Introduction

Performance is a capacious term. Using it to mark out a territory, I started researching this study by looking at the relations between Mark Twain's writings and popular performances—the wide range of shows that dominated nineteenth-century entertainments, from Yankee monologuists and blackface minstrels to Shakespearian actors, from P. T. Barnum to lecturing mesmerists and mediums. I finish the book with a more abstract, and at first glance more disparate, set of concerns in Twain's fiction and in his culture: performance and representation, the relation of performance to masculinity and race, the ways in which psychologies of "acting" and "character" redefine each other, the expressiveness of the body, and the workings in public spectacles and street theater of impulses toward social order and disorder. Performance has remained the rubric, even as its meanings have proliferated, thanks largely to the richness of Mark Twain's "acts."

Although in this shift of concerns the book became less about Mark Twain and his "influences," and more about his culture, a fundamental aim remained of changing our understanding of Twain by teasing out and multiplying the meanings for him of "performance." Always obviously pertinent to his writing and his persona, performance has nonetheless been equated with Twain's theatricality and usually disparaged or discounted. In the most influential tradition—including the work of Bernard DeVoto, Edgar Branch, Henry Nash Smith, John C. Gerber, Warner Berthoff, Dwight Macdonald, and, most recently, Guy Cardwell—performance is persistently contrasted to literary realism, with Twain engaged in a drama between the two, either periodically (and all too often) surrendering his abilities at discovering and interrogating reality to the allure of showmanship and rendition, or ultimately outgrowing comically theatrical caricatures.^[1] My first impulse was, instead, to treat Twain's theatricality seriously, following, in a way, James M. Cox, for whom this theatricality was equivalent to Twain's genius for imaginative play, or Constance Rourke, who saw in that theatricality an exemplification of American humor.^[2] I concluded, eventually, that Mark

Twain had already done this, not only repeatedly and seriously investigating his own theatricality, but also shrewdly exploring, even destabilizing, the meanings of theatricality and realism.

As in many of the doublings that gave provisional order to Twain's world, the oppositions between staging and realization, posing and expression, broke down; the terms intermingled. Like Chang and Eng, the freakshow Siamese twins who kept surfacing in Twain's writing, mimicry and mimesis, the performative and the informative, were joined at the hip. The questions of whether "acting naturally" is an oxymoron and whether "realism" and "performance" define each other through their opposition, or might have some other relation, are rehearsed in different guises throughout Twain's writing. Performance as artifice turns into performance as machinelike production; acting blends into automatism; unconscious obtuseness reveals itself as mask. William Dean Howells's admiring declaration that Twain was both "dramatic and unconscious" (while too comfortable with the paradox) identified the conundrum whose everreceding answer Twain pursued.^[3]

One effect of such intermingling on the course of my investigation was a refocusing of Twain's pursuit of fidelity in representation through the lens of performance. For, to Twain, performance meant much more than theatricality, posing, mimicry, and "effect." It also meant unconscious slips of the body and tongue, reflexes of gesture and thought, mediumship, identification—all of which became the test cases, the very criteria for judging what he called the "authentic" and the "genuine" in expression and representation. Or, at least, such dimensions of performance existed as the goals of Twain's realism until he scrutinized them as symptoms and unraveled their mechanisms, discovering unreliability in them that rivaled the displacements of theatricality, or watching the dynamics of identification swallow up both medium and ghost. Now, when narrower definitions of realism are used to cast doubts on whether Mark Twain's writings in fact belong in that category, I want to affirm that Twain was indeed a realist, partly in his grasping for the "genuine," partly in his persistent sense that it was out of reach. To group Twain's concerns with performance and representation, "sincerity" and "authenticity," under the term realism may be inappropriate to the extent that they do not exactly coincide with the more specific meanings the term realism had for Howells, its main promoter.^[4] But Mark Twain

did question and try out theories of representation, both enacting and doubting ideas about resemblance and reference in ways, I would suggest, that must make us revise any notions of him as unsophisticated about these matters.

Twain always managed admirably to get himself into trouble, and because his troubles were so interwoven with the troubles of his culture, he can remind us why questions of performance and representation—in whose difficulties his thinking was entangled from the start—matter so much beyond the aesthetic sphere. My concern to rethink Twain as a realist looks consistently to the ways his culture and society conditioned his writing; his aims and terms of representation drew their existence and urgency from cultural contradictions. In his writing, as in his (dominant) culture, sentimentality could be the extreme of inauthenticity, while "femininely" private pathos could be the extreme of sincerity. Racial blackness could quite obviously be reduced to a set of performed markers—dialect, mumbo jumbo, boasting—but could also be a basis for undoing, and seemingly redeeming, the artifices and inhibitions of middle-class gentility. The vernacular of artisans, apprentices, and raftsmen could signify unglamorized and unmediated reality as well as embody workingclass, insolent braggadocio and posing. Mark Twain undertakes his investigation of performance through such terms, and therefore what was at stake was not simply the distinction between a tear-jerk and catharsis or a mimic's turn and an emotional outpour. Enacted in categories that mattered to Twain, performance and its analysis shaped white, male, middle-class identity, and thereby worked at defining the identities of others. To a great extent for Twain, I will argue, the ease and variability with which the ordering and hierarchizing terms of theatricality and authenticity could be filled with meanings of gender, race, and class posed both a threat and a freedom, an imperative to reconceive social reality and an opportunity to do so.

