The Braindead Megaphone

by George Saunders

  The difference between Tom and Huck is that Huck believes in the reality of what he sees and feels, and Tom does not. Tom believes in what he has read in books, or, more correctly, in the concepts that have arisen from what he has read in books. Huck believes in the reality of the people and things he sees, whereas, to Tom, these things are only imperfect imitations of the people and things about which he has read. Because Huck believes that other people are real, he also believes in the reality of their suffering; he grieves when he hurts Jim, worries about the drunken rider at the circus, feels bad for betraying Miss Watson, and, most importantly, understands how much Jim needs his freedom. To Tom, Jim is not real, nor is Jim’s suffering; Jim’s suffering is simply an opportunity for Tom’s ego and cleverness to exert themselves. He prolongs and worsens this suffering by putting Jim through an insane ritual of escape à la those in Walter Scott novels (the low-comic riff that was Twain’s Apparent Narrative Rationale at that time) and by withholding from Jim the staggering truth: Jim has been free for most of the novel, because Miss Watson emancipated him on her deathbed.

  Tom and Huck, of course, correspond to different parts of their creator. Tom, perhaps, to that part of Twain that longed for acceptance from the Snooty East, and Superior Europe, and distrusted the Huck part—so crude, wild, backwoodsy, and unschooled. Literary characters can come only from their creator’s psyche, but in this case—maybe because Twain’s psyche was such a specimen psyche, and because he had such unfettered access to it—his personal binary was also a critical national one: Huck and Tom represent two viable models of the American Character. They exist side by side in every American and every American action. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn’t do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don’t come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs.

  But this is not what happens in Huck Finn.

  Instead, Huck-Growing becomes Huck-Stultified. His clarity and moral resolve fade and he becomes, if anything, more of a passive Sawyer-lackey than he was at the beginning of the book. Jim falls off the shelf of the human entirely. He allows himself to be bitten by rats, writes notes on the wall in his own blood, does not escape though there is a clear route of escape, participates in Tom’s idiotic rituals without a word of objection. Convinced of the holiness of Huck’s mission, we are forced to watch that mission reduced to a sickening vaudeville sketch.

  “Having only half-escaped the genteel tradition, one of whose preeminent characteristics was an optimism undaunted by disheartening truth,” Santayana wrote, “[Twain] returned to it.”

  LET’S BURN IT, THEN BAN IT, THEN BURN IT AGAIN

  Even before its publication, Huck Finn was at the center of a controversy involving one of its illustrations, which had been changed by an ornery typographer who put a certain part of Uncle Silas’s anatomy outside his pants rather than inside them, and made it look something like an angry duck. Original objections to the book itself centered around the issue of its crudeness. The book was a shocking portrayal of a white-trash boy who smoked, snuck out windows barefoot, sat around naked on a raft, smoked some more, told a bunch of lies, then openly expressed a desire to go to hell. Over the years, as the much-feared epidemic of young boys sneaking out of windows barefoot while smoking and wishing to go to hell never materialized, the crudity objection faded, replaced by another: the book and its author were racist. Or maybe just the book was racist. Or maybe the author was partly racist, which infected the book, which basically had its heart in the right place.

  In “Mark Twain and His Times,” Arthur G. Pettit paints a picture of Twain as a man who started out life a natural, enculturated racist and gradually grew out of it, or as out of it as his time and culture permitted. Twain was the son of a slav owner, in a town of slave owners. As a boy he saw his father administer beatings and floggings and once saw a fellow townsman crush a slave’s head with an iron bar. Near the real-life model for Huck Finn’s Jackson Island, young Clemens found the disemboweled body of a murdered slave, and at fourteen he witnessed the lynching of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Before and during the time of the Civil War, according to Pettit, Twain “ranted against ‘niggers’ and told a long series of popular jokes about ‘nigger odor,’ fried ‘nigger’ steaks, black sexual promiscuity, and the evils of miscegenation.” But by the 1880s Twain had changed; he made impassioned speeches against race brutality, paid the Yale tuition of several black students, became friends with Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. In short, his natural clearheadedness asserted itself on the issue of racial equality, and it was out of this spirit that Huck Finn came.

  But given Twain’s roots, it would be surprising if the book’s representation of blacks didn’t bear some evidence of its author’s journey. And it does. There are moments, even before the ending, when the “real” Jim—that is, the Jim we perceive through, or in spite of, Huck’s foreshortened first-person presentation of him—is not fully human but a minstrelish caricature, moments when we sense that somewhere in the back of Twain’s mind, some swaggering remnant of the Hannibal kid is cranking out stereotypical comic images of blacks for cheap laughs, images that Twain the Reformed is failing to fully reject. It is wholly appropriate that Jim be a believable slave, subject to all the restrictions, educational and otherwise, that that word implies, but there is no need for him to be an idiot. And there are places in the book where Jim is presented as simpleminded, almost retarded, and these places are in stark contrast to other places where we see him as an intelligent, kind, wary, adult runaway, doing his best to balance his natural goodness against his fear of recapture, his justifiable suspicion of Huck against his real affection for the boy.

