Category Archives: Classic Books

Bilgewater

Classic Books

 

In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the scenes involving the Duke and Dauphin show them as visitors from the theatre of the absurd. After telling Jim and Huck all about their phony recent projects of the past including “selling an article to take tartar off the teeth” only to remove “the enamel along with it as well”, and “a-running a temperance revival thar ‘bout a week,” or doing “a little patent medicines with “theatre actor-tragedy,” taking “a turn to mesmerism and phrenology,” teaching “singing geography” and “sling a lecture” they claim, with a straight face to be European nobility. One is a Duke and the other a Dauphin.

Yet, for all that, are these two “rapscallions” who are obvious hicks from rural America as far removed from European royalty as the moon is from the earth, any less believable than “real” royalty, who are only noble because people are taught to believe it? The gullibility of people in America, like the gullibility of people in Europe or Canada is staggeringly profound.

 

The “Duke” allows that Jim and Huck can refer to them as “Your Grace,” or “My Lord” or “Your Lordship”. Yet he said he wouldn’t mind if they call him “Bridgewater” to show what a good guy he is, without any airs, but “at least one of them ought to wait on us at dinner and do any little thing for him he wanted done.” After all, do nobility deserve any less that? And are these fraudsters really any more fake than the real nobility in large castles? Huck keeps referring to him as “Bilgewater” instead. A fitting name for a bullshitter.

Yet Huck is assured, “Yes gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin’, exiled trampled-on, and sufferin’ rightful King of France” And oddly, the King of France speaks with the perfect accident of a Missourian.

So Jim and Huck “set to majestying him.” After all it is the people who make majesties of hucksters. Huck had learned from his scoundrel of a father “the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.” At least until they turned the tables on them. That is what we should do with “real” kings too.  At least until it’s time to turn the tables on them.

Jim was not fooled by them either. He realized quickly that “dese kings o’ ourn is regular rapscallions.”

Huck concluded: “Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.” Wouldn’t we all like that? Including those monarchs we elect every few years.

You don’t have to look far to find a lot of wisdom in a classic novel like Huck Finn.

 

Fiction vs. reality

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

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.

Unreality: The Upside-down world of Huck Finn.

Classic Books, racism

 

When I first read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn many years ago, I recall I was a bit disconcerted by the scenes that seemed to me to be far-fetched. It seemd unreal. It was unreal. Now I think that was the point.

There is lots of absurdity in the novel: the horrible advice Huck got from his father, the Duke and the Dauphin, Tom Sawyer’s absurd attempts to make the rescue of Jim conform to what he has “learned from novels,” even if that means putting Jim’s life in serious danger.  All of this mirrors the absurdity of the American morality which condemns a slave like Jim, the most good-hearted character in the novel, just because of the colour of his skin. All this while the conventional morality, praised the  casual brutality like that of Aunt Sally who was prepared to separate Jim from his wife and family for a few dollars. After all, in a “topsy-turvy” world as Twain called it what could be more unreal than reality? Reality has to be revaluated, turned on its head, to make any sense at all.

In the novel Huck helps Jim, the black slave, to escape from the bonds of his slavery, even though he believes by doing so he is committing a mortal sin that will lead him straight to hell. He is willing to pay the supreme price to save his friend. Yet at the same time, he can’t help playing tricks on Jim. The two hop on a raft and drift on the Mississippi but of course, the river flows south which is toward ever greater danger. They should be heading north to the free states. Their plan is to drift south until they reach the place where the Ohio river flows into the Mississippi river. Then they will head north. This is where the town of Cairo is located. Their plan was to sell their raft in Cairo and buy a steamboat ticket up north. A good plan, but like so many plans, it runs afoul of reality.

One dark and foggy night Jim and Huck get separated from each other. Jim is on the raft and Huck on a canoe. To Jim it looked like he had lost his only friend in the world. He was disconsolate. But Huck finds Jim in the night asleep at the rudder and decides to play a trick on old Jim.  A mean trick. When Huck wakes up Jim who fell asleep at the rudder, he pretends that they were never separated at all. He convinces Jim that he had been dreaming. They have a conversation in the night that might just as well have been between the French philosopher Descartes and Jean Jacque Rousseau. They argue about reality! Jim says Huck had been gone. Huck denies it, even though it was true.  Jim says to Huck: “Well, looky here boss, dey’s sumfn wrong, or wha is I? Now dat’s what I wants to know.”  To which Huck responds” “Well, I think you’re here, plain enough, but I think you’re but a tangle-headed old fool, Jim.” To which Jim replies like the most sophisticated philosopher: “”I is, is I? Well you answer me this: Didn’t you tote out de line in de canoe for to make fas’ a towhead?”  From there Huck’s lies completely befuddle Jim who can’t figure out if the separation happened or he just had a dream. Reality is fractured and that is immensely cruel to an escaping slave who must at all times have a solid bead on reality to keep alive. Jim replies: “But, Huck, it’s all plain to me as—” and Hucks cuts him off, “It don’t make no difference how plain it is; there ain’t nothing in it. I know, because I’ve been here all the time.” Jim concluded it was the most powerful dream he ever had.

