Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huck Finn is Mark Twain's quintessential rogue character. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, serendipitously escaped its author's intentions mid-draft, much as its hero artfully escapes different forms of confinement--from the social to the literary. Indeed his opening words give Twain the slip: "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly." Huck's audacious leap from the page, a meta leap, not only renders Twain a character in his own novel, but hints at a relationship between reality and fantasy, and more precisely, between life and the escape from it.

From the start, Huck proves to be a new kind of American hero, a child free to speak in his own dialect, the raw and buoyant language of the Mississippi. His freedom of expression is the first sign of a newly discovered personal freedom, one that has enabled Huck to navigate between the values of his time and society and those of his own heart. In a way, Huck Finn is a rewriting of Homer's Odyssey, with the key difference that instead of returning home, Huck is escaping it. He escapes the brutal clutches of his alcoholic father, he escapes the widow's attempts to civilize him, he escapes the inevitability of growing up. When the runaway slave, Jim, eventually joins him, the theme of escape acquires a new urgency. 

At the same time, escape always threatens to become escapism, a longing for transitory freedom that leads one hopelessly astray. If the novel seems fanstastical--a boy and a slave drifting on the currents of the Mississippi in a raft, meeting all kinds of adventure--that is because fantasy is a form of escape, and Huck grows dangerously content with it. His friend, Tom Sawyer (like Don Quixote before him), is addicted to fantasy literature, distracting both him and Huck from the hard facts and exigencies of life. The ludicrous plot he hatches to free Jim, which Huck goes along with, reveals the implausible vision on which escapist literature thrives. However exhilarating and meaningful it renders the dramatic situation, it only thwarts Jim's flight into freedom, and eventually gets him recaptured. As Ernest Hemingway once said, this is where the novel should have ended, on a note of bitter irony, where the boys' fantasies of escape cost a man his freedom--and in turn, forfeit their own innocence.

But that is not where the story ends. The climax of the novel, in which Huck defiantly chooses to protect and shelter Jim at the cost of his soul and reputation--"all right, then, I'll go to hell"--suggests that it cannot end there. Huck's climactic decision reflects the fulfillment of an independent conscience, mature enough to channel the experience of escape and exile towards a higher end. As the boys make concessions to the urgency of freeing Jim, they begin to come to terms with reality and, unwittingly, with growing up. And growing up is incompatible with ceaseless escape; eventually, one must return to the world, if only to try to change it. Once Jim's predicament has been resolved, they do return. Jim's freedom is restored and Huck is offered a home. His narrative now ended, Huck is free to continue his life story as he sees fit. Will he stay and be "sivilized" by his adoptive mother, or head out west to the Indian Territory? The novel returns to an unwritten beginning. Only Huck, older and wiser, and in every reader's heart, can tell where it will go.

Happy birthday, Mr. Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899 on this day. The author of Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada was a perennial exile, first in Berlin where he wrote novels and poetry in Russian, then in America, where he refashioned himself as an English-prose writer, translator, college professor, and lepidopterist, and finally in Montreaux, Switzerland. One recalls the fantastic word play, the formal experimentation, the convoluted plots of his novels, if not the sheer notoriety of just one of them. He affirmed the generative power of his exile. A "hypertrophied sense of lost childhood," it was a yearning for a home to which he could no longer return, but also a condition for seeking. In his art, Nabokov showed that this sense of exile is common to us all, but that it need not be debilitating. Turning one's estrangement into a mode of perception, a manner of seeing the all too familiar with a new, ever startled gaze, is to deepen the mystery of one's life. And the beauty of it. Happy birthday, Mr. Nabokov.      

John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Steinbeck's swan song, The Winter of Our Discontent, is a morality tale of post-war America, set in a coastal town on Long Island. We are far removed from the Salinas Valley in which Steinbeck staked his claim to American literature. It may be no accident that he marked out the same region F. Scott Fitzgerald had for Gatsby as a beacon from which to examine the moral zeitgest of America at a critical historical juncture, the period beginning in 1960.

Ethan Allen Hawley is the impoverished scion of an old New England family. A war hero and well-educated, he is reduced to being a clerk in his father's grocery store, now owned by a Sicilian immigrant. By turns cynical and jovial, Ethan exasperates his friends and family with his keen sense of irony, which masks his insecurity about his fortunes, while it mocks the shallow pursuit of money. But money, in this day and age, is there for the taking. On Good Friday, Ethan is thrice tempted by figures who promise either adventure or quick prosperity. Though he is the most honor-bound character in the novel, Ethan is not impervious to these temptations, for they seem to answer his call for redemption.

I don't know how believable Ethan's undoing is, but it does illustrate Steinbeck's concern (common among American authors) with the fall of good men to the allurements of modernity -- easy money, shady investments, consumerism, and of course, a glittering future. That the story is set during Easter week in 1960, in the light of a dawning era, suggests the evanescence of Ethan Allen Hawley as a model of the good American and the succession of one who has not yet been tested.

Heaven?

Something which perplexes and infuriates many atheists about their adversaries, the legions of faithful, is their ability (and right) to revise the tenets of their religion. What many religionists don't get, however, is the fact that you cannot argue your way out of every theological dispute with an ad hoc, undebatable solution. Jon Meacham's recent article in Time magazine, "Rethinking Heaven," describes a new development in Christian thought that is neither ad hoc, nor perplexing, though it may rankle with those who think differently. The new proposition: heaven is not a place where one goes after death, but a culmination of human love and effort to restore the material world--heaven as a resurrected earth.

