Monday, March 15, 2010

Roughing It

Roughing It should almost be called The Adventures of Mark Twain. Written thirteen years before Huck Finn, it is easy to see how one novel leads to the other. Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical work detailing Twain’s travel and exploits when heading west, much like how Huck Finn tracks Huck’s adventures down the river.

The story begins in 1861, when Twain’s brother is appointed secretary of Nevada Territory. He and Twain take a stagecoach in two weeks from Independence, Missouri, to Carson City, Nevada. In mood for adventure, Twain heads to Virginia City to try his luck at silver mining, but fails to strike it rich. Soon after that, he gets his first job as a writer for the newspaper The Territorial Enterprise. Thus he spirals into his career as a writer.

To readers of Huck Finn, one passage that Twain confers when he is 250 miles past Salt Lake City is puzzling and seemingly hypocritical: “…we came across the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. I refer to the Goshoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent’ inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots, and actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa”(632). After reading Finn, this kind of racism feels very characteristically unlike Twain. From the same person who makes the case for Jim in Finn, how can the simple racism of naming all Indians as inferior come? Perhaps Twain thought that American Indians were inferior but blacks were equal to whites? Is it that Twain’s ideas changed between when he wrote the two books? Did he only include this passage for humor (“Goshoot Indians” seems like an attempt at humor)? This one puzzles me and if you have any ideas please add a comment below to edify me.

Readers of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court will know how Twain is a skeptic—demonstrated in how The Boss never trusts magicians or others who claim to know secret magic. Similarly they will know him as a humorist and satirist. We get a taste of that in Roughing It when he discusses The Book of Mormon: “Some people have to have a world of evidence  before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything; but for me, when a man tells me that he has ‘seen the engravings which are upon the plates,’ and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see them, and probably took his receipt of it, I am very far on the road to conviction, no matter whether I ever heard of that man before or not, and even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either”(619). Twain’s biting sarcastic tone conveys his skepticism of religion quite humorously. Even though he is only criticizing Mormonism here, Twain’s skepticism can be extended to almost any religion, and it is probable that he did not go any farther because to Christianity was popular at the time.

Much like how he makes fun of southerners in The Adventures of Huck Finn, Twain disparages the hopeful miners in Nevada as he recounts the tale of every miner’s dream, to find the fabled Whiteman cement mine: “The tradition was that […] three young Germans […] sat down to rest one day, when one of them noticed a curious vein of cement running along the ground, shot full of lumps of dull yellow metal. […] I saw a piece of cement as large as my fist which was said to have been given to Whiteman by the young German, and it was of a seductive nature. Lumps of virgin gold were as thick in it as raisins in a slice of fruit cake”(719). Whoever could believe in such this as a cement mine filled with gold would have to be as dumb as the rock of cement itself, which itself evens knows that it hails from Whiteman’s creation. Twain thusly greatly exaggerates the gullibility of the miners and suavely pokes fun at them, never as obviously as in Finn. Later in the book he details the laziness of the miners. They will post many claims, but dig a few feet into each one before moving to a new claim. Perhaps he Twain was just frustrated to never strike it rich himself.

As in Huck Finn, Twain conveys his progressive nature and view of the cowardice of courts in Roughing It. He believes that by requiring that jurors have not heard any details of a case they are picked for, the jury vetting process eliminates intelligent people, who are likely to have read newspaper reports of crimes before they make it to trial, and includes ignorant and stupid jurors who are illiterate and thus haven’t read newspaper reports. “Why could not the jury law be so altered as to give men of brains and honesty and equal chance with fools and miscreants?” (783). Twain suggest a change to the status quo, thus revealing progressivism. This particular fervor stems from a case where an obvious murderer is found Not Guilty, which is very similar to occurrences referenced to in Huck Finn by Sherburn. Sherburn claimed that jurors would not convict out of cowardice. It is such a similar situation in Roughing It that one cannot help but wonder whether the scene in Huck Finn evolved out of the one in Roughing It. This one adds the idea that perhaps ignorant men are cowardly and intelligent men are brave. But is that a valid conclusion? Doesn’t everyone express cowardice in the same way, by allowing what seem to be small transgressions because it would take too much effort to stop, like letting yourself be robbed a penny at a time. Oh yeah, Twain despise laziness, too.

In a display of Twain’s pure humor and a remark of his on human nature I close my blog post. Near Virginia City, Twain and his companions embark on a curious adventure. A flood and snowstorm strike them at nearly the same time, and as they head back from the miners’ inn to the city, the get lost in the snow. Finally, their last fourth matches burn out without starting a fire. Resigned to death, the three huddle together and drift off to sleep. When Twain wakes up and realizes he isn’t dead, he makes a remarkable discovery: “I rose up, and there in the gray dawn, not fifteen steps from us, were the frame buildings of a stage station, and under a shed stood our still saddled and bridled horse!”(702). Other than being a humorous tale, this encounter serves to relate Twain’s thoughts on human nature, namely the blindness and tunnel vision that so many of us possess. We get locked into one way of thinking, trap ourselves, and resign to a fate. High schoolers can especially identify with this. So many of us focus on colleges, test scores, and grades for so long that to do poorly seems like the end of the world. But its not, just like it was not the end of Twain’s life.

1 comment:

  1. You have a book or two worth of information and great thinking here. What idea is coming to the fore? Anything standing our more than others?

    In yesterday's SF Chronicle book section were reviews on 5 new Twain books, in celebration of something -- 100 years since his death?

    The one that caught my eye was about his trip to California and Nevada...

    ReplyDelete