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• W2002166476 abstract "THOSE OTHER THEMATIC PATTERNS IN MARK TWAIN'S WRITINGS Alan Gribben* One singular facet of Mark Twain's mind has not been explored in any systematic fashion: the series of obsessive themes (expressed in recurrent patterns of imagery in his fiction, letters, and notebooks) revealing his fascination with the painful, the ghastly, the grotesque. His family members, audiences, and literary critics have not generally shared his taste in these matters. As a biographer of Twain phrased it, Olivia [Clemens] . . . was revolted by the macabre and the gruesome. . . . Most readers would agree with her. A fruit of Mark Twain's frontier life was a tendency to treat death and decay as funny. . . . The secrets of the charnel house are not funny to readers with sensitive minds and viscera .1 Nonetheless, these macabre and gruesome passages suffuse Twain's published and unpublished writings, including his light-spirited boy-books. If The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is truly a hymn to boyhood, as Twain once alleged, its hymn-like qualities can be said to evoke fear and anguish as well as joyous elation. That ostensibly sunny landscape of Tom Sawyer is illusionary; the decisive struggles take place in the graveyard, at the Widow's lonely house on the hill, and in the gloomy cave, all of which scenes belie the innocent reputation of this work. Horror is very real in Tom Sawyer, one commentator contends, and it is horror and Tom's reactions to it that . . . connect it to the dark unity of Twain's later works.2 Twain shared this trait with another novelist capable of creating memorably humorous characters and situations, Charles Dickens. R. G. Collins observes that Dickens demonstrates the seriousness of concern of a comic writer in the close correlation that he draws between the extravagant emotion that produces joy and that which produces terror. Collins points out how Dickens uses shock as a special device, the humor of exaggeration as a control, to convey a serious truth, doing it in the same fashion, say, as Kafka was to, in the early twentieth century.3 Whether the majority of the grim details and incidents in Mark Twain's writings represented deliberate authorial stances and effects, or were (more likely) reflections of Justin Kaplan's thesis that Twain was an internally divided man whose tensions became apparent in his fiction, *Alan Gribben is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. He served on the editorial staff of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley, and has published numerous papers on Twain in addition to a book, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction (1980). He is currently working on a book on the dominant patterns in Twain's works. 186Alan Gribben his pervasive images of discomfort and anxiety can be grouped into at least three basic categories by theme: The Eternal Solitude, The Waiting Grave, and The Transcendental Deliverance. Most readers apparently assume that Twain's ghoulish images are simply aberrations from his genuine style (presumably concessions to his sensation-seeking subscription -publishers, who knew their readers' fondness for the horrific4) or quirky flashes of his latent, impending bitterness. Such interpretations miss the indications of Twain's enduring vision of human joy and human woe, mellow mirth and chilling terror, all hopelessly interlocked, and overlook how adeptly Twain was gratifying his readers' need for comedy while catering to their concommitant, less wholesome appetites. Among American authors, only Edgar Allan Poe's admixture of wryness and grotesquerie compares with this artistic feat of Twain's, but even Poe could barely maintain the impression of comedy in the balance, and his tales are often taken more seriously than he probably expected them to be. The themes highlighted in this study are less recognizable than Twain's much-noted interests in twins, pseudonyms, exchanged roles, contrasting personalities, and mysterious strangers, yet these and other better-understood patterns merge with those not usually discussed. Even Twain's early absorption with the idea of doubleness, for instance, had its counterpart in the freakish monstrosities evoked in The Siamese Twins (1872) and Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls (1875). Never reticent about referring to gruesome incidents..." @default.
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• W2002166476 title "Those Other Thematic Patterns in Mark Twain's Writings" @default.
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