The Mysterious Stranger : a Religious Allegory for a Post-Christian Age

The Mysterious Stranger : A Religious Allegory for a Post-Christian Age

Bill Scalia

The Mark Twain Annual, Volume 14, 2016, pp. 56-77 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633860

Access provided by UFMG-Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (24 Oct 2018 13:48 GMT) The Mysterious Stranger

A Religious Allegory for a Post-Christian Age

Bill Scalia

Abstract Allegory in its basic form posits a dynamic relationship between explicit and implicit elements. If allegory is a negotiation between an explicit text and an implicit text with the locus of meaning generated in the relation between the two (or a relationship that has been reclaimed as culturally and politically determined in the work of Benjamin, Jameson, and de Man), then a post-Christian allegoresis negotiates between the explicit text and the void left by the “disappeared text,” a text negated by endless internal negotiations. This article will not claim that Mark Twain composed The Mysterious Stranger as an allegory; rather, it will determine an allegoresis model acknowledging an inherent destabilization of the text. While this negotiation is necessary because text veils what it cannot state directly, a postmodern allegoresis suggests that the implicit text of The Mysterious Stranger has become inexpressible not because the themes are necessarily unspeakable but have become meaningless.

Keywords: allegory, allegoresis, The Mysterious Stranger, post-Christian, postmodern

Charles Taylor frames the thesis of his book A Secular Age in this way: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” (25). In a way, this is similar to the question Mark Twain pursues in his last novel No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger: What is different about August Feldner’s late medieval Austria and Twain’s nineteenth-century America? And how might that difference extend into twenty-first-century America? We may address this question by reading The Mysterious Stranger (composed 1897–1908; scholarly

The mark twain annual, Vol. 14, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA edition established by the Mark Twain Project in 1969) allegorically. Generally speaking, allegoresis as a reading practice is centered on the fundamental dual nature of the allegorical subject: the written text and the referent “text.” The interpretive schema of allegoresis depends on the relationship between text and referent, and the schema by which this association is made. In the medieval era, allegory as a compositional practice and allegoresis as a reading practice were tied to a common understanding of relation, contained within a framework determined by a divine order. However, as this framework shifted over time, especially after the Enlightenment and with the emergence of postmodernism, the relationship changed as well. Thus we require a unique kind of allegoresis to investigate what possible significance Twain’s last novel might hold for us today. I will not claim that Mark Twain composed The Mysterious Stranger as an allegory; rather, I will determine an allegoresis that allows us in the post-C hristian era to read the novel as an allegory concerning, in the words of Andrew Delbanco, “the shrinking range of phenomena to which accusatory words like ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ may still be applied . . . and what it means to do without them” (9). Allegory simply means “saying other.” As Angus Fletcher writes, “[Allegory] destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what they say.’ When we predicate the quality x of person Y, Y is really what our predication says he is (or we assume so); but allegory would turn Y into some- thing other (allos) than what the open and direct statement tells the reader” (2). It is easy to see in this definition how Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, asserts that all critical activity is allegorical; that is, critical interpretation considers one text and posits a separate “meaning” (89). Both allegoresis and allegory involve a doubling of the text: either one text that evokes another, “veiled” or coded text; a text that relates to a symbolic/anagogic register in which an interpretation is imminent; or a text that is determined by meaning-making determinants that operate both (in terms appropriate to Twain’s novel) ad intra (OED: “with reference to an action or characteristic of God which is not com- municable to the world outside the Persons of the Trinity; or, with the effect or result only in one’s mind”) and ad extra (OED: “with effect or result in the outside world; . . . in the world at large; externally, perceivably”). Medieval allegory in its basic form posits an explicit text, an implicit text, and a determined relationship between explicit and implicit elements. The relation between the texts is grounded in moral certainty and mutual understanding; as Karl Barth argues, the explicit text speaks a “veiled” text in concepts not express- ible (or at least subject to linguistic mediation), while at the same time the veiled text participates in the explicit text by taking its animating meaning from written

The Mysterious Stranger 57 elements (Knapp 166). The correspondence between thesee lements drives allegoresis forward, which Ethan Knapp, his 2014 essay “Reading Allegory in a Secular Age,” defines as “the hermeneutic project of establishing meaningful correspondence between divergent representational systems” (169). Allegory in the medieval mode is a negotiation between an explicit text and an implicit text with the locus of meaning generated in the relation between the two, given that the framework for this negotiation is contained within an understanding that the world is an expression of the will of God. Allegoresis as a reading practice (which predates allegorical writing) seeks to establish the relationship between text and referent; in medieval allegory, par- ticularly in personification allegory, this relationship is fairly clear: within the framework of a natural order, willed by God, represented by the Great Chain of Being, every aspect of the created world—and thus every idea as referent— had an established locus. So, allegoresis/allegory were fixed within a specific framework of common understanding and were intimately tied throughout the Middle Ages. By the nineteenth century the genre of allegory, both as writing and critical practice, had fallen into decline (Herman Melville’s failed 1849 allegory Mardi is an example of this). Enlightenment rationalism rejected allegory in the interest of realism; Romanticism favored the symbol over allegory, shifting the focus away from allegorical construction, which Romantics viewed as merely aesthetic artifice, and toward the iconic (organic) function of the symbol. The albatross in Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, for example, is a symbol rather than “allegory” because, as Coleridge noted, the poem refused to interpret the symbol; that is, the symbol was dynamic, not reducible to a single, universal meaning (Tambling 79). As the late nineteenth century shifted toward realism, allegory declined further; realism had little need for referential writing, since the world could be understood rationally and expressed as it existed (or appeared to exist). Allegoresis as a reading practice concerned more the shifting relation between word and thing, signi- fier and signified, and the instability (though largely still coherent) relation between the two. While the term allegory describes linked writing and reading practices (and tied in some way to authorial intent), and while it may be argued that reading itself is an allegorical practice, it is certain that allegory is far more complex than a simple 1:1 coding/interpreting structure. Generally speaking, allegory suggests an explicit text that elicits another, implied text. Or, we might say, one narrative that alludes to, without directly stating, a corollary text. The meaning of the hidden text depends on the nature of the

