ASSIGNMENT 2:
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (pt. 2)

We noted in the introductory comments to Assignment 1, that Twain had left off writing his manuscript of Huck Finn in the middle of chapter 16, when the raft is smashed up in the fog and Huck and Jim are separated. For three years, from 1876-79, he appears to have left the book aside, doing no writing on it. During those years, the remaining Southern states (Alabama, Louisiana) still holding out against the Northern, Republican party leadership, accepted the terms of President Grant's Reconstruction settlements and were formally readmitted to the Union (1877): the years of secession, war, and carpet-bagging reconstruction, were formally concluded. The nation's family feud had, however, extracted a heavy, bloody price: over 600,000 dead; Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, assassinated; the South's industrial production ruined; the coalescence of Southern resistance, after 1866, in the Ku Klux Klan; thus the sectional differences between North and South remained bitterly divisive; and the legal system of slavery was replaced by systems of tenant-farming that kept southern African-Americans in economic and social (if no longer legal) bondage.

This was the context, in 1879, when Twain began writing once again. Note that he leaves Jim aside, for a time, and concentrates on Huck's sojourn amidst the aristocratic Kentucky planters known as the Grangerfords, a family locked in a bitter feud with the rival Shepherdson clan. As such it's tempting to speculate that, as he began writing the book again in fits and starts during the period from 1879-1883, Twain was more likely thinking of it as a book which, despite its historical setting in the 1840s, would be understood as an allegory of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Indeed, you will note that after Jim re-enters the story, and Huck escapes from the bloodthirsty Grangerfords, the story will not only involve more idyllic stretches on the river, but also, increasingly, take us onto the shores of the Mississippi. There, Twain explores Southern society. Notably, too, it is aristocratic pretence-for example, in the Grangerford's gentility, or in the silly pretensions of the Duke and the King (consummately selfish con-artists)-that will occupy us in these chapters.

Chapters 16 and following will thus take Huck and Jim deeper and deeper into the South. From the region around Cairo and Paducah, just south of the Ohio River confluence, they will drift further into the slave-territory that Jim most dreads, eventually reaching southern Arkansas and Louisiana by chapter 31. This is the point at which Huck's new knowledge and moral vision will be put to the crucial test.

But what is the "shape" of Huck's knowledge through the first two-thirds of Twain's book? We might well describe his knowledge in terms of what it is not. Instead of books and formal schooling, Huck has demonstrated that he possesses, and at his best knows how to use, a vast storehouse of folklore. Similarly, instead of being versed in all the details of genteel custom (or "manners"), such as the pleasant bowing and oath-saying at the Grangerfords, he has a great capacity for empathy, caring, and what we might call a sense of basic human dignity-towards Jim, for example. Furthermore, while the early chapters have sometimes mentioned the details of formal economics (Huck's money held in trust and accruing interest, or Jim's investment schemes), Huck represents instead an almost primitive economics: he's like a hunter-gatherer, fishing and "borrowing" (stealing) the produce from shore-side farms. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, while Huck has a sense of the Truth, he has instead demonstrated a finely developed capacity for Lying-all of the plots, and "stretchers" he concocts along the way, and uses to enable his and Jim's survival and freedom.

One way of putting these differences is to say that again and again Twain's plot puts the officially sanctioned knowledge of high culture (books, manners, economics, Truth) into conflict with the unofficial wisdom of low culture (folklore, compassion, stealing, lying). What are the results of that conflict? Always it is the unofficial, low-life side that emerges from this struggle as a clear moral winner. Another way of putting this lesson of Twain's plot is to conclude something like this: If all the so-called "Truths" of official culture turn out, in the crucible of experience, to be ways of masking man's inhumanity to man; then aren't the so-called "lies" of the little man, all of the dodges and stretchers that enable his survival, really in fact "truths" by which one can live? This question, and its rather obvious answer, both central to the picaresque novel as a type, are what may be said to drive Huck, and Twain, as this novel moves toward the crisis of chapter 31. There Twain has Huck declare his intention to "steal" Jim out of slavery, and to face what civilization has convinced him will be the punishment of "Hell" for his illicit action. Is it illicit anyway? And in what context: the slave-holding South of 1840? or Connecticut (where Twain wrote) some 40 years later? Twain's humorous novel has begun to wrestle with key questions in American political history, and thus taken on a very serious side indeed.

Reading Assignment

1. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (pp. 81-171).

Writing Assignment

1. In chapters 17 and 18, devoted to the Grangerfords, Twain spends a good deal of time summarizing both the material possessions, and the manners, of this Kentucky family. Discuss how some of those specific details contrast with the family's violent behavior. What is Twain's point in that contrast?
2. Briefly, what is the origin of the Grangerford-Shepherdson dispute, and why is that origin significant to readers?
3. The next series of episodes involves the Duke and the King. One of their scams for acquiring money from gullible folks is to put on a dramatic performance. Looking closely at the details of these scenes, summarize what happens, why, and how they are significant.
4. The Duke and King next plan to scam the Wilks family out of their proper inheritance. Again, briefly summarize how they plan to do this. But then go further: in a paragraph, say why Huck goes along with the plan, then why he disrupts it. Support your explanations with details from these chapters.
5. How is Jim enslaved once again? And how does Huck initially (in chapter 31), respond to that turn of events, for example in writing to Miss Watson? Why does Huck change his mind?
6. Consult a handbook of literary terms, or a good encyclopedia, for a definition and discussion of irony as a literary mode. Then, write three or four well-written paragraphs examining Twain's ironic style by analyzing several instances. Your analyses should clearly indicate how Twain's irony functions, and the "targets" of his irony.

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