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PARTrSAN REVIEW
Earlier cntIcs had offered a convincing if unsettling explanation
(which continued to be held by black critics) for this condescension:
rather than being ironic, Mark Twain was himself racially condescending.
If he was capable of creating the first fully human black character
in
American literature, he was also capable of treating that same character
in
terms of racist caricature. Indeed, it is known that he took particular de–
light in his portrait of Jim in the last adventure, selecting the most hu–
miliating passages for stage readings to promote the book. Not even
his
touring partner, George Washington Cable, probably the most progres–
sive white intellectual of the period on the race question and a fierce de–
nouncer of Reconstruction-style racism, objected.
Given the problems inherent in the Reconstruction reading, it seems
surprising that its advocates could not content themselves with advancing
a less assailable but equally moral contention: that it is appropriate to re–
member Reconstruction when thinking about Mark Twain's novel.
Whether or not Mark Twain intended to indict Tom Sawyer for deceiv–
ing Jim, the critic has every right to cast Tom's behavior during the last
adventure in the dark light of Reconstruction. But the Reconstruction
reading, more than attempting to elucidate a text, sought a politically
correct position on the slavery issue. It followed Leo Marx's complaint
that Mark Twain "might have contrived an action which left Jim's fate as
much in doubt as Huck's. Such an ending would have allowed us to
as–
sume that the principals were defeated but alive, and the quest [for free–
dom] unsuccessful but not abandoned." In other words, Mark Twain
should have made a social contribution by leaving the reader in a proper
political frame of mind.
The demand for what might be called "anti-slavery instrumentalism"
eventually became the leading motif of
Huckleberry Finn
criticism. Typical
was the requirement implied by the critic who asked: "Does the relation–
ship Huck develops with Jim ever have the potential power to counteract
the slaveholding psychology?" Not only Jim's relationship with Huck, but
also Jim's character and fate were now judged according to the degree to
which they projected solutions, or at least encouraged enlightened atti–
tudes. The outcome for criticism was inevitable: first, a reduction of lit–
erature to use; second, the devaluing of
Huckleberry Finn.
As one critic
frankly concluded, "If we demand of our novels that they dramatize the
movement toward the resolution of significant human problems, then
Huckleberry Finn
is a failure."
Instrumentalism made for open season on
Huckleberry Finn.
In the
eighties, critics either frankly wished the book different from what it was,
or else they found new allegorical meanings in it that corresponded neatly
with their own political predilections. Their theories, predictably enough,
