ENGLISH LIT 344 / COMEDY & SATIRE

THE BIG BEAR OF ARKANSAS
[from America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury
by Walter Blair ad Hamlin Hill
copyright 1978, Oxford University Press]

The Big Bear of Arkansas is a story within a story. It has two narrators, a writer who tells about the gathering of an audience aboard a riverboat, and an oral narrator who unfolds an enclosed tale about a bear hunt. The first sentence is:

    A steamboat on the Mississippi frequently, in making her regular trips, carries between places varying from one to two thousand miles apart; and as these boats advertise to land passengers and freight at 'all intermediate landings,' the heterogeneous character of the passengers on one of these up-country boats can scarcely be imagined by one who has never seen it with his own eyes.
The language-even for a day when most writings were quite formal is stilted and unimaginative: its lightest touch is a drab quotation from an advertisement. The ponderous tone, the big words, and the sentence construction show up the first narrator as a bit stuffy. So does his next sentence...its sole figure of speech (here italicized) smelling of the lamp:
    Starting from New Orleans in one of these boats, you will find yourself associated with men from every state in the Union, and every portion of the globe; and a man of observation need not lack for amusement or instruction in such a crowd, if he will take the trouble to read the great book of character so favourably opened before him.
As he continues, this narrator proves to be the sort that marks off phrases b'arely edging towards slang (e.g., "latest paper" and "social hall") in apologetic quotation marks. Nevertheless, he soon shows he relishes the motley steamboat crowd and popular nicknames:
    Here may be seen jostling together the wealthy Southern planter, the pedlar of tin-ware from New England, a venerable bishop and a desperate gambIer. Wolverines, Suckers, Hoosiers, Buckeyes, and Corn¬crackers, besides a 'plentiful sprinkling' of the half-horse and half-alligator species of men, who are peculiar to the 'old Mississippi'..."
And when he boards the Invincible for a brief trip from New Orleans, he at once notices that the crowd is as miscellaneous as usual and decides that, because of special circumstances, he will not, on this trip anyhow, peruse "the great book of character" they open.

When the second narrator, Jim Doggett, arrives, the writer tells of his offstage shouts, describes and quotes him at length, remarks (about) his pleasant effect on the crowd, and because he will only see "so singular a personage" briefly persuades him to tell a long story. Jim's yarnspinning skill delights him:

    His manner was so singular, that half of his story consisted in his ex¬cellent way of telling it, the great peculiarity of which was the happy manner he had of emphasizing the prominent parts of his conversation. As near as I can recollect, I have italicized them, and given the story in his own words.
Once Jim gets going, the writer quotes him without interrupting. When Jim ends, the educated narrator describes an aftermath that fascinates him. Stuffy though his language makes him appear, then, this narrator, no aloof and prissy Whig aristocrat, has a lively interest in his fellow passengers and an even livelier one in Jim.

Jim first lifts his voice at the b'ar, shouting stock frontier boasts.

    Hurra for the Big b'ar of Arkansaw! [I'm a] horse! [I'm a] screamer! [Alongside me) lightening is slow!"
Having noisily identified himself, the Big Bear strolls into the cabin, sits, hoists feet onto the stove, greets the crowd, says he feels at home, and soon charms his motley audience:
    Some of the company at this familiarity looked a little angry, and some astonished; but in a moment every face was wreathed in a smile. There was something about the intruder that won the heart on sight. He appeared to be a man enjoying perfect health and contentment: his eyes were as sparkling as diamopds, and good-natured to simplicity. Then his perfect confidence in himself was irresistibly droll.
Clearly no clownish caricature, ths is an interesting personality attractive to men of all "creeds and characters," of all classes and parts of the country.

