S1E14: Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger
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!
Everything was brought into question when The Mysterious Stranger arrived. The most debated novel of all the works in the vault of author, Mark Twain. S1E14: The Mysterious Stranger
Released:
Click the arrow to play the episode
Click here to discover other podcast platforms to listen to Bag of Bones Podcast
Click here for more Bag of Bones Podcast episodes to choose from Transcript
Bag of Bones Podcast
Season One- Episode 14 -The Mysterious Stranger Released: December 2020 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! What would be the consequences if everything you once believed came into question? What if everything you thought to be true was only an illusion? Essentially, what if everything you’ve been taught, felt, practiced, passed on to your children… came into question. In his very last offering to the world, cementing his legacy, one author explored a life of deception, control and manipulation on a people who had no idea… Everything was brought into question when The Mysterious Stranger arrived. The most debated novel of all the works in the vault of author, Mark Twain. Intro Mark Twain was born Samuel Clemmons, in 1835 in a small rural town in Missouri. He was one of six children, being very weak and fragile in his younger years worrying his mother that he might not survive. But he did and spent his days wondering … why. His father tried working as a judge, a lawyer and a shopkeeper dreaming of wealth but it kept slipping though his fingers. He was a stern man. A devout man. His mother, on the other hand was loving and tender making their house a home to the best of her abilities, telling stories to her children and being their foundation. His father died suddenly in 1847 leaving the family near destitute. Mark Twain would have to give up his youth to help support a family. His hometown of Hannibal, Missouri inspired Twain’s writing for the rest of his days. It was a Rivertown and a world of Minstrel shows and circuses, blacksmiths and tanners earning their trade along the banks, the violence of humans, the drunks, the slaves, the dichotomy of life and hard times, were laid at his feet. His writings would forever reflect his impressions and memories. Death was not uncommon and he was no stranger to it. But why? Why this person and not that? Why did his family have to starve while others prospered? His thoughts and questions caused him to drift away from the church and he began a quest for the answers he longed for. He was spiritual, seeing God within the universe and his people within the universe being the life force and could appreciate the world around him, but believed that the Bible had “noble poetry, some good morals” and “upwards of a thousand lies.” Spent his life searching for answers… He longed for social status and when he married the love of his life, Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a rich coal merchant, he achieved it. He would buck against the pious, genteel life that he had dreamt of for most of his life but found refuge in his writings. His curiosity over death inspired him to join the Society for Psychical Research of London in 1885 as his interest in the occult deepened. He was looking for answers that the religion of the time could not and would not give him. He spent the rest of his life writing. He spun stories with his wit and imagination. His writing was real and raw and he wasn’t shy about giving his opinions which changed frequently. But while he was “of that particular state of mind,” the whole world was sure to know about it. Twain had his social standing but was missing his mark at financial status. He spent much of his time dabbling in business ventures convinced that his financial success was just around the corner, but like his father before him, it continued to elude him. He achieved a modicum of success both financial and social standing by writing and publishing the memoirs of his friend and former US President, Ulysses S. Grant. But it wasn’t long after that his publishing house went bankrupt. It was around this time, that his pessimistic views became more and more prevalent in his writing. Death had always been a curiosity. He lost his brother at the age of 19 due to an explosion. Twain felt responsible for his death guiding him into the riverboat life and he carried the guilt with him for the rest of his life. It didn’t help that he had visions of the event prior to it happening. He saw the death, the display of the body even down to the specific arrangements placed on his brother’s chest. He lost his son, Langdon while still a small child to diphtheria but it was in 1896 when his daughter Susy died of spinal meningitis that Twain began exploring spiritualism on a deeper level. It was his wife, Olivia that completely immersed herself in the belief that she could speak with her children that have crossed over. Mark Twain was known to participate in seances, but was never convinced that he ever connected with the dead until his youngest child died. There had to be more. His strict, unyielding religious upbringing and sternness of his father on one side and the colorful, loving, spiritual influence of his mother, left him open to explore other possibilities. His life was on the wane and his years were catching up to him. His body ached and his breathing was labored, and he spent more days than not, unhappy and miserable. He felt his life slipping away and sulked in his home giving up friends and family and people began to avoid the once lauded author and his foul manner. He would dream of his daughter, Susy thinking she was still alive and as his own health declined, he