Mark X: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father? by Yasuhiro Takeuchi (review)

For Twain scholars, writing about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is like a 35-year-old stage actor playing Hamlet—it must be done, cannot be avoided, for the characters and the texts offer so many avenues for interpretation and analysis. But then, of course, we question what new thing does the scholar or actor bring to the role? Scholars and teachers of Huckleberry Finn (and of Hamlet as well) can take their pick of which scholarly analyses have influenced their thinking and teaching. When I read Steven Mail-loux’s Rhetorical Power (1989), for example, Huckleberry Finn became for me a novel about the cultural reception of Huck as a negative influence for white children amidst the “bad-boy boom.” When I read Jocelyn Chadwick’s The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn (1998), Twain’s novel became for me a satire about us, about our mental attitudes toward race and racism. When I read Peter G. Beidler’s Rafts and Other Rivercraft in Huckleberry Finn (2018) I could not believe that I had spent so little time considering the actual raft, as material culture and for its thematic significance within the novel. And now that I have read Yasuhiro Takeuchi’s Mark X: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father? Twain’s novel has become a murder mystery and a story of fathers (and father figures) and sons. So if the question about what new ideas can a Twain scholar employ to analyze Huckleberry Finn needs to be answered here, perhaps the simplest and most stimulating way to find the answer is to read Takeuchi’s intriguing book. Mark X analyzes at great length Huckleberry Finn, but Takeuchi also traces similarities among numerous Twain works that all incorporate mystery and detection. While the finished boyhood novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not a detective novel, Twain did write several mysteries. Takeuchi illustrates the importance of Twain’s discarded mystery about the murder of Pap and shows how some of these elements arrived in other works. In Huckleberry Finn, for example, Twain offers several clues, such as footprints, missing boots, a corpse but no murderer, and cross-dressing characters that don clothes from a murder scene. Takeuchi notes that Twain tended to employ similar details in many of his works, such as “Cap’n Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective” (1877), “The Stolen White Elephant” (1878), Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), and “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” to name a few. Takeuchi argues that among all of Twain’s mystery fiction the plot of Tom Sawyer, Detective is the most similar to Huckleberry Finn’s original plot and suffers from the same problem: while the narrative reveals the victim, it never solves the murder and does not “bring the murderer to justice.” For this reason, perhaps Twain failed as a mystery writer. Or as Takeuchi explores, perhaps Twain’s weakness with the detective plot was in service of a larger theme. In Huckleberry Finn, at least, Twain seems more interested in exposing a nation’s guilt (the mass abuse and murder of enslaved humans) than in unveiling a single murderer of a monstrous character, Pap. Takeuchi also analyzes Twain’s various uses of twins, doubles, and “split” characters. By focusing on “splitting” to illustrate how characters, or pairs of characters, function with split consciences, Takeuchi shows, for example, that in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tom is split between two selves, and in Huckleberry Finn Tom and Huck are two halves of a whole within a bifurcated conscience. The discussion of splits builds toward the larger question found in Takeuchi’s subtitle: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father? Without divulging how and in what ways Takeuchi interrogates this question to resolve the murder, this reviewer can reveal one powerful takeaway: perhaps finding the murderer is not that interesting. If Twain, as detective and author, is instead investigating a character’s split conscience...