Dream for Dead Bodies

Front matter

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Contents

Acknowledgments

The Original Plotmaker CHAPTER I: Reverse Type CHAPTER 2: The Art of Framing Lies CHAPTER 3: To Have Been Possessed CHAPTER 4: The Great Work Remaining before Us CHAPTER 5: Prescription: Homicide?

CONCLUSION: Dream within a Dream

Chapter I

The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.

— EDGAR ALLAN POE, EUREKA

In the “Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity of unraveling a web which you (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?

—EDGAR ALLAN POE, AUGUST 9, 1846, LETTER TO PHILIP PENDLETON COOKE

Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger manuscripts are a set of three distinct, unfinished novels Twain composed between 1897 and 1908.' The third text in this series of anarchic partial fictions on moral responsibility is No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1902-8). With its references to the growth of the industrial workplace and a burgeoning labor movement that would attempt to sever workers’ “workaday selves” from those selves who must be afforded time for “what we will,’ the third of the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts takes modernity as its subject. It does not flinch from awful spectacles of human oppression and violence, some of them in a workplace Twain ought to have known well: a printer's shop. For many critics, No. 44’s printer's shop and its troublesome crew evoke Twain's well-known financial debacle as a “venture capitalist” for the failed Paige Compositor. Coupled with the Panic of 1893, this ill-fated investment would surely have ruined Twain, had not Standard Oil president H. H. Rogers bailed him out with financial advice. Twain's dream compositor was to have eliminated many of the most difficult jobs of the printer's shop, along with the labor force that performed those jobs. Little wonder, then, that one critic has called the novel Twain's “wish-dream of a supernatural shop” as well as a thesis on “threatened disintegration of personality” in the industrial age (Michelson, Printer’s Devil 210, 220). Following Forrest Robinson's unelaborated but nevertheless intriguing claim that we can describe the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts as “a succession of approaches to the question of human enslavement that are no sooner tried than they are found to be unworkable” (Bad Faith 233), this chapter treats No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger as an exploration of historical contingency and free will. More specifically, this chapter argues that Twain's manuscript experiments with the conventions of adventure detective stories to contend with interracial tensions and anxieties about governance and consent in an industrial age.

By the early twentieth century, Twain had already tinkered with the popular detective novel in its various nineteenth-century incarnations. Michael Denning has observed that “almost uniquely, Twain bridged the gap between the audiences of the cultivated novel and the dime novel” (208). In works such as “The Stolen White Elephant” (1882, written in 1878) and the unfinished “Simon Wheeler, Detective” (written in 1877) there are the bizarre disguises, fiendish villains, and improbable settings that regularly appeared in adventure detective stories. According to Grant Underwood, Twain recognized that in acceptable reproductions of the genre “disbelief [must] not merely be suspended: it had to be forcibly wrenched from one's consciousness’ (61). By the late nineteenth century, however, as the author increasingly abandoned realistic fiction for a blend of pessimistic parable and fantasy that was cynical when it was not utterly dystopic, Twain's attitude toward detective fiction changed drastically. For Twain, whose later writings fixated on“God and the devil, time and space, the origins and status of knowledge, free will, determinism, and what he took to be the inherent perversity of human nature,’ human history remained a major puzzle (Robinson, “Dreams” 454). In this period of his life, argues Underwood, Twain became “a structuralist in his relationship to the detective story,’ inventing narratives “in which the mystery is the condition of man and the detective is a god” (210). In No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger Twain turned to detective fiction to decipher the cosmos.

