Epilogue: After the Double-Cross

Summary

Doesn't a thought which introduces constraint of the system and discontinuity in the history of the mind remove all basis for progressive political intervention? Does it not lead to the following dilemma:

– either the acceptance of the system,

– or the appeal to an uncontrolled event of upsetting the system?

– The editors of Esprit to Michel Foucault “History, Discourse and Discontinuity”

Some six years after Pudd'nhead Wilson, Twain would reinvestigate the master–slave opposition in an unfinished narrative entitled “Which Was It?” In this text, he rotates the roles, depicting a slave, Jasper, as the detective who discovers a white man's act of murder. Although still maintaining the appearance of the slave system, Jasper subverts it by extorting subservience from the criminal, George Harrison, by threatening to expose Harrison's crime. Kenneth Lynn has observed the similarities between this tale and Melville's “Benito Cereno”; and the reversal of racial power and the public charades of the status quo performed by Jasper and Melville's slave character Babo are certainly remarkable. However, the means by which the power roles are reversed in the two narratives are distinctly different. In Melville's story, the slaves become masters by physical force; they become renegades from the slavery system who use the threat of violence against the agents of that system. In Twain's story, on the other hand, Jasper maintains his mastery of Harrison through knowledge of the truth and the threat of subjecting him to the system of justice whose discovery he has eluded.