58 Bill Scalia space between the two texts—that is, the formulae by which the material in one text informs the hidden text. Allegory suggests a text pointing to a referent located other, in the sense of elsewhere; so, where is the referent for the text located? Fletcher notes that the oldest idea of allegory “is a human reconstruction of divinely inspired mes- sages, a revealed transcendental language which tries to preserve the remote- ness of a properly veiled godhead” (21). This is indeed the type of allegoresis recommend by St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians (especially 4:21–31); as well, in 2 Corinthians 3:6 Paul writes, “He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Is the referent inside the original text, outside the text, or in some degree, both? In the case of medieval allegory, the referent rested in the world inferred through the evidence of God’s creation. So, in the event that the text pointed to a referent outside itself, the order of the referent was contiguous with the order of the narrative; in a sense, we might say that the inferred world mirrored the narrated text—even if through a glass, darkly. The Enlightenment shifted attention away from the mystical and toward the rational. That is, after the Enlightenment allegoresis becomes focused on the relation between human perception of the world and the bases for that perception; accordingly, allegoresis as a critical practice concerned the perceived relation between observation and essence, between the text and the reader’s perception of the text (and through the text, the world). We might say the fact of the world (in whatever way we might assume the world to have facts, or at least artifacts) was elided in favor of the perception of the world. The Enlightenment, then, shifted the framework toward empiricism, away from a strict faith; Jeremy Tambling notes that “interest in symbolism, as opposed to allegory, was a marker of the modern world” (83–84). This is not to say that faith disappeared in the Enlightenment, or that mysticism vanished from the world; this is only to suggest that the framework by which we engage the residue of creation, and the texts by which we investigate it, shifted from uncritical belief to empirical reason. In postmodernism, allegoresis has been reclaimed as a critical tool, mostly in the service of cultural criticism. Postmodern allegoresis, especially in the work of Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, and Paul de Man, points to the relation between a text and its cultural determinants (political, economic, etc.), only to highlight how the referent is infinitely deferred, and ultimately irre- coverable. The framework determining the grounding for relationship between world and word has disappeared. Postmodern allegoresis begins with presence from absence, in the specific context of the fragmentary nature of experience;

The Mysterious Stranger 59 that is, the lack of a coherent, universal truth. As Tambling notes, “When frag- ments suggest the impossibility of reading a text for a single isolatable truth, we may call this allegory . . . ‘postmodern’” (159). Allegoresis as a postmodern critical tool points not only other as elsewhere, but other meaning differently figured. That is, allegoresis points outside the text not to its linguistic referents, but to its manifold cultural determinants. The text, then, seems a product of forces that may be recovered by the process of allegoresis, but bear no aesthetic resonance with these determinants. So, while in the Romantic definition of the symbol—the symbol participates in the activity of the reality it represents—the postmodern shifts the text away from its iconic status or symbolic function. However, I believe a postmodern allegoresis that considers the aesthetics of the text—that is, a model that demonstrates the destabilization (and the recover- ability) of the referent—will be helpful in a reading of The Mysterious Stranger. This is precisely what this article seeks to determine. A post-Christian allegoresis negotiates between the explicit text and the void left by the “disappeared” text, a text negated by endless internal negotiations and subsequent negations. The model I will present for a post-Christian, postmodern allegoresis, and exemplified by a reading ofThe Mysterious Stranger, acknowledges an inherent destabilization of the text: saying and unsaying (in the character of 44); destabilization of authority; destabilization of wholeness (both of the coherent mystical structure of medieval faith/superstition as well as the wholeness of the person); the journey of August Feldner from a specific location (Austria, winter 1490) to the solipsistic void of total negation. As doubling, appearing/ disappearing, and originals/duplicates figure as major themes in the novel, Barth’s continuous “veiling and unveiling” are certainly valid; however, while Barth claims this negotiation is necessary because text veils what it cannot state directly, the implicit text of The Mysterious Stranger has become inexpressible not because the themes are necessarily unspoken, but because they have become meaningless—that is, unspeakable. Charles Taylor defines specific cultural frameworks as “social imaginaries”: that is, “the way we collectively imagine, even pretheoretically, our social life in the contemporary Western world” (Modern Social Imaginaries 650), and “generally shared background understandings of society, which make it possible for it to function as it does” (A Secular Age 323). The social imaginary involves a twofold action: the social order we inherit from previous social contexts as well as the social order we determine due to philosophical, historical, and religious changes in thinking, especially concerning human relationships with one another (political realm) as well as existence itself (religious realm). Taylor qualifies the central

