Starting over in Huckleberry Finn
DOUGLAS ANDERSON
Douglas attempts to introduce the virtues of
civilized life to the "poor lost lamb" whom she has just rescued, for a
second time, from his beloved sugar hogshead, she chooses reading
as one of her methods of enticement. Even at this early moment in
Mark Twain's famous book, the strategy shouldn't come as a complete surprise. The first sentence that Huck writes announces his intention to revisit the characters and scenes of an earlier tale:
W H E N THE WIDOW
You don't know about me, without you have read a hook hy the
name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" hut that ain't no matter. That hook was made hy Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the
truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, hut mainly
he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody hut lied,
one time or another, without it was aunt Polly, or the widow, or
maybe Mary. Aunt Polly,—Tom's aunt Polly, she is—and Mary,
and the widow Douglas, is all told about in that book—which is
mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before.
Regardless of whether they are written or spoken, good stories are
meticulously "made"—the constituent filaments of truth stretched
into fine narrative threads that invite a thoughtful and appreciative
response. Moreover, in order to make a new beginning, Huck is
obliged to gather up a few stray ends, recapitulating certain features
of an earlier book and repeating some things that he and others have
said before. When the widow, in turn, sets out a second time to save
Huck from his father's fate—to keep him from duplicating a terrible
human failure—her actions extend this pattern of interest in Twain's
pages. Starting again and starting over, change and repetition, have a
mysterious relation to one another in Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn—a relation made all the more visible by the emphasis that
Twain places on the powers of discrimination associated with reading
and the cultural memory represented by books.
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"Well, then," Huck promptly observes, as he describes his return to the widows house and the renewal of her civilizing efforiis,
"the old thing commenced again," After dressing her wayward charge
in new clothes, and reintroducing him to table manners, the widow
takes out her Bible and begins to read the story of the foundling
Moses from the opening chapters of Exodus. It is an astute choice
of text, given Huck's own semiadopted status and his early intimacy
with a powerful river, but it is also an uncanny confirmation of the
tendency for old things to recommence, in the dense texture of
Twain's imagination. Huck's initial, feverish interest in the biblical
tale completely dissipates, however, once he learns that Moses "had
been dead a considerable long time." "I don't take no stock in dead
people," he famously observes, thwarting the widow's educational
goals with a dismissive line that echoes the deadpan theatrical tactics and minstrel skits of Twain's youth.
Jim will thwart Huck's own instructive ends in much the same
way, later in the book, when the two runaways are resting on an island, going over the loot they have salvaged from the wreck of the
Walter Scott. Another biblical passage is at the center of this scene:
the ruse that Solomon employs, in l Kings, to identify the true mother of a baby boy by offering to divide the child in two. "De 'spute
warn't 'bout a half a chile, de 'spute was 'bout a whole chile," Jim insists, as he and Huck quarrel over the significance of Solomon's decision, "en de man dat think he kin settle a 'spute 'bout a whole chile
wid a half a chile, doan know enough to come in out'n de rain." Huck
plays the widow's role of pedagogical straight man, in this conversation, while Jim is the "fool," whose ignorance has a strangely rejuvenating wisdom.
Despite Huck's professed indifference to dead people, he
proves to be a determined (if ineffective) biblical exegete in this episode—itself an instance of the complex forces of recurrence that
shape his story. He is no more successful at bolstering Solomon's ethical or narrative "stock" than the widow Douglas is with Moses, or
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than Silas Phelps will prove to be in the religious performance that
he provides, near the end of the book, after the melodramatic circumstances of Tom's "evasion" have been fully explained to him. The
whole, elaborate apparatus of makeshift saws and pens, lugubrious
inscriptions, grindstones, rope ladders, rats, snakes, and anonymous
letters, with which Twain's book draws to a close, is too much for Silas
to absorb. "It made him kind of drunk, as you may say," Huck observes, "and he didn't know nothing at all the rest of the day, and
preached a prayer meeting sermon that night diat give him a rattling
ruputation, because the oldest man in the world couldn't a understood it."
