Huckleberry Finn: Antidote to Hate

By Nicholas Wolfson

Huck, Jim and Tom are American immortals. They resonate in the popular culture and, at the same time, provoke the continual concern and interest of intellectuals in the academic community. When the book was first published, and for years thereafter, many critics complained about the baleful influence the delinquent Huck, with his use of bad language, and skepticism about religion, would have on good God fearing American White boys. They did not sufficiently focus on the issue of race raised by the book. . In recent decades many scholars and educators have severely criticized the book as a bigoted tract that portrays a subservient Jim and repetitively uses the N word. This book answers those more recent concerns. It demonstrates the toughness and humanity of Jim. Professor Wolfson points out how Jim educates Huck and treats him with love. He sets forth the ways in which Jims fundamental humanity awakens Huck to the degradation of his surroundings and leads him to the famous Chapter where Huck resolves to go to hell rather than betray Jim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 21, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462806515

Nicholas Wolfson

Nicholas Wolfson is the George and Helen England Professor of Law, Emeritus at the University of Connecticut School of Law where he taught courses on Free Speech, Church and State, Securities Regulation and Corporate Law. He has written extensively; some of his books include “Hate Speech, Sex Speech, Free Speech” (Praeger, 1997); “Corporate First Amendment Rights and the SEC” (Quorum,1990);and “The Modern Corporation: Free Markets vs. Regulation” (The Free Press,1984) (translated into Japanese). He authored “Conflicts of Interest: Investment Banking”, a Report to the Twentieth Century Fund (1976). He is a member of The American Law Institute. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School (cum laude) and Columbia College, Columbia University (summa cum laude and valedictorian). He served as an Assistant Director on the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Book preview

HUCKLEBERRY FINN:

ANTIDOTE TO HATE

Nicholas Wolfson

Copyright © 2003 by Nicholas Wolfson.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

We Are Introduced To Huck Finn and

Jim—They Light Out in Search of Freedom

CHAPTER TWO

The Feud—The Duke and the Dauphin

Take Over the Raft

CHAPTER THREE

Tom Sawyer Returns—Some Concluding

Reflections on the Ending and the Book

CHAPTER FOUR

Coda

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

I’M SEVENTY ONE. I have an early-childhood memory of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was five or six years old. I was suffering from what the adults called an inflammation of the hip lining. One night, I could not sleep because of the pain. My parents read me chapters of the Huck Finn book. I still remember my laughter despite the pain.

I can’t recall the passages that got to me. But I remember, with pleasure, my laughter.

I’m not sure, but I believe I read the entire book some years later when I was nine or ten, and again in high school.

Like most Americans, it became difficult, through the years, to separate my personal feel for the book from the vast industry of Twain talk both scholarly and popular. Mark Twain is perhaps the most popular and enduring American writer, surpassing even Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway, and other great American authors we may care to mention, in mythic reputation. Mark Twain wrote many books, but Huckleberry Finn is, by everyone’s measure, his masterpiece.

When Huckleberry Finn first appeared in 1885, many

critics were dismayed by Huck’s use of lower class vernacular, his contempt for prayer and religion, and his defense of lying and stealing. They did not react to the use of the N word and to the issues of racism raised by the book. They wanted to ban the book in order to protect the children from what they perceived as vulgarity, and its portrayal of bad behavior as somehow attractive.

Nat Hentoff, in his book, Free Speech for Me-But Not for Thee¹ quotes from a Boston Transcript issue of March 17, 1885: The Concord [Massachusetts)Public Library Committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The librarian and other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, course, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.

In the past fifty years or more, the critics have focused on the issues of Black and White relations. Many African-American parents and scholars, as well as White critics, have criticized the book for what they believe is its implicit racial stereotyping of Jim, and African Americans in general. They have vigorously objected to the use of the N word more than 200 times in the book. Many of the critics have attempted to remove Huckleberry Finn from the mandatory public school curricula where Huck had achieved a prominent place. It was these efforts that attracted my attention in recent years. And so I read the book again. I did more than that. I examined the scholarly literature. I learned (what is old material for literature scholars) about the recent critical conversation and debate concerning Huckleberry Finn and issues of race and racism and the nature of Mark Twain’s scope as an artist.²

As I read the critical literature, I was amazed by its volume and ferocity. Mark Twain would be amused. If the nihilist and ironist and cynic and social critic is paying attention in Heaven, he must be collapsing in laughter behind a cloud of cigar smoke. He must also be appreciative. The intensity of the debate shows that the book is still alive after more than one hundred years.

As an experienced law professor, I am reminded of constitutional law commentary. The U.S.Constitution is some fifteen or twenty printed pages long. The volume of judicial interpretation runs in the tens of thousands of pages. The number and pages of law review articles are astronomical.

This is similar with with Huck Finn. The book is three hundred sixty or so pages. The critical commentary is in the thousands of pages. A difference, of course (among many), is that the essay of a critic does not carry with it the force of law of a judicial interpretation. And although some critiques are more influential than others, there is no clear mark of authority (which the lawyer misses with grave peril for his client), as in the case of the supremacy of a Supreme Court opinion over that of the Court of Appeals.

Still, the aroma of ideological combat—left wingers vs. more moderate liberals, modern vs. post modern, reader’s input vs. author’s intent, Black intellectuals vs. White, feminist theory vs. older approaches to gender, and so on— fill the pages of the Huck Finn literature, as it does in law review literature, if not in the judicial pages.

