At the Margins of Taste and the Center of Modernity: Mark Twain's "Cannibalism in the Cars"

Abstract

Mark Twain's Cannibalism in the Cars (1868) is a short piece, litde studied, in several ways a marginal work.1 It makes use of various boundaries?geographical, literary, and philo sophical?to forward a dark and disturbing vision of the America Twain saw developing at the time. The tale offers insight as well on central political, aesthetic, and ideological questions for Twain scholarship and cultural studies in general. By placing the yarn on the margins of nineteenth-century topography, taste, and morals, Twain approached issues that would develop into fundamental concerns for modernity. However, a supposedly repulsive humor2 and a superficially simple burlesque pattern have delayed recognition of the complexities in this crucial early work. Yet Twain himself showed attachment to the piece; he included it as one of his own contributions to Mark Twain's Library of Humor.3 One of the oddities of literary study as it serves historical research is that the light tale may be as revealing of deeper currents as the idle and unreflective remark may be to the psychologist. Briefly put, the tale presents a pleasant and somewhat stupid narrator, who is closeted in a railroad compartment with a man who claims to have been snowbound on a train some fifteen years previously, and who survived the ordeal by cooperating with systematic, even polite, murder and cannibalism. When the stranger finishes his yarn and departs, the conductor explains (to the gentieman-narrator's relief) that the canni bal is in fact a harmless obsessive, and his narrative (it is implied) wholly fictional. This frame tale of stranded railroad passengers forced to resort to the last expedient is significantly set in a sort of cultural-geographical no-man's-land, what would become the heardand of American civiliza tion, but which is also the crack through which the civilized person can easily fall. Presented with a residuum of oral narrative technique, the tale builds in central features of what Jan Brunvand has identified as an important folk genre, the modern urban legend.4 It draws upon