Literary articles - Mark Twain 2024

What can be learned on a Raft - Huckleberry Finn

“GLAD TO FIND OUT WHO I WAS”: WHAT CAN BE LEARNED ON A RAFT

Tracy B. Strong

I am ready to die and be born again in this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.

R.W. Emerson

"Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, epilogue

I have taken three books with me to this place: something new from the American Mark Twain (I love his foolishnesses more than the German idiocies), then Plato’s Laws, and your book, my dear friend.

Nietzsche to Paul Rée, last half of June, 1877.

In his Autobiography, written, as he says, “from the grave,” Mark Twain describes his work:

All through my life my facts have had a substratum of truth, and therefore they were not without value. Any person who is familiar with me knows how to strike my average, and therefore knows how to get at the jewel of any fact of mine and dig it out of its blue-clay matrix. My mother knew that art. When I was seven or eight ...a neighbor said to her, "Do you ever believe anything that that boy says?" My mother said, "He is a well spring of truth, but you can't bring up the whole well with one bucket. I know his average, therefore he never deceives me. I discount him thirty per cent for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth, without a flaw in it anywhere.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (there is no “The”) is a meticulously factual and researched work of fiction and, once one discounts the “embroidery” it contains, Twain tells us, a flawless diamond. As Huck notes for Twain in the first chapter: “he told the truth, mainly.” What is the truth that lies under these facts? With the quote from the Autobiography in mind, let us turn to it.

What happens in this book? Let me call attention to some episodes relevant to what I have to argue. The novel picks up Huck's tale, starting from the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, when Huck is adopted by Widow Douglas. The concerns and focus are different. I note, for instance, that the word “slave” appears but twice in Tom Sawyer, once in the Preface and once in a footnote. At the beginning of the new novel, Huck is on his way to being civilized: he has more or less stopped smoking and swearing (as Mrs. Clemens repeatedly urged her husband) and attends school. One winter day, Huck discovers that Pap, his alcoholic no-good father, whom he had not seen for a year, has returned home.

At the end of the previous book Huck had gotten $6000 from a recovered treasure. He knows that his father will want it and thus arranges to give the money to Judge Thatcher. Huck's father returns; they go to the woods, where Pap abuses Huck. Huck manages to escape and stages his own death. He flees to an island, where he discovers Jim, Miss Watson’s slave, who has run away because he fears being sold down the river to New Orleans. Huck, disguised as a girl, returns to the mainland and learns that his father has once again disappeared. He learns that his death has been attributed to Jim. Huck hurries back to the island and informs Jim of these events. Jim determines to head down the river to Cairo, a town in Illinois, a free state. Huck decides to help him escape – to break the law. They embark by raft but, traveling necessarily by night, they miss Cairo. One night a riverboat crashes into them. Huck manages to swim to shore, but Jim disappears.

Huck is taken in by the Grangerford family, who are locked in a perpetual feud with the Shepherdsons, for reasons unremembered by either side. The Grangerfords care for him, even provide him with a slave, who later reveals to Huck the presence of Jim in the nearby woods. Reunited, Huck and Jim steal away in their raft, which Jim had rescued and repaired. The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons resume exchanging gunfire. Back on the river, the runaways rescue two mountebanks, the Duke and the Dauphin, who engage in a series of swindles and finally hope to embezzle a family's inheritance by posing as the deceased's long-lost brother from England. The con artists succeed in their plot, but Huck, pitying the dead party's daughters, executes a complicated plan that leads to exposure of the schemers. Huck and Jim then resume drifting down the river; with no way of going up-river they are getting ever closer to precisely the place Jim wanted to avoid. The Duke and Dauphin, fleeing from yet another duped mob after a warning from Huck, rejoin them and hold them in captivity.

In a key moment, Huck, feeling that he is sinning in helping Jim to escape, decides to reveal to Miss Watson where Jim is. His heart then takes precedence over his conscience and he tears up the note proclaiming, famously, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” However, the Duke, -- who has postured proclaiming “Am I not a man and a duke” thus parodying the Abolitionist slogan “Am I not a man and a brother?” -- hands Jim over to Tom Sawyer’s uncle Silas Phelps in exchange for reward money (which has been put up for an escaped slave from New Orleans --all blacks look alike, it appears). Huck determines to help Jim escape. He presents himself to Mrs. Phelps, who mistakes him for her nephew, Tom Sawyer. When Tom actually arrives, they keep up the masquerade: Tom cooperates with Huck and presents himself as another nephew, Tom’s half-brother Sid. Huck enlists Tom's aid in the scheme to rescue Jim. These affairs keep Huck from warning the Duke and Dauphin that the townspeople are on to them; the two are tarred and feather and ridden out of town on a rail. “It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another,” muses Huck (HF xxxiii 851) . To free Jim, Tom develops an absurdly complicated escape plot based on liberation romances of Sir Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas. When they finally help Jim escape, a chase ensues. Tom is shot in the leg and Jim is recaptured. Aunt Polly arrives and recognizes Tom and Huck for whom they are. Tom reveals that he has known all along that Miss Watson died two months ago and in her will freed Jim. Aunt Sally expostulates: “Then what on earth did you want to set him free for, seeing he was already free”? Tom replies: “Well that is a question, I must say.” (HF xlii 908) They also learn from Jim that Huck's father has also died. Tom's Aunt Sally then offers to adopt Huck, but he decides that he must lite out for the territory: he has tried civilization.

And that ain’t half of it. Twain gave sub-titles for each episode in his “Table of Contents.” Over forty-three chapters there are 195 different episodes. E.W. Kemble contributed 190 drawings, pretty much one for each scene.

