Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (9 page)

Two of America’s most famous children’s books are Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. Tom Sawyer is etched deeply in the American imagination: a lovable, hooky-playing rascal who sneaks out to smoke and who is a consummate con man, as evidenced by the splendid fence-whitewashing episode. Tom loves games: pirate games, magic treasure, getting all his friends to play along. In this respect, he is our child version of Don Quixote, scrupulously modeling his escapades according to the rules laid down in the adventure stories he has read. He is also our Peter Pan, the child who never grows up. At the end of the story devoted to him, Twain does imply, through the words of Colonel Thatcher, a future for this clever, bold young man as a lawyer. That story is not written, but it is not far-fetched to imagine, down the road, young man Sawyer, credentialed, in a suit, arranging significant deals, good with gab and spin, in the swim. Bear this in mind.

Tom reappears in the second book,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, and he is true to form: assessing life according to the prescriptive laws of the adventure tales he has absorbed and being willing to go all out, to live up to this deeply bookish code. All serious readers of
Huckleberry Finn
must indeed wish that Tom Sawyer had never gotten into the second book, given that he does his level best to ruin it by transforming its profound moral vision into a kindergarten fantasy of disguise, high jinks, doing it by the book. The “it” that is done (in) by the book is, of course, nothing less than its moral heart: Huck’s nascent and difficult awareness of his culture’s ills regarding racism and dehumanization, which recedes from the picture, replaced by Twain’s stock resource whenever in a pinch, fun and games. Even Jim, who had his moments of great dignity, seems transformed into a one-dimensional minstrel-show figure by book’s end.

Yet
Huckleberry Finn
remains a stupendous account of growing up, no matter how deeply botched its close may be. Electing to tell Huck’s story in Huck’s own voice must be accounted as one of the most brilliant narrative choices in the history of fiction. If Tom Sawyer is glib, smooth, and destined for success, Huck is, in every respect, his opposite number: orphan, from the wrong side of the tracks, dropout, uncharismatic, zero cultural capital. Huck is not headed to law school at book’s end. Huck, innocent though he is, is a pragmatist, and he actually tests out some of Tom’s pet theories and finds that they don’t add up. No Spaniards, no A-rabs, no camels, no elephants; not even a genie, no matter how hard you rub the old tin lamp. Huck’s verdict is swift and profound: “It had all the marks of a Sunday school.” (Once you get your head around that phrase, you begin to appreciate both the Blakean Twain, the man who knows the insidious reach of ideology, and the Nietzschean Twain, the man who deconstructs.)

Yet it won’t do, either, to consider Huck as the prosaic counterpart to the “poetic” Tom, since much of the novel’s extraordinary beauty is to be found in “Huck-speak,” an unlettered vernacular discourse that can be lyrical and haunting. A storm comes upon Huck and Jim camping out in the woods, and Twain writes it like this:

You’ll not find this awe and immediacy in
Tom Sawyer
, and it bids to introduce a pungent native eloquence into American prose that rivals what Whitman had done, a few decades earlier, for poetry. Twain wants to bring you directly into the roiling spectacle of natural forces, and his homegrown metaphors and similes—spider-webby, like rolling empty barrels down stairs—make us sit up and take notice. This is
son et lumière
, as witnessed by a fourteen-year-old boy, yielding a bristling, pulsing vision of the natural world before it disappeared into our adult frames of reference. There is a grandeur here that is quite different from the pathos we saw in Simplicius’s notations of war or Blake’s account of the chimney sweep’s vision. Yet it is also, despite the bursts of light, often dark and grisly and outright death-inflected, as we see in the kinds of stories and lies that Huck routinely tells. From his early mention of being “so lonesome I most wished I was dead” and hearing the faraway owls “who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die” on to his theatricalized death (in order to escape Pap) and his throwaway fabrications about his sister, Mary Ann, “run off and never was heard of no more, and Bill went to hunt them and he warnt heard of no more, and Tom and Mort died, and then there warn’t nobody but just me and pap left,” we understand Huck to be a plenty disturbed boy, and one wants to agree with Toni Morrison’s brilliant observation that Huck needs Jim more than Jim needs Huck, in order to be saved from terror, melancholy, and suicide.

Yet my interest is not in putting Huck on a couch but rather in measuring the stunning moral (and ideological) education he undergoes. Twain’s genius, as always in this text, lies in writing from Huck’s angle of vision. Hence, although the novel was written in the 1880s, well after the Civil War, its setting is the 1840s, and Twain wants us to ask ourselves: what did the great questions of race and slavery look like to a dropout kid from Missouri at that time? They don’t look like great questions at all. Huck is, albeit decent, as serenely racist as everyone else around him. Jim, though likable and sweet, must needs be a not-fully-human creature, not fully evolved, given to extravagant fantasies and folk beliefs, in short: a fellow Huck enjoys laughing at.

