Mark Twain Forum Reviews: Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America by Nathaniel Williams
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Professor Williams discussed his upcoming book as part of the Fall 2017 “Trouble Begins” Lecture Series.
- Nathaniel Williams, “Mark Twain and the Inventor Fiction Boom: Technology Meets American Conceit, 1876-1910” (October 11, 2017 – Quarry Farm Barn)
Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America. By Nathaniel Williams. University of Alabama Press, 2018. Pp. 206. Hardcover $44.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1984-7.
Mark Twain’s relation to technology, religion, and imperialism has been examined by a number of scholars, especially in recent years, but these topics have not been examined together, and they have certainly not been examined in light of proto-science fiction dime novels. In Gears and God, Nathaniel Williams has done just that. While only one of his study’s six chapters focuses solely on Twain, his thoroughly researched book sheds light on Twain by placing him in a context that has been previously ignored. The result is a study that succeeds in opening up new vistas in Twain criticism.
Williams’s introduction, “This is Religion and Totally Different,” relates Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) to the “boy inventor” dime novels of the time, over 300 of them, which melded travel, technology, and Christian exceptionalism. Williams states that he wants to accomplish two things: “reevaluation of the portrayal of empire that has pervaded earlier, genre-exclusive studies of these texts, and a consideration of their role in larger nineteenth-century conversations about science and technology’s impact on religious faith” (5). In six chapters, he achieves those two goals.
Ch.1, “Inventing the Technocratic Exploration Tale: God, Gears, and Empire,” examines how “American dime-novel invention stories performed significant cultural work in the United States” (13). Science fiction scholars have called this dime novel sub-genre “Edisonades,” after the inventor, but Williams adds the term “technocratic exploration tales” (14), emphasizing technocracy as a building block of empire. He shows how these texts both justified and undermined American imperialism.
In his second chapter, “Building Imperialists: The Steam Man, ‘Used Up’ Man, and the Man in the Moon,” Williams covers the early development of the sub-genre, looking back to Washington Irving’s 1809 tale of an invasion of the Earth by the Moon, and to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up” (1839), about a soldier who has lost his limbs in the Indian Wars, and through the use of prosthetic devices becomes what science fiction scholars have called the first cyborg in fiction. His overview culminates with an 1868 dime novel by Edward S. Ellis, The Steam Man of the Prairies, which has been accepted as the first American science fiction novel. This early text set the prototype for the genre: a boy inventor and his steam-driven automaton, embarking on travel and adventure to conquer the West.
Ch. 3, “Imagining Inventors: Frank Reade and Dime-Novel Technocratic Exploration,” focuses on boy inventor Frank Reade Jr., the subject of many dime novels, written by Luis Philip Senarens, a prolific Cuban American writer. Frank Reade Jr. uses technology to travel to distant places, interfere in events, and right wrongs, which Williams aligns with Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. A few of the titles give a sense of the inventions and the locales: Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder, Frank Reade, Jr., and His Electric Boat, Frank Reade, Jr., and His Air-Ship, Frank Reade, Jr.’s Great Electric Tricycle, Frank Reade, Jr., and His Electric Prairie Schooner; or Fighting the Mexican Horse Thieves, Adrift in Africa; or Frank Reade, Jr., among the Ivory Hunters with His New Electric Wagon, and Frank Reade, Jr.’s Electric Buckboard; or, Thrilling Adventures in North Australia. His analysis of the Frank Reade Jr. novels chronicles the shift from American settings to international ones, including coverage of the Cuban Revolution, with Senarens siding with Cuba. One reason for the uproar over Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Williams argues, was the perceived deleterious effects of dime novels on American youth. Williams moves to religious matters in his fourth chapter, “Discovering Biblical Literalism: Frank Reade Redux,” documenting a turn toward biblical issues: plots that found lost tribes and identified with conservative, literal interpretations of the Bible.
