The Southern Literary Journal, volume , number , fall
© by The Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Department of English and Comparative Literature. All rights reserved.
110
“Clo’es could do de like o’ dat”:
Race, Place, and Power in
Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of
Pudd’nhead Wilson
by Garrett Nichols
Michel Foucault teaches us in The Order of Things () that the prin-
ciple of resemblance guided premodern systems of knowledge and organization.
He writes:
Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive
role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely
guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that orga-
nized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and
invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. . . . And representa-
tion — whether in the service of pleasure or of knowledge — was posited as
a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the
claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of for-
mulating its right of speech. ()
Premodern western society relied on resemblance to structure and create dis-
courses of knowledge and truth, providing order to the vast realm of what was
“known” to be true. This old order, according to Foucault, started to break down
when knowledge took up “residence in a new space” in which identity was no lon-
ger based on visibility and similitude but on “the relation between elements (a rela-
tion in which visibility no longer plays a role) and of the functions they perform”