Sometimes the laughing is quite nasty, as in the bald-faced lie Huck tells Jim regarding their getting lost in the fog. The sudden fog makes vision impossible, and all Huck’s efforts to use the canoe and secure the raft fail, so that not only are he and Jim separated, but he is “shot out into the solid white fog … with no more idea which way I was going than a dead man.” We have a surreal scene of a literally unmoored Huck, flying around in the fog, hearing “whoops” coming from all sides, losing all directionality.
Losing all directionality
. This is a bad day for the fixed, anchored self. Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius found himself on a moving stage set in motion by war. Huck experiences a comparably unhinged setting, but it is located in nature itself, in the majestic river that is a vortex of forces bidding to undo the human subject. Orphaned in every sense, Huck is booming down the river, seeing “smoky ghosts of big trees,” then comes to an eddy, utterly lost, and addresses the reader directly: “If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once—you’ll see.” He whoops for a while, hears and then loses sounds, ends up on open river, and goes to sleep. When he wakes up, it is nighttime, with shining stars, and sure enough, he sights the raft, makes to it, sees it has been badly damaged and covered with litter and trash; he climbs on it, sees Jim sitting there with his head between his knees, asleep; and he lies down “under Jim’s nose.”

Jim wakes up, sees Huck, and explodes with joy that the boy is alive, “back agin, ’live en soun’, jis de same ole Huck—de same ole Huck.” At this point the same old Huck asks Jim if he’s been drinking, since his talk is so wild and makes so little sense. He assures Jim he never left the raft in the first place, so he could scarcely have come back. Jim is rocked by this assertion, cannot square it with what he’s been through, and asks some of the novel’s greatest existential questions: “Is I
me
, or who
is
I? Is I heah, or whah
is
I?” Huck plays it to the hilt: Jim’s a fool, there never was a fog, Jim’s conviction that he and Huck were separated, that he almost drowned, all this is said by Huck to be dreams. Jim remains silent for five minutes, observes that he’s never before had a dream that so exhausted him, sets about offering an elaborate allegorical interpretation of the dream, but is then stopped in his tracks by the sly Huck, who finally points to the evidence of reality, the leaves and rubbish on the raft, and sweetly asks Jim: “What does
these
things stand for?” It is an elaborate con game, a one-upmanship performance worthy of Tom Sawyer. Jim’s answer ranks among the most noble things in the book:

Huck’s reaction to this indictment is justly famous: “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger—but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither.” By setting this entire sequence under the aegis of
fog
—collapse of contours, inability to see clear, undoing of “I”—Twain is depicting a disoriented white boy under siege, letting go of received ideas, beginning to measure the dignity and humanity of a black man. The pathos of these pages resides in their grudging generosity, since nothing in Huck’s makeup or background could have prepared him for such a perception. On the contrary, not only is Jim still, even in this passage, a “nigger”—how could he be anything else for Huck?—but Huck is routinely astonished by Jim’s humanity. Seeing Jim homesick, Huck knows that he misses his wife and children, that he’d never been away from home in his life, and again he registers one of the novel’s lovely discoveries: “I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.” Is this not what brainwashing looks like?
It don’t seem natural
. This is what Twain has signed on for in this book: to take an unschooled boy—hence a barometric figure, a kind of random sampling of how a culture thinks—and give him a set of adventures that scrambles his received views, that goes counter to what is “natural.” For that is what ideology is: the natural, the obvious, the transparent. All of which, for Huck Finn, mean: Jim as less than human, Jim as “nigger.” There is something very fine, but also very revolutionary, in moments like this, when the big protocols start to waver, to show as constructs, to lose their governing authority. Beyond even Grimmelshausen and Blake, Twain uses the lens of innocence as a window onto identity formation and the struggle needed to resist it.

The book’s final third is an embarassing mishmash of Tom Sawyer tricks, transforming the moral center of the novel—the recognition of Jim’s humanity, the emancipation of Jim from slavery—into a nauseating, spiraling series of fun and games. More distressingly, Huck experiences genuine pangs of conscience at what he is doing: freeing a “nigger.” Here is where the “natural” does its dirty business again, for how can this child view his acts as other than seditious, outright evil? “It would get around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom.” The more Huck thinks about this, “the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to be feeling.” Tom Sawyer’s games were seen by Huck as smacking of Sunday school; but Twain, like Blake before him, knows that Sunday school is lodged deep inside the human being. How, the boy asks himself, can he justify “stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm”? Providence is watching him, he feels; wickedness such as this will be punished; he’s headed for the “everlasting fire.” Culture is speaking.

Anguished by such thoughts of his sins, Huck writes a note to Miss Watson, telling her where Jim is. And he feels great relief: “all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life.” Again the biblical language testifies to the stubborn and enduring pact with culture, even in a seeming disbeliever. Huck reflects back on how close he has come to being lost and going to Hell. But reflection is a double-edged sword, and, in quasi-Proustian fashion, it brings the human Jim of these past adventures terribly, wonderfully, to life, so that Huck sees Jim before him “all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing.” (Jim is virtually storming Huck; Twain understands the vagaries of consciousness, how helpless we are when it gets riled up, how we can be victimized by what is best, as well as worst, in us.) Huck knows he is morally obliged to turn Jim in, but the Jim he sees is kind and generous and loving: he “would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was.” Remembering Jim saying “I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world,” Huck opens his eyes, looks around, and sees the note to Miss Watson. The moment of spiritual truth is here: