> Mark Twain may have written many funny pieces, and he had an ear for
> language, but is _Huck Finn_ really funny? There are funny parts in it, but
> the tone of the novel is generally dark and rather depressing (and probably
> some parts are downright scary to very young readers).
Oh, I didn't mean to write Twain off as a comedian, just to note that the grim realities of 19th century liberal society get very, very effectively skewered by Twain's wit, irony and penchant for the tall tale. This was Lukacs' point, that the novel in its heyday was something like the bourgeois form of the epic: everything that possibly can happen in the story does happen, sooner or later, and we get to sound out the comedic Heaven and tragic Hell of bourgeois society.
Incidentally, as long as we're on the subject of young readers, I had the misfortune of turning on the news just now and learning that a high school massacre broke out in Springfield, Oregon: apparently some messed-up kid, previously expelled for threatening to bring a gun to class, did so, and killed one student in the cafeteria and wounded 24 others. The story's been all over CNN and whatnot. Springfield, I should note, is really the same town as Eugene, Oregon, where I work and live -- there are two districts, but it's really one suburban community. Springfield was traditionally the mill town, with Weyerhauser plants and whatnot, and got economically crushed by Reaganomics; Eugene has done slightly better, thanks to the University economy.
I should also note that Oregon, contrary to what you may have heard, is as viciously reactionary as any place in the US these days: the state budget has been raped, higher education squeezed dry, and we even have a California-style anti-property-tax rebellion going (funded by the usual lawyering protozoans and lower life forms), which has further reduced the tax burden on the rich and real estated among us. The social polarization has been getting really bad as of late, with more and more of Oregon's quite impressive social services and artistic institutions being trashed just like everywhere else. In the Seventies, the kids could still hop aboard the counter-culture around here; since the late Eighties, the skinheads showed up and survivalists began stockpiling weapons. Now the accumulated social tinder of 25 years of barbaric neoliberalism is blowing up in people's faces.
Of course, this is the kind of stuff which has been happening in inner city 'hoods and the African American community for years: only nowadays, it's getting harder and harder to blame the terrifying and accelerating social decay on that Rightwing gender trope the threatening male gang-banger and the leechlike welfare queen (whose true referents, as we know, are really the Pentagon and the Fortune 500). The killer in question was lily-white, as were the victims. White-on-white violence comes home to roost, in the closing hours of the Wall Street bubble. And people wonder why I'm a Marxist...
-- Dennis