"I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart wasn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to [Jim's:] owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie--and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie -- I found that out...

...It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: 'All right, then, I'll go to Hell'--and tore it up."

This is a rant. I found Huckleberry Finn on my bookshelf had been changed to Huckleberry Finn Robotic Edition. Some very pc "authors" and "editors" took it upon themselves to change the N word to 'robot'. They then rewrote the book to take away any mention of humans and to 'roboticise' words such as 'eye' which becomes something like 'optical device'. The illustrations have also been changed. I have no problem with this, but I do have two major issues with this edition.

The first problem is with the librarians who think think this is close enough to the original that it should be combined and therefore share the ratings of Mark Twain's original book. There was a long discussion in the librarian thread where some librarians thought it was essentially the same book, perhaps most. So it was combined and the edition of the book I read was changed to that one. I DID NOT read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Robotic Edition.

This robot edition was a Kindle book. Think about it and the danger of these 'authors'. If this is acceptable and it is to a lot of the librarians, why not politically correct Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie (oh she's been done already. It was 10 Little N words, then 10 Little Indians, now it's Then there were 10, lol). Sooner or later print books will be in used bookshops, research libraries and old people's houses. They will become not books to be read but collector's items. For reading it will be the ebook where changes can be easily and instantaneously made.

And if politically-correcting everything becomes Amazon policy then the whole publishing world will follow and your children will never know the original story that Mark Twain wrote. They will never understand how N word people were treated and that is my second issue with this pc book.

They will never know that Jim, a grown man would not normally be expected to hang out with 13 year old boys, kowtowed to Tom and Huckleberry not just because they all liked each other, but because he was not free, he was a slave, property, and was subject to the usual treatment of property. He could be ordered to do anything no matter how stupid or harmful, he could be sold or mistreated not even for punishment but just because he had no human rights whatsoever.

Changing N people to robots negates all this. Yes it is more politically acceptable to Whites but how would a Black person feel having their history taken away from them? This is not pc as much as sanitising history and is wrong on every level. And it was done by the authors to make it easier for White teachers to teach this important book (is it important if it is about robots though?) without engendering awkward discussions about race, slavery, why some people have rights and others are property which has also meant the book is on many 'banned' school lists.

Do you find this acceptable? A lot of GR librarians don't see a damn thing wrong with it. But I do.

See Fahrenheit 451

edited 27 Jan 2018

n  n    Reviewn  n
4 out of 5 stars to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the "Great American Novels" by Mark Twain published in 1884. I've actually read this book twice: once as a 14-year-old and again in college as part of my many American English courses. My interpretations have expanded with the second read, but it's still at the core, a very profound book worth reading at least once in a lifetime.

Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer appear in a few of Twain's novels, but it is in this one where Huck truly becomes a character, especially through his relationship with Jim. It's the type of book to openly challenge the norms and ideals of the mid-19th century, relationships between various races, treatment towards fellow humankind. Over 135 years later, this book is still pertinent to society today. So much needs to evolve and change, and perhaps with literature, it will move a little more each day -- at least as one of the necessary driving forces.

At times, I tried to forget that the book was calling out differences between treatment of ethnicity and race in America at the time. I wanted to think about it also from the perspective of two human beings who needed each other for survival, growth, life experience and comfort. Being color-blind and able to connect with someone, even if you don't see them or no much about them, is an important lesson in life. And one so few of us have an opportunity to experience.

One book can't change it. One book can't truly explain it. But knowing what was happening 135 years ago versus what is happening now is important. As is what people thought back then... not just what they did. If you haven't read this, as an American, it's your responsibility. Understand the past and history. Know what it was like. Read it from 135-year-old words. And decide what you can do to keep things moving forward at a quicker pace... to help us all figure out how to ditch the differences and embrace the fact that we're all humans who need the same things to survive.

n  n    About Men  n
For those new to me or my reviews... here's the scoop: I read A LOT. I write A LOT. And now I blog A LOT. First the book review goes on Goodreads, and then I send it on over to my WordPress blog at https://thisismytruthnow.com, where you'll also find TV & Film reviews, the revealing and introspective 365 Daily Challenge and lots of blogging about places I've visited all over the world. And you can find all my social media profiles to get the details on the who/what/when/where and my pictures. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Vote in the poll and ratings. Thanks for stopping by. Note: All written content is my original creation and copyrighted to me, but the graphics and images were linked from other sites and belong to them. Many thanks to their original creators.

