544
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
Letter
as Mr. Fiedler would have us believe; it's like
Huckleberry
Finn,
in all its wonderful uniqueness. Now as between the English
attitude toward
Huckleberry
Finn-they
publish it as a Puffin
Book-and the emergent American one which sees the novel as the
Koran, the Book of the Dead,
The Castle,
and the Sermon on
the Mount all rolled into one, it is difficult to chose. To one like
myself who thinks it a delightful book, with a fully serious meaning,
this dichotomy offers no fair choice. Mr. Fiedler finally does admit,
at the very end of his book, that
Huckleberry
Finn
is "funny"
and "joyous." But it shouldn't be because it is gothic. Mr. Fiedler
explains this disparity by saying it is a "riddle," and the book
is full of "ambiguity" and "deep-doubleness." All this is another
part of his central thesis, for the great American authors are
"duplicitous": Mark Twain then must also be "duplicitous."
Since it is the fashion these days always to bring one's own
children into the argument, I'll bring in mine. I recently read to
them
Huckleberry
Finn.
They thought it was interesting and funny.
They liked Huck and Jim and didn't like Pap although he caused
no nightmares. They thought the Duke and the Dauphin were
riotous. They'd love to sail down a river on a raft although they
can see it has its dangers. (I haven't told them yet that the river
is SYMBOLICAL-they think it is only flowing water.) They
were bored by the end. "And a little child shall lead them."
Spinoza said that everything in the universe is like and unlike
everything else, and Mr. Fiedler is all on the first proposition of
the truism. "When Huck Finn cries out, 'All right I'll
go
to Hell,'
and Ahab, 'From hell's heart I stab at thee!'; when Hester Prynne
tears off her scarlet letter, they are Faustian heroes; but so too (in
all modesty and moral elegance) is Henry James's Strether when
he rejects Mrs. Newsome and Maria Gostrey alike, refuses all
rewards from life; and so, too, is Hawthorne when confiding to a
friend, after the composition of
The Scarlet Letter,
that he had
written a 'hell-fired book.' " This is interpreting the Faust legend
so broadly as to make it meaningless. "Aging, virginal" Strether
a Faust? The only one who really fits the generalization is Ahab,
and what does it mean to say that he does? He is also Prometheus,
the Byronic hero, Satan, among other things. Jamming in
Huckle–
berry
Finn
is again an injustice to the novel. In the first place
