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

2. All Right, Then, I'll Go to Hell: Historical Contexts for Chapter 31

2 All Right, Then, I'll Go to Hell Historical Contexts for Chapter 31 After irony, the second major category of claims on behalf of Huckleberry Finn I call realism. Justin Kaplan's pamphlet attributes to Twain a "truth-telling" that is "realism." Kaplan's notion virtually self-destructs, however, because this realistic world, which Kaplan calls a "faithful," "historical portrait of a slaveholding society" (18), is also, he writes, a "nightmare" of "bigotry, violence, exploitation, greed, ignorance, and a sort of pandemic depravity " (22). Anyone who believes that is "really" the best description of a functioning human society anywhere may feel themselves on the side of right, but I would not trust them to instruct parents and schoolchildren about morals. A more sophisticated variant of realism holds that Huckleberry Finn transforms the materials of everyday life into the dignity of art through the power of its idiomatic, vernacular style, which in turn exercises a critical force against traditionally elevated notions of dignity. In current literary studies, the most powerful arguments on vernacular realism have been developed from the work of the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. The inspiration for his critical insight came from the fiction of Dostoevski. Despite being himself a devoutly orthodox Christian and politically conservative czarist, Dostoevski provided such vivid speeches to his atheistic and radical characters that many readers have felt they were the heroes. Bakhtin understands a novel's greatness to arise from antagonistic "dialogue" among different ways of speaking-representing different social values-set to work in a novel's prose, and it has seemed tempting to critics to try applying this to Twain (Berthoff; Marx, Pilot; Messent; Sewell). I would argue, however, that in 37 38 I'll Go to Hell Bakhtin's terms Huckleberry Finn has less "dialogue" than we might imagine, that Twain's concern for accuracy in imitating precise dialects does little to ensure that the speakers of those dialects are taken with full seriousness, precisely for the reasons Kaplan's abovequoted words suggest: the bigoted, violent, depraved, greedy speakers are not presented as embodying ways of life that are conceivably valid alternatives to Huck and Jim for any human being we could imagine as decent. Exploring American Slaveholding Society Literary categories that claim a close relation between the text and social reality must be brought to the test of historical study, if we are to honor their claims by taking them seriously. Arguments and opinions concerning Huckleberry Finn have often relied on Twain's own statements about the world in which he grew up and in which the book is set. In various autobiographical writings about his early years, Twain strongly emphasized what our era would call the "totalitarian" quality of thought, which provided no space for any alternative to arise. In the pages that follow, I will cite, discuss, and reflect on a text in which Twain very influentially established a sense of antebellum reality on which scholars and admirers have relied. This passage delineating a solid and closed society comes from lecture notes for Twain's worldwide reading tour of 1895-96: In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing-the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible-there were good commercial reasons for it-but that it should exist and did exist among the paupers, the loafers, the tag-rag & bobtail of the community , & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then. (Huckleberry [1988] 806-7) This passage carries powerful historical conviction and wisdom. What is now called "hegemony" really does depend on persuading I'll Go to Hell 39 people that they should support a system that does not obviously reward them; hegemony makes it seem "natural" and right that certain things be done that across the gap of a historical epoch, even if only of a few years, seem almost incomprehensibly irrational, so different may be "human nature" and "common...