Dining on Huckleberry

When Mark Twain observed tourists viewing Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, he heard their "catchy ejaculations of rapture" and wondered out loud in his Innocents Abroad how these art goers could lack the imagination to not see the miracle of art (life): "How can they see what is not visible? What would you think of a man who looked at some decayed, blind, toothless, pock-marked Cleopatra and said: "What matchless beauty! (138)" So with the help of his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain first tabled this question, then tested it in Puddn'head Wilson, and put it to trial with the darkest of his stories, 3,000 Years Among The Microbes. Of these works, reality and illusion weigh in against one another to illustrate human vision. Twain takes stock of human perception by focusing on the micro-real in order to glimpse the big picture. To break things down for careful study, Twain employs a hero, like Huck, Wilson, and Bkshp, to behave as Charons who navigate the spirit of man toward the realization and acceptance that "Heaven was not made for man alone (175, 3,000)."

Because life is not a sole journey for any individual, and yet the joy of living can be obscured by human cruelty, the innocent must lead the disillusioned out of ugly times, in the way that the biblical proverb, "a child shall lead," rings true. Twain designs the path for the travelling hero along the routes of fable and bildungsroman. While a fable conveys some moral message, and the bildungsroman illustrates heroic accomplishments, the use of these two avenues organize Twain's ideas to show how innocence can mature even in the face of corruption and not be corrupted in the process.

Like the fabled boy in Robert Bly's adaptation of the Grimm's Iron Heinrich (Iron John, 7-12), Huck enters into the woods to retrieve his golden ball, the spirit of life. It is not a thing Twain quests, but rather the unraveling of what man's design is all about. Essentially, Twain's unraveling is orchestrated around things breaking down. For example, one important sign of social disorder is how one man may entrap another for a dollar or power. Just as the boy in Bly's fable goes off into the woods to discover a man trapped in a cage, Huck encounters the wild man, Jim-the-slave, and is solicited for knowledge on how to get free. Huck has the power to free the "caged one" because he, himself, is emancipated and a "low down Abolitionist (52)." When Huck frees Jim, he sets order back into the universe, and like a good caretaker, advises the free runaway to stay along the river and let nature be his guide (60) for man is unreliable and has the nature to capture, possess or destroy. In Chapter 16 of Finn, the author illustrates the common man's values in this comedic revel:

While a common man may be able to afford the luxury of foolishness, Twain's boy-hero is humbled by child abuse (36), corpses (61), and social violence (82). These encounters with inhumanity develop the lad into a Dickinsonian Pip, and empower him toward self-reliance. Huck becomes something of a Determinist because he can reverse the negative experiences and appreciate the true intent behind things. For example, when Huck is faced with turning Jim in or going to hell, he chooses to save his friend by telling a lie to protect his whereabouts (271). Why Huck refuses to give up his friend is a matter of preserving his spiritual integrity. How else could Huck live with himself knowing that he betrayed another soul, for down beneath the color of skin, whether black or white, is sharable blood. This sameness, on a cellular level, expresses a desire for unity, brotherhood, fellowship, and if conjoined to a twin, a conglomeration between people and creatures, animals and minerals, vegetables and atoms, for:

The origin of conflict in Twain's tales is the result of individuals who fail to recognize their "part and particle" relationship with other living things because of a perceptual disorder of the soul. A man will sour if he does not put his experience to use. Even a bad situation can be made into a good thing. Huck for instance does not shelve his horrors into some repressed subconscious, but extracts lessons and turns the rubble into tools. The genius of Twain is that he allows the natural play for a boy to evolve into effective engineering. With Huck's danger receptors activated, the boy can stumble across a piece of useless steel and stick, assemble the parts into a sturdy saw, and build from that a raft to leave troubled waters (31). What this ability demonstrates is that if a child can get himself out of the bad sticks, a man may do so, too. And a man ought to be able to do so off-the-fly because there is ready-made technology available to him. What prevents a man from gaining freedom is his refusal to take a ride down the river of his subconscious to be transported into the invisible majesty of reality.

