Author: Mark Twain
First Published: 1885
What Happens: Twain warns in his preface that "persons attempting to find a plot...will be shot." So the, ahem, sequence of events takes place after the end of Tom Sawyer. That novel ends with Tom and Huck each in possession of $6,000. In the sequel Huck has been taken in by a kindly widow, but his violent, alcoholic father soon gets wind of Huck's fortune and comes to town to claim it. Pap kidnaps Huck, who eventually flees. Huck meets up with Jim, a slave who has run away from the widow's farm. The town assumes Pap has killed Huck. Huck and Jim escape on a raft down the Mississippi. They hope to get to the town of Cairo, where Jim can pass himself off as a freeman, but they overshoot and wind up in slave territory, where Jim is in constant danger. A picaresque series of escapades ensues; Twain is at his best describing the townspeople along the river and the contradictions of human behavior. A pair of shysters, the King and the Duke, tag along, bilking the townspeople as they travel.
The King and the Duke print up false billets to collect rewards on Jim as a runaway slave; the last of these has resulted in his imprisonment. Huck sets out to free him. Then, in the much-discussed (and much-maligned) last section of the book, Huck encounters Tom, who has come to visit his Aunt Sally. Tom, under the influence of countless gothic adventure novels, insists on complicating the rescue to a degree that places Jim in physical torment and prolongs his confinement for a month--even though, as it turns out, Tom knows all along that Jim is actually free, because the old widow has died.
The Obligatory Discussion of the Problem Ending: Twain has indeed created a bit of a Problem Ending, in much the same way that Shakespeare (or Bacon, as Twain would have it) wrote a few Problem Plays. I think the real problem comes at the beginning of the end, when Twain gives Tom precedence in Huck's story. Huck has matured on his journey; Tom is still a boy. For the ending to feel more related to the rest of the story, pragmatic Huck would need to triumph over romantic Tom. The two would free Jim using Huck's practical means and thereby get into really serious trouble. (George Saunders, in his excellent introduction, suggests that Twain may have avoided this route because he sensed that the trouble might be so serious as to turn the novel into a tragedy.)
Once Twain has chosen to give Tom the reins, I don't see any better way for the story to proceed than the way Twain has written it. The great human comedy has become something closer to parody or farce, and a farce has to progress to a crowning punchline. Having established the meaninglessness of the events from the moment Tom insists on his complicated plan, Twain has to progress to the crowning meaninglessness: Tom has known all along that Jim was already free. (And yes, that was two meaninglessnesses in one sentence, and I don't see any way around that either.) Tom's machinations result in his getting shot; that's fitting too, since under narrative logic he should be most punished for the stupidity of his actions. It all works as narrative and as comedy.
The problem is, we've already seen much better comedy: the life along the Mississippi, through Huck's singularly frank and sometimes naïve vision. Huck and Jim have emerged as people we care about, and they must go back to being pawns who are battered by the blows of farce. The ending feels odd not because it's inferior writing--it is still Twain, after all--but because it's not quite part of the same book. It would have been fine as a short story, and Tom's revelation would have worked the same way an O. Henry ending does. However, I have already devoted enough attention to it that I fully expect to be shot.
Trivia: Jane Austen spoofed gothic novels in essentially the same way in Northanger Abbey: A too-susceptible character imagines drama in innocuous situations and thereby gets herself into trouble. The device is a bit more successful there, because it's the central gimmick of the plot, and the heroine's snooping eventually does create enough real complications for the climax to be satisfying. Perhaps that has something to do with Twain's well-documented distaste for Austen: "Jane Austen's books," he said, "are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."
Censorship History: We tend to think of Huck Finn's censorship as being one of those tragic cases of the smothering of all non-PC thought, but the book raised hackles from the beginning. Though today's readers may see racism in Twain's writing, his views on race were shockingly progressive to many of his contemporaries. Even more shocking was the book's true emotional climax, in which Huck realizes that saving Jim from captivity will mean going to hell--and he chooses to go to hell. A horrified Louisa May Alcott opined, "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them."
