Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page B

we find it. But it is also useful to resist the idea that Jim is thoroughly realistic, that black men of his time were typically this simplistic, docile, or full of minstrel-show-like patter. As we resist, we might fruitfully consider the historical backdrop of the minstrel stage, and the motives for white authors like Twain in creating such true-false black images at the moral center of their work.
    Another problem, unrelated to realistic portraiture as such, also weighed down my rereading of Huckleberry Finn. I refer to the book’s final chapters, in which Tom Sawyer reappears and invents a score of schemes that delay and imperil the freeing of Jim. In the key instance of Huckleberry Finn’s “hypercanonization,” Hemingway wrote these famous sweeping words about the novel: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn ... It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Hemingway’s other key sentences, hidden in the ellipsis above, are usually not quoted: “If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim [there it is again: Hemingway’s phrase, not Twain‘s] is stolen from the boys. That is the real end.” k While I strongly agree with those who upbraid Hemingway for recommending that the reader stop before Jim is free—and thus missing the moral center of the work—I agree with Hemingway that the novel gets infuriatingly dull once not Huck but Tom is steering the way toward freedom. And yet here too it is useful to consider the satirical commentary that might be said to go with Tom’s outrageous interferences. Could Tom’s delays and his self-serving play with Jim when he knew the man had been freed already comprise Twain’s stinging comment on the process of freeing blacks from slavery—a clumsy process that some would say is still haltingly in process? And might Tom’s absurd, by-the-book reliance on purported precedents comprise a telling commentary on the U.S. legal system not only during slavery but in Twain’s own time, when the gains of Reconstruction were undermined by compromises, and when the rights of black citizens were abridged, in the Supreme Court decision called Plessy v. Ferguson, such that constitutional sanction was given to virtually all forms of racial segregation. l The book slows down, then, to suggest the miserable slowness of the process of gaining black freedom in America—stuck in a mire of what might be termed Tom Sawyerism. We can’t stop reading until the novel’s end, but these last chapters are an agony!
    What’s left to recommend in this novel full of problems? Having resisted so much in the book, what do we gain when we read it with an attitude of receptivity? To offer an answer, I’m going to risk another piece of autobiographical reflection. For the past ten years, in my own scholarship and teaching, I have been exploring the impact of blues-idiom music on American life and literature. This new intellectual work grew out of my interest in black arts movement writers of the 1960s and 1970s, whose poetry and prose were often blues- and jazz-inflected, and in writers like Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, and Langston Hughes, whose blues/jazz writing of the 1940s and 1950s (and in the case of Hughes, also of the 1920s and 1930s) had shown the way. Was it possible to think of Huckleberry Finn as a blues novel in the tradition of Ellison’s Invisible Man? (Ellison always named Twain as a key influence, despite the problems he saw in the great novel.) Was it conceivable that a novel written more than a hundred years before Toni Morrison’s Jazz was nonetheless also infused with the spirit of the musical form called the blues, and that this musical connection helped to define why, at least for me, Twain’s book has continued to have such resonance so long after its creation? m
    Sitting in my English Department office at Columbia