Happy Anniversary, Huck Finn!
February 18, 2019 2:08 AM Subscribe
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade) By Mark Twain Complete [Gutenberg Project link, with illustrations] is a story that one more often encounters in movies or musicals. The text [Adobe.com .pdf link without illustrations] is most often read in middle grade school, and seldom after that. Perhaps it's time to revisit the novel [Genius user-annotated text] as Twain wrote it, as an adult for adults.
Originally intended to be published in time for Christmas 1884, its print run was delayed due to a nefarious illustration which had to be replaced. As a result, it began its print run on February 18, 1885.
Originally intended to be published in time for Christmas 1884, its print run was delayed due to a nefarious illustration which had to be replaced. As a result, it began its print run on February 18, 1885.
I hate to be that guy, but the book is called Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. "The" is a later addition.
posted by chavenet at 4:20 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 4:20 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
I had to study this in high-school lit, and I really never got it. With coaching I wrote the essays I needed to write, but I just didn't have the background in (American-style?) racism that one needs (sorry Mrs Gitz). Who knows, maybe the author knows what he's talking about...
Occasionally I think I should read it again, but my to-read pile already depresses me.
posted by pompomtom at 4:48 AM on February 18, 2019
Occasionally I think I should read it again, but my to-read pile already depresses me.
posted by pompomtom at 4:48 AM on February 18, 2019
The fact that someone snuck a peen into a drawing in Huck Finn is proof that some things never change.
posted by DigDoug at 5:31 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by DigDoug at 5:31 AM on February 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
I recently attended Bill Murray and Jan Vogler’s ‘New Worlds’ collaboration. During the performance Murray read from many American classics, touching on social and political issues that resonate currently, and he chose an excerpt from Huckleberry Finn, a book I had studied at university and never revisited. It was the highlight of the show, given real magic by his reading of Chapter 16, and I think Chapter 31 or 32 with a cello accompaniment of Moon River. If you like Bill Murray, it’s worth enduring the poor recording of this part of his show here.
posted by honey-barbara at 6:01 AM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by honey-barbara at 6:01 AM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
My favorite book. I've read it many times, and it definitely rewards adult rereading. There is a lot going on in there. Check out the annotated version for some interesting insights. There are also untold hundreds of pages on the web devoted to it, made by various American Studies departments and AP classes. Some of them are good.
posted by Miko at 7:13 AM on February 18, 2019 [9 favorites]
posted by Miko at 7:13 AM on February 18, 2019 [9 favorites]
I read this in high school and haven't picked it up since, but I remember hating (HATING) Tom Sawyer when he showed up in the last act. Like we've had this gritty, shaggy dog adventure all over the Mississippi filled with real-world dangers and life-or-death situations...and then Tom effing Sawyer shows up in the last act to play pretend for the length of a Bible and UGH, GO HOME TOM, Jim is FOR REAL locked up for Chrissakes.
posted by Maaik at 7:17 AM on February 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by Maaik at 7:17 AM on February 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
I remember hating (HATING) Tom Sawyer when he showed up in the last act.
That last segment of the book has baffled scholars since it was written. It used to be written off as a sort of hasty conclusion driven by Twain's need to generate cash, but my favorite theory is that it's an extended metaphor for the white bungling of Reconstruction.
posted by Miko at 7:22 AM on February 18, 2019 [15 favorites]
That last segment of the book has baffled scholars since it was written. It used to be written off as a sort of hasty conclusion driven by Twain's need to generate cash, but my favorite theory is that it's an extended metaphor for the white bungling of Reconstruction.
posted by Miko at 7:22 AM on February 18, 2019 [15 favorites]
Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky is about a western expat woman in Morocco who loses her husband/partner, is kidnapped, and taken progressively deeper into the local culture, geographically (literally deeper into the desert), and psychologically, socially, etc.
For the western reader what starts out as an exotic adventure in the real, colonialist, North Africa, becomes an adventure down the river, as it were, into the pure thing, as we follow her along. When the heroine returns to the North Africa of the beginning of the book, it seems garish and impure. It was a remarkable effect for a book to achieve.
