NEIL SCHMITZ
571
the river, a lazy life of naked lunches of catfish, cornbread, and milk–
mush, will abruptly go round the bend and into the Gulf. And surely
he must eat at last that bitterest of fruits; he must see in his ego-ideal,
this parading, posturing Tom, Mark Twain's creature, the betrayal of
everything that is good in him: sensuous tenderness, honor, honesty,
intelligence. Threatened with adoption at the end of the novel, still
taking Tom seriously (Tom has whimsically proposed they all head
out for the Territory), Huck decides to go first and alone. The moment
it dawns on Huck in Kansas or Nevada or California that Tom had no
intention to leave home, not for a moment, not with that bullet on a
watch chain around his neck to exhibit, "always seeing what time it
is," that moment Huck, too, becomes an interpreter of
Huckleberry
Finn.
And what a dour reading that must be.
It
is Tom's imagination,
Tom's style, that poses the greatest danger to Huck in his adventures
among the rogues and brutes along the Mississippi, the imitation of
which always brings Huck gratuitously near the edge of disaster.
However lunatic, Tom possesses the
right,
and Huck is wrong, and
that is the measure of Huck's innocence. Forced into Tom's bookish
fantasy at the end of the novel, his role that of a sidekick, the lesser
figure, Huck can only record the usurpation of his name and his quest,
skeptically observe Tom's absurd scenario for Jim's deliverance, and set
before us style within style, that old distinction in American humor
between speaker and writer. Tom Sawyer effectively writes the ending
of
Huckleberry Finn,
attempting an historical romance, but it is Huck
who tells the story of that farce and lets us see what he himself does not
fully see-how dense, how dumb, how blindly egotistical is Tom's
narrative. There is in fact a significant example of Tom's writing in the
text, an anonymous letter to the Phelpses warning of a "helish design"
to steal "your runaway nigger," a strange letter stuffed with duplicities.
It
begins: "Don't betray me, I wish to be your friend," then describes a
lurid plot that inadvertently betrays Tom's own confusion about
which side he is on, and hypocritically concludes: "I do not wish any
reward but to know I have done the right thing."
It
is Tom's version of
what Huck has been about, escape-artistry, liberating Jim, and typi–
cally as he goes about recasting that experience, he tries to have it both
ways. "I am one of the gang," he writes, "but have got religgion and
wish to quit it and lead a honest life again, and will betray the helish
design." Deceived, bullied, betrayed, Huck is stretched into Tom's
romance and his meaning in that script (he has risked the damnation of
hell
to
save Jim) is cruelly distorted. Just as in
Portnoy's Complaint,
almost a hundred years later, Mary Jane Reed is caught in Alex
Portnoy's fantasy, in his condescension-desired, lectured, screwed.
