SOURCE: Arac, Jonathan. “Nationalism and Hypercanonization.” In Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time pp. 133-153 Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Arac disputes the idea that Huckleberry Finn, is emblematic of quintessential “American” values.]

THE NATIONALIZATION OF LITERARY NARRATIVE

I am not an Americanist by professional formation, and as in the 1980s I came to focus my teaching and reading in American literature, I was struck by what seemed to me, compared with other national literatures I knew or had studied, a state of hypercanonization. By hypercanonization I mean that a very few individual works monopolize curricular and critical attention: in fiction preeminently The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and Huckleberry Finn. These works organize innumerable courses in high school, college, and graduate school; they form the focus for many dissertations and books. I have found literary history an important means by which to engage critically with these works and with the professional and intellectual structures that produce their hypercanonicity, to address the works while displacing the terms of address. For literary history, as I try to practice it, these works are not the answers but the problems. My previous chapters have related Huckleberry Finn, and discussions by scholars and journalists about Huckleberry Finn, to a wide range of social and political contexts—from Huck's time in the 1840s, through Twain's time of writing around 1880, and through the twentieth century (especially since 1948). This chapter is more closely literary in focus, although not exclusively so, since its major concern is the connection Americanists have made between literature and national identity.

In a recently published portion of the new Cambridge History of American Literature (volume 2, 1995), I was asked to write on “mid-nineteenth-century American prose narrative.” I set myself this problem: How do I account for the emergence, around 1850, of works that count as what readers nowadays recognize as “literature”? I mean here The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick. In contrast to them, other valuable written productions of the time, however much they prove of interest in other ways, do not now widely count as literature. This is not simply an abstract issue of terminology. The designation “literature” is heavy with value. It affects what is studied, taught, and read; and it also greatly determines the terms in which new writing is reviewed in the public press. Books published in the 1990s are praised for resembling Huckleberry Finn but not, I believe, any other single work of the later nineteenth century. My historical exploration of this issue involved two areas: the changing definition of “literature,” and its relation to differing kinds of writing, that is, a problem of genre. My solution involved reconceptualizing the emerging literary narrative type as one among several different competing generic types. The major narrative form that preceded literary narrative in the United States, and also succeeded it, was what I call “national” narrative, in which the origins, attributes, and future of the United States were made overt themes. At about the time of Andrew Jackson's presidency (1829-37), the historical fiction of James Fenimore Cooper and the History of the United States by George Bancroft defined national narrative. Cooper died in 1851, but Bancroft's History was written, in ten volumes, from 1834 into the 1880s.

In relation to national narrative, two important smaller types emerged, which differed from it but would have been impossible without it. First in the 1830s what I call “local” narrative, the line from Washington Irving that includes the so-called southwestern humorists of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee as well as the northeastern moralist Hawthorne in his shorter works; and second, in the 1840s, “personal narrative,” which, contrary to Puritan tradition and twentieth-century expectation, proved to be rather extroverted, first-person reports from the margins of the dominant culture. Important examples of personal narrative include Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast (1840), Francis Parkman's Oregon Trail (1849), Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845), and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

In response to the political crisis of 1850, which produced a compromise intended to subdue controversy, Melville and Hawthorne consolidated elements from their own earlier work and that of Poe and set their works apart from the political optimism and straightforward patriotic address of national narrative. “The Custom-House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter illustrates the point. Through literary narrative, they developed a freely imaginative space of psychological interiority, on the model of what transatlantic romantic theory and practice had set forth in the previous two generations. Both local and personal narrative elements could be incorporated under this new principle of integration, by which a self gives order and meaning to elements drawn from other narrative modes. The contrast of Moby-Dick with another great novel of 1851-52 makes this clear. Uncle Tom's Cabin is no less comprehensive than Moby-Dick, but it integrates local and personal narrative materials under the dominance of a narrative concerning the salvation of America, and in Augustine St. Clare it incorporates the figure of the sensitive spectator associated with literary narrative. St. Clare is presented sympathetically but very critically and occupies only the middle third of the novel. In contrast, the literary figure of Ishmael engrosses attention from the opening and survives Ahab's quest as witness.

I find that Americans in the twentieth century have—paradoxically—adopted as national exemplars precisely those works that were written in the literary mode so as to differ from national narrative, while great national writers such as Bancroft, Cooper, and (until recently) Stowe have been comparatively neglected. This critical distaste for the explicitly national in American writing recalls the problem of “protest” fiction, which I have discussed in the previous two chapters. If we fail to question the assumptions embedded in the idolatry of the literary, if we ignore the wide spectrum of writings of which the literary icons form only a restricted part, we damage our understanding of the present. For many of the productions now associated with multiculturalism are precisely personal, local, and revisionist national narratives—no less than was so in the past.

In Europe as well as in the United States, the nineteenth century was marked by two great cultural transformations that still powerfully shape our lives: the emergence of nationality and the emergence of literature (in the specialized sense of imaginative belles lettres, rather than the earlier idea of “letters,” which included all culturally valued writing). In our contemporary world of nations in the last years of the twentieth century, the renewed power of nationalisms throughout what was contained as the “second world,” no less than the intensified American patriotism spurred by Desert Stormers requires rethinking this relation. As I understand the last hundred and fifty years of American history, literary culture and national culture may be seriously at odds, and they harmonize only when the nation is given a meaning more psychological than religious or political. (A good example of this tendency was Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam? [1967], the title of which seems to promise a national narrative, but which in fact is literary narrative alluding to Huckleberry Finn.) This psychological understanding of the nation, in turn, has granted America the spiritual legitimacy of literature, while subordinating literature to an America so conceived as to disarm political criticism.

A line of thought reaches from the middle nineteenth century as interpreted by my chapters from the Cambridge History into the later nineteenth century. After the reawakening of widespread political controversy over Kansas in 1854, the hope of avoiding secession and/or war by stepping back from politics, which had permitted literary narrative to emerge, dried up. As we have noted earlier, this controversy was what brought Lincoln back to politics and provoked his movement toward the positions that made him a great national leader. The most ambitious writings of the immediate post-Civil War years were the volumes of Francis Parkman's national narrative of the struggle for the American forest. The most captivating writings of the same period were the first books of Mark Twain. Twain came directly from the newspaper milieu of local narrative. In Innocents Abroad and Roughing It he strung together bits any one of which might have been a newspaper sketch, integrating them through the resources of “personal narrative” (as he characterized Roughing It [527]). Meanwhile, a steady trickle of posthumous materials from Hawthorne's estate kept alive the idea of literary narrative until Henry James's study of Hawthorne (1879) marked the moment when James chose to reproduce and occupy that aesthetic, nonpolitical space with The Portrait of a Lady.

Van Wyck Brooks in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) and The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925) set James and Twain as polar contrasting cases of the artist's relation to America. For Brooks, Twain compromised his power as a satirist by yielding too much to the culture of the East, which was both too genteel and too commercial; while James preserved his art but lost his subject matter by his transatlantic expatriation. More striking than the contrast is the way Brooks made of each a mighty example. As lamented extremes, both Twain and James differ from the devalued middle ground occupied by William Dean Howells, who played a key role in the lives of both of them as friend, editor, and supporter. A moment of American literary history that has still not been adequately thought through is the period of early 1885 when the Century magazine published excerpts from Huckleberry Finn, while also serializing Howells's Rise of Silas Lapham and James's Bostonians.

Many causes have made it difficult to grasp how limited an event nineteenth-century literary narrative was. These causes include the establishment of college teaching as the main livelihood of literary scholars and the restriction of college instruction, for much of the twentieth century, to a limited canon of texts extravagantly praised as timeless and studied primarily through close reading. But the causes are not only institutional. They are also political, involving how American intellectuals imagine the place in the world occupied by the culture of their country. For Brooks after the First World War, Twain had sold out literature for America and James had given up America for literature; after the Second World War Trilling, as we saw in the previous chapter, made Twain and James the center of his understanding of the great achievement of American literature. These same causes contributed to the peculiar twentieth-century status of Huckleberry Finn. In order to achieve hypercanonization, it had first to be understood as literary, and then its literary value had to be nationalized.

Just like Ishmael's narrative in Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn is filled with the materials of local humor writing, and it draws for its fundamental mode of presentation on the conventions of personal narrative. Like Moby-Dick, too, Huckleberry Finn offers the freely aesthetically shaped world of literary narrative, through its technique of representing subject matter that plays an important part in American history (the economics of whaling, the morality of slavery) while cutting off the address to any audience of patriotic citizens who might be engaged to enact the author's vision of nationhood. It is possible to link Huckleberry Finn to fundamental national historical experiences, but the link can be made only allegorically, that is, only through an aggressively active process of reader's interpretation, about which readers in fact differ very widely. My name for this allegoric interpretive process is the nationalizing of literary narrative, and it seems to me the means by which hypercanonical idolatry takes place. The hypercanonized literary work is thought to offer an imaginative world cut free from the bounds of specific grievances or goals, so that themes at once eternal and ideally national can be projected onto it. I have tried to identify specific historical pressures in relation to which writers produced the works that have been seen as free of historical pressures, times when writers, and to some degree their readers, wished to sidestep threatening controversies—moments such as the Compromise of 1850, the end of Reconstruction, and the aftermath of World War II.

By recovering limiting contexts for the emergence of literary icons, I want to make trouble for the hypercanonical construction of Huckleberry Finn. I hope to say things about Huckleberry Finn that can be accepted as true and that, if accepted, make it harder for the book to be treated so readily as an idol, rather than as one very good book among other books, in American culture. The nationalizing of literary narrative, and concomitant psychologizing of politics, produce and reinforce the belief that there is a true America made up by those who take their distance from actually existing America. In this respect, one of the most provocative features of Huckleberry Finn is only a heightened instance of what is also true of the other hypercanonized works: its very canonical prestige is connected to the sense that it is “counter”-cultural, or, as Trilling put it, subversive.

For example, let me cite what many scholars still consider the definitive chapter-length treatment of Huckleberry Finn, from Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer by Henry Nash Smith, one of the founders of the academic discipline of American studies and for a long time in charge of the Mark Twain Papers. Like many academic readers, at least since V. L. Parrington, Smith gave special attention to chapter 31. Here Huck contemplates writing to Miss Watson so that she can recover her runaway slave, but even though this seems to him what religion teaches, he can't do it and decides instead, “All right, then, I'll go to hell.” Although Smith never referred, here or anywhere else that I know of, to Trilling's 1948 essay, he explicitly credited Trilling's 1955 book The Opposing Self for his crucial argument at this point, when he first set it out in his 1958 introduction to the Riverside college edition of Huckleberry Finn. Smith quoted Trilling on the “new recognition,” in the nineteenth century, of “society as coercion,” against which Trilling posed, as Smith noted, “the modern imagination of autonomy,” which is based on “selves conceived in opposition to the general culture” (xiii).

Taking from Trilling these terms of the autonomous self opposing social coercion, Smith built the framework for his authoritative interpretation. Smith argued on the basis of chapter 31 that the crux of meaning in the book is Huck's choice between “fidelity to the uncoerced self” and the negative results, the “blurring of attitudes,” that are “caused by social conformity” (Development 122-23). This “fidelity to the uncoerced self” was the psychological hinge by which Smith connected the literary work Huckleberry Finn to a national meaning, as token of an America beyond conformity, an America that, as if it were the star of the world's show, would lead the nations of the world, or perhaps bring history to its destined end. This is the position that led Big River to include the song “I, Huckleberry, Me,” characterized by David Richards in the Washington Post as Huck's “sprightly proclamation of independence.”

TWAIN AS HUCK: THE UNCOERCED SELF IN THE CALIFORNIA EDITION

Smith's critical position helps define the intellectual and institutional context for what I consider an extraordinary anomaly in the major new scholarly edition of Huckleberry Finn. For decades now the Mark Twain Project has been conducted from the repository of the Mark Twain Papers, the Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley campus, and its editions and scholarship have been invaluable. Yet the California editors have decided that Twain's intentions require the text of Huckleberry Finn to include a sixteen-page section that never appeared in the book during Twain's lifetime. (The discovery in February 1991 of the missing portion of the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn confirmed the facts but did not affect the logic of the editorial argument, which again surfaces in the new 1996 edition incorporating the new manuscript materials.) This so-called “Raftmen Episode” Twain published in Life on the Mississippi (chapter 3), describing it as excerpted from a work-in-progress about Huckleberry Finn, but he then omitted it from Huckleberry Finn itself.

The documents concerning Twain's intentions are three letters. The first one is from Twain, insisting that no part of this section be used in publicity materials, since it had already been published and might lead readers to fear that the whole new book would be largely familiar (Huckleberry [1988] 442). Next is a letter from his publisher wondering if the section might not be omitted entirely: “I think it would improve” the book (446). In the third letter, Twain replied, “Yes, I think the raft chapter can be left wholly out” (446). The California editors argue that Twain omitted the episode only to “accommodate his young publisher on a practical matter,” and that in editorial theory such a decision is equivalent to “accepting the publisher's censorship” (Hirst 450). (Hirst is the general editor of the Mark Twain Project, here explaining in the inexpensive paperback edition the logic of Fischer's textual decision, which Fischer himself explains in the massive, costly scholarly edition to which I otherwise refer.) It is a nagging embarrassment to the editors' scholarly scruple that even where he might have tried to bring the passage back, no evidence exists that Twain ever tried to (Huckleberry [1988] 476-77).

I have three points to make about this matter. First, I emphasize that this editorial interpretive attempt to define and magnify the individuality of Twain the author, as a self that should be uncoerced, possessor of intentions and victim of censorship, is perfectly coherent with Smith's critical position taken in interpreting Huckleberry Finn. In combating what they consider the publisher's censorship, the editors take upon themselves the spiritual authority of Huck's decision to produce an America by rejecting “social conformity”: “All right, then, I'll go to hell.” Yet the editors take a more complex and accommodating stance in the acknowledgments, the first words of the volume after its dedication and table of contents. They begin, “Our first thanks go to the American taxpayer” (Huckleberry [1988] xvii). (This kind of rhetoric led Jonathan Raban, reviewing another product of the Mark Twain Project in the Times Literary Supplement, to remark on the “alliance, unprecedented so far as I know, between tax dollars and literary history.”) Next the California editors thank “the scholars who recommended federal funding,” and the climax comes in thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the “independent federal agency” that granted the funds to make the edition possible (xvii). (That phrase “independent federal agency” is almost a perfect verbal formula for what I have described as the psychological hinge used to connect the literary to the national.)

