Sunday, April 6, 2014

The New Yorker: How America Learned to Hear Itself Talk

"Twain earned local notoriety cranking out newspaper columns in Nevada and San Francisco (often for Harte, whom he had befriended), but in 1865 he had his nationwide breakthrough. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which Twain had heard improvised by a backwoods forty-niner during a prospecting trip, is a somewhat inexplicable comic anecdote about a man who gets cheated in a bet about his pet frog. But the point of the story is all in the telling. Twain assumes the voice of a grizzled, plausibly drunken old miner who buttonholes an unfortunate visitor and weaves his way through the shaggy-dog tale. Something about the story, Tarnoff writes, “spelled the beginning of the end of the old guard in American letters: the decline of a genteel elite that looked to Europe for its influences and the rise of a literature that drew its inspiration from more native sources.”...



"Twain’s innovation was to invert the expected form of narrative, so that unrefined idiomatic English—what Tarnoff repeatedly calls “living speech”—dominated the storyline rather than being slotted into the framework of distinguished prose like specimens in a Victorian hall of wonders. When Twain assumed the gentleman-scholar affect, it was as satire. (This is the strategy of his first book, “The Innocents Abroad,” which takes the perspective of bumbling middle Americans trying to appear sophisticated as they travel through pretentious Old Europe.) He was happiest when attempting a kind of inspired mimicry, touched with artful exaggeration, of the myriad voices in the American cacophony." (read more)

13 comments:

Shouting Thomas said...

I struggle to read anything in The New Yorker, no matter the subject.

The New Yorker combines the expected strident PC leftism of Manhattan with Upper East Side snobbery and advertisements for preposterously expensive consumer toys. The magazine is a doofus stew of class striving and deep hatred of the South and Midwest.

Nonetheless, I am a big Mark Twain fan. He grew up not so far from my home town in central Illinois.

No time to read now, but I'll see if I can plow through the article later.

edutcher said...

Local color, to put it bluntly.

PS Also a big Twain fan, particularly "Roughing It".

virgil xenophon said...

Heh, I've actually been to the annual Calveras County Frog Jumping Contest in Angels Camp, CA. Great all-weekend event with vintage Bi-plane stunt-flying from a small strip in the valley in front of the mountain-side upon which all sit, logging contests of every kind (axe-throwing, tree-topping, etc., ) interspersed in between the frog-jumping on the main stage. They have events for State, local, and International entrants and other specialty divisions like the junior division, etc. It's a hoot as all the "frog-jocky's" are drunk as well as the MC. (AND the audience) Not unk for the drunken frog-jocky, in attempt to stomp the floor to encourage the jump to squash his own frog. Much hilarity ensues.

I attended in 1967, so God only knows how huge the event has become by now..

ricpic said...

Mark Twain was a complete fabrication by Samuel Clemens, who in reality was a model representative of what the enlightened up-to-date 19th century liberal bourgeoisie thought. I'm reading a book about Italian railroads, a very good read by the way - Italian Ways by Tim Parks - and lo and behold, I come across this very thoughtful sober quote of Mark Twain concerning Italy's unaffordable railroads:

There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand--and more especially I can not understand how a bankrupt Government can have such palatial railroad depots. As for railways--we have none like them. The cars slide as smoothly along as if they were on runners. These things win me more than Italy's hundred galleries of priceless art treasures, because I understand the one and am not competent to appreciate the other. But, this country is bankrupt. There is no real foundation for these great works. The prosperity they would seem to indicate is a pretence. There is no money in the treasury, and so they enfeeble her instead of strengthening.


Written like a sober pillar of the community type. And true.

Shouting Thomas said...

Mark Twain was a complete fabrication by Samuel Clemens, who in reality was a model representative of what the enlightened up-to-date 19th century liberal bourgeoisie thought.

Mark Twain was a performer's personae. "Complete fabrication" is not a good way to describe this. Like Dylan or Madonna, Twain crafted an extraordinarily successful public face. That's part of the art of the performer. Art is, after all, "artifice."

ricpic said...

Good point, ST. Mark Twain was Samuel Clemen's mask, 'kay? Don't you dare knock that one down! :^)

ricpic said...

Clemens'

Shouting Thomas said...

Honest Abe, another of my hometown heroes (New Salem is about an hour's drive from my hometown), also embodies this strange dichotomy.

His legend is that of the barefoot boy who was born in a log cabin, which is true. Lincoln employed this story throughout his life and professional career, to great advantage.

Lincoln was also a remarkably successful corporate lawyer who helped to craft the conquest of the American West by the railroads.

He was, once he triumphed, a very sophisticated and brilliant man.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

Clemens'

LOL ricpic

For people who like this sort of thing I highly recomment

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

deborah said...

I had no idea Holbrook was doing his Twain impersonation as early as 1967.

Unknown said...

What do you mean we're bankrupt? We have plenty of money. 6 billion went missing under Hillary's tutelage at State.
see.

sakredkow said...

Mark Twain was a performer's personae. "Complete fabrication" is not a good way to describe this. Like Dylan or Madonna, Twain crafted an extraordinarily successful public face. That's part of the art of the performer. Art is, after all, "artifice."

The confusion about Dylan’s identity had been there from the very start, beginning with the sly, crab-like approach of the bumpkin character who had showed up in Greenwich Village. The folksy, vagabond Bob would have been an obvious act to anyone examining it closely, but if you happened to be a tourist or an impressionable young girl, you might believe all the tall tales he told and they would only add to the patina of the performances. But even if you thought it was just a hokey routine, that was okay too. It worked either way. Dylan would be evasive and funny when people called him on it, but he never got upset about it.
“It was an old showbiz tradition,” says Dave Van Ronk. “Everybody changed their names and invented stories about themselves ...we were all inventing characters for ourselves. Look at Ramblin’ Jack Eliott, who had grown up as a Jewish doctor’s son in Brooklyn. And then gone out west and become a cowboy and Woody’s hoboing buddy.”
Who Is That Man: In Search of the Real Bob Dylan by David Dalton

Synova said...

Cute... man is the only patriot... I didn't get farther than that. Animals kill for territory, often.

A lot of humor is humor until you think more deeply about what was actually said or what it means... and then you've got philosophy, which isn't funny any more.