Speech in Personal Recollections: History, Tragedy , and Comedy

Chapter Eight addresses the character of historical, tragic, and comic speech as they come to sight in the novel. While de Conte’s memoirs constitute a kind of artless history, Joan and her peer, Paladin, employ the artful speech of tragedy and comedy, respectively. Both of these forms of speech offer powerful ways to move and hence rule over others: tragedy engages the devotional energies of its audience while comedy delights its listeners and prepare them to obey the comic poet. But precisely because Twain reveals, through his presentation of de Conte’s psychology in Chapter Seven, the problematic grounds of the desire to dominate others, then his own work, like Personal Recollections, must seek some other end. This chapter concludes by reflecting on the essentially pedagogic nature of the kind of literary romance that both uses and sheds light on historical, tragical, and comical forms of speech, a romance that distinguishes Twain from the philosophical determinism of his literary “rivals”: his narrator, Paladin, and Joan.