259
Twain’s Trauma and the
Unresolved Murder of Huckleberry
Finn’s Father
YASUHIRO TAKEUCHI*
Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, mentions Hamlet’s “irresolution in avenging his father by the murder of his uncle.”1 Hamlet’s indecisive attitude, Freud argues, is
due to “the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his
father”;2 thus, Freud is here adding another example to the patricidal theme that he
famously finds in Oedipus Rex. Given Freud’s well-known fascination with Mark Twain’s
works,3 it seems likely that the “irresolution” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with
regard to solving the mystery of the murder of Huck’s father, like the irresolution of
Hamlet and of Sophocles’s Oedipus, deserves more critical attention in the possible
context of an underlying patricidal motive.
In the novel, Huck and Jim find the body of Huck’s father in a floating house on the
river, shot in the back, but the identity of his murderer is never revealed. Huck, in fact,
remains ignorant of the victim’s identity until the end of the novel, and therefore, to be
precise, the “irresolution” belongs in an indeterminate degree either to Jim, who knew
the truth about the dead man but hid it from Huck; or to Twain, who chose not to
identify the murderer in his novel; or to both. Forrest Robinson places the onus on Jim,
stating, “As several scholars have noted, Jim’s seeming generosity, by veiling the truth
about Pap’s death, artificially preserves Huck’s principal motive for flight. So long as Jim
controls this information, he maintains the balance of power and thus retains a substantial measure of control over his companion.”4 However, attributing Jim’s silence to his
* Yasuhiro Takeuchi, 2-3-20 Maruyama Nishimachi, Chuo-ku, Sapporo, 064-0944, Hokkaido, Japan.
E-mail: [email protected].
1
Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, trans. and ed.
Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 272–73.
2
Ibid., 273.
3
Freud, when asked to name ten good books by a publisher in 1907, mentioned “Mark Twain,
Sketches.” Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Random House, 2001), 9:246.
4
Forrest G. Robinson, The Author-Cat: Clemens’s Life in Fiction (New York: Fordham University Press,
2007), 143.
Literary Imagination, volume 15, number 3, pp. 259–274
doi:10.1093/litimag/imt059 Advance Access published October 15, 2013
ß The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics,
and Writers. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: [email protected]
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Twain’s Trauma and the Unresolved Murder of Huckleberry Finn’s Father
goal of achieving freedom becomes less convincing when we note that Jim
remains reticent regarding the murder even after his freedom is secured at the novel’s
ending:
Jim says, kind of solemn:
“He [pap] ain’t a-comin’ back no mo’, Huck.”
I says:
“Why, Jim?”
“Nemmine why, Huck—but he ain’t comin’ back no mo’.”
But I kept at him; so at last he says:
“Doan’ you ‘member de house dat was float’n down de river en dey wuz a man in dah,
kivered up, en I went in en unkivered him en didn’ let you come in?”5
Even if Jim’s motives are mixed, it is beyond doubt that he no longer needs “artificially
[to preserve] Huck’s principal motive for flight” by hiding the truth about the dead man.
Therefore, self-interest is not a totally convincing reason for Jim’s unwillingness to tell
the truth.
I argue that it is in fact Twain who is unwilling to delve into the truth; the major clue
is that Jim’s last words, which appear to be revealing, are actually so hooded and misleading as to indicate Twain’s own repression regarding the death of Huck’s father. While
it may be hardly noticed by the reader, Jim’s final testament is not simply factually wrong
but also deeply manipulative. Although he recalls that the body was “kivered up” and
that he “went in en unkivered him,” what actually happened in the original scene in the
floating house was quite the opposite: Jim told Huck that the man was “naked” (61), and
Huck said, “Jim throwed some old rags over him” (61). Whether intentional or not, this
inconsistency in Jim’s final roundup can be taken as a manifestation of Twain’s psychological needs: He wanted to believe, or wanted his readers to believe, that what had been
“covered up” had been “uncovered” in the end, even if the reader was not privy to it.
This pretense that everything has been cleared up and that there is nothing to hide
becomes all the more intriguing, given that Jim’s statement is only a partial revelation.
The reader, along with Huck, finally knows the identity of the victim—Pap Finn—but
such information is generally given at the start of a murder mystery. What is in a sense
the more important truth of a murder case—the identity of the murderer—remains
veiled. Twain seems to insist that the identification of the body is a satisfactory revelation
upon which to end the novel, and to excuse himself from pursuing the whole truth about
Pap’s death. This “irresolution” on Twain’s part to pursue the killer is more complicated
and critically intriguing than the irresolution of Hamlet, because it involves the author
himself in the picture.
However, the more intriguing comparison is with Oedipus at the beginning of his
tragedy. Oedipus, the king of Thebes, is negligent in solving the murder of the former
king, Laius (who later proves to be his own father). Learning that the unresolved murder
is leading to plagues and calamities in Thebes, Oedipus is impetuously eager to solve the
5
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003), 361–62. References are hereafter given parenthetically in text.