60 Bill Scalia feature of Western modernity as “the process of disenchantment, the eclipse of the world of magic forces and spirits. This was one of the products of the reform movement in Latin Christendom, which issued in the Protestant Reformation but also transformed the Catholic Church. This reform movement . . . aimed not only at reform of personal conduct but at reforming and remaking societies so as to render them more peaceful, more ordered, more industrious” (Modern Social Imaginaries 49). We may recall that in Twain’s previous novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) Hank Morgan wants to introduce the Protestant church in the sixth century for these very reasons; he replaces one kind of magic (represented by Merlin) with another (industrial science, which seems to the sixth century to be another kind of “magic”). An essential component of allegory is an accepted framework by which symbolic associations are constructed; Taylor refers to this kind of central assump- tion as “authenticity,” located within a moral order:

It is very clear that a moral order is more than just a set of norms; it also contains what we might call an “ontic” component, identifying features of the world that make the norms realizable. . . . It is . . . tempting to think that our modern notions of moral order lack altogether an ontic component. But this would be a mistake. There is an important difference but it lies in the fact that this component is now a feature about us humans, rather than one touching God or the cosmos, and not in the supposed absence altogether of an ontic dimension. (Modern Social Imaginaries 10–11)

The ontic component Taylor refers to is what we might think of as the way in which we believe, or more precisely, what belief is; another way of thinking about this is as the background beliefs we share, and how these beliefs are grounded in reality (and thus acquire authenticity). Thus the ontic component is both what we believe, the necessity for some type of belief (as well as a func- tional integration of multiple beliefs), and the way we imagine these beliefs into practice—that is, how we qualify them existentially in order to make them work. This sense of “authenticity” is absent in postmodernity. Reading and teaching The Mysterious Stranger in the early twenty-first century involves three distinct realities:

• Medieval Austria: late Middle Ages (the setting of the novel) • Late nineteenth-century America (when the novel was composed) • The post-Christian (postmodern) era (in which we read the novel now)

The Mysterious Stranger 61 The three eras might be described as changes of frameworks, specifically as affects the agency of personal choice. It is significant that the change in social imaginaries corresponds to changing attitudes about allegory/allegoresis. A prescribed Christian hierarchy determines the culture of the book’s setting. This is not to say there were no pagans in fifteenth-century Austria; this is only to assert that the context in which the world was perceived necessarily lim- ited personal choice and self-actualization. As Taylor notes, “People who live in this kind of world don’t necessarily believe in God, certainly not in the God of Abraham, as the existence of countless ‘pagan’ societies shows. But in the outlook of European peasants in 1500, beyond all the inevitable ambivalences, the Christian God was the ultimate guarantee that good would triumph or at least hold the plentiful forces of darkness at bay” (A Secular Age 26). The hierarchical worldview, exemplified by the Great Chain of Being, was not a cultural practice or a personal choice: it was simply the way things were, naturally; it constituted the fabric of existence. “Choice” represented a potential violation of God’s plan. In the late nineteenth century, in the post-Enlightenment era of humanism, “choice” becomes an option and a means for self-fulfillment (and necessarily so; the possibility for self-actualization and self-definition is the highest achievement of post-Enlightenment humanism). We might say that the character of 44 in The Mysterious Stranger is the nineteenth-century response to the late fifteenth century in a similar way that Hank Morgan is the nineteenth-century response to the sixth century in Connecticut Yankee; in both novels Twain brings the possibility for personal and social advance (in terms of self-actualization, free from prescriptive norms) to bear on an earlier era. However, the difference between Connecticut Yankee and The Mysterious Stranger is not one of degree, but one of kind. In Connecticut Yankee Twain allows two narratives, two histories, to run parallel: the nineteenth-century rational, humanist, industrial republic, and the sixth-century monarchy and Church. Hank Morgan’s program, in fact, is to remake the sixth century in the image of the nineteenth, including reforming the Church. But even his hopeful Protestant reform is couched in corporate terms:

We must have a religion—it goes without saying—but my idea is, to have it cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States in my time. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that, it is nursed, coddled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not

62 Bill Scalia do better in a split-up and scattered condition. That wasn’t law, it wasn’t gospel; it was only an opinion—my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn’t worth any more than the pope’s—or any less, for that matter. (161)

Connecticut Yankee posits one narrative taking place alongside another on the same narrative plane—the tension between the nineteenth century and the sixth century takes place solely within the narrative context of the sixth century—and thus is not allegorical (one text is not interpretive of a veiled text). Similarly, in The Mysterious Stranger Twain did not compose one narrative to point to another, veiled narrative; he detailed two narratives within the same textual frame. However, the tensions in Mysterious Stranger occupy tem- porally and spatially separate planes; because August lives within the context of a specific, ordered culture, and 44 occupies a space outside of any context, and indeed outside of time, we may read the novel in an allegorical way by refiguring the space between August and 44. 44 brings August out of the prescriptive framework of moral order and into the realm of choice—but more so, perhaps, into the possibility of not only self-realization, but also self-definition: this is the nineteenth-century’s liberation of the fifteenth-century condition. But I would like to suggest that what qualifies as liberation in the late nineteenth century devolves into annihilation in the early twenty-first century, as an allegorical reading will demonstrate. Ethan Knapp has laid the groundwork for allegoresis as a theoretical practice for reading the space between texts, a way of delimiting theoretical practice as an allegorical process of refiguring. Considering the binary of surface and depth operative in medieval allegory, Knapp asks what constitutes “depth” in twentieth-century allegoresis, especially as this practice is largely constituted within Marxist and psychoanalytic critical perspectives. Knapp’s purpose is to open a third area, that of theology, and especially the phenomenological and existential theology of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, to this critical genealogy. However, while Knapp focuses his discussion on Barth, Bultmann, Northrop Frye, and Fredric Jameson in an attempt to refigure a theological theoretical ground, I would like to further his work by extending some of the ideas into postmodernism—specifically, what we refer to as the post-Christian age. Nietzsche wrote in 1887, “The greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead,’ that belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe” (279). As translator Walter Kaufmann clari- fies in his footnote, the expression “the Christian god has become unbelievable”

