The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

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summary

Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"

was first published in November 18, 1865. It is set in a gold-mining

camp in Calaveras County, California, and has its origins in the

folklore of the Gold Rush era.

"Jumping Frog" was originally told as a letter. In the story, Twain

recounts his visit with an old man named Simon Wheeler in a

California mining camp. Wheeler tells Twain a colorful story about

another miner, Jim Smiley. According to Wheeler, Smiley loved to

make bets; he would bet on nearly anything. Wheeler relates some of

Smiley's more famous gambling escapades, one of which concerns a

pet frog. Critics frequently cite this story as an example of a tall tale

and note Twain's use of humor and exaggeration. They also

emphasize the tale's satirical focus on storytelling and existing

cultural differences between the western and eastern regions of the

United States.

Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was

first published in the November 18,1865, edition of The New York

Saturday Press, under the title ' 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." The

story, which has also been published as "The Notorious Jumping Frog of

Calaveras County," is set in a gold-mining camp in Calaveras County,

California, and has its origins in the folklore of the Gold Rush era. It was

one of Twain's earliest writings, and helped establish his reputation as a

humorist. He eventually included it as the title story in his first collection

of tales.

"Jumping Frog" was originally told in epistolary form—that is, as a

letter—though some reprints of the tale have since omitted this

letter-frame convention. In the story, Twain recounts his visit, made at

the request of a friend back East, to an old man named Simon Wheeler in

a California mining camp.

Wheeler tells Twain a colorful story about another miner, Jim

Smiley. According to Wheeler, Smiley loved to make bets; he would bet

on nearly anything. Wheeler relates some of Smiley's more famous

gambling escapades, one of which concerns a pet frog. Critics frequently

cite this story as an example of a tall tale and note Twain's use of humor

and exaggeration. They also emphasize the tale's satirical focus on

storytelling and existing cultural differences between the western and

eastern regions of the United States.

Mark Twain

Philip Fisher

In 1861 at the age of twenty-six Samuel Clemens deserted the Company of Missouri

Volunteers; in effect, "resigning" from the Civil War in its opening days. He set out for the

territory of Nevada to spend the years of the war prospecting for silver, loafing in bohemian

ease, and learning the newspaper world of the booming West. He had, by means of his flight,

decided that his was to be the generation that lived in the shadow of the gold rush rather than

that of the Civil War. His would be the age of suddenly worthless silver-mine shares rather

than the aftermath of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Samuel Clemens would be part of

a generation rotating dizzily around the pole of wealth rather than that of race.

Presided over by P. T. Barnum, but also by the seemingly endless and lucrative inventive

fertility of Thomas Edison, its fortunes tied to oil and railroads, steel and coal, Clemens's

generation used up reality in double time. It raced from the steamboat age of a canal-, river-,

and waterway-linked republic of the 1840s and 1850s, through the continental spree of

railroad building after the Civil War, to the onset of democratic private transportation: Henry

Ford's Model T passenger car of the 1900s. The railroad boom meant the collapse of the

steamboats and canals just as, later, the highways, buses, automobiles, and trucking industry

would bring down, in their turn, the railroads. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson's image come to

life: each new circle was only formed to be, yet again, encircled.

Both wealth and fame had a magical and dangerous aspect in the years between the Civil War

and 1910, the year of Clemens's death. That magic and that danger gave him the armature for

his major works. The Clemens family lived in the dream, from which Sam at an early age

distanced himself, that the 20,000 acres of so far worthless Tennessee land to which they held

claim might someday, overnight, make them rich. Magical, possible wealth from this land

became a dream that sapped the life energy of Clemens's brother Orion and sister Pamela.

Even Sam's various talents were in some ways always seen by him as his own, private

Tennessee Land, assets that tottered between fabulous wealth and mere claims.

For the United States in these years wealth had an aspect of treasure for which the gold rush

was an accurate preview. Oil, coal, gold, silver, or iron ore might be just out of sight,

underground, like the money found by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the cave at the end of

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). The largest fortunes were still made by selling and

reselling the land itself in city lots or rural sections. The linking of the continent into the

European economic system had converted scenery into real estate, dirt into land. Accidental

rights-of-way where railroads had drawn a line on the map multiplied the value of every

adjacent cornfield. Inventions like Clemens's own easy-stick photo album, the thought of a

few minutes, earned him more than his books for a year or two. The Horatio Alger qualities of

luck, alertness, and daring paid off at a faster rate than hard work, thrift, and patience. The

nation became one large exchange, a world of "prospectors," "claim-holders," and traders in

imaginative schemes. It was a world of future values.

Shares, speculations, and political giveaways turned paper into fortunes, but just as often

turned fortunes back into worthless paper. When Clemens was a publisher, his luck and timing

brought him the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, for whose widow he made a fortune. Then,

within a few years, Clemens's own fortune had been thrown away in the same publishing

business on his speculative backing of the Paige automatic typesetting machine, which in his

typically manic style he thought of as potentially the greatest invention in human history and,

incidentally, one that would make him fabulously wealthy. His bankruptcy only ensured that

Clemens, like his entire generation, would know both sides of the cycle of boom and bust. In

Roughing It (1872) we see in miniature the sudden dreamlike shifts that would shape

Clemens's life as a whole. In one set of chapters he is rich for ten days, but within a few pages

we find him down and out in San Francisco nursing his last dime. His life led him to make and

waste fortunes. He married an heiress, spent fortunes on his gaudy Hartford, Connecticut,

mansion, chased gimmicks and inventions all his life, and signed on again and again for

ruinously exhausting but lucrative lecture tours to recoup his finances.

Clemens knew that the man that corrupted Hadleyburg did so with the promise of wealth.

Often his plots involve a poisonous gift. Three of his best late stories, "The $30,000 Bequest,"

"The £1,000,000 Bank Note," and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," turn on spectral

wealth that remains untouchable or decays in the hands. In The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

(1894), the slave woman Roxy's gift to her child of a life as a white man produces only

destruction. The treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer becomes a prison

for Huck in the book that follows, one that he has to stage his own death to escape from. This

should make us reconsider even Huck's gift to Jim of his freedom because in each of

Clemens's tales the gift of self-transformation (whether in the form of freedom, wealth, or

whiteness) turns in the aftermath to poison. And yet magical, unearned release, like the silver

wealth of Nevada, was always at the heart of what Clemens meant by action.

His story of the 1890s, "The £1,000,000 Bank Note," is an allegory of the anxiety of talent, an

uncashable bank note that nonetheless can work as wealth. The note leads to fame, newspaper

attention, public belief or amusement, credit, and finally to secondary wealth, true love,

marriage, and social position just as Clemens's own talent had. Yet the note is never spent,

only exhibited for the eyes of others. The story is an unusually candid study of the

commercialization of talent in a world of dupes and worshipers of wealth. The artist's life is

viewed as a bunco scheme, a pyramid sales fraud in which the pleasure of being entertained

leads the public to buy worthless shares. The public world of Clemens's allegory is an

inch-thick crust of reality on which only the brave walk to success or fall through to

bankruptcy. The story's hero has the elated feeling of having pulled something off or of having

gotten away with something. The world in which he moves is one in which people buy each

other's worthless shares and all get rich together on faith. They float together in the

insubstantial air of a society of massive credit, debt, risk, and collapse.

The magical and treacherous qualities of wealth under these unique American circumstances

came to seem aspects of reality itself for Clemens. The manic confidence in which all reality

seemed to be play, ready to be made into the limitless forms of the imagination, turned for him

later in life into the nightmare of depression in which the boys at play are suddenly seen as

puppets jerked mechanically by a malicious and cruel power whose game or toys they all

along had been.

A world relying on the imagery of sudden wealth and financial collapse is alternately a comic

and an embittered one. The economic swing from boom to bust or from expectation to

disappointment has formal elements in common with the style of humor on which Clemens

relied. The hoax, the fraud, the stunt, the practical joke are all comic forms based on

speculation and collapse. Boasting, bragging, mock-heroic exaggeration, and inflation, along

with their subsequent collapse into fact, are verbal and formal equivalents to the greatly

inflated promissory economics of boomtowns and boom times, to silver strikes and grand

schemes that are mere projections from small beginnings.

The strategy of hyperbole, of exaggeration and its subsequent contraction to the merely real,

becomes endemic as a comic form wherever the real is "not yet" real. Exaggeration describes

the necessary part that daring, imagination, self-confidence, dreaming, and projection play in

bringing about reality where most of reality remains unfinished. Colonel Sellers in The Gilded

Age (1873) is Clemens's most lively version of this necessary type for societies in their youth.

Such speculators are the opposite of liars. A lie looks back to the past that it alters verbally.

Speculators look forward by means of descriptions that human will, energy, and luck will

vindicate. In making reality happen the pioneer is cousin to the trickster. World builders and

frauds share common ground, and it is this ground that the comic art of Clemens makes

visible. Large numbers of values within such a world come to count in the future in a

speculative way. The price of a share of stock involves a guess about future earnings; the

worth of an acre of land takes in the future town that will be built around it and the train that

will someday connect the town to Chicago. Every riddle or joke plays on this rhythm of

speculation followed by collapse back into the ordinary. When Tom Sawyer stages his

heartless phony rescue of Jim at the conclusion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a

speculative reality is evoked and then collapsed, but not without real wounds. Tom's staging,

in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, of his own funeral, at which he then puts in a surprise

appearance, involves a similar joke like speculative reality and collapse. Fraud, trickster,

inventor, and imaginative agent of civilization, along with the humorist and the criminal

salesman of nonexistent realities, are, in Clemens's work, all blood brothers.

The comic plots of greed and speculation, fraud and dreams, unmasking and pretense are ones

that center on the moral problem of honesty rather than that of courage As a writer, Clemens

was driven both toward play and toward a directness and candor that had to be rescued from a

world of play indistinguishable from inflation, fraud, and, finally, delusion. Clemens's single

greatest creation, Huck Finn, at least always knows when he lies, exaggerates, hides facts,

plays tricks, or masquerades. He knows the difference between an alias and a name, a "story"

and a story. At the same time, he makes use of all of them.

Huck's opposite, and Clemens's single other great character, Colonel Sellers of The Gilded

Age, was a dreamer within the mazelike world of promotion and flamboyant, exaggerated

salesmanship, as his name's pun on ''seller" points out. Sellers is the master of the widest use

of what in the silver-mining West were quite rightly called "claims." He lived always halfway

between what reality was and what it might be. In this he shared one essential part of the

outlook of a generation of major capitalists and world builders. He was one of those

enthusiasts or braggarts or liars (depending on the outcome) who could see railroads where an

ordinary man sees a ditch, but who often do, in the end, make a railroad that turns out to fit

nicely right alongside what used to be the ditch, making out of worthless land a "site" for

depot, town, house lots, views, parks, and, out of all of these, money.

