228 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900over what takes priority: the laws of society, his social upbringing which, however
patchily, has shaped his conscience, or the promptings of his own heart, his instincts
and feelings as an individual. The book is about the historical injustice of slavery, of
course, and the social inequity of racism, the human use or denial of human beings.
But it is also about the same fundamental conflict as the one that fires into life The
Scarlet Letter and so many other American narratives. Huck must choose between
the law and liberty, the sanctions of the community and the perceptions of the
individual, civil and natural justice. He chooses the latter, the lessons learned from
his own experience, the knowledge of his own rebellious heart. In doing so, Huck
reflects his creator’s belief at the time in aboriginal innocence, the purity of the
asocial – and asocial or presocial creatures like the child. And he also measures the
extent of the creative triumph, since Twain manages here a miracle: that rare thing,
a sympathetic and credibly virtuous character. The sympathy and credibility stem
from the same source: Huck is a grotesque saint, a queer kind of savior because he
does not know he is doing good. His notions of right and wrong, salvation and
damnation, have been formed by society. So, when he is doing good he believes that
he is doing evil, and vice versa. His belief system is at odds with his right instincts;
hence, the terms in which he describes his final decision not to betray Jim. “All right,
then,” Huck declares, “I’ll go to hell.”
Twain’s strategies for shifting Huck’s conflict from the personal to the mythic are
several. Easily the most important, though, is his own, almost certainly intuitive,
variation on the contrast between the clearing and the wilderness: the riverbank and
the river. The riverbank is the fixed element, the clearing, the community. On the
riverbank, everyone plays a social role, observes a social function; either without
knowing it, like the Grangerford family or the inhabitants of Bricksville, or knowing
it and using it to exploit others, like the Duke and Dauphin. Everyone is obsessed
with appearances and disguises, and uses language to conceal meaning and feeling
from others and themselves. Everyone behaves like an actor who has certain lines to
say, clothes to wear, things to do, rather than as an independent individual. It is a
mark of Huck’s individuality, incidentally, that, on the riverbank, he is constantly
forgetting the role he is playing, who he is supposed to be. Everyone, in short, denies
their essential humanity on the riverbank, and the humanity of others: here, Jim is
not a human being, he is the lowest form of social function, a slave. What adds to the
power of this portrait is that, as with the account of the Puritan settlement in
The Scarlet Letter, it is simultaneously mythic and historical. This is society, the
machinery of the social system seen from the standpoint of individualism. It is also
a very specific society, that of the South before the Civil War. Drawing on the
devices of the Southwestern humorists, but exponentially developing them, Twain
offers a brilliantly detailed satirical picture of the Old South: poor whites like Pap
Finn and the people of Bricksville, middle-class farmers like the Phelps family,
wealthy planters like the Grangerfords – and, of course, the slaves. Huckleberry Finn
is an unremitting comic assault on the human capacity to substitute “style” for
substance, social illusion for experiential fact. But it is also a satire on one particular
kind of social “style” that Twain knew only too well. It is a tragic account of what,GGray_c03.indd 228ray_c 03 .indd 228 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM