Why 'Huck Finn' is still the Great American Novel

Last weekend my aunt and uncle moved into a new house down in the valley after 30 years of living in Boise's highlands. When I arrived for the moving party I was shocked to see their old abode––which had always struck me as fabulously filthy and hopelessly infested with black widows––devoid of objets d'art and the nooks and crannies that usually hide dust bunnies and poisonous spiders.

As my aunt packed some miscellaneous books into boxes, she handed me a copy of the Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume I. "Do you want this," she asked. Of course I did.

I began reading it in earnest when I got home in much the same way he dictated it, haphazardly jumping from one story and set of reminiscences to another, and found myself laughing aloud at characters the master was able to paint in the space of a sentence or a paragraph. Twain is at his best when he's describing just what kind of hero or villain a given person really is.

In a fit of enthusiasm I drew from my bookshelf my copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in doing so it fell to the ground, opening to pages 226 and 227, about three quarters of the way through. What I found there startled me with its prescience regarding the American soul and that novel's place in the canon.

But before I quote from the novel, let me suggest that like my aunt and uncle, the American novel has relocated from the heights and down into the lowlands. If, as Hemingway and Faulkner suggest, American literature grew from the seed that is Huck Finn, it's clear that much of the artistic work that followed in its footsteps has in some way been a reaction to it.

In my opinion, most authors side with either Twain's remarkable ear for the American voice, or his uncanny eye for the expanse of the American landscape. Few have tried––fewer still have succeeded––in capturing both. Consequently their readers must content themselves with being either deaf or blind.

Just take the work being produced today by the Jonathan Franzens, –Safran Foers and Eugenides of the world: So much of its focus is trained on the "alive"-ness of history and the 20th century's upheaval of sensibilities. Would The Help be much improved if it didn't take for granted the wrong-ness of mistreating house servants?

––Which leads me to what I found on page 227 of Huck Finn.

"So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter––and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

'Miss Watson your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. 

Huck Finn'"

The hilarious disgrace of the outcome of Huck's reasoning undoes the American fallacy of the easy decision. Huck faces a problem of the conscience, and his solution is to trivialize it.

Our hero wants to have his cake and eat it, too, figuring he can literally send his faithful companion up shit creek and pray for his own conscience later. Given its location within the novel, it's clear this isn't the catalyst for Huck's rambling adventure––it isn't the joke––: It's the punchline. When confronted with a choice between what's right (acknowledging the property of others) and righter still (acknowledging that Jim is a human being), Huck chooses what's merely right.

His dual sense that Jim is both man and chattel is an enduring feature of a distinctly American ethic. Wall Street holds that capitalism is the system that best puts security and material prosperity into the hands of the greatest number of people, and has admirably maintained as much in the face of millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes. 

A lot of bankers have made millions of dollars for themselves, their clients, and their shareholders, and I have to assume that they spend no small amount of their spare time praying for their eternal souls.

Like Huckleberry Finn, America is still a child trying to make sense of right and wrong, and we continue to feel blindly for the line between doing right by ourselves and doing right by the people around us. Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov acidly noted in his novel The Master and Margarita that "To speak the truth is easy and pleasant." But America is a young, naive place, and Twain's America hasn't yet the moral or ethical firmament to make Huck's––or Bulgakov's––dilemma a moral one until Huck feels the weight of his actions on his own conscience.

We can't laugh at either until we've felt for ourselves the pain of disregarding humanity or telling a convenient lie.