Long before American literature and American Studies were
made respectable, discrete disciplines in higher education, Mark Twain styled
himself as an authority in both. While
American literature was being denigrated in colleges and universities as
writing inferior to Classical and English literature, Twain was arguing for a
new approach to the craft of fiction writing, which he coded as “serious.” In fact, the introductory remarks preceding
chapter one of his novel Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn show him to be a man interested in claiming authority on
American culture through authorship.[1] Or, said another way, Twain links scholarly authority
to literary authorship.
Twain begins his tale of Huck in the most remarkable
way. He does not follow his title
“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with the first words of his narrative, “You
don’t know about me,” said by Finn himself (108). Instead, a peculiar series of introductory
texts stop readers from launching directly into the type of picaresque tale
popular in serial publications of the time.
What we get instead is text offset in a darkly outlined box that
ominously reads “NOTICE: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative
will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
personas attempting to find a plot in it will be shot” (108). The warning and penalties are drafted and
issued “BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR,” a
word that could easily be substituted with authority
(108, emphasis mine). While Twain is
clearly and harmlessly playing with our expectations of his narrative, he is
also staking new claims for the writer.
The author will not cater to the demands of the audience, especially if
doing so means compromising the author’s “serious” experimentation. Rather, the author aggressively asserts his
role as specialist and his rank as superior in the hierarchy of book matters.
This gravity of this new relationship between writer and
reader only augments in the next chunk of text, the section marked Explanatory. Any playfulness is left behind as the author
announces his careful attempt to capture the nuances of non-Eastern dialects in
America. He names no less than six,
giving them cultural (or racial) and regional markers. The audience he anticipates here is no longer
the lackadaisical, occasional reader, but one invested in Twain’s project to
record one aspect of American culture.
Afraid his readers might misinterpret his experiment with dialect as a
lack of writing skill, he says, “I make this explanation for the reason that
without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to
talk alike and not succeeding” (108).
This is precisely the charge he leveled against James Fenimore Cooper,
whom he relentlessly satirized in “The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore
Cooper,” and whom American scholars were beginning to champion as a national
writer worthy of their colleagues’ scrutiny.
Once again, the Explanatory remark is signed, like the
notice offset in a text block, by “THE AUTHOR.”
Twain twice choose to use capitalization for all the letters of “the
author,” a move that first comically and then seriously asserts the authority
of authors involved in cultivating novels of realism. As we frequently find with Twain, the comic is
in service to the serious—and nothing is more serious to him here than American
authorship.
