University of Virginia Library

CONVENTIONS AND
ANTICONVENTIONS

I want to return to the second paragraph of Twain's "Explanatory"
note, which has received less attention from scholars
and critics than the first paragraph: "I make this explanation
for the reason that without it many readers would suppose
that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding."[23]
Why, even in jest, would Twain offer this reason
for his note? Overtly, of course, he is defending himself against
the charge of mishandling literary dialect—a charge he himself
leveled against Bret Harte in public and in private. Covertly, I
think, Twain is alluding to the great nineteenth-century educational
enterprise of prescriptive language teaching, which took
for its text Noah Webster's pronouncement that our "political
harmony is concerned . . . in a uniformity of language."[24] Linguistic
prescriptivism ruled over three domains—orthography,
orthoepy, and grammar proper. But "talking alike" also
involves unwritten rules or conventions governing larger, less
easily formalized types of discourse. Rules of paralinguistic
behavior, conversational turn taking, the cases when truth
should or should not be told: these make up the bulk of the
iceberg of language that lies below the visible mass charted by
formal grammars. In a century whose only tool for analyzing
the pragmatics of spoken language was the classical rhetorical
tradition, the closest thing to discourse analysis is found in
the etiquette manuals, whose rules were of course normative
rather than descriptive: "Never notice it if others make mistakes
in language. To notice by word or look such errors in
those around you, is excessively ill-bred."[25] Mark Twain was
always fascinated by the mass of unwritten rules that govern
social behavior in general and language in particular. In public
he would flout the rules by writing burlesque etiquettes,
but privately, as his notebooks show, he was keenly sensitive
to the norms governing conversation:

(Notebook 5, 1866, NJ1, 161)

(Notebook 20, 1882-1883,
NJ2, 470-71)

Twain transforms his irritation at speakers who abide by conversational
rules different from his own into the humor of
Tom's attempts to reason with Huck and Jim in Huckleberry
Finn and (more extravagantly) Tom Sawyer Abroad.

Throughout his life Twain was interested in strategies and
rules governing conventional speech events like the tall tale,
backwoods boasting, after-dinner speeches, swearing, and so
on.[26] The "grammars" governing such events are highly sensitive
to context: for example, the pause that made the "nub"
of Twain's "Golden Arm" story so effective would have been
death to a dinner-table conversation. The conventions and
rules that govern dialogue and speech event in the world of
Huckleberry Finn are no less important than the "number of
dialects" to which Twain draws the reader's attention. It turns
out that his characters are not all trying to talk alike, because
the conventions by which they operate are mutually exclusive.
Characters ignore, misinterpret, or else seek to manipulate
each other's conventions. It is no coincidence that we remember
best from the novel Huck's lies, the raftsmen's arguments,
and the exaggerated oratory of the King and Colonel Sherburn.
We remember Huck and Jim on foreign languages:
" 'Spose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy—
what would you think?' 'I wouldn' think nuff'n; I'd take en
bust him over de head' " (HF, 97). The violent legacy of Babel,
in the form of farce (as here) or of tragedy (as in the Boggs-Sherburn
confrontation), governs the frequent misunderstandings
that occur along the Mississippi. On the few occasions
when there is perfect understanding between characters

(notably Huck and Jim, and Huck and Mary Jane Wilks), we
are in a realm of idealized convention, like that of the ideal
vernacular, that verges perilously on sentimentalism.

Huck Finn is in every sense an unconventional character.
His rebellion against the conventions of polite adult society is
the kernel around which other layers of his personality have
accreted, as critics of the novel have observed.[27] In an important
early passage we are shown that middle-class conventions
of language, physical etiquette, and religion merge almost
without boundaries as they are wielded against Huck's
behavior:

(HF, 3)

Huck's "bad" rebels against the "good" or "right" conventions
Miss Watson is imposing—literally, ortho-graphy, orthopedics,
and ortho-doxy. Appropriately, Huck's language is
thoroughly unconventional, breaking rules of discourse at all
levels. His "bad" grammar and pronunciation, markers of a
traditional literary vernacular, are finally less important than
his refusal to follow or to understand the conventions of ordinary
speech acts and of speech genres like riddles and playful
make-believe.

In Huck's speech, for example, the limited range of styles
typical of uneducated speakers is exaggerated beyond the
bounds of realism. Huck is virtually incapable of altering his
speech in the direction of a prestige dialect; moreover, his
speech lacks a distinction between formal and informal registers.
He speaks to Judge Thatcher and Doctor Robinson just
as he does to Jim; he makes no effort to alter his Pike County
dialect when posing as a British valet, though the fervor of his
effort to lie indicates that he wants the imposture to succeed.

