The Flawed Greatness of Huckleberry Finn

American Literary Realism  Fall 2012, Vol. 45, No. 1© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois TOM QUIRK The Flawed Greatness of Huckleberry Finn Herman Melville complained in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne that “all my books are botches” and, elsewhere, he said of Moby Dick in particular that he had written a “wicked” book but felt “spotless as a lamb.” William Faulkner was most fond of The Sound and the Fury but conceded that it was a “magnificent failure.” Mark Twain expressed a similar if somewhat more tame defiance when he wrote to W. D. Howells about Huckleberry Finn, “I shall like it, whether anyone else does or not.”1 All three of these books are flawed of course, though most would judge they are great nevertheless. But when it comes to flaws (or what I shall call anomalies), Huckleberry Finn trumps them both with ease. Even Homer nodded, of course, but Mark Twain appears to have fallen asleep with his face in the soup. I will offer a brief and partial inventory of these anomalies in a moment, but I want to emphasize that I am not interested in the exercise of faultfinding so much as I want to suggest that perhaps we have been looking for the greatness of Huckleberry Finn in the wrong places. Before getting to particulars, let me make a few general remarks. One of the first curiosities to note is that the Huck Finn of Tom Sawyer is not the same boy in the book that bears his name. In Tom Sawyer, we are told that Huck cusses like a sailor and is described as “conscience free.” Huck’s excessive use of the N-word may give the sense of a certain coarseness of language in the boy, but otherwise I have difficulty imagining him cussing at all, though he has plenty of reasons for blowing off steam. As for him being “conscience free,” well, his agonizing over Jim in chapter 31 alone argues for a rather different conception of his character. Though many claims have been made about Huckleberry Finn being at least a candidate for the 39 Great American Novel, whatever that phrase might mean, one should also remember that Twain doesn’t call the book a novel; in fact, in threatening ways he points out that this book has neither motive, nor moral, nor plot, and refers to it as a “narrative.” Willa Cather, more delicately, answered critics of Death Comes for the Archbishop who thought her book hard to classify and insisted that it did not qualify as a novel at all. Her open reply was “why bother” to try to classify the book and that she too preferred to call it simply a narrative. Cather added that it seemed to her that a novel “is merely a work of imagination in which a writer tries to present the experiences and emotions of a group of people by the light of his own.”2 In that sense we might safely say Huckleberry Finn is a novel. Finally, Twain began Huckleberry Finn in idle amusement in the summer of 1876; it was experimental because the author could afford to indulge himself, and this helps to explain vacillations in tone and the freewheeling mixture of burlesque, satire, tall tale, and many other improvisations of technique and purpose. Over the extended period of composition, Twain’s political, social, and philosophical attitudes changed as did his attitude toward Huck’s narrative . Nearly seven years later, when he recognized that Huckleberry Finn was a commodity to be published by his own publishing company, Twain’s view of his material became more commercial. A few more general observations are in order. First, the two most obvious anomalies have been the subject of continued critical debate. Why on earth, one wonders, would Twain have a runaway slave escape into the deep South? And second, what possessed the author to bring Tom Sawyer back into the novel in the closing chapters and to have him superintend what Tom calls the “evasion” over the perhaps too mild objections of Huck Finn and at the expense of whatever sort of dignity Jim might claim under...