Carrington: The Dramatic Unity of Huckleberry Finn

The Dramatic Unity of Huckleberry Finn

George C. Carrington, Jr.

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has, with The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, been generally acknowledged as one of the three authentic masterpieces of American fiction. But unlike the other two, whose weaknesses are judged minor and incidental, Twain’s greatest book has been regarded by able and thoughtful critics as an imperfect, indeed radically flawed work of genius.

Professor Carrington’s probing and incisive study of the novel that has been declared one of our national treasures throws abundant new light on the problem that has long vexed readers and critics alike: Does the ending belong to the book? Is our national treasure and “great American novel” deserving of these accolades only if its substance and structure are diminished by one-fourth?

The hundreds of books and articles that have been written on Huckleberry Finn have failed to resolve this conundrum, though most authorities have sharply criticized the novel’s ending and found it expendable. Unable to reconcile the abrupt shift in mood from the quiet dignity of Huck’s reverie in chapter 31 to the interminable, thoroughly outrageous, but nonetheless hilarious buffooneries of the final chapters, most critics and scholars have simply dismissed the novel’s close as unrestrained improvisation and “extended burlesque.” A version has even been published that omits the concluding and offending chapters.

It is Mr. Carrington’s position that, though Twain most certainly did write improvisation, he did not publish them, and that it is, after all, with the novel as Twain published it that we must deal. To torture the book, as a whole generation of critics have done, on the Procrustean bed of this or that approach currently fashionable in modern intellectual life, and to turn away eventually, in disgust or despair, because the ending simply does not fit the critical scheme, is to make too rigid an application of the rules of generic consistency, with their requirement that a uniformly tragic or comic mood be maintained, and to disregard the disturbing truth contained in the farce at the novel’s end.

We must, Mr. Carrington argues, force ourselves to let the novel present itself—to let incidents and their effects cluster into patterns that ultimately form their own kind of coherent whole and achieve their own effect. And it is this that he attempts to do. He employs a structuralist approach to find, not just order, but the making of order under an apparent disorder and discontinuity, and to discover for us a novel constructed of episodes that lack surface connections but are ineluctably conjoined at a deeper level of structure, where Twainian man struggles to give pattern, stability, and meaning to his world—a novel that, with its ending integral and intact, becomes a gesture of tragic recognition of an American and a human predicament, and of an acceptance of that dilemma, not of its permanence, but of its present and terrible difficulties.

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Murphy, ed.: The Holy War

The Holy War

Edited by Thomas Patrick Murphy

The Crusades of the Middle Ages are generally looked upon today as a regrettable and occasionally absurd, if cruel, lapse in the forward movement of man. Yet the taking up of arms with intent of destroying one’s enemies, in full confidence that the shedding of blood is sanctified by divine will, or is at least justified by the rectitude of one’s humane cause, is deserving of study as a recurring phenomenon in the history of man, who continues today to find ample sanctions for committing acts of aggressive violence against the alien both outside and within his culture.

The original essays in this collection are devoted to the analysis of the philosophy of belligerency for moral gain. They are: “The Genesis of the Crusades: The Springs of Western Ideas of Holy War,” by H. E. J. Cowdrey; “Holy Warriors: The Romanesque Rider and the Fight against Islam,” by Linda V. Seidel; “Early Crusade Songs,” by Richard L. Crocker; “Holy War and the Medieval Lawyers,” by James A. Brundage; “The Islamic Conception of the Holy War,” by W. Montgomery Watt; and “Renaissance Warfare: A Metaphor in Conflict,” by Thomas M. Greene. A final section is devoted to a discussion of the holy war as we have seen it in our own time, led by Chadwick F. Alger.

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Lynch: Simoniacal Entry into Religious Life from 1000 to 1260

Simoniacal Entry into Religious Life from 1000 to 1260

A Social, Economic, and Legal Study

Joseph H. Lynch

Simony, the purchasing of religious office, was a common practice of the medieval church that was by no means universally condoned. Considered today, centuries later, it seems a quaint misdeed, an infraction of the ecclesiastical code inevitably diminished by the grosser crimes of the age. But if the term is properly and carefully defined, it denotes a concept of enormous assistance in reaching an understanding of that uniquely important medieval institution, the monastery.