Like Tom Sawyer's maddening devotion to his literary "authorities," Uncle Silas's intoxicated eloquence originates in books. A few
chapters earlier, he had tried to attribute the mysterious reappearance of a lost spoon in his coat pocket to his absentminded reading
habits. He had spent the morning studying Acts 17, he explains to his
exasperated wife, and must have mistaken the spoon for his Testament. This ludicrous claim directs the reader to Paul's dramatic
assertion, in Acts 17:26, that God had made all mankind of "one
blood"—a verse likely to have troubled nineteenth-century racial
theorists. At the same time Silas's confusion prefigures a second allusion to the book of Acts in Huck's account of the inspired but incoherent prayer meeting sermon. In Acts 2, as the Holy Spirit descends
on the Apostles like "a rushing mighty wind" during the celebration
of Pentecost, they begin speaking in tongues. Peter assures the
stunned and skeptical citizens of Jerusalem that his companions are
not drunk. They are simply fulfilling the prophecy of Joel, which
Peter repeats. This portion of Peter's address is from Noah Webster's
1833 adaptation of the King James translation:
And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will
pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your
daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams:
And on my servants, and on my hand-maidens I will, in those
days, pour out of my Spirit and they shall prophesy:
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And I will show wonders in heaven above, and signs on the
earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke.
The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into
blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come.
(Acts 2:17-20)
Though Uncle Silas's state of linguistic rapture has a less exalted
source, he too appears to have dreamed dreams that brought him a
rattling reputation.
Apocalyptic images pervade Hucks story, but nearly always at a
level just beneath his own conscious understanding. They are there
to be stumbled upon, much as Huck hopes to stumble on the right
words, as he approaches the Phelps kitchen, unsure about precisely
how he will present himself to this household of complete strangers,
and free Jim: "I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan,
but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth
when the time come." A Pentecost of sorts, this moment too fits into
the complex, reiterative rhythms of Twain's book.
These allusive episodes in Twain's narrative—the widow's earnest pedagogy, Jim's repudiation of Old Testament law, Silas Phelps's
incomprehensible visions—resemble acts of artistic improvisation
rather than elements of a firm structural pattern. When Judith Loftus
entertains Huck on his reconnoitering visit to her "httle shanty"
across from Jackson's Island, her suspicions lead her to improvise
some simple tests of her visitor's sex, beginning with a request to
help her straighten out an unruly hank of yarn. The bar of lead that
she keeps handy to throw at rats and uses as a means of confirming
Huck's disguise is twisted into a suggestive knot, as if to symbohze
the riddle of Huck's identity or her own tangle of pure and impure
motives. Twain is drawn to the representation of objects and actions
that evoke the complex, interwoven nature of narrative experience:
the restless, ambulatory "weaving" of a revival preacher; the beauty
of circus acrobats as they ride "a-weaving" around a ring; an old spool
of thread recovered from the belly of a giant catfish.
These are physical emblems for the elaborate texture of verbal
experience, for reading as well as for telling. Remarkable as the oral
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elements of Twain's book may be, it is reading that starts the story on
its course, and it is readers rather than listeners who form its audience—tracing its sinuous narrative paths and discerning the "knots"
that both obstruct and comprise its plot. Reading, in fact, proves to
be precisely the opposite of rafting: an antidote to the geographic and
historical fatalism that grips Twain's characters. A reader may just as
readily go upstream as down, backward or forward, with or against
the currents of time, nature, and narrative that appear to doom Jim's
hopes for freedom. This imaginative mobility makes all the more evident Twain's commitment to retelling or reshaping stories that he and
others have already told, a commitment that lies behind every structural element in the book. For Huck's story too is carefully made,
even as it is presided over by any number of influential makers.
