mean mean pride

So, my book group and I just discussed Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published 1885, 2 years after segregation was legalized, one year before the Haymarket affair. The discussion was wonderful. Not only was it a great chance to spend time with much-loved friends but I loved seeing the differences of opinion on perhaps the novel's most-controversial figure, Jim.

The big questions were is this novel racist and is Jim a caricature or a character?

Let me cite some of Ralph Ellison's thoughts, from his essay "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke": "Writing at a time when the blackfaced minstrel was still popular, and shortly after a war which left even the abolitionists weary of those problems associated with the Negro, Twain fitted Jim into the outlines of the minstrel tradition, and it is from behind this stereotype mask that we see Jim's dignity and human capacity--and Twain's complexity--emerge. Yet it is his source in this same tradition which creates that ambivalence between his identification as an adult and parent and his 'boyish' naïveté, and which by contrast makes Huck, with his street-sparrow sophistication, seem more adult."

So, is Jim boy, man, animal, simpleton or shrewd, trickster or tricked...or simply just trapped by Tom and others like him? Is Huck trapped as well? If so, by what? Clearly Tom, who Huck near idolizes, is the more affluent, higher in social class. Tom is "civilized," well-read, and his forays into rebellion are always cushioned by the fact that he knows he is protected, to borrow language from Pulp's "Common People" he can enjoy the roaches crawling on the wall because he could stop it all. Huck, on the other hand, is essentially an orphan. His father is abusive, manipulative, eager to blow all of Huck's money, drunk and then dead. Is this orphan character part of what makes this such a quintessentially American novel? Does every American, regardless of parentage, somehow consider themselves in part a rebel, a rags-to-riches self made orphan born in an orphan country, lighting out for the territory? Manifest destiny, cult of individualism and all that?

Anyway, I need to drop the rhapsody. Tom is wasteful (using all his uncle's stuff in his "escape" plan for the already free Jim, knowledge he witholds, which gives him a frightening power) and he lives in books, which inspires him to make Jim's "escape" something more akin to torture. It's always funny when authors critique folks living in books....

memorable elements...the frequent use of the "n" word, dialect, superstition, dreams, ghosts, the glory, intrigue, and excitement of the dark, muddy Mississippi River. "dog my cats," Huck saying Jim's "white inside."
Huck's thoughts on the king and the duke "Human beings can be awful cruel to one another." Chpt.32, pg 182

Finally, Ellison in his differing from Leslie Fielder's reading of the Huck/ Jim relationship as somewhat homosexual: "It is ironic that what to a Negro appears to be a lost fall in Twain's otherwise successful wrestle with the ambiguous figure in blackface is viewed by a critic as a symbolic loss of sexual identity." What does he mean by "lost fall"? Why that word choice?



Ah, snakes! Poor Aunt Sally!

this long rambling review has been brought to you by "the old, original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker....they call [me] Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on the mother's side!...I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whisky for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing. I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak!"

(The Raftsmen's passage is pure entertainment!)