University of Virginia Library

Preface

What impressed Mark Twain most about language was its diversity.
Moving from the West to the East and on to Europe,
living among boatmen, slaves, miners, journalists, and aristocrats,
Twain heard the multiplicity of human voices that finds
its way into his work. His concern with rendering speech accurately
marks both his "Explanatory" note to Huckleberry
Finn and his oft-repeated criticism of Bret Harte's inept literary
dialect. But linguistic variety in Mark Twain's writing is
not just an aspect of literary technique: it reflects a belief in
the fundamental heterogeneity of human nature. Because this
heterogeneity is always potentially threatening, we tend to
deny or suppress it. Twain makes Jim, in arguing with Huck
over the speech of Frenchmen, represent nostalgia for a single,
undifferentiated, language that would immediately identify
its speakers as "men." The irony is that the form of Jim's very
words belies his argument. "Doan de French people talk de
same way we does?" The "we" here begs the question: Huck
and Jim speak dialects that unmistakably indicate different social

and racial status. At the same time, there is something
powerfully hopeful about Jim's naive "we," for Huck and Jim's
friendship and their struggle to understand each other suggest
that such differences may not be an insurmountable barrier
to dialogue.

Mark Twain's languages, then. Each of the chapters that follow
deals with one or more aspects of linguistic variety in Mark
Twain's work: levels of grammar, the authority of Standard English,
foreign languages, dialects, the politics of speech acts,
technical jargons, misunderstanding. Although Mark Twain's
direct statements about language often seem at best dated and
at worst simply wrong, one of my theses is that he understood
language more profoundly than is usually thought. A half
century of sympathetic criticism has not, I fear, entirely absolved
Twain of Van Wyck Brooks's charge of linguistic superficiality.
According to Brooks, the largest component of
Twain's literary criticism was

During the decades since Brooks published his criticism,
many fine celebratory studies of Twain's style and vocabulary
have made Brooks's complaints sound strident, but even supportive
critics misconceive what it is to have a theory of language.
At least since the publication of F. O. Matthiessen's
American Renaissance in 1941 we have tended to champion
Emerson and those writers most like him as our homegrown
philosophers of language, the American equivalents of Coleridge
or Goethe. Unquestionably the sophistication of Henry
David Thoreau's etymological investigations, Walt Whitman's
"language experiment," and Emily Dickinson's audacious
metaphors was beyond Twain's grasp. But all Transcendentalist
thinking about language is radically at odds with Twain's.
Whereas the Transcendentalists sought above all a poetics
that would explain how language might ideally mediate between
individual and object, Twain was interested in language
as it arises, functions, and changes as a medium of social
relations. Twain's explicit comments on language are often
disappointing because the vocabulary to express what he
knew simply did not exist in the nineteenth century. A goal of
my study, then, is to give a voice and names to ideas that are
implicit in Twain's work, especially in his best fiction.

This goal explains why I have felt compelled to revise formulas
that are by now almost standard in Twain criticism.
The two critics who have written most keenly about language
in Mark Twain are Henry Nash Smith (in Mark Twain: The Development
of a Writer) and Richard Bridgman (in The Colloquial
Style in America). Both stress the fundamental importance to
Twain of a literary style based on speech. Smith sees the "vernacular"
as a powerful instrument for deflating hypocrisy and
pretension; Bridgman finds in Twain's "colloquial" the progenitor
of modern American prose style. I find their methodologies
limited, however, by the assumption that a single linguistic
form corresponds to a single literary function. In the
course of this study I seek to demonstrate that the value and
significance of linguistic categories vary throughout Twain's
work depending on the requirements of a particular context
and the evolution of his attitudes.

