Twain, Mark
Mark Twain was, of course, the river-sourced pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), who wrote voluminously in many modes besides his famous fictions, including satirical sketches, “tall talk,” travel journals, and journalism. His original, imaginative, and frank portrayal of life in the South in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and most notably in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) established him as the founding father of American literature: indeed, Ernest Hemingway claimed that all modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn (The Green Hills of Africa 1935, 29). Although both are ostensibly boys’ books, Twain’s technique of verisimilitude derives from using a naive un-censored narrator and direct idiomatic speech, strongly accented. Furthermore, in Huckleberry Finn he daringly depicts the intimate juvenile friendship and intense bond between Huck and the escaped slave Jim, thereby raising the two major issues of slavery and color. By setting the book “some forty to fifty years ago,” Twain was placing the story well before the cataclysm of the Civil War. The book has been consistently controversial, called variously “quintessentially American,” “original,” “daring,” “subversive,” “a devastating attack on racism,” and “racist trash” (Arac 1997, vii-ix, 9).
The popularity of Huckleberry Finn has never wavered, but it has a remarkable critical history, running through a cycle of condemnation, idolization, and then sectional rejection. Like Tom Sawyer , it has a long record of being legally challenged, especially in the North, being immediately excluded by the Concord (Massachusetts) Public Library Committee in March 1885, condemned as “the veriest trash,” as “rough, coarse and inelegant,” and “suited to the slums.” According to the American Library Association, it remains one of the top ten most frequently challenged books, but on greatly varied grounds.
Recent criticism of Huckleberry Finn (post-1950s) has focused on previously neglected aspects of the character of Jim, namely an apparent ambivalence of attitude toward slavery, and especially on the use of the word nigger , which occurs 213 times in the novel. In his study, Jonathan Arac (1997) notes furthermore that the title “Nigger Jim” has come to be applied by a whole range of critics, including Leo Marx, Leslie Fiedler, and Ralph Ellison, even though he is never so called in the book. Arac also points out that the title of Fiedler’s article, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in Huck Honey!” (1948), provocatively arguing for a “chaste male love as the ultimate emotional experience,” also does not occur in the text.
Ralph Ellison objected as far back as 1958 to Twain’s use of the Negro minstrel stereotype in the presentation of Jim. This date coincides with wider opposition: “News about African American protests against the required place of honor held by Huckleberry Finn in the classroom … began to appear as early as early as 1957” (Arac 1997, 9). One of many offensive passages is Huck’s observation that “Niggers is always talking about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire” (chapter 2). The critical defenses of juvenile narration and ironic authorial intention may explain, but do not take away the offensiveness of the term. It has been argued, defensively, that " Nigger is what blacks were commonly called in the South until recent times. It is wrong to censure a novel for historical accuracy" (June Edwards, quoted in Arac 1997, 27). However, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) the callous remark “What’s all the fuss about a dead nigger” provokes the comment “The word was as a spark to a powder magazine” (592). An essay under the provocative title “Only a Nigger,” which appeared unsigned in the Buffalo Express (August 26, 1869) has been reliably attributed to Twain. It is a devastatingly sarcastic commentary on “A little blunder in the administration of justice by Southern mob-law…. Only ‘a nigger’ lynched by mistake.” Twain highlights the term by consistently putting it in inverted commas. Huck’s unselfconscious use of nigger is clearly part of his “sivilization” and the acculturation revealed in the exchange with Aunt Sally in chapter xxxii when Huck explains the reason for their late arrival:
“We blowed a cylinder-head.”
“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”
A parallel can be drawn with the South African writer Herman Charles Bosman (1905–1951), who employs a similar narrative technique in which a naive Boer narrator uses the deeply offensive term kaffir with embarrassing frequency but ironic intention.
In dramatizing the famous psychomachia Huck faces in chapter xxxi, Twain daringly complicates his dilemma by emphasizing a religious dimension. Huck’s initial response, to follow his civic duty and turn Jim in gives him a sense of salvation (“I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time in my life”). His final decision, to commit to his personal loyalty to Jim, is admirable but expressed in a provocatively wicked idiom for 1885: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” On the matter of language, Twain himself issued a typical riposte to the initial censorship from Massachusetts, insisting that Huckleberry Finn was “painstaking and truthfully drawn … with but one exception and that a trifling one: this boy’s language has been toned down and softened, here and there, in deference to the taste of a more modern and fastidious age” (Norton edition 1977, 286).
Huckleberry Finn remains a controversial text depicting the struggles of innocence to “do the right thing” in a corrupted and unjust society, especially because its direct language, notably the use of nigger , has become increasingly provocative and unacceptable. On the latter point the noted theater critic Frank Rich referred in 1995 to “Dropping the N-Bomb.”
Twain was a great traveler and recorded his impressions in some very frank Notebooks & Journals . In the entries for the Holy Land, he juxtaposed the miserable living conditions with the miracles that had been performed there: “The people of this region in the Bible were just as they are now—ignorant, depraved, superstitious, dirty, lousy, thieving vagabonds ” (Vol. I, 424-25). “Slept on the ground in front of an Arab house. Lice fleas, horses, jackasses, chickens, and worse than all, Arabs for company all night” (Vol. I, 431). However, such critical passages were omitted from his travelogue, The Innocents Abroad (1911).
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