COME BACK TO THE RAFT AG'IN, HUCK HONEY!
of love less offensively, more unremittingly chaste; that it is not adult
seems sometimes beside the point.
The tenderness of Huck's repeated loss and refinding of Jim,
Ishmael's sensations as he wakes under the pressure of Queequeg's
arm, the role of almost Edenic helpmate played for Bumpo by the
Indian-these shape us from childhood: we have no sense of first
discovering them, of having been once without them.
Of the infantile, the homoerotic aspects of these stories we are,
though vaguely, aware, but it is only with an effort that we can wake
to a consciousness of how, among us who at the level of adulthood
find a difference in color sufficient provocation for distrust and hatred,
they celebrate, all of them, the mutual love of
a white man and a
colored.
So buried at a level of acceptance which does not touch reason,
so desperately repressed from overt recognition, so contrary to what
is usually thought of as our ultimate level of taboo--the sense of
that love can survive only in the obliquity of a symbol, persistent,
archtypical, in short, as a myth: the boy's homoerotic crush, the love
of the black fused at this level into a single thing.
I hope I have been using here a hopelessly abused word with
some precision; by myth I mean a coherent pattern of beliefs and
feelings, so widely shared at a level beneath consciousness that there
exists no abstract vocabulary for representing it, and (this is perhaps
;mother aspect of the same thing) so "sacred" that unexamined, irra–
tional restraints inhibit any explicit analysis. Such a complex achieves
a formula or pattern story, which serves both to embody it, and, at
first at least, to conceal its full implications. Later the secret may be
revealed, the myth (I use a single word for the formula and what is
formulized) "analyzed" or "allegorically interpreted" according to
the language of the day.
I find the situation we have been explicating genuinely mythic;
certainly it has the concealed character of the true myth, eluding
the wary pounce of Howells or of Mrs. Twain who excised from
Huckleberry Finn
the cussin' as unfit for children, but left, unper–
ceived, a conventionally abhorrent doctrine of ideal love. Even the
writers in whom we find it, attained it, in a sense, dreaming. The
felt difference between
Huckleberry Finn
and Twain's other books
must lie surely in the release from conscious restraint inherent in the
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