SOURCE: "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Play Theory, and the Critic's Job of Work," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, Spring, 1988, pp. 357-65.

Critics shy away from belabored readings of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for several understandable reasons: the denser, richer textures of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn loom ahead; scholarship about Twain's sources has dominated discussion of the novel; and perhaps most important of all, there is a legitimate fear that a work celebrating Play will be forever spoiled by too much heavy-handed critical "work."

Skeptical students are not the only ones who worry about these matters more than they should, who wonder if critics are not creeping up on this innocent text like net-wielders after a lovely butterfly. Perhaps it is time to admit freely that important questions lie just behind these resistances. Can deep reading and an idyll co-exist? How might the circumstances of its composition help us read the novel? What can—and should—a literary critic say about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?

One tack has at least the virtue of making its appeal to what strikes most readers as lying at the very center of Twain's vision—namely, an extended investigation into, and celebration of, play. All one need do is add the word "theory" to the proceedings and if that "one" is a critic, he or she is in business. Play theory has, after all, a very with-it ring and while there are those who might object that an oxymoron has been slipped into the discussion, those who might argue that talk about "play"—especially as Twain conceived of the phenomenon—requires a dab of horse sense rather than a gob of theory, the fact is that play theory has claims on our attention that, say, theories blowing around New Haven do not.

That much said, however, several caveats are in order. Nothing degenerates into the meaningless more quickly than the notion that "play" is omnipresent, unless, of course, one has had some innings with those who insist that every event, from a white, middle-class male professor assigning The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to a sparrow's unfortunate fall, is, by definition, political. As Bruce Michaelson shrewdly points out, "There are some theorists on play who claim that virtually every human act, or for that matter every cosmic event, is a gesture in some sort of grand game." Such broad definitions are so broad as to be meaningless. If it is true that everything is a game, then it is equally true that "nothing" is a game. As Huck Finn might say, "It's enough to give you the fan-tods." It is also how the next generation of deconstructions—if there is one—will be born.

Moreover, play theory will become an exercise in the obvious if it is merely applied to those scenes that, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, come equipped with Twain's narrative commentary. For better or worse, the fence-painting episode has moved from the pages of Twain's novel to our collective unconscious. Long before we heard the term "reverse psychology" in a lecture hall, we knew how the game worked and many of us had tried our hand at substituting younger siblings for Tom's gang and dinner dishes for a fence needing whitewash. To be sure, Twain had help—from Norman Rockwell, from versions of Tom on stage and screen, from the culture at large. Readers and non-readers alike know about Tom and his playful scam in the same mythopoeic way that they know about Little Eva crossing the ice or about Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi on a raft. The image is as indelible as its "moral" is self-evident. Twain, who could no more resist the itch to play Philosopher than he could the itch to engineer a Tom Sawyer-like effect, put it this way:

[Tom Sawyer] had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he could now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a treadmill is work, while rolling tenpins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement.

Homo Ludens (1950), Johan Huizinga's seminal study in the play element of culture, says much the same thing: "Play to order is no longer play… By this quality of freedom alone, play marks itself off from the natural process." In this regard, Judith Fetterley makes a telling point when she compares the respective adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn this way:

One of Tom's defining characteristics in Tom Sawyer, succinctly dramatized in the whitewashing episode, is his capacity to convert all work into play. In Huckleberry Fin the process is reversed: what should be play becomes work.

I shall return to other reversals in a moment, ones that speak to the shape and ring of Twain's canon, but for the moment let me concentrate on the difference between play that reigns supreme, that neither threatens nor is threatening, and play that turns cruel, turns nightmarish and, in adult hands, turns deadly. I am speaking, of course, about what makes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer a boy's book, one that, in George P. Elliott's wonderful phrase, turns everything—school, work, money, even sex—into a "kind of vacationing" and the darker rhythms of moral consequence that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn investigates. It is not so much that the Tom Sawyer of his book is a lovable scamp, a boy so full of life, and of devilment, that all of us—even the beleagured Aunt Polly—finally prefer him to the bloodless goody three shoes called Sid, but, rather, that Tom's itch for "adventure," his abiding sense of play, transmogrifies a dull St. Petersburg into a world more attractive.

