Mark Twain's languages : discourse, dialogue, and linguistic variety |
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5. Not All Trying to Talk Alike |
 | Mark Twain's languages : |  |
5. Not All Trying to Talk Alike
St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 11 March 1885, p. 1 (quoted in Victor
Fischer, "Huck Finn Reviewed: The Reception of Huckleberry Finn in
the United States, 1885-1897," American Literary Realism 16 [1983]: 17).
Michael Egan, Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn": Race, Class, and
Society (London: Sussex University Press, 1977), p. 73.
Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 20. Smith
uses no single term consistently as the antonym of vernacular. Instead
he relies on a complex of adjectives related to language, culture,
and values: genteel, official, dominant, established, elevated, conventional,
traditional, high, exalted.
George C. Carrington, Jr., The Dramatic Unity of "Huckleberry
Finn" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976), p. 23. Smith
recognized that "speaking in dialect does not in itself imply moral
authority" (Mark Twain, p. 122).
Though not so flagrantly, Twain himself violated the rule he
charged Cooper with ignoring: "When a personage talks like an illustrated,
gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's
Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like
a negro minstrel in the end of it" ("Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses,"
WMT 22:62).
Like Mary Jane, Twain's Joan of Arc cannot abide a lie, and her
purity of heart makes her, although untutored, a compelling orator:
"Joan charmed [the court] with her sweetness and simplicity and unconscious
eloquence, and all the best and capablest among them recognized
that there was an indefinable something about her that testified
that she was not made of common clay" (WMT 17:135).
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), p. 18n.
Letter of 5 February 1878, in Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, ed.
Dixon Wecter (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1949), p. 217.
Karen Halttunen discusses extensively the warnings in nineteenth-century
advice manuals about hypocritical confidence men
who assumed genteel habits (Confidence Men and Painted Women
[New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982], pp. 1-55).
To George Carrington, Sherburn is a "dramatist's dramatist,"
whose speech to the mob "is actually double-talk, impressive gibberish,
a verbal drama of pure 'style' " (Dramatic Unity, pp. 98, 138).
Walter Blair, Mark Twain and "Huck Finn" (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1960), p. 353.
Some of the original forms in the manuscript are stilted.
Twain revised to maintain a consistent tone of impromptu oratory
throughout the speech. (The manuscript version of Sherburn's speech
is reproduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Facsimile of the
Manuscript [Detroit: Gale, 1983], pp. 68-74 [pp. 164-65 of the holograph
MS].)
"Preface to the Second Edition of 'Lyrical Ballads,' " in The Poetical
Work of William Wordsworth, ed. E. De Selincourt, 2d ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1952), 2:387.
Richard Grant White, Words and Their Uses, Past and Present: A
Study of the English Language, 20th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1892), pp. 5, 28.
For an example, and a discussion of the burlesque stump
speech as a genre, see Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show
in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1974), pp. 55-58.
Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 32-39. In a "Comment on Tautology
and Grammar" written in 1898, Twain distinguishes between
justifiable and careless tautology (MTA 1:172).
Meir Sternberg, "Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and
the Forms of Reported Discourse," Poetics Today 3 (1982): 148. Recently
David Simpson has made the same point in relation to Cooper's
Deerslayer: "As there are good and bad Indians [in the novel], all
speaking the Ossianic language of high poetry, so there are good and
bad dialect users (though no good polite speakers). No simple inference
of character from speech can be made" (The Politics of American
English, 1776-1850 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], p. 183).
Richard Bridgman's Colloquial Style in America remains the best
from the artificiality of the neoclassical models that presided over its
birth. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has identified a similar ability to draw
upon the full resources of the high style and the vernacular as the
essence of Faulkner's narrative art ("The Mockingbird in the Gum
Tree: Notes on the Language of American Literature," The Southern
Review, n.s. 19 [1983]: 785-801).
One exception is Lee Mitchell, for whom the paragraph signifies
the "universe of discourses [that] compete in the novel" and
undermine any belief that "language might achieve transparency, or
attain some privileged relation to experience" (" 'Nobody but Our
Gang Warn't Around': The Authority of Language in Huckleberry
Finn," in New Essays on "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," ed. Louis J.
Budd [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], p. 97). In arguing
for the fluidity of linguistic categories in the novel, Mitchell's fundamentally
post-structural essay differs from my own structural account
on many points; it should be consulted by any reader pleased
that critics are not all trying to talk alike, either.
Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language (Boston:
Isaiah Thomas, 1789), pp. 19-20. Cf. Simpson, Politics of American
English, pp. 63-81.
Cecil B. Hartley, The Gentleman's Book of Etiquette, and Manual
of Politeness (Boston: J. S. Locke, 1876), p. 24. Twain owned a copy of
this book; see Alan Gribben, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction,
2 vols. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 1:300. Nowadays we might translate
the prescription of the etiquette book quoted in the text into a
sociolinguistic rule: Avoid metalinguistic comments in an informal
setting. H. P. Grice's well-known "maxims of conversation" differ surprisingly
little from the rules in the old etiquette books; see his
"Logic and Conversation," in Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3 of Speech
Acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (New York: Academic Press,
1975), pp. 41-58.
Among the "many genres of speech activity" that linguistic
anthropologist Dell Hymes says an ethnology of speaking must take
into account are "oath taking, verbal dueling, praying, cursing, and
punning" (John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds., Directions in
Sociolinguistics [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972], p. 180). All genres but the last are tremendously important in Tom and
Huck's world.
James M. Cox, for instance, has said that Huck's role is to invert
"all [the] controls, which are really conventions, [that] exist outside
the novel" (Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor [Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1966], p. 169). I disagree only in finding
important traces of normative convention within the novel as well.
"Style shifting" is one of the five methodological axioms for
there are no single-style speakers. Some informants show a much
wider range of style shifting than others, but every speaker we have
encountered shows a shift of some linguistic variables as the social
context and topic change" ("The Study of Language in its Social
Context," in Sociolinguistic Patterns [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1972], p. 208).
For Louise K. Barnett Huck is a "picaro as linguistic outsider,"
whose adversarial relation to society is part of Twain's "satiric treatment
of language as a social instrument." In Barnett's view, Huck differs
from "society" in not having assimilated the accepted labels that
impose values on social activities: "grace" for a mumbled prayer,
"property" for a black slave, "gentleman" for a Sherburn or a Grangerford
("Huck Finn: Picaro as Lin[g]uistic Outsider," College Literature
6 [1979]: 221).
James M. Cox writes that "Tom's play defines the world as play,"
that Tom is an incarnation of the pleasure principle, and that in Tom
Sawyer "the imagination represents the capacity for mimicry, impersonation,
make-believe, and play" (Mark Twain, pp. 140, 148). Huck
understands simple physical and aesthetic pleasures, but not the
plaisir du texte in which Tom glories. Fittingly, his one mode of joking,
before Jim shames him out of it, is the practical joke.
Brook Thomas has made a similar point; see his "Language
and Identity in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Mark Twain
Journal 20, no. 3 (1980): 20.
Roman Jakobson's six functions of language are based on a
communication-theory model of addresser, addresser, and message.
Each of the six functions is oriented toward a corresponding linguistic
"factor": (1) the referential function is the denotative orientation to
the context of the message; (2) the emotive or "expressive" function
focuses on the attitude and feelings of the addreser; (3) the conative
function seeks response or action from the addressee; (4) the phatic
function is concerned with mere contact between the interlocutors;
(5) the metalingual function is focused on the linguistic code itself;
and (6) the poetic function is the "focus on the message [form rather
than its content] for its own sake" ("Closing Statement: Linguistics
and Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok [Cambridge:
M.I.T. Press, 1960], pp. 353-57).
Emile Zola, L'Assommoir, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mitterand
(Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1967), 3:599; my translation.
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