The material world of wealth, which had been both accelerated and mystified by the new

machinery of shares, claims, and inventions, and by the simple fact of the unfinished state of

American society, had its parallel in the immaterial world of fame that had been compressed

and speeded up in the public world of Clemens's lifetime. Clemens lived through three

larger-than-life American presidencies. The differences among them register the new forces

for the magnification of the self in American life. Born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, Samuel

Langhorne Clemens was a child in Hannibal, Missouri, during the presidency of Andrew

Jackson, who democratized and gave a populist turn to political imagery. The years of

Abraham Lincoln coincided with Clemens's years of apprenticeship in the newspaper world

and with his invention of his public identity, Mark Twain. His final decade was passed in the

era of Theodore Roosevelt, who had managed to surpass even Twain himself to become the

"most famous man in the world.”

These three very different but equally popular presidencies gave distinct and novel meanings

to the public world in which Clemens sought, as Mark Twain, to insert himself. Jackson's was

a public world best expressed by symbolic sculptural figures, most often of military leaders

like George Washington, Napoleon, or Jackson himself. Each leader was mythically frozen in

equestrian statuary and set in outdoor civic space.

Lincoln's was a world of the voice, of the debate platform, of the common visage best

captured in Brady's photographs, tragic but ordinary, an ugliness and integrity fit for a world

of realism. Lincoln's was a world of photographs instead of sculpture, but above all it was a

world of short, noble speeches fit for the most solemn moments of national history.

Forty years later, Teddy Roosevelt's was a world of the new fame of newspaper cartoons and

headlines, and of the early movies that would soon define the mechanism called stardom.

Slogans, bluster, distinctive, memorable, and infinitely variable signature traits: equipped with

these Roosevelt embodied the new public world of advertising. It was a projectable, thin fame

of stylistic touches and unforgettable identity that could be said to make a man or a product

"stand out" from the crowd that society had become.

Samuel Clemens's life overlapped the worlds of Jackson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, and in his

public persona, Mark Twain, he drew on elements of public style and self-promotion from

each of the three realms of popularity. William Dean Howells once called Mark Twain the

Lincoln of our literature. It would be equally true to see him as the frontiersman Jackson, the

great democrat of our literature, conquering the Eastern establishment and making our

literature, for the first time, a national rather than a provincial New England affair. At the same

time Twain was the Teddy Roosevelt of our literature, its first newspaper and media

personality, its first cartoon figure who knew how to grab publicity with his flamboyance and

his wit, and then turn that publicity to good use for the ongoing business that was Mark Twain,

Incorporated. He was, in effect, our first modern literary politician. Only Ernest Hemingway

would equal him in the generation that followed.

Samuel Clemens is the only significant American writer to be known by a pen name: Mark

Twain. Earlier English writers had used pen names to indicate aristocratic embarrassment

about taking up the low role of author, or for moral caution in an age of censorship, or, as was

the case with George Eliot, to express a woman's unwillingness to have her books dismissed

as mere "female novels." The name "Mark Twain" differs because it is more like a brand name

in a commercial world of celebrity, advertisement, and packaged products like Ivory Soap,

Coca Cola, and Winchester rifles. "Mark Twain" was an enterprise that included popular travel

writing, coast-to-coast lecturing, door-to-door subscription sales of his books, a publishing

house, and speculations in various inventions. The name was a trademark, secured by constant

public witticisms and cartoons, and stabilized by a fixed and well-known eccentric appearance.

His bushy red (later white) hair and mustache, black suits, or, later in life, white suits, and the

distinctive costumes like his sealskin coat worn inside out and his honorary Oxford gown that

he wore on every possible occasion made him recognizable on the streets or in the few strokes

of a newspaper cartoon. His flamboyant Hartford mansion, recalling a Mississippi River

steamboat, was a form of highly visible corporate headquarters, not different from the many

skyscrapers in New York or Chicago that caught the eye and stood for the corporate identities

of newspapers, banks, and the new giant industrial corporations. Clemens was so well known

that he only had to walk slowly onto the stage and stand silent for the audience to begin to

laugh.

The newspapers that Twain began by writing for as a cub reporter in San Francisco, and then,

back East, edited and owned, and finally as a famous personality of the day became an endless

series of stories for, were at the peak of their power to define public reality. Joseph Pulitzer

and William Randolph Hearst created the mass circulation newspaper in the 1880s and 1890s

as an everyday "best-seller" with sales in the millions of copies. The newspaper was an organ

of celebrity and notoriety that lived off ever new heroes and ever more sordid scandals and

political exposés. The newspapers turned nobodies into celebrities and likewise turned

yesterday's celebrities into has-beens with the same speed that the penny stocks and worthless

claims became wealth and then mere paper. The forty-year love affair between Mark Twain

and America was carried on through the new structure of celebrity and fame that had as its

center the newspapers and their new mass audiences.

