Survey of Selected Western Classics Unit 14: Mark Twain

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1 Survey of Selected Western Classics Unit 14: Mark Twain
授課教師: 國立臺灣大學外國語文學系 奚永慧 助理教授 【本著作除另有註明外，採取創CC「姓名標示－非商業性－相同方式分享」台灣3.0版授權釋出】

2 Mark Twain Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born on Nov. 30, 1835 and passed away on April 21st, 1910.

3 Mark Twain Mark: 標記 Twain: two Mark Twain: Mark Two
其中的 two 指的是: two fathoms 1 fathom = 6 feet, 180 cm.

4 Mark Twain “He was brought up in the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River.”

5 Mark Twain When he was twelve, his father passed away and he had to quit school. In 1907 Oxford University conferred an honorary degree upon him.

6 Mark Twain “He was successively a printer’s apprentice, a tramp printer, a silver miner, a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, and a frontier journalist in Nevada and California.”

7 Mark Twain 他在各行各業的工作經驗使他對社會（尤其是平民百姓）以及人性有深刻的體會。此外，他當印刷學徒時，也廣泛地閱讀。

8 Mark Twain Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin ( ), and Walt Whitman ( ) are three great American writers who benefited greatly from working at a printing store.

9 Mark Twain 為容閎 ( ) 好友，曾請格蘭總統(President Grant)寫信給清廷政府，試圖挽救留學生免遭遣返中國，未果。

10 Mark Twain 中國之友。1900/11/23於紐約博物館公共教育協會發表演講，「抨擊當時八國聯軍侵略中國及火燒圓明園，宣示其反帝國主義立場」。

11 Mark Twain 1865年出版短篇小說 “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” ，成為全國知名作家。

12 Significance “Whitman was the first wholly ‘American’ poet in his jettisoning of the Old World verse tradition. Twain was the first wholly ‘American’ prose master in disregarding the Old World prose tradition.”

13 Significance “… the Twain realism springs…especially from the living experience of the informal, broad-shouldered, get-things-done, make-it-up-as-you-go-along American Midwesterner.”

14 Significance “For the first time Twain made the authentic American idiom and the “just folks” American attitude into significant literature.”

15 Significance William Faulkner once remarked, “In my opinion, Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs, who descended from him.”

16 Significance 「[Twain] 常被稱為 “the American Dickens”……因為他們的文字風格相像，都是以機智幽默及冷嘲熱諷著稱，尤其是揶揄當時的社會制度與宗教虛偽，還有某些作品的情節與內涵互相對應。」

17 Significance “Innocents Abroad (1869), Twain’s guffawing chronicle of his European travels, is one hundred per cent American in its total irreverence toward Old World culture.”

18 Significance “In writing about childhood experiences, Mark Twain shows the trustworthiness of the heart as seen in children, the pleasure of rural American as seen through children’s eyes, the moral decline that could accompany growing up, and the sense of loss when childhood is gone.”

19 Significance Twain 痛恨虛偽做作，並善於以幽默呈現他對虛假的不齒。但Twain 也不是個浪漫的夢想家，他知道孩童般的純真無法在現代工業社會中生存，也因此 Huck 最後只能 “light out for the Territory”，出走到人煙稀少，尚未工業化的地域。

20 Significance 此外，因純真 (innocence) 往往與真實的成人世界格格不入，故 Twain 筆下的純真在幽默中總是帶著一些反諷 (irony)，而且反諷經常多於幽默。

21 Significance 「書中的諷刺 “屬於一種『文化批判』或『意識型態批判』，不是針對個人恩怨或社會腐敗，而是針對壟斷人心的意識型態、習以為常的人生盲點、顯學當道的拘泥迂腐、假正義之名的行暴虐之實、滿口仁義道德的喪盡天良。」

22 Significance The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories. (1900)，時年 65 歲，對人性的沈淪似乎有更多的無奈與無力感。

23 Significance Twain 於美國文學－尤其是美國文學的寫實主義－影響深遠。其影響主要來自兩方面：
1. 他對於 localism / local colorism 的創作理論。 2. 他的 colloquial style （如 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 中所示）

24 Significance Localism: “Midwest America is trumpeted as the only right and proper norm; anything failing to conform to it is derided as ludicrously inferior.”

