216
this same tradition which creates that ambivalence between his iden–
tification as an adult and parent and his "boyish"
which by contrast makes Huck, with his street-sparrow
seem more adult. Certainly it upsets a Negro reader, and it
a less psychoanalytical explanation of the discomfort which lay
U'-'WN '.
Leslie Fiedler's thesis concerning the relation of Jim and Huck
iB
his essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!"
A glance at a more recent fictional encounter between a Negre
adult and a white boy, that of Lucas Beauchamp and Chick
Malli–
son in Faulkner's
Intruder in The Dust,
will reinforce my point.
all the racial and caste differences between them, Lucas holds
ascendency in his mature dignity over the youthful Mallison and
re–
fuses to lower himself in the comic duel of status forced on him
bJ
the white boy whose life he has saved. Faulkner was free to reject
the confusion between manhood and the Negro's caste status
whicla
is sanctioned by white southern tradition, but Twain, standing c1aa
to the Reconstruction and to the oral tradition, was not so free
ci
the white dictum that Negro males must be treated either as
or "uncles"-never as men. Jim's friendship for Huck comes
as that of a boy for another boy rather than as the friendship of
aD
adult for a junior; thus there is implicit in it not only a
of the manners sanctioned by society for relations between
N",,,,,,,,,,e'_
and whites, there is a violation of our conception of adult malenea
In Jim the extremes of the private and the public come to foeut,
and before our eyes an "archetypal" figure gives way before
realism implicit in the form of the novel. Here we have, I
an explaRation in the novel's own terms of that ambiguity
bothered Fiedler. Fiedler was accused of mere sensationalism
he named the friendship homosexual, yet I believe him so
IJ""V'Ull'UJ
disturbed by the manner in which the deep dichotomies
"YIllllA'ru.::w
by blackenss and whiteness are resolved that, forgetting to look
the specific form of the novel, he leaped squarely into the
of that tangle of symbolism which he is dedicated to unsnarling,
yelled out his most terrifying name for chaos. Other things
equal he might have called it "rape," "incest," "parricide,"
"miscegenation." It is ironic that what to a Negro appears to
be
lost fall in Twain's otherwise successful wrestle with the
uU"V'fiuv,_
figure in black face is viewed by a critic as a symbolic loss of
identity. Surely for literature there is some rare richness here.
