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.

Exchange On Issue Of Human Exceptionality

Human Exceptionalism

L:

A funny thing, though I'm not saying this applies to her at all, is that often people who like to think of human beings as a part of nature, or who should be a part of nature, are also people who don't like to think of human beings as simply one species of animal among many.

Me:

Just on your first paragraph, if I’ve unpacked it right, it’s that often people who like to think we’re part of nature also don’t like to think that we’re just one species among others. I can quite readily see those paradoxical attitudes. It struck me while I was unbundling what you wrote that our more greatly evolved consciousness and even more our self consciousness almost necessarily, almost by definition—and maybe we can in principle dispense with the “almost”—set us apart in a special way among all species. In this sense, we’re the America of species, exceptional. Yet, we easily can think that and also think we’re part of nature.

L:

On that first paragraph -- sure the human species is "exceptional", but so are giraffes or ants. Giraffes have exceptionally long necks, ants have chemical communication systems, we have sound-based communication systems -- that's it, as far as I can see, "Smart"? --  bah, humbug. It's not to say that sound-based communication hasn't had a big impact, but it is to say, first, be careful of a long-standing hubris that falsely lifts us out of nature, as though poised between beast and angel, and second, understand that it's speech, and the "culture" that follows from that peculiar trick, that distinguishes human beings, not the "big brain" that is simply what's needed for speech. 

Sorry for the semi-rant -- just that I think the "oh sure we're part of nature, but we're better than nature" attitude is both manifestly self-contradictory and misguided.

Me:

Disagree about our species exceptionalism.

For one thing, that we’re dominant makes us so. But as I noted our dominance can be couched in our understanding that we’re part of what we dominate, all species in context greater than any 1 of us. 

Not good or bad as such, just superior.

All animals are unique as species and within species I’d imagine each, say, ant is in its ultimate infrastructure unique. So that’s not a good argument against our exceptionalism. Taken to an extreme, it beggars relative judgment. For example, if we have different breeds of dogs and one breed simply does dog things better than other breeds, then we’d not hesitate to say, I wouldn’t think, it’s an exceptional breed. 

After all, what does exceptional mean but outstanding, as in standing out. And for species, the test is dominance, I’d argue. 

L:

Exceptional doesn't mean "outstanding" in my understanding, whether in species or nations (see "American exceptionalism")-- it just means not typical, as in an exception to a rule. But if, as you say, each species is unique, then every species is an exception in its unique way. As for dominance, I'm just dubious -- the ant biome apparently outweighs the human by many orders of magnitude, and even our gut bacteria might have a better claim on dominance, but I don't much mind it either way. The main point is just not to let it go to our head and lead us to think that we're not just another animal species or, the same thing, to think that we're above nature.

Me:

Not to quibble but:

much greater than usual, especially in skill, intelligence, quality, etc.: 

an exceptional student

exceptional powers of concentration

The company has shown exceptional growth over the past two years.

Synonyms

especial formal

special  (NOT USUAL)

 Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples

good or important because of unusual qualities 

• specialAre you doing anything special for your birthday?

• exceptionalTheir standard of acting was very high but there was one exceptional performance.

• outstandingHe accepted an award for outstanding achievement in baseball.

• extraordinaryHer capacity to remember things is extraordinary.

• deluxeThe salesman tried to sell us the deluxe model.

and 

out·stand·ing

/ˌoutˈstandiNG/

Learn to pronounce

adjective

1. 1. 
exceptionally good."the team's outstanding performance.

 I think on all this exceptional means more than just not typical; it includes both unusually good and outstanding as inclining to superiority. We wouldn’t say, “X who always  runs last is an exceptional runner,” even though always running last might at least in one sense be atypical.

I agree that we ought not let what we think we are go to our heads but I still think we’re paradoxical in our self conception when don’t let that go to our heads: we can perceive our selves as superior, as up there over species in some great chain of being and at the same time we can understand ourselves as but a part of nature, the latter not excluding the former. As my friend once said, though not precisely on point: 

“What a piece of worke is a man! How Noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In forme and mouing

how expresse and admirable! In Action, how like an Angel in apprehension, how like a God!

