NEIL SCHMITZ
563
Mary Jane Reed's intelligence from her spelling. And we see that
neither Tom nor Portnoy is a good listener. This other, he/ she, can
only wrongly write and the writer can only wrong hislher speech. Each
yearns for the other,
to
be spoken, to be written, and where they meet is
in the disturbed text: "I see it warn't no use in wasting words-you
can't learn a nigger to argue."
From Hugh Henry Brackenridge's
Modern Chivalry (1792-1815)
through the Southwestern humorists in the Jacksonian period to
Huckleberry Finn,
the line of the style is almost pure, almost perfect.
Two voices (one illiterate, the other literate) contest the determination
of the real. Huck rubs and shines the "old tin lamp" that should
produce a genie, "but it warn 't no use, none of the genies come. So then
I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer's lies. I
reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me I
think different." And when he himself later turns officiously upon
Jim, adopting Tom's knowing tone, the response is quick: "Doan' talk
to
me 'bout Sollermun, Huck, I knows him by de back." To witness
entire the implicit agony in this humorous
agon,
one has only to turn
from the text to the ritual of the minstrel show. There, to the great
delight of countless audiences in the nineteenth century, a top-hatted,
formally-tailed interlocutor (by turns impatient, irate, condescending,
beguiled) dealt straight lines to a row of jabbering, monkey-faced Jims.
In the simplest possible terms the minstrel show projected through
song and dance, through sallies of humor, a drama everyone knew by
heart, the drama of resistance.
It
is the white and black world of master
and slave, that certainly, but as well it is the white and black world of
dull adult authority and free childish rebellion, a world in which the
stiff confronts the supple, the head a dancing body. The writer who did
dialect sketches, who marred
Nature
in his text, indeed resembled the
white performer who blacked his face, who imitated, who mimicked,
who stood for an idea of the black man as a feckless child of nature.
American humor therefore makes a good deal of noise in the
nineteenth century. It gives us a text now difficult to read, jokes that no
longer stir widespread cachinnation, and a slew of reputations now
fossilized in small signatures: Madison Tensas, Orpheus C. Kerr,
Petroleum V. Nasby, Dan DeQuille.
It
also outlines a structure, a
stance, that modern humorists as writers or performers, from different
angles and intensities, still assume.
It
gives us, in brief, the whole
discourse of
Huckleberry Finn
as a single act, a single meaning. Into
American literature, a logorrheic literature distorted by the prominence
of the symbol, there floats airily, breezily, out of the exchanges of