25 Significance “Twain and Henry Adams proved the two most rigorous critics of those distressing times propagated by the new urban, industrialized society.”

26 Significance “Twain in his very lack of intellectual depth spoke to the common man in his own language, sounding a perfervid plea for justice and humanity.”

27 Significance “Multitudes of Americans found in Twain no high-falutin litterateur but the genuine mouthpiece for their own fears and exasperations, their own fond dreams and hopes.”

28 Significance “He felt that a novelist must not try to generalize about a nation. ‘No,’ he says, ‘[The novelist] lays before you the ways and speech and life of a few people grouped in a certain place—his own place—and that is one book.

29 Significance “In time, he and his brethren will report to you the life and the people of the whole nation When a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people, the life of the people, the speech of the people,

30 Significance “and not anywhere else can these be had.’ Here he clearly defined the place and function of local colorism, and foresaw the coming in sections of the ‘great American novel’ to which he did his best to contribute his share.”

31 Significance Local colorism 強調某地區或某地方生活特有之趣味，凸顯當地人獨特觀念與風俗習慣，並使這種種重現於作品之中。Mark Twain大多數作品都深具地方特色，常使知情讀者會心一笑。

32 Significance “One of Mark Twain’s significant contributions to American literature lies in the fact that he made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country.”

33 Significance “Sherwood Anderson took his cue from Mark Twain and became about the first writer after Twain to take the vernacular as a serious way of presenting reality.

34 Significance “Anderson was a for a while Hemingway’s mentor in the colloquial style.

35 Significance “Ernest Hemingway was the direct descendant of Mark Twain. His masculine prose, with its infinite power of suggestion and connotation, is the continuation of and improvement upon Twain’s style.”

36 Significance T. S. Eliot 曾公開承認受到 Mark Twain 的啟發，他認為 Twain 開創了一種新的寫作方式，自成一家並裨益後人。

37 Significance J. D. Salinger 所著之The Catcher in the Rye) 明顯受到 Mark Twain 的影響，且一脈相傳。.

38 Significance “In modern and recent poetry there is a conversational element clearly observable as is revealed in the works of … Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and even in T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.”

39 Techniques “Mark Twain drew heavily form his own rich fund of knowledge of people and places. He confined himself to the life with which he was familiar, convinced, as he states in a letter of 1890, that ‘the most valuable capital, or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience.’”

40 Techniques “His usable past was mostly related to the Mississippi and the West which incidentally became his major theme.”

41 Techniques “Life on the Mississippi was such a truthful description that Howells felt that he could taste ‘the mud’ in it; Tom Sawyer walked out of Twain’s pages directly from his fresh memory of his boyhood in the West.”

42 Techniques Twain 基本上對人性的看法較為肯定，但愈近晚年，他對人性和社會的批判就愈趨嚴厲。在其後期作品中，他漸漸從一位樂觀幽默的觀察者轉變成為失望的宿命論者。

43 Techniques A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), The Mysterious Stranger (1916), 以及他的Autobiography (1924) 都對人性提出不留情的批判。

44 Techniques 有些論者認為他晚年的悲觀和他 人生後期的遭遇有關，包括他投資失敗，辛苦地獨力靠著旅行演講償清債務， 更令他難以承受的是他愛妻以及兩位女兒的去世，給他帶來難以平復的傷痛。

45 Major Works The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) 一出版就成為熱銷的「兒童讀物」，但Twain的代表作卻是其續集 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)。

46 Huck Finn Ernest Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from" Huck Finn, and hailed it as "the best book we've had”

47 Huck Finn Huck Finn 一出版就得到熱烈迴響，第一版賣了39,000本，一直到1990 年代還賣出 20,000,000 本。至今已被翻譯成 53 種語言，成為西方文學和西方文明當中最偉大的文學作品之一。

48 Huck Finn Twain: “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” A classic is also “a book which people praise and don’t read.”