The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

L:

Don't want to quible either, but you're citing one meaning which is not what I'm meaning: 

ex·cep·tion·al

/ˌikˈsepSH(ə)n(ə)l/

Learn to pronounce

adjective

1. unusual; not typical."crimes of exceptional callousness and cruelty"


Similar:
unusual
uncommon 

abnormal
atypical
extraordinary

As always, though, semantic differences, unless they're the topic themselves, are wastes of time. If we use your meaning, I just think it's misapplied in this case -- to me, it now has a kind of antique humanism about it, and I think even your friend, if read in context, understood how illusory such rhapsodizing is. In general, I don't think using a word like "paradox" lets you escape simple old contradiction.    

Me:

I’d thought you’d said that “exceptional” *just* means “not usual” and that you were excluding it having other meanings. In response I tried to show it has a more encompassing definition that includes how I was using it in relation to human exceptionality in the animal kingdom. 

Don’t fight it man, we’re species-wise marked for greatness, ‘the ecstasy of victory, the agony of defeat,” as Roone Arledge had his CBS answers say. Hey, what other animals have pro sports, the Olymipics, quarks, professional wrestling or a guy wearing a sign walking around yelling, “Eat at Joe’s”? 

The issue, though, isn’t the meaning of exceptional but whether we in all our glory and tragedy are the superior species. Use any word you like for superior, say exceptional for example, or outstanding, the precise word doesn’t matter, the underlying point does.

 Speaking for my friend, if we consider our glory side, then his point about us as the manifestation of that glory is quite well taken. Why his words are not precisely on point is that he, too quickly for our purposes, simply bypasses us as just one of many, and descends immediately to our dustiness. 

But even in the evil that men do from your local murder to your massive genocide, from your conflagatory wars to your potential to destroy all life on the planet our superiority is manifest as well. As I noted, the test is the potential for dominance, which is not a normative judgment. 

All of this is not an anachronistic vestige of humanism. It’s a clear eyed look at who and what we are.

I’m not seeing any contradiction. And I’m not using that useful “paradox” as a rhetorical dodge to escape contradiction impaling me, as you suggest I am. A paradox is an apparent contradiction. I think you’re impaled on the apparent. There’s no logical necessity to someone thinking he’s exceptional that requires him to see himself as not part of the team. He might see himself as not a part of it but he doesn’t have to. And so you have the paradox: his understanding that compared to the rest of his team he’s outstanding, he stands out, he’s, if you will, exceptional, coupled with his understanding he’s part of a team for all his self understood exceptionality. And he can go two ways on that: he can be a team player; or he can be a sheer hot dog. 

L:

" All of this is not an anachronistic vestige of humanism. It’s a clear eyed look at who and what we are."

No, sorry, I think it's kind of old-fashioned. That sort of "we're the greatest!" boosterism went out in the 19th century. It's been replaced now, of course, by "we're the worst!" of the 21st century "wokesters" ("woke" like the living dead are woke), which is even sillier -- the simple fact of the matter is that we're a species of animal that's acquired the trick of using sounds to communicate. That's a good trick, no doubt, and it's given us cities and art, and just lately some 7 billion in population, but that's only doing what a cultural animal can do, and we shouldn't let it make us giddy, or turn us into a "sheer hotdog" -- which, I'm saying, is a feature of those who insist we're above the animals.

Me:

We’re the only cultural animal in a certain understanding of culture.

We’re the only animal that can build cities out of our consciousness. And we measure other species by other species by their proximity to ours special attributes. 

You can call it a trick but that’s just one way of looking at it and when it claims exclusivity, then it’s but an arbitrary way of looking at it. 

We as superior is a clear eyed look because we come to this judgment about ourselves by surveying the field. If superior beings to us come to us, we’ll judge them as superior to us, that evident in their accomplishing what we cannot and in their ability if so inclined to dominate us. That likely would be a result of their greater cognition, the same measure that ups us the lower species. 

Here’s another line of argument in a question for you. When you see an ant or some roach or some spider, don’t you get rid of it, benignly or malevolently as you will, and perceive it as some lower form of thing that’s but pesky to you? IOW, don’t you as you go about feel yourself abrim with your own specialness compared to the dog or cat or rabbit or something in a zoo that you might see on or off a leash? I’d think you do in the sense that I think we all do. 

And if so, aren’t you arguing against your innate sense and experience of yourself, just the way people claim we have no free will when their deepest innate sense and experience of themselves tell them they’re chalk full of it?

