Both literary and moral feigning depend on the author's ability to reshape (in Latin fingere, whence "fiction") his own thoughts of untruth, which in the late Middle Ages is called narration. Only when I have gotten used to thinking as the silent tracing of words on the parchment of my memory, can I detach thought from speech and contra-diet it. A full-blown lie presupposes a self that thinks before it says what it has thought. Only when memory is perceived as a text can thought become a material to be shaped, reshaped, and transformed. Only a self that has thought what it does say, can say something that it does not think. Neither such a thought as distinct from speech, nor such a thinking self as distinct from the speaker can exist without speech having been transmogrified and frozen into thought that is stored in the literate memory.
LIKE THE TEXT, Untruth also has a history. The Old Testament knows of infidelity, broken promises, betrayals, and perjury. It knows of slander, false witness and, what is worse, false prophecy and the abominable service of false gods. Neither these detestable forms of deceit nor the skillful ruse of a patriarch imply that opposition to an abstract"truth"that is essential to what we today call a lie. Neither the Greek psuedos (used both for the"liar"and the"lie") nor the Latin mendacium (referring also to the emendation of a line on a wax tablet) in Classical times comes close to our idea of the untruthful. Both languages lack the words that could oppose the Oxford English Dictionary's"false statement made with the intent to deceive"to a flight of fancy or feigning. The Classical languages barely contain the seed for the full-fledged Western lie and the full-blown Western fiction.
The early Greeks took a sporting attitude toward duplicity. George Steiner presents an exchange between Athena and Odysseus as an example: "... mutual deception, the swift saying of 'things that are not,' need be neither evil nor a bare technical constraint. Gods and chosen mortals can be virtuosos of mendacity, contrivers of elaborate untruths for the sake of the verbal craft...."And "untruth"is always the telling of things that are not, not of thoughts that are contradicted! The patron of this cunning craft was Hermes, the trickster, the thief and the inventor of the lyre that urges the singer further into the epos. And the hero of that art is the shrewd and wily, generous and noble Odysseus, who according to Plato (Hippias Minor)is powerful and prudent, knowing and wise in those things about which he is false.
In the realm of orality one cannot dip twice into the same wave, and therefore the lie is a stranger. My word always travels alongside yours; I stand for my word, and I swear by it. My oath is my truth until well into the twelfth century: The oath puts an end to any case against a freeman. Only in the thirteenth century does Continental canon law make the judge into a reader of the accused man's conscience, an inquisitor into truth, and torture the means by which the confession of truth is extracted from the accused. Truth ceases to be displayed in surface action and is now perceived as the outward expression of inner meaning accessible only to the self.
In the fifth century Augustine had created a concept that breaks with pagan and Christian antiquity by defining every lie as an assault on truth. Intellectual errors of fact are not a moral issue for him in his treatise On the Lie. Only the person who says something with the intent of misleading violates the truth. The offense lies in the voluntas fallendi: words used with the intent to contradict the truth that is enshrined in the speaker's heart. Even a statement that is factually correct can turn into an assault on truth if it is proffered with the intent to deceive. Augustine moved the lie into the neighborhood of blasphemy: an act of contempt of God as the only Creator and Author.
For the next eight hundred years whatever truly exists is there because God has willed it to be. All things man can speak about issue from His creative Word or command. He has brought things into being because He wanted them to be and not because there is something in them that makes it necessary for them to exist. Adam is His"fiction."He molded, shaped, fashioned him out of the virgin soil of Paradise. The world is therefore contingent on God's authorship. By every lie a creature usurps authorship reserved to the Creator. Even in the thirteenth century, a cleric who writes down stories has to state that he is not the story's actual source (fons ejus), but only its channel (canalis). Likewise, the person who had dictated the story to the scribe must state that he has not "sucked it from his finger"(ex suo digito suxit)—that is, has not invented it. The dictator's disclaimer lays bare the connection between fiction and fingere. Augustine's ban on the arrogation of truth matured, during the Middle Ages, into the new duty to make truth manifest. In the many-tiered, God-willed order of the twelfth century, to be true in word and in deed came to be perceived as a moral debt. The late patristic prohibition against deceiving the listener was turned by the early Scholastics into the moral obligation to reveal the truth. Only against this background can it be understood what it means to say that the Age of European Literacy is the World of Fiction.
