Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

5 May 2010

A Norman Rockwell illustration from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn showing Jim examining a hairball. (Photo: America.gov)

Mark Twain, left, with John Lewis, a lifelong friend and inspiration for the character Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Photo: America.gov)

Ron Powers is the author of Mark Twain: A Life and Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain.

By Ron Powers

One hundred thirty-five years after its first publication in the United States, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883) continues to enlarge its international claim as a masterpiece. For uncounted millions of readers and scholars, it still stands as the greatest novel yet written by an American.  Of the 30-plus books written by Mark Twain (who died a century ago this spring), Huckleberry Finn remains the work that elevates this one-time rustic humorist into the ranks of literary genius.

Proof of the book's enduring popularity is not hard to find: it sells an estimated 200,000 copies a year, dwarfing sales by all but a handful of contemporary novelists. It has been translated into more than 50 languages and published in more than 700 editions around the globe. Three hundred thousand visitors a year - many from Europe, Russia, Asia and South America - descend upon Hannibal, Missouri (population 17,500), Mark Twain's boyhood hometown and the fictional launching-place for Huck and Jim's great Mississippi River odyssey.

And who could blame them, these ardent readers and pilgrims to the shrine?  Who could fail to be captivated by this epic, lyric tale of two companions headed down a benevolent river on a raft, seeking freedom and fulfillment of their dreams?  Who could not relish the illusion of being alongside them as they encounter fascinating characters and fend off the threats that constantly reach for them from the menacing shoreline?

Yet Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, like the Mississippi River itself, is far more complex than it may seem on its surface.  While a child can be endlessly charmed by the sheer exuberance of Huck's escapades in the company of his friend, the runaway slave Jim, adult readers often dive into the novel's depths again and again, discovering ever-new layers of allusion, social commentary, and allegory. 

Not all these readers have been gratified by what they have found.  Although American eminences from H. L. Mencken to T. S. Eliot to Ernest Hemingway to Russell Banks have testified to the novel's transformative stature, others have seen in it a renunciation of values they hold sacred.  Their questions can be sorted into two or three general lines of inquiry: what is the essence, the core quality, of Huckleberry Finn's greatness?  Is it a great novel, or is it a bad, even a socially destructive, one?

And what, finally, did this "transformative" work transform? 

Let us begin by examining the indictment which, for more than 40 years, dominated speculation as to Mark Twain's own intentions with the book: the canard that the author and his book were racist.  This controversy exploded in 1957, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People condemned its 211 uses of the word, "nigger," the infamous epithet for African slaves and their descendants.  Over the ensuing four decades, Huckleberry Finn was banned from schools and libraries across America.

Defenders of the novel held fast.  They retorted that, far from amplifying personal bigotry, Mark Twain employed the word as dialogue representative of pre-Civil War southern Americans; and, further, that he employed it to satirize, not endorse, the racial prejudices of the time.  A good example is this famous exchange, in Chapter 32, between Huck and Aunt Sally, as Huck describes a steamboat explosion:

"We blowed out a cylinder-head."

"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"

"No'm. Killed a nigger."

"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt."

Admiring readers and critics are at a loss to understand how anyone could miss the scathing irony that glitters through these lines.  The joke here is at the expense of Huck and Aunt Sally, who seem blind to the fact that "niggers" are in fact human beings.  Furthermore, Huck, unlike the older woman, is already in the process of throwing off his blinders.  Only one chapter earlier, in perhaps the book's most immortal passage, Mark Twain shows Huck tearing up a letter to Jim's owner back upriver, a letter that disclosed Jim's whereabouts and would assure his recapture and punishment.  Abetting a fugitive slave in antebellum America was widely considered a sin against God, but Huck destroys the letter with the defiant avowal: "All right, then, I'll go to hell."  An even earlier passage, far less remarked on by either detractors or supporters of the novel, depicts Huck apologizing to Jim for tricking him into thinking Huck was a ghost.  Robert Hirst, editor of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, California, maintains that this is the first - and still among the few - instances in American literature in which a white man apologizes to a black.

Nevertheless, the argument continued, though with diminished force, through the 1990s.  Die-hard dissenters still remain - proof in itself that Huckleberry Finncontinues to play powerfully on the American conscience.

But let us adopt the most likely assumption: that Mark Twain was not a racist and neither was his book.  (One of America's most eminent scholars, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, has long argued that the novel is self-evidently anti-racist.)  The question remains: what did Adventures of Huckleberry Finn transform?

It certainly did not transform race relations in the United States.  In fact, for the first half-century after its publication, neither Huck's and Jim's friendship nor the effects of the hateful epithet itself received much attention from any quarter.  What did draw attention, along with bitter controversy, was a dimension of the novel that would scarcely raise an eyebrow from a contemporary reader.  That dimension involved the subjects' habits of slang and inelegant behavior.  To put it another way, Huck and Jim and the characters they encountered talked and behaved like common, ordinary American people - not like European gentry.  (Among the few exceptions were the fraudulent "Duke" and "King," who tried hard to imitate fancy Old World manners, and failed hilariously.)

American tastemakers and guardians of public piety - still defensive about their country's cultural "inferiority" almost a century after its political liberation from Europe - found this talk and behavior mortifying.  Newspaper reviews, initially positive, took a sharp downward turn within weeks, with critics pronouncing the work "coarse," "a piece of careless hack-work," "the veriest trash."  This barrage of public scolding might have seriously damaged the new book's prospects, but for a stroke of good luck that Mark Twain himself recognized at once.  On March 17, 1885, the directors of the Concord (Massachusetts) Public Library - "those idiots in Concord," as the author gleefully called them - inadvertently salvaged the book's appeal to the public.  They accomplished this by banning it.  This amounted to "a rattling tip-top puff," Mark Twain assured his publisher, "which will go into every newspaper in the country."

And so it happened.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn survived the early tut-tutting and enjoyed sales of 43,500 copies by mid-March 1885, the best start of any new book by the author in a decade.  The author did not live to see his work mushroom into the stature of an American classic, and from there into international recognition as one of the most beloved treasures of American literature.

And therein lies the answer to the riddle of Huckleberry Finn's timeless greatness.  What did it transform?  It transformed nothing less than the literary soul of America.  Those same "common" readers who bought and read the novel in spite of - and in many cases, because of - the tastemakers' disapproval recognized something that eluded the anxious guardians of the new nation's piety.  They recognized that here, for the first time, was a work that found nobility and poetic expression in characters just like them.  Here, finally, was a work whose characters were not imprisoned by the past - by bankrupt standards of Old-World decorum and caste hierarchies - but rather, distinctly American characters, who looked to the future, who struck out for the future, who improvised their futures, at the very risk of their lives.  And who spoke to one another about their adventures in the rough but authentic poetry of the American vernacular.

No American writer had ever achieved that kind of breakthrough before.  Few American writers had dared try.  Mark Twain had the audacity to try, and he had the genius to succeed.  Huckleberry Finn is a novel intertwined with the enduring, regenerative American spirit.  That is what makes it great.