University of Virginia Library

1

Introduction:

The Problem of Variety in Language

"Mark Twain's philosophy of language": surely something
seems wrong with the phrase. It is pretentious, it claims too
much, it takes itself too seriously. Mark Twain was a novelist,
not an academic philosopher. Yet we would not balk if
the name were "Melville" or "James," or if "language" were
changed to "history" or "religion." Novelists can be philosophical,
and Mark Twain wrote at least one book, What Is
Man?, that claimed to be philosophy; the systematic determinism
of his later years is notorious.[1] We readily grant him a
thorough amateur knowledge of European history but hesitate
to admit his expertise in the very medium of which we
claim he was a master. Why?

My question is partly rhetorical; I shall not maintain in this
book that Mark Twain had a formal philosophy of language,
not even to the extent that he had a philosophy of culture or of
morals. Van Wyck Brooks is right to complain that much of
his overt commentary on language is trivial or naive. His self-education,
wide in other domains, did not, in fact, extend to
linguistics (or "philology," the term he would have used): for
every book on language that we know he owned or read, we
can find dozens of histories, biographies, and memoirs.[2] I will
claim, however, that Mark Twain's understanding of language,

as evidenced primarily in his fiction, transcended its origin in
public-school grammar instruction and moved toward an intuition
of principles just beginning to appear in his day and
fully enunciated only in our own.[3] Because Twain's principles
are largely at odds with those of the Transcendentalists, the
nineteenth-century Americans who, we agree by convention,
had a philosophy of language, Twain himself has been denied
title to that phrase. Where the Transcendentalists saw unity,
Mark Twain saw variety: this is perhaps the most concise formulation
of the opposition. David Simpson has identified
exactly this difference between the Transcendentalists and
James Fenimore Cooper, and his explication will serve for
Twain as well:
Mark Twain knew his Emerson—or at least what Emerson
stood for—well enough to understand the impertinence of
forcing the Transcendental voice into dialogue with others. So
whereas Emerson, for example, sees quotation as the fundamental
stylistic principle for appropriating the language of
predecessors and asserting one's continuity with that language,
Twain typically quotes parodically to assert radical difference.
In his most impudent act of parodic quotation he put
lines from poems by Emerson (and by Holmes, Whittier, and
Lowell) into the mouths of drunken impostors in his Whittier
birthday speech. In the midst of a tall tale, deprived of their
original context, the lines become absurd; Twain punctures
the poet's implicit claim to unchanging, authoritative meaning.
He accomplishes what Mikhail Bakhtin defines as the
purpose of parody: to shatter "the myth of a language that
presumes to be the only language, and the myth of a language
that presumes to be completely unified."[5] Mark Twain's philosophy
of language can best be characterized as an intuitive
rejection of these myths.

Jim's scandalized disbelief that there is more than one language
proper to humans (see p. ix) has a long ancestry in
Western thought. Before the nineteenth century, variety in
language was most often seen as an evil.[6] In his Cratylus Plato
has Socrates conclude that the Greek dialects are corrupted
forms of a primary language whose names corresponded
naturally to the essences they represented. The book of Genesis
provides our myths of the single namegiver Adam, who
creates an original language, and of a confusion of languages
to punish sinful presumption. After Babel, to speak with the
wrong tongue is to court death:

(Judg. 12:6)

(Matt. 26:73)

Linguistic variety is redeemed at Pentecost, when the Spirit
descends to speak through the many tongues of men; but
Saint Paul reminds would-be glossolalists that tongues without
interpretation are vain: "Except ye utter by the tongue
words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is
spoken? for ye shall speak into the air" (1 Cor. 14:9). The multiplicity
of tongues and the changeability of natural languages
is a scandal, for the divine word, or Logos, in both Greek and
Judeo-Christian wisdom literature is single and immutable.
Nostalgia for an unchanging and primary language—and as
late as 1760 Samuel Johnson was complaining of the "mutability"
of human speech—partly explains why the major projects
of premodern philology were normative grammar and etymology
intended to derive European words from their divinely
given Hebrew "originals." The Renaissance and early modern
period saw thinkers like Descartes and Leibniz initiate a quest
for universal grammars, as well as for philosophical languages,
systems in which signs and referents, language and thought,
would be maintained in precise and unchanging relationship.
Mark Twain knew none of these philosophers of language at
first hand, but their doctrines were part of the intellectual inheritance
of nineteenth-century public grammar school students.
"In the grammar of a perfect language," he would read
in the first chapter of his schoolboy's grammar text, "no rules
should be admitted, but such as are founded on fixed principles,
arising out of the genius of that language and the nature
of things." Only because language is imperfect must
speech be regulated by "custom"—that is, the way people actually
do talk.[7]

