Huck Finn and Censorship

Abstract

Huck Finn and Censorship Taimi Ranta Mark Twain and his classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are major ingredients in the witch's brew of censorship that is bubbling over its cauldron and spreading across the country. Where once Huckleberry Finn's antics were read with delight, as the harmless chicanery of an adolescent who goes through a mischievous period before settling into the rigors of adult life, many now read into the story all sorts of arcane messages about a boy on the road to hell, a boy who will end up with a symbolic long nose like Pinocchio's as a result of his mendacity. But one must remember Cyrano de Bergerac also had a long nose, and his came from birth, not from devilish behavior. Moreover, even though Cyrano's nose was a source of dismay for many conventionally-minded people, the affliction fostered in Cyrano himself the urge for heroic action and valor. While Huckleberry Finn was not actually born with a long nose, his family circumstances do make him a source of dismay for the conventionally minded, and he was equipped by his insight for valor and humanism from the outset. Although there are certainly components of the 1840-style juvenile delinquent in Huck, he is by no means jaded or unfeeling. As Henry Nash Smith wrote, "He is neither callous nor uncommitted; he does not glance off experience, or prey on it, but is absorbed by it, wrung by it, enlarged by it."1 Indeed, instead of encouraging immoral behavior in adolescents, then, Huck's tale might actually provide them with many and sundry ways of dealing with the anomie society. During his excursion through the milieu of carpetbagger-and-confidence-man-saturated mid-America in the 1840s, Huck confronts many of the disjunctures that an expanding nation needed to bring under control if democracy were to succeed. He confronts ignorance, violence, fraud, and mob spirit. He is exposed to all sorts of hustles and hypes that make the milieu of the Mississippi River as turbulent as modern-day Eighth Avenue in New York City. And it is when Huck strides forth to do battle against these disjunctures that he becomes the archetypal idealistic teenager, ripe for censoring, because he denies conventional values. Exactly because Huck doesn't waver in the face of it all, his story is a valuable one for young readers to grasp. Be that as it may, perhaps the most blatant misreading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the criteria for censoring the book: the interpretation of some school administrators and parents that the story is "a grotesque example of racism." Nothing could be further from the truth. The story was and is a sterling example of overt humanism, the likes of which is seldom seen in modern fiction; and the fact that democratic humanism comes from the mouth and the actions of a young boy should make the story all the more compelling. After traveling on the raft with "Nigger Jim" and forming a camaraderie, Huck does not see "Nigger Jim" as a shuffling, pathetic black man. As Ralph Ellison has observed, Huckleberry Finn knew, as did Mark Twain, that Jim was not only a slave but a human being, a man who in some ways was to be envied, and who expressed his essential humanity in his desire for freedom, his will to possess his own labor, in his loyalty and capacity for friendship and in his love for his wife and child.2 As for the name "Nigger Jim" and Jim's dialect, Ralph Ellison considered them and reported, Jim is drawn in all his ignorance and superstition, with his good traits and his bad. He, like all men, is ambiguous, limited in circumstance but not possibility. And it will be noted that when Huck makes his decision he identifies himself with Jim and accepts the judgment of his super-ego—that internalized representative of the community.3 In the history of fiction there have not been many novels in which a seemingly crude person, a character at the lower rung of society who plays a subordinate role to the hero, is imbued with...