The Massachusettes Review, Inc.

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1 The Massachusettes Review, Inc. The Character of Jim and the Ending of "Huckleberry Finn" Author(s): Chadwick Hansen Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Autumn, 1963), pp Published by: The Massachusettes Review, Inc. Stable URL: Accessed: 04/11/ :48 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Massachusettes Review, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Massachusetts Review.

2 Chadwick Hansen The Character of Jim and the Ending of Huckleberry Finn In 1935 Ernest Hemingway announced that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it," he continued, "you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys [sic]. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had." Since that time, all criticism of Huckleberry Finn has come from one book by Ernest Hemingway called The Green Hills of Africa. For Hemingway has pointed out the importance of the novel, the central critical problem of the end ing, and the fact that what happens to Jim is very much in volved with the success or failure of that ending. I do not think that the ending is a total failure. But I do think an understanding of Jim's character, his function in the novel, and what happens to him is central to an understanding of what is wrong with the ending and of what is right with it. I An understanding of Jim's character is by no means a simple matter; he is a highly complex and original creation, although he appears at first sight very simple. We meet him first as the butt of a practical joke played by Tom Sawyer, in Chapter II. While Jim is sleeping Tom takes three candles from the Widow's kitchen, a leaving five-cent piece on the table to pay for them. Then he slips Jim's hat off and hangs it on the limb of a tree over his head. Afterwards, Jim decides that his sleep 45

3 The Massachusetts Review was a trance induced by witches, who rode him all over the world and hung his hat on a limb "to show who done it," and he believes that the devil himself has left the five-cent piece. His version of the episode makes him a very important man in the Negro community. "Jim was most ruined, for a servant," says Huck, "because he got so stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches." The Jim of this first episode is a recognizable type-character, the comic stage Negro, a type who has trod the less reputable boards of the American theatre almost from its beginnings and who is still with us in the grade B movie and in certain televi sion and radio programs. His essential quality in this particular case is that he feels no humiliation as a result of Tom's trick. His ignorance protects him from the mental pain of humiliation and enables him to turn the trick into a kind of triumph?a false triumph, to be sure, but still a triumph. If Jim had suf fered as a result of the trick, we?the audience?would be in clined to feel pity for him. But since he does not suffer we are free to laugh at the incongruity between his account of the event and the reality. We are free to laugh at him, that is, because his ignorance is so sub-human that he cannot feel mental pain. Jim as comic stage Negro is part of a more general type-char acter, who is often the butt of low comedy, and whose essential quality is his insensitivity to mental or to physical pain. An example is the cat in the animated cartoon who runs into a wall at express-train speed while he is chasing the mouse. If this were a real cat the audience would be shocked. But it is, of course, not a real cat; it is sub-feline. It does not spatter its brains against the wall. It does not bleed. It simply folds up against the wall in pleats, like an accordion, and falls flattened to the floor, to rise a moment later as good as new. No pain has been felt, only incongruity, and the audience is therefore roll ing in the aisles. The word "slapstick" comes from the American vaudeville and burlesque stage. It was a originally paddle with which the lead comic administered resounding slaps to the padded bottom of the straight man. If the lead comic were to hit the ing?nue 46

4 The Character of Jim in the teeth with it, no one would laugh, since the ing?nue is intended to represent something fully human. But we laugh at the straight man: straight men are more padding than person. This kind of comedy is by no means limited to the popular arts in America. It finds its way into Steinbeck's Cannery Row, where people fight with broken bottles and escape miraculously without serious injury. It invests some of the more macabre passages in Faulkner, for example, "Uncle Bud and the Three Madames." It is, of course, virtually omnipresent in Western humor, that half-folk, half-sophisticated tradition in which Twain had far deeper roots than either Steinbeck or Faulkner. And Twain did not, of course, reject this tradition. Instead he qualified, developed, and refined it. Unlike most of the West ern humorists, and unlike Steinbeck, he was generally very much aware of the thin line which divides the comic from the painful, Huckleberry and he walked that line very expertly through Finn. II most of Jim is still the stage Negro the next time we see him, when Huck asks Jim to have the hair-ball tell his fortune, but our attitude toward him is very much qualified, since in this episode Huck believes as firmly in Jim's magical powers as does Jim himself. In the first episode the audience was asked to think of itself as white men laughing at old Jim, the comical nigger. Here we are asked to think of ourselves as men, laughing at human ignorance and superstition. We could attribute Jim's ignorance to his color in the first episode; here we must attrib ute it to his humanity. Perhaps this is overstating the case, since the reader who does not wish to recognize the direction Twain is taking might feel that Huck himself is not fully human; he is only a child, and a White Trash child at that. It seems to me, however, that it requires considerable insensitivity to think of Huck as less than human, even at this early stage in the narra tive, and in any case the direction of Twain's our attitude toward Jim is clear. 47 development of