To think seriously about language in the nineteenth century,
however, was to confront the problem of the One and
the Many in a new and insistent form. By 1860 Continental
philology had carried all before it, and speculations about language
that ignored Grimm's law or the findings of the Vedic
scholars could no longer receive a hearing.[8] Although the derivation
of all languages from a single ancestor was still moot,
comparative philology had shown that Hebrew could not have
been the original tongue of mankind. The hierarchical ranking
of speech, with the classical languages of Western Europe
at the summit of human culture, was giving way to the relativism
of scientific dialectology: philologists testified that rural
and other nonstandard dialects were both legitimate objects
of research and valuable enrichers of standard speech. The
major philosophical shift, however, was a growing tendency
to see variety and even discord as essential to language. The
post-Kantian reinterpretation of reason as a dialectical process
gave rise to a relativistic view of language as a dialogic
phenomenon, impossible unless the viewpoints and experiences
of the participants are nonidentical. To translate this
into Twainian: language is more like Huck talking with Jim
than like Adam talking to himself.

For German philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt duality is
fundamental to language, and all speaking is founded in dialogue.

Even in silent thought one speaks to oneself as to an
"other," for "the very possibility of speech is conditioned by
address and response."[9] Moreover, the Self can never use the
language of the Other merely as a mirror, since there is always
a gap between the language of the speaker and that of the addressee:
"No one when he uses a word has in mind exactly
the same thing that another has, and the difference, however
tiny, sends its tremors throughout language. . . . All understanding,
therefore, is always at the same time a misunderstanding
. . . and all agreement of feelings and thoughts is at
the same time a means for growing apart."[10] The Other who
echoes one's speech with fully comprehensible language is
not a true Other; to provide an escape from solipsism the
Other must provide enough uncertainty and incomprehensibility
to challenge the constructs of the speaking Ego: "Since
the spirit which constantly reveals itself in the world can never
be exhaustively known through any given number of views or
opinions but is always discovered to contain something new, it
would be far better to multiply the languages on earth as
many times as the number of earth's inhabitants might permit."[11]
Thus the myth of Babel is turned on its head, and multilingualism
becomes a liberation instead of a punishment.
Translating from one language or dialect to another or requiring
speakers of different languages to express the same idea
will create meaning rather than merely conserve it. But vital to
Humboldt's vision of glossolalia is the faith that a hypostatic
human nature unites the many varieties of speech as the hub
unites the spokes of a wheel. This hub, this unity underlying
multiplicity, prevents misunderstanding from becoming the
only force in human communication and thus plunging us
into an absurd universe where nonsense runs unchecked.

Similarly, despite its increasing reliance on historical and
empirical methods, academic philology in England and America
never entirely abandoned the eighteenth-century quest for
an a priori universal grammar. William Dwight Whitney, the
foremost nineteenth-century American linguist, gives the science
of language a Janus face when he characterizes his own
study, The Life and Growth of Language, as one that "strives to

comprehend language both in its unity, as a means of human
expression and as distinguished from brute communication,
and in its internal variety, of material and structure."[12] Max
Müller, for whom language itself was the primary evidence
that human faculties had a divine origin, mythologizes linguistics
as the secular analogue of Pauline "interpretations" of
tongues:
Whereas Müller's faith in the unity of language is theological,
Whitney's is based on an optimistic construction of social
cohesion as the centripetal force that counteracts the
centrifugal forces of class and regional dialects. The desire
to communicate necessarily limits potential incomprehension;
over and over again Whitney equates language with
communication.
Especially in this last sentence, Whitney's ostensibly descriptive
language is powerfully normative as well. Language in society
must be a homeostatic system if societies are to cohere, if
unum is to be formed e pluribus. This had been Noah Webster's
reason for desiring a truly common American language.[16] By
the late nineteenth century a looser doctrine of independent
but mutually tolerant varieties of speech has become an American
ideal. It gives rise, for instance, to the enormous popularity
of local-color fiction and nonhumorous dialect sketches
in the last quarter of the century, with their obligatory attention
to idiosyncratic speechways: differences between North
and South, East and West, urban and rural are subsumed
under the essential "Americanness" that is felt to bind us together
in spite of superficial dissimilarities. Missing from this
model of friendly heterogeneity is the sense that varieties of
language can be in active conflict or that misunderstanding
can be a deliberate social strategy.

