nf0057: to Huckleberry Finn i'm being recorded here so er er if i go i-, get 
into a terrible fit of coughing you'll know and just anyway right okay when The 
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in the mid-eighteen-eighties the 
first thing that happened was that it ran into a whole barrage of critical flak 
especially in the more culturally refined Eastern states the book was banned 
from numerous schools it was withdrawn from public libraries it was attacked in 
the establishment press and it was generally disapproved of now the reason for 
this hostility wasn't the actual plot of the novel by eighteen-eighty-five 
remember slavery had already been legally abolished for er over twenty years in 
the U-S the Emancipation Proclamation was eighteen-sixty-three so the story of 
a young boy helping an escaped slave wasn't in itself particularly 
controversial in fact contemporary readers would be more likely to approve of 
Huck's action than to throw up their hands in outrage so 
the plot itself wasn't a problem what did offend the guardians of respectable 
culture though was that in just about every other respect Huck was such a 
thoroughly bad lot he has slovenly personal habits he lies he steals he's 
disrespectful of religion er he's scornful of respectability and he's an 
educational dropout to boot Louisa May Alcott who was the author of Little 
Women er friend and associate of Emerson and transcendentalist Louisa May 
Alcott was horrified by the book and if you've got the handout you'll see i've 
i've put er one of her particular objections if Mr Clemens cannot think of 
something better to tell our pure minded lads and lasses he had better stop 
writing for them notice the assumption incidentally that Mr Clemens I-E Mr 
Twain was actually writing for children this is a dangerous assumption and i'll 
have more to say about that in a minute meanwhile though we mustn't forget to 
add to the list of Huckleberry's sins the fact that he speaks and 
writes such uneducated English his spelling is shaky his grammar is awful and 
his style his characteristic mode of expression is an offence to all 
traditional standards of literary decorum so in what always strikes me as one 
of the glorious ironies of American literary history we find supposedly 
progressive institutions like the Public Library Committee of Concord 
Massachusetts that's the same Concord that's Thoreau's birthplace for instance 
the Library Committee decided to exclude Huckleberry Finn from their shelves 
believing it to be and i'm quoting more profitable for the slums than it is for 
respectable people you'll find the full text of the Library Committee's 
decision in the box on the back of the handout Mark Twain of course was 
delighted by the bad press he reckoned that every time Huckleberry Finn was 
criticized or banned it just increased public interest and it upped the sales 
of his book and certainly many of the press reports were as bad as 
even he could have wished in addition to the Concord committee's description of 
Huckleberry Finn as rough coarse inelegant and irreverent other negative 
epithets thrown at the book by earlier reviewers include vulgar semi-obscene 
trashy and vicious so that's one view of the text and in case you think that 
such hostility is merely a dated phenomenon of the Victorian era it's worth 
noticing that even recently as recently as fifteen years ago in fact the 
censorship brigade has been back on the warpath this time the accusation is 
racism and there have been highly publicized calls for Huckleberry Finn to be 
banned from the school curriculum in the United States because of its 
endemically offensive use of the word nigger and because of its allegedly 
demeaning portrayal of black people now obviously the book's treatment of race 
is something which needs looking at in detail and i'll be coming back to that 
question in the second lecture next week but for the moment 
just add the charge of racism to all the other reasons that people have found 
for condemning Huckleberry Finn and wanting to see it removed from circulation 
now then in contrast to those negative views there's another school of thought 
which in fact was probably sanctioned and perpetuated by even more libraries 
than banned the book in the first place and this is the view that holds that 
Huckleberry Finn belongs on the shelves of children's literature that it's 
first foremost finally an uncomplicated boys' book like its predecessor Tom 
Sawyer Mark Twain himself in typically misleading fashion seems to lend weight 
to this view you'll remember the prefatory note at the front of the novel where 
he says persons attempting to find a motive in the narrative will be prosecuted 
persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished persons attempting to 
find a plot will be shot unfortunately quite a few critics have made the 
mistake of taking that 
disclaimer at face value for example i had this er Puffin er paperback edition 
where Huckleberry Finn is printed alongside Tom Sawyer and the editor's 
introduction denounces all those literary bloodhounds who tried to sniff out 
