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Ethics in Twain's Connecticut Yankee 1
Author(s) -
Kim Bong Eun
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2006.00854.x
Subject(s) - mythology , native american , white (mutation) , indictment , fantasy , narrative , literature , colonialism , absolute (philosophy) , history , apocalypticism , philosophy , genealogy , classics , law , art , theology , political science , biochemistry , chemistry , archaeology , judaism , gene
Despite his frequent utterances in favor of Native Americans, Twain has been interpreted as generally unfavorable to them. However, Emmanuel Levinas's concept of the ‘ethical encounter with the absolute other’ in ‘Is ontology fundamental?’ illuminates Twain's affirmative ethics towards Native Americans in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). The comparison of Twain's novel with the Native Alaskan Harold Napoleon's Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being (1996), an autobiographical report on the extermination of Alaskan aboriginals and their culture, demonstrates that Twain's British Arthurian fantasy embodies his postcolonial indictment for the massacre of Native Americans. The Chippewa/Ojibway Anishinaabe critic Gerald Vizenor's new code ‘postindian’ in Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (1994) exposes the latent postindian aspect of Twain's discourse. Levinas's ethics and the late twentieth‐century Native American texts disclose the ethical prevision implied in Twain's time travelogue. Deconstructing the typological Canaan myth, Twain implies that Native Americans should have been encountered in terms of the absolute other and thus problematizes his forefathers’ colonial zeal to exterminate Native Americans and assimilate Native American survivors.