Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 113As time passed, however, the narrative enclosure in which Longstreet, Baldwin,
and other Southwestern humorists chose to pen their frontier subjects tended to
dissolve. And with dramatic results: the work that certainly represents the
culmination of Southwestern humor, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, shows
that. Even before that, the abolition of the conventional narrative frame was a
notable feature of the comic stories and tall tales of George Washington Harris
(1814–1869). Harris began writing about his backwoods hero, Sut Lovingood, as
early as 1843, in pieces published in the Spirit of the Times. But it was not until after
the Civil War, in 1867, that a full-length volume appeared, Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun
by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool. Warped and Wove For Public Wear. Sut tells his own
tales. And all those tales are guided by his belief that, as he puts it, “Man was made
a-pupus just to eat, drink, an’ fur stayin’ awake in the yearly part of the nites.”
A native of rural Tennessee, Sut is a primitive or natural man: a man who stands on
the periphery of conventional society and yet still offers significant comments on it.
His life, circumscribed by the animal functions, is a continual drag on our own
pretensions, about the nature of our personalities and the efficacy or security of the
society we have organized for ourselves. At one point in his narrative, Sut admits
that he has “nara a soul, nuffin but a whisky proof gizzard”; and Harris’s habitual
strategy, of making us, the readers, share Sut’s life and experience the connection
between what he is and how he lives, leads us to suspect that in similar conditions we
might be forced to say exactly the same. Sut Lovingood is detached from us, certainly- the use of an almost impenetrable dialect sees to that – but he is detached from us
only in the way that a freakish mirror image of ourselves is. We watch him and, in
doing so, witness a curious aping and a criticism of our own behavior.
The criticism is all the more effective because of Harris’s capacity for reminding
us, in the middle of Sut’s various scrapes, that his protagonist does have traces of
what we like to call virtue, waiting for the right conditions to bring them to life. He
shows pride and independence of judgment, for instance, qualities that lead him to
consider himself “the very best society” and to punish those he feels have insulted
him in any way. More telling still is the ability Harris gives him for sensing who his
enemies are, regardless of whether they have slighted him or not. They are, he
realizes, the preachers and the pedagogues, the politic and educated leaders of
society who are there not simply to supply a butt for Sut’s fooling, although they
certainly do that, but to remind us of the kind of people – people like ourselves, the
readers, perhaps – who are indirectly responsible for his condition. For their
privileges, the suggestion is, have been bought at his expense; they, and maybe we,
are the beneficiaries of a system from which he is excluded and by which he is
deprived. The mirror is being held up to the readers as a group, in other words, as
well as to the reader as an individual. We see in Sut Lovingood a reflection of
possibilities existing in ourselves – and we are forced to acknowledge our complicity
in the creation of circumstances that, in Sut’s case, have translated possibility into
fact. And just in case we should continue to miss the point, denying Sut a germ of
sensitivity even after all this, there are moments in the narrative when more energetic
hints of his potential are allowed to appear. Instead of a reference to some dormant
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