Tom Sawyer’s appearance in AoHF has that same feeling. Huck’s become a serious person, with serious work to do in the serious world, and here’s Tom to show us show far he’s gone from where he started.
posted by notyou at 7:46 AM on February 18, 2019 [12 favorites]
For the western reader what starts out as an exotic adventure in the real, colonialist, North Africa, becomes an adventure down the river, as it were, into the pure thing, as we follow her along. When the heroine returns to the North Africa of the beginning of the book, it seems garish and impure. It was a remarkable effect for a book to achieve.
Tom Sawyer’s appearance in AoHF has that same feeling. Huck’s become a serious person, with serious work to do in the serious world, and here’s Tom to show us show far he’s gone from where he started.
posted by notyou at 7:46 AM on February 18, 2019 [12 favorites]
remember hating (HATING) Tom Sawyer when he showed up in the last act.
but he does get shot for his troubles, doesn't he?
I can't begin to list how many times I've read Huck Finn in whole or in part, or seen it in whatever version or form. But one thing remains consistent. I lose track at some point. I'm with it through the early set up, life in Hannibal, Huck going on the run with Jim, finding his dad dead, the raft getting taken out by a riverboat, that weird detour with the family in the midst of the feud with another family and its genuinely horrible conclusion, but then the con men show up and ...
I guess I need to read it one more time. Though I guess this points to one concern. As progressive to the point of modern as it may be in its themes, it's resolutely 19th century when it comes to its rambling (was Twain getting paid by the word for it?) narrative.
posted by philip-random at 7:49 AM on February 18, 2019
but he does get shot for his troubles, doesn't he?
I can't begin to list how many times I've read Huck Finn in whole or in part, or seen it in whatever version or form. But one thing remains consistent. I lose track at some point. I'm with it through the early set up, life in Hannibal, Huck going on the run with Jim, finding his dad dead, the raft getting taken out by a riverboat, that weird detour with the family in the midst of the feud with another family and its genuinely horrible conclusion, but then the con men show up and ...
I guess I need to read it one more time. Though I guess this points to one concern. As progressive to the point of modern as it may be in its themes, it's resolutely 19th century when it comes to its rambling (was Twain getting paid by the word for it?) narrative.
posted by philip-random at 7:49 AM on February 18, 2019
Fred Clark, who took on the strange but probably needful task of reading through the Left Behind series of Christian end times fantasy novels, takes the time in one of his essays to contrast them with the most critical passage in Huck Finn:
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
"All right, then, I'll go to Hell" — and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. … And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
posted by emjaybee at 7:56 AM on February 18, 2019 [10 favorites]
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
"All right, then, I'll go to Hell" — and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. … And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
posted by emjaybee at 7:56 AM on February 18, 2019 [10 favorites]
As for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn being a book by an adult for adults, it seems screamingly obvious to me that MT's tongue is firmly in his cheek when he writes: I wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for adults exclusively, and it always distresses me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean; I know this by my own experience, and to this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old.
posted by chavenet at 7:57 AM on February 18, 2019 [11 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 7:57 AM on February 18, 2019 [11 favorites]
I am not really sure when I read Huck Finn, somewhere between 8 and 12 I think, it wasn't assigned reading and it feels like I read it and Tom Sawyer well before middle school. I really cannot remember anything about Tom Sawyer except a white fence con job and a spritely movie version. Huck Finn on the other hand is still super trenchant. Maybe I don't remember the details, or maybe I remember the details but not the big picture but reading about the lethally feuding families, the new to me concept of carpetbaggers and evangelism, the, what seemed at the time to me vague and otherworldly appearance/disappearance of Huck's father, ( I don't really know how else to put it,) and finally, the depth of dissonance that I felt when reading Huck's moral quandary with regard to slavery and Jim....
posted by Pembquist at 11:11 AM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Pembquist at 11:11 AM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
it's resolutely 19th century when it comes to its rambling (was Twain getting paid by the word for it?) narrative.
It's partly that he knew he would be touring with it, on the lecture circuit, basically doing live readings, so he thought in terms of episodes and excerpts. But all his writing (barring Tom Sawyer) is kind of like that. The man could digress. Digression was an art form for him.
