484
PARTISAN REVIEW
II
The road is better than the inn, said Cervantes-and by this
he meant that rotation is better than the alienation of everydayness.
The best part of Huckleberry Finn begins when Huck escapes from his
old man's shack and ends when he leaves the River for good at
Phelps' farm. Mark Twain hit upon an admirable rotation, whether
he knew it or not (and probably did not or he would not have written
the last hundred pages). A man who sets out adrift down the Missis–
sippi has thrice over insured the integrity of his possibility without
the least surrender of access to actualization-there is always that
which lies around the bend. He is, to begin with, on water, the mobile
element; he is, moreover, adrift, the random on the mobile; but most
important, he is on the Mississippi which, during the entire journey,
flows
between
states: he is neither in Illinois or Missouri but
in
a
privileged zone between the two. To appreciate the nicety of this
placement, consider the extremes. A less radical possibility would be
his floating down the Hudson River; one sees at once how rotation is
hindered here: one remains entirely
within
New York state; there
is
no zoning; there is no sense of pushing free of land into a privileged
zone of the mobile. No one ever had the ambition of floating down
the Hudson on a raft. On the other hand, the more radical possibility,
his finding himself adrift on the ocean, is too rarified a possible for
rotation. The absolutely new, the exotic landfall, is too foreign to
the
pour soi
to exhibit by contrast the freedom of the self. Compare,
for example, the fantastic rotation of Tom Sawyer floating
in
his
balloon over the Sahara in his latter-day adventures, compare this
with Huck and Jim slipping by Cairo at night. The former is the
standard comic-book rotation, the latter is a remarkable coup, the
snatching of freedom from under the very nose of the
ens soir.
A
Cairo businessman sits reading his paper, immured in everydayness,
while not two hundred yards away Huck slips by in the darkness.
Huck has his cake and eats it: he wins pure possibility without losing
access to actualization. The
ens
SOiT
is never farther away than the
nearest towhead; the sweetest foray into the actual is a landing in
the willows and a striking out across the fields to the nearest town.
It
is noteworthy that the success of his sojourns ashore has as its con–
dition the keeping open of a line of retreat to the beachhead where the