L:

Okay, I guess it comes down to what Tyller Cowen often calls "mood affiliation", and the whole "superior", "dominant", etc. mood isn't one I'm drawn to. I get rid of creepy-crawlies when I can, but just because I don't like them -- it would seem absurd to me to compare myself to them as "lower". Nor do I feel abrim with my specialness in seeing other mammals -- you're projecting. But regardless of mood, the main thing I think is quite important is simply that the human is not some kind of being that's above or out of nature, and in that sense it's worth emphasizing our own animality.

Me:

Perhaps a happy resolution.

I agree with your last thought on what’s important. 

I’ll leave the rest of it for two reasons: I’d basically be repeating myself; and let’s not poke this happy resolution and risk saddening it.

Cheers, buddy. 

And a shout out from George ‘the Animal’ Steele, the British Bulldog and the Junkyard Dog, pro rasslin’ greats no longer with us. 

Marilyn Bowering’s Poem Cove And My Note On It

Cove

Marilyn Bowering

You, age, you are not cheerful,

Though we don’t know how to avoid you.

—Dòmhnall mac Fhionnlaigh nan Dàn 

The cove of my heart

where the swans swam,

the sun glassed

and alive on the waves.

A boat scraped ashore,

and friends now distant,

stepped onto an island.

Seated under the tree-roofed sky,

the hills to uphold me,

the mist for company,

and a dog on watch,

what could be better?

Traffic sullies the quiet,

the trees empty of birdlife:

I will not say more about age,

but why take everything

by force,

and leave us blind

to the Milky Way?

Comment mine:

A cove is a small sheltered bay. So the poet speaks of a cove of her heart, a place about which she feels intimately  reminiscent. She speaks of it within the context of the saying heading the poem, about the inexorable advance of not-to-be-cheered aging.

Note the shifting verb tenses through the poem from past to present.

The poet reminisces fondly about scenes from that cove. But then, after the first sentence, she recalls hearing a boat scraping the shore of an island, I presume a different place from the cove, which introduces a discordant note. And so nostalgic reminiscence gives way to her remembered sad sense of distant friends who stepped onto “an island,” “island” suggesting distance and estrangement and leading to the poet now being alone. 

Now, reminiscing gives way to present description: the poet is sheltered by trees; supported by the hills; the mist, sadly, is her company; her dog watches. What, she asks, could be better, a question tinged with both present contentment and lonely sadness. What could be better, the answer may be, what once was. 

Still, even if nothing is better, her moment of contentment gives way to the sadness of aging in the midst of modern development altering her heart’s cove. The poet notes the traffic sullying, that is to say, befouling, “the quiet” and “the trees empty of bird life.” So, no longer, it seems, do swans swim in the cove. No longer does the poet feel the sun “glassed and alive on the waves.” One would have to feel more alive oneself to feel and perceive that.

But, she says, she will speak no longer of aging. Rather, she confronts the violence, “force,” of endings taking all away and leaving us insensate within and to our galaxy. 

Not for nothing does the poet refer to it as the “Milky Way,” which metaphor, after all, is humans making localizing poetry out of our surrounding galactic vastness, as if the galaxy was a bucolic path somewhere pleasantly nearby . This poetry making, and all else, will be taken away from us. 

So the poem ends, does it not, with a final, piercing question of lament, a final, brief cri de couer?

A Short Note On The Last Lines Of William Blake’s Poem The Little Black Boy

 On that last line, I guess the assumption is that the little white boy, going in, will think of the little black boy as the other, or an other. 

The very last line follows a sequence of lines when, in the little black boy’s projection of what will be, of what he has learned from his mother, they are free from the clouds of their skins, black and white, and they then frolic like lambs—white things: they “joy.”

But the little white boy even then is still immersed in his innocence. He needs the little black boy to shade him until he can bear God’s heat such that he can get to bear the heat, be closer to God, lean in joy upon their “fathers knee.” 

Then the little black boy, seeming to replicate his mother’s nurturing of him, will stroke the little white boy’s silver hair, in a continued loving and generous way. So that then, the little white boy, now having accommodated experience, which is to say, the heat, will see that the little black boy is just like him and will then love the little black boy. 

