Abstract
Issues of language and of voice are raised at the very start of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). For the first voice which speaks to the reader is that of the posited author’s 1 deputy, G. G., Chief of Ordnance:
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.2
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Notes
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987 [1884]) p. 48. Page references to follow quotations from henceforth.
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983 ) p. 139.
Russell Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature ( New York and London: Methuen, 1986 ) p. 234.
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction ( New York and London: Methuen, 1987 ) p. 166.
David Murray, ‘Dialogics: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness’, in D. Tallack (ed.), Literary Theory at Work: Three Texts ( London: Batsford, 1987 ) p. 119.
Allon White, ‘Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction’, in Frank Gloversmith (ed.), The Theory of Reading ( Brighton: Harvester, 1984 ) p. 143.
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1981 [1894]) p. 64.
Allan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) chapter six, ‘Fictions of the Real’, pp. 182–207.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics translated by Caryl Emerson (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. 122. Unless otherwise noted, all the quotations in the section on carnival which follows are taken from this book, pp. 122–30. It is worth noting that carnival only temporarily overthrows established hierarchies, is made licit by those hierarchies. Bakhtin downplays this point.
Brook Thomas, ‘Languages and Identity in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, Mark Twain Journal, Vol. 21 (Summer, 1982 ), No. 2, p. 8.
Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984) p. 292, and Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction p. 166.
Harold Beaver, Huckleberry Finn ( London: Allen and Unwin, 1987 ) p. 34.
See Steven Mailloux, ‘Reading Huckleberry Finn: The Rhetoric of Performed Ideology’ in Louis J. Budd (ed.), New Essays on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Cambridge University Press, 1985 ) pp. 113–14.
See Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism ( London: Methuen, 1979 ) pp. 20–5.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982 [1845]) p. 124. Page references to follow quotations from henceforth.
Henry Louis Gates, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self ( New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 ) p. 105.
Neil Schmitz, Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) p. 104. Page references to follow quotations from henceforth.
Joyce A. Rowe, Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1988) pp. 57 and 48.
Richard Godden examines the use of the term ‘nigger’ in ‘Call Me Nigger: Race and Speech in Faulkner’s Light in August’, Journal of American Studies Vol. 14 (August, 1980) No. 2, pp. 235–48. ‘Language’ as he points out, ‘distributes power, even as it pretends to innocent communication’ (p. 240).
Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. ( New York: Harper and Row, 1982 ) pp. 259–62.
M. Pierrette Malcuzynski, ‘Mikhail Bakhtin and Contemporary Narrative Theory’, University of Ottowa Quarterly, Vol. 53, 1983, p. 57.
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 6.
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© 1990 Peter Messent
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Messent, P. (1990). The Clash of Language: Bakhtin and Huckleberry Finn. In: New Readings of the American Novel. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21117-3_7
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