Flowing

Part I

Introduction

The tongue of the river--riverine linguistics--is not a building up, like the erection of a grammatical system, but a licking away, a lingo of erosion.

from "Roilings: The Riverine Linguistic of Arundhati Roy"

Scholars have written brilliantly of the differences between life on the river and life on the shore in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Trilling; Shrubb; Banta; Hart). Others have discussed the patterns of lies and deceptions that interweave the narrative strands of the novel (Krauss; Monteiro; Bassett; Allingham). Some have concentrated on Huck's poetic and ungrammatical language (McKay; Thomas; Clerc), his relationship to parental surrogates (Stein and Lidston; Segal), and his psychological and moral perplexities (Harris; Barchilon and Kovel; Robinson). Still others have noted the thematic influence of the Mississippi on Twain's writing, of its strong role in linking his greatest novel with Life on the Mississippi (Brodwin; Cox; Ganzel; Burde; Nasu; Stoneley; Marx). Yet these insights have never been integrated within a comprehensive theory. Such a theory would have to be general enough to integrate the linguistic, psychological, thematic and stylistic dimensions of Twain's two great Mississippi works. I intend to demonstrate that Julia Kristeva's concept of the semiotic/symbolic psycholinguistic continuum offers just such a unifying framework.

Even casual readings of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi reveal that Mark Twain's Mississippi is often a benign river. To the young Samuel Clemens the river was a romantic and poetic presence. As early as 1948, Lionel Trilling observed that the river provided Huck and Jim with a haven from the social strictures of life on shore. As we shall see, although various scholars have commented on the Mississippi as refuge, only a couple have characterized it as a maternal presence and force providing a site free from the oppressive regulations of life on shore--whether these be the laws of slavery, Christian dogma, or the tyrannical presence of Huck's father (Harris; Barchilon and Kovel). I shall argue that the Mississippi can be an amicable river, a maternal force.

Yet it is also a deceptive river. Its fogs, sandbars, currents, and towheads make it ever unpredictable. Writing in a more linguistically oriented decade,James Cox noted that the opening paragraph of Life on the Mississippi--a "majestic” “current of prose" with its "grandly marshaled parallelisms, and its imposing quantitative crescendo--obscures what seems a grand joke" (71). Twain deceives us by stating with deadpan seriousness that the Mississippi drains Delaware, an impossibility we overlook borne on by that swift and compelling prose current. Obviously Twain learned a good deal about deception from the shape-shifting river. This force of trickery shows up not only in Twain's style, but in his characters. Huck and Jim's deceptions are no less cunning than those of the river and are further complicated by the fraudulent and deceitful antics of the Duke and the Dauphin. But what is the relationship between the sometimes maternal, sometimes deceptive, force of the river, the patriarchal institutions of piloting and of life on shore, and the trickster-like, deceptive antics that shuffle and barter, smuggle and interpenetrate, carnivalize and burlesque between these two realms?

James Cox has divined that "the great river grows out of some force that language cannot name" (74). What I intend to demonstrate is that the Mississippi represents what Kristeva terms "the semiotic chora," that pre-Oedipal, babbling stage prior to symbolization, wherein the consciousness of the infant is dominated by primitive drives and a sense of union with the maternal form. In both of Twain's great Mississippi texts, this pre-Oedipal stratum of language is represented by the Mississippi and by his descriptions of it in what Kristeva calls "poetic" language, language tending towards repetition, rhythm, condensation and displacement. Once the infant acquires language, then symbolization, what Kristeva and Lacan call the Law-of-the-Father, patriarchal law, interposes between the child and the maternal.

For the cub pilot Sam Clemens, the symbolic is represented by the patriarchal culture of piloting--a special language that "puts an oar in" between him and his romantic perceptions of the river. For Huck and Jim the realm of symbolization and of patriarchal law is represented by life on shore--especially by the laws authorizing slavery with a supposed transcendental ground in Christian theology.


The narratives of the texts oscillate to and fro betwixt and between these realms of the semiotic and the symbolic as majestically as the uncontrollable current of the Mississippi cuts its grand horseshoe curves through its alluvial banks, and as deceptively as Huck, Jim, the Duke and the Dauphin erode patriarchal law through trickster-like deceit, parody, mimesis and burlesque. The semiotic qualities of Twain's prose and the pranks of his characters serve a trickster-like function in that liminal space between the semiotic shiftiness of the river and the fixed, institutionalized, patriarchal presence of pilothouse culture and of life on the shore. Huck and Jim's roles are weighted toward the semiotic pole of Kristeva's psycholinguistic continuum, constituting an overflow of the semiotic influence of the river onto the raft and shore. The Duke and the Dauphin barge in on Huck and Jim's maternal union with the river, as false royalty, false fathers, false representatives of the Law of-the-Father, and are tricksters weighted more toward the symbolic pole of Kristeva's psycholinguistic continuum, constituting an invasion of the realm of the symbolic onto the raft and the river. In the end, as with the antics of all tricksters, theirs allow us to see that the Law-of-the-Father, especially the theological sanctions of slavery, are merely social constructions.

I will begin with a review of Julia Kristeva's psycholinguistic theory of the continual struggle between the semiotic and the symbolic realms of language. Special attention will be given to the subversive role of the semiotic. Next, I will chart the struggle between the semiotic (represented by the river) and the symbolic (represented by the culture of piloting) in Life on the Mississippi. Then I will turn to Huckleberry Finn. Again, I will chart the placement of the maternal Mississippi and the patriarchal shore on Kristeva's semiotic/symbolic linguistic continuum, then demonstrate how Huck, Jim, the Duke and the Dauphin interpenetrate these realms as trickster figures. For, just as the misty Mississippi makes the sound of an axe on a distant raft seem split off from the visual perception of its action, the narrative fibers of the text and the actions and words of its main characters are woven of various kinds of disjunction. I will show how these subvert, parody, mime, and burlesque social codes and conventions, causing us, at times, to laugh them out of existence, and how Huck, Jim, the Duke and the Dauphin lie, cross-dress, and deceive their ways in and out of more situations than they get through honestly.

I will further demonstrate how the semantic disjunctions propelling the narrative are due both to the spontaneous Derridean, "always-already" overproduction of meaning, to mere ludic play, and to opposing relations of power, to the fact that opposing discourses logjam and are subversively reinscribed. For, as we shall see, the semiotic, like the trickster, is a radically disruptive and subversive force. Yet it is not inherently a moral force, but an instinctual one. If the antics of Huck, Jim, the Duke and the Dauphin seldom rise above the level of a burlesque it is because the semiotic and the trickster are concerned with freedom from societal restraint rather than morality. If Huck displays moments of moral courage it is because he has risen, if only for a moment, to embody the culture-hero aspect of the trickster, only to lapse again into the instinctual, comfort-and-freedom-questing being that he usually is.

Methodology

Because of her linguistic and "feminine" orientation, Julia Kristeva is generally regarded as a representative of the school of French feminism. In the 1960's she concentrated on Bakhtin, his concept of "the carnivalesque," and the logic of poetic language. She went on, in the 1970's, to formulate her influential theory of "the symbolic" and "the semiotic." Finally, in the 1980's, she turned to the psychoanalysis of "horror," "love" and "melancholy." This thesis is primarily indebted to her work from the 1970's.

In 1974, with the publication of La revolution du language poetique, Kristeva became increasingly concerned with the signifying process in general and with the theory of the subject in relation to language, especially poetic language. In her assessment of the psychological development of infant subjects, she posited the existence of a semiotic chora, a receptacle or space across which physical and psychic impulses or drives flow rhythmically. The subject, as chora, is in a state of fusion with the maternal body, a state prior to temporality, signification, and representation. In Kristeva's terms:

The chora is not yet in a position that
represents something for someone (i.e., it is not a
sign); nor is it a position that represents someone for
another position (i.e., it is not yet a signifier
either): it is, however, generated in order to attain to
this signifying position. Neither model nor copy, the
chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus
specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or
kinetic rhythm. (Revolution 26)

This oceanic state of fusion with the maternal form is crisscrossed with rhythmic pulsations and drives. Though prior to signification, it is "generated to attain to" the "signifying position." It does so gradually, at first through a process of regulation dictated by natural or sociohistorical constraints such as the biological difference between the sexes or family structure. We may therefore posit that social organization, always already symbolic, imprints its constraint in a mediated form which organizes the chora not according to a law (a term we reserve for the symbolic) but through an ordering.

What is this mediation? (Kristeva, Revolution 27)

It is the mother's body that orders and mediates between the ambiguous(simultaneously assimilative and destructive) drives that dominate the chora and the symbolic laws organizing social relations. As these drives become gradually "marked" by constraints mediated by the mother (potty training,gender identification, separation of public and private, dirty and clean, etc.), the body of the infant, especially its orality and anality, become demarcated, becoming the "semiotic," a disorganized, pre-linguistic signifying system.

In Powers of Horror, Kristeva states that

[t]hrough frustrations and prohibitions this authority
shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices,
points, lines, surfaces and hollows." (72)

Thus, along with orality and the regulation of the flow of milk from the mother's breasts, the regulation of the flow of excrement through the anal drive plays a role in this "marking out" of the body under the pre-linguistic authority of the mother (Revolution 27). In this way the semiotic, according to Kristeva, "is articulated by flow and marks" (Revolution 40). This semiotic level, this prelinguistic flux of maternally demarcated movements, gestures, sounds and rhythms is a substratum of material that remains active beneath mature linguistic performance.

As the child matures and separates out from maternal unity, it also begins to acquire language. It begins to gain linguistic competence, competence in the realm of symbols, in what Lacan would call the Law-of-the-Father. But in order to engage in language the child must learn syntax, logic, and fixed signification. In other words, the rhythmic, meaningless flow of the semiotic must be chopped up, articulated into stable terms that have meanings. Like Professor Higgins tutoring Eliza Doolittle, the symbolic molds the relatively unorganized material of the semiotic into mature language. In entering the symbolic, the semiotic thus becomes repressed. However, the symbolic is never present without the semiotic, the semiotic surviving in mature linguistic performance as pulsional pressure--as tone, rhythm, bodily and material qualities--and also as contradiction, meaninglessness, disruption, silence and absence.

In order for societies to exist, they must maintain terms with stable meanings. But the semiotic is fluid and plural, a pleasurable and creative surplus or excess over precise denotation, taking delight in subverting the seeming stability of fixed significations. In Kristeva's view, the semiotic undermines the symbolic order most evidently in French Symbolist and other avant garde literature wherein secure meanings and received social meanings are pluralized (Revolution 211-33). Poets who tap into the semiotic enter the Body-of-the-Mother and resist the Law-of-the-Father. The result is a return to the linguistic play that is always already at work within the semiotic substratum of the symbolic, a return to language's full ludic possibilities. In this manner, the semiotic undermines the ingrained speech habits, freeing the subject not only from linguistic, but also psychic and social networks. Thus poetic revolution, the disruption of authoritarian discourse, is closely linked to radical social change, to political revolution (Lechte 149). Kristeva, then, cannot be called a feminist, if that means the creation of a new feminist order of society, for all societal order is founded on the Law-of-the-Father.

