“Whiteness”, Huck
Finn and the Logomachines: A Critical Study
Dr. Ayan Mondal
Assistant Professor of English
Bankura Christian College
Bankura, West Bengal, India
Abstract:
Mark Twain’s Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn is usually read as an exploration narrative that builds
upon the anti-racist premise of black-white amiability projected through the
relationship between the “white trash” Huck and the black “nigger” Jim. Toni
Morrison in her seminal book Playing in
the Dark; Whiteness and the Literary Imagination apart from theoretically
analysing some of the basic tenets of the workings of literary imagination to
give expression and come to terms with “whiteness”, also called for an
re-exploration of some of the seminal “white” texts which are part of the
nineteenth century American canon. She
hinted at a possible reading of Twain’s masterpiece “against the grain” to give
expression to the textual agency of making use of Jim to bolster and articulate
Huck’s “whiteness”.
This article proposes to attempt an in-depth analysis of
the some of the verbal exchanges between Huckleberry and Jim and to show
thereby how those seemingly funny exchanges get invested with power-dynamics
and thereby become operational “logomachines”. The article therefore seeks to
read the text from the methodological framework of literary “whiteness studies”
as propounded by Toni Morrison and to show how the black vehicle constantly
serves as the fodder to ignite “whiteness”.
Keywords: Literary
Imagination; Logomachines; Nigger; power-dynamics; Whiteness
Mark Twain’s Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn is considered as one of the seminal texts in the
American canon, despite Jonathan Arac’s recent contention that it has been
indiscriminately “hypercanonized” by critics. One remembers Ernest Hemingway’s
eulogy- “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain
called Huckleberry Finn. American
writing comes from that” (Hemingway 22). In the “Preface” to the third Norton
edition of the text, Thomas Cooley, the editor, brings back a question that has
perturbed critics for more than a hundred years since its publication. Cooley
writes:
Is Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn a racist book? Huck himself likes comfort- the comfort of
fishing naked from the raft, the comfort of sleeping while Jim takes his watch-
but reading Huck’s opus even in private, much less as part of a class, is a
profoundly uncomfortable experience for many people, and not just because Mark
Twain uses a single demeaning racial epithet more than 200 times in the book.
Does this mean that we shouldn’t read it? Or that book shouldn’t be taught in
the public schools? (Cooley vii).
With the publication of Twain’s text in 1885, the Boston Transcript reported that the Concord
Public Library Committee recommended the exclusion of the book from the library
; one of the committee members regarded the book as “the veriest trash” ( qtd
in Twain Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,(hereafter
AHBF) 308). The Springfield Republican too approved of the decision
of the committee and considered the book to be morally low, the perusal of
which can be harmful. In 1957, the NAACP (National Association for the
Advancement of Coloured People) in collaboration with the National Urban League
condemned the novel considering it inappropriate for teaching in the public
schools of New York City because of its consistent and repetitive use of the
word “nigger”. In 1982 John H Wallace, a
public school official who opposed the teaching of Huckleberry Finn at the Mark Twain Intermediate School, Fairfax
County, Virginia, considered the book as
“the most grotesque example of racist trash” (Twain, AHBF 309) in “The Case Against Huck
Finn”. In 1984, Julius Lester in the article “Morality and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” lambasted
the novel with charges of immorality and condemned its treatment of Negroes
under slavery.
However, favourable responses to the novel were not few
in number. In 1885, Brander Matthews in the London Saturday Review praised the dexterity with which Twain creatively
characterised Huck as a genuine boy. Matthews argued, “For one thing, the skill
with which the character of Huck Finn is maintained is marvellous. We see
everything through his eyes- and they are his eyes and not a pair of Mark
Twain’s spectacles” (qtd in Twain, AHBF
330). Lionel Trilling’s 1948 essay “The Greatness of Huckleberry Finn”,
addressed the novel as one of the central documents of American culture.
Twain’s biographer, Justin Kaplan in one of his lectures entitled “Born to
Trouble: One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn” attacked Julie Lester, claiming
that the novel’s spirit was “that of matchless satire on racism, bigotry and property rights in human beings” (qtd
in Twain AHBF 356 emphasis mine).
T.S. Eliot in his “Introduction” to Twain’s text valorised the book as Twain’s
masterpiece stating, “In the writing of Huckleberry
Finn Mark Twain had two elements which, when treated with his sensibility
and his experience, formed a great book: these two are the Boy and the River”
(qtd in Twain, AHBF 348). David L.
Smith in his article “Huck, Jim and Racial Discourse” defended the novel
against all charges of racism arguing –“Those who brand the book racist
generally do so without having considered the specific form of racial discourse
to which the novel responds”(qtd in Twain, AHBF 364).
In her comprehensive “Introduction” to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996) published four years after the publication
of Playing in the Dark, she once
again catalogued her reading-experiences of and encounters with the novel. In
the well-conceived title of her “Introduction”, “This Amazing, Troubling Book”,
Morrison furthered her erstwhile readings of the text, arguing that the novel
was simultaneously the cause of her amazement and unease. She recorded in her
article her varied responses to the novel at different stages of her life. Her
first reading could generate only fear and alarm because she missed the
“treasure- island excursion” of Tom
Sawyer in the novel. Her second reading, under the supervision of an
English teacher added some traces of satisfaction with her initial discomfort.
The liberating language of a child which was neither “baby talk”, nor the
“doggedly patronizing language” of books placed on the children’s shelf, was
one among other factors that attracted her towards Twain’s text. This was
followed by her third encounter with the text, through the perspectives of
Leslie Fiedler and Lionel Trilling, evoking the response, that the criticisms
enlightened her more than the novel did. Ironically enough, Morrison’s readings
of Fiedler and Trilling did not open up new dimensions which she was ignorant
of, but on the contrary, propelled her to consider why those critics literally
ignored things that “troubled” her. During the early 1980’s Morrison’s fourth
reading of the book was occasioned by the rising demands of removing the book
from the public libraries (discussed earlier in this chapter) on account of the
author’s persistent use of the epithet “nigger”. Though the decision to ban the
book was made with the speculation that it had possibilities of corrupting
school-children, Morrison could only identify in the drive a strategy to
appease the adults:
It struck me as a purist yet elementary kind of
censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate
the problem, band-aid the solution….Embarrassing as it had been to hear the
dread word spoken, and therefore sanctioned, in class, my experience of Jim’s
epithet had little to do with my initial nervousness the book had caused. Reading “nigger” hundreds of times
embarrassed, bored, annoyed- but did not faze me. In this latest reading I was
curious about the source of my alarm- my sense that danger lingered after the
story ended. I was powerfully attracted to the combination of delight and
fearful agitation lying entwined like crossed fingers in the pages. And it was
significant that this novel which had given so much pleasure to young readers
was also complicated territory for sophisticated scholars (qtd. in Twain, AHBF 385 emphasis mine).
Morrison, therefore was against a forceful “band-aiding”
of the solution by maintaining a highly diplomatic critical silence in
acknowledging the real nature of the “wound”-- the actual racial bruise that her reading of the text generated.
Morrison’s thesis in Playing in the Dark
and her comprehensive “Introduction” to the novel, was to “track” her unease by
studying the centrality of “whiteness”, or for that matter, Americanness, of
the text that came to be articulated in and through a parasitic dependence on
the “blackness” or the Afro-American presence that the text had taken recourse
to. Criticisms of the text attesting to Twain’s stereotypical handling of the
“nigger” were plenty, but the white characters’ (or for that matter the white
author’s) necessity of handling and
manipulating the “black” persona in specific ways was what Morrison was
interested in. The focus of the present article is to unravel the text’s
celebration of “whiteness” with reference to specific exchanges between Huck
and Jim imbricated in power-politics which Joshua terms “logomachines”.
Chadwick Joshua addresses the verbal battles between Huck
and Jim as “logomachines” and identifies some major logomachines in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn-- Huck
and Jim’s discussions about securing the canoe, Huck’s “readings” of passages
from King Solomon and the discussions that follow, Huck and Jim’s discussions
about language concerning the debate whether a Frenchman should speak only
French and the interaction between the two comrades which follow when they
reunite after being separated by the fog are some such logomachines Joshua
discusses. Anthony J. Berret states that such conversations between Huck and
Jim resemble the “comic dialogues and sentimental songs” (Berret 38) of the
first part of blackface minstrelsy shows. The logomachines which Joshua refers
to, fail to subvert the Huck/ Jim binary as oppositional categories of the
racially powerful and powerless, when seen through the lens of “Whiteness”
studies. The analysis of each passage, reversing the critical gaze from the
racial object to the racial subject, would highlight how Huck is deeply in need
of drawing psychological sustenance from Jim.
In Chapter XIV, for example, when Huck and Jim boarded
the wrecked steamboat after the robbers stole off, Huck starts excitedly
narrating all his experiences, inside the wreck and ferryboat verbally
re-enacting the adventures. But the voice of the narrator immediately records
Jim’s reaction to the same:
“…he said he didn’t want no more adventures. He said that
when I went in the texas and he crawled back to get on the raft and found her
gone, he nearly died; because he judged it was all up with, anyway it could be fixed; for if he didn’t get saved, whoever
saved him would send him back home so as to get the reward, and then Miss
Watson will sell him south sure. Well, he
was right; he was most always right; he has an uncommon level head for a nigger”
(Twain, AHBF 86 emphasis mine).
Joshua reads this episode as a moral defeat of Huck and
triumph of Jim, not merely because Huck acknowledged the uncommon intelligence
of even a “nigger”, but because Jim could assert himself registering his
refusal to indulge in any more adventures.
Jim could count his life and his freedom more than the naive pleasure of
“adventures” and this emphatic assertion on his part was interpreted by Joshua
as a sign of his victory:
Such inescapable logic from Jim to Huck makes Jim, then,
one to whom Huck will listen, at least as much as a “nigger” needs to be
listened to. Note that here Huck feels the necessity to qualify his praise for
Jim. The qualifier is framed into the sentence as an important consideration,
yet Twain places it structurally so that the real meaning of the sentence is
not dependent on this additional comment (Chadwick-Joshua 44).
Joshua’s elation at Huck’s defeat is fallacious, because
in Huck’s acknowledgement of Jim, there is an identification with what he too
wished to achieve-- freedom. Jim’s comment symbolically manifested the quest
for freedom that the boundless expanse of the river equally promised and
threatened. Again Jim’s helplessness at the possibilities of both his getting
“saved” and “drowned” only intensifies his vulnerability. A perception of Jim’s
vulnerability merely serves to strengthen the “free” spirit of Huck. Therefore,
Huck’s appreciation of Jim’s “intelligence” to fight the adversities and
threats in the river is at bottom an assertion of his own racial superiority
and advantageous subject-position. Again Twain puts Jim’s idea of “freedom” not
through Jim’s individual persona but through narrative voice of Huck. It can be
argued that in narrating Jim’s fanatic obsession with “freedom” directly to the
readers, Huck, too, in this context, re-enacts his own desires to achieve it.
Jim’s actions here get infiltrated neither through Twain’s voice, nor through
his individual dialogue. In fact, when Twain vehemently puts Jim’s desires for
freedom directly through his persona later in the novel, the readers notice how
the statements of Jim unsettles Huck as he was battling with his conscience for
helping a runaway slave.
The passages where Jim and Huck converse about “King
Sollermun” are equally loaded and revealing. Although Huck puts on airs of
intellect with his stories about the million wives in King Solomon’s harem, Jim
plays on the word “harem”, to suit his purpose, much to the astonishment of
Huck. The passage from the text is worth quoting:
But
mostly they (kings) hang round the harem.
Roun’
de which
Harem
What’s
the harem?
The place where he keeps his wives. Don’t you know about
the harem? Solomon had one; he had about a million wives.
Why, yes, dat’s so; I-I’d done forget it. A harem’s a
bo’d’n house, I reck’n. Mos’ likely dey has rackety times in de nursery. En I
reck’n de wives quarrels considable; endat’ crease de racket (Twain, AHBF 87).
Jim’s initial ignorance of the meaning of the word
“harem” gives way to his re-interpretation of the word from his own
subject-position, deviating from Huck’s elaborations. Freeing the word from the
invested meanings (a place of polygamy, prostitutes and harlots waiting to
gratify the male lust), for Jim, the word becomes a signifier of family bliss
and happiness (“a bo’d’n house”). Later, Jim even subversively argues that
Solomon’s insistence on allowing the women to tear a child into two halves was
as imbecile as tearing a dollar bill into two half- dollar ones. Jim also
antithetically counters Huck’s view- that
he has accumulated from Widow Douglas (and this time he again returns to
the hegemonic centre) - that King Solomon was “the wisest man” (Twain, AHBF 87). Rather he emphatically notes
“he weren’t no wise man, nuther” (Twain,
AHBF 87). Interpreting these Solomon
excerpts, again, as Jim’s triumph in taking recourse to his own rhetorical
strategy to counter the established ramifications of history, Joshua writes:
Jim’s signification causes the reader to rethink the
historical status of Solomon and to reconsider conventional preformed Sunday
school ideas. Jim assumes a new status, that of the one who makes the decisions
and decrees the fate of those who serve him. By assuming the persona of Solomon
and thereby appropriating Solomon’s voice and authority, Jim assertively
rejects the silence his slave and nigger status have imposed upon him
(Chadwick-Joshua 51).
In narrating his version Jim even imagines himself to be
Solomon and this impersonation of Solomon is the symbolic projection of a
New-Negro who rewrites history. Jim therefore, offers Huck the vision of an
alternative, subversive reality that he always tried to assume, but Huck is far
from acknowledging it through verbal language. Huck is either reluctant to pay
heed to the ostensibly non-sensical words of the “nigger” or is only supressing
his anxieties by reverting to the racial stereotype- “I never see a nigger. If
he got a notion in his head once, there warn’t no getting it out again. He was
the most down on Solomon of any nigger I ever see. So I went to taking about
other kings, and let Solomon slide” (Twain, AHBF
89). Rightly does Morrison remark in her book, “…it is absolutely necessary
that the term nigger be inextricable
from Huck’s deliberations about who and what he himself is- or precisely, is
not” (Morrison 55) With obstinacy and
considerable confidence Jim could configure and re-create a new Solomon who
should be forsaking the noisy harems and enjoying repose. However nonsensical
Jim’s deliberations might appear to be, Huck’s denial to continue with the
Solomon narrative points at his own anxieties regarding imagining the “Other”.
Andrew Solomon comments:
…Jim has contradicted Huck and the Widow Douglas as well
as denounced King Solomon. Slaves in 1845 did not do that. Jim’s words here are
as much an act of mutiny as running away from Miss Watson was, and the penalty
could have been, in fact, just as severe. Jim has now started to break his
psychological enslavement, just as he had recently broken from physical
enslavement; the importance of this break must not be ignored. It can even be
argued that the black man’s severing of the identification with a Biblical
Hebrew, an identification based on their mutual slavery, is in itself his first
step towards psychological freedom (Solomon 21).
Yet for Huck’s whiteness to get asserted the spectre of
enslavement is necessary for imagining not merely the “not-free”, but also the
“not me”, to borrow the expressions of Morrison. Little wonder, that Huck
considers it futile to drag the Solomon debate and he therefore slides on other
topics of discussion, but only after stereotyping the “nigger” by his derisive
comment that they are stubborn enough not to come out of preconceived notions.
In the same chapter, when Huck asks Jim what would he “think” if somebody
approached him with the French remark “Polly-voo-franzy”, Jim promptly replied
that he would simply bash the person’s “head” if he was a “nigger” and “warn’t
a “white” ”. The moment Jim suggested that he won’t dare attack a “white”
person, through him, once again Huck’s white male ego gets reinforced and
gratified. This reinforcement also has its roots in Jim’s (and this time it is not Huck’s)
use of the pejorative use “nigger” which
suggests his acquiescence to the hegemonic and hierarchical power-structure.
Jim, however, fails to understand why a French person is unable to speak the
English language. To this, Huck with supreme instance of rhetorically
sophisticated logic initiates the following conversation with Jim:
Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?
No,
a cat don’t
Well,
does a cow?
No,
a cow don’tnuther.
Does
a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?
No
dey don’t
It’s
natural and right for them to talk different from each other,
ain’t
it?
Course
And
ain’t it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk
Different
from us?
Why
most sholy it is
Well
then, why ain’t it natural and right for a Frenchman
to talk different from us? You answer me that (Twain, AHBF 57).
Jim in the same logical manner appropriates Huck’s
sophistication and answers Huck back. Jim suggested, since neither cats nor
cows were men and the Frenchman was one, there was every reason to expect that
a Frenchman would talk like a man. If Huck demanded an answer from Jim (“You
answer me that”), Jim too makes the same enquiry, in the same manner to Huck
(“You answer me dat”). Huck was at a loss to answer Jim back and could only put
an end to the verbal confrontation with another racist statement “I see it
warn’tno use wasting words- you can’t learn a nigger to argue. So I quit”. With a feeling of self-aggrandizement at his
racial superiority, Huck feels not defeated in this verbal confrontation.
However, James S. Leonard in his article “Huck, Jim and the “Black and White”
Fallacy” o`pines:
…Jim has learned his logical and rhetorical lesson and is
ready to show that the black man can play the white man’s game with equal or
greater adroitness. Tired of serving as Glaucon to Huck’s homely version of
Socrates, he decides to turn the tables- to rise up, one might say and
overthrow his rhetorical master (Leonard 58).
Chadwick Joshua also underscores Huck’s defeat in this
verbal battle: “Huck “quits” because Jim has “learned” so well that nothing
else remains to be said. Huck’s ad
hominum shift is a marker for his defeat and frustration as well as a reminder
to the reader as the racist premises on which his regard for Jim has been
based” (Joshua 53). One is inclined to question whether Huck really “quits”
when he hurls his racist aspersion on Jim pointing at the futility of involving
and engaging Jim in sophisticated “arguments”
which seems to be a strategy of the supremacist “white” world. Though
Leonard had read Jim’s swift and prompt responses as the black man’s ability to
“play the white man’s game”, Huck, who is ignorant of reading abstract or profound
ideas, could only read it as an abuse or misappropriation of the rhetorical
strategy of “argument”. Leonard further comments in this regard:
The arguments between Jim and Huck are, in fact,
exercises in sophistry- rhetorical push disguised as logic. When Huck, by his
example, “teaches” Jim to argue, what he actually accomplishes is the
“sophist”-ication of Jim. For a moment, Huck leaves his role as repository of
natural virtue and assumes the role of society at large, and in that capacity
his first act is the corruption of Jim. But his creation turns out to be a
“Frankenstein’s monster” that threatens its creator and (ultimately) society as
a whole. The interactions between Huck and Jim graphically illustrate the
slaveholding society’s need to keep its slave population “ignorant” that is
unsophisticated (Leonard 61).
Pushing Jim time and again into such an unsophisticated
domain is what Huck needs to assert
his own subject-position. Therefore, Joshua’s interpretations of Jim’s
“victory” in destroying the implications of his “teacher”, get problematized in
this context. Hansen, too, interprets the dialogues of Jim as supreme examples
of Jim’s subversion of white hegemony (‘in demystifying Solomon and
universalizing the Frenchman as belonging to the “human” race). Joshua and
Hansen’s interpretations seem limited because they overlook Huck’s continuous
withdrawals from his “pariah” status in assuming “the role of society at large”
and his needs to keep Jim in his un- sophisticated stereotypical domain of “ignorance”. It must be noted, therefore, that neither
Twain’s intended implications, nor Hansen’s or Joshua’s interpretations could
have been comprehended by the white-
narrator protagonist Huck who could only take delight in “quitting” with a feeling of superiority. In deciding
not to “waste” any more words on the Negro, Huck was simply re-inscribing Jim
in the “nigger-stereotype”, only to champion his own superior status. There is
merit in William Van O’ Connor condemns the Solomon and the Frenchman “passages”
as derisive projection of “minstrel-show, end-men sort of humour” because when
Twain minstrelizes Jim, he celebrates Huck’s whiteness.
The most striking verbal confrontation between Huck and
Jim occurs in Chapter XV, when, after being separated by the fog, Huck reunites
with Jim on the raft. Without paying any
heed to Jim’s extreme intimidation and anxiety, Huck could confidently feign
his ignorance of any “fog” that led him asunder from Jim all night:
“Well, this is too many for me, Jim. I hain’t seen no
fog, nor no islands, nor no troubles, nor nothing. I been sitting here talking
with you all night till you went to sleep about ten minutes ago, and I reckon I
done the same. You couldn’t a got drunk in that time, so of course you’ve been
dreaming (Twain, AHBF 94).
Without much difficulty, Huck could convince Jim that he
had actually been “dreaming” and even pushes him further to interpret his dream through a series of
fabricated elements- the “first tow- head”, “the whoops”, etc. The joke was
clearly intended to befool Jim, until Huck interrupts Jim to point out “the
leaves and rubbish on the raft, and the smashed oar” (Twain, AHBF 95) and Jim realises that he had
only been tricked to believe that he was dreaming. Jim’s reaction at the
revelation of the falsity of the entire narrative of “dream”, however, was far
from what Huck expected. Dejected and devastated by the joke, Jim expressed his
resentment:
…When I got all wore out wid out, and wid de callin’ for
you, en went to sleep, my heart wuzmos’ broke bekase you wuzlos’, en I didn’t
k’yer no mo’ what become er me en de raf’. En when I wake up en fine you back
agin, all safe ensoun’, de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en
kiss’ yo’ foot I’s so thankful. En all yowuzthinkin ‘bout wuz how you could
make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what
people is dat puts dirt on de head erdeyfren’sen makes ‘em ashamed (Twain, AHBF 95).