The Mysterious Stranger 63 is intended to qualify what Nietzsche means by the “death of God” (Nietzsche had made his original “God is dead” formulation in the first edition of The Gay Science in 1882). Nietzsche continues, “Indeed, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shown on us . . . At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright . . . the sea, our seas, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’” (280). The unbelievability of God, coupled with the void left by this unbelievability, eventuates in postmodernism. Mark Taylor writes that “postmodernism opens with the sense of irrevocable loss and incurable fault. This wound is inflicted by the overwhelming awareness of death—a death that begins with the death of God and ‘ends’ with the death of ourselves. We are in a time between times and a place that is no place” (6). We might also think of absence as a deferred closure, according to Mark Taylor, of the four principal areas—God, self, history, book:

Utterly transcendent and thoroughly eternal, God is represented as totally present to Himself. He is, in fact, the omnipresent fount, source, ground, and uncaused cause of presence itself. The self is made in the image of God and consequently is also one, i.e., a centered individual. Mirroring its creator, the single subject is both self-conscious and freely active. Taken together, self-consciousness and freedom entail individual responsibility. History is the domain where divine guidance and human initiative meet. The temporal course of events is not regarded as a random sequence. It is believed to be plotted along a single line stretching from a definite beginning (creation) through an identifiable middle (incarnation) to an expected end (kingdom or redemption). Viewed in such ordered terms, history forms a purposeful process whose meaning can be coherently represented. Page by page and chapter by chapter, the Book weaves the unified story of the interaction between God and self. Since the logic of this narrative reflects the Logos of history, Scripture, in effect, rewrites the Word of God. . . . The echoes of the death of God can be heard in the disappearance of the self, the end of history, and the closure of the book. (7–8)

The conditional context is, in a sense, that of the social imaginary of the Christian era; the liminal area Taylor describes as post-Christian is also the absence of the space between texts in allegoresis. The social imaginary provides the “code” by which allegoristic significations occurs (both the common understanding and the means to imagine that understanding into practice).

64 Bill Scalia I would like to propose an allegoresis in the absence of a “code”; in fact, this is in part my argument: in typical allegory the “code” is assumed, but in the postmodern era “code” has disappeared, since the code in a medieval allegory (the time of the novel’s setting) would have depended necessarily on a Christian context. Thus, in the post-Christian era, the code is absent. If we supply, rather than infer, a code, we rewrite the text, which is criticism in bad faith. Instead, we may propose an allegoresis that shows where the code has been and is no more. In this way, the lack of code is the subject of the text. To read allegorically is to postulate two texts; I will use the terms “spoken text” (the text on the page) and “speaking text” (the text as perceived by the reader) to refer to this dynamic. Allegoresis, then, is the method of determining the space between the two “texts.” Allegoresis as a reading practice transcends the simple binary of immanent/transcendent and acts as a dialectic between the places where the two texts come together and separate, and how they inform each other. This dialectic depends on some measure of linguistic determinacy; that is, while we may not agree on the prescriptive definition of terms, we take as a given the ground of determination that actualizes the meaning of terms. In the late Middle Ages, this agreement would not have been questioned; in the late nineteenth century, the ground for determination has shifted more toward the area of negotiation/choice, but a “framework” remained intact—that is, meaning grounded in some kind of assumed determinacy. A postmodern allegoresis cannot function on the level of linguistic determinacy, since meaning is relative and ultimately deferred; even an assumed determinacy would be a negotiation of authenticity, which would of course posit the existence of authenticity. Again, the lack of a code, a lack of determinacy, becomes the subject not only of our reading, but also in this mode the subject of the text itself. Determinacy in this sense is located, I think, in what Charles Taylor defines as the “hierarchical complementarity” that constituted the late Middle Ages: that is, the “medieval idealization of the society of three orders: oratores, bella- tores, laboratores—those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. It was clear that each needed the other, but there is no doubt we have here a descend- ing scale of dignity; some functions were in their essence higher than others” (Modern Social Imaginaries 11). In The Mysterious Stranger we see these orders as those who pray (Church); those who work (the print shop); those who fight (Doangivadam), in service to God and master. During this period, as Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly note in All Things Shining, “a person’s identity was determined by God. This is to take no stand on whether there actually was a God in the Middle Ages. . . . What matters instead is that in the Middle Ages

