About Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I have read this book three or four times. It is fine on any level, but I really wanted to understand it better this time because I was reading it in the context of my Lifetime Reading Plan. I knew I had to have some help. Right after I read it I listened to the Hillsdale College lectures---again. They have wonderful free courses, two on Great Books, which include the best lecture I ever heard, about this book or perhaps about anything, and several lectures on this book in a course all on Mark Twain. All excellent, and answered all my questions and more. I took tons of notes.
I would like to argue that this book is the greatest American novel, and maybe the greatest novel period. For one thing, even just literarily, it is completely unique. I mean, the whole thing is told by an uneducated homeless boy in the vernacular, and it's beautiful prose and it works! But there is much more. Maybe a good way to make my argument would be to compare it to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which was just voted the greatest American read on some online contest thing. I actually voted for To Kill a Mockingbird, as American and a great read. I have always loved it. But it is not the best book. (It may be the best movie, though.)
We love Mockingbird to this day because it is sentimental and full of warm, vivid, childhood ambience and adventure, plus it seems to expose the evils of racism. The book was a huge success at least partly because of the civil rights movement happening around that time. Through it we Americans get mass cultural revenge on our dark past and any evil enduring prejudice against black people. It centers around a lawyer in a racist southern town who dares to defend a black man being wrongly accused of raping a white girl. He loses the case and the black man is killed trying to escape from jail. Tragic, and all because of evil white people and group bigotry. So Mockingbird is about a favorite and never-ending social injustice, all set against the coming-of-age of Scout Finch, the lawyer’s young daughter who in the end learns not about universal human nature, good and bad, but about sympathy and understanding for downtrodden people, including Boo Radley, the recluse next door who ultimately comes to her and her brother’s rescue. She resolves never to be hateful or prejudiced and to believe ultimately in human goodness. And that’s about it. It stops dreadfully short of anything transcendent. Nobody changes. There is no redemption. We are shown no weighty universal truths. It just seems to be saying that some people are treated unfairly and we all just need to be nice, which in some senses isn’t always true either. We must stand for right and against wrong. Sometimes that means people have to be corrected or restrained or punished or jailed. I just read Go Set a Watchman, the newly released sequel, which people do not like at all. Why? Because it fills in the deeper realities of Atticus Finch and his town. It talks about having to deal with unsolvable problems. I think the editors and publishers took a lot of the reality out of Mockingbird in order to sell it. And sell it they certainly did! They knew the nature of the mass readership. People don’t want to be unsettled. They don’t want to think that deeply. They just want to be entertained and their popular current perceptions bolstered.
What is Huck Finn about? It takes place before the civil war and chronicles the many and various and outlandish adventures of a cast off boy and a runaway slave as they make their way down the Mississippi River. But at its core it’s not about adventurous boyhood and it’s not about slavery. It is about the shared nature of all human beings and one person’s internal struggle to go against social norms he has found out in his “grinding conscience” are very wrong. In other words, Huck discovers, through his many experiences with Jim, that Jim is a full human being equal if not better than himself, though not perfect, and that it’s wrong for people to be owned like property, which is completely opposite of everything he has ever known. At one point he even thinks he will have to go to hell for helping Jim get free!
This is the story of one person against the moral universe surrounding him and his decision to do the right thing, come what may. Even religion was no help because it had become more and more a merely social institution of codified rules and practices, rather than helping people become more humble and godly inside. It’s one of the truly great stories of redemption, about a huge change in a person’s heart and belief system, and how there is no going back. In the very end of the book Huck had no choice but to “light out for the territories” because he had tried “sivilization” and couldn’t stand it.
Mockingbird is charming and emotionally and politically charged, but compared to Huck Finn is purely sociological, somewhat small minded, and incomplete. (Maybe Harper Lee’s original manuscript was better.) While both may explore the complexities of traditions and societal norms and the morality of human behaviors aside from prejudices, Finn is also about thinking man’s internal conflicts, what motivates his choices, the mighty change of heart, human nature, and timeless universal truths.
There are several reasons people criticize Twain’s masterpiece. They did when he first wrote it. They said it had bad grammar, was vulgar, and portrayed bad morals. Today they ban it because it reminds people of a horribly shameful era in America’s past and uses the N word.
Many people, including me, are disturbed by the protracted denouement, when Tom shows up and concocts no end of pranks and tricks to make freeing Jim a grand heroic adventure. Yes, this is quite cruel and people say it’s a huge flaw in the book. It’s not how books are supposed to end, they say. Tom finds the hardest ways to do all sorts of unnecessary antics, just for fun, playing games with a very serious issues, people’s sanity and a man’s freedom. Huck tries to dissuade him, but is intimidated because Tom is well-brought up and educated and must know what’s best, unlike himself. And then it turned out Jim had been freed by Miss Watson in her will and was free all along and Tom knew it, which makes all of Tom’s falderal even more disgusting. This has always bothered me and been an unsatisfactory ending. But now that I’ve thought about it, I think this is Twain’s way of showing that Huck didn’t have the means to change society, and neither do we as ordinary individuals. It can be cruel and horrible and bad and stupid and downright silly. But we can embark on that spiritual journey down that big river and let God change us and learn to do the right things for the right reasons. Even when the whole world is wrong around us, we can all be Huckleberry Finns.
Maybe Twain in Huckleberry Finn is saying one person can't ever really make the wicked world a better place, but he can become a better human being, while To Kill a Mockingbird is saying let's just be nice to everyone and that will solve every terrible sociological problem. It's the difference between rock-hard reality and wishful fluff, however poignant and entertaining.
I think Twain's book has never been fully understood except by a very few. I have tried to understand it better this time, but it is very big. That’s why I had to write so much down in my notes. Some say Twain merely stumbled on some eternal truths larger than he supposed. But I tend to think he knew just what he meant to say, and it is pure genius.