Eventually, Jim realizes Huck has been tricking him. Fooling him and he is deeply hurt. After all he thought he had lost his best friend! What a cruel joke! Jim laments:

“When I got wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz broke mos’ bekase you wuz los, en I didn’t k’yer no mo’ what become er me en de raf. En when I wake up en fine you back ag’n, all safe en soun’, de tears come, en I coud’a’ down on my knees en kiss yo’ foot, I’s so thankful.  En all you wuz thinkin’ bout wuz you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck day is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes’em ashamed.”

Jim demonstrates that he is the real moral center of the novel. Not the Sunday school morality of Miss Watson.

When Jim explains it like that he realizes what a terrible thing he did in tricking Jim. Jim loved him and he treated him badly! As Huck said in response:

“It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back. It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go an humble myself to a nigger, but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterward, neither. I didn’t do no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d knowed it would make him feel that way.”

 

Even though it was unheard of for a white man to lower himself to the level of nigger Huck did exactly that. Reality was turned on its head. That is what Huck had to. Just he turned morality on its head.

 

Freeing the master and the slave and the victim

Classic Books, Freedom, racism

 

Azar Nafisi, the literature critic who wrote that wonderful book The Republic of the Imagination, points out how the slave Jim is the first person who encountered Huck after Huck staged his death in order to escape from his “smothery” world. Huck depends on Jim to show him how to survive on their raft. Nafisi said Jim “resurrects him.” He certainly frees Huck in more than one sense.

Later, when the white mob is after Jim, Huck literally saves or resurrects Jim from a watery grave. They save each other. They help each other to freedom. This is the central relationship in the novel.

This relationship in my mind proves that Mark Twain was right when he said, “Lincoln’s proclamation [when Abe Lincoln proclaimed slavery was abolished]…not only set the slaves free, but set the white man free also. White men were enslaved by a false and wicked ideology—white supremacy—from which they desperately needed freeing. Some have still not been freed.

According to Nafisi, later Huck realizes that “he needs to feel, to empathize with others in order to become more fully himself. All through their adventures Huck finds his own moral compass with the help of Jim. As soon as they meet under new circumstances, Jim is transformed from “Miss Watson’s nigger” to his best mate as they go from “he and I” to “we.”

This is how Huck and Jim free each other. That is a racist and non-racist can free each other. The Adventurers of Huckleberry Finn is a novel about freedom. This is its essential theme. It is a complex book in a simple form. I think it is the greatest American novel and might even be the greatest novel ever written.

In Canada Canadian non-indigenous people urgently need to be saved from their ideology of white supremacy. Allowing indigenous people to liberate themselves would lead to the liberation of non-indigenous people. This is an essential insight we can gain from reading a novel like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

 

Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Books, Classic Books

 

Many people love the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It might be the most beloved book in America. Is it a better book than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Are they comparable? If one is better than the other why is that?

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not averse to preaching and trying to persuade the reader how heinous slavery is. And she is completely right about that.  But Mark Twain was different. Twain said in the introduction to his book that no one should look for a moral or message in his novel. He was just telling stories he said. Yet in Twain’s book, as Azar Nafisi pointed out, “He does not play on our sentiments, but stirs our hearts in ways we had never imagined possible.”

 

Twain shows us the hideous underbelly of slavery and racism all without preaching. In fact, Huck himself speaks about how wicked it is to help a slave to escape. His conscience burns when he does it. He believes he is committing a sin that will lead him directly to hell. Yet he does it anyway. He forsakes his up bringing, his “conscience”, and everything be believes, for the sake of his black slave friend.

 

Stowe wanted to change the world through her ideas. Twain elicited ideas when they could lead to good stories and he did that by offering an alternative reality. And at this Twain was a genius. This is what great art is all about. This is why in my opinion Huck Finn is perhaps the greatest novel ever written and why Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a good book.

 

Heaven and Hell in Huckleberry Finn

Classic Books, Indigenous Treaties, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Huck Finn, like Mark Twain, was not really that keen on heaven.  Twain also pursued this theme with his classic sense of humour in a wonderful essay called “Letters from the Earth.” It is well worth reading.

In many ways, hell seemed more attractive to Huck than heaven. As he thought to himself after Miss Watson tried to extoll the benefits of heaven to Huck, “Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said, I wished I were there.” Miss Watson said it was wicked to say that. But in his resolve Huck remained firm: “I couldn’t see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind, I wouldn’t try for it.” Why try hard to get to a place that really didn’t seem that attractive? But Miss Watson did not give us so easily. But neither did Huck. Twain described their spiritual tussle this way:

 

“…she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.”

