Fair enough, Roger. I agree, it would be unreasonable to "interrogate" Huck about what he meant by the word "Hell." (How would one go about doing so, anyway?) But that isn't the question that I'm asking. What I'm asking is, Does Huck's use of the word, in the context of his own (other) words and actions as presented in the narrative, correlate in any significant way with the sense attached to it by defenders of the book when they point to the "I'll GO to Hell" scene as a moment of redeeming moral triumph? After all, shipping with that latter claim is a great trunk of cultural baggage (left, it's true, for the most part resolutely unpacked--for the simple reason, one suspects, that to unpack it is to begin to reveal its internal contradictions and essential foolishness), a cultural tradition that assumes that saying "I'll GO to Hell" truly is a matter of the gravest moral import, equivalent to offering the ultimate personal sacrifice: not one's life, merely, but one's immortal soul. But is that really what Huck means by it?

No one's questioning that freeing Jim goes against at least some of Huck's (residual) social conditioning. He feels a twinge of guilt at "stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm," and he certainly doesn't want to get the reputation of a "low-down Abolitionist" (the latter phrase, of course from Chapter 8, in which Huck has already repudiated Hannibal's values--"I ain't a-going to tell, and I ain't a-going back there, anyways"--long before the fabled crisis of conscience in Chapter 31). So sure, maybe Huck has a few last inhibitions to get over. But does that really amount to a heroic declaration--a wagering of his immortal soul--for the sake of his downtrodden brother man? What if "I'll GO to Hell" simply means "Screw Miss Watson"? What then? After all, he's already said as much before, and more than once, over the course of the book.

My point, then, is that "I'll GO to Hell" may not quite be able to bear the weight that defenders of the book want to place on it. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say, outright, that it can't, and doesn't.

An experiment in comparison:What's the difference between stealing a nigger and stealing a watermelon? In Huck's world, apparently, not much--"I'll GO to Hell" notwithstanding. The underlying attitudes and the rationalizations are the same all along.

Yes, of course, it's to Huck's credit that he decides to rescue Jim from the Phelps's farm. But it's hard to make a case, frankly, that the decision costs him much by way of moral struggle.

"What I want is my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon; or what I want is my Sunday-school book[.]"

And we wonder that African-American readers find Huck Finn offensive?

.

I wasn't going to get back into this, but you guys throw out too many hooks.

Careful, Stephen. That's an awfully broad comment. I don't know how many black Americans find Huck Finn offensive. I don't know if there is a general consensus among African-Americans concerning the novel. Do you?

And of course one could say that Huck is still racist at the end of the novel. He still carries the baggage of his culture, including racial prejudice. Although Huck comes to see Jim as a human being, an individual, a person of dignity and worth, he remains a flawed person. But aren't we all? Huck comes to see the humanity in Jim, but he's not at the point where he is able to transfer that concept or feeling to black people as a race. What did you expect Twain to do? Turn Huck into Mother Theresa? Now that would have been realistic!

Richard

...................
(Apparently Mr. Clemens was very insensitive to the mentally disabled, too.)

I also question whether African American readers generally consider HF to be racist, and I have certainly encountered commentary from African Americans indicating precisely the opposite. The Daily Show link is a comedy shtick, of course, but it doesn't disguise the evidently sincere point of view of the black comedian when it comes to the censoring of Huck Finn. It seems that black opinion about Huck Finn is divided. In this link, you can see that even black scholars who favor removal of the n-word often do so because they feel the novel is so wonderful that kids should read it, and a bit of censorship might be what is needed to get the book into the classroom.

Toni Morrison, one of the black people you inclusively claim believe the book to be racist, in fact is a great admirer of the book and thinks it wise and insightful about racism, and I think her opinion should certainly count as much as Jane Smiley's, given her status as a African American and Nobel Prize winner. She wrote an introduction to an edition of HF, in fact, heaping praise on it and also speaking about bygone efforts to censor the book: Ishmael Reed, an African American no one has ever accused of being insensitive to racism (as far as I know), said this: It would be easy enough to pile on quote after quote from African Americans who don't seem to be offended at all by Huck Finn, but to regard it as a humane work of literary genius that stands for all time as an insightful attack on racism, but I have made my point. Maybe Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed and so many others are wrong, or at least fail to convince some readers that Twain has nothing in Huck Finn to apologize for, but let's be a little more careful about saying things like "African-American readers find Huck Finn offensive." Such absurd generalizations about what all African Americans feel are themselves offensive, not least of all for being flat out inaccurate.