This new idea has gained currency in certain Christian circles, amounting to a real paradigm shift with startling implications. Call it a downgrading, but a radical one. If heaven is no longer a celestial paradise, a utopian otherworld in which suffering has been banished and all creation lives in harmony with God, then man's earthly existence assumes new meaning. What was once considered an elaborate way station en route to the Great Beyond, or "just passing through," becomes the real ground and field for fulfillment.

Young people today seem to understand this point without actually acknowledging it. Members of an activist generation, they live out this new theology in their concerted effort to make the earth a better place for everyone. And the internet has become their prime vehicle for social justice, enabling sites like Change.org and public information campaigns on YouTube and social networking services to inspire mass movements. Witness the galvanizing effect of an online petition for justice in the Trayvon Martin case, or the power of Twitter and Facebook in launching the Arab Spring a year earlier.

Although the new vision of heaven is a welcome change, signifying Christians' willingness to rethink fundamentals in light of modern-day circumstances and advanced knowledge, it suffers from a case of false hope. Is it really possible to redress all the social ills of the world? A cynic and an optimist will each answer differently, but one answer will probably be more realistic than the other. How can the multiplicity of human interests, desires, and preoccupations converge on a future without strife? It would seem to require some tremendous feat of social engineering, or mass delusion--or, and this is the likeliest answer, an unthinkable evolutionary advance.

In the end, as with other verdicts on utopian visions, the new conception of heaven calls into question our conception of humanity. Man, as an existent among existents, may not have the special talent to fully overcome his selfishness, his meanness, his darker nature. But he can certainly imagine it. It is a curiosity of human existence that, in rethinking where one is going, one must first rethink who one is, and why.

Carl Sandburg, "Threes"

Threes

I was a boy when I heard three red words
a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets
for: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--I asked
... why men die for words.

I was older; men with mustaches, sideburns,
lilacs, told me the high golden words are:
Mother, Home, and Heaven--other older men with
face decorations said: God, Duty, Immortality
--they sang these threes slow from deep lungs.

Years ticked off their say-so on the great clocks
of doom and damnation, soup, and nuts: meteors flashed
their say-so: and out of great Russia came three
dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die
for: Bread, Peace, Land.

And I met a marine of the U.S.A., a leatherneck with a girl on his knee
for a memory in ports circling the earth and he said: Tell me how to say
three things and I always get by--gimme a plate of ham and eggs--how
much--and--do you love me, kid?

[Sandburg's brilliance is evident here in his celebration of the here-and-now of sensuous existence, shorn of the abstractions and shibboleths which too often marred the work of the Romantic poets. Sandburg suggests that ordinary Americans live by a different code, a survivalist ethic of work, wanderlust, and simple pleasures. The dusky syllables of ideology have no place in their world.]

Elegy for the organ grinder

City corners have not been the same since the disappearance of the organ grinder, cranking his music box for pedestrians. When the organ grinder receded into history in the early 20th century, cities lost an enchanting, mystical sound. It was like the calliope of a carousel, the sound of children on painted wooden horses turning around and around. How curious to imagine that this music man was once a common fixture of the urban landscape.

The Keyhole

The closet in which Rupert was hiding for the past thirty minutes was unbearably small. Between crouching and kneeling on the hardwood floor, his arthritic legs were failing. Above him, shirt sleeves and jacket ends draped his shoulders with an air of condemnation, disembodied spirits posing with their captive. A beam of light streaming through the keyhole had settled on Rupert’s bald head.

A man and a woman quickly entered the room, and just as abruptly shut the door behind them. The sudden rush of air slightly rattled the closet door in front of Rupert's face. He looked through the little keyhole, his wrinkled eye bathed in a pale glow. He tried to quell his worried breath, which rose and sank in a shrill wheeze, while his eyelashes nervously fluttered, and a thin line of sweat trailed down his nose. The man in the room spoke coolly, knowingly, as though he could strike the woman without laying a finger on her. She was trying feebly to pacify him.

“Tell me a bedtime story, mother,” he said.

“If I had only known the trouble it would cause you, I wouldn't have mentioned it. But come to reason, please. He’s your father’s brother.”

“He is? Why didn’t anybody tell me?” he mocked.

The figures appeared and disappeared from the vista of the keyhole. They were slowly circling the room from opposite ends. When they were out of view, Rupert carefully adjusted his position. He could bend on one knee only for a short length of time before the pain became intolerable. He hoped they would leave soon. It was a bad idea, he thought. There were much better ways of obtaining information. When he looked again, he saw only the woman, framed in the keyhole’s little silhouette. Her son, whom she watched in terror, now paced along the unseen wall.

Neither one spoke. There was an interminable silence. The woman eyed her son carefully and nervously smoothed the folds of her dress. A lion tamer trapped in the beast’s cage might have shown as much restraint. Rupert now feared the possibility of a sudden, violent action. The woman will be torn abruptly from his view, he thought, killed or battered.

While still pacing, the man began to speak, but no longer in the voice of an offended child. He spoke rather with a feigned, calculating calm, as if he had summed up everything and was now pronouncing a verdict.  

“Tell me, mother, do you blush?”

“What?”  

“A whore in league with her lover, a husband’s mysterious death, a son deprived of his father. Enough reason to turn crimson?”

“What is this? What do you mean by all this?”

The man withheld his answer for a moment, as if by suspending it, he was making it monstrous. He then uttered in a menacing tone, “Murder. That’s what I mean. Foul murder.”

At this moment, Rupert banged the door with a hollow rap while switching knees. At once the hurried tap of footsteps was heard. His heart sank. The saliva in his mouth thinned, then dried almost instantly. When he peered again, timorously, through the keyhole, he saw only the man now, facing the closet door with a menacing leer.

“My, my, mother, I think there's a mouse in your closet.”