Читать книгу Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Alan Gribben - Страница 6

Alan Gribben

Mark Twain originally envisioned a cohesiveness between his most celebrated novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Nevertheless, ever since the mid-twentieth century these two works have customarily been separated by publishers, libraries, and bookstores, with Tom Sawyer relegated to “Juvenile” or “Young Adult” catalogs and Huckleberry Finn elevated to “Adult” lists, as though they have almost no relationship to each other. Literature teachers, too, understandably tend to impose a division between Tom Sawyer, with its limited village environs, and Huckleberry Finn, which features an eventful journey by raft in search of freedom. Severance of the two books has proceeded in spite of evidence that Twain wrote the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn soon after completing the manuscript for Tom Sawyer, and the fact that Huckleberry Finn announces in the sequel’s very first sentence, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.’” Moreover, characters and settings are shared by both novels.

Twain even attempted to ensure that sample copies of Tom Sawyer were carried by his “canvassers” who fanned out through neighborhoods and farmlands to take book orders for Twain’s forthcoming Huckleberry Finn. (For nearly thirty years Mark Twain’s works were sold only through these “subscription” agents and could not be obtained in retail bookstores, a lucrative but somewhat disreputable practice for an author of his stature.) Twain recommended to his publisher that customers purchasing both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn be given a reduced price on the set. However, since Twain had left the press that brought out Tom Sawyer in 1876—and was rebelliously publishing Huckleberry Finn under the imprint of his own company—tangled negotiations with his previous firm prevented this joint sale of the volumes from materializing.

Owing to difficulties in resolving plot developments and to other interruptions, the sequel to Tom Sawyer was delayed for eight long years. The hitches in Twain’s composition of Huckleberry Finn are comprehensible when his basic plot dilemma is grasped: somehow the author had to move a fleeing boy and a runaway slave farther and farther south on the Mississippi River below St. Louis—in other words, down to the part of the river with which Mark Twain had become familiar as a steamboat pilot. Yet logically the slave (and therefore his helper Huckleberry Finn) should want to head north toward the “free” states where human slavery had already been abolished by the 1840s, the decade in which Twain’s novel takes place. Twain solved part of this predicament by having Huck and Jim become lost in a dense fog at night and drift past the Ohio River inlet that led north.

The second inspiration took longer to occur to Twain, but eventually he came up with the idea of having the raft on which Huck and Jim had lived so contentedly be commandeered by two rapscallions who, in a mockery of European titles, grandly style themselves the “King” and the “Duke.” That solution put Twain over the largest hurdle and he then managed to wrap up the novel by reintroducing Tom Sawyer, thus returning to the “boy book” playacting which had characterized Tom Sawyer and carried over into the early chapters of Huckleberry Finn. These serial stages of development meant that the volume did not issue in the United States until 1885. By that time even his most loyal readers had trouble thinking of the books as forming a seamless story, with the result that customers usually elected to order Huckleberry Finn in a green cover rather than the available blue cloth that would have matched the cover of the earlier Tom Sawyer. Today most people think of them as entirely separate works.

The NewSouth Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Whether considered together or apart, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn do have one thing in common: racial slurs in their contents have increasingly presented a problem for teachers, students, and general readers. The editor’s decision to eliminate these epithets in Huckleberry Finn is likely to remain controversial. Quite simply, he hopes to introduce this book to a wider readership than it can currently enjoy. Twain, it should be remembered, was endeavoring to accurately depict the prevailing social attitudes along the Mississippi River Valley during the 1840s by repeatedly employing a linguistic corruption of “Negro” in reference to African American slaves. In Huckleberry Finn barely educated boys and uneducated adult characters in Missouri and Arkansas casually toss about this racial insult a total of 214 times (with the novel’s table of contents adding another one).

The n-word possessed, then as now, demeaning implications more vile than any insult that can be applied to other racial groups. There is no equivalent slur in the English language. As a result, with every passing decade this affront appears to gain rather than lose its impact. Even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this pejorative racial appellative. In the 1870s and 1880s, of course, Twain scarcely had to concern himself about the feelings of African American readers. That population group was too occupied with trying to recover from the degradation of slavery and the institution of Jim Crow segregation policies to bother about an objectionable vocabulary choice in a popular book.

