The Modernist Ordeal of Huckleberry Finn

THE MODERNIST ORDEAL OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN Everett Carter* "I was wrong" about the ending of Huckleberry Finn, admitted a respected critic in a recent article in The American Scholar,1 wrong about interpreting the ending of the work as a defense of "dropoutism." Few critics and scholars have been as generous. Instead, the modernist reinterpretation of Huckleberry Finn as an attack on civilization is one of the most significant dogmas of a critical orthodoxy that has revised the literature of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to meet the needs of the "adversary culture." Before 1940, conventional wisdom had accepted Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Robert Frost as essentially affirmative authors who sustained values fundamental to American culture. In the last forty years a swell of reinterpretation has all but submerged the conventional wisdom and has successfully absorbed these writers into the attitude of fashionable despair . Not only Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne , Henry Adams, Henry James, not only these genuinely pessimistic authors have been analyzed and appreciated for their radical opposition to liberal democracy and its beliefs in the goodness of man and the possibilities of progress, but Emerson has been described as a writer who turned his back on American society and dreamed of a "world elsewhere," Whitman has been made over into a poet of pessimism, Frost has been "redeemed" by the discovery of his darkness, and Howells is in the process of "rehabilitation" as a novelist of existential doubt and despair. This revisionism has been most thoroughgoing with the most representative of all these writers; a writer whom Howells had called the "Lincoln of our literature," and, in so naming, had defined his typicality: his tormented depths, his fundamental affirmation. (It was Lincoln who said that the idea of America was "hope" and "promise.") Twentieth-century critics have changed all this. Mark Twain has been rescued for modernism: ironic, bitter, misanthropic, the shade of this exuberant literary giant sits moody and shackled, another witness to the insufficiency of liberal bourgeois assumptions.2 'Everett Carter is a Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Among his publications are Howells and the Age of Realism, The American Idea, and numerous articles on American literature and culture. He is currently working on a book about the impact of Modernism on our view of the nineteenth century. 170Everett Carter In this process of reinterpretation, the analysis of Huckleberry Finn, his most famous character, has played a crucial role. If Mark Twain has seemed America's most "national" writer, Huckleberry Finn and his adventures have seemed so indigenous that to understand him and them is to understand Americans. After rejecting the early silliness of the nineteenth-century librarians who banned Huck as an anti-social delinquent , several generations of readers have accepted Huck as a sympathetic comic character in a fundamentally genial story. But in a curiously inverted way, critics have returned to the silliness of the nineteenthcentury librarians; now they revere him as a radically bad boy, an antihero in the sense that he presumably rejects the norms and values of his middle-class, republican, American society. Of course, for the modern temper this judgment is an apotheosis: in the strange world of Jean Genet and Herbert Marcuse, in the iconology of the New Left, the revisionists' Huck Finn qualifies as a saint.3 This has come about through selection and emphasis. Like most great writers, Twain was a mixture of things, and the principal elements in that mixture were a typically American paradox: a belief in both the values of civilization and a reverence for the natural and unsophisticated. Affirmative writers have always worked out this tension by criticizing the corrupt or corrupting aspects of civilization, and Huckleberry Finn is, among other things, such a criticism of the evils of a particular society, criticism with the expectation of reform. By a shift in emphasis, and by a selection from the evidence, however, critics have reinterpreted the book as a rejection of all human society, principally the society of bourgeois, middle-class technological America, with Huck as the "outsider ," his very being a testimonial to the insufficiencies of modern man...