Twain's explorations and confusions of masks and faces, posturings and unveilings, therefore always had social and cultural resonances. Seeing these confusions, as I have seen them, has been made possible, clearly enough, by the contemporary currents in literary studies that have invited the performative and rhetorical powers of language to overrun reference and mimesis—at the same time that they have tried to unfix any stability in the divisions between act

and essence, rhetoric and realism. Part of my aim has been to let these critical developments help us see performance and its effects in Twain and his writing in new ways, but to prevent them from obscuring his investments in reference and essence. Also necessary for my version of Mark Twain, however, have been new social histories, especially of popular culture, and newly historicizing literary studies, some of which, like the work of Forrest G. Robinson and Susan Gillman, have focused on Twain.^[5] The course of this book is to some degree a symptom of the kind of questions raised by this turn to history, culture, and society: To what extent is Mark Twain America's fool because America made him thus, providing the conditions of celebrity and entertainment, spectacle and spectatorship, of which he is both epiphenomenon and epitome? To what extent is he the genius of nineteenth-century popular performance? But the overarching aim is to bring together Twain as a literary writer and Twain as a public performer, and to explore at the same time the ways in which he was a theorist of representation and a careful critic and analyst of cultural performance.

My situating Mark Twain's writing, particularly his earlier writing, among such intensely popular entertainments as minstrelsy, music hall, and the burgeoning middle-class theater has much to do with making him a part, again, of a complex culture—by reasserting his popularity against a tradition of critical effort that has tried to distinguish his work from "low" culture, save him for literature, and, ultimately, place him in a pantheon of canonized texts. Franklin Rogers's study of Twain's "burlesque patterns," though indispensable, exemplifies this tendency of a certain period in Twain criticism in its focus on belletristic burlesques of novels and its minimizing of the vast supply of popular theatrical burlesques that Twain clearly enough drew upon.^[6] To find, instead, interest and urgency in Twain's popularity, in his kinship to the popular theater, is to think of him as a catalyst and tool of social meaning—if a genius, then one of "cultural work," whose ambitions were realized because they meshed with those of his culture(s). The first chapters of this study concentrate on meanings of Twain's performances enabled by and intertwined with an understanding of their milieux.

Twain's earlier writings—the pieces Edgar Branch characterized as the slapstick turns of a "literary acrobat," and even James Cox dismissed as "acts by a comedian intent on fulfilling expectations he

imagines his audience to have" (24)—perhaps paradoxically gain in interest and respect when they are considered not as intrinsically interesting but as inextricable from their performative contexts and occasions. Chapter 1, "Acting Like a Man," treats them as complicated performances of white masculinity, multileveled because they were driven by heterogeneous needs and audiences. Within the male subcultures they emerged from, these writings served generally to define white masculinity and particularly to rehearse rituals of aggression, mockery, exclusion, and status. Parodic performances of femininity and race had concrete and local purposes among men. But Mark Twain also performed these acts between classes and between local and mass audiences, and, to a great extent, he displayed the strutting and theatricality within the male subculture as a spectacle for middle-class America. A bourgeois bohemian on the boundaries of his parent culture, Twain opened the proscenium of his performances to a mass audience that could watch his experiments with masculinity and watch him perform male versions of both class and race that spoke to the fracturing Victorian constellation of domesticity, manly "character," Anglo-Saxonism, and gentility.

Twain's performances, like the general landscape of theatrical entertainment, made graphically visible the divisions between local and mass cultures, lowbrow and highbrow tastes, and "homosocial" and heterosocial groupings. Coinciding with Twain's rise to fame were the divisions Lawrence Levine has reminded us of in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America .^[7] The distinctions within a theater—between the pit, where Clemens's 1856 persona, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, ate peanuts and hollered and cursed, and the boxes, from which, eleven years later, an exaggeratedly genteel Twain looked down on the "interesting" and rowdy Bowery boys—became, at least in larger cities, distinctions between theaters.^[8] Portions of the respectable middle classes became reconciled to the theater as a respectable theater emerged, divorcing itself from the mainly male amusements of low variety, minstrelsy, and burlesque, and doing its best to attract a new audience, including bourgeois women, that supposedly wanted unoffending shows and disciplined spectatorship.^[9] Always so public, theater helped clarify social and cultural divides—lending itself to categorical simplicity—so that distinctions in class, neighborhood, theaters, gender, taste, and kinds of performance

came into conceptual alignment. Performance styles, as a result, connoted a range of conflicts, and became media in which to articulate and act out these conflicts. Twain's adoption of styles from minstrelsy, burlesque, melodeons (music halls), and saloon entertainments carried for middle-class America a high-voltage charge of subversion, threat, and fascination.

The "deadpan style" that was so much a part of Twain's initial popularity provides a special case, I argue in chapter 2, because it served as both battleground and mediator for the social and cultural conflicts that performance styles had come to signify. At the same time that Twain's deadpan brought him national recognition—in the 186os and 1870s—a similar deadpan style of seemingly unconscious humor came to dominate the middle-class stage in the performances of such comedians as Joseph Jefferson III, E. A. Sothern, and John T. Raymond. Derived from Yankee and minstrel caricatures, the deadpan style in these performances was transformed from a familiar role on burlesque and variety stages to a vehicle in the middle-class theater of an unconscious humor that exuded pathos and expression. Poised between working-class, masculine entertainment and the increasingly legitimate middle-class stage, retaining some of the mask and bluff of performances in the male subculture at the same time that it became a medium for the middle-class theater's spectacle of interiority, the deadpan style during these years engaged and negotiated socially resonant chasms of taste. The ways in which Twain's deadpan illuminates and is illuminated by the social and cultural operations of deadpan stage performances—as they both crystallized and mediated conflicts—situate his work as an act among others in a very large, national theater.

