SOURCE: Margolis, Stacey. “Huckleberry Finn; or, Consequences.” PMLA 116, no. 2 (March 2001): 329-43.

[In the following essay, Margolis responds to other critics who have castigated Huckleberry Finn for its approach to racism, arguing that the novel indicts post-Reconstruction racism by establishing social accountability.]

“You are very kind; but there must be some mistake. I have not killed anything.”

“Your house did, anyway,” replied the little old woman, with a laugh; “and that is the same thing.”

—L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

That two forceful polemics against the continued investment in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an American classic were recently published for two very different audiences—Jane Smiley's “Say It Ain't So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain's ‘Masterpiece’” in Harper's Magazine and Jonathan Arac's Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time as part of the Wisconsin Project on American Writers series—suggests that nothing has become as much an American classic as the continuing controversy itself. What is different and worth nothing about these two works, however, is their attempt to do something new, to shift the focus of critique away from the novel to the social consequences of its canonization. Rather than ask if Huckleberry Finn is a good or bad book, they ask if it has good or bad effects. To claim, then (as a number of Smiley's respondents in Harper's did about her essay), that these two works misread the novel or refuse to attend to its historical context is to miss the point.¹ Smiley and Arac have far less interest in interpreting the novel than in addressing the way it has been used and the “cultural work” it continues to perform (Arac 21); they are making claims not so much about what Huckleberry Finn means as about what it does.

Thus, despite the fact that Arac confesses early on that he believes “Huckleberry Finn is a wonderful book” (16), his goal is to assess the consequences of excessive admiration, to “explore how Twain's book came to be endowed with the values of Americanness and anti-racism, and with what effects” (vii). Predictably, these effects are shown to be devastating. In Arac's view, the novel's prominent and seemingly unshakable position as a “quintessentially American book” (vii) has led to “white” complacency about racism (“[n]orthern liberal smugness” [65]), the legitimation of racial epithets, and the delegitimation of African American experience. For Arac and Smiley, the novel's pernicious influence is demonstrated most clearly in the way that a series of well-known critics have made Huck's change of heart about Jim (Huck's decision in chapter 31 to “go to hell”) serve as a model of social responsibility. What mid-twentieth-century critics admired as a form of redemption, Arac and Smiley see as a distasteful form of liberal bad faith: the problem, in Smiley's terms, is the sense that if “Huck feels positive toward Jim, and loves him, and thinks of him as a man, then that's enough. He doesn't actually have to act in accordance with his feelings” (63).² It is this investment in good intentions (both in the novel and in celebrations of the novel) that, more than anything else, bothers Arac and Smiley. After all, what could be more politically suspect than to applaud moral courage that can never be translated into social change?

One could argue that the reading of chapter 31 to which Arac and Smiley object—the reading of Huck's decision as moral triumph—has never been as influential, at least in literary circles, as they seem to believe. Critics have been claiming since the 1960s that the futility of Huck's decision to free Jim, as well as the entire evasion sequence at the Phelps farm, must be read as a satire of white complacency and of the perils of legal freedom for blacks in late-nineteenth-century America. This reading is developed brilliantly by Laurence Holland in by far the best, if least cited, essay on the novel. In “A ‘Raft of Trouble,’” Holland argues that the novel undercuts the importance of Huck's change of heart: the necessity and the futility of his decision to free an already free Jim satirize the fact that in the post-Reconstruction era (and, Holland suggests, even “in more recent decades” [75]) black Americans were systematically denied civil and economic rights and thus, in a real sense, still needed to be freed.³ In much the same way, Russell Reising has weighed in against those critics who relegate the racial violence of Huckleberry Finn to a past that is “diffused […] with a nostalgic gloss” as a way of avoiding the presentness of Twain's nightmare America (159).

The interest of Smiley's and Arac's polemics is that they effectively invalidate all such defenses of the novel. At issue in these arguments is not what Twain intended or even what the novel really means (if these things are different) but how it has been and continues to be experienced by readers. Arac, for example, argues that to defend Huckleberry Finn's treatment of Jim or its use of racial epithets by pointing to the novel's irony is to dismiss the legitimate concerns of African Americans who experience the book not as a satire of racial injustice but as a form of racial insult. “If civil rights means anything,” he asks, “shouldn't it mean that African Americans ought to have a real voice in public definitions of what counts as a model of enlightened race relations?” (9). While Arac's and Smiley's claims about Huckleberry Finn paradoxically seem aimed at rescuing black readers from the “racist” effects of arguments by black intellectuals like Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison (who have eloquently defended the novel), the more general problems Arac and Smiley have with any appeal to the novel's real meaning is that its meaning has been overshadowed by its powerful cultural effects. Indeed, Arac's project is a kind of postdeconstructive attempt to treat Huckleberry Finn not as itself a chain of uncontrollable iterations but as an object that fosters a chain of prescribed responses (that the novel is quintessentially American, that it is anti-racist, that black readers who hate it must be wrong), so that “what counts is not the attitudes that the book supposedly teaches, but rather the opportunity the book provides for the incessant reiteration, the ritual repetition, of practical behavior” (11).