Throughout the Middle Ages, religious orders were concrete expressions of a pervasive aspiration to the perfect life, which, it was steadfastly proclaimed and commonly believed, could best be achieved through hard work and diligent prayer in a rigidly structured community where men lived in a poverty that was self-imposed and in obedience to a stringent discipline that they freely accepted. But though religious communities claimed freedom from worldly concerns, they played, in point of fact, a major and crucial role in secular affairs.

At no point did the life of the cloister intersect more consequentially with that of the larger society than in the recruitment of novices. In undertaking to identify who entered the monasteries, why they chose and were chosen to do so, and under what conditions they were admitted, Joseph H. Lynch discovers that entries into religious life represented transactions of major social and economic significance to both the entrants and the communities that received them. Protracted and involved negotiations often preceded admission, whether the candidate was a member of the nobility aspiring to high office within the hierarchy, or a commoner seeking a humbler post. The medieval abbot was accustomed to engaging in what may quite properly be termed diplomacy as an important means to his ends. He bargained with his peers and superiors for gifts and preferences, and sought concessions from, and made compromises with, his adversaries. It was characteristic, too, that he achieved economic ends through means that, on the surface, appeared religious. In the negotiations that were the efficient means of his governance, recruitment was one of the most valuable tools at his disposal.

Ironically enough, in the twelfth century the church itself was to foster the very institution from which came those opponents of simony that brought about its end, and thereby deprived the religious houses of an important source of economic support and bargaining power. For it was those canon lawyers newly trained at the emergent universities who began seriously to question the propriety of the practice, and who, in so doing, were to precipitate changes in whole areas of medieval sensibility that were profoundly to affect future developments in art, architecture, literature, philosophy, education, economics, and government.

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Wilson: Court Satires of the Restoration

Court Satires of the Restoration

John Harold Wilson

Lampoons of the kind collected in this volume represented a relatively novel literary form in Restoration England, but they were to prove enormously popular among the coterie of fashionable folk who frequented the Court, strolled in the galleries of Whitehall and St. James, drove in Hyde Park, gambled in the Groom Porter’s lodgings, and thronged the playhouses of London. And to judge by contemporary gossip as it was recorded in the private letters, diaries, and memoirs of the day, the satirical Court poets were remarkably well informed about the lecheries of members of the Court and those literary and theatrical figures who, as the chief actors in notorious intrigues and scandals, became the satirists’ unfortunate victims.

Not surprisingly, most of the lampoons were circulated without an author’s name. Hardened sinners themselves, the anonymous poets were an envious, vindictive, and vicious lot, whose blatant attacks on the personal proclivities and private lubricity of their rivals and enemies made them vulnerable to various forms of legal redress, as litigants in libel suits, as well as to less ponderous, extralegal means of vengeful retribution. But though it is difficult to make specific attributions of authorship, it is possible to say who some of the satirists were. Most of them were attached to the Court in one capacity or another and in a position to pick up the gossip of the day as it circulated in the Stone Gallery, the Privy Chambers, and in nearby public houses and taverns. Others were driven to greater lengths to hear the news. According to one account, the dissolute Lord Rochester dressed a footman as a guardsman sentinel and “kept him all the winter long every night at the doors of such ladies as he believed might be in intrigues.” And one disreputable purveyor of lampoons spent his time trotting from coffee house to brothel with pockets of verses for sale, picking up the latest scandal and passing it on to a stable of poets who supplied him, in turn, with fresh libels.

The favorite devices of the satiric poets were fescennine invective, heavy-handed irony, and occasional burlesque—all written in the coarsest possible language. The simplest form of satire was a ballad or a set of verses in iambic couplets, loaded with obscene epithets and scandalous charges of outrageous behavior against those whom the poet disliked or envied or about whom there was a gossip at the moment. No one cared that the meter was often rough and the rhymes discordant; the poets aimed for liveliness, ribaldry, and vigor—and they succeeded admirably. From their scurrilous exercises in libelous bawdry was to emerge a kind of subliterature, which is interesting in itself, vastly entertaining, and often useful to the biographer and social historian, but which, more importantly, was to provide the rich soil of a tradition that was to nourish the later masterpieces of personal satire by such writers as Dryden, Swift, and Pope.

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