questioned what was real and what lived in his mind. What if everything was just a dream. What if nothing was real? In 1904, his beloved wife passed away from heart trouble. His daughter Jean, who was the youngest was diagnosed with severe epilepsy and in 1909 died of a heart attack at age 29. It was when this child passed, that Mark Twain wrote to his remaining daughter Clara about walking into the room where Jean had died saying, “You know how warm it always is in there, no drafts. All at once I felt a cold current of air about me. I thought the door must be open; but it was closed. I said, ‘Jean, is this you trying to let me know that you have found the others? And the cold air was gone.” His inward life spiraled down, down, down into a bitter and insensitive man despite his pleasant demeanor while entertaining or out in public. By now he had lost most of his family and friends to death or abandonment. He was riddled with pain, public humiliation and always on the fringes of financial despair. He took to his writing desk, and he wrote… Commercial Mark Twain attempted four separate times to convey his feelings. Four beginnings of the same story or variations indicating growth of his thoughts. In one particular section of the Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain uses Satan as his story-teller to explain how man had lost his creativity… lost his imagination and how important it was for a man to function, for without it, he was doomed to a life of monotony. Twain uses his muse to explain that “each person was made up of a Workaday-Self, a Dream-Self, and a Soul that was eternal. The Dream-Selves would come out when the Workaday-Self was asleep, and it was then that the Dream-Self was allowed to roam free. Mark Twain continues “Man, in himself, was a very boring creature since he worries all day long about trifling measures and the Dream-Self is allowed to roam through time, space, and even the planets themselves.” Twain's belief in the misery of man was prevalent during the last stages of his life since "he had ceased to believe in independence of thought and individuality of personality" The Mysterious Stranger is still believed to be Mark Twain's final work. An anonymous review for the New York Times in 1916, the same year it was released, six years after Twain’s death, focused mainly on the perception of Twain's book as a message of doom and gloom against the human race. They write: “For here we have a last word from him we have always called the greatest American humorist- a word that comes to us after the grave has closed over the speaker, a final and conclusive word. It is difficult to imagine a message carrying a grimmer credo of despair, disillusion, and contempt for human existence. It blows upon the spirit like a cold wind over a dark and desolate land, a land where there is never a light, near or far, promising shelter, home, and love. In such a land, shivering in such a wind, what better is there than to lie down and die?” The dark words and emotion conveyed of The Mysterious Stranger were very unlike Twain's previous works in that he did not hold back his late-in-life pessimistic beliefs about humanity. As an author- you put your work out there and have no idea how your readers will interpret it. You hope that your intentions are received, but when your thoughts are not complete, tampered with and you’re not around to defend it… theological as well as literary debates continue. Twain once confided to a friend writing that he wanted - quote “a chance to write a book without reserves..which should take account of no one's feelings,...prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, illusions, delusions; a book which should say [his] say, right out of [his] heart.” End quote. Perhaps this book was never meant to be interpreted. In the Mysterious Stranger stories, Twain rebels against his youth and never being allowed to question the authority of the church. He uses this platform, his old friend the “story” to bring his character in to plead his case. He creates Phillip also known as 44 or… as Satan to allow the reader to question the religion they have been taught and show the fact from fiction as they watch the characters in the story fall under the spell of Satan. The reader is able to watch as he blurs the lines between right and wrong. Points out that they have been lied to and taught to never question what they have been told. Which, as the story unfolds, Satan proves his words false by his actions time and time again but is believed by his words. Satan enters the picture looking familiar another person of their age, that is obviously more well-off, but nothing to be fearful of. For we all know that it is unlikely that if he appeared in his red suit of horns and spiked tail, he’d be less likely to gain an audience. And even as he tells them who he is, Satan, by name, he distracts by saying that he was named after his uncle… the original. He strips them of their caution by plying them with treats and magical tricks. He drops hints into his conversation that moral sense isn’t real and there is no good or evil, there just is… even though his new friends can see that he behaves in a manner that they know is “wrong” they still follow him for fear of losing his magical friendship. And they are set up in a way that they feel more discomfort for doing the “right” thing rather than following along with the majority of the crowd. For example: The story we know: In the Bible, the story we are familiar with when God’s most favored creatures are introduced to Satan, was when he convinced them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and they were banished from the Garden of Eden. Twain spins its more like this: What if Satan