To pursue a Christian poetics of prose seems to require at least a partial account of prose.¹ The proper distinction is not between poetry and prose but between verse and prose, which are species of poetry. That is, both are verbal forms of poiêsis or artistic making. The different poetic arts or ways of making, Aristotle explains at the start of the Poetics, can differ in medium, object, and mode. It is possible for verse and prose to depict the same objects, and both can make their representation by way of narration or dramatization; the difference between them, at least in Aristotle’s day, is merely medium. Some of this difference comes into view by considering the words’ etymologies.

  Verse comes from versus and vertere, meaning “to turn.” As a plow turns at the end of a field, so poetic verse involves a turning from line to line. The lines of verse that constitute a poem thus mirror the field’s furrows.² Originally then, verse necessarily submitted to restraints: it was confined and so defined by the line.³ Whether that line is metrical, alliterative, sprung, or of a particular length are matters of convention and vary widely throughout literary history. Even so, the basic formal element of verse is the line.

  Prose, by way of contrast, submitted to no such formal element. The word comes from prosus and provertere, meaning “to turn forward.”⁴ The sense conveyed here is of going straight or continuing on. There was potentially no limit to prose. So verse submitted to meter and measure, to the confines and limits of the line, while prose was potentially endless and thereby gestured toward the absolute.⁵ Over time, however, prose and verse came to be used in different ways and to various effects such that even this tidy distinction would be challenged or elided by new poetic forms such as prosimetrum, free verse, and prose poems. Literary history challenges even the difference of medium that originally distinguished verse from prose.

  To speak, then, of a Christian poetics of prose is especially difficult not only because prose is so unwieldy but also because it is mercurial. Individual prose pieces have discernible formal elements, but these elements tend to reflect historical conventions and the aesthetic penchants or achievements of individual authors; that is, the various features of prose are not essential to prose qua prose but accidental and thus subject to change over time. So too with verse.

  Thus, it is far easier to describe how prose and verse function in particular historical moments than to attempt to define them or provide an exhaustive account as such. A poetic achievement such as epic, as it arose in Homer’s Greece, was strictly crafted in verse. Over time, however, the form moved into the realm of prose such that we can fairly speak of Joyce’s Ulysses as epic or mock-epic. Though epic was originally proper to verse, it seems there is nothing to prevent its being achieved in prose.

  And yet, there seems to be a tendency, a discernible movement, in the way that languages and literatures develop. It is beyond the scope of such a short essay to examine what undergirds or motivates such a tendency, but I take it as given that verse eventually gives way to prose and that this shift is somehow generative and changes how artists go about poiêsis.⁶ Rather than tracing this development through time or attempting to locate a particular period or genre or work wherein this shift occurs, I hope to demonstrate this change by considering the difference between Aristotle’s descriptive account of Greek epic and tragedy, when verse was the primary means of poiêsis, and the way in which Huckleberry Finn authors his adventures, when English prose and the novel had clearly gained purchase as a valid if not as the primary poetic mode.⁷ The broader change can be discerned in the fact that while the poetry Aristotle surveys privileges plot over character, by the time we get to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the relationship between the two has changed such that it is now possible for plot to exist for the sake of character.⁸ A brief interlude to consider the historical moment of Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Cervantes will afford a view of a poetic locus wherein verse and prose intermingle and where the relationship between character and action is being explored.

  As Aristotle surveyed the poetic landscape of his day, he rightly saw that muthos—variously translated as “plot” or “story”—animated poetry.[1] By definition, in Aristotle’s account of epic and tragedy, plot is not a series of events, it cannot be episodic; rather, plot is a unified and complete action wherein the component parts are causally connected and necessarily follow one from another.⁹ The act of poiêsis at this time involved making plots: in representing action through rhythm, language, and melody.¹⁰ So although many things happen in the epic, the plot of Homer’s Iliad does not relate a series of sequential, unrelated events but simply the assuaging of Achilles’ wrath. That is the plot—the singular and complete action which the epic depicts. It is complete in that the plot has a beginning, middle, and end. These are technical terms that do not relate to mere chronological sequence but to causal connections. Indeed, Aristotle is highly critical of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in poetic making.¹¹

  The beginning is set in motion when Agamemnon offends Achilles, arousing his wrath. Everything else in the poem necessarily follows from this: Achilles withdraws from the fighting because he has been mistreated, his withdrawal changes the tide of the battle, the impending defeat of the Greeks causes Patroclus to join the fray, and so on until Achilles and Priam embrace. This is the end of the action, the moment wherein Achilles’ wrath, following its necessary course, is finally assuaged. So the poem shows us how the wrath of Achilles came about, how it burned, and how it finally dissipated. Homer’s poem ends here because the plot or action that was being represented has been completed. To depict anything else would destroy the completed, the achieved unity.

