THE "ABBREVIATED EJACULATION"
IN HUCKLEBERRY FINN

The last chapters of Huckleberry Finn have provided a crux for Twain’s critics at least since Hemingway ordered us to stop reading "where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys"; "the rest," he insisted with a great deal of modern agreement, "is cheating."¹ The reappearance of Tom Sawyer and his romantic foolishness in the "rescue" of Jim once seemed more a sloppily burlesque afterthought than a fitting conclusion to Huck’s courageous and thoughtful identification with the escaping slave. But at a time when commentators still seriously questioned the artfulness of the last ten chapters, Pascal Covici’s Mark Twain’s Humor: The Image of a World put unshakable foundations under earlier intuitive defenses of the book’s ending by incisively demonstrating the logic of the humor behind much of the puzzling extravagance of the novel’s conclusion.² The last chapters not only culminate dozens of the patterns established in Huck’ s journey down river, but the very outrageousness of Tom’s treatment of Jim is clearly, Covici showed, a crucial element in both Twain’s comic and his narrative strategies. The book’s unexpected shift from its realistic middle to the ending’s world of childish fantasy is a central part in a literary hoax by which Twain implicates his audience in the very attitudes that his readers have lampooned throughout the book.

Long before such criticism was popular, Covici isolated Twain’s strategy of surprising his audience with their own sin, or at least their own incurable love of the sensational. The central scene in Twain’s hoax comes when Tom, in what Covici calls an "abbreviated ejaculation," almost blurts out that Jim is no longer a slave, information that would have freed both Huck and the reader from participating in Jim’s needless humiliation in the Phelps’ hut. But Twain’s trap is baited much earlier than Covici allows. The artful effect Twain achieves from our reaction to Tom’s slip is prepared for and greatly enhanced by two earlier mirror scenes carefully constructed to teach us how to read Tom’s later mistake safely. The essence of Twain’s joke is that, even after such careful training, our reading will inevitably fail. The book’s two earlier abbreviated ejaculations teach us also, then, how to gauge the extent of our dogged foolishness.

The basic assumption on which the book’s closing hoax rests is that the reader is smugly assured of his own tough-minded clear-

sightedness. The patterns by which Twain ridicules the romantic mentality are quite apparent. The attitudes that produce Tom’s early "pirate raids" on Sunday School classes are clearly those that allow the King to bilk the camp meeting’s religious romantics with his con-version from pirate-dom. When Tom begins to play pirates with Jim’s freedom, the alert reader cannot miss the significance of such behavior. The Walter Scott, with all its associations to the world of romance, is a dangerous wreck; and surely we have learned this lesson by the time we reach the Phelps’ farm. But it is just this assurance of our own ability to see through such nonsense, Covici establishes, that lets Twain pull his hoax. As readers, we allow ourselves to enjoy Tom’s cruel treatment of Jim only because it is so transparently a part of the romantic world that Twain represents by Tom’s presence early in the book. Firmly in control of the moral situation, we can afford to laugh. We are, Covici shows, so "unthinkingly swept along in a tacit agreement that of course we all condemn Tom’s extravagance . . . we all get the point, there is surely no problem" (p. 175). There is no problem also because we, like Huck, persist in believing that Tom, the very avatar of the respectable, slave-holding society that the book mocks, is serious in his promise to free Jim. Tom’s romanticism may, we comfortably posit, allow him to transcend his respectable past to become the true romantic hero, the hero who, like Huck, will defy society and risk Hell for righteousness’ sake. Such "sentimentering," as Huck would call it, the result finally of trying to "assure ourselves that there is something real behind our romantic daydreams" (p. 177), is abruptly betrayed by Tom’s revelation that Jim is a free man long before the boys begin their cruel and humiliating parody of an escape attempt. Instead of knowing lampooners, we, by enjoying Tom’s escapades at least as much as he does, now find ourselves participants in Tom’s dangerous romanticism.³

The groundwork for Twain’s trap is carefully laid, Covici argues, when Huck first announces to Tom his original plans to free Jim from

the Phelps:

"There’s one more thing—a thing that nobody don’t know but me. And that is, there’s a nigger here that I’m a trying to steal out of slavery—and his name is Jim—old Miss Watson’s Jim."
    He says:
    "What! Why Jim is— He stopped and went to studying. I says:
    "I know what you’ll say. You’ll say it’s a dirty low-down business; but what if it is?—I’m low down; and I’m agoing to

steal him, and I want you to keep mum and not let on. Will you?"
    His eyes lit up and he says:
    "I’ll help you steal him!"
    Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard—and I’m bound to say Tom Sawyer fell, considerable, in my estimation. Only I couldn’t believe it. Tom Sawyer, a nigger stealer!⁴

