Michael Boughnmboughn@gmail.com

Huckleberry Finn and morality redux

It is quite stunning, if you stop to think about it, that some 130 years down

the road—or river, if you will—Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn continues to be not just a magnet for moral condemnation, but a

perennial provocateur of moral clamour, patiently and relentlessly kicking

shit into the fan of public opinion year after year. Twain’s hilarious and

frightening send up of American hypocrisy has often been the target of

outraged citizens hell-bent on protecting their children from thinking about

the world. But Twain’s satire bites deep and spares no one, and over the

years, numerous other offended parties have come forward to attack its

depravity and demand that it be banned from libraries, from classrooms,

from the world if possible.

It was not long ago that Jane Smiley in a remarkable display of how

moralism cripples the imagination, attempted to convince us that the turgid

prose of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was superior to Twain’s angry ironies because

Stowe’s book had served a higher moral purpose. Not surprisingly the latest

outbreak of moral fervor comes on the heels of Barak Obama’s election and

makes claims about the moral suitability of the book not based on what it

says—or at least not explicitly so—but on how it says it. This is a kind of post-

modern refinement in the condemnation of the book, moving the critique

from substance to surface. The word “nigger”—often referred to by the

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morally punctilious as “the ‘n’ word”—is the villain here, as it has been since

the 60’s. The argument is not that the book is racist—an argument pretty

hard to sustain in the face of even the most cursory reading as Jabari Asim

has so thoroughly demonstrated—but that the language of the racist society

it represents in the spirit of “Realism” is not acceptable in the classroom,

especially now that the U.S., having elected an African-American president,

is officially a “post-racist society.”

The underlying assumption of such an argument seems to be that

students should not be offended by what they read (or see or hear), certainly

not a particularly novel argument for censorship. Mostly we are talking here

about “black” students, although many “white” students are equally thought

to be offended by the word. It is a little confusing knowing that many of

these same students, once out of the classroom, will immediately start

listening to music by groups with names like Niggers with Attitude singing

songs in which every other word is “nigger.” A brief survey includes: “my

nigger,” tre sing; “Ain’t no nigger,” Blue Sky; “Killer Instinct till the Nigger

Extinct,” Mercury; “Real Nigger,” Thug Mist; “That’s My Nigger,” Ruthless

Rap Assassins; “Last True Nigger,” Top Dollar; or “What’s Up Nigger,” I-Vory

MC.. Rather than trying to “protect” students, this seems like an

extraordinary opportunity to discuss with them language and power and the

way that the work of language informs our lives, but that is another issue,

one that moralists have never been particularly comfortable with.

The issue here has to do with moral judgment where judgment is

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understood to be an ongoing, evolving process that can never be contained

within any code. In one sense it is interesting, and perhaps significant, that

judgments of the book move from outrage over, say, content, which is seen

as a material threat to a mode of life, to being offended by language. This

shift marks, among other things, the secularization of morality, its shift from

a metaphysical register to a social register in the lives of many people. As

the world changes so does the judgment. More significant is the way such a

judgment evades examining the book for its perspective—given its terrific

moral gaze—on the question of the vocabulary that now seems suddenly to

proliferate into further questions about democracy, justice, and what we call

politics, issues that haunt our thinking of society, and certainly Mark Twain’s

thinking of it.

Nigger is a particularly powerful word (and power is the stake here

however you cut it) because it bears the history of slavery and its vicious

aftermath in American society. It reeks with the scent of burned black flesh,

a fact Mark Twain alludes to several times in his book, but significantly at the

end where Jim (already “free,” though significantly this fact is unknown to

anyone except Tom Sawyer) is captured and nearly lynched by a crowd of

nice white men who decide not to hang him (the nigger, as they refer to him,

using the word to strip him of any dimension that might disrupt their

consensus, cause some one of them to demur on the grounds that lynching

is not something one moral being does to another) because then they’ll have

to pay for him. This incident is followed immediately by the story the doctor

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tells of how lacking any help, he was losing the wounded Tom Sawyer, and

how Jim, who was hiding nearby, hearing that, came forward out of his sense

of moral responsibility, certainly to his friend, but also, say, to the human,

simply because it was the right thing to do, the way a human ought to act,

even knowing as a result he would lose his freedom to a society that never

tired of characterizing itself as the land of the free. The contrast between

these two related moments marks the moral burden the book presents its

readers with.

