This project evolved over time and it is my hope to try to capture the length an breadth of this project even some of this work started before I formalized this whole thing.
Some portion of why this project started was the pandemic, as is with everything now. Right before the Pandemic, and I mention this in my post about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, that I was reading Jeanette Winterston's latest novel, Frankisstein, which is a retelling of the famous story featuring a trans character. It was riveting stuff. As I read it though, I found out that I did not know nearly enough about the original story to be conversant in the retelling's version. This is when the pandemic hit last spring and so I decided to listen to an audiobook version of the original. Audible had just given access to free audiobooks during this time because of the stay-at-home order and I decided then to embark on something that was leading towards this journey.
From Frankenstein, I decided to try my hand at some of these other audiobooks of classics that I hadn't read yet the first up was Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which I felt like was adding up to this project where I would try to read all of the books I should have read by now, and the start of the project began to germenate for me.
This book seemed to elude me for much of my life. Many times and in many settings I thought to read this book and I am glad that I was finally able to make a space to interact with this titanic text. I am so impressed with the genius of this little text, Twain’s genius in this work is bewildering in a way I think few things still are. I am glad that we pass young American’s through the crucible of this work. If we are going to force anyone to read anything, this book I think tops that list of what we should be forcing people to read. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 feels like an essential work as well as 1984, but Twain’s book I think represents so much of the potential of America that it should be like repeating the pledge of allegiance. Even in the pledge of allegiance we have a darkness twisted through it. Politics has always touched all places of American life and Twain, being aware of this, disembarks his characters to the international waters of the Mississippi River. The book takes place in the south and middle west, but it could be anywhere that humans have the opportunity to work within the limitations of life just before are current lives where everything is chopped up, categorized and small in a way that the American experience was limitless, vast, ugly, violent, short and rife with trauma.
Finn’s lived experience is horrific, violent, and pinned in by at once a stifling thirst for propriety by people who knew little of its strictures and practices while at the same time close to a lawlessness and violence that would baffle the modern mind. The closeness with which the band of young rebels come to real violence and consequences is maddeningly narrow. The idea that Huck Finn would fake his own death and run off with a runaway slave as a matter of course happens so naturally in this world. The story of orphan in America, as well as London it just so happens, is fascinating. Huck’s orphan status propels him into a life of aimlessness and poverty out into the arms of the great river. The moments where Huck and Jim are drifting down the current looking up at the stars on the river is a moment that will stay with me for the rest of my life. It is a timeless moment of beauty and stillness at a time when violence ruled American life and danger ever present. It is just after this moment that they find the Duke and the King and they will be run aground on rocky shores at every pass just after this and it is asks of the reader, what begets these sort of meaningless adventures, but the pathlessness of the protagonists.
“This second night we run between seven and eight hours, with a current that was making over four mile an hour. We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed—only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all—that night, nor the next, nor the next” (Twain 82).
There has been a lot said about Huckleberry Finn so I don't hope to take up too much time here, but for my purposes one of the focuses of this project is to see what Classic Literature says about itself. And Huck Finn has a lot to say about classic lit. The second act of this book, if it is said to have that sort of shape is that the vagabonds Jim and Huck take up with go from town to town putting on scenes, the whole plays mind you, of Shakespeare. They pick what seem to be the most capitvating scenes from famous plays and re-enact them with two men where Huck joins in where he can. From the things I knew about this text before reading it, I was wholly unaware of this portion of the story. Faked his death, ran away with a person who was enslaved, floated down the river on a raft, these are the essentials of the story, but classic lit plays a major role in this story which is wild. The vagabonds, however unwell either of them is, see these essential stories as a sort of currency in this culture which does not seem to respect them quite the way that they 'respect' the literature which seems like an unusual mechanism Twain is using to tell this essentially American story. The vagabonds then take upon themselves false mantels of European royalty which seems obvious to the reader that these are meant to be digs at the old world concepts of power and esteem that feel just as foreign in real life to that of story's paltry representations of it. But classic lit here, as a concept, seems at stake in a way that even Twain's wry, cutting disinterest in the trappings of the old world breaks through in some way. I think it is fascinating. Twain seems to think that classic literature should have an impact on the American common folk but knows that it doesn't and the tension in the divide is what he is interested in portraying.
The other way that classic literature interacts with this text importantly is Tom Sawyer's plans for Jim's escape. Sawyer is awash in the competiting motivations of classic literature like that of The Count of Monte Cristo or The Man in the Iron Mask, both books written by Dumas (1802-1870), who would have been a slightly older contemporary to Mark Twain (1835-1910). It seems to me though that Twain is canonizing Dumas' work here in the way that the story seems natural for Tom to know and it seems odd to Tom that Huck and Jim are not as conversant in it. Tom seems to think that everyone who would be investigating what they are doing would be deeply aware of how what Tom is doing echoes and reimagines the actions of the characters in Dumas. This is the stuf
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