 | Mark Twain's languages : |  |
Notes
Preface
Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, new and rev. ed.
(London: J. M. Dent, 1934), pp. 199-200.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1981), p. 262.
1. Introduction
In the letter of 1898 that provides the epigraph to this chapter,
Twain notes that he has arrived independently at the empiricists'
doctrine that the mind "is a mere machine" whose thoughts all come
from the outside. Twain's letter to Adams is printed in Lawrence
Clark Powell, "An Unpublished Mark Twain Letter," American Literature
13 (1942): 405.
The definitive reference work is Alan Gribben's Mark Twain's
Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).
Those familiar with Mark Twain criticism may catch in my
opening queries and responses an echo of those that begin William
M. Gibson's fine study, The Art of Mark Twain (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976). He finds that readers have hesitated to call
Twain a true literary artist partly because he "exercised his art less
consciously . . . and with less interest in theory" than novelists like
Howells and James; it follows "that his art must be defined chiefly in
his practice—and his best practice, at that" (p. 4).
David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776-1850
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 232. Simpson's book
appeared when my own work was in a late stage, else I should have
liked to integrate more thoroughly his forceful demonstration that
for Cooper "language is always made up of different languages in
conflict" (p. 252).
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1981), p. 68. (In the passage from which I quote,
Bakhtin is speaking of the effect of "active polyglossia"; elsewhere
literature.)
The most wide-ranging general study of the problem of variety
in language is George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language and
Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Grounded in
a more careful historical method is Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure:
Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1982). For a popular treatment,
see J. R. Firth, The Tongues of Men (London: Watts, 1937).
Samuel Kirkham, English Grammar in Familiar Lectures, stereotype
ed. (New York: R. B. Collins, n.d. [1829]), p. 18. On Kirkham's
importance, and the evidence that young Samuel Clemens used this
text, see chapter 2, pp. 18-22.
Hans Aarsleff identifies 1860, the year that the Philological Society
of London adopted the final plan for what would become the
Oxford English Dictionary, as the end point of a two-generation battle
between the new philology and the old (The Study of Language in
England, 1780-1860 [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1967], p. 4).
Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm
von Humboldt, trans. Marianne Cowan (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1963), pp. 335-36. For an overview of Humboldt's
career and its importance to subsequent linguistics, see Aarsleff,
From Locke to Saussure, pp. 335-55.
Humboldt, Humanist, pp. 246-50. Russian semiotician Juri
Lotman argues similarly that "noise" is essential to communication.
"Non-understanding, incomplete understanding, or misunderstanding
are not side-products of the exchange of information but
belong to its very essence"; study of culture as a "sign phenomenon"
leads to the conclusion that cultures advance as they purposefully
multiply "the mechanisms which impede the process of message-transmission"
("The Sign Mechanism of Culture," Semiotica 12
[1974]: 302).
William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language: An
Outline of Linguistic Science (New York: Appleton, 1875), p. 4.
William Dwight Whitney, Language and the Study of Language:
Twelve Lectures on the Principles of Linguistic Science (New York: Scribner,
1867), p. 404.
Twain tells in The Innocents Abroad how he "burst into tears" at
the tomb of his kinsman Adam. Robert Gale lists over a dozen places
in Twain's writings where Adam is referred to or figures as a character
(Plots and Characters in the Works of Mark Twain, 2 vols. [Hamden,
Conn.: Archon, 1973], 2:675-76). Allison Ensor discusses Twain's
use of Adam and the biblical creation myth in Mark Twain and the
Bible (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969), pp. 40-61.
"The Poet," in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Alfred R. Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1971-), 3:13.
Susan K. Harris has made a similar point, finding that Eve
represents the possibility of communication, whereas "Adam's control
over language expands as he comes to understand how much
Eve means to him" (Mark Twain's Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns
and Images [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982], p. 124).
2. "A Lot of Rules"
For two fine accounts of the role of language theory and prescriptive
grammar in the history of American English, see Dennis E.
Baron, Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); and Edward Finegan, Attitudes
toward English Usage: The History of a War of Words (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1980).
For White and Moon, see chapter 3. No titles by Whitney or
Müller appear in Alan Gribben's Mark Twain's Library. I know of only
one reference to the two grammarians in Twain's writing. Twain considered
inserting in A Tramp Abroad a mock correspondence with
several philologists concerning his theories on German grammar:
"Wrote to Max Müller & Prof Whitney & J H Trumbull o[n] Phi[l]ological
matters but only got offensive answers or silence" (Notebook
17, NJ2, 266). Trumbull was Twain's neighbor in Hartford; he contributed
obscure foreign-language epigraphs to The Gilded Age, and his
death in 1897 elicited a eulogistic essay from Twain. Twain probably
knew Müller and Whitney by reputation only.
