Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (New York, NY, Barnes and Noble Books: 2005); originally published 1889.
There are certain books that slumber for decades in hardbound editions on millions of American shelves without ever getting picked up and read; Twain's 1889 work of speculative fiction, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, must surely belong to that category. Like most such acknowledged 19th century "classics," it ought to be picked up more often, however—because its contents may surprise you.
Here is the sort of book we thought we "knew," without having read it. We are familiar with it from countless references in our popular culture. If asked to describe its contents, we would no doubt depict it as a time travel fantasy and adventure story, appropriate for all ages. We would also imagine that it must be "funny"—the work of one of the country's great humorists.
And it is all of those things, in places. But would one have expected that the vast majority of its insides would be given over to extended political rants—of surprising warmth and vehemence—against the evils of monarchical government? That it would contain a vicious satire on the idea of an established church? That a whole chapter is devoted to propagandizing against the evils of tariffs and protectionist trade policies?
Whatever else the book is, then, it is not what we thought it was. It therefore repays reading, as do many of the novels we imagine to be most familiar from prior centuries. We take it up, and it is at once familiar yet unrecognizable. Intimately part of our cultural lore; yet simultaneously strange and alien. The book wears this dual aspect: which stems, perhaps, from its origins.
Twain advertised this book door-to-door, apparently, and the novel betrays the circumstance that it was designed to appeal to a mass audience. Yet it was written by an author with a decided streak of Swiftian misanthropy. Hence the book's fundamental ambivalence, which keeps it interesting and surprising.
There are unmistakable signs of padding in the novel, it must be admitted: the earmarks, no doubt, of the need to convince the average American homeowner that if they signed up for a volume in the mail, they would be getting their money's worth. There is also the book's at times cloyingly ingratiating attitude toward its audience, which has the ring of a sales pitch.
This role of salesman brings out Twain's worst tendencies as an author. On the one hand, there is—poking through and unmistakable, in patches in the novel—a profound anger. The novel is full of scorching satire and bile. Twain allows himself to wax with terrible fury, even to the point where he often forgets to try to make it funny (where are the "jokes" we might expect from America's greatest humorist?; we often go for long pages without them).
Yet all of this rage is carefully controlled. And we begin to suspect, particularly early on in the novel, that the targets of this bile have been chosen programmatically, to flatter Twain's readers. We have extended jeremiads on the evils of slavery and despotism, to be sure—but it is largely slavery as practiced by European monarchs and the feudal aristocracy, not as it existed in the United States just decades before this book's publication.
Likewise, is there something subversive about Twain's extended railing against the Church? There would be—except that we recall that most of Twain's fury is directed against the Catholic Church specifically, and his novel therefore caters in part to the xenophobic prejudices of a majority-Protestant nation, which was undergoing one of its periodic nativist convulsions at the time of the book's publication.
One is therefore almost ready to write the novel off, after its first fifty pages or so, as a propagandistic tract catering to the self-love of an arrogant young nation, delighted to hear scurrilous stories told on its Old World forbears, but meanwhile curiously blind to its own quite similar faults. There is something truly insufferable and chauvinistic, say, about the Connecticut Yankee using his powers in 6th century Britain to set up a nation of 19th century American-style Sunday Schools.
And there is something eerie about reading page after page of a 19th century text denouncing mob violence, "ignorance," "superstition," despotism, slavery, etc.—as practiced in another land long ago—without finding much mention of the fact that Twain's own society invented "lynch law," that the United States was still a slave society for much of Twain's life, and that racist pogroms, mob violence, and public murders would remain prevalent in the United States until well into the next century.
One is almost ready to dismiss the book, therefore, as sheer bombastic jingoism and nationalistic self-flattery: until one gets deeper into the novel, and the fleeting moments of self-awareness finally start to appear. Twain seemingly can't quite help himself—and this goes much to the salvation of the novel. Twain/Clemens had the impulses of a genuine satirist, the true Swiftian misanthrope, and because of this—as if in spite of himself—he eventually comes to turn its weapons (if only in brief passages, quickly hidden) against the sins of his own nation and century.
And one's awareness that Twain has gone for so many pages without stating the obvious, and indeed with deliberately trying to stifle one's doubts in order to cater to an American mass readership, makes it all the more powerful when he finally lets his guard down. One has the sense of a great tension released, and the emotional impact of it is overpowering.
This effect makes those handful of passages in Connecticut Yankee specifically denouncing American slavery—late as they come in the novel—some of the most effective and powerful I've read anywhere: far more powerful than they would be if one had the sense Twain always wanted to write them, rather than being eruptions of a genuine sardonic fury that the author cannot keep contained.
