The voice is what hooks so many young writers on the book, and inspires them to attempt to do for our time what Twain did for his, which is why every few years there appears some new work described as “a Huck Finn-like reverie on freedom and constraint, set in a convent, in which Sister Gertrude, like Huck, dreams of climbing out the window and having a smoke” or “like Huck Finn, if Huck Finn was raised in Cleveland and Pap was not a cruel drunk but a sort of cranky rabbi.” But this tendency of Huck Finn to cause other writers to write books extremely similar to it but worse is telling; the voice of the book reminds us of the beauty of the world, and of the fact that that beauty can indeed be gotten at by the word, and that our language, English, that old dowager, has not yet begun to fight. As long as there is a new reality, the voice tells us, English too will be new, and it is you, the young writer, who will make it so. And so off the young writers go, trying to figure out what their River is, and who their Jim is, and what America’s current most noxious trait is, so they can lampoon it. And although — at least the three or four times I’ve tried it — the final product is not a book at all, but a pile of papers you fling across the room; the final product is also a new respect for the originality and genius of the book, and for Twain, of whom F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, beautifully: “His eyes were the first eyes that ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas.”
In Huck Finn, the landscape appears to us on a strangely human scale: we feel ourselves actually moving through it. I don’t know if this is true for anybody else, but when I read, my inner eye is normally situated about ten feet off the ground. I look down on Dostoevsky’s characters as if perched beside some icon on a beet-smelling shelf; when Bob Cratchit tests the Christmas pudding, I’m up on the stove, which fortunately for me is one of those instantaneously cooling Victorian stoves. When I read Huck Finn, though, I am Huck’s height, looking up at all these unkempt hostile people looking down at me, grazing a tree with my arm, running a finger through the dust that has settled on an end table in that magnificently described Grangerford parlor, killing an actual pig, letting the hand that killed the pig trail behind me in the green waters of the Mississippi.
The person who tries to list all that is wonderful about Huck Finn will soon find that his family has fled, the grass has overgrown the sidewalk, the dog has starved to death, and his life is over. There is wonderfulness everywhere you look, and from whatever angle you look. I would guess that a person could wade into the book with any idea in mind (“Christianity,” or “the forest,” or “concepts of feminine beauty”) and find that idea not only represented in Huck Finn but metaphorically developed, and metaphorically developed in a way that simultaneously sheds light on Twain, the reader, and the cosmos. Try it yourself; read it, say, with “concepts of feminine beauty” in mind, and you will soon find yourself convinced that Twain only invented the stuff about the kid and the slave and the big river and freedom and democracy as a diversionary tactic so he could really sink his teeth into the concept of feminine beauty.
Such metaphorical suppleness comes, I think, in proportion to how purely the artistic product proceeds from the subconscious, and from the quality of that subconscious. Twain’s subconscious was a formidable thing — he had been just about everywhere in America, usually at a time when something big was happening, had done that most purely American thing, namely work himself above his original station, had begun his life as a lower-middle-class kid in a slave-owning household, which situated him squarely on the twin issues that make every American sweat and frown and burst into defensiveness and begin spouting groundless platitudes, namely race and class — and when this subconscious took charge, emboldened by a temporarily perplexed conscious mind, the book wrote itself out of any known genre and into this wild new thing we are still trying to classify and make sense of.
So there is the voice, and the created world along the river, and the amazing assortment of characters, and the constantly shifting skein of metaphors, and the rich stinging humor — but what truly animates the book, and makes it so dangerous and transcendent and even prescient, is the relationship between Huck and Jim.
THE CENTRAL MORAL VECTOR
Huck is an ignorant white-trash boy. Not only is he white trash, he is the lowest of the white trash, sort of White-Trash Trash, because his father is the town drunk. And this town drunk is not of the Amiable Nostalgic school of town-drunkery but of the Brutal Violent school. Huck flees town, to escape Pap and the equally oppressive if less flamboyant Righteous Spinster Duo, Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas, and soon is faced with a dilemma: this dilemma is named Jim, and Jim is an escaped slave, and all of Huck’s training thus far has been that slavery is good, biblically sanctioned even, and that he should always do what is right, which in this case means he should turn Jim in. Bearing in mind our human fondness for establishing ourselves as Worthwhile by kicking someone beneath us simply because we can, especially if we ourselves have been repeatedly kicked, it would not be surprising if Huck, who has no mother and no real home and a father who locks him in a shed and beats him, were to take a little pleasure from mistreating Jim. (Imagine a sort of contemporary Huck-equivalent: a little community-despised white-trash boy, son of an American Nazi Party member who periodically beats him and locks him in the garage for days, comes upon a sleeping and vulnerable homeless black man — what might he do?) And yet all of Huck’s instincts tell him that Jim is a man, and a friend, and we come to see that Jim cares about Huck more genuinely, with more real affection, than anyone else in the book, and so the Central Moral Vector lies in the question: Will Huck turn Jim in?
Huck struggles with this question, and watching this struggle we come to love him, and conducting this struggle, he becomes one of the great figures of world literature. “No one who reads thoughtfully the dialectic of Huck’s moral crisis,” Lionel Trilling said, “will ever again be wholly able to accept without some question and some irony the assumptions of the respectable morality by which he lives.”
Anyway, this is what we are told, and taught, and what we remember about the book years later: the book is about the question of whether Huck, this probable nascent racist, will transcend himself and help Jim realize his dream of freedom. This question hangs over the entire book and, to the contemporary mind, gives it the shape that allows us to argue for its noble moral intent, and to assess its artistic triumph or failure, but the truth is, there are entire sections of the book that behave as if this question had not been asked. Jim spends a good deal of the middle portion of the book effectively neutralized as a narrative player, hidden on board the raft or in the woods, with his face painted blue and/or tied hand and foot and/or dressed up like King Lear. There are other places where Jim fades into caricature, and in these places it seems as if Twain — involved in the writing of the book and not in its analysis many years later, flailing around in search of his Apparent Narrative Rationale, still emerging from the slog of his childhood racial attitudes, trying on different models of what his book was, inventing and reinventing his Upside-Down Lapel Reinstator — has forgotten what his book is about, or at least has forgotten what, many years later, we will claim his book is about.