49 Huck Finn 這本書顯然不好寫，Twain 寫寫停停，花了數年才寫成。全書以口語英文寫成，用的大多是美國教育程度不高的人所說的英語。書中有不少語言不合文法，卻非常貼近十九世紀中葉美國南方未受多少教育的小男孩所會使用的語言。

50 Huck Finn “Admirably suited to Twain’s purpose is this centuries-old concentration upon the ‘outsider’, the lower class youth surviving by his wits and stamina in a society that alienates him.”

51 Significance Old world genteel tradition: 「敘事者不論是第一或第三人稱，幾乎都是閱歷豐富、博學多聞，文筆優雅的上層社會菁英人士。」

52 Significance Huck Finn: Mark Twain「大膽啟用這樣一個十四歲的半文盲化外小子作為敘事者，用各式俚俗方言說故事，就是美國文壇一大革命。」

53 Significance 由小孩觀點看大人世界，「暴露成人世界的種種缺失：正經八百、道貌岸然、自相矛盾，荒唐謬誤、庸人自擾，自欺欺人等，由於出自兒童觀點，自然而然降低嚴肅性，發揮『童言無忌』模糊焦點的作用，解除讀者武裝防衛心理」。

54 Huck Finn “The book relates the story of the escape of Jim from slavery and, more important, how Huck Finn, floating along with him and helping him as best as he could, changes his mind, his prejudice about Black people, and comes to accept Jim as a man and as a close friend as well.”

55 Huck Finn “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells a story about the United States before the Civil War, around 1850, when the great Mississippi Valley was still being settled.

56 Huck Finn “Here lies an America, with its great national faults, full of violence and even cruelty, yet still retaining the virtues of ‘some simplicity, some innocence, some peace.’

57 Huck Finn “Here is a ‘hymn’ to that ante bellum America, the moral values of which vanished with the war. The machine and the worship of money were on their way, but the river-god, with its ‘sunlight, space, uncrowded time, stillness, and danger,’ had not been forgotten.”

58 Huck Finn “Twain scrutinizes that vanished South not as the realm of delight and splendor but as a land brutalized by the white man and cursed with negro slavery.”

59 Huck Finn “At every river bend lurk the violence and coarseness of white civilization; there are thirteen corpses in the novel and a plethora of cheating, hypocrisy, imposture, quarreling, oppression.”

60 Huck Finn “Always the river is the refuge from the insanities of so-called civilization.”

61 Huck Finn “The Mississippi is the awesome symbol of the ceaseless current of life and time, always bearing boon and blight, the comforting familiar and the dread arcane, upon its changing surface.”

62 Huck Finn “The boat upon the eternal waters is the individual psyche floating upon the stream of life and consciousness.”

63 Huck Finn “Huck Finn is a veritable recreation of living models. Huck, his father, Jim, the swindlers (the Duke and the Dauphin), Colonel Sherburn and the drunkard Boggs—all these characters had prototypes in real life.

64 Huck Finn “… Serious problems are being discussed through the narration of a little illiterate boy. The fact of the wilderness juxtaposed with civilization, the people half wild and half civilized, many of whom are coarse, vulgar, and brutal,

65 Huck Finn “such as the loafers of the town of Brickville, amusing themselves by torturing animals—pouring kerosene on dogs and setting them on fire,

66 Huck Finn “democratic citizens quickly changed into violent mobs, ready to take the law into their own hands and lynch people, or to seize people and pour hot tar over them and ride them out of town on a rail,

67 Huck Finn “and the fact of brutal slavery and of human beings—the Blacks—being sold in the market places like animals

68 Huck Finn “the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud shown in all its senseless, sickening perversion of a code of ‘honor,’

69 Huck Finn “the poignant portrayal of swindlers which was a common sight in the South then--

70 Huck Finn “all these and many other incidents are depicted in true-to-life detail as the background against which Huck Finn’s awareness of good and evil develops.”

