University of Virginia Library

5

Not All Trying to Talk Alike:

Varieties of Language in Huckleberry Finn

STANDARDS AND VERNACULARS

Conventional wisdom makes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a
declaration of linguistic independence and Mark Twain the
Dante of the American vernacular. In the novel's opening sentence,
one critic has said, "the American language was first
used as the medium of great fiction."[1] Mark Twain might have
written, "You don't know about Huck Finn unless you have
read a book called 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,' but that is
unimportant." Instead he let Huck tell his own story, in his
own language: "You don't know about me, without you have
read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,'
but that ain't no matter" (HF, 1). From the perspective of Standard
English, Huck's speech is riddled with errors. But that
perspective is impossible to maintain during a reading of
Huckleberry Finn; since Huck is the narrator, his speech becomes
normative for the duration of the novel. Read his narrative
aloud, and only with difficulty can you resist modifying
your speech towards your best approximation of Missouri dialect.

Indeed, the only successful resistance is to close the book
and retreat into silence. (This much the Concord Library
Committee conceded when they refused to circulate their
copy of the novel, complaining that "it is couched in the language
of a rough, ignorant dialect, and all through its pages
there is a systematic use of bad grammar.")[2] In compelling
readers to mimic Huck, Mark Twain implicitly asserts that the
narrator's language is a valid literary dialect. It is one thing,
however, to claim with Michael Egan that Twain's novel teaches
us to "speak Finnian" and another to infer that Huck's "depart[ure]
from the polite cadences of educated grammar" makes
us "co-conspirators in his subversion of our language."[3] In
fact, Huck Finn's vernacular proves in the end a staunch, if unlikely,
ally of educated grammar. After Robin Hood's fashion,
Huck's verbal outlawry victimizes only those who usurp authority
unjustly; it is ever ready to bow the knee to a linguistic
Richard the Lionhearted.

Henry Nash Smith has taught a generation of critics to perceive
a bipolar opposition in Huckleberry Finn between "vernacular"
and "genteel" language. By vernacular, Smith tells
us, he means "not only the language of rustic or backwoods
characters but also the values, the ethical and aesthetic assumptions,
they represent."[4] This conjoining of thought or
values and language runs into immediate difficulty when applied
to the novel, however. Surely, to take the most striking
case, Huck and Pap Finn do not share identical "vernacular"
values, although they speak roughly the same language.
George C. Carrington, Jr., observing this paradox, has suggested
that the distinction between vernacular and official, although
"good as taxonomy, is inadequate in terms of the dynamics
of the novel."[5] Carrington's structuralist approach to
the novel has led him to the essential insight that good grammar
and bad grammar do not correspond rigidly to good and
bad morality, that the force of an "ain't" depends on context.
But his criticism of Smith needs to be inverted: the problem
with the dualism of vernacular and genteel has less to do with
narrative dynamics than with the taxonomy itself. A better
one can be devised. There are, in fact, two different vernaculars

and two standard languages in the novel. Twain creates
a linguistic universe in which the purpose and moral coherence
of varieties of speech are more important than their
objective form.

In Tom Sawyer, where the "shadings" of dialect are much
lighter, the normative standard language is the dialect of St.
Petersburg's ruling institutions: the church, the law courts,
and the public school. In Huckleberry Finn, however, the standard
is virtually absent. Almost nobody speaks what linguists
today politely call Standard American English, what the nineteenth
century more bluntly called good English. Nevertheless,
Standard English remains, for both Twain and his narrator
Huck, the understood symbol or outward sign of social
authority. In Twain's linguistic economy, Standard English,
like paper money, has no inherent value: it is worthless unless
issued by someone possessing the fund of social authority
promised by his or her language. A character like Judge
Thatcher is "as good as his word"; his verbal currency is
backed by moral gold, authentic social worth. A Tom Sawyer
or a Colonel Sherburn issues words that look the same but are
like notes on a wildcat bank: when we try to redeem them for
gold, we find there is none in the vault.

