Acephalous

"Interpretation is and should be an exercise in totalitarianism."

(I've placed the bulk of this post below the fold because I wanted to prevent the automatic trackback from automatically tracking back, but also because I realize that not everyone is as invested in debunking the reductio ad absurdum of my own theoretical position as I am. That said, I wrote most of this last week and have spent the past two days beneath a pile of finals, so I'm not sure what exactly happened over here, only that it became not at all the sort of silly I'd intended. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to grading.)

Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II

(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me.  They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary.  I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary.  So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)

Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized.  Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.

But canonization into what? 

In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation.  Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward.  When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades.  Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.  

This was not.

When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan.  It took three months to arrive.  Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in.  Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan.  Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background. 

Are those novels good?  No.  Do they deserve canonization?  No.  Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular?  Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time?  Is that not a viable object of study?  Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical? 

For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility).  So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs.  To wit:

The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge.  An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating.  No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.  

Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last.  I did that on purpose.  Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like.  ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.)  From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this.  Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos.  But remember: 

Verisimilitude is not an end.  It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means.  What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text.  For example, this comic sucks:

The image of Red-Eye (from Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam) adds nothing to the description provided by the text; in fact, it looks like what a sketch artist would draw if provided the description in the text.  Now compare that to this or this or this or this or this.  Why do I have to justify studying the subject of all those thises but can write about Red-Eye with nary a care?  Is it because Before Adam was written by London?  Because he wrote it a century ago?  Because a quinquagenarian with Ivy credentials stretching four generations back wouldn't feel mortified if caught reading it on the subway?

(x-posted.)

But my "Twain" chapter may need renaming

A conservative's account of what's increasingly liberal about the liberal arts, in ascending order of filth

[I drafted this post then press "post" instead of "draft" because I'm desperately trying not to sweat the small stuff.  I'd delete it, but people commented.]

w/ pun less lame; schlafly don't bother me; better morning stars; obscure

Dear John Carlos Rowe: SHUT UP!

Some of us don't have tenure yet.  This is completely uncalled for:

In Connecticut Yankee, Twain warns the reader that the United States is already following the lead of the European imperial powers, a message he would repeat with growing volubility in his anti-imperialist writings from 1898 to 1905, most of which require little interpretation.  (Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 139, emphasis mine.)

You are an evil liar, John Carlos Rowe.  You may have total recall.  You may be right charming.  I may even respect you mightily.  That changes nothing.  This is beyond the pale.  Don't believe me?  Ask anyone without tenure and brace yourself for a brutal what for.  Fact:

Everything requires loads of interpretation.  All of it.  (Even that.)

Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you can give up the gig.  Some of us still have to slog through six sets a night.

How Professional Literary Critics Address Ambiguity in a Text (with Visual Aids)

My current problem is deciding which of the two conclusions I've written I'm going to append to the Pudd'nhead Wilson chapter.  I don't mean "conclusions" as in "concluding paragraphs," either.  I mean "conclusions" as in "what I think Twain is up to in the final chapter vis-a-vis race and American culture."  On Tuesday, I found a pessimism tinged with commonplace racism more convincing.  This morning, I'm inclined to consider his racism idiosyncratic and profound.   To aid others who may be in a similar plight, I thought I might diagram my pain for general amusement edification.

Coming to a conclusion in an academic essay is very much like looking at the red square pictured below.  Stare at it until it pops:

Now focus on the other red square until it does:

Then first again:

And the second:

Now both simultaneously:

Until it turns into one of these things:

This would be your argument.  It is unique and critical and it is genius.  Your timely interrogation of "box" will not go unnoticed.  The market rewards incisive interventions and yours will be no exception. 

Because I'm All Out of Clever Titles, I Christen Thee "History & Literature"

Eric and Ari's discussions about how to best incorporate literature into history classroom inverts the problem I face when designing a syllabus: "How do I demonstrate the significance of a novel outside the context in which it acquired its importance?"*  I feel compelled to contextualize for reasons best understood by the example of Huck Finn.  Consider Huck's classic epiphany in Chapter XXXI.  He's written a note informing Miss Watson where she can find her runaway slave, only to

get to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, for ever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up.

The reader's annoyance with Huck dissipates because Twain allows them to participate in his recognition of shared humanity.  Twain yokes together those clauses with semi-colons, crafting a sentence like a cartoon snowball on a mountaintop.  With a gentle nudge, he tips it down the mountainside, and minutes later everyone cheers as two stories of packed snow smashes into prevailing wisdom.   

Students cry when they read this passage.  They talk of Huck's heroism in voices trembling with patriotic pride:

"How brave!  For this boy to forsake the only moral order he has known!  'And a child shall lead them!'  How brave of Twain to condemn the South in this manner!" 

I allow them to talk in this vein for a couple of minutes, then ask them to open their book to the title page and read what it says below the title:

Then I ask them when it was published.  They don't know what to make of any of it.

"It was written twenty years after the end of the Civil War," I say.

Blank stares.

"That means slavery had been abolished two decades earlier."

Blank stares.

"How brave would it be to condemn Hitler now?"

Little bulbs appear above a few heads.

"How brave would it have been to condemn slavery after it had been abolished?"

Now they get it. 

How a work relates to the historical moment it represents is crucial interpreting its meaning.  Huck Finn would've been a different novel had it been written in 1844.  It would've been the braver novel the students ardently desire it to be.  It would be another novel still were it written in 2004, especially if it kept the conceit of having been written in 1884 about events that took place in 1844.  The question I would pose to Ari and Eric—the one I fumbled here—would be whether they're more concerned with how a work represents or embodies the ethos of a particular historical moment.   

The Killer Angels says more about what people thought about Gettysburg in 1975 than the battle itself: its representation of the battle tells us about what passed for realism in the 1970s, i.e. how the grit of 19th Century American English was presented, how much of the ubiquitous grime of 19th Century America was preserved, &c.  [Edited because it'd been a long, long day.]

---

*Table questions about The Great Western Canon for the moment.

What Does Being "More Pessimistic" Actually Entail?

The concept of "pessimism" as a quantity seems utterly foreign to me.  I've spent the early afternoon charting the events responsible for the growth of Mark Twain's pessimism.  The resemblance to Kurt Vonnegut's diagram of The Metamorphosis is uncanny:

Transpose those plot points into the real world and you get a sense of why Twain became increasingly pessimistic during the 1890s.  Not that I know what that means anymore, mind you, because I can't currently wrap my head around pessimism as a quantifiable concept.  Like when you repeatedly write your name until it no longer belongs to you then scribble it a couple hundred times more until the very concept of naming ceases to be meaningful.  I doubt my befuddlement will abate anytime soon.  You could say I'm pessimistic.  How pessimistic am I? 

I am 23 pessimistic.  I began this post 96 pessimistic.  (In pessimism as in golf, a lower score is better.)  Although I'm better pessimistic now than when I began writing, forecasters say my inability to account for the 74 point shift will likely cause a 16 point pessimistic swing. 

Would that it were so easy.  Instead, I'm forced to determine whether Twain's more pessimistic after his business fails or his eldest daughter dies.  Or after his youngest daughter develops epilepsy or his wife slips into permanent invalidism. 

Does his pessimism simply accumulate over time or does it fluctuate?  Does his bankruptcy create a baseline of 54 pessimistic or does it temporarily knock him to 54 then allow him to recover?  Does a minor tragedy at 51 pessimistic feel like a major one at 54?  Is pessimism exponential? 

I'm not sure.  I don't even know if pessimism is a limited resource.  Does my being 18 pessimistic mean someone else must compensate for the other 14 dour points I should be feeling?

In Memoriam: Jim Zwick

When I was writing my Silas Weir Mitchell chapter, I happened across Jim Zwick's comprehensive website on Twain and anti-imperialism.  So it should come as no surprise that when I started writing my Twain chapter, I sought out the two books Zwick had written on Clemens and anti-imperialism.  He and I exchanged a few emails and he was aggressively generous, sending me copies of a numerous documents I was having trouble laying hands on. 

Tonight I read Shelley Fisher Fishkin's email to the Americanist listserv informing us that he had passed away.  I never met him, and I only exchanged a handful of emails with him, but let me say this:

He was generous when he didn't have to be.

It may sound banal, but when you think about it, what better epitaph could a scholar wish for?

What is the Regnant Theory of Naturalism, Anyway?