To divorce Twain from the effects of his novel—indeed, to absolve him of any blame for those effects—is, for Arac and Smiley, to demonstrate a commitment to effect over intention that they claim most Americans refuse to countenance.⁴ The problem with liberal readers of Twain is that they insist on reducing everything—including racism—to sentiment. “White Americans,” Smiley argues, “always think racism is a feeling, and they reject it or they embrace it. To most Americans it seems more honorable and nicer to reject it, so they do, but they almost invariably fail to understand that how they feel means very little to black Americans, who understand racism as a way of structuring American culture, American politics, and the American economy” (63). For Arac, it is defenders of the novel who make this mistake, acting “as if racism were only a matter of specific intention to harm, of attitude rather than habitual practice and social structure” (13).

To make this case against white Americans or the liberal reader is to advance certain claims about what it means to be responsible for racism and, more generally, about the connections among what we do, what we intend, and what happens to us or to the people around us. It is, in fact, to make the claim that we can be held responsible not only for what we mean (or what we mean to do) but also for the unintended effects of what we do. On this account, our actions can count as racist even if we “don't know it” and even if we have no “specific intention to harm” (Arac 13). It is in making this claim, I think, that Arac and Smiley are most interesting, most convincing, and, ironically enough, most indebted to Huckleberry Finn. For in their belief in responsibility for effects rather than for intentions, they are clearly the inheritors of a nineteenth-century cultural shift in notions of accountability that involved not only the rise of a new legal paradigm (the law of negligence) but also the social satire of a novel like Huckleberry Finn.

Far from being irrelevant to questions of institutionalized racism, Twain's novel is centrally concerned with the production of effects and the assignment of responsibility for them. Huckleberry Finn participates in this cultural shift in the conception of responsibility by articulating a form of moral action on which individual intention—whether good or bad—finally has no bearing. In this essay I argue that Twain's interest in exploring the ways in which a wide variety of unknowing people could be held responsible for Jim's fate and be made to compensate him for his injuries must be read as an attempt to imagine what it would mean to extend the logic of negligence to the national level. In this commitment to examining unintentional harms, Twain not only makes his strongest case against postbellum racism but also proves himself the intellectual forerunner of social critics like Arac and Smiley. For, from this perspective, Huckleberry Finn is an attempt to imagine accountability even in the absence of malice.

“HOW A BODY CAN SEE AND DON'T SEE AT THE SAME TIME”

Whether they like it or hate it, critics of Huckleberry Finn have always seen the real drama of the novel in Huck's internal conflict, the contest (as Twain once put it) between his conscience and his heart, so that the suspense for the reader lies in the uncertainty of Huck's decision rather than in the uncertainty of his actions. This sense that Huck's decision—whether read straight or as satire—is at the center of Huckleberry Finn is the one thing that supporters and detractors of the novel have always had in common. Thus, the novel's most famous detractor, Leo Marx, claiming that Huck's “victory over his ‘yaller dog’ conscience” in chapter 31 ultimately “assumes heroic size” (301), sounds a great deal like the novel's most famous supporter, Lionel Trilling, who claims that Huck “becomes an heroic character when, on the urging of affection, [he] discards the moral code he has always taken for granted and resolves to help Jim in his escape from slavery” (111-12).

This sense that what counts in chapter 31 is Huck's conscience hardly seems surprising since it is intention rather than action that gets the final word. Announcing his decision to destroy the letter he has written Miss Watson disclosing Jim's whereabouts, Huck says, “It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming” (272). While it is clear what it would mean to let a letter stay written (by not ripping it up), it is not as easy to picture what it would mean to let words, once uttered, “stay said.” But one might make the case for the priority of intention in this novel by asserting that the permanence of these words consists in the purity of the intention that produced them, in Huck's determined refusal to change his mind. The novel dramatizes this commitment to consciousness over action most explicitly in the way that it neatly undoes the action of this key scene: Huck demonstrates his loyalty to Jim by ripping up the letter. The fact that this decision is emblematized by a letter written and then destroyed—an action done and then undone—seems even in its formal structure to privilege the coherence of intentions over the vagaries of actions.

It is the futility of Huck's commitment to Jim—a futility made visible in the destroyed letter—that has always angered the novel's detractors. The direct result of Huck's decision, after all, is not a serious attempt to free Jim but a game invented by Tom Sawyer. Yet if Miss Watson's decision to set Jim free makes the final rescue attempt a mere game, it is a game only to Tom, who knows the truth from the moment he arrives at the Phelps farm. For Huck, the stakes of freeing Jim are just as high, and the consequences just as real, when Tom takes control of the rescue as they were when Huck agonized over sending the letter to Miss Watson. Only after the rescue fails does Huck discover what he and Tom have, in fact, been doing all along: not rescuing Jim but only pretending to: “and so, sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took all that trouble and bother to set a free nigger free! and I couldn't ever understand, before, until that minute and that talk how he could help a body set a nigger free, with his bringing-up” (362). That Huck describes the evasion as Tom's action rather than his own is an issue to which I return below. For now, it is important to note that what Miss Watson's will reveals is not that Huck has failed in his commitment to liberate Jim but the more surprising fact that Huck could neither have succeeded nor have failed to free him. Already free in the eyes of the law, Jim, it seems, can never be freer than he is.