In the nineteenth century, then, the two controlling myths
about variety in language are Babel and Pentecost. Both assume
an underlying unity in language, whether it derives
from the divine origin of mankind, the Oversoul, or the universality
of human nature; they differ principally over the
question how much access speakers of a fallen language have
to the power of an Adamic tongue. As we move into the twentieth
century, and as we turn to the works of Mark Twain, we
encounter two formulations of linguistic variety, heteroglossia
and cacophony, that minimize or deny underlying unity. They
too differ in their optimism about human dialogue and mutual
comprehension. Heteroglossia is Bakhtin's term for the
healthy, indeed essential, conflict of voices that destabilizes
language, permitting change and preventing any one form of
language from maintaining authority at the expense of others.
Cacophony is my term for the condition of language in an absurd
universe, where centrifugal forces are unchecked, idiolects
tend toward maximum randomness and confusion, and
multiplicity entails misunderstanding. In this thoroughly secular
version of the myth of Babel God is dead and the Tower of
Babel has fallen not through divine intervention but of its
own weight. Mark Twain moves freely between these two
characterizations of language throughout most of his life but
he is pulled toward cacophony in the last few years. (Since cacophony
is essentially a special, pathological, case of heteroglossia,
I will reserve a description of that final movement until
the last chapter of this book.) If Mark Twain discovered
empiricism without reading Locke, he also looked forward to
the particular interpretation of linguistic variety that we associate
with Bakhtin.

As Bakhtin uses it, heteroglossia is a term not susceptible of
easy definition. In its concrete sense, it refers to the multitude
of small "languages" into which any single national language
is stratified; abstractly, it suggests that no item of language
exists in isolation, that meaning depends on all the forces that
intersect in each word, including (but not limited to) its history,
its speaker, its recipient, and the other words in its linguistic
system. Bakhtin thus speaks of two phenomena that
can be "differently voiced," the entire system of a given language
and the individual word. At the level of the language,
heteroglossia includes "social dialects, characteristic group
behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages
of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages
of the authorities, of various circles and of passing
fashions," and more.[17] As these varieties enter into conflict
and dialogue with one another, they force the "standard language"
constantly to renegotiate its centrality and authority.
The single word itself is heteroglossic (or "double-voiced," or
"internally dialogized") because in it all of these social varieties
of speech intersect and take form. The result is a "Tower-of-Babel
mixing of languages" that interposes itself between
the speaker and the object to be expressed.[18] Bakhtin insists,
as do current exponents of speech-act theory and sociolinguistics,
that the context of a word contributes indispensably
to its meaning. One person's word may resist or foil appropriation
by another, or one may subvert an original word by borrowing
it (as Twain did in his birthday-dinner parody). For
Bakhtin, the major task of prose stylistics is to disentangle the
skein of ideologies, beliefs, sources, and contexts (both literary
and social) that runs through every word of novelistic
discourse.

Mark Twain's unfinished novel Which Was It? provides a
dramatic example of the mutual interaction of the two heteroglossias.
George Harrison, a respectable white citizen, has
committed murder in the course of a burglary. The only witness
to the crime is Jasper, a free black who uses his knowledge
to blackmail Harrison, forcing the white man to play the
slave when no one else is present. Jasper parodies the language
his white "superiors" use to compliment what they interpret as

Harrison's generous act of taking Jasper on as a personal servant,
thus protecting him from banishment or seizure:

(WWD, 428)

