570
PARTISAN REVIEW
cetera.
In
the context of American humor these symbols, if not the
dream, have their own distinctive career. A carafe holds water, a
fountain lets it go. Literary writing holds speech, colloquial writing (if
truly realized) lets it go. Such is the delight of the oral tradition in
American literature that its principal speakers, exemplars of fluency,
are also hypersensual gourmands, large eaters of esoteric fare who have
no trouble in letting it go. "A brown, " Gertrude Stein writes in
Tender
Buttons,
"which is not liquid not more so is relaxed and yet there is a
change, a news is pressing." There is in fact a philosophy of food
behind the comedy of eating in
Huckleberry Finn , Tender Buttons,
and
Portnoy's Complaint
that draws strict analogies between kinds of
eating and modes of writing. Those who can eat anything on their
p late can use everything in their discourse. Those who drink freely
from the carafe of consciousness necessarily make fountains of prose.
It
all goes around and around. "Dirt is clean," Gertrude Stein declares
with the wisdom of a child, "when there is a volume." The whole issue
of the oral style in American humor is just simply the issue of ease,
loose life on a raft, the issue of issuing. Both
Huckleberry Finn
and
Portnoy 's Complaint
begin with a tale of eating, and food is what is on
the table in the midst of
Tender Buttons.
In
Huckleberry Finn
it is Tom Sawyer who persuades Huck that to
be "respectable," he must return to the widow Douglas. Huck has been
there before and knows where such identity begins. "Well, then," he
tells us, "the old thing commenced again. The widow rung a bell for
supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you
cou ldn 't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck
down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there
warn 't really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only
everything was cooked by itself.
In
a barrel of odds and ends it is
different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and
the things go better." What Huck sees on his plate is
classification
and
teleology,
a neat sentence of meat, potato, and vegetable generated by a
tidy, Bible-reading cook, a dish cooked kosher ("everything was cooked
by itself"), and there it is, the right and the wrong of it, the First
Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Eat. Miss Watson, speller in hand ,
delivers the Second Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Speak. An eater of
the worst
chazerai,
of greasy slumgullions and odious stews, writhing
in his chair as he is taught spel ling, how to letter the word, Huck
openly faces the reader and his fate at the start of his narrative is
transparen
t.
The world is going to devour him . The life he shares with Jim on