What is most striking about this revision of the rescue is that it illustrates a paradigm for the novel's representation of action. Indeed, all the central actions of the novel depend on this kind of gap in knowledge: characters repeatedly come to know what they really did (or what their actions really mean) only after the fact, only retrospectively. Thus, Jim discovers that he has not been running away from enslavement but has, as Tom announces, been simply running (361). Thus, Huck discovers that he has not been escaping from his father since, as Jim informs him, by the time they leave Jackson's Island his father is dead (365-66). The novel at once highlights intention (by focusing completely on the development of Huck's consciousness) and works to make intentions irrelevant to understanding certain kinds of action. No matter how deeply Huck is invested in his good intentions toward Jim or how powerful his decision to save Jim seems to the reader, this recasting of the rescue by Miss Watson's will already moves us well beyond an intentional model of action.

From a point of view that places the reader beyond intention, Huck's role in the evasion must be understood less as a heroic individual gesture than as an act essentially defined by other people. The game Huck finds he is playing must be understood less as something he shares with Tom than as something created by Tom. In the end, Tom's revelation neither enforces Huck's decision (as pure intention) nor invalidates it (as completely futile) but insists on the conflict between what Huck thinks he is doing and what he is told he has done. In thus recasting Huck's role in the rescue, Huckleberry Finn undertakes a project much more radical than imagining a self that can inhabit a variety of roles (after all, disguises and mistaken identities have always been central to the novel). Instead, the novel imagines what it would mean for someone to perform an action that can be narrated intelligibly only from outside the self, what it would mean, in other words, for Tom to understand what Huck is doing better than Huck can understand it himself. “It shows,” as Huck puts it, “how a body can see and don't see at the same time” (293).

This retrospective account of action is so central to Huckleberry Finn that it ultimately comes to undermine the authority exercised by Huck's self-presentation. The novel thematizes this powerlessness over narration in its meticulous tracking of textual effects, in its exploration of how texts come to define and even transform what characters can do. That is, the novel is concerned less with the ways that texts represent actions than with the ways that texts can determine what counts as someone's action. Miss Watson's will casts a shadow over the entire plot, redefining what everyone has been doing to Jim, just as Tom's adventure stories prescript the fake rescue. In the evasion sequence, tales prompt adventures not so much by providing Tom and Huck with an intention as by standing in for intention, by becoming intention's substitute. Far from exercises in improvisation, Tom's games are the products of textual blueprints: “Why blame it all, we've got to do it. Don't I tell you it's in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what's in the books, and get things all muddled up?” (27).

If Tom's perfect commitment to enforcing the rules of the romance is satirized, however, the power he accords texts is never questioned. Beyond the innovative use of dialect, what seems to mark Huckleberry Finn as the first recognizably modern American novel—what might explain the kinship a modernist like Hemingway felt for Twain's project—is the way it experiments with the production of textual effects. Through steady adherence to the illusion of presentness, the novel works to enforce a kind of readerly retrospection, so that just as Tom and Jim withhold important pieces of information until the end of the “adventure,” Huck withholds their revelations from the reader. Presentness is an illusion here because Huck, who claims to be narrating his tale after the fact, tells it as if experiencing it for the first time. As Holland points out, Huckleberry Finn presents itself as a historical novel, but it is narrated as if it were happening in the “here and now” (73). What he does not remark on is that this illusion enables Huckleberry Finn to enact its retrospection formally, forcing readers into the same kind of recognition that Huck and Jim experience in the world of the novel. It is only after the fact that readers understand the descriptions they have been reading: of a game rather than a rescue, of a free man rather than a slave, of an orphan rather than a runaway. This withholding of information, finally, makes it impossible for one ever to read the same story again by making it impossible for one to be the same reader the second time around. If one reads the novel the first time as Huck, one must read it the second time as Tom.

Such shifting positions and tenses might explain how a novel that purports to focus on the South of “forty to fifty years” before the time of its publication can be understood as a novel essentially about the post-Reconstruction era. Certainly, if the novel's setting has always suggested a kind of nostalgia—for boyhood, for the antebellum South, for the small town—the fact that Twain detaches Huck and Jim from a familiar context and sets them literally afloat already begins to suggest a concern with the chaos of postwar America. There could hardly be a better image of modernization than the move from the familiarity of the village to the anonymity of the city. And this interest in the relation between strangers connects the novel most explicitly with the politics of the post-Reconstruction era not because it raises questions about individual disorientation in a rapidly industrializing America but because it raises broader questions about accountability in a changing public sphere.

If all the actors in the evasion sequence misunderstand what they have done to Jim—Huck imagines that he is freeing a slave, the Phelpses and their neighbors imagine that by catching Jim they are quelling a slave revolt, Tom imagines that Jim's freedom can be turned into a game, and even Miss Watson imagines that signing her will is enough to make Jim free—how are they answerable for the harms they cause him? What, in the end, are these willing and unwilling participants in the evasion responsible for? These questions are at the center of Huckleberry Finn, and the novel attempts to answer them by reframing actions not merely in a wider context but also in terms of their consequences. If Huckleberry Finn is a novel about intention, it might best be read as a novel about the limits of intention, even at the moments when interiority rather than action is presented as the privileged form of self-relation. It is, finally, a novel in which your effects on other people rather than your feelings about them define what you have done and, more important, what you can be held accountable for.

