Walking with Twain

As one of the greatest American writers, “Twain may have had a bellyful of the ‘damned human race’ but he still might caution humankind to be on the lookout for the untoward event or encourage them to hang tight and muddle through (Quirk 237).” Considering the words of Tom Quirk, Twain was great because he was transitional.  Twain did not allow any era labels bind him as a writer. He wrote in such a way that did not allow others to consider his work Romantic nor a naturalistic, a critical or a sympathetic. Rather he established himself as a humorist and a moralist taking the world as he saw it. ‘My first lie, and how I got out of it’ and ‘At the Appetite Cure,’ two of Twain’s lesser loved short stories, serve as catalysts to the understanding of his works and the time period. Not only do they effectively communicate Mark Twain’s outlook, they also universally extend into our lives today through the mechanisms that allowed for escape from society’s conventional thinking.

With an onslaught on the previous era of Romanticism and the conditions of his era conditions, Twain developed an authoritative tone in his humor that can easily be detected in almost all of his works.  His humorous commentaries and analyses tend to focus on controversial issues and prove effective in his established perception of absurdity (Quirk 237). If we zoom out to the world around Mark Twain, his inspiration becomes clear. Since he lived and wrote in the tumultuous time of the late 1800’s to early 1900’s when America was struggling with the drastic social, political, and economic impacts caused by the end of the Civil War, Slavery and the effects of the Industrial Revolution (Academic American History). In his lifetime, he had fought in the Civil War, witnessed the attitudes stretching across the country and the world through travels, lost loved ones and even had dabbled in a short lived newspaper business (The Gale Group). He had experienced it all by the close of his career when he wrote ‘At the Appetite Cure’ and ‘My first Lie and How I got out of it’ in 1898 and 1899 (The Gale Group). Twain was a wise and experienced American and by now, knew it. He had gathered credibility as a writer and had developed his ‘social conscience’ to misanthropically criticize America’s politics, religion and society (Mark Twain Biography). “The truth of his novel is not circumstance; it is the direct result of Twain's dedication to honesty and his integrity as an author, as an observer of the American and other cultures, and as a human being. This is what made and still makes Twain great (Mark Twain Biography).” Twain was an open rebel of truth. He dared to poke fun at everyday occurrences with an authority knowing that they would reveal the scandal of human nature. This use of humor in displaying the absurd is found in both ‘At the Appetite Cure’ and ‘My first Lie and How I got out of it’.

Looking at these short stories in particular, we can see what makes Twain so transitional in his experiential appeal of reality to the reader, when Romantics would have never dared to speak so obviously (Carl). In ‘My first lie and how I got out of it, he jests “join the universal conspiracy and keep so still that he shall deceive his fellow-conspirators into imagining that he doesn't know that the law exists. It is what we all do--we that know.” Here he points to the ignorance or rather choice of ignorance as a perpetual loop to keep order. The notion is almost a paradox in that keeping this loop a secret benefits you but really, lying just hurts us all, placing us in a unpredictable fake world. In At the Appetite Cure he similarly states, “the average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean; it is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself; he has to get everything at second-hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year.” Again, he develops a paradox in that the connectivity with other humans is what we may define to be part of our existence. However, we depend on society so much all else becomes irrational, impairing our survival. In reading Twain, you laugh because the paradoxes are so cynically true and therefore, affirm his statement to be true (Carl). He sets issues to be so painfully wrong, that it takes on the assumption of authority enough to be able to crack a joke rather than be contemplative in detail, like previous writers.