Yasuhiro Takeuchi
mystery—“I will start afresh, and once more make dark things plain.”6 But, the danger
of Oedipus’s headlong leap into the mystery is highlighted by a warning from Teiresias, a
blind prophet, who firmly advises Oedipus not to solve the murder mystery, since he
knows the tragic truth about Oedipus’s identity and his heinous crime.7
Perhaps taking Oedipus as a cautionary example, Twain seems to have heeded
Teiresias’s warning. As if to evade his forebear’s tragic fate, Twain decides simply to
end the matter with Jim’s manipulative revelation, making an implicit but summary
declaration with the ending of the book that the dark dealings have been revealed. It has
been argued, however, that Twain’s initial intention was to expose the dark truth about
Pap’s death. Franklin R. Rogers has argued that when Twain began to write Huckleberry
Finn his plan was to write a burlesque detective fiction.8 Rogers enumerates Twain’s
repetitive references to the death of Pap in his working notes for the first half of the novel
and says, “Pap’s death was important for [Twain] in his plans for the novel.”9
Furthermore, Rogers argues, Twain’s detective stories written in the late 1870s
(though not published until the twentieth century), like “A Murder, a Mystery, and a
Marriage” (written 1876) and Simon Wheeler, Amateur Detective (written 1877), show
that “[during] the gestation of Huckleberry Finn, Twain was much interested in murder
plots and detective stories.”10 Rogers points out parallel elements between Simon
Wheeler, Amateur Detective and Huckleberry Finn: feud episodes; somewhat Romeo and
Juliet-like love affairs; and very similar characters such as Judge Griswold and Colonel
Grangerford or the “morbid” poets Hugh Burnside and Emmeline Grangerford.11
Rogers concludes,
These borrowings [from Simon Wheeler], taken together with the unfinished murder plot
in Huckleberry Finn, intimate that in its early stages Huckleberry Finn was to be a burlesque
detective story. Apparently its denouement was to feature Jim’s trial for Huck’s murder, a
crime never committed; Pap’s murder as well as the mock murder were to be connected
with the Grangerford–Shepherdson feud in a plot-complex similar to that of Simon
Wheeler.12
Rogers’s reasoning would be more convincing, however, if he had shown how
Huckleberry Finn could reasonably have developed as a detective story, based on the
events of the novel. In this article, I will supply textual evidence to support Rogers’s
idea by pointing out the clues and foreshadowing that Twain worked into the novel to
prepare for the final revelation of Pap’s murderer.
6
Sophocles, The Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, trans. Richard Claverhouse Jebb (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1883), line 132.
7
Ibid., lines 300–53.
8
Franklin R. Rogers, Mark Twain’s Burlesque Patterns (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press,
1960), 132.
9
Ibid., 129.
10
Ibid., 132.
11
Ibid., 133–35.
12
Ibid., 135.
261
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Twain’s Trauma and the Unresolved Murder of Huckleberry Finn’s Father
Once Twain’s murder plot, which is well structured despite being partially
buried, emerges, another problem arises—why did Twain abort it? Rogers says merely
that it was abandoned “for some reason, possibly because it was not readily expandable.”13 I argue instead that just as Freud attributed Hamlet’s “irresolution” in facing his
father’s murderer to his “unconscious sense of guilt,”14 Twain’s conscience must
have played a role in his faltering at the key moment. The curiously manipulative
language he employs to avoid revealing the truth about Pap’s death even more strongly
suggests a buried secret related to the father’s murder, about which Twain cannot come
clean.
In the ensuing discussion, I hope to show that Twain’s ambiguous relationship with
the truth about Pap’s murder interplays with a guilt he already carries, and that both
are related to a trauma that Twain finds it impossible to express in words.
Furthermore, this interplay is analogous to Oedipus’s laborious excavation of his
own hidden guilt for Laius’s murder—at least for Freud, since he sees in both the
Oedipus myth and Hamlet that this secret guilt, about either an actual patricide or its
mere contemplation, is buried so deep in the son’s mind that he himself is not easily
aware of it. In his later Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud finds a similarly inaccessible memory of a patricide in the ancient history of the Jews—the hypothesized
murder of Moses, the tribal father figure, and the collective repression of it—and
regards this incident as “traumatic.”15 Present-day views of trauma also confirm that
trauma, often related to a sense of guilt that cannot be resolved or effaced, is buried
deep in one’s mind, beyond one’s reach or understanding. Cathy Caruth, for instance,
states that trauma occupies in the mind “a space to which willed access is denied.”16
This naturally leads to the fundamental inability to put one’s trauma into lucid words.
Given this, Shoshana Felman says, “Because trauma cannot be simply remembered, it
cannot simply be ‘confessed.’ ”17 I argue that it was the trauma and taboo of witnessing his father’s autopsy, an experience that Twain’s pen never directly touched upon,
that led to an impasse in Twain’s attempt to write a “detective” novel and caused him
to obfuscate at the novel’s ending.18 The naked bodies of the fathers (Twain’s and
Huck’s) rest unburied at the core of the guilt (about Twain’s childhood experience
and also about the murder he wrote into his novel) that Twain was unable to put
into words.
13
Ibid.
Freud, Letters, 273.
15
Freud, “Moses and Monotheism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Random House, 2001), 23:52.
16
Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995),
152.
17
Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993),
16.
18
For discussions of the autopsy, see Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Cambridge: Riverside
Press, 1952), 116–17, and Philip Ashley Fanning, Mark Twain and Orion Clemens (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2003), 14–16.