Jim’s account of how overjoyed he was at Huck’s return,
that drove him almost to cry, kiss his foot and express his thankfulness to
him, made Huck guilty of the entire matter. James McIntyre explains: “Huck’s
experience, his close association with Jim, causes the runaway slave to emerge
from the abstract to the concrete” (37). Huck decided to apologise and “even
kiss his foot”, which he did: “fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to
go and humble myself to a nigger” (Twain,
AHBF 95). Alan and Carol Hunt was all praise for Huck in analysing this
metamorphosis. The Hunts comment about Huck:
He is on the fringe of society, and although he thinks he
is supposed to embrace the middle-class white racist ideology, he must reject
it. He grows and changes, coming to know Jim as real man. In feeling guilty,
Huck represents the conscience that society as a whole lacks. He is defying
society when he apologizes…Huck’s words bristle with defiance because society
would be shocked at his apology, at treating a slave with compassion (Hunt
& Hunt 201).
But the Hunts’s innocent discovery of the sudden transformation
in Huck hinders credibility, when one considers the reasons that brought him to
this debasement before a nigger. The genuineness of Huck’s apology should not
be dismissed at ease, but what made Huck
apologise needs to be analysed. It is here that Jim’s tirade needs close
scrutiny. With pathetic undertones Jim expressed how desperate he was to call
Huck and to find him out, because without him Jim’s existence in the Huck would
be precarious. He also recounted that on discovering Huck, “safe and sound”, he
could not restrain his affectionate tears for him and was about to kiss his
foot to express his thankfulness. Whatever Jim was narrating even gets
testified reading the immediate verbal reaction of Jim after he met Huck:
Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain’ dead-
you ain’ drownded- you’s back agin? It’s too good for true, honey, it’s too
good for true. Lemme look at you, chile, lemme feel o’you. No, you ain’ dead!
You’s back again, live ensoun’, jis de same ole Huck- de same ole Huck, thanks
to goodness! (Twain, AHBF 93).
Jim’s reactions clearly indicate two crucial things,
contradictory though. First, in
expressing his excited euphoria at meeting Huck and his desire to “kiss his
foot” out of thankfulness, he once again accepted his inferior and dependent
status to his white counterpart. Second, in addressing Huck as “child”, he
fulfils the absent paternal space in Huck’s life. The former makes it easy for
Huck to ask for “forgiveness” by humbling himself to a nigger, because his
superiority has already been acknowledged. The latter makes it easy for Huck to
consider him an important “human” element in his life. If Huck’s conscience
gets stirred here to defy society and he becomes a transformed soul, it is
Jim’s asseveration of his inferiority that makes it possible. Morrison’s
comment in Playing in the Dark is
relatable: “(The) representation of Jim as the visible other can be read as the
yearning of whites for forgiveness
and love, but the yearning is made
possible only when it is understood that
Jim has recognized his inferiority” (Morrison 56 emphasis mine). Moreover,
Huck’s emotions of apology for Jim has only been “narrated” and the readers are
deprived of deciphering the true emotional intensity of Huck. In Morrison’s
“Introduction” to the text she rightly opines about Huck: “When he “humbles”
himself in apology to Jim for the painful joke he plays on him, we are not
given the words” (389), and interprets it as “Twain’s calculated use of
speechlessness” (389).
Huck’s crisis of “whiteness” however, becomes more
palpable in Chapter XV1 of the novel when Jim’s continuous articulations about
his approaching freedom unsettle Huck and make him question his own
“whiteness”. The following excerpts might shed light on these anxieties:
I tried to make it to myself that I weren’t to blame
because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner (Twain, AHBF 110).
Conscience says to me, “What had poor Miss Watson done to
you, that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say
one single word? (Twain, AHBF 110)
I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wishes I
was dead….We neither of us could keep still. Every time he danced around and
says, “Dah’s Cairo!” it went through me like a shot, and I thought if it was Cairo I reckoned I would die of
miserableness (Twain, AHBF 110).