As there's confusion over basic procedural issues like how long a dissertation abstract should be (one single-spaced page, two single-spaced pages, five single-spaced pages), I figure there's no harm in asking a basic intellectual question:

What do you consider the dominant theory of naturalism?

If I'm to be redefining it, I ought to know what the majority of scholars think it is.  I'm tempted to follow Lisa Long, who, in her review of three recent attempts at defining naturalism, threw up her hands in defeat:

In the end, naturalism turns back on itself, becomes the uncategorizable category, precisely because the taxonomic and evolutionary tendency of literary history is naturalist in and of itself—concerned in its own way with determining what nineteenth-century critic Hippolyte Taine theorized as the ubiquitous "race, moment, and milieu" that have produced literary naturalism and other generic categories. American literary genres emerge as living, breathing, and ever-changing entities in these texts and in critical history as a whole; much collective scholarly energy has been spent, like that of biological taxonomists, looking for similarities between genres/"species" of literature, and hierarchicalizing those groups based on evolutionary relationships.

She identifies the current attempt to define naturalism as one more lost battle in a long, unwinnable war ... which means the best I can accomplish in my introduction is another pointed setback in an unending campaign of failure.  Of course, I could really surrender and claim, as one critic recently did, that naturalism is "less a movement than a jumble of proffered peculiarities."  The mind rails against the brutal honesty of that definition, but I admire its bravado.

So which naturalism should I be redefining?  The most current consensus?  The most powerful? 

Get Out Your Red Pencils: a Dissertation Abstract Awaits

For those curious as to what literary historicists do (Anthony) and those convinced I do absolutely nothing at all (Emerson), I present my dissertation abstract. 

Behold! 

Everything I've slaved over lo these many years, condensed into five paragraphs ... thereby ensuring that what I've written makes absolutely no sense.  See, I've been over this thing so many times—made so many piddling changes, emphasizing so many stakes here, dropping so many arguments there—I can no longer read the words before me. 

I don't know what they mean.  So invested am I in the history of its revisions—the agonizing decision to delete this, the writhing that accompanied the diminishment of that—I'm unable to judge whether it even makes any sense.  Are the stakes of my argument apparent?  Can you tell how necessary my corrective is to the health of the discipline? 

Does it even make any sense?

(Note: The final version of my dissertation contains a chapter on Twain which is, at the present moment, too excreable to include in the abstract.  Also, my fifty-five page intellectual history of evolutionary theory at the turn of the last century will likely become my first chapter, thus necessitating the writing of an introduction which resembles my abstract and, you know, talks about literature.)

How to Write a Dissertation, Part MCMXCVI

Option #1:

Spend weeks skimming seventeen volumes of Mark Twain's letters for references to Darwin, Lamarck, evolution or social development.  Collect all relevant references into a single file.  Collate according to potential usefulness.  Accidentally delete one or twenty of them.  Copy them again.  Feel confusion.  Know that you had that one reference.  Remember that it was right there.  Right there. 

Skim letters again for the phrase "unfortunate development."  Picture where you were and what it was like when you wrote it down.  Think: "It was overcast that day ... which was when I looked at Volume IV!"  Skim Volume IV. 

Fail. 

Cry. 

Leave library.

Drink.

Option #2:

Put off starting Twain chapter for a month.  Feel pure bliss when the Mark Twain Project launched this week.  Search Mark Twain's letters for "Darwin," "Lamarck," "evolution" and "social development."  Save relevant letters to "My Citations."  Feel "Happiness!"

Drink.

Option J:

Not an option.

Read Happy Books; or, Hell, Learn How to Read

The folks at Phi Beta Cons are waxing anti-intellectual about Mary Collins' complaint in The Christian Science Monitor.  According to Collins, her daughter has stopped reading because her school requires her to read novels with "distressing plots [and] sad, even sinister, story lines."  Most interesting to Carol Iannone, however, is Collins' account of a conversation she had with some of her daughter's classmates:

The string of searing plot patterns has resulted in some very peculiar unintended consequences. Most of the students I spoke with from my daughter's middle school claimed that the readings made them feel inadequate because they never "experienced these horrible things."

"It becomes awkward," one student said, "because you're constantly made to feel spoiled or privileged."

