Tuesday, February 5, 2008
I just realized...
...that both charaters, Tom and Huck, play tricks on Jim. Huck's trick moves the story forward, while Tom's trick comes off as just a tangential aside. I see now how Jim's different reaction to the tricks says something. Not sure exactly what, yet, but this may be the beginning of a cool paper. Someone has got to have thought of this already.
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4 comments:
Is that perhaps because Tom is such a perfect representative of Romanticism and Huck the best example of Realism?
We talked in class about these two characters and how differently they react to everything. The scenes where Huck finally figures out how to respond to Tom's increasingly "imaginative" schemes for rescuing Jim are key to understanding how each approaches life.
It sounds like you're already learning a great deal. I hope this puts to rest some of the fears you felt about going to CSUDH. I still support the notion that it's more important what the student makes of her education than where she goes to school. (But don't tell Blythe or we'll get another blog war started.)
I wish I knew more about those literary schools to make an educated guess.
I've been bloggin about this book, but I really haven't had a chance to discuss it in class. The lectures are not broken up with hardly any student discussion. In fact, I wouldn't call it a discussion. It's a true lecture; on one had I appreciate what this guy is teaching me. Giannoti has brought up several things that hadn't even crossed my mind as I read such as the American concept of innocence (having to do with the New Eden concept), the idea of tabula rasa emerging through Huck, the idea of the wilderness, also known as the Turner Thesis, and last but not least, "con men" and the "confidence" character.
At that was just today's notation. I sort of like this guy, he knows his stuff, and I would suppose that he is teaching me several things that are important, and that I would normally be very excited over, but he's not very accessible. And that quality bleeds through to his lectures. I'm not sure what he wants us to write about, but I may have to scrap my ideas and go with something that this guy has been talking about, because something tells me he's the type of instructor that needs his own ideas vomited back to him. At any rate, if I were to use some of these concepts in a paper, it would certainly be a worthwhile paper, and help me break some of the thesis habits I've been prone to lately. I'm probably going to bring him some of my work and see what kind of writing he's into, and what not.
I'm glad that you still think that my feeble thoughts and ideas presented in this blog are evidence that I'm progressing.
As far as your question is concerned, I'm more interested in Jim's reaction to the pranks than the pranks themselves. Ah, I think I see now what you mean. Tom, especially in his constant references to European literature and history, and romantic epics, is the Romantic, and Huck, with his stealing of a water melon (because he's really hungry, I suppose) is more of a realist, showing how things seem to go in daily life. I was thinking about them as representing, especially Tom, a Romanticized approach to ending slavery, and Huck, well, shoot, I guess more of a Realist. It seems like the freeing of Jim means so much more to the book, I mean, Clemens took up so many pages with that. I wondered if it was a commentary on reconstruction -- in fact the whole book seems to be an answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin, and I've been thinking of the differences between Jim and Uncle Tom the whole time.
Thanks for having this discussion with me here, as we don't do this in class. (But, as I wrote, Giannoti is covering some fascinating stuff.)
Huck and Tom are diametrically opposed. I intensely dislike Tom and what he represents which, to my mind, is a subject who has been absolutely interpellated with the ideology of his society -- "sivilization" -- which I am quite certain Twain meant to expose as fundamentally corrupt. Tom sees everything as a good capitalist Christian, full of romanticized notions with which he has been imbued by the romantic stories he has read, the schools in which he has been "educated," the religion with which he has been filled (which was used, of course, to tell people slavery was God's will). He doesn't see Huck or Jim as real, struggling individuals. They are characters in his own narcissistic little play. That's why the ending, for me, is such a tragedy. To make any logical sense, Tom's "trick" should send Jim immediately back into slavery, or even death. Twain fiddles with the ending, in my opinion, in order to get a very romanticized, improbably "happy ending" such as found in many novels of the era. Huck, I suppose, is realism, as Joe says, but he is an absolutely tragic character. He is abused, neglected, victimized, nearly killed, when he vanishes people rather quickly forget about him. He represents what this superficially "civilized" society really is: a power system which reduces human beings to pawns whose "worth" depends on their race, class, and ability to produce economically for the system. The central, ephiphanic (dn't know if that's a word) moment for me is the story of the Grangersons and the Shepherds in which we see "civilization" at its epitome: a war in which the rich kill each other for completely incomprehensible reasons. Huck's doppelganger, Buck, is killed. Huck continually witnesses horrible violence and death, which we don't, at first, really reconize as such because it is written in such a naive, childish tone. Look at the corpses pile up. Look at the destruction everywhere. I know I am getting a little over the top here, but up until THE DICK took over my life, I taught Huck Finn. I think it is an American Tragedy at its darkest (except for perhaps THE DICK). The improbable ending in which Huck will "light out" for some non-existent territory I think is Twain's final commentary on what little hope he holds out for Huck, and by extension, any individual who tries to defy the system, and finally, America has a whole.
Hope you are now thoroughly depressed.
Your idea sounds really great and I've NEVER thought of looking at it as from Jim's reactions.
Go see that inapproachable guy and make him take you seriously.
There are two moments that made me bawl in the novel: When Jim is hurt by Huck's prank, and when Jim tells Huck that the man in the floating house was Huck's father. The story about the father (and the story of the house in general floating down the Mississippi on it's side, with baby bottles and a wooden leg) is so ambiguous, and Clemens doesn't even give Huck a reaction to this news in the book.
I have felt the same way about Tom's character, which I can't stand. Giannoti lectured in class about Clemens' portrayal of civilization as inherently immoral and corrupt, and the frontier as that last hope for humanity.
Barely related, in the middle of that lecture last Wednesday I TEARED up in class when we were talking about this, because I remembered my favorite passage from The Sun Also Rises, where Jake's friend, Bill, is shaving and they are talking about Brett going to San Sebastian with Brett, and Bill says,
"Why not me...it's an honest face. It's a face any woman would be safe with.." (Talking about how Brett made off with Cohn instead of "some of her own people")
"She'd never seen it."(Jake says)
"She should have. All women should see it. It's a face that ought to be thrown on every screen in the country. Every woman ought to be given a copy of this face as she leaves the altar. Mothers should tell their children about this face. My son"--he pointed the razor at me--"go west with this face and grow up with the country."
He ducked down to the bowl rinsed his face with cold water, put on some alcohol, and then looked at himself carefully in the glass, pulling down his long upper lip.
"My God!" he said, "isn't it an awful face?"
And there they were, in Spain, treating Europe's centuries old "civilization" as a new frontier, if only to Americans, and lamenting how the women in their lives were exploring new frontiers, with men out of or below their class.
With Huck, for him to have any autonomy he has to kill himself (he kills his identity at the cabin -- instead of, by the way, killing his father, which is what Greek tragedy would call for). Call me Ishmael -- he commands, but Huck doesn't leave us with a psuedonym to give us clues about his real or imagined identity. In many ways Huck goes beyond realism to give us the soul of the American as let down by every structure inflicted upon it. If something, like the "heart of boy" is inherently free, then any structure thrust upon it will end tragically. Melville futher explores this, but identifies that nature is a structure that doesn't hold the answer, but could be seen as another struture, not holding the key to freedom, but a structure so immense, so incomprehensible, that to imagine it is where man belongs is also unthinkable. Man belongs nowhere, Melville asserts. He is inherently and forever an orphan, begetting orphans.
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