ALitA 2010, Session 9L, Mark Twain’s “Great” Works: New Sources and Complications
Tom Quirk (U Missouri), “The Flawed Greatness of Huckleberry Finn”
Lawrence Howe (Roosevelt), “Expectations and Disappointment: Twain’s Roughing It and Beyond”
Hsuan L. Hsu (UC Davis), “A Connecticut Yankee in Wu Chih Tien’s Court: Mark Twain and Wong Chin Foo”
Tom Quirk’s paper was read by Gary Scharnhorst. Perhaps we’ve been looking for HF‘s greatness in the wrong places. Also: the Huck in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer isn’t the same as the character in HF.
Cather’s definition of a novel: a narrative; HF‘s unevennesses fit under “novel” rubric by this less strict definition. Blair noted that Huck couldn’t have had time to write down his adventures; temporal discrepancy, also, in ref to ATS; Grangerford’s hair goes grey to black. Double break in an arm heals improbably quickly.
Other anomalies: experiences Huck comments upon without being able to have known them (OOC), e.g. the King’s fake English accent. These are mostly in the second half, composed during 1880s. [Several other anomalies not included here.] We indulge SLC the way Aunt Polly indulges Tom, and our reading is the richer for knowing something of SLC’s own biography reflected therein. Shouldn’t search for HF‘s greatness in its coherence.
===
Lawrence Howe discussed property and evolving views of American identity in three episodes in Roughing It—disappointments in property ownership read against the history of mining rights, yielding a more skeptical view of American materialism than that evinced by Horatio Alger.
SLC worked harder at mining (as shown in letters to brother Orion) than RI reflects. First episode: SLC’s visit to Lake Tahoe, which led to a desire to stake a claim with John Kinney of 3000 acres—followed by a wildfire sparked by SLC’s cooking fire. 1862 Homestead Act determined little about mineral rights; till 1866 only local consensus determined what happened to mining claims. Homesteading was considered an improvement of the land (following Blackstone), whereas mining camps were temporary at best and derived value not by cultivation but extraction.
Landslide hoax: attorney general acted as counsel after a landslide obliterated a house (Morgan v. Hyde); Hyde eventually offered, as joke, the opportunity to dig out his house from under thirty feet of Morgan’s land. Mining rights extended below land surface; the principle applied by the judge in this case built upon mining rules.
Blind lead: after Calvin Higbie found something odd, he descended and found another vein not protected by the Wide West claim. SLC’s wild dreams of what he’d build with the money resemble loosely what he built in Hartford around the time he wrote RI. Miner as prospective, writer as retrospective: blind lead event echoed several times subsequently.
===
Hsuan L. Hsu [handout] discussed the popular-romance sense of American heroes circa the closing of the Western frontier. Focus: CY and WCT (earliest(?) novel published by a Chinese American) to highlight anti-imperialist impulses.
Hank Morgan offers contrast to romantic heroes of Malory and Scott; his reforms lead to a conflict between modern and anti-modern ideals. SLC’s critique of Hank’s forcible enlightenment culminates in Battle of the Sandbelt and extends to a critique of conventional masculinity.
Link to explosive event in WCT, which shared CY‘s illustrator, after SLC saw Beard’s work for the former novel. The two writers published in many of the same magazines. Wong similarly made a name for himself via public (satiric) self-fashioning, which makes determining actual biographical elements difficult.
Rather than dwell on parallels, Hsu wants to focus on critiques. CY uses lens of materialism; WCT appropriates motifs of historical romance to critique 1890s-era assessments of masculine = white. [I think. Went by a bit quickly.] WCT juxtaposes political upheaval with romantic stability at the very end. WCT suggests that China can reform itself (and overthrow Manchu rule) without foreign intervention.
SLC’s interest in WCT reinforces our sense of his interest in larger imperialist issues elsewhere. His later anti-imperialist writings thus can be traced back not only to CY but to WCT‘s argument of Chinese self-determination.
===
Q&A
Q: comment connecting two papers—SLC’s treatment of Native American attempt to reclaim land in RI sets up a counter-narrative to his supposed enlightenment regarding Chinese issues.
Howe: haven’t spent much time with Native issues, but should. [ed.: Might take a look at Revard’s essay (JSTOR PDF).]
Hsu: perhaps simpler for SLC to write about foreign imperialism because it’s farther away. Injun Joe is not sentimentalized.
Q: Quirk’s paper holds a special interest given a p.m. event between SLC scholars and JFCooper scholars re: (Howellsian) Realism and Romanticism. Who’s responsible for casting SLC as a realist?
Scharnhorst: Michaelson should answer that question.
Michaelson: The doorstop anthologies like that juxtaposition because it’s a small insurrection against their own enterprise. The poke is also at what’d become the MLA.
Q: WCT part of or separate from tradition of explosive technology?
Hsu: not aware of Wong’s awareness of explosion motif. Anti-anachronism, in a way: thread that China invented whatever-it-is before y’all did, including gunpowder. Perhaps he knew them but meant to trump them by moving the setting earlier.
Q: comment—Literary Offenses published at the front of an edition of Cooper, not sure which.
Q: Morgan v. Hyde is a hoax, and should’ve taught SLC that there’s no foundation for claims—so [person] likes the theme that the fallacy recurs. Is it epistemological disappointment? something else? Why keep allegorizing that he’s someone who can’t learn?
Howe: disagrees that the blind lead was problematic. Even Morgan v. Hyde is messy primarily because judge applies mining rules to a homesteading situation.
Q: Why was Beard chosen for WCT?
Hsu: he worked often for Cosmopolitan
Michaelson: the fineness of the explosion lines is something Webster and Co. couldn’t do.