BOOK REVIEW

de Koster, Katie (ed.).  _Readings on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_.
(Literary Companion to American Authors.)  San Diego: Greenhaven Press,
1998.  Pp. 208.  Bibliography, index.  Paper, 5-1/4 x 8-1/2.  ISBN
1-56510-818-3.  Cloth, ISBN 1-56510-818-1.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

                Joseph L. Coulombe <[log in to unmask]>
                The University of Tennessee at Martin

Copyright (c) 1999 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


Any new collection of essays on Mark Twain's _Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn_ is quite welcome.  With the continuing debates over the novel and its
relevance in the classroom, easy access to a variety of viewpoints can only
help readers arrive at their own decisions.  Katie de Koster's anthology
serves this purpose, offering a range of perspectives from the date of its
publication to the present.  

In the Series Foreword, the general editors state that the essays for each
volume are chosen specifically for "a young adult audience."  With this
audience in mind, de Koster includes brief summaries of each article in the
table of contents, and she groups the essays themselves into thematic
sections with descriptive headers.  Both of these arrangements will likely
help students locate information and ideas relevant to their interests.  On
the other hand, many of the essays' original titles have been changed, and
this may prove confusing to some scholars.  But original publication
information is footnoted on the first page of each essay.  De Koster has
arranged the notably diverse essays into four sections, which she has
called: "The Storyteller's Art," "Images of America," "Issues of Race," and
"The Problematic Ending."  Each section includes four or five essays.  

The first section includes opinions by Brander Matthews, Victor Doyno,
James M. Cox, Alfred Kazin, and Ralph Cohen.  Matthews' 1885 review
provides a practical starting point for understanding the novel as well as
its shifting literary and historical significance.  Matthews not only
praises its realism, the vernacular dialect of Huck, and its humor, but he
also admires Twain's depiction of Southern blacks and Tom Sawyer's
treatment of Jim in the final chapters.  Doyno's selection – excerpted
from
_Writing Huck Finn: Mark Twain's Creative Process_ (1991) – focuses on how
Twain painstakingly revised the manuscript to shape the individual
personalities of each character.  Doyno's excellent and detailed analysis,
however, might have served better after Cox's and Kazin's more general
discussions of Huck's personality and choices and of Twain's artistic
discoveries and social purposes.  In the final essay of this section, Cohen
highlights a topic of probable interest to many college-age readers: the
games, tricks, and superstitions of _Huckleberry Finn_.

In the second section, "Images of America," de Koster chose essays/excerpts
by Horace Fiske, Andrew Hoffman, Gladys Bellamy, and Jay Martin.  Fiske's
1903 appreciation of _Huckleberry Finn_ tends toward summary, paraphrase,
and long quotation rather than interpretation, and it seems somewhat out of
place in the collection.  On the other hand, Hoffman examines Huck as a
representative of the nineteenth-century social and political ideals
associated with Andrew Jackson.  The excerpt by Bellamy purports to discuss
_Huckleberry Finn_ as a satire on American institutions, but the section on
the institution of slavery has been removed, and the expressed opinions
about race often come across as dated.  For example, Bellamy writes that
Twain "shows us the African in Jim, imbuing him with a dark knowledge that
lies in his blood" (97).  Such pronouncements are not well calculated to
illuminate young readers' understanding of Twain's novel.  In the last
essay of this section, however, Martin provides a useful and nuanced
explanation of Huck's vacillating position between Nature and Civilization.

The third section – on "Issues of Race" – contains essays by John
Wallace,
Richard Barksdale, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Eric Lott, and Jane Smiley.
Wallace's oft-quoted essay, in which he describes _Huckleberry Finn_ as
"racist trash," raises several valid concerns regarding the use of the
novel in American high schools, but lacks strength in its textual analysis.
 Nevertheless, his major concern is taken up effectively by Barksdale, who
places the novel within its historical context to show both the ironic
intentions of Twain and the difficulty of learning/teaching those ironies
in the classroom.  Fishkin then explains not only the indebtedness that
Twain had toward African American sources, including "Sociable Jimmy,"
black spirituals, and personal acquaintances, but also the impact Twain had
on subsequent American writers.  Exploring this further, Lott discusses how
Twain's reliance upon blackface minstrelsy both allowed the complex
achievement of _Huckleberry Finn_ while simultaneously making it "perhaps
unteachable to our own time."  In the final essay of this chapter, Smiley
compares "Twain's moral failure" in his characterization of Jim to Harriet
Beecher Stowe's unequivocal anti-racism in _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.  Overall,
this section is the strongest.

That these complex understandings of Mark Twain and _Huckleberry Finn_
often tend toward the negative comes as something of a surprise after de
Koster's preface.  De Koster introduces this collection within the context
of the current racial controversy, but then she offers a rather emphatic
but largely unsupported series of statements.  For example, after
recounting Huck's famous decision to "go to hell" and free Jim, she writes,
"_The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ is clearly antislavery.  The reader
is supposed to believe Huck made the right choice when he helped an escaped
slave" (13).  Instead of telling the reader what s/he is supposed to
believe, de Koster would do better to explain her reasoning within the
complicated matrix of ideas in her collection.  On a more positive note,
her preface also includes a 20-page biography of Samuel Clemens that
provides a useful introduction for students unfamiliar with his life. 

In the final section of the collection, "The Problematic Ending," de Koster
includes opinions by Joyce Rowe, José Barchilon & Joel Kovel, Carson Gibb,
and Richard Hill.  Rowe argues that Twain intentionally destroys the
"fictional comforts of verisimilitude" in the final chapters to expose the
"grotesque" values of society, including those of the readers.  Barchilon &
Kovel offer a psychoanalytic interpretation of the escape, interpreting
Jim's prison as a womb, his chains as an umbilical cord, and the
Mississippi River as Huck's loving mother.  Gibb justifies the ending as an
intentionally bad joke that reflects the culture which Huck seeks to
escape, yet the 1960 essay is most noticeable for the repeated use of the
word "nigger" without quotation marks.  Gibb seems to feels justified in
this usage because he has explained that Huck and Tom "believe niggers and
people are two different things" (177).  However, its use is unnecessary to
his argument and also insensitive to the extreme.  Because of this, the
essay itself seems inappropriate for a collection aimed specifically at
young readers.  Finally, Hill presents the most formidable vindication of
the final chapters to date, arguing that Huck's response to Tom is
plausible for a boy, and that Jim's response shows an intelligent
manipulation of contemporary stereotypes to exert at least some control
over a delicate and dangerous situation.

All in all, de Koster's collection offers a useful variety of opinions.  It
will doubtless contribute to current debates of Twain's _Huckleberry Finn_
and its place in our classrooms.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Joe Coulombe grew up in the Mississippi River town of LaCrosse, Wisconsin
(mentioned briefly in _Life on the Mississippi_).  After earning his PhD at
the University of Delaware in 1998, he began a tenure-track position at the
University of Tennessee at Martin.  He is currently expanding his
dissertation on Mark Twain and the American West into a book that explores
the interconnections of masculinity, wealth, and race in Twain's Western
persona and writings.  He has also published essays on the literary
indebtedness of Walt Whitman, the frontier romances of Emerson Bennett, and
the construction of masculinity in Edith Wharton.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joseph L. Coulombe
University of Tennessee at Martin