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PARTISAN REVIEW
that if one understands the conventions of the minstrel show, Jim actually
transcends his buffoonish status. For in the minstrel show:
Mr. Bones, although he seems at first to be abysmally ignorant in
comparison to Mr. Interlocutor, is actually very clever and usually
wins the arguments, just as Jim does.
In the same spirit, Jim's apparently mistaken contentions in arguments
with Huck that Solomon was not wise and that a Frenchman is not really
a man, were taken actually to express a deeper philosophical and human–
istic perspective than Huck's.
J.
c.
Furnas devastatingly put it that these
interpretations ofJim's arguments were attempts to "inflate Jim into a fig–
ure from an anti-racist WPA mural." In other words, they were propa–
ganda, not properly literary criticism. As for Jim's undeniably demeaning
posture in the last adventure, in the sixties this was explained as an act of
self-preservation. That is, once Jim is away from the raft and returned to
his slave status, he has, as the critic Michael
J.
Hoffinan put it, no choice
but to reassume his "slave traits," just as Huck must resume his acceptance
of society's attitudes towards slavery. Both decisions illustrate how "the
forces of society are stronger than the individual's will" - another formula
in the spirit of the 1930s criticism that Leo Marx wished to revive.
In the late sixties, there was yet another reversal. Black activists had
begun to find expressions of sympathy on the part of whites patronizing,
and this new perspective, in turn, made its way into criticism. Huck's
very befriending ofJim became suspect, and resentment at the demeaning
ofJim reasserted itself Resentment returned, that is to say, among white
critics, who have not let go of it since the late sixties. Black critics of
Huckleberry Finn,
however, tended to have a different attitude. In 1984 the
Mark Twain Journal
asked nine black critics to contribute to a special issue,
"Black Writers on
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
One Hundred Years
Later." In their essays none of the critics indicated any doubt that Jim was
demeaned, nor was there any question that this circumstance disturbingly
reflected racism on Mark Twain's part. But despite their pain at the hu–
miliations Jim undergoes, these critics did not doubt, either, that the
reader is given "the author's most powerful evidence ofJim's humanity."
Earlier, Ralph Ellison had observed:
Twain, though guilty of the sentimentality common to humorists,
does not idealize the slave. Jim is drawn in all his ignorance and su–
perstition, with his good traits and his bad. He, like all men, is
am–
biguous, limited in circumstance but not in possibility. . .. Jim .. . is