The rhetoric of acknowledgment is highly interesting. Note the mediating role of the scholarly community. It stands in the unemphasized second position between the strong opening invocation of the citizenry and the climactic summoning of the state. Yet only by means of the scholarly community can citizens receive the benefits of their federated agency, and only the initiative of the scholarly editors opened this possibility. The independence of the NEH is clearly meant to set it apart from the dangers of conformity, and the taxpayers whose “support” (xvii) made the work possible are vicariously co-agents in fighting censorship. So the logic of America as the nation defined by its opposition to itself underwrites this sequence. From economic individual to federal agency, all are free and fight for freedom. I do not think Mark Twain believed anything like this.

My second point is that in insisting on the unfettered individuality of Twain, the editors nonetheless effectively split him in two. If the editors draw glory from being like Twain, he must be protected from being like them. For their scholarly narration of Huckleberry Finn's process of publication constructs quite a different image of Twain from the one they invoke to justify their editorial decision, but more like the selves they acknowledge in giving thanks. Recall that the very name by which Samuel Clemens is known to history as an author, Mark Twain, is itself not just a pen name but a registered trade mark. This economic fact has weighty consequences for the logic of editorial argument. The editors base their decision on a split between “Mark Twain's intentions for his text” and “his publisher's needs.” They find “no documentary evidence” that these intentions and needs “coincide” (Hirst 450-51). I read their evidence to different effect, however, as showing that Twain's intentions concerning Huckleberry Finn were inseparable from its status as an economic object. The California edition shows that Clemens himself was deeply involved in the whole process by which the book moved from his manuscript to its readers.

The publisher who is supposed to have censored Twain was Charles L. Webster. Webster was a young nephew of Samuel Clemens's, and the publishing concern of Charles L. Webster & Co. was set up by Clemens, according to the very evidence gathered by the California editors, so that the author “could have complete charge of issuing and selling the book” (Huckleberry [1988] xlvii). As Webster wrote early in the process, “The Co. … is S. L. C. [Samuel Langhorne Clemens]” (xlvii). The correspondence between the two shows, according to the California editors, that “Clemens was indefatigable in directing every step” (xlvii). There is a contradiction, then: on the one side, the scholarly characterization of the actual working relation between Clemens and Webster, in which Clemens was not only active, but the senior, dominant figure, for whom Webster was basically an agent; on the other side, the claim that there was no authorial intention in the omission of the passage. The myth of Frankenstein, the theory of alienation were invented to deal with such situations, but the editors do not invoke them; they simply make of Webster the representation of coercively conformist commercial culture, set against the freedom of the author's creative intentions. As a result of this defense of Twain's autonomy, the standard MLA certified text of Huckleberry Finn is now nearly five percent longer than any edition published during Twain's lifetime, by virtue of including a passage of some five thousand words that is identically available in another of his major works.

Here I briefly note the third point. The “Raftmen Episode” involves Huck's witnessing a series of boasts and stories that brilliantly encapsulate Twain's mastery of the local narrative materials from which his art began. The logic of hypercanonization dictates that Twain's single greatest book must include as much as possible of his greatest writing. If some of the most wonderful pages from Life on the Mississippi are now also to be found in Huckleberry Finn, there will be that much less reason for anyone to read Life on the Mississippi, and the dominance of literary narrative over local and personal narratives will be further confirmed.

In principle, one might expect so substantial a change in the canonical text of Huckleberry Finn to have drastic consequences for our critical understanding; in fact it seems that critical argument has at least a five percent margin of error. I know of no major interpretive argument about Huckleberry Finn which depends on the presence, or the absence, of this episode. However excellent in itself, it seems in no way essential to the whole—as Mark Twain originally judged in agreeing to omit it.

THE SALES PITCH: LOCAL HUMOR VS. LITERARY SUBVERSION

Despite Huckleberry Finn's hypercanonicity, there is continuing variance in the fundamental terms by which its place in American literary history is to be understood, that is, in the question that I consider the essential inquiry of literary history, what kind of work it is. It is now usual to read Huckleberry Finn in relation to our contemporary concerns with problems of race and the history of slavery in the United States, and it is hard to doubt that these issues are at least intensely relevant to any apt response to the work. Yet among the documents relating to the distribution of Huckleberry Finn is one that I find astonishing precisely because it opens a world of historical difference, which thwarts our expectations.