The magnificent ambitions of No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger make way for Twain's reckless expedition into the American racial imaginary and the irregular tempo of industrial life in the nineteenth century. For this reason, it supplies an expedient point of entry into the ways that texts on the margins of the genre cultivated detective fiction’s devices for their own purposes. Twain's “cosmic” detection could not resemble the concise puzzle mystery that advances “the myth of the necessary chain,’ taking as its only proper solution a single, unassailable “step-by-step path of logico-temporal reconstruction” (Porter 41). If we were to situate No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger within a linear genealogy of the detective genre, we might suspend it loosely between an Edgar Allan Poe and an Agatha Christie. But Twain's is a text that brooks no literary lineage in linear terms. It is anything but automated. In this way, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger resembles dime novel detective fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as ideologically ambivalent a form as the proto-puzzle mystery, with its narrative intemperance and extravagant digressions. With a sprawling chronology, supernatural spectacles, and dramatic shifts in narrative scale and speed, Twain's manuscript wrestles to capture confrontations between labor and industry at the turn of the twentieth century—confrontations whose stakes were further complicated, it must be noted, by racial and ethnic tensions, as corporate bosses calculatingly recruited and manipulated immigrants, all-black convict labor, and African American “scabs” to undermine fragile forms of interracial cooperation and to quash possibilities for collective action. Twain's narrative strains to accommodate the multiple illogics of the shop. Taking the detective genre's tools as its own, it dramatizes how labor impinges on textuality while precipitating racial difference. It struggles to articulate individual and corporate resistance to a new ideology of industrial democracy, which would empower the working classes to think of themselves as consensual participants in a democratized realm of production.

Additionally, in No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, Twain produces a character well suited to negotiate the commotions of an industrial age. While this third Mysterious Stranger manuscript shares a desultory outlook with its two predecessors, the “strangers” of the first two manuscripts, Bruce Michelson argues, were “not sufficiently strange, not temperamentally free enough for the task of ultimate escape, from death, mutability, nature, cultural oppression, human stupidity—and from confinements of an individual self trying to figure all this out” (Printer’s Devil 219). By contrast, the mysterious figure in the third manuscript is so strange as to almost defy definition.’ Twain's formidable rogue, who can crack labor conspiracies, sweet-talk shop bosses, and sometimes act as informant, is charged, in No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, with the task of navigating industrial life.

“No. 44, the mysterious stranger of Twain's third manuscript, bears a strong resemblance to the dime-novel detective. A sharp wit, a physical powerhouse, and a master at disguise, the dime-novel detective is indeed an invention of the industrial world and among the chief personae in many popular literary depictions of American labor disputes. He is not merely the well-known Pinkerton agent who infiltrates the working classes on the company’s payroll, but also appears as a superhuman being whose materializations in the midst of workingmen radically reconfigures conflict and reshuffles every piece of plot. An imposter given over to serial charades, Twain's No. 44 belongs to this breed of “avenger detectives” that populated dime novels. Most strikingly, No. 44's antics in the industrial shop bring into view the infrastructure of racial competition that fractures collective action and paralyzes workers. No. 44 is an escape artist, a whiz at impersonation, a master of disguise and doublespeak, and thus of what Henry Louis Gates calls “signifyin(g)”: a “shadowing” or “(re)naming” of (white) terms, since signifyin(g) is a critique of “(white) meaning” or even the “meaning of meaning” (47). Twain uses No. 44 for illustration and exegesis and as a creature of extravagant antics, not the least of which include a vexatious, interminable recital on the Jew’s harp, a minstrel routine as “Mr. Bones,’ and a syrupy Stephen Foster medley. No. 44 also makes direct textual interventions with an extraordinary typesetter’s joke and a“Procession of the Dead” that is the manuscript’ finale.

