Friday, April 10, 2015

a delicate spider’s web over the face of the watch - Twain gets odd

I made a note on a three page Twain story, “My Watch – An Instructive Little Tale” (1870), that I thought could not be right: “Superb – like Kafka or Walser or Landolfi or Aira.”  Has anybody who wanders by here read Tommaso Landolfi?  He wrote a story where Nikolai Gogol marries a balloon woman.  He had a strange imagination.  So did Twain.  His strangeness is not always visible, maybe rarely visible, and is always concealed behind his jokes and his voice.

I could see it in “My Watch.”  Twain accidentally lets his new watch run down. He “stepped into the chief jeweller’s to set it by the exact time,” but is pulled into a minor repair.

I tried to stop him – tried to make him understand that the watch kept perfect time.  But no; all this human cabbage could see was that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator must be pushed up a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish and beseeched him to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed.

So the watch runs fast, is repaired again, runs slow, is repaired, runs alternately slows and fast, etc.  Each repair is more elaborate and damaging than the next.  The ending is the usual Twain humor column tall tale sort of thing.

The great conceit is nowhere above, but rather in the effect the watch has on its owner.  His life always moves at the pace of the watch.  When it runs fast, “[i]t hurried up house-rent, bills payable, and such things”; when slow “I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner.”  The watch becomes increasingly surreal – I mean like something in a dream sequence: “everything inside would let go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate spider’s web over the face of the watch.”  So those are the two pieces, human time matched to the watch and the watch's surreal independence, that move Twain into rarer imaginative company.

Or I am just noting a story where Twain uses technology as the source of jokes.  Many of the tales that look especially strange to me have a conceit built around technology.  The original 1875 Sketches, New and Old has, you will note, illustrations.  In “Political Economy,” the technology is the lightning rod (see illustration).  The comic conceit of the piece is entirely unrelated (see title, and also jokes about a writer interrupted by a salesman).

The idea is to push the effects of the technology too far, which is the place where some interesting imaginative effects can occur.  Not always, though, as in “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” an overly elaborate story of a romance that occurs entirely over the telephone, invented only a few years earlier, with the man in Maine and the woman in San Francisco – they even marry over the phone –  and here the conceit that maybe does not work is that Twain does not mention the telephone at all for fifteen pages from the end, but rather has Alonzo set his watch for three pages to let the reader know either that he is insane or that the person he is speaking too is in a different time zone.  I had to go to the Stolen White Elephant collection to find this curiosity that reaches for a parable of higher interest but keeps getting tangled in its own wires.  Still pretty odd, if not odd like Tommaso Landolfi.

9 comments:

  1. Interesting! In my forthcoming reading of Twain/Clemens, I hope to comes across his literary influences. The Bible, I know, is huge. But, I wonder, what other works were in his head.

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  2. Postscript: I wonder if Twain is becoming time-bound because of the author's contexts. The author was a product of his time, but is he relevant to our time?

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  3. twain was mostly influenced by his early experiences on the riverbank of the mississippi, talking and chortling with old timers who loved tall tales with a philosophical point. that kind of laid back old timey conservative pragmatic spirit that has found it's greatest exponent in the famed liar's club of various locales. it's possible to see this attitude gradually changing as clemens ages, becoming more sarcastic and bitter as time progresses

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  4. @RT: relevant to our time, or to our new Apple Watch?

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  5. As readers of Wuthering Expectations know, and perhaps regret, I love tracing influences, and the fact is that I do not really know how to do that with Twain. Aside form some obvious boyhood reading, it certainly seems like it is mostly a sub-literary world that he absorbed so brilliantly - all of the great storytelling, tall tales, and lies he heard on steamboats and in Nevada saloons. Yeah, the "old timers." Plus, all of the cliches and cant of the newspaper trade.

    Real comedians are always a bit of a mystery. A lot of this shorter stuff is time-bound, definitely, but then there are lines, passages, and entire pieces that are still plenty funny. Maybe even relevant. We still have plenty of morally "improving" literature worthy of mockery, even if it has changed somewhat from Twain's day.

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  6. nnyhav - Exactly! We still wear watches and use the telephone. Do we ever. Someone should update that watch story for the Computer Age.

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  7. Did Twain ever talk about his influences? I don't now. "1601" shows that he read the Elizabethans; he knew enough German to translate "Slovenly Peter"; his attacks on religion were inspired by Paine and Ingersoll. My guess is that he was steeped in Shakespeare and the Bible, like everyone else at the time, and probably read more contemporary books and journalism than classics. I'm curious, though.

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  8. How did "know" lose its "k"? Please imagine it there.

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  9. I don't know either. Your guesses sound right to me.

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