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conversion thirty years later. Marx condemned "the tawdry nature of the
culture of the great valley" of the Mississippi and its inhabitants. In the
sixties and seventies, his indictment was widened to what one critic de–
scribed as "the trivially vicious world of Tom Sawyer's America." At the
same time, the Reconstruction reading fueled the language of denuncia–
tion until Tom Sawyer's pre-Civil War America was routinely treated as
continuous with post-Civil War America, both South and North. To dis–
cuss
Huckleberry Finn
correctly in the 1980s, as Russell Reising summed
up contemporary criticism, required "accepting the continuation of
racism and political violence after the Civil War into the present."
The 1950s tendency to let politics color interpretation had developed
into a positive admonition to make literature serve politics. Critics are
properly influenced, Thomas and Merline Weaver could write by 1980,
by
"the larger culture's changed attitudes toward blacks." Critics so influ–
enced ought to "freely acknowledge that our reinterpretation is deeply
influenced by the dynamics of our culture." No one asked whether critics
should be influenced by retrograde changes in cultural attitudes, should
these take place. Nor was it noticed that when the progressive dynamic
had shifted from favoring irresponsibility in the 1950s to social involve–
ment in the 1960s, Huck went from being lauded to being condemned
for his inconsistent, cavalier attitude toward social justice. An essentially
continuous attitude of good will on the racial question produced chang–
ing literary interpretations, often by the same critics, not on account of
new interpretive insights, but because of a shifting political agenda. The
worth of such criticism has amounted to little more than a record of how
academic political attitudes have changed over time.
The full intellectual costs of the triumph of genteel, liberal instrumen–
tali
zing can only be guessed at. To assess them, one would have to take
into account the confusions and dubious historical assumptions perpe–
trated by the Reconstruction reading. To these would have to be added
the paradoxical imposition of a wish for
Hu ckleberry Finn
to encourage
reform, combined with such extreme vilification of its characters as to
leave not one of them capable of embodying that wish. Yet the most
damaging outcome of instrumentalism has been a coarsening of discourse.
To set side by side virtually any discussion of
Huckleberry Finn
from the
1950s with most of the criticism written after the late 1960s is to witness a
distinct loss of sophistication about how literature works.
*
*Notable exceptions to the admonitory sameness of contemporary criticism are Harold
Kaplan,
Democratic Humanism and American Literature
(1972), Everett Carter, "The
Modernist Ordeal of Huckleberry Finn," in
Studies in American Fiction
(Autumn 1985),
Bunon Raffell, "Mark Twain's View of
Huckleberry Finn,"
in
Ball State University Forum
