Mysterious Stranger: Twain Autobiography Reveals Grandpa’s Dark Side
(Weekend Update: Apparently, some Bronze-Age bible troll reported my Facebook link to this essay as “abusive,” presumably because Twain was an atheist and Huckleberry Finn, one of the most banned books in a nation that stinks to heaven of god-bothering, is the devil’s handiwork. Now, due to Facebook’s guilty-until-proven-innocent logic—a rule of thumb that wins the Idi Amin Dada Award for enlightened online governance—I’m unable to repost. Anything. Whether you like Twain or my work or not, I hope you’ll consider reposting a link to this page on your Facebook page as a way of saying you support free speech. If that sounds like product placement, mea culpa maxima.)
((YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Facebook appears to have repealed its ban on my links, at least for the moment, restoring the link to this article. Heartfelt thanks to all who stood with me in free-speech solidarity by reposting a link to this essay on their FB pages. Twain would be proud of you!
But I will be keeping a close eye on FB’s thoughtcrime police, in the future, and will devote a post to the subject if merited. As I note in the comment thread below, it’s a strange philosophy of community governance that accepts on faith the baseless accusations of self-appointed public morals czars, by which I mean: community members who, under cover of anonymity, bang the “ABUSE” button whenever they hear speech they don’t like. Shouldn’t the burden of proof be on them, not the other way ’round? I applaud FB’s prompt repeal of their ill-advised gag order, but worry about a privatized commons where the worst among us, who seem to have all the passionate intensity (if not the facts) these days, are able to muzzle freethinkers with the click of a button.))
Reports of Mark Twain’s resurrection are greatly exaggerated.
Mark Twain, found on the Web. All rights reserved.
Still, with luck, the University of California Press’s publication of the three-volume, 500,000-word, unexpurgated edition of Twain’s autobiography, the Twain enshrined in the popular imagination as a twinkly eyed rapscallion with a gently pricking wit—Grandpa Walton as Gawker blogger—will be revised along more accurate, which is to say more mordant, lines.
"When I lit my candle and went up to my room that night, there sat Pap---his own self." Norman Rockwell, illustration for Huckleberry Finn; all rights reserved.
That Twain the Sage of Pepperidge Farm is a sentimental caricature has been obvious since at least 1917, when Mencken published his thoughts on the subject in the New York Evening Mail. Twain had been in the ground only seven years, but already Mencken felt the need to set the record straight, inspired by the posthumous publication of books Twain had suppressed during his lifetime on the assumption that they would demolish, in one blow, his reputation as a lovable curmudgeon. Twain’s misgivings were well-founded: The Mysterious Stranger and What Is Man? are sardonic meditations, respectively, on the hypocrisies and fatuities of religion and the moral depravity and brutish self-interest of the species. “Mark Twain dead is beginning to show far different and more brilliant colors than those he seemed to wear during life,” writes Mencken, “and the one thing no sane critic would say of him today is that he was the harmless fireside jester, the mellow chautauquan, the amiable old grandpa of letters that he was once so widely thought to be.”
He goes on:
The truth is that Mark was almost exactly the reverse. Instead of being a mere entertainer of the mob, he was…a destructive satirist of the utmost pungency and relentlessness, and the most bitter critic of American platitude and delusion, whether social, political or religious, that ever lived.
The Twain rising from the grave on the centennial of his death lives up to Mencken’s press—and just in time for our age of Tea Party know-nothings and bible-thumping flatheads, not to mention CEOs like Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Tony Hayward of BP, poster boys for unchecked corporate arrogance and greed.
Twain was vociferously opposed to American imperialism, fulminating in suppressed passages in the Autobiography against “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and pouring scorn on a U.S. attack on unarmed tribal peoples in the Philippines, a “long and happy picnic” for “our uniformed assassins” who have “nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.” As the Times points out, “[T]he uncensored autobiography…includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.”
The paper quotes a blast of buckshot aimed, from the distance of a century ago, at the pinstriped swine wallowing in the Wall Street money trough today:
“The multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould—that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died—have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of—not to say vain of—is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.”
And you wondered where the William Burroughs of “Roosevelt After Inauguration” and the Hunter Thompson of “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”—not to mention the Matt Taibbi of that joyfully savage beatdown of Sarah Palin and her low-functioning fandom—learned their close-quarter knife-fighting skills.
- Norman Rockwell, illustration for Huckleberry Finn; all rights reserved.
