International Fiction vs. Ethnic Autobiography: Cultural Appropriation in Mark Twain and Edward Rivera

Negotiating foreignness has been at the heart of two subgenres of American prose literature, international fiction dealing with Americans in the Old World and ethnic autobiography depicting the fate of newcomers in the United States. The former flourished between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the end of World War II, and was then followed by the latter, which focuses on forms of otherness at home. Even though these two strands of American literary production, each making up an impressive corpus of works, grapple with the problem of alterity, their relationship with one another has largely been ignored.(1) One might ask, given the identity of theme, how international fictions and ethnic autobiographies differ. In Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic (1982), the Puerto Rican writer Edward Rivera provides an instructive answer to this question by engaging in an intertextual conversation with Mark Twain, one of the forefathers of international fiction. Rivera builds into his autobiography features that echo two of Twain's most important works, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and The Innocents Abroad (1869), thereby pointing out his ideological similarities and--most significantly--his differences with Twain. Allusions to Huckleberry Finn serve Rivera as a means of placing his own narrative firmly in the tradition of American literature. In chapter 3 of Family Installments, the reader is introduced to the orphan Chuito, a modern-day Huck Finn, who initiates the book's hero, Santos Malanguez, into the world of sex. After misbehaving repeatedly, Chuito is sent to relatives, who are to turn him into a decent human being. At their home, he confronts the same ordeal which Huck Finn undergoes in the household of the Widow Douglas: he must take a bath and show good manners, and he is not allowed to gamble or smoke. In chapter 6, Rivera ridicules Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, presenting to the reader a burlesque reminiscent of the theatrics performed by Twain's "King" and "Duke." By offering his readers his own version of the adventures of a young American, Rivera puts himself on an equal footing, as it were, with Twain. More important than Huckleberry Finn, however, is the second foil, The Innocents Abroad, which shares with Family Installments the narrator figure and his use of humor. On a basic representational level, both narratives are anatomies, which, as Percy Adams points out, often appear in the form of a burlesque travelogue with a naive protagonist.(2) In The Innocents Abroad, several distinct voices perform the task of guiding the reader through the societies of Europe and the Mediterranean, with Twain remaining visible and audible behind the multiplicity of narrating agents. The distance between author and narrating voice opens an ironic gap, allowing Twain to be critical both of the foreign countries he visits and of the behavior of the American travelers, whose Yankee prejudices and ignorance of foreign languages render them ill-prepared for the long journey. This critical function is performed by various humorous techniques, the burlesque in particular, and it is maintained throughout the sixty-one chapters of Twain's account. Borne out by the very title, an episodic quality also informs Rivera's Family Installments, which is narrated by the young Santos Malanguez, the bewildered and immature alter ego of the author. Like Twain, he is a guide of sorts, not for prospective tourists in the Old World in this instance, but for prospective immigrants to the United States, who might glean some insights and pieces of advice from his Memories of Growing Up Hispanic. As in The Innocents Abroad, the distance between author and narrator produces a critical space filled with humor. These textual similarities, however, do not create similar representations of the cross-cultural encounter in the narratives, nor are the different foreign experiences of the protagonists the result of the different cultures they confront. …