Weekly Journal Entry: 10/5/09

So much to talk about…

            This week’s reading is fast-paced, exciting, and yet, for one whose knowledge of American history is deplorably lacking, informative. I’ll start with Johnson because I feel as if a foundation in early American history will help frame how we read and understand Tufts. Even though I am sad to admit this, I never realized that the French Revolution occurred so soon after the American Revolution. Of course, I have heard of both, but these events were always isolated from each other; I learned about the American Revolution in high school and the French Revolution in a cursory, bullet-point world history class my freshman year of college. My point is that Johnson is great about highlighting the connections between events, events that to an unobservant eye previously appeared unrelated or at least only tenuously associated. Thus, when we talk about Tufts tomorrow, we will have to consider not just the American Revolution, but the French one as well. To broaden the scope even more, I wonder: Do we get the sense that events like the French Revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion, the battles with Native Americans, or even the debates about the Constitution ever affect Tufts? Of course, chronologically, some of these occurrences have not yet appeared in Tufts’ timeline in his tale, yet one has to wonder if political or ideological discourse adopted during these dramatic events of American history ever enter into Tufts’ story. For example, when describing his escape from a man named Peter Folsom and others who wish him harm, Tufts employs military language with gusto: “[…] my confederates issuing forth, the rencountre (a hostile meeting between two foes) became general, and was continued with undaunted heroism on both sides” (26). This type of language—or as Bakhtin would term it, a military form of heteroglossia—resonates with the many struggles that the new American nation experienced. Of course, there are many other things I want to get to in Johnson, but I think for now I’ll just note that Tufts is part of the greater debates occurring in Washington D.C. between the Federalists under Hamilton and the Democratic-Republicans led by Jefferson. For example, Tufts publishes his narrative in 1807, the year in which Jefferson’s Embargo Act fails miserably, especially in the Northeast, i.e. Tufts’ territory. Thus, even after many years between his deeds and his narration of the past, Tufts’ project of relating the truth (which to him is highly relative) is somewhat hindered by the current political and economic situations of America under a Democratic-Republican president. Further, Tufts returns from his stay with the Abenakis Native Americans in 1775; he has been almost isolated from current political news. When he returns, the war is beginning. His separation and subsequent reentrance into American events must have affected him on some level.

            However, from Tufts we receive little commentary on American news and more on his personal adventures. Yet, even these individual exploits are at times tantalizingly left bare of any reflection or contrition. We see that while Tufts is continually apologizing for his verbose descriptions, he nevertheless leaves many things out—unlike Burroughs, Tufts is not nearly as prone to philosophical reflections or self-analytic ruminations. He claims that his various adventures are so numerous and tedious that “a mere catalogue […] must swell a volume” (34). Yet, we certainly do not get a “mere catalogue,” but some brief but undeniably proud descriptions of several humorous incidents. In fact, Tufts is downright funny. For example, in a light, amusing tone, he describes a scene where he convinces his friend Smith that he is some type of wizard, and consequently steals Smith’s clothes and abandons him. The reader forgets that Tufts is a criminal, to us he seems like a lovable and mischievous Vice character onstage. 

            Roughly eighty years after Tufts published his narrative, people were still reading and still admiring Tufts exploits. In Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 76 (1888), Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote an article about Tufts’ narrative. Higginson begins his essay, titled “A New England Vagabond,” by noting, “There may usually be found in the best regulated minds some concealed liking for a vagabond, the relic of days when we thought it would be a very pleasant thing to run away with the circus or to sleep under a hay-stack” (605). Certainly, Tufts’ exploits seem like a circus with amazing acts of disappearance, a thirty-dollar picture device, and his acrobatic ability to always land in the arms of a woman. In this sense, Tufts revels in the atmosphere of the carnival, and his love for trickery and licentious behavior seem to indicate that he is indeed a grotesque character.

            Even in this first third of Tufts’ narrative, we see that he embodies many different characters. Like Burroughs, Tufts is a clever actor, and he constructs various identities for the people he interacts with and for his readers. Without a doubt, Tufts evades distinct classification—is he some type of Robin Hood-like figure, or is he merely in line with his “worthy predecessors, the knaves” (Preface iv)? It seems like Tufts is laughing at us. When he is “falsely” accused of stealing oxen, Tufts puts an admonishment to the accuser in the mouth of a gentleman: “To be careful in future how he brought an accusation against any person till well assured of his identity” (63). Because we cannot be sure of Tufts’ identity any more than the poor man who is missing his oxen can, the narrator orders us to withhold any accusation. Yet, if we can never be sure who Tufts is, then we can never charge him with any crime. We cannot even accuse him of misrepresenting his past, for truth and identity are subjective for Tufts. In this way, Tufts plays another joke, this time on us; we too are victims of his relish for jest.