Kristeva analyzes texts in terms of the interplay between the semiotic and the symbolic, for both always exist in texts:

Because the subject is always both semiotic and
symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be
either "exclusively" semiotic or "exclusively" symbolic,
and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to
both. (Revolution 24)

Every text, then, is made up of two types of threads. As Leon S. Roudiez remarks in his introduction to Revolution in Poetic Language:

Those that are spun by drives and are woven within the
semiotic disposition make up what Kristeva has defined
as a genotext, they are actualized in poetic language.
Those that issue from societal, cultural, syntactical,
and other grammatical constraints constitute the
phenotext, they insure communication. Seldom,
however, does one encounter the one without the other.
(5) All language thus contains within it a residue of
the semiotic, which can be detected in poetic language,
in the genotext, recognized by those same elements that
characterize the subconscious: repetition (rhythm)
condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy)
(Lechte 142).

It is these elements that I shall look for in my analysis of Twain's texts--but not only these. For my concern is the balance between the semiotic and the symbolic, and how Twain achieved this artistically.

Edgar J. Burde's "Mark Twain: The Writer as Pilot," is important to this study for its insight into the relationship between writing and piloting. In fact, in Burde's analysis, Twain's account of master pilot Horace Bixby brilliantly running the Hat Island crossing at night, to the admiration of a crowd of awestruck pilots, is a psychological projection created to overcome his recurrent nightmare of sinking a steamboat off Hat Island or Selma Bluffs (879-81). Furthermore, argues Burde, it is more than that--for the science of piloting in his view is nothing but Twain's vast metaphor for the art of writing. Both piloting and writing, he reminds us, rely upon memory and intuition in order to know the "shape of the river," or of the story. Another critic, Sherwood Cummings, remarks:

That the "science of piloting" chapters of "Old Times
on the Mississippi" are in effect a statement of
creative theory seems to me abundantly apparent. Not
only is the river referred to again and again as a
book, but the chapter "A Pilot's Needs" might as well
be titled "A Novelist's Needs," for in it he ruminates
on the marvel of memory, on the operation of the
unconscious mind, on the temptation of slipping
from one memory to another irresponsibly through
association, and on the need for a proportioning
judgment. (216)

Burde also observes that Twain's admiration of Bixby is threatened by a countervailing and deep psychological eddy--for Bixby eventually comes to represent the Pilots' Benevolent Association--an institution towards which Twain has ambivalent feelings. Although Twain describes it as "the compactest, the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men," (128) which exercised "absolute power" (136), Burde argues that Twain's subconscious attitude towards the Association is not as positive, for the institution has diluted Twain's beloved science of piloting. Whereas master pilots such as Bixby formerly knew "the shape of the river" intuitively, the navigational methods of the Association pilots, of which even Bixby became a member, relied upon written reports deposited by other members in the appropriate wharf box. Instead of looking to his memory and intuition, the Pilots' Benevolent Association asked the pilot to look to navigational memos.

As Burde points out, the content of the written navigational reports shared by members of the Pilots' Association matches the information Clemens entered in the notebook he kept as a cub pilot learning the Mississippi--a notebook, the greenhorn pilot informs us, "that fairly bristled with the names of towns, 'points,' bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.; but the information was to be found only in the note-book--none of it was in my head" (77). This marking, or demarcation, of the river--as we shall argue below--represents an excess of the symbolic. It is not the perfect balance between the semiotic and the symbolic achieved when a master pilot knows the shape of the river intuitively. Thus the Pilots' Benevolent Association represents an excess of the symbolic order, and a forgetting of the power of the individual pilot and his memory. Burde then goes on to argue that this demise of the sovereignty of the individual pilot and his intuitive memory serves Twain as an unconscious metaphor for the loss of his writer's memory--an affliction which is particularly evident in the last two chapters of "Old Times on the Mississippi," wherein the prose degenerates into tables of racing statistics, and which dominates the disjointed Part Two of Life on the Mississippi. It is fitting, according to Burde, that in Part Two Twain identifies with the passengers instead of the master pilot Bixby. He even assumes a passenger's voice--as he has lost his writer's (pilot's) memory and voice (885).

There is something else at work here. If Twain's mastery of the current of the Mississippi is only possible through the intrusion of the symbolic Law-of-the-Father into the maternally oriented drives of the semiotic chora--the intrusion of language, of the book of the river, into what Twain calls the poetry of the river--it imposes an Oedipal scenario. The force of this image is strengthened when Twain informs us that master pilot I.S. (which surely stands for Isiah Sellers) has been barred from the Association, and thus from the river--the mother. It is Oedipal because Twain identifies Sellers as the man from whom he presumably stole his nom de plume, his identity. It is thus as if Twain has been barred from the river.

Of course, paternal intrusion presupposes maternal fusion. Yet, though various Twain scholars have written on maternal figures in Huckleberry Finn (Barchilon and Kovel; Stein and Lidston), none have claimed to have located one in Life on the Mississippi. Nevertheless, the work of one Twain scholar implies a maternal presence. We must remember that one of the major forms of the semiotic is repetition, and in Mark Twain's Escape from Time, Susan K. Harris, while coding the Mississippi as neither maternal nor semiotic, does recognize that images of water and of women are repeated with some insistence in many of Twain's works. Basing her study on Gaston Bachelard's concept of "preferred images," Harris finds that Twain preferred images of water, space, childhood and women "to escape the psychological loneliness his emotional response to moral issues inspired"(3). Such images are "generally embedded in the most lyrical passages in any given work" (3), passages that Kristeva would deem "poetic" or "semiotic." These, she feels, serve both Twain and his characters as agents of psychological escape. Water, in its shared role with women as preferred image, is implicitly homologized with them. These preferred images of tranquillity and repose are necessary for Twain's characters because, in Harris's view, they become alienated from their societies by their moral stances. They are at odds with a prevailing belief or spirit of the times.

Furthermore, if we remember Kristeva's point that the semiotic is also evidenced by ungrammatical forms, we should not be surprised to find them in passages containing Twain's preferred images. In fact, Harris notes the "grammatical detemporalization" that occurs in passages that reiterate the image of water, women (or space):

Twain not only makes thematic associations between
escape from concrete time and moments on water and in
space, he also makes rhetorical associations,
manipulating tenses so that grammatical distinctions
between past, present, and future are obliterated. (7)

In chapter five, "Water and Space: The Imagery of Release," Harris documents Twain's use of these two elements. The water images he uses between 1866 and 1886 serve both "to illustrate his sense of alienation from the community and provide images of psychological transcendence that allow him to escape the loneliness that alienation engenders" (74). In this chapter Harris establishes that long before (and after) Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn, the shore symbolized society, and water--the sea or the river--signified alienation, freedom from society's strictures and a sense of timelessness.

In summary, scholars have already pointed the way towards positing a relationship between Twain's Mississippi, poetic writing and escape to a maternal, watery and timeless realm through repeated images and grammatical detemporalization. Our task is to show how Twain's description of learning to read the book of the river corresponds to Kristeva's stages of linguistic development. In doing so we will see how the Mississippi becomes a figure for maternal fusion in the semiotic chora, and of the untamed nature of the semiotic drives. We will also see how piloting, and especially the Pilots' Benevolent Association and other governmentalized forms of discourse concerned with the Mississippi become figures for The-Law-of-the-Father and the symbolic order. Finally, we will see how the intuitive empiricism of knowing the shape of the river represents a balance between these two poles of language.

Life on the Mississippi

Life on the Mississippi is not simply the account of a young man learning to "read" the river and of an older man's nostalgic return to that river in order to write of it. For beneath this theme is another: that of an eternal contest between the repressive activities of the symbolic and the incontestable force of the semiotic. In this battle the symbolic is represented by naming, quantification, hydrolic control, monopoly, the patriarchal, the legal, the governmental, the linearity of architecture and of the city -- and the static. The semiotic is signified by the shifting, the unnamable, the poetic, the untamable flow of the river, the eddy, quicksand, the outlaw, profanity, the mobile, the maternal, the diverse, the unquantifiable. The narrative proceeds between these two poles, and every time the river washes away an ossified symbolic form, the reader, and, we suspect, the author, experience delight. But the text is not all ludic play. The text also demonstrates how drives influence and are influenced by social, political and economic forces. It demonstrates that the semiotic is not merely poetic, but political, contesting not with a new, a purer ideology (though it, of course plays a role in creating these), but with the power to undermine and reconstruct all ideology.

Art, in Julia Kristeva's phrase, is the "semiotization of the symbolic" (79). The musical, rhythmic, repetitive and condensed qualities of semiotic, poetic language provide expenditures wherein the primitive drives of the chora are given expression. This flow of the semiotic both builds up and erodes the symbolic order, undermining its very foundation, rendering it unstable, reconstituting it into new symbolic forms, only to erode it again. The symbolic order, all the institutions of society founded on stable symbolic representations, fight to contain and repress the force of the semiotic. Literature is a site where the struggle of the symbolic to master the semiotic often fails, sometimes gloriously.

A close reading of Life on the Mississippi reveals Twain's fascination with uncontainable force. The Mississippi, of course, is the prominent figure of this in Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. But besides sharing the Mississippi, the two works also share a chapter in which forces even mightier than the Mississippi are boasted of. Twain includes this chapter from Huckleberry Finn as chapter three of Life on the Mississippi "by way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners" (51). Whatever else it may be, we must remember that, first and foremost, keelboat talk is talk. It is a special type of language, but like all language it exhibits a mastery of the symbolic realm--the Law-of-the-Father. But the metaphors Twain's keelboat men voice, when they are boasting of their strength, show that the Mississippi is not the only metaphor onto which Twain projects uncontrollable force. Such force is found in men too, or, as it proves, at least in their language. One keelboat man boasts that he is "sired by a hurricane," and "dam'd by an earthquake" (53). His rival claims to "use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales," to fan himself "with an ecquinoctal storm," and to put his hand "on the face of the sun" (54). In the end, of course, this is nothing but talk. Yet, it is talk that betrays a fascination with hyperbolic size, energy and power. In fact, a similar exchange once took place between Mark Twain and some rivermen sitting around and swapping stories about the Mississippi and how its banks had risen at flowtide. Each man was trying to outdo the others. Jake Anders said he had seen it fifty miles wide at Natchez. Billy Sharp said some tall pines on top of a hill on his property bore the highwater marks on their topmost boughs. Mark Twain listened patiently to each man's boast, then cleared his throat. "Gentlemen, you don't know what a wide river is. I've seen this river so wide that it had only one bank. (Ayres 151)

The passage presents three of Twain's central themes: hyperbolic size and power, how these are marked, and the fact that these demarcations are fictional.

