Abstract
This paper argues that Mark Twain’s under-studied final work No. 44, The
Mysterious Stranger – left incomplete upon his death – is an exploration of
the author’s engagement with the question of the relationship between
individual intelligence, brain science, and the emerging, Progressive Era
discourse of ‘merit’. I show how Twain’s novel critiques ‘merit’ and the
political structures of ‘meritocracy’ by presenting the reader with two
characters who are in fact the same person (August and Forty-Four) to
expose different facets of the meritocratic personality. These facets (a belief
in innate ability and a commitment to impressibility and growth) might seem
contradictory, but Twain’s novel demonstrates how in a moment of advanced
capitalism and industrialism that predicts our own both are deployed
consciously by the meritocrat in the transfer of power from the collective to
the bourgeois individual. With No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, Twain refines
his vision of American social values into a critique of the Enlightenment more
broadly, abandoning his earlier reformist impulses to imagine more radical
challenges to American power.
Mysterious Stranger – left incomplete upon his death – is an exploration of
the author’s engagement with the question of the relationship between
individual intelligence, brain science, and the emerging, Progressive Era
discourse of ‘merit’. I show how Twain’s novel critiques ‘merit’ and the
political structures of ‘meritocracy’ by presenting the reader with two
characters who are in fact the same person (August and Forty-Four) to
expose different facets of the meritocratic personality. These facets (a belief
in innate ability and a commitment to impressibility and growth) might seem
contradictory, but Twain’s novel demonstrates how in a moment of advanced
capitalism and industrialism that predicts our own both are deployed
consciously by the meritocrat in the transfer of power from the collective to
the bourgeois individual. With No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, Twain refines
his vision of American social values into a critique of the Enlightenment more
broadly, abandoning his earlier reformist impulses to imagine more radical
challenges to American power.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1972037 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | TEXTUAL PRACTICE |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2021 |
Keywords
- Mark Twain
- meritocracy
- intelligence
- Mysterious Stranger
- capitalism