**

Toni Morrison's entire introduction is worth reading, by the way. Here it is.

A couple of responses to posters above, and then, perhaps, I too can step off the raft again.

No, Richard, of course I do not. But then, as I've noted myself above (post #56), "there is no reason to imagine that African-Americans are 'monolithic' in this regard"--i.e., in finding Huck Finn objectionable. So you're attacking a straw man when you bring the issue up again like that. I have nowhere suggested that I believe that all African-American readers, or even a majority of them, feel one way or the other about the book. (It's not my place to speak on their behalf.) What I have suggested, from my own point of view, is simply that "the sensitivities of African-American readers who object to the book"--and it does indeed seem that there are some out there who do--"should be taken very seriously." Or again (post #48): "If an African-American reader should tell me that they do find it offensive, however, it seems to me that that opinion is not one to be taken lightly." In other words, nothing about "general consensus"--only the common-sense observation that voices of protest from the African-American community should be given a respectful hearing in this context.

As for the comment that you seize on above ("And we wonder . . . "), it is just my own, personal observation that we should not be surprised when such voices of protest do get raised, since there is indeed much in Huck Finn that seems liable to give offense. Perhaps you don't see it that way; if so, that's your prerogative. But for me, I'll say it again: I'm not surprised in the least when it happens.

And indeed, it does. About which more in a moment.

Roger, I want to thank you for finding us a link to the Morrison introduction; it's something I'd actually looked for over the last few days, and been unable to find, so I was very glad to read it at last. Morrison offers a subtle and perceptive reading of the book, one that celebrates its virtues, while acknowledging its weaknesses--in some cases reconciling the latter to a larger vision of what Twain could realistically hope to accomplish in his novel. I'm not persuaded that it succeeds as a defense of Huck Finn as an explicitly anti-racist book, but then, that really isn't Morrison's focus, is it. Hers is a mature, intelligent, nuanced reading of a problematic work of literature--one that explores the morally challenging terrain depicted therein as a journey of readerly (self-)discovery, and which affirms the value of the work on that basis. It is, frankly, just what one would expect from a writer of her calibre.

But here's the thing. As Morrison herself notes, that reading is the third (or perhaps, fourth--if you count the diversion through Trilling and Fiedler) time round for her. It dates, she tells us, from her return to the book in the early 1980s, when the possibility of censorship was raised at that time. Morrison was born in 1931; she was, then, a mature adult, in her fifties, and a successful--indeed, celebrated--writer when she picked up Huck Finn again, someone well positioned to explore her "unease" with the book without ever feeling intimidated or humiliated by it.

More germane, perhaps, to our discussion here is what she says about her encounters with the book as a younger person, in particular, her comment on reading #2: "My second reading of it, under the supervision of an English teacher in junior high school, was no less uncomfortable--rather more. It provoked a feeling I can only now describe as muffled rage, as though appreciation of the work required my complicity in and sanction of something shaming." Sure, she allows that there are satisfactions to be had from the book as well--there's lots of adventure along the way, and some interesting female characters--but the bottom line is that it was not a particularly positive experience: "Nevertheless, for the second time, curling through the pleasure, clouding the narrative reward, was my original alarm, coupled now with a profoundly distasteful complicity."

Muffled rage. Shaming. Alarm. Profoundly distasteful complicity.

No doubt, as Morrison suggests, "A serious comprehensive discussion of the term [the "N-word"] by an intelligent teacher . . . would have benefited my eighth-grade class and would have spared all of us . . . some grief." But then, is that all that's at stake in the book? Morrison herself says that Twain portrays Jim as "so complete a buffoon" in the final chapters as to merit the word "extravagance." Again, she has good things to say about Twain's depiction as well; but even as we are seduced by the subtlety of her analysis (and for all that subtlety, she still cannot hide the fact that Jim is never allowed his full humanity in the book--indeed, her argument about Jim as surrogate father to Huck hinges on the fact), we should not forget that this is the reading of her secure, reflective maturity. She tells us that removing Huck Finn from required reading lists struck her fifty-year old self on that occasion as "a purist and elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children." Which may well be true. But it may also be that she is underestimating the distance that she has put between herself and the eighth-grader who once seethed with "muffled rage" and a sense of "profoundly distasteful complicity."

And even if she is not (who am I to say?), there remains the concern that Huck Finn, for all the efforts of intelligent teachers in leading "serious comprehensive discussion" of the problems surrounding the book, may still have that effect on other young people in similar circumstances to hers. That strikes me as a quite reasonable motivation for some people to object to its continued use in classrooms--a motivation which deserves our respect, I think, even if we disagree with the verdict on the book itself.

