Sitting in Darkness

With the rise of what has been lauded as the “transnational turn” in American studies, a new disciplinary emphasis on globalistic perspective, attention has turned to that most American of literary authors, from the golden age of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American imperialist adventure, who also happens to have been—in several senses of the phrasing—our greatest literary-cultural traveler. That figure is Mark Twain, by dint of personal experience the most traveled of our major authors, and with his major texts to this day still the most traveled in the American canon. (According to Selina Lai-Henderson, one of the writers reviewed here, Huckleberry Finn [1884] alone exists in ninety Chinese translations.) Accordingly, much recent attention has turned to Twain’s travel writings—themselves an imposing percentage of his titles—but also to analogous texts such as the Mississippi River writings, the historical romances, and the large number of works, many unfinished, centered on metaphysical travel in space and time. Indeed, Roy Morris Jr., author of American Vandal (Harvard Univ. Press, 2015), a study centered on the idea of Twain as lifelong cultural and geopolitical disturber of the peace, proposes that nearly everything the author wrote might be seen as concerning itself with travel or some related form of itinerancy.Within variant takes on the new theoretical frameworks of American studies globalism described above—embracing race and gender studies, postcolonialism, material cultural studies, and transnational culture and comparative ethnic studies, three new texts undertake selected areas of Twain canon. Two, on Twain and China and the Chinese, Hsuan Hsu’s Sitting in Darkness and Lai-Henderson’s Mark Twain in China, make for interesting choices since Twain did not go to China but had a great deal of experience with Chinese immigration in the United States. This experience resulted in a regrettable early collaboration with Bret Harte, Ah Sin (1877), but also in later reformist writings—and then as time went on, developed into an almost obsessive fixation with American imperialist depredations in Asia and the Pacific. Hsu and Lai-Henderson both begin illuminatingly with Twain’s early education on race, showing how a Southerner, raised in a world of enslaved Africans, found his way into the politics of global racialization through his early travels in the American West and encounters with the Chinese. Both then go on to show how Twain’s thinking on Asia—especially through US military interventions in the Philippines and in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion—became crucial to the evolution of a figure Lai-Henderson calls the “Red-Hot Anti-Imperalist” (52). They then proceed along different lines. Hsu shows how Chinese elements in Twain’s education in “comparative racialization” came to inform major texts including Huckleberry Finn (1884), Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Lai-Henderson provides original information on how Twain eventually traveled to China as an authorial presence in his texts, discussing numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century translations and their further dissemination into variants suited to disparate Chinese political cultures, including those of the People’s Republic, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. (An added gift here is a fascinating final chapter on translation problems with American dialect.)As indicated by its title, a third text in the grouping—William Spanos’s Shock and Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”—makes Twain’s book about time travel into a text about crossings back and forth across cultural and political geographies, those of “primitive” sixth-century England and “advanced” nineteenth- (and eventually twentieth- and twenty-first-) century America. As indicated, it proposes the Yankee as a case study in the long history of American imperialist ambition and adventure—predicated on a myth of national exceptionalism Spanos defines as a hybrid of the Puritan errand into the wilderness and Manifest Destiny eventually moving beyond a Western rendezvous with Frederick Jackson Turner. He then extends the figure, as evident in his main title, through such subsequent American disasters in globalistic meddling as the Vietnam and Desert Wars. Here, as with Hsu and Lai-Henderson, the textual dating chosen by Spanos (though the 1889 appearance of the Yankee does not correspond, as he claims, to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, which was in 1898) puts the spotlight on allegedly anti-imperialist Twain. Twain’s book itself, on the other hand, he claims to tell another, more conventional imperialist story. Such a reading he bases on a complex theoretical matrix. It begins in a contrapuntal reading based on the postcolonialist hermeneutics of Edward Said, whereby one teases out the hegemonic assumption of the dominant discourse by making it the other’s other. Included also are Guy Debord on the poetics and politics of spectacle as a discourse of mass public hypnosis. In turn, Debord’s figure is refined by reference to the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben and his concept of “the state of exception,” whereby power outside the realm of the juridicial political sphere becomes claimed by governments in alleged times of crisis, eventually establishing itself as the norm. It might be added that this is a companion to another highly theorized book by Spanos about another single literary text on the institutional history of American exceptionalism—a parallel study of what he deems Herman Melville’s equally proleptic Billy Budd (1924).As to critical styles, Hsu and Lai-Henderson are notably clear and direct. Both bespeak the lively interest of setting forth new information on a hitherto neglected but important literary and cultural studies topic. Of the three books, the last is the most ambitious and theoretically grounded. Yet too often it seems most mired in the rehashing of old arguments, on everything from the Puritan jeremiad or the Turner Thesis to the degree of identification one may claim between the cultural views of a putative author named Mark Twain and the time-traveling nineteenth-century American narrator-protagonist named Hank Morgan who is his titular character. Argumentation is meticulous but sometimes exhausting. In the run-up, for instance, to the body chapter containing what he has insistently claimed to be his original Saidian Debordian Agambonian revisionary reading of Twain’s text, he feels impelled to conduct long, densely theorized revisionary readings of every other major Twainian (designated in four chronological waves) who has ever read The Connecticut Yankee. There is also a fondness for the portentous block quote, both as chapter epigraph (usually multiple) and as internal component of argument. Sometimes these derive from Twain or relevant critical commentary. As often they invoke the old Theory Gods: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault. All this makes it the least satisfying to read. The writing is dense, often unnecessarily so. On a reasonably simple point, already well argued, dropping in some reference to a continental heavyweight seems like using a howitzer to kill a housefly.Let it be insisted, however, that Spanos is surely correct on exceptionalism, as he and others have defined it, as the great American geopolitical curse. When shall we get over our sense of providential mission and geopolitical chosenness? As Spanos observes, for a brief moment some of us ventured to think that the Vietnam disaster might have driven home the point. Then came Shock and Awe. This time the boss was a rather Hank Morganish (cocksure, unreflective) Connecticut Yalie (though not a very bright one it is said), reinventing himself as politician and eventual war president as a drawling shoot-from-the-hip Texas gunslinger. A more direct, material genealogy of the Hank Morgan connection might lie in the legendary history of the Colt armament works in Hartford. Twain’s book begins and ends with the story of the Yankee and quondam Colt foreman taking down a knightly opponent with a six-shooter. Thirteen hundred years later, in the age of better living through firepower, the Colt combine turns out to have been those fine people who gave us the M-16 automatic rifle, still the basis of most rapid-fire American infantry weaponry

American exceptionalism · Art · Art history · Political science · Politics · Spectacle · Yankee · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Humor Studies · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Law