Literary articles - Mark Twain 2024

Huckleberry Finn and the Quixotic Reader

Around this time in 1885 Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was published in England in 1884, was becoming available to American audiences in its complete form. Excerpts, which had been cleaned up for a civilized (to use an adjective Huck would appreciate) readership, had appeared in the monthly periodical The Century as "An Account of The Famous Grangerford-Shepherdson Feud" in December 1884; "Jim's Investments, and King Sollermun" in January 1885; and "Royalty on the Mississippi" in February 1985, the same month that Life briefly described some of the contents of the then forthcoming American edition. Huckleberry Finn was also given a short write up in the pages of the April 1885 volume of The Atlantic Monthly, where it is called "Mark Twain's new book for young folks."

While the excerpts in The Century--which appear alongside Henry James' The Bostonians and an essay on Shakespeare, among other pieces for mature audiences--and the notice in The Atlantic Monthly are about advertizing Twain's new book, they also manage to put into place a division over how we should receive Huckleberry Finn. Is it for adults, as The Bostonians and Shakespeare criticism are, or is it for young readers, a boy book to be consumed by preteens as the publisher Grosset & Dunlap, for example, assumed when it placed Huck Finn in its junior library along with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer back in 1948?

Huckleberry Finn can certainly be enjoyed by both the young and old, but critics rarely view its content, with the exception of the episodes at the beginning and end in which Tom Sawyer appears, as simple entertainment for young folks. The intellectual ground of the book is just too sophisticated. Edward H. Cady thus observes in The Light of Common Day (1971), Huckleberry Finn "consists of a long central narration, picaresque in form and substance and framed on either end by boy-book narratives." John Seelye, in his introduction to the Penguin Classic edition, goes so far as to attack the idea of treating the novel as one for young people, calling the memories of childhood readings the "burden of foreknowledge" that we bring to the story. Such memories, in this view, help form a preconceived idea of the book that hinders our ability to read it appropriately.

Twain's view of the relationship between the young reader and us is far more complex. That the book is framed, held in place so to say (if I may extend the metaphor from the visual arts), by a boy-book narrative is significant. Twain, it seems to me, uses the idea of children's reading practices--represented in the world of the book by Tom Sawyer's take on Don Quixote--to assist us, young and old alike, to view the story more clearly.

As his gang, the organization of which is drawn directly from his books, falls apart, Tom introduces Cervantes to explain the divide between what he says the gang is doing and what Huck perceives. Huck and the other children had been frustrated by the absence of the murdering and robbing that Tom had promised them. Tom finally plans a raid on a band of Spanish and Arabic merchants, as well as their 400 strong guard of soldiers, who are going to set up camp at Cave Hollow with elephants, camels, and mules loaded with diamonds. Huck, skeptical of the gang's ability to defeat such a force, decides he will go along to see the elephants and camels, but when the day arrives, the children's raid is on a Sunday-school picnic.

"I didn't see no di'monds, and I told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads of them there, anyway; and he said there was A-rabs there, too, and elephants and things. I said, why couldn't we see them, then? He said if I warn't so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He said it was all done by enchantment." Huck, taking the part of Sancho Panza as Tom assumes that of Don Quixote, plays the realist to the fantasist here, even though Huck's ignorance of Cervantes leaves him uncertain about whether he should believe his eyes or Tom's explanation.

The exchange, as well as the gang's activity that has led to it, forms the basis of the novel's quixotic vein, which has been described by Seelye as an opposition between real and fantastic adventures. The quixotic element, however, informs so much more of the book. As Huck's story proceeds, an opposition between Huck's perspective and a Tom-like perspective arises again and again, not because Huck continually deals with those who attempt to bring fantastical tales to life, but because regardless of whether or not the situations in which he finds himself originate from a fantastical--perhaps false would be a better term considering the Duke and the Dauphin attempt to bring fiction to life for less innocent reasons than Tom--or a real source, they are formed as a result of people projecting stories onto the real world.

Buck Grangerford and the others in his family, for example, are realistic doppelgangers to Tom Sawyer in that their participation in the feud with the Shepherdsons continues only because they insist on adhering to the conventions of a feud narrative. Those conventions, in fact, are all they have: their conflict's foundation now lies not in the real world but in the idea that a feud is on, as Buck demonstrates when Huck asks him about it:

"What was the [original] trouble about, Buck?--land?"

"I reckon maybe--I don't know."

"Well, who done the shooting? Was it a Grangerford or a Shepherdson?"

"Laws, how do I know? It was so long ago."

The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons are simply conservative upholders of the laws of the feud.

Tom, too, represents, despite his talk of robbery and murder, conservatism: his is the voice of civilized society, of social norms. Tom's talk of robbing and murdering is, in fact, an illustration of his conservatism, of his desire to follow to the letter what his stories present as the correct way to do things. Huck fully understands and admires that aspect of Tom's character. The conflict in his own character, particularly with regard to how he should treat Jim, is a conflict over whether he should do things "right," that is, in accordance with social norms, or do things his way. Thus, when Tom agrees to help Huck steal Jim from the Phelps's, Huck observes, "It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard--and I'm bound to say Tom Sawyer fell, considerable, in my estimation."

Tom's belief in the inherent rightness of authority informs his understanding of Cervantes, obliging him to accept the perspective of Don Quixote, whose social position gives him more authority than Sancho Panza. Similarly, Huck's respect for social norms, despite his unwillingness to act in accordance with them, informs his conscience, which gnaws away at him and tells him that turning Jim into the authorities and condemning him to the life of a slave is the right thing to do. The external debate between Huck and Tom over the presence of diamonds is then analogous to Huck's internal debates: Huck's conscience assumes the position of Don Quixote and his other voice, let's call it that of his heart, takes on the role of Sancho, telling him to ignore the ideology that sustains the institution of slavery. Huck, of course, never becomes fully Sancho-like, as his notions of right and wrong continue to distort his perception, but he makes a valiant effort, quixotically damning himself to hell in order to follow Panza's example as far as he can and see something of the truth, even if he fails to recognize it as such.

In the end The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn's take on slavery, which was no longer a legal institution when the book appeared, or any other issue that Twain raises is secondary to its consideration of the function of the stories we tell ourselves about our world and how living by them too rigidly can blind us from the reality that surrounds us. Those so blinded remain childlike in their reading habits, Tom Sawyerish Don Quixotes. Others may be able to take control of their perception and see, if not the full truth, something a little closer to it. The "burden of foreknowledge," or childhood memories of reading the novel, play an important part in our coming to such an understanding of Twain's tale, reminding us that we once saw reality in fantasy and that escaping that habit is necessary if we are to see the fiction that informs our reality, even if doing so isn't quite as easy as seeing that Sancho Panza's vision is closer to the truth than Quixote's.