Boy, a lot of things happen to Huck Finn. I hadn't read this in 25 years and all the controversy swirling around the so-called bowdlerized version now out got me wondering how offended I would be by the unchanged wording of the original. I picked up the least-dusty looking copy from the public library (1985), opened it up and here's what I found in the introduction by Charles Neider: What! Tamper with an American literary classic? Sacrilege! Lese majesty! Megalomania! Well...maybe. But before we rush into a drumhead court-martial, let us sit and sweetly reason a few moments...Poor Twain has, apparently, been abused before and no, Neider did not take out offensive wording. He simply abridged the allegedly controversial "Tom Sawyer" section (my, how times have changed on what constitutes controversy) and added in a formerly omitted "long, brilliant raft chapter" (which I skipped because I found it... long).
Controversy aside, I was impressed by how well this story holds up. Yeah, too much happens, and some of it is skippered through while other times there is way too much detail for the importance of the section, but the story of a boy and a slave on a Mississippi raft moves right along and is amusing to boot. I actually laughed out loud several times and not just at the scene in which Huck tries to explain to Jim that French people speak a different language while Jim will have none of it. His reasoning is flawless and reminded me of a great Ionesco play in which there is a debate between philosophers in which it is finally determined, logically, that Socrates must be a cat. Trust me, in a strict debating sense, this works.
I also love Jim's condemnation of King Solomon's supposed wise decision to cut a child in half. Jim determines that Solomon was cavalier about the life of the child because he himself had so many children. You take a man dat's got on'y one er two chillen; is dat man gwyne to be waseful o' chillen?No, he ain't; he can't 'ford it. He know how to value 'em. But you take a man dat's got 'bout five million chillen runnin' roun' de house, en it's diffunt. He as soon chop a chile in two as a cat. Dey's plenty mo'. A chile er tow, mo' er less, warn't no consekense to Solermun...
And all the talk of children brings to mind the children from whom Jim has been separated. Huck ponders a bit about how wrong it is for Jim to want to steal back his own children from their master, but I didn't spend a lot of thought on what we were supposed to "learn" from Huck's attitude toward slavery because I did find that distracting and overly obvious. I was looking at the story and Twain throws in a lot of seemingly random adventures (a family feuding Hatfield-McCoy style seems particularly unimportant), but the way Huck deals with each of his encounters--his abusive father, meeting the escaped Jim, the swindling Duke and King--seems believably childish. At first I thought Huck wasn't being very bold in his actions, but then I realized he's a thirteen year old boy out on his own and so, yeah, he'll make some stupid mistakes, and he'll fall into the games of fantasy with Tom Sawyer and others, because he's still straddling that innocence and knowledge of the world.
In the end, I wasn't particularly distracted by the language, not even the dialect which I thought would drive me crazy. You get into the rhythm of it, eventually. I guess my only real complaint is that it's overly long. I think I'd keep that old "raft chapter" out and I can think of a few other editing choices I'd make, but it's a good read and a reminder that, inspite of the overwhelming choice available today, there are some classics still worthy of a visit. I hope the new version without the potentially offensive and distracting N word will encourage teachers to present it to their classes once again.
2 comments:
I enjoyed this book. I think the story line is genius, and the lessons are very beneficial to any person. I read this book for the first time this year in my AP English class. One thing that helped me immensely was to listen to a recording of the book. It was easier to listen to someone who knew how the language went and to follow along with the reader. I understood the book more and got more from the book.
Rachel, I meant to ask if your AP class discussed the "new" version? I agree with listening to any book with dialect, though it matters a lot to get a good reader.
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