Three features of American culture in the late nineteenth century fed into the uniquely popular

and commercial vitality of Clemens's work: the newspaper, the lecture platform, and the new

national market made possible by the door-to-door salesman, and later by the Sears, Roebuck

Catalog. Clemens himself was an overnight success as a writer when his story "The

Celebrated Jumping Frog" (1865) was reprinted in newspapers across the land. This initial

success was symbolic, for Clemens was in effect America's first coast-to-coast writer whose

books were known and read from literary Boston to the tiniest rural areas reached by the army

of subscription salesmen through whom his books were marketed. If the newspaper was one

side of his contact with a mass audience, the door-to-door salesman was the other, but each

fed on the chemistry of personal contact that Clemens established in his many lecture tours. It

was the overwhelming success of his lecture tours in the late, 1860s that made him a national

figure.

The lecture platform had been the source of Emerson's public fame and the place of decisive

political encounters like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It was an elevated space in which the

American crowd was roused by the abolitionists, the suffragists, or by temperance advocates.

From the platform the public was brought to patriotic fervor by Fourth of July oratory and

urged to repent by fire-breathing or gentlemanly preachers of the day. This lecture platform

was, in Twain's day, undergoing a transformation from a medium of politics and culture to a

source of entertainment. Still, it was the primary medium of public life, as the television

would be a century later in the 1960s and 1970s, or as the newspaper would be for most of the

years in between.

Americans heard rather than read the stories of travelers. The latest religious or political ideas

came fused with the seductive or the trumpeting voice. Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan

were its masters, but the Reverend Dwight Lyman Moody was its P. T. Barnum. American

philosophy itself from Emerson to William James performed in public. The lecture platform

was a culture of the voice and the ear. Many of its best-loved speakers Dickens, Kipling, and

Twain, for example were writers who were meant to be read aloud.

On the stages of America Clemens was a performer rather than a lecturer, and yet his

appearance continued that lyceum tradition in which Emerson had given his public

performances of American philosophy or in which the serious issues of the day had been aired.

By Clemens's day the great educational mission of the lecture platform had begun to give way

to entertainment. Humorists like Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby had replaced Henry

David Thoreau and William Ellery Channing. Travel lectures supplanted philosophy and

antislavery agitation. In fact, by the 1860s when Clemens's career began, the American stage

was already halfway between lyceum and vaudeville.

Yet, in spite of what might be seen as the decline to entertainment, Twain shared with

Emerson an extravagance of language and a play with those extremes of exaggeration that

lead to mystical wisdom or to laughter. Twain begins where Emersonian loftiness meets the

tall tale. Both men lectured and wrote in episodic forms of staged excitement. Twain moves

from one punch line to another following the energy of the crowd in just the way that, on a

philosophical plane, Emerson's pith and epigrams, his local intensity and explosiveness, gave

to his lectures and essays a formlessness that was in effect philosophical thrill-seeking in

search of sudden breathtaking prospects. Those huge cliffs over which Emerson invited his

listeners to peer had their equivalents in Twain's breathless stunts, his wild stories that led only

to the next even wilder story.

Throughout his career Twain worked in bursts of energy. He was a man made for tirades, for

set-piece descriptions, for loving enthusiastic sketches or venomous denunciations. As a result,

even his best books are made up of patches of extraordinary writing. Incidents or episodes that

are nearly perfect are lodged with structures that lurch from matter to matter. Dozens of

energies are ignited only to fizzle out. His books work in four-or five-chapter units. The book

then jumps to new settings, new complications. In Twain's work there are no plots, only local

complications.

The lecture circuit from which Twain, like Emerson in the previous generation, earned his

living laid the ground rules, in combination with the newspapers, their cartoons, and the

emerging art of photography, for a popular culture of celebrity and media dominance that

would, in the twentieth century, move to Hollywood and later to television. In his late

nineteenth-century world Mark Twain was what we now call a "star." By 1905 he shared with

that former Rough Rider, President Theodore Roosevelt, our first headline and cartoon

president, the honor of being the best-known American of his generation. Twain was the

funniest man in the English-speaking world.

Just as Twain's first lectures propelled him to the center of the lecture circuit, so too his first

book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), an expanded version of his newspaper columns that

reported on the events of a grand tour of Europe and the Holy Lands, became a best-seller.

Sold by subscription salesmen in the small towns of America, the book locked in a genuinely

democratic national audience for Twain's subsequent work. Twain supplied that audience with

what might almost be called, in the commercial sense, a "product" for approximately thirty

years.

Twain's awareness of his audience and of the many fads within the book market led to a

calculated positioning of his secondary books. He followed every move of the best-seller

market. The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

(1889) exploited the popularity of children's books and European romance fantasies. Personal

Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896) was written in the years that saw Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur

and Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis? become widely discussed best-sellers as religious,

historical costume romances. Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) picked up many of the devices of the

detective-story fad in the wake of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who first appeared

in 1891. Even the very special attention to dialect and Southern voice in Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn responded to the craze started by the Uncle Remus stories that Joel

Chandler Harris had published in 1881. Of course, the travel books and the lecture platform

persona were modeled on distinct popular and lucrative commercial opportunities of the

moment.

