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PARTISAN REVIEW
the failure of the power of fiction, is to find oneself oppressed with the need
to look again at experience, to be asked to try to discover what it is about life
that defeats a man, and then to come to the aid of the cause of realism .
Although it may be steeped in an evangelical melodramatism, a dated piece
of American realistic fiction is still haunted by echoes that call to the reader,
echoes that began as a call for salvation from the conditions of life itself.
Thus any reading of a work conceived as a realist enterprise requires
some assessment of the dialectic between public assertion and hidden
yearning, between the public story and the private one . Any evaluation of a
realist work requires an assessment of the strain between the writer's sense
of failure, his hopelessness, and the vitality that he nevertheless musters in
order to engage the reader in a vision of the difficult and mysterious
conditions of the quest for reality .
Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn,
for example, is generally recognized
to be a book about the split sensibility of Mark Twain himself, an expres–
sion of his conscious desires at odds with his private fears . The book is vital
because Huck himself is so deeply rooted in the superstitions which he
shared with the audience which was going to read his story . Yet Huck 's
attractive power, his social and religious savvy, his morality, and his
rapport with nature, arise from the fact that he is an outsider, an alien, and
feels innately guilty: hence his attraction to death, his tendency to change
his name, to continually obliterate himself. A great deal of his appeal
resides in the fact that he is finally without any direct power. His moral
sensitivity is deep, his pastoral descriptions most moving, but the last eight
chapters of the book are influenced neither by Huck's moral imagination
nor by the natural forces with which he associates himself. They are shaped
rather by Huck's alter ego, Tom Sawyer, who represents another side of
Twain's own sensibility.
The characterization of Tom, with his secure middle-class roots, his
talent for performance, his intuition of lines of power and forms of adult
manipulation, his misuse of the imagination, demonstrates the strain on
the writer's judgment in a world made complex by the disappearance of a
relatively stable religious vision and the incursion of industrial forces. For
Tom Sawyer has a predilection for incredible and superfluous danger, a kind
of madness of invention that thrives on pointless power and irrelevant
activity; he has no qualms about violence, and there is in his character a
complete absence of moral vision . Huck's vitality, finally, is that he can see
Tom's madness; but that Huck has no other power is an indication of
Twain's dilemma as a realist.
As the author's persona, Huck is always in love with Tom and, in fact,
finds his salvation in Tom. He can see Tom for what he is, but cannot stop
