Flaws as Meta-Merits
On the ending of Huckleberry Finn
When a poem juxtaposes fragments of thoughts and images, and readers are left alienated and confused, that can seem a flaw. But in other cases causing unpleasant states can make a work better. Would Schindler's List be any good, if it did not arouse horror and disgust? The moral is that context matters: features that are in one place artistic flaws, can elsewhere be artistic merits, that is, marks of excellence.
I've been thinking about this in connection with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The novel is often said to have a flawed ending. When Huck first helps Jim escape from slavery, he does not think too hard about it. But after repeatedly helping Jim avoid capture, he begins to ponder the implications. Huck believe what’s he’s doing is wrong, and a sin, but finds he can’t act on this judgment, and finally (as he thinks of it) gives in: “alright, I’ll go to hell.” So Twain finds himself writing a novel about the great moral evil of his time. But when he confronts the nature of the story he is telling, and the question of how that story should end...well, here’s George Saunders:
Some part of Twain realized what he had brought himself to the brink of, and great talent that he was, he did not tarry on the brink of that cliff, or pretend there was no cliff, or that he was not standing at the edge of it: instead he ran at high speed back the way he’d come.
A story whose central question had been What To Do About Jim, now sidelines Jim, and becomes social satire. As their raft floats down the Mississippi, Huck lands at various towns, and Jim, always, is left to hide on the raft, vanishing from the story for long stretches, while we follow Huck to witness a catalogue of cruelty and hypocrisy. And the reader—this reader for sure—is frustrated. The satire is mildly amusing, the Moral Messages true if predictable, but this is no longer the story of a boy and a fugitive slave that had kept us engaged for so long. The final betrayal of the reader comes in the last episode. Jim is sold behind Huck’s back, and Huck sets out to rescue him, and out of nowhere Tom Sawyer re-enters the plot, and agrees (to Huck’s surprise) to help. But Tom draws this action, which could have been easily done, out into a long charade of fabricated difficulties. And Huck acquiesces. This play-acting of romantic storybook plots was frustrating, when Tom pursued it in the novel’s opening chapters. It’s all the more so now, when it’s not just a bunch of silliness; when a man’s freedom is at stake. And then we learn that Tom has not been helping to free Jim, he has known since his arrival—and has concealed this knowledge—that Jim was freed months earlier, when his owner died and freed him in her will.
Leo Marx’s 1953 essay on Huck Finn remains the perfect articulation of the novel’s failings at this point:
it is tedious...the slapstick tone jars with the underlying seriousness of the voyage...
During the final extravaganza we are forced to put aside many of the mature emotions evoked earlier by the vivid rendering of Jim’s fear of capture, the tenderness of Huck’s and Jim’s regard for each other, and Huck’s excruciating moments of wavering between honesty and respectability.
Huck regresses to the subordinate role...Most of those traits which made him so appealing a hero now disappear. [Similarly for Jim:] On the raft he was an individual, man enough to denounce Huck when Huck made him the victim of a practical joke.... [Now] we lose sight of Jim in the maze of farcical invention. He ceases to be a man.
In summary, “the flimsy devices of plot,” “the discordant farcical tone,” “the disintegration of the major characters,” and (one should add) the recession of the inner dilemma and the moral clarity that drove the story, “all betray the failure of the ending.”
But these alleged flaws must be considered in a larger context. If you think Twain’s turning away from the moral challenge at the heart of his novel is frustrating, try contemplating what America did in reality. Huck Finn was written after the American civil war but set before it: a war which began—for many in the north, and in Lincoln’s stated purpose—only to save the union, and became, in the Gettysburg Address, a fight for a “new birth of freedom.” But the war did not end with freedom and political equality for all, at least not on the ground. If one reads American history as Marx reads Huck Finn—as a story of moral improvement—one finds it exhibiting the same flaws: moral clarity and action based on that clarity sometimes surfaces, but just as often it recedes; halting progress is reversed, tedious and superficial distractions take its place. Could it be that, in this larger view, the features of Huck Finn that so frustrate us, and that frustration itself, are telling commentaries on America and its people, and therefore contribute to the novel’s excellence?
T. S. Eliot challenged those who would criticize Huck Finn: “if this was not the right ending for the book, what ending would have been right?” Marx admits that “a satisfactory ending would inevitably cause the reader some frustration.” If Tom had not returned, if Jim had not been freed in the will, what then? Even if Huck rescues Jim, they’re again on the raft, and they can only go south, into Louisiana. Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio meets the Mississippi, is far upriver: their lost chance to reach the free states. If Jim is not recaptured, and Huck not tried and convicted for aiding a fugitive slave, they must spend the rest of their lives on the run. Would one of these tragic endings really have been better than the one Twain wrote? Maybe the fact is that Twain, in searching for an ending, faced an insoluble problem: and this, as much as what Marx calls “the faint-hearted” solution he did choose, “remains an important datum in the record of American thought and imagination.”