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PARTISAN REVIEW
fiction of William Burroughs. The human face of Speech in American
humor, its character, appears typically in different attitudes. In James
Russell Lowell's
Biglow Papers
(1846-61), there is recognizably a fussy
academician, Homer Wilbur, who introduces and frequently translates
the doggerel of a poetical New England farmer, Hosea Biglow, but just
to the side of Biglow is his rural
doppelganger,
a racist lout called
Birdofredum Sawin. Whatever we might discern in Lena Grove's laid–
back drawl, her slow sure presence, or gather from the jabbing
immediacy of Mink Snopes's insistent sentences, William Faulkner's
brighter and darker versions of Huckspeech, can obviously be seen at
work, comprehended, exercised, in Southwestern humor, in Lowell's
project, in
Huckleberry Finn,
but with this twist. The humorists were
writers whose political and professional affiliation (they were primar–
ily Whiggish journalists and lawyers) made them self-conscious defen–
ders of their own gentility and erudition. The idiom that illuminates
Faulkner's fiction, which we take as given, designated the humorist,
specified the intrinsic vulgarity of his subject, and placed him beyond
the pale of polite letters.
Unlettered speech, as opposed to literary speech, is therefore
outside the text and can only enter the text, be written, by wronging it,
by loudly announcing its difference. "Mother-wit," says Johnson Jones
Hooper's infamous Simon Suggs in 1846, "kin beat book-larnin atany
game." Where did this situate the speaker but in that strangest of
places,
N atur,
the realm left unseen by the scan of
Nature,
the space,
the milieu of Huckspeech, which is unsigned, unknown. The dropped
e
in
N atur,
an
e
every humorist dropped, comically reduces that large
written transcendental abstraction.
Nature.
It is a hole poked in the
symbol, in the metaphor, in the concept.
N atur
bespeaks an intimate
knowledge of the natural thing, the natural process, real things, other
things, mother-wit, which the humorist asserts the poet overlooks.
Metaphor magnifies a thing "about 4 times az big. " He who says
"natur" in a text is already there in it.
If
Natur
in the end generally
refers to the same full sack of verities that
Nature
represents, so that
Natty Bumppo can equably use both, the humorist nonetheless insists
that
Natur
is differently known, differently realized. That is, Natty
Bumppo can look serenely full-face at
Nature,
but at
Natur
(which is
more powerful than beautiful) he must squint in the guise of the
illiterate.
Natur
is not quite
Nature.
There is a consciousness, an
other,
a way of experiencing the world and the self, that is not
in
writing,
whose captivity in the text is the wrong we humorously regard. Tom
Sawyer corrects the grammar of Huck's existence. Portnoy construes