The weight of this moral burden haunts the book to the same degree it

haunts the word nigger, and arguably it is necessary to judge the whole book

if you are to judge the use of the word, regardless of how it makes a reader

feel. Nigger carries a tremendous burden of violence, and within that,

questions of justice and the moral judgments that found a sense of justice.

Since the characters, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, live in a world that considers

itself with great equanimity to be singularly moral, the word nigger

constantly calls moral judgment into question. Note that the issue is not

morality, but moral judgment—not a set of rules, but a process of thinking. It

has come to seem to me more and more apparent that while Huckleberry

Finn is clearly and importantly a book about slavery and freedom, before

that, it is a book about moral judgment, and in that sense, a vicious (and

hilarious) condemnation the same moralistic act that would condemn it.

This issue comes up early in the book when Aunt Polly, after trying to

inculcate Huck with some moral knowledge—unsuccessfully since Huck is

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like Longfellow Deeds in Frank Capra’s movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a

literalist of the imagination, someone who stands by and judges every word

by its—I want to say literal meaning, but that is not quite it—what both Huck

and Deeds do is refuse to allow conforming social usages—say, the unspoken

agreement that a place called Heaven is and always will be desirable

regardless of whether you, as a person with certain specific experiences, in

fact feel that way—to mediate or usurp their own meanings. In any case,

Aunt Polly, after her unsuccessful attempt at moral education is said to have

“called the niggers in” so that everyone then “said their prayers and went to

bed.”

What happens to the notion of morality and moral judgment at this

moment? The word nigger—which here means slave, those excluded from

the human community by their status as property—is poised against the

word “prayer” and against the moral gesture of “saying prayers” so that the

dissonance that arises blows apart the coherence of the whole sentence, and

beyond that, the world it represents. This is not a moralistic moment. No

morality can translate the violence of this moment into some

comprehensible lesson or set of rules. The explosive ironies only make sense

in so far as they give rise to a specific, unique judgment that arises from the

shame one feels reading them.

Laying out the problem with his typical clarity, Emerson, in his

signature essay, “Self-Reliance,” wrote, “Their two is not the real two, their

four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know

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not where to begin to set them right” (32). Even more so in Twain’s story,

the utter banality of the evil the words innocently embody rides the coat tails

of an unspoken agreement to always accept what you think the rest of them

think, as if they think for you, or worse, as if you actually think that way

yourself. Emerson called it conformism. Interestingly, Emerson, in the same

essay, early on raises the question of moral judgment and links it to what he

calls “the nonchalance of boys who are sure of dinner.”

A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse; independent,

irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as

pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift,

summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent.

troublesome . . .” (29).

Who is to say there is not literally something of this boy in the boy with

his feet on the table in the opening of Huckleberry Finn? Twain’s admiration

for Emerson is matter of record, and it is possible to read Huckleberry Finn as

a scan of “Self-Reliance.” In any case, Emerson raises in this one sentence

the complex issue that Huckleberry Finn then plays out so brilliantly—and

often excruciatingly—in its various episodes. Justice and morality (the court

with its trying and sentencing, on merits as good or bad), and their relation

to independence and freedom—as if not knowing what is freedom (and so

what is slavery) negates any possibility of meaningful moral judgment (and

so justice).

The idea of meaningful moral judgment is the central drama—and the

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ground of the satire—of Huckleberry Finn. Emerson locates the issue in what

Stanley Cavell calls perfectionism—the notion that there is always some

further self to be discovered in the process of being called to moral

judgment, not as reference to an already determined knowledge or code, but

as the confrontation, face to face, with another person, moments, Cavell

says, of humbling or humiliation. In “Self-Reliance” Emerson enacts this early

on in the essay when he writes of how “in every work of genius we recognize

our own rejected thoughts” (27). This recognition then becomes the

provocation to move beyond ourselves and listen not to what others tell us—

or others in the form of a moral code—but to what Emerson calls the “giant”

within each of us.

In Huckleberry Finn, there are several crucial moments where this

occurs, but the most powerful and famous takes place late in the story on

the raft when Huck is confronted by his “conscience” telling him he must—he

is morally obligated—to send a note to Aunt Polly turning Jim in. The

conscience, of course, is the voice of morality in Judeo-Christian culture—

Jiminy Cricket, or some cartoon angel, standing on your shoulder reiterating

some common knowledge of right and wrong. The problem in Twain’s text is

that this “common knowledge” of right and wrong arises from the

codification of slavery into the law, and the support of various institutions

(religious, scientific, financial) for that codification. If Huck abides by the law

—which the moral code represented by his conscience tells him he ought to

do because breaking the law is wrong—then he will treat Jim as the property

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the law says he is and turn him in. Otherwise he is aiding and abetting in

theft, among other moral crimes.

