Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time

Comparative Literature, Winter 1999 by Thomas, Brook

HUCKLEBERRY FINN AS IDOL AND TARGET: THE FUNCTIONS OF CRITICISM IN OUR TIME. By Jonathan Arac. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. ix, 254 p.

In a recent essay on "national culture" the historian David Hollinger argues that Mark Twain "has sustained a claim to being a national poet for the United States comparable to Pushkin for Russia, Dante for Italy, Goethe for Germany, Cervantes for Spain, and Shakespeare for England." According to Hollinger, it "should be beyond dispute" that these writers "belong to all of humankind"; nonetheless, "most credited with bringing a national language to its fullest powers," they can also "be presented as part of the 'culture' of a particular nation."' In his important book Jonathan Arac explains both how Huckleberry Finn has given Twain the status of national poet and how and when assumptions that Hollinger and many others take for granted achieved such prominence.

Arac's book grows out of "his concerns as a citizen and as a scholar." As a scholar he wants to correct bad arguments made about an "excellent and important book" (p. vii). As a citizen he is concerned that in their idolatry those arguments affect how many people-especially students required to read Huck Finn-think about the United States and race relations. As a result of this idolatry, when Huck Finn becomes a target of attack for its use of the "N-word," its defenders too often rely on arguments that cannot be sustained by a close reading of the book. Arac delights in showing how the very people who accuse the book's detractors of not knowing how to read it commit one misreading after another. For instance, he notes how often admirers cite as proof of the book's subversion of accepted social opinion Huck's famous declaration that he would rather "go to hell" than write a letter that might return Jim to slavery. Ironically, however, manv of these same admirers offer a defense of the book's greatness based on unquestioned critical opinion. Arac's purpose is not to join those who would ban Twain's novel, nor is it simplisticalls to dismiss Twain as a racist. Rather, he "want[s] to see fairer, fuller, betterinformed debates when the book comes into question" (p. viii).

To foster such debate Arac offers acute stylistic analysis that, among other things, effectively challenges Shelley Fisher Fishkin's claim that Huck's language is in fact based on Black English. He also provides historical analysis that looks as a comprehensive historical approach should, at the book's moments of representation, production, and reception. Countering those who claim that Huck Finn is a "devastating attack on racism," Arac follows the lead of Steven Mailloux and others to point out that at the time it was written its racial politics caused hardly a stir. Although the book is set in the antebellum period, it appeared in the post-Reconstruction era, and few at the time, even those mobilizing to institute legally mandated segregation, would have felt a need to dispute its attack on slavery, since slavery had already been abolished for twenty years.

While Arac provides valuable insight into the book's moments of representation and production, most of his energy is devoted to looking at a particular moment in the historv of its reception. For Arac Huck Finn may not be a "quintessentially American book" (p. vii), hut it is the quintessential example of a tendency in the United States toward "hypercanonization." Hypercanonization allows a very few works to "monopolize curricular and critical attention" (p. 133) and could be explained bv Bennett Cerf's observation that "Americans are notorious seekers of short cuts to culture."2 Arac, however, traces Huck Finn's hypercanonization to the years from 1948 to 1964 and the critical pronouncements of Lionel Trilling, Henry Nash Smith, Walter Blair, I.eo Marx, and Ralph Ellison. Although suitably respectful of all five, Arac demystifies their highly influential praise of fluck Finn by linking it to "the emergence of the civil rights move)nent and the onset of the Cold War." Although this "historical phase" is over, the book's "hypercanonization," according to Arac, "persists, a wishful residue of values that were once connected to concrete attempts to improve the life of the United States" (p. 8).

Why critical tastes produced in one "historical phase" are not displaced as we move to a new one, but instead persist, out of sync, as it were with their historical demands, Arac never fully explains. But his argument does depend on a distinction -first developed in his contribution to the Cambridge History American Literatre -between national and literary narratives. In national narratives "the origins, attributes, and frture of the United States were made overt themes." Literary narratives, in contrast, abandoned the "straightforward patriotic address of national narrative" to develop "a freely imaginative space of psychological interiority" (pp. 134-35). Harriet Beecher Stowe's t,tom's (,fle Tnm's Cabin is an example of the former, Huck Finn of the latter. Huck Finn's hypercanonization depended on the nationalization of literary narrative. The crucial figure was Trilling who dismissed the "sentimentality" of liberal protest fiction such as nf le lom's Cabin while championing the politics of imaginatively complex works whose morality refused to moralize. For Arac, Trilling's effect on the nationalization of literary narrative remains with us today For instance, Hollinger is at least indirectly indebted to Trilling's claim that "certain artists . . . contain a large part of the dialectic [of their culttle] within themselves"' when he asserts that Twain is "an emblem for many contradictions within . . . `the political culture' of the United States, and for the 'black' elements within 'white' culture" (Hollinger 323).