Nonetheless, the image of Twain as a cigar-puffing wisecracker—George Burns doing a Colonel Sanders impression—will undoubtedly prove tough to uproot, for the simple reason that Americans prefer their history Disneyfied, and have a constitutional aversion to brow-furrowing, especially about deep, dark things.
Even Camille Paglia, a literary critic of no little energy and no small gifts (when she isn’t busy defending the birthers or insisting—no, really—that this Palin gal is an intellectual firecracker) seems to have fallen for the Norman Rockwell school of historical revisionism about Twain.
In her sweeping survey of “art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,” Sexual Personae, Paglia dismisses the “Wordsworthian idylls” of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as “completely out of sync with the internal development of major American literature…bourgeois fantasies about childhood and lower-class life.” With Paglia, every critical verdict is deeply personal; what sets her teeth chattering with rage, in this case, is Twain’s “dislike of the witty Jane Austen” (an English major’s idea of blood libel).Twain, it turns out, is “hateful” not only because he takes Austen down a peg but because “his folksiness and pastoralism are counterfeit, as decadent as Marie Antoinette’s masquerades as a shepherdess.” (Good line, by the way. Paglia comes to any firefight with a speedloader full of zingers.) Oh, and Twain’s late years were characterized by “gloomy negativity” (as opposed to Up with People negativity), which just goes to show that “Wordsworthian benevolence was always false,” in the same way that his boy’s adventure stories—myth “stripped of chthonian realities” (I hate it when they do that)—betray “fear of woman and fear of nature.”
The first problem with Paglia’s reading of Tom and Huck is that, while both books do indeed contain rhapsodic set pieces worthy of the term “Wordsworthian,” they’re hardly outtakes from Bambi. Twain the nature poet is a master of the form, from his Thomas Eakins evocations of the sublime majesty of the big river at night, in Huckleberry Finn, to the jeweled miniaturism of his opening description, in Chapter XIV of Tom Sawyer, of nature coming to life on Jackson’s Island, woodpecker by inchworm, catbird by ladybug, to the sturm und drang of his description in Chapter XVI of the storm that drenches the runaway boys, a Caspar David Friedrich painting in prose: “Under the ceaseless conflagration of lightnings that flamed in the skies, everything below stood out in clean-cut and shadowless distinctness: the bending tress, the billowy river white with foam, the driving spray of spume-flakes, the dim outlines of the high bluffs on the other side, glimpsed through the drifting cloud-rack and the slanting veil of rain.” This doesn’t sound, to me, like a man who fears nature; it sounds like a man who thrills to its gaudiest special effects, cheering on its cannonade of “unflagging thunder-peals” and “booming thunder-blasts.” It also sounds like a literary stylist who understands the Burkean sublime and his era’s hunger for it, and plays to that appetite with a bestselling novelist’s shrewd sense of what sells.
More to the point, Paglia thinks Twain spins “marshmallow myth” because she’s looking for the chthonian in the pagan places that matter most to her, notably, sexuality. True child of the free-love ’60s that she is, Paglia can’t seem to see how ahistorical her analysis is. Yes, Huckleberry Finn is weirdly chaste, but it’s nominally a children’s book and it was published in 1885, after all. Twain the Swiftian satirist may have had X-ray vision when it came to the social injustices and moral hypocrisies that plagued his age, but that doesn’t mean he was immune to the attitudes of the day: he was writing in, and for, Victorian America.
And yes, as Paglia’s avowed influence Leslie Fiedler argues in Love and Death in the American Novel, Huckleberry Finn is a boy’s adventure tale, a fantasy of prepubertal innocents who, spared the meddling influence of women (not to mention sexual awakening), will be boys forever. Huck flees “sivilization,” a scrubbed and stifling world of schoolmarmish scolding and goody-goody piety run by women—Aunt Polly, Aunt Sally, the Widow Douglas and the “old maid” Miss Watson—for the carefree lawlessness of life on the run among Men Without Women (his drunken father, the runaway slave Jim, Tom Sawyer). At the end of the book, Huck is on the run, once again, from the foster mothers who want to drag him back into civilization’s embrace and (s)mother him: “I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilized me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” It’s an evergreen theme in masculinist fantasies, providing the, er, seed DNA for a literary genre: the male-bonding story, saturated by sublimated (or overt) homoeroticism, that stretches from Huck and Jim to Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick to much of Hemingway and Kerouac to the pirate utopias of William S. Burroughs, right up to Brokeback Mountain.
But to argue that, because Twain is a sucker for nostalgia, he is therefore all folksiness and pastoralism is to misunderstand him profoundly.
