class talk

Okay this might not be related to electronic literature at all, but I hope you guys can bear with me as i rant about Huck Finn again.

As i read the article by Leo Marx, i was wondering if Twain's way of ending Huck Finn can ever be justified. We all know how the ending goes - Huck subscribes to Tom's fantasies, and the moral purpose of the book seemed to disappear altogether. The ending appears to be disappointing, but is it truly unexpected?

If one is patient enough to read the book a second time, you'll find that the clues that hint toward this somewhat tragic ending are subtle, but they are present. A central theme of this book would be Twain's criticism of a decadent society - a society that appears pious and goes to church, but shoots and kills the next day. However, ruthless murders aside, we see genuinely good-natured people like the Phelps subscribing to this pseudo-religion as well. To me, their blindness to the crime of slavery is one of deliberate ignorance. Societal pressures have grained into their minds that slavery is the way the world works, but this notion might not have entered their hearts. Thus, people like the Phelps then turn to religion (or pseudo-religion) to desensitize their hearts to issues of racism; they continue doing good deeds and loving their neighbours so that they can see themselves as righteous. By doing so, they create for themselves a kind of self-righteousness that they can turn to, so as to avoid confronting the bigger question of racism and slavery. In a sense, they subscribe to a kind of make-believe to get by.

So, if the people of that time could subscribe to pseudo-religion to be at peace with their distorted notion of morality, why do we disallow Huck to return to Tom's world of make-believe at the end of the novel? Maybe this is Huck's way of dealing with the harsh reality of it all: that the ideals represented by the raft and his sound heart are impossible. In a way, it's like how Twain returns to the burlesque at the end of the novel after taking the reader through serious issues of morality - it was his way of dealing with reality. He brought up the real issues, but he didn't solve them.

[Clemens was able to] "point to what contradicts it in the facts; but not in order to abandon the genteel tradition, for (he had) nothing solid to put in its place." - George Santayana

Huimin and i were talking about this after one English class, and the conversation was about how we wouldn't mind being children again if we had the choice. Well, i guess that's subject to personal experience, but the point is that we all deal with reality in different ways. When people face a problem in real life, some of them shout it out, some of them indulge in computer games, some of them read a book, and some of them try to laugh it off. And we know some problems never get solved. In the same way, Twain embarks on the noble cause of tackling such problematic issues in Huck Finn; but when he realises that what he was saying then wouldn't appeal to his audience, he returns to the burlesque and reduces everything to a farce, in an effort to try and laugh everything off.

This is what i would like to think: you know when you say something and it turns out offensive to the other person, and then you try to laugh it off by saying you were just kidding, or by saying that the same applies to you? Well, that's perhaps how Twain felt. It's like a nervous laughter.

As for the electronic literature post, the video said something about form and content being separate? Well, in a remote sense, the form of Huck Finn may be appropriate, since Huck is now back where he came from, but the content does not favour this form at all. Haha but that's quite a remote point. Oh well.

-amelia