Ideas: Critical Approaches to Mark Twain's "No.44, The Mysterious Stranger"
While browsing the Academic Search Complete research database looking for scholarly reviews of what I was informed to be Mark Twain's unfinished novel, The Mysterious Stranger, I discovered that this collective term was used for simplicity to refer to three shorter, unfinished works, titled "No.44, The Mysterious Stranger," "What is Man?," and "The Chronicles of Young Satan." I came across an article written by Michael S. Martin, a professor at the University of Charleston in Western Virginia, which reviewed the book Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's NO.44, The Mysterious Stranger, a collection of critical essays edited and introduced by Joseph Csicsila and Chad Rohman. Like the ambiguous term of reference The Mysterious Stranger, the title of this book is slightly misleading, for not all of its collected works analyze specifically Twain's "No.44, The Mysterious Stranger" manuscript, some, for example, focusing on "The Chronicle of Young Satan," which Albert Paine's The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance most closely reflects. Below are explanations of the angles taken by various authors whose essays are included in Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's NO.44. You will notice that different readings of Twain's profound work necessarily yield radically different interpretations, and perhaps that great literary works such as Twain's necessitate critical approaches taken from all possible angles of interpretation.
Sharon D. McCoy -- "The Minstrel Mask as Alter Ego"
I have yet to read "No.44, The Mysterious Stranger," but as Martin's review of Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's NO.44 and other sources state, its plot includes a minstrel performance which utilizes the dramatic makeup technique of "blackface"--painting ones face to create a stereotyped caricature of a black person--which became the most popular form of live performance in America during the late 19th century. As Professor Martin states, McCoy argues in her essay that "blackface song, as a cultural practice, came from the significance of the racial expression beneath the blackface mask," yet, as McCoy believes, Twain's work does not perpetuate (denies) this context, because during this performance, the singer's face is never revealed to the audience, "and the vision of the performance quickly fades for the protagonist, just as 'the possibility for cultural synthesis fades as well'" (3). What McCoy's interpretation of this scene from "NO.44, The Mysterious Stranger" is suggesting to us, is that in this version of Twain's story, the external forces awakening the protagonist to the atrocity and ignorance of his species suggest that the very existence of such practices as minstrelsy prove the near impossibility of cultural synthesis, or the combination of cultures who accept each other into one culture with the qualities and customs of both.
Henry B. Wonham -- "Mark Twain's Last Cakewalk"
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In Henry Wonham's essay, he takes an approach similar to that of McCoy's, focusing on the minstrel show scene in "No.44, The Mysterious Stranger." He highlights the cakewalk dance performed during the
show. The cakewalk dance, created by Blacks during slavery times and used on plantations as an annual festivity during which a prize was granted to the couple who danced the best, was mocked in minstrel performances by Whites who painted their faces black, as shown in the video to the left. Later in his life, Twain was apparently experimenting with the concept of a duality of the "self," the tangible part of ourselves that we see and embrace every day, and our "dream self." Wonham believes that "the minstrel song in The Mysterious Stranger is reflective of the conflict between 'the original self and its burlesque representation'" (Martin 3). |
The way I see it, Wonham believes that Twain was suggesting to readers that the people we humans actually are, our ideal selves or the people we know we are and whom we fully perpetuate when we're not acting around others to receive a specific response, is ever in conflict with the part of us that, as Eliot says in "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock," puts on a face "to meet the faces that we meet." To Twain, the true people that we are may be our dream-self.
Peter Messent -- "'The Chronicle of Young Satan' and No.44, The Mysterious Stranger: A Transnationalist Reading"
In Peter Messent's essay, he criticizes both "No.44, The Mysterious Stranger," and "The Chronicle of Young Satan" through the lens of transnationalism, a social phenomena that regards improving inter-connectivity among people of different sovereign territories in light of common socioeconomic relations. He believes that Twain chose Europe to be the setting of both storis to highlight what many consider to be examples of the ignorance of American society, such as racial tension between Blacks and Whites and superficial ideological agendas. He emphasized that at the heart of Twain's work is the ability to overstep the boundaries of politics and nationalism to view human society critically in its larger context, not merely as a collection of nations.
"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." Albert Einstein
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Harold K. Bush -- "The Prophetic Imagination, the Liberal Self, and the Ending of No.44, The Mysterious Stranger
In Bush's essay, he views the ending of Twain's work, "where Forty-Four tells August that he is only a product of his thoughts and that there is no god," from a religious perspective. Unlike others, who consider the ending of "N0.44, The Mysterious Stranger" to suggest agnostic feelings toward life, Bush sees Forty-Four's words as a religious prophecy "marked by 'both critique and promise'" (Martin 5). Bush sees an advantage to being exposed to Forty-Four's prophecy, perhaps that instead of rendering life meaningless, it provides an opportunity to approach life with new, independent meaning.
Bruce Michelson -- "Mysterious Strangers and the Motions of the Mind"
Michelson's essay is, to me, perhaps the most intriguing of the collection. In Professor Martin's review of the book, he states that Michelson "reads the Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts 'as an interconnected meditation on the nature and possibilities of consciousness and the dynamics of creative thought'" (7). Without access to this essay and the others, assumption provides my only avenue of thought on this one, but as the quote tells you, and as the picture that I've provided to the right hopefully suggests, Michelson explores a deeper, metaphysical meaning to Twain's work, one that obviously goes far beyond culture, national identity, and perhaps even religion, themes that play a somewhat necessary role of limitation in the other essays.
"You can find anything in the Bible to defend the status quo."
Bruce Michelson |