When Huck opens that window to take off from home, the reader has the same thrill of anticipation one feels after hearing the first few bars of a Miles Davis solo.
—Peter Watrous of the New York Times (personal conversation)
As an African-American who came of age in the 1960s, I first encountered Huckleberry Finn in a fancy children’s edition with beautifully printed words and illustrations on thick pages, a volume bought as part of a mail-order series by my ambitious parents. While I do not remember ever opening that particular book—as a junior high schooler I was more drawn to readings about science or my baseball heroes—I do recall a sense of pride that I owned it: that a classic work was part of the furniture of my bedroom and of my life. Later I would discover Twain’s ringing definition of a classic as “something everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read.”
Like many others of that generation—and then I suppose of every American generation that has followed—I was assigned the book as part of a college course. Actually I was taught the book twice, once in a course in modern fiction classics (along with Cervantes, Mann, Conrad, Wolfe, Faulkner), then in a course tracing great themes in American literature, including those of democracy and race. In both these classes, Mark Twain and his Huckleberry Finn appeared as heroic and timeless exemplars of modernism in terms of both literary form and progressive political thought. Here was an American novel told not from the standpoint or in the language of Europe but from the position of the poor but daring and brilliant river-rat Huck, whose tale was spun in lingo we could tell was plain Americanese—why, anybody could tell it, as the boy himself might say.
His was a story of eager flight from the rigidities of daily living, particularly from those institutions that as youngsters we love to hate: family, school, church, the hometown itself. That white Huckleberry’s flight from commonplace America included a deep, true friendship with black Jim, who began the novel as a slave in Huck’s adopted family, proved Huck’s trust of his own lived experience and feelings: his integrity against a world of slavery and prejudice based on skin color. Huck’s discovery that he was willing to take the risks involved in assisting Jim in his flight from slavery connected the youngster with the freedom struggle not only of blacks in America but of all Americans seeking to live up to the standards of our most sacred national documents. Here was democracy without the puffery, e pluribus unum at its most radical level of two friends from different racial (but very similar cultural) backgrounds loving one another. Here too was a personal declaration of independence in action, an American revolution (and some would say also a civil war) fought first within Huck’s own heart and then along the Mississippi River, the great brown god that many have said stands almost as a third major character in this novel of hard-bought freedom and fraternity, of consciousness and conscientiousness.
I understood these themes as supporting the civil rights movement of that era, and, further, as significant correctives to sixties black nationalism, which too often left too little space, in my view, for black-white friendships and, alas, for humor, without which no revolution I was fighting for was worth the sacrifice. In those days, Huckleberry Finn was also part of my arsenal of defenses against those who questioned my decision to major in literature during the black revolution; for me, it served to justify art itself not just as entertainment but as equipment for living and even as a form of political action. For here was a book whose message of freedom had been so forcefully articulated that it was still sounding clearly all these years later, all over the world. What was I doing in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond that was as courageous and selfless (and yet as individually self-defining)—as profoundly revolutionary —as Huck’s act of helping to rescue Jim?
And yet I do have to say that even in those student days of first discovering this novel, I was troubled by the figure of Jim, with whom, from the very beginning, I found it impossible to identify. Though as a college sophomore or junior I wrote an earnest essay in defense of Jim as a wise man whose “superstitions” could be read as connections to a proud “African” system of communal beliefs and earned adjustments to a turbulent and dangerous new world, it was definitely Huck whose point of view I adopted, while Jim remained a shadowy construction whose buffoonery and will to cooperate with white folks’ foolishness embarrassed and infuriated me. Then too the novel’s casual uses of the word “nigger” always made my stomach tighten. Years later, when I read about black students, parents, and teachers who objected to the novel’s repeated use of this inflammatory word, I knew just what they meant. Lord knows, as a student I had sat in classes where “Nigger Jim” (that much-bandied title never once used by Twain but weirdly adopted by innumerable teachers and scholars, including some of the best and brightest, as we shall see) was discussed by my well-intentioned white classmates and professors whose love of the novel evidently was unimpeded by this brutal language. (Did some of them delight in the license to use this otherwise taboo term? What might that have meant?)
Using some of these ideas about democracy and race (including some of my doubts and questions), for fifteen years I taught Huckleberry Finn at Howard, at Wesleyan, and then at Barnard. And then somehow my battered paperback, my several lectures, and my fat folder of articles by some of the novel’s great critics—Eliot, Hemingway, Ellison, Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Henry Nash Smith—all were set aside. I suppose that one problem was simply that the book was taught too much—that students came to me having worn out their own copies already. And too often they seemed to respond not to the book itself but to bits and pieces of the classic hymns of critical (and uncritical) praise, grist for the term-paper-writer and standardized-test-taker’s mill. In recent years, when I wanted to teach Twain again, I turned to the novel Pudd‘nhead Wilson, with its own tangled problems of racial and national masks and masquerades; to short fiction and essays (including perhaps his funniest piece of writing, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”; see “For Further Reading”), and to The Mysterious Stranger, in which wry, darkly wise Satan drops in on a hamlet very much like the ones of Twain’s best-known fictions, including Huckleberry Finn. One of Satan’s messages is close to Huck’s, too: that it is better to be dead than to endure the ordinary villager’s humdrum (and very violent) life.
To introduce the present edition, I returned to find Adventures of Huckleberry Finn more deeply troubling than ever but nonetheless mightily alluring—in some ways more alluring now that its experiments and failures were so evident. In this fresh review of the novel, I have found it helpful to invoke certain of Edward Said’s terms for contemporary reading: Read receptively, he advises, but also read resistantly.a This critical strategy of armed vision presumes that there are no perfect literary achievements, that one takes even the biblical gospel, “whenever it’s poss‘ble, with a grain of salt.” Such an attitude of resistant receptivity is particularly apt for Huckleberry Finn precisely because it has been swallowed whole as a perfect book on the basis of which Mark Twain is “sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.”b As Jonathan Arac has so eloquently argued,c it has been idolized and “hypercannonized”—included in every U.S. literary reading list and anthology as an unassailable monument by some who assume that those who raise questions about it either have not read the masterpiece, or cannot do so. One of the attractions of rereading this book is that with the work of Arac and others, we as readers are freer than ever not just to worship Twain’s creation but to explore it anew—receiving and resisting as we go.
I will start, then, with what I found troubling in Huckleberry Finn, and afterward—at the risk of adding to the frenzy of hyperapproval—I will explain why I have decided to teach it again, not just as a problematic but teachable book but as one that still moves me greatly as a reader who loves words and sentences, characters and plotlines. And as a reader who loves the blues—but I’m getting ahead of my story. Trouble comes first: aspects of the novel to wonder about as we wander through the book, to resist.
The first problem is
one I have mentioned already: the book’s constant use of the word “nigger.” Not as student now but as teacher, I find this offense to be glaring: What would I do about the use of the word in my classroom? What is there to tell eighth-grade readers and their parents and teachers—the first wave of those confronting the novel as a classroom exercise? I hate censorship, and would not remove the book from any library shelf or curriculum, even at the middle-school level; nor would I recommend deleting or translating the word in expurgated editions just for kids. To readers young and old, I would point out that “nigger” was used as part of casual everyday speech by whites and blacks in the South and also in the West and the East and the North. Sometimes it was willfully hurled as an assault weapon, sometimes as mere thoughtless prattle (and, of course, ignorant assaults at times can hurt as much as any others); sometimes it was tossed off by whites with well-intentioned affection-cum-condescension; sometimes by whites who lived at the borders of black communities and who felt their proximity granted them the insiders’ privilege (always a precarious presumption) to use a term usually not tolerated from outsiders. For blacks, then and now, the word has been used within the group, just as anti-Semitic terms are used by Jews themselves, in part as a strategy to disarm the enemy. Within the black circle, “nigger” could invoke bravado and/or camaraderie and/or even flirtation: to be called a “pretty nigger” in the black Washington, D.C., of my youth could be the sweetest of compliments. (Though in the jujitsu world of black language that term could be reversed into one of disdain: “pretty nigger” as weak, absurd peacock.)
