英美文学选读学习笔记 Mark Twain

Mark Twain (1835-1910) is a great literary giant of America, whom H. L. Mencken considered "the true father of our national literature." With works like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Life on the Mississippi (1883) Twain shaped the world's view of America and made a more extensive combination of American folk humor and serious literature than vious writers had ever done.

Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born on November 30, 1835, in Missouri, and grew up in the river town of Hannibal. After his father died, he began to seek his own fortune at the age of 12. Twain was restless when he was young and moved a lot, first eastward as a journeyman printer, up and down the Mississippi as a steamboat pilot, and then farther west into the gold and silver settlements of Navada. Then he began to work as a newspaper columnist and as a deadpan lecturer.  Twain's writing during these formative western years mainly took the form of humorous journalism of the time, and it enabled him to master the technique of narration. In 1865, he published his frontier tale "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which brought him recognition from a wider public. But his full literary career began to blossom in 1869 with a travel book Innocents Abroad, an account of American tourists in Europe which pokes fun at the tentious, decadent and undemocratic Old World in a satirical tone.

Mark Twain's best works were produced when he was in the prime of his life. All these masterworks drew upon the scenes and emotions of his boyhood and youth. The first among these books is Roughing It (1872), in which Twain describes a journey-that works its way farther and farther west through Navada to San Francisco and then to Hawaii. Life on the Mississippi tells a story of his boyhood ambition to become a riverboat pilot, this time up and down the Mississippi. Two of the best books during this period are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The former is usually regarded as a classic book written for boys about their particular horrors and joys, while the latter, being a boy's book specially written for the adults, is Twain's most resentative work, describing a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives, Huck and Jim. Their episodic set of encounters sents a sample of the small-town world of America and a survey of the social world from the bank of the river that runs through the heart of the country.

A series of misfortunes happened to Twain's family that staggered him. His son and two daughters died in heartbreaking circumstances; the publishing house in which he was a partner collapsed; he had invested his money and it turned out to be disastrous. For whatever the reason, the high spirits of optimism in his works started to coexist with a caustic and increasingly bleak view of human nature. This transition can be traced long before in his social satire, The Gilded Age (1873), came out. Written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, the novel explored the scrupulous inspanidualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values, and gave its name to the get-rich-quick years of the post-Civil War era. Twain's dark view of the society became more self-evident in the works published later in his life. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), a parable of colonialization, Twain follows the journey of a resentative of modem technology and ideas into a historically backward, feudal society. Offering to-develop the Arthurian world and rid it of superstition, Hank Morgan destroys it, instead of modernizing it. A similar mood of despair permeates The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), which shows the disastrous effects of slavery on the victimizer and the victim alike and reveals to us a Mark Twain whose conscience as a white Southerner was tormented by fear and remorse. By the turn of the century, with the publication of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), the change in Mark Twain from an optimist to an almost despairing pessimist could be felt and his cynicism and disillusionment with what Twain referred to regularly as the "damned human race" became obvious. In 1910, Twain died in Hartford, Connecticut, where he had lived permanently since he moved up to the north in 1870.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and, especially, its sequence Adventures of Huckleberry Finn proved themselves to be the mile-stone in American literature, and thus firmly established Twain's position in the literary world. The childhood of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the Mississippi is a record of a vanished way of life in the -Civil War Mississippi valley and it has moved millions of people of different ages and conditions all over the world; and the books are noted for their untentious, colloquial yet poetic style, their wide-ranging humor, and their universally shared dream of perfect innocence and freedom.

As a sequel to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn marks the climax of Twain's literary creativity. Hemingway once described the novel the one book from which "all modern American literature comes." And the book is significant in many ways. First of all, the novel is written in a language that is totally different from the rhetorical language used by Emerson, Poe, and Melville. It is not grand, pompous, but simple, direct, lucid, and faithful to the colloquial speech. This untentious style of colloquialism is best described as  "vernacular." Speaking in vernacular, a wild and uneducated Huck, running away from civilization for his freedom, is vividly brought to life. The great strength of the book also comes from the shape given to it by the course of the raft's journey down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of freedom. Twain, who knew the river intimately, uses it here both realistically and symbolically.

The profound portrait of Huckleberry Finn is another great contribution of the book to the legacy of American literature. The novel begins with a description of how Widow Douglas attempts to civilize Huck and ends with him deciding not to let it happen again at the hands of Aunt Sally. The climax arises with Huck's inner struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves escape.  Huck's final decision -- to follow his own good-hearted moral impulse rather than conventional village morality -- amounts to a vindication of what Mark Twain called “the damned human race,” damned for its comfortable hypocrisies, its thoroughgoing dishonesties, and its pervasive cruelties. With the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows.

Twain is also known as a local colorist, who ferred to sent social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes 'and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the West became his major theme. Unlike James and Howells, Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so well and their life was the one he himself had lived. Moreover he successfully used local color and historical settings to illustrate and shed light on the contemporary society. Another fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular. His words are colloquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentence structures are simple, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken language. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialism to cast his protagonists in their everyday life. What's more, his characters, confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true of his local colorism. Besides, different characters from different literary or cultural backgrounds talk differently, as is the case with Huck, Tom, and Jim. Indeed, with his great mastery and effective use of vernacular, Twain has made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country. His style of language was later taken up by his descendants, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and influenced generations of letters.

Mark Twain's humor is remarkable, too. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall tales. By considering his experience as a newspaperman, Mark Twain shared the popular image of the American funny man whose punning, facetious, irreverent articles filled the newspapers, and a great deal of his humor is characterized by puns, straight-faced exaggeration, repetition, and anti-climax, let alone tricks of travesty and invective. However, his humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.