  The questions about race in Huck Finn tend to center around the presence in the book of the word “nigger,” but my guess is that, if the book were free of the types of missteps described above, and if the ending weren’t such a fiasco, that word might not be such a problem. That is, if our wishful dream of the book (in which Jim is always fully human and three-dimensional, and in which Huck steadily and then definitively comes to understand this) had been perfectly realized, I think most readers would tolerate the n-word as an important and even essential indicator of character. It is crucial that we understand Huck as a possible nascent racist, and so he had better talk like one. Imagine a story about the possible salvation of a young misogynist, son of a radical woman-hater; the story is nonsense if that budding misogynist and his creepy father speak of women only in the purest and most enlightened terms.

  Having said that, I will also say that a writer who uses the n-word (which even in Twain’s day was understood to be derogatory) walks a fine moral line. He or she can do one of three things with the n-word (or other ethnic slurs, or gender pejoratives): (1) use it less than it would “actually” be used, that is, omit or decrease its use by people who might reasonably be expected, by virtue of their class or education or stupidity, to use it; (2) use it exactly as much as it “should” be used, that is, use it whenever it seems that a given character would indeed use it, and when its use is thematically essential; or (3) use it more than it would actually be used, that is, use it gratuitously, swaggeringly. Which was Twain doing? Was Twain swaggering? Do we detect any swaggering? If so, is this possible apparent swaggering only an accurate imitation of the actual ambient swaggering of his boyhood Hannibal? At this point
in the argument, one starts to get a nauseated, bean-countery feeling: Can we ever really know to what extent this man or his book was, or is, racist? When we identify racism in the book, aren’t we really just identifying racism in the culture out of which it came? Is it fair to expect Twain to have vaulted himself out of his own time and place and arrive, clean-booted and upright, in our own? Isn’t the book still funny and deep? Aren’t I actually enjoying it? How does one do the complicated math of Ultimate Racism: If we determine that, relative to our time, Twain was a 40 percent racist, while relative to his own, he was only a 12 percent racist, or was in fact a 0 percent racist—what do we know, really?

  And yet the question of race in Huck Finn matters very much, if you are the young black man or woman who, reading the book, is made uncomfortable or ashamed by it, or if, conversely, you are the young white man or woman who, reading the book, has some secret feelings of race superiority inflamed. It matters a lot, and it is very complicated. That the book is beautiful and thrilling is undeniable. That parts of it make the contemporary reader queasy is also undeniable. That the book and its author had an antiracist intent is also undeniable. That the author did not fulfill that intent as purely as he would have, had he been born in our time rather than his own, but with the exact same talent, having had exactly the same life experiences, is also undeniable, as well as completely nonsensical. We got Twain when we got him, and thank goodness we did, and God help the culture that pretends that earlier stupidities never happened and tries to eradicate all evidence of them.

  Maybe the best we can do is concede that the book is beautiful and difficult, and that its beauties and its difficulties are inseparably linked, and then try to understand (and teach) that the book’s racial problems can be dissected and understood narratively—that is, in terms of how stories are told and received—and that we are all empowered by the process of undertaking this sort of investigation. The problems with race in Huck Finn can best be understood as narrative problems, technical problems, and the process of discerning and understanding these technical problems is a noble process, and the ability to discern and understand these problems is an essential ability. In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that “Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people’s lives by helping to tell these stories,” it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.

  AT LAST I’M DONE, AND YOU CAN GO READ IT

  Art, at its best, is a kind of uncontrolled yet disciplined Yelp, made by one of us who, because of the brain he was born with and the experiences he has had and the training he has received, is able to emit a Yelp that contains all of the joys, miseries, and contradictions of life as it is actually lived. That Yelp, which is not a logical sound, does good for all of us. Chekhov said that the purpose of art is not to solve problems but to formulate them correctly, and in Huck Finn, Twain formulated our national problems in a joyful and madly funny and frightening Yelp that amounted to a national clearing of the throat. It is kind of insane, this book, but in the same way that tribal cultures immunize and strengthen themselves by sitting around watching some half-nutty shaman flail around spouting descriptions of his mad vision, we are improved by Twain’s great Yelp: it contains, in capsule form, all that is very right and very wrong with us, and amounts to a complex equation proving that our right and our wrong both proceed out of the same national energy. If the Yelp is a bit rough, off-pitch, and inconsistent in places, God bless him: at least he did it.

  As I’ve worked on this piece, an image has sometimes come to mind of Twain standing outside a jail, and inside the jail is A True American Literature. Twain, wearing, maybe, a top hat, takes a good hard crazy run at it, and knocks the shack down, and A True American Literature is suddenly free to wander about in the world. In the process, Twain’s hat is knocked awry, and his nose is broken, and pretty soon a crowd gathers, saying, “Jeez, Mark, your hat’s crooked and your nose is broken and your ending stinks and your book seems a little racist”—but damn it, there’s that fallen shack, and A True American Literature is now sauntering off into the woods, being eagerly tracked by all those Hungry American Writers, who have included, over the years, Salinger and Ellison and Faulkner and Hemingway and Morrison and Eliot and Bellow and Carver. Twain sacrificed his hat and his nose so the rest of us would have something good to track, and track it we have, all these years, and the tracking of it has helped us, I would argue, confront the very issues that make the book problematic: racism, timidity, denial, our national urge-to-the-genteel.