The U. S. Constitution is obviously central to comprehending American political culture; hence, the extent and vigor of constitutional commentary. Likewise, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is central to an understanding of our popular character, our humor, our slant; hence, the magnitude of the literary commentary.³

However, I do not wish to push this comparison too far. I have already, perhaps, done just that. What I want to do in this work is read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn page by page and chapter by chapter with my readers. I want to take the book, almost episode by episode, and share with my readers my interpretations of the famous tale.

I enjoy Huck Finn. I still laughed when I reread it after a gap of many decades. I want to share my pleasure. I also want to share the pain the book brought me as Bernard DeVoto wrote almost seventy years ago in Mark Twain’s America, in the concluding words of Chapter X, "In Mark Twain’s humor, disenchantment, the acknowledgement of defeat, the realization of futility find a maturer expression.

He laughs and, for the first time, American literature possesses tragic laughter."⁴

I venture, with trepidation, into an area where learned scholars of literature have mined meaning and substance for decades.

The book is not simple. There is complexity, tragedy, brutality, nuance and ambiguity.

And I’m not so naive as to claim that the book should not be interpreted, but merely read and enjoyed.

I will lay out, in advance, my take, to put it a bit too bluntly, on the book. I find it, after all my years, funny! It must be, as the psychologists will tell me, the unreconstructed damned fool boy in every adult male.

The humor, however, in the end, is bloody. As a kid, I enjoyed the novel. As an adult, I still laugh. But I also weep. The book, in the end, is not optimistic about the issues of race. The humor and irony and satire are weapons used by Twain with precision and savagery to slay the monster of racism. In the end, I reject the thesis that this is, in reality, a racist tract that denigrates and stereotypes African Americans.

Twain is not certain, however, that the beast can be killed.

At the center of the book are Huck and Jim. Huck is a fourteen-year-old, uneducated White kid, son of the town drunk who is a brutal father. He is caught between the murderous threats of his father, and the suffocating sentimental hypocritical piety of his guardian, the widow Douglas, and her even more sanctimonious sister, Miss Watson. In an effort to escape the twin dangers of patrimonial violence and neighborly piety, Huck fakes his death and sets out on his journey. Soon, he joins up with Jim, an escaped slave, who is on the run from Miss Watson who has threatened to sell him down the river to the plantations in New Orleans. The two improbably team up and begin their immortal raft trip down the great Mississippi River. As they travel, they form a great bond that transcends their racial differences and form an alliance against a bizarre world that epitomizes not just the Old South, but society in the large. In this book, I attempt to critically analyze their odyssey, and endeavor to answer the critiques of those who mistakenly see the book as a racist tract.

I do agree with the formidable Norman Mailer⁵ that Mark Twain writes with genius and verve and beauty. Mailer concludes: "Reading Huckleberry Finn one comes to realize all over again that the near burned-out, throttled, hate-filled dying affair between whites and blacks is still our great national love affair, and woe to us if it ends in detestation and mutual misery. Riding the current of this novel, we are back to the happy time when the love affair was new and all seemed possible."⁶

CHAPTER ONE

We Are Introduced To Huck Finn and

Jim—They Light Out in Search of

Freedom

Huck, the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson;

The Mask of Huck’s Innocence

NORMAN MAILER HAS written a beautiful piece (referred to in the Introduction) on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which he imagines that he has just received a new manuscript by a fellow named Mark Twain. The work is brilliant, but it has one flaw: it seems a bit derivative in part. Mr. Mailer recognizes in it the influences of Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few.

The book is written by Huck who famously says at the beginning of the novel, "You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly."(1)⁷

As a kid from Brooklyn (years ago), I think I can spot the sources for the narrator Huckleberry Finn. He would have you believe that he is a naive, poor boy of twelve, thirteen or fourteen who tells a story without appreciating the humor or what the devil is really going on. He is what literary critics label an unreliable narrator; the essential context of the tale is a mystery to him. Indeed, that is considered part of the great brilliance of Mark Twain, who lets the reader perceive what Huck observes but does not comprehend. Don’t believe it. Huck is smarter than he lets out.

Actually, he is a precocious, deadpan, vulnerable, sensitive, uneducated kid Jewish comic playing the gentile borscht belt (now that is a stretcher) in the Mississippi Valley in 1840 or so. The humor has a bite—sometimes vicious, sometimes deadly. And the comic, like many, isn’t always happy. But in the last analysis, Huck (with the significant exception of Jim) is more perceptive than all of the crazies who inhabit this great novel. The reader may see more than Huck does, at times, but that is because the reader lives at a safe distance from the bizarre society of the antebellum south. And, even so, not all readers catch the ironies of the story. Indeed, the superb irony of this novel is that it is Huck, an ignorant kid at the bottom of the social pecking order, alone among the White characters, who has some real humanity and compassion for Jim, the fugitive slave, and some conception of the cruelties of the human condition. It is

Mark Twain’s ultimate joke on some readers (and some critics) who believe that Huck is the ultimate unreliable narrator.⁸ It is Huck, who in the closing chapters observes that "[h]uman beings can be awful cruel to one another."(290) The rest of the crazy cast in this book never get that message.

The author is obviously borrowing from Jewish radio and movie comics of the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s,and ‘50s, particularly in the opening chapters of the book where Huck and Tom play games of robbers and manipulate or spoof the widow and Miss Watson.

Huck, at the beginning of the novel, is living at the home of the very respectable widow, Douglas, along with her sister, the never-married Miss Watson. Huck was Tom Sawyer’s companion in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where,