While the dangers of reality stimulate Huck to adopt a hyper-aroused state of vigilance, the youth lets down his guard when nature tests his ability to withstand river hazards. He can let go of being in control around nature because like the grown up version of himself in 3,000 Years Among the Microbes, Huck Blankeship, Huck Finn knows that nature is his mother. In his true mother's arms, Huck can dream during a storm while his raft wafts about (102).

Unlike the boy in the fable who must steal the key from under his mother's pillow to free the wild man, Huck does not need go through this ritual because he is the key. Not so for Tom Driscoll of Puddn'head Wilson who sells his natural slave mother "down the river" to make a fast buck (81). The irony here is that Roxy, the mulatto slave mother, switches her light-skinned infant boy, Chambers, with her master's white infant son, Tom (14), resulting in her son's ruin. All she was trying to do was afford her son the b est possible life, but in displacing nature with her switcheroo, the true negro child became abusive while her master's son, the white boy, became kind. Such contrast of behavior has nothing to do with the influence of skin tone but rather negative socialization. The moral Twain tests in Puddn'head fits in with several popular sayings, "seeing is not believing," "beauty is beyond skin deep," and "don't judge a book by its cover."

With the help of forensic science, the art of fingerprinting, Twain guides his objective detective, David Wilson, to utilize expertly organized data as evidence. From the shelves of Wilson's office, Roxy's naughty prestidigitation i s revealed in court when another pair of lads, the conjoined Italians, are falsely accused of killing Tom's father (110). The actual murderer possesses a bit of an oedipal complex, longing for mommy love, and in an effort to gain mommy love, Tom "steals the key" when killing his father:

It is a great dramatic moment in court when Tom's face turns ashened, and is made to meet his punishment by being "sold down the river" as a negro slave. Thus his dream of being a master of others turns into his self-fulfilled nightmare reality.

The difference between dream and reality for the characters of Puddn'head is that when crimes are committed, the perpetrator is in a dissociative frame of mind, not so much a "Twinkie Syndrome," but a dream walk. The primary victims, Roxy and Chambers, act out their unhappy "place" as slaves when tampering with the lives of the Driscolls. Roxy's motivations a re direct (switching the children), while Chambers' is indirect (upper-handing clumsy Tom as "nigger-pappy" (21). Meanwhile, Tom's reaction to learning that he's really a black man inside an imagined white body is such a traumatic experience that he forgets about gambling and focuses on the humility of being a negro in Dawson's Landing. The shock of his mother's confession on his true roots generates intrusive thoughts i.e. "the nigger in him" (45), and Tom instinctively denies these thoughts by destroying the one who cages. In killing his father, Tom theoretically pays off his karmic debt, yet such reparation can not be appreciated when ultimately murder is never justifiable. Human sympathy is not with Tom for he behaved badly when a free white male, and in knocking off his father, there is still no gain. While the late Driscoll perhaps received his "just reward," Roxy loses out. Twain is not going for an editorial to support abolitionism or an end to racism, because he closes with the argument: "the motive [of killing Judge Driscoll] was not revenge, but robbery (106)." And still, such closure reminds one to be flexible with judgement.

Flexibility in thought is continued to be explored when Twain reincarnates Huck as a microbic germ in the character,
B. b. Bkshp, of 3,000 Years Among the Microbes. In this carnival of curiosity, written after many personal tragedies, the author presents a miniature version of his life near the brink of collapse. Like Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, there is disorientation of time and a narrative style that deposits one world into another. While time closes in on Twain, time expands for the microbe who goes into the bowels of a human tramp and observes reality from outside in. This perceptual shift suggests that in order to see things as they really are, there should be some suspension of reason, for a dream may be reality, and reality may be the dream (177). At least this is the way things are for microbes:

In dreams, the microbe is given freedom to be human for a while, and what Bkshp dreams for is an interracial romance with "Maggie" (193)-- not a "girl of the streets," but a "college-maid whose high privilege it is to carry in her veins the blood of the cholera germ (194)." So to love, for Twain, is to be devoured by loving. Love, imagination, and reverence for the invisible are ways to experience reality on the deepest of levels. This is a nice way to end a life—by materializing Heaven through the imagination.

For Twain, what redeems humanity is not clever opinions, but ones ability to slip inside love by imagination, and to realize life as art, which is timeless, and a Last Supper.

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