14
Yasuhiro Takeuchi
*****
Almost as impetuously as Oedipus, Twain in the summer of 1876 became absorbed in a
murder mystery; only after several weeks did his pen stop, in the middle of chapter 18 of
Huckleberry Finn.19 Although the author himself might simply have claimed that his
“tank had run dry,”20 this does not seem to have been the case, since he had already
worked several clues to Pap’s murder into the text and, as I will show, seems to have had a
possible solution in mind.21
Jon Clinch recently presented his own version of a solution to Pap’s murder in his
novel Finn (2007), where Pap becomes implicated in the murders of an African
American boy and his father, whose deaths are avenged by their mother/wife.22
Clinch’s effort is admirable as a creative work, but I suggest that if the reader of
Huckleberry Finn is interested in narrowing down the suspects for Pap’s murder, the
invention of events and scenes nonexistent in Twain’s text is unnecessary. Pap’s murder
scene contains enough clues to, literally, track the murderer.
Paradoxical as it may sound, the clues at the murder scene are things that are conspicuous by their absence. Elsewhere, too, Twain has occasionally used what is missing as
an important clue to solving a crime. For instance, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Sid
Sawyer, unlike dupes like Aunt Polly and Mary, sees through Tom’s elaborate made-up
tale of his dream of his family while adventuring on Jackson’s Island, simply because
Tom’s minute description does not differ in any particular from what actually happened.
Sid observes, “Pretty thin—as long a dream as that, without any mistakes in it!”23 Also,
when Sid, feigning sleep, detects Tom’s secret return from his night stroll, he pays extra
attention to an absence: “Tom turned in without the added vexation of prayers, and Sid
made mental note of the omission.”24 Thus, an omission or curious absence is emphasized as the clue to the unraveling of a “crime scene,” although Tom’s “crimes” are not so
serious as the murder in Huckleberry Finn.
At Pap’s murder scene also, what is crucial is a curious absence—as easily deduced
from the nakedness of Pap’s body. When Jim finds the body, he says, “It’s a dead man.
Yes, indeedy; naked, too” (61). Along with the greasy cards, the whiskey bottles, and the
mention of “the ignorantest kind of words and pictures” (61) on the wall, this is often
thought to indicate that Pap was killed in a brothel, as Clinch notes.25 Whatever kind of
19
For the history of Twain’s composition of the novel, see Everett Emerson, Mark Twain: A Literary
Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 141–42.
20
Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain in Eruption (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), 197.
21
The abandonment of the story was formerly thought to be due to Huck and Jim’s drifting into the
South, passing Cairo. See, for instance, Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 116. But, this cannot be the reason, because it is known
that Twain, in the summer of 1876, had already passed that point and proceeded into the Grangerford
episode.
22
Jon Clinch, Finn: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2007), 110–11, 282.
23
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (New York: Norton, 2007), 97.
24
Ibid., 26.
25
Ibid., 293.
263
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Twain’s Trauma and the Unresolved Murder of Huckleberry Finn’s Father
a house it might have been, or whatever confrontation may have caused the murder, the
crucial information in the scene for tracking the murderer is the body’s nakedness and
the mysterious absence of Pap’s belongings among the exhaustive catalog of items Huck
and Jim retrieve from the murder scene:
We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher knife without any handle, and a bran-new Barlow
knife worth two bits in any store, and a lot of tallow candles, and a tin candlestick, and a
gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty old bed quilt off the bed, and a reticule with needles and
pins and beeswax and buttons and thread and all such truck in it, and a hatchet and some
nails, and a fish-line as thick as my little finger, with some monstrous hooks on it, and a
roll of buckskin, and a leather dog-collar, and a horseshoe, and some vials of medicine that
didn’t have no label on them; and, just as we was leaving I found a tolerable good curry
comb and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow and a wooden leg. (62)
This comprehensive list is needed in order to provide a crucial clue for the identification
of the murderer, not through what is listed but through what is absent, namely, Pap’s
boots and his clothing. Did the killer snatch them? Their probable market value would
be nil. It might be more plausible that the killer fled in them to disguise himself or
(perhaps) herself (since the necessity for disguise may suggest that the killer is a woman).
This may well be the case, considering other instances of transgender disguise in the
novel—Huck’s disguise in woman’s clothing, coincidentally retrieved from the floating
house (66), and Jim’s similar disguise in his final escape from the confinement at the
Phelps farm (333). But, more importantly for our current concerns, the absent boots, if
worn by the killer, open up a crucial path to tracking the murderer down.
Twain planted a clue regarding Pap’s boots at an earlier stage of the novel, where
Huck finds “somebody’s tracks” (19) in the snow: “I was going to follow around, but I
stooped down to look at the tracks first. I didn’t notice anything, at first, but next I did.
There was a cross in the left boot heel, made with big nails, to keep off the devil” (19).
Twain eventually reveals that these tracks were made by Pap’s boots: “I [Huck] . . . told
him [Jim] pap was here again, for I found his tracks in the snow” (20). Therefore, if the
murderer wears Pap’s clothing and boots, he or she will be unknowingly leaving his
signature footprints wherever he or she goes.
With this, Twain has given us all the necessary clues, especially the literally
“cru(x)cial” footprint (a predecessor to the fingerprints used to identify the murderer
in Pudd’nhead Wilson); if we understand Huckleberry Finn as having been conceived
during its writing as a detective story or a story with detective elements, all the
needed elements would have been present, and there would have been no major obstacles
ahead for the completion of this version of the novel, outside of the misgivings that
eventually led Twain to complete it differently. One could easily imagine, for instance,
developments as follows: Somehow, Jim is arrested for Huck’s (staged) murder. The only
way to save Jim is for Huck to present himself in public, to the villagers’ surprise—
another Tom Sawyer-like, miraculous return of the dead. Almost simultaneously, Pap’s
body is discovered by the villagers. Then, Huck is arrested because he has a motive for
that murder: protecting his fortune from Pap, who has been claiming possession of it.