Both Huck and the reader are being set up here, Covici explains, for the trick Tom and Twain will later work on them:

Like Huck, indeed with Huck, we are incredulous when Tom announces that he will help free Jim. Tom’s abbreviated ejaculation, "What! Why Jim—" puts the readers in Huck’s position. In this particular area, we have no more knowledge than Huck has; we are all taken in by Tom’s hoax. (p. 174)

Though the reader has a book full of reasons to suspect Tom, to ask what it is about Jim that Tom almost lets slip out, we lose all prudence in our desire to make Tom the romantic quester. Twain has slyly, even deviously, given the clue that would free us from Tom’s spells, but, trusting our romanticism, he has embedded the clue where we never stop to look as we hurry to make Tom, like us, the good guy. When Tom later announces Jim’s freedom, we are forced at last to face the persistence of our own romantic foolishness.

Covici’s analysis of the ending of Huckleberry Finn now holds an accepted place in Twain criticism. But both Twain’s care in structuring his hoax and his assured awareness of his readers’ potential for folly reach further than even Covici acknowledges. Twain draws attention to and strongly emphasizes a series of exactly parallel scenes earlier in Huck Finn. Tom’s slip provides the book’s readers with their third chance to play this game; and in the novel’s first two abbreviated ejaculations the reader is well and fairly warned of the hoax that is to come.

In Chapter XI, when Huck is delightedly hearing the sensational details of his own "murder" from Judith Loftus, he unintentionally gives the clear-headed reader the first clue that should allow him to avoid the later hoax. As the wife of the slave hunter explains that Pap was at first a prime suspect, Twain carefully emphasizes the significance that interrupted speeches will hold in the narrative strategy of the book:

"Most everybody thought it at first. He’ll never know how nigh he come to getting lynched. But before night they changed around and judged it was done by a runaway nigger named Jim."
    "Why he—"

193

    I stopped. I reckoned I better keep still. She run on, and never noticed I had put in at all. (p. 49)

This scene, which Twain rewrites as Tom catches himself at his later meeting with Huck, is a clear warning to the reader of the dangers of not heeding the abbreviated ejaculation. Wrapped up in her own story of romantic sensationalism, in her thoughtless running on, the country woman allows herself to miss the most important slip Huck makes in their meeting. Though her shrewd penetration of Huck’s disguise has earned her a place in American folklore, her disastrous lack of attention also ironically costs her and her husband the three-hundred dollar reward offered for Jim, and, in fact, allows her to be manipulated into revealing the details of the search that certainly would have led to the runaways’ discovery. Against this loss, the pride she takes in condescending to Huck’s clumsy attempt at seeming a girl seems foolishly inappropriate. The smug duper is, finally, the duped. And though Judith Loftus has no chance to learn the price of her careless reading of Huck’s abbreviated ejaculation, the reader of Huckleberry Finn clearly does. Huck’s relieved awareness that he has been saved from his carelessness only by his audience’s hurry to indulge her sensationalism is an unmistakable signal to the book’s audience that a character’s inadvertent "putting in" should not go unnoticed.

The book’s second abbreviated ejaculation makes the point even more explicitly. Huck, waiting for nightfall in order to implement his plan to free Jim from the Phelps’ farm, runs into the Duke in town. What follows is a highly comic battle of manipulation and deceit. Knowing full well where Jim is and how he got there, Huck begins the encounter by fabricating an elaborate pose for himself as the foolish naïf, naïf, left capable only of tears by the cruel robbery of his raft and slave. The Duke responds in kind, creating himself as the victim of a "rascal" Huck fully capable of running off with the raft and leaving his friend at the mercy of the drunkard and spendthrift King. Huck begins the second volley by presenting himself as the defenseless orphan who must literally give his last dime to a cruel guardian and then beg for the chance that it will be spent on food, pitifully knowing that even then there is little hope he will share a morsel of it. Amid this performance, the Duke realizes that, all acting aside, the performance of the Royal Nonesuch is at the mercy of Huck:

    He looked kinder bothered, and stood there with his bills fluttering on his arm, thinking, and wrinkling up his forehead. At last he says:

    "I’ll tell you something. We got to be here three days. If you’ll promise you won’t blow, and won’t let the nigger blow, I’ll tell you where to find him."
    So I promised, and he says:
    "A farmer by the name of Silas Ph--" and then he stopped. You see he started to tell me the truth; but when he stopped that way and begun to study and think again, I reckoned he was changing his mind. And so he was. He wouldn’t trust me; he wanted to make sure of having me out of the way the whole three days. So pretty soon he says: "The man that bought him is named Abram Foster—Abram G. Foster—and he lives forty mile back here in the country.
    "All right," I says, "I can walk it in three days. And I’ll start this very afternoon."
    "No you won’t, you’ll start now; and don’t you lose any time about it neither. . . . Just keep a tight tongue in your head and move right along. . . .
    That was the order I wanted, and that was the one I played for. I wanted to be left free to work my plans. (pp. 182-83)