So close to the stodgy utterances of the writer, Jim's quoted words, phrasings and rhythms are by contrast informal, idiosyncratic, and imaginative. His homage to his dog Bowie-knife is typical:

    ...whew! why the fellow thinks the world is full of b'ar, he finds them so easy. It's lucky he don't talk as well as think; for with his natural modesty, if he should suddenly learn how much he is acknowledged to be ahead of all other dogs in the universe, he would be astonished to death in two minutes. Strangers, the dog knows a b'ar's way as well as a horse-jockey knows a woman's; he always b'arks at the right time, bites at the exact place, and whips without getting a scratch. I never could tell whether he was made expressly to hunt b'ar, or whether b'ar was made expressly for him to hunt; anyway, I believe they were ordained to go together as naturally as Squire Jones says a man and woman is, when he moralizes in marrying a couple.
Jim's zest creates hyperbole and the flood of details that support wild claims. Affection helps Jim read Bowie-knife's mind and endow the beast with human virtues-intelligence and modesty. One of the unhackneyed similes, the trope which cites the well-informed horse-jockey, signals his worldly wisdom. His praise of the timing of Bowie-knife's b'ark and bite, and his use of "whips" show his precise knowledge of a great hunting dog's tactics. His philosophical discourse about the predestination of either the hunter or the hunted is distinctive. So is a respect for what is "natural" which comes out two other times as he tells his story.

In addition to being exuberant, an acute observer, and a do-it-yourself philosopher, Jim is a superb yarnspinner. He orders expository details and events in a masterful fashion and marshals hosts of particulars and witty comments on them. Although his story (in large part because of its salty style) seems artless, it makes comical use of two anticlimaxes, mounts to its climax, and then ends.

The introduction of the two narrators, of Jim's audience, and the detailing of Jim's talk with the crowd occupy more than half of Thorpe's pages before the Big Bear begins his account of his greatest hunt. These preliminaries initiate a pattern which Doggett's yarn develops and completes—essentially one of contrasts and expansion. After saying that he feels entirely at home among the cosmopolitan steamboat crowd, Jim launches talk about a contrast that is analogous to that between his vernacular style and the formal style of the writer:

    Perhaps," said he, "gentlemen, ...you have been to New Orleans often; I never made the first visit before, and I don't intend to make another in a crow's life. I am thrown away in that ar place, and useless...Some of the gentlemen thar call me green—well, perhaps I am, said I, but I arn't so at home; and if I ain't off my trail much, the heads of them perlite chaps themselves wern't much the hardest; for according to my notion, they were the real know-nothings, green as a pumpkin vine—couldn't, in farming, I'll bet, raise a crop of turnips; and as for shooting, they'd miss a b'arn if the door was swinging.
Jim has had trouble talking with these dandies. If they speak of "game," they mean not "Arkansaw poker and high-low jack" but fowl and wild animals, which Jim calls "meat." Moreover, New Orleans game is tiny stuff, "chippenbirds and shite-pokes"—"trash" that Arkansans think beneath contempt. Jim says that at home he will not shoot a bird weighing less than forty pounds.

Arkansas is

    the creation state, the finishing-up country....Then its airs—just breathe them, and they will make you snort like a horse.
Even when Jim admits that mosquitoes there are enormous, he defends them in a way underlining the contrast between Arkansas and the rest of the world. Natives or settlers are impervious to them; and the one injury they caused was to a Yankee—
    "a foreigner" who "swelled up and busted...superated...took the ager...and finally took a steamboat and left the country."
To end his argument, Jim lists his state's features in the order of their size: mosquitoes, and then-"her varmints are large, her trees are large, her rivers are large;" Next-as if climactically-he comes to the bears. They differ not only from bears anywhere else but of any other time:
    I read in history that varmints have their fat season and their lean season. That is not the case in Arkansaw, feeding as they do upon the spontenacious productions of the sile, they have one continued fat season the year round (and running one) sort of mixes the ile up with the meat, (and if you shoot one), steam comes out of the bullet hole ten feet in a straight line.
When a "foreigner" asks, "Whereabouts are these bears so abundant?" Doggett introduces the greatest district in this marvelous Cockayne, Schlaraffenland, Lubberland, Arkansas—"Shirt-tail Bend" on the Forks of Cypress—Jim's own clearing.

Shirt-tail Bend is called "one of the prettiest places on the old Mississippi," but soon this mild claim gives way to claims that the government ain't got another such place to dispose of and that three months after planting, beets are mistaken for cedar stumps, potato hills for Indian mounds. Planting in Arkansaw is dangerous, Jim warns. Dangerous for bears are Doggett, the best b'ar hunter in the district; his gun, a perfect epidemic among b'ar; if not watched closely, it will go off as quick on a warm scent as my dog Bowie-knife will, and the aforesaid super-dog.

Soon after Jim has jocosely praised his settlement, two paragraphs in the highfalutin style of the writer return to the contrasting steamboat cabin. There skeptics briefly dispute with him, but the first narrator asks for a description of some particular bear hunt, describes the Big Bear's singular manner, then without interrupting, lets him give his account in his own salty words.

Repeating the pattern of contrast and enlargement, Jim mentions two ordinary hunts—ordinary, that is, for the Forks of Cypress—then promises to give an idea of a hunt, in which the greatest b'ar was killed that ever lived, none excepted.

A customary hunt for Jim is about as much the same to me as drinking. It is told, he says, in two sentences-a b'ar is started, and he is killed. This hunt, by contrast, requires many sentences, since the varmint was the giant beast which eluded Jim, his epidemic gun, and the incomparable Bowie-knife for two or three long years.

Jim first learns about this critter by measuring the height of bite marks made on sassafras trees-marks which, experience proves, show the length of the b'ar to an inch. These are "about eight inches above any in the forest that I knew of. Says I, 'them marks is a hoax, or it indicates the d&*%t b'ar that was ever grown.' In fact, ...I couldn't believe it was real, and I went on. Again I saw the same marks...and I knew the thing lived. That conviction came home to my soul like an earthquake.

Jim tells about hunting the bear and wasting away in flesh because of his frustration over many months before he again happens to mention the critter's size. This time the beast is a little larger than a horse. Still later, when Jim gets a final shot at him, the bear loomed up like a black mist, he seemed so large. After Jim's shot, the varmint wheeled, gave a yell, and walked' through the fence like a falling tree would through a cobweb. Thus, like Cypress Forks beets and potatoes, the bear of bears grovels at an astonishing rate.

Though this account has traced the bear's growth by degrees in Jim's narrative to his greatest size, it has not noticed a second climactic development that is not made explicit until the very end.

Soon after that earthquake conviction has proved to Jim that the giant animal lives, he has a startling thought: Says I, 'here is something a-purpose for me: that b'ar is mine, or I give up the hunting business.' The way everything goes wrong during the first pursuit of the bear is disquieting because it is past my understanding. Other happenings prove to be just as inexplicable. Jim's flesh begins to waste away faster than the ager." He becomes obsessed—sees the bear in everything he does. But when at last he gets close enough to see the beast plainly, he reacts strangely, exclaiming, But wasn't he a beauty, though? I loved him like a brother.

A companion's shot strikes the animal's forehead: The b'ar shook his head, ...and then walked down from that tree as gently as a lady would from a carriage. 'Twas a beautiful sight... Now Jim takes careful aim at his side just back of his foreleg and pulls the trigger; his gun snaps. The bear leaps into a lake, has a fight in the water with the dog, sinks, and stays submerged. Jim dives, brings up the carcass, and thinks all is over. But

    Stranger, may I be chawed to death by young alligators, if the thing I looked at warn't a she b'ar, and not the old critter after all. The way matters got mixed. ..was onaccountably curious, and thinking of it made me more than ever convinced that I was hunting the devil him¬self. I went home that night and took to my bed-the thing was killing me. ...I grew as cross as a b'ar with two cubs and a sore tail.
Kidded by his neighbors, Jim decides to catch that b'ar, go to Texas, or die, and he makes preparaions for a final hunt. But the day before that hunt is planned, at a most inopportune moment, the bear comes along. Jim manages to fire a shot. The beast wheels, walks away, and Jim hears him groaning in a thicket nearby, like a thousand sinners. When Jim reaches him, he is dead.

