Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Mark Twain's
- Huckleberry Finn
Editor's
Essay
- Two on a Raft:
- Exploring Currents of
Evil in Huck Finn
- Editor's note: this essay was originally written as part of a Master's Degree
program.
Two on a
Raft: Exploring Currents of Evil in Huck Finn
It’s been said, “Back East, they try to fool you by saying more
than they know; and out West, they try to fool you by saying less than they
know.” But this proverb must now be appended, an attachment forced upon us by Twain:
“In the South, they try to fool you with cornpone humor and good-old-boy talk.”
The author’s comic-relief lines such as “What’re you alassin’
about,” “Dog my cats,” and “preforeordestination” distract the
unwary and belie Twain’s essential preoccupation, a deep and somber undercurrent of
unease regarding the antebellum world of racial violence, bigotry, and social injustice
– the face of evil in the land of hominy grits and “well-l-l, shut ma
mouth.”
Though Huckleberry Finn would be published twenty years after the official
end of slavery, Twain well understood that the sensitive issues he dared to broach in his
now-revered work continued as open wounds upon the psyches of many Americans. Doubtless,
Twain, “the quintessential American writer” (Emerson 682), sensed that his
message -- if he were to be successful in reaching many of his post-Civil War audience --
would require a full measure of his gifts of rhetoric. Facets of these considerable powers
of persuasion – his keenly-phrased humor, affable story-telling ability, and studied,
easy-going persona – are all reflected in this important literary work; a book, on
one level, even young children will find entertaining; and seasoned readers, too, in the
midst of all the “premature balditude” banter, will find themselves engrossed,
staring at difficult and weighty issues of life: the shadow of Darkness in the hearts of
folk who, paradoxically, had become famously synonymous for warm hospitality.
As we wade into the opening scenes and chapters, something odd begins to strike us:
no one, not one single character, makes a dad-burned lick a’ sense in anything that
he or she says. All of these spirits live in a murky world of superstition, of hard-fisted
religious dogmatism, of unfounded presumption and ill-conceived certitude. These are
people who are sure! and they will brashly lecture any galoot on matters
into which angels would fear to tread. Huck, schooled in this unforgiving environment, is
wise beyond his young years, but only in street smarts. He, like the others around him,
speaks of a reality with sharp edges and dank, cold walls, one further explored in the
following terms.
Hypocrisy. The Widow Douglas disdains Huck’s tobacco habits, yet thinks
it not unusual to permit herself the same indulgence: “that was alright because she
done it herself.” Children are sternly commanded to be proper, upright, and
“never think about [your]self.” Fine words but, as the British say, fine words
butter no parsnips – words set against the backdrop of ultimate self-absorption and
ego-centricity, the justification of the enslavement of one group by another.
God. The Almighty, we learn by inference, is a respectable Southern
Gentleman. No one sees anything out-of-place in the picture of fetching “the niggers
in” to have “prayers.” This kind of cognitive-disconnect causes children to
surmise the existence of “two Providences,” one whose purposes “make a
body’s mouth water,” and the other, the kind of god you don’t much care to
be around. Huck, at one point, thinks he may opt for the rewards of the first deity –
“if he wanted me.” The gods of Twain’s universe, like their
subservient mortals below, are capricious, self-serving. Theologian Marcus Borg of Oregon
State University, in his The God We Never Knew, suggests that our mental picture of
God -- what we imagine him to be like -- affects the subsequent flow of all our theology
and personal activity. It becomes clear rather quickly in Huck Finn that the God proper
Southern people worship is, essentially, a Cosmic Slave Master, one dealing with his
people according to private whim and good pleasure – so why should his elect not
treat others in like manner? The words of preachers, representatives of this disengaged
and aloof deity, become “tears and flapdoodle,” “rot and slush.”
Happiness is defined as feeling good – “as good as church letting out.”
Superstition. We see individuals turning around in their “tracks three
times” and crossing their breasts; locks of hair are pressed into service to keep
witches at bay; coins are revered due to their once-proximity to dark spirits. Strangely,
one senses little difference between the way they view all of this and their so-called
Christian religion.
Illiteracy and ignorance. The masses in this world are, at best,
functionally illiterate. And those rare few who develop the skills of the wordsmith, like
rapacious beasts, prey upon the unlettered disadvantaged. Most words are viewed as foreign
objects – runic, awful, and indecipherable, as if they had fallen from Mars:
“I’ve seen it in books so, of course, that’s what we’ve got to
do.” The word ransomed, a word unknown to Huck and his friends, becomes a kind
of psychologist’s inkblot test, and those who attempt to plumb its depths reveal
nothing about the term itself and everything about their own darkened hearts. Precisely
divining the nature of the universe itself is also a task not too daunting for these
overreaching spirits: “Jim said the moon could a’ laid them; well that looked
kind of reasonable [. . .] because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many.” So
ignorant are these unfortunates that, at times, they fail to understand even when
they’ve been insulted: “‘[I am] degraded to the companionship of felons on
a raft.’ Jim pitied him ever so much and so did I.” We find these hapless ones
too accommodating, too polite, in some instances -- but not too shy to enslave certain
other human beings.