The middle of this book, chapters 3, 4, and 5, takes a different approach, joining Twain's fictions of the 1870s through the 1890s with contemporaneous theories of acting, gestural expression, and mediumship in order to spotlight Twain as an astute interrogator of representation in performance—though, as always, with cultural and social, never narrowly aesthetic, interests in view. Influenced by new developments in psychology and physiology, Twain's conceptions of performance led him directly to the effects on representation of gender, race, and class. Issues of "character" and cross-identification are played out repeatedly in his novels, as a clustering of these rehearsals shows: Twain's most famous character, Huck Finn, cannot

identify with or successfully play the role of a girl, although he can lose his identity to any number of white-boy roles; King Arthur cannot be drilled into a peasant role, cannot empathize with his subjects' suffering—and then, suddenly, momentarily he can; the character given a white identity in Pudd'nhead Wilson can nonetheless immediately and unexpectedly adopt a black one, and his mother can gradually work herself into the role of his unrelated slave. From these cases emerge theories about representing others, the kinds of selves best suited to represent other selves, the conscious and unconscious processes that might enable identification with and representation of another, and the ways these matters are inflected by one's color, status, and sex.

Mark Twain's thinking and the theories of acting and emotional expression he drew upon were infused with late-nineteenth-century psychology. Especially crucial were reconceptions of "character" as fluid rather than stable, multileveled rather than unitary, subject to alterations from the unconscious and "autosuggestion." Also important was the materialist impulse to root psychology in the body, to characterize certain mental operations and most emotional expressions as physiological, electrical, or reflexive. The tendency in acting theory to identify involuntary and unconscious bodily expressions of emotion as markers of credibility, and therefore to privilege identification with a role over disciplined and controlled performance, had insistent echoes in Twain's writing. Identification, unconscious expression, and automatisms of both thought and gesture became badges of immediacy and authenticity in representation. Even more extremely, gestural expression as a reflexive response caused by an electrical nervous-system circuit became a kind of model for all expression and representation. The physical nature of involuntary self-betrayal by the body paralleled the Twainian version of mediumship as "mental telegraphy," an unconscious electrical transmission. And such mediumship paralleled the workings of his own psychic system when he served as an unconscious "amanuensis" for the stories of his characters.

But these conceptions complicated Twain's investigation of representation in performance and produced a constellation of larger, unavoidable concerns. The recommendation of identification and mediumship in actorly representation raised the specter of the toomalleable artistic self, which led Twain repeatedly to stage a conflict

between effective actors and stable identities (a central issue in chapter 3, on acting and representation). The privileging of physical transmission in emotional expression and intrapsychic processes led to disillusionment due to noise in the circuit, the very density of physical material that enabled "direct" transmission ultimately derailing its reliability (a focus of chapter 4, on the expressive body). And investing unconsciousness and the body as guarantors of expressive immediacy also privileged passivity and forced Twain to grapple with gendered dimensions of representation, especially a femininity ascribed to both mediumship and novel writing (a problem investigated most fully in chapter 5, on masculinity and mediumship). Twain's various efforts, in other words, to grasp stability in meaning—to allay the social anxiety about how reliably others represented themselves, and the existential doubt about the trustworthiness of one's own self-definitions—got pushed to their points of breakdown and failure. And the failures in representation became the symptoms of an irremediable worry about identifying and understanding others.

Although these chapters make forays into nineteenth-century psychology, physics, and physiology, it is my contention that Twain's interests in performance and expression are consistently associated in his thinking and writing with the theater. The centrality of theater for Twain is obvious enough in his early interests and journalism; newspaper writing invariably involved reporting on the "manly" pursuits of the theater and the "sporting life," and much of Twain's work, especially for the San Francisco Call and the Dramatic Chronicle , consisted of theater reviewing. It is his later claim, in the autobiography, that has to be countered—that, after his days as a reporter in San Francisco, when he had to go to six theaters a night, seven nights a week, every day of the year, the mere sight of a theater gave him the "dry gripes."^[10] His continued playgoing after the 1860s (Alan Gribben lists over fifty plays Twain saw—or probably saw, judging by notebook references or ticket purchases),^[11] his history of playwriting, and his tendency to write roles for actors he knew belie the memory. He joked in 1899 that he had written 415 plays and had not been able to get even one accepted;^[12] in reality, he left behind well over a dozen dramatic pieces, if one counts fragments and aborted efforts, one of which—The Gilded Age , or Colonel Sellers (1874), as the play came to be known—was very popular and lucrative, and repeatedly led Twain to value playwriting over novel writing.^[13]

