[HN Gopher] Twain Dreams
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Twain Dreams
Author : samclemens
Score : 26 points
Date : 2025-06-02 17:25 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (harpers.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (harpers.org)
| Zorass wrote:
| Yes, even our most revered heroes have restless, perpetually
| unfinished souls. Twain, in the public eye, is a legend of humor
| and satire, yet privately he was always troubled. Perhaps it's
| this inner dissonance that makes his work so timeless able to
| touch readers even today. In a world full of "packaged
| biographies" and flattened images, reading such an honest and
| nuanced portrait of Twain feels like a rare treasure. I can
| almost imagine the coffee on my desk sharing in that quiet
| appreciation.
| Daisywh wrote:
| When I first read Huck Finn in high school, I thought it was just
| some old river story with strange spelling. I didn't really get
| it. Years later, I picked it up again and realized Twain was much
| sharper than I gave him credit for. He was funny, sure, but there
| was this quiet kind of anger underneath. Now with books like
| James reframing his work, it feels like great writing never
| settles. It keeps changing and keeps asking new questions in
| different voices. I get the feeling Twain would have had a field
| day with the internet. Or at least found a clever way to make fun
| of all of us.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I feel like Twain was a sort of Banksy of his day... except
| that in regard to personal fame, he was more akin to Andy
| Warhol.
|
| But his writings are incessantly, subtly, pointedly critical
| and yet playfully mocking of society's sins. Its real sins -
| not casinos and The Devil Rum - but slavery, celebrating greed,
| ignoring the small and the impoverished.
|
| All the while pretending to be "just a humorist"/"just a
| spraypaint vandal".
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| "Some stories land like a meteor. Others land like a seed"
|
| Jacob Geller, on Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
| the_af wrote:
| I agree that Mark Twain had contradictions, like all real people
| do, but is there anything to back this assertion from TFA?
|
| > _O'Brien said that Twain hated racism too, and it is true that
| Twain came to hate racism, although he had been a racist earlier
| in his life and even farcically fought for the Confederacy for a
| couple of weeks._
|
| "He had been a racist earlier"? I know about Twain's half-hearted
| stint in the Confederacy -- I've read the heavily fictionalized
| account he wrote about it, " The Private History of a Campaign
| That Failed" -- but I've never read he was fighting for any clear
| cause (neither slavery nor that "states rights" bullshit or
| anything). He probably was just caught up in it, and did no
| actual fighting, and got out of it soon enough (2 weeks!). Does
| this really qualify as "being a racist", even briefly?
|
| Some random site I just googled, https://civilwarsaga.com/mark-
| twains-civil-war-experience, claims _" It is not known exactly
| why Twain quit the militia. He defended his actions throughout
| the years by describing his confusion while enrolling and
| explained he was ignorant of the politics behind the war."_
|
| So confusion = racism?
|
| From the same page:
|
| > _" Twain also described the Civil War in general as: "A blot on
| our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of
| Negro souls." Whatever the reason, Twain left the military and
| never looked back."_
|
| So why does it matter? Well, it does to me, because the article
| flings this random assertion, that Twain "had been a racist
| earlier in life", and now that assertion is out there for someone
| else to quote it without evaluating what evidence is there, or
| lack thereof.
|
| So it bugs me.
| burkaman wrote:
| I don't think that sentence necessarily implies that he joined
| the Confederacy because he was racist, although that isn't a
| very far-fetched claim. It is true that he fought for the
| Confederacy, and it is also true that he held racist views, by
| his own admission.
|
| In an essay called Concerning the Jews, which was probably
| ahead of its time in defending Jewish people, he wrote:
|
| > I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices
|
| - https://origin-rh.web.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1898twain-
| jews...
|
| That "bar one" was probably referring to Native Americans, whom
| he seemed to really really hate. You can read his full thoughts
| in another essay called The Noble Red Man:
| https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/redman.html.
| It's pretty short, but a shorter summary is that he advocates
| for all-out genocide and says they are the "scum of the earth"
| and inferior to insects.