The measure of a man. In what might be the novel’s funniest scene, the
drunken Boggs, like Warner Brothers’ Yosemite Sam on a rampage, gallops and careens
into town where “[e]verybody yelled at him and laughed at him and sassed him, and he
sassed back, and said he’d attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns,
but he couldn’t wait now because
he’d come to town to kill Col. Sherburn, and his motto was, Meat first and spoon
vittles to top off on.” This is so incredibly hilarious, some of Twain’s
best, I think. But the audience’s mirth, here, is quickly dampened when Sherburn guns
down in cold-blood the sottish and pleading-for-mercy Boggs. Then, almost worse, the
pathetic Sherburn tries to convince all of us that he is, in fact, a real man and a real
hero – the quintessential man of the South; unfortunately, for his day, he seems to
be correct.
Huck Finn is a book that tells a story of the Darkness of America's Darkest
Age. The people of Huck's world, generally, would have defined darkness as the absence of white
– this becomes clear, I think, in the above examples; but, far from their
definition, the true essence of darkness and evil reveal itself in Twain’s work as
the absence of light – the light of reason; of human kindness; of empathy and
good will.
Jim, not Huck, gradually emerges as the book’s central character in terms of
the author’s message. Throughout much of the story, we see Huck saving Jim –
but, in the end, these roles are reversed. Jim, we witness, has not only endured the evils
inflicted upon him but has risen above them. One of Michelangelo’s sculptures depicts
what appears to be a half-formed man attempting to tear himself out of sheer rock: the
artist seems to emphasize a process of Man forming himself – Jim is like
that. He is transformed before our eyes. He is introduced to us as one similar in
nature to any of those around him, but later we note his evolving magnanimous spirit when
slighted; his profession of true friendship and special terms of endearment for Huck; his
selflessness in small matters, taking an extra watch on the raft and never breathing a
word of it.
Jim, ostensibly, represents the South’s spirit-stunted idea of the
off-scouring of the earth, a complete non-entity: “'Good gracious! anybody hurt?'
'No’m. Killed a nigger'” -- this kind of testimony is painful to read. But by
tale’s end, we begin to deeply admire Jim. Some claim that Twain, by his portrayal of
"nigger" Jim, is guilty of “racism” (Person B10) and “moral
passivity in response to slavery” (Charles B1). This is most unfortunate –
literary critics who cannot read!
Far from disrespecting Jim, Twain means for us to be drawn to Jim, even, to be
saved by him! We love him because he first loved us. This phrase, of course, is
biblical in origin – and it is Twain’s intention, which becomes increasingly
clear near the end of the book, that we should draw such an inference: Jim sacrifices his
freedom for Tom’s sake and does so after a supplicant’s quiet appeal, a prayer,
for help; Christlike, Jim is silent during his mockings and cruel treatment; Jim is
released and is glorified – resurrected from his death; a prophesy made by Jim comes
to pass; he exhibits a kind of power over death by revealing the fate of Huck’s
father. However, Twain’s most obvious allusion to Christ, without a doubt, is
expressed by the dauphin-king of con who plays the part of Judas-as-betrayer and sells Jim
for forty dollars!
There’s nothing quite like a raft on a great river, Huck wants us to know
– the sheer, almost wild, sense of personal sovereignty; of gentle ordered harmony;
of clearer perspective; of participation in a cosmic order, borne witness to by the grand
starry skies above -- all of which create a sense of careless intoxicating human dignity.
What is Twain
really telling us with this picture? On the river, unlike the nearby land of Darkness,
there is peace. The force, the power, of the undercurrent sweeping us along easily directs
us to the metaphysical, the true underlying nature of things. The God of the River,
however, requires no religion, only spirituality and true expressions of the heart. But,
just a half-mile away on shore resides Darkness: forms and shadows, ostentation and
hypocrisy, rules and laws for those without the heart to obey -- all manner of evil, even
a kind, so demonically cavalier, that, for a mere question regarding the time of day or
name of town, one might kill you as easily as look at you. For Huck and Jim, the Mighty
Mississippi is separate from all of that and becomes Twain's metaphor of a New World of
social harmony and true spirituality.
As we have seen, evil has many faces – but, I think we can also say, it
has but one spirit. Twain sees this dark spirit of his society as one of hubristic
presumption and ego-centric despising; of self-blinding and self-delusion; of
hard-heartedness and callous manipulation. This is the hard rock out of which Jim, a kind
of savior, alone in his efforts, begins to tear himself. And this is why we begin to
admire him, why Huck begins to love him, by which process Huck is saved by Jim. And Huck
Finn, of course, becomes Twain's attempt to save his society, and all of us, from the
Darkness.
Twain, with humor,
folksy story-telling and subtle chiding, leads his 19th-century countrymen into the
radical enlightenment that black slaves are, in fact, human beings: "When I waked up
just at daybreak [Jim] was sitting there with his head down betwixt his knees, moaning and
mourning to himself [. . .] He was thinking about his wife and his children. [. . .] 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." Yes, it didn't "seem natural" to many
of Twain's day that this could be the case -- that a black man could grieve for his absent
wife and children; that a black man was "as white folks." Huck's epiphany
becomes Twain's hope for every member of white society.
Jim, the slave-man, is first introduced to us as one in bonds – but, as our
eyes grow accustomed to the Light, we suddenly find that Jim, alone, is the unfettered
one, the only free Man standing before us.
Works Cited
- Charles, Ron. “Challenging Mark Twain’s Tales of Simpler Times.” Christian
Science Monitor 26 Mar 1998: B1.
-
- Emerson, Everett. “Huck Finn as Idol and Target.” American
Literature 70.3 (1998): 682-683.
Person, James E. “Was Mark Twain a
Racist?” Washington Times 13 Sept 1998: B10.
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