In brief, Twain is at his best when he is genuinely angry. And while much of his apparent wrath in this novel is mere show—he is working himself up against some other country's system of government, or some vulnerable recent immigrant group's church of preference, to cater to the priors of his own society and class—there are moments when he lets the dog off the leash; and in so doing so, his satiric fury and bile become genuinely subversive.
An American mass readership might cheer as a matter of course, for instance, long pages of denunciations of royal heads of state and European aristocracies—as such rants flatter, by implication, the young nation's own political institutions and democratic prejudices. Yet, would they be entirely comfortable reading on in Twain's diatribe, and would they still be cheering when he gets to the long passage proclaiming the French "Reign of Terror" to be nothing compared to the centuries-long reign of terror inflicted by the privileged against the masses through poverty and oppression? When he preaches the inefficacy of "goody-goody talk and moral suasion" compared to violent revolution against injustice?
Would they still be cheering when Twain finally gets around to acknowledging indirectly that slavery—so vehemently denounced in 6th century Britain—existed in their American country and within their lifetimes too? When he points out that in his own childhood, free Black people in the United States were still periodically kidnapped and impressed into slavery—as happens to our main character in the slave markets of medieval Britain?
Would they still be cheering when Twain defends trade unions? When he declares that the American republic can only be expected to last for as long as it does not have an established church? (Of course, that last part can be read as still more anti-Catholic propaganda, but it feels timely still, in our present era of creeping Christian nationalism; and it's also worth noting that Twain's defense of Protestant sectarianism does not emerge from any visible theological convictions—but from a desire to have so many competing denominations that they can render each other toothless.)
A Connecticut Yankee, then, for all its apparent catering to American nationalism and bumptious chauvinism, is actually a slyly and subtly subversive book. This is one more of its surprising traits—and yet another reason to take it from the shelf where it has been collecting dust unopened for generations, another "known" and "well-beloved" American classic that we have not even begun to understand.
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p. 15. Twain's introductory note forestalls any criticism of the outrageous anachronisms of his portrayal of the 6th century. Twain seems to attribute centuries of abuses of late-medieval feudalism and early modern absolutism to a dark age society that would have had no knowledge of them, but his note shows he is aware of the fact and is striving for no precise historical veracity. This is a satire on the ancien régime writ large, and must be accepted in that spirit.
p. 91-2. [See the tale of the humorous speaker who appears to bomb with his audience, because they meet his words with crickets, only to be told enthusiastically afterward that it was the funniest thing they ever heard, and it was all they could do to keep from laughing out loud in church.] The astounding thing about this anecdote, which Twain deplores as ancient and hoary at the time of this writing, is that I could swear I heard it repeated as if it were fresh when I was in the ministry. I may even have heard it attributed to Twain—by someone who missed that Twain repeats it only in order to convey his utter loathing and contempt for the story as a piece of pseudo-humor. Worse still, I fear I may have even told the anecdote myself. In my defense, I told it only because it actually happened to me. Perhaps the tale managed to become hoary in the first place precisely because this sort of thing genuinely happens in New England churches!
p. 147. "why, its pale and noiseless—just ghosts scuffling in a fog." Sic—should be "it's."
p. 316. After countless pages of denunciations of European slavery, this is the first passage in which Twain acknowledges and similarly deplores the practice of slavery in the United States during the earlier part of his lifetime. As said above, the effect is powerful, coming as it does as a sort of uncorking of suppressed thoughts and emotions that had been bottled up for all the pages up to this point.
p. 345-6. Here comes an extended illustration of the principles of real wages and "money illusion." This is what I mean about there being unexpected content in this novel!
p. 367-8. Another powerful example occurs here of Twain finally allowing himself to acknowledge that the same institutions and vile laws he denounces in the European ancien régime also existed in the American slave society of his own time.
p. 376. "shelter andsustenence [sic]"
p. 459. Hank's brutal massacre of the flower of English chivalry, by means of electrified fences and gatling guns, at the story's unexpectedly bitter conclusion, may be another example perhaps of where Twain/Clemens is letting the dog of his own dark instincts off the leash of his advertiser's countervailing instincts to placate a mass audience. (The editorial introduction to this Barnes and Noble edition calls attention to the odd circumstance that contemporary reviewers entirely failed to mention the novel's bitter ending, even though it stands out vividly to us as modern readers for both its pathos and its gruesomeness.)
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