The restaging oi Romeo and Juliet, in the Grangerford chapters,
makes it immediately evident that Shakespeare is the most conspicuous of these literary antecedents. The duke's splendid ineptitude
with Hamlet's soliloquy is clearly aimed at readers who have had
some experience with the unpredictable behavior of memory in a
culture that is steadily drifting away from its oral roots. The echoes
of Lear in Twain's story are at once pervasive and elusive. They begin
before we are really equipped to detect them, with the bawdy performance of "The King's Camelopard," a burlesque of the bare-forked
animal to which Lear, in his furious despair, believes all mankind is
reduced. Jim's "Sick Arab" disguise, at the commencement of the
Wilks episode, consists of a coating of blue "theatre-paint" and King
Lear's costume from the duke's well-equipped carpet bag. Peter
Wilks's three orphaned nieces, Mary Jane, Susan, and Joanna, do not,
in themselves, bring Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia immediately to
mind, but the sisters do preserve a suggestive sibling hierarchy. Acting on the king's suggestion, the two older girls, Mary Jane and Susan, entertain the town dignitaries in their deceased uncle's parlor,
sitting in state at the head of the table. Huck and Joanna ("the harelip," as he repeatedly calls her) make their supper "off of the leavings"
in the kitchen. Cordelia's leavings are less meager, perhaps, but like
Joanna Wilks she does not share in the oral dexterity of her sisters.
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Just before these events take place, Jim sets the comparative
apparatus in motion by offering a beautifully compressed account of
the persecution of a dutiful daughter, as he and Huck discuss the
pathological behavior of kings. Jim's daughter, Elizabeth, "warn't on'y
'bout fo' year ole," Jim recalls, and just recovering from an attack of
scarlet fever when one day he asked her to shut the cabin door. After
she twice appeared completely to ignore him, Jim's anger erupted
and he struck the little girl to the ground:
Den I went into de yuther room, en 'uz gone 'bout ten minutes;
en when I come back, dah was dat do' a-stannin' open yit, en dat
chile stannin' mos' right in it, a-looldn' down and moumin', en
tears runnin' down. My, but I umz mad. I was agwyne for de
chile, but jis' den—it was a do' dat open' innerds—jis' den, 'long
come de wind en slam it to, behine de chile, ker-blam!-—en my
Ian', de chile never move'! My breff mos' hop outer me; en I feel
so—so-—I doan know how I feel. I crope out, all a-tremblin', en
crope aroun' en open de do' easy en slow, en poke my head in
behine de chile, sof en still, en all uv a sudden I says poto! Jis' as
loud as I could yell. She never budge! O, Huck, I bust out acryin' en grab her up in my arms en say, "O de po' little thing!
De Lord God amighty fogive po' ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne
to fogive hisseff as long's he Hve!" O, she was plumb deef en
dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb—en I'd ben a treat'n her so!
Wind is always on the point of becoming "spiritus" in Huck's receptive imagination, displaying the transformative religious force
of Pentecost, even in much humbler tongues. Here, in addition to
prompting an echo of Lear's inarticulate pain, it mingles a mystic,
biblical presence with Jim's deep remorse. Twain repeatedly invokes
this suggestive cultural presence, as he gains command over his own
imaginative offspring.
Quite early in the book, the widow Douglas and Miss Watson
describe for Huck their antithetical senses of Providence, like muses
competing for influence over an unformed artistic intelHgence.
Huck's narrative fertility—allusive though it may be—is completely
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free of the book-bound loyalties that shape the mind of Tom Sawyer
"You want to be starting something fresh all the time," Tom complains to Huck as the two boys quarrel, near the end of the book, over
the best means of liberating Jim. But it is difficult to start anything
fresh in a world that is replete with so many old stories. Moments
after Hucks dismissive comment on Moses, in the books opening
pages, as he sits in his room preparing for bed, the noises of the surrounding night seem to him to be saturated with gloomy memories
and foreboding prophecy, culminating "away out in the woods" with
"that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about
something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so
can't rest easy in its grave and has to go about that way every night,
grieving." Oppressed with loneliness, Huck flicks a spider off his
shoulder into the flame of his bedside candle, augmenting his sense
of impending misfortune: "I didn't need anybody to tell me that was
an awful bad sign."