H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th ed. (New York:
N.Y.: Linguistica, 1950).
In 1909 Ambrose Bierce published Write It Right: A Little Blacklist
of Literary Faults, a reactionary usage manual that crusades against
"loose locutions of the ignorant" and "expressions ancestrally vulgar
or irreclaimably degenerate" ([New York: Neale, 1910], pp. 5-6).
We learn from Bierce that since leave is transitive, we cannot say "he
left yesterday" and that pants for trousers is "vulgar exceedingly."
Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 19.
The Mark Twain Papers owns a copy of an 1835 edition of
Kirkham that appears to have been signed by the young Clemens.
Alan Gribben hesitantly accepts it as authentic; he explains his
doubts in Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols. (Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1980), 2:383-84. As Gribben notes, Twain twice refers in passing
to Kirkham, in A Tramp Abroad and in an autobiographical dictation
of 1907 (2:384). That Twain has schoolmaster Ferguson refer to
"about thirty" rules of grammar is good circumstantial evidence for
his remembering Kirkham's prominent list of thirty-five rules of syntax.
Rollo Lyman has documented that Kirkham's grammar was at
the height of its popularity in the early 1840s, just when Twain was
entering grammar school (English Grammar in American Schools before
1850 [Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922], p. 83).
Samuel Kirkham, English Grammar in Familiar Lectures, stereotype
ed. (New York: R. B. Collins, n.d. [1829]).
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, a Play, in HHT, p. 301; I have omitted
the italics that Twain used to indicate vocal emphasis. In an 1887
dinner speech, he would cast himself in the Ben Rogers role: "I remember
myself, and all of you old fellows probably remember the
same of yourselves, that when I went to school I was told that an adjective
is an adverb and it must be governed by the third person singular,
and all that sort of thing—and when I got out of school I
straightway forgot all about it" (MTS, 217).
Number Forty-Four knows the English grammar by heart because
he has "heard [the] grammar class recite the rules before entering
upon the rest of their lesson" (MSM, 178). Twain certainly believed
that memory alone was incapable of conferring linguistic
prowess. The prodigious memory of the pilot Brown, in Life on the
and ruins him as a storyteller.
Mark Twain, "An Excellent School," Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise, 12 February 1864 (ETS1, 345).
Twain's evaluation of the purpose for grammar resembles serious
statements made by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians.
Robert Lowth, for instance, wrote in the preface to his
grammar of 1762 that a "principal design" of any grammatical
treatise should be "to teach us . . . to judge of every phrase and form
of construction, whether it be right or not" (A Short Introduction to
English Grammar [London, 1762], p. x). Kirkham defines English
grammar as "the art of speaking and writing with propriety" (English
Grammar, p. 18).
Mark Twain, "The Facts Concerning the Recent Trouble between
Mr. Mark Twain and Mr. John William Skae, of Virginia City,"
San Francisco Californian, 26 August 1865 (ETS2, 258).
Randolph Quirk suggests that speakers of English fall into
three categories: assured, anxious, and indifferent. Speakers at the
top of the social scale belong to the first group; their status is so secure
that they need not worry about criticism or correction. "Their
nonchalant attitude toward language was epitomised in the nineteenth
century in the words of Bulwer Lytton: 'I am free to confess
that I don't know grammar. Lady Blessington, do you know grammar?'
" (The Use of English [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962],
pp. 69-70).
Writing to Bret Harte soon after the publication of The Celebrated
Jumping Frog, Twain takes pride in the "handsome" appearance
of his first book but complains of the "damnable errors of grammar
and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch" that
slipped in because he was not able to read proof (letter of 1 May 1867,
MTL 1:124). When he proposed turning his Quaker City excursion
letters to the Alta California into a book, he promised Elisha Bliss that
he "could weed them of their chief faults of construction and inelegancies
of expression" to make an acceptable volume (letter of 2 December
1867, MTL 1:141).
In 1878, while correcting a manuscript by his brother Orion,
Twain objected to an instance of this usage: " 'Next came 100 people
who looked like they had just been, &c' That wretched Missourianism
occurs in every chapter. You mean, 'as if' " (holograph MS, MTP,
DV 415) (s=d).
While on his Mississippi trip Twain identified the "error" as
peculiar to the region; in his notebook he records, "Here they say 'I
will do so & so, when they mean shall' " (NJ2, 470).