5 The Massachusetts Review We see Jim next on Jackson's Island, where two episodes de serve particular notice. In the first of them Jim and Huck have been discussing "signs," and Jim predicts that he will be rich because he has hairy arms and a hairy breast. Then he gives us an account of his "specalat'n" in stock?livestock?and in a bank. The dialogue might have come from any minstrel show, and Jim has lost his money like any other stage Negro. But the conversation ends with Jim's reflection that "I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'." With this statement we move outside the world of low comedy, and Jim becomes something more than the ordinary stage Negro. Twain has done enough by now to prepare us for the first of the tricks Huck plays on Jim. Huck kills a rattlesnake and curls it up on the foot of Jim's blankets. He expects, of course, that Jim will react like any other stage Negro. His eyes will bug out; his teeth will chatter; his knees will knock together; and Huck will have a good healthy laugh. But we are dealing now with someone who is more than a stereotype. "When Jim flung himself down on the blanket... the snake's mate was there, and bit him." Huck is sorry and ashamed for what he has done. He throws the snakes away in the bushes, "for I warn't going to let Jim find out it was all my fault, not if I could help it." But he does not blame himself for failing to understand that Jim is a human being, who can be hurt if you play a stupid trick on him. There is something much simpler for which Huck can blame himself, and whenever he can, Huck will use Ockham's razor. "I made up my mind," he says, "I wouldn't ever take aholt of a snake skin again with my hands, now that I see what had come of it." From this he proceeds to on speculating whether it isn't just as foolhardy to look at the new moon over your left shoulder. Old Hank Bunker done it once, and bragged about it; and in less than two years he got drunk and fell off the shot tower and spread himself out so that he was just a kind of a layer, as you may say; and they slid him edgeways between two barn doors for a coffin, and buried him so, 48

6 The Character of Jim so they say, but I didn't see it. Pap told me. But anyway, looking at the moon that way, like a fool. it all come of With the entrance of Hank Bunker we are back in the world of slapstick comedy, and we can recognize how very little Huck understands of what has happened. But the episode has, I think, made some impression. That snake-skin continues to haunt Huck's consciousness far down the river. At the beginning of Chapter XIV we discover that Jim has a good deal of common sense, when he complains to Huck of how dangerous it is to go looking for the sort of adventures to be found on the Walter Scott. Huck has to admit that Jim is right. "He was most always right; he had an uncommon level head for a nigger." Having begun the chapter with Jim's "un common level head," Twain fills the rest of it with the dia logues on whether Solomon was wise and why a Frenchman doesn't talk like a man, which William Van O'Connor con demns as a cheap and inappropriate sort of humor."1 "minstrel show, end-men Now there is a considerable distance between the world of the minstrel show and the world of William Van O'Connor, and most of that distance is, of course, to Mr. O'Connor's credit. But the distance is so great that it prevents him from seeing the ways in which these are dialogues appropriate. Jim is "down on Solomon" for threatening to cut a child in two, and this is plainly preparation for our later discovery that Jim cares very much for his own children, and blames himself for having been unintentionally cruel to his daughter. The dialogue on why a Frenchman doesn't talk like a man is much more complicated. In order to understand it we must re member the conventions of the minstrel show, where Mr. Bones, although he seems at first sight to be abysmally ignorant in comparison to Mr. Interlocutor, is actually very clever and usually wins the arguments, just as Jim does. But what is im portant is not that Mr. Bones wins again; what is important is 1 "Why Huckleberry tober 1955), 7. Finn is not the Great American Novel," CE, 17 (Oc 49

7 The Massachusetts Review the terms in which the argument is won. Huck argues that since a cat and a cow "talk" differently, and since it is "natural and right" that they should do so, it is equally "natural and right" for a Frenchman to talk differently from an American. Huck's unstated assumption is that ethnic difference is founded in na ture, and has, therefore, the same magnitude and necessity as difference in species. Jim immediately spots the fallacy. He agrees that there is a basic difference between a cat and a cow, which requires that they "talk" differently. But he asks, "Is a Frenchman a man?" "Yes," says Huck. "Well, den! Dad You answer me dat!" blame it, why doan' he talk like a man? Jim recognizes, and Huck does not, that all men share a common humanity. When we remember that this argument has been over differences in human language, when we remember that Twain boasted at the beginning of the book of accurately seven reproducing discrete dialects, and when we remember how thoroughly man is divided from man in the society of the Mississippi Valley, this little dialogue takes on an extraordinary richness of meaning. But Huck's only conclusion is that "you can't learn a nigger to argue." He does not understand how he has been beaten, since, as Henry Nash Smith has clearly demonstrated,2 he is incapable of handling abstract ideas. But the careful reader will notice that while Huck is not capable of handling abstract ideas, Jim is. Chapter XIV is clearly minstrel show humor, and the Jim of this chapter is equally clearly Jim as Mr. Bones. But within the framework of minstrel show dialogue Twain has created a cluster of meaning both significant and appropriate. Ill How much do we know about Jim at the end of Chapter XIV? We know that his character is a partially type-character, the comic stage Negro, but that it extends far beyond the limits 2 In his introduction to the Riverside Edition, xii and xiii. 50