Clemens, you recall, had set up Webster's company to issue and sell Huckleberry Finn. The means of sale was subscription. Agents around the country were set up with territorial rights, and they went door-to-door selling subscriptions. Clemens insisted that the book would not come out until forty thousand subscriptions were sold. To assist in sales, agents were equipped with a prospectus for the book, which included an “abstract” of the book's “story,” which I quote in full:

the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and a negro named Jim, who in their travels fall in with two tramps engaged in taking in the different country towns through which they pass, by means of the missionary dodge, the temperance crusade, or under any pretext that offers to easily raise a dishonest dollar. The writer follows these characters through their various adventures, until finally, we find the tramps properly and warmly clothed,—with a coat of tar and feathers,—and the boys and Jim escape their persecutions and return safely to their friends.

(Huckleberry [1988], 846, emphasis in original)

Huckleberry Finn is described as a (belated) local narrative of southwestern humor. The King and Duke appear as the central selling point of the book; only the middle third of it in which they appear plays any role in the publicity. Although this description focuses on two rogues, it presents a far less countercultural book than the one that has been read for most of the last fifty years. Huck is never alone with Jim, and the inclusion of Tom suggests that they are not fleeing but frolicking. The issue of slavery is so far buried that Jim's unfree status is not even mentioned, let alone that it might provide any motive for the travels.

I'm not accusing Clemens of misleading advertising; rather, I'm suggesting that these documents point to problems in our historical understanding of how Huckleberry Finn came into the world. This abstract was still used in the 1889 Publishers' Trade List Annual advertisement (Huckleberry [1988] 850), long after it could be likely that the question of Jim's enslavement was being masked because of fear that the subject would not be attractive to potential buyers. (It was by no means uncommon for popular writings of the 1880s to address life under slavery. See, for an overview, the chapters “The South Begins to Write” and “The North Feels the Power of the Pen” in Buck, who, however, does not mention Huckleberry Finn, tacitly acknowledging its generic difference.) This critical interpretation of the book's shape and substance, this abstract, was put out by the young publisher whose every arrangement enjoyed, according to the California editors, “the accompaniment of an unremitting barrage of advice, assistance, and interference from his employer” (xlviii), the author, Mark Twain. Even where evidence is not available, the editors are certain that all advertising material had “at least the author's tacit approval” (843).

Literary history exposes radically different understandings of what, in the most basic sense, Huckleberry Finn is about, and the efforts of literary historians to place the book expose the argumentative structure of literary history. The dialectic terms most basic to literary history are tradition and innovation, and Huckleberry Finn has been placed solidly with both. As tradition, it has been understood as part of American romance, notably by Richard Chase (The American Novel and Its Tradition [1957]) and Leslie Fiedler (Love and Death in the American Novel [1960]), or as American pastoral by Leo Marx (The Machine in the Garden [1964]). As innovation, it has been seen as inaugurating the triumph of the vernacular in American prose, notably by Henry Nash Smith, and, again, Leo Marx, who will be discussed in the next chapter. The sense of Twain as innovative was, in the period before hypercanonization, especially fostered by those who wished themselves to be innovative. I think particularly of the early American prose modernists such as Sherwood Anderson (in his correspondence with Van Wyck Brooks [see Edmund Wilson, The Shock of Recognition]) and Ernest Hemingway (in The Green Hills of Africa: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” [22]). The issue of linguistic innovation helps elucidate Twain's status as iconoclastic idol.

TWAIN VS. COOPER: LITERARY VS. NATIONAL

I shall come finally to Twain's divergences from national narrative as exemplified by Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, but my starting point will be Mark Twain's major work of literary criticism, one of the most successful, best-known critical essays in English, “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.” As its title suggests, Twain's essay is a bill of indictment, an act of offense in the guise of judgment. The essay's force springs from the double cross of its opening. Twain begins parodically with three epigraphs, in which the revered Cooper is extravagantly praised by Professors Lounsbury and Matthews and by the famous English novelist Wilkie Collins, but Twain's critique of Cooper makes his readers eventually find in the language of these authorities the same complacent wooliness he has found in Cooper. So Twain offers all the pleasure of a violent assault on the establishment.

But in this essay Twain himself appears not as a wild man, a western rule breaker, but precisely in the role of a pseudoneo-Aristotelian, enunciator of eighteen inflexible rules that Cooper can be shown to have violated. Twain's rational-technical authority stands against the traditional authority of Cooper, and the English, and the professors. Twain does not himself historicize his argument with Cooper, except for one moment when he speculates that perhaps Cooper's procedures would make sense if it were possible to believe that there ever “was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say” (“Fenimore” 592). The very terms of Twain's concession point to its incredibility; time has been money in America at least since Ben Franklin, a century before Cooper. A time in which time had no value would be, by the very words, a worthless time. Twain treats Cooper as a contemporary, that is, as a fellow author confronting a timeless realm of practical rules. Twain attempts to persuade us that Cooper's work is no longer writable and is readable only for those in a state of distraction, their levels of attention set at near zero.

