On Thu, 21 May 1998, Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> On Thu, 21 May 1998, J Cullen wrote:
>
> > I believe that Clemens was active in the Anti-Imperialist League and
> > protested American adventures abroad. Late in his career he wrote a book of
> > very sardonic stories (I believe the name was Letters from Earth). As I
> > recall he attacked religion, patriotism, imperialism and other conceits of
> > the Gilded Age.
>
> Let's not forget the proto-science fiction of "A Connecticut Yankee in
> King Arthur's Court" (which has a properly gory conclusion: the sci-fi
> version of the American Civil War, as it were). The short story collection
> in question does have some gems -- e.g. "Extract from Captain Stormfield's
> Visit to Heaven", where the Big H turns out to be -- surprise, surprise --
> America as it ought to be, i.e. populated by vast numbers of indigenous
> Americans and many other cultures, instead of the tawdry robber baron
> reality outlined by "The Corruption of Hadleyburg" (Faust rewritten as a
> leasing agent, as it were).
>
> Twain had a remarkable ear for language, and integrated all sorts of
> unofficial dialects into his work way, way before this was acceptable to
> the literary canon; "Huck Finn" has an amazing earthiness
> (we get to see the hideousness of slavery, Southern brawls/feuds, lynch
> mobs, child abuse, drug addiction, the culture-industry of the day,
> as well as stinging displays of the milder evils of the Gilded Age, e.g.
> prejudice, cupidity, greed, moralistic violence, etc.) compared to,
> say, Flaubert's rentier conceits or Melville's moralizing monologues (let
> alone Hawthorne's self-abnegating conservativism). I always thought that
> Twain did for the American novel what Whitman did for American poetry,
> i.e. opened up the floodgates of a new type of cultural democracy -- not
> with a Biblical hammer, but with earthly laughter. Somewhere Twain once
> said (I'm misquoting here, so correct me if you know the exact quote) that
> the surest way to defeat a prejudice is not to combat it, but to laugh at
> it. I treasure the thought that someday, far in the future, our distant
> descendants will be able to laugh in their cribs at fairy tales about the
> Big Bad Corporation and the plucky Good Worker at odds in the Forest of
> the Global Market, in a world emancipated from the horrors
> of the commodity form.
>
> -- Dennis
>
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