More Musings...
                                                 

My Mate Huck Finn

The session was held to mark the centenary of the death of Samuel Clemens better known by his pen name—Mark Twain. 

My Mate Huck Finn 

“I have no race prejudice. I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being -- that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.”
(Mark Twain in his essay, ‘Concerning the Jews’)

I believe Mark Twain. That’s the voice I hear in Huckleberry Finn. And while children all around the world enjoy reading about their good friend Huck, for adults, the book takes on a deeper meaning. We can better understand the book’s context through our reading and exposure to popular culture. Slavery in the USA and pre Civil War Southern society are familiar topics—blame it all on Gone With the Wind if you like, but adult readers understand how the culture of slave owning and the Civil War cast a dark cloud over race relations for a century—some would argue even longer.

Today in the USA there’s a huge Mark Twain ‘industry’. Scholars are still divided in their opinions about the novel. When first published in 1885, the book drew sharp criticism from newspaper critics. The lack of respect shown for adult authority and religion, the way it ‘encouraged’ law breaking, and so on, shocked many conservatives—this was a book not meant for children, they pontificated.

I’m sure they counted all of ‘The 10 Commandments’ that Huck breaks: stealing, lying, not honouring his parents, taking God’s name in vain…even his belief in magic and superstition could be translated into worshipping false gods. And please! Let’s not forget ‘coveting’ his neighbour’s property i.e. Jim, slave and property of that dreadfully sanctimonious Miss Watson. Here I agree with critics who think Miss Watson’s change of heart, where she frees Jim on her deathbed, is out of character. It’s an element of the story that’s hard to believe.

The other aspect of Twain’s masterpiece that troubles me still is the ending, at Phelps’ Farm, where Tom Sawyer suddenly reappears and Huck hands over the reins of the entire ‘freeing Jim’ enterprise to Tom, his social superior. It’s the only time Huck (or Twain) lets me down. But I’m prepared to forgive any writer whose books are banned or ‘black listed’.

In its day, Huck’s ungrammatical vernacular voice as narrator was also attacked as coarse and ‘inappropriate’. Banned by the Concorde Massachusetts Library board in the same year it was released, the board described the novel as ‘Trash’ and only suitable for the slums’. Other libraries soon followed suit.

Years later Twain said this about his book, which took him eight years to complete and which, according to some authorities, he put aside for three years.

“But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.”

 Even today public opinion still remains divided as to the novel’s literary worth, its anti-racist status, and particularly the use of the word ‘nigger’. Some educational authorities, teachers and African- American parent groups are troubled by ‘the N word’ and feel their children are put under the spotlight and made to feel ashamed. They don’t believe it should be required reading at high school.

Someone once described it as ‘this amazing troubling book’… it’s a fair description, I think.

Pulitzer prize winner, Jane Smiley prefers ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ as an anti-slavery text and thinks Huckleberry Finn’ overrated; she disagrees with Ernest Hemmingway who once said,   ‘All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain, called 'Huckleberry Finn’.

Yet when rereading Twain for the Writers’ Festival this year I found myself marvelling over his genius for nuance and language. I know which side of the Twain Debate I stand. It’s easy to forget the society he was writing for—this was the time when most white people still thought African Americans inferior human beings—but Twain knew better. Through his character of Huck we see, as Twain meant us to see that, ‘a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience’. In other places he  described his creation as ‘...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.'

As I mentioned earlier, opinion is still divided in scholarly circles:

• Is Twain sympathetic but too paternalistic in his writing?
• Is he a rabid racist as some claim?
• Or is the author something else altogether? Is Huck a humanist account?

I think we need to remind ourselves that Twain’s audience in the 1880s was still a society of lynchings and segregation, and that he was holding a mirror up to this world that had certainly not been transformed by the Civil War. Twain was terribly troubled by his boyhood in the slave-trading town of Hannibal and filled with guilt…death is another recurring theme in this novel.

Later in life Twain, or Samuel Clemens, married into a family of abolitionists, lived next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe and helped to financially assist young black men through college. Some see this as an act of contrition for having been born in the South and coming from a family that owned a few slaves. But in ‘Hick Finn’ Clemens, or Twain, overcame his upbringing; Jim’s humanity comes through clearly.

Some Twain experts argue that Jim is made out to be a buffoon in the ‘Minstrel’ Show tradition of the ‘darky’. Others disagree. Jim’s no fool, they argue, and is very good at manipulating Huck when he must. I agree. I think Jim wears a mask in front of ‘white folk’. By the book’s end however, Huck and Jim have learnt to respect one another.

I’m still waiting for ‘Spike Lee’s Huckleberry Finn.’ the movie script written by Afro American writer Ralph Wiley to one day hit the screens. Why is it taking so long? Wiley decided to write his movie script after Hollywood actor Denzel Washington remarked to him that, ‘Some people try to act like it [slavery] never happened. Wiley cautions critics who come down on Twain: ‘Don’t mistake Huck’s views for Twains,’ he says.

***

Earlier this year, on the Channel Nine television show ‘Red Faces’, many viewers couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but the look on American singer, Harry Connick Jnr.’s face said it all. The man was absolutely shocked that in this day and age the producers would allow on camera a group of men with blackened faces and golliwog appearance—except for one in ‘white face’ supposedly deceased singer Michael Jackson. Despite the bewilderment written on compere Daryl (‘What’s it all about?’) Somer’s face, other viewers knew what the ‘fuss’ was about. You didn’t have to come from the Deep South like Connick Jnr. to understand the implied insult, which would be clear enough to an audience in the USA today. ‘Come on! Can’t you take a joke?’ is often our Australian response… . The adults who ‘performed’ the act should have known better—one of them (a medical doctor born in India) thought it was a hoot and went on to protest that some of his old uni mates and co performers were ‘ethnic’.  This only proves that education is no safeguard against stupidity. In the words of Mark Twain,

'Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.’

But dear reader, why don’t you revisit Huckleberry Finn and decide for yourself?