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I didn’t consciously think about this until I finished the book and put it aside for a few hours and pulled up the book’s Goodreads page (which seems to have been shadowbanned or something - you ever tried looking it up?). I now know who Huck Finn reminds me of. When I was in middle school, I had a friend that made school worth it. My classes had been shuffled around from the previous year, and a lot of my close mates had been separated from me (a turn of events which I thought was an unfortunate coincidence, only for one of the teachers to later tell me that this had been a deliberate move on behalf of them all – we were delinquents). This was difficult, as not having a seatmate in the seventh grade is the end of the world – believe me. Anyway, this friend – he needs a name, doesn’t he? Let’s say Paul. Paul was the underrated class clown. He wouldn’t toss out clangers into the middle of the lesson, but he knew how to make a fart joke here, hand out a purple nurple there. He got assigned the seat next to me. Fuck. The end of the world once again, and nothing could be worse. I didn’t talk to him for all of two periods. After lunch, we were fast friends. Why? When we were filing in from lunch, he came up to me and asked me for 50 cents (lots of money for a seventh grader without an income, I’ll have you know). Okay, why do you want 50 cents? I asked. I don’t know, but will you give it to me if I slam my head into that locker over there? That was his reply. I told him that he can just have 50 cents, no need to slam his head into the locker. He did it anyway.

That’s the kind of guy Paul was. He was already much shorter than me and I hadn’t even hit my growth spurt. He would weasel around, begging change off of the kids for the daredevil tasks that, honest to god, no one wanted him to go through with. He loved the early, skull-crushing days of the UFC and wouldn’t shut up about it. Parents were aware of him, as were the teachers. Already, he carried around him the exact reputation that Huck Finn did around St. Petersburg, Missouri. Everything was handed in late. Common was the occurrence of him wearing the same shirt to school more than two days in a row, though strangely enough, he never reeked. He just looked like he would, is all. I liked him a lot. One of the first times I had bonded over music with someone to an insane extent was with Paul. We were sat in music class, learning about the history of the four lads from Liverpool, when he leaned over and struck up a conversation about Green Day’s Nimrod, which I was obsessed with at the time. Then he talked about the Red Hot Chili Peppers. That was (and has remained) one of the surefire ways to get on my good side. We talked everything Stadium Arcadium, which had been out for a couple of years at the time. We bonded over the hits, sure, but the ones that people were ignoring, how crazy was that?? How could people not know about Wet Sand, Readymade, and Especially in Michigan? In class, he would lean over and whisper the funniest shit at the exact worst moment. Something about the teacher’s potbelly, perhaps, as he strolled around the room, silently boring holes into our faces and reprimanding us for having been so horrible to the supply teacher the previous day. I would turn red from suppressed laughter and get in shit. But it’s the thrill we do it for, isn’t it?

Of course, the dark side of this is lurking all around the fond memories I described. I never really thought about his hesitation to go home after school. He preferred to stay on the field with everyone else, though he never played football. He would bum a skateboard off of someone and try his hand at it. If we all played for a few hours, he was there. Never part of the game, never completely outside of the premises. When we were cleaning up, he would linger. I wasn’t exactly sheltered, but I remember seeing weed for the first time when he opened up a tin of Altoids and showed me some dried up nuggets. Whoah. Thunder strike, and for me, ever the nerd, a slight warning in the back of my mind to watch it. Watch it with him. How would his parents have reacted if they had found out? I had a pretty good idea - they wouldn’t have. They were “hands off”, which is a diplomatic way to say negligent and abusive. Alcohol issues, emotional trauma, and plenty rich. Money certainly did not buy happiness in this case.

