A tale as new as time
Politics and fireworks in Twain classic
If you only know the various comic-book and film adaptations of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, you’re liable to imagine the book as a laugh riot, an exercise in anachronistic fun. Knights on bicycles! Knights in armour playing baseball! A newspaper named The Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano!
In fact, Twain’s 1889 novel — now available in a handsome anniversary edition — is seldom what we’d call funny.
The plot is simple enough and may sound eerily contemporary: A brash outsider arrives from nowhere and, after acquiring almost unlimited power, quickly upsets a country’s long established political and social order. Hank Morgan, however, is much smarter, and far more humane, than the person you’re thinking of.
He’s a 19th-century American shop foreman who finds himself mysteriously transported back to sixth-century England. There, his technological expertise, combined with a taste for the stagily theatrical, allow him to perform apparent miracles. After showing up Merlin and thus earning that magician’s lifelong enmity, Hank becomes King Arthur’s righthand man, eventually granted a special title: The Boss.
All this Twain relates in a jaunty, first-person style, almost a cleaned-up, more formal version of the voice he used in his previous novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
But just as that book assailed the evils of slavery, so this one indicts society’s entrenched elites, the parasitically wealthy (represented by England’s nobles) who are, in Twain’s words, “idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world.”
For Twain, this heartless one per cent also includes the period’s ultraconservative religious establishment (the Catholic Church). As Hank angrily recognizes:
“The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble, to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world.”
Even worse than this, the peasants and working people, brainwashed into docility, dumbly accept whatever their overlords do to them.
A slave-master brutally whips an exhausted woman for stumbling as she tramps along in a chain-gang. A group of well-to-do pilgrims, Hank tells us, “looked on and commented — on the expert way in which the whip was handled.”
Later, the woman is sold and separated forever from her husband, who looks longingly, desperately at her and their child before he is pulled away.
Hank quickly resolves to transform this callous, brutal system. In an attempt to show the king the realities of life, he and Arthur disguise themselves as artisans and wander the countryside. As they set out, Hank worries that his royal companion looks too proud, too manly:
“Make believe you are in debt,” he tells him, “and eaten up by relentless creditors; you are out of work … and can get none; and your wife is sick, your children are crying because they are hungry’ — And so-on, and so-on. I drilled him as representing, in turn, all sorts of people out of luck and suffering dire privations and misfortunes. But lord, it was only just words, words — they meant nothing in the world to him. I might just as well have whistled. Words realize nothing; vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe. ”
Eventually, Hank does establish a democratic republic, but the latent forces of reaction soon strike back.
In Twain’s last chapters the Connecticut Yankee and his few remaining supporters coolly calculate how to destroy an army of 25,000 enemy knights — and then, using explosives, electrified fences and Gatling guns, they do it. Some critics have described this massacre as exaggerated tall-tale humour and not to be taken seriously. To me, it reads like Swift or Celine, pure nihilism, a giving-up on what Twain once called “the damned human race.”
When you consider our own world these days, you can certainly understand his despair.