The Mysterious Stranger
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| The Mysterious Stranger | |
| Author | Mark Twain |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publication date | 1916, posthumously |
| Media type | |
The Mysterious Stranger is an unfinished work, and the last novel attempted, by the American author Mark Twain. It was worked on periodically from roughly 1890 up until his death in 1910. The body of work is a serious social commentary by Twain addressing his ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race". A "complete" version was published posthumously in 1916 by Twain's biographer Albert Bigelow Paine under the name The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance, but this version is under scrutiny concerning the extent of editing performed on Twain's manuscripts by Paine. The published version is a novella.
Twain actually wrote multiple versions of this story, each unfinished and each involving the character of "Satan". The first substantial version is commonly referred to as The Chronicle of Young Satan and tells of the adventures of Satan, the sinless nephew of the biblical Satan, in an Austrian village in the Middle Ages. The story ends abruptly in the middle of a scene involving Satan entertaining a prince in India, suggesting Twain abandoned this piece before he finished writing it.
The second substantial version Twain attempted to write is known as Schoolhouse Hill which involves the familiar characters of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and their adventures with Satan, referred to in this version as "No. 44, New Series 864962", and is set in America. Schoolhouse Hill is the shortest of the three versions.
The third version, called No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger: Being an Ancient Tale Found in a Jug and Freely Translated from the Jug, returns to Medieval Austria and tells of No. 44's mysterious appearance at the door of a print shop and his use of heavenly powers to expose the futility of mankind's existence. This version also introduces an idea Twain was toying with at the end of his life involving a duality of the "self", one being the "Waking Self" and the other being the "Dream Self". Twain explores these ideas through the use of "Duplicates", copies of the print shop workers made by No. 44. This version contains an actual ending, however the version is not considered as complete as Twain would have intended.
The edition published in 1916 is composed mainly of a heavily edited Chronicle of Young Satan with a slightly altered version of the ending from No. 44 tacked on. Paine, who had sole possession of Twain's unfinished work after Twain's death and kept them private, searched through Twain's manuscripts and found the proper intended ending for The Mysterious Stranger. After Paine's death in 1937, Bernard DeVoto became possessor of Twain's manuscripts and released them to the public. Beginning in the 1960s, critics studied the original copies of the story and found that the ending Paine chose for The Mysterious Stranger referred to the characters from different versions of the story (e.g. No. 44 instead of Satan) and that the original names had been crossed out and written over in Paine's handwriting.
The book version that was published nonetheless maintains Twain's sharp attack on the hypocrisy of organized religion that is the subject of much of Twain's later writings. He views religion as a (questionably) "moral" order to protect wealth, power, and oppression.
In 1982, The University of California Press published, as part of The Mark Twain Library Series, a scholarly edition of No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger: Being an Ancient Tale Found in a Jug and Freely Translated from the Jug. According to the "Mark Twain Project" editors of this series, this is the definitive version of the text as close as possible to what Twain would have published had he lived to do so. In addition to omitting a quarter of the original text, Paine's version invents the character of an astrologer who is made responsible for the villainies of Father Adolf.[1]
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[edit] Summary of Paine's version
In 1590 a few boys are living happy sheltered lives in a remote Austrian village named Eseldorf. (Esel means "donkey" or "ass" in German and can refer to a stupid or ignorant person, and "dorf" means village, so in essence it is a village of stupid people.) The story is narrated by one of the boys—Theodor, the village organist's son—in a first-person narrative. One day, a handsome teenage boy named Satan appears in the village. He explains that he is an angel and the nephew of the fallen angel Satan. Young Satan performs several magical feats. He claims to be able to foresee the future and informs the group of unfortunate events that will soon befall those they care about. The boys don't believe Satan's claims until one of his predictions comes true. Satan proceeds to describe further tragedies that will befall their friends. The boys beg Satan to intercede. Satan agrees, but operates under the technical definition of mercy. For instance, instead of a lingering death due to illness, Satan simply causes one of Theodor's friends to die immediately.
Mayhem ensues — witch trials, burnings, hangings, deaths, mass hysteria, and redistribution of wealth. Satan vanishes with a brief explanation:
In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!...You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier. It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
[edit] Characters in "The Mysterious Stranger"
- No. 44, New Series 864962
- August Feldner, narrator, 16 years old, printer's apprentice.
- Satan, the angel.
- Doangivadam, who lives in Austria during the Middle Ages. He is physically strong and very clever, and uses these abilities to help those in need.
[edit] Film Version
According to IMDB, a film version of #44, The Mysterious Stranger, was shot by The Great Amwell Company and shown in the United States on PBS, later running on Home Box Office. The role of 44 was played by Lance Kerwin, with August played by Chris Makepeace.
Another movie adaptation of this book was shot in the Soviet Union by Igor Maslennikov and released under the name "Filip Traum". It was shown in the cinemas only once in 1991, and up until 2007, when a remastered DVD-version was released, the general public mostly didn't know anything about this film.
[edit] Animated adaptation
The Mysterious Stranger was adapted to a short scene in the 1985 claymation film The Adventures of Mark Twain, in which the children visit a planetoid and meet an angel named Satan[2]. He claims to be incapable of performing an evil act as he does not understand the concept of wrongdoing. Satan builds a sandcastle and has the children make clay figures which he then brings to life. Two of the clay men bicker over ownership of a cow, and Satan kills them by mashing them with his palm. He then creates a storm and an earthquake to kill the remaining people and destroy the castle, to the horror of the watching children. Thereafter, the kids leave the planetoid as Satan lectures, "Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists save empty space and you, and you are but a thought," ultimately disappearing with the planetoid, an illusion he created himself.
Due to the disturbing nature of this scene, it is edited out of the movie when aired on American television.
[edit] External links and references
[edit] References
- ^ Twain, Mark (1982). No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger: Being an Ancient Tale Found in a Jug and Freely Translated from the Jug. California: University of California Press. ISBN 0520045440.
- ^ http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cqi5F5MqqTQ&feature=related