8 The Character of Jim of that type. We know that his superstitions are shared by some whites. We know that he is human enough to suffer physical pain. We know that he has a considerable amount of common sense, and that within the rather severe limits of his knowledge he is capable of handling abstract ideas. We know also that the ideas he expresses?that there is a kind of wealth in owning oneself, and that all men share a basic humanity?are most ap propriate to his own situation. Huck, of course, has learned much less than the reader. At the level of conscious thought, which is his weakest point, Huck has learned only that it is bad luck to handle a snake-skin, that Jim has "an uncommon level head for a nigger," and that in spite of his common sense "you can't learn a nigger to argue." But in Chapters XV and XVI Huck is placed in situations where he, as well as the reader, is forced to learn something new about Jim. Chapter XV is devoted to the justly famous episode in which Huck is separated from Jim in a fog. He gets back to the raft while Jim is asleep, and convinces him that the whole experi ence was a dream, which Jim proceeds to "interpret." Then Huck points to the rubbish on the raft, evidence that the experi ence was real. He asks Jim what // means, and gets ready to laugh. But the laughter does not come. Instead, Jim tells him that "dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed." Not the least of Twain's achievements is his ability to give such dignity and force to Negro dialect (not that Negro dialect in itself is weak or undignified; but literary use of it has generally been both). The Jim of this episode, although he still speaks in the dialect of the stage Negro, is not the stage Negro, but man in the abstract, with all the dignity that belongs to that high con cept, and he teaches Huck that it is painful, not childish tricks on human dignity. Huck says, funny, to play-" It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger?but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it after wards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way. 51

9 The Massachusetts Review "If I'd a knowed." It is easy to penetrate Huck's feelings, but it is almost impossible to penetrate his mind. The idea that he hadn't really known Jim has penetrated, however, and it comes briefly to the surface of Huck's mind in Chapter XVI, when he wrestles for the first time with his "deformed con science." Huck thinks, Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, com ing right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children?children that belonged to a man I didnyt even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm, [my italics] The ambiguity is evidence that Huck's mind has been touched at last. And when Jim calls him "de bes' fren' Jim's ever had" and "de on'y white genlman dat ever kep' his promise to ole Jim," Huck's reaction is "I just felt sick." Huck is not one to overstate his emotions; "sick" is as strong a term as he ever uses for them. He uses it here, and when he watches the Grang erford boys being butchered, and when the King and the Duke are ridden on a rail, and when he sees the farmers sitting with their guns in the Phelps' parlor. Jim's appeal to his friendship and his honor, coming immediately after he has betrayed Jim with a stupid trick and is about to betray him again, hits Huck very hard indeed. It makes it impossible for Huck to continue to be totally ignorant of who Jim is, and it makes it possible for him to win this first battle with his conscience. IV There are four more passages which seem to me essential to an understanding of Twain's development of Jim's character. First, we have Jim laughing when Huck is washed overboard by a wave (Chapter XX). Huck was in no danger, so there is nothing vicious in Jim's laughter. All Huck can do is grumble that Jim "was the easiest nigger to laugh that ever was." The episode is one more illustration of Twain's fondness for playing brilliant variations on themes from folk humor. In this case he has simply and skilfully reversed the roles, making the white man rather than the Negro the butt of the humor. 52

10 The Character of Jim Second, and more complex, is Jim's grief over his uninten tional mistreatment of his four-year-old daughter (Chapter XXIV). He had told her to close the door, and when she didn't move, he struck her. Then he discovered that scarlet fever had left her deaf, and he tells Huck his reaction to this discovery: "Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin' en grab her up in my arms, en say, 'Oh, de po' little thing! de Lord God Amighty fogive po' ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long's he live! ' Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb?en I'd been a-treat'n her so!" To understand what Twain is doing in this passage, we must remember that the popular culture of Twain's time was far more apt to sentimentalize family relationships than the popu lar culture of our own time. The sick or dying child; the old drunkard who deserves kindness because he is "somebody's grandpa"; mother; the young girl with her child in her arms thrown out in the snow by the stern arm of father?these figures are, by and large, no longer with us. To be sure, we are still afflicted by Little Orphan Annie. And it must be admitted that the mother song is dying a lingering death, with certain old time entertainers extracting every possible groan from the suf ferer. But the mother song received its death blow in 1921, with the publication of "Granny, You're My Mammy's Mammy."3 Or, more probably, the mother song received its death blow in the major shift of American values that followed the First World War. In any case, since that time the popular song has largely abandoned family sentimentality and devoted itself almost exclusively to the emotional spasms of the pubes cent. It is easy for us to see how Twain is using popular culture when Huck describes Emmeline Grangerford's drawings and poetry, partly because the intention is so plainly satirical, and partly because Emmeline's emotions differ only in detail rather than in kind from those of the girls in present-day popular songs. But we must make a somewhat greater effort here. 8 Words by Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis. Music by Harry Akst. Irving Berlin Inc., New York. 53