improbably complicated meanings as far as he's concerned the two books Tom 
Sawyer and Huck Finn belong together as i quote the radiant memories of an 
unspoilt mind forget all about morals and motives says this kind of reader Huck 
is simply a delightful ragamuffin and his adventures are the thing after all 
look at the ingredients we have escapes uninhabited islands camping outdoors 
boat wrecks floods dead bodies buried treasure all the ingredients of a ripping 
yarn and no boring girls along to spoil the fun and no boring critics either 
it's implied should be allowed to spoil the fun so there you've got a second 
perspective on Huckleberry Finn the first one points to the novel's nastiness 
the second one makes it sound merely nice and in neither 
case do we get much sense that the book has any real literary merit so let's 
redress the balance and to suggest some of the claim that the book does have on 
our attention let me quote the verdict of some other commentators first the 
critic Lionel Trilling Huckleberry Finn he says is one of the central documents 
of American culture in nineteen-eighty-six a century after its publication 
there was an article in the Washington Post which called Huckleberry Finn i 
quote the greatest work of art by an American the Sistine Chapel of our 
civilization Mark Twain as the American Michelangelo no less and i'm sure that 
you'll already have come across Ernest Hemingway's famous accolade where he 
says all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 
Huckleberry Finn it's the best book we've had all American writing comes from 
that now these are fairly breathtaking claims but at least they suggest that 
there is more to this novel than either the 
book-burners or the children's librarians have recognized so don't be lulled 
into a false sense of security by Twain's authorial pretence that there's 
nothing serious going on remember that Mark Twain is a pseudonym it's a 
constructed and very convenient device through which Samuel Langhorne Clemens 
promoted a public persona as humorist and popular entertainer but that 
ingenuous comic persona is a mask and it's adopted for a purpose and i reckon 
that you should always keep in mind the George Bernard Shaw comment that i've 
quoted on this sheet here er Mark Twain says Shaw has to put things in such a 
way as to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking and 
there may be a more serious purpose going on beneath this apparently casual 
insubstantial text right er just a few details er career details which seem to 
me significant in the shaping of Huckleberry Finn the first book Clemens 
actually published under the pseudonym Mark Twain in 
eighteen-sixty-nine was a sort of comic travelogue called Innocents Abroad 
three years later in seventy-two he published Roughing It which he'd originally 
thought of calling The Innocent At Home again this was a comic first person 
account of his travels er this time to the open spaces of the American West and 
the only reason i mention these books is that they show Twain already 
experimenting with the strategy of a deliberately naive narrator-protagonist he 
was obviously drawn to the idea of speaking through the persona of an innocent 
at large someone whose wide-eyed confrontation with the world could be 
developed as a source of both comedy and satire then came Tom Sawyer ninetee-, 
er eighteen-seventy-six now here Twain abandoned the first person format for a 
more traditional third person omniscient narrator but what's significant for 
our purposes is that here for the first time he turned from the contemporary 
scene back to the fictionalized world of his own 
boyhood in the small riverbank town of Hannibal Missouri in Tom Sawyer in other 
words Twain opened up the imaginative arena where Huckleberry Finn is also set 
he also of course introduced Huck Huck is a character in Tom Sawyer as one of 
Tom's friends but significantly he's observed from the outside and well in any 
case the focus is on Tom having finished the novel Twain obviously felt there 
was more to be said about that childhood world of the old South enough for a 
kind of companion volume to Tom Sawyer but perhaps with a different perspective 
perhaps it needed that innocent at large to see the world so spurred on by the 
popular success of Tom Sawyer Twain immediately set to work on what seems to 
have been conceived initially as an unproblematic sequel 
he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells that he'd begun another boys' book 
which he describes as Huckleberry Finn's autobiography but then the trouble 
started having launched Huck and Jim off downriver on the raft suddenly the 
narrative seemed to hit a snag stall midstream and Twain found that he simply 
couldn't write any more at one point in fact he was so frustrated that he spoke 
of possibly burning the manuscript just gave up on it fortunately he didn't 
burn it he simply shelved the work for several years he returned to it briefly 
in eighteen-seventy-nine gave up again it still wasn't moving got on with other 
things what eventually seems to have produced the breakthrough was a trip to 
