Mark Twain's languages : discourse, dialogue, and linguistic variety |
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7. Toward a Chaos of
Incomprehensibilities |
 | Mark Twain's languages : |  |
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 : | |