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Life Without Father: The Role of the Paternal in the Opening Chapters of Huckleberry Finn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Harry G. Segal
Harry G. Segal
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology, Department of Psychology, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York 14456–3397, U.S.A.
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Extract

Critics have argued for generations about the failure of the ending of Huckleberry Finn. Ernest Hemingway began the debate by characterizing the escapades at Silas Phelps' farm as “cheating” his statement was soon followed by rhetorical volleys between Eliot, Trilling, Marx, and others whose writings, taken together, form a miniature canon all their own. While the ending has been variously defended on formal, political, aesthetic, and moral grounds, the very presence of a debate sustained for more than sixty years bears witness to the “problem” of those closing chapters. Perhaps the most simple, and ultimately unanswerable, criticism of the ending is that the characters have grown inexplicably younger – that is, they appear to behave in ways which disregard or “undo” their earlier, more maturing experiences. It seems inconceivable that Huck would go along so easily with Tom's Count of Monte Cristo escapades after witnessing the Grangerfords' feud, just as Jim's childlike acquiescence to the escape plan cannot be reconciled with the wisdom and dignity he had earlier shown as Huck's surrogate parent. Despite the ingenuity of even the most brilliant supporters, no reading can provide the characters in the closing chapters with those psychological qualities they so palpably lack; instead, supporters are left in the more awkward position of arguing that the failure of the ending constitutes an ironic success.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , April 1993 , pp. 19 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 The series of essays about the ending of Huckleberry Finn have been referenced as a group many times and may be found collected in several critical anthologies as well as in an appendix to Norton's annotated edition of the novel. The following footnote is excerpted from “Mark Twain, ‘Realism,’ and Huckleberry Finn” in Budd, Louis, ed., New Essays on Huckleberry Finn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar:

The locus classicus of the stand-off between proponents of the humorous and serious Twains is the famous debate about the ending … beginning with Ernest Hemingway's declaration that “if you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. This is the real end. The rest is just cheating” (Green Hills of Africa [New York: Scribner's, 1935], p. 22)Google Scholar. Leo Marx argues that the burlesque ending betrays the serious implications of the novel in “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling and Huckleberry Finn,” American Scholar 22 (1953): 423–40Google Scholar. His targets, on the basis of equally serious readings of the novel, defend the ending. See Trilling, Lionel, “Huckleberry Finn” in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Scribner's, 1950)Google Scholar, reprinted in Simpson, Claude M., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Huckleberry Finn (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 107–8Google Scholar. James Cox, to continue the available permutations and combinations, defends the ending as part of his attack on serious readings of the book. See Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 175–82Google Scholar.… for a general discussion of this debate, see Reichert, John, Making Sense of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), PP. 191–203.Google Scholar

2 Although “psychoformalism” is not an established term, the process to which it refers was first noted by Kenneth Burke who presented a technique he called “metaphorical psycho-analysis” along with an all-too-brief reading of Coleridge's pattern of images which served as an example, in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 62–76Google Scholar. See also his brilliant essay “Psychology and Form” in Counterstatement (Los Altos: Hermes, 1953)Google Scholar. Other related theories include Ernst Kris' classic work on creativity and ego regression, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: Shocken Books, 1964)Google Scholar; Davis', Walter A. recent exposition of a “hermeneutics of engagement” in Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989)Google Scholar could be applied to an author's dialectical relationship with his works; and the undercited work of Albert Rothenberg who argues that creativity is essentially the mechanism of dreamwork in reverse – see his The Emerging Goddess: The Creative Process in Art, Science & Other Fields (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar. A more extensive presentation of the psychoformal approach is in preparation; see also Segal, Harry G., Mark Twain and the Power of the Paternal: A Psychoformal Analysis, unpublished dissertation, English Department, Yale University, 1990, pp 6–64Google Scholar, and Segal, Harry G., The Effort After Meaning: Theoretical, Clinical, and Empirical justifications for the Psychological Assessment of Narrative, unpublished dissertation, Psychology Department, University of Michigan, 1990.Google Scholar

3 Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer's Comrade (Berkeley: The University of California press edition, 1985).Google Scholar