Setting out to write in the late 1860s, Twain found himself in the shadow of the unprecedented

popularity of Charles Dickens, whose American reading tours in 1842 and 1867 were models

for Twain's own. Just as James Fenimore Cooper had Americanized the historical novel of

Walter Scott by importing the techniques of description, setting, national history, and the

adventure-novel form into the American novel of the 1820s, so too did Twain and his

contemporaries Bret Harte and Harriet Beecher Stowe take their start from the novel as

designed by Dickens, the central novelist of the English-speaking world. Whereas Scott's was

a novel of place and landscape, its finest passages being descriptive and atmospheric, the

novel of Dickens was a novel of the speaking voice. Both narrator and characters came to life

by means of unique, garrulous torrents of inventive language. It was this that Twain learned

from Dickens: voice was the key to a comic, dramatic novel of picturesque individualities. In

his Martin Chuzzlewit (1842) Dickens had shown American writers how to do America by

means of its bragging, exaggerating, florid voices, its colorful characters with their energy and

oddness.

Twain's many great speaking voices, which range from the riverboat pilots to Colonel Sellers,

the King, and the Duke, are men made real by their flow of talk. Dickens invented the novel

as a gallery of voices and it was just such a gallery that the greatest of Twain's works would be:

books that can be heard as they are read. The set of distinct authorial voices from the canny

narrator of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog" through The Innocents Abroad, Life on the

Mississippi, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the cranky, sarcastic voices of the final

books: these voices add up to Mark Twain, the signature by which he is best recognized.

Naturally, one of Twain's greatest achievements was to write the most important first-person

narrative in American literature, the novel told in the uniquely honest and vital voice of Huck

Finn. In Huck, Twain invented a richer autobiographical voice than the comparatively weak

first-person voices of Dickens. In David Copperfield and Great Expectations it is in the

central voice of David or Pip that Dickens's art lacks character. It was just here that Twain

went beyond Dickens. Dickens needed to set his picturesque figures at a distance where they

can be seen externally, like actors of their own identity on the novel's stage. In this visual

distance Twain created Colonel Sellers, his most obviously Dickensian character. Twain, in

the naive voice he assumed in The Innocents Abroad, in the deepened voice of fervid

admiration in "Old Times on the Mississippi," and in his greatest voice, that of Huck Finn,

enriched the Dickensian pattern. He played off the gallery of figures and voices against a

central voice that was both poetic and humorous, capable of reaching unexpected and fanciful

passages that were as strongly etched as the characters themselves. Twain made it possible to

become intimate with the Dickensian character, knowing it from the inside. He shattered the

doll-like mechanical externality of Dickens's figures by staging his books around the inner life

of an appealing central narrator whose voice and idiom had a freshness that created anew the

entire observed world and charged it with moral drama and play.

The experience that gave an essential form to much of Twain's work was the experience of

travel. In motion from place to place, alternating excitement with the boredom or exhaustion

that tells the travelers to move on, Twain created in his travel work the model of a novelist

who, whenever he runs dry, turns to a new chapter or that of a humorist who pauses and

begins an unrelated anecdote whenever he feels his audience becoming restless. Travel is

made up of a set of episodic events and encounters with what Twain would always call

"characters." What holds the loosely assembled episodes together is the fresh descriptive point

of view of the traveler himself. The series of clearly audible narrative voices that give both

texture and tension to his works was one of Twain's greatest achievements. Its climax was the

extraordinary speaking voice of Huck Finn. The reliance on a central, distinctive guiding

voice was a consequence of the travel form where the fresh angle of vision holds the reader's

interest, where there is neither a plot nor any characterization that is more than momentary.

From The Innocents Abroad (1869) through A Tramp Abroad (1880) to Following the Equator

(1897) Twain produced what were literally travel narratives, but the inner logic of travel

shaped his more important works as well. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn describes a journey

down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives, Huck and Jim. Their episodic set of

encounters lets the reader sample the small-town world of America and survey the social

world from the bank of the river that runs through the heart of the country. Twain's

autobiographical Bildungsroman, Roughing It (1872), works first of all as a story of

successive apprenticeships in which young Sam Clemens turns prospector, reporter, lecturer in

the process of finding himself or rather, finding himself to be Mark Twain. This story Twain

superimposes onto a travel narrative of a journey that works its way farther and farther west

through Nevada to San Francisco to Hawaii. The journey west, like the journey south

undertaken by Huck Finn, is at the same time a journey toward identity. Going west and

growing up, rafting south and finding moral identity are both stories told by means of the

loose, bit by bit structure of travel.

Twain's other great autobiographical work was the work known as "Old Times on the

Mississippi" when it appeared month by month in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875. Later

expanded to make up the book Life on the Mississippi (1883), it was the most concentrated

and fervid of his books of memory. The story of his boyhood ambition to become a riverboat

pilot, it too, like Roughing It, was a novel of education and apprenticeship, and it too was told

in terms of journeys, this time up and down the Mississippi. The young man masters the river,

learning it like a book whose every word and comma he memorizes while, in the process,

growing into his dream. He passes from the boy on the small town's wharf looking with awe

at the steamboat to the young man who has become a pilot. Like many of Twain's books about

dreams, Life on the Mississippi is the story both of a dream achieved and of a dream shattered.

The boy becomes a pilot, but the Civil War ends the brief days of glory on the river. In Twain's

narrative the steamboat explosion that kills his brother Henry and ends the boyhood narrative

substitutes for the larger explosion of the war itself. The journeys up and down the miles of

the river in which its every danger is memorized are then replaced by journeys of memory in

which the middle-aged writer revisits the river as the scene of his youth.

In Twain's own work the outward travel of the novel of education that had yielded Roughing It

and Life on the Mississippi gave way to the inward travel of memory and recollection that, in

the aftermath of the later chapters of Life on the Mississippi, produced two of Twain's best

books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In these classic

accounts of small-town American boyhood, Twain, now married, successful, established in the

wealthy Eastern suburbs of Hartford, travels back to a childhood that has to be protected from

growth or education. Within the books one of the most powerful acts is the act of running

away.

The Hawaiian, European, or world tours that lay behind Twain's successful lectures were only

the most literal of his travels and travel books. His later fantasy books had as their premise

travel in time instead of in space. These could best be seen as travel books through history

rather than through either geography or personal memory. A Connecticut Yankee in King

Arthur's Court (1889) literally transports, in the style of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, the

nineteenth-century Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan, back into the mythic days of King

Arthur and Merlin. Time-travel takes the hero through an episodic experience of the feudal

world comparable in structure to the experience of contemporary Europe in The Innocents

Abroad or of the American West in Roughing It or of the South in Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn. Twain's book for children The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and his historical novel

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896) were more superficial examples of his narratives

of time-travel. But it was not the journeys into the historical time of A Connecticut Yankee in

King Arthur's Court or the Prince and the Pauper that yielded Twain's most profound work.

The central experience that produced "Old Times on the Mississippi," The Adventures of Torn

Sawyer, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn within the ten years between 1874 and 1884 was

a journey back into personal memory that let Twain view his own boyhood as a country to be

revisited and reported on to his extraordinary audience.

His late stories "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1899) and the posthumously

published "The Mysterious Stranger" represented, for the first time, the story of travel from

the other side of the telescope, that of the society invaded, disturbed, or finally destroyed by a

traveler who mysteriously arrives and just as mysteriously disappears. Twain's normal point of

view is that of the invader, the outsider, the traditional trickster of folk literature. Huck Finn is

his Don Quixote and Odysseus all in one. Like every traveler, Twain's disappear, taking with

them at least the story of their adventures from which they will profit elsewhere. Only in the

final stories did he address the disruptive influence of the visitor, his power to toy with the

world that he invades like a god, and, finally, his power to vanish when it suits his mood or

purpose.

In his greatest work, Huckleberry Finn, Twain splits his outsiders into two pairs. The King

and the Duke invade to plunder and con the many worlds along the river. Huck and Jim enter

homes or towns because they must. To protect their freedom or their lives, they disguise

themselves, lie, invent stories, and accept affection and hospitality in order to survive, while at

their side, the King and the Duke duplicate their every ploy in the interest of hard cash. The

King's first social disguise is in fact accurate. He is best described as a pirate, but not as the

romantic pirate of children's literature. He lands to plunder. One of the most banal and squalid

outlaws of American literature, he cashes in on every situation that he encounters. His loot,

like many a pirate's, ends buried in a grave, and the only money he holds onto comes from the

sale of Jim for $30. Huck's greatest danger in the novel is that he will be contaminated by

those characters whose acts parallel, while differing in subtle ways from, his own. The King

and the Duke draw him into their performances, which differ mainly in clumsiness and greed

from his own earlier defensive ruses. Later, after Huck has escaped being tarred by the same

brush that finally blackens the two villains, his adventures are juxtaposed to those of an even

nearer twin: the artistic but innocent theatricalities of Tom Sawyer, whose very name Huck

finds himself stuck with in his final impersonation. One of the extraordinary features of the

structure of Huckleberry Finn rests on these nuanced moral differentiations made between

closely parallel outsiders, tricksters, and frauds, outsiders and invaders who stir into visibility

the many sleeping towns they slip their way into.

These literal and metaphoric travels anchor Twain's writing and design his narrator around the

perceptions of the tourist, the visitor, the greenhorn, the innocent, the fugitive, or the demonic

intruder. At the same time his many travel forms resonate with the wider social facts of the

years between 1840 and 1910. His wise-guy reporter style, perfected in his first best-seller,

The Innocents Abroad, parodied the rather solemn Victorian cultural pilgrimages in which

thousands of Americans paid homage to the art and history of Europe. John Ruskin in his

Stones of Venice or Henry James and Henry Adams in their travel writings or novels

spiritualized the journey abroad, giving it, as Henry Adams was to do in Mont-Saint-Michel

and Chartres, a quasi-religious, high-cultural tone that completed a new solemnization of art

and history for which Ruskin, Walter Pater, James, and Adams were key figures. In contrast,

Twain debunked and sassed his way past the masterpieces of Europe as though his struggle

with Europe were something of a boxing match between two scrappy lightweights. He stood

up to Europe, unlike James who looked up to it. He refused to be bullied by culture, and in so

doing he defended democratic ordinariness with his arsenal of humor and sarcastic leveling

against the cultural pressures to genuflect but also to buy up the treasures of Europe. Twain

writes against the grain of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun or Henry James's novels

from The American to The Ambassadors. Although Twain subtitled his book "The New

Pilgrims Progress," what he defies with bravado is the American self-deprecation that the

homage to Europe of Hawthorne, James, and Adams involved. (p640)

Twain did not locate himself purely as the antagonist of Victorian cultural stuffiness; he also

positioned his travel books, especially Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, within the rich

nineteenth-century literature of exploration. Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail or the earlier

Journals of Lewis and Clark along with the exploration-like passages of Cooper's Leather

stocking tales are instances of a pragmatic and lyrical spirit that fused exploration with both

realism and poetry. Thoreau's exploration and mapping of his own backyard in Walden and the

best chapters of Twain's Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn are the essential lyrical

masterpieces of American pragmatic exploration. Both Thoreau and Twain are surveyors who

know the world through exact measurement and precise description. It is a world that he who

knows, masters. The pilot, not the passenger, is the master of his fate on the river. It is a detail

of great symbolic importance that in his greatest work, Huckleberry Finn, it is the more fragile

and vulnerable raft, barely controllable and subject to many forces larger than itself, traveling

mostly in the dark of night and carrying fugitives, that Twain substitutes for the lordly

Mississippi steamboat, a regal dominating presence on the river. But from the pilot house of

the riverboat the singular authority of the pilot takes dominion over the river as Thoreau did

over his smaller world at Walden.

