On
one side, a childhood bully with more money “than a body could tell what
to do with,” the product of religious fundamentalists, and an
individualist resentful toward bureaucracy and fearful of government. On
the other, the improbable hero of his own story, the son of an absentee
father, a born storyteller with a once-troubled youth. To see this
rivalry played out, you could go to any number of news sources. Or you
could go to one book. Because I’m not talking about Mitt Romney or
Barack Obama. I’m talking about a single character, a 13-year-old boy
invented almost 130 years ago by Mark Twain.
Published in 1885
during Reconstruction, but set before the Civil War, “The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn” might be the most nuanced and intelligent account of
the dual instincts of the American mind our literature has to offer. In
the voice of one unforgettable narrator — a confused but insightful,
unlawful but moral adolescent — Twain’s novel shows us more about our
complex and contradictory ideals about government, race, economics and
politics than just about any blog or radio show you’re likely to
encounter.
Concerned with the size and role of government? Start with this intoxicated, anti-federalist rant from Huck’s “pap.”
“Call
this a govment!” he exclaims. “The law backs that old Judge Thatcher up
and helps him to keep me out o’ my property … A man can’t get his
rights in a govment like this.”
It’s a sentiment we’ve heard
before from the Tea Party in arguments about tax reform, economic
inequality and corporate bailouts. Consider Glenn Beck, for example, in
2009: “There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America, and the
way it is done, it has been done through … the guise of an election.”
Then,
like some irate radio call-in guest, pap’s rant turns quickly racist:
“There was a free nigger [in town] from Ohio; a mulater, most as white
as a white man,” who, according to pap, has deprived him of wealth
—“there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he
had” — education and employment — “they said he was a p’fessor in a
college” — and an electoral voice — “when they told me there was a State
in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out.”
We’ve
heard this before, too — the fear of a culture and government that
elevate a black man above his “station.” Remember Rush Limbaugh’s claim:
“If Obama weren’t black he’d be a tour guide in Honolulu”? Or Arizona
Secretary of State Ken Bennett’s recent demand that Hawaii disclose
Obama’s birth certificate before he strikes his name from the fall
ballot?
The
difference, though, is that Twain sends pap spilling over a tub of salt
pork immediately after his speech, making sure pap ultimately figures
as a comic character in the novel. Pap might take himself seriously, but
no careful reader can endorse his politics after seeing him take his
anger out on a dinner drum.
Even so, Twain is unwilling to let the
matter be resolved swiftly. Elsewhere, the novel criticizes government
authority and excess in earnest, even in the plot itself. The novel is,
after all, the story of an escaped slave and a poor orphan coming to
terms with their humanity in the absence of civil constraint. Their
friendship is enabled precisely by Huck’s disregard for the law. In as
much as we’re rooting for Huck and Jim to get away, we’re also rooting
for the arm of the law not to intervene.
In another
passage, Jim himself raises concerns over government’s reach. To pass
the time, Huck is telling Jim stories about “kings, and dukes, and
earls, and such.” But when Huck gets to the story of King Solomon, Jim
stops him short to explain how he missed the point. The moral, according
to Jim, isn’t about a good mother and a bad one. It’s about the limits
of power. In short, it’s a libertarian parable. A man in possession of
only a couple of children, he explains, “know how to value ‘em,” but a
king overseeing “five million chillen runnin’ roun’ de house, en it’s
diffunt. He as soon chop a chile in two as a cat.” The
implication being that matters of private life shouldn’t be left to
large government bodies.
Huck later comes around to Jim’s point of view. “Sometimes,” he says, “I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.”
But
for all Huck’s speechifying, he actually trusts and respects authority.
In order to hide money from his thieving father, Huck entrusts all his
riches to Judge Thatcher, who then establishes a kind of CD that pays a
respectable dollar a day in dividends. Because Huck neither trusts his
father nor himself with the money, the novel’s chief figure of authority
— indeed the book’s only government official — must intervene where the
individual has failed. He protects those who can’t protect themselves.
He assumes financial responsibility for the poor. And we come to regard
Judge Thatcher and his office as a necessary indemnity against financial
ruin. He figures as both a regulatory committee and a kind of safety
net — perhaps the role Chief Justice John Roberts claimed for himself as
the deciding vote in the Supreme Court’s healthcare decision.
What
about the economy? Well, there’s plenty of that, too. In addition to
pap’s fears about government largess, his screed about the freed slave
from Ohio suggests an innate fear of social and economic displacement.
Like some anti-immigration hard-liners, he feels disenfranchised by the
emancipation of others and believes another man’s financial
opportunities (a non-white’s, that is) are detrimental to his livelihood
(never mind the fact that the man in question holds a position pap
could never achieve). His nativist tirade could be pulled straight from
the pages of NumbersUSA, or a Lou Dobbs broadcast. Remember Dobbs
saying, “The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of
many Americans”? It’s hard not to picture pap first in line to hear that
quip.
It’s not only Huck’s alcoholic father who feels cheated by
the social contract, though. This anxiety pervades the novel — to the
point that even in rural settings far removed from civilized society,
the characters manage to find somebody to feel cheated by. Early in his
adventure, Huck wanders alone into the woods. “I slunk along another
piece further, then listened again,” he says. “[I]f I see a stump, I
took it for a man; if I trod on a stick and broke it, it made me feel
like a person had cut one of my breaths in two and I only got half, and
the short half, too.” Throughout the novel, the characters we love, and
even the ones we don’t, all seem to be left holding the short end. (“I
should tell my story,” Mitt Romney might sympathize. “I’m also
unemployed.”)
But as we’ve seen before, the novel isn’t willing to
promote only one position. Despite its anxiety about economic
inequality, it also champions prosperity. Throughout, Tom Sawyer, a
well-to-do kid with nothing but time on his hands — basically a young
George W. Bush — is held up, at least by Huck and Jim, as the paragon of
glamour and intelligence. What would Tom Sawyer do? plays like a mantra through Huck’s narrative. He even disguises himself as Tom late in the novel.
In
another incident, Huck tricks his way into the comfortable home of a
tacky but well-off family named Grangerford. “On a table in the middle
of the room,” he observes, “was a kind of lovely crockery basket that
had apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled up in it which was
much redder and yellower and prettier than real ones is.”
The
reader knows to laugh at this description, but not Huck; to him the fake
fruit basket is the epitome of taste and sophistication, an emblem of
the kind of life he wishes for himself, but which is unavailable to him
except through deception. But moving among the wealthy requires an
uncomfortable duality. On the one hand, he wouldn’t mind a few of those
apples and oranges for himself. (Somewhere in the back of his mind he’s
channeling Vice President Joseph Biden: “The middle class is getting
screwed.”) On the other, affluence isn’t worth going “back to the widow
and [being] respectable.” He’s trapped between an instinct toward
individualism and the acknowledgment that law and society can offer
support he can’t get on his own.
If this doesn’t sound like the
book you remember from middle school, don’t fret. It’s still an
adventure story, a romance and a farce. There are murders,
double-crossings, pratfalls and charades. But antics and entertainment
aside, “Huck Finn” is also a portrait of moral ambivalence, financial
(im)mobility and shifting cultural paradigms. Its equivocations serve to
illuminate the duality of the American political mind — a duality that
doesn’t appear to have changed all that much in the last century and a
half.
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