Yes, Twain is nostalgic for the distant, drowsy summer of his boyhood, synonymous for him and us with an arcadian America shattered by the Civil War and dragged headlong into modernity by the industrial revolution. But Huckleberry Finn’s “Wordsworthian idyll” hangs in tense, perfect balance with Twain’s scabrous portrait of the herd mentality and mob violence that keep threatening to scuttle our little raft utopia, an unsteady, sometimes rudderless experiment in mass democracy. Not for Twain Whitman’s big-hearted, bear-hug embrace of a mythic American People. He knows what’s behind our tear-jerking public homilies about the American Dream, our fulsome Palin-isms about the Real America. Twain has lived in the Real America, and he knows that at its best—for instance, when a friendless, homeless boy finds the moral courage to help a runaway slave find freedom—it lives up to its myths. But he also knows it at its too-common worst: in the grotesque institution of slavery, of course, but also in the terrifying ignorance of one-horse towns where bored hicks amuse themselves by “putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin pan to his tail and see[ing] him run himself to death” or tarring and feathering “some poor friendless cast-out women.” He grew up in the age of the lynch mob and the carpetbagger and the jackleg preacher, bilking the rubes at a tent-show revival with sanctimonious blather.
Reborn in our time, Twain would probably recognize the America of his antebellum childhood in our Tea Party rallies and subprime-mortgage peddlers and prosperity-gospel televangelists in their stadium-sized megachurches. In Huckleberry Finn, he says, across a century, this land is your land, too.
Fiedler, unlike Paglia, understands this, which is why he says, in Love and Death, that Huck is the product of “a terrible breakthrough to the undermind of America itself,” a figment of the American unconscious as it dreams “the anti-American American dream.” Yet something puzzles him:
“[T]his thoroughly horrifying book, whose morality is rejection and whose ambiance is terror, is a funny book, at last somehow a children’s book after all; and the desperate story it tells is felt as joyous, an innocent experience. This ambiguity, this deep doubleness of Huckleberry Finn is its essential riddle. How can it be at once so terrible and so comfortable to read?”
My answer to the question Fiedler posed in 1966 is simply that Huckleberry Finn’s deep doubleness is our doubleness as a nation, and thus feels familiar, terrible though it may be.
Twain dramatizes our essentially double nature—the weird mix of sentimentality and cynicism, idealism and rough justice, gregariousness and loneliness that is an essential part of the American genome. Because he was, as Mencken argues, the most American of American writers, in voice and sensibility and subject, he knows all of our secret places for the simple reason that they’re his secret places, too. His mythic portrait of the American psyche is in some ways a self-portrait. He captures our Hallmark sentimentality at odds with our love of violence; our Reaganesque nostalgia tripping over the half-buried bodies in our genocidal history; our lip-service to Christian ideals making a jarring noise against the ugly reality of our bigotry. And he manages to conjure a world that is terrible and comfortable at the same time because his yearning for a boyhood lost in time is as sincerely felt as his fury at racism and ignorance.
Twain is strangely at home with some of his scoundrels, and even exhibits a perverse fondness for them, because he realizes that he, like all Americans, shares some of their family traits. How many American icons began by reinventing themselves at Ellis Island, their dreams still echoing with the howl of the mob at their heels? How many American millionaires made their fortunes peddling promises—the dream of home ownership, say, with no money down and no background check?
Like W.C. Fields and William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits, Twain’s voice echoes with the cadences and jargon of that archetypal American, the confidence man. A felon with a thousand faces, we see him everywhere in our nation’s family photo album: carny barker, riverboat gambler, revival-meeting preacher, traveling salesman, soapbox orator, politician. He may not be the best of Americans, but he is likely the most American of Americans, with a silver tongue and something to sell and his cardboard suitcase always packed, ready to light out for the territory if somebody wises up the marks.
“On the road…I told Tom all about our “Royal Nonesuch” rapscallions, and as much of the raft voyage as I had time to; and as we struck into the town and up through the middle of it—it was as much as half after eight then—here comes a raging rush of people with torches, and an awful whooping and yelling, and banging tin pans and blowing horns, and we jumped to one side to let them go by, and as they went by I see they had the [rapscallions] astraddle of a rail—that is, I knowed it was [them], though they was all over tar and feathers, and didn’t look like nothing in the world that was human—just a couple of monstrous big soldier-plumes. Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”
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I posted this to my FB page; heck, even without the censorship issue, it’s a terrific article!
Big thanks, Lorraine, for the plaudits, and especially for reposting to your FB page.