Muffled rage. Shaming. Alarm. Profoundly distasteful complicity. Would you want your kids to have to endure that at school?

Well, Julius Lester certainly does not. One good turn deserves another. To your Toni Morrison, Roger, I answer with Lester's "Morality and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn": Lester's essay is well worth reading in its turn, and not just because of the balance provided by the quotation above. Indeed, while it is a little stronger in its rhetoric than it needs to be, I think--Lester has some stinging things to say about the white American male psyche--it is the best articulation I have seen of what really is wrong about the end of Huck Finn--and thus about the book as a whole:Lester puts his finger right on it there, I think. To answer my own question from earlier today, for Huck, Hell is "sivilization"--it is Miss Watson and hypocrisy and all the corruptions and lies and cruelties of society. And really, it would hard to blame him for feeling that way, at least some of the time. But there's the problem: he's declared that he's going--"All right, then, I'll GO to Hell"--and yet the event shows that he will do nothing of the sort.

Richard asks above if I expected Twain to "turn Huck into Mother Teresa." That's a caricature, a straw man. But it points, at least, in the right direction. For if Huck's decision to "GO to Hell" for Jim is to have any real meaning, that is in effect what he must do: he must face the real meaning of freedom, as Lester describes it, and return to "sivilization" to take responsibility for himself and that portion of the world that he makes his own. Which in his case now, surely, must include a friend--a fellow man--named Jim.

That's Hell for Huck, maybe, but it's also his best hope for true freedom. A paradox, as Lester would say.

.

In the course of this long and interesting discussion, I have arrived at one clear conclusion: There's this side and that side, and never the Twain shall meet.

Richard

I continue to believe that Huck reached a genuine moral crisis and made what for him was a revolutionary and courageous decision to do what the virtuous reader should consider the right and moral thing, but even were this not the case, and even if the reader can still detect less admirable or even racist attitudes and prejudices remaining in Huck despite his development and gathering maturity, this would not allow a conclusion that the book itself, or Twain himself, shared or projected these attitudes. For me, the bottom line, which I would hope we could all agree on, is that this is a book that would tend to upset negative prejudices more than reinforce them. No reader who joins Huck and Jim on the raft could possibly end up less disposed to see the humanity of a people once treated worse than animals or more comfortable in the notion that there are human beings, on the one hand, and "n"s on the other hand. You can speak in detail about this or that aspect of the book, but if you think this is a book that would encourage prejudice rather than dampen it, I can only conclude we live on different planets and wish you well on yours.

Further sayeth your affiant not.

This could be taught instead. Or together with.

http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Terrell_What_It_Means.pdf

The thread entered now a territory of fun.

Stephen is right, there is no such evidence.

For 13 years old boys "eternal" means, on emotional level, a year or two; "perdition of soul" means "being scorned for more than a week by a person of moral authority."
(I suspect this might be true even of much older boys.)

Huck makes an experiment any boy attempts at some point --- let's break a taboo and see what happens. That after the fact of breaking it they seek reconciliation with the socium is an indication that that was just an experiment.

To overanalyze the whole story as if Huck was Hamlet, is fun, but is it meaningful or just "thought up"?

I dunno, Dmitri. Sounds to me like a lot of what you've just said could be described as over-analysis. It does not take a great leap of imagination to understand that adolescents, or even younger children, can believe in hell and fear eternal punishment.

I think many people are judging certain aspects of the book through the eyes of our current cultural ethos. From the medieval period onward, hell and damnation were part and parcel of religious instruction. The secular and the religious blended together. This may not be the case today, but it was the case for centuries in Western culture. It's still evidenced among fundamentalist believers in our own time. Talk to someone over 50 or 60 who attended conservative Catholic schools and was given religious instruction by nuns and priests. Many of them will tell you what they believed and felt about hell when they were children.

Mark Twain wrote extensively about training, conditioning, and habit and how difficult it is for a person to change. These themes run throughout his works. That Huck is able to break training and change in a significant way is one of Twain's greatest treatments of this theme.

And it's interesting that you should mention Hamlet. Why is analyzing the character of Huck Finn any less significant that analyzing the character of Hamlet? Huckleberry Finn and Hamlet may have more in common than you seem to think. I'm reminded of a line from one of Hamlet's soliloquies: Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. Darn near sounds like something Huck might say.

Richard