The Mysterious Stranger 65 people could not help but experience themselves as determined or created by God. Indeed, it was so much a part of the way they understood the world they lived in . . . that it was virtually inconceivable that one’s identity might be determined in any other way” (13). We might recall August Feldner’s introduction of the Castle Rosenfeld residents (master, servants, and printing workforce) as a demonstration of the kind of hierarchical complementarity Taylor defines; we might also recall Father Peter’s sermon in Chapter 10 on the lessons, and necessity, of divine providence. As Dreyfus and Kelly observe, by 1600 the medieval world, affected by the emergence of Shakespeare and Descartes, was breaking down. We might add to this the influence of the Protestant Reformation, the invention of the printing press, and the work of Charles Darwin. By the late nineteenth century, the idea of God’s order had given way to the idea that we may choose what kind of life to live, although still within a moral framework (if only that of implied moral imperatives). By the late nineteenth century we are in the modern era— self-actualizing, a horizontal society (all in the service of all), but there is still a hierarchy of sorts, as indicated by Twain’s continued critiques of organized religion—and the abuses attendant to a hierarchy beyond critique, especially a moral one. As Delbanco notes, at the turn of the century, “Thrown out along with other superannuated ideas like providence and destiny and God himself, the old morally comprehensible devil, who had once embodied the concepts of sin and pride and the fall . . . was now truly a relic. He had been discarded because he no longer correlated with experience” (168–69). But even given Twain’s relentless critique of religion, he was no mere icono- clast. He did believe in God, “the real God, the genuine God, the great God, the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only” (Autobiography, Vol. 2 136), though as Alfred Kazin notes, “He was too obsessed with God to be consistent about Him. If ever there was a Calvinist who survived his faith, it was Mark Twain” (190–91). From Twain’s notebook (1887):

I believe in God. I do not believe that he ever sent a message to man by anybody, or delivered one to him word of mouth, or made Himself visible to mortal eyes at any time in any place. I believe that the Old and New testaments were imagined and written by man, and that no line in them was authorized by God, much less inspired by Him.

66 Bill Scalia I do not believe in special providences. . . . I believe that the world’s moral laws are the outcome of the world’s experience. It needed no God to come down out of heaven to tell men that murder and theft and other immoralities were bad, both for the individual who commits them and for the society which suffers from them. (qtd. in Kazin 189–90)

Kazin writes about The Mysterious Stranger, “It turns out that predestination is just as real as John Calvin said it was. The difference is that it is all, all of no account. Life is nothing but a vision, a dream. What a friend we have in Satan—if it is nothingness we now desperately seek after life’s crushing hour!” (192). However, Twain makes clear delineations between the God who created man and the God created by man, “the little God whom we manufactured out of waste human material; whose portrait we accurately painted in the Bible and charged its authorship upon Him; the God who created a universe of such nursery dimension that there would not be room in it for the orbit of Mars . . . and put our little globe in the center of it under the impression that it was the only really important thing in it” (Autobiography, Vol. 2 127). Given Twain’s quarrel with religious prescription, and with the doctrine he has Huck Finn mangle as “preforordination,” I understand the rationale behind Kazin’s claim. Twain’s critique, as evidenced by the quote above, lands more on religious institutionalizing of “God” than on God himself. But I would ven- ture that, as the nineteenth century moved to the twentieth, and beyond to the postmodern, post-Christian twenty-first century, that “nothingness” is no longer a dream—if I understand Kazin to mean that the nothingness we seek is freedom from restriction (physical, spiritual, psychical). In the postmodern world, nothingness is the absence even of dream, the absence of, or negation of, self: the freedom 44 seems to offer (and which Kazin seems to identify) has become annihilation. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain used one culture to show the imperfections of, and to satirize, another, especially its religious practices; he followed a similar pattern with The Mysterious Stranger, telling two stories in interactive complement: that of August Feldner and that of 44. However, in Connecticut Yankee Twain allows the two parts of his narrative to run concurrently and remain distinct; that is, Twain keeps the reader outside the sixth-century framework. In the first half of The Mysterious Stranger Twain seems to be working similar territory, but in a more fantastic way; if in Connecticut Yankee the Boss’s science seems like magic to the court in sixth-century England, in The Mysterious Stranger 44’s mystical qualities are

The Mysterious Stranger 67 just that: mystical. In The Mysterious Stranger Twain displaces one narrative with another; while in the first half of the novel the two strains run roughly parallel, in the second half Twain displaces, and destabilizes, one framework for another, and ultimately the annihilation of “framework” itself. A postmodern allegoresis can help us understand The Mysterious Stranger because the allegoristic process opens the dynamic of the two “texts,” within the same textual frame, given that in the post-Christian era this dynamic becomes available due to the absence of an implied determinacy. In fact, this model of allegoresis is made possible by post-Christian culture. In the early twenty-first century, the post-Christian era, the idea of hierarchy is meaningless; all rela- tions are relative. The absence of moral imperative seems to define the post- Christian era; we no longer live in a time of assumed moral tenants (we might say determinacy), but in negotiated relative authority, which Charles Taylor associates with moral relativism: “By this I mean the view that moral positions are not in any way grounded in reason or the nature of things but are ultimately just adopted by each of us because we find ourselves drawn to them” (Malaise of Modernity 18). As Taylor further determines, subjectivism (exclusive self- interest) and instrumental reason (exclusive cost-benefit analysis) define the era. And, as Taylor claims in A Secular Age, the institutions that make this possible are already in place in the late nineteenth century (28). In determining a postmodern allegoresis attentive to narrative aesthetics in The Mysterious Stranger, “spoken” refers to a text/usage coeval with conven- tional language practice (the interpretive community that would have assumed common ground for meanings). The “speaking text” unsays the spoken; the speaking reinforms the spoken in such a way as to qualify, or perhaps desta- bilize, the authenticity of the spoken text. Between the two texts is the ground by which the equivalencies of typical allegory are established and practiced. This ground between texts, in which associations are constructed, is a protean interchanging of language and ideas; for our purposes this has as much to do with the fact that two texts are spoken/speaking in a different time frame as much as a different set of linguistic understandings. In The Mysterious Stranger this ground of interchange, which I would posit as the ground of indeterminacy into which 44 leads August, progresses by degree as the novel moves forward and the spatial and temporal displacement becomes more pronounced. There is, I believe, a threshold of determinacy, a demarcation in which August crosses from the last understanding of his world and into the radical indeterminacy of 44’s, which occurs at the end of Chapter 16, the halfway point of the novel, when 44 is seemingly destroyed by the magician Balthasar Hoffman and