  Achilles’ character is important only insofar as it propels the plot. If Achilles were not haughty, were not a great warrior, were not capable of such deep affect, the action would never have been set in motion. This is what Aristotle means when he says that “the story is the foundation and as it were the soul of tragedy, while moral character is secondary” (1450a37). Poiêsis, in Aristotle’s day, involved

a representation not of persons but of action and life, and happiness and unhappiness consists in action. The point is action, not character: it is their moral status that gives people the character they have, but it is their actions that make them happy or unhappy. So it is not in order to portray moral character that the actors perform; rather, they include character for the sake of action. (1450a15–23)

Interestingly, like verse, well-crafted plots or actions involve a turning—not only from beginning to middle to end but also in that the best plots involve peripeteia or reversal and anagnorisis or discovery. A reversal is a turning or a change in the direction of the course of events: it is the point at which things stop going well and start going poorly. Discovery is a sort of recognition, a turning in the mind from ignorance to knowledge. In Oedipus the reversal and discovery coincide. The moment where both of these turns occur is when the king realizes he has killed his father and taken his mother as his wife, when he comes to know that he is a son of Thebes not of Corinth, when he realizes that though all men call him wise he does not even know himself. So the verse turns line by line and the action or the plot turns from beginning to middle to end, and—more forcefully—tragedy makes a downward turn, a katastrophe, as things turn from good fortune to bad fortune and thereby elicit suffering. When the plot or action is complete, things have come, as it were, full circle, and so the turning of the verse ceases.

  Character is important in Greek poetry, but only insofar as it sets the action in motion and keeps it turning. As character exists for the sake of action and is restricted to dactylic hexameter, it is perhaps not surprising that the Trojans sound so very much like the Greeks. Achilles, Hector, Nestor, Agamemnon, and Odysseus all sound rather similar—as do Poseidon and Athena, Ajax and Diomedes. There are rhetorical differences, but in general the characters are differentiated more by their actions than by their speech.

  It would be difficult, however, if we move forward in time, to mistake Dogberry for Puck, or Prospero for Macbeth. Does anyone sound like Hamlet? Shakespeare occupies an interesting historical moment in that prose and verse live side by side in his dramas. Indeed, much has been made of the movement between verse and prose in individual plays, especially when a character alternates back and forth between the two. Hamlet is further interesting because his character is on display so forcibly that he seems to all but halt the action his play attempts to depict.¹² He soliloquizes endlessly, the verse turning and turning and all but refusing to come to an end until someone intrudes on his physical space and so disrupts his thought. But Hamlet also speaks in prose, and his verse, enticingly, is not always strictly metrical. So the first line of his famous meditation, “To be or not to be—that is the question ” is neither bound to strict iambic pentameter nor to ten syllabus (3.1.64). Furthermore, in the soliloquies we see thought as action, we witness a mind acting or turning upon itself in a way that seems (like prose—or perhaps like verse unmoored from action) potentially endless.¹³ Whenever Hamlet stops thinking, he seems to act in such a way as to prevent the plot from developing. He interjects his own smaller plots into the larger action that would otherwise be unfolding.¹⁴ Hence the central question: why Hamlet’s delay? From a formal perspective, one might suggest that a partial answer is because in Hamlet character is no longer strictly subservient to plot. Hamlet has gained a more important role in the poiêsis, which is further brought to bear by his usurping the role of author-director as he writes new lines to be added to the performance and orders the Player King about the stage.¹⁵ So we see in Elizabethan drama that something has begun to change as verse gives way to prose and as poiêsis shifts away from privileging plot over character.