wasn’t the one who was evil? What if that was the way history portrayed him? Why would God, tempt the couple with one tree in a vast land of everything they could have wanted? Mark Twain asks the question of who really is Satan? And perhaps the One that people have been following and serving was really a hoax. Not that he was not God, but if He was a loving and just God and the creator of all… why create sin? And why tempt his creation at all? In this section, Twain writes as 44: “His error was in supposing that a knowledge of the difference between good and evil was all that the fruit could confer.. .The fruit's office was not confined to conferring the mere knowledge of good and evil, it conferred also the passionate and eager and hungry disposition to DO evil…” And so therein lies the base of the story. No matter which version you read, it is the battle of Christian beliefs, what we should do, and human nature, what we most desire. Twain once wrote: "I have no special regard for Satan; but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him, and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side. We have none but the evidence for the prosecution, and yet we have rendered the verdict...We may not pay him reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents." Ronald J. Gervais in an essay entitled, "The Mysterious Stranger: The Fall as Salvation adds this continued view, that Satan’s main goal was to bring knowledge to man. The characters in the story are presented with this mysterious man who can perform amazing tricks, feed them and claims that he is a good person saying that he is unable to tell the difference between good and evil. What Gervais believes about this story is that Satan consider’s knowledge a “gift” and since they “cannot be happy with the partial knowledge which they gained when they lost their innocence and since that lost innocence is irrecoverable, a continual fall into more and more knowledge is the only salvation.” The people of the village were taught only one thing and were not allowed outside the borders of their small town. Within the short time Satan has spent with the main characters he has completely put everything they have learned into question and replaced that doubt with more knowledge. In his mind, he has saved them by destroying their innocence and introducing the pain that knowledge often gives. And this… was the master of the quill… Satan creates and destroys and so does Twain in that he has generated a story where he attacks and tries to debase common beliefs often held by people. It is believed that Twain used his Satan character to reach his reader shocking them into hearing the viewpoint, using the story as means to share the injustices that he believed threatened mankind and then hoping that they see it in themselves all the while not destroying the beauty of hope, trust and belief. Commercial The four different versions of the novel are titled “The Chronicle of Young Satan”, “Schoolhouse Hill”, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger and one more… His life had come full circle. The books that made him a household name, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn both came from his real-life home town that he fictionalized as St. Petersburg, his final manuscript… the fourth in the Stranger series… The St. Petersburg Segment. After his death in 1910, his literary editors surgically stitched together thier own endings and published the novel posthumously in 1916. Their deception went undiscovered for decades. Over one hundred years has passed since the publication of this novella and it is still much debated. The novel is most often interpreted as Twain’s final lashing out to the world spewing his pessimistic and disenchantment in the Christian movement. When the book was released, posthumously, the world was embroiled in WWI and with the turmoil and chaos of life, Twain’s book did little to bring comfort. And it is easy for that to be the reader’s first take-away. But if you were able to look deeper, you’ll see his powerful insights into morality, deception, modern religion and reality vs. perception. And hopefully, this episode has given you some new perspective that might have been missed on the first go-round. One last thought from Crystal Travis who wrote The Demonology of Mark Twain: Reading the Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts… she writes: “Mark Twain was and still is one of America's greatest satirists. While these stories may be from a very intelligent and humorous source, they were left unfinished for a reason besides the fact that Twain died before he could finish them. He began a tale, which would encompass those things he saw wrong in the world, stopped, started over, and began again. Twain did this three times. In each, something new is expressed and something new is gained, be in a new view of Christianity, a real sense of humanity, or an urge towards the imaginary. Twain urged preconceived notions to be challenged and not to rely on what was taught from childhood. Asking these questions is the beginning of a search for truth. Mark Twain desperately sought for those truths of humanity and self throughout his lifetime.” And as we close this episode, I leave you with these two questions… Without darkness, can we truly see the light? Without wisdom, which is what comes of applying knowledge, are you not doomed to to follow in the footsteps of decisions made for you.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorAuthor and Host Elizabeth Bourgeret takes you behind the curtain and down the rabbit hole in some of the most interesting stories in American history! Use our Coupon Code for 10% off your order!
BAGOFBONES ArchivesCategories |