11 The Massachusetts Review Huck's reaction to Jim's feelings for his family is worth notic ing. "I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their'n," says Huck. "It don't seem natural, but I reckon it's so." "It don't seem natural." As on so many other occasions, Huck is more right than he knows, since, at the level we have been discussing, Jim's feelings are anything but "nat ural"; they are as conventional as they could possibly be. And yet they are convincing, primarily, I think, because they are given to us in Jim's language rather than in the "soul-butter" style which is used in "grieving" over two other children: Wil liam Dowling Botts, deceased, and Charles William Albright, deceased (the latter is the baby in the barrel in the excised raftsman passage). Twain has produced here a variation on one of the tritest popular themes of his time, and has made it effec tive and genuine by giving it to Jim.4 He has achieved the unique distinction of producing the most magnificently written piece of schmalz in all American literature, and with it he has added one more dimension to Jim's character. Third is a facet of Jim's character which is presented to us at many points, but is most completely described during Huck's second struggle with his conscience. This is the Jim who is kind and gentle, who stands Huck's watch on top of his own and al ways calls Huck "honey."5 This is Jim as Negro Mammy, and like several of the other faces of Jim it is a skilful variation on a type-character from folk and popular culture. Fourth, and finally, we have the Jim who is capable of noble 4 Bernard De Voto, in Mark Twain at Work, has shown that in Twain's notes for the novel this episode had not yet been assigned to Jim, but was still in the context of the white man's popular culture. 6 Leslie Fiedler is, I think, over-reading when he finds implicit homo-sex uality in use Jim's of the word "honey." It should be remembered that this was the commonest word used an by adult southern Negro of either sex for a white child of either sex toward whom the Negro was at all well disposed. Jim calls Tom once "honey" during the "Evasion," and Nat, the Phelps' old slave, calls Tom "honey" when Tom to promises free him from witches. I am not arguing that there are no psychological, or?better?socio-psychological impli cations in the relationships between the adult Negro and the white child. I am arguing only that Mr. Fiedler, like Mr. O'Connor, has underestimated the differences between his world and the world of Huckleberry Finn. 54

12 The Character of Jim action, who sacrifices his freedom in order to save Tom's life. Like the Jim whom Huck tries to make a fool of on the raft, this Jim is man in the abstract, and in both cases he manages to assume this high role while remaining "nigger" Jim, the run away slave. The Jim of the episodes on the Phelps plantation is a spe cial problem which must be reserved for later. At this point in the argument, however, it is necessary to summarize Jim's character and try to reach some conclusions about it. Jim is, in part, the comic stage Negro who can be made the butt of Tom's childish humor. But he is also a second Negro type, Mr. Bones, whose cleverness enables him to turn the joke back on the Interlocutor. He is also a third Negro type, the kindly old colored Mammy, the protector of the white child. He is a fourth type, the sentimental family man who weeps for the suffering of his own child. And he is a fifth type, man in the abstract?natural man, if you wish?with the reasoning power, the dignity, and the nobility that belong to that high abstrac tion. "Begin with an individual," said F. Scott Fitzgerald, "and before you know it you find that you have created a type; be gin with a type, and you find that you have created?nothing." But what happens when you begin with five types? Given Mark Twain's genius for piling theme-with-variations on top of theme-with-variations you arrive at a character who is relatively consistent, who manages to retain his identity through all of his varying roles. You arrive at a character who is human, unlike the type-characters of low comedy, since he can feel both mental and physical pain. You arrive at a character who is ca pable of a curious and highly original kind of development as he passes from the lower role to the next higher. But you do not, by any stretch of the imagination, arrive at a fully-rounded character. It should be recognized that it is by no means easy to create a fully-rounded character for the fictional Negro. He is easily handled if you confine him to the limits of the low comedy type. And he is also easily handled if, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, you make him "the lowly," a person who is not a charac 55