the South in eighteen-eighty-two this was the first time that Twain had been 
back on home ground he himself was a Southerner from Missouri it's the first 
time he'd been back to 
the South in over twenty years and when he returned from that trip the 
languishing manuscript of Huckleberry Finn was revived everything seemed 
suddenly to fall into place and after more than seven years in the making the 
novel was finished eighteen-eighty-three and went to press in eighty-four now 
then let's backtrack it used to be thought that the snag i mentioned the the 
sticking point at which the novel almost got er abandoned or destroyed used to 
be thought that that snag was er the end of chapter sixteen now if this had 
been so it would have been wonderfully appropriate because chapter sixteen you 
remember is the one where er Huck and Jim's downstream journey is brought to a 
catastrophic violent end when the raft collides with the upriver steamboat so 
that would have been a lovely place to say cut the story has come to a dead 
halt in fact er recently a manuscript was discovered which shows that the break 
in composition came just a bit later Twain 
stopped writing halfway through chapter eighteen rather than immediately after 
the steamboat collision still as the critic Shelley Fishkin says the fact 
remains in the summer of eighteen-seventy-six Mark Twain smashed the raft that 
was to have carried Huck and Jim out of slave territory and into freedom and he 
did not return to the manuscript for several years so clearly there was some 
kind of narrative crisis at this juncture of the novel and we need to ask why 
why did Twain feel he couldn't continue writing what are the implications of 
that steamboat collision what kind of turning point does it represent i'm not 
sure i can answer those questions definitively since critical opinion on the 
subject is notoriously divided but i've got a few suggestions at any rate that 
may give you something to mull over one way of looking at the steamboat 
collision is to see it as a symbol of modern technology destroying a pastoral 
way of life there's an excellent book 
by Leo Marx i've mentioned this point three on the the lecture notes Leo Marx's 
book The Machine in the Garden which argues that this theme the idea of the 
impact of industrialization on a traditionally rural society the machine 
invading the garden he argues that this has generated some of the most 
compelling themes in American literature you might remember in Thoreau for 
instance how the peace of Walden Pond is is shattered by the reverberations 
from the Fitchburg railroad anyway in Mark Twain's version of this theme we 
have Huck and Jim drifting peacefully downriver in harmony with the flow of 
nature only to have their pastoral idyll smashed to pieces by the steamer 
pounding upstream against the current the unnatural machine if you like 
destroying the natural idyll of the raft so at a symbolic level Twain may be 
expressing his sense that the pace of change the mechanisation of society was 
already well on its way to destroying or obliterating America's 
pastoral dream of a more natural simple existence however to get the full force 
of this pivotal moment i've just lost my notes there we are yes we're still on 
this sheet to get the full force of this er we need a bit of historical context 
i'm sure you know this already right but anyway let's just remind ourselves 
Huck Finn went to press in eighteen-eighty-four but we're told that the scene 
of the novel is the Mississippi valley some forty to fifty years ago in other 
words the novel is set roughly around the late eighteen-thirties there's a huge 
significance in these dates or in what happened between those dates between the 
date of the novel's imagined action and the date of its actual composition and 
what happened of course was the American Civil War eighteen-sixty-one to sixty-
five now even if you know next to nothing about American history you must be 
aware that the Civil War was cataclysmic in the national consciousness quite 
apart from the appalling loss of life 
a bitter division of loyalties the spectre of disunion the devastation of the 
South and everything else the war also seemed metaphorically speaking to bring 
one phase of American history to an end the urban mechanized technologically 
superior north had ruled ruled its juggernaut over the South and the largely 
agrarian economy of the Confederate States the machine had invaded the garden 
with a vengeance and the modern citified industrial age was er upon us and this 
was a psychic watershed which Henry James i think has defined as well as anyone 
and i've produced this quotation on the sheets 'cause i think it's important 
Henry James says the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind 
it introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of the world 
being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed the good American in 
days to come will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident 
grandfather he has eaten of the 
tree of knowledge he has eaten of the tree of knowledge think that phrase 
should have started some bells ringing for you because inevitably we're back to 
