Western American Literature

Reviews 153 lor Years considerable interest for readers who are concerned with social and cultural history, especially that of the western United States. Even readers already well acquainted with Twain’s early years will find several parts of Sanborn’s book illuminating, especially those dealing with the difficult living conditions Twain knew as a youth; Twain’s lively, sometimes even imposing, mother, Jane Lampton; and the humorist’s work as a reporter at the Nevada legislature. The biographer also vividly recreates Twain’s early lectures. Finally, Sanborn’s entire account is informed by a keen sense of both the witting and unwitting humor of Twain’slife. BRIAN COLLINS University of California, Santa Cruz The Duplicating Imagination: Twain and the Twain Papers. By Maria Ornella Marotti. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. 198 pages, $24.95.) In The Duplicating Imagination Maria Marotti applies an eclecticmix of literary criticism to published works from the Mark Twain Papers: Satires and Burlesques, Fables of Man, Which Was the Dream?, and The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (University of California Press). At best, Marotti’s semiotic, structuralist, archetypal, and genre criticism demonstrates the enor­ mous critical value of the Mark Twain Papers. At worst, Marotti exemplifies the least productive habits of Mark Twain scholars. Marotti convincingly argues that the authorial persona in the Papers reflects a late 19th-century tension between technology and myth when she demonstrates a textual opposition between reason and imagination in the late, self-reflexive fiction. The theory of Jung, Lévi-Strauss, and Barthes allows her to classify Clemens as creator, interpreter, and believer in American myth, partially explaining Clemens’ ambivalence about technology and progress. These innovative observations about the “Mark Twain” of the Papers need to be tested against the “Mark Twain” in works published during Clemens’ lifetime. Unfortunately, Marotti’s criticism is sometimes marred by the attitudes she says have retarded Mark Twain scholarship. Biography sometimes informs her analyses, and io part she derives her treatment of The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts from critics whose analyses devalue the Papers. She astutely observes that Clemens’ burlesques are indebted to the southwestern frame sketch, but her conclusion—that Clemens aspires to a “zero degree” of writing —is lost to Henry Nash Smith’s 29-year-old conclusions, at least partially because her most recent reading on the frame sketch is Kenneth Lynn’s 1959 Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor. Marotti does, however, establish that Clemens uses the frame sketch productively in his last decade, a useful correc­ tion of criticism that divides Clemens’ career sharply in half. 154 Western American Literature The publisher’sclaim that Marotti “brings a fresh Continental perspective to bear” on Mark Twain scholarship is not always true. Her statements about the superiority of her critical method annoyed me, and her sacrifice of textual reading for critical theory was not to my taste. Finally, though, I must admit that although uneven, The Duplicating Imagination is a useful, sometimes brilliant investigation of the Mark Twain Papers. SUSAN J. REED Heidelberg College Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture. Edited by Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. 262 pages, $35.00/$16.95.) One gathers, from the number of times that Hershel Parker’s name comes up in these essays, that this collection was conceived, at least in part, as a response to Parker’s thumping of Pudd’nhead Wilson and its celebrators in his Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (1984). At issue, one also gathers, is not so much what Parker says in that book as how he says it. The breezy, mocking tone he uses in exposing Twain’s careless compositional habits, and in admon­ ishing those critics who seek and find thematic “unity” in this “patently unreadable” novel, is in sharp contrast to the dead seriousness with which editors Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson and their collaborators per­ form their critical inquiries. Yet in his essay, “The Sense ofDisorder in Pudd’nhead Wilson,” Robinson readily agrees with Parker that the novel’s “deeply fractured textual founda­ tion” is a fact that can no longer be ignored. Unlike Parker, however, who, at the moment he discovers what a mess...