To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel (review)

Whether perceived positively or negatively, cross-racial exchanges characterize American literature and understandings of the American self. Jeff Abernathy begins his study of southern literature with this apt assertion, referencing canonical novels by Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Alice Walker, as well as other lesser-known southern novels. Abernathy argues, in part, that these works, "frequently express directly the national ambivalence over race: the journeys across the color line [in the novels] are founded in American culture writ large, so that the South has become the locus of a national engagement with race" (2003, 3). This broad claim turns out to be just beyond the scope of the chapters that follow. The introduction connects the southern novels to American literature outside the South with references to James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, to American culture with a brief overview of nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, and to a national understanding of self with references to psychoanalysis and archetypes; but the following chapters fail to develop these connections sufficiently to affirm southern literature and the South as a "locus of national engagement with race." However, the introduction also makes a more focused claim for the centrality of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to southern novels' subsequent portrayals of race. Abernathy convincingly shows that black and white southern writers have repeatedly "recast" Huck and Jim in an effort to define new parameters for black/white relations.

The significance of Abernathy's title becomes clear in Chapter One, in which he identifies an important pattern in Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In the novel's climactic scene, young Huck decides to defy his community's moral standards, to "go to hell," rather than turn in the fugitive slave Jim who has become his friend. Abernathy plays on the irony of Huck's words in which the community's definition of a damnable act is to author and reader a moral good. In this journey to "hell," according to Abernathy, Huck comes to a deeper understanding of himself, of his racial other, and of the intersection of the two. However, Huck symbolically rejects these insights and returns to the community's standards when he allows Tom Sawyer to take control of the narrative in the novel's problematic concluding chapters. Abernathy reads Huck's final decision "to light out for the Territory" somewhat optimistically, arguing that Huck "tacitly acknowledges his own need to escape a society in which he cannot help but be corrupted by the predominant ideology. . . . The Territory for which Huck lights out is the 'hell' to which he had earlier resigned himself. He has been to hell and back and would, at the narrative's end, return without the mentor who enabled his passage" (2003, 47). This chapter lays a firm foundation for the following chapters by identifying and explaining a pattern of awareness followed by rejection of the "place of otherness" within the protagonist's identity, a pattern that Abernathy also explores in later novels. In addition to close readings of the novel, Abernathy provides quotations from literary critics to emphasize the historical and continued significance of this novel in U.S. discussions of race. Greater contextualization, including elaboration and support for his assertion that "Mark Twain draws from both the minstrel show and the slave narrative" (15), would have added support to Abernathy's introductory claim for southern literature as the platform on which America displays its cultural ambivalence about race.

Chapters Two through Six convincingly argue that a broad range of southern authors, both male and female, black and white, from the 1930s to the 1990s return to and revise the pattern Abernathy identifies in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Though as Abernathy points out, "critics have long pointed out the indebtedness of Go Down, Moses to Twain" (2003, 57), his readings of...