reporting, and so in the authorial audience we have a strong warrant for tak-
ing his interpreting and evaluating as reliable. If anyone knows whether To m
Sawyer contains stretchers, Huck is the guy. On the other hand, if I do take
Huck as fully reliable, then the implied Twain would be guiding me to find
some ethical deficiency, however minor, in his writing of Tom Sawyer. The way
out of this amusing dilemma is not far to seek: Huck’s narration here involves
mildly unreliable reading and regarding that arises from the implied Twain’s
play with the relation between the mimetic and the synthetic components of
Huck’s character. For the authorial audience, Huck is as synthetic (or, if you
prefer, invented) as any of the events in Tom Sawyer, and so the distinction
between truth and stretchers that he makes within that synthetic fiction (or
invention) does not hold. The implied Twain is not inviting his authorial audi-
ence to go back to Tom Sawyer and search for the stretchers, because they
wouldn’t be able to find them.
Furthermore, the authorial audience recognizes that Huck can accuse
Twain of telling stretchers—and condone such telling—only because Twain
licenses him to. To put all this another way, the playful comparison involves
Twain’s deployment of metalepsis: he allows himself to appear on the same
diegetic level as Huck (transforming himself from the author of a fiction to
the journalist/biographer/historian who investigated Tom’s life and then wrote
a book about it), while relying on his audience to recognize (a) that he retains
his identity as creator of that diegetic level and (b) that, as creator, he gives
Huck license to find fault with his diegetic equal. By giving Huck both this
license to accuse him of telling stretchers and the ability to be magnanimous
about those failings, the implied Twain makes Huck both mildly unreliable
and immensely appealing. The result is a first paragraph that leads the autho-
rial audience to bond strongly, both affectively and ethically, with Huck and
with the implied Twain.
The third subtype of bonding unreliability is what, with a nod to Viktor
Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” I call naïve defamiliarization, and it most often
occurs as a kind of unreliable reading. Consider this sentence from the first
chapter of Huck Finn: “but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her
head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything
the matter with them” (33). Huck in his naïveté fails to recognize that what he
calls grumbling the Widow Douglas would call saying grace. But the freshness
of his perspective allows him to capture the rote, thoughtless quality of the
prayer even by someone as sincerely religious as the Widow Douglas. In other
words, Huck’s naïveté defamiliarizes the act of saying grace and does so in a
way that both acknowledges and closes the interpretive and ethical distance
between him and the authorial audience.
106 • CHAPTER 5