University of Virginia Library

7

Toward a Chaos of
Incomprehensibilities

Conversation between two characters who fail to understand
each other is a major topos in Mark Twain's work. In the classic
example, the dialogue between Scotty Briggs and the parson
in Roughing It, refined Eastern theological jargon collides with
brash Western mining slang. "Scotty Briggses" occur from the
beginning to the end of Twain's writing career, from "The
Dandy Frightening the Squatter" in 1852 to the Mysterious
Stranger manuscripts of the 1900s. In the earlier instances, incomprehension
usually results from mutually unintelligible
social or occupational dialects rather than from different regional
dialects per se. (Roughing It is atypical in its stress on
regional provenience, but even there the West is identified as
the place where at a certain historical moment, men from all
classes and walks of life were mingled promiscuously.) This
incomprehension is presented not as the rule but as the exception,
which occurs when two speakers from different
spheres happen to be thrown together and obstinately refuse
to move their speech toward a neutral region of expressions,
usages, and grammar understandable to the average person.
Twain never abandoned his faith in the ideal of clear, precise,
and comprehensible speech and writing, in the "right word"
and the plain style, as his own prose attests. He would be
bothered almost as much by Mary Baker Eddy's muddled expository
style as by her doctrines. Once Twain has adopted
"everyone is insane" as an aphorism, however, he begins to
treat incomprehensibility as potentially immanent in all communication.

In addition, he begins his abortive—incomplete
or unpublished—attempts to embody in fiction the incommensurability
between the human and the divine (or the human's
idea of the divine) that makes conversation with God
impossible.

Three general stages in the evolution of incomprehensibility
can be identified in Twain's work. Their boundaries are
indistinct, and elements of each can be found at every point in
Twain's career. Still, a rough classification helps account for
the unquestionable difference between, say, the broad humor
of Roughing It and the dark irony of the Mysterious Stranger
tales. The first stage, then, is loosely congruent with Twain's
Western period; the publication of Roughing It in 1872 provides
a good cutoff date, especially since The Gilded Age (1873)
marks a new direction. During this first stage, when Twain
was primarily a humorist, he used mutually unintelligible varieties
of language to provoke laughter through sheer incongruity.
When the dialogues have a satirical aim, it is generally
the lighthearted mockery of folly rather than the serious
indictment of social ills. The second stage begins with Twain's
first novel, The Gilded Age, and ends in 1894 with his last
major published novel, Pudd'nhead Wilson. This is his "heteroglossic"
stage, when, as Bakhtin puts it, incomprehension is
polemical.[1] Different classes speak languages that reflect different
experiences and worldviews, as Si Hawkins's wife implies
when she urges him to move to Missouri: "You are out of
your place here, among these groping dumb creatures. We
will find a higher place, where you can walk with your own
kind, and be understood when you speak—not stared at as if
you were talking some foreign tongue" (WMT 5:10). In the
novels of this period, breakdown in communication leads
to violence or ostracism: Pap Finn's brutality against Huck,
Hank Morgan's war on British civilization, the villagers' dismissal
of David Wilson as a "pudd'nhead." Features of this
middle period reemerge as late as the publication of Which
Was it? in 1902. Tom Sawyer Abroad, published in 1894, marks
Twain's entry into the linguistic absurdity of the final phase, in
which the basic mechanisms of all semiosis, rather than the

particularities of individual dialects, create barriers to understanding,
and interpretation becomes a guessing game.[2] Inquiries
into the connection between thought and language
become more and more insistent. To appreciate how misunderstanding
becomes philosophically "absurd," however, we
must first return to the early works to see how it begins as
pure comedy.

From the beginning Twain had a Rabelaisian feel for the inherent
humor of slangs and jargons. Thanks to a wide range
of occupations and reading, he was able to wield convincingly
the specialized vocabulary of such disparate fields as printing,
piloting, sailing, gambling, mining, law, medicine, and
theology. Travel to the West, especially, exposed him to the
shocks of languages and cultures that occur continually in
a physically mobile society. If the Scotty Briggs episode in
Roughing It is the master enactment of this observation—and
Twain in introducing the story explains that Nevada had attracted
adventurers from "all the peoples of the earth" and
had therefore the richest slang (RI, 298)—we see him preparing
for it with a series of finger exercises as soon as he arrives
in the Nevada Territory. The earliest of these exercises, one of
the first things he wrote after arriving in the West, opens a
letter, ostensibly to his mother, published in the Keokuk Gate
City of 25 June 1862. Since the letter has not been widely reprinted,
and since the mechanical self-consciousness of the
joke contrasts with Twain's later ease in handling similar material,
I include the relevant section in full:

Alexander Pope (the first line is from the Essay on Man),
Richard Allestree (the author of The Whole Duty of Man), and
Mrs. Clemens are jumbled together in an interlocutor who
misunderstands the speaker of poker-ese. Before long Twain
will learn how to stage less contrived clashes of dialect. Behind
his burlesque is the sense that any language setting itself
up as a model is bound for a fall—or, to use the appropriate
figure, bound to be trumped. "Authorized" discourse like the
Essay on Man and The Whole Duty of Man leaves out the game
and language of poker, which is, if ungenteel, nevertheless a
systematic mode of self-expression. The metaphor of language
as a game will recur again and again; Twain delights in
showing that people use specialized vocabularies more to impress
others than to convey information. He enjoyed most the
sheer gratuitousness of such slang: the technical vocabulary of
a game is as far removed as possible from cultural universality
and makes no claims for any adherence to outward fact. Twain
created a doubly removed dialect when in 1866 he recorded
the dialogue of old whaling captains playing euchre. "What
in the nation you dumpin' that blubber at such a time as this
for?" one demands, and Twain feels compelled to explain
that "those ancient, incomprehensible whalers always called
worthless odd-suit cards 'blubber' " (LSI, 12-13).