Yasuhiro Takeuchi
This “patricidal” case could be solved by either Tom or Huck, who happens on the
footprints and follows them. Doing so would lead to an astounding confrontation with
Pap’s “ghost”—a Hamlet-like setting quite appropriate for Twain’s novel about the
murdered father. Although the ghost would feign deaf-muteness, so as to conceal her
identity, the disguise would be revealed by the undeniable evidence of Pap’s boots with a
cross—a somewhat similar resolution to the ending of Tom Sawyer, where another cross
is presented as the key item in solving a mystery: Tom and Huck are in search of a cross,
“the mystic sign,” in their pursuit of Injun Joe’s hidden treasure in the cave.26
Interestingly, Twain even has a cross (“crossing”) lead Huck to the Grangerfords; the
setting which, according to Rogers, was initially prepared for the climactic resolution.
Huck, separated from Jim when their raft is destroyed by a steamer, swims in the
“crossing” to the shore near the Grangerfords:
I sung out for Jim about a dozen times, but I didn’t get any answer; so I grabbed a plank
that touched me while I was “treading water,” and struck out for shore, shoving it ahead of
me. But I made out to see that the drift of the current was towards the left-hand shore,
which meant that I was in a crossing; so I changed off and went that way.
It was one of those long, slanting, two-mile crossings. (131)
But, Twain chose not to let Huck “tread” the crossed footprints on the ground after all.
Why then did Twain abort what seems to have been his intention to use Pap’s “cross” to
identify the murderer, despite these well-wrought preparations? This question—Twain’s
curious aversion to solving Pap’s murder—becomes all the more important when
we consider that the novel must also have been constructed with the myth of Oedipus
in mind.
Critics like Lawrence Howe and David Ketterer have pointed out Twain’s interest in
the Oedipus story,27 but I argue that Twain initially constructed at least the first half of
Huckleberry Finn specifically on the model of Oedipus’s tragedy. The major basis of this
claim is the so-called raft chapter, first written for Huckleberry Finn but later incorporated into The Life on the Mississippi. Not only is the episode, which is about the vengeance of the ghost of a baby (Charles William Allbright) against his murderous father
(Dick Allbright), itself patricidal; there are other parallel elements as well. One is that
both fathers are murderous. Dick killed Charles, and Laius, Oedipus’s father, abandons
his baby son in the mountain to die—since he has been warned by an oracle that he will
be killed by the hand of his own child, he “pin[s] its ankles together, and ha[s] it thrown,
by others’ hands, on a trackless mountain.”28 But, both murderous fathers eventually
experience the uncanny, fateful reappearances of the dead sons. The scenes of the
patricidal encounters bear the most striking resemblance—both fathers lose their lives
at three-way crossroads. Sophocles repeatedly emphasizes this point: “Now Laius—as, at
least, the rumour saith—was murdered one day by foreign robbers at a place where three
26
Ibid., 160.
Lawrence Howe, Mark Twain and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 220.
David Ketterer, Tales of Wonder, by Mark Twain (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 362.
28
Sophocles, Œdipus, lines 718–19.
27
265
266
Twain’s Trauma and the Unresolved Murder of Huckleberry Finn’s Father
highways meet”; “The land is called Phocis; and branching roads lead to the same spot
from Delphi and from Daulia”; “When in my [Oedipus’s] journey I was near to those
three roads, there met me a herald, and a man seated in a carriage drawn by colts.”29 The
raft episode is also structured around a three-way crossroads, this one in the river at
Cairo, Illinois, where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers converge. Disoriented in the fog,
Huck sneaks onto the raft, hoping to gather information about his location. Instead, he
hears the story of the baby ghost recounted by a raftsman named Ed. “Five years ago I
was on a raft as big as this, and right along here it was a bright moonshiny night” (114),
says Ed, making it obvious that Dick’s tragedy occurred close to Cairo.
Twain, once a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, was certainly aware that Thebes,
Illinois, lies less than twenty miles upstream from Cairo. The name Thebes originates
from Thebes in Egypt; indeed, Southern Illinois is known as “Little Egypt” due to the
prevalence of Egyptian place names. But, there is another Thebes, in Greece, whose king
Oedipus was. It is easily imaginable that Twain’s familiarity with the river around
Thebes, Illinois, and the three-way junction gave or reinforced the inspiration that led
him to evoke the Oedipus myth in his own story of patricide.
If we accept that Twain had Oedipus in mind when he wrote the raft episode, an
enigmatic inscription in the margin of the manuscripts discovered in 1990 can be seen in
a new light.30 In the top left margin of page 363 of the manuscript, immediately following the raft episode, Twain wrote the word “Eddy.” Fischer and Salamo see this as “a
possible reference to ‘Ed’ of the just completed raft episode, who tells the ‘baby and
barrel’ story,” but also note, “Perhaps, however, the note forecasts a danger to the raft as a
solution to his literary problem at this crucial plot point (Huck and Jim have unknowingly passed Cairo). If he planned to have the raft get caught in an ‘eddy’ as a means of
getting Huck and Jim to shore, however, he did not use that plan.”31 Twain’s note,
however, may also be a reference—occluded because the theme is unbearably threatening
to the author—to “Eddypus” or Oedipus. Twain later transforms the last name of the
founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, into “Eddypus” in his unfinished work,
“The Secret History of Eddypus, the World-Empire” (written 1901–02).
