Like everyone else this week, I’ve lost more than a little sleep
thinking about what happened at Virginia Tech. I fret over the
university context one minute, the comparative one the next—two hundred people died senselesly in Iraq
yesterday—but more than anything else, it is the professional context
that dogs my mind. Cho Seung-hui was an English major, after all, and
thus an example of the abject failure of the liberal arts to humanize
the troubled souls who study them. His plays are compelling evidence that Plato was onto something in Book X of The Republic:
literature originates in the base, irrational place to which it
appeals; and the production and consumption of it succours the worst in
us. Put mildly, Cho’s work was not cathartic. He fell prey to the
vicious cycle of unreason Socrates described.
As a senior English major at Virginia Tech, he could have taken courses
that appeal to the most hardened culture warrior—Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Augustan Literature, Romantic Literature, Renaissance Literature,
&c.—or those the cultural studies side considers morally
edifying—Ethnic Children’s Literature, Introduction to Women’s
Literature, Introduction to African-American Literature, Literature and
Ecology, Postcolonial Cultural Studies, Contemporary Horror, Women in
Sport, &c. My intention is not to declare a pox on both houses,
but to point to how thin this justification of our work is. One course
in postcolonial literature does not a progressive make, nor will
reading Shakespeare transform a troubled soul into a humanist. On one
level, we know this—witness the photograph of the SS officer, feet on
desk, reading Goethe—but on another, our professional identity
intertwines with the notion that good books make good people, so long
as someone teaches them how to read.
Which is what we say we do, careful as we are to pepper our
conversations with “critical thinking” whenever we interact with the
outside world. All of which dovetails with a long, unsatisfactory post
I’ve written on The Novel of Purpose. In her discussion of Mark Twain, Claybaugh addresses Huck Finn‘s belated purposiveness via Jonathan Arac’s Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target. I have written previously of my admiration for Arac, but Idol and Target
has always bothered me. Arac is right to say that the book has always
been an exercise in self-congratulation—it is an abolitionist novel
published in 1885—but as someone who has taught the novel three times
now, I think his critical distance shows here. Students latch onto
Huck’s declaration of war against Southern custom: “All right then,
I’ll go to hell,” Huck says after recognizing his shared
humanity with the captured Jim. It is a powerful epiphanic moment,
even if it leads to the odd fact, as Claybaugh writes, “[g]enerations
of readers have identified with Huck and have in the process
congratulated themselves as if they were alone in recognizing that
slavery was wrong, that African Americans are human beings” (175).
Huck Finn may only obliquely be a novel of purpose,
but its characterization of Jim is perhaps the finest argument for the
novel as a moral tool. As Claybaugh notes, when Huck Finn
opens, Jim is little more than a caricature; over the long middle
section of the novel, Jim displays ever more intellectual and emotional
complexity; when Tom Sawyer returns, so too does the caricature. Only
now, it is mediated by effects of the Bildungsroman that supplanted it. Jim is not a flat character, but a flattened one.
Claybaugh’s emphasis on the reformist tradition leads her to follow Arac and consider Huck Finn a belated antislavery novel. Though still central, I would say that “All right then, I’ll go
to hell” is less significant as an antislavery sentiment than a promise
broken by the horrors of the final act. Huck’s declaration makes Tom’s
dehumanization of Jim all the more harrowing, which points to the moral
content of the novel: it is one thing to say words—no matter how
hard-won—another to act upon them when faced with cultural precedent.
(Which is what Tom represents for Huck, as established in the opening
chapters.) The perfidy of the otherwise sympathetic Huck bothers
readers not because Twain conned them into self-congratulation, but
because it demonstrates the weakness of Huck’s conviction.
This is not to say that I disagree with Claybaugh’s reading of the
novel overall—Twain toys with the conventions of reformist literature
throughout the novel—only that the focus on the belatedness foregrounds
the issue of slavery, such that it is difficult not
to read the novel as self-congratulatory con. She is correct to insist
on Twain’s reluctance to consider literature morally edifying: Huck Finn‘s unfinished sequel, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, a realist counterpart to what he would later call “Fenimore Cooper’s literary offenses.”
The sequel picks up where Huck Finn left off, with Tom
applying what he has learned—from “Cooper’s novel,” as he admits to
Huck—only instead of imposing generic conventions on life, Huck and Tom
learn that such conventions aren’t drawn from it. They expect to meet
honorable “Injuns” Fenimore Cooper portrayed, and reality seems to
conform with literature at first. As Huck says, “we was all stuck
after the Injuns, kind of in love with them, as you may say, and I
reckon I never had better times than I had then.” The good times came
to a quick close, however, when the Indians betray them, killing all
but one member of the party Huck and Tom had befriended and kidnapping
Jim. This is when Huck discovers Tom learned “about Injuns, how noble
they was” from Fenimore Cooper; the rest of their journey to find Jim
is an exercise in perpetual disabuse. The symmetry is telling: in Huck Finn, Tom uses literary convention to enslave Jim; in Among the Indians,
Tom must shuck literary convention in order to free him. In neither
book, then, can a case be made that Twain thought much of the novel of
purpose.
And yet, the third act of Huck Finn brutally enacts a
failure of conviction. I can think of no other discussion in which the
students become as enraged at a character than the one spanning the
last two classes on Huck Finn. They feel betrayed by Huck—so
betrayed, in fact, that I wonder whether that anger is a permanent
bequest. Has reading the novel increased the thought they put into a
promise? Has literary study improved them, even if only in this
smallest of ways?
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