  At the same time that Shakespeare is crafting such profound persons as Hamlet and Falstaff, Juliet and Cleopatra, Montaigne and Cervantes are exploring the limits of prose more explicitly on the continent. Montaigne’s Essays are sprawling in nature, more proper to the formal quality of prose than of verse. Hamletian in impulse, we watch the prose search out and explore until, like Keats’ urn, it “dost tease us out of thought.” It is not that essays cannot be achieved in verse so much as the success of the prose essay engenders the possibility of a verse one. The very title is suggestive. Montaigne’s success makes the essay a noun; etymologically, however, essay or assay is a verb meaning “to attempt” or “to put to the test.” By definition it defies something akin to a completed action. The attempt has no defined beginning, middle, or end, no completed action toward which it moves, and as we read we discover the essay exists for the sake of character. This does not equivocate or misapprehend difference of genre. Rather, my suggestion is that the historical tendency enables prose and verse to create new genres that the other may then pursue and, perhaps, even occasionally perfect. Hamlet’s soliloquies are attempts—they are essays. And if they do not reach anything like unto the length or excessive sprawl we witness in Montaigne that is due less to the formal aspect of verse than of drama: how long can an actor be on stage doing nothing? When Milton shortly thereafter pivots from tragedy to epic, he loosens the essay form in verse and we witness the infernal debate in book two of Paradise Lost as the backdrop against which we watch Satan essay or soliloquize, to compete with Hamlet. That he does so in blank verse might suggest a loosening of the stricture of verse toward prose though Milton is unwilling to abandon it fully as he seeks to compete not with Montaigne or Cervantes but with Shakespeare, Virgil, Hesiod, and Homer.

  In Cervantes we witness the rise of Don Quixote and perhaps hear the death knell of plot as epic and drama give way to the novel, as verse yields to prose. Interestingly, the text is not wholly free of verse. It opens with a series of poems that parody, well, almost everything: poets that make plots, grand or superior action (for Aristotle, epic and tragedy depict actions that are superior, comedy that which is inferior), and even verse itself. The frame deflates verse almost in order to create space for the sprawling prose that follows. The novel contains no plot as such but a series of potentially endless episodes—at the end of part one we are pleased to discover there are more manuscripts, more adventures wherein we encounter not plot but the gentleman of La Mancha. In the second part the narrator even apologizes for his digressions, for his losing the plot, as it were, in part one—though mercifully, part two gives us not a unified action but more glimpses of the don. Much like Falstaff, who is witty in himself and causes that which is wit in other men, our chivalrous knight, the ingenious gentleman, is the soul of the narrative, and we only wish there were something more, something like The Merry Wives of Windsor, so that he could animate further scenes. Like Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, it seems Don Quixote explores how comedy might not necessarily depict only inferior action but how it may somehow, mysteriously, redeem it—even transfigure tragic, superior action by way of grace. I am not at all convinced that the good don is in the end a fool, nor that anyone in the text sees the world quite so clearly as he. In this, he is like unto both Montaigne and Falstaff, persons both real and imagined. But he is also like Huckleberry where the distinction between the real and the imagined becomes blurred.

  For Huckleberry is not merely a character or the narrator of his Adventures, he is the author himself. He dismisses Mark Twain and his book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer out of hand in the opening paragraph:

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. (1)

And the novel closes with a brief meditation on authorship before Huck signs it: “so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it and ain’t agoing to no more . . . THE END, YOURS TRULY HUCK FINN” (362). Unlike in Tom Sawyer, where Twain as author overshadows any character, he is nowhere present in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn except for in the front matter: what we get is pure Huckleberry. The book is Huck’s poiêsis, and everything rendered therein comes through and by Huck’s prose. If the real poiêsis of Montaigne’s Essays was not the creation of a literary form but the creation of a thinking self, Huckleberry’s profound poiêsis is the realizing of a character who is more than a character.

  As we move forward to nineteenth-century American literature, we encounter Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where, following Don Quixote, everything has been turned topsy-turvy. While Greek epic and tragedy privileged plot or action over character and relied on verse as the medium, Huckleberry Finn upends the paradigm and subjects plot to character. This is in part discerned through speech.

  While many of Homer’s figures sound similar, none of the characters in Huckleberry Finn sound alike. Twain worried that the panoply of voices would be perceived as a failure rather than an aesthetic achievement. So before Huckleberry’s narration begins, the reader encounters an explanatory note that enumerates the various dialects in the text. It encourages the reader to recognize that the distinct voices were not “done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly . . . I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding” (xlv). So we meet many characters throughout who sound wholly distinct: Huck and Jim, certainly, but also Colonel Grangerford and his daughter, Emmeline, the duke and the king, and many more. Their speech reveals character, but it is not at all clear that character serves to advance any singular, unifying, or complete action. Furthermore, the various characters Huck meets all speak in prose.

