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In the brief but fascinating “hair-ball” scene from chapter 4 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain,1 Huck tries to determine what the future has in store for him by appealing to a higher authority : a magic hair ball in the possession of Jim, a slave belonging to Miss Watson. These two positions of ownership—Jim’s of the hair ball and Miss Watson’s of Jim—merely scratch the surface of the complex and convoluted paths of ownership, knowledge, authenticity, and authority at work in this episode and in Twain’s novel. Miss Watson owns Jim, who in turn owns the hair ball, which contains a spirit that Jim also “owns.” As the owner of the magic hair ball, Jim might also be said to own the key to Huck’s future at this particular moment. If Huck wants the secrets of the hair ball revealed, he must do what it/Jim demands . Yet Jim’s ownership of the hair ball does not, apparently, come without complications. After all, he must collude with Huck in order to “trick” the hair ball into revealing its secrets. The connection between ownership of objects and knowledge is equivocal: the hair ball “know[s] everything” (19) but seems loath to give up its secrets; however, Jim also “knows” from experience what it will take to make it talk, namely money. In fact, Jim knows more than this—and much more than he lets on. He certainly knows that Huck is rich (as a result of the treasure he and Tom Sawyer found)—it is common knowledge in town—and that he is desperate for information. (Huck is particularly interested in 3 “I couldn’t see no pro¤t in it” Discourses of Commoditization and Authenticity in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The accumulation and use of knowledge is a complex form of power in which choices are constantly made about what is worth looking into and what is not. —Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting knowing the whereabouts of his violent and malevolent father, who has his eye on Huck’s fortune.) Jim also knows, it is reasonable to assume, that the hair ball is not magical at all (unless we believe he is delusional and actually hears voices, not something his overall behavior would suggest ). He also knows that the way to make a counterfeit quarter “pass” is to stick it in a potato overnight. In fact, ownership of this supposedly magic object gives Jim authority and power out of all proportion to his status as a slave. But Huck is not without knowledge of his own: he has a dollar in his pocket that he has received from the Judge in “exchange”for his fortune. This information is withheld while Huck instead offers a counterfeit quarter (“pretty bad money”) to the hair ball on the chance that “it wouldn’t know the difference” between real money and fake (19). Finally , what appears on the surface to be Huck and Jim working in tandem (the ¤rst of many such episodes) is actually a complex game of manipulation and countermanipulation: Jim accepts a fake quarter on behalf of the hair ball because he knows methods for making it appear genuine. The hair ball will be fooled while Huck will get to keep his dollar because Jim can turn “bad money” into good, making it seem authentic enough that “anybody in town would take it in a minute, let alone a hair-ball.” Fortunately for Huck, the hair ball seems satis¤ed with this arrangement; the promise of future money, good or bad, is enough to release its prophecy about Pap. Huck apparently does not notice this discrepancy, caught up as he is in his own predicament and his consternation at having been bettered by Jim in the art of counterfeiting . The transaction ends as it began, with the concept of ownership, although now it is the ownership of knowledge that is at stake, with Huck’s hollow-sounding declaration, “Well, I knowed a potato would do that, before, but I had forgot it” (20). Although poorer by a fake twenty-¤ve cents and a bit of his pride, Huck has apparently managed to deceive both Jim and a hair ball, while Jim is a fake twenty-¤ve cents richer.2 This early episode establishes a number of tropes that are central to Huck Finn—ownership (whether of objects, other people, or knowledge ), identity, authenticity (and the primacy of the visual in...

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