When this scene, too, recurs thirty chapters later, at the beginning of the novel's problematic closing episodes on the Phelps farm,
the spider reappears as the mournful originator of tales and fates
whose activity Huck vaguely detects in "the dim hum of a spinning
wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again. . .the lonesomest sound in the whole world." At this climactic moment, after
Jim's betrayal by the king and the duke, Huck again registers the
presence of spirits in the surrounding loneliness, "spirits that's been
dead ever so many years," restlessly spinning their tales of incommunicable grief. Twain applies this verb to the way a canoe goes spinning down a big bend in the fog-shrouded river, or a wagon goes
spinning up a country road, but Huck explicitly recognizes its application to narrative as well. "The old gentleman was spinning the
truth," he observes, as the genuine Wilks heirs make a belated appeal
to their dead brother's neighbors and friends, whose suspicions about
the king and the duke are just beginning to stir. Only "a lot of prejudiced chuckleheads," Huck asserts, could have failed to make the distinction between true speakers and false ones.
Twain himself does not always seem to share Huck's interpretive
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confidence. His recursive pattern of narration suggests at least some
degree of authorial uncertainty, expressed as a succession of false
starts and dead ends that, at times, appears to signal an essential
bewilderment about how to proceed. The composition history of
Huckleberry Finn is consistent with the working out of just such a
struggle, but Twain's apparent hesitation about completing the book
may spring from tactical rather than creative dilemmas. The fundamental problem of what to write troubled him less than the question
of how explicit he might be in writing it. Tom Sawyers provocative
practical joke, at Jim s expense, in the second chapter of the book,
points to the nature of the material that Twain intends to address as
he breaks down the protective insulation of historical fiction. Jim had
heard Huck stumble over a root outside the widows kitchen as the
two boys were sneaking off to join their gang. Jim posted himself
against a tree in order to keep watch for intruders but fell asleep
before the suspicious nighttime noises repeated themselves. At first
Tom wanted to tie the unconscious Jim to the tree "for fun," before
he and Huck continue on their escapade, but in response to Huck's
anxieties he settled for something less risky and reported the results
to Huck: "Tom said he slipped Jim s hat off of his head and hung it
on a limb right over him, and Jim stirred a little, but he didn't wake.
Afterwards Jim said the witches bewitched him and put him in a
trance, and rode him all over the State, and then set him under the
trees again and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it."
The passage is both innocuous and disturbing, partly a prank
and partly a visionary lynching that casts a shadow over the band of
make-believe robbers that Tom shortly forms—a miniaturized klan,
with its secret oaths and pseudochivalric rituals. It was important to
the agents of racial terror, too—the night riders of the postwar
South—"to show who done it." Twain makes clear from the outset
that he is writing in layers, as much as in lines, addressing representational challenges that call for a great deal of circumspection. These,
in turn, soon lead him to a cluster of narrative precursors in Genesis
that exert the same feverish grip on his imagination that Exodus initially exerts on Huck—precursors that call for considerable caution
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on the part of a writer who hopes to exploit their authority and still
sell a substantial number of books.
These patterns of telling and of retelling, of moving forward
while doubling back, echo Twain's strangely episodic engagement
with Huck's story. Over and over, he sat down at his desk to recommence this particular old thing. As a result. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may well be the most famous of all "blocked" novels. It is
never entirely clear, however, who or what was responsible for the
blocking. Twain completed the book in three, intense creative bursts,
between July 1876 and September 1883. These productive "stints," as
Victor Fischer terms them, were broken off, in part, by the sort of
inventive lapse associated with writer's block, but in the long intervals when he was not adding to Huck's story. Twain was energetically generating two other books—The Prince and the Pauper and Life
on the Mississippi—bringing them to satisfactory conclusions and
seeing them safely into print. In these channels, at least, the creative flow was unimpeded.
