Keeping the Faith in Samuel Clemens’s Worlds

KEEPING THE FAITH IN SAMUEL CLEMENS'S WORLDS ForrestG. Robinson. In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Tv.•ain:~s: America. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1986. v111 + 255 pp. JohnMadson. Up On The River: An UpperMississippi Chronicle.New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1986. 276pp. Illus. BeverlyR. David. Mark Twain and His lllustrators: Volume1(1869-1875). Troy: The Whitston Publishing Company,1986. xi + 268 pp. Illus. Douglas Babington Forrest G. Robinson's complex notion of bad faith can be applied not only to the novels of Mark Twain but also to the culture and politics of the American nation. Take, for instance, the Irangate affair. A recent analysis in The New Yorker magazine proposes a startling analogy whereby Ronald Reagan becomes freewheeling Oliver North and the American electorate becomes President Reagan. The article concludes that "the American body politic, with a sort of wink and a nod, endeavored to shield itself from the recognition of what its subordinate ... was up to and what the consequences of his activities might be.'' 1 So unfold the reciproca_l deceptions between Tom Sawyer and his audience, according to Robinson. Tom the master gamesman is able to charm and amuse his audience (both readers and the residents of the fictional St. Petersburg) precisely because that audience is willingly myopic. Such cultural imperatives as innocence , freedom and boyhood are maintained by the unconscious determination not to see Tom's deviousness, his cruelty, his knowledge of things dark. By overlooking the disruptive implications of McDougal's Cave or Mr. Dobbins's anatomy book or Sid Sawyer ("quintessentially the kill-joy and the spoiler"), the audience protects the "all-American boyhood paradise" that is Tom Sawyer (60). Robinson is more literary sociologist than literary critic. Bad faith, as he meticulously defines it, is a universal feature of social arrangements, one which involves acquiescence in ''manifest departures'' from law or custom: Badfaith features the deception of self and other in the denial that such departures have occurred, and bears the clear implication that humam will sometimes permit what they cannot approve so long as their complicity is submerged in a larger, tacit consensus (211J 414 Douglas Babington The citizens of St. Petersburg may not approve of Tom Sawyer's behavior,but their permission of it effects "salubrious relief from the daunting submissiontoa civilized regimen" (7). What complicates Robinson's analysis - to the pointof inducing vertigo - is the chain of bad-faith collusion which links fictionaland nonfictional realms: ''For if the culture of TornSaw_veris Tom's because it 1 sthe town's, then it is the town's culture because it is Mark Twain's; and it is Mark Twam's because he shared it with, and profoundly articulated it for, hi~ audience'' (IOI). Thus the witty condescension of Twain's narrative voice,while encouraging readers of the novel to smile along at the foibles of St. Petersbur~ society, works to conceal its own bad faith. The culture that embraces thenovel i~ a~blind as the citizens who embrace Tom Sawyer. Add to this alleged '·centuryof critical blindness" a language beholden to both sociological and psychoanalyttc criticism, and the reader of In Bad Faith is confronted by paradoxical, webbed conclusions: ''For Tom, however, the correlative to enhanced social acuity1s heightened vulnerability to a crippling double consciousness" (27) or "The collective moral economy exacts apparently gratuitous or excessive attack~ of conscience as the return on numberless unacknowledged duplicities" (35). Like so many professional readers of literature, Robinson is persuaded thatour greatest books "compress mu/tum in parvo" (10). He strives, therefore,to articulate the secondary shades of Aunt Polly's soul, even as Twain's narratiVe voice articulates its primary shades. (And English students go on asking, "Who else will ever care to read these novels so closely - or as many times - a~ professors do?") Despite his keen attentiveness to Twain's language, Robinson occasionally reads more than the text presents; an unqualified question posedby Jim to Huck is, for example, used fallaciously to infer a state of weary resignation ( 168). Nevertheless, the chapters on Huckleberry Finn significantly anchorthe vertiginous theory of bad faith by dwelling on what Robinson calls "the paramount dilemma of our history and culture": whether to befriend...