The two short stories also use realist logic to take the concept of human impulse-like features such as appetite and lying and prove them both to be nothing more than conditioning. As John Dewey explains in Quirk’s Book “The opportunities the infant has to give these ‘native qualities expression invariably requires interacting with a ‘mature social medium (Quirk 193-194).’” Here he is talking about the human development of instinct and natural instinct. There is no need for a baby to cry, but from being exposed to world they have learned that crying amounts to attention, food, and change, it becomes necessary. This ‘impulse’ goes for the amount of meals per day and motives/methods for lying can equally be manipulated and thus reflect the society born into. ‘At the Appetite Cure’ establishes this notion in saying, “My system disguised--covert starvation. Grape-cure, bath-cure, mud- cure--it is all the same. The grape and the bath and the mud make a show and do a trifle of the work--the real work is done by the surreptitious starvation.” Here, multiple meals in one day are not necessary, but in the societal convention of family, capitalism and ‘health’ the thought of losing appetite becomes a crisis. Therefore, methods of repair are developed easily, but in deceit of the victim. Similarly the notion is clearly seen in ‘My first Lie and how I got out of it,’ points to the same societal twist “There is a prejudice against the spoken lie, but none against any other, and by examination and mathematical computation I find that the proportion of the spoken lie to the other varieties is as 1 to 22,894. Therefore the spoken lie is of no consequence, and it is not worthwhile to go around fussing about it and trying to make believe that it is an important matter.” Again, he is proclaiming spoken lie immoral is unnecessary in the midst of the more convincing and powerful unspoken lie. However, in getting along with society, gaping loopholes have been created to prove otherwise. In each of these short stories, Twain swiftly tackles simple human impulses with logic (Quirk 194). He flips them so that the reader questions what is, in fact, reality. This is why reasoning Mark Twain’s concepts seem to be primitive, but once applied to everyday life, they become indefinitely more complex due to the societal barriers put in place, whether realized or not. He was truly skilled in the art of observing, transitioning beyond scientific fact and pure imagination.

Twain may not have always explicitly arrived at a conclusion in his works; however, he clearly gave the reader a versatile seed of contemplation. We can think of his experiential authority and paradox humor as tools to reason out Slavery is wrong and Capitalism is a detrimental lie, but he doesn’t specifically state his stance (Mark Twain Biography). He just simply states the root of the ‘problem’ with human morality. Because Twain derives from the root, his pieces can specifically be applied to issues of today. For example, we can apply these short stories to issues we face today whether really specific our broad. Why do we continue to enhance the deterioration of the environment when we know it has a direct effect on our food security? Why does Shell continue to wastefully burn Natural Gas when it is killing off villages and could positively be used to power them? These seem to be quite simple issues that have simple solutions, but we fail to follow through because the nature of being human stands in the way. Lying, deceit and greed all have a clear negative moral connotation but society has found its loopholes into making them seem more acceptable. At this point in time, our generation is on the brink of transition just as Twain’s was. We have the choice to remain accepting the societal perception of ‘business as usual’ or the choice to transition into an era of change, assaulting the failing state of our world today both individually and as a global society. ‘At the Appetite Cure’, we can see that crisis allows for manipulation and business allows for deceit. We can see in ‘My first lie and how I got out of it’ that societal perception allows unspoken lies to be accepted. Human Nature is to cover up our faults in manipulating reality (The Gale Group). We must break these imposed impulses of society today in confronting issues related to climate change just as Twain encouraged over two decades ago on the issue of slavery. There is no doubt that Twain was transitional. He confronted the root of human’s paradox reality with a humorously critical eye, enabling his works to withstand the test of time.

Bibliography

Academic American History. "The Gilded Age, 1865-1900." 22 July 2011. Web. 07 Oct. 2011.<http://www.academicamerican.com/recongildedage/index.html>.

Carl, Eric. "The War of 1893; Or, Realism and Idealism in the Late Nineteenth Century." Academic Search Premier. Web.

"Mark Twain Biography." Essortment Articles: Free Online Articles on Health, Science, Education & More. Demand Media. Web. 07 Oct. 2011. <http://www.essortment.com/mark-twain-biography-20396.html>.

Quirk, Tom. Mark Twain and Human Nature. Columbia: University of Missouri, 2007. Print.

The Gale Group, Contemporary Author’s Online. "Mark Twain Biography." UNet Users' Home Pages. Brandeis. Web. 09 Oct. 2011. <http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/twainbio.html>.