I guess that’s why I thought of Paul while reading this book. The school grounds were for him what the Mississippi River was to Huck – a place outside of time and outside of all the putrid structures in his life. It was a new chance at life, a second life, a chance for him to role play what spiritual calm would be. Now, looking back to the 8th grade and graduation and the final days in middle school, I don’t remember anything about how it all ended. I could not tell you about Paul in those final days if I tried. Surely there must have been some sort of a goodbye to mark the occasion? Surely a symbol of some kind to mark this rite of passage? It all faded. All gone. We lost touch.

A couple of years ago, I found out Paul had died. I was scrolling through Instagram and saw an obituary notice from a distant acquaintance. I had it confirmed and sat there in shock. I’m horrified to say that the shock didn’t come from his death, though it always kills you to see the young go. No. It sucks, but I will keep it honest here. The shock came at my own sudden confrontation with time, realizing that one day, we crossed paths on the school field for the last time and we had no idea. I was shocked because I realized that I had had it good and someone else hadn’t, and that I had only thought of him as an extension of my own image and my own story, as if he was a tertiary character in a drama. I realized that I couldn’t muster up a tear, though I desperately wanted to. I realized how sad it was that this is how things had come to an end, because this was most certainly not a picture perfect story or novel. This was life.

I never got to say or do anything about it, and Huck stirred all these things up in me. So I thought, why not dedicate a few Anthony Kiedis lines to Paul. These lines brought us close all those years back, and this was his favourite song off of the album:

Life is my friend, rake it up to take it in
Wrap me in your cinnamon, especially in Michigan
Well, I could be your friend

White clouds, I’m in a mitten full of fishermen
Come on Huckleberry Finn, show me how to make her grin
Well, I’m in Michigan

Cry me a future where the revelations run amok
Ladies and gentlemen

tom sawyer was a vexation on my spirit and I’m so glad I finished this so I never have to hear from him again

"Yes; en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wish I had de money, I wouldn't want no mo'."

Though this book is might have the appearance of the second book to the Adventure's of Tom Sawyer, it is not at all similar. Tom Sawyer was a simple, fun-filled story covering a brief series of events where as this is a much heavier work in almost every aspect. Aside from having certain shared characters, reader will find no find other similarity.

However, what you will find, is the long, hard and adventurous journey of Huck and Jim, highlighting many aspects of a slavery and the social aspects at the time. If you start reading this, expecting a continuation to Tom Sawyer, you'd be pleasantly surprised instead of disappointed, giving you a very different kind of entertainment.

" Beh, allora, mi sono detto, a che serve imparare a comportarti bene, quando per comportarti bene devi fare tanta fatica e per comportarti male invece no, e il risultato alla fine non cambia?
Mi sono bloccato.
Non riuscivo a rispondermi.
Così ho deciso che non mi ci spaccavo più la testa, e che d’ora in poi facevo come mi veniva.”


Pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1884, “Le avventure di Huckleberry Finn” seguono quelle dell’amico Tom Sawyer che qui, per altro, ritorna.

Costretto alla fuga, Huckleberry si trova ad affrontare un viaggio rocambolesco con una zattera.
Partendo dall’Illinois, attraversando il Kentucky e raggiungendo l’Arkansas dovrà misurarsi con gli uomini ma anche con se stesso costruendo giorno dopo giorno un’amicizia che ha dell’impossibile: quella con lo schiavo fuggiasco Jim.

Da un lato c’è qualcosa di reale, di concreto come lo schiavismo in ogni sua forma disumanizzante ma anche come la povertà e le violenze domestiche che non escludono i bianchi e fanno crescere ragazzini come Huckleberry Finn.
Ragazzini che si ribellano alla morale comune perché hanno avuto altri maestri nella vita e la lezione che ne hanno tratto ha fruttato loro una gran dimestichezza nel cavarsi dai guai inventando bugie e nel sapersi procurare un tetto e del cibo anche in situazioni estreme.
Se, pertanto, si sorride per quanto combina Huckleberry Finn, d'altro canto, si respira quella mefitica aria del Sud che sa di catene e linciaggi.

La voce narrante è quella dello stesso protagonista che si esprime con un linguaggio infantile e sgrammaticato: è l’uso dei dialetti del Sud (per riprodurre il più fedelmente il linguaggio reale) che diventa ancor più palese con le parole pronunciate dallo schiavo Jim.

