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Duplicitous Mark Twain
- Abstract
Duplicity is the most notable, perhaps the essential characteristic of the greatest American novelists; and surely the most duplicitous of all is Mark Twain, precisely because he wears the mask of straightforward simplicity. The notorious “Notice” affixed to Huckleberry Finn reads: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be persecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” This apparently bluff warning, however, comes to us not directly from “the Author,” but “Per G. G. Chief of Ordnance”; it is, that is to say, proffered as a joke, a piece of fiction. And who is “the Author,” anyhow? Huckleberry Finn, who purports to tell the story which follows? “Mr. Mark Twain,” who, Huck informs us in his first paragraph, told a few “stretchers” in Tom Sawyer? Or Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who lurks somewhere behind the Mark Twain who looks over the shoulder of Huck. If he is Huck or Mark, he is only a character speaking inside a story or a lifelong impersonation, not very different from the “Ishmael” who ironically warns us against taking Melville’s account of the whale hunt as a “hideous and intolerable allegory.” And if he is Samuel Clemens, who likes to boast of how he took his readers in, he can scarcely be trusted!
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