For Twain the obscure jargon par excellence would always
be nautical terminology, whether correctly used or not.[4] He
was hardly the first writer to exploit its resources, of course;
incomprehensible nautical characters can be traced from Ben
Pump of Cooper's Pioneers all the way back to the Elizabethan
stage. But Ben Pump and his predecessors are dominated by
a presiding "humor," so that their language is a fixed, stereotypical

key to their limited repertoire of action and opinion.
Some of Twain's more briefly sketched characters are humorous
in this Jonsonian sense, but generally speaking, an authentic
person in a carefully observed social setting can be
seen at the core of his stylistic pastiche. One of Twain's 1866
letters from Hawaii was "Mrs. Jollopson's 'Gam,' " an account
of the conversation of the wife of a whaling captain who
talked in pure whaling slang. After giving what he claims is a
transcription of her speech, Twain explains, "Every section of
our western hemisphere seems supplied with a system of
technicalities, etiquette and slang, peculiar to itself. [The account
of the "Gam"] is intended to give you a somewhat exaggerated
idea of the technicalities of conversation in Honolulu—bred
from the great whaling interest which centers
here, and naturally infused into the vocabulary of the place"
(LSI, 69). In this case a narrowly specialized way of life has
created an entire society, of whalers and nonwhalers alike,
segregated from the wider speech community by its use of an
occupational jargon inaccessible to outsiders.

Jargon or technical vocabulary does not by itself create
confusion. That ensues when interlocutors persist in using
registers that are wildly at variance with everyday English discourse.[5]
In the first prototype of the Briggs-parson confrontation,
idiosyncratic speech reinforces the point that there is no
such thing as objective perception. "The Evidence in the Case
of Smith vs. Jones," an 1864 newspaper sketch, is the mock
report of a trial for assault and battery in which accounts of a
fight differ absurdly. It is pointless for the judge to demand
that witnesses stick to a "plain statement of the facts . . . and
refrain from the embellishments of metaphor and allegory"
(ETS2, 16): the "facts" are products of the language that expresses
them. The witness Alfred Sowerby, a vernacular figure,
frustrates the lawyer for the defense with his inability
to use the precise verbal formulas that legal convention demands
for expressing a physical fact:

(ETS2, 15-16)

Sowerby's vernacular humorously undermines the defense
lawyer's implicit claim that only legal language can properly
and authoritatively transmit evidence. But the lawyer cannot
be faulted for his own discourse, since in the courtroom formal
legal language is the unmarked variety and vernacular the
deviant. Twain arrives at the Briggs-parson configuration only
when two interlocutors meet on relatively neutral ground, in
a context that calls for a common, ordinary language. In "A
Rural Lesson in Rhetoric," for instance, an 1869 newspaper
sketch, a temperance lecturer dismays a trio of farmers by
employing florid euphemism to ask a simple question: "[I
hope] that you do not indulge in intoxicating beverages? . . .
That you do not indulge in the inebriating cup?" Once the lecturer
finally gets his meaning across, one of the farmers provides
the "lesson in rhetoric": a lecturer ought to adapt his
words to the capacity of the hearers (FW, 133-34). Rephrased
a bit, this lesson becomes the "cooperative principle" that
H. P. Grice posits as the basis of rules governing conversation;
this principle assumes that in a given speech community, individual
linguistic repertoires intersect like the circles in a
Venn diagram and that interlocutors are obliged to remain, as
far as possible, in the portion of their circle common to each.[6]
Twain's early burlesques present the comic vision of a centrifugal
society in which speakers retreat to the outermost diameter
of their circles, like toddlers playing separate games in
the same room, cheerfully oblivious to one another.

Critics have disagreed over whose "side" Twain takes in
chapter 47 of Roughing It, the discussion between Scotty Briggs
and an unnamed minister about the arrangements for the funeral
of the miner Buck Fanshaw. Henry Nash Smith is surely
right to observe that the narrator no longer has the point of
view of "one of the boys," but it is less certain that he now

stands apart from them and "identifies himself with the men
'of high social standing and probity.' "[7] Kenneth Lynn reads
the opposite moral into the chapter: "The conflict between
two radically different styles is the enduring drama of American
humor, representing as it does a conflict between two
utterly different concepts of what American life should be.
. . . The anecdote makes it quite clear that . . . the narrator
prefers Scotty Brigg's."[8] Both readings err, I think, by taking
the dialogue too seriously as a model of class conflict. A realistic
meeting between high and low culture would be characterized
by a negotiation for power that is absent here. "Are
you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?" (RI, 299):
Scotty's first speech to the parson would count under ordinary
circumstances as "fighting words," a refusal to yield to
the upward pull on language and manners that a minister's
physical presence automatically created in nineteenth-century
America. The parson, for his part, would have recalled the etiquette-guide
dictum that one should never speak so as to
make another person sensible of inferiority. The humor of the
passage comes from a suspension of the feedback that normally
corrects misfiring conversations: neither party becomes
angered by the other's failure to be intelligible, and neither
sees that his own obscure discourse is contributing to the
problem. "Well, you've ruther got the bulge on me," Scotty
says. "Or maybe we've both got the bulge, somehow. You
don't smoke me and I don't smoke you." "Your observations
are wholly incomprehensible to me," the parson complains.
"Would it not expedite matters if you restricted yourself to categorical
statements of fact?" (RI, 300). Obviously Twain is
"blaming" both characters for acting silly. We are more sympathetic
toward Scotty because he is by far the more fully realized
character of the two; moreover, Twain's major object in
this chapter was to create a tour de force of Western slang, the
success of which is certified by his contemporaries' appreciative
response.[9] But the object of satire here is language
itself, which creates as much opportunity for misunderstanding
as for communication. At worst, an individual's language
becomes a meaningless idiomatic verbal tic. Among the miners,
Twain tells us, formulas like "You bet!" and "No Irish
need apply" were often repeated unconsciously, "very often
when they did not touch the subject under discussion and
consequently failed to mean anything" (RI, 298). The second
phrase was the dead Buck Fanshaw's "word," as Scotty says
(RI, 305), and thus Scotty sees no incongruity in adding it to
the "Amen" at the close of the parson's funeral prayer. One's
"word" as discourse and structure of thought can be exclusive
and even xenophobic. This sinister potential of social dialect,
barely nascent in Roughing It, develops into a major theme in
the novels of the next two decades.