  Indeed, the novel is a profound achievement of poiêsis that is almost entirely prose. There are two notable exceptions. First, there are the botched soliloquies of the duke and the king. Purportedly drawn from Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, and Hamlet, these speeches make a curious assemblage of lines and half-lines from numerous plays coupled with interpolations and malaprops worthy of Bottom. The scenes and the language are delicious, and they reveal much about the charlatans.

  Shakespeare appears again in a more profound albeit subtler form in the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. This is less a parody than a translation of Romeo and Juliet into the context of the American Civil War. It is in the midst of the feud that the other instance of verse appears in the poems or “tributes” of Emmeline Grangerford. Her verse commemorates the dead, though by the time Huck finds himself in this episode Emmeline has already passed. Huckleberry only meets her through her pictures and her poems, through the artistic creations she has left behind. Poetry was the death of her: she seemingly “pined away and did not live long” after failing to craft a poem for a dead boy, after being unable to find a rhyme for “Whistler” (140). Her death seems to announce—rightly or wrongly—the slow failure of verse in Twain’s day, and thereby intimates at the way verse has yielded to prose.¹⁶ Even so, Huckleberry affirms her poiêsis: “It was very good poetry” (139). He is so impressed and moved by Emmeline’s achievement that he tries his hand at authoring verse: “Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was alive, and it didn’t seem right that there warn’t nobody to make some about her, now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn’t seem to make it go, somehow” (141). Despite his failure at crafting verse to preserve Emmeline, Huckleberry does perform a loving poetic act here. He affirms the dignity of Emmeline, preserves one of her poems by copying it into his book,¹⁷ and thereby honors her through his prose. His prose exceeds his halting verse, and the incomplete episode rises above unified action through the loving vision and poiêsis of Huck.

  The Grangerford episode, like Romeo and Juliet, seems to have a unifying action, but we do not see it brought to completion. The death of Buck—Emmeline’s brother and Huck’s mirror or surrogate in this episode—propels Huck forward. He leaves before the action is completed. Like prose, he continues to turn forward down the river. Unlike Emmeline, he cannot craft a turning: there is no verse, no turning, to propel movement toward a completed action. If the episode does achieve a plot, that is, a completed action, we do not see it. Huck himself is carried forward by the river, and his Adventures are carried forward by his continued prose.

  This is the way with each of the many actions, which we might call small or discrete plots, that are scattered throughout Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. They welcome Huck in briefly, but they are not a fairer house than prose: they serve only to allow us to see Huck more clearly. In each, we discern another ray of being that radiates forth from this loving and capacious boy. For the remarkable thing about Huckleberry is that he is more real and more human than most real humans you meet. In his Adventures, poiêsis aims to make not action but character, and he ultimately makes himself. And the prose form, like the river itself, allows Huck to continue moving forward rather than turning to complete any of the smaller actions he encounters along the way. In this way, Huckleberry’s adventures are quixotic. We long for the text to continue, for its ending to be delayed, for more episodes to appear, if only so that we can see more of Huck.

  It is not that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains no actions—for each episode is a potential action or small plot—but rather that there is no singular, unifying, complete action to animate the text. In fact, the work asserts rather boldly that there is no overarching plot. In addition to the explanatory note about the various dialects, Twain affixed the following notice to the text:

NOTICE.

PERSONS attempting to find a Motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a Moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a Plot in it will be shot.

By Order of the Author

Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance. (xliii)

  Rather than plot, Huckleberry is the soul of the novel. And we are content to watch Huckleberry simply be. In the end, there is only Huck, and he is enough. He does not need to do anything, to bring any action to completion, for Huckleberry is a profound statement of and affirmation of being. As we saw with the way Huckleberry looked at Emmeline Grangerford’s poems, Huckleberry beholds being, affirms it, and elevates it by authoring it into his Adventures. He affirms but also preserves the dignity and being of others irrespective of plot or action. In Huckleberry’s affirming and loving gaze, things are transfigured, brought into a greater degree of being. We see this perhaps most clearly where there is no plot or action unfolding, and we see this where Huckleberry looks at otherwise worthless things.