Several of the novel's characters speak what I call authentic
Standard English, which indicates merited social, moral, and
intellectual position. Chief among these is Judge Thatcher,
the sole character in Huckleberry Finn whose represented
speech is entirely free from grammatical error or regionalism.
Properly speaking, Judge Thatcher is not so much a character
as a function: he serves as a polar opposite to Pap Finn, with
whom he disputes the fate of Huck and Huck's money. Where
Pap's heavily shaded dialect and scorn for literacy mark him as
"ornery," an occupant of the lowest rung of white society, the
judge's correct and colorless speech guarantees his respectability.
The opening of the novel sets up a sharp distinction
between civilized and uncivilized modes of behavior, and the
judge's language is a convenient shorthand for "civilized." It
is further characterized by semantic precision, as befits a lawyer.
After puzzling out Huck's motive for wanting to give away

six thousand dollars, the judge says, "I think I see. You want
to sell all your property to me—not give it." Then he writes
"for a consideration" on a sheet of paper, has Huck sign it,
and explains, "That means I have bought it of you and paid
you for it" (HF, 20). Judge Thatcher's careful discrimination
between words illustrates the value of literate culture: attention
to the fine distinction between written "sale" and oral
"gift" will safeguard Huck's money against Pap's greed.

Twain's need to express social relationships precisely explains
the inconsistencies in the speech of another minor
character, Doctor Robinson of the Wilks episode. When he
first appears in chapter 25, where his function is to debunk
the King's imitation of an Englishman, his speech is eloquent
standard American except for a lone colloquial "somewheres"
(HF, 219). His speech in this chapter serves two purposes.
First, it contrasts his authentic learning with the exorbitant
pretension of an "ignorant tramp," the King, who is attempting
to pass counterfeit oratory and etymology for current
coin. Second, it establishes his social distance from the rest of
the audience, since he alone recognizes as fraudulent the
King's imitation of English pronunciation, still the model for
elegant American speech in the mid-nineteenth century. In
chapter 29, however, when the morally outraged town shares
the doctor's suspicion of the "Englishmen," Twain has him
slip back into a comfortable Pike County dialect: "Neighbors,
I don't know whether the new couple is frauds or not; but if
these two ain't frauds, I am an idiot, that's all" (HF, 251). From
the point of view of mimetic realism Twain has erred, but in
its context the doctor's language is appropriate in each case.[6]
Lawyer Levi Bell and the unnamed doctor in the Phelps episode
both consistently speak a heavily shaded dialect, reinforcing
the interpretation that relates Doctor Robinson's unique
use of correct English to the constraints of the fictional situation
rather than to the typical speech of the small-town Southern
professional classes. (The "jedge" who attends the "Royal
Nonesuch" in Bricksville and proposes that the rest of the
town be "sold" also speaks Pike County dialect [HF, 197].)

The absence of Standard English at even the upper levels of
society in villages along the Mississippi accords with Twain's
conscious evaluation of speech habits in the West and South.
In Life on the Mississippi—written while he was at work on
Huckleberry Finn—Twain is severely critical of the region's
grammatical laxity (see pp. 22-23). Huckleberry Finn is the
product of an author for whom correct speech is still a moral
norm. Huck's vernacular—and this point will be explored at
length—is "good" partly because the rules of adult society
simply do not apply to it. The vernacular of Pap, the King,
and the Bricksville loafers is "bad" because it represents corruption
and degradation, either the "knowing" and "purposeful"
debauching of civilized values that Twain complains about
(WMT 12:223) or an atavistic ignorance that is even worse.

The use of "correct English" to indicate moral authority explains
what is otherwise a flagrant inconsistency in the speech
of a major character, Mary Jane Wilks. At first she shares the
dialect of her younger sisters. Redheaded and "awful beautiful,"
she appears conventionally genteel, but her speech
betrays her origins: "Take this six thousand dollars . . . and
don't give us no receipt for it" (HF, 219); "It ain't right nor
kind for you to talk so to him, and him a stranger and so far
from his people" (HF, 224). For three chapters Mary Jane is
kindly and sympathetic, but she is not yet a heroine. When
in chapter 28 she assumes the moral stature of Twain's beloved
Joan of Arc, she undergoes an instantaneous linguistic
transformation.[7]

As the chapter opens, Mary Jane is sobbing over the fate of
the household slaves, separated when the King sold them
in opposite directions. While she remains an object of pity,
she is allowed to keep an index of her vernacular: "Oh, dear,
dear, to think they ain't ever going to see each other any
more!" (HF, 238). As Huck reveals the details of the King and
Duke's con game, sorrow gives way to righteous indignation,
marked physically by "eyes a-blazing higher and higher all
the time" and a face "afire like sunset" (HF, 239-40). Her
speech becomes that of a dramatic heroine, losing all trace of

grammatical impurity: "The brute! Come—don't waste a minute—not
a second—we'll have them tarred and feathered, and
flung in the river!" (HF, 240). More than pure, it is elegant:
Mary Jane has deftly navigated the modal waters of "shall"
and "will," thus escaping the confusion judged in Life on the
Mississippi to be endemic among Southerners.

Doctor Robinson's protean dialect and Mary Jane's sudden
grammatical purgation result from a conventional, as opposed
to a naturalistic, handling of character, which is not an
error but a deliberate strategy, one that Twain would have discovered
in English novelists from Fielding to Dickens. In the
British novel, as Norman Page has shown, "dialect is a variable
dependent on the demands of fictional situation rather
than on the probable behavior of an actual speaker."[8] Oliver
Twist speaks like a young gentleman despite his origins;
Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend rapidly loses dialect features
as her moral education progresses. In general, Dickens
follows a "convention of dialogue which deliberately sacrifices
realism to moral appropriateness."[9] For the American
novelist there was a closer model, James Fenimore Cooper,
whose young heroines in the Leatherstocking tales rarely
share the rough vernacular of their male companions. In The
Deerslayer, for example, Cooper repeatedly draws attention to
the gentility of Judith Hutter's speech, absorbed from her
mother and preserved despite her having grown up in the
woods with an uncouth, illiterate father. So powerful was the
literary convention that attractive young women speak correctly
that it is followed even in Twain's unfinished "Huck and
Tom Among the Indians," which overtly attacks other aspects
of Cooper's romanticism. Young Peggy Mills might as well be
Judith Hutter's twin: the rest of her family are the "simple-heartedest

good-naturedest country folks in the world," but
she herself has read "considerable many books" and talks just
like a Walter Scott heroine (HHT, 99).

For the virtuous characters in Huckleberry Finn, then, the
standard language is a sign of affiliation with a natural aristocracy
whose membership qualifications are primarily moral.
Another set of characters uses, or attempts to use, correct or
elevated speech in support of claims to an aristocratic station
for which they are not morally qualified. I classify their deceptive
language as misappropriated Standard English; it corresponds
to what Henry Nash Smith calls "genteel English."
This is language as sheer instrumentality, a commodity valued
entirely for what it can accomplish.

To the Duke, for example, Standard English is merely the
sine qua non of a professional confidence man, and his ability
to wield it distinguishes him from the King, who like Pap
Finn has barely emerged from the lowest stratum of drunkards
and villains in frontier fiction. While the King is firmly
locked into his own strongly marked dialect, the Duke, as an
experienced actor, can modify his lightly shaded Pike County
speech upward to achieve a reasonable facsimile of hypergenteel
sentimental diction. He shifts into his formal register to
establish his "aristocratic" credentials shortly after he meets
Huck and Jim. His performance is flawed by an "ain't" here
(HF, 161) and an "I reckon" there (HF, 178), but on the whole
he is convincing: he can fabricate the high style as easily as
he can a patent medicine. Thus he represents what Erving
Goffman has called the confidence man's essential threat to
the reliability of social indicators: "Perhaps the real crime of
the confidence man is not that he takes money from his victims
but that he robs all of us of the belief that middle-class
manners and appearance can be sustained only by middle-class
people."[10] Twain wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks after his notorious
Whittier birthday speech, wondering why "anybody
should think three poets insulted because three fantastic
tramps choose to personate them & use their language."[11]
Goffman's definition of the confidence man gives the answer:
by using the language of the respected classes the confidence

man undermines the belief of those classes that their language
is ipso facto a mark of respectability.[12]

We ordinarily think of dialect imitation as a unidirectional
phenomenon: a performer of higher social status mimics a
dialect with low prestige for comic effect. The Duke reminds
us that so far as mimicry is concerned, Standard English is as
legitimate an object as any other. Twain observed in the minstrel
shows of his boyhood the capacity of the professional
showman to imitate in either direction:

(MTE, 111-12)

When used by actors and charlatans, "correct English" is void
of moral value; it is one of an array of tools with which any
competent social "performer" may achieve an effect.

