ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
And Mark Twain may even anticipate some of Homer’s most prominent successors in
his stylizing of Huck’s perceptions, which not only delight in decrying phenomena –
sky, shoreline, river, river-craft, voices, dwellings, even just the coming of daylight
itself – that in almost every other circumstance in the novel would of necessity cause
the fugitives to take alarm and look no longer to the phenomena but to how to escape
the possible discovery that such phenomena portend; Huck’s representations subtly
transform the coming into view of three-dimensional things into a composition of
two-dimensional shapes: woods become “a dull line,” sunrise becomes “paleness,
spreading around,” river “softened up” into “black” and then “gray,” trading scows
become “little dark spots,” rafts and snags become “long black streaks” (157-58). And
the play that Mark Twain attributes to Huck’s serene apprehension of the scene in its
entirety is that of pure, non-binary difference: dark and light, silence and sound, even
the stink of “rank” dead fish and the “sweet” smell of a “nice breeze” (158). Monet’s
late waterlilies, or even Huysman’s Des Esseintes’ carnival of odors in Au rebours, or
even Derrida’s différance. A post-modern, post-structuralist The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was of course inevitable, and I won’t pretend that the precocities I just
suggested are either the first or even the most audacious that have been claimed for
the novel. I will direct you to a very good, relatively brief, example, which identifies
certain intriguing textual affinities between The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and,
of all things, late nineteenth-century tort law, with its structuralist divorcing of individual agency and motivation from ill consequences, including the very ill ones of
racism in general and Jim Crow discrimination in particular: Stacy Margolis’s article
in a 2001 issue of PMLA, “Huckleberry Finn; or Consequences.”
But the interruption of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Chapter XIX permits yet
one more, final and