Although Twain’s use of the Oedipus myth may seem simply to be a trace of an
abandoned intention to write a (detective) novel about the murder of the father, it
also, more importantly, suggests the presence of a nagging indecision in Twain’s mind
about the murderer, which may have led to the impasse discussed above. I have
argued that Twain’s conscious plan was to assign the role of the murderer to a disguised
woman, but at the point where the raft episode was being constructed for inclusion in
29
Ibid., lines 715–16, 733–34, 800.
Rita Reif, “First Half of ‘Huck Finn,’ in Twain’s Hand, Is Found,” New York Times, February 14,
1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/14/books/first-half-of-huck-finn-in-twain-s-hand-is-found.
html (accessed November 22, 2012).
31
Fischer, Victor, and Lin Salamo, with Walter Blair, “Mark Twain’s Marginal Working Notes,” in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003),
522–23.
30
Yasuhiro Takeuchi
Huckleberry Finn, against the backdrop of the Oedipus story, Pap’s son would clearly also
have come into view as a potential killer. Upon being discovered as a stowaway, Huck,
who has listened to the Allbrights’ story, dares to identify himself with the baby. When he
is asked his name by a raftsman, he answers, “Charles William Allbright, sir” (121)—by
extension, the Oedipal son. At this point, Twain evades the dark issues that he has evoked
by shifting the narration from uncanny to comic: The crew roars with laughter at Huck’s
answer, which is thus made to seem offhand.
However, Huck’s notably Oedipal history is certainly present as subtext. Just as the
fathers of Charles Allbright and Oedipus both thought that they had killed their sons,
not only did Pap once come close to killing Huck (“He chased me round and round the
place, with a clasp-knife, . . . saying he would kill me” [36]), but along with the villagers
Pap was fooled by Huck’s staging his own death to escape from Pap’s cabin; he believed
his son had actually been killed. Indeed, Pap is soon regarded as Huck’s murderer by the
villagers: “people thinks now that he killed his boy and fixed things so folks would think
robbers done it” (69). At least in the eyes of the villagers, Pap is a murderous father like
Laius and Dick Allbright.32
Huck similarly bears common characteristics with Oedipus and Charles, as the son
returning from (assumed) death. Just as Oedipus, whom Laius thought dead, fatally
confronts his father at the three-way crossroads, and just as the slain baby reappears to
haunt his raft-borne father at the crossroads near Cairo, Huck also surprises his surrogate
father figure, Jim, by his “miraculous” return from death to the raft around Cairo.
Reunited with Huck after their separation in thick fog, Jim is stunned: “Goodness
gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain’ dead . . . ?” (103). Of course, Jim, along with
Pap, was the prime suspect in Huck’s (apparent) murder: “they changed around and
judged [Huck’s murder] was done by a runaway nigger named Jim” (69). These correspondences among Charles Allbright, Oedipus, and Huck imply that Huck inherits a
submerged role in the novel—the guilty son responsible for his father’s death.
To summarize the discussion above, I argue that although Twain’s intention was in
the end unrealized, Huckleberry Finn was at first consciously constructed on a murder
plot with a woman murderer, but that all the while, and somewhat contradictorily,
another murderer lurked in Twain’s mind—the patricidal Huck. The near-invisibility
of the latter aspect to the reader is likely to derive from the same cause as the strangely
obscured presence of the father, Pap. In other words, not only is Huck’s dark nature
submerged, but his father’s true identity as well is insistently effaced: Pap is nameless,
dead or alive. When alive, in fact, Huck’s father is always referred to as simply “pap,” not
as the capital Pap; and, even after his death, the identity of his body is withheld until the
final page of the novel.
Similarly, the identities of both Oedipus and Charles Allbright are vague: Oedipus
does not know whose son he himself really is, and Charles presents himself merely as an
32
Huck’s killing a pig to stage his own death, according to Kenneth Lynn, may already suggest his
desire “to slay his father,” because Pap had once compared his hand to that of a hog. See Kenneth S.
Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 211.
267
268
Twain’s Trauma and the Unresolved Murder of Huckleberry Finn’s Father
enigmatic ghost. Both their fathers, Laius and Dick, also have their identities obscured
for a time, in life and death. Oedipus does not at first know the identity of the old man
whom he has killed—the victim’s body, like Pap’s, is “nameless”; and Dick’s identity is
not revealed until he is faced with his slain baby’s body. However, in both these cases, the
true identities of all parties are finally revealed. The revelations have profound effects on
the respective stories: Oedipus’s “casual” killing turns into a tragic patricide, and the tale
of the Allbrights, which started out as a simple “ghost story,” ends as something grimmer,
an infanticide and patricide.
If any of the four hidden identities here had remained obscured, the respective
patricidal relationship would never have surfaced. Likewise, as long as Twain can
suppress the identity of either Huck or Pap, he can avoid really facing the dark
nature of the relationship between them. This might be best understood as an effect
of a psychological defense mechanism in the author’s mind, a possibility that might
also explain why even the final revelation is only partial and unsatisfactory, with the
identification of the victim but not the murderer, and is accompanied with the inaccurate and curiously manipulative insistence that what has been “covered” is now
“uncovered.” In other words, Twain, at the end of the novel, is pretending that he
has confessed and is trying to convince himself that his sin in entering these dark
waters has been cleansed.