Twain's description of the manners and speech of the minstrel
show straight man is a coat that will fit Colonel Sherburn
with little alteration. He "was a heap the best dressed man in
[the] town" (HF, 184); his speeches to Boggs and to the lynch
mob are courtly and artificial; and the ignorant villagers of
Bricksville are cowed and impressed by what is essentially a
set piece. Sherburn's address to the mob is, in fact, a dramatic
performance, no less theatrical than the "Balcony Scene"
from Romeo and Juliet that the Duke and the King have just
advertised.[13] The high style in Colonel Sherburn's speech is
marked mainly by rhetorical structure rather than by grammar
and diction, which, though far above the level of the
Bricksville patois, fall short of perfection. Walter Blair argues
that Twain revised to make Sherburn's character more sympathetic

by eliminating the "excessively rhetorical" passages in
the manuscript version: "Colloquial phrasing is in character
for even the leading citizen of Bricksville. More important, as
revised the speech loses the highfalutin diction which in the
book is a mark of insincerity."[14] The revision, however, is not
extensive enough to produce a difference in the stylistic pitch
of Sherburn's oratory.[15] In fact, too great an increase in colloquialism
would have reduced Sherburn to the level of the parochial
Western gentleman who uses "loose grammar" out of
"careless habit, not ignorance," and hence would have discredited
his self-proclaimed cosmopolitanism and superiority
to the mob. Some critics are disturbed by Sherburn's denunciation
of mob violence and human cowardice because they
feel that we hear too obviously the voice of Mark Twain speaking
ex cathedra. Twain's language it is, but Sherburn has misappropriated
it, his cold-blooded murder of Boggs having
eliminated his right to pretend to any degree of normative
speech. His address to the mob is the supreme example of the
misappropriated standard in Huckleberry Finn: the heroic ethos
he means to project is in truth a persona, a mask, a role. The
veneer of Murray's Grammar that covers his Southern village
speech is the verbal equivalent of whitewash on a sepulchre.

If standard or "genteel" speech in Huckleberry Finn is not inherently
"bad," neither is the vernacular inherently "good."
Three varieties of vernacular speakers in the work are distinguished
not so much by the form of their speech as by the
purposes it serves. First are the figures like Huck, Jim, Judith
Loftus, Aunt Sally, and the raftsmen, whose vernacular functions
as part of a positive characterization. Critics speaking of
the "vernacular values" of the novel have these characters in
mind. I call their language folk speech, a term from folklore
studies that suggests appropriate parallels with folk art, folk
music, and folk narrative. The second category is the speech of
pretentious ignorance (a phrase I borrow from Richard Grant
White). This is the speech of the King, the Grangerfords, and
Tom Sawyer—of characters, that is, who attempt to assert the
authority of an elevated social class but who are not skilled

enough to mimic the genteel style, so that they superimpose a
few learned borrowings on a substratum of the vulgate. Third
is ornery speech, defined by the depravity of its users, their low
social position, and their active hostility or passive indifference
to rungs higher up on the social ladder. Pap and the
Bricksville loafers are clear examples. Whereas the linguistic
unconcern of folk speakers proceeds from childlike innocence,
ornery speakers are adults who knowingly choose
vicious language. This three-way structural division of vernacular
speech reflects similar distinctions in the writings of
nineteenth-century observers of language, in both England
and the United States.

Folk speech is a product of the romantic movement. It is a
thoroughly idealized version of genuine vernacular, understood
to be morally and aesthetically superior; rural rather
than urban, it is the Adamic language away from which civilized
society has fallen. Had Twain been pressed to explain
why his greatest novel should be narrated by an ignorant runaway,
he could have done no better than to cite Wordsworth on
the "language really used by men" in rural life, which

From this conception of folk speech comes the lyricism of
many passages in Huck's narrative discourse, such as the long
description of morning on the river that opens chapter 19. Romantic
as well is Huck's innate sense of linguistic propriety; as
narrator, he is his own purifier, careful to avoid occasion for
"dislike or disgust." Huck and the other folk speakers are not
gentlemen and gentlewomen, but they are gentle. Folk speech
is the natural language of the family, an androgynous language
that gives force to women's speech while tempering
male discourse. The women characterized by folk speech—
Judith Loftus, Aunt Sally Phelps, Aunt Polly (to whose brief
appearance here may be added her role in Tom Sawyer)—are
matrons who serve as stable centers of households that actually
or symbolically lack men. (Aunt Polly is a widow; Silas
Phelps is an absentminded, ineffectual man; Judith Loftus's
husband is gone when Huck arrives.) The promise of strength
and protection in their ungrammatical, coarse-hewn speech is
absent from the sentimental dialogue of their genteel sisters.
Here Judith Loftus speaks to Huck: "Set down and stay where
you are. I ain't going to hurt you, and I ain't going to tell on
you, nuther. . . . You see, you're a runaway 'prentice—that's
all. It ain't anything. There ain't any harm in it. . . . Bless you,
child, I wouldn't tell on you" (HF, 73). Similarly, the violence
of little Davy's raftsmen's slang is directed, in a parental way,
against anyone who would unjustly harm Huck: '"Vast there!
He's nothing but a cub. I'll paint the man that tetches him! . . .
Come, now, tell a straight story, and nobody'll hurt you, if
you ain't up to anything wrong. . . . Overboard with you, and
don't you make a fool of yourself another time this way. Blast
it, boy, some raftsmen would rawhide you till you were black
and blue!" (HF, 121-23). An oath in form only, Davy's "blast
it, boy" is identical in emotional force to Judith Loftus's "bless
you, child." Beneath the gruff exteriors beat hearts of gold;
Twain owed more than he cared to admit to Bret Harte's benevolent
gamblers and harlots. That Twain's slave Jim does not
speak the exaggerated farcical dialect of the blackface minstrels
has misled critics into describing his speech as "realistic"
black dialect. It is, in fact, romanticized folk speech, purified
of any forceful hostility that might, coming from a black
speaker, have seemed threatening to a white readership even
in the postwar North. (As we shall see in the next chapter,
black vernacular becomes progressively more threatening in
the works that follow Huckleberry Finn.)

The distinction between folk speech and ignorantly pretentious
speech is stressed frequently in Richard Grant White's
Words and Their Uses:

White's categorization also helps relate language use to the
moral evaluation of characters in Huckleberry Finn. The birthright
use of correct English by members of the natural aristocracy
provides one standard and "simple, unpretending" use
of the vernacular the other. But woe to those who presume to
a cultural authority they have not earned. Twain reserves his
special scorn, in Huckleberry Finn as elsewhere, for social
climbers of all colors who attempt to pass off flawed and inflated
language as genuine merchandise, relying on a mannered
style to cover hollow thoughts. In Huckleberry Finn the
line between the vernacular of pretentious ignorance and misappropriated
Standard English is not sharply drawn. Instead,
characters can be ranked along a continuum, according to
their success in imitating prestige forms: the Duke and Sherburn
at the top, followed by Tom Sawyer and the Grangerfords,
with the King at the bottom. Tom, the King, and the
Grangerfords fall into the category of pretentious ignorance
because their speech is essentially colloquial, with fragments
of the genteel style pasted over it at irregular intervals. The
humor in the treatment of Tom and the King derives largely
from their misuse of language they believe will make a good
impression. Speakers of the misappropriated standard are too
dangerous to be funny, but the vernacular of pretentious ignorance
continually deflates itself with needles borrowed
from Mrs. Malaprop. The King, eulogizing his dead "brother,"
tries to cover up his reference to "funeral orgies" by insisting
that "orgies is the right term . . . it means the thing you're
after, more exact," supporting his claim with a ludicrous
mock etymology (HF, 218). Tom wants Jim's coat of arms to figure
a "runaway nigger, sable, with his bundle over his shoulder
on a bar sinister"; pressed by Huck for an explanation of
the last term, he confesses his ignorance: "Oh, I don't know.
But he's got to have it. All the nobility does" (HF, 322). Ostentatiously
misused Latinate vocabulary traces its ancestry in
English comedy at least as far back as Shakespeare's constable
Dogberry, but the King's discourse probably derives more immediately
from the grotesquely error-laden stump speeches
of the minstrel show.[18] This broad humor is achieved at the
expense of a fully engaged condemnation of hypocrisy. More
bitingly ironic is the masterful description of the Grangerfords'
sham gentility. Colonel Grangerford's pretension to aristocracy
is a realistic double of the Duke and King's wild
claims to special treatment. When the colonel and his lady
came down to breakfast,

(HF, 143)

(HF, 163-64)

For the pretentious ignorant, fine language and literature
are worthwhile as symbols of social status; for the ornery
speaker these objects do not possess even display value.
Books in the Grangerford parlor are "piled up perfectly exact,
on each corner of the table" (HF, 137)—for decoration, in
other words, not for use—but when the illiterate Pap Finn
brings "an old book and two newspapers" to his cabin in the
woods, they are to serve only as wadding for his gun (HF, 32).
"Correct English" is foreign to this class of speakers, an intruder
regarded with all the xenophobia of Know-Nothingism.
Moreover, the compactness, energy, and penchant for metaphor

characterizing folk speech are absent from this vernacular.
Instead, ornery speech is marked by its tedious repetition;
it is the language of the verbally damned, condemned
to walk forever in the same conversational circles. The Bricksville
loafers, for example,

(HF, 181)