Her co-blogger, David French, picks up the baton and—in a move calculated to prove, definitively, his nub-mindedness—promptly thwacks the first professor he sees:

I enjoyed Carol’s post highlighting how the typical college reading assignment seems designed to make students feel “spoiled or privileged.”  In fact, professorial contempt for “spoiled or privileged” students is nauseatingly common.  Yet this is yet another example of academic blindness.  It is tough to imagine a more “privileged” person than a tenured faculty member at a major university.  Six figure income.  Ten month work year.  Absolute job security in the absence of actual fraud or criminal behavior.  No other profession in America enjoys such benefits.

That Collins and Iannone spoke of middle school reading lists is irrelevant.  The point is to drub academics wherever and whenever you can; in this case, for their contempt for the "spoiled and privileged."  You know that varnish spoiled, privileged children are taught to apply to their elitism in (ahem) finishing schools? 

French forgot to apply it.  He speaks here, openly, for the downtrodden, i.e. the spoiled, privileged children of wealth.  He is nauseated by the contempt in which these spoiled, privileged children are held.  That they behave in spoiled, privileged ways is irrelevant.  That is their culture, see, and these postmodern multiculturalists are hypocrites for shitting on these children's unearned pretensions. 

They come from a better culture—one with money and power—and these arrogant professors have the nerve to inform them that the world shouldn't bow to their every wish and whim?  Who do these professors think they are?  Did they go Andover?  Groton, even?  Who are they to spit upon our spoiled children?

To return to my original point—which, to be honest, I've yet to even hint at—Collins suggests that these children can be cheered up by reading something chipper like Huck Finn.  Because once Huck and Tom fool Jim into thinking he's still enslaved, then torture him for a little while in order to satisfy Tom's love of historical romance—well, those are an absolute hoot.  Guaranteed to cheer up a sallow youth any day. 

For that matter, why not have them read Connecticut Yankee?  It's finale is clean, wholesome fun for children of all ages.   I mean, The Boss insists that the electrocuted knights be delivered a coup de grace, when he could have left them on the field to die horribly and alone, save for the screams and rattles of their compatriots.

My point, then, is that the canon debate factors into these issues in ways we shouldn't, but do, ignore.  If Twain wrote Huck Finn today, I guarantee Collins and her ilk would complain about it being taught to their children.  (They do, of course, but for different reasons.)

pastcast, v.

To ascribe, assign, bestow to historical personages, as a defining property or characteristic, contemporary theories, doctrines, beliefs which they did not or could not have held.

1939 J. Joyce, F. Wake. 314 Paradoxmutose caring, but here in a present booth of Ballaclay, Barthalamou, where their dutchuncler mynhosts and serves them dram well right for a boors' interior (homereek van hohmryk) that salve that selver is to screen its auntey and has ringround as worldwise eve her sins (pip, pip, pip) willpip futurepip feature apip footloose pastcast with spareshins and flash substittles of noirse-made-earsy from a nephew mind the narrator but give the devil his so long as those sohns of a blitzh call the tuone tuone and thonder alout makes the thurd. 2007 S.E. Kaufman, Diss. 171  In Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), written during the decade in which the [Modern] Synthesis gradually coalesced, Richard Hofstadter pastcasts a heavily synthesized Darwinism into fin de siècle American culture as a means of justifying New Deal social policy through an implicit comparison of the consequences of Roosevelt's interventionist approach to the depredations brought about by the laissez-faire policies of the Gilded Age.

Apropos of Nothing ...

... an excerpt from Twain's post editorial, "One of Mankind's Bores" (1871):

I suppose that if there is one thing in the world more hateful than another to all of us, it is to have to write a letter.  A private letter especially. And business letters, to my thinking, are very little pleasanter.  Nearly all the enjoyment is taken out of every letter I get by the reflection that it must be answered.  And I do so dread the affliction of writing those answers, that often my first and gladdest impulse is to burn my mail before it is opened.  For ten years I never felt that sort of dread at all because I was moving about constantly, from city to city, from State to State, and from country to country, and so I could leave all letters unanswered if I chose, and the writers of them would naturally suppose that I had changed my post office and missed receiving my correspondence.  But I am "cornered" now.  I cannot use that form of deception any more.  I am anchored, and letters of all kinds come straight to me with deadly precision.   