Tra parentesi, questa del linguaggio è fondamentalmente la pecca del dover leggere una traduzione che non può restituirci questa finezza del lavoro di scrittura (per quanto Giuseppe Culicchia abbia cercato di rimanere fedele alle forme sgrammaticate originarie, come ci dice nella breve introduzione) seppur riesca a darcene un’idea.

Quello che fa Twain è di far sorridere il lettore mentre ridicolizza comportamenti e discorsi razzisti dell’uomo medio americano che proprio nella loro verosimiglianza appaiono in tutta loro assurdità, come ad esempio in questo dialogo tra Finn e la zia Sally:

“Non sono state le secche, quelle ci hanno fatto perdere poco tempo.
È che è saltata in aria la testa di uno stantuffo”.
“Dio santissimo! Si è fatto male qualcuno?”
“No, signora. Ha ucciso solo un negro.”
“Beh, per fortuna, perché a volte c’è chi si fa male (…) “

La fantasia rimane un rifugio a cui ci si aggrappa tanto da farne qualcosa di concreto e reale.
Cosi, ad esempio le avventure raccontate nei libri sembrano essere per Tom Sawyer l’unica legge a cui obbedire perché l’unica e la sola in grado di restituire dignità.

“(…) Ma è così che si fa. L’ho letto nei libri, e perciò è quello che dobbiamo fare anche noi, naturalmente.”
“Ma come facciamo se non sappiamo che cos’è?”
“Preoccuparsi è inutile, tanto dobbiamo farlo. Non ve l’ho detto che nei libri è così?
Volete fare diverso da come sta scritto nei libri, e rovinare tutto quanto?”

Un avventuroso romanzo di formazione che si dipana sul filo di una domanda:
cos'è il male e cos'è il bene?

Scegliere la risposta significa decidere che tipo di esseri umani si vuole diventare.

NOTICE
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
...
Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.
...
Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opens in the aftermath of  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and for a time, it has the same joyous feel as the boys continue their antics of rebellious 12-year-olds. But the return of Huck Finn’s drunk of a father, Pap, hints at the darker, more serious themes of this novel. After being kidnapped and beaten, Huck escapes his father by faking his own death and then going on the run. He soon crosses paths with a runaway slave, Jim, and together they raft their way down the Mississippi.

Like its predecessor, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is largely a series of vignettes with a very loose overarching plot. Huck and Jim travel from Missouri through Kentucky and Arkansas and into the antebellum South, getting into scrapes and making escapes along the way. There’s some great humor in their conversations on the raft; their argument about the wisdom of King Solomon is priceless. And there’s classic Twain satire and exposing of hypocrisy here, from the feuding Grangerford and Shepardson families to the con men known as the Duke and the King.

So why was I reading this classic novel during Banned Books Week? For that, we have to talk about race and racism. The characters here (and the author, for that matter) are products of their 19th century time. The n-word is used relentlessly in this book, even by the slaves themselves, and it is jarring. Huck says casually racist things here that are heartbreakingly awful; on one occasion, for example, he compliments Jim by thinking “I knowed he was white inside.” And some critics fairly read this book as irredeemably problematic, reinforcing racist stereotypes and repeatedly deriving humor from a variation of a minstrel show.

But I come down on the side of those who read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as transcending and challenging the racist stereotypes of the time. Huck has been taught by society all his life to view blacks as slaves, as less than. And at a pivotal moment, he writes a letter to report where Jim can be found by his master, and at first he thinks the letter is the right thing to do:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

Huck says the wrong thing, and uses racist language, again and again throughout this book. But he ultimately recognizes and acts on his and Jim’s shared humanity and equality. That might be the best we can realistically expect from a book published in the 1880s. And some days, it’s obvious that our society has not come nearly as far on this score as we’d like to think we have.

Is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the Great American Novel? It’s written by an immortal, epically talented writer. It was one of the first books to truly capture the course, plain spoken language of its time. And by focusing on racism and slavery, it speaks to America’s original sin. So yeah, it just might be, even though I prefer  To Kill a Mockingbird. Highly recommended.