  In chapter 9, before Huck and Jim are well on their way down the river, a storm stalls their motion. Where verse would halt, prose continues. Hamlet’s soliloquies must end to get back to the action, the Greek poets discussed by Aristotle would remove the episode because it does not advance or necessarily relate to action, but for Huckleberry the stalled motion is heaven, a thing to be delighted in and extended. The storm brings all action to a standstill. There is no plot unfolding, no action to behold. There is simply the storm. In Huckleberry’s eyes,

it was as bright as glory and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about, away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the underside of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs, where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know. (59–60)

This is stunningly beautiful—would that I could see storms as Huckleberry does. He is, of course, not safe, having made camp with Jim on Jackson Island in a small cavern, hardly a good place to endure such a storm. Yet even the cavern is affirmed by Huck. It is a tight place, and yet—in the midst of the howling storm—Huck affirms it, the storm, and the impossible situation in which he finds himself: “Jim, this is nice,” he says, “I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else but here” (60). What with the cave and the storm and his companion, it is somehow enough for Huckleberry simply to be. He wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

  When the storm finally lets up, some ten or twelve days later, the river brings an adventure to Jim and Huck: a frame house, washed off its foundation in the storm, floats past Jackson Island, and Jim and Huck decide to climb aboard. The house holds a dead man and a story. It is the scene of a completed action, but Huck has no interest in it:

Jim throwed some old rags over [the dead man], but he needn’t done it; I didn’t want to see him. There was heaps of old greasy cards scattered around over the floor, and old whisky bottles, and a couple of masks made out of black cloth; and all over the walls was the ignorantest kind of words and pictures, made with charcoal. There was two old dirty calico dresses, and a sun-bonnet, and some women’s underclothes, hanging against the wall, and some men’s clothing too. We put the lot into the canoe; it might come good. There was a boy’s old speckled straw hat on the floor; I took that too. And there was a bottle that had had milk in it; and it had a rag stopper for a baby to suck. We would a took the bottle, but it was broke [. . .] We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher knife without any handle, and a bran-new Barlow knife worth two bits in any store, and a lot of tallow candles, and a tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty old bed-quilt off the bed, and a reticule with needles and pins and beeswax and buttons and thread and all such truck in it, and a hatchet and some nails, and a fish-line as thick as my little finger, with some monstrous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin, and a leather dog-collar, and a horse-shoe, and some vials of medicine that didn’t have no label on them and just as we was leaving I found a tolerable good curry-comb, and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow, and a wooden leg. The straps was broke off it, but barring that, it was a good enough leg, though it was too long for me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn’t find the other one, though we hunted all around. (61–62)

His is a cataphatic mode; Huck is himself a sort of kataphasis—not only a profound statement of being, an affirmation of what is, but a profound denial of katastrophe. Huck denies the destructive downward turn, of any turning, that seeks to brings an action to a completion, and he denies the katastrophe of character that seeks to diminish being. Instead, Huckleberry stands: he stands as being and as an affirmation of being content to turn, however prosaic, only and every forward, to continue on. Huckleberry’s kataphasis is a sort of perpetual turning wherein there is no end and the only end is more being. What he finds is garbage, utterly worthless if not dangerous—a broken prosthetic leg, dirty women’s underclothes, unlabeled medicines? The reality is crawling with danger, venereal disease, things that anywhere else pose a threat to being. Yet his description is beautiful. The boy is almost breathless, the sentences cannot, will not, cease—the prose sings praise almost endlessly: if only there were more room on the page. These are some of the longest syntactical sentences in the whole text. Homer may have his catalog of ships, his epic similes, but Huckleberry has his truck, and we are the better for it. He not only sees it and affirms this otherwise degradation of being, but his gaze elevates it to and for and in the reader. In Huckleberry’s eyes, even a broken prosthetic leg is beautiful to behold. This is poiêsis unlimited; this is pure poetic prose.

