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PARTISAN REVIEW
colloquial humor, a style that is symbol-blind, metaphor-blind, a style
in which the writer must efface, as much as he can, the trace of his
writing, a styleless style that depicts with stringent clarity an extraliter–
ary apprehension of the world, a style that is tragically overtaken. The
prevalence of Huckspeech in modern American literature is so great
that reference takes the form of a litany. There is Ring Lardner's Jack
Keefe ("You know me Al."), there is Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty
("Gimme!"), there is even John Seelye's audacious enterprise,
The
True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1970), which fell like a stone to
the earth. Any character in fiction , on television or in the movies, who
appropriates Huckspeech immediately identifies himselflherself as a
way of feeling, thinking, and seeing the world that we, as knowers of
the letter, of the law, recognize as lost, as absent.
I am Humor,
this
voice delicately says,
I
am to be cherished.
Such figures, whether
profaned or sanctified, have but to wrench their syntax, wrong a word,
in order to flash this significance, to become a mythical signifier as
large and imperative as Richard Brautigan's
Trout Fishing in America,
a myth so sacred, so corrupt, that, clothed in tattered, faded denim, it
speaks everywhere on the earth. But this Huckspeech is not the
Huckspeech that Huck writes; his line is enjambed, it runs back into
Tom Sawyer's script, and from there into exegesis.
The first critic of Huckspeech saw this awful recuperation as
clearly as Huck sees the naked lunch on his plate and swells at us
ominously at the start of the book, warning off the metaphor-makers:
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prose–
cuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Motive, moral,
plot: nothing is herein hidden, there are no secret meanings in
Huckleberry Finn,
there is no code but that which frames what is said.
Because he does not understand how genies are produced from the old
tin lamp, because he has not yet learned to see the metaphorical genie
and say: "Ah , this is an act of the imagination, " Huck is humorous. To
this extent, he is always in flight, in the speech act, in the present,
privileged. Huck writes, but he is not
in
writing, metaphorical,
yearning for the presence of speech.
It
is the literary writer who is
forced to articulate his intention, his motive, or conceal it, who
justifies, who plots to achieve an end, who imagines Huck and writes
Huckspeech. At the end of
Huckleberry Finn,
near the Gulf of the
Unfunny, Tom Sawyer busily writes a narrative in which he (as Huck)
liberates Jim from slavery, imposing on the event a motive, a moral,
and a plot, but it is metaphor-blind, plotless, immoral Huck who