The exploration of the American West, described from the moment of the rush to settlement

and land claims in Twain's Roughing It, went on simultaneously with the great European

exploration of Africa, the Nile, and the Arctic. The travel works of Henry Stanley, David

Livingstone, and Mungo Park describe the conquest of the few remaining unknown parts of

the globe with which the exploration and settlement of the American West coincided. The look

and feel of the entire surface of the earth, including its odd local customs and inhabitants, was

being digested by a culture that had invented anthropology and had begun to measure the

details of social life on a worldwide basis. Twain's Roughing It, especially its ludicrous

Hawaiian chapters, was a minor masterpiece of the amateur, reportorial wing of a powerful

intellectual hunger to know and to observe, to explore and record even the most remote

cultures. The interest within literary realism in local color and regionalism, along with the

authorial pride in recording dialects and local expressions, is the more conventional,

provincial part of this wider narrative research.

From the genial, wisecracking pages of The Innocents Abroad to the pessimism of Twain's

final stories, ''The Mysterious Stranger" and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," one

feature of what Twain himself called the "invasion" of another culture lay beyond the

self-awareness of reporters, explorers, and anthropologists. Unlike them, he notes with

stronger and stronger revulsion the outsider's disturbing presence, his revolutionary and

destructive impact. We might say that he was the first of Western writers to be aware of the

nihilism latent in the crossing of cultural borders.

Hank Morgan's visit to the world of King Arthur begins with the ordinary post-Enlightenment

contrasts between cultures in which progress and backwardness, superstition and modern

scientific technology are set in opposition. However, what begins as argument quickly

degenerates into battle, then into warfare, and finally into cataclysmic slaughter. The truly

portable knowledge that one civilization brings to another is the knowledge of killing. Finally,

all cultural competitions come down to the machine gun versus the crossbow.

Hadleyburg is not observed, it is corrupted by its visitor. Twain's outsiders tamper, expose, and

distort. They run experiments, often experiments in cruelty. In The Innocents Abroad we feel

that Twain would rather tease Europe than record it as it is on its own terms. He has something

of the small-town practical joker's point of view. He sets off firecrackers near sleeping cats or

ties a tin can to a dog's tail to watch it run. The dog alone, asleep in the shade, doesn't interest

him. He has to stir it up. In Europe Twain sets out to stir up some excitement, tease or play

jokes on the guides or locals. He sees himself as the player in a game who is expected to be

lied to or tricked out of his money. He plans to outwit the tricksters who take him for a fool.

He is at heart a provocateur. Even Huck plays his cruel hoaxes and tricks on Jim, putting a

dead snake in Jim's bedding to watch his alarm.

What are, in the early works, teasing experiments that trick reality into unwitting

self-revelation, turning the tables on the con artists who for once go down to defeat at the

hands of the greenhorn, are, in Twain's later stories, demonic, nihilistic paranoid plots. The

early geniality of the outsider's trick has its best example in the story that made Twain famous,

perhaps the best yarn ever written in America, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras

County." The carefully trained frog is filled with buckshot when Jim Smiley is out of the room,

and the absurd frog-jumping contest is reversed. In the stories written thirty years later, in the

final years of the century, tempting inheritances or windfalls force to the surface the greed and

veniality of otherwise respectable people, the kind of honest folk who have never, in Twain's

view, been given the right opportunity to display just how vicious and grasping they really are.

Hank Morgan "modernizes" or destroys Arthurian England. Even a benign parable like "The

£1,000,000 Bank Note" of 1893, an intricate parable of Twain's own life and talent, in which a

random stranger is given the use of an uncashable, large bank note for a month, involves an

experiment on a human being that most likely will destroy him. From the story of the frog

filled with buckshot to that of the man in the street handed a £1,000,000 bank note or the

citizens of Hadleyburg tormented with a windfall that is dangled just out of reach in front of

their eyes, Twain's plots turned on the outsider whose manipulation of reality has the character

of a practical joke. In essence, a practical joke is a small psychological experiment performed

for an audience of insiders. The practical joke has deep structural ties to fraud or to the

paranoid pessimism that darkened Twain's final years.

The intruder, the provocateur, the reporter, the explorer, the tourist, and the fugitive are all

variants of the figure who enters or who moves between cultures. For American society

between the Civil War and the stock-market crash of 1929 a number of major experiences at

the core of the culture restate the same pattern of movement between cultures. It was the

greatest age of European travel, and, in the other direction, the greatest period of immigration.

Many writers from Henry James to Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway became expatriates,

balancing two cultures as they went back to Europe, moving, in effect, against the stream of

immigrants.

With his travel writing and the literary form of the journey, Mark Twain set his work in

resonance with the entire complex cultural pattern. He followed Horace Greeley's well-known

advice to "Go West, young man!" and found his vocation there. He traveled again and again to

Europe, spending about a sixth of his entire life abroad. During the 1890s he was, in effect, an

expatriate. He entered and conquered cultural worlds from the beginning to the end of his

career.

In what might be called the first of his dark works, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's

Court, Twain's larger reflection on these many patterns led him to write one of the first

parables of colonialization. In his novel he follows the journey from an advanced, confident

civilization of a representative of modern technology and ideas who moves in time rather than

in space into a historically backward, feudal society. Modernizing and destroying at the same

time, Twain's enlightened cultural emissary is a slightly disguised version of his many

contemporaries who were carrying what they called the White Man's Burden of colonial

education and integration into the modern world system. The great fame of Rudyard Kipling,

Twain's main rival as a popular author in his day, grew out of this colonial movement. The

climactic barbarities of King Leopold's Congo, to which Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

as well as Twain's own journalism was a response, is already visible in Connecticut Yankee.

Offering to develop the Arthurian world and rid it of superstition, Hank Morgan brings it war

and destruction. Twain's book, like his great denunciations of the exploitation of the Congo in

the early 1900s, was a thoughtful account of that most pressing of late nineteenth-century

travel forms: the final mad scramble of the European powers to grab up and modernize

whatever scraps were left of the underdeveloped world. Like his contemporaries Kipling and

Conrad, Twain wrote, in A Connecticut Yankee, a parable of cultural arrogance and its

self-destructive naïveté that has its place alongside Conrad's Heart of Darkness with its

idealist turned savage, Kurtz.(p643)

9. One of the characteristics that have made Mark Twain a major literary figure in the

19th century America is his use of____________ .

A. vernacular B. interior monologue

C. point of view D. photographic description

13. About the novel The Scarlet Letter, which of the following statements is NOT

right?

A. It’s very hard to say that it is a love story or a story of sin.

B. It’s a highly symbolic story and the author is a master of symbolism.

C. It’s mainly about the moral, emotional and psychological effects of the sin

upon the main characters and the people in general.

D. In it the letter A takes the same symbolic meaning throughout the novel.

16. After the Civil War America was transformed from ______ to _________.

A. an agrarian community „ an industrialized and commercialized society

B. an agrarian community „ a society of freedom and equality

C. a poor and backward society „ an industrialized and commercialized

society

D. an industrialized and commercialized society „ a highly developed society

18. Which of the following is not right about Mark Twain’s style of language?

A. His sentence structures are long, ungrammatical and difficult to read.

B. His words are colloquial, concrete and direct in effect.

C. His humor is remarkable and characterized by puns, straight-faced

exaggeration， repetition and anti-climax.

D. His style of language had exerted rather deep influence on the contemporary

writers.

38. In Hawthorne’s novels and short stories, intellectuals usually appear as

______________.

A. commentators B. observers

C. villains D. saviors

47. The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne is known for his“black vision．”The

Term “black vision” refers to______________.

A. Hawthorne's observation that every man faces a black Wall

B. Hawthorne's belief that all men are by nature evil

C. that Hawthorne employed a dream vision to tell his story

D. that Puritans of Hawthorne's time usually wore black clothes

55. With Howells, James, and Mark Twain active on the literary scene, ______became

the major trend in American literature in the seventies and eighties of the 19th

century．

A. Sentimentalism B. Romanticism

C. Realism D. Naturalism

57. Hester Prynne, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth and Pearl are most likely Characters

in_______.

A. The House of the Seven Gables B. The Scarlet Letter

C. The Portrait of a Lady D. The pioneers

61. American Romanticism stretches from the end of the ________ century through

the outbreak of ______.

A. 18th, the Civil War B. 18th, the War of Independence

C. 19th, WWI D. 19th, WWII

68. After "The Adventure of Tom Sawyer", Twain gives a literary independence to

Tom’s buddy Huck in a book called_________, and the book from which "all modern

American literature comes".

A. Life on the Mississippi River B. The Gilded Age

C. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn D. The Sun Also Rises

72. Mark Twain, one of the greatest 19th century American writers, is well known for

his ____.

A. international theme B. waste-land imagery

C. local color D. symbolism

3. American Realism Realism is the theory of writing in which familiar aspects of

contemporary life and everyday scenes are represented in a straightforward or

matter-of-fact manner. This is the theory that authors try to use and guide them in

their writing. It stresses truthful treatment of material. It is anti-romantic,

anti-sentimental, and without abstract interest in nature, death, etc. Mark Twain

laughed at people who were caught up in the world of illusions, who were not mature

enough to see real situations. This is one example of the truthful treatment of material.

4. American Romanticism

Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. It was a

movement of conscious rebellion against being too objective. The romantic spirit

was one of subjectivity of inward feelings that one could trust one’s subjective

responses. Romantics placed a high premium upon the creative function of

imagination, and saw art as a formulation of intuitive and imaginative perceptions

that tend to speak a nobler truth than that of fact.

11. What are the writing features of Mark Twain’s literary creation?

Topic Discussion

1. What makes Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn more than a

child’s adventure story? Briefly discuss the question from THREE of the following

aspects: the setting, the language, the character(s), the theme and the style.

2. Take Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an example to illustrate

the statement that Mark Twain was a unique writer in American literature．

2. Take examples to analyze the style and theme of Mark Twain.