68 Bill Scalia reemerges as spirit, available only to August (and to Mary Florence Fortescue Baker G. Nightingale, the talking cat). The first half of the novel posits the relationship between August and his curious contemporary, 44. This relationship is formulated with at least the appearance of order; August (and the rest of the castle) are not able to distinguish 44’s “magic” from that of the magician (whose appearance, significantly, 44 takes on through the novel’s second half). In the first half, August shows concern for 44’s soul; he is concerned about 44’s propensity to dismiss religion: “I saw that 44 was not minded to pray, but was full of other and temporal interests. I was shocked, and deeply concerned; for I felt rising in me with urgency a suspicion which had troubled me several times before, but which I had urgently put from me each time—that he was indif- ferent to religion. I questioned him—he confessed it! I leave my distress and consternation to be imagined, I cannot describe them” (80). While the mystery of 44’s powers escapes August, 44 exists to his perception in his own time; the two exist in the same framework to enough of a degree that August is corre- spondent with 44. 44 seems to be, to August, a soul in need of salvation: “In that paralyzing moment my life changed, and I was different being; I resolved to devote my life, with all the affections and forces which God had given me to the rescuing of this endangered soul” (80). August’s distinction between salvation and damnation depends on a Christian definition of sin. But by the turn of the twentieth century, as Delbanco notes, “Even Freud, skeptical as he was about the value of religion, and committed as he was to the idea that the mind regulates itself from within, realized that with the disappearance of God the idea of sin had become unsustainable” (156)—which is to say that, in 1490, 44 is perceived as a soul in danger; by the time Twain was composing the novel, 44 is not merely the inversion of God, but the disappearance of God. August’s commitment to save 44’s soul occurs in Chapter 15, within the context of the framework Twain has established for the relationship between 44 and August. However, this framework is broken with 44’s destruction in Chapter 16:

There was a scream, and Katrina came flying, with her gray hair stream- ing behind her; for one moment a blot of black darkness fell upon the place and extinguished us all; the next moment in our midst stood that slender figure transformed to a core of dazzling white fire; in the succeed- ing moment it crumbled to ashes and we were blotted out in the black darkness again. Out of it rose an adoring cry—broken in the middle by a pause and a sob—

The Mysterious Stranger 69 “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away ...... blessed be the name of the Lord!” It was Katrina; it was the faithful Christian parting with its all, yet still adoring the smiting hand. (90–91)

The scene suggests an inversion of the transfiguration of Jesus, a story which itself is an allegory: “The heavily symbolic character of the story indicates that this story . . . is more theological than historical in character. The narrative must rest upon a mystical experience of the disciples, but the experience is described in symbolic imagery in such a way that the experience itself is impossible to reconstruct” (New Jerome Biblical Commentary 93). While Christ is praying he is transformed, “his face shown like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Matthew 17:2); “his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them” (Mark 9:3); “the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Luke 9:29). After the transformation occurs the theophany: a cloud overshadows the scene, from which God speaks, “This is my Son the, the Beloved; in Him I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matthew 17:5; the wording is the same in the other gospels, except that Luke substi- tutes “Chosen” for “Beloved”). Here, 44 is transformed by a dazzling white fire; however, rather than being transformed into a higher manifestation, he is con- sumed to a lower state: he is reduced to ashes. Afterward, Katrina (the present “mother”), not God (the transcendent Father), delivers the “theophany.” From this point on, in the second half of the novel, 44 leads August through time, turns a chatty maid into a speaking cat, extends the actions of the duplicates, shows August a vision of hell, and proceeds to the culminating event within the narrative frame of the novel, the parade of the dead in Chapter 33. We might say that the novel is divided into the first half, which introduces August and 44 and sets the narrative framework, and the second half of the book, which declines toward the destruction of that order. The event closing the first half of the book is 44’s transfiguration; a second transfiguration scene closes the second half of the book’s narrative frame:

Then suddenly there was a great light! [Katrina] lifted her head and caught it fully in her swarthy face, which it transfigured with its white glory, as it did also all that place, and its marble pillars, and the frightened people, and Katrina dropped her knife and fell to her knees, with her hands clasped, everybody doing the same; and so there they were, all kneeling like that, with hands thrust forward or clasped, and they and the stately columns all awash in that unearthly splendor; and there where the magician had

70 Bill Scalia stood, stood 44 now, in his supernal beauty and his gracious youth; and it was from him that that flooding light came, for all his form was clothed in that immortal fire, and flashing like the sun; and Katrina crept on her knees to him, and bent down her old head and kissed his feet, and he bent down and patted her softly on the shoulder and touched his lips to the gray hair—and was gone!—and for two or three minutes you were so blinded you couldn’t see your next neighbor in that submerging black darkness. (172–73)