At this point, ending his story, Jim states a deduction for which his yarning has prepared:

    ..strangers, I never liked the way I hunted and missed him. There is something curious about it, I never could understand,—and I never was satisfied at his giving in so easy at last. Perhaps he had heard of my preparations to hunt him next day, so he just come in, like Capt. Scott's coon, to save his wind to grunt with in dying; but that ain't likely, My private opinion is, that that b'ar was an unhuntable b'ar, and died when his time come.
So the biggest bear in Shirt-tail Bend, domicile of the biggest bears in Arkansas, a state which itself is greater than any other country—such a bear in the end is slain not by bullets, but by the inscrutable fate which has brought him and the Big Bear of Arkansas together. And from the first sentence to this point a parade of details prepare for this climax.

This climax has some relevance to remarks that (William) Faulkner made...Yes, the bear was a symbol; he was the wilderness, On the frontier ...things could be pretty hard. Here was a farmer trying to beat back the woods, trying to make a crop, and not having a very easy time of it; and here was the bear. If he could kill him, he had licked the wilderness.

For however noteworthy are the realism and the characterization of The Big Bear of Arkansas, in essence it is a comic story. Its different narrators and styles, its incongruities and expansions, its fantastic imaginings as well as its initial reception and subsequent history make this clear to all readers except a few thesis-ridden scholars.

Important aids to the humorous effect are the changes in Jim's attitude and that of his listeners while he tells his tall tales, and two strategically placed anticlimaxes.

En route to the cabin, Jim pauses at the b'ar. Soon he is shouting a cheer for himself, boasting that he is a horse and a screamer, and alleging that compared with him lightning is slow. After he joins fellow passengers, they are at first startled or irritated. But soon "something about the intruder"—his joie de vivre, his Gemutlichkeit and his "irresistibly droll" self-assurance-win every heart and cause everyone to smile. As he joyously pours out one whopper after another, the listeners' reactions show that they know very well that he is putting them on. When he talks about shooting only forty-pound turkeys, twenty voices in the cabin at once proclaim disbelief. When he piles on details about the fatness of one of these birds, a cynical-looking Hoosier asks "Where did all that happen?" and a bit later he interrupts Jim's claim that Arkansaw is without a fault by saying, "Excepting mosquitoes." Undeterred, Jim makes even more outrageous claims, whereupon a gentlemanly Englishman, "foreigner" though he is, laughs and voices disbelief, and a 'live sucker' from Illinois...has the daring to say that our Arkansaw friend's stories smell rather tall.

Jim argues with this skeptic surely in a playful spirit with no hope that he will close yawning credibility gaps. And though the listeners do not interrupt Jim's yarn about his biggest hunt, as he launches it they cannot be unaware of Jim's exaggerations or unappreciative of his witty way of phrasing them.

But as the story moves along, Jim's attitude and that of his listeners change. At the start, fresh from the b'ar, Jim is high spirited, jocose, humorous. His eyes sparkle as he invents and exaggerates wildly improbable details. But signs that he and his listeners are amused decrease. When he finishes, both he and his audience are solemn:

    When his story was ended, our hero sat some minutes with his audi¬tors in a grave silence; I saw there was a mystery to him connected with the bear whose death he had just related, that had evidently made a strong impression on his mind. It was also evident that there was some superstitious awe connected with the affair ,-a feeling common with all "children of the wood," when they meet with any thing out of their everyday experience.
The picture is of a man who tells a beautiful lie—such a superbly imagined and performed work of art that he convinces not only his audience, but also himself. Fantastic Cypress Forks, which Jim has created out of thin air (and a fact or two) becomes a reality for him. The bear, which he has imaginatively enlarged beyond all reason and even gifted with supernatural powers, has overawed Jim's auditors and—still more impressive—Jim himself. Thanks. to his own soaring eloquence, paradoxically, Jim has confused the real and the imagined.