Importantly, dime novels supplied an alternative to nineteenth-century realism or the quasi-realist prose of the evolving “clue-puzzle” mystery. ‘They invited allegorical readings insofar as they relied on “magical transformations to compensate for the impossibility of imagining ‘realistic’ actions by powerful agents” (Denning 74). In No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, however, Twain amplifies and intensifies the allegorical dimensions of the dime novel to access affective and textual realms that constitute another order of prose fiction: an “expressive” realism. The dime novel’s digressive, roundabout plot is externalized in Twain's impossible chronology of nested chronotopes, which leaps forward in time to register the degradations of the industrial workplace and to dramatize the dilemma of modern political consent. Besides these textual cogitations, Twain mobilizes No. 44's symptoms of “strangeness” to elucidate the obstacles to interracial sociability in the shop: racial and ethnic antagonisms fostered by industrial life. Finally, No. 44's assorted escapades end by denaturing narrative itself and, in doing so, demolish the industrial landscape that narrative buttresses. In Twain's manuscript, this textual rebuttal to the crises of industrialism and modern political consent involves nothing less than the annihilation of whiteness.

“WRITTEN RECORDS CAN LIE”

No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger approaches the dislocations of industrial modernity and the problem of modern political consent from the distant past. Twain dramatizes the pull of modernity through the temporal-spatial arrangements of his text, which takes literary history as a portable scaffold, and shifts with increasing velocity through various chronotopic registers to alight temporarily on the bildungsroman. But modernity is a centripetal force, and the narrative lurches ever forward, in search of a form befitting the scale and speed of the observable world. There is an industrial landscape at the center of the manuscript, and Twain turns to the dime novel and its remarkable adventurer detective in search of coordinates for social cohesion that have nowhere to emerge but from this world of work.

The novel's mise-en-scène is a heterochrony, countryside irregularly punctuated by temporal gradations and moving, like a set of nested, open-ended parentheses or an inverted telescope, from the“Dark Ages” to the turn of the twentieth century. The opening date is 1490, some years shy of the Reformation. “Some even set it away back centuries upon centuries and said that by the mental and spiritual clock it was still the Age of Faith in Austria,” the narrator remarks, and the evolutionary line is held fast by the devout and dim-witted, so that it “promised to remain so forever” (221). There is no world, it seems, beyond Austria. What lies outside is an extraterrestrial abyss. Inland, however, in the midst of this comatose countryside, is “our village” Eseldorf, mired “in the middle of that sleep, being in the middle of Austria. It drowsed in peace in the deep privacy of a hilly and woodsy solitude where news from the world hardly ever came to disturb its dreams, and was infinitely content” (221).

Just past this pastoral haven for spiritual imbeciles and intellectual buffoons (saddled with a village name that is at best impolitic) there is a“mouldering castle” where the primary action takes place (229). Here the medieval scenery deteriorates and the Middle Ages fall from view. To be sure there is a magician, a real snake-oil salesman who commands awe from all corners of the crumbling castle, but the business of the castle lies elsewhere, in the operation of a printer’s shop managed by a master craftsman (Master Stein) and staffed by various journeymen and apprentices. We have already leaped into the modern era, yet the inner workings of the shop turn on another anachronism: the very latest developments in movable type. And in addition to an up-to-date printing apparatus, there is what would have been for Mark Twain a fundamental shift in nineteenth-century corporate arrangements: the labor union. Into the midst of this industrialized workplace riddled with labor altercations and union disputes the Mysterious Stranger descends. He deals in the “goods” of the future: frilled collars and tobacco, cornpone and “coon” shows, not to mention news of Christian Science and the Russo- Japanese War—as if the unforeseen (and unpremeditated?) fruits of Western civilization were unsystematically distilled onto a pallet of break bulk cargo, or as Twain subtitled his manuscript, “Being an Ancient Tale found in a jug and freely translated from the jug.”

