On Ralph Ellison And The Meaning Of Huckleberry Finn

https://quillette.com/2020/12/28/i-was-never-more-hated-than-when-i-tried-to-be-honest/

…the dialogue between Huck and Jim, the former slave Huck befriends, captures something real that expands the reader’s moral sense:

“Huck’s relationship to Jim… is that of a humanist; in his relationship to the community he is an individualist. He embodies the two major conflicting drives in 19th century America. And if humanism is man’s basic attitude toward a social order which he accepts, and individualism his basic attitude toward what he rejects, one might say that Twain, by allowing these two attitudes to argue dialectically in his work of art, was as highly moral an artist as he was a believer in democracy.”…

I digress from the main thrust of this fine overview essay.

The above quoted is but a small part of this good biographic and thematic overview of Ellison. But as to one of my favourite books, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, I don’t precisely recognize the distinction Ellison draws between the humanist in Huck’s relationship with Jim and the individualist in Huck’s stance towards the community.

For Ellison, Huck as humanist shows in his basic attitude toward a social order he accepts; and as individualist, Huck is negative in his basic attitude toward what he rejects.

If I understand what Ellison means, then I’d argue he has things mistaken. I’d argue there is no social order Huck accepts and that his individualism and humanism, which is to say, respecting and loving Jim in pure friendship and treating him as an equal, happen and can only happen in their best moments on the raft going down the Mississippi, when they are both away from the social order that deforms them.

Before he gets on the raft in the novel’s first part, then when he periodically gets off the raft in the novel’s picaresque part and then again when he finally leaves the raft, the tentacles of his social deformation and ongoing involvement in a pervasively and fundamentally racist society immediately squeeze the individualism and humanism of idyllic life on the raft out of him.

That is why in Twain’s savage social excoriation evident in the novel’s poorly understood last part, Huck allows himself to fall under Tom Sawyer’s poisonous, racist sway. So fallen under, Huck willingly participates in Tom Sawyer’s make believe plot to rescue a tragically and falsely enchained Jim who by right, both immediately legal and universally moral, should never have been enchained and who should and could have been freed from the start.

The tragedy and savagery lie in the contrast between Huck and Jim in their best moments beautifully and nobly together as equals on the raft and the pitiful state Jim is reduced to when falsely enchained. This is what racism does to the beauty, nobility and innocence of loving and equal human relationship in friendship set apart from what deforms it.

The white supremacist society Twain excoriates, peopled by ostensibly well meaning whites who live and breathe their racism in the unthinking core of themselves and in their every external act and in the social structures they create, exemplifies, unlike present North American society, what Critical Race Theory theorizes.

In opposition to Ellison’s notion of Huck’s basic attitude toward a social order he accepts, the fact of the novel is that there is none. This is why Huck, at novel’s very end, says,

“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before."

The ending implicates no acceptable social order. Just the opposite, such an order is inconceivable to Huck. The best to be said is that he’s broken past the bonds that have tied him to the racism of his society and that have constituted him. He does so by rejecting his society as such. But he has no nuanced consciousness of what his final decision involves.

Getting back to Ellison and Kronen, though, the spirit of Ellison’s comment gets closer to the deepest meaning of Huckleberry Finn than does most of the academic criticism of it. And in that proximity is Ellison’s own complex, large-visioned liberal humanism through which Kronen so aptly takes us.