  Twain would like this, I think, this continuing struggle to understand his book. We have not had a writer as devoted to seeking out truth and outing lies. Huck Finn is a great book because it tells the truth about the human condition in a way that delights us. It is a great work of our national literature because, more than any book before or since, it locates itself squarely on our National Dilemma, which is: How can anyone be truly free in a country as violent and stupid as ours? The book still lives, because the question does.

  BUDDHA BOY

  WANT TO SEE A POSSIBLE MIRACLE? NO THANKS, I’M DOING MY TAXES

  Last December, I got an e-mail from my editor at GQ. A fifteen-year-old boy in Nepal had supposedly been meditating for the past seven months without any food or water. Would I like to look into this?

  I went online. The boy’s name was Ram Bahadur Bomjon. He was sitting in the roots of a pipal tree near the Indian border. The site was being overrun by pilgrims, thousands a week, who were calling this boy “the new Buddha.” He’d twice been bitten by poisonous snakes; both times he’d refused medicine and cured himself via meditation. Skeptics said he was being fed at night behind a curtain, that his guru was building himself a temple, that his parents were building themselves a mansion, that the Maoist rebels, in on the hoax, were raking in tens of thousands of dollars in donations.

  I e-mailed my editor back: I was pretty busy, what with the teaching and all, besides which Christmas break was coming up and I hadn’t been to the gym once the preceding semester, plus it would be great to, uh, get an early start on my taxes.

  Then we embarked on the usual Christmas frenzy, but I couldn’t get this boy off my mind. At parties, I noted two general reactions to the statement, Hey, I heard this kid in Nepal has been meditating uninterruptedly in the jungle for the past seven months without any food or water.

  One type of American—let’s call them Realists—will react by making a snack-related joke (“So he finally gets up, and turns out he’s sitting on a big pile of Butterfinger wrappers!”) and will then explain that it’s physically impossible to survive even one week without food or water, much less seven months.

  A second type—let’s call them Believers—will say, “Wow, that’s amazing,” they wish they could go to Nepal tomorrow, and will then segue into a story about a transparent spiritual being who once appeared on a friend’s pool deck with a message about world peace.

  Try it: Go up to the next person you see, and say, Hey, I heard this kid in Nepal has been meditating uninterruptedly in the jungle for the past seven months without any food or water.

  See what they say.

  Or say it to yourself, and see what you say.

  What I said, finally, was: This I have to see.

  NO NUMBER OF HOT ROLLS CAN STOP MY MONKEY-MIND

  Austrian Airlines is big on hot rolls. Red-clad flight attendants continually tout their hot rolls in the accents of many nations, including, one feels, nations that haven’t actually been founded yet. (“Hod roolz?” “Hat rahls?” “Hoot rowls?”) The in-flight safety video is troubling: It’s animated and feat
ures a Sims-like guy with what looks like a skinless, skeletal death’s-head who keeps turning to leer at a slim Sims lady who keeps looking away, alarmed, while trying to get her long legs tucked away somewhere so Death can’t see them. Later she slides down the emergency slide, holding a Sims baby, Death still pursuing her.

  Ancient Mariner–style, my seatmate, a Kosovar, tells me about a Serbian paramilitary group called the Black Hand that left a childhood friend of his on a hillside, “cut into tiny pieces.” During the occupation, he says, the Serbs often killed babies in front of their parents. He is kindly, polite, awed by the horrible things he’s seen, grateful that, as an American citizen, he no longer has to worry about murdered babies or hacked-up friends, except, it would appear, in memory, constantly.

  Story told, he goes off to sleep.

  But I can’t. I’m too uncomfortable. I’m mad at myself for eating two roolz during the last Round of Roolz, roolz that seem to have instantaneously made my pants tighter. I’ve already read all my books and magazines, already stood looking out the little window in the flight-attendant area, already complimented a severe blond flight attendant on Austrian Airlines’ excellent service, which elicited an oddly Austrian reaction: She immediately seemed to find me reprehensible and weak.

  On the bright side, only six more hours on this plane, then two hours in the Vienna airport and an eight-hour flight to Katmandu.

  I decide to close my eyes and sit motionless, to make the time pass.

  Somebody slides up their window shade and, feeling the change in light on my eyelids, I am filled with sudden curiosity: Has the shade really been lifted? By someone? Gosh, who was it? What did they look like? What were they trying to accomplish by lifting the shade? I badly want to open my eyes and confirm that a shade has indeed been lifted, by someone, for some purpose. Then I notice a sore patch on the tip of my tongue and feel a strong desire to interrupt my experiment to record the interesting sore-tongue observation in my notebook. Then I begin having Restless Leg Syndrome, Restless Arm Syndrome, and even a little Restless Neck Syndrome. Gosh, am I thirsty. Boy, is my breath going to be bad when this stupid experiment is over. I imagine a waterfall of minty water flowing into my mouth, a waterfall that does not have to be requested via the stern flight attendant but just comes on automatically when I press a button on the overhead console marked Minty Water.