Many many meta levels of analysis can be done on this book which is why it's one of the monster great novels. For me, when I first read it in elementary school, I experienced the welcome shock that a kid could be an independent actor working against the mores of church and society. Between this book and Sherlock Holmes I discovered books can free your mind from the chains of what people say you should think and how you should act vs. what you see and hear and experience in the real world.

The first time I read 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' I was in the fifth grade, and it gave me a lot more insight into my own family even though we were as far from the South as is New York City in time and place.

I personally gained much valuable insight into frauds, scams, situational piety, and what can only be defined as the pure social stupidity and greedy foolishness of people as seen from a viewpoint as clear-sighted as one like the author's, Mark Twain. I suppose having been a Mississippi riverboat pilot and a journalist, among other jobs, gave Twain much eye-opening fodder for the adventures of his fictional protagonists. People have not changed since the time of 1885 when Twain published this book. Is there any other author with such insight into the Art of the Con when done by a real criminal or thought of by such a child as Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn's best friend and mentor?

I learned a lot how emotions can be played and lies done by reading the two interlinked books (this book is the sequel to the previous book featuring Tom Sawyer - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) although I couldn't articulate my newfound knowledge as a kid. To me, they are survival manuals for kids on how to deal with parents and other authority figures who tend to obfuscate Reality and insist on mysterious customary rituals of behavior. Now I can see how even more apt and essential a manual of "how to play and prey on human nature for fun and profit" Twain's books are for adults as well, especially appropriate in the 21st century! Hello, cable news and celebrity gossip! Hello, Twitter and talk radio! Hello, internet marketing and ad targeting strategies! Hello television, YouTube and movies! However, just because society is full of manipulated emotions doesn't mean emotions are ALL based on falsified sources! 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' would not be a great book if it didn't also include the simple everyday expressions of heartfelt sentiment, support and the honest morality of family and friends, beneficial and worthy to living. Plus, plenty of humorous fun!

The main narrator, Huckleberry Finn, is a homeless 'street' kid with an unorthodox childhood. He runs away at around age 13 or 14 years of age from St. Petersburg, Missouri, on a raft with another runaway, Jim, an adult slave. While floating up and down the Mississippi and various near tributaries, they stop only out of necessity in little and large towns, trying to avoid authorities who would put both Jim and Huckleberry into slots of legal civilization neither would be happy in. Huckleberry is escaping his dangerous alcoholic father while Jim is hiding out because he was threatened with being sold by his owner, Miss Watson, to owners reputed to murder slaves through torturous field work.

Huckleberry was completely stressed out when his alcoholic sh*t of a father kept him prisoner in a cabin after kidnapping him from a more stable adoptive home. Pap is having alcohol-induced psychotic breaks, and he has nearly killed Huckleberry several times with beatings and trying to shoot Huckleberry. So Huck fakes his death with pig's blood and an axe before Pap comes back from a drunk and escapes his father's shack through a hole Huck cut in the wall. He has a canoe which he loaded up with supplies, and he hides out on an uninhabited island. With a few days, he discovered Jim is also hiding out on the island!

A search party lands on the island looking for Jim. The two runaways hide in a cave temporarily, but they realize they have to leave. Jim or Huckleberry have little faith in how civilization and its laws works for people like them, so they join up in escaping Law, Civilization and Order, and the people who legally owned both of them.

There are 21st-century real-life analogs of all the 19th-century characters Huck and Jim meet on their trip down the Mississippi River walking about today - bankers, real estate brokers, family relatives, talk-radio DJs, politicians, religious and wellness gurus, criminals, feuding neighbors, and lowlifes, to name a few. I also recognized some of the scams (many successful) that a couple of criminals attempt on towns along the shores of the Mississippi River. Huck and Jim are forced to accommodate the bad guys for awhile on their raft, as the two cons intimidate and blackmail Huck and Jim with exposure as runaways. Despite the dangers the bad guys cause for the heroes, there is plenty of humor and an education in scams in store for Huck, Jim and us readers!

Will our heroes find freedom from Civilization? Will Huck overcome his qualms at the "immorality" of helping his friend Jim escape, since he has been taught he will go to hell for stealing "property"? Will Tom Sawyer rescue his friend in the manner all of us have come to love?

I'm not telling, gentle reader.

