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Crisis in Camelot: Mark Twain and the Idea of Progress

2012; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 120; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2012.0039

1934-421X

Cushing Strout,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Crisis in Camelot Mark Twain and the Idea of Progress Cushing Strout (bio) Hemingway and Faulkner are often cited for saying that all American literature begins with Huck Finn. They had in mind Twain’s mastery of Huck’s language and sensibility. Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker (November 29, 2010) sees another side of Twain and calls him “an American type: a show-biz genius.” Gopnik believes that “the tension between show business and art turned out to be the special province of American civilization.” If he is right about that, then he is wrong to dismiss A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as a “one joke” production (1889), notable only for its title. Hank Morgan, the Yankee, trained in an arms factory, where he learned all about guns and explosives, was played by Will Rogers in the film version of Twain’s book (1931). Rogers did a rope-spinning act in vaudeville and used his talent in the film to illustrate the episode in the novel in which Morgan spins a lariat and pulls a knight off his horse, much to the delight of his Camelot audience. It is the only thing from the novel that works on screen (no business like show business). Roy Blount Jr., in his introduction to the Modern Library Paperback Classics edition (2001), makes an essential point in saying that Twain’s book is “less a novel than a performance.” The story of the Yankee begins with a puzzling exchange between him and a denizen of “Camelot, whose colorful costume puts Morgan in mind of a circus performer. ‘Bridgeport?’ said I, pointing. ‘Camelot,’ said he.” I have never read any critic who has wondered why Morgan, pointing at Camelot’s towers on the horizon, asked if it were Bridgeport. The answer is simple: because he knew that P. T. Barnum headquartered his winter circus in Bridgeport. Barnum’s circus had three rings, and the acts were not connected to one another by any theme that would require the spectator to look at the rings in some particular order. For that reason it is hard to summarize a circus, and so it makes a good metaphor for Twain’s helter-skelter plotting as it shifts from scene to scene. The Yankee refers to his “circus side,” which appears right away in his use of scientific information about an imminent eclipse to give the effect of his having magical control over the sun. Whenever he needs to counter Merlin’s black magic, Morgan relies on his sense of showmanship. Dan Beard’s first illustration of the Yankee portrays him dressed in a checked costume, like a [End Page 336] barker in a carnival. He is using a straw to tickle the nose of a British lion, carved for a monument. The political point is obvious, but it can also be read as a parody of a lion-taming act. Such acts were already famous in circuses. (Holmes and Watson in one of Doyle’s tales mention a rivalry among three lion-tamers.) There is an enigmatic inscription on the monument’s side—“The Tale of the Lost Land”—that will be explained only at the very end of the novel. Twain was not just interested in the circus side of the Yankee. Morgan is Victorian in his belief in progress, which had its root in the common American idea that the Old World and the New were polarized. The difference favored the New as the hemisphere of freedom and enlightenment in contrast to Europe, which, as Jefferson puts it, is “loaded with misery by kings, nobles, and priests and by them alone.” These are also Morgan’s enemies in the novel. At age eighty-one Thomas Jefferson wrote that “a philosophical observer could begin a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains eastwardly towards our coast” and see “the march of civilization . . . advancing over us like a cloud of light, increasing our knowledge and improving our condition. . . . And where this progress will stop no one can say.” George Bernard Shaw, in his preface to Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), satirizes this idea of progress as the process of moving from barbarism through many...