Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale by Henry B. Wonham

Abstract

356 Western American Literature wide audience, for as Kathleen Church rightly asserts, “None who read these poems will be unaffected; some will clutch the reader’s heart as they do mine.” What I hear in poem after poem is what Church said when asked about her poet’scredo; “It’sthe land thatwants to be said.”Isthat notalso the credo (or at least a major part of it) of RobinsonJeffers, Thomas Hornsby Ferril, and Gary Snyder, those other great poets ofthe American West? I hope that every library will soon have a copy ofthis book so that as many readers as possible can enjoy it and can come to understand why, at the end of“I Have Looked at the Earth,” Church can say: Oh never fear death for me for I have looked at the earth and loved it. I have been part ofearth’sbeauty in moments beyond the edge ofliving. JAMES H. MAGUIRE BoiseState University Mark Twain and theArt oftheTall Tale. ByHenry B.Wonham. (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1993. 207 pages, $32.00.) The tall tale is a collaboration which depends on a discourse community, a group of insiders. The knowledge shared by the community allows it to follow the game, with its quick swerves between truth and falsehood which outsiders, the gullible, cannot separate. That the deadpan tall tale is a distinctively American kind of humor, and that Samuel Clemens was a master ofit, is not news, nor that Clemens includes tall tales in many ofhis works. Here, then, isthe single but productive insight of Wonham’s study: the rhetorical situation of the tall tale is central to Clemens’s aesthetic, and it informs works even when tall tales are not reported to the reader. Consider, for example, the fellowship of pilots in Old Times on the Mississippi, with Horace Bixby and his cronies sharing tales based on their common fund ofriver lore—taleswhich we do not hear. In Wonham’sview, the pattern ofthe tall tale remains even in aslate awork asPudd’nhead Wilson,when the very community of knowers has disappeared. Readers are sucked into a narrative game which leads them to believe that theyare part ofsuch a commu­ nity, but theyare not: they (rather,we) are caught, gulled, and implicated in the compromised morality of Dawson’sLanding. Wonham gestures in the direction ofStanleyFish and other theorists oftext and discourse, but the real interaction of this book is with other Mark Twain scholarship.James Cox isWonham’smajor predecessor; Mark Twain: TheFateof Reviews 357 Humor is cited with approval (though not always total agreement) in every chapter. Forrest Robinson is Wonham’s straw man, a gull, in his view, without wit enough to follow the play. We finish Wonham’sstudywith a clearer sense ofClemens’saesthetics, how he envisioned narratives and audiences, aswell as thoughtful interpretations of individual texts: particularlyvaluable, Ibelieve, are his readings of TomSawyer(a contest of narrative authorities) and of the always-troubling Pudd'nhead Wilson. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University Mythical TricksterFigures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Edited by WilliamJ. Hynes and William G. Doty. (Tuscaloosa: UniversityofAlabamaPress, 1993. 261 pages, $41.95.) Scholars who choose to write about tricksters mayfind themselves tracking a subjectwho circles back, laughing from behind trees to alert the whole forest to the intruder’sposition. Editors Hynes and Doty do well to abandon the hunt and, instead, to listen at the borderlands where tricksters work their magic. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach which avoids a unified perspective, the editors make it possible for their anthology to reflect the multivocality inherent to tricksters whether in specific cultures or studied cross-culturally. The editors frame the book in such a way as to make it an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with scholarship on tricksters. A chapter by Hynes and Doty outlining theoretical issues and methodologies informing the history of trickster studies prefaces the more specific essays on tricksters from Greece to Africa, America toJapan. With its extensive bibliography of trickster studies, the book should prove to be a valuable resource for those writing not only on traditional tricksters but also on contemporary ones in the works of Gary Snyder, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gerald Vizenor, and others Hynes men­ tions in his...