Immediate after publication Huckleberry Finn was banned in Concord, Massachusetts as “absolutely immoral … with very little humor and that of the coarsest sort, … the verist trash.” . While Twain’s reaction in a letter to his publisher was to express delight that this would surely boost sales by 25000 copies, it is that case that throughout his life and after, this book was excoriated in various places around the country as vulgar, unhealthy and, at a later date, racist in effect if not in composition. In our day critics such as Julius Lester and John Wallace , both African-Americans, as well as Caucasian writers such Jane Smiley and Jonathan Arac have attacked Huckleberry Finn as a white adolescent fantasy of race and defended the superior virtue of the message of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. On the other side, writers as different as Ralph Ellison , Bobbie Ann Mason, Jorge Luis Borges, and Toni Morrison have all agreed with Ernest Hemingway’s judgment that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

Clearly Twain was close to some bone in this book. What bone was it? Why so close? Part of the answer lies in his writing.

In The Double Barreled Detective Story, Mark Twain wrote that “no real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.” It follows that generally one should not tell a “naked truth”; Twain then proceeds immediate with an over-the-top description of a countryside:

The lilacs and the laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their homes in the treetops and would visit together… [T]the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary esophagus slept upon motionless wing.

Several bemused readers wrote in inquiring as to the “esophagus.” Referring to one such letter, Twain responded:

“Do you notice? Nothing in that paragraph disturbed him but that one word. It shows that the paragraph was most ably constructed for the deception it was intended to put upon the reader… Alas, if I had but left that one word out, I should have scored! Scored everywhere; and the paragraph would have slidden through every reader’s sensibilities like oil and left not a suspicion behind.”

He tells another bemused reader to “carefully read the whole paragraph and he would not find a vestige of sense in any detail of it.” One could start with the fact that laburnums and lilacs bloom only in the spring….

This is role of Twain’s humor. He is exceptionally conscious of the fact that his readers are likely to swallow almost anything, providing it slides down easily. The humor is there to catch the reader up and make him or her see that the joke is on them. The humorist gets the reader to do the work – a bit like Tom Sawyer’s fence – and the writer must in all cases disguise his position in order to make it the more effective.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains much that is humorous and much that is disguised. The disguise is the oil lets the piece slip down and makes it possible for the world into which the text comes to want to appropriate it. The humor catches the reader in the process of swallowing and prevents him from swallowing it whole. Laughter always gives a distance and that which makes one laugh is the entry key to the deep message of the book. Here the repeated banning of Huckleberry Finn from immediate after its publication on to the present is an indication of how expertly Twain straddled this line. His very penname derives from a measure of depth and signifies the twelve feet of water that insures safe passage for a river boat. So there is safe passage in this work, but only constant sounding and the skill of a pilot in reading the river will keep you from getting caught up on the shoals.

For these words and events are not “just” humorous. Recall that at the end of the Symposium, Socrates compels the others to admit that the genius of comedy is the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also. Reading properly is not easy. How then is one to read this book that wants to slip down too easily yet always gets stuck on some word or event?

There are three punishable sins, the author tells us right off, that one may commit in approaching the book. The first, and from the proposed punishment, the least serious, would be to look for a motive in the narrative, for which the reader will be “prosecuted”; the second is the attempt to find a moral, which will lead to “banishment”; the last, and most severe, the attempt to find a plot, will lead to “execution.”

This notice has constantly attracted attention. And, frankly, just as constantly, critics have sought to find narrative, plot and moral in the text. What had Twain in mind? The first and most important thing to say is that he wants you to read his book. He does not want his book to be dealt with like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, and which had notably motive, moral and plot. Uncle’s Tom’s Cabin is an argument and, as Twain says in Connecticut Yankee, “arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff.” .

What might one do about “petrified training “? – say about attitudes towards chattel slavery? While Huck does undergo change – we might call it a conversion – over the novel, from seeing Jim as Miss Watson’s property and as the subject of jokes and pranks to seeing him as a free person, who loves him and whom he loves, capable and deserving of any virtue of which a human being is capable and deserving, this does not take place as the result of an argument. Tellingly, Huck gives up what he thinks to be morally correct and to be obedience to the law, because to hold to that would mean to hold unquestioningly to the law, to rules that are in manifest contradiction with the relation he has developed with Jim. What allows him to choose hell is his ability to acknowledge the actuality of his relation with another human being.

Central to the marking of this transformation is the moment at which Huck hears Jim’s voice. Buck Grangerford has just been shot and killed; Huck, needing to escape, finds that the raft is gone from where he thought it left. In a panic, he calls out and Jim answers. “It was Jim’s voice – nothing ever sounded so good before.” (HF xviii 798). It is in the actual hearing of a voice and seeing of an other that we learned to acknowledge our heart over our inherited moral standards, over human law. Noticeably the next chapter insists on the first person plural: “We set out the lines. Next we…” It is the dawning of the aspect of this new commonalty that will eventually allow Huck to choose hell over turning Jim in. This is why Huck must repeatedly be reborn throughout the book and why in Tom Sawyer as well as here one can witness one’s own funeral. If you do not witness your own funeral -- stand opposite yourself and see that self -- you can never be reborn.

In choosing hell, Huck is not simply inverting his value scheme. Rather he is on his way to adopting a new set of values, the values of a world to which friendship and fraternity are central. Interestingly, in Letters from the Earth, one of the defects of heaven is said to be the absolute lack of distinction between individuals. Such universalism would make friendship impossible for Twain. Friends are those one really sees and hears. In a letter to Mary Mason Fairbanks, he writes:

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

Again and again Twain will write to his friends urging them to visit so that he may see them.