that familiar theme in the American imagination we've traced since the start 
the idea the myth if you like of the American Adam if you follow through on the 
implications of the James quotation you see that the antebellum period pre-war 
period is being tacitly imaged as a sort of Garden of Eden it's as if the Civil 
War like Adam's transgression in the garden has effectively put an end to 
American innocence and set the American people adrift in a fallen world now 
it's true that Mark Twain was born and grew up before the Civil War however he 
wrote all his fiction after the Civil War so he may yearn for the simple 
certainties of his childhood before he and his countrymen had their illusions 
shattered he may well be tempted as many people were to invest that vanished 
antebellum world with a a mythic glow of paradisal 
innocence but like Henry James' good American Twain too had eaten of the tree 
of knowledge and it seems to me that as Huckleberry Finn took shape Twain found 
it less and less possible to blinker out the facts of change so you have a 
nostalgia for the past becoming informed by a sharper historical sense and a 
more critical and complex realism as he recognizes that that world of the past 
has gone so let's go back to the crux of chapter sixteen Huck and Jim like 
Thoreau for instance before them Huck and Jim have turned their back on the 
corrupt artificial values of so-called civilization and they've attempted to 
escape to a freer more authentic life in harmony with nature and for a while 
the life that they create for themselves on the raft seems as though it could 
go on forever seems like a sort of timeless idyll but however much Twain 
yearned to stop the clock he was also aware going back to that James quotation 
that the world was a more complicated place than it 
had hitherto seemed Twain knew that the illusion of innocence childhood idyll 
American dream of pastoral retreat a fresh start in nature he knew that all of 
these were vulnerable to the logic of history Huck and Jim cannot live in a 
time warp they cannot make a separate peace and pretend that they can cut 
themselves off from the world around the raft therefore has to be destroyed 
they have to engage with the real world but what then where could they go next 
now it seems to me that Twain's critical intelligence recognized the world as 
it was as it had become but part of him emotionally was still tied to this 
nostalgic vision of the world as he in part remembered it to have been so he's 
at an impasse with his commitment to realism denying him the romantic release 
of the story he wanted to write so maybe that's why he couldn't continue with 
the story maybe that's why it comes to that grinding halt it's one theory 
anyway however we're on 
firmer ground if we move on to the question of whether in fact and if so how 
the novel changes after that break after the steamboat crash did Huckleberry 
Finn in fact alter in direction in emphasis when Twain returned to the 
manuscript in eighteen-eighty-three so let's examine some of the textual 
evidence for that maybe the first thing we notice from chapter sixteen onwards 
is that Jim's role excuse me Jim's role in the narrative is considerably 
diminished he's actually absent from the story for a couple of chapters when 
Huck is staying with the Grangerford family and in many later scenes he's 
merely assumed if we remember him at all assumed to be waiting patiently 
somewhere in the wings so what this suggests is that Twain's narrative 
attention may have shifted from the the thematic line of Jim's bid for freedom 
to a satirical attack on various aspects of Southern society that the 
main point of the story may have shifted sideways from Jim to white Southern 
society in confirmation of this we find that in the second part of the novel or 
after chapter sixteen far more time is spent far more of the action now takes 
place on shore and it's noticeable too that the quality of the action changes 
violence fraud cruelty cheating attempted lynching murder had a wonderful er 
sentence in a finals examination paper a couple of years back er where a 
student wrote i took notes on the exam paper a student wrote it is possible to 
count approximately thirteen corpses between Saint Petersburg and Pikesville 
and none of the corpses died a meaningful or purposeful death i haven't counted 
the corpses but i'll take her word for it anyway what we find is that the 
indictment of shore society becomes increasingly er savage er with a bitterness 
of vision that er is quite different from the perspective of the early chapters 
now of 
course the raft is patched up and the journey is resumed after the Grangerford 
episode but the idyll can't be restored Jim says that he's managed to stick the 
raft together almost as good as new but the fact is that neither the raft nor 
the dream it embodied can ever be whole again previously the raft had been a 
sanctuary from the shore a haven of sanity and right values compared with the 
corruption of society but now in the second half of the book that polarity 
