THE REFORM AESTHETIC: POLITICAL FUTURITY IN THE SELECT WRITINGS OF MARK TWAIN

Abstract

The present thesis engages with the persistent notion of Thomas Moore’s ‘utopia’ from the inception of America’s establishment as a self-proclaimed exceptional nation-state to the demolition of the same myth in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), which appeared during and after the failure of Reconstruction. The process of Reconstruction started after the bloody Civil War that resulted in numerous deaths. After emancipation, ‘black codes’ were promulgated to re-enslave black people. However, constitutional amendments were made to provide civil rights in 1875 to achieve social and political equality for blacks, with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. These rights were proclaimed illegal by Supreme Court in 1883. Consequently, black people fell again into the hell of slavery from which they were trying hard to come out. This research displays Twain’s reactions to the failure of Reconstruction, which is highly disappointing for him to see the wretched condition of black people in the post-Reconstruction society. Therefore, he expatriates himself aesthetically into the past to reform society by documenting an alternate history of actual historical reality. His anger was too much to unleash in present-day (post-Reconstruction) society inflicting atrocities on black people. Twain’s reform aesthetic adumbrates the future remembrance of the past through past misremembrance, to procure the world of multimodal utopias— ‘reverse utopia’, ‘protopia’, and ‘whites utopia’ in select writings. The narratives are imbued with the political futurity to achieve a better world since political reform has brought enormous violence in America. By taking Reader-response, Memory Studies, Historical Criticism, and Narratology as critical approaches, this research exposes an idea of ‘narrative fallibility’ brought forward by the active response of the reader’s discourse world. Furthermore, it highlights the difference between the actual and the textual reality. By doing so, this research creates a paradigm to study narrative fallibility through the lens of negative criticism, a part of historical criticism, to question the credibility of the author’s statement for future readers through analysing the novels under scrutiny. This thesis attempts to actively investigate historical reality in Twain’s select writings since passive reading will not divulge the textual anomalies encoded in the text. Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), demonstrates the author’s ‘memory-activism’ style as a dissent against the reality of post-Reconstruction times by retreating into the pre-Civil War society and how conservative Clemens is different from the liberal Mark Twain. Twain debunks the ‘spectacular violence’ of the Civil War (1861-1865) to depict the ‘slow violence’ of the everyday reality of pre-Civil War society. However, he cannot evade the violence of the novel’s time, ostensible in the ‘catastrophic realism’ style, showing his sense of commitment to the truth in writing the realistic historical narrative. After the failure of Reconstruction, Twain works on reconstructing cultural memory to achieve Reconstruction’s objectives by presenting an alternate history of the actual historical reality of pre-Civil War society. To achieve this, Twain employs ‘disnarration’, ‘negation’, ‘counterfactual’, and ‘negative uninformativeness’ mechanisms to accomplish a better world for black people. To evade the violence of the past, Twain envisages a ‘reverse utopia’ model— imagining not an ideal world but a world where black people may not endure the sufferings and hardships they have already gone through. In order to forge the nation’s cultural memory, Twain depicts the surreal act of a black person’s (Jim) freedom supported by a white boy (Huck), blacks having voting rights, and Jim being given a voice and agency in pre-Civil War society. These acts can be seen as an outcry against the historical reality of post-Reconstruction society, denying basic human rights to black people. However, by depicting an alternate history, the institution of slavery and its consequences cannot be eradicated from the nation’s cultural memory. Thus, the restoration of slavery in the post-Reconstruction society alludes to the failure of his ideals. Therefore, Huckleberry Finn can be seen as a failure since it fails to achieve desired objectives. The thesis further reveals Twain’s intention to identify the factors that prevented political reform and brought enormous violence in America through his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). It is evident in the non-fulfilment of dialogic function between medieval England (South) and Hank (North), resulting in the battle of Sand-belt (American Civil War), bringing tremendous violence and bloodshed. However, through the mutual reverence and complete dialogue between Hank (North) and Sandy (South), Twain strives to achieve harmony between North and South. He traces the history of slavery in the novel by putting it in medieval England. Then he criticises the enduring influence of outdated notions of medievalism that are to be blamed for slavery in the modern South. By setting the novel in medieval England, Twain first explores the history of slavery and secondly criticises the pervasiveness of antiquated ideas of medievalism responsible for slavery in the contemporary South. However, Hank’s selfish desire for power and comfort as a practical politician demolishes the possibility of protopia, as propounded in Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable (2016), anticipated by Twain’s Connecticut Yankee to achieve a better future. After the failure of Huckleberry Finn, Twain seeks techno-politics to achieve a better future since practical politics has brought tremendous violence in America. In order to achieve his selfish desired end, Hank departs from Twain’s techno-political vision (protopia) to become a practical politician of nineteenth-century America. Twain’s Connecticut Yankee suggests the protopian reading of the novel by highlighting how techno-politics (pure) resonates with Kelly’s protopian vision, corrupted by Hank’s practical politics (impure) for power and comfort, for which Twain criticises him. Hank pretends to achieve utopia, to secure the power and privileges, not to realise utopia itself. Kelly’s suggestion of technology as the centre of civilisation takes us towards the state of protopia. Unfortunately, it has been misused for mass extermination in the novel. The thesis insinuates that Kelly’s idea of protopia has been present in earlier utopian writings, which illustrates a much larger concern with determining whether policies and advancements should aim at revolutionary and systematic changes (like Hank) or take smaller ‘baby steps’ over a longer period. The reader-response approach establishes a paradigm for future readers to unearth the protopian reading scope to re-read the dystopian novel as a narrative of progress. This research argues that to achieve the quintessential goal of humanity, protopia appears to be an appropriate model since utopia is unachievable. Additionally, to track down the course-plotting of whites’ utopia in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), the thesis investigates how Samuel Clemens sheds the liberal skin of Mark Twain to achieve eugenics (blood purity). By setting the narrative of Tom in the 1830s, Clemens alters the past of pre-Civil War society to create future remembrance of the past to make the white race vigilant towards the impending disaster of black overtaking whites if the problem of colour conflict is further ignored. This research reveals the author’s struggle to conceptualise the narrative style as a blend of ‘historical realism’ and ‘minstrel tradition’ to deride blacks’ attempt to imitate whites. Therefore, they do not deserve realistic treatment. Contrary to Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, Clemens repudiates the instances of historical reality to debunk the scope of narrative fallibility; however, it persists in the difference between the actual and the textual reality. Indeed, the infliction of cruelties by white men on black people makes sense in history that fails to do such in the novel since Clemens portrays the white class as more decent and generous towards blacks in the 1830s. Through the science of fingerprint, Clemens opposes Roxy’s desire for blacks’ utopia to realise whites’ utopia. In Connecticut Yankee, Twain intends to use technology for social welfare. At the same time, the present narrative segregates whites from blacks to establish a paradigm to restore whites’ status quo by eliminating the scope of blacks’ dissent in the future. It reflects the more conflicted, biased, and ambiguous personality of Mark Twain in defending slavery, which is fundamental to the white South. In short, this research creates a paradigm to study the narrative fallibility for future readers by highlighting the difference between the actual and the textual reality.