All these passages reflect what Peter Schmidt addressed
as “the climax of white racial panic” (Schmidt 111) when Huck becomes aware of
the sins he had committed against “whiteness” on previous occasions. However,
Huck outgrows this anxiety soon when, at the point of Jim’s getting caught by
two slave-hunters, he decides not to reveal his racial identity. Asked whether
the man inside was “white or black”, Huck replied “white”. Duping them, Huck remarked that the person
inside was actually his father, and through his tricks, led them to believe
that he had caught the contagious disease. Two things are crucially important
here. First, Huck makes a father of his black companion and second, he invests
him with an improvised “whiteness” to save his life. In fact Jim has been a
surrogate-father to Huck (and this is also the white boy’s need from the black
adult) even before his Odyssean journey began. Threatened with the
possibilities of being seized by Pap Finn, his biological father, Huck gets
emotional succour from Jim. In Chapter 9, after discovering Pap Finn’s body
inside the house that floated, Jim decides to conceal it from Huck and embarks
on the new journey to protect the fatherless boy with paternal care. Huck,
behaving like an obedient son abides by Jim’s statement of not looking at the
dead man’s face. In fact, Huck, who was denied the bliss of familial happiness
starts restructuring places he inhabits with Jim as “home”. Tuire Valkeakiri
rightly comments “Twain here deliberately seeks to transcend the stereotypical
image of the black male slave as an “uncle”” (Valkeakiri 35) and this
transcendence is nevertheless a need for the orphaned white boy. But whether
Huck’s white racial identity can accept Jim for a father, or whether he can
really invest Jim with this adulthood gets expressed in Chapter XIII of the
text, when the readers encounter Huck’s silence at Jim’s narration of his
former experience with his deaf and dumb four-year old daughter. Jim narrates with
supreme filial repentance how he chastised and slapped his little one mistaking
her indifference to his orders for her insolence, when actually she was deaf.
At this point however, Twain’s chapter XXIII abruptly ends. Morrison has it
right in “This Amazing, Troubling Book” when she says –“The chapter does not
close: it simply stops” (389). And this time Twain’s silence becomes eloquent.
Valkeakiri comments: “At this point, Jim’s real family signifies a rival for
his new, needy “son” Huck” (38).Huck denial to reciprocate the highly intense
and emotionally charged narrative of Jim, therefore merely suggests his
psychological denial to accept Jim’s role as a “real father figure” because he
can be “controlled” unlike his Pap, who within the limited space of the novel
in which he was incorporated, exerted his violent and corrosive control over
Huck. Having contextualised this dilemma in Huck, Morrison’s comments on Huck’s
crisis seems pertinent:
As an absurd and homeless child running from a feral male
parent, Huck cannot dwell on Jim’s confession and regret about parental
negligence without precipitating a crisis from which neither he nor the text
could recover…Because Jim can be controlled, it becomes possible for him to
feel responsible for and to him- but without the onerous burden of lifelong
debt that a real father figure would demand. For Huck, Jim is a
father-for-free. The delicate, covered and fractious problematic is thus hidden
and exposed by litotes and speechlessness, both of which are dramatic ways of
begging attention (Morrison 389-90).
On learning that Jim has been sold to Phelp’ s farm, Huck
gets preoccupied and is left with two alternatives- either to inform Miss
Watson about Jim or to steal Jim from Aunt Sally’s farm. He overcomes this
crisis ultimately in tearing the letter written to Miss Watson and finally
deciding to help Jim out- - “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”. Here too, Huck’ s
liberal choice as an attestation of his friendship to Jim becomes
problematic, because in his statement that hell would be his ultimate destiny
for helping a runaway “nigger”, Huck is merely reproducing the dictum of the
hegemonic white society which has informed him that assisting a nigger would
land him into the “bad place”.
This transformation of Huck, however, was preceded by his
submission “to the power of social pressure” (Traber 31) when the Duke and the
Dauphin enter the space of the raft and make all possible attempts to ostracize
and “minstrelize” Jim successful, until they decide to sell him, back into
slavery for a sum of forty dollars. In the Phelps farm, once Tom Sawyer enters
(and Twain spares 11 chapters for Tom’s adventures), Huck once again indulges
in uncritically idealizing Tom with whom he already shares a history of
“adventures”. In fact, even when Huck gets isolated from St Petersburg, Tom’s
ideas of adventures came to be mindlessly imitated by Huck, at every possible
opportunity – be it making fun of Jim or enjoying the adventures on the wrecked
steamboat, thinking of how Tom would have done the same. In this context, the
role that these comic pranks in this novel needs to be re-assessed. In their
essay “The “Practical Joke” in Huckleberry Finn” Alan and Carol Hunt referred
to the first folklorist Tallman who theorised “practical joke” as a folklore
form and pointed out the intention behind a joke- either benevolent or
initiative or malevolent- which always conditioned the relationship between the
actor and the perceiver. Bruce Michelson argues in favour of the fascination
Twain had for games and riddles “in making up new games, in acting our
children’s fantasies, in poker and billiards, in wild costumes, cake-walks,
impersonations, jokes, toys, pranks, puzzles, riddle-play and games of every
imaginable kind” and in Huckleberry Finn,
the practical jokes, have implications that help one look into the
relationships of Huck and Tom with Jim. In the first prank that Tom played, he
slipped Jim’s hat off while he was asleep and hung it on his limb. After
waking, Jim interpreted the entire episode as his bewitchment by the witches.
