Recently I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark
Twain. Yes, I’ve read it before, but
that was some 50 years ago, I believe when I was in middle school. Huck is such a part of American culture that
I remembered every chapter – and was bored by none. Some movies reach that level, ingrained in
our minds in detail forever – The Wizard of Oz, or Casablanca -- but books
don’t seem to do so … maybe Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
I rarely discard a book (though have loaned out many, never
to see them again – hint, hint), yet I seldom re-read them. The ones I do revisit more than once seem to
have a political-historical theme: The Mayor of Castro Street, Exodus, The
Fire Next Time, and Silent Spring. Huck
has that historical “place in time” context, but falls more so into the fiction
category.
So what made me re-read Huck?
The decision relates directly to a book I reviewed about a
year ago: The Republic of Imagination by
Azar Nafisi. The author (of Reading Lolita in Tehran) is an Iranian
immigrant to the U.S. who “learned” about America through its literature. She cited Huckleberry Finn as her biggest
influence. While I heartily agree that
Huck is an American classic, I was somewhat surprised, and concerned, that it
shapes a world view of the United States – actually “alarmed” might be a better
word. I thought it might be time to
revisit the book.
Normally in a review this is the point where one would provide a synopsis of the book to the reader, but does
anyone really need to have Huckleberry Finn spelled out for them? For an American this book is about as universal knowledge as one can get – and perhaps that is one of the points Nafisi is making.
Huck is one of Mark Twain’s four Mississippi river writings,
the others being: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and
Pudd’nhead Wilson. Though written post-Civil
War, it tells of life along the fault line of America before the war. An underlying story in the book is an examination of that
part of America where citizen loyalties were divided between pro-slavery
advocates, and the growing abolitionist movement ... with both sides quoting the
Bible. But significantly, it isn’t told as a
political treatise (like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin became);
in Huckleberry Finn, slavery is set as a backdrop to Huck’s youthful trials (hence “The
Adventures of” part of the title).
The adventures of Huck, and Jim – technically a run-away
slave, set in river towns up and down the Mississippi, are what I believe
caught Nafisi’ eye. Her book explores what she refers to as "the emotional basis
of America as geography." Mark Twain captured that perfectly.