The loafers' language is entirely formulaic. Their social lies
are so old and worn out that they "don't fool nobody but a
stranger"; their insults and complaints never vary. Pap Finn's
dialogue is comparatively animated, but it too displays an
abundance of the reiterated formulas typical of authentic vernacular
speech: "I never see such a son" (two times); "Hey?"
(three); "You hear?" (two); "Looky here" (three), all of these
in the space of two pages (HF, 24-25). Pap's "Call this a govment!"
monologue is marked by similar formulas, this time in
a narrative context (HF, 33-34). He stresses his reported dialogue
with a constant "says I" and a defiant "them's the very
words." (These same formulas are also the most distinctive
feature of the "extreme backwoods" dialect of old Mrs. Hotchkiss
on the Phelpses' farm, where they typify the "clack" of
rural gossip. But her dialect is not ornery speech, since its ignorance
is handled with humor and sympathy.) Although as
Richard Bridgman has stressed, repetition is integral to the
narrative poetics of colloquial prose, the purely phatic repetition
in the speech of Twain's lowest characters is meant to be
read as a structural weakness.[19]

David Carkeet has pointed out that ornery speech shares
several traits with the "negro dialect" of Huckleberry Finn. "In
Huckleberry Finn, gwyne, palatalization, and r-lessness are—
for both blacks and whites—physical signals of low social
status, and—for whites only—physical signals of 'substandard'
morals."[20] The reason is not far to seek: slaves are not

responsible for their low social status and marked speech,
whereas whites are not only allowed but obligated to educate
out the "infelicities" of their language. Standard English, backwoods
speech, and black vernacular in the novel, all of which
vary in significance, provide good examples of what Meir
Sternberg has called the "Proteus Principle" in discourse
theory: "In different contexts . . . the same form may fulfill
different functions and different forms the same function."[21]
Standard English and vernacular English do not possess value
independent of context; their meaning depends on their structural
function in a series of oppositions. In Huckleberry Finn
we have a schema like this:
     

Virtue:	Authentic Standard (natural aristocracy)		Folk Speech (idealized vernacular culture)
Corruption:	Misappropriated Standard (sham aristocracy)	(↔)	Pretentious Ignorance (social climbers)
			Ornery Speech (debased vernacular culture)

(The arrow between Misappropriated Standard and Pretentious
Ignorance indicates that these two forms shade into each
other.) The contradictions and oppositions between categories
suggest the traditional logic square for modal propositions.
Indeed, we can redefine the categories to fit it precisely
("SE" stands for Standard English):

• SE must be spoken

• SE can be spoken

• SE cannot be spoken

• SE need not be spoken

Each group of speakers can then be described in relation to
the deontic statement "Standard English must be spoken."
Huck and his fellows do not defy the linguistic code; they are
merely incapable of following it, speaking as they do a language
ordered by entirely different rules. Their failure thus
carries no moral opprobrium. Far more severely judged are
those who are able but unwilling to follow the normative code
and those who follow it out of self-interest rather than out of
a sense of obligation. In the world of Huckleberry Finn logical
contraries ("must be" versus "cannot be") can coexist, and
Judge Thatcher and Mary Jane Wilks, bearers of the authoritative
culture, can form common cause with the innocent outcast
Huck.

These schemata help clarify the confrontation of the vernacular
and the genteel in the novel. Neither Twain nor Huck is
mounting a demotic attack on genuine high culture. Instead,
the major conflict is between an idealized folk better than its
real prototype and a debased pseudo-gentility parasitic on its
prototype. The model also explains why Mary Jane can jump
instantaneously from folk speech to standard without inconsistency:
a positive moral component sets these two varieties
of speech together against the three corrupted varieties. Moreover—and
most importantly—the only "characters" in the
novel who simultaneously understand the systems of both
the ideal standard and the ideal vernacular are the author and
his implied reader. As a naive narrator, a folk speaker who is
outside the standard system and the values it symbolizes,
Huck is likely to mistake what Emerson called the "paper currency"
of "rotten diction" for the "good writing and brilliant
discourse" that make words one with things. Although Huck
can see through the "tears and flapdoodle" of the King's oratory,
he stands for the uncritical mass reading audience when
he is impressed by the sentimentality of Emmeline Grangerford's
funerary poems. Only the intelligent, sophisticated
adult reader who brings to a reading of the novel the entire
complex of values belonging to the high culture can evaluate
correctly the inflated and pretentious language of a Grangerford,
a Sherburn, a Tom Sawyer. Only the literary artist Samuel
Clemens, speaking elsewhere in his own voice, could fuse the
standard and the vernacular to form the tertium quid of his
mature colloquial prose style.[22]

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.