Hank Morgan: Linguistic Entrepreneur

Deborah Baker Wyrick

North Carolina State University
In "A Word of Explanation" launching Mark Twain's A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the frame narrator examines the Yankee's
manuscript account of the Camelot experience and notes that "it was a
palimpsest. Under the old dim writing of the Yankee historian appeared
traces of a penmanship which was older and dimmer still " 'The palimpsest can act as a paradigm of Hank Morgan's puzzling, inconsistent style-a style marked by shifting layers of vernacular speech and conventional,
at times archaic diction, of self-conscious verbal manipulations and selfrighteous diatribes. This fragmented style leads to the belief that Hank
Morgan fails as a vernacular narrator and that this failure contributes greatly

to the disintegrationof the novel.2

Most readers agree that one of Twain's major achievements is stylistic
--his ability to create the illusion of vivid, spontaneous speech and to make
this speech construct a meaningful and coherent world.3 They also agree,
however, that Twain is prone to egregiousstylistic lapses, including triteness,
sentimentality, and bombast. Thus, critics argue that he needs a detached
and limited point of view to curb his stylistic excesses and mannerisms.
Point of view, then, becomes style, and style not only clothes the meaning
of narrative action in words but also, in itself, reveals meaning. In Twain's
novels, the most detached and limited point of view is Huckleberry Finn's;
consequently, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is seen to embody Mark
Twain's style at its best, and Huck himself--the most coherent of Twain's
vernacular narrators--is held responsible for the book's excellence. Since
Hank Morgan would seem to provide a similarly well-defined point of
view,' he is commonly blamed for the flaws in A Connecticut Yankee. A
re-examination of the complicated modulations of his speaking voice,
however, suggests that his narrative point of view has its own distinctive
integrity, that his stylisticvariations are essential to his function in the novel,
and that linguistic assets are vital to his entrepreneurial mission in Camelot.
Although some critics maintain that Twain forgets or loses control of
vernacular focus as A Connecticut Yankee progresses, this does not seem
to be the case. Hank's dominant mode of speech, the "Yankee colloquial,"

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is established in the book's first large episode, which extends from Hank's
arrival in Camelot to his' destruction of Merlin's tower. In this mode,
relatively short declarative sentences, characteristically unlubricated by
sentence-inaugurating connectives or dependent clauses, convey the impression of emphatic, direct speech; qualifications or additions usually trail the
subject-verb-object core, thereby preserving the assertiveness of the
straightforward syntax. The diction is informal. It establishes a certain intimacy with the reader by using direct address and conversational asides.
It also veers between loose, almost careless wording--dependence on cliches
(e.g. "as easy as rolling off a log," p. 10)or flabby, interpretive modifiers
(e.g. "beautiful," "gorgeous," p. 21)--and sharp, striking figures of speech,
sometimes drawn from general slang (e.g. "new-fangled way," p. 20) and
sometimes drawn from the specific argot of card playing (e.g. "just play
that thing for all it is worth, even if it's only two pair and a jack," p. 36),
baseball ("step to the bat, it's your innings," p. 89), mechanical gadgetry
("naked as a pair of tongs," p. 57; "the man's coat looks as if it had been
done with a biscuit-punch," p. 38), and business economy ("Merlin's stock
was flat," p. 91). The "Yankee colloquial" mode never disappears from
the book; as late as Hank Morgan's penultimate narrative chapter, his
speech reveals the same characteristics of syntax and diction. In a warconsultation with Clarence, Hank explains:
"[Y]our lightning is there, and ready, like a load in
a gun, but it isn't costing you a cent till you touch it off....
"England will be a hornet's nest before noon to-morrow,
if the Church's hand hasn't lost its cunning--and we know
it hasn't....
"We strike--by the Proclamation--then it's their innings. "
(pp. 542-44)
Since the "Yankee colloquial" mode does not drop out from the novel,
the problems perceived in the book's narrative style are ones of addition
rather than subtraction. Hank does use flaccid, conventionally picturesque language to describe the British landscape; he occasionally employs
the Malory-ese that serves in the novel for 6th-century speech; he erupts
into hortatory hysteria--completewith hammering rhetorical repetitions and
relentless piling up of clausesnwhen he lashes out at feudal injustice. Certainly these speech mannerisms depart from the colloquial norm. But before
they are branded as indices of artistic failure--implicitly measured against
the standard of Huckleberry Finn's unified speech and therefore found
wanting--the assumptions underlying this conclusion should be analyzed.

One should ask whether Twain was trying to achievethe same sort of unified
narrative tone in A Connecticut Yankee as he had achieved in Huckleberry
Finn and whether the narrative voices of Hank and Huck have the same
functions vis vis the experien~es they record.
Twain, in fact, uses Hank to ridicule reductive notions of unified diction and to burlesque dependence upon idiosyncratic speech habits as
delineators of character and markers of literary success. During one of
Sandy's interminable tales, Hank remonstrates:

"This is not good form, Alisande. Sir Marhaus the

king's son of Ireland talks like all the rest; you ought to
give him a brogue, or at least a characteristic expletive;
by this means one would recognize him as soon as he
spoke, without his ever being named. It is a common
literary device with the great authors. You should make
him say, 'In this country, be jabers, came never knight
since it was christened, but he found strange adventures,
be jabers.' You see how much better that sounds." (p. 183)
Besidesthe obvious nonsense of using a singlepat phrase as a bumper sticker
to identify the communicating vehicle, Twain may be indicating his own
impatience with sustaining a limited point of view throughout an entire
novel. Unlike Huck, Hank is an adult--and a resourceful and worldly-wise
one at that. There is no reason why Hank, like other adults, cannot respond to experience in a variety of ways and record these responses in a
variety of verbal manners. If his linguisticrange wereas restricted as Huck's,
he would degenerate into a tedious simpleton incapable of conceiving, much
less of executing, his schemes to reform and to control Camelot. Huck,
of course, is no simpleton. But his resourcefulness and canniness are not
predicated on the ability to assume many verbal guises.
In addition, a great deal of evidence supports the opinion that Mark
Twain identified closely with Hank Morgan. Even critics who think that
Twain didn't "like" or "respect" his Connecticut Yankee--often taking
out of context Twain's application of the epithet "ignoramus" to Hank
Morgan, ignoring the word's ironic use in reference to the refinements and
weaknesses of a college education6--maintain that Hank frequently serves
as a mouthpiece for Twain's social and political views.7If Twain--a man
of humor and passion, insoucianceand commitment--projected himself into
Hank Morgan, it would be imperative that Hank be able to vary his modes
of discourse. These verbal variations, therefore, can point to fundamental
differences between the conception and function of the narrative voice in
Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee. These differences are existential (those stemming from the narrator's position in the world he

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describes) and effectual (those stemming from the use the narrator makes
of language to direct the action of the novel).
For the most part, Huck "belongs" to the environment he speaks
about. He may use a dialect which varies from the standard Pike County
speech and may be considered an outsider by the book's townspeople, but
he understands how they talk and how they think.' And certainly Huck
knows the country through which he moves, is attuned to the natural
rhythms of river and woods, and can use with accuracy previous experiences
to interpret new sights and situations. In contrast, Hank Morgan does not
in any sense "belong" to Arthurian Britain. The language barrier is substantive; for example, in Hank's fIrst Camelot conversations, the knight's word
choice and pronunciation utterly obscure his meaning. And Hank learns
that differences in language indicate basic differencesin thought and perception, as his initial reading of Sandy as a circumlocutory liar and his subsequent unfruitful attempt to pry out the facts of her"tale make clear. Hank
is not only an outsider to Arthurian speech and society,but he is also baffled
by the very appearance of ancient Britain and its inhabitants. When Hank
first awakens in Camelot, he sees "a fellow on a horse, looking down at
me--a fellow fresh out of a picture-book. He was in old-time iron armor
from head to heel, with a helmet on his head the shape of a nail keg with
slits in it" (p. 21). Here Hank tries to comprehend an unfamiliar visual
apparition by invoking more familiar frames of reference-the nail keg and
the picture-book. Hank continues to connect the sights of Camelot with
pictures: a turreted fortress is the first he "had ever seen out of a picture"
(p. 22); the dazzlingly clad Clarence "was pretty enough to frame" (p. 34).
These retreats to the picturesque can help explain the outpourings of genteel
lyricismwhich seem to contradict the practical, unpoetical (seep. 20) nature
of Hank's narrative persona.
Chapter 12, for instance, begins with a landscape description that
departs completely from the standard "Yankee colloquial" vernacular. Here
Hank Morgan lathers his prose with conventionally pretty, pictorial, often
polysyllabic phrasing (e.g. "hills, blue with haze, stretching away in billowy
perspective to the horizon," p. 141);the syntax is marked by uncharacteristic
parataxis and clausal accumulation (e.g. the 159-wordsentence beginning
with "we crossed broad natural lawns" and ending with "in the impenetrable remotenesses of the woods," pp. 141-42). This ~inguisticshift
indicates Hank's role as an outside observer who borrows "picture-book"
language to translate an alien scene into terms which both he and the folks
back home can understand. In this sense, Hank resemblesTwain as Western
journalist as well as the first-person narrators of Twain's travel books.'
All these narrative personae are mediators between known and unknown
environments, writing from foreign territory back to the familiar
community.