The most memorable portions of Life on the Mississippi unfold the story of a cub pilot learning to master a mighty current that otherwise carries him all but helplessly along. I intend to demonstrate that this process of mastery is cannily akin to the mastery of another current, a current that in its infancy is fluid, uncontrollable, unnavigable, dominated by primitive drives, and only gradually yields to conscious control and mastery--that current of sound and meaning we call language. Just as the river is vivified by an uncontainable current, language is impelled by the semiotic, and especially its relation to the unconstrainable oral and anal drives. Kristeva, in fact, might argue that the entire narrative is implied in the word "Mississippi." In doing so she would not be invoking the Winnebago tale in which the Mississippi is an unruly spirit road, riddled with eddies, which their scatological trickster figure Wakdjunkaga must be enlisted to make navigable. She would be employing her theory that links "m" to primitive orality and mother and "p" to primitive anality, rejection, and papa (Lechte 143).

Beginning with the opening paragraph of Life on the Mississippi, and continuing sporadically throughout the narrative, the Mississippi is described as an uncontrollable force. Its immense fluid body straightens, shortens, and stretches itself out, cutting through necks of land, eroding one farm and depositing its soil on the opposite bank a few miles downstream, violating state boundary lines, inundating entire towns and counties whose economies depend upon it, forever shifting about, stalking ship's hulls with its snags and sandbars, ceaselessly meandering in its great horseshoe curves. And it is not only an uncontrollable force--it is, for the green cub pilot, unnamed.

Because the semiotic is characterized by rejection, especially the rejective power of the anal-aggressive drive, it is important that three or four thousand miles of villainous, uncooperative current are defined in terms of what they are not. They are not, for the young cub pilot, marked. They lack that which would bring them from the semiotic into the symbolic order--demarcation.

If the aspiring young riverman demarcates the unmarked river, it is only romantically, poetically. Twain admits that in learning every feature bordering the Mississippi as well as he "knew the alphabet" he had lost something valuable too. He writes:

I had lost something which could never be restored to
me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the
poetry had gone out of the majestic
river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful
sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to
me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood;
in the middle distance the red hue brightened into
gold, through which a solitary log came floating,
black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting
mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the
surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that
were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush
was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with
graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so
delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely
wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this
forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled
trail that shone like silver; and high above the
forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single
leafy bough like a flame in the unobstructed
splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were
graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft
distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the
dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it,
every passing moment, with new marvels of
coloring. (95)

As Leo Marx has observed (132), this poetic passage is pictorial. Twain uses painter's terms: "ruddy flush," "a red hue brightened into gold," "many-tinted as opal," "soft distances," "dissolving lights," terms of the prelinguistic, of the semiotic. The river is marked, but the markings are more in Kristeva's sense of the gradual "marking" of the oral and anal drives and the flow of excrement and milk as these play a role in the "marking out" of the body. Such "marking out" is prelinguistic, under the semiotic authority of the mother. Similarly, Twain's description is "prelinguistic" in that the features of the river do not receive names, as they will when he becomes a pilot. There is only a "broad expanse" of the river, a "shore" "densely wooded," and the interplay of light.

Speakng of the authority of the mother, Lechte quotes Kristeva as saying that "[t]hrough frustrations and prohibitions this authority shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows" (163). In the same way, the young Sam Clemens (he has not yet become Mark Twain), having "marked" the features of the Mississippi prelinguistically, gradually learns to keep a notebook bristling with names, "the names of 'points,' bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc." (77). As the prelinguistically marked features of the river gradually give way to names, the young Sam Clemens establishes "a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cottonwood and obscure woodpile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles" (81).

After several years of apprenticeship the young cub pilot is able to write this:

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful
book--a book that was a dead language to the
uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me
without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets
as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.
And it was not a book to be read once and thrown
aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was
never a page that was void of interest never one that
you could leave unread without loss, never one that
you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher
enjoyment in some other thing. There was never so
wonderful a book written by man; never one whose
interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so
sparklingly renewed with every re-perusal.
The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a
peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the
rare occasion when he did not overlook it altogether);
but to the pilot that was an italicized passage;
indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the
largest capitals, with a string of shouting
exclamation points at the end of it; for it meant that
a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the
life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated.
It is the faintest and simplest expression the water
ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot's eye. In
truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw
nothing but all manner of prett pictures in it,
painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds,
whereas, to the trained eye these were not pictures at
all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading
matter. (94-95)

We must remember that the semiotic, through condensation, assumes the form of metaphor, and this passage is remarkable for its extended metaphor showing that the river has been thoroughly brought from the visual into the linguistic order. It has not only been named, it has become "a wonderful book." Moreover, the ability to read that book is the only thing that saves one from the deadly force of the river, just as the symbolic's repression of the drives is the only thing that saves "the subject" from their potentially destructive force.

The passage (quoted above) in which Twain laments losing the poetry of the river is followed by one in which all the pictorial descriptors, which had signified only visual interreflections of surface beauty in the poetic passage, are now seen through the eyes of the river-literate pilot. Suddenly these descriptors cease bobbing about on the surface, as what theorists of Lacan and Kristeva's milieu would dub "floating signifiers," and become anchored to seemingly fixed signifieds. Suddenly these discriptors, which had floated, horizontally, lyrically, as if adrift in a kind of Saussurean-Lacanian-Derridean semantic soup, free of distinct signifieds, now stand out vertically, as signs, markers of various distinct meanings. Marx draws our attention to the phallic nature of these descriptors: "logs," "bluff reefs," and menacing "snags" (141 n).

This sun means that we are going to have wind tomorrow;
that floating log means that the river is rising,
small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water
refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill
somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it
keeps on stretching out like that; those
tumbling '"boils" show a dissolving bar and a changing
channel there; the lines and circles in the slick
water over yonder are a warning that that
troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that
silver streak in the shadow of the forest is
the "break" from a new snag, and he has located
himself in the very best place he
could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall
dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going
to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get
through this blind place at night without the friendly
old landmark? (95-96)

Yet, how well anchored are these signifiers? We learn from this passage that anything Twain names a "mark"--the "slanting mark" referring to the bluff reef or the "landmark" of the tall dead tree--is ephemeral. The tree with a single living branch--the signifier which Marx sees as the major "phallic" signifier in this passage--is a slippery, soon-to-be-floating signifier. It is not going to last long.

Even when every attempt to name, mark, control and repress the semiotic has been made, just when the current has been thoroughly "mastered," it breaches, overflows, and inundates that mastery. Yet, the efforts of the symbolic to contain--to remark--the semiotic are endless. The symbolic is not content with merely naming. It must seek total suppression of the current of the semiotic. Thus the Mississippi current becomes not only named, but geographically charted, hydrologically engineered, legally regulated, nationally administered, each of these actions producing a body of discourse that would attempt to confine the semiotic within the structures of patriarchal law--the Law-of-the-Father. It is logical, then, that the language of the river is learned from father figures. As early as chapter five Twain openly adores the huge, muscular, whiskered and tattooed mate who "in the matter of profanity" "was sublime." After quoting a lengthy passage of his colorful speech, Twain states, "I wished I could talk like that" (70). Moreover, Twain only learns to give names to objects on the river, to book these perceived differences into the symbolic order, under the authority of the father-figure and master pilot Horace Bixby.

The Law-of-the-Father, as it interposes itself between the subject and the mother, assumes increasingly confining forms. Yet, these must be breached by a force proportionate to that of the repression. Just as the symbolic would attempt to monopolize how the river is represented, replacing an impressionistic pictorial sensorium with discrete linguistic markings, the pilots would seek to reign as kings upon the river. United States law forbidding pilots to listen to commands or suggestions while navigating affirms that the pilot's knowledge and word were absolute. This monopoly on authority that the pilots enjoyed was paralleled by their economic monopoly. In order to garner better wages the best pilots formed an association. In order to sharpen their competitive edge over non-association pilots, they created a system of sharing navigation information among association members. Twain informs us that this navigational information was accessed through U.S. government-owned post boxes at landings along the river which contained detailed, updated quantified accounts of crossings, soundings, and marks. In time underwriters would insure only association-piloted boats, and the non-association pilots were forced to join. And it is here, again, that Twain's resentment of the repressive power of the symbolic order resurfaces.

After all, the Association changed piloting from an individual and intuitive art to a collective reliance on written memos. As Burde argues, all this is a metaphor for Twain's inspiration drying up. It does so as master pilot Horace Bixby disappears from the narrative and master pilot Isiah Sellers is forced off the river. This marks the end of "Old Times on the Mississippi" and the beginning of part two of Life on the Mississippi. It also marks the point at which Twain had lost the intuitive art of writing and began to rely on the written memos of previous navigators of the river.

The interplay between the realms of the semiotic and the symbolic may take place in poetry or prose, but also in painting, sculpture and architecture. The cover of the 1986, Penguin edition of Life on the Mississippi displays a detail from a lithograph, "Birds' Eye View of New-Orleans Drawn from Nature on Stone" (1851), by J. Bachman. It shows a row of steamboats hugging a wharf fringing the city. The neatly ordered, intersecting lines of the city stand out in sharp contrast against the fluid bend of the river. The painting suits the central themes of this thesis, for the symbolic consists in organizing, marking, and structuring the otherwise chaotic semiotic pulsations. Twain displays a sculptural sensitivity to the play of the semiotic and the symbolic throughout Life on the Mississippi, by contrasting the unmarked curvilinear and explosive fluidity of the flooding Mississippi with the marked, static perpendicularity, the ness of structures such as levees, towns, houses, pilot houses, quantification, and even names. The contrast involves the juxtaposition of a "square" element--metaphor for the symbolic--with a fluid, explosive, or erosive one--metaphor for the semiotic. In such juxtapositions the explosive element destroys the static one with a delight akin to that of a two-year-old knocking down a structure made of building blocks.

Perpendicularity is constantly showing up in Life on the Mississippi, whether in the structure of a pilot house, a town or a single dwelling. John E. Hart, in "Heroes and Houses: The Progress of Huck Finn," provides some insight into the meaning of the house motif. He observes that in Twain's other great Mississippi volume, Huckleberry Finn, houses stand for civilization and fixity (39-40). Of course Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn share not only the Mississippi, but also similar descriptions of a house. In Life on the Mississippi, chapter 38, entitled "The House Beautiful," describes a dwelling which shares many similarities with the Grangerford's home in chapter 17 of Huckleberry Finn. Just as the "civilization" of the Grangerford house is disrupted by the explosive Grangerfield-Shepherdson feud, Twain's description of the "House Beautiful" is capped with an implied threat--an image of anal repression waiting to explode: "not a bathroom in the house; and no visitor likely to come along who has ever seen one" (278). This juxtaposition of images suggests that domestic structures are like a pair of wooden blocks Twain has added to his narrative structure, designed and set in place only in order to be swept away by unfettered forces.

