of carpet that had his remains woven in, and people come a hundred miles to 'tend the funeral. There was fourteen yards in the piece. She wouldn't let them roll him up, but planted him just so-full length. (Norton 3 2: 21) In this way, the independence of the speech and of the narrative are affirmed. The narrative frees itself from established authorities and becomes more than a way in which some events are told. It invents the events in a strange chain of associations, it can go on endlessly, and is finished only when the speaker stops or the listener runs away. According to Wonham, 'the tall tale [...contains] more than one potential meaning-it does express a will to lie and a contradictory will to tell the truth at the same time' (1993: 31; my emphasis). It also consists in a 'rhetorical pattern of interpretive challenge and response' dramatizing 'the interaction of voices without pretending to solve them into a single, unified voice' (Wonham 1993: 67). In this way, the tall tale creates a new community of narrators and listeners, scattered in an immensity of the Big Empty (the vastness of the Great Basin) and communicating both orally and in printed word, at tall tale contests and festivals as well as reading and writing the tales, and circulating them by means of printed medium and even internet (Ghost Stories). ## Mark Twain The tall tale was still very popular when Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) left in 1861 after an unsuccessful period of service in the Confederate militia for the Nevada Territory where his more successful brother Orion (1825-1897) became government Secretary. The adventurous journey to Carson City and various schemes to get rich became the subject of Roughing It (1872), a book composed of loosely connected stories, some of which can be called 'tall.' In 1862 Clemens established himself as a journalist in Virginia City in Nevada. He became the editor of a booster paper called Territorial Enterprise and he started to use the pseudonym 'Mark Twain' meaning 'two fathom depth of safe water' in reminiscence of the pre-war times in which he piloted Mississippi steamboats (his experience is the source of Old Times on the Mississippi [1875] and other works). As a miner and journalist Clemens become both acquainted with the life in the camps and interested in tall tales. His first publication, Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog (1865; there are several titles of this tale, including 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' and 'The Notorious Jumping Frog of the Calaveras County') resembles a transcript or imitation of a tall tale. But it may also be an ironical version of a booster tale, and thus it becomes an independent work of literature (an adventurous enterprise is substituted by betting, riches by a surfeit of animals, and booster names are given-ironically-to animals: the puppy is called Andrew Jackson-referring to the popular US president, 1829-1837; the frog is named Daniel Webster-after a leading antebellum politician and charismatic orator). In Roughing It a different feature of literariness can be seen. It is also based on irony which is directed not only against the loose, incidental development of the tall tale, but also against another specific feature of frontier talk: the jargon of an itinerant preacher. The speaker tells a bizarre story of how a missionary and his wife had been eaten by cannibals who then were saved, because of having received the godly substance of the servants of the Lord. But mind you, there ain't anything ever reely lost; everything that people can't understand and don't see the reason of does good if you only hold on and give it a fair shake; Prov'dence don't fire blank cartridges, boys. That there missionary's substance, unbeknowns to himself, actu'ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbecue. [...] Don't tell me it was an accident that he was biled [boiled]. There ain't no such things as accident. (Norton 3 2: 21) The narrative confirms the contrary: it is driven by accidental association of ideas, and people are lost in it: as we saw earlier, they for instance can die, having been processed by machinery (in the carpet factory), and woven into commodities (a three-ply carpet) which then become fetishes or monuments. But the passage points to another dimension of the narrative: instead of a metaphysical notion of the whole it is based on the process of the dissemination of meaning. The original burlesque disappears and is replaced by another meaning, completely dissimilar. Thus both the 'main idea' and the characteristic genre features get lost: what remains is the energy of popular language creating the narrative and wasting itself at the same time. In 1864 Mark Twain arrived in San Francisco and a year later he started to contribute to the Californian. Here his first tales appeared, and he also became acquainted with another storyteller and successful writer from the West Coast, Bret Harte (1836-1902), a journalist and a poet who also started to write short stories from mining camps and had great success with