13 The Massachusetts Review ter in his own right but an object of the white man's character more specifically, an object of the white man's Christian char ity, a person whose chief non-minstrel characteristic is his desire for that freedom the author wishes to grant him. But if you try to make him more, he still tends to lapse into a type. Faulkner generally uses the name "Sambo" in speaking of the Negro in Intruder in the Dust, and even Dilsey, in The Sound and the Fury, is made generic by the characterization "they endured." The Negro's own attempt to discover his identity has been the central problem for the Negro author; it dominates the fiction of Richard Wright, and it is the central theme of Ralph Elli son's Invisible Man. But all of this is somewhat beside the point, because I do not believe that Jim's function in the novel requires that he be a fully-rounded character. V Before considering the question of Jim's function in the novel it is necessary to ask another question that has been asked many times before: why didn't Twain let Jim escape to the free states? He could have had him paddle across the river to the Illinois shore. He could have had him go up the Ohio River at Cairo. He could have sent him north when Huck found a canoe below the Grangerford plantation, just before the Duke and came Dauphin aboard. Since it was, after all, Mark Twain who made the book up, he could have sent Jim north at any point and in any manner he chose. And it would have been easy to start Jim north, since Jim's purpose is much more specific than Huck's. Huck is escaping from civilization, but the direction of that escape is, through most of the novel, a matter of supreme indifference to him. Jim is escaping from slavery in order to avoid being sold south, away from his family, and he intends to deliver his family from slavery as well. The fact of the matter is that it cost Twain a good deal of trouble, particularly at Cairo, to prevent Jim's more specific intention from dominating the novel. One can sense his relief once he gets Jim past Cairo and settled at the river's pace. And I don't think there can be 56

14 The Character of Jim any question here of Twain's not knowing what he was doing. Huckleberry Finn is not an primarily anti-slavery novel, but certainly it is that in part, and it is my contention that letting Jim go north would spoil the anti-slavery theme and much more as well. Remember that Twain has given us, very early in the novel, a picture of the northern free Negro. In Pap's drunken tirade against the government we learn that the free Negro in Ohio is a college professor who talks all kinds of lan guages and knows everything, and the reader is being asked, of course, to contrast this to the situation of the Negro?and the white man?in a slave society. Now, with all due respect to Jim's virtues, including his mental ones, it must be recognized that Jim would tarnish this bright image the moment he set foot on Ohio soil. Jim is simply not college professor material. Furthermore, how is Jim to accomplish his purpose? He intends to work and buy his family out of slavery, but he is an unskilled laborer, and he would have to save every penny for the rest of his life before he would have enough to buy one child. This could, I suppose, be made the theme of a very mov ing piece of fiction, but surely it is better suited to almost any other talent than Mark Twain's. Or suppose that Jim had taken the other alternative that has occurred to him, of getting an abolitionist to "steal" his family. Such a course would take us unavoidably into the realm of abolitionist ideas, and we have already seen that our narrator, Huck, is incapable of handling ideas. Twain could not report them to us without doing great violence to Huck's established character. More important, this is a novel in which two innocents en counter every kind of viciousness and hypocrisy whenever they come in contact with society. If Twain had sent them north he would have had to face the issue of northern viciousness and hypocrisy, and surely this would have confused the anti-slavery theme. Whereas, by keeping them on the river he can admit through Colonel Sherburn that northerners have their own vices without in any way obscuring the reader's impressions of what was wrong with slave society. Finally, and most important, this is not primarily an anti 57

15 The Massachusetts Review slavery novel, nor even a novel in which two innocents en counter a corrupt society, although it is partly that. But first of all it is a novel about a boy escaping from civilization?from a civilization in which slavery is only the most conspicuous cruelty. Remember, however, that the escape is not complete. Twain referred to the book as a conflict between "a sound heart & a deformed conscience," and Huck's conscience still belongs to society. What is Jim's function in this novel? I think it is, quite simply, to be the white man's burden. I do not intend that phrase ironically. I mean that Jim's function is quite literally to be Huck's moral burden. Jim may, and does, disappear from Huck's view temporarily, but he always returns. And finally, by his constant presence, and his constant decency, and his con stant humanity he forces Huck to do something more than drift with the river. He forces Huck to come to grips with that part of himself that belongs to society, forces him "to decide, forever, betwixt two things," forces him to decide to go to hell rather than betray his fellow human being. Jim's chief function in the novel is over at that point (Chap ter XXXI), and so is the book's central moral conflict. All that remains is to get the characters off stage as gracefully and plausibly as possible. But this is, of course, a very large "all," and it brings us to the problem of the ending, or, more prop erly, to the problems of the endings. VI The simplest of these problems is the transparent device by which Twain gives Jim his freedom. Remember that this is in part a novel in which two innocents encounter a corrupt so ciety, and that it is also a novel in which the author walks that very thin line that separates the comic from the painful. It would spoil the tone of such a novel?it would be senselessly brutal?to plunge the innocent finally and irrevocably into pain at the ending. Jim cannot be killed, then, and he cannot be re turned to slavery. He cannot even escape to the Territory with Huck, since his function as Huck's moral burden is over, and 58