Huck Finn is still in the top ten of the American Library Association's list of most challenged books, and that's no mean feat when you consider that American Psycho is #60. Huck's challenges nearly all have to do with the word nigger and the sometimes minstrel-ish potrayal of Jim. (Interestingly enough, African American writers Toni Morrison and Alex Haley have spoken in defense of the book.)
Huck Finn has quite a few things in common with another book that gets challenged on similar grounds, To Kill a Mockingbird. Both authors grew up in the South, and certain assumptions color their writing despite their best efforts. Both of them show racism through the perception of a child--and a white child at that, a child just beginning to be aware of his or her own prejudice. If it's clear from the discussion of race that Huck predates Mockingbird by almost a century, it's also clear that the device endures as a way to present honest portrayals of the adult world.
However, where Mockingbird's Scout is naïve because she is priviliged and quite young, Huck is naïve because he is ignorant and largely unschooled. He has unthinkingly absorbed many of Pap's worst traits. Pap is the anti-Atticus; he thinks Huck is putting on airs by attempting to read and write, and he rails against perceived slights from every corner of society, blaming the government, the rich, and eventually even "free niggers" for his drunkenness and poverty. Pap's drunken monologue is instantly recognizable. Twain is unsparing and pretty much letter-perfect in depicting the weaknesses that underlie human cruelty, and what was not yet called addiction. (In many ways, today's clinical vocabulary weakens our ability to describe characters, reducing them to collections of symptoms rather than true people who bear some responsibility for their actions. We fiction writers will have to find some ways around that.)
Huck, Twain, Racism, and Bus Rides: Twain's father owned slaves, and Twain's perception of race and racism evolved considerably between childhood and adulthood. I have to imagine that, consciously or not, part of his impetus for writing Huck Finn was to convey his awakening to the injustice of racial prejudice. (The book was published twenty years after the end of the Civil War, so he's not lobbying for abolition here; he's talking about basic human interaction.)
To me, it's pretty clear that Twain wanted to contrast Jim--who protects Huck, sacrifices for him, listens to him, conspires with him, and ultimately loves him--with Pap, who drinks, extorts, picks fights, abandons and then kidnaps his son, turns instantly and savagely violent, refuses to work, and sees Huck as a meal ticket. Later, when Huck and Jim are joined by the King and the Duke, it's quite obvious that Jim is the kindest and most honest person on the raft. It's unfortunate that Twain sometimes pushes Jim's guilelessness to the point of idiocy. But let's think for a moment about how many other Southern writers of the time were willing to see nobility and humor in the hearts and minds of slaves. Likewise, though many characters--including Huck--discuss the innate inferiority of the people they always call niggers, it's clear that the beliefs belong to the characters, not to Twain.
That said, a few days ago I was reading the book on the bus, fairly early in the story, when Huck is revealing some of his more unfortunate beliefs. A black man sat down next to me. We met each other's eyes and smiled, and I surreptitiously marked my page with my finder and shut the book. After a moment he glanced at the cover and said "Huck Finn, huh?"
I gabbled about how long it had been since I'd read it, how it was funnier than I remembered. I asked if he had read it, and he shook his head no, still smiling. The word nigger hovered unspoken between us. Was he supposed to accuse me of reading something offensive? Was I supposed to mention the topic we're not supposed to notice any more, the thing you don't talk about with strangers? We rode on in silence. After a few more stops I got off the bus.
I suppose it's something that we could ride on a bus side by side: that he could take the seat next to me without fear of reprisal, that I could look at him and see a person capable of legitimate offense. When strangers can honestly talk about race, though, we'll really be getting somewhere. Whatever the book's limitations, I think it's obvious that's what Twain really wanted, and I have a feeling it's more or less what his censors want too. That day might come sooner if we could start the conversation with a point of commonality--such as, say, all reading the same book.
No comments:
Post a Comment