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. In No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger “our village” Eseldorf is a setting the narrator August quickly abandons in favor of the castle, with its vocational promise, even though the publishing industry is censured by a Church dead set against the effects of mass production, which lead to “the cheapening of books and the indiscriminate dissemination of knowledge” (230). In spite of the Church, the printer's shop goes about its business unobstructed. What's more, its separate jurisdiction is also a temporal distinction, and its shifting coordinates in time and space are essentially a chronotopical shift. The chronotope, as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, is a temporal-spatial frame that delimits narrative genre and whose partial purpose is to parse the development of the novel as an apparatus of an expanding human cognizance of time (Tihanov 157). A chronotope is not to be differentiated from the human dispositions it informs, nor do subjects exist independent of its temporal-spatial arrangements. Life in Eseldorf, with its “mental and spiritual clock” stopped, is a bit like what Bakhtin designates “adventure time,’ a genre in which time never enters as a dimension of human life or is suppressed entirely (157). No part of the world is jeopardized by the prospect of annihilation by time; then too, there is no chance the universe will be “remade, changed or created anew” (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination,110). This seems right, and yet if we enter the drowsy village, with its “little homesteads nested among orchards and shade-trees,’ there are signs of something closer to Bakhtin’s “folkloric chronotope”: a world that takes its tempos from the seasons; harmonious, cohesive; a place where private duties have not yet been ripped from public life (Tihanov 160).

Of course, the very idea of the “folkloric” drips with sentiment, and pastoral Eseldorf could scarcely emerge from Twain's gauntlet of irony intact. Twain's stance is most evident in the depiction of Father Adolf, the selfaggrandizing Aesop who throttles any folk contrariness with his insidious susurrations and violent threats. August, Twain's narrator and clearly some kind of dupe, remembers with pleasure that holy man about his seasonal duties: the funerals, where Father Adolf lost no opportunity to bestow “a staggering whack in the face” upon any disrespectful “oaf”; various suicides, over which Father Adolf officiated with morbid efficiency to ensure “for himself, that the stake was driven through the body in a right and permanent and workmanlike way”; and that familiar “procession through the village in plague-time” when Father Adolf traded blessings for cash (225). The politicking of this tyrant alone punctures the pastoral idyll. Nevertheless, it is not obvious why Twain would see fit to bludgeon his readers (or, if he never intended to publish the work, the paper it was written on) with yet another uninspired essay in human hypocrisy, religious or otherwise. Could it be he means to show us Austria and the Dark Ages as something other than a blackboard for his arithmetic on the moral frailty of the human race? August's nostalgic reminiscences about the annual festivities of terror are simply naive or, if we admit him capable of sarcasm, are of a piece with Adolf’s contention that in Eseldorf, “when you are in politics you are in the wasp’s nest with a short shirt-tail, as the saying is” (223). If it is naïveté plain and simple, Twain is doling out what Frederic Jameson calls the “irony of the intellectual,” which profits from the “incongruities of a peasant language and a peasant ignorance” (Seeds of Time 113). Otherwise we are anchored in a different kind of irony, irony as “some ultimate life stance and moral and political metaphysic” that orders reality (115).

But consider that Adolf’s routine brutality is the work of a bureaucrat, that his power pales before the influence of the briefly mentioned prince Rosenfeld, who owns the land to whom the livelihood of each villager is ultimately mortgaged, and whose occasional visits dazzle the townspeople “as if the lord of the world had arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along” (222). After their quick stopovers in Eseldorf, this local deity and his retinue leave “a calm behind which was like the deep sleep which follows an orgy” (222), perhaps because the event necessitated some frantic bacchanalia orchestrated to entertain the prince. Is this uncontested service and submission the actual target of Twain's derision? And, if so, is Father Adolf the inconsequential straw man for a duplicitous irony? Then we are dealing with Twain the vindictive exhibitionist, cutting up on every side with his “burlesque circus of authority's violence” (Lewis 69), the Twain whose narrator (August) stakes his memoirs on a familiar paradox: “ Written records can lie’—though Twain gives that screw a third turn—“unless they are set down by a priest” (227). So Father Adolf supervises the villagers’ dream life, and if the villagers accept his demands, it is permission issued in the dark and mediated by blind irony, permeated with a “forbidden laughter” that repudiates all. But Prince Rosenfeld, the master of their wakeful state, cannot be deposed by the “no” of “yes and no.’ To overthrow the despotism of the “folkloric, Twain must provide a total shift in narrative habits: a crescendo of human consciousness that reaches its height in the castle perched on a precipice just opposite the outskirts of the village.