4 Smith, Henry Nash, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trachtenberg, Alan, “The Form of Freedom in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Southern Review, 6, (1970) 954–71.Google Scholar

5 More recently, Hoffman, Andrew Jay, Twain's Heroes, Twain's Worlds (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988)Google Scholar claims that it is a “fruitless” critical task to separate Twain from Huck. “The character we identify as our hero cannot be fully separated from the character who writes him; the writing Huck cannot be fully separated from Mark Twain; the reader cannot be fully separated from the book.” (31). Hoffman identifies the shifting tone and diction of the novel, decides that this quality necessitates a “holistic” reading, and insists that interpretations will falter if they privilege “only one of the several clearly interdependent parts of the novel” (p. 39). Certainly the contrast of Smith and Trachtenberg's individually influential readings would tend to support Hoffman's caution; Huck both “deepens” as a tragic character, yet seems trapped by the satiric frame surrounding him. However, Hoffman's solution is to step back from the novel and see it as an interplay of history, heroism, and textuality. (For him, Huck is a traditional Raglanian hero who is ultimately powerless at the novel's end because he has been taken from mythology and placed in a “realistic” novel determined by society and the writing of history.) His approach is an interesting extension of Robert Regan's work, but it effectively sidesteps the blurring of Twain and Huck by simply pointing out that it exists. He does not attempt to explain why it is so, nor does he address the psychological factors which may have compelled such confusion.

6 After beginning his career by applying the mystical “I/thou” formulations of Martin Buber to romantic poetry, Bloom then embarked on his long and sometimes obscure project of positing a theory of literary succession and influence. See, of course, The Anxiety of Influence (London: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar and The Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

7 See Freud's, Anna major work, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1946)Google Scholar as well as that of Blos, PeterOn Adolescence: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (New York: Free Press, 1962)Google Scholar – both classic treatises on the successful and unsuccessful outcome of the oedipal phase as first experienced by toddlers and re-evoked during adolescence.

8 See Rene Girard's perceptive argument on the roles of triangulation and desire in Don Quixote in Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.)Google Scholar

9 What makes Finn's novel rare, however, is that it is an especially strong sequel. Like the New Testament, read by more people than the Old Testament, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is no longer a sequel. For most readers, it is the first text.

10 To translate this idea into psychoanalytic terms, one could think of Hack Finn as the latent meaning of the manifest content of Tom Sauyer. See also Fields, Wayne, “When the Fences are Down; Language and Order in The Adventures of Tom Saayer and Huckleberry Finn,” Journal of American Studies, 24 (1990), 3, 369–386CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who argues that the world of Tom is one characterized by order and limits, while in Huck's narrative order is consistently undermined.

11 A beautiful description of this kind of awareness may be found in an early chapter of The Magic Mountain, As his grandfather once again shows Hans Castorp the family's baptismal bowl and recounts the young boy's christening, “a familiar feeling pervaded the child: a strange, dreamy, troubling sense: of change in the midst of duration, of time as both flowing and persisting, of recurrence in continuity – these were sensations he had felt before on the like occasion, and both expected and longed for again, whenever the heirloom was displayed.” Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain, trans. Lowe-Porter, H. T. (New York: Knopf, 1949), 23.Google Scholar

12 Robert Regan, in his excellent book on Mark Twain, is the only critic I have found who questions the integrity of Judge Thatcher in this scene. Regan sees a “hint” of hypocrisy in Thatcher even in Tom Sawyer and argues that the Judge's redemptive act of returning Huck's money at the end of the novel takes place “several years and several hundred pages after the scene in which [he] gives Huck a dollar in return for his fortune.” He goes on to speculate: “Perhaps the author had simply forgot the seed of doubt about the Judge's honesty he had planted so long before.” Regan, Robert, Unpromising Heroes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 135.Google Scholar

13 I am grateful to John Seeleye for his comments as a reviewer on this manuscript. He suggests that the pun on quarry may be a triple pun: “Twain wrote much of Huck Finn while staying at Quarry Farm near Elmira – a place he associated with creativity.” I am also grateful for the comments of Eric Sundquist, another reviewer.