[N.B. The following review was authored by Glen M. Johnson, on whose
behalf I am merely posting it. --T.R.]

BOOK REVIEW

     Arac, Jonathan.  _Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The
     Functions of Criticism in Our Time_.  (The Wisconsin Project on
     American Writers.)  Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
     Pp. 264.  6" x 9".  Bibliography, index.  Cloth.  $39.95.
     ISBN 0-299-15530-7.  Paper.  $17.95.  ISBN 0-299-15534-X.

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     Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

          Glen M. Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
          The Catholic University of America

     Copyright (c) 1997 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be
     published or redistributed in any medium without permission.


"The `Lincoln of our literature' must yield to the Lincoln of our
politics."

That is the punch line of _Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target_.  What
Jonathan Arac means by it is not altogether clear.  Much earlier in his
book Arac has focused on a problem: many students and parents feel pain
and anger at required reading of Mark Twain's novel in schools.  We
might well assume, then, that the yielding that Arac's sentence calls
for involves constructive suppression of _Huckleberry Finn_ in the
interest of what, in his phrasing, is represented by Abraham Lincoln.
And indeed, Arac goes on to say that "principles and actions, and public
debates over principles and actions, are more important to remember than
_Huckleberry Finn_ if we wish to end racism. . . ."  If we wish to
understand Arac's point, we must pay attention to his nuanced use here
of "remember."  But we can come to terms with that and still not
understand how we are to protect people from the pain caused by Twain's
book and, simultaneously, make it the focus of public debate.

To be more specific, Arac has emphasized Twain's use of "the word."  To
his credit, Arac doesn't resort to euphemisms: "nigger" is there in his
book, as it is in Mark Twain's, over and over.  Yet Arac doesn't address
the possibility that his own contribution to public debate has the
potential to cause pain to students and parents.  Perhaps Arac intends
his university-press publication to function at a higher level--of age?
education? intellect?--than the reading of _Huckleberry Finn_ in
schools.  Twain's novel is "a wonderful book," Arac says.  Evidently a
point comes where potential pain is--replaced? balanced out?
incorporated?--in the process of discussing principles and actions.
Unfortunately, Arac doesn't tell us where this point is on the spectrum
from the junior high classroom to the Ph.D. seminar.  Nor does he
discuss the alchemy that determines whether a particular word or work
will be, at a given moment, assaultive or part of constructive debate.
How do we teachers promote discussion of these issues without inflicting
on those in our power the pain that Arac believes is encoded in
_Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_?  Has Arac led us into this wilderness
only to abandon us?

Jonathan Arac has produced an extraordinary contribution to scholarship
and culture studies.  I have risked beginning my review in an ironic
mode to help establish what kind of book _Huckleberry Finn as Idol and
Target_ is--which is not quite the kind of book Arac wants to claim.  He
subscribes to the now-familiar notion that literary criticism is a form
of radical activism.  Nevertheless, the energy and intelligence of his
book are metacritical, not political.  He examines the process by which
_Huckleberry Finn_ achieved its unique stature, what Arac calls
"hypercanonization."  Although he evidently doesn't reject aesthetic
criteria, Arac won't accept artistic value as a sufficient explanation
for how this novel became a cultural "idol."  "Idol" is loaded language,
of course, but Arac cites enough hyperbole to justify it.  There has
indeed been a degree of religious fervor in the praise heaped on
_Huckleberry Finn_, as well as in the iconoclastic assaults on it--and
also in the responses to the iconoclastic assaults.  Arac guides us
through all of this intelligently and with respect for the critics he
anatomizes.  You will get a lot from his book if you're willing to
accept that _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ is a socio-cultural
phenomenon as well as a literary masterpiece--and, more to the point,
that the cultural and the literary define each other.

The bulk of _Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target_ is devoted to this
narrative of hypercanonization and idolatry.  Arac is historically
specific: the unique prestige of Twain's novel, he says, is a product of
the mid-twentieth century and the work of a small number of prominent
literary critics including Lionel Trilling, Henry Nash Smith, and Leo
Marx.  Arac is most attentive to Trilling's 1948 introduction to a
college edition of _Huckleberry Finn_, later a chapter in _The Liberal
Imagination_ (1950).  In the historicist take on this period, now
familiar from work by Arac, Donald Pease, Russell Riesing, and others,
literary criticism was bound up in the politics of the early Cold War.
What Trilling praised in Twain's Huck were the values of America's anti-
communist left: the complex individual self, dialectical struggle,
internalized protest, truth-telling, and "moral style."  Huck's decision
in chapter 31, to "go to hell" rather than betray Jim, was adopted by
liberals like Trilling as the epitome of individualism, as opposed to
(Stalinist) group solidarity, and of moral sensibility as the essence of
political freedom.  To these values Leo Marx added the "vernacular"
stance, revealed most impressively in the daybreak scene in chapter 19
of _Huckleberry Finn_.  For Marx in "The Pilot and the Passenger"
(1956), vernacular language carries democratic social value.