Another "brick" is the structure of part two of Life on the Mississippi. Here Twain's creative juices have run dry, and he resorts to an episodic narrative structure. In contrast to the fluid structure of "Old Times on the Mississippi," in which the narrative flow floods over from one chapter into the next, the episodic chapters of part two are discrete and autonomous. In some of these, as Dewy Ganzel has thoroughly documented, Twain literally imports text from previous Mississippi travelers. Chapter 29, in its title, perhaps displays Twain's feeling towards such material--"A Few Specimen Bricks." The materials seem to be mortared together with no regard for any artistic merit, as if a mason were hurriedly erecting a wall to keep out an impending flood. But just as the incognito Twain travels under in Part Two is "exploded" in a chapter entitled "My Incognito is Exploded," and just as various pilots and pilot houses are blown away by boiler explosions, the structure of this episodic narrative is inundated by two recurrent motifs: 1) the horseshoe pattern of the Mississippi which is always changing course and 2) flooding. Yorimasa Nasu has argued that the plot structures of much of Twain's greatest fiction conform to an A-B-A logic imitating the great horseshoe swerves of the Mississippi. In fact, he cites Twain himself, who in his Autobiography stated that
narrative should flow as flows the brook down through
the hills and the leafy woodlands, its course changed
by every bowlder it comes across and by every grass-
clad gravelly spur that projects into its path; its
surface broken, but its course not stayed by rocks and
gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that
never goes straight for a minute, but goes, and goes
briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes
fetching a horseshoe three-quarters of a mile around,
and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of
the path it traversed an hour before; but always
going, and always following at last one law, always
royal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no
law. (237)

Thus, argues Nasu, Huckleberry Finn traces the horseshoe pattern of A (Tom's heroic world), B (Huck's anti-heroic world), A (Tom's frivolousness and Huck's awakening).

How does Life on the Mississippi adhere to this horseshoe pattern? Nasu does not concern himself with this, but an inspection of the work will reveal that it does so by its recurrent return to the motif of flooding, and to efforts to control it. In the following passage, the repressive force of the Law-of-the-Father has assumed almost cosmically cartoonish proportions--it becomes the United States River Commission:

Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night,
with the exception that now there were beacons to mark
the crossings, also a lot of other lights on the Point
and along its shore; these latter glinting from the
fleet of the United States River Commission,
and from a village which the officials have built on
the land for offices and for the employees of the
service. The military engineers of the Commission
have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the
Mississippi over again,--a job transcended in size
only by the original job of creating it. They are
building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the
current; and dikes to confine it to narrower bounds;
and other dikes to make it stay there; and for
unnumbered miles along the Mississippi they are felling
the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the
purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark
with the slant of a house-roof, and balloting it with
stones; and in many places they have protected the
wasting shores with rows of piles. One
who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver--not
aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River
Commissions, with the mines of the world at their
back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb or
confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there,
and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has
sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction
which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh
at. But a discreet man will not put these things into
spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not
their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be
known of their abstruse science; and so, since they
conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river
and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific
man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it.
Captain Ads, with his jetties, has done a work at the
mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly
impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to
prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one
would pipe out and say the Commission might as well
bully the comets in their courses and undertake to
make them behave, as to try to bully the Mississippi
into right and reasonable conduct (205).

Here Twain, who in "Old Times on the Mississippi" was so enamored of the regulatory power of the symbolic, in this passage, sides with the river, and in much of the narrative demonstrates how the river, again and again, transgresses the bounds that would seek to constrain it. The power of the United States River Commission is breached here not only by the river but by the poetic, semiotic force of the passage, with its parallel clauses, its other repetitions and the flood of its narrative stream, suggesting that such regulatory measures are but flotsam on a swiftly rising current. Thus the untamable nature of the Mississippi and the semiotic power of Twain's prose enter into a kind of ongoing confrontation and erosion of the symbolic order.

In other passages, also, Twain takes delight in the Mississippi floods. He writes that as early as 1682 the French explorer La Salle had drifted down the river and attempted to take formal possession of it by erecting a sign (another square marker) bearing the inscription:

LOUIS EL GRAND, ROY DE FRANCE
ET DE KNAVERY, REGINA;
EL NEUVIEME AVRIL, 1682.

But Twain quickly adds, on the same page, that even as he wrote, New Orleans intended to celebrate the bicentennial anniversary of this event, but had to divert all her energies and monies elsewhere. For "the flood was upon the land then, making havoc and devastation everywhere" (202). Similarly, chapter 30 opens with a paragraph describing the recurrent flooding of the Mississippi below Memphis, a flooding that submerges the "signs," and woodyards, remaining navigable only through the agency of government beacon lights (225).

In chapter 28, "Uncle Mumford Unloads," Twain mirrors this physical flooding with a kind of linguistic flooding. The term "unloads," in addition to its scatological suggestiveness (especially in relation to Twain's use of the word "bricks"), refers to Uncle Mumford's compulsion, in his diatribe dedicated to the vanity of constraining the unconstrainable Mississippi, to punctuating his run-on clauses with explosions of profanity. In one of these outbursts Twain's editor has replaced the author's "damn" with the less indelicate "perdition" (207 n). In another the original "hell" has succumbed to "blazes" (206 n). Furthermore, Uncle Mumford's flood of wrath, culminating in his censored "damn," forms the middle section of a three-part chapter bearing his name, dammed in on either shore by passages in which Twain describes the folly of the United States River Commission in attempting to dam in the Mississippi. Thus this chapter, in its structure, masterfully replicates the theme of the entire narrative, the force of the semiotic assuming an irrepressibly profane avuncular persona, dammed in by mere membranes ready to burst at any moment. After all, scholars have restored all these deletions, even if they have relegated them to footnotes. Evidently, as Guy A. Cardwell documents, these are not the only suppressed passages in Life on the Mississippi. Other colorful phrases, and even entire episodes, were omitted.

This struggle between the semiotic and the symbolic recurs in almost every chapter of Life on the Mississippi. In chapter 18 Twain describes how the United States government erected beacons at the head and foot of every crossing. Twain concedes that it renders navigation of the river safer and faster, but he laments that this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent.

It and some other things together, have knocked all
the romance out of it. For instance, the peril from
snags is not now what is once was. The government's
snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these matter-
of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have
rooted out all the old clusters which made many
localities so formidable; and they allow no new ones
to collect. Formerly, if your boat got away from you,
on a black night, and broke for the woods, it was an
anxious time with you; so was it also, when you were
groping your way through solidified darkness in a
narrow channel but all that is changed now.--you flash
out your electric light, transform night into day in
the twinkling of an eye, and your perils and anxieties
are at an end. Horace Bixby and George Ritchie have
charted the crossings and laid out the courses by
compass; they have invented a lamp to go with the
chart, and have patented the whole. With these helps,
one may run in the fog now, with considerable
security, and with a confidence unknown in the old
days. (204)

For Kristeva--even though the primitive drives in the semiotic constitute the basis of a transgression against the social and the symbolic--corporeal, bodily drives appear in an already social space (Revolution 27). It is not, then, that the drives are something mysteriously emergent from "inside" individuals. Instead, they are linked to a social context that is there before an individual subject is formed by it. Thus the drives are both "inside" the subject and imposed, socially from "outside"--and thus are, to some degree, socially constructed.

The socio-economic force, the social construct, that Twain observes influencing the untamed fluidity of the Mississippi, is simply the force of profit. The punch line to Twain's chapter on the misguided efforts of the United States River Commission to tame the untamable and guide the unguidable is this conclusion:

When a river in good condition can enable one to save
$162,000 and a whole summer's time, on a single cargo,
the wisdom of taking measures to keep the river in
good condition is made plain to even the uncommcercial
mind. (210)

That "external" economic activities can influence the "internal" flow of the river is the subject of chapter 17, "Cut-Offs and Stephen." Twain notes that the upper Mississippi, from Cairo to St. Louis flows through rocky country and is thus relatively straight. The lower river is another matter:

The water cuts the alluvial banks of the "lower" river
into deep horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in
some places if you were to get ashore at one extremity
of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or
three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest
a couple of hours while your steamer was coming
around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an
hour, to take you aboard again. When the river is
rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back
in the country, and therefore of inferior value, has
only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across
the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the
water into it and in a wonderfully short time a
miracle has happened: to wit, the whole Mississippi
has taken possession of that little ditch, and placed
a countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling its
value), and that other party's formerly valuable
plantation finds itself away out yonder on a big
island; the the old water course around it will soon
shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles of
it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former
worth. (145)

Once the width of such a ditch has reached 15 feet, Twain declares that there is no power on earth that can stop it. Thus the untamable drive of the current has been molded by "external," "social" and economic forces. It is by virtue of such economics that backwoods plantations grow into landings, landings into villages, villages into towns and towns into cities.

But if readers of Life on the Mississippi are offered many instances of the river's ability to build up the flow of economic activity that results in the growth of a backwoods plantation into a city, they are more often reminded of the river's ungovernable nature. Twain concludes chapter 23 with the observation that St. Genevieve, once a river town, had been cut off and made into a country town when the eccentric river built up a huge tow-head directly in front of it.

The crowning episode of the return of the repressed, however, is found in chapters 31 and 32. Here we find Twain steaming upriver towards Napoleon, Arkansas. He has an errand there. But we do not learn the nature of that errand until he involves the reader in a gothic tale of murder which takes us all the way to Germany. We have completely forgotten about the river when, at the end of the story Twain informs his fellow passengers that in Napoleon he is to recover a treasure which has been hidden there. Its location is precisely denoted: "Brick livery stable, stone foundation, middle of town, corner of Orleans and Market. Corner toward Court-house. Third stone, fourth row" (242). There, "in the north wall of the foundation, fourth row from the top, and third stone from the west," the treasure was buried (242). The stifling squareness of the image should alert us to what comes next. Of course the captain can't put him ashore there! We soon learn that the whole town, years ago, was inundated by the Arkansas River and swept into the Mississippi. The flood motif returns through an unexpected horseshoe turn of the plot. Thus we can agree with Stanley Brodkin that "Life on the Mississippi may meander but, like the Mississippi, meanders with significant purpose" (199).