To see a person as a friend is to look at the world in a different way and it is worth noting that in order to do so, Huck has to learn to distrust his “conscience.” His conscience is thus not just authoritative social convention. It is that which keeps Huck from responding appropriately to an occurrence. After he sees the Duke and Dauphin tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail (not a gentle fate) he notes that he was “feeling … to blame somehow, -- though I hadn’t done nothing. But that’s always the way: it don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience does, I would pisson him It takes up more room than all the rest of a person’s insides [in the manuscript Twain had first written “bowels”] and yet ain’t no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer, he says the same” (HF xxxiii 851). In the late “What is Man?” conscience is said to be the master passion, a “mysterious autocrat … which compels the man to content its desires… [It is] the hunger for Self-Approval.” Conscience is the desire to satisfy whatever desires one has, and such desires are always learned and never, for Twain, “natural.”

Let us pick up once more the encomia of the prefatory “Notice.” What has neither motive, nor moral, nor plot? For Twain the answer is, I think, a river, a life, a country. If this be credited, then Huckleberry Finn , written entirely in first person narrative, is the voice of a person and of a country, told as such lives are lived, told naturally and as they move on and are moved by a river. Hence it is “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” not “The Adventures...” for what we have is a flow. Once embarked everything follows – out of necessity but without purpose or plot. Central here is Twain’s conviction, expressed forcibly by Satan in The Mysterious Stranger, that it is the lot of human beings (as opposed to that of Satan) that “nothing can change the order of life after the first event has determined it.” In the very late (1910) “The Turning Point of my Life” he indicates that his entire life has followed from the day that as a twelve-year old, he caught the measles on purpose, Confined to his room during an epidemic, he decides that “Life on these miserable terms was not worth living, and at last I made up my mind to get the disease and have it over….” He goes to the house of a friend who has the disease, catches it himself and almost dies. “I made up my mind” is key: once he has made that choice everything else follows by a necessity written in the events themselves and not in a goal or an intention. “Im Anfang war die Tat”: an original act rather than an original sin, one might say.

What seems then to be important in Twain’s work is the expression of ones own voice as a person and as an American, for only having a voice of ones own – which cannot be had without the recognition of the voice of another -- will make friendship and the escape from inherited moral codes possible. To this, two points. First, the choice of an only partially educated youth as his narrator reflects Twain’s conviction that we all have something to say. As he wrote in his Notebooks, “All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can't get it out.” Secondly, in Huckleberry Finn Twain gave us a literary voice that was authentically and democratically American. In the “Explanatory” that follows the “Notice” he takes pride in pointing out that in his book seven different dialects are used, something, he points out, is important for the reader to understand for otherwise or she might think that “all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.” It is thus central to his vision of America that we do not all talk alike, nor ought we to try.

Lastly, Twain here employs a particularly American trope: that of the first person narrator. Like other great American books -- Moby Dick or Invisible Man or White Noise -- the book is written entirely in the first-person. This is notably not the voice of an omniscient narrator. The teller of such a tale is typically trying to come to grips with the world around him. In doing so he makes various mistakes, mistakes that sometimes he is able to correct, mistakes that the reader sees or can come to see as mistakes. Any novel so written is then about the process by which a given individual (with the particular qualities of that individual) comes to change as he or she moves about in his or her world. And the same happens with the reader. Any initial identification the reader might make with Huck should get caught up on the shoals of the text. But a refusal of all identification with Huck is to refuse the book as a whole. As the protagonist makes mistakes and learns (or does not) so also the reader makes mistakes about what is important and learns. Hopefully what he or she learns is what helps deal with petrification, the self-righteous resistance to change that he makes quick to tell us in Connecticut Yankee is general in a society.

What makes these voices authentically American? If in the American Scholar, Emerson had declared American’s literary and intellectual independence from Europe, so in Twain’s writings is this independence realized. It is the case, however, that in Twain’s understanding, America’s relation to Europe (and to the English/American language) remains, however, always complex without being ever severed.

On the one hand, Americans seem to think of themselves as autochthonous. Finn has “no truck with dead folks,” and such folks are mainly and almost always European. In Innocents Abroad we find a marvelous burlesque. The museum guide in Genoa has just shown them a letter written by Christopher Columbus.

--"… zis is ze great Christo -- "

--"I don't care who it is! It's the worst writing I ever saw. Now you musn't think you can impose on us because we are strangers. We are not fools, by a good deal. If you have got any specimens of penmanship of real merit, trot them out! -- and if you haven't, drive on!"

--We drove on. The guide was considerably shaken up, but he made one more venture. He had something which he thought would overcome us. He said:

--"Ah, genteelmen, you come wis me! I show you beautiful, O, magnificent bust Christopher Colombo! -- splendid, grand, magnificent!"

--He brought us before the beautiful bust -- for it was beautiful -- and sprang back and struck an attitude:

--"Ah, look, genteelmen! -- beautiful, grand, -- bust Christopher Colombo! -- beautiful bust, beautiful pedestal!"

--The doctor put up his eye-glass -- procured for such occasions:

--"Ah -- what did you say this gentleman's name was?"

--"Christopher Colombo! -- ze great Christopher Colombo!"

--"Christopher Colombo -- the great Christopher Colombo. Well, what did he do?"

--"Discover America! -- discover America, Oh, ze devil!"

--"Discover America. No -- that statement will hardly wash. We are just from America ourselves. We heard nothing about it. Christopher Colombo -- pleasant name -- is -- is he dead?"

One could multiply such examples.

On the other hand, if Twain presented Americans as oblivious to their origins --in Redburn, Melville had named America a country without specific mother nor father -- it is also the case that he reminds us constantly that whether they know it or not, Huck and the others are empowered by the collective past. Their oblivion is the source of both strength and weakness. Huck will at the beginning of the novel indicate that he has no truck with “them bulrushes” but will escape Pap by floating down the river lying flat in a canoe. He rejects what the “wider” tells him about the Bible, and then regales Jim with the story of King Sollermun and his harem. Tom, in planning the escape of Jim, invokes, in one sentence, Baron Trenck, Casanova, Benvenuto Cellini, Henry IV (of France) as well as all the authorities as to “how it is done in Europe.” In fact, in 1907, Twain ends a speech at the Hotel Savoy in London with “When I stand under the English flag, I am not a stranger. I am not an alien, but at home.” There are echoes of Robinson Crusoe in chapter 8 of Finn, in chapter 31 of Tom Sawyer and in Life on the Mississippi. Even religion sticks to us. Twain will write to his friend Howells about “a but-little considered fact in human nature: that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place.” One could go on and on.

Yet it is also the case that the characters in the novel, in the words of one critic, “reflexively recycle stories they have absorbed but cannot ... understand.” Hence we smile at Huck and Jim debating King Sollermun’s wisdom. But it is Twain’s point that as we do so we are as beholden and enmeshed in that culture as are Jim and Huck. As Jim and Huck drift down the river they seek to escape such entanglements, but they cannot. Can anyone? Should anyone want to? What is to be done about the past?

To ask this is to ask what Twain thought might be possible for America. If he was aware of the debt that America owed to Europe, he nonetheless was engendering for America what he took to be the particular virtue of its own self. For Twain, America was the land that invented liberty, though as always his praise also recalled an opposite edge: "We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty." We Americans are “glorious”, he averred in an article from 1863, “fearfully and wonderfully made, and … will occasionally astonish the God that created us when we get a fair start.” Americans, he continued, had the “unspeakably precious freedom of speech, freedom of conscience “and the “prudence never to practice either.”

And, for Twain, the most salient resource for the experience, invention, and attainment of freedom came in the lives of those who had freed themselves from the petrification of their training. Such could be found in the experience of African-Americans, and it was also found, perhaps more ambivalently, in that of Huck. It is there that Twain sought to find America as he dreamed it might be. While the answer to Shelly Fisher Fishkin’s rhetorical question, “Was Huck Black?”, is “no”, it remains nonetheless true that it would have to be in the language of those who have been freed that Twain sought his American vernacular. Jim and Huck, in different and similar ways, are freed --Huck from Widow Douglas and Pap; Jim from Mis Watson and slavery -- and it is thus their speech that Twain mined.

Twain’s intention in Huckleberry Finn was to take American vernaculars, place them in the mouth of a barely educated adolescent boy, and show that the languages of a people could be found in such an apparently unlikely source. While it is not totally true, as some have affirmed, that the poorer your grammar the better person Twain thought you to be, what Twain did realize was that American English as she was spoken, in the place that was America, contained all that was necessary to be great art. Furthermore this is American spoken as she was west of the Alleghenies, with the distance gained from England.

How does language express a people? If, as Heidegger remarks, “human beings are brought into their own by language,” it is the task of the writer, the poet to make available the language for this self-creation. For Twain, it is the language as spoken by ordinary people, heard and presented with the understanding that that language is or can be poetry. We might think of a task of the author to read and speak a country or a way of being. All great modern writers have known this. In a like manner, for instance, Robert Frost (I could have taken Wallace Stevens, or many others) finds orientation in the cadences of everyday conversation:

'Fred, where is north?'

'North? North is there, my love.

The brook runs west.'

'West-running Brook then call it.'

(West-Running Brook men call it to this day.)

West Running Brook

The Mississippi runs North to South and Twain called its basin the “body of the Nation.” It is first and foremost the backbone of this book with no visible plot, no moral and no motive. In Life on the Mississippi, he speaks of it thusly: “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book – a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told most of its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long eight hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest… There was never so wonderful a book written by man…. Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river . . . I had made an acquisition.” This river is, for Twain, the book of America and it is to be read.

Twain learned the river and as a licensed pilot is entitled to read it to us. As they learn to read the river, what do Huck and Jim find? Here it is important to remember that while the reader is tempted to identify with Huck, no character is a book or a play speaks for the author. The first answer is that they do not learn to navigate it very well. Huck and Jim drift down this river on a raft for a total of about 800 miles with the barest minimum possibility of navigating, open to all the dangers and risks of the unforeseen. They can only go with the current.

What does the raft take them to? On the one hand it takes them to moments of unalloyed bliss.

We slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres – perfectly still – just like the whole world as asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line – that was the woods on t’other side – you couldn’t make out nothing else; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black no more, but gray….” (HF xix 740)

Or again: “We said that warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” (HF xviii 739) Not much in modern literature gets better than this and it goes on for about another page and remains as exquisite as it started.

On the other hand, in night and fog they drift past where the Ohio empties into the Mississippi at Cairo (Cairo is on a narrow peninsula between the Mississippi and the Ohio but most of the lights are on the Ohio River side) and thus pass further and further into Southern and slave holding territory. Tellingly, their raft will be run over by a riverboat and, for a while, thought destroyed. Twain’s description of this episode is detailed enough to permit locating the precise spot on a map. The accident occurs just as they pass the line of the 1820 Missouri Compromise at 36.30 degrees of latitude. The apparent destruction of the raft thus marks their entry into territory where the practice of slavery was prevalent. The next episode is the Shepherdson-Grangersford feud episode: Huck is taken in by the Shepherdsons and, as is natural to his new location, is given a slave. No slavery was to be allowed in the Louisiana Territory north of that latitude (except for compromised Missouri which was a slave state); only the recapture of those slaves who had escaped from a slave state was permitted. The Fugitive Slave Act imposing penalties for not helping in the recovery of escaped slaves and providing rewards for doing so was not passed until 1850 and Scott v. Sanford (the Dred Scott case), which determined that blacks had no rights under the Constitution, was not finally decided until 1857: the two together effectively extended the possibility of the practice of slavery to all of the territories. These two decisions postdate the explicit dating of the events of Huckleberry Finn: the question of slavery after the Missouri Compromise is thus not resolved at the time of the story. When the raft, which had been their insulation and hopefully escape from slavery, appears lost, Huck becomes a slave-owner. Importantly, it is Jim who finds and mends the raft that Huck thought destroyed, thereby freeing Huck from the ownership of a human being.

