This chapter explores Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the most celebrated novel of the late nineteenth century, as the most completely realized example of the perspectival realism of the Reconstruction generation. Addressing Twain’s relationship with Howells and considering the way Twain’s absorption of the categories of the “sentimental fool” and the practices of mugwump aestheticism fed into his approach as a novelist, this chapter reads Huckleberry Finn as an allegory of the irreducible complexity of emancipation. This reading overturns traditional readings of the novel that celebrate Huck’s raft as a space of utopian freedom. It also offers an alternative to the dilemmas encountered by readers who have confronted the novel’s minstrelized depiction of the escaped slave Jim. What Twain called his “double-barreled” novel must be read for the way the possibilities of emancipation are hidden in plain sight, obscured by symbols of freedom such as the raft. Written in an age of renewed federalism even as it looks back at the antebellum world, Huckleberry Finn invites the reader to consider the possibility that the multiplicity of jurisdictions and overlapping, nonunified character of the U.S. legal system might represent a route toward emancipation in a world in which, absent a uniform law, no community could represent true justice.
The Metaphysics of Decoherence