The two dialogic conflicts in this passage correspond to the
twin varieties of heteroglossia. First, Tom's standard language
contrasts with the dialect into which Jasper transposes it. By
itself, the language in which Tom's speech is cast might appear
"neutral," but Jasper's paraphrase retroactively changes the
significance of the original speech: the grammar and pronunciation
of Black English, nonstandard and socially stigmatized,
remind us that Tom is using the conventional grammar
and rhetoric of the empowered class. His "really well" places
him just as surely as Jasper's "real good" does Jasper. (George
Eliot's Fred Vincy provides a livelier version of the same judgment:
"All choice of words is slang. It marks a class. . . . Correct
English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays.")[19]
Standard English implicitly claims to be inclusive,
but as Tom uses it here it is exclusive, drawing boundaries between
master and servant. Second, Jasper's irony underlines
the ideology in Tom's vocabulary. The word perform is a key to
the whole passage. As applied to Jasper it means "carry out a
task." When Jasper mocks Harrison with "you's p'fawmin'
real good," we are forced to interpret the meaning as not only
"act a (deceptive) part" but also "follow the master's orders,"
for Harrison has been doing both. If we now return to the first
two instances of perform, we perceive that these meanings
must always be part of the internal dialogue of the word when
it is applied to a slave. That is, the slave is "functioning" (performing
as a machine) from the master's point of view, but
role-playing (performing as an actor) from the slave's. Similarly
heteroglossic are Tom's words "behave," "worthy," and
"protector." Tom means his speech to be congruent in register
with "Well done, true and faithful servant"; Jasper hears it as
tantamount to "Good dog." Analyzing the effect of Jasper's
paraphrase helps us to see that even the narrator's language is
double-voiced, exhibiting what Bakhtin calls "stylistic hybrid."
The third paragraph of the passage consists of two parts,
the first "belonging" to Tom and the second to Jasper. The
reader knows Jasper is not genuinely "moved" or "grateful"
for Tom's words, and "gracious" and "touched" cohere with
the sentimentality of Tom's speech. Although syntax marks
the first part as objective narrative discourse, semantic content
forces us to read it as a form of free indirect discourse
emanating from Tom. Likewise, if we return to the phrase
"fling him a compliment" and filter it through Jasper's perception
("Good boy!"), the trace of "fling him a bone" is unmistakable.
Even so apparently neutral a word as "gave" takes
part in this dialogue: "Tom was quite touched, and gave [Jasper]
a dime, which he gave to Harrison that night." In Tom's
semantic world give connotes charity; in Jasper's, condescension
or scorn. All of the dialogue that goes on around Jasper
demonstrates that any language passing between the free and
the enslaved is open to contention because it can be "possessed"
by only one of the two parties. (In chapter 6 I will argue
that an identical principle governs varieties of language
in Pudd'nhead Wilson.)

At times heteroglossia nearly pushes upward from the substructure
of Twain's fiction to become an overt theme. Twain,

no more able than Bakhtin to imagine a state of language that
precedes or transcends dialogue, relentlessly satirizes the
quest for monologic speech that admits no one else's claims.
To be sure, Bakhtin concedes that poetry can treat its relation
to an object as unmediated, for in this discourse the speaker's
consciousness is entirely immanent in speech that is "his language."[20]
But this conception of poetry is ultimately an enabling
fiction, for objects are always encountered already
named: "Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal
and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word,
could really have escaped from start to finish [the] dialogic
inter-orientation with the alien word that occurs in the object."[21]
Representing Adam as human, however, means endowing
him with real human speech. Twain, who was all but
obsessed with the character of his "poor dead relative," consistently
embodies him in fiction as a man with all the foibles
of his race, including verbal ones.[22] The opening of "Extracts
from Adam's Diary" (1893) is a comic rendering of Humboldt's
paradox: "Man is only man through language; to invent language,
he would have to be man already."[23] The underlying
thesis of the sketch is that left to his own devices Adam would
never have invented language, never have broken the silence
of a solipsist's paradise. Naming begins in dialogue, with the
advent of Eve, much to her husband's displeasure.

Far from being either private or a monologue, "Adam's
Diary" is a dialogue on two levels. The interlocutor physically
present is Eve, whose arrival provokes Adam to record his
thoughts. The latent interlocutor is Ralph Waldo Emerson, the
major American expositor of the Adamic language that Twain
is mocking. Emerson claimed that language had originally
been poetry and that any poet who re-creates language is another
Adam. The poet is "the Namer or Language-maker,"
who "nam[es] things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes
after their essence," who gives each thing "its own
name and not another's."[24] To name is to see the "soul of the
thing," to hear the "pre-cantation," of the sea, the mountain
ridge, Niagara. In "Adam's Diary" the running joke (a poor
one, to be sure) is that Eden was located just north of Buffalo.