16 The Character of Jim since this would be a further and perhaps final separation from his family. Jim has to be reunited with his family, and the only way to accomplish this without writing another and very different novel is to use a machine, just as Fielding had to use a machine to rescue Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. There is nothing wrong, then, in Twain's a using deus ex machina to free Jim; what is wrong is that when the machine appears what is de posited on stage is neither a god nor Squire Allworthy but Miss Watson rampant upon a field of Christian repentance? and this is a very shabby image to associate with Jim's freedom. But there is no way out of it. There are no gods available to Twain. Even if the river is a god, it cannot accomplish what must be accomplished here. Twain could, of course, have had the Widow or Judge Thatcher shame Miss Watson into freeing Jim, but this would have been no more convincing than Miss Watson's repentance. If the reader has learned anything from this novel he has learned that the consciences even of the decent people have been depraved by their moral blindness to the evil of slavery. There are no Squire Allworthys in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We have simply got to swallow Miss Watson, however indigestible she may be. The series of events on the Phelps plantation?the "Evasion" directed by Tom Sawyer?is a far more serious problem. Lionel Trilling has said that it is too long. It is also too dull and too childish. And at the center of the problem is the Jim of the Phelps plantation. Tom wants Jim to tame a rattlesnake, and Jim reacts to this suggestion like every other frightened stage Negro. Jim bites into a compone in which Tom had hidden a piece of candlestick. "It most mashed his teeth out," but it didn't, apparently, produce any pain. Tom fills Jim's shack with vermin, and the rats bite him. But again there is no pain. There is not even human blood, but only "fresh ink" with which to "write a line in his journal." The careless brutality of that phrase is almost beyond belief. This Jim is not the charac ter Twain had so carefully developed, moving him from the lowest of roles to the highest. This Jim has lost all his dignity and become a sub-human creature who feels no pain and bleeds 59

17 The Massachusetts Review fresh ink. This Jim is a flat, cheap type, and this Jim is a meas ure of the failure of the ending of Huckleberry Finn? Henry Nash Smith, in his introduction to the Riverside Edi tion, has brilliantly demonstrated that a most important tech nical achievement of Huckleberry Finn resides in Twain's recognition, before Henry James', that "the management of was point-of-view the central technical development in modern fiction." One must add, however, that the central failure in the novel is a failure in the management of point-of-view, since the trouble with the Jim of the Phelps plantation lies in the way Huck sees him. It is true that Huck has never been able to articulate the idea, "Jim is a human being like myself." The closest he comes to it is on the occasion when Jim risks his free dom by telling Huck to get a doctor for Tom, and then the best he can manage is "I knowed he was white inside." Huck's ideas have never been particularly adequate. But he hasn't been en tirely bereft of common sense. When Tom wants Jim to tame a rattlesnake, Huck ought to protest that Jim might get bitten. He has every reason to know this could happen. At the very least he might protest that it is bad luck to handle a snake-skin. But he doesn't say anything at all. And whatever the state of Huck's ideas, his heart has always been sound. Yet on the Phelps plantation he is usually incapable of feeling either Jim's physical pain or his humiliation. The sorry truth of the matter 6 All academic writing is incestuous, but there are special complications here which should be explained. These ideas on the Jim of the Phelps plantation as a measure of the failure of the ending were the main theme of a short paper which I to Leo Marx while I was a presented graduate student at the Univer sity of Minnesota. He borrowed them, with generous to acknowledgement myself, in his "Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn," American Scholar, XXII (Autumn 1953), Mr. Marx's article was widely read, and these ideas have long since become general knowledge. They have turned up in a number of other most places, notably?in much revised form?in Henry Nash Smith's introduction to the Riverside Edition. I have outlined this rather complicated migration of ideas not to announce only that I am bor rowing them back for the moment, but also to acknowledge the debt I owe to Mr. Marx and Mr. Smith. Their use of these ideas in very different and very suggestive contexts has thrown a good deal of 60 light upon them.