|
| Side note: if written today, Concerning the Jews would
| definitely be considered racist, because he defines Jewish
| people as basically a separate species with inherent traits not
| shared by other "races". That is the definition of racism, even
| if the traits you're calling out are considered positive. You
| can't say "I have no racial prejudices, I just think all Asians
| are good at math". This would maybe be an unfair standard to
| apply to someone writing in the 19th century, but I just want
| to point out that it would be reasonable to say that Twain was
| racist but in a much more benign way than most of his
| contemporaries (except when it came to Native Americans).
| the_af wrote:
| > _I don 't think that sentence necessarily implies that he
| joined the Confederacy because he was racist, although that
| isn't a very far-fetched claim [...] It is true that he
| fought for the Confederacy._
|
| I think it does imply it [1], and it's also an unfounded
| claim. Twain himself seems confused about why he joined, and
| deserted _after two weeks_ without firing a single shot (his
| farcical account of it claims his unit killed a single man,
| but this has been proven false). Hardly the actions of a
| convinced racist.
|
| > _That "bar one" was probably referring to Native Americans,
| whom he seemed to really really hate_
|
| Yeah, I concede this. Twain framed his "Noble Red Man" as
| ridicule of the "noble savage" stereotype so common in
| literature, but even then, it's hard to find a positive
| example of an Indian in his writing. So I concede this point.
|
| Though... why didn't TFA mention _this_ instead of going on a
| tangent about the Confederacy?
|
| ----
|
| [1] Because TFA qualifies this as "earlier in his life",
| which wouldn't make sense if this was about Twain's opinions
| on Native Americans. It clearly links his racism "earlier in
| life" to his joining the army of the Confederacy.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I don't think there is much evidence for any early racism
| regarding African-Americans, although given his origins it
| would not be surprising, that said he does tend to wax
| nostalgic about his youth in a slave-owning town, and to deny
| any problem in that in his various writings focused on his own
| youth, so that is the kind of thing that is considered somewhat
| racism-adjacent in our understanding of such matters, at least.
|
| As far as Asian racism he wrote articles against abuse of
| Chinese workers by police in San Francisco when he worked there
| as a journalist.
|
| However where Native Americans are concerned he was quite
| racist https://medium.com/luminasticity/mark-twain-and-the-
| racist-s...
| the_af wrote:
| Right! I forgot about his writings on Indians. Not Twain's
| finest. I wonder why TFA doesn't mention this, instead of
| going on an irrelevant tangent about the Confederacy?
|
| I have to say I do think Twain's writings about Indians are
| racist (so yeah, point taken) but always couched in
| ambivalence; some of it for example looks like exaggeration
| to ridicule the poetic "Noble Savage" of Fenimore Cooper and
| others, which is also bullshit (and unfortunately, lives on
| to modern age, "Dances With Wolves" et al).
|
| But yeah, I admit I forgot about the Indians.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Lovely article, worth the read~30mins read. I've read the usual
| suspects from Twain's body of work, but somehow I never remember
| any particular attention being paid to Huck's moment of decision
| to go to hell trying to help Jim - I wouldn't have thought to tie
| it to the classical 'journey to hell' katabasis trope at the
| time, but now - maybe it's time for a re-read.
| throwanem wrote:
| Those thirty minutes would have been far better spent with
| Twain than with a critic as thunderingly, blockheadedly obtuse
| as this one.
| sp1nningaway wrote:
| I'm having a difficult time reading this article because of the
| syntax, I think. So many parentheticals, a little subject verb
| object never hurt anyone.
| throwanem wrote:
| Twain, like Faulkner, has long been a favored subject of the
| trust-fund set...now that he's safely dead and unable to render
| a direct opinion in the matter, of course.
|
| In this case, the author evidently need not earn his living
| through the quality of his prose. He would be destitute,
| otherwise. But Harper's is not what once it was.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| I don't think the syntax is particularly difficult, if slightly
| archaic; but the real problem is the lack of a paragraph break
| in the first 2 paragraphs (it felt like reading Henry James)
| and the way Harper's styled their website. On paper, though,
| even when the sentences and style are quite out there, I find
| Harper's to be the most readable of all the major magazines.
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