The deception inherent in the abbreviated ejaculation is highlighted here in a way that neither Huck nor the reader can possibly ignore. Since Huck and the audience already know that Jim is at the Phelps’, we watch the structure of the Duke’s near-blunder worked out in sharp detail before us. The first step is the impulsive and unstrategic near-ejaculation of the truth. Phelps’ name comes partially out; the mistake is almost made. The strategic and deceptive reassessment of the situation is emphasized by Huck’s unequivocal evaluation of the Duke’s moves. Having used such strategies himself in his experience with Judith Loftus, Huck is able to mark and comment on the exact moment when the Duke realizes that he needs Huck away for at least three days to bring the Nonesuch off safely: "he stopped; . . . and began to study." But the reader should be learning from experience too. Earlier it was Huck who said "I stopped" as he almost gave away Jim’s presence to the country woman. The parallels will become clear in the book’s last abbreviated ejaculation, as Huck will unheedingly watch this second step after Tom "stopped and went to studying," beginning to realize the advantages in concealing Jim’s freedom. In the final step, the duper starts to form and implement his hoax: the Duke is seen as "he was changing his mind," devising the strategy that is designed to start his victim chasing the wild geese.

The scene also allows Twain to reveal again the rewards for alertness. Since Huck, unlike Judith Loftus, can see through the schemes of the trickster, the Duke’s strategy backfires. Instead of being duped, Huck is in fact comically in control, even as he toys with the Duke

by guessing that it will take exactly three days to walk the forty miles to the imaginary Foster farm. All the hoaxer’s efforts lead only to, as Huck explains, "the order I wanted," one that Huck has all along "played for," and that enables him "to be left free to work [his] plans." When the abbreviated ejaculation is heeded, Huck is allowed liberty to "start in on [his] plan straight off, without fooling around." Later, with a pointed irony on Twain’s part of course, Tom’s hoax will work elaborate delays into Huck’s plans for Jim’s quick freedom.

The abbreviated ejaculations in the book function, then, as signs that always signal the presence of a duper. Correct reading of the sign will render the duper comically ineffective and assure the freedom of both Jim and the intended victim. By Chapter XXXIII, when Twain springs his trap, the reader of Huckleberry Finn has had two clear lessons in how to read such a signal.

These insistent parallels make Twain’s hoax far more artful than Covici grants. And the joke’s comment on the reader’s unfounded self-esteem is far more excoriating. Twain shows us Huck as he saves himself from his own blurted mistake and then has him precisely enumerate both the steps and the context for such deception when the Duke clumsily attempts the technique. Yet when the same narrative event recurs only a chapter after the second example, few of us, bubbled in our own stubborn romanticism and self-importance, are awake enough to prevent Tom and Twain from easily making us fools. Despite two clear patterns to guide us, we run through the book’s third abbreviated ejaculation as quickly and as foolishly as Judith Loftus does the first. The point insisted upon by Twain’s careful manipulation of structure, by his strategic paralleling of abbreviated ejaculations in Huckleberry Finn, is one that was understandably easy for Hemingway, working largely within the narrative assumptions of the realist, to overlook. For Twain, his reader’s potential for not learning experience’s most clearly presented lessons is such a central and yet such a comically unexpected part of human behavior that it is perhaps only expressible by the grotesque or the absurd. Twain’s abrupt shift from the realistic journey down the Mississippi to the almost surrealistic foolishness of Tom’s romanticism is that folly’s objective correlative.

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO

NOTES

   ¹Green Hills of Africa (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), p. 22.
     ²(Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1962). Introductions to Huckleberry Finn by Lionel Trilling (New York: Rhinehart, 1948) and T. S. Eliot (London: Cresset, 1950) provide the most influential defenses of the ending before Covici’s book. Attacks by Bernard De Voto (Mark Twain at Work [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1942], p. 92) and Leo Marx ("Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn," The American Scholar, 22 [1953], 423–440) furnish the standard argument against the conclusion. See also Thomas Arthur Gullason, "The ‘Fatal’ Ending of Huckleberry Finn," American Literature, 29 (1957), 86–91.
    ³James M. Cox’s Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 170–184, also provides an excellent discussion of the way in which Twain’s hoax functions to incriminate the reader.
    ⁴Ed. Henry Nash Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 189. All quotations from Huckleberry Finn are from this edition.