As much as the full-fledged lie, narratio presupposes an author and a text that is contingent on his self—his or her creation. Neither the epic bard, nor the later storyteller, nor even the highly literate poet are fully authors: They do not pretend to create a world that by the standards of the early Middle Ages would be untrue. Chaucer, Defoe, and Twain provide us with landmarks in the history of the author who weaves" lies"into the convincing untruth of fiction.
Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales*(1386), is the first English author who recognizes the emerging literate mindset of his courtly audience. Defoe, in the Journal of the Plague Year*(1772), takes into account that the mind of his middle-class readership has been shaped by journals and magazines, and writes the first English"novel."And Twain publishes the first great work of fiction from Democratic America, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*, in 1885, just two years after the New England Journal of Education had coined that curious Americanism, "literacy."Modern readers take for granted that The Canterbury Talesis a standard book; after all, it is neatly printed and housed between solid boards. Moreover, its pages are filled with stories—eccentric characters involved in dramatic action. And that is, of course, exactly proper activity for books that are intended to be held in our hands and read to ourselves. But medievalists have been compiling convincing textual evidence since the mid thirties to prove that, while Chaucer's poem was written down by a number of scribes, it was in all likelihood delivered orally.
Which means that Chaucer's audience was prepared to listen to a long poem, presumably something they had done many times before. The majority of them, in fact, could probably not have read the poem, even if they so desired. Strangely enough, however, the opening lines of The Canterbury Talesdemand a sophisticated literacy. Chaucer begins his poem with one of the most difficult syntactic forms for the listener to grasp, the subordinate clause, which requires the listener to hold the sense of the dependent clause steadily in mind, suspending the fulfillment of meaning that the independent clause promises to deliver. Chaucer compounds this highly literate construction—one that never appears in oral formulaic poetry—by beginning "The General Prologue"to The Canterbury Taleswith not one but two consecutive subordinate clauses: the first from lines one to four, the second from lines five through eleven. He holds back the independent clause, "Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages"—and hence leaves dangling the meaning of the early part of the poem—until line twelve.
By line twelve, however, Chaucer's audience would probably have forgotten what came before, or at best retained only a vague sense of it. His audience could only have felt uncomfortable, perhaps even irritated. To use a medieval designation, he has made them feel like ignoramuses. It is one thing to recite a poem using oral devices—formulaic constructions, repetitions—so that the audience can keep abreast and understand, but quite another to present the same information through highly literate techniques—in Chaucer's case, by using two sets of subordinate clauses and so forcing his audience to forget. By causing his audience to forget, however, Chaucer introduces one of the major concerns of the poem: the imposition of literacy upon an inherently oral activity—the composition and delivery of poetry.
If forgetting enables Chaucer to turn his audience into auditor/readers—in a sense, they must envision the page as they hear it aloud—it enables him to turn from storyteller into writer. And so he also points to his own ability to forget. Chaucer the narrator begins by telling us what he remembers about some thirty-three pilgrims with whom he sat one evening at the Tabard Inn and with whom he set out on the road to Canterbury. What is more astonishing, he intends to tell us, before he forgets it all, the four stories those pilgrims told on their round trip, "as it remembreth me," in the distinct voice of each of the pilgrims, utilizing their exact metaphor, image, color of language, and idea. All told, Chaucer will retell this entire event in over eighteen thousand lines, for the most part meticulously rhymed and metered—certainly a prodigious feat.
Prodigious or not, Chaucer employed this strategy knowing that his medieval audience would have believed him—but only up to a point. Indeed, if, as historians argue, Chaucer was probably educated at the Inns of Court, he would have learned some mnemonic system—his own Man of Laws learns"every statute... plein by rote"—and so would have been able to retell from memory a large amount of detail. But this is not Homer's Mnemosyne, that great treasure bag of phrases and images, into which one could dip, threading now one and now another on his marvelous loom. Chaucer's is a literate memory; many of the stories have been"sucked from his finger. " And he boasts of remembering such minutiae that an audience—medieval or modern—is forced to conclude that he must be lying to them. No one could possibly remember that much detail with that much precision—mnemonic devices or not. As auditors, then, they would have been pulled up short.
