Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 229generally, happens when people stop seeing and testing things for themselves, as
individual human beings. But it also a very American tragedy about a moment in
American history when a sense of humanity and individuality was lost, with terrible
consequences for the nation.
The river, the fluid element and the medium for escape for Huck and Jim, is, of
course, Twain’s version of the mythic wilderness. It is a place where Huck can enjoy
intimacy with Jim and an almost Edenic harmony with nature. Recasting Huck as an
American Adam, Twain shows his hero attending to the moods of the river and its
surroundings and, in turn, projecting his own moods in and through those natural
surrounds. Huck appears to enjoy a separate peace here on the river, a world apart
from rules, codes, and clock time, where “lazying” becomes a positive activity. Free
from the postlapsarian compulsion to work, Huck can simply be and wonder: live,
meditate, and marvel at the miracle of the particular, the minutiae of life. It is in
these episodes on the river that the indelible connection between the voice of Huck
and his values becomes clear. Huck scrupulously, instinctively tells it as it is. He sees
things as they are, free of social pretence or disguise. He describes things as they are,
not cloaked in the rhetoric of society. So he can judge things as they are, not as the
social system would tell him to judge them. It is also in these episodes that
Huck’s power as a syncretic figure becomes clear. Huck Finn brings together and
synthesizes the warring opposites of Twain’s earlier work. Huck is a focus for all
his creator’s nostalgia, all his yearnings for childhood, the lost days of his youth, the
days before the Civil War and the Fall; and he is also, quite clearly, a projection
of Twain’s more progressive feelings, the belief in human development and
perfectibility – he suggests hope for the future as well as love of the past. Again, this
is measured in the language of the book, in that it is precisely Huck’s “progressive”
attention to the use and function of things that gives his observations such color and
immediacy. His words do not deny the beauty of things: the glory and splendor, say,
of a sunrise on the Mississippi River. But neither do they deny that things are there
for a purpose. On the contrary, they acknowledge that each particular detail of a
scene or moment has a reason for being there, deserves and even demands recording;
and they derive their grace and force from that acknowledgment. The language
Huck is given, in short, is at once exact and evocative, pragmatic and poetic: it reveals
things as they are, in all their miraculous particularity. And Huck himself, the speaker
of that language, comes across as a profoundly realistic and romantic figure: a
pragmatist and a dreamer, a simple figure and a noble man – a perfect gentle knight,
who seems honorable, even chivalric, precisely because he sticks closely to the facts.
Which is not to say that even this book is perfect. As many commentators have
observed, the last few chapters do represent a decline – or, to use Hemingway’s more
dismissive phrase, “just cheating” – in the sense that Huck is pushed to one side of
the action, and Tom Sawyer is permitted to take over and reduce the issue of Jim’s
slavery to the level of farce. For all Huck’s occasional protests at Tom’s behavior, or
his famous final declaration of independence, the comedy loses its edge, the moral
problems are minimized, and the familiar divisions in Twain’s writing begin to
reappear. There are many possible reasons for this, but one possible one is that TwainGGray_c03.indd 229ray_c 03 .indd 229 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM