In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6. Invisible Man, Huck, and Jim lbert Bigelow Paine, in his 1912 three-volume biography of Mark Twain, said of Huckleberry Finn, "it is built of indestructible blocks of human nature; and if the blocks do not always fit, and the ornaments do not always agree, we need not fear. Time will blur the incongruities and moss over the mistakes" (798). Despite Paine's prediction , time, like the novel's Mississippi, has flowed unavoidably toward conflict, not resolution. In 1945, therefore, when Ellison wrote about Huckleberry Finn, in his essay "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," he was responding to what was already significant controversy about the book. The controversy related most directly to the interpretations of the last third of the novel. In that section Huck has abandoned the river to live in disguise on the Phelps farm so that he may set free the recaptured Jim. Huck is able (perhaps fortuitously, perhaps not so fortuitously) to assume as his disguise the identity of Tom Sawyer. Tom very shortly arrives, takes the identity of his own brother, Sid, and joins in Huck's escape plot, almost immediately taking charge and directing Huck's and Jim's activities so that they become a child's distorted replication of historical romances in the style of Scott and Dumas. Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, in keeping with their thesis that the Gilded Age after the Civil War created an environment in which artists could not function, find Twain's work deficient. 1 In The Ordeal of Mark Twain, Brooks sees Twain's work as a case of arrested development and considers Huckleberry Finn a book lacking adult emotions, a book for boys out of the mind of a boy. Bernard DeVoto rests his extensive rebuttal of Brooks largely on the first two-thirds of Huckleberry Finn, which DeVoto considers a panorama of uniquely American life, an exploration of society from the Grangerfords at the top, through the many-personed middle class, down to the squatters and the river-drifters, and below them to the raw stuff of mobs and such creatures of darkness and dream as the two rogues. An exploration made dangerous by the unseen powers which the ghosts cry about out of the midnight woods and which are forever hinting their menace in signs Invisible Man, Huck, arid Jim 125 and portents-but made much more dangerous by the human violence that is always threatening to break through. (Mark Twain's America, 100) The last third of the novel DeVoto considers a sharp falling off into burlesque. "In the whole reach of the English novel," he states, "there is no more abrupt or more chilling descent" (92). DeVoto argues, nevertheless, that the last third of the novel is excellent in its kind and attributes its misplacement in Huckleberry Finn to Twain's lack of self-discipline, his incapacity for selfcriticism : "Precisely there is the central limitation of Mark Twain's genius. He felt no difference in value between the highest truths of fiction and merely literary burlesque-if in fact he could at all discriminate between them.... He was in the antique sense a genius: he wrote in obedience to an inner drive, he exercised little voluntary control over it, and he was unable to criticize what he had written" (91). Ernest Hemingway, along the same line, in The Green Hills of Africa, renounced the last third of the novel with his famous statement that all modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn. "If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating" (22). In an essay, Ellison responds directly to Hemingway as he does indirectly to DeVoto (as well as Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford), by defending the complete text of Huckleberry Finn and asserting a level of self-awareness in Twain that the others denied: After Twain's compelling image of black and white fraternity the Negro generally disappears from fiction as a rounded human being. And if already in Twain's time a novel which was optimistic concerning a democracy which would include all men could not escape being banned from public libraries, by our day his great drama of interracial fraternity had become, for most Americans at least, an amusing boy's story and nothing more. But, while a boy, Huck Finn has become the somersault motion of what William Empson terms "pastoral," an embodiment...

Share