In response to another comment. See in context »I like the way you assume it was “some Bronze-Age bible (sic) troll.” Sort of like the guy who finds his trash cans kicked over and concludes, “Apparently, some colored kids came by and did this.” It’s always the people we don’t like.
At any rate, I’m not sure this is the right site for raising free speech issues. A while back, Rick Ungar got annoyed at me when I suggested BP can’t be trusted on any level. (What a daring charge, no?) When I suggested that he simply wanted to clamp down on criticism of BP, he said, “You may not know this, but if I wanted to quiet voices, I have this neat little delete button where I can make a comment disappear.”
In other words, I’m not guaranteed a voice at T/S. And it has nothing to do with free speech. Ditto for Facebook. I’m not agreeing with their stupid policy, though I’m not surprised. I consider F., as a mode of communication, one step up (if that) from passing notes in class.
Why the [sic], Savio? I don’t capitalize bible because I don’t hold it sacred. True, usage panels would frown on this, which is why I’d capitalize it in formal writing, but the note I appended here was written with blood at a rolling boil, and hardly formal. As for my assumption, I have that inside intel on good evidence from a friend on FB. Then, too, logic points us in that direction. Card-carrying ACLU members of the atheistic stripe aren’t known for their book-burnings; the thought police and self-appointed public morals czars, in recent history, are overwhelmingly, if not entirely, of the religious-right persuasion. Freethinkers are just that, and will defend to the death not only their own right to do so, but the right to free speech of the least appealing members of the community—something fundies on a mission from God (note capitalization!) can’t ever seem to grasp. As for free speech on FB and T/S, the difference is that on FB, a faceless, inaccessible bureaucracy makes the rules, and seems to kowtow to the least principled voices in the bewildered herd—i.e., those who deem speech they don’t like “abusive,” and are willing to perjure themselves by punching that button when it isn’t legitimately merited. Here, every blogger is the master of his own domain name, so to speak. I don’t share the perception of the blogger you mentioned, as is evident from the number of vituperative comments I not only permit but, going further, CALL OUT. See the Gaga thread, for example. I’m more anarcho-libertarian when it comes to community ethos on the Web, although I draw the line at trolls. And who doesn’t? That said, I’d never zap someone’s comment unless it was pure, expletive-riddled abuse. And even in many of those instances, I tend to be a firm believer in giving someone enough rope to hang himself.
In response to another comment. See in context »“I don’t capitalize bible because I don’t hold it sacred.”
I don’t find my name sacred, either. But I capitalize it. Using lower-case to convey lack of respect strikes me as… Facebook-ish. And why stop at the Bible, God, or Christianity? How about sarah palin, john boehner, the republican party, texas, fox, the nra? Why is this ritual reserved for Christian nouns? (That’s a semi-rhetorical question.)
“Card-carrying ACLU members of the atheistic stripe aren’t known for their book-burnings; the thought police and self-appointed public morals czars, in recent history, are overwhelmingly, if not entirely, of the religious-right persuasion.”
Well, most believers aren’t known for silencing their critics, either. My mainline Protestant church focuses on what IT believes, and there’s no talk of rescuing America from Rachel Maddow, or anything like that. I’m sure we have people who never turn on MSNBC, but they’re live-and-let-live sorts. Our church focuses on Vacation Bible School, praise music, potlucks, pie sales, etc.
I agree there’s a serious problem with intolerant twits controlling the mute button, but much of that is a consequence of the crowd-is-always-right philosophy that seems to rule in cyberspace, and which poses a serious problem to any kind of speech, free or otherwise. Amazon.com is especially bad in that regard, since they allow users to decide which comments are “useful” and which aren’t–instant censorship. I hate to note that, in the atheist-book-title section of that site, the bullies are overwhelmingly NOT the believers–as at HP, you can’t say a nice (or even neutral) thing about religion without being harassed off the site. An easy solution would be for both sites to start enforcing their own rules (esp. the one about personal attacks), but that seems to be a new one on them.
“I’m more anarcho-libertarian when it comes to community ethos on the Web, although I draw the line at trolls. And who doesn’t?”
Who doesn’t? Well, trolls, for one. I doubt they draw the line at themselves.
To me, the primary virtue of having a reasonable and clearly-communicated set of posting conventions is that it provides a reference point for expression. The issue goes beyond a question of when to shut up vs. when to chime in, or a question of how far is too far. Those should be auxiliary, not primary, concerns.
