Bloom's How to Write About Mark Twain (Bloom's How to Write About Literature)

335 Pages·2007·18.77 MB·English

by  R. Kent Rasmussen

B L O O M’ S
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT
r. kent rasMussen
introduction by Harold bloom
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Bloom’s How to Write about Mark Twain
Copyright © 2008 by R. Kent Rasmussen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form
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Bloom’s Literary Criticism
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rasmussen, R. Kent.
Bloom’s how to write about Mark Twain / R. Kent Rasmussen; introduction by
Harold Bloom.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7910-9487-7 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910—Criticism
and interpretation. 2. Criticism—Authorship. 3. Report writing. I. Bloom, Harold.
II. Title. III. Title: How to write about Mark Twain.
PS1338.R37 2007
818'.409—dc22
2007007248
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Contents
Series Introduction v
Volume Introduction vii
Prologue ix
How to Write a Good Essay 1
How to Write about Mark Twain 41
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 83
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 105
The Prince and the Pauper 139
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 165
Pudd’nhead Wilson 193
The Jumping Frog Story 227
“The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” 241
“The War Prayer” 255
Roughing It 271
Life on the Mississippi 297
Index 318
series
introduCtion
Bloom’s How to Write about Literature series is designed to inspire
students to write fine essays on great writers and their works. Each
volume in the series begins with an introduction by Harold Bloom, med-
itating on the challenges and rewards of writing about the volume’s sub-
ject author. The first chapter then provides detailed instructions on how
to write a good essay, including how to find a thesis; how to develop an
outline; how to write a good introduction, body text, and conclusion;
how to cite sources; and more. The second chapter provides a brief over-
view of the issues involved in writing about the subject author and then
a number of suggestions for paper topics, with accompanying strategies
for addressing each topic. Succeeding chapters cover the author’s major
works.
The paper topics suggested within this book are open ended, and the
brief strategies provided are designed to give students a push forward
on the writing process rather than a road map to success. The aim of
the book is to pose questions, not answer them. Many different kinds of
papers could result from each topic. As always, the success of each paper
will depend completely on the writer’s skill and imagination.