Town that was county-seat of a great and important
county; town with a big United States marine hospital;
town of innumerable fights--an inquest every day; town
where I had used to know the prettiest girl, and the
most accomplished in the whole Mississippi Valley;
town where we were handed the first printed news of the
"Pennsylvania's" mournful disaster a quarter of a
century ago; a town no more--swallowed up, vanished,
gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a fragment
of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney! (247)

The contrast of architectural forms against a backdrop of fluid river power is important not only because architecture is static, but because it is backward looking and associated, in Twain's mind, with a Southern romanticism strongly influenced by the novels of Sir Walter Scott. As Stoneley points out (51), Twain's first assault on the South's imported romantic mode occurs in chapter 40, entitled "Castles and Culture." Therein he blames Scott for the Middle-Ages-inspired architecture of the Baton Rouge capitol building. Twain's most prolonged offensive against Scott's "enchantments," however, appears in chapter 46, where he holds the Scottish author responsible for the degeneration of Mardi Gras, slavery, the Civil War, Southern sentimentality, chivalry and flowery eloquence (327-28).

Much of the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic, is summed up by the nom de plume "Mark Twain." For as Kristeva has pointed out, the symbolic aspect of language is always already inhabited by an unnamable force--the semiotic--so that to name it is a lie. Of course Kristeva recognized this in naming the ineffable semiotic chora. And the name "Mark Twain" rests on just such a necessary deception. It is, after all, an ambiguous name. The cry "Mark Twain" sounds either as a warning or a relief--depending upon which direction a steamboat is heading. Yet it is also, like many of Twain's demarcations, deceptive, a lie, what Lacan and Kristeva would call a "floating signifier," in that it attempts to name, to mark, what cannot really be named--the constantly shifting, deceptive and uncontrollable current. In the language of piloting it represents both the repressive force of the symbolic--the Law-of-the-Father--and the ambiguous, evershifting, unnamable river. The entire myth and career of Mark Twain depends upon the force of this repression--and its disruption. When the force of that repression was not great, it flowed as the more continuous narrative that courses through "Old Times on the Mississippi." When it was strong it embodied the markings, the constraints, of society--publishing pressures, deadlines, family--that impinge on the drives and dry up the creative current.

Scholars such as Cardwell and Fatout who, having waded through much of Twain's self-promoting myth-making, have tried to discover the origin of the pseudonym and have concentrated on what the name signifies. Rather they should ask how it signifies, for true to form it marks a hyperbolic power, Sam Clemens, and is, along with the myths of its origin, a lie.

If art is the semiotization of the symbolic, then Huckleberry Finn achieves a fuller artistic realization than does Life on The Mississippi. In Part One of Life on the Mississippi--composed principally of chapters 4-17, "Old Times on the Mississippi"--the symbolic, as we have seen, is represented largely by the discourse and institution of piloting. In Part Two the forms Twain marshals against the semiotic are limited to the episodic structure of the narrative, the dams and levees of the United States River Commission and the castles and culture of what Twain calls "the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization" of the South (327), which he viewed as a jaded cultural inheritance of Old World civilization.
As we have seen, the semiotic forces Twain unleashes against these forms of the symbolic are the twists and turns of the flooding Mississippi current and a correspondingly serpentine plot structure. Now, Mississippi water is so thick, so muddy, that in the words of one keelboatman, "if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to three quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom, according to the stage of the river" (56). Yet, if muddy river water is your main character, no matter how thick it may be, it makes for thin drama--something akin to mud-wrestling between two Titans--the Semiotic and the Symbolic. What is missing are personifications of these two forces and their interrelationship.
In the more fluid medium of fiction, Twain is able to create a more diversely cast dramatis personae to represent both the semiotic, the symbolic, and their interactions. To be sure, on the side of the symbolic we still find the codes and conventions of the Sir Walter Scott South, but we also find the
laws of slavery in collusion with Christian piety, we find Pap, we find houses, steamboats, and Tom Sawyer's bookishness. On the side of the semiotic, to be sure, we still find the maternal power of the Mississippi, but, as we shall see, it is more sensitively and artistically evoked. Furthermore, mediating
between these two Titans we find something akin to what ethnologists call a trickster figure, a shapeshifter--a veritable phantasmagoria of shifting forms: Huck, Jim, the Duke and the Dauphin in all their various guises and disguises, parody, satire, and most fundamentally, language itself. In what
follows we will discuss the semiotic role the Mississippi plays in Huck Finn before moving on to various forms of the symbolic and finally to a discussion of various trickster figures that mediate between the semiotic and the symbolic.
In Jose Barchilon and Joel Kovel's psychoanalytic analysis of the novel, they aver that

[m]ost of the voyage is nocturnal and its dreamy
quality is reinforced by a backdrop of magical
thinking, that of children and Negro slaves,
while the comic and make-believe aspects of the book--
the shifts and transpositions of identity between the
various characters, further facilitate the emergence
of unconscious wishes. (778)

They assert that throughout the novel, Huck "seeks a substitute" for his mother (78), his need recognized by "a procession of women, sweet, sincere, or maternal" who "step forth and try to take him in" (781). Although Barchilon and Kovel do not list these women, Regina Stein and Robert Lidston, in "The Mother Figures in Twain's Mississippi Novels," list Mrs. Judith Loftus, Mrs. Grangerford and Aunt Sally Phelps, none of whom Huck
accepts. Why? Because, as we shall see, Huck accepts the Mississippi as a mother surrogate. Barchilon and Kovel almost get this right in discussing the novel's ending:

In turning away from "sivilization," with all its
unbearable cruelties, he elects at the same time to
relate directly to nature. This shall now be the
mother. She has been present all the time as the
river god which sustained and swept him along, now he
will give over his life to her. (807)

What their analysis misses is that Huck has already done so. Furthermore,though Huck cross-dresses in his role as Sarah Mary Williams and the Dauphin switches gender in his role as Juliet, it is doubtful that mother nature,as Barchilon and Kovel would have it, cross dresses as a river god.
We shall see that the river represents the semiotic chora--that state of union with the mother that is so unified that neither the mother/child distinction nor the Oedipal triangle exists--and the primitive drives contained within it. If the Mississippi does represent the pre-Oedipal Mississippi, Huck and Jim's sexual orientation should be pre-genital, pre-phallic. In fact Barchilon and Kovel assert that their libido retreats to and remains inhibited at a pregenital level.

The slave and the orphan relate as clinging brothers,
naked babies on the cradlelike raft. (792)

Furthermore, if the Mississippi represents the semiotic then the passages describing it should revert back to the rhythmic, metaphoric, syntactic qualities of the semiotic. In fact this is so. The most famous passage describing the Mississippi in the novel occurs in chapter 19; it is here that
Twain returns most lyrically to what Susan K. Harris has termed his "preferred image" of water. According to Harris:

When Huck describes dawn on the river he confuses
past, present and future tenses, conveying the moment
as a seamless unity in which the discomfort he feels
in all other situations disappears and he rests,
infinitely contented, within the circle of natural
plenitude. (8)

This comes about through Twain's manipulation of tenses in such a way that grammatical distinctions between past, present and future are obliterated.

Moreover, Harris notes that Twain's "preferred image becomes the matrix of a poetic metaphor that expands into reality for him" (11). This metaphor--
river = sunrise = semiotic = maternal is, of course, unconscious for Twain, surfacing only in the rhetorical strategies underlying the lyricism with which Huck records his experience of the river. These strategies are analyzed with great precision by Charles Clerc, who finds the famous first paragraph of chapter 19 "remarkably compressed" (67):

Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might
say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth
and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It
was a monstrous big river down there--sometimes a mile
and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid day-times; soon as night was most gone, we stopped
navigating and tied up--nearly always in the dead
water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods
and willows and hid the raft with them. Then we
set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and
had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we
set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about
knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a
sound, anywheres--perfectly still--just like the whole
world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-
cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking
away over the water, was a kind of dull line--that was
the woods on t'other side--you couldn't make nothing
else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more
paleness, spreading around; then the river softened
up, away off, and warn't black anymore, but gray; you
could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so
far away--trading scows, and such things; and long
black streaks--rafts; sometimes you could
hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was
so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you
could see a streak on the water which you know by the
look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak
look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the
water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you
make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on
the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-
yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can
throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze
springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so
cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the
woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way,
because they've left dead fish laying around, gars,
and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next
you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the
sun, and the song-birds just going it! (129-30)

The passage, which Clerc finds "poetic" and "subjective" (68), he also finds filled with an array of grammatical errors. Some of these are merely trademarks of Huck's colloquial style. His misuse of tense, however, Harris has cited as an example of grammatical detemporalization, an agrammaticism that condenses past, present and future. Such condensation, we must remember, is a mark of the semiotic. It is Huck's way of creating a composite, condensing several sunrises into one, negating, in Clerc's view, "ordinary demarcations of days and nights" (71). By the use of what Clerc regards "as an episodic method in miniature" (70), Huck achieves further condensation by compressing many physical actions into a few lines: "flight
at night, hiding during the days, predawn stops to tie up and conceal the raft, ursuing the demands of hunger by putting out lines to fish, swimming to relax, to clean up, and to escape the heat, and finally, observation" (70). And there is yet another mark of the semiotic: Clerc notices a graceful rhythm to the passage, especially as created by the short, cadenced sentences and clauses bound together with conjunctions, prepositions and pronoun references. He quotes: "You couldn't make nothng else out," "you could see," "you could hear," "you know," "you make out," "you can throw," "fanning you," and "you've got the full day" (72).
The semiotic chora, which is associated with the babbling stage of the infant, exists prior to signification. The sounds the infant emits do not link up with concepts or referents. Similarly, the river scene is either "perfectly still," like a breastfeeding infant, or filled with sounds that have no particular meaning: "Bullfrogs a-cluttering," "a sweep screaking," "jumbled up voices," "song birds just going it!!" Of course these sounds have referents, but they do not have meanings. And yet, it is "so still and sounds come so far" that in the very next paragraph Huck relates that when you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they're most
always doing it on a raft; you'd see that axe go up
again, and by the time it's above the man's head, then
you hear the k'chunk! -- it had took all that time to
come over the water. (130)

This is followed, in the same paragraph, by another instance of sound without a clear referent--voices coming over the water from a raft or scow lost in the fog. These sounds, floating free of fixed meanings, are intensified by the blurring of demarcations that Clerc notes in Huck's use of qualifiers:
"'water about knee deep,' 'tied up nearly always in the dead water," "only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe,' 'a kind of dull line,' 'sometimes you could hear,' 'sometimes not that way,' 'pretty rank' (italics [Clerc's])" (74).

