436
PARTrSAN REVIEW
one else at the farm does not, that Jim has recently been set free - some–
thing Tom reveals only at the end.
It
is Huck's participation in Tom's
doubly unnecessary rescue shenanigans that has always disturbed critics
and has threatened the book's stature as a classic. In the course of his ad–
ventures Huck had learned that contrary to the South's slaveholding ide–
ology, Jim is fully a human being. But now Huck's hard-earned apprecia–
tion ofJim's humanity is no longer evident.
The aesthetic shortcomings of all the coincidences and late revela–
tions, and the diminution in stature of the characters, troubled Leo Marx
less than the neglect of what he considered "the theme at the novel's
center." This was the "quest for freedom" from slavery for Jim and
all
others of his race and condition. According to Marx, this is the theme
actually being developed through Huck's gradually dawning appreciation
ofJim's humanity. But Mark Twain suffered a "failure of nerve," charges
Marx; he let Huck regress to his initial, stereotyped view of Jim (and at
the same time returned Jim to his initial, equally stereotyped behavior).
As
for Eliot and Trilling, they were guilty of taking the theme of freedom
from slavery altogether too "lightly" by discussing the shortcomings of the
last adventure in aesthetic rather than moral terms.
In order to make his case against
Huckleberry Finn's
treatment of race,
Marx had to challenge Eliot and Trilling's mythic interpretations. He be–
gan by labeling Eliot's account of the river "extravagant." The book's cri–
tique of slavery should be located not there, he argued, but in an action:
jim's run to freedom with the aid of Huck. Marx himself made clear the
function of his shift in emphasis from the realm of the mythic to specific
actions. His was an attempt, he wrote, to restore some of the social con–
sciousness of the 1930s-style, leftist criticism against which Eliot and
Trilling seemed to him to be overreacting. From a leftist point of view,
Huck and Jim can be seen as rebels whose actions criticize and whose
spirits reject society as it is.
Somewhat contradictorily, though, Marx offered a second account of
the book's theme, this time implying that the social message was not ac–
tually located in the actions of the characters. In this account, the raft is
"the symbolic locus of the novel's central affirmations" - a formulation
that in its emphasis on symbol rather than any explicit action could have
been made by either Eliot or Trilling. (Marx did not explain why it
should be critically correct to assign a broader meaning to the raft but
critically "extravagant" to assign broader meanings to the river.) Marx
identified the raft's meaning specifically with Huck's often-cited remark
that "what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be
satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others." Instead of taking this
in the usual way as an expression of genial unconcern with principles,
