4 - Mark Twain's Civil War

Summary

Humor, at its best, forgives and resolves a grievous wrong. It admits it, full measure, receives it, and expresses the immediate experience in humorous language. With verbal dexterity, in some comical voice, it economizes pain's impact. It speaks beautifully in Huck Finn's report of Buck Grangerford's death: “It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain't agoing to tell all that happened - it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn't ever come ashore that night, to see such things. I ain't ever going to get shut of them - lots of times I dream about them.”' Humor doesn't deny, or defend; it transacts, it negotiates. Buck is dead, but there's Jim and the blessed raft, safety, survival. The Civil War section of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ends with Huck's euphoria, the sensation of escape, river and raft sweeping Huck away from the combat zone, ends with Huck's ecstatic rediscovery of Jim, the good food, the great stories. “You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft” (HF: 155). Briefly Huck sails free of the unreconstructed South. Its fight is not his fight. He's not a Grangerford, doesn't see himself in their narrative. His is the new narrative of the new (reconstructed) South, the solution for a still-dumbfounded postbellum Southern writing, very shaky in its postwar fiction, its plots, its speeches.