Introduction
I have now taught Huck Finn two times in three years; plus, I read it once in high school and once in college. To be perfectly blunt, I don’t find it all that compelling. Perhaps this is blasphemy, but I often don’t find Twain’s writing that enjoyable – and I find his characters so incredibly unrealistic, even if they are caricatures.
So rereading it multiple times becomes rather painful. This year, I approached it with a strong focus on the satire and its devices – i.e. comedy, Socratic Irony, etc. – and we connected it to a lot of outside satire. The students did projects on examples of satire of their choice. Listening to projects on The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and Family Guy made the unit bearable.
Although I understand the purpose of the novel’s episodic nature (a satire on American society must travel often in order to generate enough situations and characters as fodder for social criticism), it makes it weak narratively. Perhaps on a journey like this the thematic and character development can make up for this narrative lapse; but alas, the last ¼ of the novel is so entirely lacking in any sort of development that this too collapses. Twain put the book down for two years, not able to decipher a proper ending; and when he came back to it, he dropped the serious and biting satire for lighthearted slapstick, on the verge of literature’s version of blackface.
The Moral Level of the Novel and Contemporary Society’s Misreading of It
But instead of approaching this review on a purely literary level, I would like to approach the moral level of the novel. Huck most definitely takes a moral journey down the Mississippi, a trip in which he finally sees Jim as a human person, even if subconsciously; and he makes a final decision to free him, even if he must go to Hell, since society’s values tell him being a “low-down Abolitionist” is hell-worthy.
An extremely common approach to the moral aspect of the novel is to see it as a journey in which Huck is finally able to reject social values and morals in favor of his own values and morals. In this light, it becomes a triumph of the individual, who boldly crafts his own set of standards and values. I find contemporary’s tendency to see the novel this way as incredibly indicative of a false and specious argument often made in the realm of modern ethics; it is emblematic of the modern world’s praise of amorality or “individually-created moral systems,” when these are simply facades for a very specific moral order.
Huck does in fact reject society’s moral system – at least subconsciously. (That Huck still thinks he is going to hell for helping Jim lets us know he hasn’t consciously rejected society’s system of values; but he is still able to act out against society, and it very clear that this is because he recognizes the humanity of Jim.) Our tendency to see the novel as a criticism of blindly accepting a system of values as put forth by a specific society is clear. However, Huck did not simply act, after rejecting society, by his own set of individually created standards. No. In fact, he acted in line with a very specific code of ethics: one that recognizes the humanity of all people.
If Huck had rejected society’s laws in favor of another set of values, say, one that allowed him to rape and pillage villages all down the Mississippi River, not only would modern audiences not applaud his “individuality,” but they would be appalled – and rightfully so. Why? Because Huck has not rejected society’s values in favor of any sort of subjective system of ethics. In fact, quite ironically, Huck’s discovery of Jim’s humanity, and his actions in light of this, point more to a firm sense of objective morality and natural law, and the individual’s ability to recognize both.
Huck, orphaned and marginalized by a society that upholds both the goodness of and need for slavery, is able to recognize (once again, unconsciously) that this culture is inherently flawed. In his friendship with the runaway slave Jim, he comes to recognize the dignity and worth of the individual person, whatever his race may be. Huck has not decided to simply follow what he feels he wants to do, or what sort of ethics he wants to project onto the “morally impressionable” world; instead, he finds within himself a sense of what is objectively true: human equality. And Huck’s ability to find this, recognize its existence, and importantly, to act on it, reveals Twain’s belief that certain basic tenets of ethics are knowable by the human individual, via something like natural law.
Modern society often praises individuals, artists, movies, books, or whatnot for their rejection of society’s harmful, narrow-minded, and constricting ethics in favor of a morally free and nonjudgmental approach. However, just like people wouldn’t praise Huck if he rejected society in favor of a system that admired raping children, people only shower this praise on people whose “individual and subjective system of ethics” corresponds to their own set of rigid ethics.
For example, people praise the brave and inspiring works that support gay and lesbian lifestyles for their rejection of conservative society’s lifeless and rigid moral codes; but would they praise such a work that was intensely anti-homosexual, even if it was done in the selfsame name of “subjective morality?” I don’t think so. People praise Huck for his reconfiguring of ethics, in that he saw slaves as equal on a human level; and they should praise him for this. But, even though they may think it, they don’t praise him for deciding his own set of ethics. They praise him because he found a very specific code of ethics that they agree with.
Racism of an Anti-Racist Novel?
Last, I find it ironic how a book that is reputably one of the cornerstones of the anti-slavery and anti-racism movement is itself racist, to a certain degree. Although Jim is undeniably and genuinely good, he is incredibly inept. He cannot grasp any sort of “higher level” concepts, even extremely simplistic ones. Twain uses this for the sake of humor; but the effect is the same nonetheless. In fact, there isn’t a single black person that is presented in the novel as capable of any sort of abstract thinking. Is Twain reprehensible in his use of caricature and stereotypes? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, I find it silly and overly defensive to find no scent of Twain’s unconscious and subtle racism. I see Twain’s indistinct racism the same way Leonard Woolf saw T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism. Woolf judged that Eliot was probably "slightly antisemitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon. He would have denied it quite genuinely.”
Should Huckleberry Finn continued to be taught? Despite my own problems with it, I say yes. First, it is an undeniable cornerstone to early American literature; “well-read-ness” demands it of us. Second, despite it’s narrative difficulties, it remains a clever, imaginative, and intellectually stimulating example of Socratic Irony and Cognitive Dissonance; and to have students able to read the novel as such is an apt window into having them understand literature on a deeper level.
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