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COPYRIGHT 2006 Adam Mickiewicz University
ABSTRACT
By common agreement, Huckleberry Finn is not only the most American boy in literature, but is also the character with whom American readers of all ages tend to identify most readily and most intimately. Against ready-made assumptions, the paper investigates the protagonist's unique constitution, modus operandi, and existential appeal. As a passe-partout to the text, it is suggested that Huck is at one and the same time, and as a primary rather than a secondary phenomenon, a small boy as well as a full-grown man. An apparent repository of classically definable unnecessary desires, informed by a combined Carlylean-Melvillean-Whitmanesque discourse of the (magical) mirror, Twain's figure in the carpet emerges as a nuanced negotiation and transposition: speculum meditantis--mirror of one meditating, speculum vitae humanae--mirror of human life, speculum totis paria corporibus--mirror equal to the body of the country at large, and ultimately hyperbolically as utilitarian speculum humanae salvationis.
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It is by no means an easy matter, at this late day, to say anything new or fresh about Huckleberry Finn.
Laurence Hutton (1896)
As regards fame, Seneca notes pedantically that as against for instance love or friendship the opinion of one does not suffice (ad gloriam non est saris unius opinio); Arendt, for her part, offers that Fama, that powerful and much coveted goddess of fountains--not unlike Moneta, the goddess of mnemonics--sports a great many faces, of various sorts and sizes (cf. Arendt 1968: 1-3). Be all that as it may, William Styron makes no bones about it, according to him all one ever need do to achieve immortality is neither more nor less than simply write a book like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (see Brewer 2002). To pastiche Yeats's awe-inspiring oxymoronic national chant, towards the end of a peculiarly restless, nervous, bustling American century, amidst much clamor and publicity, a terrible (literary) beauty was born--marked by a twain (pun intended) title, venue and date--after an excruciating eight-year plus delivery, a challenge to the earlier largely genteel and largely meaningless words and worlds.
"Come slow; push the door open, yourself--just enough to squeeze in," ... I took one slow step at a time, and there warn't a sound, only I thought I could hear my heart ... [then] unlocking and unbarring and unbolting.... [I] pushed it a little and a little more, till somebody said, "There, that's enough--put your head in." I done it ... and there they all was, looking at me ... It]hey held the candle and took a good look at me ... [at last] the old lady says: ... "get the wet clothes off from him and dress him up in some of yours"
(Twain 2001: 133-134). (1)
Apparently impervious to the formidable verve and flourish of power relations, culture wars, de-gradation, stigmatization, templatization, canon revision and canon formation, (2) Mark Twain garners the highest popular (visage and name) recognition of all American writers (despite his mere 5'8" eclipsing even such commanding figures as Whitman or Hemingway), and the amount of critical commentary generated by the work on which his fame rests is estimated to be in the range of judicial interpretation accorded to the Constitution of the United States. Anecdotally, fifty years ago to date, in the wake of his ill-fated short essay "Why Huckleberry Finn is not the great American novel", Van O'Connor (1956: 108) admitted somewhat wryly that to criticize Mark Twain is as irreverent and sacrilegious as to criticize Mother's Day. (3) Also, as Skandera-Trombley (1994 [1997]: 1) specifically points out apropos of biographical criticism, writing about Samuel Langhome Clemens has proved to be a near obligatory rite of passage for a whole legion of eminent Americanists.