Thus Chaucer deliberately undercuts his own demands for believability by presenting a new textual memory. No other writer—not Dante, or Gower, or Boccaccio—had used memory as such a storehouse for fiction. His audience would have been alert to a ploy, for in Chaucer they found such a revolutionary form. In a deliberate way, then, Chaucer focuses his audience's attention, not on his memory, but on forgetting.
Chaucer is composing his poem at a time when England is making its transition from an oral to a literate culture. And the poem reflects this uneasy shift. Chaucer presents us with details that he says he has overheard; but by the end of the fourteenth century, hearsay, at least in courts of law, was already being supplanted by written testimony. So while Chaucer roots his poem in oral tradition, he does so in such an overblown way that few if any of his contemporary listeners could have taken his boast seriously. Chaucer's strategy is simply to push the limits of orality to absurdity. He forces his medieval audience to hear The Canterbury Talesas a work of literature. By getting them to think about their own literacy, as well as their own connections with the oral tradition, he has brought them face to face with the process of writing fiction. For if Chaucer could not possibly have remembered all that he says he has, he must be making it up, embellishing and shaping his initial information. He must be telling a story, inventing a tale. That is, he must be writing fiction. Chaucer is forging a working definition of the medieval idea of auctor, which he must of absolute necessity separate from the divine auctoritee. By assigning to himself the capacity to remember every scrap and nuance, every blink and titter of all thirty-three pilgrims, he sets himself up as a liar: a teller who intends to deceive with fibs and fables. Only by placing himself in this category can he become a mundane author. In any other category of literary creation, Chaucer would be usurping divine authorship.
Chaucer here becomes entangled in an important philosophical/theological idea of the Middle Ages—the question of"contingency. "From Augustine to the end of the thirteenth century, the principle of contingency became the necessary cause for all creation. Contingency represents the state of an essence or nature that admits of, but does not demand, actualization. St. Thomas translated the idea to mean"that which can be and can not be, "which he used as the basis for the demonstration of the existence of God. Since the essence of the contingent being does not itself contain its existence, the reason for its existence must be found in an extrinsic efficient cause. Antecedent causes must, likewise, find the reason for their existence in some other antecedent cause. Ultimately, the argument goes, one reaches a first cause whose existence is underived—that is, whose essence includes existence. But only one thing is both necessary and absolute: God.
This theological idea impinges on literary creation: The Canterbury pilgrims are dependent on Chaucer for their"existence"; he appears to be their absolute and necessary cause—though of course Chaucer's own existence is a contingent one. Still, the question arises: Is it proper in this fuzzy literary area to call Chaucer a creator? Literary creations must be seen, at least in part, as mirror images of heavenly creation. Chaucer falls into a literary trap: If the existence of the world is contingent on the grace of the Word in"divine authorship, "then Chaucer can only escape blasphemy by undercutting that singular, tremendous power that enables him to create—literacy.
Chaucer's task is thus a complicated one. He needs to have his Canterbury story taken as truth—for this is the way readers come to enter into any fictional dream. He gains this sense of verisimilitude in several ways. By making himself one of the traveling group of pilgrims, Chaucer has to tell one of the proposed hundred and thirty or so tales,"The Tale of Sir Thopas,"which he uses to further undercut his own literate power by telling a story so dull that the hosts beg him to stop. He adds even more of a sense of realism by drawing some of the other pilgrims—Harry Bailly the Host, for example—from actual citizenry of fourteenth-century London. Finally, there is no better way to imply that all this stuff is real than to say,"I was there, and I remember. I saw all this, I heard them all speak, and let me tell you what they said and did."But while he needs to give his poem a sense of realism, for theological reasons he must also see to it that his audience experiences the poem as made up. It is inevitable, then, that the subject of his poem should be—at least in part—the paradoxical nature of literacy. The written word is the authorized version, the authenticated truth. But too much truth can get Chaucer into theological trouble; he must move his creation into another category, into untruth. And he can do this best by letting his audience think of him as a liar. And so the muse for Chaucer can no longer be Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Recollecting, but some other unnamed Goddess—of Forgetting.
Fiction reaches its first flowering in the novel —a word used initially to stand in opposition to the stuff of romances—when literacy broadened to include more of the middle class of English society in the late eighteenth century. The first successful London daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared March 11, 1702. The word magazine was first used to designate a popular literary journal with the publication of the Gentleman's Magazine in 1704. In this context, the most literate genre, the novel, begins to take shape through the efforts of Daniel Defoe, a man who in 1704 printed his own weekly newspaper, the Review. His Journal of the Plague Yearis usually referred to as England's first novel.
Like Chaucer, Defoe needs to establish the veracity of a new form. While Defoe's audience may be more used to reading than Chaucer's, and, in particular, used to reading fictional narratives like romances, the novel is, as its name implies, new. Like Chaucer, Defoe wants his story to be taken as true, and so he needs to fabricate a believable lie, which he does by presenting his narrative as ajournal kept by one H. F., who purportedly lived during the plague year of 1665. This H. F. gives an eye-and ear-witness account; in fact, the subtitle of the book reads: "Being observations or memorials of the most remarkable occurences, as well publik as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665. Written by a citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made publik before."Thus, H. F.'s account derives from what he saw (observations) and remembers (memorials), all of which, he assures us, is true (happened in London).
Defoe's premise differs from Chaucer's in that the former admits to writing down events daily in a journal and finally making the journal public—that is, publishing his evidence. Between Chaucer and Defoe the printing press has intervened, and it turns out that Defoe's real subject is the bureaucratization of the word, authenticated through the reality of type, and spread like contagion, in hundreds and hundreds of copies, directly from the platen of the press. The printed word impresses its own version of reality.
Defoe opens his journal by conjecturing on the origin of the plague, surprised that it might have come from Holland, but suggesting that no one really knows, since "we had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumors and reports of things...."News traveled by "word of mouth,"but the truth of the plague cannot be gotten in that manner. In time, however, as the Journal makes clear, the Secretaries of State "got knowledge of it,"and took on the responsibility of determining the truth and making it known to the citizens—a bureaucratic process that will reach its final goal in publication.
First, the State sends out professionals, two physicians and a surgeon, as certified agents, to examine the corpses of two recently dead Frenchmen. Through an undisclosed procedure, they determine that the Frenchmen both died of the plague. They render their opinion to the parish clerk, who turns over their positive findings to city hall. The last step toward truth involves making public—publishing—the doctors' decisions in the weeky Bill of Mortality: "Plague, 2. Parishes infected, 1."The plague has thus begun, its reality contained in the first Bill of Plague posted at various places around the parish. From this point on, no rumor, no piece of information transmitted orally can counter the truth of the written reports.
Few people dare question the physicians' verdicts, for these men are certified professionals. Their published reports become automatic testimony in the bureaucratization of the word. And their word helps create the reality of the plague; indeed, as the news travels by the Plague Bill, so does the infection, for people act on the printed reality. Spreading the plague by word of mouth, they close themselves in, huddling closer together, unwittingly serving to infect each other."Facts"matter very little. The narrator of the Journal actually sees very few dead bodies; he merely reprints the body counts from the weekly Plague Bill. The citizens of London learn that the plague is getting worse or getting better by the numbers of people reported in the weekly Bill. The reality of the plague resides in these figures; the shadow of the medical"truth"of the plague lies somewhere else—in rats or in fleas, or in some other theory. But these"medical facts"interest no one but the historian of disease, or the medical scientist.
Defoe's narrative account mimics this social construction of the plague. Defoe himself was four years old during the plague—hardly an eye-or ear-witness. That doesn't matter. For he knows he is free to make up the facts, or at least to play with them, keeping only the barest remnant of historical accuracy and molding the rest to fit his aesthetic needs. Defoe invents events, plays with statistics. Compare Defoe's account with other"historical"accounts of the plague and the numbers all differ. Knowing that he is writing both fiction and history, Defoe can call into question the notion of truth.
His literary task is in some ways more difficult, in some ways easier, than Chaucer's. He knows, for instance, that people firmly believe in the veracity of the news—as it is presented in the dailies, in magazines, or now in novels. (Both news and novel thrive on the freshness of the word; each ultimately derives from Latin nova,*"new.") It is in this period that the idea of story begins to separate itself from history: What constitutes "untruth"and"fact"take separate paths. And news helps forge that separation. Defoe takes advantage of this confusion between story and history: in his own story, he shows us that what people lose faith in are forms of oral discourse. Old wives' tales, rumors, forecasts by astrologers—all of these are stuff, Defoe alleges, of the deluded minds of the common people in eighteenth-century London. Some of these illiterates, Defoe tells us, were even silly enough to run"about the streets with their oral predictions,"publishing them as best they could. But he is reporting all of this, of course, in a skillfully made-up work of fiction. Thus, like Chaucer, he undercuts a growing reliance on literate forms—testimony, records, numbers—with a literate form, the novel.