Twain represents Cooper's failings as sensory, failures of eye and ear. Cooper's “ear was satisfied with the approximate word” (“Fenimore” 593, emphasis in original), not the “right word,” but only its “second cousin” (584). Because of his “poor ear for words,” Cooper was guilty of “literary flatting and sharping”: “you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it” (593, emphasis in original). Sensorily handicapped as he was, Cooper “failed to notice that the man who talks corrupt English six days in the week must and will talk it on the seventh, and can't help himself” (592). Mark Twain does not believe in linguistic Sunday best, the flexible usage that scholars know as “code-switching.” Cooper was not just half deaf; he was half blind too. Twain ignores the fact that the French novelist Balzac adapted the tense alertness of Cooper's woodsmen to highlight the perceptual intensity required for life in Paris; for Twain Cooper was not “an observer” (586). Cooper could not “see the commonest little every-day matters accurately” (587). If he had, “his inventive faculty would have worked better; not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly” (586). In one episode that Twain mockingly analyzes at length, Cooper's imprecision concerning speed and distance means that “the inaccuracy of the details throws a sort of air of fictitiousness and general improbability” over the whole business (589).

Twain's vocabulary of judgment echoes the etymological history of its terms: plausible and probable both originated as terms of social approbation but have come to be used as if they were absolutes, and so Twain versus Cooper. Nowadays when to read Cooper at all requires, as Yvor Winters already argued over fifty years ago, “an act of sympathetic historical imagination” (182), it is clear that Twain's terms were those that most effectively served to emphasize the differences between the emerging standards of taste of his time, standards that he was actively fostering in this essay, and the standards of Cooper's time, still residual in Twain's. By downplaying his own innovation, by emphasizing not tradition but rather the eye and ear, the plausible and probable, terms that are conventionally understood as unchanging “nature,” Twain sets his critique as little as possible in the realm of the overtly ideological. He might, for instance, have attacked Cooper on the grounds that Cooper was the “American Scott,” a liability both on nationalist cultural grounds and, more particularly for Twain, because Twain believed that Scott had exercised a disastrous influence on Southern culture (Mississippi 500-502).

But Twain does not address the ethical-national issues raised by the comparison of Cooper to Scott; he shifts the ground to linguistic and aesthetic issues. Yet Twain's technically rational standards of observation and consistency, based on the regularities of the natural world and human nature, rule out of court the possibility that people may speak in several distinct registers for different purposes, at different times, with different interlocutors. Twain insists on linguistic consistency as the index of a psychologically and socially unified identity. In Huckleberry Finn the only characters who manifest the variable linguistic usages of which he accuses Cooper are the King and the Duke, and they are frauds. Twain would explain that their variation occurs because they are bad people, not because they are badly written. Cooper, however, offers a different view of linguistic instability. In The Pioneers, Cooper notes that Judge Temple, raised as a Quaker, tends to fall into Quaker idiom at moments of passion, as does his daughter to a lesser degree. Neither the Judge nor his daughter is a fraud, but neither has the kind of stability Twain requires. In the United States of the later nineteenth century, as is emphatically the case now, questions of educating immigrants and members of culturally distinct but long settled groups necessarily involved thinking through questions of what it might mean to use situationally variable languages, but this is no concern of Huckleberry Finn. Jim speaks for the book when he answers Huck's question, “Spose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy—what would you think?” Jim answers, “I wouldn' think nuff'n; I'd take en bust him over de head” (97). And yet roughly within what would have been Jim's lifetime, Missouri had been part of the Louisiana territory controlled by France.

The whole book of Huckleberry Finn, of course, does not confine itself to a single form of English. Twain's initial note on the language of his book proposes an agenda of dialect accuracy that has been studied and warranted by generations of scholars:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

(lvii)

For Twain, it is important that characters sound not like each other but each like her or himself.

Yet Cooper, too, in The Pioneers made a work to serve as the repository for a great range of voices, as a registry for American idiosyncrasies of speech. Despite all that Twain says against his offenses, Cooper represents in The Pioneers a wide range of American immigrant, regional, professional, and ethnic linguistic varieties: representations of English spoken by American blacks and Indians; the socially pretentious Essex County New England talk of Tabitha the housekeeper and the Jacksonian-Democratic New Englandism of Billy Kirby the Vermonter; the jargons of doctors and lawyers; English as spoken by New York Dutch, a French emigré, and a Cornishman, as well as the cultivated transatlantic English of young Effingham, not to mention again the Temples and Natty.