Even in Roughing It violence and death of a comic sort are
associated with misunderstanding. (Scotty and the parson are
trying to agree on the burial rites for Buck Fanshaw. Horace
Greeley's uninterpretable handwriting drives one man mad
and is the death of another.)[10] In the novels of the middle period,
however, incomprehension is as often as not tragic,
as the consequences of Pudd'nhead Wilson's "fatal remark"
have shown us. Those whom we cannot comprehend—or
who cannot comprehend us—pose threats, as Jim implies in
Huckleberry Finn when he says he would assault any black
man who dared to greet him with "Polly-voo-franzy" (HF, 97).
If we treat Jim's hostility as simply funny we forget that Jim
has become violent over a misunderstanding. Remember his
"po' little 'Lizabeth," refusing to obey his command to close
the door, deaf—unknown to her father—from scarlet fever.
"O, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en
dumb—en I'd ben a treat'n her so!" (HF, 202). His sin is small
enough, as sins go; Hank Morgan treats an entire population
so.

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the mutual
incomprehension of a Yankee and sixth-century Englishmen
destroys a whole society. It begins comically enough, in confusion
over vocabulary. (The language of Twain's Arthurian
society, deriving from Twain's familiarity with writers from
Malory to the Elizabethans, is one of the book's many anachronisms.)
Hank Morgan, transported back in time, wakes to
the vision of a knight in full armor:

(CY, 51)

Hank's puzzlement, here and elsewhere, defies the authority
of chivalric language much as Scotty's defied that of the parson's.
But in A Connecticut Yankee Hank's defiance quickly becomes
conscious and programmatic, and it is generally met
with a physical, not merely a verbal, response. Superficial linguistic
differences that provoke confusion in the first chapter
or two ("Prithee do not let me." "Let you what?" [CY, 61]) are
soon replaced by a profounder misunderstanding that stems
from ideological divergence. The rigidity of "Arthurian" society
(really Twain's image of European culture as a whole) is
demonstrated in the inability of its members to assimilate new
concepts and the words that denominate them. In one narrative
sequence, repeated many times, Hank's efforts to make
someone see from his point of view are inevitably frustrated
by the fixed vision of his interlocutor. Fair dialogue under
these circumstances is impossible, yet Hank's rage to convince
persists, gradually becoming an obsessive need to win arguments
at any cost. If his opponent does not know the rules of
the game, Hank's "victory" can come only from the opponent's
wholesale destruction. In chapter 33, "Sixth-Century
Political Economy," his anticipated victory in an argument
over wages is snatched from him because the blacksmith
Dowley lacks what for Hank is the pivotal awareness that economic
signs are not fixed but "floating": a given monetary
value is not permanently tied to a corresponding real value in
commodities. So Hank turns Socratic method into an offensive
weapon, manipulating Dowley into pronouncing his own
death sentence, in effect, by admitting that he has committed
a crime that should send him to the pillory. At this point conversation
breaks down altogether; no longer able to trust
Hank, Dowley and his friends soon precipitate a brawl. On a
larger scale this happens at the end of the novel when Hank
proclaims a republic in language meaningless to a feudal
society: "The monarchy has lapsed, it no longer exists. By
consequence, all political power has reverted to its original
source, the people of the nation" (CY, 469). The result, as
Hank foresees, is war to extinction. Since the knighthood
massed against him cannot comprehend the power of the
weaponry he controls, it is futile for Hank to send a message
proposing surrender. Like the God we will shortly see Twain
blame for punishing Adam and Eve, Hank Morgan attempts
to compel obedience by threatening his opponents with a
force they do not understand. Nor has Hank ever truly understood
his foes. Ultimately, A Connecticut Yankee inscribes Mark
Twain's own incapacity to comprehend the medieval world,
the unbridgeable gap (which illustrator Dan Beard has represented
iconically [CY, 491]) between Malory's language and
his own.

The first major text to exemplify "absurd" misunderstanding,
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1893), suggests why it is so easy to see the
last two decades of Twain's writing career as a desperate, misguided
retreat from realism. Although characters called Tom,
Huck, and Jim appear in Tom Sawyer Abroad, they are disappointingly
unlike the trio in Huckleberry Finn. The plot Twain
cribs from Jules Verne is painfully fantastic. (An evil balloonist
kidnaps the heroes but is lost when he falls overboard during
a scuffle with Tom. The three sail over the Sahara and have
adventures with lions and tigers, caravans, and bands of
thieves. The tale ends abruptly when Jim returns home to
fetch Tom a corncob pipe and is caught by Aunt Polly, who
demands that Tom come back at once.) It is wrong, however,
to evaluate the novel as if it were a continuation of Huckleberry
Finn. Although it presumes to depict real characters in real
settings, it is in fact a precursor of the dream voyages Twain
would write over the next few years. The distinguishing feature
of Twain's dream tales is that characters in them do not
share the same reality. As a fragment of Heraclitus has it,
"They that are awake have one world in common, but of the
sleeping each turns aside into a world of his own."[11] Tom

Sawyer Abroad is one of Twain's first works to suggest that all of
us may be "sleepers" in this sense, with languages that express
different subjective worlds. I read it as a philosophical
fable not with any desire to elevate its position in the Twain
canon but to clarify its continuity with the line of development
that leads to the Mysterious Stranger stories.