The voice and names I provide for Mark Twain reflect a
number of intellectual debts. A long-standing interest in sociolinguistics
and discourse theory, and in literary criticism
informed by their concepts and methods, will be evident in
specialized vocabulary and unspoken postulates about the
way language works. Mikhail Bakhtin has given the most direction
to my thinking, for he speaks to Mark Twain's condition
as a writer better than any other theorist of the novel we
have. "The language of a novel is the system of its 'languages,' "
Bakhtin tells us; "the novel can be defined as a diversity of
social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages)

and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized."[2]
We need such a generic definition if we are to make sense of
books like Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee, Pudd'nhead
Wilson. Nevertheless, mine is not an unalloyed "Bakhtinian"
reading of Mark Twain, if only because Twain's own troubled
investigation of language's shortcomings calls into question
Bakhtin's utopian dialectics. If hardly as consistent or sophisticated
as Bakhtin's, Mark Twain's understanding of language
is ultimately more complex and less sanguine.

I have learned a great deal about language from Mark Twain
himself. When I first conceived of this study, I was a graduate
student wary of becoming a "Mark Twain scholar," troubled
by Twain's lack of both high seriousness and literary difficulty."
Luckily, days on end spent reading Mark Twain teach a
distruct of easy categorization and self-serving hierarchies. If
Twain wrote, as he told Andrew Lang, for the belly and not
the head, it is well to remember that in the belly Epicurus located
the soul. Above all, Twain teaches respect for the plain
style and clear writing. He could easily wield polysyllabic
technical vocabularies, but for his own prose voice he chose
the most accessible of styles. His lesson is that since we each
bear ultimate responsibility for our language, we should not
hide ourselves behind borrowed discourse in the hope that
like some Wizard of Oz's screen, it will make us appear greater
and more terrible than we are. I have often been aware that
my own critical vocabulary confronts Mark Twain's language
in a manner embarrassingly reminiscent of the parson's talk
with Scotty Briggs. My consolation is that Twain, supremely
among our writers, was catholic in appreciating the multiplicity
of styles and voices in our verbal universe. Should
Mark Twain, in spirit somewhere, be reading this study and
stumbling over terminology assimilated from semiotics, sociolinguistics,
and literary theory, I trust he will be kind enough to
extend to me the indulgence he granted to a stretch of theology
that he found rough going: "I do not know that vocabulary,
therefore I laugh at the book by the privilege of ignorance,
while quite well understanding that men with better
heads than mine have learned it and stopped laughing" ("Fragment
on Unfamiliar Texts," WIM, 517).

My scholarly career owes much to the influence and support
of two teachers. From Craig Williamson's courses in Old English
and stylistics at Swarthmore College I learned the wundor
of words along with analytical linguistic method. Roy
Harvey Pearce directed this study in its original form as a dissertation;
the less cumbersome title it bears as a book was his
idea. Roy taught me to temper my native formalism with a
critical appreciation of history. Many members of the community
of Mark Twain scholars will find their imprints here, but I
wish to offer particular thanks to Everett Emerson, Victor
Fischer, Forrest G. Robinson, and Thomas Tenney. Without
Alan Gribben's Mark Twain's Library as a reference several
chapters of this book would have been virtually impossible to
write as they now stand. James Cox read the book in manuscript
form; for his gracious and incisive comments I am especially
grateful. Robert H. Hirst and the staff of the Mark Twain
Papers at the University of California, Berkeley, helped me
make profitable use of unpublished material in their collections.
The Interlibrary Loan staff of Central University Library,
University of California, San Diego, made accessible essential
research materials from around the country. I wish to
thank the Regents of the University of California and the College
of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rochester for
research and travel grants that facilitated my work at several
stages. A version of chapter 4 originally appeared as "We
Ain't All Trying to Talk Alike: Varieties of Language in Huckleberry
Finn," in One Hundred Years of "Huckleberry Finn," ed.
Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 1985). To Doris Kretschmer and Barbara
Ras of the University of California Press go my thanks
for their encouragement and patience; to Stephanie Fay, appreciation
for her especially thoughtful copy-editing. Elizabeth
Bennett and David Ames provided crucial help during
the final stages of manuscript preparation. I owe most of all
to those whose language has shaped and sustained me: my
friends, my parents, my wife and daughter.