Huck is at his most attractive when he is lazing on the raft with Jim. The raft affords him his moments of reflection— in particular of the famous conflict between his heart and his conscience, where his conscience tells him that he is sinning in helping Jim to escape and his heart persuades him to take hell over turning Jim in. (Twain once described his book as a book “where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat." ) It is, however, also the case that this raft, drifting down the river, takes them closer and closer to enslavement for Jim. It takes them closer to danger: the feuding families of the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, the murder of Boggs, the captivity by the Duke and Dauphin and the eventual attempt to sell Jim down the river.

Whether purposive or pushed, the two do effectuate a voyage. What is that voyage? In that they are pushed by events and not in control of their journey, one might even think of this as an odyssey. The Homeric parallels are not insignificant. Twain, in fact, wrote in 1883 an essay (that remained unpublished) purporting to be the review of a new German book entitled Die Odyssey. Eine Erzählung der alten Welt. Von Homer. The terms of Twain’s critique of this “Homer” are remarkably like ones that might have been made and have been made of Huckleberry Finn: the story stretches credulity, the characters are often unsavory, etc… even if Twain does conclude by finding the whole book worthwhile. The parallels are also there: it takes place on water mostly; the journey is long and for much of it with no real sense of where its goal is; there is a shipwreck; Huck is unmasked (as a girl) by an all-seeing woman; the end goes on for what appears to be a very long time; Huck, like Odysseus, is polytropos; like Odysseus, Huck is not recognized as who he is when he arrives home. I think that Twain did have the Odyssey in mind while writing the book (the essay mentioned above shows he did have it in mind in some fashion) but one should not, I think, make more of this that is necessary. Odysseus has no friends comparable to those Huck has. Slavery is not an issue. Kenneth Rexroth, in “Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn” also draws this parallel. Rexroth writes: “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not modeled on the Odyssey the way Joyce’s Ulysses is, but it would have been quite impossible for Mark Twain not to have Homer constantly in mind, as he must also have had Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the travels of Peter and Paul and of dozens of others, not least Marco Polo. He carefully contradicts them all.”

The voyage is however one during which Huck comes to a slow and incomplete transformation of his attitudes towards a slave. If Huck’s voyage is that of (at least partial) conversion, how and to what effect is it then accomplished? First is the fact that while Huck can and does come to see Jim as a friend this does not imply that he has suddenly shaken off his attitudes, his “petrification.” Twain is clear that ingrained attitudes die hard. When Mrs. Phelps, thinking Huck is Tom, asks why he has arrived on foot, he tells the false story of an explosion on a riverboat

- – “We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

- – Good Gracious! [exclains Mrs Phelps] Anybody hurt?

- – No M’m . Killed a nigger.

- – Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. (HF xxxii 841)

It is, I submit, impossible to read this and not be struck by the blatant juxtaposition. Less anyone think that Twain retained what I might call “crude” racist attitudes (as opposed to Huck), recall that on August 26, 1869, as editor he had published an unsigned short and biting essay in the Buffalo Express, “Only a Nigger,”. He wrote:

A dispatch from Memphis mentions that, of two negroes lately sentenced to death for murder in that vicinity, one named Woods has just confessed to having ravished a young lady during the war, for which deed another negro was hung at the time by an avenging mob, the evidence that doomed the guiltless wretch being a hat which Woods now relates that he stole from its owner and left behind, for the purpose of misleading. Ah, well! Too bad, to be sure! A little blunder in the administration of justice by Southern mob-law; but nothing to speak of. Only "a nigger" killed by mistake -- that is all. Of course, every high toned gentleman whose chivalric impulses were so unfortunately misled in this affair, by the cunning of the miscreant Woods, is as sorry about it as a high toned gentleman can be expected to be sorry about the unlucky fate of "a nigger."

Second, of course, there is the raft. It is the space that permits friendship to develop, friendship that will enable a transformation in Huck. It is significant that much of the journey takes place at night when they will not be seen but also when the skin color difference would be vastly reduced: in shadows all are of the same color. It is therefore important that only after the raft voyage is accomplished – and after Huck has made the choice for hell and for friendship – that Huck first comes to a realization of who he is. How does this come about?

In chapter thirty-two of Huckleberry Finn, immediately after the “I’ll go to hell” chapter, Huck encounters Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally and family. She mistakes him for Tom and greets him enthusiastically, but not by name.

I was getting so uneasy I couldn't listen good. I had my mind on the

children all the time; I wanted to get them out to one side and pump them

a little, and find out who I was. But I couldn't get no show, Mrs.

Phelps kept it up and run on so.

What Huck does not know at this point is that Mrs. Phelps takes him for Tom and that she is Tom’s Aunt (hence she orders the bewildered Huck to “call me Aunt Sally”). In comes Mr. Phelps; Aunt Sally hides Huck and has him pop out.

She stood a beaming and a’smiling like a house afire, and I standing pretty meek and sweaty alongside. The old gentleman stared and says:

-- Why who’s that?

-- Who do you recon t’is?

