After reading The Good Lord Bird, I felt inspired to go back and read the classic it reminded me of. Or perhaps it was re-read; I don't have any memory of this book from high school, and perhaps they had stopped assigning it by the time I got there (towards the end of the neolithic revolution). It's a thoroughly entertaining read. There are some spots (mosty the parts with Tom Sawyer) where it drags things out for longer than I would have thought necessary. Though maybe this pacing is appropriate for a novel about floating down the Mississippi on a raft? I also really enjoyed the vernacular language of it and plan to incorporate "warn't" into my daily speech.
The basic story is simple. A 14 year old Huck Finn runs away from his drunken and dangerous Pap near Hannibal, Missouri. In his escape, he crosses paths with Jim, a negro slave who has run away from the family who took Huck in when his father proved to be a drunk. Together, the two of them float down the big river 1,100 miles to somewhere near Point Coupee Parish, Lousianna, on a homemade raft, having various adventures along the way. At the end of this journey the two stumble upon the family farm of Huck's good friend Tom Sawyer, and Jim is recaptured. Since Tom arrives soon after for a visit with his Aunt, he and Huck lay a plan to free Jim and let him escape to the North. The plan is an epic and hilarious failure, and leads to Jim's recapture, but it turns out that he is actually not a runaway slave after all. His former owner declared him a free man when she recently passed away, a fact which Tom knew all along.
Thematically, the novel is one long sardonic take on the idiocy of antebellum South. The characters Huck and Jim come across in their travels range from narrow-minded to mendacious. And while some of them may mean well and even help them out, there are no heroes along the way. Which observation indirectly brings us to the central controversy that today surrounds this once banned classic -- is it a racist book?
To begin with, true to its vernacular, it features the N word prominently. Since that alone will keep you off the college cheer squad these days, we're not off to a good start. In addition, the few slaves depicted in the book are uniformly portrayed as uneducated and superstitious, often with a tinge of a mocking or comic element to them. Of course, some of this can be defended as Twain accurately picturing the realities of the language and culture he grew up in. But using black characters as comic relief is harder not to see as anything except playing off and reinforcing every stereotype of the era -- minstrelsy! However, when you consider in addition that most white characters in the novel often see even less flattering, and equally stereotypical, portrayals, you might be willing to say that the novel depicts a racist world, but is not itself racist.
However, this lukewarm defense seems to miss a key point. The central tension that holds the whole book together is the 'sivilization' of young Huck Finn. At the outset, Huck chafes at the strictures imposed by his guardian the widow. Under her roof, he can't cuss, has to use a knife and fork, wear shoes, and go to church. His escape down the river with Jim liberates him from all of these rules that just seem like nonsense to a 14 year old boy who loves to be in the backwoods. At the end of the journey though, it seems likely that Tom's aunt will end up adopting Huck and finishing what the widow started. Set within this context, all the Huck's many reflections on what to do about Jim take on a special significance. On the one hand, Huck knows that he's supposed to follow the moral rules these women lay down. These include not lying, and not stealing, both of which he is contravening by not turning in a runaway slave. So Huck constantly feels guilty for helping Jim. On the other hand, he and Jim have a great time together, and Huck knows he's a true friend who has bailed him out many times over during their adventures. In other words, his first hand experience of Jim finds a full human being, and not a piece of property. So throughout the whole novel, Huck has to struggle against what he sees as the morally correct thing to do -- turn Jim in -- which constantly wraps his teenage conscience in a knot. He can't ever bring himself to quite do it, but he knows it's wrong and attributes this moral failure to his terrible upbringing.
I think it's impossible not to see Huck's journey as gradually moving away from the absurd rules of 'sivilization' and towards an appreciation of the humanity of Jim. Huck is taught to be a racist, but he fails at it. And we see the entire process by which a young mind wrestles with and overcomes the stereotypes it began with. This culminates in the tension of the final jailbreak. Tom Sawyer concocts an elaborate and almost quixotic plan for freeing Jim. It takes weeks to prepare. But of course, for him it's all fun and games, since he knows that Jim is already free. Huck, Jim, and the reader, however, don't know what Tom knows. Which makes the ridiculous plan, and the too many pages spilled on its comic execution, a double edged sword. It's funny and absurd and makes an adult Jim seem crazy for going along with some adolescent fantasy. But you, Huck, and Jim can also all feel the frustration with this absurd plan build into a panic -- stop fucking around or they're going to sell Jim down the river tomorrow dammit! So in the end, you get to really feel the commitment of Huck Finn. He's going to lie, cheat, and steal from people who have treated him well. He's even going to risk getting himself killed. Now that he's made up his mind, he is going to do whatever it takes to free his friend Jim, 'sivilization' be damned. It's hard to see how Twain could have more thoroughly dramatized the process of overcoming of the racial attitudes of the day.
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