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An irksome puzzle has persisted through more than a century of Mark Twain scholarship. It has usually been avoided altogether, or at best it has been briefly touched upon by a handful of scholars. In her ground-breaking new study, Kerry Driscoll spells it out clearly: “While Twain’s view on blacks . . . [demonstrate] unequivocal growth away from the racism of his origins in the antebellum South, his representations of Indians do not follow a similarly redemptive arc. They are instead vexingly erratic and paradoxical, commingling antipathy and sympathy, fascination and visceral repugnance” (4). Driscoll credits scholars who have dealt briefly with Twain’s attitude toward America’s indigenous people–Ned Blackhawk, Louis J. Budd, Joseph Coulombe, Leslie Fiedler, Philip Foner, Max Geismer, Harold J. Kolb, and Jeffrey Steinbrink–and points out that they tend to fall into two camps that either idealize or vilify Native Americans. Both camps distort Twain’s own views by over-simplifying the issue. The truth is more complicated, and a book length study to explore these complications is long overdue.
The genre of plays is one of the least-explored offshoots of Twain’s legacy, perhaps with good reason. He did have one unqualified success in the format, “Colonel Sellers,” based on characters from The Gilded Age (1873), co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner. It had a run of over ten years and earned Twain more in royalties than Tom Sawyer or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, enticing Twain to make at least two more attempts to repeat its success. The first, Ah Sin (1877), co-written with Bret Harte, had a run lasting a month, and Is He Dead? (1898), titled after the repeated joke line in The Innocents Abroad (Twain likely “borrowed” the line from Artemus Ward), was unpublished until 2003. There are also snippets of other plays in Mark Twain’s Satires and Burlesques (University of California Press, 1967), suggesting that, whether for lucre or “littery” reasons, Twain had as much difficulty relinquishing a self-perception of a writer adept at all literary forms as he did giving up any presumptions regarding his investing prowess.
Hardly a season passes without another Twain’t springing up from the fertile soil tilled so long ago by Mark Twain. His influence seems everlasting, and his writings, biography, and cultural iconography continue to inspire bountiful crops of works based upon his writings–borrowing characters, titles, or plots–or stories featuring Twain himself as a character. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone has inspired attempts to write sequels (beginning with Twain’s own efforts), modern day adaptations, pastiches, stage and musical and movie versions, and even comic books, graphic novels, and one robotic version. These Twain’ts (they ain’t Twain; hence they are Twain’ts) have sometimes taken successful innovative directions, like Jon Clinch’s masterful Finn (2007), that provided a startling dark counterpoint to the original novel, illuminating the character of Pap Finn and shedding light on Huck’s maternity, or Tim Champlin’s recent time-traveling romps for young readers that insert modern characters into reimagined adventures of Huck, Tom, and Becky. Some Twain’ts succeed and some fail, and the vast majority fall somewhere in between, so the arrival of a successful Twain’t is cause for notice.
Mark Twain was a man of the waters. His nom de plume signifies two fathoms–safe water when navigating out of the shallows–dangerous water under other circumstances. He spent his boyhood just a few blocks from a steamboat landing, dreamed of becoming a steamboat pilot (or else a pirate) and realized that dream for a time. He lost childhood friends to drownings and lost a beloved brother in a steamboat accident. His first piece of writing to be published in a nationally recognized publication was about a disaster at sea, his first best-selling book was the result of a four months voyage with stops on several continents, and his literary masterpiece takes place on the dangerous waters and shores of the Mississippi River. When his second daughter died (in water) and he was suffering from late stage congestive heart failure (edema), he lit out for the island of Bermuda for his last months of life, and when Paine was bringing him home to die he begged for a fatal dose of morphine to end his life while at sea.