In the Journal, literacy impresses itself more and more deeply into the text, crowding out virtually every oral locution. In the early part of the Journal, Defoe uses phrases like "it was about the beginning of September, 1664,""some said,""pretty much,""about six weeks,""others said it was brought from Canada; others from Cyprus."These terms of vague approximation are slowly extinguished and replaced by precise numbers. The supposition, of course, is that numbers carry accuracy, precision, and hence the truth. These are things we can believe in and act on.
Gradually, as we read the Journal, we begin to realize that we are being infected—or rather that Defoe's Journal, his attempt at establishing the scientific veracity of the plague, is infecting us. He makes us believe, with his reportorial, exact mind, that "or al discourse"does not have the capacity for carrying the truth; oral discourse does not allow for the power of critical analysis. For that, one must have writing, or better yet, the authority of print. One must be able to"think"about the problem through discursive prose. The sentences must stand still, an impossibility with oral discourse. Those who remain outside this literate circle will thus remain incapable of thinking.
Prose is not democratic. Not everyone can read. But neither is the plague—Defoe tells us that it affects the poor in greater numbers than the wealthy. The irony of this book begins to become apparent. While the majority of Londoners will survive the plague, they will not survive the new literacy. For the plague, this crisis of the State, has been met with the best weapon the State has at its disposal: certification through the word. Through it, in fact, the State has managed to concentrate, solidify, and expand its power. It is one thing to create civil servants, but an entirely other thing both to invest them with power and to coerce the population to believe in that power.
But we must once again understand the literary trick: Defoe makes his readers fall for the power of the printed word. He not only says he was there—so were a lot of other people—but he wrote all this down. And that is why he now stands in the privileged position of passing on the truth. Where Chaucer was careful to work out a limited sense of his own power as an author, walking a fine line with the ultimate authorial power, Defoe has already assumed the power of the word to create his own historical fabrication with it. But we should note that, as with Chaucer, the trick is two-edged. For at the same time that he establishes the validity of the word, he also distrusts it, and so undercuts it by associating it metaphorically with the plague. This might have been more apparent for an eighteenth-century reader than for a modern one, far removed from the event of the plague. By 1667, there were at least a dozen contemporary accounts of the plague, including the authoritative eight-volume Loimologia sine pestis nuperae apud populum londinensem narratio by Quincey, published in 1720. And Defoe's facts and figures are at best shaky. Not because he is a sloppy historian, but because he understands the true nature of history: That it is a narrative in the best sense of the word and that the"facts"must therefore be constructed.
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*, Mark Twain lays for his readers the nineteenth-century equivalent of this trap of literacy. At the same time that literacy opens the lid a crack to the treasure trove of white, received society—one that is, of course, closed to the Negro Jim—it also exacts a high price, and so Huck flees it. Huckleberry Finn is a book about a book. And we won't know about the literary character Huck, Huck himself tells us in the opening line, "without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."Here is a literary creation telling us to read about his past in another book—the genealogy of the Homeric epic transformed into literary pedigree. We have come a long way: Twain achieves his verisimilitude by coming clean, by laying bare the literary lie—this is only a book, these are only characters playing out their parts. Having established Huck's literary credentials, Twain has Huck follow what is now a familiar pattern: He undercuts that literary importance."But that aint no matter,"Huck insists, immediately after telling us to read Tom Sawyer, pulling off a wonderfully literate pun. It doesn't make any difference is one sense of Huck's line; but it can also mean that books are without substance, materia—without matter.
Huck probably means both things. But we must be more on guard with Twain than with any other author, for he is so disarmingly honest—or rather, his confederate, Huck, tells us his creator is so honest. He's so honest, in fact, Huck confesses, that in his other books "Mister Twain told us the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."Standing inside a formal literary tradition, this semiliterate begins his story by telling about his early days with the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson, who both set out to civilize Huck by teaching him the rules. They do it principally by reading to him from Miss Watson's book about "Moses and the bulrushers."When this fails to impress its mark on Huck, Miss Watson escalates to a spelling book.