Known rhetorical formulae can facilitate this interpretive task; they

can also provide an insulating perspective which can be used for satiric or
polemic contrasts. Chapter 30 ofTbe Innocents Abroad, for instance, begins
with a bizarrely elaborate word painting of Naples as viewedfrom Vesuvius.
The succeeding paragraph, however, warns against coming down from the
aesthetic mountain to "go within the walls and look at [Naples] in detail,"
for the Romance-and, perhaps, the Romantic tourist--will be buried in the
f1lth and pestilence that stalk the city. I 0 Chapter 12 of A Connecticut Yankee

sets up the same sort of contrast, albeit a much less savage one; Hank's
chivalric pastoral idyll turns into immediate practical discomfort as his ar-

mor makes him itch and sweat.I I

But by the end of the book, Hank Morgan's protective aestheticizations backfire; he is so immersed in his ill-fated campaigns for reform that
he cannot maintain a safe distance from their dreadful outcome. At the
beginning of the Battle of the Sand-Belt, Hank employs simile, synecdoche,
and the neutral pronoun it to abstract the approaching knights into a nonhuman landscape observed from afar:
[W]esaw a prodigious host moving slowlytoward us, with
the steady drift and aligned front of a wave of the sea.
Nearer and nearer it came, and more and more sublimely
imposing became its aspect...Yes, it was a fine sight....
[W]ell,it was wonderful to see! Down swept that vast
horse-shoe wave--it approached the sand-belt...Great
Scott! Why the whole front of that host shot into the sky
with a thunder-crash, and became a whirling tempest of
rags and fragments. (pp. 553-54)
Soon afterwards, however, Hank literally crawls into his picture of destruction and comes face-to-face with its hideous reality. The screen of picturesque distance has been penetrated, and Hank reverts to his vernacular speech
patterns and the humanitarian vernacular values they represent:
Yes, it was a man--a dim great fIgure in armor, standing
erect, with both hands on the upper wire--and of course
there was a smell of burning flesh. Poor fellow, dead as
a door-nail, and never knew what hurt him. (p. 561)
Hank makes a feeble attempt to insulate himself from this horror by noting
that the dead knight "stood there like a statue" (p. 561), but this strategy
collapses as he watches another knight electrocute himself by touching a
corpse's shoulder. Human terms replace pictorial ones, and the asides reestablish intimacy with the reader; the knight was "Killed by a dead man,
you see--killedby a dead friend, in fact. There was something awful about

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it" (p. 563). Hank's final comment about the Battle concerns human
beings--not "a vast horse-shoe wave" or "homogeneous protoplasm, with
alloys of iron and buttons" (p. 556)--and it is cast in a flat, declarative
statement: "Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us" (p. 563).
. Th~ Battle of the Sand-Belt raises the issue of language as a moral indicator. As early as The Innocents Abroad, Twain seems to be striving for
a narrative voice which responds directly and intuitively to observed particulars in a way which transforms objective reportage into patterns of larger

significance,into a sort of itinerantwisdomliterature.I 2 And certainlythe

integrity of Huckleberry Finn's speech has been cited as a paragon of honesty against which the verbal posings and trickeries of other characters in