They are letters of all sorts and descriptions, and they treat of everything. I generally read them at breakfast, and right often they kill a day's work by diverting my thoughts and fancies into some new channel, thus breaking up and making confusion of the programme of scribbling I had arranged for my working hours.  After breakfast I clear for action, and for an hour try hard to write; but there is no getting back into the old train of thought after such an interruption, and so at last I give it up and put off further effort till next day.

[...]

It comes natural to me in these latter years to do all manner of composition laboriously and ploddingly, private letters included.  Consequently, I do fervently hate letter-writing, and so do all the newspaper and magazine men I am acquainted with.   

The above remarks are by way of explanation and apology to parties who have written me about various matters, and whose letters I have neglected to answer.  I tried in good faith to answer them—tried every now and then, and always succeeded in clearing off several, but always as surely left the majority of those received each week to lie over till the next. The result was always the same, to wit: the unanswered letters would shortly begin to have a reproachful look about them, next an upbraiding look, and by-and-by an aggressive and insolent aspect; and when it came to that, I always opened the stove door and made an example of them.  The return of cheerfulness and the flight of every feeling of distress on account of neglected duty, was immediate and thorough.   

Regular posting and contributing to my own comment threads will resume shortly.  Had I more time, I'd comment on the post-like quality of 90 percent of Twain's Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays.  Crushed as I am, this will have to do.

Thank You, God, For the Silicon in My Motherboard, the Carbon Dioxide I Expel, the Paper in My Book, &c. &c. &c.

According to this article, "frozen smoke" or "Aerogel" is a "miracle material for the 21st century."  All well and good.  Until you read the comments.  "Edmund Burke" opines:

If it is produced in the laboratory, it is not a miracle.

"Markangelo," from "Torrance, Amerika," responds:

Why can't "GOD" make a miracle in the laboratory[?]

"CK" of "DFW, Texas" answers his question:

He did.

The Universe that provides the elements that the scientists manipulate to make these wonderful things.

Or, did you miss that?

"AGS," from Chicago, attempts to bring some common sense to the proceedings:

Please note that "miracle material" is not a theological term implying supernatural origin. It simply indicates unusually outstanding properties and applications that exceed the conventional by a wide mark.

He is ignored.  "Eric" of Atlanta merely repeats "CK"'s answer to "Markangelo"'s question:

He made the silica gel, the carbon dioxide, and the brain of the man that has the arrogance to think he can "make" anything.

All glory goes to God.  Humanity arrogantly credits itself for His work in the world.  To be honest, I hadn't noticed this mode of theistic complaint until it was brought to my attention yesterday.  More Twain, again from Letters from Earth:

If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years before doing it. That is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about it all the time. When exasperated men rise up and sweep away an age-long tyranny and set a nation free, the first thing the delighted pulpit does is to advertise it as God's work, and invite the people to get down on their knees and pour out their thanks to him for it. And the pulpit says with admiring emotion, "Let tyrants understand that the Eye that never sleeps is upon them; and let them remember that the Lord our God will not always be patient, but will loose the whirlwinds of his wrath upon them in his appointed day."

They forget to mention that he is the slowest mover in the universe; that his Eye that never sleeps, might as well, since it takes it a century to see what any other eye would see in a week; that in all history there is not an instance where he thought of a noble deed first, but always thought of it just a little after somebody else had thought of it and done it. He arrives then, and annexes the dividend.

For "Eric," "CK," and their ilk, nothing is possible without God, therefore all credit ultimately belongs to him.  This is why home-runs lead to hosannahs:

If God had not blessed a particular athlete with the skills required to hit a home-run, he never would have been able to the swing the bat (whittled from lumber of His stock), smack the ball (composed of tightly wound rubber from trees He grew, wrapped in skin of His cows), have it fly threw the air (seventy-eight percent His Beloved Nitrogen), over the dirt (whose sundry particulates He crushed Himself) and the grass (which He so carefully tends), and into the stands (built by people whose skills He gave them, the architect her math, the construction worker his stamina, &c.). 

This is a profoundly religious perspective; so religious I'm tempted to say it's nothing more than a rhetorical ploy designed specifically to shame.  Another way to put this:

No one outside a monastery thinks like this, right?

How to Pay Attention One Stray Period and Thoughtless Typo at a Time

Seems the best way to force myself to pay attention to the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text is to copy-edit it.  It's a truth I rather wish weren't.

Today, I focused on the only online version of Mark Twain's Letters from Earth.  The link'll take you to it.  The next post'll be about it.

The hyper-vigilance required to produce clean-copy forced me to crawl the bowels of Twain's text.  Through tedium, I earned an understanding of it pleasure never produced.  That, however, will be the subject of the next post.  For now, I simply want to ask:

What do you do to focus your critical faculties on a text?  Read it aloud?  Re-read it in different languages?  Re-translate the original into English, or from English into another language you know?  Read it really, really hard?

If You Love Satan, Raise Your Hand

Re-reading Mark Twain's Letters from Earth (1909) provides a bracing reminder of why they turned me into an atheist all those many years ago.  The Letters are from Satan to his fellow angels, and they document humanity's idiotic attempt to understand the God who created them, i.e. The Bible.  Reading it now, two things immediately strike me:

1. The Letters presuppose the existence of God and His Heavenly Host, they simply insist that humans have got the story all wrong.
2. Satan may not be the most reliable of narrators.

These facts overlap invidiously in terms of audience: people who would consider Satan a reliable narrator are not people who presuppose the existence of God.  Short of members of the Church of Satan—not founded until sixty years after the Letters were written—it's not entirely clear who Twain imagines his audience to be within the fiction's framework.  Beyond it, his intent is obvious: he employs Satan as a narrator because it galls those he mocks and delights sympathetic atheists.

But obvious as it is, the text contravenes it at all turns.  For you to buy the legitimacy of Satan's critique, you have to accept that there's an actual Heaven to which the absurd creation of humanity compares.  Quick example:

I recall to your attention the extraordinary fact with which I began. To wit, that the human being, like the immortals, naturally places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys—yet he has left it out of his heaven! The very thought of it excites him; opportunity sets him wild; in this state he will risk life, reputation, everything—even his queer heaven itself—to make good that opportunity and ride it to the overwhelming climax. From youth to middle age all men and all women prize copulation above all other pleasures combined, yet it is actually as I have said: it is not in their heaven; prayer takes its place.

They prize it thus highly; yet, like all their so-called "boons," it is a poor thing. At its very best and longest the act is brief beyond imagination—the imagination of an immortal, I mean. In the matter of repetition the man is limited—oh, quite beyond immortal conception. We who continue the act and its supremest ecstasies unbroken and without withdrawal for centuries, will never be able to understand or adequately pity the awful poverty of these people in that rich gift which, possessed as we possess it, makes all other possessions trivial and not worth the trouble of invoicing.

Satan knows from profound coitus, so silly humanity err twice-over: once, for the paltry quality of mundane intercourse; then again, for even leaving its meager attendant joys out of its conception of heaven.  The whole work is thus structured around Satan's knowledge of the True Heaven from which he's been temporarily expelled. 

But his knowledge of God's mind isn't even what he implicitly claims it to be.  Consider this bit from the opening narration:

"Yes," said Michael, "and He said He would establish Natural Law—the Law of God—throughout His dominions, and its authority should be supreme and inviolable."

"Also," said Gabriel, "He said He would by and by create animals, and place them, likewise, under the authority of that Law."

"Yes," said Satan, "I heard Him, but did not understand. What is animals, Gabriel?"

I open my chapter with this quotation, and I'm damn close to titling the beast "What is Animals?"  What better title and introductory bit for a chapter which by-and-large addresses Connecticut Yankee and What is Man?  But I digress.  The force of Satan's complaints seem logical in nature; but given Satan's imperfect knowledge, it's difficult to credit the premises from which he draws his sniggering conclusions.  How did Twain try to blindside his readers into assent?

By writing some of the most forceful prose of his career.  He's undone by his own talent here.  To wit:

On the third day, about noon, it was found that a fly and been left behind. The return voyage turned out to be long and difficult, on account of the lack of chart and compass, and because of the changed aspects of all coasts, the steadily rising water having submerged some of the lower landmarks and given to higher ones an unfamiliar look; but after sixteen days of earnest and faithful seeking, the fly was found at last, and received on board with hymns of praise and gratitude, the Family standing meanwhile uncovered, our of reverence for its divine origin. It was weary and worn, and had suffered somewhat from the weather, but was otherwise in good estate. Men and their families had died of hunger on barren mountain tops, but it had not lacked for food, the multitudinous corpses furnishing it in rank and rotten richness. Thus was the sacred bird providentially preserved.