This scene appears in Chapter 31; in Chapter 32, 44 (appearing to August) reverses time in order to plan the parade of the dead (Chapter 33). After the second “transfiguration” the narrative closes, if narrative depends on an understanding ad intra of the uniformity of time and space. Furthermore, this transfiguration differs from the earlier example; 44 is not only transfigured, but disappears, closing (in a sense) his presence in the larger narrative frame. As a doubling of the earlier transfiguration scene, this is significant if we remember that in Matthew’s gospel, the transfiguration of Jesus occurs immediately following his foretelling of his death and resurrection and his statement on self-denial. The doubling of the transfiguration scenes frames the novel’s second half, and this framing makes the second half distinct from the first. Doubling is itself a marker of allegory/allegoresis, whether explicitly, in double plots/double characters, or in the allegoristic practice of spoken/speaking text (such as Frye suggests). Plot elements may be doubled to deepen allegorical interpretation, as I believe is the case with the double transformation scenes, and also accounts for their distinct difference: Twain could not have merely repeated them because no separation would result. Instead, we read the second scene through the action of the first, and thus are led to an allegorical reading. While in the novel’s first half 44 allows the castle to believe the magician is working through him, he does not double the magician. The 44/magician doubling occurs after the first transfiguration, in such a way that 44 replaces the magician; in a sense, he allegorizes him, leading to the increasingly blurred lines between magic and mysticism. In fact, the doubling evident in the allegorical process is reflected as a central theme in the novel, especially as concerns the duplicates. The action of the “duplicates” in the second half of The Mysterious Stranger concerns, I think, the distinction I wish to make. The duplicates appear as doubles of the characters in the spoken text, making them a part of both texts—that is, a duplication. Since this kind of duplication occurs as a part of the spoken text, it is already, in a

The Mysterious Stranger 71 sense, allegorical. The action of the duplicates in the determined text unspeaks the text. That is, the space between the two texts is rendered progressively less determinant, since the duplicates exist as a copy of the spoken text: the duplicates exist as shadows, out of time and space; in this sense they are closer to 44’s realm than August’s. 44 actualizes the duplicates from his position both inside of, and outside of, August’s late medieval framework. But Twain takes the process further: 44 exists outside of space and time, and as such, exists outside of any determinant framework. To August, 44 seems unworldly precisely because he is not of the world of the fifteenth century. 44 presents a paradox to August: 44 must be from another world, but he cannot define what that “world” is; August’s worldview admits of magic as well as a mystical realm of existence, but not the temporality of other physical worlds 44 represents in his travels. That is to say, 44 destabilizes August’s world, and eventually his very sense of self. Such is 44’s power: to lead August not to a personification, or assertion, of meaning (as in medieval allegory) or a reassessment of meaning (as in modernity), but to lead August to annihilation of meaning. The danger of this for us is clear: as Delbanco writes, “If the language of evil is finally eliminated, we shall surely be left in a kind of dumbness—akin to the condition that accompanies sexual or aesthetic experi- ences when we let the music wash over us. . . . In such circumstances, one will- ingly gives up language for the sake of the pure exclamatory sound that is the substratum of language. This reaching beyond verbal means can be a liberation in sexual or aesthetic matters. But in the ethical life it is an imprisonment” (11). It is important to remember that in Chapter 1 August tells the story of Father Adolf’s deal with Satan to build a bridge in a single night; as payment, Satan would be granted possession of the first Christian soul to cross the bridge. However, upon completion of the bridge Father Adolf sends across a dying monk, whose soul is carried to heaven by angels, leaving the devil with only a “useless carcass.” Through this trick Satan is cheated of his prize; the sermon Father Peter preaches in Chapter 10 occurs on the occasion of the annual festival of the Assuaging of the Devil—a mock festival dedicated to appeasing the devil’s anger over this trick. More importantly, Fr. Peter’s sermon unifies the narrative context of the book’s first half. The second half of the novel, beginning with Chapter17 , leads to the parade of the dead in Chapter 33, which eliminates time and space; 44 displays all of history in a single moment. This is another example of 44’s inversion of order. Typically in allegorical presentations of the dead (or the daemonic), as Angus Fletcher demonstrates, there is a hierarchy, which is perhaps an inversion of the

72 Bill Scalia Great Chain of Being: “The daemons all have their own ranks, and heroes or agents of the daemonic kind are similarly ranked and fixed, and finally pinned down at a particular level. Men are ranked according to spiritual and temporal powers, and thus, for example, the Pope or the King is always the first figure in the traditional Dance of Death, while the Fool or the Antichrist is likely to be the last” (65). We might note as well that neither the Great Chain of Being nor the daemonic ordering Fletcher identifies is present in 44’s parade. August names many of the participants in the procession: “kings, and kings and kings till you couldn’t count them”; “skeletons whom I had known, myself, and had been at their funerals only three or four years before—men and women, boys and girls”; “King Arthur with all his knights”; “The skeletons of Adam’s predecessors,” who “outnumbered the later representatives of our race by myriads”; and “Among them was the Missing Link. That is what 44 called him” (184–85). In August’s catalog there is no order, only observation; though the Missing Link is the last figure August names, it is clear it is not the last figure in the procession, no more than Pharaoh (the first named) is the first. 44 has moved beyond inversion of order (which is itself a kind of order) to destabilization of order. The parade of the dead is a parade of history that, in August’s catalog, has no end; at least, he does not experience the end: “For hours and hours the dead passed by in continental masses, and the bone-clacking was so deafening you could hardly hear yourself think. Then, all of a sudden, 44 waved his hand and we stood in an empty and soundless world” (185). The end of the procession is the end of history, or, as Mark Taylor suggests, the end of the struggle for transcendence:

This struggle for transcendence is always acted out in the shadow of a wholly other God. As totally self-identical, fully perfect, and completely self-present, the divine other is eternally beyond, always elsewhere, and absolutely transcendent. This transcendent God is the ruler of history. In His domain, subjects are condemned to the anxious search for transcendence. The end of history not only presupposed the death of the transcendent God and the disappearance of the sovereign self . . . The affirmation that opens the end of history inevitably entails negation. . . . Put differently, the Yes that ends history is the denial of the denial of death. (72)

