But luckily that phase is past, and I can now, using quite a number of verbs, espouse a Tentative Narrative Theory regarding Huck Finn.
A TENTATIVE NARRATIVE THEORY REGARDINGHUCK FINN
Have you ever been in an airport and seen those escalators whose purpose it is not to actually escalate, but to move people horizontally, which is why they are called people movers? Imagine the novelist as a person standing at one end of a people mover, with a shovel, in front of a big pile of dirt. The pile of dirt represents The Thing This Writer Loves To Do, And Does Naturally. The writer started writing so that he or she could endlessly and effortlessly do this thing and nothing else — be funny, say, or verbally brilliant, or write lush nature vignettes, or detailed descriptions of the interiors of rich people’s houses — and then be declared Wonderful, and buy a nicer car. But all writers soon find that their Dirt is not enough. Yes, their readership stands at the far end of the people mover, eagerly awaiting this Dirt, but if the writer simply dumps shovelful after shovelful of Dirt onto the people mover, the people mover grinds to a halt, and the readership walks away to see a movie. Three hundred pages of descriptions of rich people’s houses will not cut it: the writer must connect the dots of Dirt with something else, something narrative, something that imitates forward motion. The people mover must be fed Dirt a little at a time, so that it will keep moving, and in this way, and this way only, the readership will in time receive all the Dirt the writer wishes to administer.
Now, to extend this already rickety metaphor, let us say that what keeps the people mover moving is what we will call the Apparent Narrative Rationale. The Apparent Narrative Rationale is what the writer and the reader have tacitly agreed the book is “about.” In most cases, the Apparent Narrative Rationale is centered around simple curiosity: the reader understands that he is waiting to learn if Scrooge will repent, if Romeo will marry Juliet, if the crops will be saved, the widow rescued. While the reader waits for that answer, the writer gets a chance to create the Three Christmas Ghosts and compose the Balcony Speech, and in the end, the reader finds that this — the Dirt — is what he or she has wanted all along.
The Apparent Narrative Rationale, then, can be seen as the writer’s answer to his own question: “What exactly is it that I am doing here?”
I now skillfully segue back to Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens.
Twain is the funniest literary American writer, and his funniness is so energetic and true and pure that it must have been a great pleasure to be him, sitting there dressed all in white, smoking cigar after cigar in your hexagonal study, with the pure funniness pouring out of the top of your head, helping you combat your native grouchiness. Like many lower-class writers (Chekhov, Dickens, Gogol come to mind), he started his career being purely funny, in comic sketches that were mostly Dirt and very little people mover, and all his writing life struggled with the question of what his Apparent Narrative Rationale should be, which is why he left behind such a long trail of abandoned manuscripts. He was not an outliner, not a planner, did not establish an agenda and carry it through, but wrote as the spirit moved him, in as improvisatory a manner as any writer ever did. “Mr. Clemens,” wrote William Dean Howells, his friend and editor, “is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before or the thing that may be about to follow…. [H]e would take whatever offered itself to his hand out of that mystical chaos, that divine ragbag, which we call the mind, and leave the reader to look after relevancies and sequences for himself.”
Huck Finn was written in three or four distinct bursts of creativity, between which Twain put the manuscript away and wrote plays no one has ever heard of and invented machines no one has ever used. Each time he stopped, he apparently did so for the simplest of reasons: he didn’t know how to keep going. He lost faith in his Apparent Narrative Rationale, or interest in it, or found that it had led him to some seemingly insoluble narrative problem, and so put the book aside and invented an Invisible Ink Typewriter or a Systematic Noodle Identifier. Each time he came back to the book, he did so with renewed enthusiasm and a new plan on how to proceed: a new Apparent Narrative Rationale. This sequence of Apparent Narrative Rationales may be roughly described as follows: (1) I Will Rewrite Tom Sawyer, but from Huck’s Point of View; (2) I Will Take Huck and Jim Up the River, Ostensibly to Freedom; (3) I Will Write a Treatise on the Mores and Manners of the American Southwest; (4) I Will Build This Whole Deal Up into One of the Most Beautiful Moments of Impending Action Ever, in Which We See That Huck Must Risk His Life to Single-handedly Save Jim; and (5) I Will Let Tom Sawyer Come Inexplicably Back into My Story and Ruin My Ending.
Now, all fiction writers labor under this burden of not-knowing. “The writer,” said Donald Barthelme, “is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.” In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut conscious mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious. We surprise ourselves, and make something bigger than we could have imagined making before we started trying to make it. But as Twain wrote Huck Finn, his not-knowing seems also to have been operating on a second and more profound level. All those adjustments of his Apparent Narrative Rationales took place in part because his book was making him uncomfortable. His comic novel was doing things a comic novel was not supposed to do, and yet he sort of liked it, and yet, come to think of it, it was really pretty darn uncomfortable, and he didn’t yet feel like fighting the battles his story was presaging. In effect, his subconscious was urging him to do things his conscious mind didn’t know could be done, or didn’t particularly want done, and so my Tentative Narrative Theory is simply this: the tension between various warring parts of Sam Clemens — the radical and the reactionary; the savage satirist and the kindly Humorist; the raw hick and the aspiring genteel Literary Figure — is what makes Huck Finn such a rich and formidable book.
That is all the narrative theory I have at the moment, but I will return to this question of Twain’s understanding of his own book later, after I dispense with the question of whether Huck Finn is indeed a Great Novel or if, on the other hand, the millions of people who have read and loved it and felt that it was morally important and gorgeous have all been stupid and deceived and hopelessly old-fashioned and dupable.
WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT IT?
Twain started the book in 1876, as a companion piece to one he had recently finished, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but with a critical difference: he would tell the new story from the point of view of its main character, Huck Finn, son of the town drunk. “I shall take a boy of twelve & run him through life (in the first person),” Twain wrote to Howells in 1875. This first-person voice turned out to be one of the most natural and poetic literary voices ever devised, a voice still startling in its ability to bring the physical world (predawn birdcalls, a tin drainpipe on a moonlit night, the mud-smell of a river at dawn) off the page and into our heads, making us feel as if we hadn’t merely read the scenes but lived them, over and over, in some parallel and primal universe. It is this voice that first gets us, and it is this feeling of love for the voice — our delight in Huck’s common sense, his original way of thinking, the perfect roll and cadence of these odd sentences, so unliterary by the standards of Twain’s time — that first, I expect, put into some early critic’s head the idea that the book was not just a boy’s book, not just a quasi-naughty work of low comedy, but in fact, a great and seminal work of art. With this voice, Twain threw open the door on an America previously unrepresented in our literature: its lower classes, its hustlers and religious con men, possessed of equal parts Spirit and Lust; its leaning frame houses, inside of which corpulent men, tended by slaves, read aloud from Bibles. In an era when Whitman and Emerson were linking the health of the American democracy to its downward inclusiveness, along came Huck Finn, which was so terrifically downwardly inclusive that it was banned by the Concord Library for “dealing with a series of experiences not elevating.”