It is not simply a question of recognizing slavery is wrong or cruel or

that it has roots in the economic realities and necessities of the moment. Nor

is it simply a question of recognizing Jim as “human” in some abstract sense.

Huck can do both and still feel a moral obligation to turn Jim in, because

morality as a code demands conformity. Both of those notions finally must

have recourse to a moral code, a code, say of virtues, before which one

abandons one’s own thinking, one’s own responsibility to pay attention. You

can conform to such a code and seemingly do right. This would be the case,

say, if you opposed slavery because it was “unChristian,” or because

freedom is good, or because humans shouldn’t be treated as objects. Such

virtuous acts are finally acts of conforming to a code. In fact, as Emerson

points out in “Self-Reliance,” “[t]he virtue most in request is conformity,” as

if the notion of “virtue” itself is compromised by a coercive dimension (29).

Emerson goes on to propose that, as he puts it, “self-reliance is its aversion.”

What he calls self-reliance is a turning away from some shared sense of

virtue, especially virtue as it defines codified responses to complex

questions.

What Huck goes through has nothing to do with recognizing the

authority of a code, not even the one that he is frequently identified with, the

one that says Jim is a human, and humans can’t be property. When Huck first

decides to go with his conscience, to act in a virtuous manner, his emotional

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response is in keeping with the terms of morality. “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,” he says (222). Once again, prayer comes up in a context where it

confirms a certain virtue, the virtue, as Emerson has it, most in demand. In

one sense, it seems as if the decision to acquiesce to the moral code, to

listen to his conscience, frees him. This is the sense of being “washed clean”

of sin. But what does it free him from? What is the “sin” here?

Instead of praying “straight off,” he starts, as he says, “thinking.”

Praying and thinking then are set up as two opposing modes of response. If

praying would have confirmed him in his new virtue, stabilized it (it is,

Emerson says, a “disease of the will”) (45), the course of his thinking unfolds

toward a crisis, as if thinking were inevitably critical, inevitably led to a

turning point (Greek, krisis), say, an aversion. He begins by “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.” The “went on thinking” seems to

suggest that once you start thinking (which, by implication, is not something

people ordinarily do—as opposed to, say, praying?) you can’t stop. It leads

him to thinking about the trip he and Jim have shared, and as he thinks

about the trip he is suddenly confronted by the figure of his friend.

This is where the crisis arises for Huck. The figure of the friend has

come up earlier in the book in Chapter XXV in the episode with the King and

the Duke and the Wilks girls. The King and the Duke, having pumped some

traveler for every ounce of information they could get out of him about his

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town and its inhabitants, present themselves to the town using their newly

acquired knowledge to pose as the English brothers of the recently deceased

Peter Wilks. Their goal is to con the Wilks girls out of their inheritance, and

the whole episode is concerned with issues of real and phony knowledge, of

proof and skepticism. The whole town, including the girls, falls for the con

hook, line, and sinker—with the exception of one man, Dr. Robinson. While

the rest of the town seems eager to avoid any sort of critical relation to the

strangers and their claims, refuses to think about them, Dr. Robinson

immediately denounces them as crooks on the basis of recognizing their

accents as phony and their words as empty names and facts.

He then appeals to the girls not to give their money to crooks, basing

his appeal on the fact of his friendship. “I was your father’s friend, and I am

your friend,” he says raising friendship as a critical issue in relation to

questions of proof and trust. The King and the Duke are able to use their

“empty names and facts” to “prove” their claim. All the doctor has is his

friendship, which proves nothing and has no proof, but rests on what he

claims is “knowledge.” “Mary Jane Wilks, you know me for your friend, and

for your unselfish friend, too,” he reiterates (183). Perhaps he is asking for

acknowledgement above and beyond the ability to prove. Most importantly,

he is the one person in the town who acts according to a sense of friendship

that resembles the idea Emerson puts forward in his essay of the same

name:

I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I

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may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy,

and second thought which men never seem to put off, and may deal

with him with the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical

atom meets another (119).