Huck Finn’s name signifies an insignificant (huckleberry) Irish child (Finn). The stereotypical Irishman of the nineteenth century was a drunkard and thief, and Irish immigrants frequently were met by signs in shop windows reading “No Irish Need Apply.” Although Irish women could get jobs as housekeepers, Irish males were more often hired as day laborers and rarely hired as butlers or allowed to work in a home; African-American males were more often hired as house-servants than Irish-American males. If African-Americans occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder during and after slavery, Irish-Americans, who flooded into the country in the 1840s to escape the cruelties of British rule and forced starvation (not famine), were only one rung up the ladder – which bred resentment and racism. Huck was the son of Pap Finn, the town drunk, an Irishman who need not apply, nor should his son.
“It’s lovely to live on a raft” says Huck just a few paragraphs into chapter 19 of Mark Twain’s masterpiece. But what kind of raft is it lovely to live on, and does it even matter what kind of raft Huck lived on? Of course, everyone who has read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn knows that the raft that transported Huck and Jim into literary immortality was a tiny affair consisting of a few short logs tied together with barely enough room to hold the two of them. Proof of this can be found on the covers of many modern paperback editions of the book. But looking at more covers it becomes obvious that their tiny raft was made of logs with a plank deck on top, and a wigwam. Of course, anyone who has studied the one dozen illustrations in the first edition of the book (found in chapters 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 24, 29, and 40) knows that their raft was in fact made of planks and had a wigwam and a long steering oar, but nowhere in the book does an illustration depict the entire raft, so even a careful study of E. W. Kemble’s drawings does not tell the whole story. Finally, anyone who has read the text carefully, knows that Huck gives a fuller description of their raft, declaring that it measured twelve feet by fifteen or sixteen feet, and that it was made of pine planks that had broken off of a much larger lumber raft, and that it sat a good six or seven inches out of the water, and had one long oar. They also know that Jim had to fashion a second steering oar to control their not-so-tiny raft, make a raised platform of dirt upon which to build a fire, and build a wigwam large enough to accommodate that fire. They also know that the raft later had room for the Duke and the King. These astute readers think they know more than those readers who misplaced their trust in those modern paperback covers, but even astute readers don’t know the half of it.
The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871 is the first volume in a planned 3-volume edition from Gary Scharnhorst, university professor, editor, and noted Mark Twain scholar. It is a well-written and well-documented attempt to untangle the facts from the myths and legends that surround the early life of Samuel Clemens. Much of the information that has been published about Clemens’s early life originated with Clemens himself who embellished, embroidered, and misremembered facts in his own writings and autobiography. His hand-picked biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, who lived nearby him during his last years and assumed the role of a surrogate son, exercised a rigid determination to please the Clemens family and protect their reputation. Paine’s 1912 biography has been rightly criticized for being less than objective.
The genre of literal literary thriller may be somewhat restricted, a notable exception being Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” or even an oxymoron, but H. K. Bush’s The Hemingway Files is well-crafted, strong testimony to its validity, richness and attraction. The action in this book is more internalized than in one of Jonathan Kellerman’s popular mysteries, but the building tension and story convolutions are no less compelling. Bush’s ability to write prose that pulls the reader, willingly, and eagerly, into multiple exotic cultures of ethnicity, history and literary studies, with interwoven elements of romance, mystery, and adventure, renders this novel a tour-de-force begging the question, where has this novelist been hiding in plain sight?
This collection of essays edited by Mark Twain scholar Joseph A. Alvarez was inspired by a 2005 South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) conference session. The session was organized by Morehouse College professor Eileen Meredith, who coined the title of the session that this book uses. Then of Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina, Alvarez was not involved in that session, but he nevertheless took up a suggestion from Cambridge Scholars Publishing (no relationship to Cambridge University Press) to shape a book around the subject of Mark Twain’s writings on geography. In June 2006, he posted a call to the Mark Twain Forum listserv for papers on Mark Twain’s individual travel writings. The result was this collection of ten essays, including two originally presented by Jeffrey Melton and Charles Martin at the SAMLA conference. When the book was published in late 2009, it received sparse publicity and no reviews and then quickly fell out of print. However, in a stroke of good luck for those who failed to find a copy previously, the book is now once again listed on amazon.com and a request to the publisher for a review copy was promptly answered.