So, on this way of seeing it, the little white boy is being brought along to understand the holy truth of their essential sameness and then to love the little black boy all thanks to the little black boy’s loving, nurturing generosity.

What strikes me, though, following the sequence of the these concluding lines this way, is that they are shot through with terribly biting bitterness compared to the unstinting reality then of slavery and whites’ view of blacks as inferior to them. Which also lays in heart breaking poignancy along with the bitter irony given what the little black boy imagines as against the impregnably harsh reality of things.

My Savage Dislike Of David Fincher’s Movie, Mank

 Well, my cinephile friend, here’s a harshly opposite take. We saw two different films.

I wrote this to a friend:

....Thanks Larry.

Well, you only have a solid 20 minutes you’ll never get back. I have about 130 of them. The “craft” and the “techniques” of the movie meant 0 to me. It’s an inert film and I had to force myself to watch it, my trouble being the longer I watched it, the more I felt like I had invested myself in it and, so, was determined to see it through. Generally, it repeats itself, sometimes seems confusing and is dull.

Basically, I just didn't like any of the characters, including Mank. Well, maybe the secretary. And as for the endless smart-alecky one-liners, I think the screen writers need to learn that less is more. I’m unclear what the audience is to get from it, much less its takeaway besides maybe some admiration for its showy craft. It’s such a talky movie,  seemingly made by someone insistent on relaying a mess of detail.

So much mushy padding. For me, the film sinks into its abundant windy talking, which immobilizes the movement of things, whether giving us once-(in)famous men or the governor’s race. The cold emotionlessness of it all, matched by the hazy black and white, helps inform the inertness.

I guess Fincher thought he had to pay homage to Citizen Kane by also doing fancy-schmancy, to borrow your words, technical things. But they didn’t mean anything to me in Kane either, a film I dislike. Also, for me, Mank, to repeat, is an exercise in showy inertness. As you say, “a pack of quipping sleazebags mouthing off in choreographed one-liners, fancy-shmancy camera angles, back and forth story line  and of course the usually pretentious black and white.”

The film comes across to me overall like a washed out made for TV movie. As for you, the black and white and white doesn’t  serve it well for me either, only enhances how maddeningly dull and faded it all is. As you say, the characters are off putting, basically uninteresting when not repulsive. 

The scenes between “Mank” and Hearst’s squeeze, Marion Davies, which even the very few panning critics hail, seem staged, uninteresting and unnatural to me, as does the scene when the drunken Mank shocks everybody at Hearst’s costume party with his drunken story of Hearst as a failed Don Quixote. I simply fit that scene into my overall distaste for the movie and the characters. 

The whole thing with Upton Sinclair’s shot at becoming governor is distracting.

And how ironic it is that the scene involving the roomful of brilliant wits,  Kaufman, Perelman, Hecht and the others, including Mank, falls flatter than a collapsed soufflé. Nothing said by any of them is memorably sharp or witty. 

I didn’t fast forward anything. I figured that for whatever penance I have to do in this life, I’d get a head start on it by submitting myself fully to the film’s 2 hours plus...

I’d give it 5.2 out of 10. 

P.S.  The organ grinder and the monkey parable is big in Mank. He’s the monkey. But, metaphorically, whom does Mank think he forces to play music when he dances? Hearst, it seems, but why? What does Mank falsely imagine he forces Hearst to do, the way the monkey in the parable thinks he forces his guy to play music because he dances? I see 0. Does the parable even work?

As I have it, the point of the parable is that the monkey delusionally thinks the organ grinder plays because he, the monkey, dances when the truth is the reverse. In the movie, near the end, Hearst relays the parable in full text to Mank.

So, I guess it can be seen in different ways in relation to the movie.

As I see it, Mank is the monkey. I’m not sure who the organ grinder is, though I think it’s likely Hearst. (I can see an argument that it’s Welles, and even an argument that Welles is the monkey and Mank is the grinder.) But if Hearst is the organ grinder, I can’t for the life of me see what Mank might falsely think he’s doing that makes Hearst, in the parable’s terms, play music on his organ to Mank’s dancing. 

One further thought: maybe there’s a case to be made that Hearst is the monkey thinking he can control Mank, use him for his own entertainment, while Mank, in writing a screenplay for a movie that builds Hearst down into Kane, acknowledged by many to be the greatest movie ever made, in that sense gets the last word...