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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
In The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King Bellow is, of course, using a fictional convention invented by Mark Twain. The language of Huckleberry Finn embodies every naïve, shrewd, awkward, or painfully honest attitude of a South-Western boy. Without forgetting this mimetic performance, however, we see that the words act directly on the sensibility of the reader in terms of his literary expectations. He is kept alert by fresh and vital rhythms and by idiomatic phrases which attract by their very incorrectness. His excitement is not primarily a response to the authenticity of the language he hears, although this is an important part of the effect. It is a response to a tension of style, involving the counter-pointing of the rhythms and incorrectnesses of a South-Western small town idiom against Victorian literary and subliterary language. Huck's relief on emerging from the Grangerford–Shepherdson feud is communicated by language which excludes, yet is aware of, fireside scenes in Dickens and the melting cadences of ‘Home, Sweet Home’: ‘I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.’
page 275 note 1 The Portable Mark Twain, ed. De Voto, Bernard (New York, The Viking Press, 1946), pp. 340–1Google Scholar.
page 276 note 1 The Adventures of Augie March (London, Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 65–6Google Scholar.
page 277 note 1 Henderson the Rain King (London, Penguin Books, 1966), p. 174Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.
page 277 note 2 Forster, John, The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. iii (London, 1874), p. 158Google Scholar.
page 278 note 1 Henderson's psychic refrain ‘I want! I want!’ for instance, is quoted referentially from plate 9 of Blake's ‘The Gates of Paradise’ (reproduced in Keynes, Geoffrey (ed.), The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (London, The Nonesuch Library, 1956), p. 573Google Scholar).
page 279 note 1 In, for instance, A Year of Grace (London, 1950, Penguin edition, 1955)Google Scholar.