What Historical Links Inspire Mark Twain Bsd'S Character?

When they chose authors for the personalities in ‘Bungo Stray Dogs’, I was excited to see how they would turn authors into mythic figures. Mark Twain’s incarnation of Samuel Clemens is very historically accurate and drawns greatly from his riverboat days when he would call people “mark twain” (meaning “Commercial steam benchmark: twelve feet” , which would roughly translate to “I’m at rest” in this context), hence the roaming Riverboat Character. The journalist and travel-writer chapters of Clemens are also much on show, especially his fame as a very popular lecturer, touring from place to place to entertain his audiences in a very Theatrical manner.

It’s not just mannerism that is borrowed from Twain in this show. Rather, the backdrop of the author’s life is provided in the show in terms of the political and social history of the time of slavery, the Civil War, the Reconstruction period and the remaining inequalities of the Gilded Age. And so, the moral struggle of the character, satire and also much world-weariness is contained in this character. Works like ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘The Innocents Abroad’ contain contrast between humor and criticism of the world and so these are also contained in the character. The late bitterness of Twain in his essays and private letters are also conveyed. In fact, I half expect the character to pull out a line from ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’ and then pull off a card trick to get home his point.

The character of Mark Twain in ‘Bungo Stray Dogs’ is essentially Samuel Clemens, just distilled down. The man who got the name ‘Mark Twain’ from a riverboat, the showman-lecturer, the travel-writer all shine through in this character. The man lived through the biggest changes in America’s history, before and after the Civil War, the industrialization of the country and all the grime of the Gilded Age. So naturally his character has a moral ambivalence and a satirical view of life. His best known works ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Letters from the Earth’ are full of warmth, irony and dark satire. Mark Twain was a traveling performer, a humorist, so the character is also half entertainer. If you want to get more into his character, it might be useful to read through ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and then look up some of his speeches.

I really love how writers can get brought into fiction and how they translate. Mark Twain in 'Bungo Stray Dogs' is an amazing example of this. This character, Mark Twain, has so many amazing traits of the real-life Samuel Clemens. He’s a riverboat pilot just like Clemens, and his pen name “Mark Twain” comes from the term that was used to tell passengers that there was safe water in the river for shipping. He’s a storytelling character and I think a lot of his traits come from Clemens’ early life as a journalist and travel writer. Also, his personality comes from his restless nature to be in different places and to get a reaction from people. He’s charming one second and can then brutalley criticize people in the next second.

The show also tapped into Mark Twain’s life in the era of the so-called “Gilded Age”, or the period of seemingly high economic growth accompanying grave social problems. In his famous novels, the author of Bungo Stray Dogs explores questions of identity, issues of race, and of morality in times of deep change. His life as a penniless pirotechnist’s son, and then as a pilot on the Mississippi river, gave him a strong sense of identity and of story-telling that later informed his career as a writer of essays, satirical short stories, and more. Bungo Stray Dogs brings to life this cerebral and fluid and iconoclastic author.

When I actually read ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ on a riverboat (long story), one of the things that most clicked with me was how freely the author changed scenery between scenes of freedom and scenes of constraint. There’s a similar dynamic at play in the Mark Twain character in ‘Bungo Stray Dogs’, and this is all based off Samuel Clemens’ life and career. The character is sort of a humorous mix of moral complexity and performance art, and that’s really cool to see in a fictional context as opposed to just being a name dropped by some author.