Day 41: The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain

Today's the day I finally write something about the collection of Mark Twain short stories I've been reading. Thing is, these stories are so diverse in both topic and execution that I'm struggling to begin. Where do you even start when trying to comprehend 50+ stories spanning 45 years? It's difficult to even pin down a particular style of his. There's so much I love about these stories that don't fit with the typical 'rules' people follow for short fiction and just as soon as I think I have a grasp on how he likes to break those rules, he goes and breaks his own rules with the next story. He absolutely will not conform to expectations. In line with that philosophy is the satire that runs in his veins, pouring out into almost every story until they're packed full of equal parts humor and social commentary. He can take a topic as mundane as the delivery of a beef contract and turn it into a riot, chock full of slapstick, word play, drama, and ultimately, social and political commentary on the United States bureaucracy. His stories can feel absurd, even completely random when you start reading them, but by the end it becomes obvious that he was on topic all along, so on topic in fact that he's now brought ten or eleven confounding problems to your attention that you might have never considered. From a critique of the legislative processes through a survival story that devolves into committee-based cannibalism as in 'Cannibalism in the Cars,' to a commentary on the sensationalization of news from the perspective of an ignorant editor in 'How I Edited an Agricultural Paper,' he always has something to say, and a clever, compelling way to get his point across. Often the problems he addresses in these stories are the same problems we have have today. Even some of the smaller issues he has with society are still topical. Take this excerpt from 'A Day at Niagara' for example:

On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime Niagara; and a great many people have the incredible effrontery or the native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime.

Followed shortly by:

There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to display one's marvelous insignificance in a good strong light, but it requires a sort of superhuman self-complacency to enable one to do it.

Something tells me he wouldn't be very happy with today's self-obsession on social media, nor would he be very impressed the way we idealize and aggrandize cultures we don't fully understand:

The noble Red Man has always been a friend and darling of mine. I love to read about him in tales and legends and romances. I love to read of his inspired sagacity, and his love of the wild free life of mountain and forest, and his general nobility of character, and his stately metaphorical manner of speech, and his chivalrous love for the dusky maiden, and the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements. Especially the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements.

If that made you feel icky to read, then know that Twain succeeded. Later on the narrator goes to meet a tribe dotted around Niagara, and encounters a 'noble Son of the Forest' who is busy at work making knick-knacks for the local gift shop.

'Is the Wawhoo-Wang-Wang of the Whack-a-Whack happy? Does the great Speckled Thunder sigh for the war-path, or is his heart contented with dreaming of the dusky maiden, the Pride of the Forest? Does the mighty Sachem yearn to drink the blood of his enemies, or is he satisfied to make bead reticules for the pappooses of the paleface? Speak, sublime relic of bygone grandeur--venerable ruin, speak!'

The relic said:

'An' is it mesilf, Dennis Hooligan, that ye'd be takin' for a dirty Injin, ye drawlin', lantern-jawed, spider-legged divil! By the piper that played before Moses, I'll ate ye!'

I went away from there.

He goes on to mortally offend a large group of 'natives,' who throw him down the falls. He dies, but survives, with only 16 fatal wounds. At the end, it turns out the people the narrator has been accosting in the forest for several hours are actually a large group of Irish immigrants from the city of Limerick. It seems superhuman self-complacency is hard to avoid even for the narrator.

I think it's impossible to fully sum up all I have to say about these stories I've read so far (about 20 of them), but there's a note I want to end on, and that's the fact that Mark Twain was making fun of weebs as far back as 1869, and if could give you only one reason to read some Twain, it would be that one right there.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley