JUSTIFICACIÓN E IMPORTANCIA

Postbellum South

As we have seen in Mark Twain’s hyperbolic critique of Walter Scott in chapter one, the Scottish Romantic influence in the South is by no means limited to simple acts of reading, but rather in Samuel Clemens’s writing is dispersed

throughout the domain of Southern culture and everyday life. What drives

Clemens to rhetorically associate Scott with what he perceives as the South’s

cultural and political failings is a question of some complexity which I will address in this chapter. I wish first to demonstrate that the influence of Scottish Romantic work is visible and critical in Samuel Clemens’s writing,

while at the same time looking more closely at how his Scottish Romantic references operate and how they come to signal urgent political and cultural tensions in the nineteenth-century South. It is not merely Scott’s use of dialect, genre and regional anthology which is present in Clemens’ work, but also a

concern with anthropological depictions, the performance of race and cultural

heritage, and with the very ‘stuff’ of cultural anthology – the relics and artefacts of the past.

Twain’s stylistic and generic objections to Walter Scott’s writing can be partly attributed to the drive toward literary Realism in late nineteenth-

century America.1 _{The rejection of Scott explicitly forms part of the project of}

American literary Realism, and yet many elements of the new ‘realist’ style paradoxically had antecedents in Scott’s prose works. William Dean Howells’s discussion of the new realism in ‘Criticism and Fiction’ (1891) proclaims the

necessity of rejecting Scott and other nineteenth-century British writers. Howells, like Clemens, was a Midwesterner, and they appear to share a common purpose in their definition of the kind of writing which should be pursued in their time. For Howells, the refutation of Scott and other Romantic authors is critical to a simultaneous refocusing on everyday, unmediated reality:

The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of everyday life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy by people who would like to have him show how Shakespeare's men talked

and looked, or Scott's […] He is approached in the spirit of the pedantry

into which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws itself and stands apart from experience in an attitude of imagined superiority.2

Scott is thus associated, perhaps correctly, with pedantry, pedagogy and an effusive literary style, involving a distant ‘superior’ kind of omniscient

narration. We can see this realist rejection of the position of the omniscient

1 _{See Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature 1884-1919 (Cambridge:}

Cambridge University Press, 1981), or for a more critical study see Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

2 _{William Dean Howells, ‘Criticism and Fiction’, Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, ed.}

outsider in the first-person narration of Huckleberry Finn,and in that text’s

ambitions towards immediacy and naturalism. Nevertheless, this supposed conflict between a romantic or literary worldview set against a more

pragmatic, rational engagement is exactly the one expressed in Scott’s

Waverley itself, and indeed in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which was a significant literary resource for Clemens.

Scott’s style is objected to as ‘tiresomely descriptive’, yet Howells

ultimately terms him, for his time, a ‘great’ writer, but one now only suitable

for younger readers. Like Twain before him, Howells feels obliged to list

Scott’s political failings, ‘his mediaeval ideals, his blind Jacobitism, his intense

devotion to aristocracy and royalty; his acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ignoble, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it

were the law of God.’3_{As with Twain’s account, Howell’s political critique of}

Scott seems heavy-handed and based on a cursory reading of a writer with complex affiliations who, like Samuel Clemens himself, did not put his own name to his works, and cultivated an elusive and often contradictory authorial presence.

For Howells, the Walter Scott problem extends to American literary critics, who still yearn for his antiquated, effusive and sentimental style. As we will see in Clemens's work, Scott becomes the emblem of the anachronistic and primitive in American culture, and his critical followers are painted as

superstitious, barbaric figures:

To be sure, the critic sometimes appears in the panoply of the savages

3 _{Howells, p.17.}

whom we have supplanted on this continent; and it is hard to believe that his use of the tomahawk and the scalping-knife is a form of conservative surgery.4

The critical gap between Realism and Romanticism here becomes another frontier, where the realist seeks to supplant the primitive and violent native whose worldview has faded into irrelevancy, a desire which reveals Realism’s

imperial ambitions in American culture. This remark may have been aimed at the memory of an American Romantic writer whom Howells also sought to reject – Edgar Allan Poe, whose savage Blackwood’s-style reviews of his American contemporaries in The Southern Literary Messenger earned him

the moniker ‘Tomahawk Man’.5

As with Twain’s critique of Scott, it is interesting to note the cultural

associations which attend the novelist’s legacy in the American tradition in

Howell’s account, when he asserts that, ‘these amusements have their place, as the circus has, and the burlesque and negro minstrelsy, and the ballet, and

prestidigitation.’6 _{Categories of performance, crude and offensive}

impersonations, and the practice of illusions are here all associated with Scott’s writing. These amusements range from the high and affected culture of

old Europe (the ballet) to the lowest forms of popular entertainment (burlesque) and racialized performances (minstrelsy). Twain, with his narrower view of the South, focuses on Mardi Gras in the same vein, as an unacceptable remnant of French and Spanish culture, which is shorn of earlier

religious associations and infected instead with the ‘Walter Scott disease’. In

4 _{Howells, p.20}

5 _{See Brett Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style (Montreal and Kingston:}

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), pp.85-106.

Howells’s text, the sanity, practicality, and mimesis of Realism are set against the hysterical, the effete and the affected in the Romantic tradition as

embodied by Scott.