If Huck is another Oedipus in Twain’s mind, the presence of Pap’s corpse in the novel
is a constant reminder of patricidal guilt. This being the case, it is no wonder that Twain
represses Pap by keeping him nameless, dead or alive, to prevent this accusation from
overwhelming him and to save the author from having to express and explore it. Pap’s
illiteracy is appropriate here—it places him beyond the realm of written language, just as
Twain was unable to find the language to express the dark truth behind Pap’s and Huck’s
relationship and had to abort his original murder plot as a result.
What drives this aversion and silence over Pap’s murder and the enigma of his naked
body? Twain’s own silence over another naked body, that of his own father, suggests that
the aversion is the reaction to trauma. Twain never wrote about the nakedness of his
father, John Clemens (1798–1847), at his autopsy, which, according to Wecter, the
young Sam Clemens (Twain’s real name) witnessed through a keyhole.33 In fact,
Twain writes very little overall about the event—a few enigmatic words on only two
occasions. The first is a simple phrase, “The autopsy,” which abruptly appears at the
closing of “Villagers of 1840-3” (1897), his notes on the people around him in
Hannibal, Missouri, in his childhood days.34 According to Walter Blair, “the note,
‘The autopsy,’ refers to a terrifying experience young Sam Clemens had, of which no
explicit record has been left.”35 The other reference is found in Twain’s jottings in notes
of December 10, 1903: “1847. Witnessed post mortem of my uncle through the
33
Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 116–17.
Mark Twain, “Villagers of 1840-3” in Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Huck & Tom, ed. Walter Blair
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 40.
35
Ibid., 349.
34
Yasuhiro Takeuchi
keyhole.”36 Wecter concludes that the autopsied body belonged not to Twain’s uncle but
to his father, reasoning that “since 1847 marked the date of no uncle’s demise, but was
the never-to-be-forgotten year of his father’s death, the true identification is easily
made.”37 But, Twain’s note should not be seen as a mistake to be corrected. The significance of Twain’s jotting lies in his repressive phrasing, “my uncle” displacing “my
father,” which indicates that Twain’s lifelong repression of witnessing his father’s autopsy
is so profound as to make him evade the truth even in a private note.
In an interview with The Times of London, Twain once said that “[a] man cannot tell
the whole truth about himself, even if convinced that what he wrote would never be seen
by others.”38 Although Twain was speaking generally about an autobiographical project
that was “to be published 100 years after his death,”39 he may well have had a specific
example in mind, since the quote is followed by this curious sentence: “I have personally
satisfied myself of that and have got others to test it also.”40 Michael J. Kiskis shrewdly
suggests that the “reference to ‘others’ here may be to Clemens’ attempt to get his
brother Orion to write autobiography.”41 Kiskis’s argument is supported by Twain’s
letter to Orion dated February 26, 1880, in which he advises Orion to “confess shameful
things” by banishing “all idea of an audience” in his autobiographical project.42
However, Orion seems to have taken this advice too literally—he wrote about the
autopsy.
William Dean Howells, responding to Orion’s manuscript, wrote to Twain on June
14, 1880 with a warning: “But the writer’s soul is laid too bare: it is shocking . . . . Don’t
let any one else even see those passages about the autopsy.”43 Twain’s subsequent correspondence with Orion and Howells suggests, as Fanning demonstrates, that he had
become less enthusiastic about Orion’s project.44 When asked by Orion to return his
completed manuscript, Twain “seems to have ignored the plea.”45 Fanning shows further
that Twain destroyed part of the manuscript sometime later, and that the remainder was
destroyed by Albert Bigelow Paine, who, in response to a request by Fred W. Lorch in
1927 to see Orion’s autobiography, explained, “It was M. T.’s wish that all should be
36
Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 116.
Ibid., 116.
38
Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2006), 334.
39
Ibid., 333.
40
Ibid., 334.
41
Michael J. Kiskis, “Dead Man Talking: Mark Twain’s Autobiographical Deception,” American
Literary Realism 40 (2008): 112n15.
42
Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2010), 6.
43
Mark Twain–Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William Dean Howells,
vol. 1, ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960),
315.
44
For the detailed correspondence between Twain and Orion at that time, see Fanning, Mark Twain
and Orion Clemens, 180–202.
45
Ibid., 201.
37
269
270
Twain’s Trauma and the Unresolved Murder of Huckleberry Finn’s Father
destroyed.”46 Almost twenty years after Howell’s warning, Twain also tells in the Times
interview about the results of his getting “others to test it” as follows: “You cannot lay
bare your private soul and look at it. You are too much ashamed of yourself. It is too
disgusting. For that reason I confine myself to drawing the portraits of others.”47 Orion’s
autobiography, which touched upon the shame of Twain’s “private soul,” thus was
silenced. Clearly, the naked, autopsied body of his father remained beyond the realm
of Twain’s ability to process using language. This repression, and the extent to which he
had to go to maintain it, suggests that the incident was seriously traumatic, and that the
trauma remained unresolved, beyond Twain’s expression and understanding.