As Peter Brooks, Nina Auerbach, Martin Meisel, and a host of Dickens scholars have amply demonstrated, nineteenth-century theater and novels were imbued with each other, novelists in particular writing for an audience in tune with stage conventions, echoing theatrical values of melodrama, burlesque, variety, spectacle, "situation," and "effect," and rehearsing a preoccupation with performance and role-playing.^[14] For Mark Twain this is especially true, though curiously unexplored. He worked on plays while he worked on novels; conceived of The Prince and the Pauper and, possibly, Tom Sawyer first as plays and eventually turned them back into plays; and permitted a host of other authors, who saw theater in his writing, to dramatize his novels.^[15] Widely perceived as a medium for actors rather than playwrights, nineteenth-century theater reinforced Twain's attention to performance—his own writerly performance and the performances of his characters. Unlike the company of still-canonized nineteenth-century literati who wrote unsuccessfully for the theater and then disparaged it, Twain was not predisposed to think of theater as a necessarily demeaning realization of an author's conception, as an unfortunate materialization of the ideal, or as inevitably involving the solicitation of a concrete audience that turned creation into marketing. An actor's "living, breathing, feeling pictures," he wrote, could convey reality—and teach morality.^[16] And the immediacy possible in theatrical performance could stand as a model for his own literary performances.

When the mature Twain does evaluate and diagnose the derailments of representation in performance, as I argue in chapter 6, he can do so in a way sharply attuned to the dissimulative effects of power. As he became himself a cultural icon whose performances benefited from a new, media-created sphere of magnified performance and spectacle, and whose acts exercised powerful cultural force, he also became a self-reflective analyst of national theater and mass-cultural sensation. He directed his attention partly to the ways in which cultural pedagogies involved subterfuges, and the ways in which collective meanings and theatrical representations of social order might involve dramatizations of power specializing in reemphases, displacements, refocalizations, and communal amnesias. Twain understood that power, be it that of an imperial state or of an entertainer, could masquerade in the guise of realistic fidelity. Part of his critique and disillusionment, however, belonged specifically to a

late-nineteenth-century moment that looked more and more pessimistically on the possibilities of realistic representation and increasingly felt a modern dissociation. Drawing on earlier distinctions between imagination and sense, "symbol" and "show," but also tied to emerging, and now familiar, discourses about "mass culture" as degenerative and "cornmodification" as an evacuation of significance, his grim view of modern spectacle traced a continuum from alibis and ruses to meaninglessness. If theatricality in A Connecticut Yankee could involve fetishism and Hank Morgan's spectacles could involve disavowal, their products could also be radically unmoored, available for sale but not for representation.

The middle of this book, then, focuses on Twain's efforts to secure fidelity of representation in performance, whereas chapter 6 stresses Twain's doubts. I argue in my last chapter that the later fictions rehearse, and search for resolutions to, the tensions Twain had elaborated within performance. In Joan of Arc he posits and tests the possibilities of sincerity in public; of pure and unequivocal signification in a spectacle; of femininely mediumistic representation in a national, public theater; and of divine ideas performed in female flesh. The figure of the transvestite crystallizes this dynamic, pushing Joan of Arc beyond such gendered oppositions at the same time that they are preserved. The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts , in a related way, overlay the opposition between spirit and matter, or between mind and body—an opposition that organized and bedeviled thinking at various cultural levels, from popular science to psychological esoterica—with distinctions between genders and conceptions of "materialization" in performative "effects." The very final gestures in these writings toward a monism of mind attempt to finesse problems of both gender identity and theatrical representation, although to Mark Twain's credit the route to this end is convoluted and unsure.

Sir Henry Irving, the English tragedian, reportedly told Twain, "You made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession. You would have made even a greater actor than a writer."^[17] But Twain's friend William Dean Howells knew better—that Twain already was a "great and finished actor" in his platform performances and more generally was "realistic," yet "essentially histrionic."^[18] If acting and theater could serve as means to comprehend Twain's performances, however, their public topography could also serve as terms for measuring. Howells's likening one "sort of fiction" to "the circus and the

variety theatre in show-business," a fiction for "the masses" rather than for "the most cultivated classes," could rebound in Twain's famous declaration that he "never cared what became of the cultured classes; they could go to the theatre and the opera; they had no use for me and the melodeon."^[19] But the inscription on the literary act of cultural distinction could also be confounded in that performative moment when the line between theatrical flourish and expressive gesture is impossible to trace. Twain traced and retraced that line, defining and redefining theatricality and realism, conceiving and reconceiving the cultural and social distinctions arrayed for him along that divide.

One of the earliest pieces the young Samuel Clemens wrote described a performance that interwove distinctions between theatricality and realism, the ideal and the material, and the pedagogical and the grotesque with concerns of brow level, masculinity, and show business. It exemplified from an early moment, that is, the way that Twain's concern for representation through performance intersected with larger cultural questions. I offer a reading and a contextualization of it here, along with some thoughts on method and historicization, in order to provide a touchstone for the ensemble of concerns in this book and a pattern for what is to follow.

In "Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse" (1852), the narrator, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, recounts the following tale, supposedly relayed from a friend.^[20] Not long ago, one of the town's business firms exhibited a show titled "Bonaparte crossing the Rhine." Somewhat mysterious—none of its customers would talk about it afterwards—it attracted one of the town's adolescents, Jim C——, who, surrounded by a crowd of other boys, plunked down five cents for the show. Abram Curts, the exhibitor, then solemnly pulled out "the bony part of a hog's leg" and "a piece of meat skin"—"properly speaking, the hog's rind"—and began "slowly passing the piece of bone back and forth across the skin," in a lewd joke that he nonetheless gravely maintained was "a very apt illustration of that noted event in history, 'Napoleon crossing the Rhine.'" The crowd laughed and laughed—at the joking replacement of Bonaparte and Rhine with bony part and rind, and undoubtedly at the simulation of sexual intercourse, the old back-and-forth—but also at the swindled Jim, who, far from joining in the fun, set his face in "the most woe-begone

look," and in a far from jovial state of "mental abstraction," strode out of the house, spitting out the words "Sold!—cheap—as—dirt!"

