WORLDS OF STYLE
517
of this book is given over to a close look at such "passages" (the tenn
"passages" could not be more apt) and to examining why they some–
times exist, with relation to the rest of the books in which they occur,
much as do James's drunken or mystical experiences when these are
"inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them out for any
length of time." The rest of life, like the rest of a book, "tends to
contradict them more than it confirms them."
The greatest American authors really do try, against the per–
petually greater power of reality, to create an environment that might
allow some longer existence to the hero's momentary expansions of
consciousness. They try even when they are sure of failing, as Haw–
thorne was; they struggle for years in the face of failure, as Mark
Twain did with his finest book, and as Melville did with most of his;
and when they succeed, as James sometimes does, it
is
only that they
may then be accused of neglecting the "realities" of sex, economics or
social history.
A novel as familiar as
Huckleberry Finn
is perhaps illustration
enough of the problem of environment. Briefly, the book creates two
environments for the hero: the raft and the shore. The environment
of the shore is an investment in history and locale; Jim and Huck's
few moments on the river, before they are joined by the King and the
Duke, are a retreat from history; they are quite literally out of place
and beyond economics. To remember the novel is spontaneously to
remember the raft scenes, and yet looking back at the text we discover
that the space and time given the scenes on the raft constitute less than
a tenth of the whole, and that even on the raft Huck's mind is con–
taminated by the values of the shore. What Mark Twain discovered
at the point of his famous and prolonged difficulties after Chapter XV
was that even his limited effort to create an environment alternative
to the shore had made his task impossible. He must, finally, "insert"
Huck back into his customary environment. He must, in effect, destroy
him. Huck as a character, created mostly in his soliloquies up through
Chapter XV,
is
replaced by another figure, using the same name,
but able to exist within the verbal world of the last two thirds of the
novel, a world demonstrably different from the verbal world or en–
vironment in the first third.
Huckleberry Finn
is a kind of history of
American literature and it
is
altogether superior to most of what passes
for histories of American literature. It is superior because it brings