Arac's discussions of Trilling, Marx, and their contemporaries are
respectful, carefully reasoned, documented, and valid.  His book
performs a service in reminding us, once again, how "universal" values
in our canonical literature always reflect specific political
assumptions and agendas.  We should now be less facile in praising the
democratic language of chapter 19 or Huck's moral debate in chapter 31.
(And I should make clear that Arac doesn't demand that we stop praising
these things.)  There are, nevertheless, serious weaknesses in Arac's
narrative.  One is that neither moral nor vernacular arguments
originated with Cold War-era intellectuals.  Arac can't give due credit
to Howells, Brooks, DeVoto, and other obvious predecessors of Trilling
and Marx, because doing so would reduce the role of the historicists'
bugaboo, liberal anticommunism.  Arac is aware of his problem but evades
it.  For example, DeVoto's praise of Twain's "'making the vernacular a
perfect instrument'" is reduced by Arac to "the earliest relevant usage"
of the term. Arac engages in a similar sleight of hand in citing
Mencken, Constance Rourke, Walter Blair, F. O. Matthiessen, and others
in praise of common language--then against his own evidence announcing
that "only in the years after World War II did _vernacular_ emerge with
the prominence it still maintains."

Another problem involves how Arac folds racial issues into his political
narrative.  Reading his book leaves the impression that the civil rights
movement was invented by white intellectuals as a Cold War move.  Martin
Luther King is barely mentioned, in passing, in Arac's discussion of
liberal race consciousness during the 1950s.  In a book that decries
lack of serious attention to African-Americans' complaints about
_Huckleberry Finn_, it is remarkable to find Arac rendering voiceless
the black leaders of the postwar period.  This is even more astonishing
given Arac's criticism of the work of Gunnar Myrdal and others, for whom
"blacks function as objects of complex white feelings."  Yet precisely
the same thing occurs in _Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target_, which
becomes another example of what Arac denounces, "a long persisting
inability to recognize the agency of African-Americans in regard to
their liberation and advancement."  The likely explanation for this is
that Arac has been blinkered by his historical narrative, with its need
to assert the cultural-political power of university intellectuals.

Arac's thesis concerning race and liberals is that Huck's sensitivity to
Jim's humanity appealed to Cold War intellectuals as a validation of
America--of the ability of Americans to solve political problems without
radical change, through moral struggle focused within the hearts of
individuals.  Thus Twain's book "came to be endowed with the values of
Americanness and anti-racism."  To support his point Arac points out
that the earliest serious criticism on _Huckleberry Finn_, by Howells
and others, did not emphasize chapter 31 or see the novel primarily as a
parable of racial understanding.  Somewhat contradictorily, Arac also
provides a long discussion of how Twain came to promote himself as a
moralist on race, through "retrospective contextualizings of his
fiction."

There's little question that Arac is correct in identifying the 1940s
and 1950s as the origin of the standard racial-moral reading of
_Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_.  Yet his narrative ignores the
principal source of liberal racial consciousness in that era, which was
not leftist politics but the powerful tradition of civil disobedience
and nonviolent resistance.  Just as he slights Martin Luther King, Arac
ignores Gandhi and a line of American thinkers going back to Thoreau and
Emerson.  Arac's blinders in this area so narrow his vision that he has
a great deal of trouble with the African-American thinkers whom he does
treat, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and John Hope Franklin.  These
individuals largely shared the liberal beliefs of the white
intellectuals who are Arac's targets.  For some reason, however, Arac
does not subject the black writers to the same kind of historicist
scrutiny.  So Baldwin's and Ellison's subtle contributions to
discussions of _Huckleberry Finn_ tend to be quickly summarized, then
left to float, largely unattached to the narrative.  The predictable
exception comes in an instance where Baldwin criticized white northern
liberals--_that_ gets Arac's attention.  With Ellison, Arac is
condescending: the novelist spoke about "our" burden of world
leadership, and for that he is called "highly quixotic," though Arac's
own narrative makes clear that such sentiments were characteristic of
the time.

