Narrative Jujitsu: Twain's “Studied Fictions” and Their Plot Against Audience

Abstract

Anyone familiar with mark twain's humor will recognize its traces in this description of an early stage performance. Here is selfmockery, the mockery of grandiloquent stage oratory, and the mockery of grandiloquence itself, all the more fun for our reviewer's high-serious complaint. Here is a trace of something else, though, that has not been fully appreciated in Twain criticism: the aggression his oral and literary performances exert against their audiences. As our reviewer describes it, Twain's comic gambit about the Sandwich Islands also mocks and catches out his listeners. In the process of seeming to gratify the sort of conventional, “serious” expectations that auditors like our reviewer take to the performance, Twain becomes “untrustworthy,” so that the audience's not knowing where “the fun will come in” comes close to its knowing that the fun is at the expense of these expectations. Its “queer state,” like a bruise, marks Twain's deepest aggression: while indulging his audience's highcultural desires – his “brilliant” purple prose signals the entry into a touristic transaction as clearly as buying a berth on theQuaker Citydoes inInnocents Abroad– Twain's concluding verbal self-consciousness flourishes before his auditors both the inauthenticity of his offer and the selfdelusion involved in their accepting it.