[On November 18,
1865, Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in The New York Saturday Press (under its
original title, “Jim Smiley
and His Jumping Frog”). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “Frog” and four
other local color short stories, leading up to a special weekend post on
teaching such American texts.]
On what frame
narratives and narrators help us understand about storytelling and humor.
As I noted in this
post on Washington Irving’s fictional historian Diedrich Knickerbocker and
his role in how Irving presents short stories like “Rip Van Winkle,”
complicated meta-fictions and frame narratives can be found in American
literature at least as early as the first decades of the 19th
century. But it was with the rise of local color writing in the middle of that
century that such framing devices and narrators became a fixture in American
fiction. While of course you can’t reduce that entire, multi-decade and
continent-wide literary movement to any single element, it’s fair to say that
one of the most consistent tropes in American local color writing is a framing
structure in which an outsider narrator arrives in a particular community,
encounters a storyteller therein, and then both listen to and reports for us
what that local voice has to say. Sometimes (as in Sarah Orne Jewett’s
magisterial The Country of the
Pointed Firs) that narrator remains an important character throughout
the text; but often, as in Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog,” the narrator only
appears in the opening and closing frames, ceding the text over to the
storytelling voice for the bulk of his pages.
In many ways,
Twain’s outside narrator and frame structure feel very similar to the typical
uses of those consistent local color elements. He is clearly an outsider, or at
least a recent arrival, to the story’s local community, “the ancient [and
fictional] mining camp of Angel’s”; as he tells us in the opening sentence, introducing
both that outsider past and his present relationship to this new community, it
is upon the request of “a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East” that the
narrator seeks out “good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler.” What the
narrator needs from Wheeler is a story, a narrative not just on his request’s
ostensible subject—his Eastern friend’s “cherished companion of his boyhood
named Leonidas W. Smiley, … who he had heard was at one time a resident of
Angel’s Camp”—but also one that depicts the specific and distinctive world of
this post-Gold Rush frontier mining community. And when he gets from Wheeler a
version of that story (if one focused not on Leonidas at all, but rather on the
clearly distinct character Jim Smiley), he includes it at the center of his
text in an overly meta-fictional way, as “the monotonous narrative which
follows this paragraph.”
That crucial
adjective “monotonous” highlights a divergence in Twain’s local color story
from many of those published over the next few decades, however. Although Twain’s
narrator seems to transcribe Wheeler’s story faithfully, he also calls it (in
the same framing paragraph) an “interminable narrative” and “such a queer yarn”;
when he returns as our narrator in the brief closing frame, it’s in order to
literally run away from Wheeler lest he break into another such tale. These
details of “Jumping Frog” are closely tied to Twain’s emerging
voice and career as a
humorist, one for whom eliciting an audience’s laughter is a primary
artistic goal. On a broader level, local color stories could likewise frequently
be described as humorous, but with a key and complex follow-up question: who
is, ultimately, the butt of the joke? Is it the storyteller, oblivious to his
or her silliness (as Simon Wheeler seems to be)? Is it the narrator, subjected
to the silliness (as Twain’s narrator also is)? Or is it the reader? Are we
laughing, that is, as much at our own gullibility as readers as at the
multi-layered humor present in the text in front of us? All questions raised by
Twain’s influential framing structure and narrator.
Next short story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this story? Other local color stories you’d highlight?
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