Such inability to adapt to the demands of different speech
situations is hard to reconcile with Huck's real, if limited, exposure
to the language of schooling and literature and his
awareness of the difference between the "quality" and the
"ornery."[28] But Huck's limitation has a clear literary purpose:
folk speech in Twain is characteristically innocent, averse
to the role playing that goes along with the shifts in style
adopted easily by the Duke or Tom Sawyer. To a large extent
Huck's language is dictated by his long-recognized role as an
"innocent eye," a naive narrator whose perceptions of social
hypocrisy create ironies that he misses but the reader is meant
to catch: "The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to
come to time. When you got to the table you couldn't go right
to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her
head and grumble over the victuals, though there warn't
really anything the matter with them" (HF, 2). Literal Huck
does not understand the concept of "saying grace"—objectively,
the utterance sounds like grumbling. The humor resulting
from such gaps between literal and conventional readings
of words and events is part of the "making strange" that is a
fundamental technique of satire.[29]

But Huck's lack of socialization extends far beyond the
structure of his lexicon. In general, Huck does not or will not
understand linguistic processes that permit a dissimilarity
between content and form. To use J. L. Austin's terms, the
widow at the dinner table performs the locutionary act of
uttering mumbled words. The illocutionary (or meaningful)
force of the act, however, is "prayer" or "thanksgiving," a conventional
significance independent of the content or even the
intelligibility of the words. (A standard illustration of illocutionary
force is the question, "Can you pass the salt?"—not a
query about capability but a request for action. Huck's reluctance
to understand Tom's "Gimme a caseknife" [HF, 307] as the
encoded form of "give me a pick-axe" plays on a similar relation
between apparent and actual meaning.) Huck commonly
rejects the mechanism that gives a statement a force different
from that of its propositional content:

(HF, 220-21)

Far more tolerant than Molière's misanthrope Alceste, Huck
nonetheless shares his disapproval of the minor insincerities
that make society go.

In his dialogue with Tom, Huck demonstrates his hostile
unfamiliarity with several oral and literary genres. At both
the beginning and the end of the novel, Huck fails to comprehend
Tom's make-believe; he does not care to will the suspension
of disbelief required for the success of both children's fantasy
play and the literary play of the romances Tom enjoys.
The opposition between literal Huck and quixotic Tom has
long been a topic of critical commentary. Critics have not
noted, however, that Huck's pragmatism is "vernacular" only
in the linguistic form it takes as idealized folk speech; it is
otherwise anything but commonplace. Tom's enthusiasm for
varieties of make-believe is "realistic" insofar as it exaggerates
in degree but not in kind children's actual behavior. Huck, on
the other hand, shows that he is an outcast not only from
adult society but from the subculture of childhood as well. He
has no idea how to respond to Buck Grangerford's riddle:

(HF, 135)

Huck does not see, because he does not understand the conventions
governing the genre "riddle." (Specifically, the riddlic
question must not be interpreted as a request for information
but as an invitation to either "guess" or "give up.") For Huck,
a question ought to be a question; the sheer gratuity of riddling
is beyond him, as is the language's general capacity for
play.[30] His comments and his own speech activities demonstrate
that he thinks language ought to be instrumental,
which in turn explains why he (like Jim) understands magic
but not religion. Spells work automatically so long as proper
ritual is observed, but when praying for fishhooks fails to
produce fishhooks, Huck rightly—according to his logic—
discards prayer as useless.

Huck's most strikingly unconventional linguistic behavior
is his lying. Like his ungrammaticality, it puts Huck in conflict
with superficial social norms while establishing his loyalty to
profounder values. Characters in the novel stand in precisely
the same relation to truthfulness as they do to Standard English;
the schema representing varieties of lies and truths in
Huckleberry Finn turns out to be homologous to the schema of
language varieties:

   

Virtue:	Authentic Truth (Truth must be told)	Innocent Lie (Truth cannot be told)
Corruption:	Conventional Truth (Truth can be told)	Vicious Lie (Truth need not be told)

As the objective absence or presence of dialect features in
characters' speech does not correspond to "virtue" or "corruption,"
so the difference between "good" and "bad" statements
in the novel is not their propositional truth-value but
their intent and effect.[31] Authentic truth and innocent lies are
both beneficial, both dictated by the heart, not the reason.
Authentic truth is an ideal realized in the novel primarily by
Mary Jane Wilks, who "ain't one of these leather-face people"
and so cannot play a false role. The ethos of authentic truth
makes truth telling a categorical imperative. Huck's mytho-mania,
like the tall tales and boasts of the raftsmen, is an idealized
component of folk speech; his typical lie has "no harm
in it"—in fact, it "smoothes people's roads" (HF, 242). Huck
lies because he cannot tell the truth in a hostile society whose
values are at odds with his own. He himself shows awareness
of the gap between moral ideal and practical exigency when
he pleads with Judge Thatcher, "Please . . . don't ask me
nothing [about the money]—then I won't have to tell no lies"
(HF, 19). Only when his interrogator is Mary Jane does he find
"a case where . . . the truth is better, and actuly safer, than a
lie" (HF, 239). (Almost immediately afterward, however, he
must tell a white lie to cover Mary Jane's departure, something
Mary Jane herself cannot do.) Vicious lies are the genuinely
harmful, self-serving deceptions of confidence men—the
Duke and King at the Wilkses' provide the best example.
Characters whose lies are predatory reject the morality of
truth telling altogether. Conventional truth includes what Twain
calls "gigantic mute lies" (WMT 23:162)—socially dictated
"truths" like the institution of slavery or the Grangerfords'
code of honor. This variety of truth figures not so much in
dialogues as in the novel's overall semantics. Thus, to conventional
truth the proposition "Jim is a runaway slave" is false
because he has been manumitted according to the formal legal
procedure. To authentic truth, relying as it does on transcendental
sanctions, the statement is false because the term slave
cannot be predicated of a human being.

If Huck's unconventional language prevents him from participating
fully in the discourse of his society, it paradoxically
liberates him to move more freely in the domain of language
itself. If we take Roman Jakobson's six functions of language
as a convenient typology, Huck's discourse would seem to be
limited to the referential and the conative functions: he is interested
in the content of his speech and its pragmatic effect
on a listener (particularly when his speech is a lie).[32] Tom, with
his interest in "style," presumably values the poetic function

of language, "focus on the message for its own sake." I would
suggest, however, that Huck's beliefs about his own use of language
are as inaccurate as those about his "guilt" as a proto-abolitionist.
In fact, Huck and Jim are the only characters in
the novel who freely and joyously embody all six of Jakobson's
functions. Huck thinks he is merely pragmatic and literal, but
we who read both his reported dialogue and his narrative
know better. His descriptions of the river and his account of
his attitude toward Jim are fully "emotive" and "poetic"—that
is, Huck's own feelings and the texture of his language are foci
of attention. Huck is sometimes even "metalingual," as when
he evaluates the King's imitation of an Englishman or condemns
the graffiti in the floating house as "the ignorantest
kind of words" (HF, 61).

The limitations of other characters can be related to Jakobson's
categories, although his scheme of six basic language
functions must be elaborated by combining it with a moral
axis. (Referential language can be true or false; emotive language
sincere or insincere; conative language manipulative or
empathetic; phatic language perfunctory or affectionate.) The
language of the Bricksville loafers is stripped of all but its
phatic function, "we exist" the sum of its referential content.
Tom values the emotive and poetic functions to the exclusion
of the conative; his delight in the "evasion" derives from a
self-centered aesthetic, for he lacks Huck's concern about the
effect of his words on his hearers. Tom is thus incapable of an
apology, particularly one directed to Jim. The best he can do
is offer a payment that substitutes for words ("Tom give Jim
forty dollars for being prisoner for us so patient" [HF, 360]).
The Duke and the King, on the other hand, value only the
conative function, which allows them to manipulate others.
For the Duke, Hamlet's soliloquy signifies money; so long as
he "fetches the house" (HF, 178), it is no matter how Shakespeare's
words are mangled.

These characters are not all trying to talk alike: Mark Twain's
central linguistic insight in Huckleberry Finn is that the heterogeneity
of language goes beyond surface features like pronunciation

and morphology. Take, by way of contrast, Emile
Zola's defense of vulgar slang in the preface to L'Assommoir in
1877: "My crime is to have had the literary curiosity to collect
and pour into a carefully worked mold the speech of the
people. . . . Nobody saw that my desire was to perform a
purely philological labor, one that I believe to be of lively historical
and social interest."[33] The naturalist Zola wants to
transfer unchanged to his literary work speech that exists objectively
in the working-class districts he writes about. Despite
the apparent empirical pretensions of the "Explanatory"
note to Huckleberry Finn, Twain's project was different: he created
a literary simulacrum of linguistic diversity that exaggerates
and stylizes the heteroglossic interweaving of speech
types in real societies. In the process he created several pure
types that never exist unadulterated in the world. Huck Finn,
in particular, is a linguistic impossibility. He speaks an unfallen
Adamic dialect that names objects as if they had never
been named before.[34] His language is logically impossible, for
it is a plenum, a fully functioning system, that is nevertheless
innocent of the conventions imposed by the social roles that
language must play. It is not, like that of Swift's Houyhnhnms,
an idiom incapable of "saying the thing that is not," but it is
one that speaks no evil. Roy Harvey Pearce has written of
Huck as a boy who "exists not as an actuality but as a possibility
. . . [an] ideal, perhaps never-to-be-attained type."[35] Huck
is, in fact, an infinitely more human and humorous version of
the Mysterious Stranger who was to haunt Mark Twain's later
imagination, a figure whose transcendent nature makes him
incapable of understanding ordinary human behavior. His
speech reminds us that language, like any social institution,
progresses only through the interplay between the fixed standard
that crystallizes old visions and old voices and the grammarless
voices, undergoing constant growth and flux, of the
present historical moment.