Mark Twain's languages : discourse, dialogue, and linguistic variety |
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6. Languages of Power and Submission |
 | Mark Twain's languages : |  |
6. Languages of Power and Submission
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 33.
Eberhard Alsen, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Fight for Popularity
and Power," Western American Literature 7 (1972): 143.
Twain's language notes are included in PP, 351-64. One clearly
marked distinction between languages of submission and command
in sixteenth-century English, the difference between "thou" and
"you," is used inconsistently in Twain's historical fiction. The dialogue
in The Prince and the Pauper shows a general understanding that
"you" was for superiors and "thou" for inferiors. In practice, however,
Twain often muddles the distinction: Tom Canty addresses the
prince as "thou" in chapter 3, a solecism repeated in chapter 14 in
the whipping boy's speech to "King" Tom.
Evelyn Schroth has pointed out that in A Connecticut Yankee
Twain attempted only sporadically to differentiate among classes on
the basis of dialectal differences; see "Mark Twain's Literary Dialect
in A Connecticut Yankee," Mark Twain Journal 19, no. 2 (1978): 26-29.
James L. Johnson, Mark Twain and the Limits of Power (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1982).
The two characters are Ned Blakely in Roughing It (RI, 322),
and Jasper in Which Was It? (WWD, 410).
See Kenneth Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1959), p. 262; and Martha McCulloch
Williams, "In re 'Pudd'nhead Wilson,"' Southern Magazine, February
1894, 101.
Evan Carton, "Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Fiction of Law and
Custom," in American Realism: New Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 85.
The structure of the dialogues in each case follows this scheme:
| Black initiative | White response |
| (1) Self-effacing request for attention | Irritated response |
| (2) Plea of physical and other hardship | Angry response |
| (3) Despairing request for aid/sympathy | Firm refusal |
| (4) Final query and request for aid | Angry dismissal |
| (5) Veiled threat of retaliation | Fear, puzzlement |
| (6) Disclosure of threat | Attempted conciliation |
| (7) First commands | Grudging obedience |
| (8) "Manners lesson" | Crushed submission |
but even specific phrases from Pudd'nhead Wilson.
On signifying, see Thomas Kockman, ed., Rappin' and Stylin'
Out: Communication in Urban Black America (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1972); and Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The
Language of Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
Harold Beaver has gone so far as to argue that Jim designedly
crafts his sentimental speech to Huck to influence Huck's actions and
secure his own liberty ("Run, Nigger, Run: Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn as a Fugitive Slave Narrative," Journal of American Studies 8
[1974]: 339-61).
James M. Cox's view of the aphorisms as above and outside the
narrative is similar to mine (Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor [Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966], p. 238).
As Evan Carton has it, Wilson's fingerprints "collapse the distinction
between biology and convention, for they represent biology
in the service of convention" ("Fiction of Law and Custom," p. 92).
All classificatory statements implicitly assert the speaker's
power or right to classify; hence no classificatory statement can ever
be ideologically innocent. See "Classification and Control" and "Utterances
in Discourse," in Gunther Kress and Robert Hodge, Language
as Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 62-102.
| Mark Twain's languages : | |