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

4. Uncle Tom's Cabin vs. Huckleberry Finn: The Historians and the Critics

4 Uncle Tom's Cabin vs. Huckleberry Finn The Historians and the Critics In setting Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huckleberry Finn as opposites , Jane Smiley repeated a well-established gesture of what she called the "Propaganda Era," except that by preferring Uncle Tom's Cabin she reversed the established evaluation. In its broadest terms, the distinction between Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huckleberry Finn is the difference I have mentioned earlier between "national" and "literary " narratives. In the middle third of the twentieth century, this issue was phrased as a literary critique of "protest" fiction. Lionel Trilling's praise of Huckleberry Finn gained force from Trilling's campaign, begun in the later 1930s and continuing even beyond the publication of The Liberal Imagination, against the widespread conventions shaping current fiction of social protest. Trilling was often in sympathy with the political goals of such novels, but he found them weak as literature, and, he argued, their weak sense of what human beings were like was itself politically damaging. Stalinism was the strongest name he gave to this tendency to reduce individual complexity on behalf of a collective cause. Appearing in Partisan Review in 1949, the year after Trilling had joined its masthead , James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel" took Trilling's critique an important step further, for Baldwin gave special attention to American protest fiction on racial issues. Although Baldwin's central pages were devoted to the genre as a whole, the two works he attacked in detail were Uncle Tom's Cabin, with which he began, and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), with 90 Uncle Tom's Cabin vs. Huckleberry Finn 91 which he ended. Baldwin's first sentence laid Uncle Tom's Cabin as the "cornerstone of American social protest fiction." The fundamental vice of this genre, for him, is "sentimentality," which he characterized in a bravura passage: "Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty." Stowe's inability to produce honest feeling, experience , and life comes from her being "not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer" (326-27). As a pamphleteer, she is devoted to a "Cause," rather than to "truth." For Baldwin, truth means "devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted." In contrast to the unchartedness of "human being," the Cause is all chart and legislation and science in the name of "Humanity," the abstraction rather than the concrete, the general instead of the specific. This inhumanity in the name of Humanity means that "Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty." In the late 1940s the memory of the Nazis and the pressure of the Cold War assured this identification of Causes with mass murder. Baldwin named the crucial quality of human being in the same terms that New Criticism was at this time developing to describe literature: "complexity," "ambiguity, paradox" (327). Despite its "good intentions," protest fiction uses simplifying "categories" instead of inventing complicated human beings, but categorization must fail because "literature and sociology are not the same" (329-30). Current defenders of Huckleberry Finn still use these terms that emerged after World War II. Baldwin brilliantly portrayed the self-deluded goodwill he found at the core of the problem. He said "an American liberal" once told him that "as long as such [protest] books are being published ... everything will be all right" (330). That is, the continuing production of such works replaces the never-attained solution of the problems they decry. The deadpan vernacular narration of Huckleberry Finn, in this postwar system of values shared by Baldwin and Trilling, stands for its honest engagement with life. Yet the liberal slogan Baldwin mocked just as well fits the current responses by public authorities to objections made against Huckleberry Finn in the schools: "As long as this book is being taught, everything will be all 92 Uncle Tom's Cabin vs. Huckleberry Finn right." And to turn the specific "human being" Huck into a national exemplar, as the hypercanonic critics do, is to reestablish "categories " in a way that I call "nationalizing literary narrative" and discuss more fully in chapter 6. The conjunction...