Mencken, The American Language, p. 46. Mencken quotes the
of "he don't": "Here in Virginia many men of the highest education
use the phrase habitually. Their ancestors have used it for many
generations, and it might be argued with some reason that when the
best blood and the best brains of Virginia use an expression for so
long a time it becomes correct." Twain must have heard the usage
often from his Virginia-born father.
Henry H. Breen, Modern English Literature: Its Blemishes and
Defects (London: Longman, 1857), pp. v, 8. During the 1860s, Dean
Alford, George Washington Moon, and Edward Gould had engaged
in a noisy feud over linguistic judgments and grammatical errors in
one another's writing. Although there is no evidence that Twain
knew any of their works until he read Moon in the 1890s, the controversy
was covered widely in newspapers and periodicals on both
sides of the Atlantic, so he was probably aware of the epidemic of
mutual faultfinding among these critics.
The extracts are from A Tramp Abroad (WMT 9:203); Contributors'
Club, Atlantic Monthly 45 (1880): 850; Life on the Mississippi
(1883) (WMT 12:222); dinner speech, 27 April 1887 (MTS, 226);
"Comment on Tautology and Grammar," dated 1898 (MTA 1:173);
"Remarks" at Women's Press Club tea, 27 October 1900 (MTS, 34647);
Christian Science (WIM, 273).
Dennis Baron (Grammar and Good Taste, pp. 145-51) and
Edward Finegan (Attitudes toward English Usage, pp. 48, 57-59) both
comment on the moralistic tone of nineteenth-century grammar
texts. Lindley Murray, in his "Address to Young Students," says he
wrote his grammar out of "a desire to facilitate your progress in
learning, and, at the same time, to impress on your minds principles
of piety and virtue" (English Grammar [Bridgeport, Conn., 1824; facsimile
reprint, Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1981],
p. 306).
Kenneth Lynn has observed that the "Clown" of Southwestern
humor "was unselfconsciously infantile even when he was technically
an adult. Whooping and hollering and jumping into the air,
he behaved with childlike unrestraint in no matter what company;
his vernacular speech—grotesque, drawling, ungrammatical—was a
sort of baby-talk" (Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor [Boston: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1959], p. 133).
Brander Matthews, "What Is Pure English?" in Essays on English
(New York: Scribner, 1922), p. 33.
On malapropism in American humor, see Walter Blair and
Hamlin Hill, America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 138.
James M. Cox writes that Brown is "clearly modeled upon
Pap" and "speaks in [his] tone if not [his] very accents" (Mark Twain:
The Fate of Humor [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966],
p. 162).
In his version of the fight, Albert Bigelow Paine records several
lines of dialogue between the two, but they seem to be merely a
fictional expansion of the indirect description in Life on the Mississippi
(Mark Twain: A Biography, 3 vols. [New York: Harper, 1912],
1:136).
Quoted in Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 12. In his first chapter
Elliott discusses the ancient traditions of invective that precede the
development of modern satire.
Thomas Lounsbury, The Standard of Usage in English (New
York: Harper, 1908), p. 98. Twain owned a copy of this book; see
Gribben, Mark Twain's Library, 1:424.
Brander Matthews provides our best independent evidence
of the sway that linguistic respectability held over even a "liberal"
in Twain's day. Before Twain's death Matthews had celebrated "the
speech of the people," identifying Twain and Kipling as the two authors
with the best ear for it. In 1920, however, he would eulogize his
friend more cautiously by insisting that he did indeed speak and
write the "best English": "In his own person . . . he refrained from
[using slang], tempting as many of its vigorous vocables must have
been to him. . . . He knew better than to yield to the easy allurement;
and his English is as pure as it is direct and uncompromising.
. . . Mark spoke his native tongue in its utmost purity, which is why
every Englishman could understand him. He spoke pure English, as
free from obtruded Americanisms as from obsolete Briticisms, the
English current on both shores of 'the salt, unplumbed estranging
sea,' the English of Defoe and Bunyan, of Franklin and Lincoln"
("Mark Twain and the Art of Writing," in Essays on English, pp. 24445,
247). Matthews may have taken this line of defense in reaction to
Van Wyck Brooks's just-published Ordeal of Mark Twain.
Contributors' Club, Atlantic Monthly 45 (1880): 850. Twain
would long remain sensitive about his adverb usage: in an 1898 notebook
entry he carefully puts "only" in the formally required place
("a person who is present in your imagination only") and then adds
the irritated parenthetical remark, "I wish the word 'only' was in
hell" (MTN, 365).