 

Once again, Huck was prepared to go to hell for a friend. Friendship was more important than religious ideology. Even an ideology he had been swimming in since birth and even though it came with powerful religious artillery. He even wished his friend would be in hell to keep their friendship intact.

The Revaluation of Morals

Classic Books, Critical thinking, Morality, Rebel

 

When Huck Finn does what he thinks is wrong—helping a slave to escape his master and gain his freedom and deprive his master of her property—Huck decides he must be wicked, because to do “the right thing” is the wrong thing. He turns morality on its head. In doing so, Huck helps to turn civilization on its head too.

 

Hopefully this can help all of us to think better by making a “long think” about what is right and wrong. Is it what we were taught in Sunday school? Is it what our parents taught us? Or our friends? Or our betters? Or is it something we can discern for ourselves? Are Indigenous children slovenly brutes as many of us were taught? Do Jews really smell as many were told? What is respectable? What is civilized?  Don’t just believe what we are told. We must look for ourselves. We must give it a “long think.” We must be willing, if necessary, to turn the world on its heads even if means risking a place called hell.

 

Azar Nafisi said this is what she tried to teach her students when she was a professor,  in Iran, where they were indoctrinated from birth to believe what the Imams and parents told them. Who can do this in America? Who can do this in Canada? In her view, gleaned from Twain and other writers, “I tried to share with my students in Tehran , explaining to them that moral choice comes from a sound heart and from a constant questioning of the world and of oneself and that it is just as difficult , if not more so in society that appears to give you every freedom.

 

I think it comes from starting with fellow feeling and then a long think where all the relevant facts must be ascertained and then weighed.

 

I remember one time having a serious discussion with a young lawyer on an issue of morality.  His argument against what I said consisted of saying, “Well this is what I learned at home.”  It is all well and good to be taught at home. We all needed parents to do that as we could not have survived without their help. But when we become adults, we have to learn to think for ourselves too. Mark Twain once said elsewhere that “education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.” And as much as we loved our parents and respected their viewpoint they were not always right. Just as our children won’t think we were always right.  Thank goodness for that.

 

The same goes for teachers. I know I have learned a lot from good teachers. But Friedrich Nietzsche that great German philosopher, said “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil.”

 

Azar Nafisi said this source of wisdom was “the rebellious heart that beats to its own rhythm.” What we really need, in addition to good parents and good teachers is critical thinking combined with fellow feeling. This is what I have gleaned from one of my old philosophy professors. I am eternally grateful to him for that.

 

 

The Religious  Mob

Classic Books, Extremism, Fear, Freedom, Politics & Religion, Rebellion and Resistance

 

In the amazing novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when it is discovered that a slave has escaped from his master, a mob of white people—mainly good Christian white people—got excited and gave horrific chase to the slave aided and abetted by his young white friend. These were good ordinary citizens of America. They believed it was their religious duty to give chase to an escaped black slave and return him to his owner. Of course, it helped that they might reap a $40 reward from the owner. Is that all it takes?

 

Azar Nafisi was a Muslim woman living in Iran who taught Huckleberry Finn to young Islamic men and women.  By and large these students were respectful of the tyrannical regime in their country. Like good American citizens, they were good citizens and good Muslims? What would they think of Huck Finn?

The book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is as I have been saying a book about freedom and resistance to authority.  Those are both characteristics that have usually been absent in Iran. At least that was true until recently, when there have been some rebellion led by young women resisting the authority of the government to impose dress requirements upon them, as well as other even more important impositions on their freedom. The women have demonstrated uncommon bravery in the face of that tyranny. A number of them have been killed by the government for their opposition.

Mark Twain in that brilliant book showed how an uneducated white boy and his black slave friend revolted against the “conscience” of the nation. Most people in America, at the time, believed in the racial superiority of whites and in their absolute right to do as they saw fit with the inferior black race in their midst.

Nafisi said this about the book:

“It looks at how ordinary decent people, or outcasts like Huck and Pap, could abandon their hearts and take the easy road, embracing ugly thoughts and prejudices when they are sanctioned by society. Could such horrors as slavery or the Holocaust happen without the complicity and voluntary blindness of decent, ordinary people, those who go to church and volunteer for good works and yet can easily turn, as they do in Huck Finn, into a murderous mob? It might have been the question that gave Huck such a dramatic sense of urgency when I taught it in those violent revolutionary days in Iran”.

 

How can good people wreak such havoc on other more vulnerable good people? Is a $40 reward all it takes?

Yet the young students of Iran largely supported the rebellious position of Huck. They applauded his actions in refusing to return the slave to the master.

Even though they were good Muslims, they did not support the religious mob! I found that interesting.