the collection entitled The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories (1870). In comparison with Twain, his stories used current literary language, and employed colloquial speech only in dialogues. He also did not imitate or recreate the grotesque or absurd aspects of the tall tale. His stories were based on the moral and psychological contrast between characters. In general, they were more popular with contemporary readers than Twain's works. In his later development Twain seems to abandon the tradition of the tall tale but he never forgets it completely. His next and very popular work, Innocents Abroad (1869), has features of cultivated journalism. Twain was commissioned to write a series of letters for two papers, Alta California and the New York Tribune and Herald, describing a steamship tour to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land. In his ironic letters Twain mocks European sights and manners from the position of an American democrat who has no understanding of cultural differences and looks at everything foreign very critically and with deep suspicion, noticing the undemocratic, decadent, and pretentious aspects of the Old World. Of course, the irony works both ways, as the later works, unpublished in Twain's lifetime (e.g., his English Notebook) clearly show. While in Innocents Abroad the balance is still in favor of Americans, later satires mock their lack of culture, ignorance, and narrow-mindedness. The real gateway to Twain's literary success was not his writing but his marriage to Olivia Langdon, the delicate daughter of a wealthy industrialist from New York State. No doubt the newly married couple were happy, as Twain's famous letter to his childhood friend Will Bowen (dated 6 February 1870) testifies. Twain was provided for. But the letter reveals also other consequences of this event. Stylistically and thematically, it is split in twain. On the one hand there is the powerful associative flow of Twain's childhood reminiscences, an utterance whose syntax resembles the tall tale. On the other hand, the letter contains some passages of polished and conventionally sentimental speech representing his happiness with his 'Angel' Olivia. This gap foreshadows the later division of Twain's work into publishable and unpublishable parts: it was Olivia, or Livy as he used to call her, who objected to the publication of many bitter satires on Americans and on the whole human species, called Letters from the Earth, Papers of the Adam Family, Damned Human Race, Burlesques on the Etiquette, etc.). The main objection was the godlessness of Twain's criticism, the absence of any moral or divine aim in the life of Americans. In Letters from the Earth which appeared as late as 1963, Twain (disguised as Satan) mocks the absurdity of the conventional meeting-house vision of eternal life: In man's heaven everybody sings! The man who did not sing on earth is able to sing there; the man who could not sing on earth is able to do it there. The universal singing is not casual, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on, all day long, and every day, during the stretch of twelve hours. And everybody stays; whereas in the earth the place would be empty in two hours. The singing is of hymns alone. Nay, it is of one hymn alone. The words are always the same, in number they are only about a dozen, there is no rhyme, there is no poetry: 'Hossanah, hossanah, hossanah, Lord God of Sabaoth, 'rah! 'rah! 'rah! siss!-boom! [...] a-a-ah!' (Letter II: Satan to Michael and Gabriel, AmTrad: 1095) This somber vision of America and its ideals is to be found even in Twain's earlier works. The central theme of many of them is the baseness and corruptibility of Americans who, in pretending unblemished morality, have ceased to distinguish between appearance and reality (e.g., in the novella The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg [1900]). A complete collapse of the distinction between the true and the false, the fictitious and the real is typical of the last, posthumously published, allegorical novel The Mysterious Stranger (1916), whose Satanic protagonist is called Philip Traum. The novel, which vainly tries to distinguish between the unconscious (or 'dream') and conscious (or 'reality') selves, displays 'the other side of Samuel Clemens, Realist. In an ultimate uncanny moment [...] reality itself is dismissed and dissolved' (Crow 2009: 85): there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You. And You are but a Thought-a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities! (Twain 1970: 405) During his years at Hartford, Connecticut, Twain felt very lonely and repressed. He had to meet people from the higher echelons of Hartford society, dominated by polished upper-class artists, for instance Harriet Beecher Stowe. After his first satirical novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), which he wrote in collaboration with a conventional Hartford writer, Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), he ceased to publish anything satirical and decided to return in his