The 1860s witnessed a battle of the books over just this issue
of adverb placement. Dean Alford, following the colloquial model,
championed relatively free placement of only; purist George Washington
Moon protested that this created ambiguity and "proved" that
one of Alford's sentences could be read in no less than 10,240 different
senses. "In contemplating the way in which our sentences will be
understood," replied Alford, "we are allowed to remember, that we
do not write for idiots" (The Queen's English: A Manual of Idiom and
Usage [1864; reprint, London: George Bell, 1895], p. 98).
Matthew Arnold, General Grant, with a rejoinder by Mark
Twain, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1966), p. 13.
James B. Fry, "Grant and Matthew Arnold: An Estimate,"
North American Review 144 (1887): 349-57.
"Use good grammar" is one of the "little" rules governing literary
art that Cooper "coldly and persistently violated," according to
Twain (WMT 22:63). While on his round-the-world voyage in 1896,
Twain recorded in his notebook: "Zangwill's 'Master' is done in good
English—what a rare thing good English is! and the grammar is
good, too—and what a very, very rare thing that is!" (MTN, 267).
See Chester L. Davis, "Mark Twain's Marginal Notes on 'The
Queen's English,' " Twainian 25 (1966): 1-4.
William Cobbett, A Grammar of the English Language, in a Series
of Letters (1823; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 7.
3. The Gilded Age and the Corruption
of Language
Bolinger's penetrating analysis of verbal shamanism makes up
the first chapter of his Language—the Loaded Weapon: The Use and
Abuse of Language Today (London: Longman, 1980).
Leonard Bloomfield, "Secondary and Tertiary Responses to
Language," Language 20 (1944): 45. For the influence and importance
of White, see H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th ed. (New
York: Knopf, 1936), pp. 61-62.
Richard Grant White, Words and Their Uses, Past and Present: A
1892), p. 3. (Further references in this chapter are to this edition and
are incorporated in the text.) Richard Grant White (1821-1885), a
critic and editor of Shakespeare, wrote on questions of language as a
self-admitted amateur. Like his counterparts in our own day, he thoroughly
opposed the latitudinarianism of professional linguists.
White writes, "The . . . confusion of like and as . . . is common
with careless speakers. Thus, for instance, He don't do it like you do,
instead of as you do" (p. 137). Twain's belief that shall and will were
confused more often in the South can also be found in Words and
Their Uses: "The distinction between these words . . . is liable to be
disregarded by persons who have not had the advantage of early intercourse
with educated English people. I mean English in blood and
breeding; for . . . in New England it is noteworthy that even the boys
and girls playing on the commons use shall and will correctly; . . .
while by Scotchmen and Irishmen, even when they are professionally
men of letters, and by the great mass of the people of the Western
and Southwestern States, the words are used without discrimination"
(p. 264).
Twain's copy of Words and Their Uses was an 1872 edition signed
"Mark Twain, 1873" (see Gribben, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction,
2 vols. [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980], 2:762). Twain had probably
seen at least a few of the original articles since he published his first
article in the Galaxy in 1868 and became a regular contributor, over
sixty of his pieces appearing there during 1870 and 1871.
The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson
et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971-), 1:20.
Review of Words and Their Uses, North American Review 112
(1871): 470. The distrust of the "foreign element" evident in the concluding
triumvirate looks forward to The Question of Our Speech by
Henry James. Compare the scorn of a writer in the Biblical Repository:
"Custom is undoubtedly high authority. . . . But the custom
of whom do we accept as the standard? Of children? of the ignorant
and uncultivated? Or does the voice even of the majority of those
who are educated determine grammatical rules? Or is it the usage of
the best speakers and writers? Really it seems almost childish to ask
these questions" (quoted in George Washington Moon, Learned
Men's English: The Grammarians [London: Routledge, 1892], p. 211).
Samuel L. Clemens, "The Curious Republic of Gondour," in
The Curious Republic of Gondour and Other Whimsical Sketches (New
York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), pp. 1, 3-4.
Sociolinguist William Labov has made a similar polemical
charge in our own day: "Our work in the speech community makes it
painfully obvious that in many ways working-class speakers are
more effective narrators, reasoners, and debaters than many middle-class
mass of irrelevant detail. Many academic writers try to rid themselves
of that part of middle-class style that is empty pretension. . . .
But the average middle-class speaker that we encounter makes no
such effort; he is enmeshed in verbiage, the victim of sociolinguistic
factors beyond his control" ("The Logic of Nonstandard English," in
Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular
[Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972], pp. 213-14).
