The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,67

have fully assimilated the ideological assumptions of its society and culture; because it is narrated in the voice and controlled by the gaze of a child without status (an outsider, marginal, and already “othered” by the middle-class society he loathes and seems never to envy); and because the novel masks itself in the comic, the parody, and exaggeration of the tall tale.

In this young but street-smart innocent, Huck, who is virginally uncorrupted by bourgeois yearnings, fury, and helplessness, Mark Twain inscribes the critique of slavery and the pretensions of the would-be middle class, the resistance to the loss of Eden, and the difficulty of becoming that oxymoron, “a social individual.” The agency for Huck’s struggle, however, is the nigger Jim, and it is absolutely necessary that the term “nigger” be inextricable from Huck’s deliberations about who and what he himself is. Or, more precisely, is not. The major controversies about the greatness or near-greatness of Huckleberry Finn as an American (or even “world”) novel exist as controversies because they forgo a close examination of the interdependence of slavery and freedom, of Huck’s growth and Jim’s serviceability within it, and even of Twain’s inability to continue, to explore the journey into free territory.

The critical controversy focuses on the collapse of the so-called fatal ending of the novel. It has been suggested that the ending is a brilliant finesse that returns Tom Sawyer to center stage where he should be. That it is a brilliant play on the dangers and limitations of romance. That the ending is a valuable learning experience for Jim and for Huck for which we and they should be grateful. That it is a sad and confused ending to a book that the author, after a long blocked period, did not know what to do with and so changed back to a child’s story out of disgust. What is not stressed is that there is no way, given the confines of the novel, for Huck to mature into a moral human being in America without Jim, and therefore that to let Jim go free, to let him not miss the mouth of the Ohio River and passage into free territory, would be to abandon the whole premise of the book.

Neither Huck nor Twain can tolerate in imaginative terms Jim freed. To do so would blast the predilection from its mooring. Thus the “fatal” ending becomes an elaborate deferment of a necessary and necessarily unfree Africanistic character’s escape, because freedom has no meaning to Huck or the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism, the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another: the signed, marked, informing, and mutating presence of a black slave. The novel addresses at every point in its structural edifice, and lingers over it in every fissure, the slave’s body and personality: the way it spoke, what passion, legal or illicit, it was prey to, what pain it could endure, what limits, if any, there were to its suffering, what possibilities there were for forgiveness, for compassion, for love.

Two things strike us in this novel: the apparently limitless store of love and compassion the black man has for his white masters, and his assumptions that the whites are indeed what they say they are—superior and adult. This representation of Jim as the visible Other can be read as white yearning for forgiveness and love, but the yearning is made possible only when it is understood that the black man has recognized his inferiority (not as a slave but as a black) and despised it; that, as Jim is made to, he has permitted his persecutors to torment and humiliate him, and responds to the torment and humiliation with boundless love. The humiliation Huck and Tom subject Jim to is baroque, endless, foolish, mind-softening—and it comes after we have experienced Jim as an adult, a caring father, and a sensitive man. If Jim had been a white ex-convict befriended by Huck, the ending could not have been imagined or written because it would not have been possible for two children to play so painfully with the life of a white man (regardless of his class, education, or fugitiveness) once he had been revealed to us as a moral adult. Jim’s slave status makes the “play and deferment” possible, and also actualizes, in its style and mode of narration, the significance of slavery to the achievement (in actual terms) of freedom. Jim seems unassertive, loving, irrational, passionate, dependent, inarticulate (except for