He’d call it an adventure - Huck Finn vs Walter Scott, and the struggle to find Jim

Mark Twain had presented his argument against Walter Scott in Life on the Mississippi.  He returns to it in Huckleberry Finn and in fact makes it a principle, if submerged, theme of the novel.  It explains some of the unpleasantness of the novel’s final episode.

Southerners developed an ethical system that was a fantasy based on novels; that is Twain’s argument.  The novels are not really the issue, just useful stand-ins for a critique of Southern culture – the over-emphasis on honor, the duels and feuds, the glorification of violence, and the pride in lost causes – all of this on top of a dehumanizing system of chattel slavery, which was also part of the fantasy, allowing slave-owners to think of themselves as feudal chiefs.

Tom Sawyer is the novel’s representative of this ideology.  He wants to turn everything into an adventure story, a less innocent pastime than it first seems.  By the end of a novel, Sawyer is revealed as a sociopath, completely indifferent to human suffering and all too proud of his new bullet wound.  The irony of that detail is pretty ugly.

I love Huckleberry Finn for his independence and his ability to make moral decisions – “’All right, then, I'll go to hell’” (Ch. 31), right?  “It was awful thought, and awful words, but they was said.”  The escaped slave Jim becomes his friend, as human as himself.

Yet Finn cannot free himself from Tom Sawyer.  Jim and Huck come upon a steamboat wreck.  Jim says skip it; Huck says:

“Do you reckon Tom Sawyer would ever go by this thing?  Not for pie, he wouldn’t?  He’d call it an adventure – that’s what he’d call it; and he’d land on that wreck if it was his last act.  And wouldn’t he throw style into it?...  I wish Tom Sawyer was here.”  (Ch. 12)

Six pages later, just by the way, we learn the name of the steamboat:

“On the wreck.”

“What wreck?”

“Why, there ain’t but one.”

“What, you don’t mean the Walter Scott?”  (Ch. 13)

Huck had also wished Tom were present while he was emptying out Pap’s cabin and faking his own death.  Whatever problems a reader might have with the final episode of the novel, when Tom Sawyer engineers Jim’s escape from imprisonment, but only on Tom’s insane terms, as if they were all in a Dumas novel, you can’t say that Twain had not set things up.  Thematically, the ending logically follows.

The episode is deeply uncomfortable.  However resourceful Huck is on his own, he is crushed in the presence of Tom Sawyer, servile, even.  He achieves a powerful moral breakthrough about his friend Jim and then abandons it without a fight.  I understand why people dislike the ending.  It is unpleasant.

No more unpleasant, though, than what Jim has been experiencing throughout the novel.  He already lives away from his family, his wife and two children living on a Missouri farm while he works in town.  He flees slavery because of a threat that he will be sold away from his family.  He hopes to work in Illinois and buy his family.  The further he floats south – the longer Tom Sawyer keeps him chained up in prison – the more he risks not only personal violence but the loss of his family.

For Huck Finn, family is something to escape, plus he is just a boy.  How can he understand any of this?  The young reader has the same excuse.  The adult reader ought to struggle to bring Jim out from the background.

Much of the above is indebted to John Keene’s story “Rivers,” from Counternarratives (2015), in which Jim tells his story.  It is a fine piece of literary criticism.

John Keene's Counternarratives - a warning - I elude him and all of them, gliding higher

I want to write more of a warning than a review.  The book is John Keene’s Counternarratives (2015), short stories and one novella about hidden aspects of the black experience in America, mostly meaning the United States but also Haiti and Brazil.  Each story is formally distinct – written in two columns, or as a historical work, or as a (long) footnote to a different book, or as the stream of consciousness of a madman.  The novella, which is also the footnote, is written four or five different ways.

Titles include “An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” and “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon.”  Often, especially early on, the key is to pay attention to the black characters hidden behind the surface story.  Soon they move to the front, often writing or telling or thinking their own stories, as in, say, “Acrobatique” where the confident acrobat Miss La La describes her meeting with Degas (the painting is in the London National Gallery), or “Cold,” where the creator of the first African-American musical is driven to suicide.  That one is stream of consciousness with inset sidebars containing his song lyrics, ironic in context, and perhaps also out.  The black characters are always unusually intelligent or talented.

Now we should all have a clear idea about the heavily conceptual aspect of the book.  Many readers would hate it, find it distant (which much of it is), resent that it suggests a person might know something about history, etc.  My warning has nothing to do with this, since Keene’s ideas about fiction are sharp and his choices of form fit the stories he tells with them.  Maybe the last one, a dialogue between two African dictators, maybe that one fell flat.

No, my warning is about “Rivers,” in which the narrator is the former Jim Watson, the slave for whom Huckleberry Finn risks Hell, describing his life subsequent to Huckleberry Finn, including his second trip into the Deep South, this time as a soldier in the Union Army.  “It was a bit daunting to take on ‘Jim’ from Mark Twain’s novels, though I also wondered why no one had done so before. (Or maybe someone has.)” says Keene in an interview.  Inevitably, the story is also about Huck Finn.

Yet the mere mention of that boy’s name, one I seldom think about, not even in dreams or nightmares, retrieves the sole two times since those years that I saw his face.  That first time the name and face had become molded to the measure of a man, still young and with a decade before him but rendered gaunt and taut by struggles unknown to me and perhaps to that writer, also from Hannibal, who had made him, both of us, briefly famous.  (219)

There is a suggestion that Huck does in fact go to Hell in some way.  Tom Sawyer, by contrast, has become, or always was, a monster.

Many versions of Jim’s story are imaginable, and Keene’s is plausible and meaningful. “Rivers” is going to be much-anthologized and much-taught, mostly alongside Huckleberry Finn.  If you have some sort of arbitrary “will it be read ten years from now” rule, I am saying the answer is “Yes!”  So will the rest of the book, but “Rivers” is going to be the famous one.  The stories disguised as Brazilian colonial history are fascinating, but unteachable to ordinary undergraduates.  “Rivers” is good but also useful.  You should know about it.

Two reviews I found useful in helping me understand Counternarratives: Adrian West in Music & Literature and Eric McDowell in Michigan Quarterly Review.  Both give a better idea than I do of what Keene is doing and why it is worthwhile.

The title quotation is from "Acrobatique," p. 247.