“NOBODY TO BLAME”

The problem with most critiques of Huckleberry Finn is that they assume Twain was invoking an intentional model of morality (thus the frequent allusions to Huck's decision to act, for better or worse, against the mores of the community and in accordance with his “heart”), when he was exploring a model of moral action in which any particular state of mind or change of attitude is finally irrelevant. This model did not originate with Twain or emerge full-fledged in nineteenth-century America. In fact, it resembles what Bernard Williams, examining classical texts, calls the “whole person response” to harm (61). By this Williams means an understanding that the existence of a harm requires us to trace causation and to hold someone accountable, even if the harm was caused unintentionally. The relevant question about a harm, in other words, is not “whether the agent intended the outcome” but rather “what exactly his action may be said to have caused” (63). Thus, in the Odyssey, Telemachus, having left open the door to the storeroom by accident, is nonetheless to blame—for this and for the fact that the suitors could subsequently get at the weapons. To hold persons responsible in this way, to insist that they are accountable for their accidents and mistakes, is to make certain assumptions about what constitutes individuality. It is, according to Williams, to concede that committing an action “unintentionally does not, in itself, dissociate that action from yourself” and thus to know “that in the story of one's life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done.” “Telemachus can be held responsible for things he did unintentionally, and so, of course, can we” (54, 69, 54).

As Williams points out, nowhere is this model of responsibility for unintended effects more powerfully expressed than in the law of torts. Virtually nonexistent in antebellum America, torts became one of the most important elements of common law in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization, urbanization, and improved systems of transportation forced masses of people into close proximity and thus gave rise to an increasing number of accidental injuries. What made such accidents unprecedented (aside from their numbers) was that they at once demanded some form of reparation for suffering and raised serious questions about accountability, including questions about who should be held responsible for accidental harms and who should bear the cost of them. With the dramatic rise of such harms, what had been an insignificant branch of the law dealing with torts became an increasingly important remedy precisely because it did not make intention the ground of liability.⁵

In The Common Law (1881), which advanced one of the first and most influential theories of tort in America, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., made explicit this model of responsibility for effects. He claimed, “It may be said that, generally speaking, a man meddles with [tangible objects] at his own risk” (153)—that the owner of an object might be understood as responsible for harms caused by that object.⁶ Antebellum American courts were basically committed to this model of strict liability, under which actors are held responsible for the harms caused by their actions no matter how blameless their conduct. By midcentury, however, legal scholars were concerned about the economic effects of such a system; strict liability threatened American industry (which would have to pay for the damage it caused) by promising a radical redistribution of wealth. Holmes, reacting to the ever-increasing demand for compensation, dismissed calls for a system of strict liability, denying that the state's role was to “make itself a mutual insurance company against accidents, and distribute the burden of its citizens' mishaps among all its members” (96). In fact, the story that legal historians generally tell about tort in the nineteenth century is the story of its limitation, of the way that the promise of compensation was routinely undermined in the American courts.

More than anything else, the courts' growing insistence that there be a standard of negligence significantly limited liability. If under a system of strict liability persons are liable for every harm they cause, under a system of negligence they are liable for a harm they cause only if they are at fault. According to Holmes, who was instrumental in establishing negligence as the general principle of liability in tort, persons are at fault when they act carelessly, when they cause a harm that anyone could have foreseen and avoided. “Unless my act,” Holmes says, “is of a nature to threaten others, unless under the circumstances a prudent man would have foreseen the possibility of harm, it is no more justifiable to make me indemnify my neighbor against the consequences, than to make me do the same thing if I had fallen upon him in a fit, or to compel me to insure him against lightning” (96). Thus, the key distinction in a determination of guilt “is not between results which are and those which are not the consequences of the defendant's acts” but rather “between consequences which [the defendant] was bound as a reasonable man to contemplate, and those which he was not.” For example, “[h]ard spurring is just so much more likely to lead to harm than merely riding a horse in the street […] that the defendant would be bound to look out for the consequences of the one,” although he would not be held responsible “for those resulting merely from the other; because the possibility of being run away with when riding quietly, though familiar, is comparatively slight” (93-94). By proclaiming the harmful consequences of some actions to be predictable and by making agents pay only for their mistakes, American law drew formal boundaries around how much agents would have to pay for the harms they accidentally caused.

As The Gilded Age (Twain and Warner; 1873) makes clear, by the 1870s Twain was concerned about the consequences of such limitations on liability. This novel is, at least in part, a condemnation of the American courts for their failure to protect people from the damaging side effects of economic progress. Twain and his coauthor, Charles Dudley Warner, devote an entire chapter to an account of a deadly steamboat accident and its aftermath. While the painstaking depiction of this accident seems, at least initially, out of place in a novel satirizing Washington, the account of the explosion reveals a great deal about the general mechanisms of guilt and blame in the age of industry. If the captains and crews of the two ships were clearly responsible for the race that led to the accident—the head engineer of the Amaranth calls his second engineer a “murderer” for refusing to heed his warnings about stress on the engines—the “jury of inquest” on the case refuses to find anyone liable for the accident: “after due deliberation and inquiry they returned the inevitable American verdict which has been too familiar to our ears all the days of our lives—Nobody to Blame” (52).