seems to break down in fact the con men society in the shape of the con men the 
Duke and the King actually invades the raft not only that but the con men bring 
with them and impose onto the raft precisely the cultural baggage of shore life 
that Huck and Jim had been trying to escape from in the first place when it was 
just the two of them alone on er the raft in nature the gulf between the races 
seemed to be closing an ideal of equality and brotherhood seemed to be 
attainable but as soon as the Duke and 
the King come back on board with their fake titles and their jockeying for 
position the concept of social hierarchy again imposes itself and ominously as 
soon as social hierarchy imposes itself where does Jim find himself right at 
the bottom finds himself having to revert to the role of slave so i think there 
is substantial evidence that Huckleberry Finn does change in terms of tone 
emphasis atmosphere perhaps even in terms of Twain's own purposes after the 
crux of chapter sixteen this does not mean however that i think the novel is 
broken-backed or lacking in continuity or overall design on the contrary i'd 
argue that as the tone darkens as the satire intensifies after the steamboat 
collision what Twain does is echo rework or extrapolate from the material of 
the earlier chapters so as to expose the meanings which were latent there from 
the start now there are lots of examples of how this works but i've picked out 
one which i think is a particularly good one and 
it's the way the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud seems to expose the underlying 
implications of Tom Sawyer's early games at the start of the book where Tom's 
messing around with his robber gang now you'll remember in those early chapters 
Tom and his friends are only playing they're just school kids hyped up with the 
clichés of adventure romantic fiction er we might think that the fantasies of 
gore and violence are pretty lurid but we're probably inclined just to put that 
down to the amusing excesses of a childish imagination we'd probably laugh at 
Tom when rather than admit the mundane reality in front of him which is simply 
a dull Sunday school picnic er he glamorizes into that romantic scenario of 
camels and elephants and Arabs so you know we laugh at Tom Sawyer's games but 
the laughing stops surely when we see precisely the same syndrome at work in 
the Shepherdson and Grangerford clans think about this rather than recognize 
and admit to the facts in front of them 
which are the facts of the stupid brutality of meaningless murder rather than 
admit that they too dress up their activity as a romance this time with the 
high-flown rhetoric of feud family honour inherited codes of duty nobody knows 
what this feud is about nobody gives a damn what this feud is about but they 
all know they've got to kill each other because that's what the books say 
that's what tradition says okay now it's as if Mark Twain had decided to show 
the full-grown poison tree that springs from the seeds of corruption in Tom 
Sawyer's world if you take Tom Sawyer's romanticized fa-, fantasies of violence 
if you take that childish imagination saturated with the stylized posturing of 
romantic er tradition and heroism if you then translate that into the adult 
arena you get real killing real death now in a sense this is the folly the 
tragedy of the American South as a whole Twain was deeply critical of the 
antebellum South for its romantic self-image as a 
land of gallant hot-blooded heroes high chivalric gesture he believed that 
Southerners had become so crippled by what he called the Sir Walter disease 
that is they'd become so infatuated with the mythic world of historical romance 
created by novelists like Sir Walter Scott that they'd actually lost touch with 
reality instead of sober self-knowledge Twain said Southerners had deluded 
themselves with i quote sham grandeurs sham gauds sham chivalries and it was 
this as much as anything Twain thought which had allowed the evils of Southern 
society to go unchecked actually Twain thought that Sir Walter Scott was 
responsible for the Civil War but that's slightly er uncharacteristic 
historical analysis you might notice just in passing another episode where the 
steamboat goes a-, aground on the rocks and is breaking up and don't blink or 
you'll miss it but the name of that steamboat is the Sir Walter Scott and the 
fact that it goes down on a sandbank 
with a bunch of murderers on board may be a fair indication of what Twain 
thought should happen to Southern romanticism anyway this kind of 
extrapolations cross-reference the symbolic linking between early and later 
episodes seems to me a crucial aspect of the novel's design and i am stressing 
the idea of design and form because Huckleberry Finn is sometimes assumed not 
to have any the basic structure of Huckleberry Finn is of course picaresque oh 
i don't need to write that on the board i've written it on your er things yes 
five second dash loose picaresque form picaresque er picaresque novels 
characteristically are are these loose shambling affairs with separate episodic 
adventures strung together by virtue of the of the hero's presence and 