Since August has no way to conceive of 44’s annihilation of time, he is led outside his sense of self, and even away from the sense that he may define himself: he is led to a nonself. 44 presents this reality to August in a form he can

The Mysterious Stranger 73 recognize: a list of characteristics of God—or rather, as Twain wrote in 1906, choices imposed on the “little God” of human manufacture:

We are told that the two halves of our God are only seemingly discon- nected by their separation; that in very fact the two halves remain one, and equally powerful, notwithstanding the separation. That being the case, the earthly half—who mourns over the sufferings of mankind and would like to remove them, and is quite competent to remove them at any moment he may choose—satisfied Himself with restoring sight to a blind person here and there, instead of curing all the cripples; furnished to five thousand famishing persons a meal, and lets the rest of the million that are hungry remain hungry—and all the time He admonished inefficient man to cure these ills which God Himself inflicted upon him, and which He could extinguish with a word if He chose to do it, and thus do a plain duty which He had neglected from the beginning and always will neglect while time shall last. He raised several dead persons to life. He manifestly regarded this as a kindness. If it was a kindness it was not just to confine it to a half dozen persons. He should have raised the rest of the dead. I would not do it myself, for I think the dead are the only human beings who are really well off—but I merely mention it, in passing, as one of those curious incongruities with which our Bible history is heavily overcharged. (Autobiography, Vol. 2 129–30)

44 takes August outside of the fifteenth-century worldview so he might see it objectively—that is, as a series of choices. The fact of 44’s articulation of choice is in itself a radical destabilization of August’s understanding of the world. But 44 utilizes this moment to offer August a litany of God’s crimes:

A God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell—mouths mercy, and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to others, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man

74 Bill Scalia without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, on himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor abused slave to worship him! (186–87)

44 hands August a deception which to August looks like liberation. August might understand choice, but only choice set within a framework of moral imperative. Again, though, this is 44’s trick: August can choose not to accept his role in the Chain of Being only by stepping outside that chain itself, by stepping outside of “being” itself. As 44 tells him:

Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world,—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars: a dream, all a dream, they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you! . . . And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a Thought. . . . It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You. And you are but a Thought—a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering -for lorn among the empty eternities. (186)

In the early twenty-first century, the reality 44 offers August is not liberation but solipsism (you are not you), because, in Charles Taylor’s terms, the condition lacks authenticity. That is, there is no framework to determine how one should live or what one should be. Every option is equally valid, and also equally without value. August cannot “choose” because the options no longer make sense. Thus his liberation is now annihilation. August is only thought; he is no longer “August.” Again, as 44 tells him, “you are not you”—which is the same as saying “you are not.” We might compare 44’s assertive negation with Yahweh’s self-identification to Moses in Exodus 3:14: “I am that I am.” In both cases the statement offered is a tautology; but 44’s definition of August is an inversion of God’s assertion of his being to Moses. That is, Yahweh’s assertion to Moses is a positive tautology, in that Yahweh speaks his condition: “I + am [that] I + am” / being + assertion = condition. However, 44’s tautology is negative in that 44 negates August’s condition: “You + are not + you” / identification + negation = condition. Charles Baudelaire famously stated that “the devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.” In The Mysterious Stranger, Twain has gone

The Mysterious Stranger 75 one better: the devil’s even greater trick is not only to persuade August that the devil does not exist, but that neither does he, August, exist. So, in the late nineteenth century the ending of the novel might seem like liberation, but at what cost? August is no longer human—is this a paradox, or dilemma, or trick? In the twenty-first century the ending is truly solipsistic. Even if 44 reasserts choice for August, it is choice that August can only make within a framework of moral imperative. Given that this framework is missing, August’s choice is no longer free, but is in fact meaningless. So, 44 has delivered August from human existence into annihilation, not freedom. It might be said that 44 leads August to a life of choice over a life of imprisonment in a divine order, and he does this by showing that the order is, from August’s perception, morally random. Twain leads us from the dynamic between a spoken text and a speaking text to an ending that is unspeakable—that is, in a real sense, unable to be spoken. The book begins in a specific time and place (Austria, winter 1490) and ends in annihilation of time and space. The devil, who was cheated by Father Adolf out of his payment of a human soul upon the completion of the bridge, has at last claimed the soul of August Feldner. bill scalia holds a PhD in American literature from Louisiana State University. He has published essays on literature and film in the journals Religion and Literature, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Perichoresis, and in the anthology Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema. He edited the anthology Classic Critical Views: Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dr. Scalia currently teaches philosophical writing and literature at St Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore.

Works Cited

Delbanco, Andrew. The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Sean Dorrance Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011. Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1964. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957. Kazin, Alfred. God and the American Writer. New York: Knopf, 1997. Knapp, Ethan. “Reading Allegory in a Secular Age: Mid-Century Theology and the Allegoresis of Frye and Jameson.” Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory 26.2–3 (2014): 163–77. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Edited by Raymond E. Brown, SS, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, and Roland E. Murphy, OCarm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968.

76 Bill Scalia Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Tambling, Jeremy. Allegory: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2010. Taylor, Charles. The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, ON: House of Anansi, 1991. ———. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. ———. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2007. Taylor, Mark. Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Twain, Mark. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. Edited Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith. Berkeley: U of California P, 2013. ———. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. ———. No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.

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