71 版權聲明 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 4 “He was brought up in the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River.” 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁132。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 6 “He was successively a printer’s apprentice, a tramp printer, a silver miner, ……and a frontier journalist in Nevada and California.”

72 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 10 抨擊當時八國聯軍侵略中國及火燒圓明園，宣示其反帝國主義立場。 王安琪譯注，《赫克歷險記》（台北：聯經出版社，2012），頁57。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 12 Whitman was the first wholly ‘American’ poet in his jettisoning of the Old World verse tradition……in disregarding the Old World prose tradition. Martin S. Day , A handbook of American literature: a comprehensive study from colonial times to the present day (St. Lucia, Q. : University of Queensland Press, 1975), p.162.

73 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 13 … the Twain realism springs…especially from the living experience of the informal,…… make-it-up-as-you-go-along American Midwesterner. Martin S. Day , A handbook of American literature: a comprehensive study from colonial times to the present day (St. Lucia, Q. : University of Queensland Press, 1975), p.162. 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 14 For the first time Twain made the authentic American idiom and the “just folks” American attitude into significant literature.

74 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 16 [Twain] 常被稱為 “the American Dickens”……因為他們的文字風格相像，……還有某些作品的情節與內涵互相對應。 王安琪譯注，《赫克歷險記》（台北：聯經出版社，2012），頁97。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 17 Innocents Abroad (1869), Twain’s guffawing chronicle of his European travels, ……toward Old World culture. Martin S. Day , A handbook of American literature: a comprehensive study from colonial times to the present day (St. Lucia, Q. : University of Queensland Press, 1975), p.162.

75 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 18 In writing about childhood experiences, ……and the sense of loss when childhood is gone. 童明，《美國文學史》（北京：外語教學與研究出版社，2002），頁148。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 21 書中的諷刺 “屬於一種『文化批判』或『意識型態批判』，……假正義之名的行暴虐之實、滿口仁義道德的喪盡天良。 王安琪譯注，《赫克歷險記》（台北：聯經出版社，2012），頁126。

76 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 24 Localism: “Midwest America is trumpeted as the only right and proper norm; anything failing to conform to it is derided as ludicrously inferior. Martin S. Day , A handbook of American literature: a comprehensive study from colonial times to the present day (St. Lucia, Q. : University of Queensland Press, 1975), p.162. 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 25 Twain and Henry Adams proved the two most rigorous critics of those distressing times ……industrialized society. Martin S. Day , A handbook of American literature: a comprehensive study from colonial times to the present day (St. Lucia, Q. : University of Queensland Press, 1975), p

77 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 26 Twain in his very lack of intellectual depth spoke to the common man in his own language, sounding a perfervid plea for justice and humanity. Martin S. Day , A handbook of American literature: a comprehensive study from colonial times to the present day (St. Lucia, Q. : University of Queensland Press, 1975), p.163. 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 27 Multitudes of Americans found in Twain no high-falutin litterateur …… and exasperations, their own fond dreams and hopes.

78 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 28 “He felt that a novelist must not try to generalize about a nation……and that is one book. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁134。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 29 “In time, he and his brethren will report to you the life and the people of the whole nation……the speech of the people,

79 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 30 and not anywhere else can these be had……. to which he did his best to contribute his share. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁134。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 32 One of Mark Twain’s significant contributions to American literature ……in the literary history of the country. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁138。

80 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 33 “Sherwood Anderson took his cue from Mark Twain and became……a serious way of presenting reality. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁138。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 34 “Anderson was a for a while Hemingway’s mentor in the colloquial style.

