Free Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books by Arnold Weinstein Page B

Huckleberry Finn
     
    Two of America’s most famous children’s books are Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. Tom Sawyer is etched deeply in the American imagination: a lovable, hooky-playing rascal who sneaks out to smoke and who is a consummate con man, as evidenced by the splendid fence-whitewashing episode. Tom loves games: pirate games, magic treasure, getting all his friends to play along. In this respect, he is our child version of Don Quixote, scrupulously modeling his escapades according to the rules laid down in the adventure stories he has read. He is also our Peter Pan, the child who never grows up. At the end of the story devoted to him, Twain does imply, through the words of Colonel Thatcher, a future for this clever, bold young man as a lawyer. That story is not written, but it is not far-fetched to imagine, down the road, young man Sawyer, credentialed, in a suit, arranging significant deals, good with gab and spin, in the swim. Bear this in mind.
    Tom reappears in the second book,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, and he is true to form: assessing life according to the prescriptive laws of the adventure tales he has absorbed and being willing to go all out, to live up to this deeply bookish code. All serious readers of
Huckleberry Finn
must indeed wish that Tom Sawyer had never gotten into the second book, given that he does his level best to ruin it by transforming its profound moral vision into a kindergarten fantasy of disguise, high jinks, doing it by the book. The “it” that is done (in) by the book is, of course, nothing less than its moral heart: Huck’s nascent and difficult awareness of his culture’s ills regarding racism and dehumanization, which recedes from the picture, replaced by Twain’s stock resource whenever in a pinch, fun and games. Even Jim, who had his moments of great dignity, seems transformed into a one-dimensional minstrel-show figure by book’s end.
    Yet
Huckleberry Finn
remains a stupendous account of growing up, no matter how deeply botched its close may be. Electing to tell Huck’s story in Huck’s own voice must be accounted as one of the most brilliant narrative choices in the history of fiction. If Tom Sawyer is glib, smooth, and destined for success, Huck is, in every respect, his opposite number: orphan, from the wrong side of the tracks, dropout, uncharismatic, zero cultural capital. Huck is not headed to law school at book’s end. Huck, innocent though he is, is a pragmatist, and he actually tests out some of Tom’s pet theories and finds that they don’t add up. No Spaniards, no A-rabs, no camels, no elephants; not even a genie, no matter how hard you rub the old tin lamp. Huck’s verdict is swift and profound: “It had all the marks of a Sunday school.” (Once you get your head around that phrase, you begin to appreciate both the Blakean Twain, the man who knows the insidious reach of ideology, and the Nietzschean Twain, the man who deconstructs.)
    Yet it won’t do, either, to consider Huck as the prosaic counterpart to the “poetic” Tom, since much of the novel’s extraordinary beauty is to be found in “Huck-speak,” an unlettered vernacular discourse that can be lyrical and haunting. A storm comes upon Huck and Jim camping out in the woods, and Twain writes it like this:
    It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest
—fst!
It was as bright as glory and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about, away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than