Mark Twain Humor

Mark Twain Humor

Don Florence has written a valuable and often perceptive study of Mark Twain's persona and humor in the early writings. While the book has some problems and may even prove frustrating for some readers, especially in its first half, it sets forth a clear argument in a clear way, laying the groundwork for, one would presume, further study of Twain's complete career.

The book has four chapters, with the first devoted to theory and definition, then three chapters on Mark Twain's early works: early Western tales and sketches, The Innocents Abroad, and Roughing It. Florence's first chapter promises much, and indeed has much ground to cover, as it attempts to define humor in general, to argue with many critics about the nature of Mark Twain's persona, and to set up an epistemological approach to a study of humor and persona (Scott 2005 536-982).

An important early point for Florence, one that will guide him through much of the study and provide many of its strengths as well as some of its weaknesses, is that critics have made too much of the dualism in Twain. While he recognizes the presence of dualism, he posits from the beginning that "[t]his study, however, is concerned almost exclusively with Twain as the controller of his works, a personality much more complex than dualities can suggest" (Arac 1999 56-74). That personality, he argues, is a creation of both the author and the reader: to adopt the terminology of the Geneva School of phenomenological criticism, Mark Twain is the mind that we sense both governing a work and expressing itself through that work the literary mode of thought, if you will, that Samuel Clemens entered into whenever he sat down to write. In short, Mark Twain is what Samuel Clemens becomes and perhaps in some ways fundamentally is as a writer and a persona: it is the way we are induced to conceptualize him. Mark Twain's persona or Mark Twain as a persona is the basic way Twain is projected in a given work; it is how we know him as a literary consciousness. To a large extent, we construct the implied author Mark Twain, the metaphysical entity behind and creator of a given work, through his manifestation as narrator and character (persona) in that work (Hamlin and Joyner 2007 256-347).

We read, then, the early writings as "narrative histories" of Mark Twain, as what Florence calls "fictive truths, or better yet, true fictions". And that Mark Twain, Florence argues, is complex, changeable, and dynamic, rather than an interplay between dualities. The result is a persona that becomes a free-standing "mind" who "humorously observes and shapes his world". Florence claims that "Twain achieved fluidity as a literary self by 1872 and maintained it throughout his career". "Indeed," Florence concludes, "the writings through Roughing It form a distinct, self-contained movement that takes Twain as far as he is to go in a certain direction; namely, that of a variable, inclusive personality who uses the plasticity of ...