Mark Twain's languages : discourse, dialogue, and linguistic variety |
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1. Introduction |
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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Clark Powell, "An Unpublished Mark Twain Letter," American Literature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).
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