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The Recomposition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

TEN YEARS AGO my title might have been catchy or at least puzzling. These days, anyone who keeps up with the trends in criticism assumes that I will somehow play upon the principle—most commonly associated with Stanley Fish—that the meaning of a text "has no effective existence outside of its realization in the mind of a reader," that each reader creates the text during the process of absorbing the words that an author has strung together. Furthermore, anyone on the cutting edge expects that my own deep content will reveal that a definitive interpretation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not defensible, not even for a truly self-analytic critic who constructed it. The recomposition of Huckleberry Finn I much more simply propose, however, involves examining some versions held by various constituencies or interpretive communities. Those constituencies are various indeed. For example, Reader's Digest played up the centennial of Huckleberry Finn. In turn, its story quoted Charles Kuralt as speaking for "the feelings of millions of the book's admirers" when he declared on TV: "If I had to say as much about America as I possibly could in only two words, I would say these two words: 'Huck Finn/" Rising beyond provinciality, John Barth recently proclaimed Huckleberry Finn one of "the most profound, transcendent literary images the human imagination has ever come up with." A supposedly scientific poll showed that 96% of college faculty now put Huckleberry Finn at the very head of the list of reading for entering freshmen, 68% of whom claim to have already done their duty, that is, to have recomposed the novel in their minds—with some large degree of reverence if they had seen, for instance, a feature article in the Washington Post of January 1986. After comparing Huck and Elvis Presley as our national "bad boys," it decides that Huckleberry Finn is "the greatest work of art by an American, the Sistine Chapel of our civilization." That's a tall order for a story told by a boy who tries to convince the doctor that Tom Sawyer "had a dream and it shot him" in the leg or who thinks that the trick riders in a circus are performing in their "drawers and undershirt." Obviously there are now many worshipful, sometimes astonishing interpretations of Huckleberry Finn.1 But even with those readers who