Though Clerc does not classify the passage as semiotic, he does recognize that the water of the river serves as a "maternal principle" (76). He also finds maternal union suggested not only by the "unified mood" of the passage but also by what he describes as Huck's "sensuous delight" in the river dawn (70). When Huck "sits on the sandy bottom of the river while immersed in knee-deep water," which in Clerc's analysis links him with the equally amphibious "a-cluttering" of the bull-frogs (77), it also links him, in our analysis, to the maternal-semiotic. If we have any doubts about this maternal orientation in what has been, in this passage, a prolonged meditation on the pre-Oedipal, pre-linguistic state, then a couple of paragraphs later these doubts must yield, for we find something quite remarkable, a passage that brings separation anxiety to the fore:

We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and
we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and
discuss about whether they was made, or only just
happened--Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed
they happened; I judged it would have took too long to
make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them;
well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say
nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most
as many, so of course it could be done. We used to
watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak
down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out
of the nest. (131)

Much of the chapter, then, seems to be a contemplation of the dreamy boundary between pure sound and signification, between maternal union and beginnings of separation, of Oedipal intervention. And, in fact, the chapter culminates with the intrusion, onto the raft, of the Duke and the Dauphin.

According to Leo Marx, the chapter achieves a more integrated artistic expression of the river than Twain achieved in Life on the Mississippi (129-46). After all, Marx reminds us, when Sam Clemens mastered the language of piloting, he lost the "poetry" of the river. Huck on the other hand, is able to recognize a dangerous snag, with a pilot's acumen, but voices a passage that, according to Marx, does not lose the poetic language of the river (141).
The most monolithic representatives of the Law-of-the-Father are the social conventions, codes and laws supporting slavery--especially as these are supposedly transcendentally grounded through Christianity. Throughout Huck Finn it is apparent that "niggers" are considered subhuman--or if
human--children. And this is a set of codes and conventions that Huck has internalized. After all, Huck finds it difficult to "humble [him]self to a nigger" (105). At another point, when Aunt Sally inquires about the steamboat accident (chap 32) she asks if any men aboard the steamboat have been killed. Huck replies, "No mam, one nigger killed." Furthermore, Huck is
astounded that a socially respected person such as Tom Sawyer would stoop to helping a slave escape. Finally, he is convinced that in helping Jim he is going to go to Hell.
The set of social conventions that permit slavery gain respectability and divine sanction through their alliance with religion. After all, the pious Miss Watson, the Widow Douglas, the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, though devout Christians, see nothing wrong with buying and selling another human
being. The most convincing evidence that Huck has internalized the social conventions of slavery is in his internal debate in chapter 31. Janet Holmgren Kay's linguistic reading of this passage analyzes in detail how Huck's oral conflict is reflected in his language. In fact her analysis supports our thesis that what is at work in the passage is a conflict between the symbolic
and the semiotic.
When Huck learns that the Dauphin has sold Jim back into slavery, he confronts the most important moral dilemma of the novel. Should he acquiesce to the values of a "civilization" that would buy and sell a human being, or follow instead the dictates of his heart? According to McKay, when he wrestles with this internally, his linguistic style demonstrates that he has "incorporated the rhythms and lexicon of religious jargon" as part of his own thought processes (24). He blames himself for helping a runaway slave, feeling that he is now being punished by "the plain hand of Providence slapping [him] in the face and letting [him] know [his] wickedness was being
watched. . .and now was showing [him] there's One that's always on the lookout. . ." (234). Furthermore, Mckay notes, Huck is "full of trouble, full as [he] could be. . ." (234). McKay next points out that when Huck has written the letter to Miss Watson, to tell her where Jim is, he feels relieved. He has
done what society would expect of him. McKay recognizes the phrases-- "hand of Providence," "full of trouble," and "washed clean of sin" -- as "stock religious phrases" (25). Furthermore, she hears "sermonlike rhythms" at work in "full of trouble, full as I could be." These "compete with constructions and lexical choices the reader has come to associate with Huck, such as his cumulative participial sentence pattern, his colloquial 'on the lookout,' and the alliteration of wickedness and watched" (25).
After writing his letter to Miss Watson, however, Huck begins to reminisce about the events and quality of his friendship with Jim:
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first
time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I
could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but
laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking
how good it was this happened so, and how near I come
to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking.
And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and
I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in
the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms,
and we a-floating along, talking and singing, and
laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no
places to harden me against him but only the other
kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n,
stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and
see him how glad he was when I come back out of the
fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up
there where the feud was; and such-like times; and
would always call me honey, and pet me, and do
everything he could think of for me, and how good he
always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him
by telling the men we had small pox aboard, and he was
so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim
ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now;
and then I happened to look around, and see that
paper. (234-35)
McKay views these reflections as a synthesis of the relationship between the reader, the narrator and the riverscape. After rehearsing some stock religious concepts Huck begins to recall the significant experiences he has already shared with the reader. "The river," she adds, "is woven into each of these
experiences--it is both the setting and the catalyst. On a more subtle level, Huck's syntax mirrors both his consciousness and the rhythms of the river"(26).
Kristeva argues that we can recognize the semiotic at work not only by rhythm, but by syntactic disruptions, and McKay draws our attention to the fact that in this river-influenced passage Huck's sentences lack syntactic links. Though this is, admittedly, characteristic of Huck's style, McKay notes that in this instance the syntactical liberties he takes are pushed to the limit. Furthermore, McKay, using an opposition dating back to Lionel Trilling's 1948 "Introduction" to the novel, notes that Huck moves from "shore values" to "river values," "beginning the passage with a series of religious cliches and concluding under the power of his own sound heart" (26). McKay observes that the present participle "thinking" appears in sentences two, three and four--its repetition establishing a "subliminal rhythm" that seems to mirror the urging of Huck's memory as it frees itself from the grip of his conscience"(27). She then adds that Huck uses sentence fragments sparingly in the narrative, reserving them for "crucial junctures" (27). In fact, she compares the construction here with that of the crucial juncture in chapter 19 that we have identified, above, as the major semiotic passage in the novel, that passage that, in McKay's words, "marks a shift" "from the description of mundane activities to the glorification of the river's beauty" (27): "Not a sound anywheres--perfectly still--just like the whole world was asleep. . ." (129). How is the river conjured up linguistically? McKay states:
In sentence four the process of drift is poeticized by
the preset participles, which suggest continuous
motion, and by the rhythmic parallelisms: "in the
day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight,
sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking,
and singing, and laughing." (27)
She adds that the participles
create a mood rather than making a point. Moreover,
the participles are part of the rhythm of Huck's voice
as are other constructions here. For instance, the a-
preceding the present participle before a word with a
similar unstressed / stressed pattern--"a-floating
along"--follows a pattern Huck uses elsewhere--
. . .(27-28).
McKay finds Huck's last sentence the most interesting. Especially useful for our purposes is her observation of what Harris has called grammatical detemporalization. This occurs through another syntactic disruption. When Huck says "and the only one he's got now," Mckay argues that:
the now suggests that this is Huck's interpretation of
his present relationship to Jim. However, the phrase
seems to be embedded in what Jim said about events
earlier in the novel. In fact, Huck is repeating
almost verbatim Jim's earlier speech:". . . you's de
bes' fren' Jim's ever had; en you's de only fren' ole
Jim's got now [ ]" (29).
She goes on to say that:
This is one of the most subtle syntactic manipulations
of the entire debate. By distancing the clause from
the tag, ("[he]said"), and by placing it in the
present tense Twain merges the past event with
Huck's present dilemma. Whether Huck thinks this or
merely remembers Jim saying it, it is Huck's memory of
Jim which determines his ultimate change of heart. (29)
In summary, McKay's analysis presents precise linguistic evidence that as the semiotic and symbolic wrestle in Huck's consciousness, they leave their marks linguistically--and they do so in ways that are known to be characteristic of them. The semiotic makes its appearance through repetition, rhythm, and syntactic manipulations. The symbolic signals its presence
through word-for-word appeals to authoritarian discourse.
One might be tempted to argue that the "sermonlike rhythms" McKay noted and that we have cited as evidence of the symbolic are rhythms, and thus partake of the rhythmic nature of the semiotic. But we must remember that the semiotic and the symbolic never exist in mutual isolation, and that the symbolic, in the form of religion, may harness the rhetorical and rhythmic devices of the semiotic in a controlled, ritualized way, in order to reinforce its own position and authority. In fact, this phenomenon is illustrated wonderfully in the camp-town revival meeting in chapter 20. This attempt of the symbolic to reinforce its own authority and position through a theologization of the semiotic is subverted (for the reader) through the "king's" semiotic act of mimesis.
When Huck and the "king" enter the revival meeting Huck observes that the preacher was "lining out a hymn" with the congregation joining in a kind of call-and-response manner (144). "Everybody sung it," says Huck, "and it was kind of grand to hear it, there was so many of them and they done it in such a rousing way" (144). Then Huck shares with us that the people "woke up" and "sung louder and louder; and towards the end, some begun to groan, and some began to shout" (144). Then, according to Huck, the preacher began preaching, weaving from side-to-side, leaning out towards the congregation, shouting at the top of his lungs, intermittently holding up his Bible and holding it open, waving it to and fro and shouting "It's the brazen serpent in the wilderness! Look upon it and live!" Then, the assembled would shout "Glory! -- A-a-amen!" And, according to Huck, it went on and on:
"Oh, come to the mourners' bench! come black with
sin! (amen!) come, sick and sore! (amen!) come, lame
and halt, and blind! (amen!)come, poor and needy,
sunk in shame! (a-a-men!) come all that's
worn, and soiled, and suffering! --come with a
broken spirit! come with a contrite heart! come in
your rags and sin and dirt! the waters
that cleanse is free, the door of heaven stands open -
- oh, enter in and be at rest! (a-a-men! glory,
glory hallelujah!) (145)
Then, Huck relates that the preacher's words were drowned out by the shouting, crying, singing, of the mourners who "flung themselves down on the straw, just crazy and wild' (145).
It would seem that the language and behavior of the camp meeting are, on the face of it, almost abandoned to the rhythmic pulsations of the semiotic. Stoneley, after all, writes of how in camp-meetings "women evolved rituals which bypassed the restraint that was considered appropriate to them" (47).
What is important for our purposes is to note that these are rituals, and thus "sacred" enclosures which can safely contain the semiotic. Though the passage--with the rhythms of the preacher's sermon, the rhythmic gestures of his body, the call and response of the hymn, the fervor and theological
meaning of religious ejaculations, and the shouting and glossolalia of the congregation--does contain strong elements of the semiotic, it also enacts, like all religion, what Kristeva's terms, a "theologization" of language (Revolution 57-61). In this language game even the primitive, semiotic nature of glossolalia is contained and harnessed in order to reinforce the theological authority of monotheistic, authoritarian religious discourse.
According to Kristeva, the semiotic elements, when put to such uses, act as "instinctual floodgates within the enclosure of the sacred" (Revolution 61). In order for this sacralized symbolic to be subverted by the semiotic, the latter must protest and parody the symbolic's self-righteous posturing. This is, in fact, an important function of novels, according to Kristeva. For in novelw meaning is distributed and redistributed from one sign-system to the next: for instance, from scholastic discourse, to courtly poetry to carnival (59). And this is precisely what happens next in the revival meeting when the king, first of all, joins the glossolalia and then mimetically mirrors the preacher's theological discourse as parody. This occurs through what Kristeva terms "transposition," which she defines as
the abandonment of a former sign system, the passage
to a second via an instinctual intermediary common to
the two systems, and the articulation of the new
system with its new representability. (60)
This transposition of the preacher's theological discourse into the king's "pirate" discourse is a form of mimesis which subverts the "theologization" (61) of language. In fact, the entire revival-meeting passage is a wonderful example of how mimesis (and poetic language), in Kristeva's view, prevent
authoritarian language from "hiding the semiotic process that produces it" (58). After all, semiotic glossolalia is demonstrated in this episode to be equally productive of "pirate" discourse as it is of theological discourse. As
an act of "mimesis," the king uses the preacher's theological discourse "as a necessary boundary--but not as an absolute or as an origin" (61), creating a parody which, like all mimesis, is "profoundly a-theological" (61). In this instance mimesis undermines the transcendental basis of the Christian sign
system that authorizes slavery.
Huck achieves a similar effect in his own assault on Christianity in passages such as the following, which Margaret Ann Baker has cited (97):
The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost
lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but
she never meant no harm by it. (3)