Crystallized in this short sketch are several interlocking tensions: between high cultural history and low cultural joke, fidelity in representation and the very different order of puns and homophones, an idealized distant reality and a present grotesque one, the ordered propriety of pedagogy and the profanity of meat and genitals, naïveté and an initiated masculine sexuality, the depiction of a performance and the enactment of one. The sketch invites us to see how Clemens managed in his performance to implicate concerns of status, culture, and gender; the lowness here, for example, of culture and caste is related to a certain kind of masculinity and sexuality. But it also, as we shall see, emphasizes contests—not only between kinds of masculinity and kinds of culture, or between texts of history and trickery, but also between serious and parodic ways of reading—in ways that address and question assumptions of realistic representation.

I would like, in fact, to use young Clemens's sketch as an instructive example for reading Mark Twain—an example that invites us to believe in realistic representation, but not to do so unwarily; that gives both reference and material reality their due, but that is attuned to the performative turns—on stage, in writing, in discourse, in social interactions—that subvert aims and claims to faithful representation. Part of the lure of the showman Curts's Napoleonic history, the narrator Blab's story, and Clemens's sketch is access to an actual reality, historical or social. (The editors of these Early Tales cite the sketch as evidence of Clemens's "impulse to write realistic fiction" and declare it "based four-square on a local event and real people" [78].) But the overbearing consciousness of the story is that of the potential for trickery, misrepresentation, and displacement, of the likelihood that the very means of representation will decisively bar access to its object. If, as readers and scholars, we are uncomfortably situated between believing enough in reference to posit historical contexts for the texts we study and disbelieving in the reliability of such contexts as they prove themselves to be tricky constructions, then this mediation in Clemens's sketch between history and ruse is an aid. Constructing and looking for understanding in historical contexts, in social relations, in enactments of domination and subordi-

nation are now critical imperatives—and so are a wiliness and misgiving about such contextualization as a rhetorical strategy.^[21]

As if to underscore the paradox that writing and performance include both history and ruse, the ruse itself in Clemens's sketch is historically specific, and resonated, in Hannibal in 1852, with larger cultural developments. The ruse refers. This may not at first seem obvious, since the sketch can indeed be seen as a limning of rather ahistorical vicissitudes of representation; that is, writing and performance here are slippery, presenting (at least to Jim) the "fact" as lure and the trick as the final truth. Implicit in the title is the ambiguity of whether "Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse" voices a protest about history wrongly turned into a ruse or presents an equation suggesting that any "exhibition," any such holding forth or theatrical display, might involve a swindle. The latter imputation may be strengthened by the implication that, in the opposition here between denotation and joke, it is the joke—which does not exist without the laugh—that prevails, because it openly acknowledges the reality of stratagem and exchange. And as denotation is overborne by joke, so an imagined signified of the past (Bonaparte and the Rhine) is overborne by the immediate signifiers in the present (bony part and the rind). The expectation of iconic similarity (which, presumably, is what such exhibitions provide) and of a re-creation of history gives way to the phonetic level of the pun. And whether Jim and the boys want the signified of Napoleon and the Rhine or of penis and orifice, the bone and the meat skin impose, and interpose, themselves. Instead of transports of the imagination or desire, they get a ruse, a joke, a dead hog.

Far from being the eternal uncertainties of representation, however, these vicissitudes of realism and joke, imagination and meat, are inextricable from Mark Twain's historical circumstances. They allude, of course, to shows like those of P.T. Barnum (to whom Clemens referred in print a couple of times in the year before "Ruse" appeared, once by suggesting an edge of hoax to Barnum's paragon of sincerity and transparency, Jenny Lind).^[22] The connection exists not only because Clemens's sketch is similarly occupied with hoaxing, but also because Barnum's museum (very famous by 1852) most prominently epitomized the cultural form that joined apparently moral or informative lectures with swindles, and that brought to-

gether what passed for high culture in the eyes of many bourgeois with vulgar theatrical amusement.^[23] "Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse" and Barnum's museum existed as both symptoms and enactments of that larger cultural struggle, focused in popular theatrical entertainment, that established an antagonism between high and low culture—and exacerbated the previous cultural manifestations of class factionalism. "Historical Exhibition," that is, appears to some extent to rest on the separation in entertainment of tragedy and farce, seriousness and vulgar comedy, Shakespeare and minstrelsy, "respectable" middle-class theaters and "low" halls for minstrelsy and seminaked "artistes." For a sharp opposition exists here between the genre of the serious exhibition and that of the rowdy, men-only sex show.

A question of representation, of serious fidelity to another scene, hinges on this cultural divide. For the cultural antagonism appears in this sketch at the expense of the serious lecture, whose various features—gravity, the transmission of information and lesson, the authority of the lecturer, the passivity and receptivity of the auditor—are all pilloried: the show, with "the attractive title of 'Bonaparte crossing the Rhine,'" is supposed to include "a lecture, explaining its points, and giving the history of the piece." This enticement appeals to a desire not only for information, but also for comprehension, for the full grasp that assumes transparency of representation. Curts, "the learned lecturer," pedagogically says to the youths that he hopes "by this show to impress upon your young minds, this valuable piece of history, and illustrate the same in so plain a manner that the silliest lad amongst you will readily comprehend it." His lecture, delivered "deliberately" and "lucidly," caricaturedly combines plainly transmitted history, a clarity of content insured by illustration, and invisibility of form with the passivity of the audience—minds ready to receive a direct impression, and, in the case of Jim, ready "with mouth, eyes and ears wide open."