Readers should be aware the book has real Southern dialects and racial language typical of Southerners in the 19th century, some of which is particularly offensive today. Nonetheless, I recommend this book. Twain may or may not have had racist beliefs, but he definitely did not like slavery. Whenever he writes of it, there is a satirical tone towards White attitudes of slavery, and he always includes scenes showing the contradictions of what society believed about Black people and the actual humanity and heroism of Black people. Perhaps today we more sophisticated types would call the inclusion of 'magic negro characters' sadly misdirected liberalism, but for the times this book was written, I can only see it as a positive.

Having never so much as fingertipped a Twain until this moment, in the last rattle of my twenties, this caustic racial satire packaged as a rootin’-tootin’ Boys Own romp proved a pleasant surprise, rather like some other late-in-the-game experiences in my life, such as listening to Tom Waits for the first time, discovering the movies of Werner Herzog, and having a proper relationship with a woman who turned out not to be an asexual narcissist. [I include the last bit to shock regular viewers used to a steady diet of impersonal MJ sumuppagge]. Ah, the pleasures of reading classics untethered from schools and syllabi!

HUCK IL SELVAGGIO


Il film più recente è del 1993 diretto da Stephen “La Mummia” Sommers. Huck è un giovanissimo Elijah Wood, otto anni prima della Trilogia dell’Anello, e suo padre nella foto è Ron Perlman.

Romanzo d’avventure, romanzo di formazione, Huckleberry Finn è forse il Grande Romanzo Americano, come e più di Moby Dick.
È così almeno per Hemingway che del libro di Twain scrisse:
Tutta la letteratura moderna americana deriva da un libro di Mark Twain intitolato Huckleberry Finn. La scrittura americana arriva da lì. Non c’era mai stato niente del genere prima. E non c’è più stato più niente del genere dopo.
Viene infatti da dire che è così almeno nella lingua: ben più ‘sporca’, ben più quotidiana, ‘moderna’ e impregnata della terra di quella di Melville.


Huck e lo schiavo in fuga Jim.

L’avventura c’è eccome, la formazione non saprei, forse no: perché Huck fugge per essere libero, per vivere come vuole, e alla fine è costretto a tornare indietro e rientrare in quella civiltà che rifiuta, dalla quale voleva allontanarsi e separarsi. Alla fine è sconfitto, ma non domo.

Me ne stavo all’aria tutto il giorno, felice e contento, fumavo e pescavo e non studiavo mai. Così sono passati un paio di mesi e i miei vestiti sono tornati gli stracci sozzi di sempre, e io non riuscivo più a capire come mai m’era piaciuto dalla vedova, dove bisognava lavarsi, mangiare nel piatto, pettinarsi, andare a letto e alzarsi regolare e starsene sempre con un libro in mano con Miss Watson che rompeva tutto il tempo. Non volevo più tornarci. Avevo smesso di dire parolacce perché alla vedova non gli piaceva, ma adesso avevo ricominciato perché papà non aveva niente in contrario. Lassù nei boschi, tutto sommato, me la spassavo proprio.


La versione di Michael “Casablanca” Curtiz del 1960. Sulla zattera insiem a Huck e Jim il Duca e il Re.

Nella sua fuga il ragazzino naviga per il grande fiume Mississippi ed è istintivo pensare al fiume Congo, a Conrad e il suo Marlow, a quel cuore di tenebra che sembra riverberare in questo lungo e maestoso fiume americano dove anche Huck incontra gente ben selvaggia, più selvaggia di lui stesso.
Fa poca differenza se il viaggio di uno è a risalire il corso d’acqua verso la sorgente e il suo cuore nero, quello dell’altro è invece a scendere verso la foce.

E quando sull’isola deserta del fiume incontra lo schiavo nero Jim, che è fuggito alle catene, e lo porta con sé sulla zattera, come non pensare a Robinson Crusoe e Venerdì?
In un mondo di adulti da evitare, sorta di feccia umana, violenti truffaldini lestofanti oppure bigotti e oppressivi, l’unico adulto che si salva è proprio lo schiavo nero Jim.
Nella violenza del padre ubriacone che tiene chiuso e sequestrato il figlio come non ritrovare le figure di padri e tutori e maschi adulti che mettevano i brividi nei romanzi di Dickens?