You had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and
grumble a little over the victuals, though there
warn't really anything the matter with them. (3)
In each instance, through Huck's horseshoe twist in perspective, born of the drive energy of negation--conventional Christian piety is rejected.
Another representative of the symbolic that Twain unleashes semiotic forces against is what Twain has called "the Walter-Scott sham civilization" of the South. As in Life on the Mississippi, the symbolic, in its form as southern culture, is represented architecturally. Huck Finn, after all, is a narrative that progresses from the Widow Douglas's house and then, as John E. Hart has indicated, moves to the cabin, going on, then from an Edenic island and house of death to the raft, from the ark-like raft to the sinking Walter Scott, and then, spreading out on river and land, from the raft to the Grangerfords, the "stores and houses" for the Boggs-Sherman adventure, to the Wilks, and finally to the house and hut on the Phelps farm. (39)
Hart also asserts that these "houses are mainly a storehouse of the trappings of civilization. . ." (39). One of the most blatant of Twain's architectural targets as fixed, static relic of the Walter Scott South, appears in chapter 12. Here, Huck and Jim, while drifting downriver, come upon the wreck of the Sir Walter Scott, a steamboat with only its pilothouse and "texas" still above water. Jim wants no part of any boarding party. Huck, however, is different. If we have any doubts that this is not just a description of a wreck, but a statement of the doomed status of the romantic Southern tradition, these are erased when Huck invokes Tom Sawyer's name, telling Jim that Tom would'nt pass up such an "adventure--" and that he'd "throw style" into it (76). The vessel soon goes the way of many structures in Life on theMississippi, succumbing to the semiotic flood of the river.
Twain blamed the stolid, fixed conventions of Walter-Scott culture for causing and supporting both slavery and the Civil War. Another passage in which he gave this cultural complex architectural expression is his depiction of the Grangerford home in chapter 17. The house, which is based on the
"House Beautiful" of Life on the Mississippi, is in Peter Stoneley's view, "both a residence for the living, and a mausoleum for the dead, and for the past generally" (71). In fact, Mrs. Grangerfield keeps her departed daughter
Emmeline's bedroom "trim and nice and all the things fixed in it just the way she liked to have it when she was alive" (115). These include her morbid and elegiac poetry, china, fruit, paintings with romantic titles such as "Shall I Never See Thee More Alas" and "And Art Thou Gone You Thou Art Gone Alas," and which appear to Huck as "different from any pictures I ever seen
before; blacker, mostly than is common" (112). Stoneley notes that the family practices "a Walter Scott type ceremony at breakfast" (71). But it is not only the house which is overly romanticized, and fixated. The men of the household are tied to a fixed and hypocritical romantic code honoring a feminine, poetic aesthetic which, in Stoneley's terms, gives "a decorousness or a feminine sanction to male territorial aggression" (72). The Grangerford men, according to Stoneley, have given up "the vital male privileges of social and geographical latitude, and have accepted the closure of the world that women were usually obliged to accept, and that Emmeline celebrated" (72).
If poetic language--the semiotic--is an instrument for undermining fixed institutions and codes, then what if the fixed institution is a feminine aesthetic that celebrates morbid, elegiac verse? How and why can Twain subvert a feminine and poetic Law-of-the-Father?
We have noted Barchilon and Kovel's insights, that the nocturnal and dreamy quality of Huck and Jim's voyage, with its magical thinking, and ephemeral, shifting identities "facilitates the emergence of unconscious wishes" (778). We have also noted that, in their view, Huck "seeks a substitute" for his dead mother, and that his journey downriver provides him with a procession of willing maternal surrogates. Barchilon and Kovel then go on to say that Huck cannot accept any of them, for though Huck seeks reunion with his dead mother through substitutes, this wish harbors a conflict. Due to "an infantile rage which Huck experienced at mother's abandonment through her death" Huck wishes to kill his mother (751-52). In fact, Barchilon and Kovel suggest that the violent episodes in the narrative may be a "projection of his own anger" (782). This would help explain not only the violent episodes in the narrative, but must also imply that Twain's wrath against what Stoneley calls the "feminine aesthetic" is at least partly rooted in a similar psychology.
Whereas the last sentence in the description of "The House Beautiful" of Life on the Mississippi mentions the lack of a toilet, implying the violence of repressed anality, the aesthetic serenity of the Grangerford home is disrupted
by a feud. It is as if the semiotic is trying to say that if its poetic language is going to be appropriated by the symbolic in the form of morbid, sentimentalized poetry, then it must erupt in a more primitive, drive-ridden form of negation--violence. This violence, however, is only thematic, not linguistically semiotic--not rhythmic, condensed, syntactically disruptive, densely metaphoric. It leaves the contest between the semiotic and the symbolic on the primitive level of the "mudwrestling" of Life on the Mississippi. The reader yearns for a more artistic expression of this struggle.
As if in answer to this need the semiotic pluralizes its otherwise rather monolithic persona and adopts a strategy of undermining denotation through lies, disguises and role-playing. Of course, the Mississippi is the ultimate role-player. The river demonstrates this powerfully in chapter 15. Huck, in the canoe, gets lost in a dense fog and separated from Jim, on the raft, which is carried away by a current. When Huck, blinded by the fog "whoops and listens" he hears a distant whoop, not knowing if it is Jim or not. These disembodied whoops recreate the sense of spacial and linguistic ambiguity that characterizes Huck's description of sunrise on the river and of the disembodied "k'chunk" of the axe in chapter 19. Just as the river is never fixed and static, and objects on or near it float free of fixed boundaries, the characters of Huck and Jim, the Duke and the Dauphin, assume a kind of semiotic motility that erodes the seemingly unassailable posturing of symbolic fixity. Philip Allingham has observed that in St. Petersburg civilization everyone has a fixed social position (457)--as fixed as that of the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Huck and Jim, the Duke and the Dauphin, however, take on a dazzling variety of roles. Huck assumes no less than eight: Sarah Mary Williams, George Peters, the weeping survivor of the wreck of the Sir Walter Scott, the boy whose family on the raft is afflicted with smallpox, George Jackson, an orphan whose raftsman father has been killed by a steamboat, an English "valley," and Huck-as-Tom. The Duke pretends to be not only European royalty (surely a poke at Tom-Sawyer-Walter-Scott-style romanticism), but supposedly is a "jour printer by trade," who can "also "do a little in patent medicines; theatre actor--tragedy, you know; take a turn at mesmerism and phrenology when there's a chance; teach singing - geography school for a change; sling a lecture, sometimes" (133-34). The Dauphin, besides being make-believe European royalty, is good at "doctoring," "layin' on o' hands," telling "a fortune pretty good," "preaching and "missionaryin around" (134).
Yet, if the efficacy of one's untruth is evidence of semiotic motility, then Huck's untruths are more semiotic than the Duke's and the Dauphin's, because he fools them while he sees through their deceptions. But, after all, the Duke and the Dauphin are more aligned with the symbolic order, as they parody, and thus implicity know, some of its major institutions--the theater, the church and medicine. As false representatives of the Law-of-the-Father they represent the realm of the symbolic nevertheless--even if it is through the semiotic strategies of negative verisimiltude: mimesis and parody. Huck, in getting them to accept his explanation that a runaway slave would not run downriver, deceives the deceivers--thus representing a greater depth of deception. Huck's lies, which deceive people on the shore, on the river, and the Duke and the Dauphin, are, in fact, a form of mimesis also, for they are usually pragmatic and situational responses that mime the lies that the Duke and the Dauphin and "sivilization" have imposed on him (Monteiro 229).
In their role as deceivers, Huck and Jim and the Duke and the Dauphin act as trickster figures that mediate between the semiotic motility of the river and what we have seen are the fixed significations of the shore. Huck and Jim are aligned, as we have seen, more with the semiotic motility of the river--the Duke and the Dauphin enact an invasion of the realm of the symbolic onto the raft. In fact, they arrive just at the sunrise scene in chapter 19, the scene, we must remember, in which fusion with the maternal body in the semiotic chora is depicted and then threatened by Oedipal intervention. Just as Huck is "sivilized" to the extent that he has learned how to read and write, containing both the semiotic and the symbolic--the Duke and the Dauphin represent both an attenuated European tradition and, along with Huck and Jim, the semiotic, mimetic carnivalization of that culture.
In using the designation "trickster figure" we are not employing it in a strict ethnographic sense. After all, the designation, and I am paraphrasing Grottanelli here (117), is the product of 19th century ethnographers who discovered the "type" in Native American lore and subsequently in other
ancient and contemporary societies. Thus, to date, the designation includes not only the ethnologically precise personae of Coyote and Raven, but more comparativist members such as Marcolphus, Bertoldo, Till Eulenspiegel, Margutte, Pantagruel, Panurge, Hermes , Prometheus, Shiva, Legba, Loki,
Dionysos and Odin, clowns, fools for Christ's sake, Zen fools, Taoist fools, the young Krishna, the picaro, Coyote and Road Runner (of the cartoon series), Carlos Castaneda, certain characters in certain Davy Crockett stories, and Jacques Derrida -- to name just a few (Grottanelli 121; Koepping 200-204; Sayre 71-81).
The Whitmanesque length of this list is due to the fact that during this history of inclusion the "type" has become as assimilative as the chronically hungry Coyote, stuffing itself not only with the leaner fare of ethnographers, but also the meatier offerings of comparativists, phenomenologists, Jungians, neo-Bakhtinians, and the fertile fare of postmodernists and post-structuralists. In fact Kristeva's theories of "the semiotic" and of "poetic language" emerged from an intense study of Bakhtinian "carnival." Thus she regards "the poetic," and the semiotic," as a kind of "carnivalization" or subversion of
the authoritarian language (Lechte 105-109).
Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, in her illuminating discussion of the trickster figure, laments the fact that the designation "trickster" has become prevalent, feeling that the literary term "picaresque" more aptly describes so-called
"trickster tales" (159). For her "picaresque"
combines with the notion of trickery and roguish
behavior the idea of the uncertain or hostile attitude
of an individual to existing society and an
involvement in narrative focused on movement, within
and beyond that society. The main interests of
picaresque fiction are social and satirical, and the
picaro or rogue whose adventures it relates in