Huckleberry Finn appears to follow that so people have sometimes assumed it's 
not a very artistically designed novel i want to argue though that there is in 
fact a much firmer more cohesive formal organization at work firstly 
as i've just been suggesting er there is this er way that connections are made 
between one part of the journey and another they're established through 
prolepsis and echo prolepsis a kind of foreshadowing a figure of anticipation 
so you have this proleptic link between Tom Sawyer's games and the Grangerford 
killings okay so there's those kinds of connections but equally or perhaps even 
more important the novel's coherence and continuity come from the constant 
presence of the river the river itself from the time that Huck escapes his 
father in chapter seven to the time he lands up at the Phelps' farm in chapter 
thirty-one the entire narrative action is based on back and forth movement 
between shore and river between civilization and nature if you like and the 
tension between those two gives rise to the structuring polarities that 
underpin the whole novel now i've i've given some examples on the sheet of what 
i mean by these structuring polarities shore versus 
river civilization versus nature you can call it what you like but what we see 
is that that basic structural contrast generates a whole series of other 
oppositions in the novel as an obvious example the shore is associated with 
captivity it's where Jim has been a slave [cough] and it's where Huck has been 
first of all cramped up by the widow Douglas and secondly er abused and locked 
in by his drunken father so the shore is associated with captivity and tha-, 
against this the river for both runaways is associated with freedom although it 
is worth noticing that freedom means slightly different things to Huck and Jim 
however another contrast here the shore is identified with artifice insincerity 
style watch out for that word style in the novel by the way it's a term that 
develops extremely negative connotations it's almost always associated with Tom 
Sawyer who throws a bit of style into everything okay the shore is associated 
with style artifice whereas the river is associated with the alternative values 
of simplicity naturalness authenticity truth telling 
and there's one more polarity which you need to register it's crucial because 
it lies at the very heart of Huck's moral dilemma and this is the opposition 
between conscience and heart now at first sight it may seem a bit strange to 
put conscience in my left hand column here for people like Thoreau remember 
conscience was the authentic inner voice of natural morality Thoreau would obey 
his own conscience at all costs even against the dictates of society or even go 
to gaol for his conscience sake so you might think that conscience ought to be 
associated with the river you know the natural values of the river rather than 
the shore but that's not how Mark Twain is using the term for Mark Twain 
conscience is the repository and the spokesman for society's values it's like 
the sort of the Freudian superego conscience is the socialized authoritarian 
voice which tells Huck what's right 
and moral in the eyes of the majority so all those lessons that he's learned 
from Sunday School from Widow Douglas from absorbing the racism of his 
community so it's what society tells him is moral is his conscience the heart 
by contrast is what speaks for the innate values of the individual so in Mark 
Twain's own words Huckleberry Finn is i quote a book of mine where a sound 
heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and basically it's the 
developing interplay between those two between Huck's natural individual heart 
based values and the corrupted values that he's absorbed from society 
individual versus society that provides the novel's thematic coherence right 
well it's probably something of a record but so far i've managed to put off 
talking about the single most important thing in the whole novel and this is 
the thing which above all gives its continuity coherence and aesthetic unity 
and that's the voice of Huck Finn himself it's 
difficult to know quite where to start on this how on earth do you convey the 
revolution inherent in Twain's choice of narrator and not the least of my 
problems is that the critic Tony Tanner has already done such a brilliant study 
of the er qualities and the significance of Huck's language that really my best 
advice is go and read The Reign Of Wonder for yourselves particularly chapter 
seven where Tanner talks about the whole new world that is opened up by Huck's 
vernacular style however just to kind of whet your appetite i'll give you a few 
pointers the key to Tanner's argument is a lovely and useful phrase which i've 
quoted on your handout language is a way of world-watching now what he means by 
this is that the kind of language you use has a bearing on the way you perceive 
and think about the world around you we're often told for instance i gather 
this is a myth but it doesn't matter we all believe it anyway we're often told 
that the Eskimo or the the Inuit peoples 
