Introduction: Bearing the Double-Cross

Summary

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

– Randall Jarrell, “An Unread Book”

The novel and the romance,… these clumsy separations appear to me to have been made by critics and readers for their own convenience, and to help them out of some of their occasional queer predicaments, but to have little reality or interest for the producer, from whose point of view it is of course that we are attempting to consider the art of fiction.

– Henry James, The Art of Fiction

America is a trap: its promises and dreams … are too much to live up to and too much to escape.

– Greil Marcus, Mystery Train

Under the shadow of epigraphs declaring that the novel, literary criticism, and America are all plagued by “something wrong,” what I am about to undertake might seem doomed from the start. For if these claims are true, then to attempt literary criticism on the novels of the writer most identified with America is to have my work cut out for me. Nonetheless, in my view, the something wrong in Mark Twain's novels is something worth investigating.

In part, the something wrong in Twain's work stems from the characteristic doubleness operating at every level of his literary conception, which in turn inspired and thwarted every project he undertook. The crucial term in the Twainishness that informs his texts and persona is authority.