-- I haint no idea. Who is it?

-- It’s Tom Sawyer.

By jings I almost slumped through the floor. But there warn’t no time to swap knives…. (HF xxxii 843)

The Phelps family rejoices at “Tom’s” safe arrival. Huck says for him it was like “being born again, I was so glad to find out who I was.”

The scene plays, of course on multiple levels. On the one hand, Huck is simply being ironic: he has at last determined who they think he is and can thus play that role (which he proceeds to do, inventing enough information on the doings of the Sawyer family “for six families.”) But on the other hand it is also the case that Huck says explicitly that he really is Tom Sawyer, that is, that he was not to be clearly distinguished from Tom, that he is twinned.

What is the significance of twins to Twain? It is a theme that fascinated him throughout his life. Differences between twins derive from social circumstances and are thus for Twain the entry into social analysis. Huck and Tom are paralleled in many aspects by Tom Canty and Prince Edward in The Prince and the Pauper. In 1874 Twain even wrote a surreal interview of his (non-existent) somewhat mentally challenged twin brother. Puddn’head Wilson revolves around an apparent set of twins, one 1/32th black and the other white; its original title was “Those Extraordinary Twins” which later became the title of a short story by Twain about Siamese twins that ends with one of them being hung. (!?) It is worth noting here that that the segregation case that gave rise to the “separate but equal” doctrine, Plessy v Ferguson, was initiated in 1892, two years before the publication of Puddn’head Wilson. It was decided by the Supreme Court in 1896; importantly, Homer Plessy was visually indistinguishable from a white person (he was “1/8th” black and “7/8ths” white). We know that Twain followed the case.

The twin theme runs deep in Twain’s soul. At a New Year’s party in 1906, he came out at 11:30 dressed in his white suit with his arm around another man whom he introduced as his Siamese twin; a pink ribbon ligatured them together. The New York Times reported the occasion on page one the next day.

Twain was rather short and broad and his hair was snow white. His brother was very tall and very slight and had black hair. It was easy to see that they were brothers. Mark remarked on the close resemblance almost as soon as he came into the room.

"We come from afar," said Mark. "We come from very far; very far, indeed -- as far as New Jersey. We are the Siamese twins, but we have been in this country long enough to know something of your customs, and we have learned as much of your language as it is written and spoke as -- well -- as the newspapers."

"We are so much to each other, my brother and I, that what I eat nourishes him, and what he drinks -- ahem! -- nourishes me. I often eat when I don't really want to because he is hungry, and of course I need hardly tell you that he often drinks when I am not thirsty.

"I am sorry to say that he is a confirmed consumer of liquor -- liquor, that awful, awful curse -- while I, from principle, and also from the fact that I don't like the taste, never touch a drop."

Mark then went on to say that he had been asked to take up the temperance cause and had done so with great success, taking his brother along as a horrible example.

"It has often been a source of considerable annoyance to me, when going about the country lecturing on temperance, to find myself at the head of a procession of white-ribbon people so drunk I couldn't see," he said. "But I am thankful to say that my brother has reformed."

At this point the Siamese brother surreptitiously took a drink out of a flask.

"He hasn't touched a drop in three years."

Another drink.

"He will never touch a drop."

Another drink.

"Thank God for that."

Several drinks.

"And if, from exhibiting my brother to you, I can save any of you people here from the horrible curse of the demon rum!" Mark fairly howled. "I shall be satisfied."

Just then apparently some of the rum, or the influence of it, got through the pink ribbon. Mark hiccoughed several times.

"Zish is wonderful reform -- "

Another drink.

"Wonder'l 'form we are 'gaged in."

"Glorious work. We doin' glorious work -- glori-o-u-s work. Best work ever done, my brother and work of reform, reform work, glorious work. I don't feel just right."

The company by this time was hysterical with laughter. Mark was staggering about on the improvised stage, apparently horribly under the influence. His brother still held the bottle and was still putting it to the use for which it was made.

The laughter became so great that it was impossible for the old man to carry on the farce any longer, and in a few minutes the Telharmonium music, played a mile and a half away up on Broadway, was turned on and it was playing "Auld Lang Syne" when the New Year was ushered in.

The twin theme in Twain (can the resonance be an accident?) reflects the author’s conviction that the differences between human beings are constructed from environment and accident rather than derived from any inherent traits. I cited above the passage from “The Mysterious Stranger” about this; the most extreme version comes in the dialogue “What is Man?” where the Old Man argues that man is “moved, directed, COMMANDED, by exterior influences – solely.” Twain is not a pure materialist, however, as the quality of a man’s soul result from a combination of the “elements” of humanity, which, to a greater or lesser degree, are “intellect, courage, majesty of build, beauty of countenance, charity, benevolence, magnanimity, and kindliness.” Twins serve therefore as his case study and are evidence of the difference that social and cultural context makes. It is the exposure to the various components or elements that make up a society that make the difference between otherwise indistinguishable individuals.

In the novel, Twain is calling our attention to the fact that Huck and Tom form a whole – that they represent two different but linked temptations of the same American, call them the “natural” and the romantic. Huck has no difficulty in adapting to his alter ego and finds his new self amenable.

Now I was feeling pretty comfortable all down one side, and pretty uncomfortable all up the other. Being Tom Sawyer was easy and comfortable, and it stayed easy and comfortable till by and by I hear a steamboat coughing along down the river.