  If his adventures are quixotic and yearn toward limitlessness, Huckleberry is himself Falstaffian: he is being in itself and causes that which is being in other things. His is an affirmative gaze: he looks at everything, and everything at which he looks is loved and affirmed, drawing the dignity of its being upward. That is to say, to be looked at by Huckleberry is to be transformed, mercifully, transfigured by him. For Huckleberry’s loving vision enables all things better to be themselves. Emmeline Grangerford and the worthless rubbish on the frame house suffer this magnificent transformation, as does everything upon which Huckleberry casts his eye. His poiêsis, the way in which he looks and attends and loves and creates in prose, is thus remarkably Christian.

  As we watch him affirm others, we slowly learn to see the goodness and dignity of all things, to see the world as Huckleberry sees it. That is his great act of poiêsis—not only to affirm the being of what he looks at but, in so doing, to craft the consciousness and thereby the moral vision of his readers. He looks at the duke and the king, who have only ever hurt Huckleberry—lied to him, sold Jim back into slavery and into suffering, lied to their own satisfaction and gain—and still he sees some thing, some ray of being, worth affirming. In fact, near the novel’s end he sets out to warn the carpetbaggers that they are about to be run out of town on a rail. Why he would seek to help such scoundrels is beyond me—but then my thesis is simply that Huckleberry is beyond me. Because of that, Huckleberry assists me into being. It serves no purpose, no moral, no intention, no plot: it simply is.

  He is too late, however, and sees the pair—and yet, the pair even in their diminished state are remarkable, epiphanic, in more ways than one. He looks and sees them—and thereby checks my looking, my seeing, which seeks only to diminish—for in Huckleberry’s eyes, behold, the duke and king

astraddle of a rail—that is, I knowed it was the king and the duke, though they was all over tar and feathers, and didn’t look like nothing in the world that was human—just looked like a couple of monstrous big soldier-plumes. Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another. (290)

Here, Huckleberry looks on perhaps the most despicable figures he encounters in his Adventures, but he does not chastise them. Instead, his loving and affirmative gaze chastises the reader who revels in this seeming scene of poetic justice. This is why Huckleberry is more real and more human than most real humans you meet—for he reveals that even poetic justice cannot be just, if only ye have eyes to see.

  Of course, the greatest thing that Huckleberry looks at, affirms and transfigures, is Jim. He does not see a slave, a worthless thing or a not thing, but a human being who is kind and tender, noble and good. In the famous episode where Huck deliberates whether to turn Jim in as a runaway slave—in his own terms, whether he’s willing to be damned—he looks at Jim in his mind’s eye and sees not only a loveable human being but a human being that loves. For Jim has loved and affirmed Huckleberry. He has played no small part in affirming Huckleberry’s ability to be—for where society sees in Huck, as it sees in Jim, a not thing, the son of a drunk, a boy who is, in the cruel language of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, “idle and lawless, and vulgar and bad,” Jim sees something beautiful and worth affirming (47). Perhaps, in this way, it is Jim’s constant and abiding presence that has taught Huckleberry how to be. Like beauty, which is self-effusive, being seeks to draw forth more being, and so we long for one more scene in the storm, one more episode where Huck and Jim are all but lost at sea, left to themselves, simply to be: to affirm the being that is the other, to sing in endless prose. It is no surprise then that—although Huck finds himself in this deliberation in an even tighter place than he found himself in the storm—that he determines and insists and continues to turn forward: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (271). His affirmative mode, his kataphasis, is so capacious that he would embrace hell—redeem it, even—if only that meant that he could be with Jim. He wouldn’t want to be nowhere else.

  We are always behind Huckleberry, struggling to catch up. He is always out in front of us, loving the world, and thereby making it more fully what it already is. He is already out “ahead of the rest,” and we struggle and strive to catch up with this beautiful boy (362). The novel is a profound achievement of poiêsis that is almost utterly and essentially prose. The novel is Huckleberry, and mercifully there is no plot, no verse or turning to propel movement toward a unified or completed action. Huck himself is carried forward by the mighty river that is the Mississippi, by the many actions or small plots he encounters along the way that allow us to see him more clearly. Ultimately, Huck is carried forward by being itself—his own and that of others—which refuses to do anything but be, whether that be discerned in the river or storm, broken and worthless truck, scoundrels or slaves.

