The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) Read Online Free PDF Page B

talked to the fierce Hotchkiss cat, Sanctified Sal, is dramatic and finely humorous in the style of Uncle Remus or of Twain's own jumping-frog and blue-jay yams. For all the slapstick Twain's avatars indulge in, they are the agents of a master humorist who is especially skilled in "black humor." I have already cited an instance in which Traum ridicules the doctrine of papal infallibility-a section Paine deleted from the published book. In a well known passage, Traum cries:

    Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution-these can
lift at a colossal humbug,-push it a little-crowd it a little-weaken
it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags
and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can
stand.
    But Twain's illustrations never reached print. His account of how
Robert Burns broke the back of the Presbyterian church and set
Scotland free was to prove laughter's power. The general failure of
readers to detect "the funniness of Papal Infallibility" would demonstrate how rarely mankind used that power.
    Humor and music as catharsis and satire as correction are omnipresent in Mark Twain's theory and writings. The citizens of
Hadleyburg, for example, restore their town's reputation for hon esty by laughing down their "incorruptible" leading citizens, whom another mysterious stranger has exposed. But in these stories and other late writings Twain could never quite decide whether laughter was divine or only human. Pudd'nhead Wilson in 1897 insisted: "Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven." 80 Five years later Clemens observed, "We grant God the possession of all the qualities of mind except the one that keeps the others healthy; that watches over their dignity; that focuses their vision truehumor." 81 Of all the paradoxes in the three Mysterious Stranger stories, none is more paradoxical, or more sanative, than Twain's demonstrations of the power of laughter-was it merely human?in the empty spaces of the universe.

    Mark twain put the concepts and actions thus far distinguished to real dramatic use in the plots of the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. Only in "No. 44," the last, longest, and most diffuse version, did he develop a concept that resisted incorporation into the plot: that is, his speculative distinctions between Waking-Self, DreamSelf, and Immortal Soul and the resulting rather farcical incarnation of Emil Schwarz (Feldner's doppelganger) and the printer's crew of Duplicates or Dream-Selves. How Twain arrived at this psychology is therefore as much a biographical question as it is a matter of literary genetics. Although Clemens in maturity was a champion of eighteenth-century rationalism, he grew up at a time when spiritualism and faith-cures roused widespread and lively interest, and he had long collected instances of "mental telegraphy," a power with which he endowed 44. In 1886 he and Howells collaborated in writing an absurd play, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, in which one of Sellers's great schemes is to materialize the dead in order to build up a great supply of free labor (free, since the "materializees" neither slept nor ate).
    By the early 1890's Clemens was taking an increasing interest in mind-cures, which he associated with hypnotism, the work of J. H. Charcot's pupils, and the reports of the Society for Psychical Research.' Characteristically, his interest took two forms in alternation: a rational and satiric view and a speculative and psychological view. The first is exemplified earlier in the King's remark in Huckleberry Finn, "Layin' on o' hands is my best holt-for cancer and paralysis, and sich things"; Twain develops it amusingly at length in "Schoolhouse Hill" when Oliver Hotchkiss holds a seance. The second appears in Twain's sketch of 1876, "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," a brilliant narration of the conflict between "Twain" and his