Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn is the other side of the Myth of
America, the dark side. Yesterday I outlined a monolithic tradition from the
vantage point of my long experience as an Americanist. Today I’ll speak of a
single, volatile, regional text from the vantage point of a novice. Huck Finn is a national icon in the United
States, the hero of a national epic, many say the national epic, the one book that’s read
at every age in every part of the United States. I’m sure you all know that, but I did
not, when I lit out for graduate school in the U.S. There were no American literature courses in my Canadian education. And Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn was my first graduate reading assignment. It was a stunning experience. I’d been led to expect a light-hearted,
happy-go-lucky children’s story. What I found instead was a morbid, soul-sick book. And that’s how in my innocence I presented it. Everyone was outraged of course, and the
outrage persisted whenever I ventured my views later, as teacher and colleague. But my views have continued to haunt me, and at a certain point not long ago I decided to put that ghost to
rest, if I could – to test my outrageous interpretation by writing it out. What better place to test interpretation then in the city of Kafka?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is funny. That’s one of the few points of consensus, amidst all controversies
over its meaning. We may ask (as many critics have) if we should laugh
at certain jokes, but that’s a different, prescriptive order of
inquiry. Whether we should or shouldn’t,
the fact is we cannot help but laugh at Huck’s adventures. But what’s
funny about the book? A simple question,
and it warrants a simple answer. What’s funny about Huckleberry Finn is
that it’s a humorous story. But then, what’s humorous? Here’s the way Twain himself defined the
term, in a late essay entitled “How To Tell A Story”:
The humorous story [he writes] is American, the comic story is English. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the other bursts.
The humorous story is strictly a work of art -- high and delicate art -- and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic story; anybody can do it.
The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with an eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through.
Very often [the] humorous story finishes with a nub, point, [or] snapper. Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from the nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretense that he does not know it is a nub.
This talk is about the nubs or
snappers in Huckleberry Finn, and more broadly about a distinctive and
(according to Twain) a uniquely American mode of being funny. I refer to deadpan, a comic form that runs
through a wide range of folklore, from Yankee Peddler to Riverboat Con-man, and
that’s best known through the Western Tall Tale. I’m sure you’ all know the formula. The joke is told gravely; the teller is straight-faced—he
recounts in earnest detail how Davy Crockett at age nine killed the biggest
bear in Arkansas or how you can get the Brooklyn Bridge real cheap—and what’s
funny is the listener who believes. In
Twain’s case, the joke reflects the peculiar historical conditions of the
Southwestern frontier. I refer to the
vast border areas connecting the slave states and the so-called Western
territories in the first half of the nineteenth-century, a vast stretch of so-called
open land, characterized by ongoing warfare against the Native Americans,
slave-dealing, social displacement, ethnic migrations, endemic economic
instability – all the extremes of a new capitalist nation in the process of
emergence.
This was the birth-place of the tall
tale. It was also a con man’s
paradise. Its psychological
uncertainties, physical turbulence, and shifting identities made for a world
that was ripe for all forms of deadpan fun, where what’s funny encompassed all
three basic meanings of the word [I quote from the standard dictionary]: (1) Funny as in “just plain fun”—the child-like humor
we designate as “kidding around.” (2) Funny in its antiquated meaning of “befool,” a
satiric mode that ridicules the hypocrisies of everyday life. (3) Funny as in “odd or curious,” the
chilling sense of some sinister hidden meaning, as when we say there’s
“something funny” about that con-man; he might be a killer. Kidding around is purgative; it provokes
anxieties in order to resolve and release them.
Satire is normative. It pokes fun
at misbehavior and so teaches us how to behave.
The sinister registers the scene of violence and mayhem I just described
without the stabilizing props of comedy and satire. It works to explode norms
and sustain tension. The laughter
it evokes thrives on anxiety; the fun it offers is the kind that thrives on
horror and depravity. In our
post-frontier times (the era of movies like Blue Velvet and Pulp
Fiction, or for those of you familiar with American TV, the era of
Beavis and Butthead) it’s the pleasure we take in sick jokes and the
grotesque.
Usually deadpan artists specialize
in one way or another of being funny— let us call them cheerful, satirical, and
sinister—but the humor reaches its highest pitch, the finest turn of its “high
and delicate art,” when the joke reverberates with all three layers of fun,
from (laughingly) “that’s funny” to (suspiciously) ”that’s funny.”
Mark Twain’s humor is deadpan at its
best, and Huckleberry Finn is his funniest book. The novel draws on techniques from all three
stages of his career, from his early slap-stick tales of the Wild West to his
savage satires of the Gilded Age – savage, but ebullient, in the spirit of Pan,
the Greek trickster god – and from trickster satire to deadpan, the
deadly laughter of what biographers have termed the Late Dark Twain. Since this
is not the Twain we usually think of – since in fact the popular image is quite
the reverse -- it may be well to take a moment to explain.
Between 1876, when he began Huckleberry
Finn, and 1884, when he completed it, Twain suffered a series of personal
and financial disasters from which he never recovered. A short list would include: the loss of close
friends, a drastic break with his publisher, financial troubles running to
bankruptcy, ruinous involvements with various patents he had acquired; “a
bitterly disappointing return to the Mississippi River, Hannibal, and boyhood
scenes; and the beginnings of chronic ill health for the four [deeply loved]
female members of his family.” His response was an increasingly bleak view of
things, spiraling rapidly from cynicism to nihilism. Here are a few
representative excerpts that trace the precipitous course of that downward
spiral. From his journals: “I have no
race prejudices, nor color prejudices, nor creed prejudices… I can stand any
society. All that I need to know is that
a man is a human being; that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.” From his letters: “Man is … an April-fool
joke played by a malicious Creator with nothing better to waste his time upon.
… [Thus man] tarries his little day, does his little dirt, commends himself to
God, and goes out into the darkness to return no more, and send no messages
back – selfish even in death” – and a joke to the end. From his essays:
“history, in all climes, all ages, and all circumstances, furnishes oceans and
continents of proof that of all creatures … man is the most detestable, below
the rats [and] …grubs…. There are certain sweet-smelling, sugar-coated lies
current in the world…. One of these is that there is heroism in human life:
that man is not mainly made up of malice and treachery; that he is sometimes
not a coward; that there is something about him that ought to be perpetuated.”
All this “precisely at the height of
Twain’s creative powers,” through the decade of the stop-and-start making of Huckleberry
Finn. The novel that emerged is the apotheosis of American deadpan, a
masterfully coordinated synthesis of all three layers of the meaning of funny,
with the emphasis on the sinister.
Twain’s mode of coordination--the
dialectic behind his synthesis--is a drastic reversal of effect. The novel overturns the basic conventions of
deadpan. That is to say, Twain inverts
the very tradition he builds upon. As a rule, that tradition belongs to the
narrator. Huck speaks “gravely,”
deadpan-style; but the funny thing is, he’s not a humorist, not even
when he’s putting someone on (as he does Aunt Sally, when he pretends to be Tom
Sawyer). In fact, he rarely has fun;
he’s usually “in a sweat”; and on the rare occasion when he does try to kid
around (as when he tells Jim they were not separated in the fog) the
joke turns back on itself to humiliate him.
Huck’s voice may be described as pseudo-deadpan; it sounds comic,
but actually it’s troubled, earnest. The
real deadpan artist is Mark Twain of course, and what’s remarkable -- what
makes for the inversion I just spoke of -- is that this con-man is not
straight-faced (as Huck is), but smiling.
He wears the Mask of Comedy.
Officially, he’s telling a very amusing, sometimes hilarious story and
having a wonderful time at every point.
His “story bubbles gently along,” he’s laughing through it all; and so
are we.
So here’s the odd or curious set-up
of Huckleberry Finn: the deadpan artist is Mark Twain, wearing the Comic
Mask, doing his best to conceal the fact that there’s anything grave, let alone
sinister, about his story—and he succeeds famously. Then, as we laugh, or after we’ve laughed, we
may realize, if we’re alert, that there’s something we’ve overlooked. We haven’t seen what’s funny about the fact
that we’ve found it funny. This artist
has gulled us. Somehow he has diverted
our attention away from the real point, and we have to go back over the story
in order to recognize its nub.
The first thing to explain is why
the novel is funny at all. The
slave-hunt serves as both metaphor and metonymy for the world it portrays: Huckleberry
Finn describes a slave-hunt
undertaken literally, collectively, by a society which is itself enslaved -- a
culture in bondage to all the Seven Deadly Sins (in addition to the sin of
chattel-slavery), and accordingly characterized by violence, callousness,
ignorance, and deceit. A fair example is
Pikesville, a shanty-town somewhere along the river:
All the streets and lanes was just mud; they warn’t nothing else but mud--mud as black as tar and nigh about a foot deep in some places, and two or three inches deep in all places. The hogs loafed and grunted around everywheres. You’d see a muddy sow and a litter of pigs come lazying along the street and whollop herself right down in the way, where folks had to walk around her, and she’d stretch out and shut her eyes and wave her ears whilst the pigs was milking her, and look as happy as if she was on salary. And pretty soon you’d hear a loafer sing out, “Hi! so boy! sick him, Tige!” and away the sow would go, squealing most horrible, with a dog or two swinging to each ear, and three or four dozen more a-coming; and then you would see all the loafers get up and watch the thing out of sight, and laugh at the fun and look grateful for the noise. Then they’d settle back again till there was a dog-fight. There couldn’t anything wake them up all over, and make them happy all over, like a dog-fight—unless it might be putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or typing a tin pan to his tail and see him run himself to death.
My
experience has been that readers of the novel remember Pikesville not for that
bit of “fun” (though that’s the town’s main source of laughter), but for the
Shakespearean soliloquy delivered there by the Duke and the King:
To be or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life...
‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
That’s
what we laugh at, as we should.
Consider, however, that image of a sow on the run, “squealing most
horrible,” of a dog running himself to death.
And now think of the nub concealed within the Shakespearean parody: the
Duke and King are debased men, the townspeople are debased, and debasement in
both cases is a metonym for the slave trade.
The stray dog is Jim on the run, or it’s Huck hounded by
civilization. The animal kingdom is
paraded before us as in a deadpan Eden: pigs, dogs, and people mingling in mud,
and the joke lies in the calamity we humans make of “so long life.” Clearly, this is the world of the Late Dark
Twain, the nihilistic world of The Damned Human Race, which posits a
religion of Calvinism without God; of the Satanic Letters from the Earth,
which explains why man, the lowest of all animals, “is first and last and
always a sarcasm.”
Question: What’s funny about Huckleberry
Finn? Answer: the teller of this
Tall Tale has conned us into thinking that us he’s a Comic Writer. I mean to explore his method of persuasion
through three typical jokes. The first
is Twain’s first: his opening “Notice to Readers”:
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, [bold caps]
Per G. G., Chief of Ordnance [spell out]
Now
there’s a humorous way to start a story: a warning against
interpretation! But it’s humorous,
remember: a deadpan warning. This Notice is clearly a form of kidding
around, a prank of sorts; and then, too, it has a satirical edge: it makes fun
of pompous authority. And notice the
violence within the satire —the penalties for trespassing (prosecution, banishment,
death), and the deadly pun that reinforces them: “ordnance” is not just a
colloquial misspelling; technically, it
means “cannon or artillery.” A “Chief of
Ordnance” in this case is a military officer ready to blow you to bits. And to do so, be it noted, for the least
of interpretive offenses: not for seeking motive or moral, but just for finding
a plot.
All this makes for an especially
funny predicament. We’re not allowed to interpret (not even on the most
elemental level), but the story Huck tells demands interpretation, demands it unrelentingly and
all the time. We can’t get any of its
jokes without figuring out motive and plot, and we can’t possibly do that without assuming a moral position. Take even the simplest joke: say, the story
that Huck tells Jim about ex-kings who emigrate from Europe to America. Since we don’t have jobs here for kings, says
Huck, they have to get work teaching French; he then shows off his
French (“What if I was to say to you ‘Polly-voo franzy’?”), and proceeds to explain
why people need to have different languages (humans are different from one
another, as dogs are different from pigs, pigs from horses, etc.). Jim’s famous rejoinder is that all people are
alike (all people, universally, are different from dogs, pigs, etc.). If he’s a
man, says Jim, “Well, den! Dad
blame it, why doan he talk like a man?”
This is a parody of social
pretension: Huck, the master of the colloquial style, is bragging in the
language of the elite, as French then was. And in turn the parody is a sick
joke about Southern history: Jim, the victim of chattel-slavery (so-called
because slave-society rhetoric built on the comparison between blacks and
animals) -- Jim, the example of man-reduced-to-beast-of-burden, is articulating
the self-evident truths of human equality.
How can we not interpret?
And our interpretation is prodded, if we need prodding, by Huck’s
concluding response: “You can’t learn a nigger to argue. So I quit.”
Huck doesn’t see the fun in all this; he’s simply frustrated. We do see the fun because we know we’re
hearing a comic tale (by Mark Twain, humorist); but in order to take that step
we have to interpret. In short, we
interpret because Huck doesn’t.
I will return to that particular
twist later on. First, let me repeat
what’s funny about the Notice.
Officially we’re prohibited from interpreting on pain of death, but the
notice itself requires interpretation, and the narrative at large demands it. So the nub lies in the inversion: far from
forbidding interpretation, the Notice is calling attention to it.
It’s eliciting our impulse to look for plot, moral, and motive.
Having seen that, we should feel uneasy.
There’s something funny about Twain’s summons to interpret. It’s a deadpan summons. What’s Twain’s motive? What’s the plot?
To explore the issue I turn to my
second example, the last joke in the novel.
I refer to what is surely Huck’s best-known line—his decision to light
out for the territory. The general impression of the scene (ask anyone) is that
Huck leaves because he wants to be free. And no doubt he does; but the text
itself tells us something else:
...then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory, for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me...
So
Huck decides to light out “ahead of the rest,” and the nub is: he’s just
kidding around. He plans to get an
“outfit” and leave for a while (“a couple of weeks or two”), which we interpret
as a flight to freedom—and then (if we follow critical tradition) we proceed to
allegorize it as the freedom of the spirit.
Over the century that allegory has established itself as a cultural
icon: Huck Finn, the rebel hero of the open road.
It’s a striking flight of
interpretation. Just think of the deadpan connection here between
African-Americans and Native Americans: Jim “dressed up for howling adventures
amongst the Injuns”! It’s a joke akin to
that of the Duke and King when they dress Jim up in a King Lear outfit, with a
sign reading: “Sick Arab --but harmless when not out of his head.” A sick joke indeed; but I’d say that Jim
dressed up as an Injun is sicker still.
Twain’s humor here should alert us to the intricate narrative pattern he
has developed. Huck is about to light
out from the Phelpses for the territory: this liminal moment joins two crucial
dimensions of the novel’s structure.
First, the dimension of space: the “settlements,” as defined by the
N-word, are being linked to the “territory,” as defined by the I-word, Injun
territory. Then, there’s the dimension
of time: “Injun” is a clue to the cultural connections implicit in the novel’s
double time-frame. The fictional time,
the period of Huck’s adventures, is the ante-bellum South, the slavery era. The
authorial time, the decade in which Twain wrote the book, was the era of
Indian-killing. What joins both
time-frames is nothing less than the most sinister line of continuity in
American history, from slavery to genocide -- in the pre-Civil War period, the
country’s economic growth through slavery; after the Civil War, the country’s
territorial growth through Indian Removal, mainly in the deadly sense of the word
“removal.” For between 1876 and 1884,
the territories provided the setting for the final wars (at Red Cloud, Little
Big Horn, and Wounded Knee) against the Native Americans, under the notorious
banner, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Would it too much to compare Tom’s notion
about lighting out to that of a German teen-ager in the early 1940s – a
mischievous, fun-loving young boy – who gets a notion to go hunting kikes in
the open war-zone?
In any case, Huck’s “escape to
freedom” is a Tall Tale which suggests how much can be concealed in the
act of interpretation. And it suggests
further what this kind of exclusion makes room for. I refer to the cultural commonplace
(“lighting out”) that draws its force from a powerful set of national self-definitions:
the notion that “the territory” in the United States means (and always meant)
not other peoples’ land, but freedom; the familiar interpretations of “open
land” not as expropriation but as opportunity and hope. Think for a moment of all that’s being mocked
here! It is not too much to say that in Huckleberry Finn we are being
laughed at for buying into the American belief-system.
To put it starkly, the nub that ends
the novel is that interpretation may be trap of culture. I mean interpretation now in a special sense
-- special but central. We usually think
of interpretation as a more or less independent act, an assertion of what
something or someone means to me, sometimes in opposition to prevailing
beliefs. I agree and I hope that my
lecture falls within that category. But
the fact is that interpretation is also -- and far more characteristically
-- a cultural institution. And on this
institutional level, interpretation is a process carefully nourished by society
– in the U.S., from the first Dick and Jane Reader to the latest
America-is-multicultural handbook.
Through this cultural process we learn to confirm, each of us
--inwardly, privately -- our beliefs in what our culture has taught us to
believe. Through that process,
interpretation directs our deep and abiding need for meaning towards
socialization. It turns our world,
imaginatively, into a system; it organizes our fantasies in ways that that
accommodate us to things as they are; it forges the foundational links between
subjectivity and society. And typically
in the U.S., it does so individualistically, in the manner of the American
do-it-yourself kit. Each of us labors
self-reliantly to arrive at what turns out to be more or less the same interpretation.
Over
the past two centuries, the institution of literary interpretation has proved
spectacularly effective in this regard.
First in Europe, then in the United States, it has served as a pivotal
factor in the formation of national identities. Consider, for example, the role
literary tradition in the invention of Italian, Russian, and German
nationalism. In the United States we
have to look no further than the first major History of American Literature
(1917). “In ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred,” write the editors, “ the “astounding transformation of … immigrants
into citizens [as well as] … the transformation of … the native born into
Americans … is very largely accomplished through the language and literature of
America. … [We] teachers of American
literature are [thus] … special
custodians” of society. Much the same
message marks the introduction to the next major Literary History (1948) and
the various histories that followed.
Together they amount to a grand enterprise in socialization. And Huckleberry Finn has been its
centerpiece. Over the past three decades (our current period of critical
diversity, ideological self-consciousness, and the hermeneutics of suspicion),
Twain’s novel was taught in high-schools more than any other long work,
including Shakespeare’s; in colleges and universities it has been the standard
text for demonstrating the integrative ideals encoded in America – to quote a
recent survey of the subject, the model text for showing the culture’s
nourishment of personal freedom on the one hand and, on the other hand, its
capacity for integration – multiculturalism, multi-denominationalism,
multi-racialism.
If we read the novel’s last scene
closely, those facts come with a shock.
Call it the shock of re-cognition: understanding something all over
again, doing a double-take. If we allow
it to register, that shock of re-cognition suggests how official institutions
of interpretation in America work to conceal the unsavory realities of history
-- specifically, in this instance, the incongruity between national facts
(slavery, genocide) and national beliefs (open road, free opportunity). The joke about Huck’s lighting out is funny
enough, in the sinister sense, to provide the finale to the greatest
deadpan act in the history of American sick humor.
Interpretation may be a trap of
culture: Twain’s snapper carries special relevance nowadays for literary
critics, who speak of their work as cultural subversion. The impression they convey of the powers of
interpretation is as familiar as it is comforting. Conversely, Twain’s joke about Huck’s flight
to freedom is as discomforting, and as deflating, as it is surprising. The misfit it reveals
between the text before us, literally, and the meaning that critics have
assigned it, spiritually, should remind us once more -- but now in an entirely
new, genuinely threatening sense -- of Twain’s opening warning: Beware
of Interpretation. What I called the
social institutions of interpretation --our sources of official interpretation
-- serve above all as centers of social control. I would venture this as a
cross-cultural generalization. Historically, across time and place, the status
quo has defended itself precisely at its points of conflict, its potential
weak-points, the areas of thought and feeling most susceptible to subversion,
by means of interpretation. One need only think of the power of medieval
exegesis. For well over a millennium in
the Christian West, the four-fold method of interpretation not only sustained
the doctrine of the divine right of kings, but helped fortify every segment of
the status quo. And it did so by
securing the social body, hermeneutically, through interpretation, precisely at
its intricate, brittle intersections, the potentially vulnerable joints connecting
gender and class, spiritual and civil law, public and private life.
In America, of course, Twain’s and
mine, the process of official interpretation works differently. Medieval exegesis was instated
hierarchically, by a literate elite. Exegesis in the U.S. is based on doctrines
of individualism, pluralism, and personal consent. These are the culture’s ideological
limits. And insofar as earlier Christian
hermeneutics persist – as indeed they do (that’s one of the main butts of
Twain’s humor) – they are Protestant modes: basically individualist, grounded
in conscience. But the results are no
less binding. Chairman Mao missed the mark when he wrote that power comes out
of the barrel of a gun. Guns are not even the most effective instrument of
state power. They merely force us to submit; interpretation gets us to
consent. It turns our world,
imaginatively, into a system; it organizes our fantasies in ways that
accommodate us to things as they are; it forges the foundational links between
subjectivity and society. And it does so
playfully, creatively, in the manner of the American do-it-yourself kit. Each of us labors individually to arrive at
what turns out to be more or less the same interpretation.
This elemental, conservative power
is what Twain’s deadpan compels us to recognize. The nub in our willed flight
with Huck into the territory is that we’re trapped not only in the joints of
the social body, but in the movement of history – from slavery to
Reconstruction, from territory to civilization (and back again) – trapped, that
is, in the very transitions of culture through which we had hoped to escape.
Nothing funny about that, but we
can’t stop there. We owe it to Twain’s
art to account for our laughter. To that
end, I turn to my third and main example.
The passage comes when Huck lands at the Phelps Plantation, where he
meets Sally Phelps, who mistakes him for her nephew Tom Sawyer. Huck instinctively goes along with his new
identity, but he gets confused in explaining what now turns out to be his late
arrival: Tom had been expected by steamboat some time before. Huck at first
explains that the boat had been grounded; then can’t think of which
grounding -- but (resourceful liar that he is)
I struck an idea, and fetched it out: “It warn’t the grounding--that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder head and crippled a man. And I think he died afterwards. He was a Baptist. (pp. 279-280)
Again, we’re at a pivotal point of
the narrative. The arrival at the Phelps
Plantation unites all three sections of the novel (Hannibal, the river journey,
and the Phelps episode); and it connects the tall tale and the con job through
all three layers of deadpan fun (cheerful, satirical, and sinister). It also demonstrates Twain’s hermeneutic
imperative--we must interpret this scene (its humor leaves us no
alternative)--while offering a striking example of what’s funny about our
habits of interpretation. I take the
joke to lie in the infamous one-liner “No’m.
Killed a nigger.” Actually it’s a
one-liner divided into two parts: “No’m [period: full stop]. Killed a
nigger.” We are then diverted from its
nub by Aunt Sally’s story of the Lally Rook.
To recall Twain’s instruction: when the joke comes, “the listener must
be alert, for...the teller will divert attention from the nub by dropping it in
a carefully casual or indifferent way, with the pretense that he does not know
it is a nub.” The Baptist is a decoy; it
allows the story to bubble gently along.
In fact, to keep it bubbling, just in case the reader doesn’t laugh
straight off, Twain extends Aunt Sally’s ruminations: “Yes, I remember now, he did
die. Mortification set in and they had
to amputate him. But it didn’t save him.
Yes, it was mortification -- that was it. He turned blue all over, and died in the hope
of a glorious resurrection. They say he
was a sight to look at.” A very funny
sight, but its nub is encoded in Huck’s two-part throwaway line: “No’m. Killed a nigger.” In what follows I mean to decode Twain’s
deadpan by outlining eight points about Huck’s response to which we should be
alert, if we’re courageous enough to want to get the joke.
First, the episode is a model
instance of the way Twain combines the tall tale and the con game through the
sinister aspect of deadpan. Huck’s
response is a comic exaggeration, a harmless fiction. As such, it serves successfully as a con job,
persuading Aunt Sally the Huck is Tom. And as such it stands as one of
the most vicious jokes in the history of prejudice. Huck’s “No’m” reflects back
through the narrative, in ways that undermine virtually all of the novels’
“good characters,” like the kindly frontierswoman, Judith Loftus, who cuts
short Huck’s visit to join the ”nigger hunt” – or for that matter Aunt Sally
herself, who along with Uncle Silas, is portrayed as “decent folk,” warmly
hospitable, salt of the earth, even as she and Silas help organize the
near-lynching of Jim: the novel’s climactic episode, in which the “no one” joke
is most fully enacted.
Second,
Huck’s use of “nigger” is profoundly racist.
We can’t argue (as too many critics have done) that it’s just slang--a
poor ignorant boy’s way of saying African-American. What Huck means is far worse than what a bigot means by “wop”
or “wasp.” Huck is saying that a
“nigger” is a no-one, a non-human.
(That’s the “joke” in response to the straight-man query, “anybody
hurt?”).
Third, Huck’s response is
gratuitous, totally unnecessary. That’s
the sick joke in the forced pause at the center of the line. Huck could just as well have stopped at “No’m.” And be it noted that that kind of gratuitous
remark, in all its racist implications, is typical of Huck. The casual
N-word is fundamental to his vocabulary.
As critics over the past three decades have pointed out, the word
“nigger” occurs on virtually every page of the novel, and it’s worth
emphasizing that it took three generations of readers before them to
take offense. The first debates about Huckleberry
Finn centered on issues of class, not race.
The complaints had to do with Huck’s delinquency, bad habits, and poor
grammar. The N-word went largely
unnoticed until the 1960s, and I believe that the not-noticing was basic to
Twain’s deadpan. Part of the joke is
that the word was woven into the very fabric of Twain’s self-proclaimed
democratic culture. Huck’s response is
entirely appropriate both to him and his post-Civil-War readership of
1885.
It’s also appropriate to the plot of
the novel. That’s the fourth point to
make about Huck’s remark. His joke
concerns a dead person, or rather a dead non-person, and death is a main
narrative thread-- death in the deadpan mode, gilded over by humor, as in the
early passages concerning Tom’s gang:
Tom got out a sheet of paper that he had wrote the oath on, and read it. It swore every boy to stick to the band, and never tell any of the secrets; and if anybody done anything to any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person must do it. And if anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets, he must have his throat cut, and then have his carcass burnt up and the ashes scattered all around, and his name blotted off the list with blood.
Everybody said it was a real beautiful oath... Some thought it would be good to kill the families of boys that told the secrets. Tom said it was a good idea, so he took a pencil and wrote it in.
Then Ben Rogers says: “Here’s Huck Finn, he hain’t got no family; what you going to do ‘bout him?”
“Well, hain’t he got a father?” says Tom Sawyer.
“Yes, he’s got a father, but you can’t never find him these days....”
They talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they said every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn’t be fair and square. Well nobody could think of anything to do--everybody was stumped, and set still. I was most ready to cry; but all at once, I thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss Watson--they could kill her. Everybody said:
“Oh, she’ll do. That’s all right. Huck can come in.”
This
is funny, although not to Huck (he’s “most ready to cry”). It’s Tom who’s having fun, along with
us.
But Twain has a different point in
mind. And (as in the case of Huck’s
N-word, in response to Aunt Sally) the point is obvious once we’re on to his
method. Murder and mayhem are writ large throughout the novel, in virtually
every scene and episode. The blood-bond
that Tom invents is a mirror-reflection of the world of Huckleberry Finn.
It foreshadows the death-hoax that Huck thinks up when he leaves for the river,
and the horrific scene earlier, when his blind-drunk father chases him around
the shack with a “clasp knife” (laughing with “such a screechy laugh”),
cursing and roaring that Huck is the Angel of Death, and that he will now kill
him once and for all. These sorts of
fantasies and facts are the adventures of Huck. They come to life in the Boggs lynching, in
scenes of tar-and-feathering, in the Grangerford-Shepherdson clan
massacre. According to Twain scholars,
there are thirty-three corpses in Huckleberry Finn, and that does not
include the section Twain omitted, surely one of the most vivid and morbid he
ever wrote, describing Pap’s dead body.
It’s not too much to say that dead bodies, real and imagined, are the
anatomical links of Huck’s story. It’s
appropriate that G.G., the authority (you recall) behind the opening Notice to
the Reader, should be a Chief of Artillery, warning that anyone seeking a plot
would be shot. Getting killed is a key
to the novel’s plot-line.
The fifth point to make about Huck’s
“joke” concerns the cause of death. On
the river he travels, explosions are a common experience. Aunt Sally confirms this in the case of the
poor Baptist, and we can find many other examples in the novel (steam-boats
grounded, blown up, cutting rafts in two).
The point is: this river is sinister.
Critics have tended to sentimentalize it -- T. S. Eliot called it the
“River God that gives to Man his dignity” -- and to be sure Twain invites such
sentiments. But if we pay attention he
makes it all too plain that this a deadpan god.
Satan reports in Letters from the Earth, that “Nature is a
killer,” and Huckleberry Finn
might have been his proof-text.
The river is the source of storms and water-snakes, it calls up the fog
that keeps Huck and Jim from reaching Cairo; it is “dangersome” to those on it
and those who live near it. One example
of many:
the houses was sticking out over the bank, and they was bowed and bent, and about ready to tumble in....People lived in them yet, but it was dangersome, because sometimes a strip of land as wide as a house caves in at a time. Sometimes a belt of land a quarter of a mile deep will start in and cave along till it all caves into the river in one summer...the river’s always gnawing at it.
This river affords Huck and Jim some
wonderful moments together; and to underscore these critics like to quote
Huck’s description of life on the raft: “what you want is for everybody to feel
right and [be] kind towards the others.”
But they have generally failed to add that that’s how Huck rationalizes
allowing the King and Duke to have their way (“it warn’t no use,” he says, “to
tell Jim”) -- and to my knowledge they have never yet noted that for most
of the river journey (over two-thirds of it) life on the raft is controlled and
directed by those “rascals,” as Huck charitably calls them. Count the pages devoted to the happy idyll of
Huck and Jim on the river. In the
standard edition it amounts to three and a half pages out of three hundred:
1.2% of the book. Huck and Jim may be in flight on the
Mississippi, but the Mississippi is the natural habitat of the Duke and King,
just as it is naturally the cause of mud-slides. This river is emphatically not an
emblem of Nature’s Nation; it belongs to the world of Hobbes, not Emerson. Nothing is more natural about Huck, nothing
more clearly shows how close he is to the river, how well he knows it,
than does his spontaneous invention of the exploding cylinder that (only)
“Killed a nigger.”
Not that Huck needs the river to
prompt his invention; he always thinks in terms of death and disaster. That’s the sixth point to note about Huck’s
casual response. It alerts us to the
fact that he’s a death-haunted young boy.
I’m referring now to the way he thinks and imagines rather than what he
experiences. Twain provides two clues to
Huck’s inner world: the lies Huck tells and the images he conjures up when he’s
alone--in other words, the reality that Huck himself makes up, for others and
for himself. In both cases, it’s the
reality of the grotesque. Huck talks
gravely -- grave-ly. The stories
he invents for strangers are a series of horror-tales: families dead, dying, or
diseased. And he thinks grave-ly
too -- except that in his solitary musings the dead return as ghosts. Consider his arrival at the Phelps
plantation:
When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny; the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s spirits whispering--spirits that’s been dead ever so many years--and you always think they’re talking about you. As a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all.
What’s funny about this description is that actually, to all ordinary appearances, it’s a lovely Sunday morning. There’s no reason for Huck to think this way, except that that’s the way he thinks.
But of course he’s not alone when he
invents the cylinder explosion; on the contrary, he’s trying hard to please
someone else. He’s being led on by Aunt
Sally, who prods him about the grounding.
He knows what she’d like to hear, and he knows she’ll think a “nigger”
is “no one,” just as he knows she wants him to be Tom. And naturally he complies. That’s the seventh point to note about his
response. Huck wants to
conform. More precisely, he’s a
conformist who can’t make it. Huck would
like to please everyone, including Miss Watson.
He would even like to live with Pap, if only Pap would let him live; he
tries as best he can to “satisfy” the Duke and King; he tells us he’d gladly
join the Grangerfords (at the expense of abandoning Jim); and he’d love
to be Tom Sawyer—he’d love to, but he can’t. Huck Finn is Woody Allen’s Zelig
in reverse: a deadpan artist’s Zelig.
Zelig may not want to be a Chinese chef or a Nazi, but he can’t help
becoming just like whomever he’s with.
Huck’s dilemma is just the opposite: he can’t help being different. Certainly we sympathize with his difference,
we applaud it, but the nub remains.
Huck’s desire to fit in is underscored by his inability to do so. That’s because he so totally believes in
society. He believes in racism,
class hierarchy, Southern aristocracy, Sunday School religion. Why else would
he be so disappointed, towards the end of his adventures, in Tom’s plan to
“steal” Jim? “Well, one thing was dead
sure,” he says, crestfallen, after trying to persuade Tom otherwise,
one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom Sawyer was in earnest, and was actuly going to help steal that nigger out of slavery. That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was respectable and well brung up; and had a character to lose; and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant; and not mean, but kind; and yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling, than to stoop to this business, and make himself a shame, and his family a shame, before everybody. I couldn’t understand it no way at all. It was outrageous.
If this were a children’s book
called Tom Sawyer, we could read this passage ironically, as a salutary
bit of social satire. The white-trash
boy is at once denouncing (when he shouldn’t) and looking up to (when he
needn’t) the respectable head-of-the-gang.
But Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is something else
altogether. It’s a complex,
sophisticated narrative about a black-white relationship. To recall Twain’s
phrase, it’s a work “of high and delicate art ... [as] only an artist can tell
it”--one in which an African-American takes on extraordinary human force. Jim,
we learn, is the noblest person in Huck’s life; really the novel’s hero, once
we get by the minstrel-show humor to which Jim himself is subject, tragically,
as well being its persistent object. Can
it be funny that Huck thinks like this after his long experience on the
river? After all he has seen of Jim--
having acknowledged, however reluctantly, Jim’s goodness, intelligence, and
caring -- having felt so ashamed of his behavior towards Jim that, on one
singular occasion, he actually apologizes for it (though “it was fifteen
minutes,” he tells us “before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to
a nigger”) -- after all this, can Huck
believe that it would be “leather-headed” for Tom to “stoop to this business”?
In order to explain this nub we need
to rehearse its context. As I noted at
the start, this last narrative section, occupying almost a third of the novel,
has become a familiar critical crux.
Twain scholars have debated its merits ever since Hemingway advised
readers to skip it altogether. Evidently
Tom’s tricks at the Phelps did amuse the Reconsrtuctionist audience of the time
(the world of the minstrel show and of D. W. Griffith’s epic celebration of the
Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation, filmed in the decade after what
Twain wrote his famous satire, “The United States of Lyncherdom”): Jim shackled
in a wood-shack, writing messages in blood, biting into a corn-pone with a
candlestick hidden in it. “It most mashed all his teeth out,” Huck reports,
straight-faced, and continues: “Jim he couldn’t make no sense it but he allowed
we was white folks and knowed better; so he was satisfied.” Tom’s higher knowledge comes from the
romances of Alexander Dumas (whose black African ancestry, if Twain knew about
it, would add another dimension to the satire); he names his scheme the Great
Evasion; and the joke, it turns out, is that Jim has already been freed. If we carry the logic of the joke to its
absurd end, we could say Jim was lucky he didn’t get to Cairo and the
North, since he would then never have known that he was a free man.
To their credit, critics over the
past half century have roundly denounced the hoax and all it implies. We can now safely say that it’s a grand
sarcasm on Twain’s part directed against Tom Sawyer. But this is deadpan sarcasm. The satire of
the Good Bad Boy (whose mischief-by-the-book we see through and scorn) is a
Great Diversion from the snapper. What’s
really funny about Tom’s hoax is that the Bad Bad Boy, our Huck,
goes along. Fundamentally, he’s no
different at the end from the racist, death-haunted, would-be conformist he was
before he set out on his adventures. Let
me repeat: racist, death-haunted, conformist -- that’s what makes it
appropriate for him to respond to Aunt Sally as he does, in spite of all he has
learned about Jim. Or rather, because
of all he has not learned. That’s
the eighth point to note about Huck’s gratuitous “No’m. Killed a nigger”: Huck
never develops. He speaks and thinks and
feels at the Phelpses pretty much as he does at Miss Watson’s. The great middle
part of the novel, the so-called journey to freedom, is the deadpan
center-piece of a triptych -- Tom Sawyer’s gang, a raft of trouble on a
treacherous river, and a free man shackled in a wood-shack – a deadpan triptych
whose three panels are variations on a nub.
Now, there’s a technical reason for
this: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Huck’s personal
retrospective, specifically intended to set the record straight. He wants to retrieve the true story, he tells
us, from Mr. Mark Twain’s stretchers. If
he had realized what we’d like him to have realized, he would have written an
entirely different book. He would have
felt differently not only about Jim but about Tom and all others, including
himself. The boy who might have emerged chastened
and humbled, as critics have told us he did, would never have said “you can’t
learn a nigger to argue”; he would have expressed some regret for not
having confided to Jim what he knew about the Duke and King; he would have felt
obliged to explain why he abandoned Jim to live with the Grangerfords; and
surely he would not have expected Jim, this grown man eager to free his wife
and children, to join him and Tom in the territory. That is to say, if Huck Finn had really grown
morally, Twain the deadpan artist could not gull us into thinking that he does.
There would be no snapper to the story; its humor would be un-American.
Huck doesn’t develop so that we
can be conned into believing he does: this joke reminds us that what we
believe in ultimately is Huck’s integrity. He has the same poignant purity from
start to finish. He’s always the
lovable boy with the “sound heart”; from the outset his innate decency is set
in contrast to society’s “deformed conscience.” And to draw out this con-game,
it’s precisely that admirable aspect of him -- the potential we discern within
Huck’s innocence -- which invites us to interpret his narrative. That
much-discussed, much-celebrated innocence, let me stress—that echt-American
innocence that which runs throughout U.S. popular culture. high culture, and
global politics -- lies at the very heart of Twain’s con-game. For Huck is emphatically not innocent of the
world around him. Quite the contrary: he
has been thoroughly socialized into it, as his reply to Aunt Sally
demonstrates. He is not innocent, for
example, of the abolitionist cause, which he roundly denounces. Nor is he innocent of the values of the
Southern class system, as he demonstrates by his awe-struck admiration for the
shabby and violent world of the Grangerfords.
We may say, however, that Huck is innocent insofar as innocence means
ineducability. Husk is innocent of
alternatives to the way things are.
Therefore (to repeat) he doesn’t develop, and therefore we do it
for him. We know him better than he
knows himself. Indeed, we know him as he
cannot know himself, since his naiveté, his forever-unrealized
potential, is what we know about him, and what we cherish.
The deadpan this involves posits two
contrary responses on our part: first, our superiority to Huck; and second, our
identification with him. The link
between these responses lies in Twain’s directive for interpretation. I said earlier that the Notice goads
us into seeking moral, motive, and plot.
I would now add that the deadpan point is then to guide us into a certain
mode of interpretation -- one that steers us away from the nub, so that the
humor can bubble gently along. Just how this works is well illustrated by the
scene that critics have rendered the locus classicus of Huck’s moral progress. You all remember it, I’m sure. It’s one of those points of light (like
Huck’s humbling himself to Jim, or Huck and Jim fishing together) – one of
those mirage-like points of light that flickers from time to time against the
ever-darkening journey back into slave-country.
Here’s the famous scene, over two-thirds way though the novel. Huck learns that the Duke and King have
disclosed Jim’s whereabouts, and he decides that rather than see Jim sold to
“strangers,” he should return him to Miss Watson, “his true and proper
owner.” Then he succumbs,
conscience-stricken, to memories of how he himself helped this “runaway nigger”
so that now “people could [rightly] call me a low-down Abolitionist”:
I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t much to blame: but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday school, you could a’ gone to it; and if you’d ‘a done it they’d a’ learn’t you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.” It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come....You can’t pray a lie--I found that out....At last I had an idea: and I says, I’ll go and write the letter--and then see if I can pray....So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down, and wrote:
Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.
HUCK FINN.
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking...[and went on thinking] and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling.... I studied a minute,...and then says to myself: “All right then, I’ll go to hell”--and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said and never thought no more about reforming...
What’s funny about this scene is:
(1) cheerful--it’s a mock-conversion that turns into a Devil’s Pact; (2)
satirical --it’s an indictment of the ravages of Southern Evangelical
Calvinism; and (3) odd, curious, and sinister--it’s a mockery of our relation to
the text. For in order to get the joke
we have got to interpret, and yet we feel sure that our
interpretation is voluntary. This comes
straight out the deadpan artist’s do-it-yourself kit. The meaning we find seems purely subjective,
a meaning from the heart, and yet it’s entirely predictable. We interpret, each of us, through a prescribed
pattern of inversions. Huck says
“conscience” meaning the Right Thing to Do, and we think “source of evil”; he
says “wicked” and we think “kind”; Huck laments that he was “brung up wrong”
and we’re glad that he has held fast to his virtues; he tells us he shivered
with fear and we think he’s brave and independent; he says, trembling, “I’ll go
to hell” and we think “he’s saved!”
Now, this pattern of inversion is an act of
protection. Whether or not we’re aware of it, we’re reaching between the lines
to save Huck from everyone around him -- from Miss Watson and the Grangerfords
and the Phelpses. And our act of
protection is in turn a claim to ownership.
It makes Huck ours. The
opening gang-oath is worth recalling in this regard. The question that Tom raises about family
hostages opens into a much larger question: to whom does Huck belong? The narrative plays out a series of
options--Pap, Tom’s gang, Jim, the river, the Territory --until it becomes
obvious that Huck belongs only to us. We adopt him; we take him into our hearts; we interpret him in
our likeness; we rewrite his text; we appropriate Huck as the child-in-us. The interpretive plot, then -- that is, the process
of interpretation carefully elicited from us, with all the sly diversions of
deadpan art -- leads inexorably from inversion to protection to adoption to,
triumphantly, appropriation.
Let me name the snappers. First, there’s the issue of style. Huck Finn is a great writer; his grammar and
spelling are faulty, but that simply accentuates the beauty of his expression,
which is extraordinarily simple, spontaneous, and vivid. And yet we have to protect him all the time
from his own text. We have to explain away his words, to redefine the emotions
he records, to reverse the convictions he sets out. Huck is a master of the literal statement; he
writes with unfailing lucidity and directness; he’s the prime example (as
Hemingway noted) of the American plain style.
And yet we have to save Huck at every turn from his own plain meanings.
(Think of what fun it would be to read Hemingway this way!) We have no choice,
as it were, but to recast “shiver” (when Huck says “it made me shiver”) into something
positive, to deny the import for Huck (the stated effect) of his
decision to choose hell, to white out his numerous N-words. Once we’ve done all
that, we can laugh along with Huck, our Huck, the uncorrupted
child in us who (we’re certain) would never really think that a nigger
is a no-one. To paraphrase Jim: we’re
sophisticated folks, and so we know better, and can smile contentedly and be
satisfied.
Still, we should be wary by this
point about the process we’re engaged in.
Our act of appropriation ends with the child-in-us -- who is us? As Huck tells the story, we come to feel that
his conscience is the object of Twain’s expose.
It’s conscience that makes Huck a racist, conscience that that keeps
leading him astray, and we interpret his
conscience, properly , as an indictment of the values of the antebellum
Southwest. But there was no need in 1885
to indict slave society. Primarily,
Twain’s deadpan is directed against his American readership, then and later,
even unto our own time – against, that is, the conscience-driven forms of
liberal interpretation. I mean by “liberal” an institution of interpretation
designed to fortify a certain way of life. It’s precisely in this sense that a
distinct liberal theme permeates the discourse about the novel – I speak here
of American discourse, though so far as I know Americanists abroad have
followed pretty closely -- a critical
main-current that runs through virtually all sides of the argument (provided
that the critic does not dogmatically, foolishly, condemn the book for
being racist). To judge from a century of Twain experts, Huck (I quote now from
several casebooks on the novel) Huck is “the individual in nature,”
“self-reliant,” “the affirmation of adventure,” “mobility,” and “enterprise,”
an “independent spirit,” the soul of “liberation” and “tolerance.” More than
that: Huck and Jim on the raft have been taken as an emblem of the ideal
society. In contrast to the settlements,
they represent (quoting again) the “spiritual values” of “individualism
compatible with community” – not just the proof of “Twain\’s commitment to
black civil rights,” but his summons to “the cause of freedom” in general. Listen to these academic encomia: Huck and
Jim together forecast “a redeeming hope
for the future health of society”; they stand for the very “pinnacle of human
community”; they provide “a utopian pattern of all human relationships.” Critics have reiterated these (quote) “great
redemptive facts about the book” over and again with what can only be called
reflexive adoration, as in the adoration of the magi.
Reading through these casebooks is
like participating in a secular-scared ritual – the process of interpretation
as self-acculturation. It’s a case –study in how socialization works. The abstractions I’ve just rehearsed are
applied as universals, as though Huck represented not just what America is
about, but what humanity ought to be. Thus a particular cultural
vision -- individualism, enterprise,
mobility, personal freedom) – is translated into a set of universals –universal
moral imperatives -- and as universals they are then reinstated, restored as it
were from heaven to earth, from utopia (no-place) to an actual locale, defining
America. As Norman Podhoretz, editor of the conservative journal Commentary,
has written: “Sooner or later, all discussions of Huckleberry Finn turn
into discussions of America.” Or in the
words of the late Irving Howe, writing in his left-wing journal Dissent, “Huck is not only the most American boy in
our own literature, he is also the character with whom most American readers
have most deeply identified.” Harold
Bloom accurately summarizes the tone of his collection of “best critical
essays” on the novel when he remarks that Twain’s “book tells the story most
Americans need to believe is a true representation of the way things were, are,
and yet might be.”
Twain’s deadpan humor stands out
brilliantly against this consensus. And it is aimed directly against
that instinctive, socially malleable, ideologically vulnerable need to
believe. What’s funny about our interpretation of Huckleberry Finn--both
of the narrative and of its autobiographical hero--is that what begins as our
independent assessment, and often our oppositional perspective, leads us
laughingly, of our own free will, into the institutions of culture. Thus it was all but inevitable that in our
multicultural era, Huck should be discovered to be (in addition to everything
else that’s positively American) multicultural.
This is not the place to discuss Huck’s
“blackness”
-- or for that matter
the possibilities of his ethnic Irish-Americanness --but it’s pertinent here as
elsewhere to recall Twain’s warning that interpretation may be a trap of
culture.
He speaks abundantly of the nature
of that trap in his later writings. Indeed, in
1880, when Huckleberry Finn was in process, still in mid-stream
as it were, Twain began developing a series of what he called “deterministic
principles” of interpretation. By those
principles, all our ways of seeing, he argued, along with the values and
beliefs these registered, all of them, are the product of cultural
training. “The human machine,” Twain
writes, gets all its inspirations from the outside and is not capable of
generating an idea of any kind in its own head.” On reflection, in 1882, he did allow for one
source of human agency. He described it
as man’s tendency towards “malice, cruelty, servility, and nastiness,” an
“incorrigible depravity,” innate, irrepressible “vicious predisposition,” which
he dubbed, humorously, the “Moral Sense.”
In A Connecticut Yankee
(1889) the Moral Sense leads to mass destruction. “Training is everything,” laments Hank Morgan
about the intransigence of medieval England, and by training –his own
nineteenth-century training -- he cannot see that he is himself the main victim
of that plight, the butt of the joke of the faith in progress. In his posthumous novel The Mysterious
Stranger, Twain lays bare the strategy behind the joke. Here his stand-in deadpan artist, Satan,
pairs up with a poor-white, innocent, sound-hearted little boy, a boy not
unlike Huck--befriends him and conjures up for him a variety of alluring
spectacles and promises, only to reveal, at the end, the absurdity of each one
of them. “You perceive now,”
Satan declares, that it “is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.” And then the boy’s epiphany: “He vanished,
and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all that he had said was
true.”
That’s the humorous point of Huckleberry
Finn, if we’re alert. The novel’s underlying moral and motive, its deadpan plot,
is that this grand flight to freedom--black and white together, the individual
regenerated by nature--was all a dream. Not a grotesque dream, to be sure, but
a foolish one because a dream that befools. Recall our image of the novel,
virtually all of ours. The plot is a river-story, the style is a flow of humor,
bubbling gently along, and our interpretation is a raft that promises
protection (from conscience, from civilization, from all the slings and arrows
of outrageous adulthood). Recall that
myth, and now consider the facts. The river keeps returning us again and again
to the settlements, the raft proves to be a very insecure haven, and on this
treacherous raft, on this river that betrays and kills, we’re left with two
mock-symbolic figures. One is Huck Finn,
bond-slave to society, mostly scared to death, speaking a language we don’t
trust, and (as Pap puts it, in a drunken flash of insight) an Angel of Death. The other is Jim, the fugitive Black who need
never have run off, and who leads Huck into what Jim himself, early in the
novel, calls the Black Angel’s hell’s-pact. So the nub is: the Angel of Death
and the Black Angel, on a deadpan raft-to-freedom, drifting deeper and deeper
into slave-territory. It makes for a
savagely funny obituary to the American dream.
* * * *
That’s my Huckleberry Finn, then and still now – then, in my immigrant ignorance,
and now after some three decades of virtual acculturation. I have tried hard
over the years to find a happy ending, something positive to come away
with, if only to please, Huck-style. My best recourse here was pointing to the glaring paradox in our response to Huckleberry
Finn. I refer to the odd or curious fact that even after we get Twain’s point – even after we’ve struck through the
comic mask and seen con-man’s leer behind it – even then we can’t help enjoying
the book. Whatever our analysis tells us, our experience of Huck is exhilarating. In this respect,
what’s funny about the novel us that it leaves us in feeling good.
Let me try to set that paradox
in a larger literary perspective. The
bleakness of Huckleberry Finn is not a unique instance in the history of
American humor. There’s a great line of the sinister deadpan mode. It runs from (say) The Confidence-Man -- Melville’s absurdist-apocalyptic
caricature of a world where “truth comers in with darkness” – through the
Depression-era novels of Nathanael West, the self-styled “laughing mortician”
of America’s consumerist ”dream-dump,” and Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern
deconstructions of the “paranoid legacy America.” Within this tradition --
which extends to cartoonists like Robert Crumb, stand-up comics like Lenny
Bruce, and film-makers like David Lynch -- Mark Twain is the American
Funnyman. His vision and method are
related in various ways to the others, but he differs from all of them in the
nature of his humor. That difference
lies in what I called his strategy of inversion. Twain plays out his deadpan while wearing the
Mask of Comedy, and the mask works – it comes to life, as it were. His novel is genuinely funny. The other humorists in this tradition make us
shudder, wince, or squirm even as we laugh. Twain make us laugh outright, with an almost childish delight. Somehow, his book does cheer us up, in the
manner of the tall tale; it even manages at times to reinforce normative
ideals, in the manner of satire – as The Confidence-Man, Miss
Lonelyhearts, and Gravity’s Rainbow emphatically do not.
One way to explain the paradox
of exhilaration is through D. H. Lawrence’s famous dictum: trust the tale, not
the teller. Think of the disjunction between what Twain meant to do and what he
wrought – between the terrible story he tells and the radiance of Huck’s
monologue. Huck may simply have slipped out of Twain’s control. That’s the case for a
cheerful outcome, and there are good grounds for making it. I refer to the
dazzling play of language in the novel. Twain achieved this only once. His earlier works are rarely sinister, even
when they’re brim-full of violence, as in Roughing It; his later works
are so sinister they’re rarely funny, even when they’re full of scam-full of
jokes, as in Puddn’head Wilson. But in Huckleberry Finn he wrought a
miracle of humor, bringing into play with equal force the most optimistic, most
cynical, and most despairing dimensions of American culture. On one hand,
there’s an extraordinarily daring con game going on: we’re being sold on the
American dream-works, all of it, lock, stock, and barrel. On the other hand, we’re being asked to fall
in love with Huck. And one game depends on the other. We must buy into the
dream-works if we are to preserve our love for Huck, and the other way round:
we must preserve our love for Huck in order for Twain’s design upon us to work.
The
result is a simultaneity of contrary effects, hence a constant volatility of
perspective. And – here’s the Lawrencian
snapper, if I may call it so – that volatility undermines the deadpan
mode. For deadpan is a logical system;
it depends on a comprehensive, bottom-line meaning-- the nub, the
re-cognition, the deadly point- of- it-all, which explains (even as it undoes)
everything that has come before. But the dynamics of laughter that the
narrative sets loose interlink all levels of meaning. In effect, the flow of
humor is shift-shape, like a kaleidoscope.
It keeps moving from one meaning to another, from tall tale to con game
to sick-joke and back again; the strategy itself demands that we bubble merrily
along, from the imaginary “nigger” to the Baptist on the Lally Rook. As we read and reread, conscious of the nubs
and yet flowing happily along with the currents of comedy, our response keeps shifting
from cheerful to satiric to sinister, sinister to satiric to cheerful, back and
forth, and (in mood) up and down, down and up.
Although the plot leads deterministically downwards – down in hope, down
the river – the strategy behind it requires an anti-deterministic flow of
aesthetic give-and-take, so that what we experience is not levels
of meaning, but a buoyant linguistic excess. The joke here is on Twain. What’s funny about his tale is that Huck Finn
turns out to be ours, after all.
That’s
the cheerful resolution: finally, this story is just plain fun. Another way to
explain the paradox of exhilaration is by taking its satire seriously. I refer
to the novel’s moral dimension, the uplifting mood we’re left with --
spiritually uplifting – again, even after we get the nub. The issue here is depth of character: the
fictional self that comes to life for us through the volatility of language. In
this view, Twain fashioned in Huck Finn a character that he himself could not
fully understand: a creative presence whom, therefore, we can never fix or
label– who is neither merely what he says he is (poor white trash), nor merely
an expression of the American ideals we project upon him, nor merely the
laughing-stock of a tall tale – but towards whom we cannot help but feel
protective. That protective feeling is
the result neither of superiority nor of identification. Quite the contrary: it comes from our
recognition of difference. We
might even argue that on some unarticulated level a similar protective
relation, a felt mutuality based on the respect for otherness,
springs up between Huck and Jim. In any
event, we are compelled by Huck in this version because he’s not like
us; and we come to appreciate him best precisely when we laugh at our urge
to appropriate him. Such laughter is
directed at ourselves, it’s self-incriminating; but what’s funny about it is
that it enlarges our capacity for love. It helps us see in Huck what Emanuel Levinas calls “a height of the
good” that transcends categories of logic – the logic of critical analysis no less
than deadpan logic and the logic of culture -- so that the novel provides a
kind of lifebuoy (a coffin-lifebuoy) to the ethical life.
That’s the ending I would have preferred, and it’s just as plausible as the
argument for the cheerful outcome. The problem in both cases is that we posit a
comic resolution, and any such resolution, however we frame it, tends to return us
-- in a philosophic or aesthetic (or anesthetic) fog --to that deadpan raft once
more. In either case, that is, our critical ingenuities come at the expense of
Twain’s fantastic achievement. They allow us to evade the challenge of his
devastating snappers. They obscure the high and delicate art by which he takes us in;
and through which he gives us the opportunity to have a good laugh at ourselves
good in the sinister sense, without illusions of redemption – a laughter
good enough to do the job that Twain said all humor should do, which is “to blow history to rags and tatters at a
blast.” To indulge in those dreams of transcendence I just outlined – those flights from textual-historical meaning
unto some free territory elsewhere, of formalism or philosophy – is to return
in a metaphysical or aesthetic (or anesthetic) fog to the Humorist’s raft once
again, drifting into precisely the traps of culture which the novel seeks to
expose and explode.
Freud offers a useful insight into
the dilemma I’m suggesting. As a rule,
he observes, the comic mode serves to distance us from the “distressing
effects” of humor – the kind of humor that “does damage” and “causes pain” – to
the point where we are entirely disengaged from the painful situation. “The victim of the injury,” he writes, “might
obtain humorous pleasure, while the unconcerned person laughs from comic
pleasure.” That’s the core of the difference between Twain and those who would
find ways out of the predicament he creates.
To disengage from the injury is to slight both form and content in
Twain’s art. Huckleberry Finn
exploits the pleasure principle in order to shock us, painfully, into
re-cognition.
One last contrast. In speaking earlier of the image of Huck in
“Injun-territory,” I ventured an analogy to the Holocaust. Now, the issue of Holocaust humor –
representations of the Holocaust in the comic mode (as in Roberto Begnini’s
film, Life is Beautiful) – has been much debated. Is it possible to joke
about that horror? Those who defend that
position point to the tradition of Jewish humor – the laughter of pogroms and
persecution – and the biblical context it draws upon. They speak of an “aesthetics of deferral”
developed by Jews over the course of their long diaspora, one that balances
recurrent disasters against scriptural promises of millennial redemption. In this context, laughter itself, even the
laughter of the concentration camp, is a sign of hope. It attests to continuity, and continuity,
even in its bleakest forms, evokes the promise of redemption. To laugh at the horror is thus a defense
against “the trauma of history.” For
Twain, there is no such defense. In some sense, no doubt, we could read the
American redemptive dream into the river idyll – that, indeed, is the import of
those critical interpretations I noted of Huck and Jim together as a version of
utopia. But it’s a deadpan utopia. In Huckleberry Finn, as in all the
writings of the Late Twain, the promise of a New World paradise is the last and
greatest of history’s con jobs.
It was from this perspective that I
risked comparing Huck (when he prepares for “howling adventures among the
Injuns”) to a derelict, sound-hearted German boy lighting out for fun games
among the ghetto Jews. Having gone that
far, let me extend the Holocaust analogy to the African-American condition
under slavery. Imagine that German boy,
then – call him Heinz Pfin – running away from home and teaming up accidentally
with an adult Jew just escaped form a lager, an empathetic, loving,
extremely capable, and enormously grateful man, desperate to reunite one day
with his family. In spite of himself,
Heinz sometimes treats the escapee as an equal, all the while feeling ashamed
for doing so. And he feels ashamed because fundamentally, deep down, he
believes that the Jew is what his Nazi culture has taught him: a “nobody,” a
non-person. Accordingly he refers
repeatedly to “Jew-vermin” (you can’t learn a kike to argue,” “if I struck
anything like it, I’m an Ungezeifer”), or, in his most generous gesture,
directly after the escapee has saved his best friend’s life at the risk of is
own (as Jim saves Tom’s life), “I knowed he was aryan inside.” Imagine reading a genuinely funny book of
this kind and concluding that this boy is not just forgivable (for his
ostensible innocence and innate kindness), but a moral hero, the very model of
what boyhood should be. That would be
deadpan on the author’s part. And to
follow Twain to the bitter end, the book would have to be addressed to a German
readership that was still very much anti-Semitic, as Twain’s Reconstructionist
readership was still very much racist.
And one last twist: imagine members of that readership laughing at themselves
for having been taken in by the deadpan, but, according to the author, having
no alternative – no way out of the process of acculturation (and an inherently
vicious predisposition) that made them admire the boy the boy in the first
place.
What to do, then, with that paradox
of exhilaration? We must leave it simply
as paradox, I believe, and find the courage to confront the import of Twain’s
deadpan. The fact that critics have evaded it seems to me to express a certain
desperation, well expressed some forty years ago by Perry Miller’s rhetorical
question: “Can Americans imagine what
they would take themselves to be if … Huckleberry Finn were expunged
from the national recollection? How,
without that book, would even those of us who had never seen the Mississippi
River know who we are?” How indeed,
except be somehow meeting the challenge of Twain’s devastating American
humor? Other writers found a way out of
despair. For Twain there was no turning
back. He made contempt for hope his
ground of creativity. To he end he maintained that an optimist is a “Daydreamer
more elegantly spelled.” To the last he
claimed that there were no thoughts, no opinions, except those that were
“transmitted to us” so that (as he lamented in his final autobiographical
dictations) the is “no escape form [our social and] natural environment r, not
even for someone [like himself] who recognized it.” Miller’s question presupposes a comic view of
Huckleberry Finn. Bit at the very
least the comic mode calls for a celebratory reunion at the end, if only as a
fiction to accommodate audience desire.
By contrast, the reunion that ends Huckleberry Finn is a snapper
directed against the convention of happy endings, and the laughter it provokes
is designed to turn desire into distress. Twain seeks to engage us through our
laughter in the process of our victimization.
The laughter of the victim: a bleak prospect. It’s like imagining Job laughing at his own misfortunes. And perhaps even that grim image is inadequate. “Though He slay me,” cries Job in his darkest hour, “yet I will maintain mine integrity.” In the deadpan version, we would be invited to laugh at Job’s belief not only in God’s concern, but in his own integrity. No comfort here; but then, there are always plenty of comforters at hand, left and right. We owe it to Twain’s art to attend to his discomforting snappers. Should he not have the last word? And could we not find something enabling in that ending as well? – enabling, not ennobling. I don’t offer this as the Canadian perspective. There’s no such thing anyway. Nor is it quite the Kafkaesque perspective I spoke of yesterday, though there are certain affinities. And I don’t ask you to endorse the stance it involves. You don’t have to, I submit, in order to acknowledge its insight, even its heroic quality – which involves the integrity to confront our dilemmas as dilemmas – no solution in sight –and the courage to laugh at the traps that beset us, without seeking refuge in our laughter. So understood, what’s funny about Huckleberry Finn -- is that its most positive feature, if we may call it so –the one aspect of the novel that may be said to promote interpretation, rather than to mock it – lies in its denial of comic relief.