On the one hand, then, The Gilded Age registers the way in which the courts limited liability, favoring industry over the persons it injured. On the other, this scene, in its sense of justified outrage over the verdict, also dramatizes the important ways in which common-sense expectations about liability had been transformed. While it is true that legal devices like negligence limited liability and thus eased the burden placed on industry, the logic of negligence worked out by Holmes and other scholars actually succeeded (often despite their intentions) in articulating new forms of individual and corporate obligation. Making carelessness the ground of responsibility implied that persons (even corporate persons) have at all times an obligation to act with caution. Formerly understood only as the failure to live up to a specific duty—the failure to fulfill a contract, say, or to perform a public office adequately—negligence began to be defined as the failure to meet a general standard of care. With the rise of negligence, not only were professionals like doctors bound by particular duties but everyone was imagined to be bound by an obligation to others, an obligation not to cause harm. Negligence, designed to limit liability, ended up producing a much more expansive form of obligation owed to “all the world” (Holmes's phrase, qtd. in White 19).

The system of negligence installed by theorists like Holmes created a range of impersonal obligations. If one had a duty to “all the world,” this duty had nothing to do with how one felt about one's fellows.⁷ The law, that is, did not require people to love their neighbors. Thus, while Holmes was adamant in his support of the fault principle's limitation of liability, arguing that “undertaking to redistribute losses” for injuries resulting from blameless action would not only hinder progress but also undermine any “sense of justice” (96), he nevertheless insisted that individuals were always acting under a general obligation to the public. If the move to a system of negligence meant that the law often failed to provide adequate compensation for the harms occasioned by industrialization, it nonetheless extended the reach of social obligation and thus transformed what it meant to act in public.

Huckleberry Finn invokes the rise of negligence in fantasizing solutions to the post-Reconstruction racial crisis. Unlike earlier and later stories by Twain involving the adventures of Tom, Huck, and Jim, however, Huckleberry Finn contains no courtroom scene, no overt intrusion of the law into the world of the novel.⁸ Instead, Twain derives from the system of negligence that had become central to American common law a general model of responsibility for the consequences of action. The model he invokes is impersonal and universally applicable. It is impersonal because it measures conduct not against the agent's intentions but against a general standard. As H. L. A. Hart argues, negligence “is not the name of ‘a state of mind’” but the name of an action, a failure “to comply with a standard of conduct with which any ordinary reasonable man could and would have complied” (147). In negligence cases, the courts did not ask whether actors had in fact predicted the harm that would follow from their actions; the courts measured the actions against a general standard of behavior. The model is universally applicable because it is not subject to individual consent. The law of negligence, as Holmes claimed, is grounded in “some general view of the conduct which everyone may fairly expect and demand from every other, whether that other has agreed to it or not” (77).⁹

In the broadest terms, what Twain recognizes in negligence as a way of judging behavior is its potential to solve the problem of postbellum civil rights, a problem he conceives as structural rather than personal. If Jim's precarious position in the text—free in name but not in fact—represents the precarious political and economic situation of African Americans after Reconstruction, this position cannot be transformed by the power of sentiment, because it is held in place by people who have the best of intentions. By the end of the novel, Huck's love for and commitment to freeing Jim become paradoxically essential to the game of humiliating him. I do not mean to claim that Huckleberry Finn simply replaces an intentional model of responsibility with one that disregards intention—it would be wrong to argue that Twain merely ironizes Huck's love for Jim. Rather, I am suggesting that the form of impersonal responsibility explored in the novel supplements an intentional model (just as negligence supplements criminal law); it is a way of imagining remedies for different kinds of harms. Twain, in other words, raises questions of sentiment in Huckleberry Finn to suggest that sentimental conversions go only so far to remedy wrongs that can be traced to no one agent.

Indeed, in Huckleberry Finn, intention is consistently overshadowed by the problem it attempts to address, the problem of racial discrimination that is embedded in (to echo Smiley) American cultural, economic, and political systems. From this perspective, it makes more sense to see each character's ignorance of the true meaning of his actions less as a moral failing than as a generalization about the unpredictable effects of individual action. Critics have been too quick to blame Tom for Jim's suffering, not acknowledging how the formal structure of the novel links Tom to much larger networks of action that include not only Huck but also Miss Watson and the widow Douglas, the Phelpses and their neighbors, the slave catchers, and the King and the Duke. The narrative's enforced retrospection reveals that we have effects in the world that go beyond our intentions but for which we are nonetheless accountable. In drawing on a model of responsibility derived from the law of negligence, Huckleberry Finn enacts a fantasy of national responsibility for the bottoming out of black civil rights in postbellum America.

