t-t-twain

While Twain's battlecry against "literary offence" is both hilariously undersupported and plain old hilariously hilarious, I do agree with some of his claims against Cooper (and against literature as an art). That which struck me the most is when Twain said that " the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others." If we are applying this quote to The Last of the Mohicans, it assumes another complexity, as most characters die in the end. What Twain seems to be implying is that each character must not just be a character, but a living, fully realized person. If a character is only in the novel to die, to teach a lesson to another or to act as a plot-device, that character should not exist at all. Alice, in the context of the plot, exists to die. Her relationship with Heyward affects no other characters, and her only main purpose in the novel is to act as a sort of "bait" for the pursuit. (Though she could be removed and the pursuit would still continue; that Cora is the General's daughter is enough to instigate the action). Even David, as simple and extraneous as he is, is an active participant in the plot, and causes other characters to react and change. (It is his singing that enthralls his captors and seems to stave off his demise).
One of Twain's more contrary statements is that "the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency." This seems too obvious to even discuss. What would be the point of reading at all! Yes, the characters should be well defined, and yes, the reader should believe that what a character does in an emergency bodes well with how that character has been presented, but if an author were to write a novel in which the reader can not only guess what the emergency will be, but what the character will do, he might as well call the art of story dead right then and there.