In short, Tom is precisely the sort of rapscallion adults love, and secretly wish they could be. Today, it is the ritual of "Tom Sawyer's Gang"—complete with bone-chilling oaths, bloodcurdling screams and forbidden pleasures of smoking; tomorrow, the Moose Lodge! Put another way, Tom Sawyer livens up his sleepy Missouri town by superimposing the best, and the worst, of the Romantic tradition into its pedestrian, workaday landscape. Cervantes, Alexander Dumas, the Arabian Nights' Entertainments … these are the fragments Tom Sawyer has shored against his boredom.

For Tom, going by the Romantic book—what Huizinga calls the "play concept"—is an activity essentially unrelated to the getting-and-spending that comprises an adult day. Indeed, it is this boyish imagination that Twain both celebrates and allows to circumscribe the dreamy world we enter when we read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. As Huizinga suggests:

All play has its rules. They determine what "holds" in the temporary world circumscribed by play. The rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt … as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play world collapses. The game is over. The umpire's whistle breaks the spell and sets "real" life going again.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is, among other things, the umpire's whistle blown, the spell of play broken. Real life—in this case, a world where people tote guns rather than lath swords; where going by the romantic book means shooting down a defenseless drunk; where, as Huck rightly says, "People can be mighty cruel to one another"—reasserts itself in deadly earnest.

To be sure, Twain's attitudes about romance's power were as divided as his pseudonym. He could blame Walter Scott for the Civil War and take Fenimore Cooper to humorous task, but it is also true that Romanticism had an attraction he could never entirely shake. Tom Sawyer's penchant for style, for gathering up steam toward some grand effect, found similar expression in the public face Twain wore as lecturer, humorist, writer, world-class celebrity. Like any artist, he made what he did look easy—in his case, by yoking the playful with the preachy. The discipline, the sweat, in a word, the work was less obvious.

Which brings me to reversals of a different order. The arc of Twain's canon—from The Innocents Abroad to Roughing It, from Life on the Mississippi to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—moves steadily backwards, not only in chronology, but also in a need to recapture his childhood by reimagining it. One could argue, of course, that there is playfulness aplenty in Twain's debunking of travel book pieties in The Innocents Abroad or in his construction of a tenderfoot-as-schlemiel persona in Roughing It, but the "playful" is not synonymous with Play. Twain is one of American literature's great counter-punchers, which is to say, he took a great delight in letting artificial, highfalutin' language swing away at airy nothingness and then in knocking it flat with a well-aimed American lick. Romantic expectations were especially good candidates for Twain's playful deflations. The Scotty Briggs of "Buck Fanshaw's Funeral" who says: "Why, pard, he's dead!" is but one example; there are countless others, stretching from an apprentice piece like "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter" to final ones like "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."

Play, I would argue, was another matter altogether. Huizinga argues that the nineteenth century "lost many of the play-elements so characteristic of former ages." Always the cultural anthropologist, he attributes this fact to byproducts of the Industrial Revolution:

The 19th century [Huizinga insists] seems to leave little room for play. Tendencies running directly counter to all that we mean by play have become increasingly dominant. Even in the 18th century utilitarianism, prosaic efficiency and the bourgeois ideal of social welfare—all fatal to the Baroque—had bitten deep into society. These tendencies were exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution and its conquests in the field of technology. Work and production became the ideal, and then the idol, of the age. All Europe donned the boiler-suit.

However many "faults" Twain had—and the list of crimes, both real and imagined, was very long—being a Luddite is not among them. Like Franklin, Twain was a tinkerer, a believer in the proposition that gadgets of all kinds could make life better. Unlike Franklin, however, Twain was largely a flop—sometimes spectacularly, as in the case of the ill-fated Paige typesetting machine; sometimes modestly, as in his self-pasting scrap book (which actually turned a small profit) or the Mark Twain History Game (which did not).

