ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
EXPLANATORY
IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the
extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been
done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the
trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms
of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose
that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
THE AUTHOR. (iv)
Fishkin’s book adds linguistic authority to presumptions that go back to even before
Leslie Fielder’s somewhat puckish suggestion of a homoerotic tie that the rapport that
Huck and Jim develop anticipates the possibility that racial amity will one day replace
racial animus in the US. Fishkin’s premise is no more outrageous than Fiedler’s, and
to many probably a good deal less so; better a hetero Huck devoted to a black mentor,
Eminem-to-Doctor-Dre fashion, than a closeted gay-leaning jungle-feverish one. If
any of this seems too atypical an overreach on Fisher Fishkin’s part, realize that Russel Banks implies in his Introduction to the 1996 Oxford edition of A Tramp Abroad
that Jim might be considered white (xi).
But rather than tussling anew with T.S. Eliot/Ernest Hemingway/Lionel
Trilling/Henry Nash Smith/Shelley Fisher Fishkin/Justin Kaplan/Russell Banks et al.,
or closing ranks with Leo Marx/Jane Smiley/John Wallace/Jonathan Arac/Ishmael
Reed et al., I’m going to concentrate just on trying first to redetermine the much overdetermined place I referred to in my title that lies beyond the closing of the novel, and
second to focus on – dare I confess to fetishize? – a rather less thoroughly examined
place that lies, conversely, deeply in the novel’s interior, at its center, the nineteenth
of its forty-two numbered chapters. My point will be to critique the very many critiques of the novel that promise that some kind of race-blind great good place awaits
Huck in “the Territory,” correctly spelled – and implicitly awaits also all other Americans willing to venture beyond what that noted Mark Twain predecessor and butt of
his literary derision earlier famously disparaged as “the settlements.”
Once having ascended – descended? – to the status of fetish, texts acquire the privilege to inspire in enthusiasts the tendency to elide seemingly repellant elements of its
plot and diction – and not just the n-word, objections to which Alan Gribben’s recent
edition blithely presumes to counter by simply performing a global edit changing all
two-hundred-nineteen n-words to “slave (“Indian” is also made to replace the “Injun”
that appears mainly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is also included in Gribben’s new NewSouth edition. New South, indeed.) Laura Skandera Trombley, a Mark
Twain scholar and current president of Pitzer College, says recently in an article in
The Chronicle of Higher Education that in her “favorite lecture,” called “Why Huck
Matters,” she tells her first-year students “about the character of Huckleberry Finn, a
young boy whose mother is dead, who skips school and who suffers severe abuse at
the hands of his alcoholic father. Nobody much cares what happens to Huck. He is
poor, uneducated, lacking in social status, and without influence.” Mother dead,
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