When Samuel L. Clemens (who would adopt the pen name “Mark Twain” in 1863) was growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, his views on slavery were in keeping with those of his fellow villagers. His father, significantly, had owned as many slaves as he could afford. In a letter written when he was seventeen, Sam Clemens mockingly alluded to Northern people attempting to free slaves as “infernal abolitionists” (August 23, 1853). But as an adult, after he had traveled widely and read more, he courted and married (in 1870) a woman whose New York State family had vehemently opposed slavery long before the Civil War. Twain ultimately made an unreserved turnabout from his younger attitudes, so much so that in 1874 he wrote a profoundly touching account of how the slave system had cruelly split up African American families—“A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.” A similar impulse led Twain to portray Huckleberry Finn as (in Twain’s summation in one of his notebooks) a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”—that is to say, someone reared amid such pervasive prejudice that he had a hard time seeing through its premises. This conception has become a heavier and heavier burden for the book to carry ever since the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s erased many racial impediments and sensitized succeeding generations of Americans to the manner in which language can affect thinking.

We might recognize Twain’s incentive as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults nonetheless repulse modern-day readers. Twain’s two books do not deserve ever to join that list of literary “classics” he once humorously defined as books “which people praise and don’t read,” yet their long-lofty status has come under question in recent decades. In this connection, it seems relevant to remember that Twain habitually read aloud his day’s writings to an audience gathered on the porch of his summer retreat overlooking Elmira, New York, watching and listening for reactions to each manuscript page. He likewise took cues about adjusting his tone from lecture platform appearances, which provided him with direct responses to his diction. As a notoriously commercial writer who watched for every opportunity to enlarge the mass market for his works, he would presumably have been quick to adapt his diction if he could have prophesied how today’s audiences recoil at racial slurs in a culturally altered country.

The Editor’s Story

Through a succession of first-hand experiences, this editor gradually reached the conclusion that an optional epithet-free edition of Twain’s books is needed today. For nearly forty years I have led college classes, bookstore forums, and library reading groups in detailed discussions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in California, Texas, New York, and Alabama, and I always found myself unable to utter the racist put-downs spoken by numerous characters, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I invariably substituted the word “slave” for Twain’s ubiquitous n-word whenever I read any passages aloud. Students and audience members seemed to find this expedient to be preferable, and I could detect a visible sense of relief each time, as though a nagging problem with the text had been addressed. Indeed, numerous communities have dropped Huckleberry Finn as required reading in public schools owing to its offensive racial language and have quietly moved the title to voluntary reading lists. The American Library Association lists this novel among the most frequently challenged pre-twentieth-century books across the nation.

Over the years I have taken note of valiant and judicious defenses of the prevalence of the n-word in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as proposed by eminent writers, editors, and scholars, including those of Michael Patrick Hearn, Nat Hentoff, Randall Kennedy, and Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua. Hearn, for example, correctly notes that “Huck says it out of habit, not malice” (22). Apologists quite validly encourage readers to intuit the irony behind Huck’s ignorance and focus on Twain’s larger satiric goals. Nonetheless, Langston Hughes made a forceful, lasting argument for omitting this incendiary word from all literature, however well-intentioned an author. “Ironically or seriously, of necessity for the sake of realism, or impishly for the sake of comedy, it doesn’t matter,” explained Hughes. African Americans, Hughes wrote, “do not like it in any book or play whatsoever, be the book or play ever so sympathetic. . . . They still do not like it” (268-269).

During the 1980s, educator John H. Wallace unleashed a fierce and protracted dispute by denouncing Huckleberry Finn as “the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written.” In 1984 I had to walk past a picket line of African American parents outside a scholarly conference in Pennsylvania that was commemorating, among other achievements in American humor, the upcoming centenary anniversary of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. James S. Leonard, then the editor of the newsletter for the Mark Twain Circle of America, conceded in 2001 that the racist language and unflattering stereotypes of slaves in Huckleberry Finn can constitute “real problems” in certain classroom settings. Another scholar, Jonathan Arac, has urged that students be prompted to read other, more unequivocally abolitionist works rather than this one novel that has been consecrated as the mandatory literary statement about American slavery. The once-incontestable belief that the reading of this book at multiple levels of schooling ought to be essential for every American citizen’s education is cracking around the edges.

My personal turning-point on the journey toward this present NewSouth Edition was a lecture tour I undertook after writing the introduction for a National Endowment for the Arts-funded “Big Read” edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer designed to interest younger readers in older American literature. As I spoke about the novel to reading groups of adults and teenagers in small towns and in larger cities, I followed my customary habit of substituting the word “slave” when reading the characters’ dialogue aloud. In several towns I was taken aside after my talk by earnest middle and high school teachers who lamented the fact that they no longer felt justified in assigning either of Twain’s boy books—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—because of the hurtful n-word. Here was further proof that this single debasing label is overwhelming every other consideration about Huckleberry Finn, whereas what this novel has to offer readers hardly depends upon that one indefensible designation.

Word Exchanges

My understanding about this situation crystallized into a definite resolve. Unquestionably Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can be enjoyed just as deeply and authentically if readers are not obliged to confront the n-word on so many pages. Consequently in this edition I have elected to translate each usage of the n-word to read “slave” instead, since the term “slave” is closest in meaning and implication. Although the text loses some of the derisive spin that the n-word carries, that price seems small compared to the revolting effect that the more offensive word has on readers these days. Moreover, slavery is recognized globally as an affront to humanity.

I had come to believe that a significant number of school teachers, college instructors, and general readers might welcome the option of an alternate edition of Twain’s novel that spares the reader all contact with a racial slur that never seems to lose its vitriol. Despite occasional efforts of rap and hip hop musicians to appropriate it and well-meaning but usually futile (from my own experience) endeavors by classroom teachers to inoculate their students against it by using Huckleberry Finn as a springboard to discuss its etymology and cultural history, the n-word remains inarguably the most inflammatory word in the English language. The synonym “slave” seems to express adequately the cultural racism that Twain sought to convey, as in Huck Finn’s report to Aunt Sally Phelps in Chapter 32 that a steamboat explosion had “killed a slave,” to which she responds heartlessly, “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

This word—“slave”—also usefully reminds readers of the historical fact that ten percent of the Missouri population in 1850 consisted of African American slaves. In the contiguous state of Arkansas (where the latter part of Huckleberry Finn is set) the percentage was twenty-six, and that percentage rose drastically in the Deep South, with fifty-five percent of the residents of Mississippi consisting of enslaved workers. By 1860, four million of the twelve million people living in the Southern states were slaves who owned neither their bodies nor their labor.

Similarly, the editor has rendered a racially derogatory label for Native Americans as “Indian” in order to assist in retiring another antiquated and insulting word (even though the very name “Indian” itself commemorates a misnomer, perpetuated by erring explorers and cartographers eager for a new trade route to India). Presumably a merely informative racial sobriquet will inflict less injury on the descendants of a native people who were endeavoring to survive the ravages of diseases and the onslaught of settlers and buffalo-hunters that had decimated their ways of life during the era in which this novel was published.

Reevaluating the “Boy Book”

At the time that Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Huckleberry Finn, first appeared, the line between juvenile and adult fiction was far from definite. Adults and young people often shared their reading materials. The spectacular success of the Harry Potter series with broad audiences reminds us of that formerly blurry distinction between juvenile and adult literature. For over a decade, bookstores and movie theaters teemed with crowds of children, teenagers, and parents each night that a new Harry Potter installment was released. Similarly, more than a century and a quarter earlier, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories in 1865 and 1872 were hardly restricted to young readers.

All the same, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn extended the boundaries of a subgenre combining fiction and autobiography that would come to be known as the American “boy book.” The very idea that a boy’s thought-processes and actions were worthy of recording in a novel was itself still an innovation in the nineteenth century, despite Charles Dickens’s steps in this direction. Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), an English writer and reformer, is credited with launching the investigations of boyish minds with Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), largely based on Hughes’s remembrances of loyalties and cruelties at Rugby School. It seems probable that Twain’s memories of early day Hannibal were jogged by the now-forgotten Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s semi-autobiographical The Story of a Bad Boy (1869), the first true “boy book” in the United States, whose sentimental incidents were told somewhat archly. Aldrich’s Tom Bailey and his chums slip out of their homes at night, coalesce into a small gang, and play pranks on the upright citizens of their New England town. Twain scoffed at Aldrich’s Bad Boy on December 27, 1869, writing to the woman he would soon marry, Olivia Langdon, “I could not admire the volume much.” Nevertheless in 1872 he began to experiment with the possibility of composing a work about his own Missouri boyhood. He aborted that effort, of which only a fragment known as “Boy’s Manuscript” survives, but in 1874 he got the novel underway that would rival and long outlast Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s creation, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which had a protagonist named “Tom,” just like Aldrich’s book). Other male writers such as William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, and Booth Tarkington would follow in Twain’s wake by recounting the fun and the terrors of boyhood, but only Harold Frederic’s evocative tales and Stephen Crane’s poignant Whilomville Stories (1900) deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Twain’s works.