In Twain's case, such dreams were fueled by the prospect of becoming rich, a condition that would allow him to pay his evermounting bills without the need either to lecture or to write. It is no small paradox, then, that lecturing and writing—both difficult, both draining, both products of dogged work on Twain's part—were the only activities he could finally depend on. His alternative careers—as a printer, a silver miner, a steamboat pilot, a journalist—provided material for the platform lecture and the blank page.

And with virtually each lecture, each book, Twain moved steadily backwards to Hannibal. "Old Times on the Mississippi," a series of articles that appeared originally in the Atlantic Monthly of 1875, is, in this sense, inextricably linked to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer published in the following year. Here, memory and desire mingle with History and technological advance—and always in ways that deeply divided and only settled, if indeed they are, in the making of fiction.

Not only was the prospect of becoming a steamboatman the "one permanent ambition" among Twain's boyhood friends, but it was also the one profession Twain presumably valued above all others:

If I have seemed to love my subject [Twain remarks in Life on the Mississippi], it is no surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is plain; a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that ever lived in the earth.

To be sure, the Civil War and the locomotive scotched that career long before Twain's "glory story" of how a wide-eyed cub became a sharp-eyed pilot could sink into the tedium, the work, if you will, of trip after trip along the same stretches of the Mississippi.

For Twain, the issue is complicated and inextricably tied to his notion of power. For all of Twain's relentless attacks on Romanticism—whether it comes dressed in the costumes of Walter Scott's historical romances or it stalks through imaginary forests wearing the mocassins of Fenimore Cooper—it was the grip of Romance, its sheer power—that held him spellbound. Bixby's hard lessons make piloting itself possible, but they come with a price tag. And we are hardly surprised when Twain, being Twain, wonders if the assets outweigh the liabilities:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!

Unlike the world of Tom Sawyer, where "swaps" are restricted to dead cats and hoop sticks, "acquisitions" in the adult world are fraught with compromise. Twain found it easy to wax romantically elegiac about piloting and, later, to turn downright "philosophical" about Life with a very large L, but playfulness had a way of eluding him, except as a matter of will and childhood memory.

There is more to be said about this aspect of "play" in Twain because one could argue that a "willed playfulness" is also a desperate playfulness, that behind the dream of Tom Sawyer's fantastic play lies the nightmare of Huck Finn's death-haunted life. Henri Bergson argues that "the comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art." Bergson's savvy remark tells us much about, say, the Benjamin Franklin who set about the task of constructing [inventing?] his Autobiography and by oblique angles, about the Mark Twain who could only free himself from the worries of "self-preservation" in the guise of Tom Sawyer, and in the mode of Play. Unlike Franklin, Twain is so busy settling old scores, so consumed with self-serving, that his Autobiography strikes us as more "ledger" than legerdemain.

The image of unfettered freedom, of a radical independence, however, remained. One of its faces belongs to the Tom Sawyer who tests out the possibilities of Play in a sleepy, altogether conventional Protestant culture; another, of course, belongs to the Huck Finn Twain himself described as modeled on Tom Blankenship: "the only really independent person—boy or man—in the community." In a nineteenth-century world that equated progress with the boiler suit and an efficiency expert's watch, Adventures of Tom Sawyer is, I would submit, an extended counterargument on behalf of liberation-as-Play. Twain, who made the cause of freedom his life's work, alternately hoped and despaired about the role that technology, that "gadgets," might play in the pursuit of that happiness he called Progress. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain tests out the possibility of armor-as-boiler suit and discovers that it will, sadly enough, not suffice. In his case, the dynamo destroys not only the Virgin—that is, the established Church, with its legacy of superstition and its abuses of power—but also the very notion of human betterment. We are left with mountains of charred bodies and bitter laughter.

By contrast, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer insists that play can thwart figures of adult authority—parents, preachers, teachers—and certified villains like Injun Joe. The novel not only brought Twain back to the locale, and the source, of his greatest achievements, but it also reminds us—critics and common readers alike—of what Play can be, and how important that commodity still is.