1. Quite relevant to my argument is Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Orvell argues that between 188o and 194o in

America a transformation took place from a "realist" culture that valued imitation and illusion to a "modernist" culture that valued ''authenticity," rejecting the "sham" of mimesis and attempting to create works of art that, instead of being replications, would be "real things" themselves. I am arguing, differently, that a version of this tension is present in Mark Twain's work from a very early date. I am inclined, in fact, to agree with Mark Seltzer's argument in Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), that generally, in "the realist project," there existed a goal of "perfect referentiality: bodies and matter writing themselves " (108-9)—a kind of "real thing" tantamount to Orvell's modernist authenticity.

2. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1955; rpt. New York: Greenwood, 1969), 364.

3. Howard Horwitz, in By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 99-100, 117, argues quite differently that the "semiotics of the river" in Life on the Mississippi "amount to a critique of empiricism" because the signs on the water's surface seem unreliable. But they are radically unreliable only to the uninitiated cub, not to Bixby, his tutor. When Bixby stresses the shape of the river "that's in your head , and never mind the one that's before your eyes," and asserts that this is learned through "instinct," he is not articulating an epistemology of "romance," as Horwitz argues, that somehow bypasses the visible. Instead, in a process I shall make clearer in my next chapter, the pilot's way of knowing the river "unconsciously," "naturally," and instinctually by amassing observations of it is akin in its automatism not only to the machinery of a tear, but also to the mechanical, automatic registration of a bluff reef on the water's surface.

4. Linda Williams, in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), discusses the way in which late-nineteenth-century scientific discourse on the mechanisms of the human body treated the female body, as "science" joined the drive for visibility and knowledge to prurience, and joined fetishism and voyeurism to "the positivist quest for the truth of visible phenomena" (46). Williams notes the centrality (as in Jean-Martin Charcot's research) of watching unconscious movements, involuntary spasms, and hysterical convulsions for such male glimpses into "hidden" truths of female bodies; see, especially, chaps. 1 and 2. Also germane, of course, and important for Williams's discussion, is Michel Foucault's attention to confession, exposure, the pursuit of truth, and the penetration and control of bodies, in The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978).

5. Charles S. Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce , ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 98-119.

6. Useful for my argument here was Rosalind Krauss's discussion of the pursuit in modernist art of indexical signs—traces, imprints, rubbings, "clues"—as "uncoded," more immediate, and therefore a security against

the loss of confidence in representation; see Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 1" and "Notes on the Index: Part 2," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 196-219.

7. Clemens read George Sumner Weaver's Lectures on Mental Science According to the Philosophy of Phrenology . See Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals , ed. Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson, 3 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), I, 11-16. The fullest account of Mark Twain's lifelong interest in (and doubts about) phrenology is Alan Gribben, "Mark Twain, Phrenology, and the 'Temperaments': A Study of Pseudoscientific Influence," American Quarterly 24 (1972): 45-68. For a powerfully persuasive discussion of the interweaving of phrenology, physiognomy, and photography into a cluster of indexical signs useful for "assessing the character of strangers in the dangerous and congested spaces of the nineteenth-century city," providing "intelligence" about them, and documenting them, see Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (1986): 3-64. Phrenology and physiognomy, and Twain's interest generally in the legibility of character, are obviously related to an anxiety about and a desire to control seemingly troublesome "others''—in other words, to formations of discipline and surveillance.

8. Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck and Tom , 152-242.

9. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , 19.

10. Gillman, Dark Twins , 88-95; Michael Rogin, "Francis Galton and Mark Twain: The Natal Autograph in Pudd'nhead Wilson ," in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture , ed. Gillman and Robinson, 78-81; and David R. Sewell, Mark Twain's Languages: Discourse, Dialogue, and Linguistic Variety (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 124-25.

11. Francis Galton, Finger Prints (1892; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1965), 16-18.

12. See Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), which argues that Lavater's theory "permeated nineteenth-century literature" (xvii) and had a particularly strong hold on European and American culture through the 1860s. Also see Patrizia Magli, "The Face and the Soul," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two , ed. Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 86-127. A broadranging history of physiognomy and of beliefs that the body registers the soul, Magli nonetheless helpfully provides a background for nineteenthcentury physiognomy, discusses such crucial figures as Lavater and Charles le Brun, and suggests the social anxieties—about charting, classifying, and controlling "the other"—that provided such a powerful impetus for this "science."

13. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective , 412.

14. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , 50. Alan Gribben, in Mark Twain's Library , notes that Twain made "numerous pencil

marks" on the pages of Darwin's book that dealt with habit and reflex action (I, 175).

15. Twain articulates his interest in and concern over this confusion explicitly in What Is Man , where the Old Man defines instinct as "inherited habit" and concludes that the term "confuses us; for as a rule it applies to habits and impulses which had a far-off origin in thought, and now and then breaks the rule and applies itself to habits which can hardly claim a thought-origin" (190).

16. James, The Principles of Psychology . On Mark Twain and James, see Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , I, 351, and Gillman, Dark Twins , 154.

17. Cap'n Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective: A Light Tragedy , in Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques , 216-311.

18. The argument about deaf-mute sign language as natural or conventional had long occupied theorists of gesture and language. See James R. Knowlson, "The Idea of Gesture as a Universal Language in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries," Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (October-December 1965): 496-97. Also see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 88-91.

19. Forrest G. Robinson's In Bad Faith , 31, 37-39, attends to the control of "face" in Tom Sawyer in connection with the "dynamics of deception" Robinson is tracing—a concern quite different from mine.

20. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 245, and II, 633.

21. Twain refers to the composite photograph in an 1895 interview, quoted in Blair and Fischer, "Explanatory Notes," Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , 371. Galton's practice of and ideas about composite photographs receive a full discussion in Sekula, "The Body and the Archive"; also see Orvell, The Real Thing , 89-94.

22. Quoted in Orvell, The Real Thing , 124.

23. Twain to Howells, November 17, 1879, Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 279.

24. Quoted in Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain , 226.

25. Mark Twain's Letters , ed. Paine, I, 371, 373.

26. Mark Twain Speaking , 167-68.

27. Love Letters , 116.

28. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 279.

29. Roland Barthes's ideas in his essay "The Grain of the Voice" may help focus these nineteenth-century antecedents ( Image, Music, Text , trans. Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977]). Barthes writes: "The 'grain' is the body in the voice as it sings"—that is, the membranous fleshiness of the vocal cords, the throat, etc. The "grain" is also the body in "the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs" (188). Barthes echoes Twain not only in this connection between gesture and voice; he also similarly discovers a sexuality in the voice—derived from the body, and specifically from its metaphoric phalluses, ''the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose" (183).

30. Elaine Scarry, Introduction, Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons , ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), xxi.