The Mysterious Stranger by Samuel Clemens
Gramercy, 448pp, ISBN 978-0517150733
Samuel Clemens, as you know, wrote amazingly well in a variety of formats, the collective result of which was the creation and refinement of American satire into an level of craftsmanship unseen since. Best known for delivering Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer to their rightful place as classical American novels, Clemens also wrote far better fare that would be impossible to include as required grade-school reading, since there would scarcely be time to clarify the most prominent ideas before recess and math intruded. The Mysterious Stranger is one of these, containing Clemens' dissection of the lofty image humanity has for itself as well as an irrefutable dismissal of “Moral Sense,” a topic he also eviscerates throughout his Letters From The Earth essays.
Will Vinton Studios, the stop-motion
studio in Portland Oregon responsible for the California Raisins,
released a film called The Adventures of Mark Twain in 1985,
telling five or six of Clemens' shorter stories framed by Huck Finn,
Tom Sawyer, and Becky Thatcher stowing away for Claymation-Twain's
airship death march into the tail of Halley's Comet. The entire film
is amazing, introducing our Crystal Pepsi-sodden brains to Clemens in
an friendly, tangential way and visually representing multiple
stunning and complete worlds in intricate detail, using what can
kindly be called a clumsy medium. Vinton only included a very small
section of the beginning of The Mysterious Stranger in the
film, but this five or so minutes is the reason contemporaries of
mine remember the movie, as it is a sharp visual and emotional turn
from the consistently lighter tone, presenting some very challenging
ideas and indelible imagery. I highly suggest you see it, as it
caught my young attention immediately and made me revisit Clemens in
a new light.
Go find it. You'll remember.
Begun in 1898 and never finished, The
Mysterious Stranger was posthumously published in a handful of
slightly differing forms, all of which contained Satan, the most
important character of the story. Satan (who is either the one and
only Satan, or perhaps Satan's nephew, depending one which edition
you come across) acts as a clearinghouse spokesman for Clemens' later
views on morality and humanity by way of his interaction with three
schoolchildren in 16th century Austria. Wasting no time,
Satan's first appearance is a grand adventure for the children as
they populate a tiny village with clay people and animals given
temporary life. The children's wonder gives way to stunned shock as
Satan begins explaining the folly of right and wrong, killing the
clay townspeople individually before creating miniature storms and
earthquakes to kill them altogether.
Clemens' arguments on the Moral Sense
are very convincing, as they do not require external support or
permission and are not muddied by idealism or vanity. As in Letters,
much ink is devoted to the dissection of the human race's ego and the
diminished status the race actually holds in the scheme of things,
only temporarily held at bay by our opposable thumbs and inflated
self-opinion. Roughly halfway in, Satan has transported himself and
one of the boys so they might invisibly investigate the torture
chamber of the local jail. While there, they witness an accused
heretic being tortured into confession by the driving of splinters
into the nailbeds of his fingers. Afterward, the boy rails against
the brutality of the event, to which Clemens' Satan replies:
“No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word … it is your paltry race – always lying, always claiming virtues it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals which alone possess them. No brute ever does a cruel thing – that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong, for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it – only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his.”
"Satire's great and all, but what I really want to do is typeset."
Clemens was not a friend to religion,
and The Mysterious Stranger is a stronghold of straightforward
criticism and ridicule to the provincial attitudes and behavior
religion fosters. The majority of Stranger is an account of
the fervor the townspeople work themselves into accusing each other
of witchcraft and heresy, reaching fever pitch with the town turning
on its own preacher and burning women at the stake. Satan's ability
to change the order of people's lives is explored, along with what it
means to die at the proper time and presenting an almost Calvinist
view of predestination without the pesky salvation or damnation that
comes with it. Page after page, in fact, dismisses the binomial
proposition of good and evil as a vile excretion of human Moral
Sense, a deluded and useless byproduct of a pointless and pompous
machine.
