Mark Twain, William James, and the Funding of Freedom in Joan of Arc

Abstract

Beliefs at any time are so much experience funded. William James, Pragmatism(1) Mark Twain as hagiographer seems improbable, yet this is the Twain we encounter in his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. From his opening preface through the concluding paragraphs, Twain never tires in his praise of Joan, consistently holding her forth as worthy of imitation and even veneration. Miracles abound in the book, and the extraordinary nearly becomes the commonplace. The mystical meshes with the magical, playing across a harsh political reality, while the effusively emotional, sentimental, and melodramatic obfuscates the very claim of historical accuracy to which the narrative evidently aspires. Through it all, Twain's Joan emerges as an image of perfectly reconciled thought and action, an exemplary marriage of human genius and divine intellect, bold in spirit, pure, good, and true. Such laudatory coloration might well be expected in the biography of a saint, but few would expect Mark Twain to engage in such a style. But he did. Twain's idealistic presentation of Joan and her narrative - moralistic, allusively religious, even mystical, yet starkly uncomplicated in characterization - is surprising. However surprising, in his Joan of Arc Twain continues the fictional theorizing upon consciousness begun as early as his Huckleberry Finn. The question of whether being in reality is free or determined, or a complex mixture of the two, and the related tensions of the apparent divisions of the mind, which were deployed so dramatically in Huck's internal dialogues, are still the problems compelling Twain's attention. Joan's own interior struggles, however, are accompanied by voices and visions that Twain constructs as dream-like phenomena, religious experiences of a sort central to a verification of that independence of mind only partially acknowledged in his earlier characterization of Huck Finn. In so doing, Twain validates and celebrates independent thought by developing a novelistic image of a psychology that reflects our capacity for interior kinds of significant freedom. If Joan is Twain's exemplary model of independent thought, then her own encounter with religious experience must somehow reflect her capacity for such intellectual independence; and yet Joan's voices appear to think for her, or rather her own faculties seem subject to the will of her voices rather than to a will of her own. Indeed a layer of voices seeks to subdue Joan's own voice, often claiming authority over her life and import by manipulating her message along religious and political lines.(2) Yet it also seems that Twain believed her own life could nevertheless speak through the binding and blinding voices of heavenly angels and earthly politics and liberate free thought into effective action. The central problem for Twain involves the possibility of liberation in the face of divine will and historical constraints. He must free Joan and the truth she embodies and return them both back into a sense of the contingency of the moment. To better understand Twain's attempt to deliver Joan and to figure forth her experience of freedom as an appropriable truth, we can turn to the work of one of Twain's contemporaries and acquaintances: William James. I am not making a case for direct influence here, though after meeting in Florence in 1892, Twain and James entered into and nurtured a friendship interweaving their often complementary strands of thought. Rather I am using James to illuminate Twain's unusual style and surprising sentiments in Joan of Arc, what for some may be an unfamiliar Twain. James can serve as a kind of cultural mirror in which to read Twain because James's belief in independent thought and its efficacious movement in the world became the cornerstone for his powerful pragmatism, which embodied a metaphysics of freedom that enabled authentic movement of the individual toward a realization of truth within and upon the world. …