Tom Sawyer departed from literary conventions by jabbing at clichéd children’s books, notifying readers that the age of Realism had arrived in America. Twain had fun at the expense of Romantic icons by having Tom Sawyer ludicrously misconstrue nearly all of his revered literary “authorities.” Twain developed this humorous tactic more fully in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Tom misguidedly quotes his outmoded Romantic books relentlessly and, in Chapter 13, a sinking steamboat is named Walter Scott after the deceased but still esteemed author of Ivanhoe, Redgauntlet, Kenilworth, and other historical novels.

Critics’ Objections to Huckleberry Finn

Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was more ambitious in plot than its predecessor and brilliantly allowed a single boy to narrate his own tale. All the same, the vast majority of commentators tend to express dissatisfaction with the manner in which Twain opened and concluded his masterpiece. This disappointment is even voiced by many of the novel’s most ardent admirers. The failing, for the preponderance of scholarly critics, is that Twain insisted on reinserting Tom Sawyer into the first three and last eleven chapters of the forty-three-chapter novel, thereby giving the book a subtle structural symmetry and avoiding a tragic climax. Academic critics also have two additional cavils. While they applaud the interracial friendship that develops in Huckleberry Finn between the African American adult and the parentless white boy, they are bothered by Jim’s ungrammatical dialect and concerned about Huck’s periodic sense of superiority to him. Above all, however, they deplore Tom Sawyer’s tomfoolery in the concluding “evasion” (Tom’s term for it) sequence of Chapters 33 to 40 when he subjects Jim to absurd and time-consuming requirements rather than liberating the imprisoned man. These three objections—Twain’s handling of the “evasion” chapters, Jim’s speech patterns, and Jim’s relationship to Huck and Tom—merit thoughtful consideration.

The Pitfalls of Literary Burlesque

More than anything else, readers’ pronounced distaste for the so-called “evasion” episode at the end of Huckleberry Finn amounts to a rejection of Twain’s penchant for literary burlesque—a technique of ridicule by absurd exaggeration that he had mastered early in his writing career and repeatedly returned to in his sketches, short stories, and longer works. In 1859 Clemens had burlesqued the river reports of Isaiah Sellers, a veteran pilot, and the literary hoaxes of his Western years, such as “Petrified Man” (1862) and “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson” (1863) relied, in the former case, on the frequency of fossil finds and (in the latter instance) took advantage of the bloodthirsty credulity of frontier journalism. In the mature phases of his career, he often turned this literary form against authors he basically admired; literary burlesque supported, for example, his ingenious spoof of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). The Duke and the King’s mishmash of Shakespearean plays in Chapters 20 and 21 of Huckleberry Finn likewise comes across as hilarious inasmuch as those garbled but immortal lines from the Bard remain familiar to us; the jumbled treatment of them is brief and delectable. But when Twain took aim elsewhere (in other works) at books for which he had less respect—as, for example, his burlesques of detective Allan Pinkerton’s boasting memoirs about his exploits or Twain’s mockeries of Arthur Conan Doyle’s infallibly ratiocinative Sherlock Holmes—the results often failed to endure as successful literature.

The chapters that wind up Huckleberry Finn’s journey fall somewhere between these examples in terms of their effectiveness. Although the prompt arrival of Tom Sawyer at the exact farm where Huck and Jim have landed asks us to accept a monumental coincidence, this happenstance is really not much more incredible than Abel Magwitch’s secret funding of Pip’s rise in social status in Dickens’s Great Expectations during the period when Miss Havisham appears to be favoring him. Timely rescues and discoveries of family connections were taken for granted in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, since plot-line coincidences were a well-established literary convention of the nineteenth century. Roger Chillingworth arrives in the Puritan colony just in time to witness Hester’s humiliating climb upon the scaffold in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Lambert Strether glimpses two people at a revealingly intimate moment in James’s The Ambassadors, and the saloon safe fails to lock in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie on the day that George Hurstwood is contemplating a fantasy of leaving Chicago. To recall anticipatory examples, one need only contemplate the number of fortuitous or calamitous coincidences in the works of Richardson, Defoe, Smollett, and other trend-setting practitioners of the novel.

