Bibliography
Feb. 18th, 2007 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
It has been taking me forever to read this, so I finally set aside half an hour to polish to off on Friday. Which was good, as I was starting to get a bit fed up of it. The premise is that a chap from 19th century Connecticut, who is a dab hand at all things practical and technical like making iron and blowing things up, not to mention running telegraph and telephone lines, mysteriously gets transposed back into 6th century England, the period of King Arthur and Merlin and knight errantry and so forth. Hank Morgan, for it is he, essentially decides that he is going to have a good old go at bringing 19th century modernity into the 6th, and so manages (by an amazing recollection of when there was a solar eclipse due) to make himself the right-hand man of King Arthur, pull Merlin into disrepute, and generally tries to hurry the society along a bit, despite the opposition of the church and the inbuilt servitute of the people themselves. This all comes to naught when Morgan is in France when the whole Arthur/Lancelot/Guinevere/Mordred saga; the church gets things back under its control, there's a really horrid final battle in which Morgan kills off all knights still alive with a powerful electric fence, and finally somehow Merlin pulls a spell over Morgan that sends him to sleep until the present day. The narrator, having met Morgan in the present and invited him to tell his story, has been reading all this in manuscript form; when he has finished, he goes into the room Morgan is asleep in, only to see him draw his final breath.
It's a fabulous bit of story-telling, and I can see why it tends to be popular with younger people - as a combination of knights/armour and so forth with good old practical hand-on-erry, I'm certain I would have adored it when I was a bit younger. However, cynic's eyeglasses now pervade my reading. For a start, the constant attacks on the church are deeply irritating. Alright, Morgan wishes to replace the established church with the Protestant church, or his own denomination, and make it non-compulsory, but the whole 'church as a grinding force against progress' is rather overdone. True of this period, yes. Accurate in the 19th century? Perhaps not. There's also a very fierce critique of slavery in action; Morgan and King Arthur, in disguise, at one point get pulled into a slave chain gang, and are nearly hanged when their master is murdered (until the timely appearance of 500 brave and bold knights on bicycles). The experience obviously is designed to show precisely how icky slavery is. Although the 13th Amendment finally ended slavery in the US in 1865, and the book was published in 1889, there's still clearly a rhetoric that needs working out in the literature of the period, and it is somewhat heavy-handed. Equally, there's a huge chip on the shoulder about the character of the Englishman (happy to be ruled by a monarch with no obvious merit) and the American (upright, freedom loving, independent sorts) which gets a bit wearing after a while.
That aside - there are some interesting elements going on here. The first is the characterisation of Morgan as completely prosaic - he is concerned purely with the practical, the doing, the getting on with things and technology. He's got no time for what one might consider the elegances or the literary aspects of King Arthur's court - and yet is completely surprised when King Arthur, in disguise as a peasant, behaves just as nobly in the house of a family dying of smallpox as when he was at court. It's also mildly entertaining to watch Morgan's language move from the brisk, straightforward Yankee vocabulary to a more flowery and ornate register the longer he stays in the company of the court. The other great interest is the nature of illusion and magic. It's made explicitly clear throughout that magic is bunkum. All of Merlin's attempts at magic fail mightily. The mysterious veil that's supposed to make Sir Sagramor invisible to his enemy but visible to everyone else doesn't work, as Morgan sees him well enough to make a great deal of pretending not to see him; the enchanted maidens are just pigs; the dried up well is dried up because of fallen masonry rather than the wrath of God. Yet Merlin is still able to cast a spell over Morgan to make him sleep until the age he is from arrives. Never resolved and most curious.
I really wish I'd read this earlier, but at this stage the style is somewhat leaden and a bit OTT for me, I'm afraid.
It has been taking me forever to read this, so I finally set aside half an hour to polish to off on Friday. Which was good, as I was starting to get a bit fed up of it. The premise is that a chap from 19th century Connecticut, who is a dab hand at all things practical and technical like making iron and blowing things up, not to mention running telegraph and telephone lines, mysteriously gets transposed back into 6th century England, the period of King Arthur and Merlin and knight errantry and so forth. Hank Morgan, for it is he, essentially decides that he is going to have a good old go at bringing 19th century modernity into the 6th, and so manages (by an amazing recollection of when there was a solar eclipse due) to make himself the right-hand man of King Arthur, pull Merlin into disrepute, and generally tries to hurry the society along a bit, despite the opposition of the church and the inbuilt servitute of the people themselves. This all comes to naught when Morgan is in France when the whole Arthur/Lancelot/Guinevere/Mordred saga; the church gets things back under its control, there's a really horrid final battle in which Morgan kills off all knights still alive with a powerful electric fence, and finally somehow Merlin pulls a spell over Morgan that sends him to sleep until the present day. The narrator, having met Morgan in the present and invited him to tell his story, has been reading all this in manuscript form; when he has finished, he goes into the room Morgan is asleep in, only to see him draw his final breath.
It's a fabulous bit of story-telling, and I can see why it tends to be popular with younger people - as a combination of knights/armour and so forth with good old practical hand-on-erry, I'm certain I would have adored it when I was a bit younger. However, cynic's eyeglasses now pervade my reading. For a start, the constant attacks on the church are deeply irritating. Alright, Morgan wishes to replace the established church with the Protestant church, or his own denomination, and make it non-compulsory, but the whole 'church as a grinding force against progress' is rather overdone. True of this period, yes. Accurate in the 19th century? Perhaps not. There's also a very fierce critique of slavery in action; Morgan and King Arthur, in disguise, at one point get pulled into a slave chain gang, and are nearly hanged when their master is murdered (until the timely appearance of 500 brave and bold knights on bicycles). The experience obviously is designed to show precisely how icky slavery is. Although the 13th Amendment finally ended slavery in the US in 1865, and the book was published in 1889, there's still clearly a rhetoric that needs working out in the literature of the period, and it is somewhat heavy-handed. Equally, there's a huge chip on the shoulder about the character of the Englishman (happy to be ruled by a monarch with no obvious merit) and the American (upright, freedom loving, independent sorts) which gets a bit wearing after a while.
That aside - there are some interesting elements going on here. The first is the characterisation of Morgan as completely prosaic - he is concerned purely with the practical, the doing, the getting on with things and technology. He's got no time for what one might consider the elegances or the literary aspects of King Arthur's court - and yet is completely surprised when King Arthur, in disguise as a peasant, behaves just as nobly in the house of a family dying of smallpox as when he was at court. It's also mildly entertaining to watch Morgan's language move from the brisk, straightforward Yankee vocabulary to a more flowery and ornate register the longer he stays in the company of the court. The other great interest is the nature of illusion and magic. It's made explicitly clear throughout that magic is bunkum. All of Merlin's attempts at magic fail mightily. The mysterious veil that's supposed to make Sir Sagramor invisible to his enemy but visible to everyone else doesn't work, as Morgan sees him well enough to make a great deal of pretending not to see him; the enchanted maidens are just pigs; the dried up well is dried up because of fallen masonry rather than the wrath of God. Yet Merlin is still able to cast a spell over Morgan to make him sleep until the age he is from arrives. Never resolved and most curious.
I really wish I'd read this earlier, but at this stage the style is somewhat leaden and a bit OTT for me, I'm afraid.