episodic fashion tends to be peripatetic because he is "fleeing from; looking for, or passing through: some
aspect of society. Through his trickery, that is, his
negations and violations of custom, he condemns
himself to contingency and unpredictability. (159)
Furthermore, Babcock-Abrahams asserts that tricksters usually display sixteen characteristics (159-60). Of these Huck, Jim, the Duke and the Dauphin exhibit nine. 1) They exhibit an independence from and an ignoring of temporal and spatial boundaries. Huck and Jim's flight down the Mississippi is, for the most part, a nocturnal one, defying the normal diurnal rhythms. As Huck said, "We run nights, and laid up and hid day-times" (129). The size of the Mississippi helps them float free of spatial boundaries. Again, in Huck's terms, "It was a monstrous big river down there" (129). 2) Tricksters tend to inhabit crossroads, open public places (especially the marketplace), doorways, and thresholds. In one way or another they are usually situated between the social cosmos and the other world, or chaos. The camptown meeting; the circus, the street-locus of the Boggs-Sherburn incident, are all public places; the raft is a site between the social cosmos and the potential chaos of the river. 3) Tricksters are frequently involved in scatological episodes. After all, satirists must inevitably become soiled by the very dirt they expose. Thus the Duke and the Dauphin are soiled by tar and feathering.
Although Babcock-Abrahams does not mention it, the scatological motif is but one manifestation of a more general characteristic--the trickster-figure is drive ridden--not only by the anality, but by his equally assimilative orality. Also, like Huck, the trickster basically seeks only his own comfort. In fact, Martha Banta finds Huck's need for comfort as the main motivation for his movements (79-87). 4) Tricksters may, similarly, in their deeds and character, partake of the attributes of Trickster-Transformer-Culture Hero. Huck is not only a deceiver, but a moral hero, one with the courage to go against the social and legal conventions of his society, if only for a moment.
5) Tricksters have an ability to disperse and to disguise themselves. I have already commented on this, above. 6) Tricksters often have a two-fold physical nature and/or a "double" and are often associated with mirrors. Most noticeably, the trickster tends to be of uncertain sexual status. Huck has a kind of double in Jim; Huck-and-Jim have a double in the Duke-and-Dauphin. The sexuality of Huck and Jim, as noted, is pre-genital. Moreover, Huck and the Dauphin both cross-dress. 7) Tricksters are generally amoral and asocial--aggressive, vindictive, vain and defiant of authority. All these are qualities of the Duke and the Dauphin; the last pertains to Huck and Jim. 8) In keeping with their creative/destructive dualism, tricksters tend to be ambiguously situated between good and evil. All the trickster figures in the novel inhabit a moral space which is both neither/nor and both/and good and evil. Even the Duke and Dauphin's duping of various "sivilized" people is "good" in that it is satirical in a trickster-like manner. 9) Tricksters are often ascribed to roles in which an individual normally has freedom from some of the demands of the social code. The preacher, the deaf-mute, and the Arab are all such roles.
An important relationship in which tricksterly deception comes to the fore is that between Huck and Pap. The latter, Huck's blood father, is an obvious, form of the Law-of-the-Father which Huck semiotically resists. Yet
Huck has so much in common with Pap. Both Huck and Pap, like the Duke and Dauphin, live outside the laws of society, the conventional Law-of-the-Father. Huck, after all, has done so even from the days of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and like his father is something of an outcast in respectable St. Petersburg society. Thus it is to the tyrannical laws of this blood father that Huck must first conform and rebel. For Harry Segal, Huck's relationship with father figures Pap, Judge Thatcher and Jim are merely functions of a kind of Harold Bloomian anxiety of influence. The father in this instance, or what Kristeva would call the Law-of-the-Father, is the book Tom Sawyer, written by Mark Twain. Twain, Segal, argues, felt anxiety about writing what amounted to a sequel, and thus created the author Huck, who, on the opening page, goes so far as to call Twain a liar. What is important for our discussion is that Huck outwits and escapes his father through deception--through leaving a trail of false signifiers.
What is disappointing is that Huck does not use the same strategy to outfox Tom at the end of the novel. For, after all, Tom Sawyer is a major representative of the romantic tradition that Twain so detested and stands in sharp contrast to the carnivalesque momentum Twail has built up in the middle of the novel. If Twain had been able to semiotize Tom, to subject his tomfooleries to the same kind of tricksterly treatment that Christian piety and river-town culture receive in the middle of the novel, then the ending would be more satisfactory. That Huck should accept Tom's schemes goes against the trend of reversal that dominates the end of the novel. In the end, it is the Law-of-the-Father that frees Jim. He is freed through the symbolic order in the form of the legal agency of Miss Watson's will. The river ceases to be a safe refuge; Huck is forced off it by the fact that the Duke and Dauphin have sold Jim into slavery. But Huck, as all readers discover, caves in to Tom's schemes. As Jennifer Krauss has noted, Tom has, for the most part, European kings as heroes (22). His backwardlooking, romantic, literate tendencies stand out in sharp contrast to Huck's. If we accept John Earl Bassett's view, Tom dominates the beginning and end of the novel and significantly influences much of the rest (92)--the camp meeting in Pokeville being a variant of the Sunday School picnic, for instance. If Huck has grown morally in his journey downriver, argue most critics of the ending, then how can he allow Jim to suffer so at the hands of Tom's romantic bookishness? Has Twain lost touch with his character, or is it that many readers expect too much of Huck?
We learn from Babcock-Abrams that the role of the trickster tale is manifold: 1) It provides entertainment; 2) it acts as a social steamvalve; allowing what is impermissible to take place within the fixed bounds of what is permissible; 3) it is evaluative, like all satire, if taken seriously, permitting an examination of social mores; 4) it is reflective, allowing readers to contemplate various aspects of reality; 5) its overturning of hierarchies dissolves distinctions, reverses roles and allows the imagination to float free of socially constructed roles (182-85). Huckleberry Finn does all of these. If Huck is something of a trickster figure and Huckleberry Finn is something of a trickster tale, we must remember that a trickster does not consistently or primarily play the part of culture hero. More often, he is found searching for comfort and the satisfaction of his primitive drives. In doing so he humorously exposes the socially-constructed nature of rigid conventions. This exposure, as Babcock-Abrams suggests, can act as a "steamvalve," allowing racial tensions to come into conflict and be released within the fixed bounds of the literary work. Yet, its reflective values also allow readers to contemplate and re-examine social mores. The evaluative and moral function, then, is up to the reader. And thus all we can expect of comfort-seeking Huck is to give us a momentary vision of a culture hero, before he sets out to escape "sivilization" and culture again. For a culture hero is part of culture, and therefore, part of the Law-of-the-Father, and no self-respecting, hurricane-sired son of the semiotic, having once built up a cultural form, can rest long without subverting it, without escaping "sivilization" again, as Huck does in the end. In this Huck is not so much different from the Mississippi or the semiotic, building up "fixed" alluvial banks or linguistic marks, cultures and institutions only to be found slipping away constantly, flowing ever onward, twisting through countless horseshoe or linguistic turns, deceiving navigators at every turn, and eroding and carrying away everything fixed and static, again and again.
Is Twain's use of semantic disjunction, gender-blurring, inversion, mimesis and humor merely ludic; is it meant only to entertain? Or are these strategies employed in the safe "ritual" space of the novel merely as a steam valve, to vent racial tensions? These strategies do entertain, and they do expose racial tensions. But are entertainment and the postbellum equivalent of "consciousness raising" their ultimate function? Twain, in fact, seems to suggest that they should serve as a moral force. George Monteiro's analysis of the novel provides a key to Twain's attitude about the moral function of such strategies. Monteiro observes that there are two kinds of lies that dominate much of the novel, ludic and expedient (233). Tom Sawyer's deceits, which strongly influence both the beginning and the end, are merely boyish play, ludic. Huck's lies, and those of the Duke and Dauphin, are always aimed at achieving some practical objective. I would like to make a further distinction: between the morally expedient lies that Huck, in his more heroic moments, tells, and the merely pragmatic frauds perpetuated by the Duke and the Dauphin. As Montiero documents, ludic lies in Huckleberry Finn invariably elicit punishment. Tom, in retribution for his boyish fictions, is eventually shot; Huck, when he deceives Jim into believing that their separation in the fog has all been a dream, suffers guilt. Merely pragmatic fictions are punished as well; the Duke and the Dauphin are eventually tarred and feathered. It is only fictions in the service of morality, such as Huck's "smallpox" lie, which do not elicit punishment. If we apply the same criteria toward the fiction entitled Huckleberry Finn, then the novel should neither merely entertain nor serve pragmatic ends. It should serve a moral function. Perhaps Huck's moments of moral courage are what save him from the "soiling" that satirists, picaros, tricksters and all agents of purification inevitably suffer.

Conclusion
In conclusion, Kristeva's theory of the semiotic/symbolic linguistic continuum offers a unifying framework for integrating many diverse critical perspectives concerning Life on the Mississippi and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It reveals that in both texts Twain's concern is, to a considerable degree, linguistic. Twain is concerned with the static nature of traditional, institutionalized language. Against these fixed significations he marshalls all the forces of the semiotic, the fluid significations of the poetic, of lies, of deceptions, of parody and of mimesis.
Kristeva's framework also provides a guideline for assessing the comparative artistic merit of the works. If art is the semiotization of the symbolic, the playful breaking down of fixed significations, then Huckleberry Finn, with its vast and fluid panorama of semiotic forms and strategies, outshines the more grossly etched energies of flood and structure that dominate Life on the Mississippi.
Finally, Kristeva is fully aware that the semiotic is, by nature, opposed to all distinctions, even the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic. But she also realizes that theories and theses are symbolic structures, involved with the language game of making distinctions within the symbolic order, if only for a day. She knows that in any theory or thesis there will always be an excess that, like Huck and the Mississippi, resists formalization, resists "sivilization," and "just keeps rollin' along."