Then, feature by feature, the lecture and its supposed directness of representation are cancelled. The hog parts obstruct the representational transparency. The lucidity of the lecture turns out to be a mimicry. The pedagogical stance of Curts is replaced by the communal hilarity of the boys, as the respectfulness and obedience of Jim ("Yes, sir," he says at the start to acknowledge his submission) become ridiculous in the new frame supplied by the disrespect of the horny

joke and the guffaws of the gang. Jim's silent, spectatorly role of "seeker after knowledge under difficulties" is rendered completely inappropriate when the situation is recast as one of "general merriment." The conditions of emerging middle-class theatrical entertainment—the newly disciplined and respectful audience, and a realist discounting of performance and the present in favor of supposedly unimpeded expression and representation of the past—are pointedly juxtaposed with the older theatrical conventions of manly rowdiness, irreverent inversion, and performer-audience exchange.^[24]

In other words, the discounting of reference itself in Curts's exhibition relies on reference to a cultural contest—a contest in which the dismantling of supposedly edifying and therefore sanctioned representations apparently operates as a tactic of insubordination. The anti-representational performance, male ritual, punning, and sexual joking serve to weaken any faith in reference; as we shall see, the sketch further undermines such faith by finally presenting its own reportage as a possible joke. Yet the sketch resonates with—and refers to—not only a larger, culturally shaped understanding of tensions between highbrows and lowbrows, but also the social and demographic changes precipitating (and molded by) this cultural understanding.

If this securely grounded "context" is not assuredly available to us, the difficulty ought not to prevent us from discerning in Clemens's sketch glimmers of social structure and strands of the cultural activity that made society intelligible. But to help mediate the divide between the generality of national transformations and the specificity of Clemens's little piece in the Hannibal Journal , consider the more local hierarchies of society and culture in Clemens's home town. Hannibal at the time may have had a population of only around three thousand,^[25] but, Twain later asserted, distinct classes were apparent, "grades of society—people of good family, people of unclassified family, and people of no family. Everybody knew everybody, and was affable to everybody, and nobody put on any visible airs; yet the class lines were quite clearly drawn and the familiar social life of each class was restricted to that class."^[26] These divisions effected similar cultural divides. On one side, men such as Sam Clemens's father promoted lectures and debates through the Hannibal Literary Institute,^[27] and the respectable young men of Hannibal's Murdoch Histrionic Association acted out entertainments presented as "rational amusement and pleasing instruction," entertainments

devoted to "the improvement of themselves in literary taste and elocutionary practice."^[28] While Baptists and Methodists might shun this theater ("Church members did not attend shows out there in those days," Twain recalled),^[29] the thespians' training in taste aimed to distinguish their productions from the more fully profane: such low-culture shows as the river-traveling circuses, blackface minstrels, medicine shows, and showboat variety troupes. It would be important, too, to shun the audiences and hangers-on of these shows, the groups perceived as toughs, drinkers, knife fighters, gamblers, and "mountebanks."^[30]

The cultural contest smoldered hotly enough to bring the Hannibal city government in 1845 to institute penalties for any showman who chose to "exhibit any indecent or lewd book, picture, statute [sic ] or other things, or who shall exhibit or perform any immoral or lewd play or other representation."^[31] "Napoleon crossing the Rhine" would thus fit into a class of entertainments that had to tangle with the law. However, while there was a chasm between these regulating lawmakers and the local youths who periodically terrorized Hannibal by riding up and clown the streets firing their revolvers,^[32] it would be wrong to overemphasize the clarity of the divide or the purity of proper middle-class revulsion. For Sam Clemens attended and was profoundly fascinated by circuses and minstrel shows,^[33] and he, like other middle-class boys and men, had some license to be "a person of low-down tastes from the start, notwithstanding my high birth, and ever ready to forsake the communion of high souls if I could strike anything nearer my grade."^[34] Nor would it be right to stress the novelty of this cultural antagonism, since it obviously partook of more old-fashioned, religion-based hostilities to theater and idleness. Converging in Clemens's sketch, in other words, were live, local tensions fueled by uncertain borders between higher tastes and low-down ones, respectable persons and persons with no respect, past prejudices and new conditions. A preoccupation with these terms, the social order their clarification promised, and the disorder their permeable borders posed, surfaces in "Historical Exhibition."

It is important, obviously, to give the complexities of what we can grasp of Clemens's milieu their due, and in particular to acknowledge the malleabilities of constructions of class, culture, and gender. Clemens could partake of a rough masculinity and a respectable one; he could, as a middle-class male, attend and help define what was

deemed entertainment for "low-down tastes"; he could claim membership in the class repelled by and pledged to control lewd and indecent "representations" as well as in the subculture that fascinatedly consumed them. Among the "contexts" for "Historical Exhibition," that is to say, were interlocking contests , cultural conflicts both internalized and projected, which were complicated in themselves—a matter I illustrate by considering Clemens's sketch, finally, in relation to another text: the report of and response to a burlesque of Shakespeare, performed in Hannibal in 1848 by Dan Rice, probably the most famous circus clown to travel the Mississippi.