Also, all the weird digressions that make no sense now were pointed pop culture satire at the time. For instance, the poem-writing, dead-bird-drawing daughter in the feuding family, Emmeline Grangerford, mocks middle-class girls of the era and is a direct parody of sentimental women poets like Julia A. Moore and Lydia Sigourney.
In my studies as an adult I found that almost everything that makes zero sense in the book eventually does make sense when you understand what phenomenon of respectable society Twain was skewering at the moment. A lot of it just didn't make the translation to the present day, so it seems like it has no rationale.
posted by Miko at 12:30 PM on February 18, 2019 [9 favorites]
It's partly that he knew he would be touring with it, on the lecture circuit, basically doing live readings, so he thought in terms of episodes and excerpts. But all his writing (barring Tom Sawyer) is kind of like that. The man could digress. Digression was an art form for him.
Also, all the weird digressions that make no sense now were pointed pop culture satire at the time. For instance, the poem-writing, dead-bird-drawing daughter in the feuding family, Emmeline Grangerford, mocks middle-class girls of the era and is a direct parody of sentimental women poets like Julia A. Moore and Lydia Sigourney.
In my studies as an adult I found that almost everything that makes zero sense in the book eventually does make sense when you understand what phenomenon of respectable society Twain was skewering at the moment. A lot of it just didn't make the translation to the present day, so it seems like it has no rationale.
posted by Miko at 12:30 PM on February 18, 2019 [9 favorites]
then the con men show up and ...
Con artistry is fundamental to nineteenth-century American literature. Melville wrote a whole book (strange, weird, wonderful) about a ship full of con artists (or maybe it's one con artist? or maybe it's the devil?). The sense of American identity as essentially unmoored, improvised, thus open to all sorts of invention, for good or ill, goes back a long way.
posted by praemunire at 12:38 PM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
Con artistry is fundamental to nineteenth-century American literature. Melville wrote a whole book (strange, weird, wonderful) about a ship full of con artists (or maybe it's one con artist? or maybe it's the devil?). The sense of American identity as essentially unmoored, improvised, thus open to all sorts of invention, for good or ill, goes back a long way.
posted by praemunire at 12:38 PM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
I was shattered by this book when I first read it in high school... Huck's "I'll go to hell" scene felt like a shining, definitive moment of anti-racism -- in which an eternity of damnation is worth it, if it means affirming the humanity of a friend who is black.
The more I think of the book in retrospect, however the more I think of the hollowness, lack of development, and child-like nature of Jim's character. Twain's anti-racism had plenty room for a white savior, but apparently not enough room for a black character with a full interior life. There's lots of criticism today of the book's use of racial slurs, but that seems irrelevant to me (they are true to the time and place). But the portrayal of Jim's character on the other hand seems like it should be one of the main things discussed about the book.
But it has been years since I've read it. Perhaps the one-note nature of Jim can be explained enough by the book being from the perspective of a surely self-centered teenage boy.
posted by lewedswiver at 1:05 PM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
The more I think of the book in retrospect, however the more I think of the hollowness, lack of development, and child-like nature of Jim's character. Twain's anti-racism had plenty room for a white savior, but apparently not enough room for a black character with a full interior life. There's lots of criticism today of the book's use of racial slurs, but that seems irrelevant to me (they are true to the time and place). But the portrayal of Jim's character on the other hand seems like it should be one of the main things discussed about the book.
But it has been years since I've read it. Perhaps the one-note nature of Jim can be explained enough by the book being from the perspective of a surely self-centered teenage boy.
posted by lewedswiver at 1:05 PM on February 18, 2019 [4 favorites]
Almost all of Twain's writing is (and has been) available via Gutenberg for many, many years. Twian is the first author I completed a life-output readthough of on a digital device, a Palm III, in 2000. my family and I happened to be in the National Portrait Gallery early that January and there was a late-1800s 3/4 length portrait of Twain, just pre white suit I would reckon. As we looked at it I realized the device in my pocket had an essay by Twain from about when the picture was painted which concerned the experience of sitting (or standing) for a portrait, and was able to read the entire piece to my family in front of the painting in a largely empty gallery. It was an amazing experience.
