ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
“The Territory Ahead” – the clothing catalog now, not Fisher Fishkin’s book – used to
print all of the last words of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – with “territory”
demoted to a common noun – on page three. In one of the catalogs, a slide of which I
show my students, the words are printed over a picture of footprints in the snow leading off into the distance toward an empty mountain landscape. In later catalogs this
flawed testimonial to the novel disappears altogether, and recently even Mark Twain’s
article has been eliminated: the catalog appears now as just plain “Territory Ahead.”
The gradual erasure of the original, and I’m asserting an original foreboding, and the
gradual ascendency of the land, along with the Americanist/naturalist exceptionalism
that it more than just implies, characterizes too much of our misunderstanding of more
than just America’s literary history. Far from promising a race-blind future, the original ending of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can be recognized ominously to
prophesy that after the end of Mark Twain’s novel there probably lies more of the
same, to which a certain very prominent, Nobel-prize winning US intellectual, not
exactly a professional reader of Mark Twain but one to whom race tragically never
stops mattering here, gives powerful voice. In her “Introduction” to the same 1996
Oxford edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which Fisher Fishkin first
makes the claim that the novel is “the most taught piece of American literature,” Toni
Morrison warns that “the danger that sifts from the novel’s last page, is whether Huck,
minus Jim, will be able to stay those three monsters [“a child’s fear of death and
abandonment,” the “sadness at the center of Jim’s and his relationship,” and “Huck’s
engagement with a racist society,”] as he enters the ‘territory.’” Morrison goes on to
ask “will that undefined space, so falsely imagined as ‘open,’ be free of social chaos,
personal morbidity, and further moral complications embedded in adulthood and citizenship?” (XLI). It’s a rhetorical question, and I think Mark Twain would agree.
Notes
1. This from Fishkin’s “Prologue.” She’s quoting a sentence from a 1993 English Journal article by Allen Carey-Webb (22) and had made the same proxy claim earlier in the opening of
her Foreword to the Oxford edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (xi). Carey-Webb’s
estimate precedes the MLA survey and would seem to be restricted – as would be expected in
an article in this journal, which is sponsored by the NCTE – to works assigned in junior high
and high schools. Evidently pro-fetishizing Mark Twain scholars have a tendency to introduce
their testimonials with memoir. Whereas Trombley recalls her father, Fishkin recalls her mother, who, in the first sentence of her book, “startled me out of a cocoon or cartoons and cocoa
one blustery Saturday morning when I was eleven. ‘Get dressed. We’re going on a mystery
trip” (3). Turns out to be Mark Twain’s Hartford home. As proof that Fishkin neglects the geopolitical significance of “Territory,” proper noun, consider this, from the conclusion of her
“Epilogue”: “The territory Mark Twain ‘lit out for’ was a strange and complicated place, filled
with promise and pitfalls, beauty and barbarity. Twain, like Huck, lit out ‘ahead of the rest,’
foreshadowing a host of challenges and conflicts we are still negotiating today” (203). “Ahead
of the rest” seems to imply to her a clairvoyant glimpse of the modern US, which Huck evidently shares with his author.
2. Thoreau is a close second to Hawthorne in the rankings of the importance of individual
nineteenth-century American authors, but Walden wins out over The Scarlet Letter by a large
margin in the rankings of individual nineteenth-century American texts most taught. High
school teachers were of course not surveyed, so these findings reveal the preferences only of
university and college English professors. Among the latter, interestingly, The Adventures of
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