Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"It’s tempting to begin by apologizing for picking Huckleberry Finn due to, as you note, the predictability of the choice—and even more so because insensitive discourse and pedagogy surrounding the novel has magnified the harm caused by its use of a racial epithet. As Jonathan Arac pointed out, critics and commentators have made frequent reference to “N­— Jim,” despite that specific phrase never appearing in the novel. Or, conversely, it’s tempting to begin with a defense of the novel by invoking Toni Morrison , who famously extolled it as “classic literature…[that] heaves, manifests, and lasts.” I’m beginning precisely with such an apology and a justification, both. But I chose the book largely because I think Mark Twain —like my next choice, Charles Chesnutt—is a major innovator: he expanded our sense of what the nineteenth-century U.S. novel could do, all while dramatizing how slavery’s legacy persisted into Reconstruction and the Gilded Age —and on into the present day. Almost everything beautiful and troubling about this novel comes back to Twain’s complex decision to focalize a tale of shocking brutality through the perspective of a child. Unlike Tom Sawyer—who exults in violence and others’ suffering—Huck has only partially and imperfectly learned America’s lessons in cruelty. The central payoff of this experiment in point of view is the famous scene in which Huck feels an instinctive aversion to the legal and social proscription against helping Jim escape, an act he accepts as a damning transgression: “All right, then,” he declares, “I’ll go to hell.” But Twain’s conceit also leads him to produce passages of strange, synesthetic beauty (“Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and smelt late. You know what I mean—I don’t know the words to put it in”), and he allows Huck’s playful phraseology and the digressive structure of vernacular speech to shape a prose style that anticipates what we might think of as “modernist” experiments in abstraction. All of this contributes to the novel’s tonal mix of dread and idyll (“days and nights … [that] slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely”), and on this point I defer again to Morrison. She reads the novel as exploring an attachment between white and Black protagonists that is so intense it can’t quite be laughed away or disguised by Jim’s minstrelization, as Twain sometimes seems tempted to do. Morrison writes: “What does Huck need to live without terror, melancholy and suicidal thoughts? The answer, of course, is Jim.”"

"Yes, I think we have to have it. Hemingway said that all American fiction comes from Huckleberry Finn . That’s true, in the sense that Twain invented a way of looking at the American experience and putting it into fiction. I think almost every American writer has to acknowledge that. He is for Americans as important as Chaucer might be for us. He’s a pioneer and shapes the terms of trade of American fiction writing for a long time. He was able to turn the American vernacular into literature. Well, it’s partly a sequel to Tom Sawyer which was a story for boys, so yes. But, at the same time, it’s also about race which is a very important question. It’s about the American frontier, which is also a very important: you can’t imagine a book like Kerouac’s On the Road or a lot of Hemingway without it. It’s a very important dimension in American life, the frontier, and Twain nails it completely. Yes, he’s drawing on his life on the Mississippi . If you read his Life on the Mississippi , you find a portrait of life on the river which feels like outtakes from the novel, in a way. Huckleberry Finn is written in at least two—if not three—parts and begins in fairly high spirits and gets darker and darker. It was written over quite a long period. Its darkness, in some ways, is quite unsatisfactory from a narrative point of view because it becomes very bleak. You talked about bleakness: he was very, very bleak. Yes, in America there are periodic attempts to get it banned by various mad, bigoted high schools."

"Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and unlike Moby-Dick , this is a book that had quick popular success; indeed, it was so popular that for quite a while it wasn’t esteemed to be serious fiction . As a sequel to Tom Sawyer , it tended to get put in the young adult box. And it tended to be trivialized because of its comedic side. It is the least ‘serious’ of just about all the Great American Novel contenders. But over time, its more complicated resonances were perceived, and it garnered serious admirers. It also gathered criticism in the post-Civil Rights Era for the incessant repetition of the N-word. There have been battles about delisting it in school districts for decades. Huckleberry Finn is another romance of the divide. The trip down the Mississippi , from the Upper South border regions to the Deep South, and back again, is the movement of the plot. It’s also a romance across the color line, between Huck and his companion, Jim, who escaped slavery. Romance doesn’t necessarily mean a sexual relationship (although it has been argued that there’s a homoerotic bond between Huck and Jim, I think that is overheated). The friendship and understanding between Jim and Huck is the moral center of gravity for the book. Huck’s been a figure that some readers identified with over the years as either the perennial youth resisting acculturation or the personification of wanderlust. He’s a slacker, the exact opposite of the American pioneer driven by work ethic. That is part of the novel’s broad appeal and one of the reasons it’s a candidate for Great American Novel. As far as the intractable whiteness, that chiefly goes to show that the GAN mirrors the scene of cultural production. The dominant literary culture, until recently, has been white. And the paying readership dominantly has been white. So, you get a somewhat skew-y version of the national tapestry if you look at the nominees for the title of GAN. But that doesn’t prevent novelists of color from seizing the legacy and reconceiving the stakes of the Great American Novel and reweaving the ingredients of the GAN into monumental efforts of their own. Tony Morrison does that in Beloved . Ellison drew from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huck Finn . Generativity is a characteristic of this GAN game. Candidates are not only good reads, they tend to lend themselves to metamorphosis. The game doesn’t remain stable. Morrison and Ellison reinvigorated the Great American Novel tradition by morphing it."