Healing the Nation by Squires L. Ashley;

Author:Squires, L. Ashley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

ENVIRONMENT AND THE HISTORICAL OBSERVER

As I stated earlier, “Eddypus” tends to sow doubt about the seriousness of its apocalyptic pronouncements and the reliability of the characters who make them. To read this story the way one might read 1984 would probably be a mistake. Twain is likely quite sincere in his many indictments of American hypocrisy and imperialistic greed, but at the center of this vision of history as “a tidal wave of accumulated accidents” is the idea that none of us really know what we are doing, that none of us are capable of judging the historical ramifications of our actions. And Twain included himself in that evaluation, as he would essentially have had to do in order to remain consistent. The device of projecting the problems of the nineteenth century into the distant past and future could be seen as a way of seeking enough distance to get perspective on them. But using characters like Adam and Eve and the anonymous narrator of “Eddypus”—all commenting on their own historical moment—simply collapses that distance and obliterates any perspective one might get, as the author remains committed to having each character speak from his or her own quite blinkered vantage point. At the moment when Twain was writing about Christian Science, Twain was also clearly preoccupied not only with his worries about imperialism and demagoguery but with doubt about the individual’s ability to accurately assess or solve the true problems of his or her historical moment. In fact, the stories suggest that even “progressive” innovations could wind up being the sources of humanity’s annihilation.

Twain was deeply pessimistic about the progressive potential of “reason” and was far more convinced that “environment” was the critical force in shaping human decisions. “Environment” in Christian Science is similar to what Hank Morgan, protagonist of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, describes as “training”:

Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clan or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.56

This preceding disquisition on the burdens of “training” is delivered from the dungeons of Morgan le Fay, where the protagonist bears witness to her arbitrary cruelty. He believes ignorance and “training” to be the source of not only her moral blindness but that of her entire society. Morgan, who, once again, has been transported from nineteenth-century Connecticut to Arthurian England, aspires to be one of those few who

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