In this emerging world of literacy, correct spelling offers the key to the correct look of literacy, the visual check on a person's Education, in much the same way that skin color is a key in this book to freedom or slavery. A person usually knows enough grammar to sound literate; and speech betrays no errors of punctuation or spelling, only mispronunciations. So, for example, Huck speaks the word civilization, but in writing the book he spells it sivilization. In the twelfth century, Huck would have been classed as a rustico more, someone who communicates in an unlearned tongue for which there exists no written counterpart bound by grammatical rules.
Huck's misspellings are common to the illiterate, who pay more attention to what they hear, without recognizing on the page the words they frequently use. We know what Huck means, but that "aint no matter."And here we step into the first part of Twain's trap. What Huck says takes a secondary position to the way Huck presents— "writes"—it. Anyone who is able to read Huck Finn is obviously literate, literate enough to harbor the impulse to correct Huck's mistakes, for the mistakes loom as boulders impeding the smooth and steady flow of the reader's fluency. To borrow the central image of the book: We need to transform Huck's babbling stream of speech into a smooth flowing river of prose.
This book forces us to read in an aristocratic way, in a modern obverse of Hugh of Saint Victor's, in which the critic, the inner self that sits in judgement, silently corrects Huck's speech. This is not the reading of contemplative silence, but the busy-ness of critical judging. Twain has made us not only into readers, but editors; and our laughter at Huck's mannerisms must sound haughty—in the sense of high and lofty—as we elevate ourselves over that poor, unlettered boy. Twain provokes that judgement in part because the book seems to be a reproduction of the spoken and not the written word. In precisely the manner that a medieval scribe recorded what he heard in ductus, Twain creates the illusion that Huck dictated this novel and that what we have as a result is a raw medieval manuscript, which we read out of literate training as modern critics. After all our years of Education about and knowledge of the rules of grammar and syntax and spelling, we simply cannot allow him his sloppy freedom. We need to correct him, keep him in check—even against our wills—as strongly as the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson.
Twain makes us feel superior to Huck's mistakes. Even though he speaks—and even though he tells us that he has written this book—we can only conclude that he is dumb. In early use, in Old High German, the word dumb meant one who was both mute and stupid. Perhaps the logic went something like this: Because we don't hear what the person knows or understands, we assume he knows nothing. Only saints and sages are assumed in their silence to be wise. In Huck's case, we assume he is dumb precisely because we see, verbum ad verbum , what he is saying. In a poignant way, he has been"silenced" by prose. His words have undergone no re -vision. He says what he thinks at first glance. And since his story is not, in a traditional sense, authored, what he writes cannot be taken as authority. Even in nineteenth-century society, he might as well be mute. For in his illiterate ignorance, he is as disenfranchised from society as his Negro friend Jim.
Twain drives home just how strongly we are chained to our own literacy through Huck's illiterate silence. While he allows Huck to live comfortably in orality, he prevents us from entering that world. The Canterbury Talesbegs to be read aloud—one can hear it in the easy rhythms of"The General Prologue"and in Chaucer's hilarious rhymes, for instance when he undercuts the romantic kisse in"The Miller's Tale"with the earthy pisse. It may not matter if Defoe's Journal is read aloud or not. A journal is a fairly private affair, but one can easily imagine it read aloud to a group of close friends. At any rate, Defoe's subject is a public one.
There is no question about the way The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnmust be read. If the book is not read silently on the page, it loses its meaning. Huck's illiterate phonetic prose ties us to our own literacy. For if we want to get all of the humor Twain intends, we must see Huck's sentences and not hear them. For example, when we read Huck's sivilization aloud, we miss the irony of the mistake. If Twain makes Huck dumb, then he makes us mute.
Twain shocks us with his anachronistic linguistics: He would have us think that there is only one language—the spoken one that through writing or printing is made visible on the page. And he has pulled this illiterate kid out of the woods to embody this irony, twenty years after the War for Emancipation—that is, the struggle for wholesale American democracy. It is ironic, for, of course, there are two languages—the one that we freely speak and the one, orthographically and grammatically correct, that appears on the printed page. And they are radically different in what they convey. We might expect Huck's brand of speaking from someone like Jim, not yet fully integrated into the educational scheme, but certainly not from Huck, a young white adolescent. He should know better; and Twain forces us, the literate readers, to teach him. To use Hugh of Saint Victor once more as an example, it is as if his comment—per se inspectiones—had become a curse, transforming forever speech into words never to fly free from the text again.