Providentially. That is the word. For the fly had not been left behind by accident. No, the hand of Providence was in it. There are no accidents. All things that happen, happen for a purpose. They are foreseen from the beginning of time, they are ordained from the beginning of time. From the dawn of Creation the Lord had foreseen that Noah, being alarmed and confused by the invasion of the prodigious brevet fossils, would prematurely fly to sea unprovided with a certain invaluable disease. He would have all the other diseases, and could distribute them among the new races of men as they appeared in the world, but he would lack one of the very best—typhoid fever; a malady which, when the circumstances are especially favorable, is able to utterly wreck a patient without killing him; for it can restore him to his feet with a long life in him, and yet deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, and idiotic. The housefly is its main disseminator, and is more competent and more calamitously effective than all the other distributors of the dreaded scourge put together. And so, by foreordination from the beginning of time, this fly was left behind to seek out a typhoid corpse and feed upon its corruptions and gaum its legs with germs and transmit them to the re-peopled world for permanent business. From that one housefly, in the ages that have since elapsed, billions of sickbeds have been stocked, billions of wrecked bodies sent tottering about the earth, and billions of cemeteries recruited with the dead.

Many a passage in Letters from Earth stokes the fire of overblown pathos.  I don't dare list them all.  So let me leave you with a little more typical Twain:

A eunuch is a person whose candle has been put out.  By art.

The accompanying footnote is particularly withering.

 

That Feeling Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived

The liquor store is emptier than usual.  Scott expects the typical level of casual banter with Pete (cousin of benevolent Mike), the store's new part-owner.

Pete: The usual for you tonight partner?

Scott: You know the drill: kill the liver, heal the mind.

Pete: Tough week?

Scott: You could say that.  Writing and writing and writing and every word of it crap. 

Pete: I've always wondered, what exactly is it you're always writing?

Scott: (his mind a blank)  It's a ...

Pete: You write it all the time and you can't remember?

Scott: Quiet!  I want to cherish this moment. 

Pete: What do you mean?

Scott: I can't remember.  I'm unencumbered.  Frame this moment: I'm free.

Pete: ... ?

Mark Twain, "Man's Place in the Animal World" (1896)

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man.  I find the result profoundly humiliating to me.  For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

[...]

Some of my experiments were quite curious.  In the course of my reading I had come across a case where, many years ago, some hunters on our Great Plains organized a buffalo hunt for the entertainment of an English earl—that, an to provide some fresh meat for his larder. They had charming sport.  They killed seventy-two of those great animals; and ate part of one of them and left the seventy-one to rot.  In order to determine the difference between an anaconda and an earl—if any—I caused seven young calves to be turned into the anaconda's cage [of the London Zoological Garden].  The grateful reptile immediately crushed one of them and swallowed it, then lay back satisfied.  It showed no further interest in the calves, and no disposition to harm them.  I tried this experiment with other anacondas; always with the same result.  The fact stood proven that the difference between an earl and an anaconda is, that the earl is cruel and the anaconda isn't; and that the earl wantonly destroys what he has no use for, but the anaconda doesn't.  This seemed to suggest that the earl was descended from the anaconda, and had lost a good deal in the transition.

I was aware that many men who have accumulated more millions of money than they can ever use, have shown a rabid hunger for more, and have not scrupled to cheat the ignorant and the helpless out of their poor savings in order to partially appease that appetite.  I furnished a hundred different kinds of wild and tame animals the opportunity to accumulate vast stores of food, but none of them would do it.  The squirrels and bees and certain birds made accumulations, but stopped when they had gathered a winter's supply, and could not be persuaded to add to it either honestly or by chicane.  In order to bolster up a tottering reputation the ant pretended to store up supplies, but I was not deceived.  I know the ant.  These experiments convinced me that there is a difference between man and the Higher Animals: he is avaricious and miserly, they are not.

[...]

Among my experiments was this.  In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends.  I put them in a cage.  In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit.  In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves.  Finally a monkey.  They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen.  Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansaw; a Buddhist from Chrina; a Brahmin from Benares.   Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping.  Then I stayed away two whole days.  When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh—not a specimen left alive.  These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.