Laughter and the Tree of Knowledge

Mark Twain, in The Diary of Adam and Eve, tells a funny story about the expulsion of our fore parents from the Garden of Eden. It was not an apple that caused the Fall but a Chestnut. A Chestnut, asks Adam, what Chestnut? A Chestnut, Eve explains, is another word for a sick joke. Did he by chance tell such a joke at the moment she was taking a bite from the apple? Adam combs his memory and remembers, yes, he did. Just as Eve was approaching the Tree of Knowledge, Adam was basking in the sight of a phenomenon they have named "Niagara Falls" when suddenly he had the "radiant thought" of water tumbling upwards. And I was just about to kill myself with laughing at it when all nature broke loose in war and death, and I had to flee for my life. "There," she said with triumph, "that is just it. The Serpent mentioned that very jest, and called it the First Chestnut, and said it was coeval with the creation." [12] "Coeval with the creation" does not quite say that the jest caused the mortal new world, yet it does establish a strict connection between them. Adam's musing about how nature might operate differently and Eve's encroachment on the Tree of Knowledge are presented as interchangeable. Eve's mistake lies in wanting to know more than God ordained; Adam's in flights of the imagination. Of course, in these humorous diaries, where the perspectives of Adam and Eve are consistently at odds with each other, there is no telling who has the story right. In Adam's opinion Eve is an insufferable busybody, constantly meddling with the order of the garden, erecting signs saying "Keep Off the Grass" and pointing "This Way to the Whirlpool." Bombarding Adam with small talk and trivial observations, she shows a compulsive tendency to domesticate what lies displayed in its self-sufficient splendor before them. Her plucking the apple from the Tree of Knowledge is the result of an irrepressible desire to subject nature to an intellectual scheme. Adam has his own problems, according to Eve. He is passive to the point of stupor--unplanning and acquiescent in his unmediated relation to self-present existence. When he gets his "radiant idea" of water flowing backwards, he may be even more out of touch with the splendors of the garden than the practical, controlling Eve. Wouldn't it be nice, he wonders, if things were not ruled by gravity? If there were no firm and ineluctable necessity? As with Eve, we suspect the workings of intellectual hubris. Adam's Chestnut is an "error," a mental wandering away from the plain constitution of nature. If viewed seriously, it is a Promethean gesture, appropriating the (sole) right of the Creator to imagine how things should be. If this is a sin, it is certainly one that Adam's descendants will repeat in perpetuity, as their attention fluctuates between the facts of What Is and the fantasies of What Could Be. Judging from the name given to the tree from which Eve plucks the apple (Knowledge of Good and Evil) what humans have been told not to pry into are distinctions between right and wrong. Might Twain be recasting Original Sin as the human tendency to judge experience, to think up better and worse ways of doing things? (1) The freedom to do so was always implicit in Eden; but once it was activated "all nature broke loose in war and death." The new problem would be how humans could then find their way back to grace. Twain's diaries say nothing further about this intellectual contravention of God-given gravity. Nor do Adam and Eve ever refer back to the Chestnut in the period that follows the Fall. Twain, in other words, does not consolidate a tie between the spirit of jest and the idea of primordial disobedience. These diaries do not fixate on some transgressive compulsion of God's children to form notions not in the Father's plan. If anything, by means of his counter-tale Twain probably intends to deflate the very notion of Original Sin, suggesting that "the fall into mortality" could be attributed to a bad joke just as easily as to plucking a fruit. …