"Shakespeare actually was popular entertainment in nineteenth-century America," Lawrence Levine asserts (4); the readiness, for instance, of the duke and the king in Huckleberry Finn to perform both the scene from Romeo and Juliet and the nonsense burlesque of "To be or not to be" rests on common practices and common knowledge of these plays (13). It also rests, Levine argues, on a typical freedom with Shakespearian texts that characterized both serious theater and burlesque in antebellum America—a freedom, however, that was interdicted by America's intellectual elite during the second half of the nineteenth century as Shakespeare was sacralized and annexed as the property of people with "cultivated" taste (90). If, from about mid-century on, middle-class representatives intensified their efforts to distinguish their respectable entertainments from the low shows they sought to regulate (while irreverent male subcultures like that in Clemens's sketch fought back), then the occasion of Dan Rice's performance in Hannibal effectively reproduces the conflict. Billed in Hannibal as "the modern Shakespearian jester," Rice undoubtedly performed one of his usual travesties of Shakespeare, turning the language into nonsensical soliloquies (like the duke's in Huckleberry Finn ) and quoting Shakespeare for incongruous purposes in a free and supposedly "indecent" banter with his audience.^[35] This time his performance was followed by a letter from "A Looker On" to the Hannibal Journal (the paper edited by Sam Clemens's brother Orion). "As to Rice, the 'great Sheakspearian [sic ] clown,'" the writer declared, "we think that the title Sheakspearian blackguard would suit him much better." Rice's low wit and lack of decency, his "dramshop slang" and "sacrilegious tongue" had defiled the beautiful language and sublime ideas of the "immortal 'Bard'" with "moral filth and uncleanliness."^[36] We have here quite obviously a public contest

over the ownership of Shakespeare, one in which "A Looker On" has indeed sacralized the bard and has pitted high culture against the language and tastes of the dramshop.

But also present is the assumption about representation that lies behind this sacralization—that performance of Shakespeare should "realize" his language and ideas with a minimum of interference; the verbal rearrangements typical of the widespread nineteenth-century Shakespeare burlesques, in this view, shamefully cloud the bard. Fidelity in representation appears here as a marker of taste, pitted against the opaque filth of Rice's act. This overlay of a question of representation on a division of taste and class matches a similar alignment in "Historical Exhibition," in which the expectation of mimesis, of the re-creation of the historical event, belongs with the aspiration to a higher level of taste and knowledge, while the defilement of this historically sublime representation with pig body parts and "moral filth and uncleanliness" belongs with lowbrow horseplay and raillery.

Finally, in both instances—the Rice episode and Clemens's story—these issues of representation, brow level, and class intersect with contesting forms of masculinity. Most obviously, there is a contrast here between a more official and respectable manhood and a rowdy one. The first is represented by "A Looker On" and Jim, the isolated individuals here, and it enshrines self-improvement, self-education, quietness, privatism, detachment, and deference. The second is represented by the showmen and their audiences, and it exalts boisterous and disorderly hooliganism, camaraderie, obscenity, tall tales, impudent performance, and rites of male sexuality.^[37] The respectable manhood, which spanned classes but of course had its class associations, is bound to a passive, silent spectatorship that is bound, in turn, to an expectation of immanent meaning. And "A Looker On" (whose alias says much) uses his schema of truth-revelation as a weapon in a contest of manhoods. Though, he writes, he gullibly went to see Dan Rice and his "motley gang of Bacchanalian mountebanks," their effort to dupe and swindle him backfired, because Rice and his troupe "exhibited, or rather exposed themselves" for the low hucksters they were. "Looker," in other words, has gotten revelatory truth out of a performance designed to impede it, and in so doing he has bested the players. In his account, re-

spectable manhood, highbrow and higher-class culture, and exposure of underlying reality prevail.

In Jim C——'s case, a serious absorption and interiority that preclude low-masculine horseplay are stressed throughout, from his beginning state of wide-eyed and passive receptivity to his ending states of "mental abstraction" and "profound reverie, seemingly entirely unconscious of the jeers cast at him by the company." The contrast to the vulgar performance of Curts is so great that one might like to put Jim on the side not only of privatism and interiority, but also of chaste domesticity. The story takes the shape of an initiation into a kind of masculine sexuality that Jim fails, or refuses. One of "the uninitiated," he arrives quite aroused—"gasping and out of breath," ready to throw down his money "in as great a hurry as if life and death depended upon the speed of his movements," and declaring, "I want to see it the worst kind." He is, indeed, in a state of excitement, "so anxious to see the show that he could scarcely stand still." But at the crucial juncture, the climax—when Curts tells his "juvenile audience" to "draw near and give me your attention a moment, for this is the most interesting part of the exhibition," and then proceeds to pass the bone across the rind—the results are laughter from the surrounding boys and humiliation for Jim. Seemingly, Jim sought an initiation only into a sexuality fully sublimated into the pursuit of truth. When confronted with this scene of quite another sexuality and masculinity, he withdraws inside himself, ultimately into "reverie" and "meditations."