A far more profound difficulty for the twenty-first-century reader is the fact that Twain gambled (and lost) on a bet that future generations would be familiar with, and enthralled by, a literary fad of his day that evaporated during the twentieth century. To furnish literary models for Tom Sawyer’s notions about proper prison escapes, Twain set out to burlesque a combined number of “dungeon” books that had chronicled the isolation, suffering, and escapes of prisoners who languished in damp and dreary cells in England and Europe. William Ainsworth’s The Tower of London (1840) was among the novels treating confinement and the prospect of imminent death. Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837) recorded lurid details about the Bastille. Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1839) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) added elements of irony and revenge to tales of forced incarceration. Baron Friedrich von der Trenck’s Life was translated from German between 1788 and 1793 with American editions that followed; Trenck’s memoirs supplied Twain with ideas about taming a mouse, using a penknife to dig, making a rope from bed sheets, sawing a bed-leg, and encountering a moat. Twain is on record as being fascinated by the memoirs of Casanova, a copy of which he acquired in 1879 and which provided details about imprisonment and escapes. Likewise Twain referred to Benvenuto Cellini’s Life (1728), a chronicle of banishment and frequent flight amid the beauties of the Renaissance, as “that most entertaining of books.” Joseph X. B. Saintine’s Picciola, a novel published in 1836, told the sad story of a man condemned to solitary imprisonment whose sanity and health are flickeringly kept alive by a plant seed that drifts in through the window of his cell and grows into a blossoming flower; he carefully tends and waters this single point of focus in his otherwise claustrophic cell.

Although today’s readers may possibly have seen films based on Dumas’s exciting novels, our age is otherwise ignorant of this once-popular craze for stories of the horrors of captivity and the fortitude and cunning of dungeon prisoners. The appetite for these tales died out soon after the success of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894). Consequently the humor of Twain’s lampoons of his bygone sources seems pointlessly exaggerated and drawn out. My personal experiments with distributing samples of these dungeon narratives to my college students indicate that those textual aids can resurrect the comedy and enable students to find the conclusion of Huckleberry Finn more comprehensible and enjoyable, but this exploration can only take place in a classroom setting. Ordinary readers cannot be expected to trace the background of Twain’s attempt at burlesquing formerly popular stories.

What, then, are readers disappointed by Tom’s reappearance and his insistence on resuming his jejune games of pretending (in this instance based on his romanticized notions of dungeon literature) to do about the ending of a work they otherwise cherish? Perhaps it would help to consider Mark Twain’s situation as he came to this juncture of his novel. He had started out to write another “boy book,” a sequel to his relatively well-received novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but then he had the fortuitous inspiration to let this outcast boy narrate his own story. Having rehearsed the same juvenile antics that characterized Tom Sawyer in the first three chapters of this new book, Twain abruptly introduces the sinister figure of Huck Finn’s father in Chapter 4 and the novel takes a far more serious turn. In Chapter 8, Huck, hiding out on Jackson’s Island, encounters Jim, Miss Watson’s runaway slave. For the next twenty-four chapters, critics agree that it is as if, ensconced in his airy little octagonal study atop the hill at Quarry Farm and looking down on the shining Chemung River snaking its way past the town of Elmira below, Twain held a muse-driven pen transmitting divine bolts of lightning from the heavens; he wrote, in several separated stretches, a story immensely better than he had probably intended and far superior to any boy book that had preceded or would follow this masterpiece of fiction. But when the raft landed again and Jim was sold by the unscrupulous King, Twain, a master of short stories and newspaper and magazine sketches but an author invariably troubled by the intricacies of plotting a novel, had to confront the fact that he had moved Huck’s tale deeper into a South where slaves were more numerous and that institution firmly entrenched. He still envisioned this as a companion piece to the earlier, lightsome The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, despite the problems that had delayed its completion, and so he veered instinctively away from any possibility of a gloomy ending.

Would the book have been more authentic and less criticized if Twain had shown an inclination to face up to the realities of slavery in the 1840s and to the unlikelihood that Jim could have returned to St. Petersburg as a free man who owned himself? John Seeley tested this hypothesis in 1970 by rewriting Twain’s novel as The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; in that version we are spared the Phelps farm episode and the book-addled reemergence of Tom Sawyer, because Jim has died a heroic death attempting to swim across the river in manacles. Although Seelye’s tour de force was an enormous sensation when it issued, it hardly became the preferred version and was seldom invoked after a few years passed. Was Mark Twain not then correct, after all, in appending eleven fairly brief chapters at the end which in effect allowed his readers to decompress from the “raft” chapters that had gone before and returned the story to the level of the three “boy book” chapters of horseplay that had commenced the narrative? These closing chapters form a bookend matching not only the opening chapters but also the tone of the preceding novel. He avoided any horrific ending for Huckleberry Finn—the Boggs shooting and the Shepherson-Grangerford massacre had given us an adequate taste of violence—and got to relive and share with readers the sights, sounds, food, and general atmosphere of blissful summers at his uncle John Quarles’s farm in interior Missouri. Tom Sawyer’s exaggerated dictates may not be what most readers would prefer, but they are really no more outlandish (and much less harmful) than the nonsensical claims uttered by the King and the Duke aboard the raft and at the Wilks family’s home, or the insane feuds of warring patriarchal clans that Huck witnessed, or the bitter glimpses of human nature to which Huck was exposed along the river. The novel comes to a soft, safe end of the voyage, like a raft bumping gently and finally against the land at its eventual destination. The lightning in Twain’s pen had departed, but his memories of a Missouri farm and his determination to keep the narrative within the perimeters of a boy book took over and guided him into port.

The Magnetism of Folk Speech

Jim speaks with an untutored dialect because it was against the law in nearly all slave states (including Missouri) to allow slaves to attend school or otherwise learn to read and write. Penalties for conferring the gift of literacy on a slave were quite severe by the 1830s and usually consisted of substantial prison sentences as well as fines. Huck’s own education has been so hit and miss that in numerous passages his English is not much more standard than Jim’s. Yet both Jim and Huck are sufficiently communicative when they need to be, and their phrasing is often memorable. Huck reels off scattered bits of prose poetry (“it most froze me,” “ain’t got no show,” “lazying around,” “the song-birds just going it!,” “kind of clogged up the air”) and effortlessly invents examples of onomatopoeia (the “screaking” of rafts’ sweeps, “bull-frogs a-cluttering,” axes going “k’chunk!”). Twain appears to be saying that rules of grammar cannot harness the power and aesthetic of genuine folk speech. Jim hits the right note when it matters greatly, as in Chapter 16 at the moment that Huck is wrestling with his conscience and Jim calls out (just before Huck meets two slave-catchers): “Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de only fren’ ole Jim’s got, now.”

Jim’s Acquiescence to Huck and Tom

As for the contention that Huck condescends to his fellow passenger on the raft, one can assume that Twain was determined to provide a plausible picture of his own provincial ignorance at Huck’s age. Jim, on the other hand, knows that he is utterly dependent on Huck’s goodwill to keep him from being caught. He may out of necessity give the appearance of docility, yet he is hardly a buffoon. In a novel abounding in secrets—Huck himself pretends to be murdered, Tom Sawyer hides the news of Miss Watson’s manumission of Jim, and various other characters withhold or distort information—Jim keeps mum about a monumental discovery he made in Chapter 9 that probably would have dissuaded Huck from accompanying him any farther. At the time Jim shrewdly excused the deception to Huck as “too gashly” to reveal.

Regarding Jim’s overly obedient subjugation to Tom Sawyer’s romantic whims, let it be remembered that in Chapter 40 when the injured Tom reaches the raft and commands Huck and Jim to cast off and “man the sweeps—man the sweeps,” it is Jim who boldly declares, “I doan’ budge a step out’n dis place, ’dout a doctor; not ef it’s forty year!” He thus voluntarily and selflessly casts himself back into slavery in order to save Tom’s life. Huck agrees with Jim about the seriousness of Tom’s wound, and they withstand Tom’s protests: “He raised considerable row about it, but me and Jim stuck to it and wouldn’t budge; so he was for crawling out and setting the raft loose himself; but we wouldn’t let him. Then he gave us a piece of his mind—but it didn’t do no good.” This incident goes far to rebut the many critics who denounce Huck and Jim’s inability to resist Tom’s grandstanding.

As a prisoner on the Phelps farm, Jim is obliged to make peace with Tom’s insistence that he inscribe his dungeon wall and plant a flower in the cabin and so forth (though he firmly draws the line at the suggestion that he adopt a rattlesnake as a pet). Huck, on the other hand, follows Tom’s ever-expanding script because he relishes the entertainment, especially its flourishes and embellishments. Tom is the foil who brings invention, glory, and British and European literature into Huck Finn’s deprived existence. It is Tom who creates elaborate schemes that pretend the world is a place of intrigue, suspense, and danger—without, of course, challenging except in play the social foundations of human slavery. Yet whereas Tom manufactures the dangers, it turns out to be Huck who has the nerve to overcome actual hazards along the river and try to do something about humanity’s injustices. (Ironically, too, it is Huck and not the show-offy Tom who composes a lengthy picaresque novel.)