the novel shouldbe compared.13 But Hank Morgan'sexistentialsituation

is much more isolated--and dangerous--than is that of Huck Finn or of the
travel book narrators, and the moral dimensions of Hank's speech cannot
be held to simplistic or absolutist requirements. The Connecticut Yankee
has journeyed through time as well as through space; after he accepts that
being in Camelot is not a dream, he does not expect to return home. Unlike
Huck, Hank is stranded in an alien linguistic field; in fact, planting his
own vernacular value system in this alien field becomes one of his major
civilizing projects. Hank's various linguistic stances--the adherence to the
vernacular and the retreat to the picturesque discussed above, as well as
sentimental bathos (e.g. the description of the woman burned at the stake
or of his own blissful domesticity) and programmatic outrage (e.g. fulminations against the Church and against class oppression)--represent an array
of possible responses to a strange, frequently hostile environment.'. This
multiplicity need not indicate Hank's moral vacillation or ethical bankruptcy; rather, it does suggest a certain adventuresome linguistic self-awareness
that other vernacular narrators lack.
Huck Finn rarely precipitates the events in his narrative. l' When Huck
does generate events, he usually works through his actions (e.g. running
away, dressing as a girl) rather than through his words. Thus his narrative
voice functions in the novel largely as a passive recorder of what occurs
around him, as well as a tonal filter through which disparate happenings
are woven into a brightly patterned but consistently textured verbal fabric.
Hank Morgan, however, uses words to affect events. His ability to
manipulate words, particularly when compared with the linguistic naivete
and lack of verbal dexterity he perceives in Camelot, becomes one of his
most effective weapons in the fights for self-preservation and social reform.
The groundwork for his verbal manipulations is laid by his intense consciousness of language, emphasized throughout the book, whether it be
teaching Sandy how to be a better raconteuse, dissecting Sir Dinadan's bad
joke, or appreciating a cleverly turned phrase or a rhythmically worded

. passage. Hank is also susceptible to language; he is nearly enthralled by

Morgan Le Fay's sweetlymusical voice, and he-like Adam in Twain's "The

Diaryof Adamand Eve'" 6 --doessuccumbto the soothingcharmof Sandy's incessant chatter.

Hank Morgan draws upon his general awareness of the powers of
language for specific verbal tactics to activate his mute powers of historical
knowledge and technological skill. Hank knows how to yoke gesture and
tone of voice to spoken discourse in order to produce the desired "effect,"
as he demonstrates in his management of the eclipse and in his restoration
of the Holy Fountain. These incidents, therefore, often involve mannered,
archaic language, but those who think that this sort of linguistic changeof-pace makes Hank into an overgrown Tom Sawyer posturing as a Sir
Walter Scott hero'? or into a sell-out to the feudal morality the book
theoretically opposes" should note Hank's control of, and insight into,
his verbal pyrotechnics. His final orchestration of the King's rescue from
the hangman provides a case in point:
I waved my right arm as Launcelot swept in--he
recognized my rag--I tore away noose and bandage, and
shouted:
"On your knees, every rascal of you, and salute the
King! Who fails shall sup in hell to-night."
I always use that high style when I'm climaxing an
effect. (p. 491)
Similarly, Hank's employment of elevated vocabulary and "Arthurian"
diction, such as in his instructions to the King about how to pass as a commoner, are conscious strategies--not unwitting lapses. In addition, Hank
believesthat the easilycommunicated word is a vital civilizingforce. Among
his first innovations are the telephone, the telegraph, and the newspaper;
he teaches Clarence and the boys to talk "neat modern English" (p. 552);
less seriously, he transforms Arthur's knights into traveling iron-plated
billboards. And it is the clash of word against word--the Church Interdict
versus Hank's defiant Republican proclamation--that triggers the
catastrophic Battle of the Sand-Belt.
Linguistic awareness and flexibility, then, are essential to Hank
Morgan's character and function in A Connecticut Yankee. The demands
on his narrative voice are much greater than those on Huckleberry Finn's;
Hank's linguistic entrepreneurship must allow him to adapt to and make
changes in Arthurian Britain. When readers pin their dissatisfactions with
the book upon its narrative point of view, they suggest that Twain tried
to fashion a restricted vernacular point of view and failed. Instead, it seems
that in A Connecticut Yankee Twain tried to expand the capabilities of

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a first-person vernacular narrator, to give him the verbal elasticity necessary

to interpret and to act upon a bewildering and contradictory alien world.
I

Mark Twain. A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court (New York: Charles L.