"In Huckleberry Finn," according to William Lyon Phelps,
"we have three characters who are so different that they live in
three different worlds, and really speak different languages,
Tom, Huck, and Jim."[12] This is even more radically the case in
Tom Sawyer Abroad. In Huckleberry Finn, the three "languages,"
although stylized, were motivated by each character's social
background. In Tom Sawyer Abroad the original tendencies of
the characters are exaggerated, so that each represents a myopic
vision of semiosis. Tom, as in Huckleberry Finn, is the most
sophisticated, meaning both that he understands vocabulary,
references, and figures of speech beyond the others' grasp
and that he is slippery and protean—able to shift from one
semantic category or mode of evaluation to another, whereas
his friends commonly apply a single standard. Huck is more
than ever the literalist, whose special idée fixe is that representations
must be identical with represented objects. Jim
takes over Huck's previous role as a linguistic innocent suspicious
of figurative language.

In the story's first chapter incomprehension still has the satiric
bite it had in Huckleberry Finn. Tom is trying to stir up the
other two to undertake a crusade, explaining that "a crusade
is a war to recover the Holy Land from the paynim" (ATS,
260). Huck offers moral objections: if he owned a farm and
another man wanted it, would it be right for that man to take
it? An indignant Tom clarifies: "It ain't a farm, it's entirely different.
. . . They own the land, just the mere land, and that's
all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians,
that made it holy" (ATS, 260). In this case, he goes on, it is
"religious" to take land away from someone. Now Jim objects:
"I knows plenty religious people, but I hain't run acrost none
dat acts like dat" (ATS, 261). After more discussion in this
vein, Tom gives up in disgust: "I don't want to argue no more

with people like you and Huck Finn . . . [that] ain't got any
more sense than to try to reason out a thing that's pure theology
by the laws that protects real estate" (ATS, 261-62). The
misunderstanding here has less to do with differing vocabularies
than with incompatible uses of words like "crusade" and
"war." Semantic representations of these words as Tom understands
them would each have some such component as
that would be lacking in Huck and Jim's versions. As in
Huckleberry Finn, the reader is meant to sympathize with the
naive view that the meaning of killing and theft cannot be
changed by a label, no matter how widely that label is accepted.[13]
Yet this is the first of a series of arguments that undermine
faith in the workings of dialectic. More radically than
in the "King Solomon" debate of Huckleberry Finn, Twain implies
that Socratic reasoning accomplishes nothing when disputants
are divided by dissimilar languages or conceptual
systems.

Social satire has nothing to do with Huck's naive belief
that the states they fly over in the balloon should be colored
differently:

(ATS, 270)

(Later on Twain repeats the joke when he has Huck suggest
that to discover where they are, they keep a lookout for the
meridians of longitude on the ground.) Like some of the paradoxes
in Lewis Carroll's work, Huck's error plays with fundamental
categories of logic and symbolization. One critic has
analyzed Huck's mistake as an instance of "confusing the map
with the territory."[14] The problem, however, is more complex.
Huck knows that a map is a symbolic representation that is
meant to translate geographical facts into two dimensions. In
most respects a map is a formal diagram in which each component
corresponds precisely to either a geophysical or a political
reality. But the use of different colors to keep the states
distinct violates the nonarbitrary one-to-one correspondence
that rules the map in all other respects. Tom explains, "It ain't
to deceive you, it's to keep you from deceiving yourself" (ATS,
271). But Huck, like Jim, remains steadfastly suspicious of
multiply layered semiotic systems.

The story abounds in instances of humor or confusion arising
from the discrepancy between signs and referents. For
Huck and Jim there is no distinction between natural and artificial
signs—both are supposed to correspond to their referents
without ambiguity. Jim cannot bring himself to imagine
how time can vary according to a difference in longitude, refusing
to admit that hours and days are arbitrary demarcations
of an undifferentiated continuum. Tom, scanning the
horizon, announces that he sees camels through the telescope.
Huck takes up a glass and is disappointed: "Camels
your granny, they're spiders" (ATS, 288); he has not learned
the rules for translating small objects seen through a telescope
into features of the landscape. Huck and Jim are terrified
by a mirage and even more scandalized by Tom's insistence
that it "ain't anything but imagination" (ATS, 300). A
naive realist, Jim believes that the lake they see must be there
one way or another; if it can disappear, it is the ghost of a lake,
and the desert is haunted (ATS, 303). Tom, as usual, is able to
jump from one form of validation to another without difficulty,
becoming confident that the third lake they see is real
because the flock of birds heading toward it is a natural sign
(or index) of the presence of water.

Metaphor, says Umberto Eco, is a "scandal" for any literalistic
theory of language: "It is obvious that when someone
creates metaphors, he is, literally speaking, lying—as everybody

knows."[15] "Everybody" does not include Jim, whom
Twain allows to exhibit an incomprehension of metaphor unthinkable
in a normal adult. Huck has just cornered Tom by
forcing him to admit that he does not know what "welkin"
means, even though Tom has just used the word. Tom counters
that its meaning is irrelevant:

(ATS, 281)

Protest as he will that his example was a "metaphor"—Tom
himself uses the term ("that word kind of bricked us up for a
minute," says Huck)—he cannot convince Jim that it is not
"sinful" language. He pleads as precedent a saying whose
truth he expects Jim to admit, that "birds of a feather flock together,"
but Jim observes that bluebirds and jays avoid each
other despite their identical plumage. If Jim's incomprehension
is polemical, it cannot be aimed at any particular social
group, since figurative language is universal. We sympathize
with his ignorance, because on some level we do believe both
that metaphor is showy and that the deviation from ordinary
language separating humans from one another results from
our "sinful" human condition. Huck, Jim, and Tom are no
longer characters tied to St. Petersburg, Missouri, but characters
in a semantic morality play.[16]

The conventions customarily governing discourse have
broken down entirely in "The Refuge of the Derelicts," a late
(1905-1906) unpublished story about one Admiral Stormfield,
whose home is a haven for outcasts and failures, and
George Sterling, a young poet whose desire to interest the admiral
in a pet project (a monument to Adam) is frustrated by
his difficulty in communicating with the old man and his
"derelicts." Characters speak the same language, but their

particular manias lead them to misunderstand one another.
Conversation is treated as the art of manipulation; logic is valued
not for its consistency but for its power to bully an interlocutor
into silence.

The opening of the story is unusual for Twain, who most
often prefers a traditional exposition that immediately identifies
setting and narrator. "Refuge" instead begins with a
forceful unattributed command: "Tell him to go to hell!" The
sentence is curious in less obvious ways. It suggests that the
reader has been thrown in medias res, has just overheard, say,
the furious conclusion of a heated exchange between antagonistic
speakers. The succeeding sentence breaks this frame:
" 'So that was the message the footman brought you from
the Admiral!' said Shipman, keeping as straight a face as he
could, for he saw that his friend the young poet-artist was
deeply wounded" (FM, 162). The opening sentence, it turns
out, is an exclamation reported at the third remove. The admiral
had conveyed it to a footman, who repeated it to the poet
George, who in turn has repeated it to his friend Shipman.
And this tenuous chain of reported speech is part of a narrative
about the abrupt cessation of dialogue: George had
called at the house of the admiral, a stranger, and had been
unable to obtain an interview.

In chapter 2 George succeeds in meeting the admiral, but
their dialogue becomes increasingly an exercise in frustration.
The eccentric admiral so ignores rules governing pronoun reference,
assumptions about shared knowledge, and conversational
turn taking that in the admiral's account of his Aunt
Martha, George finds himself adrift, a "derelict" among the
others:

(FM, 178)

The admiral goes on to describe the two women in question.
Jimmy, it turns out, is actually a young woman, Aunt Martha
an old maid. Clarity lasts only briefly:

(FM, 178-79)

The admiral speaks a language that is veering toward solipsism.
He expects his interlocutor somehow to get behind the
opaque referentiality of his discourse to figure out which person
"she" or "her" refers to at any given point. The pathos-tinged
humor in this passage is different from that of the
Briggs-parson dialogue. The image of the "derelict," which
reappears in the dream-voyage tales, is reflected in the conversational
isolation of the speakers, their inability to reach
through the befuddling constructions their language provides
and to penetrate one another's thought.

Conversation in "The Refuge of the Derelicts" is based on a
principle Twain had enunciated a few years earlier, in what
was to become book 1 of Christian Science, his attack on Mary
Baker Eddy and her disciples. "Let us consider that we are all
partially insane. It will explain us to each other" (WIM, 234).
Because each belief system—religion, philosophy, political

ideology, or whatever—requires new words for new concepts,
each creates a dialect that is meaningless to the uninitiated.
This insight is dramatized in chapter 2 of Christian Science, in a
Briggs-parson dialogue between Twain and a practitioner of
Christian Science whom he claims to have met in Austria;
most of the words he puts in her mouth are taken verbatim or
paraphrased from Mary Baker Eddy. Like the interlocutors in
Roughing It, the practitioner offers explanations that are more
confusing than the originals. Twain questions her assurance
that pains are "illusions propagated by matter," asking,

(WIM, 220)

And the practitioner happily adds that it will be just as clear
read backward, or jumbled up any way you please, for that
matter. Twain has a marvelous time parodying what even
sympathetic readers must admit are the obscurities of Eddy's
style (and parts of the first chapters of Christian Science stand
among the best burlesque Twain ever wrote), but beneath the
humor lies a serious observation about the way thought and
language mold one another. After reading Science and Health
attentively, Twain concluded that it could be comprehensible
only to someone who accepted its tenets. True dialogue between
believer and nonbeliever is futile because each inhabits
a closed system of interpretation inaccessible to the other.
Twain condensed this estimation into a paragraph that comes
close to stating a general theory of incomprehensibility:

(WIM, 229-30)

For one who lives in the world of commonsense empiricism,
the radical idealism of Christian Science is unimaginable. The
"figures" that Twain hits upon to express the problem echo
the metaphors Saint Paul uses in discussing the problem of uninterpreted
glossolalia.[17] In the last decade of his life Twain's
imagination was haunted intermittently by a vision of Pentecost
in reverse, a world whose babble no descending Spirit
would make intelligible.

Around 1905, in particular, interpretation becomes a key
word, reappearing in a variety of shorter and longer pieces;
typically Twain mulls over a text whose meaning is finally undecidable.
Like other incomprehensibilities, the "mystifying
text" has a long history in Twain's work and originates likewise
as a purely humorous device. In 1866, for example, he
published in the San Francisco Golden Era a piece entitled
"Mark Twain Mystified," about a telegraphic dispatch so filled
with typographical errors and other muddles that it is "in the
last degree mysterious" (9 December 1866, MTS, 34). Chapter
70 of Roughing It is the story of a man driven mad when a
handwritten letter he receives from Horace Greeley is so indecipherable
that every reading produces a different nonsensical
text.[18] "First Interview with Artemus Ward," published
in Sketches New and Old (1875), recounts how Twain had been
"sold" in California when Ward befuddled him with "a string

of plausibly worded sentences that didn't mean anything under
the sun" (WMT 7:338). In "Some Learned Fables," animals
try to figure out the purpose of objects in a human village. A
wood-louse philologist, puzzling over inscriptions like "Boats
for Hire Cheap," concludes that Man had a written language
"which conveyed itself partly by letters, and partly by signs or
hieroglyphics" (WMT 7:156). These early "mystification"
pieces have no wide symbolic significance, but they suggest a
fascination with the playful subversion of norms in nonsense.