“The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied,’ writes Bakhtin, and in the castle the dullness and duration of the folkloric dissolves into a makeshift modernity. It is crude space initially, but one that pushes forward with a technological enthusiasm that culminates in the printer’s shop, where men rapidly assembly plates of movable type. Later, the machinery runs with dizzying precision of its own accord. ‘These technological developments are not simply the materials of modernity (and even industrial life, as I have suggested above). The mechanized industry, mass production, and alienated labor force are accompanied by temporal changes that irretrievably alter human experience. This experience, especially as it is narrated by August (lately of Eseldorf and still the lowest lackey in the print shop), also belongs to a chronotope, the bildungsroman. The task of the bildungsroman is to reconcile the buoyant, unfixable dynamism of modernity with modernity's representation; as a result, this chronotope is precisely a formal contradiction (Moretti, Bildungsroman 6). Its subject is youth, the “specific material sign” of modernity's energetic turmoil (6). But the force of youth must be checked, bracketed, abbreviated in the bildungsroman, since “only by curbing its intrinsically boundless dynamism, only by agreeing to betray to a certain extent its very essence, only thus, it seems, can modernity be represented” (6). Its objective, then, is the “interiorization of contradiction” (10), an enactment of social compromise and the truncation of the subject in its definitive sense. Franco Moretti asks,

How is it possible to convince the modern—“free’— individual to willingly limit his freedom? Precisely, first of all, through marriage—in marriage: when two people ascribe to one another such value as to accept being “bound” by it. It has been observed that from the late eighteenth century on, marriage becomes the model for a new type of social contract: one no longer sealed by forces located outside of the individual (such as status), but founded on a sense of “individual obligation.” (22)

In No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger it is August who inhabits the newly unruly space of modern life and struggles to interiorize its anarchic course. As Schiller wrote to Goethe of Wilhelm Meister, “Everything takes place around him, but not because of him” (qtd. in Moretti 20). Like Elizabeth Bennett, August must refit himself to the world and apprehend it anew, and each act of conversation becomes an effort to absorb the world’s activity (Moretti 50). Like both, August has the fortune to be “polyparadigmatic”: each event of the novel takes its sense (should it have sense) from the “the internal harmony that it helps to bind or crack” when it crosses the threshold of his existence (42). But the bildungsroman requires contractual consent as its final stabilizing force. This union between the individual and the social order is a “reciprocal ‘consent’ which finds in the double ‘I do’ of the wedding ritual an unsurpassed symbolic condensation’ (22).

Given the centrality of this “pact” between the individual and the social order, and the wedding vows that serve as its narrative emblem, August's fanciful betrothal to Marget Regen (the niece of Master Stein) toward the end of the manuscript is not out of place. It is neither a saccharine, sighinducing interlude nor evidence of an old man’s self-indulgent digressions, as some critics have contended. Instead, it is a narrative checkpoint whose presence registers a genuine concern about modernity and the prospect of its representation. And in this intuitive litmus test, Twain's gauge of the odds for reciprocal consent in the midst of magic technology, modernity fails miserably. Marget is dreaming when she bestows her affections on August, a youth who never charmed her in her waking moments. Meanwhile August plays the Svengali with Marget's sleepwalking self, a dream creature who goes by the name“Lisbet von Armin.’ August is, in essence, a paramour whose object of affection is an insensible puppet, hardly capable in her dream state of accepting his proposal—and yet Marget swoons before his miasmic enticement“in obedience to suggestion’ and recites her wedding vows (349). Theirs is a shotgun wedding, for when August discovers Marget in a dream state, he begins “to volley the necessary ‘suggestions into her head as fast as I could load and fire” until at last she makes “obeisance to imaginary altar and priest” and recites the marriage oath (349).