Huck lets the readers know that Jim even exaggerated this supposed
witch-experience to the other niggers in the neighbourhood, hung the
five-center piece (which Tom had given) around his neck and interpreted the
same as a gift from the devil, that can cure anybody. David L. Smith interprets
this as a way by which “Jim clearly benefits from becoming more a “celebrity”
and less a “servant”. Alen and Carol Hunt, however, interpret this joke in a
completely different way:
Jim is never aware of the first joke about the hat, and
when he embellishes the tale with his superstitions, he and the other slaves
look ridiculous to Tom and to a number of readers. The result of the joke is
divisive, for it separates the white and black communities by defining the
insiders, the middle class white society which Tom represents, and the
outsiders, the powerless slaves, which Jim represents. This malevolent intent
results in a more negative relationship between the characters: the prank
represents the traditional middle-class prejudice (Hunt & Hunt 199).
However, as a prelude to Tom’s adventures, this attempt
by Twain to mould Jim in the role of a humorous “minstrel”, who has a fanatic
belief in superstitions and supernaturalisms allows Tom enjoy a superior status
as a “middle class educated” white boy. In Tom’s narration of the episode to
Huck, there is a further ego-reinforcement as both having a common share of the
cultural baggage of whiteness partake of pleasure and delight at the black man
being befooled. If Tom’s Sawyer’s “band of robbers” is a celebration of the
white boys’ fantasies and glories in imagining themselves as plunderers, Jim’s
celebration of his transformed entity from a “nigger” to the devil’s “chosen
one” heightens the hilarity. Kemble’s “illustration” at the very next episode
shows all the white boys’ wearing their caps celebrating their spirit of
adventure. This further makes the parody more palpable when one remembers Jim’s
interpretation that the hat was stolen by the witches and hung on his limb. In
another instance, in the Jackson’s island Huck tricks Jim by keeping a dead
rattlesnake on the foot of Jim’s blanket when he was sleeping, to evoke
amusement owing to Jim’s belief that touching a snake skin with hands brings bad
luck. While Huck was awaiting “Jim’s stereotypical reaction”, the plan did not
work as intended. As Chadwick Hansen puts it- “He expects, of course, that Jim
will react like any other stage Negro. His eyes will bug out: his teeth will
chatter, his knees will knock together, and Huck will have a good healthy
laugh” (48) Contrary to expectations the snake’s mate comes there and bites
Jim. This joke, therefore, “backfires” and Huck promises, “I made up my mind I
wouldn’t ever take aholt of a snake-skin again with my hands now that I see
what had come of it”( Twain AHBF 64).
But it must not be missed that Huck still denies Jim a reciprocation of human
sentiments, he still doesn’t blame himself
for bringing forth unintended outcomes by playing the stupid trick. On the
contrary, his mind confirms and acknowledges the superstition about “snake”,
earlier addressed by Jim and this confirmation comes only at the cost of Jim
becoming a pitiful victim. All the logomachines analysed above, therefore, show
that Huck required the exchanges with Jim to bolster and foreground his complex
white positionality.
Works
Cited
"Huck, Jim and the “Black
and White” Fallacy." (2008). In Mark Twain's The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, (pp. 44-55). Viva Books Pvt Ltd.
Hunt, A., & Hunt, C.
(1992). The practical joke in "Huckleberry Finn". WesternFolklore, 51(2),197. https://doi.org/10.2307/1499366
Morrison, T.
(1993). Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination.Vintage.
Solomon Andrew. (n.d.). Jim
and Huck: Magnificent Myths.” Mark Twain Journal, 16 (3),
17-24. www.jstor.org/stable/41640959.
Accessed 4 Apr. 2018.
Traber, D. S.
(2000).Hegemony and the politics of Twain's protagonist/Narrator division in
"Huckleberry Finn". South CentralReview, 17(2),24.
https://doi.org/10.2307/3190010
Tuire & Valkeakari.
(2006). Huck, Twain, and the Freedman's Shackles: Struggling with
"Huckleberry Finn". Atlantis, 28 (2),29-43. www.jstor.org/stable/41055245?seq=1.
Accessed 4 July 2016
Twain, M., & Cooley, T.
(1999). Adventures of huckleberry Finn: An authoritative text, contexts
and sources, criticism. W. W. Norton.