“FORTY ACRES AND A MULE”

The relation of the novel to the law has, in much recent criticism, been seen primarily in terms of opposition. Where the law is rigid, critics say, the novel is flexible; where the law is impersonal, the novel is committed to the human character; where the law fails in its mission to act justly, the novel provides a comforting form of “poetic justice” (see Nussbaum; Dimock, Residues). Yet this vision of literature as law's supplement has perplexing implications. To claim that novels humanize the law is to suggest that novels in and of themselves are somehow more human than the law and thus inherently better at determining what is just. Moreover, it is to suggest that the legal concept of justice must be understood as “a formal universal,” which “necessarily does violence to what it abstracts” (Dimock, Residues 9). This apparent conflict between the formal and the quotidian, the abstract and the particular, prompts Martha Nussbaum, in her analysis of actual legal cases, to attribute all judicial attention paid to “history and social context” and all judicial expressions of empathy to “the literary” rather than the legal “imagination” (115). The novel, according to Nussbaum, not only describes but also creates sympathy by addressing “an implicit reader who shares with the characters certain hopes, fears, and general human concerns, and who for that reason is able to form bonds of identification and sympathy with them” (7).

Such defenses of the novel against the deadening abstractions of the law require us to concede that the novel, as a form, is always and inevitably devoted to the sanctity of individual experience and thus committed to the production of “bonds of identification and sympathy.” But just as there is no reason to imagine that legal reasoning excludes the personal and the particular (after all, legal cases depend on individual stories of harm or damage), there is no reason to imagine that novels are limited to producing an experiential model of personhood. Huckleberry Finn attempts to move away from a model of responsibility that requires such bonds and changes of heart by disarticulating the meaning of individual and collective action from questions of sympathy or intention. This disarticulation emerges most strikingly in the novel's investment in producing actions that can only be understood retrospectively. But it also emerges in Huck's failure ever to recognize his own role in the evasion—in his sense that it was Tom alone who “had gone and took all that trouble and bother to set a free nigger free!” (362). When it comes to describing the harm done to Jim and to assigning responsibility for it, the novel implies that Huck's experience—what he recognizes or fails to recognize about himself—is irrelevant. In the end, Huckleberry Finn is concerned less with the harms that individuals do to one another than with the harms done by systems. The novel ultimately envisions a form of collective or corporate responsibility for systematic harm that has nothing to do with individual experience.

To imagine that a novel, especially a novel about race, divorces collectivity from experience goes against a great deal of recent work that sees collectivity almost exclusively in terms of its effects on individual experience and individual identity. The collective, in other words, has been understood to extend the limits of experience, making it possible for individuals to imagine that they could, as part of a collective, remember things that they never experienced. Thus American Jews are enjoined to remember the Holocaust.¹⁰ Such work often literalizes the metaphor of the social body by claiming that membership in an ethnic group gives one access to certain memories that then serve as the sign of one's ethnicity. From this point of view, collective memory and collective guilt look like two sides of the same coin: one is imagined to inherit guilt for ancestral crimes in the same way that one inherits a cultural past. But Huckleberry Finn refuses to make collective responsibility contingent on guilt or on ghostly notions of inheritance. Instead, it attempts to extend the logic of corporate responsibility—responsibility not simply for harms you have caused but also for harms committed in your name—to the nation.

What it would mean to hold an entire nation accountable for harm is articulated most compellingly in the novel's final scene of compensation—the much discussed moment in which Tom hands Jim forty dollars for playing the part of prisoner “so patient, and doing it up so good” (365). Almost all critics of Huckleberry Finn—proponents and detractors alike—are united in their condemnation of Tom's attempt to settle the score. Critics as diverse as Holland and Arac have suggested that this forty-dollar payment is, at best, condescending and have seen in Tom only the manifestation of postwar racism. Not only is this payment a paltry sum in comparison with Tom and Huck's wealth, the argument goes, but it is hardly enough to give Jim a fair chance to support himself or to buy his family out of slavery. That the number forty is something of an obsession in this text suggests, however, that it represents more than a pittance. Twain seems to insist on the symbolic weight of the payment by referring to the number with astonishing frequency in the evasion sequence. The Duke, lying to Huck, tells him that Jim is being held “forty mile back here in the country, on the road to Lafayette” (275). Huck and Tom, plotting to sneak a ladder into Jim's cabin in a pie, claim that they had “rope enough for forty pies” (322). When Tom is injured, Jim agrees to stay with him: “No sah—I doan' budge a step out'n dis place, 'dout a doctor; not ef it's forty year!” (345). And the neighbors surveying the damage after the evasion imagine that the slaves have been plotting: “A dozen says you!—forty couldn't a done everything that's been done” (350).

This interest in the number gives Tom's payment an iconic quality; the payment appears as the culmination of a complicated circuit through the text, as a sum repeatedly given to and withheld from Jim. He first receives the money, indirectly, from the two slave catchers who offer Huck forty dollars after they refuse to help tow his raft to safety. The money then resurfaces with the King and Duke (who sell Jim for forty dollars) and reverts back to Jim when Tom pays him for his patience at the end. Both payments to Jim, it is worth noting, serve as damages for harm, even if the donor misunderstands the harm he has caused. If Tom's final gesture counts, then, it counts as an attempt to imagine what real compensation for a series of harms would look like. By linking these characters—Huck, the slave traders, the King and the Duke, the Phelpses and their neighbors—through their relation to Tom's largely symbolic payment, Twain ties the scene of compensation that ends his antebellum tale to the post-Reconstruction era of failed national promises.