This relation is the same one he invokes in “Self-Reliance” in the person of

the boy in the parlor, what Stanley Cavell calls “my further rejected self.” It

can be put this way: the friend is the one in whom we recognize our own

rejected thoughts and so are moved, through our shame, toward the desire

to make ourselves intelligible, toward our further self.

Dr. Robinson is a friend to the girls, and to the town. The measure of

his friendship is his willingness to speak up, and so to risk that friendship by

articulating what he knows. When he calls on the Wilks girls to recognize that

friendship, it is not a call to agree with him, but a call to act as he acts, which

is to say, to think and speak intelligibly. But they won’t have any of it, and

gladly hand their inheritance over to a couple of crooks.

When Huck starts thinking on the raft, he thinks about Jim’s friendship,

not his “humanity.” This is not a question of identity, which the thought of

“humanity” necessarily invokes: I am human, he is human too, therefore we

are the same. Huck does not recognize Jim as the same. That is not

friendship. What he sees when he thinks of Jim is someone different,

someone whose acts are always from a heart that is uncompromised. Jim’s

challenge to Huck—the same challenge he presented when Huck tricked him

during the trip through the fog—is to step up, to make intelligible his feelings

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about Jim, to meet Jim as “one chemical atom meets another.” It is a call to

Huck’s further self, pitched not in reference to some code or system of

reference, but to the act of relation that establishes that moment of

necessity. “Life only avails,” Emerson says, “not the having lived.”

And Huck does. In a moment that echoes Emerson’s own stunning

declaration in “Self-Reliance,” “ . . . if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then

from the Devil,” Huck decides that he will go to hell—literally—rather than

turn Jim in. This moment of moral judgment on Huck’s part would not be

possible within the framework of a moral code or system, certainly not the

codes and systems represented in Huckleberry Finn. It is only possible when

one finds oneself beyond the possibility of such a ground, on one’s own.

Certainly, Uncle Tom, for instance, in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, would be

incapable of coming to such a point. He is effectively the voice of a Christian

code, and everything he does or says, including voicing both abolitionist and

temperance sentiments, originates from and expresses that code. For all

intents and purposes, from an Emersonian perspective, Uncle Tom is no

more than that code. One name for this in literary terminology is allegory. In

Emersonian thinking it is called conformism.

For Emerson, the problem was to locate the possibility of moral

judgment in a world that had lost its foundation, its fixed point of reference.

“Life,” to reiterate, “only avails, not the having lived. . . . This one fact the

world hates, that the soul becomes.” Or, as he puts it in “Experience,”

“Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand” (250). Not to

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recognize this leaves us besotted with the stupidity of codes.

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another

handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these

communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few

particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every

truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the

real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not

where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip

us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to

wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest

asinine expression. (32)

Twain’s ironies pushed this insight even further, presenting an America that

is utterly corrupted. The corruption doesn’t arise from slavery. Slavery is just

one of its manifestations. The disease is a blind adherence to codes and

systems that leads to a ubiquitous self-deception. It is a world where people

go to church in the morning and praise sermons about peace and love, and

then blow each other’s heads off in the afternoon. It is a world where people

speak of themselves as freedom loving but own slaves. It is a world where

people ask the slaves in to say prayers. Every episode in Huckleberry Finn is

permeated with this sense of world of automatons blindly mouthing codified

platitudes on the one hand, and merrily doing the opposite on the other—

with no sense of disjunction.

Whether or not this is suitable material for children in the classroom is

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anybody’s guess. It would be nice to think it is, regardless of the color of

their skin. The situation Huck finds himself in, and the judgment it demands

of him, would seem to have lessons for all of us. But it probably depends a

lot on the teacher, the particular group of students, and the situation. To

dismiss the book, though—whether because you find its Realism distasteful

or because you like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s moralisms better than Mark

Twain’s ironies—is, in a sense, to find yourself in exactly Huck’s “close

place.” 130 years after its publication, it continues to locate itself as our

friend—in Emerson’s sense—and to demand that we step up and meet it as

“one chemical atom to another.” Perhaps that is why people continue to find

it so upsetting.

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Works cited

Asim, Jabari. The N word : who can say it, who shouldn't, and why. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007.

Capra, Frank, dir. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. With Gary Cooper and Jean

Arthur. Columbia Pictures, 1936.

Cavell, Stanley. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the

Moral Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Essay of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1987.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. NY: WW Norton: 1994.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberty Finn. 3rd Ed. NY: WW Norton,

1999.

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