History repeats itself. There’s nothing new under the sun. Some things never change.
None of that sounds like a promising premise for a groundbreaking book, but those ideas are essential to Andrew Levy's Huck Finn's America, an unusual new take on the Mark Twain classic.
With the vast catalog of commentary that's been written about Huckleberry Finn, it's natural to think there's not much new to be said about it. Levy disagrees. He argues that we've long ignored two factors that are crucial to a full understanding of Huck: the influence on Twain of the minstrel show and his complex views on childhood. Those views, he says, were a synthesis of his near-frontier upbringing, the pervasive violence that children were exposed to in Twain's time, nascent social and psychological theories on child-rearing, and Twain's own experience as the parent of three young girls.
As children, if we read Huck Finn, we're inclined to see it as a children's book, full of adventure and fun. Later, our teachers insist that Twain is giving us a treatise on how progress can be made in race relations.
Levy believes both those views are seriously misguided. He gives us plentiful examples of the violence that Twain observed as a child, and that all Americans knew both firsthand and from sometimes ghastly newspaper stories of the day. He also points out that things are not so different today; we, too, are bombarded by reports of violence, often involving (or even perpetrated by) children.
One emerging issue in Twain’s day was how to educate children, to shape them into responsible adults: Was it better to drill knowledge into them in class, or should the outdoors be their classroom and nature their teacher? How strict should parents be? What about corporal punishment?
In Levy’s view, Huck and his pal Tom Sawyer are Twain’s way of blasting to smithereens any idea that we’re really able to shape children into adults. Despite every attempt to keep Tom under control and Huck in school, both boys build their own lives and shape their own development — in Tom’s case, by seeing the world through the lens of the dime novels he’s read.
Which, oddly, brings us to the topic of minstrelsy. Levy goes to great lengths explaining the evolution of minstrel shows, pointing out Twain's love of them dating back to his childhood. Levy contends that through blackface, dialect (or parodies of it), and other means, these shows blurred the distinction between racial identities. Levy also points out many minstrel-like elements in Huck, including the "Royal Nonesuch" episode. Most eye-opening is his contention that the closing section of the book is not a horribly misbegotten deviation from what precedes it, as generally thought, but is in fact Twain subversively making a complex critique of race relations.
In this section, Jim is held captive at a farm which, improbably, Tom Sawyer is visiting. Tom, inspired by those dime novels, insists on a needlessly Byzantine plan to rescue Jim, one laden with minstrel-inspired situations. The episode is comical and pathetic, seemingly out of tune with the rest of the book, but for Levy, it ties up in a bundle the points Twain has been trying to make. As Levy writes, “For Twain, the minstrel show was the one institution in American life that acknowledged that race was a joke, and a fake, that skin color was negotiable.”
Huck Finn, he says, "tells us less about how to move forward to integration and equality than what it means to want all the things many complicated white Americans want: justice for all, the pleasures of deferring justice for all, and the hard satisfaction of knowing what a fool and malicious spirit you are to want both."
“Mistaking a dark comedy about how history goes round for a parable about how it goes forward,” Levy says, “is a classic American mistake.”
Levy’s arguments are detailed and intricately woven; unfortunately, occasional flaws in his writing create unnecessary distractions, such as when he uses the lofty-sounding but incorrect “an historian.” These are quibbles, but they’re mistakes that don’t belong in a book this scholarly and reasoned.
Huck Finn's America
Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece
(Simon & Schuster, $25)