It is at this point that Tom arrives. Huck intercepts him, explains the situation and gets him to pretend that he is his own half-brother, Sid. Tom (Sid), ever efficient, locates the imprisoned Jim, locked up in a shed. Huck may have come to see Jim as a friend, but he in no ways thinks that this will be self-evident to anyone else, including his closest friend, nor that this new reality should extend to human beings universally – he does not make the mistake of thinking that what is true for him is or should or can be socially the norm. He is in fact aghast that Tom, who is “respectable and well brung up, bright and not leather-headed, knowing not ignorant, and not mean but kind” (HF xxxiv 853) is going to help him steal Jim to freedom. As a friend he feels an obligation to tell Tom that he is doing wrong.

And I did start to tell him; but he shut me up, and says: Don’t you reckon I know what I’m about? Don’t I generly know what I’m about?

And whereas Huck simply wants to pull off a plank so to open a hole through which Jim could escape, Tom wants an escape that is “[a] little more complicated than that.” Huck wants to saw off the leg of the bed to slip the chain loose – he points out they can just lift the bed and is rebuffed with the assertion that this would be too “old-maidy.” Tom wants to dig a moat, so they can shinny down to it; he wants to saw Jim’s leg off; he wants to send him a rope-ladder in a pie (the cabin is on level ground); he wants to make a pen out of an old barrel hoop rather than a goose feather, despite the fact that Jim, as a slave, was not allowed to learn to write as per a Missouri law from 1847; he wants to dig a tunnel like the prisoner in the “Chateau Deef” who came out, Tom says, in China – well, you get the idea. Tom has “read all the books that give information about these things.” (HF xxxv 862ff)

What are we to make of this burlesque? When Twain gave this section during the “Twins of Genius” tour, he reported to Livy that it “went with a long roll of artillery-laughter all down the line, interspersed with Congreve rockets & bomb shell explosions, from the first word to the last.” This section has however been much criticized, most recently by none other than John Updike in the New Yorker. Twain is deemed to have lost control of his narrative. But what in fact do we find? First, Twain is lampooning our attachment to the romantic. Huck escapes from normal society by a kind of retreat to nature; Tom escapes into romance. Neither of these directions proves satisfactory for Twain and each without the other is even more seriously deficient. Twain wrote two longish essays on “The Literary Sins of James Fennimore Cooper,” attacking him for an overly-romantic Europe-imitating style of writing.

Secondly, though he does not let it on to the reader or to Huck, during all these preparations Tom knows that Jim was in fact freed in Miss Watson’s will. His constant insistence on “the authorities” as to how a person should be set free is thus from one point of view self-indulgent. Read literally, however, as one must also always do, it is also the insistence that to be realized in life freedom must somehow have authority behind it, that it must be authorized. “The authorities” provide some analysis of what it means actually to attain freedom. Not anything will count as true freedom.

Thirdly, however, the question of freedom is complex. When after the escape, the chase, the wounding of Tom, it is revealed that Jim is as free as anyone, how are we to understand that expostulation? What is freedom?

Think now of the context. The novel was begun in 1874 and finished in 1885 . Right after the Civil War, General Sherman, by his Field Order #15, had given 400 000 acres of good coastal land to the newly freed African Americans of South Carolina. (Sherman was a racist who hated rebels more than he hated blacks). When a few years later this became Senate Bill # 60 and passed both houses, President Johnson, responding to pressure from the South and the North (no compensation was offered to the former owners for this land or for the slaves: the New York Times said Sherman’s act could lead to interference in the relation between labor and capital) and to his own biases, vetoed the bill. The short-lived promise of a bi-racial society of independent small ownership of the immediate post-Civil War period – an extension of the Lincolnian promise of Free Soil – was well gone by l885. Reconstruction was effectively dead by 1876 and the patterns of segregation that were to be declared constitutional in Plessy were well established. (The Reconstructionist hope will be briefly resurrected by the populist Thomas Watson during the 1890’s in “The Negro and Free Soil” and in the campaign of 1892.) Twain was aware of these issues throughout his life: if he had written “Only a Nigger” in 1869, in 1901 he wrote “The United States of Lyncherdom”.

With this in mind what we see in these chapters leading up to the end of Huckleberry Finn is a man who is free yet who is not free. Tom’s position here is complex: There is truth to Forrest Robinson’s claim that Tom is “willingly” self-deceived, that the theater he concocts around freeing Jim is a form of bad faith. But even inside this we see that, bad faith or not, at some level he grasps the reality of the situation, even though he may not be able to admit it to himself for what it is. For we in fact see, once we bracket the theatrics, is Tom insisting that to set Jim truly free will have to be authoritative and that attaining that will require much that is complex, difficult and long. Tom will even suggest that they “could leave Jim to our children to get out” -- alas, a sad truth (HF xxxvi 868). In this sense, Tom is right and the point of this burlesque is profound: Jim is not truly free until his freedom is won rather than granted. Freedom has to be achieved and that will be hard. What Twain reminds us of by his ending is that in 1885 African-Americans were free in name but not in life. And as several of them had pointed out in letters to various authorities after the end of the Civil War, in some ways their lot was worse than before.

And here I again remind all those who are in danger of forgetting it that no character in any great work speaks for the author, especially not in a novel written, as I noted, in the first-person. If one thinks Huckleberry Finn racist because one identifies with Huck and his racist feelings (among others) or with Tom, who seems to use Jim for his own romantic dreams -- and both of them use the “N” word freely -- well then one has missed Twain’s complex irony and humor and should have stuck with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which makes the world easy.