Twain returned to the motif of the indecipherable telegram
in 1905 while writing the third and last of his Mysterious
Stranger stories, "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger." Forty-Four
is explaining to his young friend that augury is no simple
matter. Suppose, he asks, you receive "a telegram in the Christian
Silence [sic] dialect, what are you going to do? Why,
there's nothing to do but guess the best you can, and take the
chances, because there isn't anybody in heaven or earth that
can understand both ends of it" (MSM, 382-83). Forty-Four
gives the text of the muddled telegram (one really by Eddy,
taken from a Boston newspaper) and laments that its message,
however important it may be, is hidden forever by a fog
of "uninterpretable irrelevancies" (MSM, 384). He then returns
to the subject of omens and prophecy, mocking the self-assurance
of augurs confident that they can discover the divine
meaning behind mundane occurrences. Twain treated
this topic at about the same time in "As Concerns Interpreting
the Deity." His point there is that if human communication is
hard to interpret, signs from God are even more obscure. Hieroglyphs
in both Egypt and the Americas have proved intractable
to scholars. "Thus we have infinite trouble in solving
man-made mysteries," he says, concluding sarcastically that
"it is only when we set out to discover the secrets of God that
our difficulties disappear" (WIM, 111). The remainder of the
sketch satirizes interpreters, both medieval and modern, who
have detected the hand of God in wars and disasters. If the
world is a telegram from God, as the Protestant exegetical tradition
would have it, might it not be either full of misprints or
written in a dead language?

The ultimate case of incomprehensibility for Twain is communication
between human and divine beings. If they existed,
angels or gods would neither act nor speak in ways that
men and women could understand. To borrow Wittgenstein's
aphorism for the connection between mental horizons and
language, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand it."[19]
In attacking the orthodox view that man is responsible for the
Fall, Twain depends on an explicit variant of the Whorfian hypothesis
that language constrains thought: Adam and Eve
could not have understood God's injunction because it used
words standing for concepts wholly alien to their experience.
This is the premise of "That Day in Eden," Satan's version of
the Genesis narrative. As the sketch opens, Adam and Eve are
puzzling over the words "Good, Evil, Death," and eventually
they ask Satan to explain them. He is at a loss how to begin,
but decides to try an analogy:

(WMT 29:340-41)[20]

Satan tries to explain death as an extended sleep, but Eve responds
that sleep is delightful. Lacking any comprehension
of the prohibition, they have no reason to avoid eating the
fruit. "I have not understood any of this talk," Adam says to
Eve, "but if you like we will eat it, for I cannot see that there
is any objection to it" (WMT 29:344). Twain's God is, so to
speak, a parson who has created Scotty Briggs, given him his
circumscribed range of miner's slang, and then condemned
him to death for failing to make any sense of polysyllabic theology.[21]
Like most of Twain's insights in What is Man?, this one
is neither original nor profound. It is significant, however,
as the endpoint of a long literary engagement with the relation
between thought and language; the frequency with
which the insight recurs during the period of the Mysterious
Stranger stories is evidence of its hold on Twain's imagination.[22]

Nearly all of the obsessive themes of Twain's late years
play a part in the three Mysterious Stranger stories: dreams,
doubles, the injustice of the Judeo-Christian God, the degraded
condition of man's moral sense, the gap between man
and other creatures (both "higher" and "lower"), and the
limitations of human language. To the end Twain believed in
the importance of dialogue, as shown by the form of the two
long versions ("The Chronicle of Young Satan" and "No. 44,
The Mysterious Stranger"), large portions of which are quasi-Socratic
dialogues between a young narrator and an omniscient
mysterious stranger. Paradoxically, however, what they
learn in these conversations is that dialogue is illusion, a corollary
of the radical skepticism that ends "No. 44": "It is all a
Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but
You. And You are but a Thought" (MSM, 405). "The Chronicle
of Young Satan," the only Mysterious Stranger story known to
the world as such for half a century, dramatizes in narrative
form the philosophical positions that What Is Man? elaborates
in a nonfictional form. The predominant incomprehension is
adumbrated in the tales of Adam and Eve: the incommensurability
of man and the divine that prevents either party
from understanding the other. Philip Traum (or "Satan")
states its logical basis: "One cannot compare things which by
their nature and by the interval between them are not comparable"
(MSM, 55). The angels and humans cannot converse
about phenomena because they conceive of them in essentially
different ways. An incident in chapter 2 powerfully
symbolizes this gap. Philip is explaining to the boys that the
angels were not affected by the Fall. "We . . . are still ignorant
of sin; we are not able to commit it." Two of the tiny automata
Philip has created begin an argument; Philip breaks off his

speech to crush them between his fingers, then continues:
"We cannot do wrong; neither have we any disposition to do
it, for we do not know what it is" (MSM, 49). The boys are
stunned at "the wanton murder he had committed—for murder
it was, it was its true name." The paradox is that both angel
and human are correct. The angels (like animals) lack the
moral sense; because the words wrong and sin are absent from
their conceptual scheme, to apply either one to their actions
simply "does not count." Nor can the boys conceive of a "possible
world" where unmotivated killing would not count as
"murder"—hence Theodor's excusable Cratylan belief that
murder is the "true name" (and not the culturally determined
name) of Philip's action. Twain's irony is double-edged. On the
one hand, he is debunking the orthodox view of a benevolent
Providence, as he does throughout "Young Satan"; on the
other, he is satirizing humans for believing that comprehensible
communication is any more possible between God and
man than between man and ant. To paraphrase Wittgenstein,
if God could talk, we could not understand him.