I want to develop further this comparison of Huckleberry Finn and The Pioneers, because Twain's stylistic innovation in presenting an extended vernacular narrative of comprehensive scope and great emotional power has effectively rendered invisible a series of extraordinary similarities between these two works. Once these similarities are recognized, it is then possible to define more precisely the divergences of Twain's literary narrative from Cooper's national narrative. Cooper's national narrative is grounded from its words on up in claims that were no longer representable aesthetically or politically to Twain and many of his contemporaries. National narratives held a positive understanding of the course of American history, and their writers believed it was a responsibility of culturally ambitious and important narrative not only to show but also to make explicit this understanding. Literary narratives denied any such responsibility, challenged any such understanding, and developed techniques to supersede such explicitness. American studies has most often struggled to reincorporate literary narrative into a renewed national allegory, undertaking to explicate what was programmatically, even polemically, left silent. William Dean Howells, during Twain's lifetime, humorously predicted and warned against a future of “forming Mark Twain societies to read philanthropic meanings into his jokes, or studying the ‘Jumping Frog’ as the allegory of an imperializing republic” (Cady 351). Howells memorialized Twain as “the Lincoln of our literature” (My 741), but he knew the difference between literature and politics.

The ground of resemblance between Huckleberry Finn and The Pioneers that I find most primary is the setting in place and time. Each book locates its action a full generation back in the setting that was its author's childhood home. Living in New York City around 1820, Cooper wrote back to the frontier days of Cooperstown, set in 1793. Living in Hartford around 1880, Twain set his action in “the Mississippi valley forty to fifty years ago.” Both books are sharply divided between satire and idyll. They satirically portray the small-town social interactions that make up much of the work's fictional substance, but they ecstatically evoke the beauties of the natural world that are set in contrast with town life. Both books locate important values in a smaller social group particularly linked to the natural setting. Moreover, in both books this smaller, marginal group is single-sex and biracial. Leslie Fiedler has made the resemblances in the relations between Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo and Huck and Jim unforgettable points of reference for thinking about the history of American culture. In each case a single individual is made to carry the burden of typifying a whole group. This technique has not been confined to novelists: until the last few years historians almost inevitably wrote of “the Negro,” “the Indian,” as if there were indeed only one such person.

Both The Pioneers and Huckleberry Finn establish a crucial scene of conflict between the white outsider and the law, setting up an opposition between human nature and the state which reinforces the contrast between landscape and town. Both works rely on a mystery plot to bring about their conclusions, and in both the white outsider resists remaining within the bounds of the civilized scope that the book has delimited. Natty ends as “foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent” (465). Huck aims to “light out for the Territory” (362). The differences that appear on the ground of these resemblances help to define the historical shift from Cooper's time to Twain's, from a time when national narrative was still emergent to a moment when its authority was again, more effectively than in 1850, challenged by literary narrative. Not that literary narrative wholly superseded national narrative in the 1880s: The Grandissimes (1880), by George W. Cable, a writer closely associated with Twain during the later phases of the writing of Huckleberry Finn, is much more like Cooper than Twain in the respects I discuss.

In the context of my argument, and developing further the analysis of chapter 2, the outstanding difference between Twain and Cooper is that Twain isolates the historical setting of his book. Cooper through his plot and his narrative voice brings the settlement of 1793 into conjunction with at least three historical epochs: with the period of colonial exploration and initial relations between whites and Indians; with the Revolutionary War that brought the United States into existence as the sovereign authority replacing the British and that also significantly altered property relations within the white world and between whites and Indians; and finally, the narrator acknowledges the changes that have further transformed American life since the time of the novel's action.

In contrast, Twain's aesthetic choice requires that Huck have almost no historical perspective on the land he lives in, either in its local or national dimensions, and there is no narrative presence beyond Huck to open up a deeper past or to link his time and concerns to those of the time Twain was writing in. So rigorously dramatic is Twain's technique, by which any voice that appears must belong to a character, that he requires stage directions to place the novel's events. The title page is inscribed “Scene: The Mississippi Valley; Time: Forty to Fifty Years Ago” (liii).

The Revolution is not part of Cooper's novel, but it is part of what makes the world of that novel intelligible, and it is therefore included by reference. The Civil War is not part of Twain's novel, and it is not in any way textually present, although without its having occurred the meaning we read in Huckleberry Finn would be, we think, wholly different. When excerpts from Huckleberry Finn ran in the Century magazine (December 1884-February 1885), they appeared in issues crammed with Civil War memoirs. In November 1884, the Century had begun a massive feature on the Civil War that was so popular it ran for three years; Twain's “Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885) was contributed to it. Yet there is no published evidence I know of—whether in the papers of the Century editor, Richard Watson Gilder, in Twain's correspondence, or in any reviews or notices—that registered the conjunction of these materials with Huckleberry Finn. It is certainly appropriate, even imperative, for historical criticism now to take such juxtapositions into account. My claim, however, is that we have as yet failed to take account of the formal absences and historical silences that are primary data to be interpreted before assimilating the work into a larger context. We must explain the blanks before filling them in.

