This is of course not the first time I read The Adventures of Huckleberry. It is at least the second. I am trying to re-read at least one classic book each year. I know the last time I read it, about 30 years ago, or more, I was a bit put off by some of the fantastical elements. I thought they were too far out there. Not real. Not believable.
Now with the maturity of a second read, I feel differently about these fantastical elements. They are fantastic. There is no doubt about that. But they have their place. They are there for a reason.
I know I was deeply perplexed by the scenes involving the Duke and the Dauphin. These were two obvious conmen. Who could take them seriously? Not even rural rubes from Missouri could be fooled by these knaves. At least so I thought.
Now after my own “long think,” as Huck would call it, I feel differently. They are absurd and fantastical, but that is exactly the point. Reality is no less absurd! In fact, reality is much more absurd than these fantastic or fabulist elements. After all, what could be more absurd and unbelievable than Jim, the noblest character in the novel, being owned by others solely because the “owners” have a different coloured skin than Jim does? That is the “real world” of Missouri in the middle of the 19th century. It is a world in which a noble black man can be ripped from his family and sold “down river” to evil men in the deep south of America just because these white men claim ownership. And in that process these evil white men are constantly supported by the law, the churches, and “the good people” like Miss Watson. It is impossible for a writer of fiction to come up with anything as fantastic and unbelievable as this so-called reality.
And that is the point. Fiction is a mighty weak force for creating unreality compared to the powers that be.
In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn many people tell stories. The worst is probably Tom Sawyer in his short but extravagant appearance in the novel. He manipulates fakeries and puts the life of Jim in danger as a result. He means well, but he stresses out Jim to the point of torture with his crazy stories and absolute necessity of doing what the books say to save Jim when there is an obvious simpler saner way to do it. The fraudulent Duke and the dauphin are constantly making up stories to set people up to be conned. Pap rants and raves in his wild stories. And the pious Miss Watson tells stories about heaven and hell while she prepares to separate a black man from his wife by selling them down the river to different owners. Thankfully though she recants. Jim brings everyone down to reality. Jim shows the reality of his suffering and his pain that almost everyone else is blind to because he is black.
Fiction can be true in the same sense that sacred texts are true. It is not because either of them produce facts. They don’t. But a work of fiction, like a work of faith, can have a much deeper reality than the paucity of surface facts. Such texts can show a deeper reality, if not a literal reality. They don’t need to show a literal reality, which, after all, can be a pretty thin gruel. It is as nonsensical to read a work like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to find facts as it is to find facts through a literal reading of the book of Genesis. And both exercises lead to perverse consequences. In both cases the person intended to benefit from the exercise is put in jeopardy instead, like poor Jim in jail being rescued by Tom Sawyer who merely desires to make the plot glorious no matter how much danger his planning puts Jim into. The literal reality is not important. The deeper reality is all. Just as it was absurd for Tom Sawyer to plumb works of literature to learn how to rescue Jim from jail, so it is absurd to read the book of Deuteronomy to find rational ethical principles. Yet neither texts are less for that. Both can sing with truth.