As is often the case with traumatic episodes,48 Twain’s is also the source of his deepest
guilt (“You are too much ashamed of yourself” ), a situation that resonates with the
proposition that Twain cannot help but subconsciously detect Huck’s Oedipal guilt
over the naked body of his father. For evidence on this point (the relationship in
Twain of a naked corpse and guilt), Twain’s short story “The Facts Concerning the
Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” is most revealing. Published in Atlantic
Magazine in June 1876, only a couple of months before Twain began to write
Huckleberry Finn, the story somehow foretells Twain’s at least subconscious motivation
for writing the first half of the novel: the chance to approach surreptitiously the source of
guilt, or forbidden fruit, which is his father’s autopsied body.49
The story begins with the protagonist encountering a dwarf at his door. It soon turns
out that the dwarf is familiar with every little shameful behavior of his, down to
“refus[ing] to read [a] young woman’s manuscript the other day, and give her an opinion
as to its literary value.”50 Being a worthy enough writer to have his advice sought by a
young aspirant, the protagonist can be seen in a sense as a proxy for Twain. Like Twain,
who famously cursed the presence of conscience in man’s mind,51 the writer expresses
his consuming grudge against his own conscience when he learns that the dwarf is
an incarnation of it: “I have wished a hundred million times that you were tangible,
and that I could get my hands on your throat once!”52 And, indeed, he finally kills
46
Ibid., 217–18.
Twain, Interviews, 334.
48
Guilt is widely known to be a component of trauma response. See, for instance, K. R. Hemming and
B. C. Frueh, “Combat Guilt and its relationship to PTSD symptoms,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 53,
no. 8 (1997): 801–8.
49
Takeuchi has pointed out Twain’s ambivalent attitude toward corpses, at once fascinated by them and
inhibited from writing about them. For a detailed discussion, see Yasuhiro Takeuchi, “A Fascination
with Corpses: Mark Twain’s ‘Shameful Behavior,” The Midwest Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2013): 202–17.
50
Mark Twain, “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” in Mark Twain:
Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852-1890, ed. Louis J. Budd (New York: Library of
America, 1992), 647.
51
Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee, for instance, imagines, “If I had the remaking of man, he
wouldn’t have any conscience. It is one of the most disagreeable things connected with a person.” See
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1979), 209–10.
52
Twain, “Carnival,” 649.
47
Yasuhiro Takeuchi
the dwarf, and liberates himself. Now “a man WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE,” he
starts to commit “scores of crimes, of various kinds.”53 To whatever degree
Twain’s fable of conscience may be seen as a predecessor of Freud’s theory of the superego,54 what is important for our purposes is the concluding paragraph, where the
protagonist, liberated now from his sense of guilt, advertises the corpses in his possession
for sale:
In conclusion I wish to state, by way of advertisement, that medical colleges desiring
assorted tramps for scientific purposes, either by the gross, by cord measurement, or per
ton, will do well to examine the lot in my cellar before purchasing elsewhere, as there were
all selected and prepared by myself, and can be had at a low rate, because I wish to clear out
my stock and get ready for the spring trade.55
According to Victor Fischer, “Twain was well aware of the traffic in illegal corpses”
for medical purposes.56 Twain’s uncle, James Andrew Hay Lampton, had studied at
McDowell Medical College in St. Louis; its founder, Joseph Nash McDowell, was
known as the “eccentric anatomist,” since he “advocated and practiced body snatching
in Missouri in the 1840s.”57 Therefore, there is little doubt that Twain in the last
paragraph of the story had anatomy and autopsy in mind. And the large number of
corpses “selected and prepared” for medical purposes is presented in the story as proof
that the protagonist’s loss of conscience is real. In other words, Twain’s notion of what is
in a sense the worst crime imaginable—that which demonstrates the complete loss of the
antagonist’s conscience—is not murder itself, but procuring bodies for the purpose of
anatomy. I argue that Twain’s sense of guilt—the “worst guilt”—fundamentally prevents
him from coming to grips with his experience of his father’s autopsy. Witnessing his
father’s naked corpse being dissected by a doctor is the darkest sin of all, and one that he
was never able to confess or put into words.
Although unable to explore or express the full implications of his experience, Twain,
like other people “possessed by [a traumatic] image or event,”58 returns insistently in
Huckleberry Finn to the theme of anatomy/autopsy even when it seems to have no
apparent relevance to his traumatic experience. In this sense, it is not surprising that
Twain’s manuscript for the first half of the novel, which was discovered in 1990, turned
out to contain two episodes related to the theme of medical dissection. Victor Fischer, an
editor of the Mark Twain Project, inspected the manuscript and reported in the interview
with New York Times that he confirmed the presence of two episodes, which had been
53
Ibid., 660.
For such an argument, see William M. Gibson, The Art of Mark Twain (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976), 182–84, and Sam B. Girgus, “Conscience in Connecticut: Civilization and
Its Discontents in Twain’s Camelot,” The New England Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1978): 549.
55
Twain, “Carnival,” 660.
56
Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo, “Jim’s Ghost Story: A Passage Deleted from Chapter 9,” in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 533.
57
Ibid., 532, 533.
58
Caruth, Trauma, 4–5.
54
271
272
Twain’s Trauma and the Unresolved Murder of Huckleberry Finn’s Father
excluded from the novel at publication.59 One of these was about Jim’s “encounters with
ghosts and corpses.”60 Fischer argues that the reason for its omission was that “[i]t was
just a little too lugubrious to be allowed to remain in the book”;61 However, considering
that Jim in this episode was visiting the dissecting room at a medical college, only to be
“possessed” by the corpses retained for dissection (Jim believes he was caught by a corpse
from behind), the ambivalent—in the sense that they are taboo but curiously repeated—
themes of cadavers and autopsy very likely influenced Twain’s decision to delete the
episode.
