From Tom Sawyer to Huckleberry Finn : Toward Godly Play

Abstract

FROM TOM SAWYER TO HUCKLEBERRY FINN: TOWARD GODLY PLAY Michael Oriard* Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest. —Plato, Laws1 That Mark Twain was a habitual game-player in both his life and his work is a fact almost too obvious to state. The man who conceived the "Empire City Massacre" and "Petrified Man" hoaxes, who read his facetious Whittier birthday-dinner speech to a particularly unplayful audience, who patented a history game pretentiously called "Mark Twain's Memory-Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates" among his other ill-fated commercial ventures , and who peopled his writings with playful narrators, practical jokers, and perpetrators of hoaxes, as well as the archetypal playing child, the two most memorable con men in American literature, and a Yankee who played against an entire kingdom and nearly won—is among American writers our clearest example of Homo ludens. But to recognize Twain's game-playing is not to fully appreciate it or to acknowledge its importance in his literature. Play and games are central to his fiction to an extent that is unique among nineteenth-century American writers. From Tom Sawyer to The Mysterious Stranger the moral vision of each of Twain's major novels is based somehow on ideas of legitimate and illegitimate games, of authentic and inauthentic playing. To write fiction, of course, is to "play" with words and ideas, and some writers are more explicitly playful than others. Twain is not just one of these playful artists, but one who uses specific games and modes of playing in his novels to define character and even to express a basic vision of life. Life is a game in novel after novel, but what may be today a simple-minded cliché is, in Twain's fiction, a conception capable of meaningful variation; to say that life is a game can fundamentally affirm the significance of human existence or inspire despair over its futility. It is possible to trace a declining faith in human 'Michael Oriard, an Assistant Professor of English at Oregon State University, is the author of Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868-1980, and of articles on sports and American literature in Critique, Io, Journal of American Culture, Southern Literary Journal, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book-length study of traditions of game-playing in American literature. 184Michael Oriard nature through Twain's novels after Huckleberry Finn in which playing gamçs becomes increasingly wrong-headed or even perverse. It is a curious fact that formal games are virtually absent from the St. Petersburg world of Tom and Huck, but that beginning with A Connecticut Yankee as the novels' vision of life becomes more grim, the appearance of such highly organized games as baseball and poker becomes increasingly common. In Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, in Tom's compulsive games and Huck's benevolent playing, Twain established the norms by which play can be judged in his other novels as well, and in so doing he created in Huck Finn the most fully autonomous and self-sustaining character in all his fiction, the genuine "godly player." It is not necessary to rehearse the ideas of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and the many other theoreticians of play and games, whose works are by now well-known.2 Rather, a more pertinent entry into Twain's fiction is through James M. Cox, a Twain scholar more interested in Twain's humor than in games per se. In Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor Cox has brilliantly described the world of Tom Sawyer as a world of play. Not only do Tom and his gang reenact adult rituals of love, death, war, and justice in the harmless patterns of their play, but Tom induces his audience, the adults of St. Petersburg, to collaborate with him "in creating the illusion that the world is ultimately given over to play." Tom "converts all serious projects in the town to pleasure and at the same time subverts...