18 The Character of Jim is that Huck as well as Jim is much diminished during Tom's "Evasion." Lionel Trilling attempts to justify the ending on the ground that there is "a certain formal aptness" in returning us to the mood of the beginning. But what was the mood of the begin ning? At the beginning Huck was willing to accept Tom's leadership in the episode of the A-rabs, and he was willing to experiment with rubbing a lamp to see if he could call up g?nies. But he was also capable of arriving at the conclusion that "all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer's lies." Contrast that statement to Huck's conclusion on hearing Tom's plan for the "Evasion"; Tom's plan, he decides, "would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied." This cannot be irony; Huck is incapable of irony.7 And if we are to take this at face value then this is neither the Huck of the river nor the Huck of the beginning, but an insensitive idiot-boy whom we have never seen before and have no wish to see again. Yet despite the defects of the ending, I do not think it is a total failure. We must remember that Huck and Jim have al ways admired Tom's baroque imagination at the same time that they have distrusted it. Jim, when he believes the "Evasion" has succeeded, is willing to call it "splendid." And we must remember that Huck and Jim have no choice but to accept Tom's leadership; they are completely in Tom's power. Finally, and most important, neither Huck nor Jim has com pletely forgotten their purpose. Jim does not agree to Tom's 7 It can, of course, be irony if it is Mark Twain rather than Huck who is speaking here. If this is the case?and I suspect that it is?the failure in the point-of-view remains, and the irony achieved at the expense of point-of-view is cheap at best. The Huck of the "Evasion" is not, of course, consistent. Nor does Twain's intention toward him seem consistent, and the result is that the text will support a considerable variety of interpretations. Two of my col leagues, Charles Davis and Alan Trachtenberg, have pointed out to me ways in which the "Evasion" may be read as an elaborate parody, and there is much to be said for such a reading. I do not, then, consider my own reading of the ending to be definitive in any sense of the word. The most I would claim for it is that it may add one more dimension to a long-standing argument. 61

19 The Massachusetts Review plan until he has been assured that it will be changed the mo ment it becomes too dangerous. And Huck is not always en tirely submissive to Tom's foolishness. Most notably, when Huck has brought the news that armed men are on their way to the shack, and Tom is dithering about how "bully" the ad venture has become, Huck cuts him short. Huck speaks only four words, but they are the right ones. "Hurry!" he says. "Hurry!" And, "Where's Jim?" This is the old Huck speak ing: the Huck of the beginning, whose common sense pre vented him from ever becoming totally absorbed in Tom Saw yer's sleazy fantasies, and the Huck of the river, who cared more for what happened to Jim than he cared for the fate of his own soul. And this brings us to the Huck of the last two sentences in the novel, that second and final ending which somehow manages to redeem all that is wrong with the epi sodes of the "Evasion." VII But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, be cause Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before. Henry Nash Smith points out that it is Tom who first sug gested going to the Territory, that Huck expects Tom and Jim to join him later for more "howling adventures," and that these two sentences do not constitute an articulate rejection of slavery as a social principle. All of this is true, but it is not the whole point. The point is that Huck is lighting out "ahead of the rest" because he can't stand being civilized, and the im portant question is what being civilized means to Huck. The Buffalo MS. shows that Twain originally wrote "they're going to adopt me," and then substituted "Aunt Sally she's" for "they're." The correction was thoroughly in character, since "they"?that is, society?is an abstraction, and Huck has never been comfortable with abstractions. But it is significant that Aunt Sally takes the place of "them." 62

20 The Character of Jim What would living with Aunt Sally have meant to Huck? It would, of course, have meant the discomforts of clothes and shoes and washing. Huck had come to tolerate these discom forts at the Widow's; he had even come to like them, although he can no longer understand how this was so. He will be re lieved to be finally rid of them, although one may ask whether the genuine feeling he has developed for Aunt Sally would not have been enough to make up for these discomforts. But living with Aunt Sally would also mean living on the outskirts of the town in which Huck had seen the Duke and Dauphin ridden on a rail. Here again we must bridge the gap that exists between our world and the world of Huckleberry Finn. We must remember that a rail was made by splitting a log length wise, and then splitting the halves, so that the fence-rail was wedge-shaped at the ends, with a sharp and splintery edge. When a man was ridden on a rail, with nothing between his body and the rail but a coat of tar and feathers, there would be very little left of his groin, and the chances were that he would lose at least a part of his genitals as well. Huck does not describe the details of the scene for us. He does not want to, just as he does not want to describe the butch ery of the Grangerf ord boys. But he says "it made me sick to see it," and here as elsewhere "sick" is all we have to stand for one of those profound psychological wounds which Philip Young has shown to be so central to his character. Huck cannot arrive at the conscious statement "I reject society because it is stupid and cruel and vicious" (the best he can manage is "Human beings can be awful cruel to one another"), but he can feel it. And feeling it as strongly as he does, he cannot stand it any longer. He is escaping from all that is worst in society, and his flight is much more fully motivated than it was at the beginning of the novel. This is, I think, what the final sentences mean for Huck. But they have other meanings as well, and to discover them we must return to a consideration of the folklore in which Twain had so many roots. We must ask what Arkansas means in folk lore and what it means in Huckleberry Finn. We must ask 63

