I’m afraid that my foray into American literature is not off to an auspicious start. I have been defeated by James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. It isn’t a terribly long book, and I expected to have the fortitude to read it, but I have to admit defeat. I can only read a few pages at a time before I invent an excuse to do something, anything, else.
Tonight I decided to stop torturing myself and took solace in Mark Twain’s memorable skewering of Cooper. I take no joy in agreeing with it, but I must:
It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are–oh! indescribable; its love scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.
Twain was speaking of The Deerslayers, but his criticisms apply equally to The Last of the Mohicans. I would class the offenses generally under three headings:
- Plausibility – Twain documents at length Cooper’s many offenses against simple physical reality, such as a stream that narrows dramatically as it approaches its destination.
- Character – Rarely have I read a work with poorer characterization. Characters are hardly recognizable from one chapter to the next. This problem is exacerbated by Cooper’s irritating havit of giving characters multiple names and then employing those names apparently at random. The mercurial nature of the characters is especially troubling in their …
- Language – Twain notes that “the rules governing literary art … require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.” This rule is violated most egregiously in the case of the many-named hero of the Leatherstocking series, whose language is as perversely inconsistent as his knowledge and behavior.
Twain also points out Cooper’s bizarre notions of woodcraft, or “the delicate art of the forest.” An example that struck me, as a former botany student, was a scene in which the wounded villain Magua has fled from our heroes. “Hawkeye” finds a clue: “Look at this sumach [sic]: its leaves are red, though everybody knows the fruit is in the yellow blossom in the month of July.” Is Hawkeye suggesting that one might mistake the brilliant red-orange of sumac in the fall for fresh blood on a leaf? Is he trying to show off? Is Cooper? Why not say “There’s blood on this bush”?
An even worse example is Hawkeye’s bear disguise. Cooper never tires of telling us of the aforementioned “delicate arts” of the Indians. But despite their profound knowledge of the natural world, they are fooled, at very close range, by Hawkeye dressed up in a bear skin and engaging in all sorts of unbearlike behavior.
I could go on, but I really just want to leave this disaster of a novel behind me and move on to something worthwhile.