Rant in D Minor: Hail Saint Huck

Recent reports in the New York Times that the Mark Twain museum in Hartford, Connecticut is in dire financial trouble coincided with this reader’s revisiting of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, inspired at least in part by George Saunders’s essay ‘The United States Of Huck’ published in The Braindead Megaphone several months ago.

There’s no bad time to get reacquainted with Huck, the backwoodsy wild boy with the heart of, if not gold, then pig iron. Finn couldn’t be anything but American, and more than that, a southerner, but he obeys no borders, and has reincarnated in novels from all territories over the last 120 odd years.
The first thing the reader notices about the novel is its opening lines are so unorthodox they’re almost post-modern: “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. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”.
Such is the book’s influence on skewed first-person narratives (especially those related by juvenile delinquents), that almost every writer attempting a Huck Redux, regardless of creed or nationality, seems compelled to forge a humdinger of an opening line that encapsulates his creation’s vernacular, character, and predicament.
In Dara McCluskey’s Patrick McCabe documentary Blood Relatives, which aired as part of RTE’s ArtsLives series the other week, you can hear the ghost of Huck echoed in the voices of the novelist’s wife, family, and fellow writers as they repeat the opening line from The Butcher Boy: “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.”
If the barefooted, pipe-smoking runaway’s argot inspires mantras, his spirit is a manitou. He’s there at the start of Iain Banks macabre highlands tale The Wasp Factory (“I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.” ) He’s Niall Griffiths’ wild colonial boy Ianto from Sheepshagger, a feral Welsh urchin driven to wreak terrible vengeance on big city weekenders who have turned his former homestead into a holiday retreat. He’s in Nick Cave’s novel And The Ass Saw The Angel (Cave also swiped the opening holler of “Looky yonder” in ‘Tupelo’ from the part where Huck and Jim encounter a capsized boat on their Mississippi odyssey). He’s in Russell Hoban’s 1979 post-apocalyptic fable Riddley Walker:“On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly been the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time before him nor I aint lookin to see none agen.”
Huck knows no gender either. Read how pragmatically and unselfconsciously he dresses up in bonnet and skirts in order to glean intelligence about the bounty hunt for his scapegoated slave friend Jim, and one thinks of the half-breed bisexual berdache boy in Tom Spanbauer’s The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon. But the most explicit literary homage to the novel was probably Davis Grubb’s classic 1953 tale Night Of The Hunter, adapted for cinema by Charles Laughton.
Huckleberry Finn is a much darker book than it lets on. It’s also flawed and problematic, especially in its portrayal of Jim as an impotent man-child, and the controversial ending. But it’s still a hell of a story. They’ve tried to ban it and and burn it as recently as the 1990s, when the American Library Association ranked it the fifth most frequently challenged (in the sense of attempting to ban) book in the US that decade. Some things never change. On the book’s publication in 1885, The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee famously decided to exclude it from their collection, denouncing it as, “the veriest trash... dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”
Now there’s a rave review if I ever read one.