The problem of consent is at the center of the text: here, it is consent coaxed from an insensate; in Eseldorf, it is the villagers’ blithe assent to the will of a commonplace tyrant, and so on. Consent in its uglier arrangements comes up again and again in Twain's Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. It is perhaps best embodied by the narrator of The Chronicles of Satan, who joins in the merciless stoning of an innocent—as if his willingness to join the slaughter is the only measure of his inclusion in the race. This capitulation to another's bidding illustrates Twain’ dark proposition in What is Man? that humans are “moved, directed, commanded, by exterior influences— solely,’ a remark that implies, according to Forrest Robinson, “that humans are exempt, as machines are, from moral responsibility” (“Dreams” 455). Indeed, as Robinson points out, Twain is quick to exonerate any afhliate of the species, which “originates nothing, himself—not even an opinion, not even a thought” (qtd. in Robinson 455). And yet in Twain's writings, the least of these creatures, however morally inept, is not exempt from shame. Twain's young narrator, for instance, purports to have acted against his will: “All were throwing stones and each was watching his neighbor, and if I had not done as the others did it would have been noticed and spoken of” (150). Or there is the case of Twain's well-known tongue-tied introduction to President Grant, after which ensued “an awkward pause, a dreary pause, a horrible pause,’ during which Twain “merely wanted to resign,’ and then, extraordinarily, voiced the single thought that came to mind: “Mr. President, I—I am embarrassed. Are you?” (Following the Equator pt. 2, 16).

If man is, in Twain's appraisal, the fall guy, the easy mark who stoops to take direction, shame is the complement to his pathetic show of acquiescence or habitual deference to the mob. For the individual easily swayed, however, shame seems also to be the outward show of some invariable nature, the means by which one takes exception to one’s own deference, or rather one’s own failure to resign, one's failure to not consent. To put this more briefly, shame signals the self obliterated by consent, a consent that pollutes like vile slopped onto a canvas—though (as we shall see) there is in Twain's writings also the faint suggestion that some other part, like the person of Dorian Gray, escapes undisfigured.

And truly the business of consent annihilates the subject. Classical bildungsroman is predicated upon digesting social contradictions. It requires incorporating every subjective or partial view of events (sjuzhet) into a totalizing, unassailable narrative system ( fabula) (Moretti 70). Narrative restructuration brings with it the end of subjectivity, is even synonymous with the deterioration of the individual. Still the bildungsroman, which is, like classical detective fiction, “always and intimately linked to the solution of a mystery” (70), achieves its ends by regulating the narrative's historic-diachronic dimension: “Not only are there no ‘meaningless’ events; there can now be meaning only through events” (6). No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, as I have indicated above, gestures at this obligatory order but is plagued by temporal seizures, and the fits and starts in its historic-diachronic dimensions suggest why sjuzhet and fabula are perpetually misaligned. Twain draws on the parameters of the bildungsroman to give reality order and modernity an image of itself, but No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger is finally bereft of the act of genuine consent, that signature on the social contract embodied by the wedding oath.

In fact, Twain's subjects of modern life are no less spellbound than their chronotopical predecessors. But what is the thing that obstructs the possibility of narrative order, leaving subjectivity intact but listless, lumbering forth like the living dead, embarrassed? What spoils consent, averting the marriage of sjuzhet and fabula, and thus turns time out of joint? Moretti warns us that “capitalist rationality cannot generate Bildung,’ and in No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger an industrial order ushers in its own obligatory propositions: bodies mechanized in the mirror image of machines; labor and capital divided by their interests; capitalist acquisition, that never-exhausted engine, ubiquitous. This world of work, foreign to Elizabeth Bennett and Wilhelm Meister but wholly defining August's existence, baffles time.’

