A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

So let's be clear--A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is not Mark Twain's best.  In terms of medieval pastiches, Twain's The Prince and the Pauper is far more witty, skillful, and successful in poking at aristocratic pretensions--not to mention it's just a better-told story.

Yankee also suffers from leaning far to heavy on the "tell" end of "show-vs-tell," as well as poorly drawn bare-sketches of characters, pedestrian prose, inconsistent tone, a meandering, hap-hazard story-line,  too easy of satirical targets (serious, the barbaric Feudal system was hardly a much-loved American institution in need of being taken down a peg--shoot, Cervantes was already poking fun at knightly romances in Don Quixote clear back in 1605), over-reliance on astronomical coincidences (i.e. the eclipse), credibility-stretching faith in the ability of a factory foreman to innovate all 19th-century technology from scratch, heavy-handed preachiness, utter lack of introspection, too much self-satisfied smugness in American awesomeness, and swarming historical anachronisms (Britain wouldn't have been called England in the 6th century, the Tower of London wasn't started till the 11th, Castle Warwick not till the 10th, Arthur would've spoken Gaelic, not English, which didn't even exist as an understandable language till the 15th, the droite de seigneur may not have ever even existed outside literature, etc) that betray a lack of basic research into the era on Twain's part, which undermines his credibility.

Also, the novel made me never want to ever read Malory's La Morte d'Arthur, which is quoted liberally throughout.  Sheesh, what a soul-crushingly boring block of prose!


Now, I've read defenses of this novel, that Twain's purpose was to poke holes in the pretenses of the antebellum Southern Aristocrats he knew so well, who based their sense of chivalry and justifications for slavery in the romantic visions of an idealized Feudal Europe that never actually existed.  But again, I think Twain had already sustained this assault on Aristocratic pretentions much more effectively in The Prince and the Pauper.

Now, one might then argue that Pauper was perhaps too subtle in its attacks on aristocracy, and the more direct satire of Yankee was required to make his point clear.  But if his purpose was to attack the South, why not just attack the South directly instead of going side-ways through Medieval England?  And in fact, Twain had already done this through Huckleberry Finn. In Connecticut Yankee Twain is no longer firing on all cylinders.

That all having been said, however,  Yankee is still Mark Twain.  Mark Twain is like Pizza--even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.  Despite my frustrations, I still read the whole thing, and even found myself turning the pages more quickly as the book built up to its climax.

In fact, that's just the thing--in the book's closing chapters, one gets a sense for what this book could've been, if Twain could only have been bothered to quit hammering at his Feudal satire so tiresomely.

For the novel ends, you see, with Arthur dead in the civil war sparked by Guinevere's dalliances with Lancelot, and our Yankee finds all of England turned against him by an edict from the Catholic Church.  30,000 knights in armor charge his position, and he and his motley crew of 52 failed-Republicans destroy the whole of them with mines, electric-fences, and gattling-guns.  The battle is actually an unmitigated massacre on the part of the knights.

Yet there is no smug joy in victory here--there is only acknowledgment of the despair and horridness that comes with such a slaughter, and the emptiness of a win that keeps them trapped among walls of rotting bodies.

Yet more than knights have die that day--all hopes and dreams of establishing a modern Democracy right there in 6th-century Britain are crushed by the Edict, with the sad realization that over a thousand years will pass before another chance will arise, and that Britain is doomed to make all the same mistakes again in that slow and painful march to freedom.

That is, there is a sense of fatalism, despair, and futility running through the end of this novel.  All victories are hallow, all wars are unjust, all heroes are fallen.  Homer's Iliad was already saying the same thing 3,000 years ago, and in a strange way, Twain's Yankee, while mocking the whole rest of epic conventions, has still here preserved the same sense of melancholy that permeates the best of these epics.

That's what this novel could've been, you see--a meditation on not only what was false in Medieval epic, but also all that was true.  These epic poets may have been wrong about the Romantic aspects, but they were dead right in their acknowledgement of the injustice of the world and the fickleness of fate and fallen-state of man.  If we read these ancient epics and find these knights romantic, then we've missed the point; but if we read these epics to understand how they understood the same sadness that we feel, then perhaps that was the point all along.  Twain (and Cervantes) perhaps attack not a genre, but a misreading of the genre.

And then the epilogue itself!  Yankee's framing device is the author is reading a manuscript given him by a mysterious American visiting Castle Warwick.  A spell from Merlin sent him sleeping for 1,300 years, only to arise again in our present day (Merlin, upon gleefully completing the only successful spell of his career, is promptly killed on an electric fence).  The author, upon completing the manuscript, beholds the mysterious American on his death-bed, and in visions cries out for his wife and child from the sixth-century that he sees himself finally reuniting with.

For some reason, though I found the novel as a whole average at best, that final scene deeply moved me, and I've been trying to pin-point why.  I mean, we hardly met his wife over the course of the novel!  Twain was too busy in his endless, tedious task of parodying the Dark Ages to show how a man might in fact set down new roots, try and find a new life, in the ancient past. 

In a way, this novel could've been a Kafka-esque meditation on the capriciousness of fate and strange punishments meted out by a seemingly indifferent Universe.  Why does he get a wife only to lose her?  Why is he sent back in time 1,300 years if he can't change anything?  Why do all his most noble plans and benevolent intentions fail so totally?  How does it feel for a man once second only to a King to be betrayed so completely, and forgotten by history so thoroughly?  How might that break a man?  How might that make him long for the only true love he's ever really known?

Skirting around the edges of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a far more interesting book than the one we got.  Twain buries this more interesting book under endless layers of easy satire and tiresome parody, but even he can't keep it completely buried.  Like the Yankee who did finally re-arise in the 19th century to have his story told at last,  this far more interesting novel on the human condition cannot stay completely buried--it does finally peak out in the end, and does not let you walk away from the book without pondering your mortality and the love alone that matters after all things fail.