Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

From Stephen Railton's Introduction toA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Courtmay be the world's first novel about time travel. It certainly has the most fantastic plot of all Twain's fictions. But the inspiration to send a modern American through time as well as space sprang directly out of Twain's long-standing literary goals. The story of the story begins on a Saturday in December 1884, with Twain traveling around the country on a reading tour to promoteHuck Finn. In a bookstore in Rochester, New York, George Washington Cable, his fellow novelist and partner on the tour, suggested thatLe Morte d'Arthur(The Death of Arthur), Sir Thomas Malory's classic romance about the knights of the Round Table, would make good reading matter for the trip. Twain bought the book, began reading it the next day, and shortly afterward made a note in his journal about an idea for a sketch: Dream of being a knight errant in armor in the middle ages. Have the notions & habits of thought of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. No pockets in the armor. No way to manage certain requirements of nature. Can't scratch. Cold in the headcan't blowcan't get a handkerchief, can't use iron sleeve. The emphasis here is on the idea's comic possibilities. The literary goal Twain's audience always expected him to put first was making them laugh. As a professional humorist, one of the first tricks he learned is that people are much more likely to laugh when they're nervous or uncomfortable. Sex, for example, that staple of modern stand-up, is not inherently funny, but it is a subject to which almost everyone attaches some degree of discomfort. The mores of Twain's late-Victorian America ruled out sex as a subject; people laugh when they're anxious, not when they're offended or shocked. But the principle of making an audience uneasy enough to laugh applies to any subject in which they are emotionally over-invested, and his culture's proprieties and evasions gave Twain many other opportunities to make his audience uneasy. One of his favorite strategies was treating something they considered sacred in a mocking or irreverent spirit. A knight in shining armor was a subject that you were supposed to approach on bended knees. If, while looking up at that knight, you notice his nose is running, the disequilibrium caused by this clash between the sacred and profane, between what a culture enshrines and what it represses, will probably seek to discharge itself through laughter. The movieMonty Python and the Holy Grailproves that Camelot is still a target-rich environment for comedy to attack; and in Mark Twain's time, when the standard for depicting the days of knights was set by elegiac works like Tennyson'sIdylls of the King(finished in 1885), the territory Twain works in the novel was even more vulnerable to burlesque and parody. Twain never forgot that the job his readers paid him for was making them laugh, but that was only one of his literary goals. In an autobiographical dictation made near the end of his life, he explains how his achievement differs from that of "mere humorists" by asserting that "I have always preached." As a text for a sermon, that dream of being a knight whose body itches in places he can't reach points toward Twain's project as an American realist. To Twain as a humorist, texts like Malory's book were good things to mTwain, Mark is the author of 'Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court ' with ISBN 9781593082109 and ISBN 159308210X.