The second deleted episode is the raft episode mentioned earlier. It turned out,
Fischer says, that “the Huck Finn segment in ‘Life on the Mississippi’ was an integral
part of Twain’s draft of Huck Finn.”62 Although its removal from the novel is widely
believed to have been done “solely to serve the practical convenience of his publisher,”63
here, too, the element of the cadaverous may suggest otherwise. One of the raftsmen asks
of Charles Allbright’s body, “[H]ow could it keep, all that time?” Not only is Charles
found naked in a barrel—a typical container for corpses trafficked illegally for medical
purposes64—but also his body is not decomposed even three years after its death, just like
an embalmed corpse—and in fact, in medical schools, in cases where dissection of a
corpse was to be delayed, it would be embalmed. Considering this, Dick Allbright, like
Jim in the other deleted episode, can be seen as trying to escape from the cadaver, which
is chasing after him; running, in a sense, from a fearsome possession. What is more,
Dick’s experience is colored not only by fear but also by his deep sense of guilt at having
killed his son.
The parallel deletions of these cadaverous episodes from the novel clearly indicate
the tenacity of Twain’s repression on this topic and also embody the reason for it:
Twain’s sense of guilt. Although Charles’s dead body reveals his father’s secret guilt,
the raft episode as a whole, as noted earlier, has a somewhat different focus, as
expressed by its similarities with the myth of Oedipus. Although both the raft episode and the Oedipus story begin with an (attempted or actual) infanticide, the
focus is on the patricides perpetrated by the baby and Oedipus. The “guilty anatomy” theme is in this way connected in the raft episode with the theme of patricide.
As the baby’s double, Huck in the raft episode also reveals a kind of guilt over his
father’s death, and in turn, like the baby’s murderer, an implicatedness in the
59
Rita Reif, “Twain Manuscript Resolves Huck Finn Mysteries,” New York Times, February 26, 1991,
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/26/books/twain-manuscript-resolves-huck-finn-mysteries.html (accessed November 22, 2012).
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid.
63
Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo, “Explanatory Notes,” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 409.
64
Fischer, “Jim’s Ghost Story,” 533.
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presence of the mysterious naked body floating on the river in a house if not a
barrel. If this is the significance of the episode, it is dangerous: How could Twain
have retained it (however obfuscated the danger might be) without being forced to
grapple with the traumatic episode in his own past? Just as Dick Allbright, cornered
by the baby’s corpse, submerges both his son and himself in the river (clearly a
symbolic act of repression), the only way left for Twain to resolve the ambivalence of
simultaneously being possessed by his trauma and unable to assimilate in his writing—was to remove it from the novel.
*****
The exact nature of Twain’s emotional response to witnessing his father’s autopsy
must of course remain a matter of speculation. At least, however, our reading of
Huckleberry Finn, which revealed Huck’s repressed yet still potential Oedipal role, indicates that for young Sam Clemens, witnessing his father’s body being dissected must have
felt tantamount to being an accessory to the murder of his father. That conviction—his
own responsibility for his father’s death—would certainly have been sufficient to traumatize the boy and engrave a deep sense of guilt within him. As the traumatized individual is possessed by an event and insistently reenacts it,65 Twain cannot help but write
out his internal tensions surrounding the cadaver, autopsy, and patricide/filicide. But,
their significance is covered and blurred in his text, such that their relevance to his
father’s death cannot be readily detected. Twain’s obfuscation on this point may not
be so much as the result of a simple defense mechanism as the result of a fundamental
inability to digest and find meaning in the traumatic event. Because it is beyond his
understanding, it haunts him.
As a result, Twain is compelled to return to the scene of the crime, just like
Tom Sawyer, who witnesses a body-snatching (again, for medical purposes) at the
graveyard, committed by a doctor with the help of Injun Joe and Muff Potter, and
who comes back to the graveyard the next day “because an awful, unaccountable
fascination drew him on.”66 This inexplicable return to the scene is soon repeated,
but this time with a deep sense of guilt, by Muff Potter, even though he is the
prime suspect:
“Why didn’t you leave? Why did you want to come here for?” somebody said.
“I couldn’t help it,” Potter moaned. “I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t seem to come
anywhere but here.” And he fell to sobbing again.67
Twain himself comes repeatedly back to his forbidden theme in Huckleberry Finn.
However, because of the obscurity of the source of his compulsion, reflected in Tom’s,
and its irrationality as in Potter’s, his treatment of the topic is often odd: superfluous
(resulting in deletion) or enigmatic (as in the ghost stories of Jim and Eddy), but always,
65
66
67
For discussion on the insistent return of a traumatic event, see, for instance, Caruth, Trauma, 4–6.
Twain, Tom, 65.
Ibid., 66.
273
274
Twain’s Trauma and the Unresolved Murder of Huckleberry Finn’s Father
deep down, redolent of sin (like the murder cases of Allbright and Pap). Driven by
Twain’s repressed guilt, they culminate in the unresolved mystery of Pap’s murder,
behind which the traumatic memory of Twain’s father’s autopsy is lurking. To understand fully the “sinful event” in cases like these, the crucial evidence will always be what
is suppressed in or excluded from text, like Pap’s boots, crucially undiscovered at the
murder scene.