Webster. 1890). p. 23. All funher citations

edition and will be noted in the text.

from A Connecticut

Yankee will be from this

'For. example. Henry Nash Smith (Mark Twain: Tbe Development of a Writer [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1972]. p. 139) believes the novel fails because of Twain's "inability to make Hank Morgan a consistent character"; Richard Bridgman (The CoUoqulal
Style In America [New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 1966], pp. 14446) thinks that the "limits
of the diction and syntax...are not clear in Twain's mind." that the style is "uncontrolled."
and that the ungoverned colloquial mode has produced a "hopelessly uneven book"; Roben
Regan (Unpromising Heroes: Mark Twain and his Chancters [Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press. 1966]. p. 184) notes the stylistic slips and concludes that the book falls into a "shambles."
'See. for instance. William M. Gibson, Tbe Art of Mark TwaIn (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press. 1976). p. 5.
'John C. Gerber. "The Relation between Point of View and Style in the Works of Mark
Twain." in Style In Prose Fiction: EngUsh Institute Essays, 1958 (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press. 1958), p. 165; Leo Marx. "The Pilot and the Passenger: Landscape Conventions and
the Style of Hucldeberry Finn," American Lltenture 28 (1956). 143; Smith, pp. 113-14. These
critics believe Huckleberry Finn to be Twain's finest stylistic achievment.
'Kenneth S. Lynn (Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor [Boston: Little, Brown, 1959].
pp. 250-5 I) in fact states that Hank's "narrative style makes him sound like a grown-up Huck
Finn" but adds the less defensible assenion that Hank "is Huck with a vengeance...an aggressive adult who...has a relentless and unforgiving contempt for the human race...[and]
is able to laugh uproariously at the spectacle of human suffering."
'See Dan Beard's account of Twain's description of Hank Morgan's character in "Mark
Twain, the Man. as Dan Beard Knew Him." San Fnnclsco Examiner, April 25. 1910, p.
16; rpt. in A Connecticut Yankee In King Artbur'. Court: A Norton Critical EdJtlon, ed.
Allison R. Ensor (New York: Norton, 1982). p. 309.
'Gerber (pp. 166-67) is one such critic.
'For Huck's dialect in relation to other characters' speech patterns. see David Carkett.
"The Dialects of Huckleberry Finn," American Lltenture 51 (1979). 315-22.
'A provocative discussion of how and why Twain as a novice writer tried to project a
mediating narrative voice can be found in Stephen Fender, "'The Prodigal in Far Country
Chawing on Husks': Mark Twain's Searcb for a Style in the West." Modern Language Review
71 (1976). 737-41.
I 'Mark Twain. Tbe Innocents Abroad (Hanford,
Conn.: American. 1985), p. 315.
,, Smith (p. 155) suggests that the "pastoral landscape might have been presented merely
to make the towns seem more sordid by contrast. But there are other hints that...he feels
a nostalgia for Arthur's Britain." a nostalgia for a pre-industrial paradise that Smith couples
with Twain's feelings about the Quarles farm (p. 156). This view is disputed by Louis J. Budd
(Mark Twain: Social Phllosopher [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. 1962]. p. 140).
I 'See Philip D. Beidler. "Realistic Style and the Problem of Context in The Innocents
Abroad and Roughing It," American Lltenture 52 (1980), 33-34.
I 'See, for example. Janet Holmgren McKay. "'Tears and Flapdoodle': Point of View
and Style in The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn," Style 10 (1976).47-49. This article also
contains a useful linguistic analysis of Huck's style. Sydney J. Krause ("Twain's Method and
Theory of Composition." Modem PhUology 52 [1958]) addresses the issue of linguistic honesty

by referring to the ideal of fonnal integrity and stylistic consistency implicit in Twain's criticism
of Cooper and Scott (167) and by maintaining that to Twain. artificiality was the worst possible literary fault (174).
"John S. Dinan believes that Hank Morgan is an American underdog in a hostile. brutal
world, but he thinks that Hank's awareness of style dissociates form from content and helps
him create a violent counter-world to vanquish his enemies ("Hank Morgan: Anist Run
Amuck
Massachusetts Studies In En.gUsh 3 [1972]. 72-77).
"Huck's somewhat disturbing passivity is discussed in Leo Marx, "Mr. Eliot. Mr. Trilling. and Huckleberry Finn," The American Scholar 22 (1953). 423-40.
'"For example, Adam writes: "At first I thought she talked too much; but now I should
be sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life." ("The Diary of Adam and
Eve," in The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider [1957; rpt. Boston:
Doubleday. 1980], p. 282).
"E.g. Gerber. p. 170.
"Dennis Berthold. "The Conflict of Dialects in A Connecticut Yankee," Ball State University Forum 18 (1977).51-58. believes that Hank Morgan gradually accepts "Arthurian" dialect
and. consequently. the inhumane and aristocratic values of Arthurian society.