The difference I have been establishing between Huckleberry Finn and The Pioneers bears also on the way the mystery plot works in the two books. In Huckleberry Finn the mystery—or double mystery, the death of Huck's pap and the freeing of Jim—both take place within the time frame of the main narrative, while in The Pioneers, the mysteries have to do with events before the action of the book opens. In Cooper, the revelation of these events gives meaning to what was obscure during the book's narration, but in Huckleberry Finn, as many readers and critics have observed, the revelation of the hidden events diminishes the meaning of what seemed the book's action: Huck's flight from his pap, Jim's flight from slavery. In keeping with the tendency of literary narrative to focus on the “sensitive spectator,” and in the spirit that Trilling ascribed to Dewey, where the “gesture” of moral style becomes more crucial than what is actually done, these motives are erased as fully as they are in the advertising prospectus. By the same token, the reference in Huck's first sentence to the book Tom Sawyer, which initially suggests that an older Huck is narrating from the present time of publication, is nullified by Huck's explanation on the last page that he has composed his narrative almost immediately after the conclusion of its events.

The conflicts between laws of the state and values taken as nature's, that is, as grounded in the American land, are also handled very differently by Twain and Cooper. I find that The Pioneers succeeds in making readers feel pulled both ways between the claims of the law as represented by Judge Temple and the claims of custom and nature in Natty Bumppo; in contrast, I do not know of any reader who has believed that Huck should have turned in Jim. Moreover, as argued in chapter 2 of this book, the crisis of judgment in chapter 31 of Huckleberry Finn is treated purely internally; Huck is by himself. He describes his decision in terms that evoke the sharp senses Twain valued but denied to Cooper. Huck repeats that he could “see” Jim (270), but this is only in memory; Jim is not there. Moreover, it is a crucial feature of Twain's scene that legal penalties never occur to Huck as he thinks over the situation, only religious retribution. All this is very different from The Pioneers. A full courtroom scene is mounted, in which the force and value of the law are presented, even as the actual legal agents are mocked and criticized.

A comparable difference may be defined in the treatment of what I have called the registry of American voices. In Huckleberry Finn readers have found no other voice with the authority of Huck's. In The Pioneers, however, many readers have found Natty's voice to exceed in authority Judge Temple's or even the authorial narrator's. More broadly, in the terms that Bakhtin has made familiar to recent literary study, we may understand the different voices of The Pioneers as indices for the struggles among different social groups, while in Huckleberry Finn this is much less frequently and forcibly the case. Indeed, as early as the narratives of the anti-Jacksonian, Whig congressman Davy Crockett in the 1830s, a written folk voice was put to use for elite politics, while in the 1840s the abolitionist escaped slave Frederick Douglass wrote to a highly formal standard rather than using vernacular. The powerful voices of pap in his tirade against the “govment” (33-34) and Colonel Sherburn against the lynch mob are isolated grotesques rather than integral parts of an action, while the kindly Gospel teachings of Widow Douglas are simply forgotten at the moment Huck's mind turns in crisis to religious terror.

Huckleberry Finn emerges from these comparisons as a much more powerfully centered work than The Pioneers in the conjunction it effects between its hero and its narrative language. Huckleberry Finn is famous in critical tradition for displacing narrative and linguistic authority from the traditional centers to a character marginal in any number of defined ways, yet it is not certain that The Pioneers may not be a much more fundamentally multifocal, and in that sense uncentered, work. Cooper's concern is the process of civilization, which requires many human agents in a variety of roles. For instance, Cooper sets the values of property and mobility into historical tension through contrasting Natty and Effingham. Through the course of the book they live and hunt together with Chingachgook, but after the Indian's death Natty goes out west, while Effingham enjoys marriage and his rightful inheritance after the death of his long-missing and hidden father. Huck, in contrast, both plans to light out for the territory and also finds six thousand dollars rightly restored to him after Pap's death. Twain consolidates the values of Natty's mobility and Effingham's wealth into his single idealized figure of Huck.

Again, Huckleberry Finn is famous for bringing crucial moral issues to bear on and in the psyche of its protagonist, yet this too is a further centering; the form and fable of Huckleberry Finn reject the very possibility of clashing voices in public debate. After the political failures that led to the Civil War, after the political failures that brought Reconstruction to an end, Twain's literary narrative takes the obliquity of radical ellipsis. In Cooper's national narrative, the light of American nature insures that Natty will feel right about what he did; in the national narrative of Uncle Tom's Cabin the light of grace insures that readers who respond properly to the horrors of slavery will “feel right.” Huck Finn lives so as to feel right with no sanction beyond his own psyche, the imaginative construction of an autonomous self that is the cultural work of literary narrative, and that Lionel Trilling made the keynote of his anti-Stalinism.

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