Set against both the rise of negligence and the fall of the Freedmen's Bureau, Tom's offer begins to look like the antithesis of buying Jim off for a pittance and thus maintaining the fiction that he is property. It looks instead like formal, legal recognition of his personhood, of the obligation to compensate him for his injuries. Surely forty is meant to recall the promise of forty acres and a mule, which were to make the freedmen equal as well as free.¹¹ From this perspective, Tom's payment looks less like further injury to Jim—a refusal to see him as a man—than like a form of compensation much broader in its effects because it makes him representative of a group. In the post-Reconstruction era, Tom's payment would have recalled not only the promise of the Freedmen's Bureau to support freed slaves through the redistribution of confiscated or abandoned lands but also, and more forcefully, the government's total failure to fulfill its obligation. It was, at the time, the nation's most famous broken promise.¹²

This investment in collective forms of compensation also helps explain why Huck virtually disappears from the last third of the novel: Twain attempts to dissolve him, finally, not simply into Tom (whose name he takes) but also into the collective that Tom (always the mouthpiece for the authorities) has come to represent. Since Tom is the source of this collective voice, his final gesture, far from a dismissal of the economic problems faced by the freedmen, symbolically enacts the compensation that the nation withheld.¹³ And if, as I have been arguing, the force of the novel is to disarticulate accountability from intention, to make it possible to imagine guilt even in the absence of malice, then Tom's gesture is collective not because it stems from a shared experience of hatred reformed but because it offers Jim compensation for a series of systematic harms. To end the novel by recalling the promise of forty acres and a mule is thus to suggest a very different way of defining collective accountability. Instead of imagining a spiritual connection among disparate individuals, it imagines “some general view of the conduct which every one may fairly expect and demand from every other, whether that other has agreed to it or not” (Holmes 77). Like the law of negligence, which created (even as it tried to limit) new forms of corporate responsibility, Twain's novel imagines extending this version of the collective—the corralling of actions for which no individual is to blame—to the nation.

From this perspective, Huckleberry Finn represents Twain's way of rewriting history or, more accurately, of fantasizing a new racial history of postwar America. What remains puzzling is that his biography suggests a much more ambivalent position on and within post-Reconstruction racism than this reading of the ending might seem to allow. Assessing the political and economic situation of African Americans in 1885, Twain remarked, “We have ground the manhood out of them. The shame is ours, not theirs, and we should pay for it” (qtd. in Fishkin, “Racial Attitudes” 613). This “brutally succinct comment on racism,” according to Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “is a rare non-ironic statement of the personal anguish he felt regarding the destructive legacy of slavery” (613). Of course, as Fishkin has pointed out, Twain had a habit of contradicting himself. “What would it take,” she asks, “to acknowledge the complexity and diversity of this man?” (Lighting Out 127). One thing it might take is a clear-sighted sense of Twain's equivocations on the subject of race: he was both a critic of political discrimination and a fan of minstrel shows and “darky jokes” (Pettit 127), a defender of both George Washington Cable and Joel Chandler Harris.¹⁴Huckleberry Finn is full of these kinds of puzzles: why, for instance, does Jim reprimand Huck for his selfishness early in the novel and then silently bear his humiliations at the end? Tom Quirk, grappling with this problem, asks us to separate “Mark Twain, the imaginative artist” from “Samuel Clemens, U.S. citizen” (74-75) and thus attempts to rescue Twain from his own opinions. Smiley and Arac ask us to absolve the man by blaming the book.

The reading of the ending advanced in this essay depends on a recognition of Twain's commitment to black civil rights. But it would be a mistake, I think, simply to add Huckleberry Finn to the list of evidence in his favor. For the interest of the novel lies in its attempt to think about the problem of American racism in structural rather than personal terms and thus to shift the focus (not permanently but, perhaps, strategically) from belief to practice, from intentions to effects. The fantasy enacted by the novel demands that the ascription of responsibility be seen as a formal rather than a moral question and that the world accordingly begin to see the problem of the freedmen as political rather than moral. What Twain recognizes is the poverty of treating racial justice as a question of sentiment (requiring a “change of heart”) instead of as a question of structure (requiring new political policies). Unlike Cable, who frames his answer to the problem of postwar black civil rights in terms of “equity,” so that people might begin to judge on the basis of “the eternal principles of justice” (74), Twain frames his answer in the context of negligence, so that the individual's blindness and petty prejudice might be replaced by a system that overrides the accidents of personal opinion. Ultimately, the logic of Twain's novel—which fantasizes a political solution to Jim's troubles—works to override the deficiencies of its representations, in which Jim is often made a fool.

