Mark Twain: the Torture of Excess

Abstract

From the writing of his very first story, ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’, Mark Twain could never escape the imputation of being excessive. His credibility was always at stake. In this his predicament resembled that of Melville, since they were both strongly suspected of extravagantly embroidering the facts and even of shameless invention, yet on the face of it this should not have been much of a problem. Melville, after all, was presenting himself as a serious man and a truthful reporter, while Twain, as a self-confessed Western humorist, might be expected to relay tall tales as a matter of professional necessity. Yet this almost inevitably meant that Twain’s narrative would be received with a raised eyebrow and a knowing wink and that any pretension he might have as a serious writer would continually run up against the massive social fact of his current reputation and the all-pervading odour of mendaciousness. So Twain’s and Melville’s literary careers follow entirely different trajectories. Melville has to struggle against the demand for plain and unvarnished truth in order to create space for the claims of the imagination, while Twain has to struggle to write something that will seem convincing. In this connection, of course, the manner of the Western yarn-spinner becomes a serious liability. Since his endeavour is to take in some naive and credulous auditor by palming off some grotesquely exaggerated tale as no more than a plain account of well-attested and authenticated facts, it is incumbent on him to unburden himself of his narrative with the utmost sobriety.