How to write about
Mark twain:
introduCtion
by Harold Bloom
There generally is no problem with what to write about in Mark
Twain, because Huckleberry Finn is one of the essential American
books. Only The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, Emerson’s
Essays, and Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems can compete with it in
our 19th century. In the early years of the 21st century, we cannot as yet
agree what in American 20th-century literature will prove indispensable.
I myself would choose Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury,
Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! as the best of our prose fiction in
the last century. The poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and
Elizabeth Bishop also would be among my candidates: most critics would
add T. S. Eliot and W. C. Williams, and some would select Ezra Pound and
Marianne Moore as well. Of the poets of my own generation, the works of
John Ashbery and of the late A. R. Ammons and James Merrill persuade
me they are permanent. One can add the major plays of Eugene O’Neill,
Tennessee Williams, and Thornton Wilder, and the principal novels of
Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, doubtless among others.
If asked the Desert Island Question, with the condition that the one
book would have to be American rather than Shakespeare, I might be com-
pelled to choose Leaves of Grass, and then hope to memorize Huckleberry
Finn before I am cast away. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S.
Eliot all would have chosen Huck rather than Walt, but Whitman seems to
ii
iii Bloom’s How to Write about Mark Twain
me the unique writer of Western Hemisphere literature, whether written
in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or English. Mark Twain, like Whitman,
is read throughout the world, yet Whitman breaks the new road, as D. H.
Lawrence remarked. Huck Finn takes the path that Don Quixote and San-
cho Panza cut in their wanderings through a declining Spain, and Twain
can be thought of as the American Cervantes.
Pragmatically then the question becomes: how to write about Huck
Finn, who has proved larger even than his splendid book, rather in the
mode that Falstaff and Hamlet established among Shakespearean charac-
ters. Twain after all had first created Huck in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876), where the young outcast all but runs off with the book. Eight years
later came Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Twain is a master literary
artist and gives us much his greatest work, never remotely to be matched by
him. To write about Twain, whether in Huckleberry Finn, or in such more
problematic achievements as Pudd’nhead Wilson and A Connecticut Yan-
kee in King Arthur’s Court, you need to ask and try to answer: What are the
varieties of the comic that he extended and at least partly invented?
Much that is best in Twain’s humor exploits the limits of fantasy and
farce. A great but reluctant live entertainer, ambivalent though almost
as successful as Charles Dickens, Twain conveyed his anxious expecta-
tions as a performer even in the freedom-loving figure of Huck Finn. I
myself would urge anyone writing about Huck to work at analyzing the
boy’s need to evade, tell untruths, and mystify even the reader, in addi-
tion to anyone he encounters except for his raft-companion, Jim. Huck
lies merely to keep in practice, weirdly bringing together Twain and the
totally antithetical Nietzsche, who urged survival by “lying against time.”
Huck’s immediate nightmare is his mad, murderous father, the drunken
Pap, but his ultimate antagonist is time. How to write about Huck at last
becomes each reader’s personal quest for the blessing of more life, a time
without boundaries.
Twain read Nietzsche, with some gusto, only after he had finished
Huckleberry Finn, but Twain remains our authentic American nihilist,
outshining such descendants as Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon.
Huck is Mark Twain’s will revenging itself against time, and time’s dread:
“It was.” Huck incarnates that will: He never can age into a “maturity”
that merely represents death-in-life. Writing about Huck is to meditate
upon your own will to live, whoever you are.
Prologue
In her introduction to Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on
Mark Twain and American Culture (1997), the distinguished scholar
Shelley Fisher Fishkin recalls how she became interested in Mark Twain
during her youth. She started reading his books while she was in grade
school and found them to be great fun. However, it was not until high
school that she began to take them seriously. During her junior year, she
read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time and experienced
a kind of awakening—what might be called an epiphany. Expecting that
book to be much like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, she was stunned
when her English teacher announced the topic on which everyone in the
class was to write an essay: “How Mark Twain used irony to attack rac-
ism in Huckleberry Finn.”
The assignment caught the young Fishkin off guard, but as she got
into Mark Twain’s novel, this challenge gradually began to make sense.
Fishkin happened to be reading the book in 1965, a year when the United
States was tearing itself apart over unresolved racial conflicts, whose
origins went back to the era of slavery—the same era in which Huck-
leberry Finn is set. At the same time Fishkin was puzzling over news
stories about such disturbing events as Mississippi civil rights workers
being murdered for helping African Americans register to vote and cit-
ies across the nation erupting in deadly racial violence, she was meeting
characters in Mark Twain’s novel whose words and behavior helped her to
understand the roots of modern American racism. The novel also helped
her to appreciate the nature of irony—the use of words to express ideas
that may be the opposite of their literal meanings. Among the examples
of racial irony that Fishkin recalled from her first reading of Huckleberry
ix
x Bloom’s How to Write about Mark Twain
Finn is Pap Finn’s outrageous tirade against an educated black man he
has encountered:
Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There
was a free nigger there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white
man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat;
and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he
had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the
awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think?
they said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of lan-
guages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he
could vote, when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is
the country a-coming to? It was ’lection day, and I was just about to go
and vote, myself, if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told
me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I
drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they
all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never vote agin as
long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger—why, he wouldn’t a
give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people,
why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold—that’s what I want to
know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be
sold till he’d been in the State six months, and he hadn’t been there that
long yet. There, now—that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that
can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a gov-
ment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks
it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before
it can take ahold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted nigger,
and—”
The irony in this passage is as powerful as any in literature. On its sur-
face, it is an impassioned antiblack diatribe filled with racist invective. At
the same time, however, it exposes the illogic of racism by subtly calling
attention to the differences that separate Pap from the black professor
whom he denounces. The professor appears to be a model citizen—
refined, highly educated, and holding a responsible position. Neverthe-
less, Pap rages at the very idea that any government would allow such a
man to vote and not permit him to be sold back into slavery.