81 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 35 Ernest Hemingway was the direct descendant of Mark Twain……of and improvement upon Twain’s style. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁138。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 38 In modern and recent poetry there is a conversational element……and even in T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

82 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 39 Mark Twain drew heavily form his own rich fund of knowledge of people and places……in the building of novels is personal experience. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁134。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 40 His usable past was mostly related to the Mississippi and the West which incidentally became his major theme

83 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 41 Life on the Mississippi was such a truthful description that Howells……from his fresh memory of his boyhood in the West. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁134。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 46 Ernest Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from" Huck Finn, and hailed it as "the best book we've had" WIKIPEDIA: 瀏覽日期: 2014/06/07

84 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 48 “A classic is ……nobody wants to read.” WIKIPEDIA: 瀏覽日期: 2014/06/09 “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Brainy Quote: 50 Admirably suited……in a society that alienates him. Martin S. Day , A handbook of American literature: a comprehensive study from colonial times to the present day (St. Lucia, Q. : University of Queensland Press, 1975), p.166. 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。

85 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 51 敘事者不論是第一或第三人稱，幾乎都是閱歷豐富、博學多聞，文筆優雅的上層社會菁英人士。 王安琪譯注，《赫克歷險記》（台北：聯經出版社，2012），頁81。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 52 大膽啟用這樣一個十四歲的半文盲化外小子作為敘事者，用各式俚俗方言說故事，就是美國文壇一大革命。

86 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 53 「暴露成人世界的種種缺失：正經八百、道貌岸然、自相矛盾，……發揮『童言無忌』模糊焦點的作用，解除讀者武裝防衛心理」。 王安琪譯注，《赫克歷險記》（台北：聯經出版社，2012），頁81。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 54 The book relates the story of the escape of Jim from slavery and, …..and comes to accept Jim as a man and as a close friend as well. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁135。

87 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 55 “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells a story about the United States……when the great Mississippi Valley was still being settled. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁135。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 56 “Here lies an America, with its great national faults,…… some innocence, some peace.’

88 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 57 Here is a ‘hymn’ to that ante bellum America, ……‘sunlight, space, uncrowded time, stillness, and danger,’ had not been forgotten. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁135。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 58 Twain scrutinizes that vanished South not as the realm of delight and splendor but as a land brutalized by the white man and cursed with negro slavery. Martin S. Day , A handbook of American literature: a comprehensive study from colonial times to the present day (St. Lucia, Q. : University of Queensland Press, 1975), p.167.

89 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 59 At every river bend lurk the violence and coarseness of white civilization;…… hypocrisy, imposture, quarreling, oppression. Martin S. Day , A handbook of American literature: a comprehensive study from colonial times to the present day (St. Lucia, Q. : University of Queensland Press, 1975), p.167. 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 60 Always the river is the refuge from the insanities of so-called civilization.

90 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 63 “Huck Finn is a veritable recreation of living models……all these characters had prototypes in real life. 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁136。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 64 “… Serious problems are being discussed through the narration of a little illiterate boy……many of whom are coarse, vulgar, and brutal,

91 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 65 “such as the loafers of the town of Brickville, amusing themselves by torturing animals—pouring kerosene on dogs and setting them on fire, 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁136。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 66 “democratic citizens quickly changed into violent mobs, ready to take the law……pour hot tar over them and ride them out of town on a rail,

92 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 67 “and the fact of brutal slavery and of human beings—the Blacks—being sold in the market places like animals 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁136。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 68 “the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud shown in all its senseless, sickening perversion of a code of ‘honor,’

93 頁碼 作品 版權圖示 來源/作者 69 “the poignant portrayal of swindlers which was a common sight in the South then-- 常耀信，《美國文學簡史》（天津：南開大學出版社，2003），頁136。 依據著作權法第46、52、65條合理使用。 70 all these and many other incidents are depicted in true-to-life detail……Huck Finn’s awareness of good and evil develops.