imagination to the times of his childhood and youth spent on the Mississippi. His first book of the Mississippi series, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (the original title was A Boy's Manuscript) appeared in 1876, but the first draft dates as early as 1870. This novel, though successful in Twain's time, soon became mainly reading for boys. Twain's writing rose to a higher artistic level in his following autobiographical work Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), which he later made into a book entitled Life on the Mississippi (1883), confronting his recollections of boyhood and youth with recent impressions from the visit of his native country. The book became important for the development of Twain's style and gave him the opportunity to reconsider his aesthetic stance (he refused the influence of Scott's romanticism in Southern literature and praised such regionalists as George Washington Cable (1844-1925) of New Orleans or Joel Chandler Harris (1845-1908)). Between 1876 and 1884 Twain was working on his major novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which became the first modern American epic. This was not Twain's ambition, rather he wrote the book with the intention of representing the speech and life of the Mississippi valley, a place he knew so well. Therefore he was careful to select typical dialects and to invent a plot which would lead the reader downstream through the valley. An interesting feature of the river part of the plot is the regular alternation of chapters whose scene is the stream of the river and those which take place on the riverbanks. The stream also plays a role as plot-device, since it carries the raft with Huck and the runaway slave, Jim, along, and thus works against every attempt of theirs to transform their journey into an adventurous pursuit of freedom. Instead, Huck and Jim become observers of the life on the riverbanks and especially of many instances of fraud and violence. The fake aspects of Southern Romanticism and booster behavior are depicted in the characters of the Duke of Bridgewater and Dauphin or King Louis XVII of France, confidence men who also pretend that they are the famous English actors, David Garrick and Edmund Kean. The danger of mass violence is represented in the lynch scene. Another dominant feature of the book is the problem of the relationship of the whites to the blacks. It is significant that Huck does not change his wary attitude to Jim for ideological very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. (Emerson 1992: 134–35; 'Self-Reliance') In numerous ways, it is possible even instructive to see in Mark Twain's work and consciousness the influence of Emerson and his associates in the 'American Renaissance.' In his appreciation of the 'other' and his critique of its limited appreciation and exploration by many contemporary (white/male) writers, for example, Twain manifests a clear awareness of the diversity ideal in the cultural paradigm of American democracy. His commentary on the portrayal of Native Americans by James Fenimore Cooper provides one instance of this sensibility; and his treatments of African-Americans in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Those Extraordinary Twins (1892), and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) present others. ## Other Local Color Other representatives of the 'local color' movement are often 'dislocated' like Twain. A leading journalist of the New South, Joel Chandler Harris (1845-1908) was mostly interested in the black folklore of Georgia. In 9 books commonly called 'Uncle Remus stories' (1880-1948) he created a powerful, though at times highly schematic, image of African-Americans, influenced by their oral story-telling tradition and using their dialects. Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) and Kate Chopin (1850–1904) are early feminist writers; Harriet Beecher Stowe is best known as the abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). The only well-known writer who comes close to our idea of a regionalist is Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), an author of novels, tales, and sketches about her native Maine. In spite of this, American literary scholarship has seen a revival of interest in regionalism. As Charles Crow points out, this change has been effected both by 'the spectacular appeal to readers today of the books with regional emphasis' and by the revaluation of old canons based on 'the assumption that regional writing was inherently minor.' Crow highlights the importance of 'feminist scholars' (especially of Judith Fetterley) who 'challenged the belief that the literature of 'small and private lives' was necessarily less important than stories about seafaring and fighting Indians.' Although it can be admitted that works of regional literature may provide contemporary readers with a possibility of the nostalgic escape to the rural world of the past, it should not be overlooked that 'the perspective of a region [can] offer a useful minority view, a healthy subversion, of dominant values' (Crow 2004: 1-3).