The first chapter of Edward S. Gould's Good English; or, Popular
Errors in Language (1867) is entitled "Who Is Responsible?" (for the
corruption of language). His answer: "Among writers, those who do
the most mischief are the original fabricators of error, to wit: the men
generally who write for the newspapers" (6th ed. [New York: Widdleton,
1875], p. 7). Gould goes on to quote Dean Alford's extensive criticism
of the British press, which begins: "The language . . . is undergoing
a sad and rapid process of deterioration. Its fine manly Saxon
is getting diluted into long Latin words not carrying half the meaning.
This is mainly owing to the vitiated and pretentious style which
passes current in our newspapers" (Henry Alford, The Queen's English:
A Manual of Idiom and Usage [1864; reprint, London: George
Bell, 1895], p. 179).
Twain had already complained about the pretentious display
of foreign words, notably in chapter 23 of The Innocents Abroad. The
closest precursor to the scene in The Gilded Age is a signed sketch in
the Buffalo Express, 4 December 1869, recounting the inanities of a
pair of Americans "Back from 'Yurrup.' " They pretend to have spoken
French so long that English comes "dreadful awkward," and
they flounder through a conversation in "barbarous French . . . and
neither one of them ever by any chance understanding what the
other was driving at" (FM, 141-44).
Although the bulk of the chapter in which this passage occurs
is unquestionably Twain's, the section that contains it appears on stylistic
grounds to be Warner's. As a matter of fact, Laura's speech does
not really "betray itself," in this chapter or elsewhere; even when
Laura is still a girl in Missouri—in chapter 10 of the first volume, one
of Twain's—her speech is elegant. The important point, however, is
that Twain and Warner both mean us to understand Laura as a superbly
manipulative woman who is superior to even practiced Washingtonians
at establishing and maintaining a facade that will procure
influence.
Jean-Joseph Goux, Economie et symbolique (Paris: Seuil, 1973),
p. 182. See also Goux, Les Monnayeurs du langage (Paris: Galilée,
1984); and Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), and Money, Language, and Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
The biblical echoes here are general, but two passages from
the New Testament are especially relevant: "Lay not up for yourselves
treasures upon earth . . . but lay up for yourselves treasures
in heaven" (Matt. 6: 19-20), and "[In God and Christ] are hid all the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Col. 2:3).
Twain had just handled the themes of inflation and wild
speculation in Roughing It. Chapter 29, for instance, describes how
miners in the Humboldt region owned a multitude of mines with impressive
names whose wealth was wholly prospective. Chapter 44
describes in detail the rise and fall of stock in wildcat mines.
"Random remarks here and there, being pieced together gave
Laura a vague impression of a man of fine presence, about forty-three
or forty-five years of age, with dark hair and eyes, and a slight
limp in his walk. . . . And this indistinct shadow represented her father"
(WMT 5:97).
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, abr.
and ed. John W. Yolton (London: Dent, 1976), p. 255.
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 473, 47.
4. "Babel Come Again"
William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language: An
Outline of Linguistic Science (New York: Appleton, 1875), p. 154.
Frederic William Farrar, An Essay on the Origin of Language
(London: J. Murray, 1860), pp. 86-87.
See "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," in Mikhail
M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), especially pp. 61-66.
Henri Bergson poses a "law in accordance with which we will
define all broadly comic situations in general. Any arrangement of acts
and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of
life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement" (Laughter
[1900], in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1956], p. 105).
See, for example, the letter Twain wrote Bayard Taylor from
Heidelberg on 7 May 1878, when his knowledge of German was at
time of the "apotheke" story:
Ich habe heute gecalled on der Herr Profesor Ihne, qui est die Professor
von Englishen Zunge im University, to get him to recommend
ein Deutchen Lehrer für mich, welcher he did. Er sprach um mehrerer
Americanischer authors, und meist güngstiger & vernügungsvoll von
Ihrer. . . .
Ich habe das Deutche sprache gelernt und bin ein glucklicher Kind,
you bet.
Mark Twain," American Literature 8 (1936): 47-48.
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, p. 343. See also Caryl Emerson,
"The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization
of Language," Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 255.
Mark Twain, letter dated 20 March 1862, published in Keokuk
Gate City, 25 June 1862, p. 1 (reprinted in The Pattern for Mark Twain's
"Roughing It," ed. Franklin R. Rogers [Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1961], p. 39).
Pidgin English was used by Indians not only to speak to
whites but also to conduct affairs with other racial groups. See J. L.
