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COPYRIGHT 2007 Southern Illinois University
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In the long history of Harper's magazine, the most letters ever received about an article was in response to a 1996 essay by Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley entitled "Say It Ain't So, Huck"(Berube 693). In this now-notorious piece, Smiley took on the exalted critical status of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, questioning its preeminent role in American literary history and positing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as a superior model for American literature. For Smiley, the most notable problem with Huckleberry Finn was that Twain took the public question of race and removed it to the private sphere. It was only on the raft floating down the Mississippi away from societal constraints that Huck was able to overcome the racist attitudes of his culture and understand Jim as a man. But far from being a solution, Huck's change of heart simply illustrates the problem for Smiley.
If Huck feels positive toward Jim, and loves him, and thinks of him as a man, then that's enough. He doesn't actually have to act in accordance with his feelings. White Americans always think racism is a feeling, and they reject it or they embrace it. To most Americans, it seems more honorable and nicer to reject it, so they do, but they almost invariably fail to understand that how they feel means very little to black Americans, who understand racism as a way of structuring American culture, American politics, and the American economy. To invest The [sic] Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with "greatness" is to underwrite a very simplistic and evasive theory of what racism is and to promulgate it, philosophically, in schools and the media as well as in academic journals ("Say" 63).
This extended quotation captures the force of Smiley's argument as well as much of what proved controversial following the article's publication. In attacking Huck's personal transformation, Smiley doesn't simply say the novel fails (by now a familiar debate); she argues instead that the problem of the novel is where it succeeds. By placing Huck's feelings at the center of the book, Twain derails any kind of structural understanding of racism. Racism becomes a personal matter rather than a political one, allowing readers to substitute feeling for action.
It is precisely the opposite quality that stands out in Uncle Tom's Cabin for Smiley. She claims that the broader scope of Stowe's novel allows Stowe to present a range of voices--whites who are pro- as well as anti-slavery, blacks who emerge as heroic as well as psychologically wounded by their enslavement--so that the issue never boils down to a question of individual attitude. Even more crucially, in Uncle Tom's Cabin personal relationships are never removed from politics. The racist structure of slaveholding society supplants, in many cases, bonds of friendship, of loyalty, and, most importantly, of family.
Stowe never forgets the logical end of any relationship in which one person is the subject and the other is the object. No matter how the two people feel, or what their intentions are, the logic of the relationship is inherently tragic and traps both parties until the false subject/ object relationship is ended. Stowe's most oft-repeated and potent representation of this inexorable logic is the forcible separation of family members, especially of mothers from children (65).
Essentially, what Smiley admires is that Stowe's novel takes place "off the raft." In Uncle Tom's Cabin, there is no space where relations of power can be transcended, no space where the personal is not also always political. For Stowe, all personal interactions, even of the most intimate nature, are implicated in power relationships and reflective of the unequal distribution of power under the regime of slavery. For Smiley, this makes Stowe's novel a more thoughtful and more meaningful meditation on the place of slavery in nineteenth-century American culture.
Smiley's article proved controversial, though it is worth noting that she was not alone in her views. Her article foreshadows many of the claims made by Jonathan Arac in his book length study, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target. That said, Smiley was castigated in Harper's subsequent "Letters" section where she was called a Philistine and a "dunce" for presuming "to criticize Mark Twain's masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, on such lame topical and political grounds" (Fiore 83, Theroux 7). Her championing of Uncle Tom's Cabin was termed an insult, and Stowe's novel was castigated as "treacle" (Boyce 7, Friedman 84). Another writer complained that the version of Huckleberry Finn Smiley would write would consist of "three hundred bore-me-slack-jawed sermons from the high pulpit of a hundred years' hindsight" (Cameron 83). In one sense, these letters prove Smiley's point. Viewing Huckleberry Finn as the quintessential American novel, a process Jonathan Arac refers to as "hypercanonization," functions as a way to disarm critics without having to take their arguments seriously (137). The rage with which Smiley's article was answered, however, also speaks to the enduring appreciation for Twain's novel.
An unexpected epilogue to this controversy occurred two years later when Smiley published a novel that took on many of the same issues raised in her Harper's essay. In 1998, she released The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, a historical novel set largely in Kansas Territory during the 1850s, a time when battles over whether the territory would be admitted into the Union as a free or slave state earned it the nickname "Bleeding Kansas." From the tenor of Smiley's Harper's article, one might have expected her to use Uncle Tom's Cabin as a touchstone for her writing on the 1850s, taking Stowe's novel as the kind of model she felt it should have been for American literature. But the surprise of Lidie Newton, a revelation even to Smiley herself, is the extent to which Huckleberry Finn became her stylistic model. This is not to say that...
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