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.Yet all along the way there is penetrating information, exquisite criticismof other books on the Mississippi, pungent observations of the culture of thegreat valley, acute commentary on the society, literature, and art of both preand post Civil War America.9 Information and history are so interlaced withtall tales, intruded jokes, and seemingly irrelevant  loitering and gab thattruth and exaggeration scarcely can be told apart.Finally there are theepisodes that Mark Twain recounts of his boyhood as he reaches Hannibalnarratives which biographers have all too often taken as the traumatic, trueexperience of Mark Twain s childhood, although they have about them theaspect of indulgent (as well as invented) guilt fantasies.A way of seeing it all, in a bit of nubbed down compression, would beto remember that the pilot whom Mark Twain meets on the Gold Dust iscalled Rob Styles (the actual name was Lem Gray, and he was killed in asteamboat explosion while Mark Twain was writing the book).How right aname to be waiting for Mark Twain as he hopelessly tries to hide his ownidentity! For Mark Twain does indeed rob styles, showing us, by implication,our outlaw writer operating as a literary highwayman, ready to raid even hisown work to flesh out his book.How much of the King and the Duke he hasin him! No wonder he comes back to that name of his in this part of thebook, showing that it had first been used by Isaiah Sellers (and here what ispresumably the true name is nonetheless perfect), a veritable Methuselahamong riverboat pilots.Samuel Clemens had thoughtlessly yet irreverently parodied the oldman s river notes and the lampoon had, according to Mark Twain, silencedthe old captain, leaving him to sit up nights to hate the impudent youngparodist.And so Mark Twain says that when, on the Pacific Coast, he had setup as a writer, he confiscated the ancient captain s pen name.He concludes his102James M.Coxaccount by saying that he has done his best to make the name a  sign andsymbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambledon as being the petrified truth. 10Never mind that Samuel Clemens didn t first use his nom de guerre onthe Pacific Coast (we experts see that joke).11 The point is that, if in  OldTimes Mark Twain had shown the memory, skill, anxiety, courage,humiliation, and the joke attending the leadsman s call, he now shows theaggression, theft, parody, and comic guilt attending the act of displacing theancient mariner of the river.Having confiscated the old man s pen name, hemakes his own life and writing identical with the epochs of the river semergence from the sleep of history.The  petrified truth, which the name Mark Twain is said to signify, isitself the broadest of jokes.The actual truth is as elusive as the shape of theriver that Horace Bixby had said the pilot must know with such absolutecertainty that it lives in his head.Through all the shifts of perspective in thisbook, through all the changes of direction, the abrupt compression of space,and wayward digressions to kill time, there is yet a single writer whose shapeseems somehow in our head, rather than in the shifting book before us.Thatfigure is of course the myth of Mark Twain, growing out of and beyond thebook that cannot contain him.We might devalue, and have devalued, thisbook, but in devaluing it we are already preparing to use it as a foil forHuckleberry Finn, the book that was waiting to be finished even as MarkTwain brought this one to an abrupt conclusion.And this mythic figure, always materializing above his books, whoseshape is in our heads, seems in his way as real as the great river seems,indeed, to be that river s tutelary deity.He is the figure who, more than anyof our writers, knows the great truth that Swift exposed in the fourth bookof Gulliver s Travels: that if man cannot tell the truth, neither can language.Language can only lie.In this connection, it is well to remember those Watergate days whenRichard Nixon said that he would make every effort to find out  where thetruth lies. Apparently, Nixon never saw the joke in his assertion,12 but MarkTwain would certainly have seen it since he knew that the truth lieseverywhere, and nothing can really lie like it.Being our greatest liar, he knewhow much he believed in and needed the beautiful and powerful anddeceptive river at the center of his country.It was a muddy river the riverhe knew so that you couldn t see the bottom, which was always so near, andit ran south into slavery just as man s life runs down into the slavery ofadulthood.It rolled from side to side, wallowing in its valley as it shiftedlandmarks and state boundaries.It could hardly be bridged, and to this day103Life on the Mississippi Revisitedhas few bridges on it between New Orleans and St.Louis.It was, and still is,a lonely river for anyone upon its current.Lonely as it is, and monotonoustoo, it remains a truly wild river.Even now it may burst its banks and headthrough the Atchafalaya Bayou, leaving New Orleans high and dry.For it isa living river, always changing, always giving the lie to anyone who counts onits stability.If Mark Twain grows out of the lie that language can t help telling, thegreat river grows out of some force that language cannot name.To begin tostudy the current of Mark Twain s prose in this book is to begin to sense thepower of that other current that his discontinuous narrative displaces morethan it represents.How good it is that Mark Twain does not spend all histime he actually spends quite little in describing, analyzing, orcelebrating the river.If his book is not a great book, as great books go, it iswell worth revisiting.Revisiting it makes me know that it is time for the present generationof critics to take up Mark Twain.With their problematics, their presences-become-absences, and their aporias, they will be able to see the river as thegenius loci of Mark Twain s imagination.I very much believe that this newercriticism, dealing as it can and does with discontinuity and open-endedforms, should be able to give a better account of Mark Twain s structure andlanguage than the generation of New Critics who relied on the closedstructures of lyric, drama, and novel.In the gap I had almost said aporiabetween Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain, these critics may see, as if for thefirst time, the writer s two I s which yet make one in sight.NOTES1.See my Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1966), pp.105 26, 161 67.2.The most penetrating and suggestive treatments of this passage that I know are byHenry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1962), pp.77 81, and Larzer Ziff  Authorship and Craft: The Exampleof Mark Twain, Southern Review, 12 n.s.(1976), 256 60.3.For interesting discussions relating the art of piloting to the art of writing, seeEdgar J.Burde,  Mark Twain: The Writer as Pilot, PMLA 93 (1978), 878 92; SherwoodCummings,  Mark Twain s Theory of Realism; or the Science of Piloting, Studies inAmerican Humor, 2 (1976), 209 21; and Larzer Ziff,  Authorship and Craft, 246 60.4.Anyone interested in the conception, composition, and interpretation of Life on theMississippi will find Horst H.Kruse s Mark Twain and  Life on the Mississippi (Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press, 1981) indispensable.For a briefer account whichcorrects many prior errors and misconceptions concerning the composition of Life on theMississippi, see Guy A.Cardwell,  Life on the Mississippi: Vulgar Facts and LearnedErrors, Emerson Society Quarterly, 46 (1973), 283 93.104James M.Cox5 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]