Dillard, All-American English (New York: Vintage, 1976), pp. 99-111.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed.
Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade-Baskin, rev. ed.
(London: Peters Owen, 1974), pp. 11-13.
An extreme case of linguistic domination is the stock dialogue
between the boot camp drill sergeant and the new recruit. When the
former repeats a question, shouting, "I can't HEAR you!" the latter
may not respond, "But I spoke perfectly clearly"; he has no choice
but to repeat his answer even more loudly, as many times as the sergeant
elicits it.
Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,
and Other Sketches (New York: Webb, 1867), pp. 58-59.
See Franklin R. Rogers, Mark Twain's Burlesque Patterns, As
Seen in the Novels and Narratives, 1855-1885 (Dallas: Southern Methodist
University Press, 1960), pp. 21-24.
For James M. Cox, The Innocents Abroad is the record of Mark
Twain's "mock-initiation" into the reality of Europe, through a process
of "illusion followed by disillusion . . . so recurrent as to be the
very mechanism of the narrator's behavior" (Mark Twain: The Fate of
Humor [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966], pp. 45-56).
The paradox is similar to the famous one in Life on the Mississippi.
To navigate the river safely, the pilot must learn to read it as a system of signs that indicate relative danger and safety. Once the
beauty as landscape is forever lost.
The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson
et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971-),
pp. 19-20. On Transcendentalist belief in a universal language, see
Philip F. Gura, The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature
in the New England Renaissance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1981), pp. 9, 75-105, 125-26.
"Mark Twain in Paris," New York Sun, 27 January 1895, sec. 3,
p. 4 (quoted in Louis Budd, "Mark Twain Talks Mostly about Humor
and Humorists," Studies in American Humor 1 [1974]: 9).
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 71.
Th[érèse] Bentzon, "Les Humoristes américains: Mark
Twain," Revue des deux mondes 100 (1872): 314.
In her final paragraph, speaking of Twain's works in general,
Bentzon writes: "Ce qui est intraduisible surtout, c'est ce qui fait le
principal mérite de ces bigarrures, le style original et mordant, le
tour idiomatique, le mélange bizarre et souvent pittoresque de néologie,
de patois et d'argot qu'on appelle le slang" ("Les Humoristes
américains," p. 335).
Translated direct discourse has the same formal appearance
as ordinary direct discourse but a different ontological status. The resistance
of foreign discourse to assimilation is suggested by the following
paradigm (in which the asterisk and question mark represent
"unacceptable" and "questionable," respectively):
| Direct Discourse (original): | Pierre said, "J'ai faim." |
| Direct Discourse (translated): | Pierre said, "I'm hungry." |
| Indirect Discourse (original): | * Pierre said that il avait faim. |
| Indirect Discourse (translated): |
Pierre said that he was hungry. |
| Free Indirect Discourse (original): |
?Pierre stopped. Qu'il avait faim! |
| Free Indirect Discourse (translated): |
Pierre stopped. How hungry he was! |
interested in the theory of represented discourse should refer to Ann
Banfield's masterful study, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation
in the Language of Fiction [Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1982].)
For an argument that there is no nonarbitrary distinction between
View and the Indirections of Direct Speech," Language and Style 15
(1982): 67-117.
John T. Krumpelmann, Mark Twain and the German Language
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953).
Paine thought the essay "one of Mark Twain's supreme bits of
humor . . . Mark Twain at his best" (Mark Twain: A Biography, 2:669).
The Mark Twain Papers contains an unfinished burlesque
German grammar, "German As She Is Acquired" (DV 155) (printed
in David R. Sewell, "Varieties of Language in the Writings of Mark
Twain," Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1984,
pp. 174-76).
According to a newspaper report, Twain made similar suggestions
when he spoke on Italian grammar in Florence for a British Relief
Fund benefit; see "Mark Twain to Reform the Language of Italy,"
New York Times, 10 April 1904, sec. 2, p. 1.
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, in The Annotated
Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New-York: Bramhall House, 1960), p. 269;
see also Gardner's extensive note on Humpty-Dumpty's semantic
logic, pp. 268-70.
Twain's translation: "REVOLVERATION IN THEATER. Paris,
27th. La Patrie has from Chicago: The cop of the theater of the opera
of Wallace, Indiana, had willed to expel a spectator which continued
to smoke in spite of the prohibition, who, spalleggiato by his
friends, tirò (Fr. tiré, Anglice pulled) manifold revolver-shots. The
cop responded. Result, a general scare; great panic among the spectators.
