Huck Finn Rides Again: Reverberations of Mark Twain's
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HUCK FINN RIDES AGAIN: REVERBERATIONS OF MARK TWAIN'S ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVELS OF CORMAC MCCARTHY Except where reference is made to the work of others, the work described in this dissertation is my own or was done in collaboration with my advisory committee. This dissertation does not include proprietary or classified information. ________________________________ Leslie Harper Worthington Certificate of Approval: ______________________ ____________________ James Emmett Ryan Bert Hitchcock, Chair Associate Professor Hargis Professor English English ______________________ ____________________ Miriam Marty Clark Joe F. Pitman Associate Professor Dean English Graduate School HUCK FINN RIDES AGAIN: REVERBERATIONS OF MARK TWAIN'S ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVELS OF CORMAC MCCARTHY Leslie Harper Worthington A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama December 17, 2007 HUCK FINN RIDES AGAIN: REVERBERATIONS OF MARK TWAIN'S ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVELS OF CORMAC MCCARTHY Leslie Harper Worthington Permission is granted to Auburn University to make copies of this dissertation at its discretion, upon request of individuals or institutions and at their expense. The author reserves all publication rights. ________________________ Signature of the Author ________________________ Date of Graduation iii Dissertation Abstract HUCK FINN RIDES AGAIN: REVERBERATIONS OF MARK TWAIN'S ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVELS OF CORMAC MCCARTHY Leslie Harper Worthington Doctor of Philosophy, December 17, 2007 (Ed.S., Troy University, 1997) (M.A., Auburn University, 1988) (B.A., Auburn University, 1984) 227 Typed Pages Directed by Bert Hitchcock This dissertation examines the intertextual significance of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the works of a major contemporary American writer: Cormac McCarthy. As many scholars have noted, Twain’s novel helped define the direction of modern American literature and created what Leland S. Person calls The Huck Finn Tradition. In an attempt to clarify Twain’s legacy, this study utilizes, among other methods, Harold Bloom’s theory of tessera, the practice of completion, from The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom believes American writers see their fathers as not having dared enough and attempt, often through the iv language of the taboo, to revise or complete their predecessors. This study looks in detail at six of McCarthy’s novels: Suttree (1979), The Orchard Keeper (1965), Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). In these works, McCarthy transforms what he has absorbed from Twain and ventures beyond what his forefather dared. He particularly escalates Twain's presentation of violence in society and the human threat to the natural environment. Faulkner’s The Reivers is considered as a link in the literary chain between Twain and McCarthy. These echoes in McCarthy are vehicles for enriching our understanding of both McCarthy's and Twain's works: particularly our understanding of character, setting, time period, and reoccurring motifs. Twain's reverberations in McCarthy are persistent and pervasive. However, although they have been noted by many scholars, usually they have not been pursued much beyond brief mention. v Style manual or journal used: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers Computer software used: MS Word vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE. TWAIN IN NEW TERRITORY.........................................................1 CHAPTER TWO. HUCK IN THE WASTE LAND........................................................8 CHAPTER THREE. HUCK IN 100 YEARS................................................................65 CHAPTER FOUR. HUCK IN THE TERRITORY .....................................................109 CHAPTER FIVE. HUCK ON, AND OFF, THE BEST SELLER LIST ......................147 CHAPTER SIX. CONCLUSION – HUCK EVERLASTING .....................................175 WORKS CITED..........................................................................................................183 APPENDIX. THE LITERARY PRESENCE IN THE LITERARY PAST...................203 vii CHAPTER ONE TWAIN IN NEW TERRITORY In a eulogy for his friend, William Dean Howells called Mark Twain “the Lincoln of our literature” (84). In addition to exalting Twain to hero status, Howells’s statement also implies that Twain set American literature free. Twain was indeed a writer who brought about change, and his influence did not end with his death in 1910. This influence, especially on American writers, carried on through the twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first. Shelley Fisher Fishkin says, “Mark Twain indelibly shaped our view of who and what the United States is as a nation and who and what we might become. He helped to define the rhythms of our prose and the contours of our moral map” (Lighting Out 7). She hails Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) as his masterpiece and the chief force of his influence on twentieth-century writers: Twain wanted to do something that hadn’t been tried before.... He wanted to write a book no Englishman could even conceive of at the time... Everything changed on the literary landscape after this book appeared: it made Hemingway, Faulkner, Ellison – twentieth-century American fiction – possible. (Lighting Out 184) Leland S. Person uses the term the Huck Finn Tradition to describe this extraordinary influence (6 1 Nothing testifies to Twain’s significance and the appeal of Huck Finn to later writers, and the consequent change to the American literary landscape which was brought about by this work, more than do the words of these writers themselves. The most often quoted statement is, of course, Ernest Hemingway’s pronouncement that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.... There was nothing before and there has been nothing as good since” (22). Robert Penn Warren called Twain the “founder of our ‘national literature’” (“Mark Twain” 105). H. L. Mencken said he was a “colossus” (“The Man Within” 489) and that Huck Finn “is perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English” (488). William Faulkner also dubbed Twain “the father of American literature” (qtd. in Jelliffe 88). Twain’s impact shows up in the most unlikely of places: in many ways, he has become a pop culture icon. Jimmy Buffet in his autobiography A Pirate Looks at Fifty names Following the Equator and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as two of the “baker’s dozen” of books he would have to take on a desert island (94). And in Buffet’s chapter “A Visit With Mr. Twain,” his parting words, as he begins one of his many adventures, are “we are going to light out into the territory and see what’s left out there” (95). Similarities, parallels, echoes, borrowings, parodies, allusions, persistent patterns, prototypes, recursive phenomena from Twain all are found in the works of a long list of twentieth-century writers. These children of Twain may be said to be remembering, recalling, inheriting, echoing, confronting, extending, engendering, adapting, reshaping, transposing, reincarnating, imitating, and storystealing. They are male and female, black 2 and white. They come from various geographical locations and social backgrounds. And they have created different products from this common source. T. S. Eliot cleverly calls such influence or inspiration an author’s “posthumous history” (An American Literature and the American Language 52). He asserts that Twain is one of the few authors “who have discovered a new way of writing, valid not only for themselves but for others” (54). According to Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn is “not only a cultural treasure but a resource for power” (31), a powerful resource for later writers. These writers are now what Eliot would call Twain’s “living generation” (An American Literature and the American Language 52), later writers who must balance tradition, the weight of Twain’s accomplishments, and their own creativity and originality. Each writer has remembered, resurrected and reshaped what he/she found in Twain in his/her own way. As Eliot posits, when a mature writer borrows, he makes what he borrows into “something better, or at least different” (An American Literature and the American Language 53). Likewise, Julia Kristeva asserts that this borrowing involves not only absorption but transformation (66). The younger writers transform what they take from the older writers into something new. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein believe that the power of influence actually belongs to the younger writer rather than the older. “If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X” (6). They view “Y rather than X as the agent” (6). Influence for the older writer is not an “intentional action,” while for the younger, his/her “observation causes an action” (7). (See Appendix.) In Lighting Out for the Territory, Fishkin provides a long list of American writers who she says “all acknowledge Twain as an important forebear”: Arthur Miller, 3 Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, Herman Wouk, Ben Hecht, Henry Miller, William Saroyan, Elizabeth Spencer, and Tillie