An uneasy mixture of realism and outrageous fantasy,
"No. 44" is indeed less "sustained and coherent" than its
better-known predecessor.[23] Its faults may be attributed to a
shift in emphasis: Twain is less interested here in satirizing orthodox
Christianity than in creating fictional representations
of the dream state and the split psyche. Absurd, chaotic, and
melodramatic by turns, "No. 44" is an allegory of the limitations
of speech, communication, and human thought, all conceived
of as different aspects of a single phenomenon. When
he returned to an Austrian setting ("Schoolhouse Hill," the
second of the Mysterious Stranger tales, had been set in
Hannibal), Twain made two important changes. In "Young
Satan," the narrator was a boy without occupation who lived
in the center of the village. In "No. 44," August Feldner is a
printer's apprentice living in an ancient castle on a precipice
overlooking the town. Both the print shop and its location
function as symbols. Printing is a metonymy for communication
in general, but in August's society the printers are treated

as outcasts. The Church opposes "the indiscriminate dissemination
of knowledge"; the townspeople lack interest:
"Our villagers did not trouble themselves about our work,
and had no commerce in it; we published nothing there, and
printed nothing that they could have read, they being ignorant
of abstruse sciences and the dead languages" (MSM,
230). The printer's workshop in an isolated castle issues messages
that are ignored or not comprehended. Twain's description
of the shop's exact location in the castle suggests a more
specific symbolic identification. The castle itself was

(MSM, 229)

(MSM, 234)

Like Poe's House of Usher, the castle represents a physical
shell inhabited by a rational soul, a Self residing at the center
of a labyrinth. Whereas much of the action in "Young Satan"
took place out of doors, almost all of "No. 44" is set inside
the castle, which symbolizes the psyche whose architecture
Twain explores in the story.

For several years Twain had been mulling over the theory
that humans possess two distinct selves, a waking self and a
dream self, with separate consciences and modes of existence,
that are "wholly unknown to each other, and can never
in this world communicate with each other in any way" (Notebook
entry, 7 January 1897, MTN, 349). In the confrontation
between the castle's inhabitants and the dream-self "duplicates"
that Forty-Four creates, Twain discovers that he does

not have to postulate an angelic interlocutor to arrive at maximum
incomprehensibility: because the psyche is divided, in
each of our minds the potential exists for an ultimate Briggs-parson
colloquy. When August and his dream self finally sit
down for a face-to-face talk, the result is like the stalled conversation
in "The Refuge of the Derelicts." August cannot
understand his counterpart's apparent indifference to a girl
whom he had been about to marry the previous day:

(MSM, 368)

Perhaps because the restrictions of time and place that bind
waking selves do not apply to dream-beings, their "discourse"
seems nonsensical; the fewer their ties to mortality,
the less comprehensible they are. It is as if a god and an infant
were combined—as in effect they are in the mysterious
stranger in each of the tales, a character that Twain perhaps
first encountered in apocryphal tales of the boy Jesus.[24] As
a minor character observes, "Sometimes they [the dream
selves] know all languages a minute, and next minute they
don't know their own, if they've got one" (MSM, 373). Because
their experience is alien to that of the waking self, the
dream selves find it difficult to convey that experience in human
language. Schwarz, August's dream self,

(MSM, 377-78)

The language of the unconscious seems possessed of transcendent
meaning, but the conscious glimpses that meaning
fitfully, through large patches of nonsense. Simultaneously a
threat and a promise, dream language keeps one poised on a
knife-edge between ecstasy and madness. If Twain seems to
anticipate Freud in his surmise that dreams and the unconscious
have a language all their own, he is much less confident
that it can be interpreted.

At its worst, submersion in the dream world brings absolute
chaos, as when Forty-Four, for a joke, turns time backward.
He and August journey around the globe to observe the
effects: "Everywhere weary people were re-chattering previous
conversations backwards and not understanding each
other, and oh, they did look so tuckered out and tired of it
all!" (MSM, 399-400). Ultimately, articulated language itself is
found wanting. The dream, could we pierce its veil, would
prove a "rainbow"; speech washes it of color. In "Young Satan"
Theodor complains that "words cannot make you understand
what we felt" when Satan was nearby. "It was an ecstasy; and
an ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like
music, and one cannot tell about music so that another person
can get the feeling of it" (MSM, 54). Number Forty-Four must
go beyond language altogether to answer August's question,
"What are you?":

(MSM, 318)

The feeling that language is an inadequate bridge between
minds drives Twain back into nostalgia for a form of communication
that might undo the fall of Babel by transcending linguistic
divisions. Just as Twain could espouse mechanical determinism
and still place faith in a pseudo-scientific "mind
cure," so the sometime debunker of monoglossia would long
for a universal metalanguage that could withstand the menace
of cacophonous heteroglossia.