have something like thirty different words for snow so the language enables 
them to see snow more specifically than we do they can articulate minute 
differences they can have a word for the way it falls they can have a word for 
the way it lies for the type of snow for the changing texture for how fast it 
melts all these kinds of things the English language just isn't geared to that 
kind of visual discrimination so when we look all we see is snow or sleet or 
sludge language is a way of world-watching there was another fascinating 
example that turned up in the Guardian some while back again i i don't know if 
this is true but it said it was in the Guardian er in Japanese apparently only 
men are allowed to use a certain form of the first person singular the language 
allows a man to assert his personal identity in relation to the world he 
perceives so a man can say i say it's cold outside Japanese women by contrast 
would have to say something like it's cold 
outside don't you think now just imagine what structures of perception and self-
perception are built in to linguistic codes like that there's George Orwell's 
Nineteen-Eighty-Four where the government takes hold of language if you like 
tries to simplify all the possibilities out of language so that they're 
suppressed er peoples can only think in in orthodox ways okay language is a way 
of world-watching i'm sure you've got the idea now in Huckleberry Finn for the 
first time in American literature a particular type of language is used Tanner 
calls it a subsocial vernacular a spoken American idiom which is 
unsophisticated unliterary blithely unconscious of the correct forms correct in 
inverted commas and the point is that because of this language Huck has a 
different perception of America precisely because he is naive and uneducated he 
hasn't yet learned the orthodox ways of world-watching this means that his 
perceptions aren't conditioned by conventional 
linguistic habits so he can see and respond to things in a different way and 
what we get then is this marvellously fresh spontaneous registering of 
experience not the world as other people have described it not the world as 
filtered through the lens of official language and culture not the world that 
has been described for him in books but he's learned to see through an 
inherited tradition this is the world or America rather seen as it were for the 
first time when Hemingway says that all modern American literature comes from 
Huckleberry Finn he probably had several things in mind but primarily i think 
he was referring to this stylistic breakthrough to the fact that here for the 
first time we have a vernacular American language that is capable of seeing and 
describing not what we're taught to look at but what actually presents itself 
to the eye and the innocent eye that has an innocent language if you like to 
articulate its perceptions so Huck's voice then that 
distinguished that distinctive language and style which opens up his 
distinctive vision of the world is the control centre of the novel and of the 
novel's aesthetic unity and its success at which point right it's time to come 
clean many people perhaps even the majority of readers and critics do not 
believe or are not convinced that Huckleberry Finn is a successful aesthetic 
whole the first er sentence of my Norton critical edition reads Mark Twain was 
a great writer who never wrote a great book so we have a problem here you may 
have noticed that i have studiously avoided any discussion of the concluding 
section of the novel from chapter thirty-two to the end now this is the 
notorious Phelps farm sequence where Jim has been recaptured Tom Sawyer comes 
back on the 
scene much fun and games and merry pranks supposedly and it all ends happily 
ever after or something like that now the fact is this section the Phelps farm 
sequence is one of the most controversial and fiercely debated pieces of text 
in all American literature for many people those final chapters destroy the 
unity the coherence and even the meaning of the whole novel Ernest Hemingway 
for instance may have called Huckleberry Finn the best book we've had but he 
went on to say i apologize for the racist language but i'm quoting he went on 
to say you must stop where the nigger Jim is stolen that is the real end the 
rest is just cheating so anyone who believes that the novel actually works that 
it is purposefully and successfully shaped all the way through including 
the stuff at the Phelps farm has to confront what's come to be known as the 
problem of the ending now i want you to think about this if you feel or felt 
when you read it that the end of the novel jars if it if it leaves you 
uncomfortable try to analyse why and if it doesn't jar then you probably 
haven't been reading carefully enough i'm trailing my coat here but basically 
there's three major issues that i want to talk about next week Mark Twain's 
treatment of race the question of whether the novel is intended intended to be 
comic and the perennially thorny question of what's actually going on at the 
Phelps farm okay don't miss next week's exciting instalment