After having finished this tale, I do not feel any more resolved one way or another. After Margret and Father Peter got sorted, there seemed to be just more incidents of Satan's interference in the course of events. Each trip, each event only emphasized the smallness of humanity. It only made human beings seem more and more like to the insects that Satan keeps comparing them to. It really is a very dim tale. I cannot help but wonder about Mark Twain after having read this. Does he endorse this view of humanity or is he dramatizing and romanticizing it?
I think the most interesting aspect of this tale is the way Mark Twain defines and uses the "Moral Sense." Contrary to what the reader may be inclined to think, Satan talks about the ability to judge right from wrong in a decidedly negative way. Moral Sense, for Satan, explains the cruelty in life, the confusion, the hate, the bad ends that people make for themselves and one another. I think that, apart from presenting this argument in possibly the most morbid way EVER, Twain is making "good judgment" relative to a particular person, time or place. In this way, Twain is troubling the notion of the existence of a (capitalized) Moral Sense; there are only moral senses. Twain takes a bleak view of this relativity and, through Satan, shows that the absence of an absolute Truth of morality must mean that there is no morality at all, that humanity is doomed no matter what sort of judgment a person uses.
I do not believe in any absolute truths; there are some things that are true in my mind, and others that are not. I think there are very few things that can be true for every member of humanity because, as Mark Twain says, training is everything. However, I do not know how such a morbid view of this sort of relativity came into being! I do not believe the philosophy on life that Twain is advertising. I do not buy into it. I think it comes from a selfish, jaded place.
On the other hand, I liked the creativity of the piece and found it engaging. I think it will be a good while before I ever want to read it again, though. It is so depressing!
Along the lines of depressing strangeness, below is a clip from a clay-animation kid show about "The Mysterious Stranger." It is pretty disturbing; it shows the scene from the beginning where Satan makes the tiny clay people and then smashes them like flies when they become annoying.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree with you about the philosophy Mark Twain presents in this story is from a very jaded place. It's almost hard for me to believe it was written by the same person who wrote "The adventures of Tom Sawyer" and some of the other stories we have read.
ReplyDeleteAs for this clay animation clip, Satan is so creepy the way his head was just that mask floating around and the voice was even worse. The whole thing was creepy. I think it might actually give me nightmares...
It really is such a dark story, but I just can't bring myself to add it to Twain's bibliography because it's not fully Mark Twain! Who's not to say that if Twain had actually written and finished this piece that it wouldn't still be this dark and twisty, but I think I'm going to read the "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger" manuscript or book (whatever it is!) and see what a true blue Twain version would have been like.
ReplyDeleteThis story is by far the darkest piece we have read that has Twain's name on it. However, like Lisa pointed out, it's hard to credit Twain to this because he never finished it.
ReplyDeleteI posted that clay animation clip as well and it is SOOO creepy. If you have seen the other clips, I think it is just the old school clay and the voices that they use that make it to eery. And, why was Satan depicted as a character with the mask floating around? I just don't get it.