Traveling in Picaresque Company: Mark Twain, the Picaros, and the Art of Interruption

Abstract

Mark Twain’s first book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), tends to be neglected by modern readers, despite remaining his most popular book throughout his lifetime. Prominent Twain scholars Robert Gray Bruce and Hamlin Hill once belittled it as a “patchwork scissors-and-paste job.” The Mark Twain Project, over fifty years after its founding, has yet to publish a critical edition of Innocents. Like most of Twain’s early writings, Innocents tends to be seen as unduly interruptive, utterly unclassifiable, and valuable only when read as a primitive predecessor to his novels. I propose that to appreciate it historically and literarily, we must first venture further back in the Western canon to the classic Spanish picaresque. Innocents, I argue, can be read as what Alexander Blackburn terms the “symbolic picaresque.” In short, it constitutes “travel-picaresque” in the modal, rather than generic, sense. I focus my study on interruption, which both covers up and stripteases divides between author and narrator, writer and reader, and fact and fiction. In the picaresque, interruptions constitute art, but in Innocents, they are cursorily dismissed as defects. In my comparison of these works, I examine three types of interruption — asides, tangents, and interpolations — with the goal of redeeming interruption as art and Innocents itself as a meaningful, relevant text for readers today.