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Marx treated it as a "human credo" that "obliquely aims a devastating
criticism at the existing social order."
The criticism presumed to be implied in Huck's words supposedly
had to do with slavery. That is, the idea of people feeling "right and
kind" toward one another evokes other people enslaving one another.
For Marx, Huck's credo marked a stage in growth toward his decision at
the end of the book to light out for the "Territory," supposedly because
he can no longer bear the slave-holding society of the American South.
On the way to the book's ending, Huck's famous decision to go to hell
rather than turn in Jim is taken to be "the climactic moment in the
ripening of his self-knowledge" ; at the very end, Huck is not escaping
petty harassments but portentously traveling "west ahead of the in–
escapable advance of civilization" (and therefore slavery). Yet Marx ulti–
mately expressed disappointment with his own symbolic raft. That con–
veyance, he wrote, "provides an uncertain and indeed precarious mode of
traveling toward freedom, " instead of offering an alternative, positive
social vision - as he believed a symbol in a book should do.
Following Marx, critics of
Huckleberry Finn
would go on to voice
similar disappointments for the next forty years. Gradually at first but
unmistakably by the end of the 1960s, Marx's updated, 1930s-style con–
ception of the book as a social document came to dominate criticism. The
essential subject was confidently taken to be slavery and freedom. And the
only question to be answered was how well Mark Twain stuck to this
subject. The mythic and symbolic interpretation of literature exemplified
by Eliot and Trilling was everywhere set aside (though it sometimes crept
back in, as with Leo Marx's raft). Nor was the shift to the social approach
deterred when its assumptions were thrown seriously into question in
1962 by one of the leading scholars of Mark Twain and of American lit–
erature.
Henry Nash Smith challenged placing slavery at the very thematic
and symbolic center of
Huckleberry Finn.
Doing so, he wrote,
presupposes first, that the question of slavery as an actual institution in
the Old South is central to the entire novel, and second, that Huck
has matured in the course of the narrative so that his last decision has a
depth not characteristic of his attitudes and actions at the beginning.
Huck's maturity, according to this view, now enables
him
to perceive
that slavery is evil.
Neither of these suppositions, Smith went on to show, can stand up
to critical scrutiny. Jim's escape from slavery constitutes the overt action
of
Huckleberry Finn
but not, as Leo Marx had it, "the theme at the novel's
