Rafting

River, Raft and Shore: The Semiotic and the Symbolic in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi.

The narratives of Mark Twain's two Mississippi works, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, oscillate between the realms of the Semiotic and the Symbolic with a motion equivalent to the uncontrolled and uncontrollable current of the great river. Civilization in general, and especially the institutions of piloting correspond in complex, fruitful ways with Kristeva's use of the Symbolic, while the Mississippi corresponds to the fluid, drive-ridden, maternal, and polymorphous qualities of the Semiotic chora. Both the Semiotic qualities of Twain's prose and the antics of his characters serve a trickster-like function in the liminal space between the semiotic shiftiness of the river and the fixed, institutionalized--and patriarchal--presence of pilothouse culture and life on the shore. Weighted toward the Semiotic pole of Julia Kristeva's psycholinguistic continuum, Huck and Jim's pranks constitute what Jim Powell calls an overflow of the Semiotic influence of the river onto the raft and the shore. (less)

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