Personal memories of Joan of Arc
Personal Recollections on Joan of Arc (Original: Personal Recollections on Joan of Arc ) is a historical novel by the American writer Mark Twain . It was first published in Harper's Magazine in 1895 and was published in book form in 1896. It is an unusual text for Twain. Nevertheless, he considered this novel to be his best work, which is probably due to the ideal image of the pure virgin of Joan of Arc that he created here (which for him also embodied his own wife).
Among the many adaptations of the Jeanne d'Arc material in literature, the Mark Twains is not only chronologically between Friedrich Schiller (1801) and George Bernard Shaw (1923); With their attempt to combine serious historiography and a romantic-tragic worldview with burlesque elements, the 'memories' also stand between these two outstanding forms of the topic in terms of literary history.
In contrast to the 'usual' satirist, Twain indulges in very romantic, lengthy, sentimental and pathetic effusions (“She was perhaps the only selfless person whose name has a place in worldly history”, preface), which also prompted him to do so not to publish the work under his usual pseudonym “Mark Twain”. He places his eponymous heroine directly behind Christ in her world-historical significance. Of his three historical novels - besides this work The Prince and the Begging Boy 1861 and A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur 1889 - this one is the most ambitious and the least satirical.
In order to make these “memories” appear historically objective, Mark Twain invented two (fictional) “authorities”: the page and secretary Sieur Louis de Conte (“freely translated from ancient French into modern English”), who supposedly in the same Dorf grew up, and the translator Jean François Alden, who, from the perspective of the 19th century, contributes further comments in footnotes to Conte's 'Memories'. It is no coincidence that Conte wrote his memoirs at the age of 82, allegedly in 1492, the year America was discovered, and dedicated them to his great-great-grand-nephews and nieces.
Mark Twain actually studied the specialist literature available to him in detail and compiled it in a pseudoscientific apparatus; the biographical facts from the life of Joan of Arc and the historical sequence are largely authentic. A few inserted fictional characters (Conte, Rainguesson, the Paladin) and some clearly fictional episodes reveal the 'old' Mark Twain now and then, who mostly disappears behind the mass of historical material; Occasional interpretations and comments of historical events (from the pen of the fictional Conte) loosen up the 'memories'.
literature
- Mark Twain: Collected Works, Vol. 8. Hanser Verlag. Munich-Vienna 1977 (German by Otto Wilck) ISBN 3-446-12447-0
- Kindler's Literature Lexicon on dtv in 25 volumes. Munich 1974, vol. 17, p. 7391/92