A text imprisoned in the page also cannot be successfully translated. Huck's idiom and jargon, his mispronunciations and misspellings will not convert in any way to another language. So Twain's text is frozen fast. The second part of Twain's trap snaps on this idea. We may feel smug about correcting that dumb kid's spelling, or dismissing Jim's spells. But in his loose and sloppy jargon, that dumb boy has given us one of the greatest novels in America. This may be the boldest lie in all of American fiction. Huck has created something grander than most of his readers are capable of doing—in their educated prose. God knows what Jim is capable of doing. Aren't we all, Twain may be asking, the ones enslaved by our mannered language, ordered and ruled and in which it may be more difficult to write about freedom and the great meandering Mississippi than in Huck's dialect?
Twain asks for a broad reading of slavery. For Huck is just as removed, just as cut off from society as Jim. Jim is even more radically illiterate than Huck, but for him every inch of the world is animate—the weather, the fog, the river. His reality breathes strongly through superstition and spells; his knowledge is still gained from what lies around him. Tom Sawyer has developed his perceptions from reading Arthurian romances, and in the course of the novel he passes this on to Huck. Tom's solutions to problems are intricate and complicated, Jim's are immediate. When this book was written, slaves had already been granted their legal freedom; when the narrative begins, Jim has already been granted his by his owner. Twain lumps Huck and Jim together: they both appear to be fugitives; they float on the same raft; they are friends who speak the same sort of dialect. If Huck is stupid, then so is Jim. But if we can appreciate the language—and we do partly because we enjoy the book so much—then we must grant to Huck great brilliance, and we must allow that same possibility for Jim. In a sense, we must see them both as"articulate" human beings. We must grant them their freedom. By stepping into Twain's linguistic trap, we are forced into being abolitionists. We have to come to appreciate the richness and the power and the beauty of that oral culture—both black and white. Freed from rules and regulations, their language unites them: Huck and Jim learn from each other.
Civilization in this novel resides on the riverbanks—the world of Miss Polly and Widow Douglas and Judge Thatcher. The raft is an island of orality on which these two characters float along, separated from the land. Facts and details from the riverbank fade into metaphor and image on the raft. Like Chaucer and Defoe, Twain is struggling with the phenomenon of literacy. Chaucer adopts a fictional stance—his prodigious memory—that undercuts itself so that his audience can accept a made-up story. Defoe too presents us with a literate form—the journal—and then proceeds to undercut it by showing us that the plague exists in great part only in authorized descriptions on the page, and that perhaps the true victims are those unfortunates who remain illiterate, and who, as a result, will be left behind by the march of progress. In Twain, the process is more complicated, for by presenting us with an illiterate but brilliant character he forces his readers to undercut their own literacy.
Chaucer is still writing for an audience that is essentially illiterate. He is concerned with the coming of literacy, only to the extent that it forces him to confront what it means to write fiction. For Defoe, literacy is a perceptual problem: How does print affect the way people understand the world? For Twain, in nineteenth-century America, literacy is a problem of the highest political and social order. It gets at the heart of democratic America. Let us understand, he seems to say, that two languages mean two Americas—in terms of the novel, two classes: the Judge Thatchers and the Jims and the Hucks. If we applaud Huck at the end of the novel, then we must also clap our hands for Jim. And if we allow Huck to light out for the territory at the end of the book, then we must set Jim free.
Thus, Twain brings into focus the trap of literacy. There is a whole world in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy. They can't, for ironic example, read this marvelous work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*. And yet we must recognize a world rich with superstition and folklore, with adventure and beauty, that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained to letters. But Twain forces us also to look forward, for by the end of the nineteenth century, very little territory remained. Only small pockets of orality still survive in the country—mostly rural, mostly poor, mostly black. The rest is literate in the most sweeping way. By 1885 the New England Journal of Education was already conducting surveys to determine levels of literacy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. No one would have thought in the nineteenth century that we would be hanging fast to literacy, as we see it too vanishing: People now becoming enslaved to the power of a machine in their pursuit of computer literacy. So long as we remain as aware as Twain, we have lost nothing.