ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
“lighting out for the Territory ahead of the rest”:
The Future of/in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
R.C. De Prospo
“We are outside history, outside sociology, caught up straightaway in the territories toward which
Huck Finn lit out.” Geoffrey O’Brien, “Dreams on the Water.”
I
The wisdom that becomes conventional is almost always the wisdom that reassures.
Conventional wisdom concerning The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that a combination of fellowship with a supremely caring slave coupled, a bit less obviously,
with an affinity for nature combine to convert a racist 1830s poor-white-trash Missouri teenager if not into a proto-abolitionist at least into a proto-integrationist, conventional wisdom that is frequently deployed to counter minority wisdom that a combination of the novel’s profusion of n-words coupled with some inconvenient racist
remarks by its author justifies removal from the ranks of American classics, if not an
outright ban. (The most popular buddy movies all feature mixed-race couples: The
Defiant Ones, In the Heat of the Night, Trading Places, 48 Hours, I Spy, the Men In
Black franchise, Training Day, Die Hard: with a Vengeance, Django Unchained, the
Lethal Weapon franchise, still, even after the disclosure of some inconvenient racist
remarks by the white star.)
But suppose Huck’s ethics to remain questionable, or worse, even at the end, and that
the beneficial agency of the river or of what is usually spelled, incorrectly, the “territory” to be negligible. Maybe both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its author
are best uncoupled from Huck’s supposed conversion and nature’s supposed redemptive potential. Maybe doing so enables the novel and its author to be said to be precociously cognizant of race matters, exceptionally pessimistic about their easing any
time soon in the US, and so as hyper-sensitive to the plight of their victims as even a
Cornel West or an Al Sharpton could possibly wish for.
Entirely too much fulminating has already occurred over the fetishizing of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both pro and anti, for me to want to add to it. I’ll confess a
tendency toward the anti – note the unsubtle tell of my choice of “fetishizing” – but,
then, I ought further to confess a tendency generally to be against the worshipping of
canons. And believing, as I do, that race still matters in the US, I’d be loath even to
ask, was Huck black? which is a rhetorical question to Shelley Fisher Fishkin and the
title of her 1993 book. Elaborating upon, and implicitly contesting, Mark Twain’s insistence in his Autobiography that Huck Finn was based entirely on Hannibal’s celebrated vagrant, bad, dirty, but nonetheless definitive H