Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time

8. Nation, Race, and Beyond

8 Nation, Race, and Beyond In the four decades since Leo Marx's essays on vernacular , no discussion of Twain's language has had more impact, reaching beyond the academy as far as People magazine, than Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (1993). I share her goal of respect for African American voices in public discussions of Huckleberry Finn, but I fear that her book is not having a good effect. Instead, people are using her work as a license to keep up the idolatry. In the media buzz when her topic became known, even before the book appeared, Justin Kaplan was quoted in the Times: "My understanding ... is that nigger is a taboo word when used by a white person, but it's an OK word used in a black framework. ... If you can claim that this is a black voice speaking, I believe the objection to the word nigger is somewhat defused " (DePalma). Kaplan was tentative, but by 1995 the flagship scholarly journal American Literature published an essay which claimed, on the authority of Fishkin's work, "If Huck has any African American linguistic authority, his use of the word 'nigger,' a rallying point for movements to ban Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from our high schools, partakes of the privilege any people have to refer to themselves as they choose" (Hoffman 45). So Huck's "black" voice becomes more cultural capital for hypercanonization. But Huck, in referring to himself as he chooses, never names himself as African American and above all never applies the word nigger to himself . More broadly, as we shall see, Fishkin's argument relies on sources that argue for the African American component in all American speech. Does this mean every white person might have 183 184 Nation, Race, and Beyond the linguistic authority to call anyone nigger? The social analysis of linguistic history is not the same social analysis that governs human relations in the United States. Whites have been taking possession of elements of black culture for centuries, but it has not ended the structures of inequality from which the pain of name-calling arises. Fishkin's book troubles me on two grounds, both of which I will address in this chapter. First, it is deeply committed to nationalism: Huck as the representative American, and his book as the exemplary great American book. Of course it is a matter of choice and opinion how one judges this position. I try to make strong arguments for another perspective, but I realize that I am making an unpopular case. So I will delay this part of my argument until I have worked through my other objection. Second, then, I am not persuaded by Fishkin's stylistic and linguistic evidence. I shall lay out my objections in detail so that the issues are available for discussion . Her book's impact and influence make it important that any weaknesses be acknowledged, and I have not yet seen any of my points developed in reviews. But before beginning my criticisms, it is first necessary to define her project. Fishkin proposed to redefine the "American." She used "America " as her Trojan Horse, to bring new values into Huckleberry Finn while still valuing it in the name of "America." She argued that Huckleberry Finn, long recognized as fundamentally American, is also fundamentally African American. According to Fishkin, the very possibility of the American vernacular of Huck's narration required the encounter of Samuel Clemens with an African American boy named (perhaps) Jimmy around 1872: Jimmy's lively speech reawakened Clemens's memories of his life among enslaved African Americans in Missouri, and it also directly influenced the particular voice devised for Huck in the novel. Her text for this argument is Twain's brief newspaper sketch of 1874, "Sociable Jimmy," published in the New York Times. Fishkin's book is rich in biographical particulars of Clemens's relations with African Americans , especially the intriguing issue of African Americans as an eager audience for Twain (89, 188-89). It also exemplifies a specific political strategy: granted the talismanic power of Huckleberry Finn in American culture, Fishkin appropriated that prestige to use for interracially progressive purposes, rather than attempting the uphill battle of questioning the identification of a nation with a book, or of the United States as "American" with this particular book. Nation, Race, and Beyond 185 Fishkin's argument relies...