Writing often struck Twain as a kind of industrial process. He
loved to update his various correspondents on the number of manuscript sheets that he was producing each day and how many hours
he devoted to producing them, how rapidly a given story might be
"booming" along, and how his publication timetables were shaping
up, "The book will be done soon now," Twain wrote Elisha Bliss of his
progress on Roughing It, in the spring of 1871, "I have 1200 pages of
MS already wrttten and am now writing 200 a week—more than
that, in fact; during the past week wrote 23 one day, then 30, 33, 35,
52, and 65.—How's that?" When these formidable imaginative energies faltered, he was not inclined to picture the difficulty in profound
psychological terms. Part of Mark Twain's appeal, for modern readers, is that he is not Marcel Proust—-a fact that makes all the more
uncanny the peculiar resemblances between the opening paragraphs
of Swann's Way and Huck's haunted, candlelight vigil in his bedroom
in the first chapter of Twain's book. By and large, the mysteries of his
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own subjectivity did not strike Twain as especially interesting. The
workmanlike connotations of "stint" make it exactly the right term to
characterize his concentrated periods of literary effort.
A sensibility like Twain's could still be susceptible to the unpredictable effects of a creative impasse, but elements of self-censorship
may also come into play. Part of his compositional process included a
collaborative arrangement with his wife, Livy, who functioned as a
kind of literary conscience. Livy would read Twain's manuscript, as
he produced it, and excise any improprieties that, she felt, shouldn't
get into print. Sometimes the Clemens daughters would get involved, urging their mother to be merciful with certain favorite anecdotes that Twain had inserted into his pages and read aloud to his
family, partly as a sort of game that he and Livy played. How far
could suggestion or implication safely go? How vulgar was too vulgar? As the evidence of Twain's published books clearly shows, Livy's
judgment was by no means simplistically prudish, nor was censorship
completely extrinsic to Huckleberry Finn. Huck is an unusually active censor in his own right.
The earliest indication of Huck's propensity to withhold information from selected audiences occurs when he discovers some interesting tracks in an inch of new snow outside the widow Douglas's
garden fence. Without pausing to explain to the reader the source of
his alarm, he rushes to Judge Thatcher's house and desperately tries
to divest himself of the small fortune, recovered from the robbers'
cave in Tom Sawyer, that the judge is managing in his behalf. "Please
take it," Huck pleads with the judge, "and don't ask me nothing—
then I won't have to tell no lies." It is the first of two occasions in the
book when Huck is burdened with the sudden necessity to get rid of
six thousand dollars in gold. Only when he is on the point of consulting Jim's magic hairball, to find out what the future holds, does Huck
indirectly disclose that a talismanic cross in the left boot heel of the
tracks identifies their maker as Pap.
At first Jim's hairball seems to share Huck's reticence, until it is
properly bribed. Once Jim begins to transmit the hairball's oracular
wisdom, it rapidly becomes apparent, to the reader, that Jim is using
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this ruse to ease Huck's fears, much like a parent might withhold a
full account of life's menace from a child who is more in need of
immediate reassurance than of knowledge. This scene is the first
indication of the complexity that Twain will gradually develop in Jim's
character, expressed through an act of benevolent censorship that is
only the more conspicuous for its sensationally explicit conclusion:
"it's down in de bills," Jim ultimately assures his anxious client, "dat
you's gwyne to git hung." He has diagnosed only too accurately the
nature of Huck's genuine fear: that his father will simply beat him to
death, in a drunken rage, when he finds that he cannot get his hands
on Huck's money. Within moments of actually confronting Pap, at
the beginning of the next chapter, Huck appears to dismiss this possibility—^"I see I wam't scared of him worth bothering about"—but
Twain never dismisses it. These early chapters make clear that Huck
must stage his own death in order to keep from being murdered.
An equally complex instance of multiple censorship takes place
as Jim and Huck prepare to explore the two-story frame house that
floats past the west side of Jackson's Island. Jim succeeds in concealing the identity of the naked corpse that they find in one of the
house's upstairs bedrooms by throwing some old rags over Pap
Finn's decomposing body, "but he needn't done it," Huck admits, "I
didn't want to see him." Huck turns his attentions instead to itemizing an extensive array of old clothes and bedding, along with various
household odds and ends that he and Jim salvage from the ruin: two
dirty calico dresses "and some women's under-clothes," a lantern, the
blade of a butcher knife, "a lot of tallow candles, and a tin candlestick," a sewing ldt, and "some vials of medicine that didn't have no
label on them." They leave behind a broken bottle with a rag stopper
that Huck rather knowingly recognizes to be a crude, artificial nipple
for feeding a baby.