  Thus the historical tendency has come to fruition—thus the achievement of prose. For the medium allows Huckleberry to continue moving forward rather than to turn to complete any of the smaller actions that he encounters along the way. So the ending, which is no ending, no completion of any action, has troubled many critics. It is as though they paid no heed to the notice.¹⁸ Things end suddenly, and in mighty poor fashion, because there is no single unified action that Huck seeks to depict. There is no plot. There is no verse. There is only prose and Huckleberry. What there is, is character and being and the perpetual movement forward that entails. The novel shows us enough of Huckleberry to justify the ending, however malformed or aborted it may be.

  What is perhaps most remarkable about Huckleberry’s poiêsis is that it transcends the book. While Huck looks out and affirms the being of the world, the reader looks on and affirms Huckleberry. This is a deep and mysterious poiêsis: the art of reading. For as we look at and learn to love Huckleberry, we make him present in our minds and souls. In a similar way to how Huck transfigures all he looks at and incarnates it into the words of his book, our reading potentially incarnates Huckleberry in us. For the truth is that he lives not only in his book or in the territory he sets out for but in us, his readers. There, if you let him, he will continue to influence the way you look on the world, he will continue to make not just prose but our souls and lives. So Huck, a fiction—that is, a made thing—becomes a maker. We bring him into greater being by allowing him to inhabit our souls, and there he continues to bring us into further being. This is neither exclusive nor essential to prose but a particular historical achievement thereof. There are various poetic modes that proffer a redemptive, affirmative vision of being. But perhaps the particular suggestion of prose is that this affirmation has something eternal about it.

  Prose then, having perfected the poiêsis of character unmoored from completed action, can like Huckleberry seek out new frontiers. It thereby liberates verse to achieve character in a new way as well and can itself turn forward to explore something more—perhaps language itself, perhaps seeking to become a more poetic prose. In the end, perhaps, prose somehow mysteriously leads back to verse. It may be that in the end they are one: verse is turning and turning while prose turns forward until, blessedly, they converge. We may discover, as Eliot suggested, that

the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. (“Little Gidding”)

Verse and prose are, after all, born of the same stuff: the relation between words and being.

  The boy is the soul of the novel, and so although the book, Huck’s Adventures, has to end somehow, Huckleberry himself, like prose, must continue on. He journeys on into the territory ahead of the rest—he continues his prose though we cannot hear it, cannot run fast enough to read it, he exceeds us and continues to turn ever forward, not in search of more actions or plots but simply so that he can be. If ever we could catch up, wherever that territory may be found, in the still quiet between a sonnet’s turn, or in a tight place like unto a cavern from which we may look out at the frightening, lightning-lit night sky that is, in the final analysis, life itself, it is there that we shall surely still find him: Huckleberry. There—not doing but simply being, engaged in the perpetual prose that is poiêsis, that is not only poetics but a profoundly Christian poetics, that is the affirmation of being itself. May he ever and always continue to teach us to be.

N.B.: Bekker numbers will be provided throughout. All direct quotations come from Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Also, quotations from Mark Twain’s works are from the following editions: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021).