Eve has named it Niagara and its waterfalls Niagara Falls, as
Adam complains: "Says it looks like Niagara Falls. That is not
a reason, it is mere waywardness and imbecility" (WMT 24:
342). Poor Adam gets no chance to name anything, for Eve always
jumps in ahead, and "always that same pretext is offered—it
looks like the thing." We have leapt into a hermeneutic
circle where essences bite the tails of appearances and are
bitten in turn, where neither can precede the other. Trying to
disentangle the logic of the paradox reminds us, as Twain's
joke does less rigorously, that we cannot begin to imagine
what it would be like to create names in a world devoid of
them.

Names, words, come from other people. Adam, who would
remain in blissful aphasia if he could, finds that to have an
Other is to have another's word. "I wish it would not talk; it is
always talking. . . . I have never heard the human voice before,
and any new and strange sound intruding itself here
upon the solemn hush of these dreaming solitudes offends
my ear and seems a false note" (WMT 24:343). Adam has evidently
been reading Nature. (In the woods, says Emerson,
after one has become a transparent eyeball, "the name of the
nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers,
to be acquaintances . . . is then a trifle and a disturbance.")[25]
Try as he will to keep away from the bothersome
"new creature," Adam cannot help assimilating her voice:
"Cloudy to-day, wind in the east; think we shall have rain. . . .
[ellipsis dots in original] We? Where did I get that word?—I
remember now—the new creature uses it. . . . 'We' again—
that is its word; mine, too, now, from hearing it so much"
(WMT 24:342-44). "We" is a word that cannot exist in an
imagined primal Adamic language; "we" is always an "alien
word," a word that comes from without. It inevitably brings
limitations with it, as Adam laments:

(WMT 24:343)

In Twain's earliest published fable of Adam, the voice of God is
entirely absent. Instead, the first prohibition derives from a
human agency. Eve "litter[s] the whole estate with execrable
names and offensive signs"; Adam dares not ask their meaning
because "she has such a rage for explaining" (WMT 24:
344). The semiotic puns that we cannot help hearing are entirely
in accord with Twain's conscious intention: he means to
show that acts of naming and assigning significance are resented
as restrictive and even hostile by a being who has previously
enjoyed the luxury of speechless communion with
himself. In Adam's brief conclusion to the diary, a serious,
sentimental paragraph headed "Ten Years Later," he admits
that the fall into companionship and the Other's word was a
fortunate one: "After all these years, I see that I was mistaken
about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden
with her than inside it without her. At first I thought she
talked too much; but now I should be sorry to have that voice
fall silent and pass out of my life" (WMT 24:356). "Adam's
Diary" is a fairy tale whose happy ending is entirely dialogic:
the conflict of two competing "words" is resolved by love,
understood as a pair's mutual assimilation of each other's
voices, a joint invention of the pronoun "we." ("He seemed
pleased to have me around," Eve says in the sequel "Eve's
Diary," "and I used the sociable 'we' a good deal, because it
seemed to flatter him to be included" [WMT 24:364].) Eve,
initially misunderstood by her helpmate, is finally incorporated
as an inner word.[26]

Happy endings, though, rarely have the last word in Mark
Twain's work. Variety in language would always remain for
him both promise and problem. Against "Adam's Diary" we
will have to set the pessimism of another Adam tale, "That
Day in Eden," in which the Fall results directly from misunderstanding.
In the following chapters I shall trace an often
contradictory movement from one characterization of language
to another as it develops in Mark Twain's works. Chapter
2 examines Twain's relation to one of the most powerful
centripetal, unifying, forces of the language, the authority of
standard grammar and usage, which Twain never consciously

defied. Linguistically suspect as arbitrary prescriptive rules
may seem in the age of Chomsky, the traditional grammarians
served Twain the satirist well by showing him that language
and social values are interconnected. Chapter 3 examines
Twain's embodiment in The Gilded Age of a premise that descended
to him from Emerson through the essayist Richard
Grant White: corrupt language means a corrupt society. The
remainder of the book focuses on Twain's encounter with variety:
the shock of foreign languages, the heteroglossic mix of
dialects and idiolects along the Mississippi seen in Huckleberry
Finn, the role of language as a divisive tool of power in the
racially divided society of Pudd'nhead Wilson. The final chapter
documents Mark Twain's journey toward representing dialogue
as mutual incomprehension, even as he paradoxically
grew nostalgic for a transcendent metalanguage that might
resist the centrifugal force of violent cacophony.