21 The Massachusetts Review what going to the Territory means in folklore, and what it means in Huckleberry Finn. Arkansas is represented in folklore as the wildest, wooliest, gaudiest, and most violent state in the Mississippi Valley. For example, in one recording of the "Arkansas Traveller" the following dialogue takes place: "Well, where's John?" "He went a-huntin'." "Don't he fear God?" "Takes his gun everywhere he goes." "Any Presbyterians around here?" "There's one hangin' on the wall; he skins ever'thin' he kills."8 This manages to stay within the realm of comedy, but it is particularly low and particularly violent comedy. In T. B. Thorpe's "The Big Bear of Arkansas" we find the narrator threatening at one point to stick his knife into his friend's liver (the threat seems to me gratuitously specific) and at another point comparing his friends' laughter to that of "hyenas over a dead nigger." It is a complex simile, and most of the emotions it evokes are anything but comic. In Huckleberry Finn, of course, Arkansas is the absolute nadir of slave society. When Huck comes ashore in Bricksville he finds very little that is comic; we are in a world of depravity and violence that is seldom relieved. It is in Bricksville that the drunken braggart, Boggs, is shot in the street and his fellow citizens define their "rights" as getting a turn to gape at the corpse. Huck meets a lynch mob; he discovers the theatrical tastes of Southern Gentlemen; he discovers that the favorite sport of the street loafers is putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him. It is at Bricksville, Arkansas that the river forsakes its usual indifference to mankind and becomes the active enemy of society. "Such a town as that," says Huck, "has 8 Sung by the Tennessee Ramblers, on Brunswick 225A. Reissued in Alan Lomax's collection, "Mountain Frolic," Brunswick BL

22 The Character of Jim to be always moving back, and back, and back, because the river's always gnawing at it."9 Arkansas is also an American nadir in a folk song which has appeared in many versions and under many titles. In some ver sions the tone is comic; in others it is pathetic. In some versions the singer has returned to the East; in this one he has gone to the Territory; in others he doesn't say where he has gone. But in all versions the singers are agreed in having left Arkansas and in considering Arkansas the nadir of something. Lee Hayes, who calls his version "The State of Arkansas", sings: I'm goin' to the Indian Territory and marry me a squaw, Bid farewell to the canebrakes in the State of Arkansas. If you ever see me back again I'll extend to you my paw, But it'll be through a telescope from Hell to Arkansas.10 The Territory, then, is a possible refuge from Arkansas and all that Arkansas represents in the white man's folklore. But the Territory also figures in Negro folklore, strongly enough so that in 1924?-long after the Territory had ceased to exist? the following stanza turns up in Bessie Smith's recording of "Work House Blues": 'Cause I'm goin' to the Nation, goin' to the Territo'. Say, I'm bound fo' the Nation, bound fo' the Territo'. I got to leave here ; I got to get the next train goin'.11 The escape is not, in this case, from the State of Arkansas but from the more generic state of trouble. But the destination is 0 It is at this point that Mr. Trilling's reading of the river as a god takes on an added concreteness of meaning. In the course of developing his argu ment, Mr. Trilling remarks on James Joyce's use of Huckleberry Finn. And in this connection it is worth noticing that Huck's last name is that of a pre Christian Celtic nature god who is "Fionn" in Irish, and who gave his name to the cities of Vienna and Vienne. Joyce was, of course, aware of this, but it is unlikely that Twain was. So we must probably conclude that Wien bleibt Wien und Finn bleibt Finn and never the Twain shall meet. Nevertheless, it is an intriguing parallel. 10 Commodore record FL30,002. "Columbia D. 65

23 The Massachusetts Review the Indian Nation?the Territory?the last extensive tract of land in the continental United States to be free from the control of American society. I suppose it is not very likely that Mark Twain knew this particular blues. But he did know Negro folklore very well, and loved it very well?so well that he has alienated a certain type of twentieth century critic by announcing loudly and pub licly and in print that he preferred Negro folk song to any of the music he heard in Europe. It seems to me very probable that he had encountered the Territory somewhere in Negro folklore, since it was a pre-civil War theme that was strong enough to last until Bessie Smith's time. And it is impossible that he should have been ignorant of the fact that lay behind the Negro's attitude toward the Territory?the fact that before the Civil War more southern Mississippi Valley Negroes es caped to the Territory than to the north. It was closer, of course. And the Indians welcomed the Negro. It was even pos sible for the escaped slave to become a chief in his adopted tribe. Considering all this, I think that the final sentences of Huckleberry Finn are even richer than has previously been supposed. They are for Huck an emotional, if not an intellec tual rejection of civilization and an escape from it. On a strictly mythic level they are also an escape for the Negro, and as such they do much to repair the damage that has been done to Jim. And finally, of course, they are on that same level an escape for every man who cannot stand civilisation because he has been there before. 66