In response to another comment. See in context »Your logic is irrefutable regarding the capitalization of the word “Bible,” of course. (Parenthetically, I must say that my Inner Felix Unger is thrilled by the mere fact that two equally punctilious souls have found each other, thanks to the miracle of the interwebs, and are debating this point. What are the odds, I wonder?) I’ll repeat my point that I wrote what I wrote in haste, and in heat, but the match point is yours, in this instance.
In response to another comment. See in context »As for your argument that “most believers aren’t known for silencing their critics,” that wasn’t my point, exactly. Rather, I was arguing that, in the public arena (i.e., voices that rise to the level of media visibility), the most vocal morality police and free-speechphobes tend, on balance, to be rightward-leaning, and many if not most of them tend to be religiously conservative. That assertion isn’t at all at odds with your assertion that most mainline Protestants have no dog in the free-speech fight. We’re arguing at cross-purposes. Xtians of the SOJOURNERS persuasion who follow Christ’s many admonishments to minister to the wretched of the earth (“Even as you do unto the least of mine,” etc.) win my unstinting praise and respect. Regrettably, the Xtians hogging most of the media bandwidth—the religious right—adequately earn Nietzsche’s verdict, “The last Christian died on the cross.”
Punctilious is a good word. But most people call me obsessive. (-:
“…many if not most of them tend to be religiously conservative.”
Unfortunately, yes. The new brand of pop Christianity is an evil version of the previous, “You go to your church, and I’ll go to mine” type. It retains the friendly, sweet veneer (if only barely), but nothing else. I do feel there are many truly decent people on (in?) the religious right–people whose private values are the antithesis of the official line. Just as there are Catholics doing wonderful work while their leaders set new lows for hypocrisy and corruption. I also feel the media could at least try to document ordinary, everyday religion, even if it’s less exciting than the ranting, simple-minded kind.
Hopefully I’m not repeating what you’ve already said, but it’s scary that many of Twain’s observations are so current. I guess it demonstrates how far we haven’t come in 100-plus years.
In response to another comment. See in context »Thank you for this. I based a story
at my blog on this post.
High praise indeed. Thanks!
In response to another comment. See in context »Mr. Dery,
You write that the modern reader is likely to see “Twain as a cigar-puffing wisecracker—George Burns doing a Colonel Sanders impression”. This of course true but that is because it is the image Mark Twain himself wished upon himself – most of the time. He of course dropped this façade when he came out publicly against imperialism or racial hatred. However, with the US government having “won” the wars in Cuba and the Philippines, and Black people having been shoved back down by the violence against their success after Reconstruction, people quickly forgot this side of Mark Twain, as he himself wished. The American people did not dream up this Disney-fied version of Mark Twain themselves, it is what he wanted them to think. In his old age he was worried about the financial security of his children and that depended on re-publication of his most marketable books – hence “Colonel Burns”. However he did not forget is convictions. While dictating his autobiography he gave explicit instructions to the editors that they could “suppress” as much of it as they felt appropriate for commercial reasons. He did not think that a lot of his views would need to fully expressed to the public for many decades. What amazing foresight.
You wrote:”Yes, Twain is nostalgic for the distant, drowsy summer of his boyhood, synonymous for him and us with an arcadian America shattered by the Civil War and dragged headlong into modernity by the industrial revolution.”
The classic problem that late readers of “Huckleberry Finn” have is that they project upon it “Tom Sawyer”. The two books could not be more different. There is nothing sentimental or nostalgic about Huckleberry Finn. It is a dark tale about a boy who steals a slave and, like Odysseus is blown off course to face all that is frightening and overwhelming in America. It is an American Odyssey all of the cyclopes and sirens along the way. It is not childs tale.
Really nice piece on Twain. I have taught Huck Finn at university for many years, and sometimes The Mysterious Stranger. Most students were not surprised that Twain was not Col. Sanders in disguise. In advanced courses I used the collected stories.
One student response relates to your riff on Camille Paglia. I had a brilliant Greek exchange student who said about Huck Finn that he had long wanted to read what he had heard was America’s Odyssey. But it was a disappointment because of the total lack of sex and women. He though that juvenile. Naturally I made the point that Twain was writing in Victorian America. But Huck’s presumed sisters, prostitutes probably, were too noticably missing for his reading.
I do disagree with your evaluation of Paglia–she may be brilliant, but she’s also an idiot, a kind of idiot savant about sex and real life. But that’s me.