¹ As will become clear, I do not think that any sufficient account of prose qua prose can be given. Perhaps the best we can do is offer more or less accurate descriptions of prose as it appears in its various historical milieux.
² With a form such as the sonnet, we see that the turning can also be figurative. Especially in Shakespeare’s sonnets, the volta marks a turning not only from line eight to line nine or from the octave to the sestet but also a thematic turning of the poem in a new direction.
³ Of course, the submission to such a limit is actually what liberates verse, frees it in a remarkable way, to achieve things in meter and rhyme. So Wordsworth, following the agrarian image, praises the “Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground” where it is “pastime to be bound.” The limit is capacious: “In truth the prison, into which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is” (“Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Rooms,” ln 11, 8–9). And Wendell Berry speaks in “Faustian Economics” of the inexhaustibility of such limited forms: “And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex.” The limit yields freedom.
⁴ A separate etymology appears in prosa oratorio, meaning “straightforward speech.” In one sense, this means to speak truly, but as Emily Dickinson exhorted, one might also “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” There is a way, then, in which artistic fictions, that is “made things,” can best express the truth. Indeed, a close reading reveals there are two distinct types of lies told throughout Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. First, there are lies that distort reality and aim to harm or diminish being. Such are the lies of Tom and of the duke and the king. Then there are Huckleberry’s lies. The more distance he obtains from Tom the more he comes to lie in such a way as to reveal truth and affirm being. Such are his lies that capture the essence of the danger of communicable disease, whereby he saves Jim, and the lie he tells the night watchman that, although he does not linger to see the action completed, presumably saves Jim Turner and secures the capture of the murderers aboard the sinking Walter Scott.
⁵ There is an irony here, which is beyond the scope of this paper, in that verse, even atheistic verse such as Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, was originally connected with the divine—there is always an invocation, a making present of the deity in the composition. Prose, on the other hand, appeared to eschew the divine. So Herodotus’ Histories, the first extant prose work in Western literature, not only refuses to invoke a muse—startling, as Clio was well established as the muse of history—but also searches out purely materialistic causes for the war.
⁶ Owen Barfield notes in a brief aside in Poetic Diction, a study that traces the relationship between language, meaning, and human consciousness through history, that “if we chose to confine our prophetic gaze to language and its ‘progress’, we should certainly behold Poetry giving poor Verse a bill of divorce and flying at some distant date into the arms of prose” (149). He argues in “Philology and the Incarnation” that it was the incarnation itself which undergirds the movement in language that Poetic Diction first attempted to describe.
⁷ It seems to me that, following Barfield’s thesis, the incarnation would likewise motivate the movement from verse to prose as the primary and capacious artistic modes across time if only because while most of the Old Testament is verse that we can call poetry, most of the New Testament is prose that we cannot.
⁸ I do not mean to suggest that verse cannot emphasize character. It can. But the historical tendency in poiêsis seems to indicate that verse does so after prose has made the achievement possible.
⁹ “Of defective stories and actions, the worst are those that are episodic. I call a story episodic when the sequence of episodes is neither necessary nor probable . . . Writing pieces for competitions, they [bad poets] drag out the story and are often forced to distort the sequence of events” (1451b32–35).
¹⁰ It is important to remember that Aristotle’s account is descriptive not prescriptive. Having surveyed the Athenian tragedians and Homer, he sees that the most successful poetic works possess similar qualities of plot, character, language, ideas, music, and staging. We do not have Aristotle’s account of lyric, though it is likely that he thought lyric making would be less centered on action. It seems that epic and drama are privileged hierarchically by Aristotle precisely because of their particular capacity to represent action and because of their so-called tragic effect, their ability to effect the catharsis of pity and fear.
¹¹ “There is a great difference between something happening after certain events and happening because of those events” (1452a20–22). This justifies his claim that poetry is superior to history, for the former deals with universals and well-crafted actions, showing us what a particular kind of person would do in a particular kind of situation, while the latter deals with particulars and merely chronicles that one thing happened after another, irrespective of any causal relationship (see 1451b).
¹² So too, Shakespeare seemed to disdain plot. Despite Aristotle’s descriptive account of the centrality of plot in Homer and the tragedians, Shakespeare lifts his plots from others: from Plutarch and Ovid, Holinshed and British history. So too, he freely changes the plots he steals, whether Romeo and Juliet or King Lear. He excelled at the poiêsis of character. Witness Falstaff, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Iago, Leontes, Cleopatra, Juliet, et al. So too, he complicated plot as a singular unified action. Hamlet resists its own completion, but The Winter’s Tale and other problem plays present multiple if not contradictory actions. The Merry Wives of Windsor was written, by popular demand, less for the sake of plot than to make another dramatic landscape wherein the fat knight might continue to play. It seems that in the drama of Shakespeare we can witness plot being usurped by character. After all, the question for Shakespeare’s most profound character is not, “to do or not to do?”
¹³ In his rhetorical volley with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet declares “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me, [Denmark] is a prison,” and when Rosencrantz suggests that it may be too narrow for Hamlet’s mind, the prince’s riposte suggests his desire for an infinite soliloquy: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and / count myself a king of infinite space, were it not / that I have bad dreams” (2.2.273–75)
¹⁴ “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” (2.2.604–05)
¹⁵ This would be especially provocative if, as has been suggested, Shakespeare himself took on the role of the Player King.
¹⁶ Rightly, in that the novel had become by this time the primary means of poiêsis; wrongly, given the significant achievements of lyric poets such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, of whom Emmeline may function as a parody.
¹⁷ Her “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d” appears in full in chapter 17.
¹⁸ Like Tom, many critics attempt to usurp the novel, to seek to impose a plot or a unified action on the adventures.