Nobody hurt" (WMT 24:240). (Spalleggiato means "backed" or
"supported." Otherwise the translation is jovially accurate, except
that scarica means "salvo.")
See Wilga Rivers and Mary S. Temperley, A Practical Guide to
the Teaching of English as a Second or Foreign Language (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978), pp. 20-23; and R. Titone, Teaching Foreign
Languages: A Historical Sketch (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, 1968), pp. 33-37.
Mark Twain, Notebook 32, MTP TS, p. 12 (✝); see Alan Gribben,
Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols. (Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1980), 2:269.
François Gouin, The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages,
5th ed., trans. Howard Swan and Victor Bétis (London: George
Philip & Son, 1894), p. 10.
Neither Gouin's name for his method nor his criticism of traditional
been preceded by Professor John Stuart Blackie: "The time was . . .
when the Latin language was taught in the natural and proper way,
by talking and discoursing as well as by reading. . . . But for the
most part, in this nineteenth century, Latin, and Greek also . . . are
taught in a most painful and perverse manner, by grammars and dictionaries
and books only, to the utter neglect of the natural method,
according to which, as we have shown, the knowledge of language
comes by the ear, not by the eye" ("On the Study of Languages,"
Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, n.s. 9 [1842]: 749).
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.
Richard Bridgman has observed that whereas an adult is
"tainted with stylistic original sin," Huck's style is "prelapsarian in
its innocence and single-minded directness" (Colloquial Style, p. 10).
Roy Harvey Pearce, "Yours Truly, Huck Finn," in One Hundred
Years of "Huckleberry Finn": The Boy, His Book, and American Culture,
of Missouri Press, 1985), p. 323.
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.
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 149-56; Cox, Mark Twain, pp. 233-45;
and Alsen, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Fight," passim.
Mark Twain, letter to Olivia Clemens, 12 January 1894, in The
Love Letters of Mark Twain, ed. Dixon Wecter (New York: Harper,
1949), p. 291.
7. Toward a Chaos of
Incomprehensibilities
"Stupidity (incomprehension) in the novel is always polemical
. . . always implicated in language, in the word: at its heart always
lies a polemical failure to understand someone else's pathos-charged
lie that has appropriated the world and aspires to conceptualize it,
a polemical failure to understand generally accepted, canonized,
inveterately false languages with their lofty labels for things and
events" (Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael
of Texas Press, 1981], p. 403). Several recent studies have explored
this aspect of Twain's fiction, concentrating especially on
Huckleberry Finn. See Louise K. Barnett, "Huck Finn: Picaro as Lin[g]uistic
Outsider," College Literature 6 (1979): 221-31; Janet H. McKay,
Narration and Discourse in American Realistic Fiction (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), chap. 4; and Brook Thomas,
"Language and Identity in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,"
Mark Twain Journal 20, no. 3 (1980): 17-21.
Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill make a similar point about the
evolution of Twain's use of nonsense. His earlier fiction contains
wordplay that is "traditionally funny because . . . incongruous in a
world that is sane." But "some of the linguistic humor in later works
like 'The Great Dark' . . . stands somewhere between the verbal
gymnastics of the literary comedians and the verbal nihilism of contemporary
absurdist humor" (America's Humor: From Poor Richard to
Doonesbury [New York: Oxford University Press, 1978], p. 360).
Reprinted in Franklin R. Rogers, Mark Twain's Burlesque Patterns,
As Seen in the Novels and Narratives, 1855-1885 (Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1960), p. 35.
Twain used the nonsensical collocation of nautical terms as a
comic device as early as 1868 ("The Story of Mamie Grant, the Child-Missionary")
and as late as 1898 ("The Great Dark").
In 1898 Twain records a memorandum concerning an ambitious
use of jargon in a projected story: "In next story the sailors
must talk sailor-talk, the doctors doctor-talk, the carpenter
carpenter-talk &c—everybody must be glibly & easily technical"
(Notebook 40, MTP TS, p. 50) (✝). Following the word "doctors"
Twain subsequently inserted "astronomer, chemist lawyer, midwife
barber." The story was apparently never written, but elements surface
in works like "The Refuge of the Derelicts."
H. P. Grice, "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.
Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 61-62.
William Dwight Whitney singled out the conversation as an
"instructive" literary example of the extent to which a jargon can "be
made to go in figurative substitution for ordinary speech" (The Life
and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science [New York:
Appleton, 1875], p. 112).
I am indebted to my former student Alan Spring for drawing
to my attention the morbid undercurrent in these passages.