Huckleberry Finn as Realist

Tom and Huck are one of the best-matched teams in literature, and even at the outset of critical commentary on the novel in the 1920s it was apparent to careful readers that Twain had in mind a younger version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Don Quixote was one of Twain’s favorite books because, Twain declared in Life on the Mississippi, Cervantes’s work “swept the world’s admiration for the mediaeval chivalry-silliness out of existence.” A principal target of the Tom-and-Huck exchanges was the idealized fiction and poetry of English Romanticism that still in some respects overshadowed the American realistic movement of which Twain was a stalwart champion. Huck Finn’s habit of noting gross particulars, even while absorbing a sublime sight, constitutes a vote against the earlier view that literature should primarily ennoble human perceptions. A single sentence in Huckleberry Finn aptly captures the gist of what Twain sought to accomplish in revolutionizing the outlook of fiction. Huck interrupts (in Chapter 19) his tribute to the beauty of dawn along the river’s forested shoreline with a jarringly frank acknowledgment: “The breeze . . . comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank.” Few if any authors before Mark Twain (other than Walt Whitman) would have included in this context such an unsavory detail as the pungent odor of rotting fish.

Ernest Hemingway and Huckleberry Finn

In a semi fictional work, Green Hills of Africa (1935), Ernest Hemingway’s narrator made an astute and widely quoted pronouncement about Huckleberry Finn. The key element in this opinion was the word “modern”: “All modern American literature,” Hemingway’s character declared, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . . All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before” (italics added). Hemingway had noticed a momentous difference between Twain’s novel and its literary precursors. In “modern” literature, as opposed to much British and American fiction of the nineteenth century, the reader is no longer coached regarding what to think of the characters and their actions. This prior type of moral guidance had typically been threaded obliquely throughout the paragraphs of a novel, or else summarized overtly at the end of a chapter or a short story.

In contrast to this previous view of the author’s role as both narrator and interpreter, Twain devised a narrator so young and inexperienced that he often cannot quite figure out what he is describing. That is the case, for instance, in Chapter 22 when Huck sneaks into a circus and relates how an intoxicated man staggers out of the audience and demands a chance to ride one of the performers’ horses. The crowd hoots and jeers at the drunk’s interruption of the show, until the ring-master reluctantly gives in and allows the man to mount one of the animals. At first Huck is fearful for the man’s safety as the trained horse races around the ring at faster and faster gaits, with the helpless man “hanging onto his neck, and his heels flying up in the air.” Then Huck (along with the crowd) is astonished when this “sot” suddenly stands up on the galloping steed, sheds layers of clothing “so thick they kind of clogged up the air,” and reveals himself to be “slim and handsome” in an acrobatic costume that was “the gaudiest and prettiest you ever saw.” Immediately he “lit into that horse with his whip and made him fairly hum.”

What is Huckleberry Finn’s response to this obviously well-rehearsed circus act? Huck erroneously perceives it as a clever prank played by a stunt-rider on the ring-master. “The ring-master he see how he had been fooled, and he was the sickest ring-master you ever see, I reckon. Why, it was one of his own men! He had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on to nobody. . . . I wouldn’t a been in that ring-master’s place, not for a thousand dollars.” As with Hemingway’s minimalist short stories and clipped vignettes in In Our Time (1925), the reader rather than the author must undertake the interpretation. The author simply sketches a situation, in Twain’s book through Huck’s naive eyes, and then compels the reader to carry out the task of construing its meaning. This is the breakthrough feat that Hemingway recognized Twain had achieved for later American writers.