Having steered the text through heterogeneous configurations of landscape that arise in the Middle Ages and wind up in the twentieth century, Twain finds fiction no longer has a form to fit to, or at least the bildungsroman will not do. But No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger proceeds as capitalism wrenches interiority from its ordinary forms. The bildungsroman, that thing which adapts sjuzhet to fabula, which quashes everything that is irregular, perverse, and indigestible in narrative to its guileless contours, which diminishes mystery to the mundane, is superseded at last by its lowbrow kin: the dime novel. And it is in this world of permanent disorientation and temporal bedlam, a sort of hinterlands where the past “cannot stop having been and returns in the future as it has been transformed by the future itself” (Torlasco 62), that a stranger arrives.

“WHAT A DEVIL TO WORK THE BOY WAS!”

‘The trickster figure “No. 44” parades through Twain's novel as a far-fetched crossbreed engendered by the industrial age. He is a monstrous jumble of man, machine, slave, dog, and witch; Katzeyammer remarks, “Every time a person puts his finger on you you're not there” (Twain 39). But what is to be made of the fact that No. 44, whose supernatural alterity allows him to view the sum of human history and to sample the spoils of empire, bears the markers of a distinctly African American brand of servitude and, later, African American strategies of cultural resistance? With his serial charades, mercurial moods, and inexplicable talents, No. 44 is an unknown quantity. First tractable then tyrannical, humble then brazen, he raises the hackles of the workingmen and wins over Master Stein. Working in castle and then the print shop, No. 44 mediates the regimes of sociability and the fragile alliances among workers as well as the ethics of management. Codified in misgivings, suspicions, and outright hostilities, moreover, No. 44's “strangeness” elucidates an infrastructure of racial competition nurtured in industrial life. His ambivalent entrenchment in the manuscript is instrumental, in other words, since Twain uses No. 44 to decipher and then detonate the industrial landscape.

First, there is No. 44’s numeric brand—a stamp of industrial make— the sort of designation that treats factory men as indistinguishable from the machinery they operate. What is of additional interest, however, is the conjecture in Twain’s text that the number signifies he is a convict of some kind. This rumor immediately surfaces, and when he does not “seize the opportunity to testify for himself,’ kicks off “a low buzz [that] skimmed along down the table, whose burden was, “That silence was a confession—the chap’s a Jail-Bird” (Twain 239). These suspicions of incarceration, given the presence of a“jail-number,’ speak to another industrial enterprise that Douglas Blackmon has incisively called “slavery by another name.’ The criminalization of black life in the South, beginning with Reconstruction and continuing far into the next century, supplied corporations with a workforce that had been captured and sold into involuntary and uncompensated servitude. In short, there is an articulation of the black subject through the consolidation of factory and penal signifiers.

Second, the rapport this pariah cultivates with the master of the shop adheres very distinctly to a model encouraged by the then prominent Booker T. Washington, who admonished black workers not to exert themselves seeking union membership. Washington insisted instead that blacks could surmount trade unions by appealing to employers and personalizing associations with management rather than struggling for union afhliation. Washington also attempted to persuade management of the black worker's superiority, noting that he was “not inclined to trade unionism” and “almost a stranger to strife, lock-outs and labor wars; [he is] labor that is law-abiding, peaceable, teachable . . . labor that has never been tempted to follow the red flag of anarchy” (qtd. in Foner, Black Worker 79). This brand of servile quietism characterizes No. 44's filial engagement with Heinrich Stein, who generously exploits the stranger while the other workers call for his eviction from the premises. No. 44 fends for himself, endures the merciless bullying of the other men, and doggedly completes demanding menial tasks, exhibiting the kind of excessive investment in his work that matches Washington's depictions of his own labor in the best-selling 1901 memoir Up from Slavery. Just as Washington diligently sweeps the recitation room at the Hampton Institute—the de facto entrance exam that will take him “up from slavery” and into economic solvency, No. 44 dutifully, almost farcically, applies himself to the tasks at hand.*