But my point is that in Twain’s world of the 1870s and 1880s (when he was writing Huckleberry Finn), in the world of the novel itself—roughly the 1840s—and, crucial to note, in our own precarious world, the word “nigger” is and was, among these other things, a word of deepest racial hatred, a willful assault. In class discussions of the novel and in writing about it, let the students use the term warily, in quotation marks, in recognition that somebody in the class could take it as a deeply hurtful act of indifference, ignorance, or outright viciousness; and that at the next turn of the screw a nasty racial term may be hurled back at the hurler! For my part, as I teach the book this year at Columbia University, I will be ready with materials on the word’s history, in literary and cultural arenas beyond literature. Two important sources will be Jonathan Arac’s book, along with Randall Kennedy’s study Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Wordd—in which, among other things, Kennedy lists dozens of court cases in which a black defendant in an assault or murder case has claimed as a defense that the white victim of an attack had started the fight by spitting out this one nasty word.
In defense of Twain’s language, I would remind readers that we are getting Twain’s creation of Huck’s tale in Huck’s voice, and that, as many have argued, we should read Huck’s uses of “nigger” not only as evidence of authentic historical talk, however unpleasant, but as Twain’s relentless, well-turned irony. (With “irony” referring to an aside that is understood by reader and writer, and perhaps at times by a particularly knowing character like Huck, but not by most of a work’s characters.) One central irony here is that even a boy who strikes us as pure in heart and thoroughly genuine in his love for Jim uses the term in sentence after sentence—that’s how deeply ingrained the language of American racism was (and, sadly, is). In one of the novel’s most unforgettable scenes, Twain’s irony is most effectively pointed. In chapter 32, Huck, masquerading as Tom Sawyer, pretends to have just arrived on a riverboat that was delayed by an explosion on board. Aunt Sally asks, “Anybody hurt?” “No‘m,” is Huck’s quick reply. “Killed a nigger.” “Well, it’s lucky;” said Aunt Sally, “because sometimes people do get hurt” (p. 201). Even motherly Aunt Sally, who seems well-meaning enough, is at home not only with this term “nigger” but also with the news of the death of an African American, who in her language is neither a human being nor worth a sigh of remorse. Further, Huck’s use of “nigger” in this instance adds detail to his cleverly turned lie, and asserts a sense of (white) community with Aunt Sally to hide his real intention of freeing Jim. As Huck suspected, Sally and family have bought Jim and kept him hidden as part of their own plan to sell him down the river. Behind what at first seems like her wonderful good manners lurks the monster of race hatred, unabashed.
Clearly, if in this scene we change the racial designation to “Negro” or “negro” (the more common nineteenth-century usage), we would lose the violence of the word “nigger”; but it is also true that with the emendation we would sacrifice the deepest, most slashing irony that Twain turns against the word and the world of prejudice underlying it.
The second problem I want to raise also involves race—the portrayal of Jim. Here a whole book-length essay could follow. But for this space my central complaint is that in this realistic novel, Jim is just not real enough, not true enough either to historical type or to human dimensions that transcend historical type. I’ll start by observing that the greatest critic of his era on this question of African-American portraiture, Sterling A. Brown, disagrees with me on this point, and in fact has strongly commended Twain’s portrait of Jim. Like Huck and Tom, writes Brown, Jim is “drawn from life. He is no longer the simple-minded, mysterious guide in the ways of dead cats, doodle-bugs and signs of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Running away from old Miss Watson who... ‘pecks on’ him all the time, treats him ’pooty rough’ and wants a trader’s eight hundred dollars for him, Jim joins Huck on the immortal journey down the Mississippi.”e Brown finds Jim’s humor rich, not the stuff of minstrel buffoonery alone: “His talk enlivens the voyage. He is at his comic best in detailing his experience with high finance—he once owned fourteen dollars. But the fun is brought up sharp by Jim’s ‘Yes—en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’t want no mo’ ” (p. 46).