Twain's desire to escape the limitations imposed by natural
language is behind his interest in parapsychological phenomena,
particularly "mental telegraphy" (what we call telepathy).
That interest goes back at least as far as the mid-1870s,
according to the essay "Mental Telegraphy," published in
1891. As Twain explained, a number of otherwise inexplicable
experiences had convinced him that minds could telegraph
thoughts to other minds. Several times, for instance, he had
been able to predict the contents of an unopened letter because
it was from someone who had been in his mind during
the past few days. Repeated experiences of this sort demonstrated
that "one human mind . . . can communicate with another,
over any sort of a distance" (WMT 22:122). Twain was
enough of a materialist to hypothesize that the conveying medium
was "a finer and subtler form of electricity." Should we
discover just how to harness it, we would be able to invent the
"phrenophone," a device whereby "the communicating of
mind with mind may be brought under command and reduced
to certainty and system" (WMT 22:128). It is hard to
believe that Mark Twain the skeptic could write an essay like
"Mental Telegraphy" without tongue in cheek, yet all the evidence
is that his interest in parapsychology was sincere. His
notebooks are filled with accounts of "telegraphic" experiences;
in 1898 he assures Howells that "some day people will
be able to call each other up from any part of the world & talk

by mental telegraph" (MTHL 2:675). In the fantasy "Three
Thousand Years among the Microbes" (1905), the narrator is
able to dictate into a "thought recorder," which records the
impressions preceding articulate thought, "and so luminous
are they, and so clear and limpid and superbly radiant in expression
that they make all articulate speech . . . seem dull
and lifeless and confused by comparison" (WWD, 490).[25]

Fortunately, Twain did not compound his Paige typesetter
mistake by subsidizing the development of a mental telegraph
or a thought recorder. But he did make extended literary capital
of an intuitively understood dream language in a sentimental
sketch entitled "My Platonic Sweetheart," written in
1898 but not published until two years after his death. If
stories like "No. 44" and "Which Was the Dream?" (about a
nightmare that comes to seem real) represent the dark side of
an ambivalent feeling about dream communication, "My Platonic
Sweetheart" is the sunny obverse. It describes a recurrent
dream that Twain first had, he says, when he was nineteen.
Always in different places, a seventeen-year-old Twain
meets a fifteen-year-old sweetheart. In each dream the lovers
call each other by different names, because the semantics of
dream names differs from that of our waking names.

(WMT 27:296)

Twain goes on to claim that in his notebook he has recorded
and translated letters from his dream sweetheart in the dream
language (none of his existing notebooks contain examples,
although he did sometimes record dreams):

(WMT 27:296-97)

"Everything in a dream is more deep and strong and sharp
and real than is ever its pale imitation in the unreal life which
is ours when we go about awake," Twain says in the final
paragraph of this sketch (WMT 27:304). His true Platonic
sweetheart, it would seem, is thus Plato himself, for in this
sentence he virtually recreates the myth of the cave.[26] Natural
languages, imitations of some vaguely grasped ideal, all fall
short of the perfect communication that can be recaptured
only in dreams and visions. We have come full circle: if cacophony
in the real world seems to fling the bricks of Babel
ever further apart, we may enter a dream world where the
tower stands intact as an Idea.

But we must not let even Plato have the last word. None of the
parabolic or doctrinal writings of Twain's last years sets forth
an ultimate position, and his practice often contradicts his
theory. The last fifteen years of his life, for example, represent
perhaps his greatest commitment to the spoken word as a
means of communication, as he undertook a round-the-world
lecture tour, delivered speeches at innumerable banquets,
and was interviewed more often than any other public figure.
While arguing for mechanical determinism and decrying the
intractability of language, Twain is typically doing his utmost
to change the world and to reach as many people as possible
with his words. In his stylistic criticism of James Fenimore
Cooper and Mary Baker Eddy he is still fighting the corruption
of language as he had a generation earlier in The Gilded
Age. One conclusion of this study, accordingly, must be the
reaffirmation of an old critical insight, that there are "two
Twains," two contradictory personalities, an irreducible dualism
inhabiting the same creative mind. In previous chapters
I have examined Twain's ambivalence about prescriptive grammar,
the vernacular, and foreign languages. His alternate debunking

and embracing of primal, Adamic, transcendent languages,
along with his wavering between delight and dread at
the prospect of an infinity of tongues, is nothing more than
the same pendulum swinging more widely.

The conflict between Language and languages is as old
as the opposition between Parmenides' claim that Being is
changeless and indivisible and Heraclitus' claim that Being is
change, that "all things take place by strife." For all his wavering,
in the end Mark Twain was a pupil of Heraclitus. He felt
a great terror of absolute stasis, which he associated with
speechlessness, the absence of dialogue. "The Enchanted
Sea-Wilderness" provides us with Twain's mythical embodiments
of change and stasis. Written in 1896, this is an unfinished
tale about sailors lost south of the Cape of Good
Hope, in a vast circular region of the ocean consisting of different
rings. The outer ring is the Devil's Race-Track, "lashed
and tossed and torn by eternal storms"; the inmost is the
Everlasting Sunday, where there are "no winds, no whisper of
wandering zephyr, even, but everywhere the silence and
peace and solemnity of a calm which is eternal" (WWD, 76).
The inmost ring is the more terrible. Becalmed there, sailors
abandon their logbooks—"Where one day is exactly like another,
why record them?" (WWD, 85)—and sit apart, brooding,
speechless. When at length they hear a man cry, "A ship!"
the human voice pains and distresses them; "their brains were
so blunted and sodden that at first his words couldn't find
their way into their understandings, all practice in talk having
ceased so long ago" (WWD, 83). Unchanging eternity is death
to language. By contrast, when in "Captain Stormfield's Visit
to Heaven" Twain imagines an eternity he might consent to
live in, the result is a joyful mingling of voices of every nation,
race, and faith. To paraphrase Blake: dialogue is eternal delight.
Whatever the cost of a divided psyche may have been, at
least the two Twains do not cease to speak to one another, or
to the world. Instead, they carry on in Mark Twain's writing
a lifelong conversation, one that we enter into through the
acts of reading and interpretation. Mark Twain's languages
are ours.