It Huck and Tom are in some sense twins, what are we to make of the Huck-Jim relation? Are they in any sense twinned or is, as some critics have claimed, Jim merely a conventional white man’s portrait of an African-American, drawn to allow Huck to have his adventures – and to make white readers happy with the fact that some do in fact overcome (more or less) their racism? Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s argument against this position in her Was Huck Black? is that Huck, although a poor white boy, both speaks and acts like the African-Americans whom Twain knew and on which he drew for Huck’s portrait. Both responses seem to me inadequate. If on the one hand Huck comes to see Jim as a friend, it is also the case the Twain makes clear that Huck’s transformation is not clear. That the language Twain gives to Huck draws upon the speech of African American slaves shows only that there exist social relations between them. Huck does not speak just like Jim. If one reads this novel as a social novel – not just about Huck – then what Twain shows us is that the while Huck does move somewhat at some times and in some places (most especially on the raft; most often, as I noted, at night) towards the recognition of Jim, he does not by any means abandon the trappings of his racist upbringing. If freedom for African –Americans (and for all humans) is difficult and has to be won, it is also the case that the racism of white society is not overcome simply by a raft trip – although important lessons can be learned in such encounters. What we do see is that on occasion, Jim does in fact speak for what is best in Huck and that, on occasion, Huck sees and acknowledges that. What they learn on the raft, however, has to be learned again and again off the raft.

Where do Huck and Tom end up? In chapter forty-two, Tom (as Sid) boasts of having set Jim free; Aunt Sally says that Jim has been recaptured. It is at this point that Tom then reveals that Jim was set free by Miss Watson two months earlier. At this point Aunt Polly arrives. She of course recognizes Tom as Tom and the confusion becomes total:

-- "Oh, deary me!" says Aunt Sally; "Is he changed so? Why, that ain't TOM, it’s Sid; Tom's--Tom's--why, where is Tom? He was here a minute ago."

-- "You mean where's Huck FINN--that's what you mean! I reckon I hain't raised such a scamp as my Tom all these years not to know him when I SEE him. That WOULD be a pretty howdy-do. Come out from under that bed, Huck Finn."

“So I done it. But not feeling brash.”

“Aunt Sally she was one of the mixed-upest-looking persons I ever see --except one, and that was Uncle Silas, when he come in and they told it all to him. It kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he didn't know nothing at all the rest of the day, and preached a prayer-meeting sermon that night that gave him a rattling ruputation, because the oldest man in the world couldn't a understood it. So Tom's Aunt Polly, she told all about who I was, and what.”

At the end of the novel the transformation or conversion remains incomplete and Twain intends that we see it that way, as if America were constantly unfinished business. If Jim has freed Huck, as one might correctly conclude, Huck intends, famously, to use his freedom to lite out for the territory – to seek freedom in nature. Huck’s “liting out” is in some sense the recognition that he can never be happy in “sivilisation.” One can read this as a limitation on America (which it is) or else as a limitation on Huck (which it also is). If Jim seeks political freedom (which he obtains) and human freedom (which is in doubt) Huck seeks absolute freedom (which he can never obtain). His attempt in this novel ends up in a situation that is no different than it was as they started down the Mississippi. Likewise, Jim was free at or very shortly after the start of the novel and he is in that condition at the end. As for Tom, he remains bound by the romance of adventure. In fact, precious little has happened over the course of several hundred pages except for Huck’s choice -- and that has yet to be realized. In the first paragraph of the final chapter, Tom indicates that he had hoped to continue down the river to New Orleans, then to make a triumph return on a riverboat to St. Petersburg as heroes.

In Tom Sawyer Abroad, an 1894 parody of Jules Verne and one of the several not very successful sequels that Twain published or essayed to Finn, we find at the beginning of the first chapter:

Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? I mean the adventures we had down the river, and the time we set the darky Jim free and Tom got shot in the leg. No, he wasn't. It only just p'isoned him for more. That was all the effect it had. You see, when we three came back up the river in glory, as you may say, from that long travel, and the village received us with a torchlight procession and speeches, and everybody hurrah'd and shouted, it made us heroes, and that was what Tom Sawyer had always been hankering to be.

This is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Tom is poisoned; he can never stop.

In fact, when Twain actually considered the fate of those who made sought freedom for their life in the territories he had sympathy neither for the lot of the Native Americans nor for those who went to find their fortune. With little or no truck with the Cooperian myth of the noble Native American – a myth still powerful: think of Natty Bumppo as the Godfather -- , he writes:

It was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of white men, except the stage stations, that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. I refer to the Goshoot [or Digger] Indians. … I say that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. The revelations that came were disenchanting. It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive—and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings—but Goshoots, after all. They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine—at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody’s.”

No one is spared. Of the miners who sought out California, he writes:

And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth--or prematurely aged and decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all-- victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf--the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. It is pitiful to think upon.

For Twain, Huck and Tom are both still deluded, as are those who seek their fortune over the rainbow or in the gold of the West or who idealize the “natural freedom” of Native Americans; they are not the answer, perhaps not even on a path to one. Indeed, the society as a whole made it difficult for man or woman to recognize their likeness in each other. As Satan says in The Mysterious Stranger: “[The human] race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted self-delusion. It duped itself from cradle to grave with sham and delusions that it mistook for realities, and this made its entire life a shame.”

Against this, Twain -- or Satan -- allowed only two touchstones. It could happen that the necessities, the accidents of temperament and circumstance – like being on a raft together -- can allow some to see what most do not: to recognize and teach each other of their mutual dependency and their ignorance of anything beyond this earth. “There is no other world,” says Satan. This requires only the hardest thing: that each acknowledges the other as other. Such recognition in this novel is partial and constantly called into question by the processes of petrification. And secondly, and as importantly, humans have “one really effective weapon … against power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution” and that is laughter. But while “against the assault of laughter nothing can stand,” says Satan, “You are always fussing, and fighting with other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.” One is grateful that Samuel L. Clemens had the sense and the courage for laughter: “All of us have music and truth inside” and if “most of us cannot get it out,” I sure think Mark Twain did.