perfidy

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Can you believe that I'd never read this one? It's amazing! Even though it's not much of a "novel," in the sense that novels have plots/beginnings/endings/heroes/villains, and more of a picaresque road novel a la Don Quixote without any higher purposes, I'm still tempted to go ahead and dub The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the Great American Novel. Half the pleasure of a good novel is in the language. This is one reason I don't often care for books in translation. Removing Murakami's prose from Japanese, or even Chaucer's from Middle English, bleeds away the specific pleasures of pun, inflection, word choice. Although a very skilled translator can overcome these limitations and even retain the flavor, the "-ness," of an author's particular style and native tongue, good translators are as common as honest politicians. Twain's ear for dialect serves him well, as does his ability to combine screwball comedy with wry satire without apparent effort. In a way this is a very post-modern book (there's that goddamn word again) in that there are no white-hat heroes or black-hat villains, just people. Although Huck is good-hearted enough, he does fake his own death and then watches in wonderment as his friends and guardians grieve and search for his corpse. He also vacillates between hiding Jim (not his whole name) and deciding that a runaway slave is a thief whenever Jim is captured. Although the Duke and the King are bad men, their evil, such as it is, stems solely from greed and aspires to nothing more than being lazy and spending other people's money.

And then there's that word. You know: the big "N" word. Writing in an era when slavery was gone but casual racism was the American way, Twain's treatment of race and racism in the book in all its glory and splendor is important to keep around. In this PC day where you can get in trouble even for saying "niggardly," it's helpful to recall that there was a time when things were worse. It is also helpful to recall that even when things were worse, people were people and slavery was not a monolithic institution. It's hard to read Twain today without the uncomfortable experience of ubconsciously cringing every time The Word comes up (and I definitely had a hard time reading the book on the subway. You never know when somebody might glance over and take exception.), but flinching is our modern reaction to a bygone way of life.

But that's probably overthinking things. Twain was certainly a social critic and a satirist, but at the end of the day Huck Finn is just a stupid Missouri boy who ran away from home and got his ass in trouble. Good story. Next!

[wik] The whole "N" word thing reminds me of a bit I heard on Howard Stern a few years ago. He was running a "roast" contest in which listeners would send in their best roast of Howard or one of his crew members. The winner won something stupid and expensive. A fairly large segment of the submissions that passed the first screening were roasts of Robin Quivers, who as we all know, is black. Every single one of those indulged in crass and graceless material like riffs on watermelons, etcetera. It was painfully unfunny. But the strangest one of all - and one that Howard & Co. played repeatedly as a comedic treasure - was a guy whose roast of Robin consisted in sum total of the following: "N**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger!"

Is that funny? If so, on what level? 'Cos I don't get it. Discuss.