I do not know if I was ever able to definitively tie the essay to the painting, but it was the first time I really experienced the power of distributed mobile digital data access. The Palm was not a wifi or SIM equipped device; I had simply downloaded the entirety of Twain's Internet Archive material to the device and happened to be able to put my finger on it at the exact moment it was best found!
posted by mwhybark at 5:54 PM on February 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
I do not know if I was ever able to definitively tie the essay to the painting, but it was the first time I really experienced the power of distributed mobile digital data access. The Palm was not a wifi or SIM equipped device; I had simply downloaded the entirety of Twain's Internet Archive material to the device and happened to be able to put my finger on it at the exact moment it was best found!
posted by mwhybark at 5:54 PM on February 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
child-like nature of Jim's character
Huh, I don't see it that way. One thing that's interesting in the Huck-Jim relationship is the subtle power shifts they have while they still have to negotiate within a racist society. AT the beginning, Huck is full of all the wild ideas and shallow adventures. Jim is, understandably, a lot more cautious. He becomes paternal as the story goes on - but a paternalism he knows can't be accompanied by authority.
Reread the part that's kind of just an idyll, where they're both floating for days on the raft watching clouds and ripples. Contrast that with the moments humans come along, and they have to snap back into some semblance of master-slave.
I do wish there were more interior monologue from Jim. He has everything at stake and has been sent an incredibly imperfect delivery device in the form of Huck. It's interesting fodder for thought. Perhaps someone will write a narrative or play from Jim's POV sometime.
posted by Miko at 5:01 AM on February 19, 2019 [4 favorites]
Huh, I don't see it that way. One thing that's interesting in the Huck-Jim relationship is the subtle power shifts they have while they still have to negotiate within a racist society. AT the beginning, Huck is full of all the wild ideas and shallow adventures. Jim is, understandably, a lot more cautious. He becomes paternal as the story goes on - but a paternalism he knows can't be accompanied by authority.
Reread the part that's kind of just an idyll, where they're both floating for days on the raft watching clouds and ripples. Contrast that with the moments humans come along, and they have to snap back into some semblance of master-slave.
I do wish there were more interior monologue from Jim. He has everything at stake and has been sent an incredibly imperfect delivery device in the form of Huck. It's interesting fodder for thought. Perhaps someone will write a narrative or play from Jim's POV sometime.
posted by Miko at 5:01 AM on February 19, 2019 [4 favorites]
Perhaps someone will write a narrative or play from Jim's POV sometime.
this notion instantly fascinates me.
posted by philip-random at 9:19 AM on February 19, 2019 [2 favorites]
this notion instantly fascinates me.
posted by philip-random at 9:19 AM on February 19, 2019 [2 favorites]
I read AoHF when I was about 12, making it over 50 years ago, and I remember being astounded by this exchange, demonstrating a white woman's completely dismissive treatment of a (made-up) black person. Huck is fabricating a story to explain to Aunt Sally why he was late:
What kep' you?--boat get aground?”
“Yes'm--she--”
“Don't say yes'm--say Aunt Sally. Where'd she get aground?”
I didn't rightly know what to say, because I didn't know whether the
boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on
instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up--from down towards
Orleans. That didn't help me much, though; for I didn't know the names
of bars down that way. I see I'd got to invent a bar, or forget the
name of the one we got aground on--or--Now I struck an idea, and fetched
it out:
“It warn't the grounding--that didn't keep us back but a little. We
blowed out a cylinder-head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No'm. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. . .
posted by megatherium at 5:18 PM on February 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
What kep' you?--boat get aground?”
“Yes'm--she--”
“Don't say yes'm--say Aunt Sally. Where'd she get aground?”
I didn't rightly know what to say, because I didn't know whether the
boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on
instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up--from down towards
Orleans. That didn't help me much, though; for I didn't know the names
of bars down that way. I see I'd got to invent a bar, or forget the
name of the one we got aground on--or--Now I struck an idea, and fetched
it out:
“It warn't the grounding--that didn't keep us back but a little. We
blowed out a cylinder-head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No'm. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. . .
posted by megatherium at 5:18 PM on February 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
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posted by infini at 3:31 AM on February 18, 2019