The room gets a fairly thorough verbal ransacking in every
respect but one. Huck does not offer any details concerning tlie charcoal drawings and messages that he notices on the walls, acknowledging only that they represented "the ignorantest kind of words
and pictures." In light of the rest of the debris that Huck observes
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scattered around the floor—whiskey bottles, old playing cards, some
masks—it is not particularly difficult to imagine their nature. Part
nursery and part brothel, this criminal retreat is itself a picture, in
grim detail, of the kind of room where Huck might have been
born—an association made almost inescapable by Jim's disclosure,
late in the book, that the naked man on the floor was Huck's father.
The decision to censor the implicitly pornographic images on the
walls is one that Livy Clemens too would have made, though in this
instance it is not Livy who makes it. Sordid though this place may be,
it is also strangely compelling, full of evocative as well as loathsome
objects, awakening vague memories of the domestic wreckage from
which Mark Twain's gifted orphan has mysteriously emerged. "Come
in, Huck," Jim urges, as he covers the corpse in the far corner of the
room. The invitation confers a sense of belonging, a tacit recognition
that inexplicable undercurrents of familiarity break through the barriers of censorship.
Huck's reluctance to describe the graffiti in the floating house is
consistent with similar moments of genteel reserve elsewhere in the
book. He decides, for instance, not to record the complete exchange
of insults between the two, tall-talking raftsmen whose confrontation
he vwtnesses on a "monstrous" lumber raft that he has surreptitiously boarded, hoping to find out how far he and Jim might be from
Cairo, Illinois. Excised from the novel's first edition and published
separately in Life on the Mississippi, this section of Huck's story is an
unusually complex instance of the interplay between censorship and
disclosure in its pages. The blustering antagonists make long speeches proclaiming their mythic appetites for mayhem and destruction,
"whooping and jawing like Injuns." But Huck stops short of specifying the names that they apply directly to one another, noting only
that they were "the very worst land of language." Delicacy likewise
leads Huck to refrain from giving a full description of the obscene
prop from "The King's Camelopard" that the duke s handbill euphemistically terms "The Royal Nonesuch."
Two chapters after the mock conflict on the lumber raft, Huck's
censored report of Buck Crangerford's death is motivated not by
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standards of polite speech or behavior but by grief and revulsion at
the fate of Buck and one of his cousins, who are briefly pinned down
by their Shepherdson enemies behind a wood pile, before being driven to their deaths—all of which Huck witnesses from the forks of a
nearby cottonwood tree:
All of a sudden, hang! bang! hang! goes three or four guns—
the men had slipped around through the weeds, and come in
from behind without their horses! The hoys jumped for the
river—both of them hurt—and as they swum down the current
the men run along the hank shooting at them and singing out,
"Kill them, kill them!" It made me so sick, I most fell out of the
tree. I ain't agoing to tell all that happened—it would make me
sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn't ever come ashore
that night, to see such things. I ain't ever going to get shut of
them—lots of times I dream about them.
When censorship is dramatized in this manner, it is necessarily
imperfect. The reader is invited to supply what is missing from various hints that remain in the text. The Clemens domestic censoring
team appears to have been very good at leaving just enough information in place to suggest what Huck was not willing to record: the
nature of the unparalleled piece of royal apparatus that the king's
"nonesuch" was intended to depict, the content of the drawings in
the floating house, the sickening spectacle of Buck Grangerford's
mutilated body. A feud perpetuates itself through family lines until
one lineage or another is completely extinguished. It is a kind of war
against reproductive power—a fact that makes the romantic entanglement of Harney Shepherdson and Sophia Grangerford especially
galling to the embittered antagonists. Buck is the last surviving male
Grangerford. His father and two older brothers are already dead by
the time that Huck arrives at the steamboat landing where Buck and
his cousin are trapped. Once Buck is killed. Colonel Crangerfords
seed is destroyed—or so the perverse logic of feuding might suggest—a triumph that the killers apparently celebrated by castrating
Buck's corpse.
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A more complete form of censorship resulted in the removal
from Twain's typescript of a long passage that left no direct trace
of its presence, when the book was finally published. This is the anecdote that was entitled "Jim and the Dead Man" when it first
appeared in the New Yorker in 1995. Twain apparently drafted these
pages in order to intensify the climate of sexual pathology that he
hints at in the circumstances surrounding Pap Finn's death, in the
phallic display of "The King's Camelopard," or in Buck Grangerford's nightmarish fate. The excised material forcefully underscores a critical feature of Twain's narrative design: its interest in the
pertinence of Genesis to Huck's story. This allusive relation is among
the most familiar in the book, but Twain's ambitions for it are anything but superficial. Genesis is the paradigmatic biblical text of new
beginnings—of starting over and starting again, after the failure of
an initial, creative impulse. The expulsion from Paradise, the Flood,
and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah reflect this reiterative
structure: the repeated acts of genesis in Genesis. Twain's original
typescript incorporated all three biblical elements in the interlude
of peace that Huck and Jim enjoy on Jackson's Island, before the vigilance of Judith Loftus (or the bad luck associated with handling a
snakeskin) drives them down the river.
During a spectacular thunderstorm that breaks out over the
island in chapter nine—a moment of extraordinary sublimity, in
Huck's view, "bright as glory" one moment and "dark as sin" the
next—a long description of Jim's encounter with a ghost, when he
was sixteen years old, originally intervened between the passages in
which Jim insists that birds know when it's going to rain and Huck's
description of the flood that transforms Jackson's Island into an ark.
Jim's master at the time, he recalls, a student in a "doctor college,"
sent him to start a fire in the college dissecting room and warm up a
cadaver until it was soft enough to work on. Jim finds the right body
among the four that are available, "a rattlin' big man," with black
whiskers, who looked "like a pirate." "He was naked," Jim remembers, "dey all was," with "his knees cocked up some," so that
when Jim moved him down the anatomy table, closer to the fireplace.
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the corpse "sot up, all naked in front. . .wid his laigs spread out." The
dead man's face, in this position, was so disconcerting that Jim covered it with a sheet.
As he stooped down between the corpse's legs to start the fire,
its toes appeared to move. In retrospect, Jim realizes that the movement was only a hallucination, but at the time the effect was quite
different:
You see dat was a great big old ramblin' bildin', en nobody but me in it, en dat man over me wid dat sheet over
his face, en de wind a wailin' roun' de place like sperits dat
was in trouble, en de sleet a-drivin' agin' de glass; en den
de clock struck twelve in de village, en it was so fur away,
en de wind choke up de soun' so dat it only soun' like a
moan—dat's all. Well, thinks I, I wisht I was out'n dis;
what is gwyne to become er me?—en dis feller's a-movin'
his toes, I knows it—I kin see 'em move—en I ldn jis' feel
dem eyes er his'n en see dat ole dumplin' head done up in
de sheet, en—
Well, sir, jis 'at dat minute down he comes, right a-straddle er my neck wid his cold laigs, en lacked de candle out!
At that instant, Jim says, he lit out for home, "a-yelpin every jump."
His master later returned and "chopped" the cadaver up, Jim noted
with some satisfaction: "Dod rot him, I wisht I'd had a hack at him."
Huck objects that this experience isn't the same as meeting a ghost,
but before Jim can supply a better story, the storm breaks up and the
printed version of the chapter resumes with the flood that will shortly carry the derelict house containing Pap's body past the island.
The image of a naked white man, with his head concealed in a
sheet, straddling a young black man's neck is brutally explicit, even by
today's standards. It is not surprising that it did not survive the exacting scrutiny of Livy Clemens. The terrible sexual hostility that fueled
contemporary racial violence was no secret to late-nineteenth-century observers, but Twain has placed this harrowing feature of his
times on a literary dissection table, exposing with ruthless clarity the
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intense erotic pathology behind it. It is inconceivable that he
believed this passage to be funny, or thought that its terrible significance was sufficiently veiled to escape most readers. His draft is a
land of refuge from the representational limits that he elsewhere
imposes on language that he expects to put into print. What is going
to become of me? Jim wondered, as the wind moaned around the
ramshackle medical college "like sperits dat was in trouble." It is the
same question that Twain's book insistently poses, against the vivid
historical tapestry of judgment and redemption that his language
evokes.
The raftsmen whom Huck encounters, drinking and brawling
their way down river, reflect some of the same sexual and spiritual
threat. "Whoo-oop! Bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of
sorrow's a-coming," the Child of Calamity cries, echoing Jim's dissection room experience, as he struts around in a circle, "swelling himself up and breathing hard," with his "south end sticking out." "Show
us the bunghole, do," some of the raftsmen yell out, as they mock the
pathetic tale of Charles William Albright in his ghostly barrel. When
these men finally discover Huck hiding behind some shingle bundles,
"warm and soft and naked," it is not the comparatively innocuous
prospect of Huck's being painted blue and thrown overboard that
first occurs to the reader—nor to Huck himself, as he crept trembling out from behind the shingles and "began to beg." If Jackson's
Island is, in some degree, a lost paradise, then the great lumber raft
is a floating Sodom, spared only because of the interposition of little
Davy, the kindly raftsman who comes to Huck's defense. But, as in
the excised account of Jim's dream, Twain's language in this episode
evokes a cultural narrative, as well as a sexual one. Cenesis is the biblical antecedent that depicts, most insistently, the apocalyptic results
of dramatic communal failure. It is not a model that accommodates
evasion.
Nor is Twain disposed to accommodate it, even during the years
that the incomplete typescript of Huckleberry Finn lay waiting for
the next phase of its artistic re-genesis. In a chapter entitled "Southern Sports" from Life on the Mississippi, Twain includes a description
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of a New Orleans cockfight that is at least as ambitious as the figurative experiments in telling and retelling old stories that Hucks narrative records. Men and boys "of many languages and nationalities"
were present at the fight, Twain reports, but no "brutal" faces. It
looked like a prayer meeting, he thought, until the actual contest
began, when the shouting grew so "prodigious" that the gathering
might have been mistaken for a revival:
A negro and white man were in the ring; everybody else outside.
The cocks were brought in in sacks; and wtien time was called,
they were taken out by the two bottle-holders, stroked, caressed,
poked toward each other, and finally liberated. The big black
cock plunged instantly at the little gray one and struck him on
the head with his spur. The gray responded with spirit. Then the
Babel of many-tongued shoutings broke out, and ceased not
thenceforth. When the cocks had beenfightingsome little time,
I was expecting tliein momently to drop dead, for both were
blind, red with blood, and so exhausted that they frequently fell
down. Yet they would not give up, neither would they die. The
negro and the white man would pick them up every few seconds,
wipe them off, blow cold water on them in afinespray, and take
their heads in their mouths and hold them there a moment—to
warm back the perishing life perhaps; I do not know. Then,
being set down again, the dying creatures would totter gropingly about, with dragging wings, find each other, strike a guesswork blow or two, and fall exhausted once more.
It is a tribute to Livy Clemens s sensibility that these memorable and
disturbing words passed under the censor's pen and emerged
unscathed. Like much of the language and the events of Huckleberry
Finn, this passage too refiects the haunting fatality with which old
things appear to recommence under the thin disguise of contemporary existence—their own perishing life, in turn, restored by the
inexplicable mixture of tenderness and brutality in human character.
This paradoxical condition asserts itself repeatedly in the intricately
woven fabric of Huck's experience—from the first moment that the
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inarticulate ghosts outside his bedroom window make clear how
attentive Twain s narrator will prove to be to the profusion of stories
that constitutes his world.