Direct, brief, well-informed, and polemical ("How will Americans
respond to the news that Huck...was part black?"), Fishkin
(American Studies/University of Texas, Austin) provides a
questionable but dramatic genealogy of Huckleberry Finn's
African-American ancestors as a gesture toward "desegregating"
American literary history. Inspired by David Bradley's 1985
lecture, "The First 'Nigger' Novel," Fishkin argues that the
prototypical American literary hero in what major writers have
considered the archetypal American novel was based on a black child
named Sociable Jimmy; that Twain's language ("raised to a level of
literary eloquence," as Ralph Ellison said in 1970) is derived from
African-American voices; and that his satirical social style was
inspired by a black boy named Jerry whom he knew while still a
child. But although Twain enjoyed black culture enough to
appropriate it for his writings, he repressed the sources because,
Fishkin says, he wanted to be respectable - and in the age of p.e.
(of which this study is a monumental example), that makes Twain a
hypocrite, a character-type that he himself found particularly
contemptuous. To prove that an imaginary hero in a work of art (or
even a popular commercial novel, as Huckleberry Finn was originally
conceived) is multiracial, multicultural, even androgynous, would
be to explain his perennial appeal. But Fishkin treats the novel
and its lead character as a social commentary or textbook,
referring often to its presentation in the classroom and shaping
her argument for literary critics. Isolating Huck's
African-American traits - some based on stereotypes, others
uncovered through sophisticated linguistic analysis - seems to
create its own form of segregation, to oversimplify a complex
literary character, and to compromise the universality to which a
wide range of authors (whom Fishkin quotes) have paid tribute -
authors such as Ellison, Faulkner, Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and
others, who claim to have learned their language and acquired their
voices from Twain. In spite of the confused motives: an exhaustive
and provocative work, already creating a stir. (Kirkus Reviews)
An examination of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn suggesting that more than any other work, Twain let African-American voices, languages, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. Adds new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism, and the literary canon, showing how it has helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century.
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