Underestimating Huckleberry Finn

It is possible to suppose that the main point of Huckleberry Finn is how its title character ultimately learns to view Jim as a fellow human being with valid feelings about his family and his future. That way of reading the novel is a principal reason why the boys’ ridiculous antics at the Phelps farm upset so many critics; Huck seems to fall back from the progress he had made in affirming Jim’s humanity and friendship. But we make a large mistake in merely settling for Huck’s discovery that his fellow passenger on the raft is sensitive and caring. What Twain presents is a far more complex proposition—that it is conformist and cowardly of us to take it for granted that prevailing laws and customs, no matter how solidly established, are too sacred to be skeptically examined and intellectually tested by each of us as individuals. And this truly subversive slant to the novel challenges readers to ponder whether or not they themselves might be succumbing to social pressures by participating in practices that are in vogue and yet tremendously wrong. Twain was able to write about this sort of blindness so convincingly because he recalled how he himself had gone along with the institution of slavery through his adolescence and beyond, blithely overlooking manifold signs of its ethical and spiritual immorality.

Mark Twain wrote and published another boy book, The Prince and the Pauper: A Tale for Young People of All Ages (1881), in the interval between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (note that Twain dropped the definite article “The” from the title page of the latter book, presumably to better fit Huck’s vernacular narrative). That middle novel, The Prince and the Pauper, though certainly worth reading, largely relied on Twain’s research in English history books and lacks the sense of “lived” experience that animates his pictures in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn of the Mississippi River, its villages, and its vessels. There are no other American books in the last half of the nineteenth century that offer a reader the pleasures of Twain’s two companion boy books with their ingenuity of plot and characterization, slice-of-life sharpness, penetrating irony, and sweepingly panoramic display of an entire sector of society.

The Raftsmen Episode in Huckleberry Finn

One other editorial choice had to be determined. Scholars have vigorously debated whether a lengthy passage in the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn that Twain first published in Chapter 3 of Life on the Mississippi (1883) to illustrate the rawness of early river days should be reinserted into the novel from which it was extracted. In this adventure Huck swims to a large raft and listens while “a mighty rough looking lot” of raftsmen drink, argue, sing, dance, and swap yarns. The men discover Huck in his hiding place, threaten to “paint him a sky blue all over from head to heel,” but let him go with a stern warning. Mark Twain agreed to delete the episode from Huckleberry Finn for fear that the public might think he was duplicating “old matter” (Twain’s words) in his new book (since he had used it previously in Life on the Mississippi) and because the publisher pointed out that Huckleberry Finn was longer than Tom Sawyer, damaging the impression that they were companion volumes.

The author yielded to his publisher’s suggestion on April 22, 1884 so obligingly (“Yes, I think the raft chapter can be left wholly out”) that most subsequent editions of the novel have followed suit. The NewSouth Edition incorporates the raftsmen passage into Chapter 16 as Twain initially wrote it in his manuscript and published it in the American edition of Life on the Mississippi. That episode, with its strutting, pugnacious braggarts and its chilling ghost tale about a child’s murder, contains some of Mark Twain’s best writing. Its inclusion enables readers to savor more of Twain contributions to the then-reigning “Local Color” school of fiction that prized vivid descriptions of an area’s vocations and peculiarities.

Textual Emendations

With the exception of the changes in racial denotations (and in four archaic references to skin color) and the insertion of the raftsmen passage, the text of the novel otherwise follows the wording of the first American edition. Issues about questionable punctuation were resolved by consulting a facsimiles of Twain’s manuscript. The editor has silently modernized certain eccentricities of nineteenth-century punctuation and spelling, and has given American spellings preference over British spellings. Obvious typographical errors introduced by the printers and inconsistent spellings have been corrected.

Alternative Editions

It goes without saying that textual purists object strenuously to these editorial alterations of an author’s final manuscript, especially regarding key racial denominators. (For confirmation of this reaction, see the editor’s essay, “Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer Go Back to School,” Independent Publisher 29, v [May 2011], as well as CBS’s “60 Minutes” segment devoted to the NewSouth Edition that aired on March 20, 2011.) However, the fact of the matter is that literally dozens of other editions are available (including several published by NewSouth Books) for those readers who prefer Twain’s original phrasing. Those standard editions will always exist. Even better, Twain’s holograph manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is now viewable in a CD issued in 2003 by the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.

This NewSouth Edition of Huckleberry Finn is emphatically not intended for academic scholars. Those individuals should consult instead the magisterial edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2003) issued in The Works of Mark Twain series by the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley. Scholars can also turn to Michael Patrick Hearn’s meticulous and resourceful edition, The Annotated Huckleberry Finn (2001).

Dr. Alan Gribben co-founded the Mark Twain Circle of America, compiled Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, and recently co-edited Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader. Gribben has written numerous essays about Mark Twain’s life and image. He teaches on the English faculty of Auburn University at Montgomery and edits the Mark Twain Journal.