But as Brown observes, “he did want more. He wanted to get to a free state and work and save money so he could buy his wife, and they would both work to buy their children, or get an abolitionist to go steal them.” In Brown’s evaluation, “Jim is the best example in nineteenth century fiction of the average Negro slave (not the tragic mulatto or the noble savage), illiterate, superstitious, yet clinging to his hope for freedom, to his love for his own. And he is completely believable, whether arguing that Frenchmen should talk like people, or doing most of the work on the raft, or forgiving Huck whose trick caused him to be bitten by a snake, or sympathizing with the poor little Dauphin, who, since America has no kings, ‘cain’t git no situation.’” Here is parental tenderness and shame as Jim ”tells of his little daughter, whom he had struck, not knowing she disobeyed because she had become deaf from scarlet fever.” Says Jim: ”Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plum deef en dumb—en I’d been a-treatin’ her so!“f
Likewise, in his first writings about Huckleberry Finn, the novelist Ralph Ellison strongly defends Twain’s presentation of Jim (whom incredibly even he, Ellison, sometimes calls “Nigger Jim”) as “not only a slave but a human being, a man who in some ways was to be envied.” Echoing Brown, Ellison praises Jim’s portraiture, particularly its inclusion of faults that humanize: “Twain, though guilty of the sentimentality common to humorists, does not idealize the slave. Jim is drawn in all his ignorance and superstition, with his good traits and his bad. He, like all men, is ambiguous, limited in circumstance but not in possibility.” For Ellison, what’s most significant is Jim’s role as Twain’s shining “symbol of humanity, and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil taken for civilization by the town.”g
Yet Ellison, writing in the 1950s, more than ten years after his first defense of Jim, also began to find fault with Jim’s portrayal. On second thought, the figure was so close, he said, to the tradition of blackface minstrelsy—that form of American theater best known for its feature of white men wearing burned cork on their faces to imitate, t
ypically in grotesque exaggerations, black American forms of song and dance—that black readers keep their distance from Huckleberry’s black friend. Recalling his reading the book as a boy, Ellison says, “[I] could imagine myself as Huck Finn (I so nicknamed my brother), but not, though I racially identified with him, as Nigger Jim [sic; recall again that this was never Mark Twain’s phrase], who struck me as a white man’s inadequate portrait of a slave.”h Elsewhere, Ellison said that Twain evidently did not calculate blacks among the readers of his novel: “It was a dialogue between... a white American novelist of good heart, of democratic vision, one dedicated to values... and white readers, primarily,” he said. And Twain’s failure as an artist, in this view, is that he relied too much on the barroom joke and minstrel show for images of blacks rather than seeking true images, not only from lived experience but from prior forms of literature, depicting blacks and other figures from beneath the social hierarchy. To this degree, Twain was “not quite as literary a man as he was required to be,” wrote Ellison, “because he could have gone to Walter Scott, to the Russians, to any number of places, and found touch-stones for filling out the complex humanity of that man who appeared in his book out of his own imagination, and who was known as Jim.”i
In her eloquent commentary on Huckleberry Finn, the novelist Toni Morrison finds the solution to Huck’s loneliness and despair to be not the godlike river—with its own terrible unpredictability—but the companionship of Jim. Floating on their raft, free from the troubles of the shore, Huck and Jim talk quietly, and their communion together is “so free of lies it produces an aura of restfulness and peace unavailable anywhere else in the novel.”j But given the real distance between blacks and whites in America, Morrison says, so extreme today and infinitely more so a hundred-plus years ago, this wonderful friendship is doomed, and as savvy southerners, Jim and Huck know in advance that it is doomed. Morrison says that this inevitable split between the two friends, the novel’s underlying tragedy, helps explain why Twain presented Jim in such exaggeratedly outsized stereotyped terms—lest Huck or the reader get too close to him. “Anticipating this loss may have led Twain to the over-the-top minstrelization of Jim,” writes Morrison. “Predictable and common as the gross stereotyping of blacks was in nineteenth-century literature, here, nevertheless, Jim’s portrait seems unaccountably excessive and glaring in its contradictions—like an ill-made clown suit that cannot hide the man within.”
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 2
