Twain's Modernism: The Death of Speech in Huckleberry Finn as the Birth of a New Aesthetic

Abstract:While critics may wrestle with Huckleberry Finn's role in the American canon – including what Hemingway meant by singling it out for praise – they usually agree that Huck sounds as lifelike as "a real boy talking out loud." Yet Twain himself believed that "the moment 'talk' is put into print" it turned into a "corpse." His solution was a specifically written mode of 'talk,' severed from its origins in speech so as to belong on the page rather than in anyone's mouth. For Hemingway, Twain provides a model for overcoming the problem of artificial dialog not because his printed talk sounds just like the real thing, but because it's no longer primarily trying to. And when Hemingway himself composes dialog that displaces what was 'really' said somewhere off the page, using a kind of purported translation that Ben Lerner has termed "virtualization," he reveals Twain as an unexpected source of American literary modernism – and of modern nationalism as well. That is, since Huck's language derives from oral catchphrases rooted in racialized dialect, his voice transforms the kind of minority speech associated with the country's deepest divisions into the kind of literary language that everyone could recognize as "purely American."