Kind of you to say. Did Huck have sisters? I’d missed that. I’ll have to comb more carefully through the backstory, in TOM SAWYER. There’s a reference to his dead mother—interesting link, here, from Huck’s and Tom’s dead mothers to all the motherless animals in Disney and all the motherless children in ’60s and ’70s TV (Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Family Affair, Nanny and the Professor, et. al.)—but I didn’t recall any reference to sisters. Your Greek student is wrong in his assertion that HUCKLEBERRY FINN “lacks” women; as I note above, women—Aunt Polly, Aunt Sally, the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, the shrewd country woman who isn’t fooled by Huck’s cross-dressing attempt to pass as a girl, and of course the spirited, tough-minded Mary Jane Wilks—are indomitable figures in the novel, buzzkills in some instances to be sure (Miss Watson is little more than a caricatured figure of fun) but empowered nonetheless. But yes, sex is everywhere absent from Twain’s nostalgic world, except as a signifier of the sordid: the House of Death floating down the river, fouled by debauchery, with a man’s corpse dressed in women’s clothes, is a skin-crawlingly creepy emblem of depravities too monstrous to be described outright.
In response to another comment. See in context »As for Paglia, perhaps I was too subtle: what I was trying to say, perhaps too judiciously, is that I think she’s a carpet-chewing loon in every regard but her literary criticism, and even that suffers from an eye-rollingly corny insistence on shoehorning everything into her Jungian binary (Apollonian versus Dionysian archetypes), then adding an Oedipal spin. Yet despite a terminal narcissism that insists on inserting herself into nearly every pronouncement, a weakness for sweeping generalizations unsupported by citations, and a mind straitjacketed by simplistic binaries, she’s often hilariously funny and jaw-droppingly outrageous, even if she’s weaving her argument out of brain floss. Her best book, far and away, is SEXUAL PERSONAE; the rest is brain droppings. I like her in the way that I like, say, Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption”: as a self-parodically over-the-top, middlebrow exercise in the Male Arc of Transcendence she loves so much. Nothing succeeds like excess. Of course, her political arguments are puerile, not to mention utterly incoherent. But she has the courage of her convictions, wetbrained though they be, and after a hard day’s wading through impenetrable, irony-impaired critical theory, she’s a jolt of Red Bull, straight to the brainstem.
No, Huck did not have sisters, because if he did, they would be sluts, to be realistic, as Twain thought he was being. Not my original idea, someone else said it.
You are brave to find Paglia refreshing. But truly, a diet of self-conscious literary criticism will do it. I am a literary historian and first-generation pop culture scholar. Was a practicing semiotician but found a lot of my peers in the Semiotic Society appearewd to be speaking in tongues, and not just the French.
All politics are local, all knowledges situated (Tip O’Neill meets Donna Haraway). Read Homi Bhaba for an hour, or Rosalind Krauss, or Lacan, or Spivak, and Paglia will go down like a Mensan’s idea of a Jell-O shooter.
In response to another comment. See in context »Well, I loved the Grandpa Goth essay. But what is up with the eviscerating assault on Camille Paglia in the comments section, here? “Wet-brained”? Really? Harsh tone, man!
You were so fair, so respectful and courteous in the original article. You disagreed with her assessments of Twain, but kindly, letting the reader decide for themselves whose arguments were more compelling without ad hominem attacks implying brain damage. (If you really think that, then you shouldn’t be debating her in the first place.)
Anyway, I take Paglia’s side when it comes to Twain’s literary style. You close your essay with a Huck Finn passage that drips with a fakey-folky twang. While it may touch on a big Truth or two, the prose definitely comes across as more than a little aritificial. The nature scenes you quote from Twain struck me as a little garage sale oil painting-ish.
Still, I look forward to reading Twain’s autobiography. I love that he insisted it remain unpublished for so long. If art and the artist’s life have real meaning, then they should still resonate 100 years after the fact. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we can see ourselves in his dark vision, and if we can’t, then why would we read it at all?
Well, I think Mr. Dery is more respectful of Paglia than she is of anyone she disagrees with. If you like Paglia, how can you object to some strong language??
As for “fakey, folky twang”–alas, poor Twain, getting the J.F.Cooper treatment which he administered so blithely. He thought he was setting down the way his characters would sound in real life.
Strong language is great. I just hate when the arguments resort to these attacks on a person’s mental competence. But I’m seeing plenty of examples where Ms.Paglia does it too. So, fair game. Carry on!
In response to another comment. See in context »Off point, but T/S is going down soon and I thought I’d better get this in- Just finished reading “Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raider Fan Empire”, by Miller and Mayhew, as per your reccomendation. Thanks! What a lovely little book.