Though the mid-century political and critical climate is Arac's main
concern, he carries the saga of _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ forward
in two ways. Not surprisingly, his main interest in contemporary
criticism is Shelley Fisher Fishkin's _Was Huck Black?_ (1993).  Arac's
critique of Fishkin has two emphases.  First, her work is nationalistic,
using Twain's novel for "interracially progressive purposes" rather than
"questioning the identification of a nation with a book."  Second, and
more telling, Arac finds fault with Fishkin's linguistic arguments for
African-American sources of Huck's vernacular.  Such criticism of
Fishkin's evidence is not as original as Arac claims.  Nevertheless, his
detailed analysis leaves big holes in her argument. So thorough is the
critique that Arac can be accused of piling on, getting into petty
points about geography.  In any case, Arac makes the critical prestige
of _Was Huck Black?_ look suspect, on both scholarly and cultural
grounds.

Arac's second emphasis in studying the reputation of _Huckleberry Finn_
over the past quarter century is what he calls "idolatry."  It's
interesting that he uses two terms for the process he seeks to expose:
"hypercanonization," which is the work of literary critics, and
"idolatry," which is its "journalistic by-product."  There's snobbery in
this distinction.  Academics and journalists are doing the same thing,
identifying "a book not just with a nation, but with the _goodness_ of a
nation."  However, evidently only the professors are intellectually
serious.  Condescending or not, Arac provides a devastating critique of
journalists who jump to the defense of _Huckleberry Finn_ against those
who would remove it from classrooms.  Granted, it's not difficult to
make Nat Hentoff or Jonathan Yardley look foolish: you just need to
quote them.  But it's not only these columnists who come off looking
bad.  When literary debate gets into the newspapers, "many smart people
say foolish things."  And Arac demonstrates that something pernicious
lies behind much of the foolishness: the argument that black parents and
children don't know how to read serious literature.

There's something pernicious in the literary criticism as well.  Near
the beginning of _Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target_, Arac provides a
"maddening survey" of instances where Huck's companion is called "Nigger
Jim."  As Donald Gibson first pointed out in 1968, Twain never wrote
this phrase, never made "Nigger" part of Jim's name.  And yet Arac finds
it in the writings of a who's who of Twain scholars, from DeVoto,
Wecter, and Krutch through at least three prominent critics writing
today.  It's not necessary for Arac to mention Detective Mark Furhman--
though he does, twice--to get his point across.  Literary critics have
contributed to "the continued honored circulation of a term that is both
explosive and degrading."  We may not follow Arac to the point of
calling the idolatry of _Huckleberry Finn_ "an excuse for well-meaning
white people to use the term _nigger_ with . . . good conscience"--but
it is difficult to explain why so many _have_ used it.

Jonathan Arac indicates that he worked on _Huckleberry Finn as Idol and
Target_ for over a decade.  If such a book had appeared in the mid-
1980s, it would have created a sensation.  Though I anticipate strong
reactions in 1997-1998, the shock value is much diminished.  The new
historicism in American literary studies is now dominant, its political
stances conventional, its rhetoric familiar.  This is a good thing, I
believe, because it may keep us from jumping immediately into a shouting
match over Arac's book.  Rather, we can read _Huckleberry Finn as Idol
and Target_ for its scholarly excellence and its incisive, provocative
criticism.  Arac touches on much more than I have mentioned in this
review: read what he has to say about the editing of the California
edition of _Huckleberry Finn_, for example, or his comparative comments
on works by Stowe and Cooper, or his discussions of critics whose
assumptions he shares, Raymond Williams and Edward Said.  This is a book
that we all must take into account from here on.

Arac's book is free of the "gotcha!" rhetoric of much contemporary
historicist writing.  Though he criticizes the great line of Twain
critics, he also compliments Trilling, Marx, Smith, et. al., by wishing
to join their company. This ambition is overt, if immodest: "My own
critical premises are largely in the line that I am criticizing. . . .
They also all believe, as I do, that . . . imaginative goals are always
linked, in complex and important ways, to the society and history in
which the writing occurs. . . .  Therefore the criticism that treats
them must not be restricted to a narrowly defined aesthetic sphere."  In
pursuit of his ambition Arac has given his book an Arnoldian subtitle,
_The Functions of Criticism in Our Time_.  One of its benefits is to
suggest that today's historicist American scholars--our "tenured
radicals," in Roger Kimball's snide phrase--belong to a significant
tradition of cultural criticism with activist ambitions.  I, for one,
find the activist pretensions of these word mongers to be mainly soul
butter and hogwash.  _Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target_ will not do
much to end racism, just as _The Liberal Imagination_ had little effect
on the Cold War.  Still, both books help us to read our literature well,
which should be a good thing no matter how you define "literature."