It is significant, certainly, that Jim's one moment of retaliation—after the situation of truth seeking has been demolished, clearly replaced only by that of manipulation and conflict—involves angrily calling Curts "nothing but an old swindler." Separating himself from rowdy sexuality, Jim also separates himself from the masculine world of marketplace chicanery, as if his pursuit of realism and truth is foiled just as much by their commercialization as by the hoax itself. The "exhibition," after all, has all the marks of a marketable commodity. Mounted at the store of "the enterprising firm of Curts & Lockwood," it is well publicized (news about it "had been pretty extensively circulated"), and one of its most prominent features is that it costs" 'one dime per head, children half price.' "The transformation of the exhibition into pig parts and a ruse may even serve as an

allegory for the transformation of realism into commodity, and the placement of representation in a world of objects and hustling, where exchange replaces transparency. In recoil, the beaten Jim flees this territory of masculine sexuality and masculine marketplace, of the material present and of exchange. His final comment, "Sold!—cheap—as—dirt!" makes him the object of both exchange and defilement, though "opening his lips" he "ejaculated" these "significant words," as if by expelling the taint of selling and dirt he could preserve an unsullied (domestic? feminine?) interior.

In his well-known "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," Clifford Geertz takes an event that mixes masculine status rivalry and masculine bonding and, laying out its multiple layers of meaning, argues that the event, like a kind of show or theater, provides a "simulation of the social matrix" and "a dramatization of status concerns" (436–37)—representing, interpreting, ordering, and rendering comprehensible the conflicts and hierarchies of everyday life.^[38] "Historical Exhibition" does the same, I would argue, but it also does more than provide the kind of "metacommentary" Geertz thinks symbolic forms articulate about social structure. In addition to dramatizing conflicts between levels of culture, between classes, and between a bourgeois subjectivity and a "low" masculinity, the story offers a further commentary on representation itself, calling its capacities into question. By aligning oppositions between highbrow and lowbrow, the proper middle-class subject of knowledge and vulgar masculine irreverence, the historical sublime and the materiality of the lower bodily stratum, and the transparency of representation and its dismantling, it clarifies relations among levels of culture and society at the same time that it profoundly confuses their ontology—inviting us to think of class and gender as effects of uncertain representation, and to think of representation itself as an uncertain effect of class and gender. If this sketch, as Geertz claims for any cultural text, enables social tensions to be "more exactly perceived," it also, at a level of "metacommentary," undermines the security of our perceptions.

Moreover, while "Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse" may work to order and explain the conflicts of its context, and to some extent can claim the distance such tasks presume, it also is an instance of conflict. If performances, in Geertz's view, can be read as texts, as interpretive stories a culture tells about itself, this text can also be read as a performance, an act within—rather than merely a reflection of—

contending versions of brow level, class, and gender. "Historical Exhibition" displays a heightened, though perhaps tricky, consciousness of itself as a writerly act and of itself as an exchange between a performer and his audience. When W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab begins by saying, "A young friend gives me the following yarn as fact, and if it should turn out to be a double joke, (that is, that he imagined the story to fool me with,) on his own head be the blame," we immediately have to recognize that, as Curts's historical exhibition was a ruse, so is this yarn. The duplication is underscored by the parallel alibis of Curts, that he is "merely an agent" for a "wholesale firm" and not responsible for Jim's dissatisfaction, and Blab, that he is merely a conduit for the story of his young friend. The implication, of course, is that far from being transparent mediums, relayers who take seriously their office of faithful representation, Curts and Blab—and Clemens—are tricksters, each presenting a joke in fact's clothing.

There exists a possibility that the story's readers could be doubles for Jim the dupe. This would require the predisposition to take this "yarn as fact." Given the particular situation of publication—the mischievous Clemens was editing a single issue of the Journal while the serious Orion was in Tennessee—readerly expectations may have run more toward report than joke and hoax. But the place more plausibly carved out for the reader doubles that of the "crowd of eager boys" that follows Jim into the show, an audience that does not have to put down a token of its gullibility and that is saved humiliation by framing Jim, making him bear all the embarrassment, and laughing at him heartily. That a reader could conceivably occupy either place further turns the sketch into a dramatization of opposing subjectivities and their opposing cultures. It also suggests the cultural force of readings themselves: Jim as a reader of realism actively resists the joke, just as the joke can be taken as a subversive "reading" of realistic exhibition; and a reader of Clemens's sketch could take it as truth, though the piece also works as a mocking reading of straight reportage. Because the drift of the sketch, however, is to humiliate Jim, cancel the representation with bone and rind, undermine propriety with raucous masculinity, mock education with gross sexuality, and displace fact with joke, the sketch takes on the character of an act within a cultural struggle. When a performance mimics what it designates, when it enacts what it denotes, the act of representation changes from the invisible to the palpable, and the depiction of soci-

ety transforms into a social act. The performative moves of the "mere" representers—Curts, Blab, and newspaper editor Clemens—prevail, and the sum of the sketch's effects tally on the side of irreverence, burlesque, and communal hilarity, at the cost of serious representation, self-improvement, and privatized subjectivity.

But this was just a beginning skirmish, a moment of competitive performance whose enactments and embodiments set a stage for Twain's repeated rehearsals of the stakes in representation. In a multitude of ways over the course of his career, the fundamental difficulties of representation in performance meshed with concerns over social order, disorder, and change; his concerns as a "realist" in search of reliable expressions of meaning and identity intersected with the uncertainties of situating people by sex, class, and race. And this dynamic connected his double identities as performing artist and cultural critic.