Heraclitus, frag. 95, in Selections from Early Greek Philosophy,
ed. Milton C. Nahm, 3d ed. (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1947), p. 93.
Other fragments make it clear that the "world in common" here is a
figure for the divine logos, or wisdom, that may be identified with the
Adamic language lost to fallen humanity.
Compare Huck's well-known passage on the semantics of
"borrowing" watermelons and other produce: "Pap always said it
warn't no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them
back, sometime; but the widow said it warn't anything but a soft
name for stealing, and no decent body would do it" (HF, 80).
Jack Matthews, "Mark Twain, 'Cartographer,'" ETC: A Journal
of General Semantics 23 (1966): 479-84.
Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 89.
A more farcical and less effective version of this debate over
metaphor occurs at the end of chapter 31 of "No. 44, The Mysterious
Stranger" (MSM, 394).
"And even things without life giving sound, whether pipe or
harp, except they give a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be
known what is piped or harped? For if the trumpet give an uncertain
sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? So likewise ye, except
ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it
be known what is spoken?" (1 Cor. 14:7-9).
As a reporter for the San Francisco Call in 1864 Twain had been
less amused by mystifying handwriting. In the newspaper published
1 October 1864 he reported the case of a doctor's patient who
had recovered damages from two druggists who had put up the
wrong prescription for him. The blame in cases like this, Twain editorialized,
usually "lies with the prescribing physicians who, like
a majority of lawyers, and as many preachers, write a most abominable
scrawl, which might be deciphered by a dozen experts as
many different ways, and each one sustain his version by the manuscript"
(CofC, 192).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E.
M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 213. Richard Macksey
comments: "The philosopher is clearly not talking about 'cracking
the code' of lions or dolphins, but of the impossibility of apprehending
any language unless we have some access to the speaker's Lebensform"
("Lions and Squares: Opening Remarks," in Richard Macksey
and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences
of Man: The Structuralist Controversy [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1972], p. 13). Macksey cites G. C. Lichtenberg and
able to entertain propositions that are absurd to humans, such as
that two times two equals thirteen.
It is not necessary to look forward to the anthropologist Benjamin
Lee Whorf for an analogue to Twain's theory, since the theory
is already implicit in John Locke's epistemology. Thus Locke says that
the names of simple ideas cannot be defined because they are indivisible;
the first framers of language borrowed from "ordinary known
ideas of sensation," which come either from "sensible objects without,
or what we feel within ourselves" (An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, abr. and ed. John W. Yolton [London: Dent, 1976],
p. 206).
As early as 1882 Twain had handled this very scenario, in a
dialogue between two blacks he claims to have overheard on a steamboat.
The first speaker states the theme: "Wanted to send message to
His Chillen, & didn't know no way but to sen' it in read'n & writ'n,
w'en he know'd pow'ful well dey warn't no niggers could read it—&
wouldn't be 'lowed to learn, by de Christian law of de Souf—&
more'n half er de white folks! Ki-yi-yi-yi! (derisive laughter)—if'twas
a man dat got up sich a po' notion, a body'd say he sick er he can't
invent worth shucks; but bein' its Him, you got to keep yo' mouf
shet" (NJ2, 493). The speaker goes on to maintain that since man's
capacity for sin came from God, God is responsible for sin.
The first appearance of the idea that I have found is in A Connecticut
Yankee. Hank Morgan is training the disguised king to act like
a peasant by describing the sufferings and deprivations they undergo.
"But lord, it was only just words, words,—they meant nothing
in the world to him. . . . Words realize nothing to you, vivify
nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the
thing which the words try to describe" (CY, 324-25). The admiral in
"The Refuge of the Derelicts" expounds the theory in several jocular
paragraphs: "How was [Adam] going to know what 'surely die'
meant? Die! He hadn't ever struck that word before . . . there hadn't
ever been any talk about dead things, because there hadn't ever been
any dead things to talk about" (FM, 209). Versions in "Letters From
the Earth" and "Papers of the Adam Family" follow closely the model
of "That Day in Eden" (WIM, 415; LE, 76).
James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 271.
In one of his early letters to Livy, Twain had quoted his friend
Joseph Twichell to the effect that "we didn't always think in words—
that our . . . most brilliant thoughts were far beyond our capacity to
from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images [Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1982], p. 147).
For Susan K. Harris, because "My Platonic Sweetheart" is
Twain's "most formal statement of belief that he has an ideal alternative
life divorced from concrete time," this text is central for a
theme that she calls "the imagination of escape," which runs through
his work (Mark Twain's Escape from Time, p. 141).
| Mark Twain's languages : | |