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Introduction
- University of Wisconsin Press
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Introduction In 1959, to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Huckleberry Finn, the New York Times Sunday book review section published a feature by the brilliant young critic Norman Podhoretz, in which he proclaimed, "Sooner or later, it seems, all discussions of 'Huckleberry Finn' tum into discussions of America-and with good reason. Mark Twain was the quintessential American writer." Decades later, in 1992, in a letter to the Times, the correspondent declared, "Huckleberry Finn is not only the most representative American boy in our literature, he is also the character with whom American readers-white American readers-have most deeply identified" (Howe). In a prestigious recent anthology of essays on Twain, the editor authoritatively described Huckleberry Finn as "an autobiographical journey into the past" that at the same time "also told the story of the nation" (Sundquist 10). These kinds of claims are commonly made in discussion of Huckleberry Finn. I hope to persuade critics to stop doing it and readers to stop liking it. If Huck is representative, it can't be in the sense of average or typical, or "it was just like that." If most Americans before the Civil War had felt about slavery the way Huck does about Jim, there would have been no war. As Harriet Beecher Stowe had urged in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Americans would have brought themselves to "feel right," and those who owned slaves would have freed them. Huck, in the widespread critical commonplace, represents a morally idealized best American self, as is suggested in the memorial judgment with which William Dean Howells concluded My Mark Twain: "he was the Lincoln of our literature." Yet Lincoln has a more shaded reputation on race matters than Huck enjoys. The 3 4 Introduction historian David Potter, in a highly admired synthesis of the process that led to the Civil War, finds Lincoln's views "ambiguous." Based on his position in the debates with Stephen Douglas, "Lincoln was a mild opponent of slavery and a moderate defender of racial discrimination ." But considering the direction that Lincoln's thought was moving, Potter concludes, "he held a concept of humanity which impelled him inexorably in the direction of freedom and equality" (Impending 354). Why can't we treat our literary heroes with the same critical nuance we use for our political heroes? Harry Truman, himself from Missouri and an admirer of Mark Twain's work, became in 1948 a "Mark Twain character" of "grinning, cocky, vernacular, give 'em hell" (Podhoretz, Doings 302). Truman established the governmental momentum that led to the civil rights movement, but he proved no supporter of the movement once it turned to protest. Or take another political hero of civil rights, the Texan Lyndon Johnson. Everyone knows Johnson's faults, and yet his political commitment and skill made possible the laws on which most current bans on discrimination depend. Why have we for decades recirculated a single idealizing set of claims about Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn? I think of an anecdote from the career of the Southern writer George W. Cable, a friend of Twain. His historical novel The Grandissimes (1880), set in Louisiana around 1800, was being serialized in Scribner's magazine, and members of the editorial staff queried a certain passage of dialogue that set forth white supremacist beliefs. They doubted that any character would actually have "thought of uttering such a truism "-that is, they held that the prejudicial views went without saying. Cable, who had grown up in Louisiana and fought for the Confederacy, asserted his knowledge of what things had been like: "The old false beliefs . . . were only sustained by incessant reiterations . I heard them myself from my earliest childhood, up" (A. Turner 97). My book is concerned with a set of incessant reiterations , and it tries to suggest the work done by such repetitions. As a road map, I need to offer a very brief historical sketch of the reception, by literary authorities, of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn. Twain is widely valued nowadays for his opposition to the established culture of his time; we recall the library committees that refused to carry Huckleberry Finn because of its unsavory setting and uneducated language. But there are higher authorities than li- [3.95.2.54] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:37 GMT) Introduction 5 brary committees. Twain was greatly admired by, and his career supported by, the two most important and prestigious editors of the leading high-culture magazines of his...