Nel film di Michael Curtiz del 1960 Buster Keaton nella parte di Lion Tamer.

Romanzo d’avventura e (forse) di formazione, dicevo: ma anche romanzo picaresco per ragazzi e per adulti, pagine che parlano a grandi e piccini. Romanzo sulla fuga. Sulla libertà.
Tom Sawyer, l’amico di sempre e delle altre avventure negli altri romanzi, uno prima e uno dopo questo, è un monello che alla fine accetta la civiltà e impara le regole: non così Huck, che rimane selvaggio – il suo viaggio nella civiltà è in realtà un viaggio attraverso la moderna inciviltà.


Nell’edizione originale del 1884 ecco l’incontro tra Huck e Jim.

Ci sono ovviamente altri livelli di lettura, meno diretti ai ragazzi e più agli adulti, come si addice a un grande romanzo: Huck mette in scena la sua morte, rinuncia alla sua identità per essere libero, dalla morte nasce la sua vita. E quindi una partenza ben nera.
Come nero è Jim, nero il fiume percorso soprattutto di notte sotto le stelle, nero il mondo degli adulti (bianchi), nera la civiltà da cui è meglio tenersi alla larga, fuggire, nera la modernità, a cominciare proprio dagli Stati Uniti. Nera è la morale e nere sono le regole di questi adulti, del loro mondo ‘civile’ e ‘moderno’…


Huckleberry Finn in un disegno di E.W. Kemble dell'edizione originale 1884 del libro.

È bello vivere su una zattera. Il cielo, lassù, era tutto tempestato di stelle, e noi ci sdraiavamo sulla schiena a guardarle e discutevamo se le aveva fatte qualcuno o se erano capitate lì per caso: Jim pensava che le aveva fatte qualcuno, io invece che erano capitate lì per caso – ci voleva troppo tempo per fare tutte quelle stelle. Jim ha detto che forse le aveva covate la luna, e a me mi sembrava sensato, così non ho detto niente anche perché avevo visto una rana covare altrettanti ranocchi e perciò era possibile. Guardavamo anche le stelle cadenti e le scie che si lasciavano dietro. Jim diceva che erano guaste e così le buttavano fuori dal nido.


Huck e Jim sulla zattera, illustrazione dell'edizione del 1884.

Finally, I have read something substantial by Mark Twain. It has taken a very long time—Mr. Twain’s works have never been assigned reading for me in any high school or university courses that I have taken. Here in Canada, we are much more likely to be assigned the classic of Stephen Leacock’s, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (I may have read that, although it does not stand out in my memory).

I borrowed a 1918 printing of Huck Finn from our university library, so I got a politically incorrect edition, complete with copious use of the N word. It is jarring to the modern reader, but it provides a look back into the heads of people in the past that is intriguing. Scholars will probably continue to debate whether the work is a critique of racism or not, but to my way of thinking, Twain humanized those who were considered to be “other.”

Common wisdom would have it that a writer should avoid using dialect, but Twain does this masterfully in Huckleberry Finn. The book is very readable and comprehensible, especially considering that it was the dialect of the 1880’s southern states and I am a Canadian reading it in the 21st century. I’ve certainly encountered science fiction books with more difficult language (the slang in Clockwork Orange for example, or pretty much all of Riddley Walker).

What struck me hardest, I think, was the persistence of social problems—Huck’s drunken & abusive father, the judgments of society on poor people, and the difficulty of making a living when you are on the fringes of society. In some ways, Huck was lucky because he could hunt and fish to provide for himself—many of our modern folk living on the edge are in cities and don’t have those avenues available to them.

As many have pointed out, few people would criticize Huck for escaping from his abusive father, so his flight would likely be considered legal, despite his status as a minor. Jim is doing exactly the same thing, but his skin colour makes his escape illegal. The reader must wrestle with this dichotomy and make their own determination of the rightness or wrongness of the situation. This may be the crux of why people object to the book—Twain doesn’t get preachy on the subject. He doesn’t come right out and tell us what to think. The story is what it is, and he considers his readers intelligent enough to come to their own conclusions.