Come Back to the Text Ag'in, Huck Honey

The past twenty years have witnessed a remarkable series of misadventures for Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 1982, John Wallace, a black teacher at (where else but) the Mark Twain Intermediate School in Fairfax, Virginia, made national news with the inflammatory claim that Huckleberry Finn is “racist trash,” thereby prompting a raft of editorials on Twain’s behalf. Then, in 1985, the centennial of the book’s publication drew paeans and panegyrics from all quarters, including a testimonial from then-President Reagan, who summarized the book in his usual random-access-memory mode (“Huck works hard to keep Jim free, and in the end he succeeds”). In 1993, Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s titular question, Is Huck Black?, met with the kind of scandalized media attention one associates with books like Is Elvis Alive?; in 1996, when Jane Smiley’s “Say It Ain’t So, Huck,” appeared in Harper’s, the piece reportedly generated more hostile mail than any other essay in the magazine’s long history. In almost every controversial episode, the central issue concerned the novel’s representation of race. But what was at stake in the outpouring of encomia, screeds, and defensive responses that marked—and ineluctably reinforced—the novel’s unique status in American cultural life?

I can think of no better answer to such a question than Jonathan Arac’s Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Arac briefly surveys the novel’s reception since 1885, focusing on the post-World War II years in which its meaning became explicitly tied to larger debates about the history of interracial exchange in the United States. Most common, in the decades since the 1960s, is a structure of debate wherein black readers object to the word “nigger” (and/or the representation of Jim) and white readers respond that such people are ignoring (a) the political milieu of the antebellum United States, (b) Twain’s narrative irony, (c) the book’s critique of slavery, (d) Jim’s general goodheartedness, or (e) the simple point that, as Robert Nadeau put it in a Washington Post op-ed, “in slave states the word was merely the ordinary colloquial term for a slave, and not necessarily abusive” (qtd. at 70). The first half of Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target is a thorough and devastating reply to these various responses, which Arac pointedly frames with the question, “why must the book be rescued from African American parents and students for their own good?” (10). The second half of the book consists mainly of close hand-to-hand engagement with influential Americanist scholars of one generation (Lionel Trilling, Leo Marx) and another (Shelley Fisher Fishkin), in which Arac enlists his own chief influences, Raymond Williams (for The Country and the City) and Edward Said (for Culture and Imperialism). It is only a slight exaggeration, I think, to suggest that Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target is really two books, one written in the discursive context of, say, the New York Times Magazine, and the other written in the idiom of boundary 2. Both books are quite good (and it is always nice to get two for the price of one); taken together, however, they tend to provoke, without answering, the question of how we can most usefully understand the functions of criticism in our time.

Arac begins by describing the extraordinary national overinvestment in the novel between 1948 and 1964, when it became “an icon of civil rights consciousness” (9) and its dominant meanings assumed a specific ideological form: “Huck, in the widespread critical commonplace, represents a morally idealized best American self” (3). Arac’s primary—and most successful—claim is that Huck Finn became, for liberal white American intellectuals in the postwar period, a totemic figure that did powerful cultural work on two fronts, expiating the nation’s legacy of slavery in the past while standing in as an...