ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
and American Culture what I guess must be considered American literature’s gold
medal, “the most taught piece of American literature” (9)1 – this despite the best evidence having been obtained in a 1990 survey by the Modern Language Association
that the award may, somewhat unexpectedly, go to Thoreau’s Walden (Huber 40).2
Revelations of the incorrect or dubious awarding of literary prizes have become increasingly more commonplace these days, and I don’t think anybody can be absolutely certain that the MLA’s award might either never have been statistically deserved or
might by now be outdated, and that Fishkin’s wishful estimate may actually be correct. But the casual assumption that the title of her book can be accepted to be the
novel’s very last, concluding and conclusive statement on Huck’s future deserves to
be challenged, not only because it’s careless and wrong but because it might be said to
be silently, and therefore all the more profoundly, motivated.
The phrase that has come to quintessentialize The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to
the novel’s admirers is of course a foreshortening of Mark Twain’s original. This
phrase foreshortens the original, and, moreover, departs significantly from the original’s orthography. The celebrated final half-dozen words of the novel, confirmed by
the discovery of Mark Twain’s autograph, are “the Territory ahead of the rest”; see the
xerox of Mark Twain’s very legible “Territory” on the final page of his 1883 manuscript reproduced in the Mark Twain Library 2001 edition (508). The adumbration,
whose adoption extends from the popular culture of the title of a high-end apparel catalog all the way to the university culture of the title of Fisher Fishkin’s book, encourages the notion, dear to the hearts of virtually all Americanists, even irreverent ones
like Leslie Fiedler, that it is virgin land that is beckoning to Huck at the end as a purifying alternative to Aunt Sally and “sivilization.” But the phrase in its entirety implies
the opposite, that Huck is driven by the very “sivilized” urge to get there first, driven
by the desire for competitive advantage, and Huck’s destination, “Territory” the upper-case proper noun, is innocent only in accordance with the most incomplete, ahistorical understanding of the geopolitics of North America; “Territory,” upper-case
proper noun, was the fruit of America’s original, original sin (remember “Indian” Joe
from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer who is dispossessed of a twelve-thousand-dollar
treasure, half of which constitutes Huck’s fortune) and continued to be inextricably
tied, at least since the corrupt bargain of 1820, to its second. If Huck is headed in the
1830s to land above parallel 36°30’ north and outside the Missouri Territory he can
invest his $6000 as capital and aspire to get even richer off of slave labor as the arriviste master of a plantation himself. A contemporary equivalent of Mark Twain’s
“Territory” would be the very vexed and thoroughly politicized “Occupied Territories,” or, if you prefer, the “Disputed Territories,” of the Middle East.
II
Backtracking, I can’t claim to be the first to notice the felicities of Huck and Jim’s
idyll on the bank of the river in Chapter XIX. But I am among a minority to emphasize the irony of its placement at virtually the precise, mathematical, center of the
novel. For, almost all of Chapter XIX constitutes the longest interruption of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the novel, a long pause structurally central to the novel
that is rudely brought to an end by the beginning, at the chapter’s conclusion, of the
penultimate, and to Jim the second most costly, adventure of all, initiated by Huck’s
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