Since I have set aside until now the difference this reading makes to the issue of the novel's canonization, let me return briefly to the question of readership with which I began. It would be tempting to argue that, given Huckleberry Finn's critique of Jim Crow America and its fantasy of racial justice, those who have argued so strenuously against its continued presence in the canon and curriculum are wrong and must stop. Indeed, if my reading is persuasive, it counters Arac's and Smiley's arguments against the novel not only because it sees an interest in social effects where they see only liberal bad faith but also because it has the potential to change the way readers experience the novel. But taking the project of Huckleberry Finn seriously means taking effects seriously, and that must include bad as well as good effects that the novel has had on readers. To insist that effects, whether bad or good, are irrelevant or based on misreading is, as the novel itself illustrates, to misread the way in which objects and actions can produce profound social consequences that cannot be explained in terms of intentions. Huckleberry Finn is about both the difficulty and the necessity of valuing effects over intentions. Thus, one of Twain's implications is that no reading of the novel can put an end to the debate it has engendered. Taking effects on readers seriously means acknowledging that responses to the novel can be neither dictated nor replaced by a reading of the novel; even more important, it suggests that Huckleberry Finn provides the grounds for its own reassessment. Seen in this light, both proponents and detractors get the novel wrong. That Arac and Smiley have finally pointed us to the social effects of Twain's project should not, despite their best intentions, be understood as entailing its dismissal. Their use of Huckleberry Finn to oppose the politics of good intentions must count as a sign that we are beginning to get the novel right.

Notes

1. The responses in Harper's were uniformly hostile to Smiley. Although they raised different objections, most were troubled by her insistence on using contemporary standards of political correctness to criticize Twain. One example: “It's too bad Smiley couldn't judge Twain for the book he wrote rather than for his failure to meet her 1990s political agenda” (Pendleton 7).

2. Both polemics can be understood as extensions of Leo Marx's influential 1953 essay contending that American idolatry of Huckleberry Finn had gone so far that it had blinded readers to the novel's serious flaws. Against Lionel Trilling's and T. S. Eliot's well-known celebrations of Huckleberry Finn, Marx argued that the “burlesque” Phelps farm sequence destroyed the novel by undermining its moral seriousness. For recent attacks on the ending that follow Marx's logic, see Carton; Jehlen. For recent defenses of the ending, see Hill; Morrison.

3. When Holland's essay appeared in Glyph in 1979, James Cox had already made a version of this argument about the ending (although Cox sees the ending as an indictment of the complacent liberal reader). This tendency to read the novel in the light of post-Reconstruction politics has only gained steam in recent years, during which the imperative to historicize has been taken to mean addressing the moment in which the novel was written. One of the latest of these essays is by Christine Macleod, who interestingly extends Holland's claims without ever citing his essay. See also the essays collected in Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (Leonard, Tenney, and Davis), especially by Nilon; Barksdale; and Smith.

4. This impulse both to berate and to absolve Twain is shared by Arac and Smiley themselves. Arac claims, “I am not holding Twain solely responsible for such use of his book” (23). Smiley claims, “These are only authors, after all, and once a book is published the author can't be held accountable for its role in the culture. For that we have to blame the citizens themselves, or their teachers, or their teachers, the arbiters of critical taste” (66).

5. My discussion of tort law and the novel is indebted to Ferguson.

6. For another important contemporary treatise on torts, see Cooley. For legal histories of the period, see Friedman; Horwitz.

7. For an opposing view, see Goodman.

8. Twain continues this pattern in later stories like “Tom Sawyer Abroad,” “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians,” and “Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy” (the last two were unfinished), in which Huck and Tom endanger Jim so that they might have adventures rescuing him. It seems worth noting, however, that in the years following Huckleberry Finn (esp. after the Plessy decision, when almost all hope for racial justice evaporated), Twain does not address the problem of responsibility for harm in the same terms. The relevant legal context had changed. In “Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy,” for example, Jim is falsely accused of murder and threatened with execution; he is thus no longer a victim in need of legal remedy but a victim of the criminal law.

9. Wai Chee Dimock has suggested that this sense of universal liability must be understood as an extension of contractual relations. Yet to imagine that one could calculate responsibilities as one calculates the benefits of entering a contract is to miss what is most important about the form of responsibility created by negligence: it is nonnegotiable. One cannot, generally speaking, contract out of liability. See Dimock's “Economy.” For an account of the late-nineteenth-century American novel in relation to contract, see Thomas.

10. There is a vast archive that sees the Jewish relation to the Holocaust in terms of memory. Some of the most interesting recent examples are Hansen; Hartman; and Young. For a critique of this position, see Michaels.

11. Richard Gollin and Rita Gollin link Tom's claim that it would take thirty-seven years to free Jim to Lincoln's suggestion during the war that the slaves be freed by the year 1900 (thirty-seven years later). Their argument that this number ties Twain's text to the history it seems to be evading remains relevant to the current debate over the novel and to my account.

12. To say that the nation's offer of forty acres and a mule functioned as a promise suggests that it was a kind of contract. But not all promises are contracts. In this case, there was not even the pretense that the freedmen and the government were equal partners.

13. For a history of the Freedmen's Bureau, see Foner.

14. For an interesting account of Twain's use of ethnic caricature, see Wonham.

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