Mark Twain, Memory, and the Failures of Historicism

Abstract

I want to begin with the rather simple statement that Mark Twain’s autobiographies—and here I am referring mostly to Life on the Mississippi and the text we now call the Autobiography—hold open the past as a resource for slowing down time. In itself this isn’t a highly provocative claim; I imagine that many would agree that we find in Twain’s work a desire to hold off futurity. I think, too, that it is fair to say that his continual return to the materials of the past is in part motivated by modernity’s culture of planned obsolescence. Obsolescence becomes an issue when the speed of “progress” requires a diminishing of the present in addition to the past. Temporality, under modernity, is organized into the past, present, and a horizon of expectation known as the future. The future increasingly encroaches on the present by directing our thinking and desires forward; Twain well understood the risks and anxiety of this minimized present through the market logic of investment. Planned obsolesce exploits such anxieties through the introduction of looming future dates of expiration. While ancient, dead forms of culture were of no interest to Twain, those still-working elements of the past had some attraction. The ability to use these elements, to repeat certain experiences, to laugh twice at the same joke: these are what he understands to be threatened by obsolescence.1 While we recognize the extent to which narrative has broken down in his Autobiography—it is precisely this feature that has made this text’s reputation— we might not immediately link this formal feature to Twain’s anxious response to modernity. If we carefully consider how individual moments of breakdown are framed and what they might contribute to any possible larger narrative structure and authorial strategy, we expose what I would like to suggest we recognize as narrative leftovers or remainders. These originate in, and are signifiers of, a failure to fall into line with the requirements of a certain temporal