"Mark Twain" is a speech printed in the 1981 collection Palm Sunday. It was given at Twain's home in Hartford, Connecticut on April 30, 1979, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its completion. It was originally published under the title "The Necessary Miracle" in The Nation on July 7, 1979 and was reprinted under its original title by that periodical's ebook Vonnegut By The Dozen in 2013.
Summary[]
Mark Twain House, Hartford
Twain once said that when literature produced a "well-drawn character" he would often "take a warm personal interest" in that character since he had "known him before—met him on the river." Vonnegut calls this a Christian joke, relying on a basic beginning with an unexpected conclusion, centered on the words "warm", "personal", and "river," which is the river of life. In short, like Jesus, Twain couldn't help loving everyone. Like Twain, Vonnegut is a religious skeptic which he inherited from his family and has passed on to his children, motivated by a desire to be able to say to God on Judgment Day that they were good, even without religious belief or taking God into their "calculations" at all. Religious skeptics tend to become bitter at the end of life, and Vonnegut expects that will happen to him as well since he'll realize he's been right all along about the lack of God, Heaven, and Judgment Day.
One common use of the verb "calculate" in 19th century frontier America was asking that one's lies be respected because their logic was sound, which is also the secret of good storytelling: selecting between believable lies such that the story generates itself. For example, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court begins with the comical premise of a 19th century scientific optimist sent to the Arthurian Middle Ages and ends with a massacre brought about by technology. It wasn't Twain himself who produced this ending, but the logical conclusion of his premise. Who in the story was morally good and bad, wise and foolish—which had seemed so clear through the rest of the book—was now muddied. It encapsulates the chief premise of Western civilization: "the sanest, most likable persons, employing superior technology, will enforce sanity throughout the world." While the premise may shape the story, it is the author who produces the language and mood, and Twain was an expert at using the best of American English. He was the most important American in any of his works, who made the readers fellow Americans, no matter their origin. This is a specific kind of miracle called "myths," and this single man, after whom Vonnegut named his first born son, created much of that American myth.[1]
See Also[]
- "Opening Remarks in The Unabridged Mark Twain", an introduction to a 1976 collection of Twain's works
- "Palm Sunday" in which Vonnegut reads John 12:1-8 as a "Christian joke"
- ↑ "Mark Twain", Palm Sunday, pp. 167-172.