Overwhelmed though he is, Jim manages to recover before his silenced listeners:

    He was the first one, however, to break the silence, and jumping up, he asked all present to 'liquor' before going to bed,—a thing which he did, with a number of companions, evidently to his heart's content.
As the style indicates, after Jim ends his story, his salty language gives way to the stuffy style of the first narrator—latinate words, apologetic quotes, long sentences. Simultaneously, Jim and his audience are plopped down again in the mundane cabin. The final sentence of The Big Bear of Arkansas rounds out the contrast between Jim's clearing and the world of the writer:
    Long before day, I was put ashore at my place of destination, and I can only follow with the reader, in imagination, our Arkansas friend, in his adventures at the 'Forks of Cypress' on the Mississippi.
The shift in style marks an anticlimax. Another anticlimax which occurs earlier was probably even more impressive in 1841.

The period (during which this story was first told)...was, by modern standards, an incredibly "prissy" one...the slightest hint of blasphemy or obscenity shocked Americans beyond belief...Jim, in a passage quoted a few paragraphs back, said that his gigantic bear groaned like a thousand sinners. Because the simile somehow sounded irreligious, the words were cut out of a number of early reprintings. Whole books have been written about taboos in force against references to sex. Following the publication of Herman Melville's Typee—five years after Thorpe's Big Bear—so many wails would be raised about its frankness that numerous passages would be excised from subsequent editions—passages which readers today often study with complete bewilderment, unable to imagine what the readers of those quaint times found suggestive in them. Even rarer than references—including vague ones-to sex were scatological passages. Melville, in the final chapter of The Confidence-Man (1857) would write about what a character called a life preserver—described as a brown stool with curved tin compartment underneath which smells bad—and alert readers somehow managed to discover that the passage refers to a toilet seat. In our own dear enlightened era, when folk are daily uplifted by televised Curses on Constipation and Paeans to Regularity or by bits about bodily functions in respected books, plays, and movies, we need a translation for (this) passage that in 1841 was unique—part of Jim's story:

    ...I went into the woods near my house, taking my gun and Bowie¬knife along, just from habit, and there sitting down also from habit, what should I see, getting over my fence, but the b'ar! Yes, the old varmint was within a hundred yards of me, and...he walked...towards me. I raised myself, took deliberate aim, and fired. Instantly the varmint wheeled...I started after, but was tripped up by my inexpressibles, which either from habit, or the excitement of the moment, were about my heels...
What he is saying is "Accompanied by his dog and carrying his gun., as usual, Jim entered the woods to take his daily crap. Squatting there, he looked up, saw the bear approaching, and fired at him. The bear turned. Jim started after him, but his pants ("inexpressibles" in 1841!) fell about his heels and tripped him." Combined with this account, shockingly frank for 1841, were phrases that are indicated above by dots: the way he walked over that fence—stranger, he loomed up like a black mist, he seemed so large." and he walked through the fence like a falling tree would through a cobweb." In other words, at the very moment when Jim's imagining carries the picture of the bear to a climax of physical grandeur, he also tells about having a bowel movement, letting his pants fall, and being tripped up by them. And the clauses following the quoted passage are those which tell about the bear's groaning and his mysterious death.

This combination of the earthy with the fantastic makes for a superb anticlimax—an incongruous coalescence that is not only typical of American humor and the tall tale but also one of their superb achievements.

    This story is generally attributed to Thomas Bangs Thorpe who was 25 years old when he wrote it in 1841. It was published in The Spirit of the Times, a periodical of the day and was picked up and reprinted in newspapers and periodicals around the country, touted by William T. Porter, a well-known editor, as "the best sketch of backwoods life." Thorpe spent his childhood in Albany, New York. As a teenager he studied painting in New York City where he would sit in on storytelling sessions. In 1836 he moved to Louisiana and eventually settled down in Mississippi where he most likely heard this story told and wrote it down.