PARTISAN REVIEW
author's assumption of the character of Huck; the passage in and out
of darkness and river mist, the constant confusion of identities (Huck's
ten or twelve names-the questions of who is the real uncle, who the
true Tom), the sudden intrusions into alien violences without past
or future, give the whole work for
all
its carefully observed detail,
the texture of a ,dream. For
M oby
Dick,
such a point need scarcely
be made. Even Cooper, despite his insufferable gentlemanliness, his
civilized tedium, cannot conceal from the kids who continue to read
him the secret behind the overconscious, stilted prose: the childish
impossible dream. D. H. Lawrence saw in him clearly the kid's
Utopia: the absolute wilderness in which the stuffiness of home yields
to the wigwam and "My Wife" to Chingachgook.
I do not recall ever having seen in the commentaries of the
social anthropologist or psychologist an awareness of the role of this
profound child's dream of love in our relation to the Negro. (I say
Negro, though the beloved in the books we have mentioned is vari–
ously Indian and Hawaiian, because the Negro has become more and
more exclusively for us
the
colored man, the colored man par ex–
cellence.) Trapped in what has by now become a shackling cliche:
the concept of the white man's sexual envy of the Negro male, they
do not sufficiently note the complementary factor of physical attrac–
tion, the mythic love of white male and black. I am deliberately
ignoring here an underlying Indo-European myth of great .antiquity,
the Manichaean notion of an absolute Black and White, hostile yet
needing each other for completion, as I ignore more recent ideologies
that have nourished the view that concerns us: the Shakespearian
myth of good homosexual love opposed to an evil heterosexual at–
tachment, the Rousseauistic concept of the Noble Savage; I have tried
to stay within t.he limits of a single unified myth, re-enforced by dis–
parate materials.
Ishmael and Queequeg, arm in arm, about to ship out, Huck
and Jim swimming beside the raft in the peaceful flux of the Missis–
sippi,-it is the motion of water which completes the syndrome, the
American dream of isolation afloat. The Negro as homoerotic lover
blends with the myth of running off to sea, of running the great river
down to the sea. The immensity of water defines a loneliness that
demands love, its strangeness symbolizes the disavowal of the conven–
tional that makes possible all versions of love.
668