A rather special combination of voice, dramatis personae, place, and event, though not exactly a passport to exquisite culture, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is reputed to be the most insinuating and the most compelling of all American novels. Moreover, it is probably the only proposition over which the confirmed highbrows and the lowbrows, the upstairs and the downstairs, the toffs and the toughs would be ever likely to come close on the clappometer. Although it is difficult to appraise with accuracy something as nebulous as general impact, it is impossible not to note Huck's versatile signifying presence today, extending as it does from the field of social psychology and cultural politics to the world of entertainment and outdoor fashion, to electricity supply, information technology and e-commerce. The phenomenon can be conveniently dubbed after the eponymous coinage from the first realm as the "Huck Finn Syndrome", in its own right, to borrow from William Carlos Williams, a pure product of America, root and branch, bona fide genuine stuff. Notwithstanding the shifting ideological and outright political agenda brought to bear upon the reading of the novel, notwithstanding the long shadow of the ongoing, often impassioned and acrimonious race controversy surrounding it, notwithstanding the occasional hue-and-cry it raises (or maybe also very much on account of it), Cox's sweeping assessment (1973: 225) is not likely to lose its currency any time soon: "[W]e know that Huckleberry Finn will be part of our future as much as it will have been a part of our past.... There is really no other American book like it". (4)
Smith (1965: 72) is not alone in his appreciation that it is specifically the protagonist's personal attributes and character-traits that make the work a unique, cherished, proud possession of the American people. Unsurprisingly, when Huck is set up by the tandem of Europhile rapscallions, the "King" and the "Duke", to pass himself off for a valet from Sheffield, England, the preposterous, ignominious sham renders him uncharacteristically extremely ill-at-ease and the whole scheme is all but literally laughed out of town: "'Are you English, too?' / I says yes; and him and some others laughed, and said, 'Stuff!'" (252). Even if its origins and meaning are somewhat dubious, the charge: "I am not an American. I am the American" is one of the most widely circulated Twainisms today (see Duncan 2001/2). On first meeting Huckleberry in The adventures of Tom Sawyer the image we are offered, with the fillius terrae tang of home turf and native soil compensating for legitimacy deficit, is that of a gaudy romantic outcast, happy-go-lucky interloper, artful dodger, free-rider, simple-lifer, do-it-yourself-er, feel-gooder. We learn that he does not have to obey anybody and as his own master apparently has ready access to everything that goes to make life precious; it is hardly surprising that all harassed, hampered, respectable boys should admire and envy Huck, wishing they dared to be just like him. It is precisely this wishing to be like him that seems to be the foundation of Huck's hyper-canonization, of his talismanic status as an all-American icon, potent cultural signifier, and object of near personality cult. A popular early-twentieth-century Huck Finn song is not so much about a boy by the name of Huckleberry Finn as about a grown man wishing he were that very boy:
If I were Huckleberry Finn; I'd do the things he did, I'd be a kid again. You'd always find me fishin' beside a shady pool; Wishin' there never was a school; If I were only Huckleberry Finn, In ev'ry mischief I'd be in; How I wish I were him. (5)
The extent of Huck's seductive appeal is probably best indicated by the paradoxical admission made by Ellison (1958: 222), one of the most distinguished, high-profile African-American figures of the twentieth century: "I could imagine myself as Huck Finn ... but not, though I racially identified with him, as Nigger Jim", arguably an ultimate proof that "[t]here is a bit of Huckleberry Finn in all of us" (Hartford--Snarey 2001: 293). This is how, to twist Mark Twain's own words into a prophetic albeit totally coincidental line: "H[uck] still lives; or rather, they live" (Clemens 1977: 286)--the successive generations of Americans discovering, requisitioning, and indefatigably reinventing him anew, in terms of most immediate response trying to emulate (if only as vicarious fantasy) the bravado, the jauntiness, the rough-and-tumble, the defiance, the boisterousness, the abandon, the hardiness, the wittiness, the freedom, the licentiousness, the fun, the laziness, the delinquency. (6) Owing to Huck, America still looms or rather beckons, in the words of Kesey's unambiguous reference (1964 [1971]: 227), as "a land for childhood frolic" where one can "trade rats and capture beetles", and where one can entertain, as Garland had earlier (1899 [1961]: 423) idealized it, "all the other now vanished pleasures of boy life". (7)
It was Thomas Bailey Aldrich who in 1869 formally introduced into American literature the "bad boy", such as you might have admittedly met anywhere in New England, "I did not want to be an angel and with the angels stand" (Aldrich 1996: 1-2), a counterpoint to the pathetic heroine of Maria Susanna Cummins's massive bestseller of 1854 The lamplighter, "No one loved her, and she loved no one", "eight years old and all alone in the world" (Cummins 1988: 2). Charles Dudley Warner's 1877 Being a boy opens with the assertion that this condition-position is one of the most delectable things in the world imaginable, the only disadvantage being that "it does not last long enough" (Warner 2002: 3). A bon diable rather than a bon camarade affair, this communication depends on the assumption that "the bad boy is the norm, and that for all his badness he is still lovable" (Macaigne 1983: 326). Randolph in Henry James's Daisy Miller seems to be a logical development down this line of juvenile abandon, identified intertextually in terms of the anthropological fantasy of pre-settlement (pre-agricultural) "'romp[ing] on from day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age'" (James 1878 [1985]: 66). Etched against the backdrop of well-behaved European (rather incredulously, Polish) boys strolling about in the Trois Couronnes gardens with their governors, Randolph, equipped by nature with bright, restless, penetrating little eyes, appears as a perfect American urchin. He is effervescent, precocious, assertive, adventurous, recalcitrant, for all intents and purposes establishes himself as his own master, and rambunctiously stands (up) for the spirit of his country. However, Randolph tends to get condescendingly naturalized as one-dimensional type, a literal enfant terrible, an obstreperous parody of (young) America, ineffectual comic relief, or simply an unavoidable minor nuisance, and as such does not support the larger thesis. When out of a total, determined, sleepless opposition to the alien ambiance and the whole adult society Randolph (sporting knickerbockers, red stockings, a provocative cravat, and brandishing an oversize sharp alpenstock to boot) cries (specifies) in his hard, truculent little voice for all the world to hear: "'I'm going up the Alps!'"--"'This is the way!'" (James 1878 [1985]: 7), the announcement, very simply, just because he is just a child, does not impress anybody in the slightest. Implicitly, the additional unpropitious circumstance is the very suggestion of a departure from the solidity of the surface. As Henry David Thoreau (1975a: 520) concluded over his own abortive climbing expedition: "The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe", "[t]his ground is not prepared for you". It has been observed more than once that the whole of human history proves to be rooted in the earth, but it is Americans who are believed to be peculiarly Antaean, or geotropic, they expect daily to be shown tangible matter so that they might come directly into contact with it: "the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense!" (Thoreau 1975a: 525). (8) Charles Olson (1947:114) explains famously that "only in touch with the land and water of the earth do we keep our WEIGHT, retain POTENTIAL".
With his two feet firmly on the ground, in no danger of slipping/falling through the rabbit hole, Huck's special appeal is not a case of a mere infantile infatuation, capricious autobiographical longing to be a little child again for one bright summer-day, habitual nostalgic childhood throwback, or boys-will-always-be-boys logic. Reminiscing, given the unique advantage of hindsight, most people do at one time or other wish they were children once more (sun-baked leaves wishing to be green with youth again), but hardly anybody would be actually prepared to give up their hard-won experience, entitlements, allowances, habits, regimens, allurements, pleasures, wisdom, and generally social status as adults. When, in a broader context and with a somewhat different emphasis and overall intent, Bercovitch (2002: 118) dramatizes the rapport between the hero of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and his fans as: "Huck belongs only to us. We adopt him; we take him into our hearts; we interpret him in our likeness; ... we appropriate Huck as the child-in-us", this is really missing a larger point. This appreciation seems to be but echoing a conventional outsider/stranger response in Chapter 11, namely the inadequate coaxing, patronizing, adoptive, finally insincere: "'You just tell me your secret, and trust me.... Tell me all about it, now--that's a good boy'" (73), of and to which Huck remains appropriately enough suspicious and unresponsive to the very last. While (on Alfred Kazin's authority) it is impossible to imagine Tom Sawyer as anything but a boy, the projection made imaginatively available by Huck's story is much more "strange and unregular"--"[you] never see nothing like it" (239). (9) Most emphatically, however, it is a product of so much more than simply his paradigmatically liminal nominal age of "thirteen or fourteen or along there" (134), which is indicated doubly conjecturally, indirectly, inferentially, apropos of somebody else and only well into the story at that. The present case seems to be a different can of beans and a different ball-game, so to speak. As Huck puts it straightforwardly in the earlier volume: "'I ain't everybody'" (Twain 1982: 212). The classical blanket theme of initiation believed to be central to the book does not apply here classically at all since the protagonist is not exactly an abecedarian, neophyte, initiate or liminar poised on the precipice of an inevitable trans-figuration. His is not what James Fenimore Cooper calls "the hobbledehoy condition" when one has lost the graces of childhood without having yet attained the finished form of man (cf. Cooper 1845 [1962]: 368). While there is, as at all times and everywhere, an element of ongoing pathe mathos, setting out on his journey Huck is anything but a a lump of soft wax, empty cabinet or tabula rasa. (10) He is in no need of any specialized patronage, tutelage, and toughening up since he has effectively, to use his famous words, "been there", meaning through practically everything, before (the one real exception is possibly "a real bully circus ... the splendidest sight that ever was" [191]). Besides being effectively an orphan and having to deal with all the nitty-gritty all by himself, in the previous volume alone Huck's brush or rather face-on encounter with the raw stuff of life includes grave-robbery, suspected necrophilia, murder, death of starvation, blackmail, court trial, as well as advice on how to best get revenge on a woman: "'[Y]ou don't kill her--bosh! You go for her looks. You slit her nostrils--you notch her ears, like a sow's! '" (Twain 1982: 176).
Huck's uniqueness may to a better effect be appreciated in terms of Ray Bradbury's classic (quasi-gothic) fantasy of aging and de-aging set in the emblematic Mid-Western Green-Town, Something wicked this way comes (1962). Actually, what comes even closer to the marrow of the present matter, so to speak, is the early postmodernist school-boy fantasy in Donald Barthelme's "Me and Miss Mandible" (published originally in 1961 as "The darling duckling at school"), where a thirty-five-year-old man is formally recognized as an eleven-year-old boy. Not only does he get...
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