Charles
>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> 05/21 5:23 PM >>>
Jim Divine writes:
> I can't believe that people reject Huck Finn (though there's no evidence
> that anyone on this list does so -- I know for a fact that Louis P.
> doesn't). Because of the "N-word"?
>
> HK is a great novel, highly critical of the conventional morality of the
> Tom Sawyers of the world: Tom believed in following the rules to the
> letter, keeping appearances, but didn't care at all that his adventures
> hurt Jim, while Huck thought the most important thing was to treat Huck as
> a fellow human being. It's an anti-racist (and anti-slavery) novel.
Like all great humor (or whatever: I'm not sure it's the correct word for most of Twain), *Huck Finn*'s humor depends more or less completely on the reader sharing all the basic assumptions with the writer. Consider the following, which I hope no one on this list (including me) responds to as "funny," but which nevertheless must be uproariously funny to anyone who *can* share the proper assumptions:
Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage
Transports our adversary, whom no bounds
Prescribed, no bars of hell, nor all the chains
Heaped on him there, nor yet the main abyss
Wide interrupt can hold . . .
P.L. iii, 80-84
This is what seems comic to Omnipotence, and to those who serenely hold that they share the perceptions of Omnipotence.
Or to take a lesser example rather nearer to the wretched closing chapters of *Huck Finn*, consider the following joke from a whole series of "height of" jokes in the early 1950s. I say it resembles Twain's closing chapters because its "real meaning" is perfectly acceptable, but it draws on tacit assumptions which are no longer so acceptable.
What is the height of Arrogance?
A flea approaching an elephant with intentions of rape.
That captures arrogance beautifully. But it also, willy-nilly (i.e., independently of the intentions of its originator and original audience), rests on the assumption that there is something intrinsically funny about rape. The objections to the final chapters of *Huck Finn* (aside from the original, and valid, formalist objections that they reduce the the whole work to incoherence) is that they not only would not have been funny but would not have been "writable" had Jim not been a slave (had he been, say, a committed, white and literate follower of Danton awaiting execution). (Given the date of *Huck Finn* he *could* have been a Communard. Given the time of the story itself, he could have been Karl Marx.)
This has nothing to do with the N-Word. It has a great deal to do with the inability, which seems to continue to the present, of white Americans to actually grasp what it must feel like to be black.