This is part of Luker and Sorcia’s “Back to School Special” month of titles. If you’d like us to rip a new hole in something particularly awful you recall from school-days of yore, put it on our Suggestions Page or in the comments! Also, don’t forget to vote on Luker’s last name!
Fuck Hinn – a story of racism and cross-dressing written in elitist vernacular, with under-developed themes of homoeroticism.
Punch him the fuck out, Jim.
By Sorcia MacNasty
Oh, this book. I don’t know what god-awful (and probably male) powers in the universe got together and decided to mind-rape the fuck out of a generation, but I had to read this goddamn thing 4 times before I was 22. That’s 4 times too many, loyal readers. If you didn’t have to read it, you’re probably Canadian/European, home-schooled, well-adjusted or some combination of those things. I personally believe that it’s wide-spread in American schools simply because crotchety old department heads of public school English departments get their jollies from allowing the N-word back into the classroom in an official capacity. You stay KKKlassy, public schools.
Spoiler Alert for any lucky soul who has escape this nonsense! Ok, we get Huck Finn, a filthy youth clearly in the pay of Samuel Clemens, since he opens the story with a foreal plug for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Thanks for the lesson in marketing, ya douche. Then he SUMS UP Tom Sawyer for us. God. Really?! Long story short, Huckleberry has been adopted by a kindly widow, inherited a pile of gold stolen from robbers and is chafing under the Widow’s well-meaning efforts to turn him into less of a filthy urchin than he is. Naturally, he resents this. I guess we’re suppose to side with him or laugh at him (Twain goes out of his ever-loving way to make Huck appear as superstitious and ignorant as humanly possible, because I guess under-educated abused children of alcoholics are hilarious?) but it’s hard when you’re distracted by the N-word being thrown around like pinata candy.
Anyhow, he gets kidnapped by his dad, fakes his own death and hooks up with Jim, a runaway slave, whereupon they raft down the Mississippi River together and have ridiculous “adventures.” Wocka-wocka — Huck dresses like a girl! (Just like Tom did in Tom Sawyer — what the good hell, Twain? You need to tell us something?) These “adventures” allow Twain the opportunity to heartlessly mock all walks and forms of Southerners, good and bad alike, including cruel lampoons that make fun of poems written for DEAD CHILDREN. Nice. Defenders of Twain say that he is deliberately trying to exploit the failures of Reconstruction, which is fine, except that the lazy bastard never bothers to suggest how to actually correct or escape the situation. He just criticizes the shit out of everything and we’re all supposed to be “Har-dee-har-har!” He was like a 19th-century Glen Beck, and just as humorous.
Keep in mind that this whole thing was written by a financially-inept tool who fame-whored his way back into good credit-standing, even lecturing while his daughter died of fucking meningitis while visiting her childhood home — the one her dad thoughtfully lost to outstanding debt. Where’s the mockery of dead kids now, Clemens?
There is one good character and one good moment in this book. Jim, the runaway slave, is both smarter and kinder than any other character, and also provides the few moments of genuine humor (i.e. not Minstrel Show in quality), usually when he’s fucking with Huck. He’s also the only one on the raft who has a good reason for running away, since he’s a SLAVE. The one good moment is when Huck finally (and I do mean FINALLY, it only takes the little sonofabitch 31 chapters to get there) decides to NOT turn Jim into the authorities despite the law-breaking involved in harboring a runaway slave. He doesn’t actually decide that slavery is wrong, of course, but he does realize: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” – hell being better than turning over your best pal to be lynched (Twain 202). And that’s a pretty profound moment. If the book ended right there, we’d be gang-busters.
Unfortunately, what follows gets off-the-chain ludicrous instead. From Chapter 34 to the end, mother-fucking Tom Sawyer shows back up (there is even MORE mistaken identity… Seriously, did Twain have any other goddamn tricks in his bag from creative writing class?!) and the reader is treated to a slap-stick account of the two boys torturing the good-shit out of poor Jim, who is locked in a cabin, awaiting punishment for his running away. What the Fuck, Huck? You’d rather go to hell than turn in your pal, but Tom shows up and you’re totally cool with putting rats and snakes in his cabin?!
There is all kinds of stupid little boy pranking throughout the last ten chapters, leaving any sensible reader exasperated, confused and annoyed. How do they get away with still teaching this shit in schools? Twain is happy to allow the boys to complete revert to a level of immaturity that is baffling, and, in the light of Huck’s newfound humanity, depressingly pathetic. It’s impossible to draw a decent lesson or moral, because Tom KNOWS that Jim has been freed all along and is still happy to devise tortures for the man while he waits, psychologically tormented by the knowledge he might be branded or even lynched for running away. The only good part is that Tom does, in fact, get shot. Unfortunately, he lives.
In sum: Mark Twain just made you sit through 30 chapters of excrutiatingly boring 19th-century hijinks, and when he finally bequeaths a decent moral, he reverts right back to even more preposterous hijinks. For God’s sake, WHY?! The only explanation I can come up with is that he was a complete and utter LAZY ASS. Twain at his desk: “Oh, man, my brain is tired from writing a few compelling and moralistic sentences. Better get back to the cartoon bullshit. Immortalized literature — here I come! BWAHAHAHAHA!” And then I picture him tossing back his shaggy head in maniacal laughter before inviting Tesla over to talk about coils.
SO, what is billed as a poignant and funny bildungsroman is in fact a pack of lies. There is no “coming of age” when the hero reverts back to childhood, jackass. Funny? I guess, if you completely hate yourself. Poignant? Sure, for misanthropic recluses. Whatever good parts of this book that were initially celebrated were first noticed by predominantly white male critics who waxed philosophic about Twain’s message about boyhood and freedom. Fine. I get that times change regarding values and ideals, especially in literary trends. But why on earth are we still shoving this particular, and very convoluted message down teenage throats? Idiots will tell you: Oh, it’s such a good story about Racism/Reconstruction/Vernacular language/Coming of Age.
I beg to fucking differ. You want a good book about racism? Read Frederick Douglas or Ralph Ellison. You want a good book on the Reconstruction? Read Jubilee by Margaret Walker. Want to read dialect and high-quality dialogue? Read anything by Kate Chopin. Need an honest coming-of-age story? Good fucking christ — take your pick! And really, I am pretty sick of reading about racism and the Reconstruction from any Old, Dead, WHITE guy. There are too many alternatives, and we are doing students and the literary canon a disservice by still including this tripe.
Some particularly absurd lines:
– “I don’t take no stock in dead people.” (33)
You and everyone whose seen The Sixth Sense, Huck honey. Seriously, though, Huck is so fucking superstitious that this line is just patently dumb. It’s Twain’s sad attempt to show how silly the Bible seems to young people — ooooh, what a radical idea, Twain! Tell us more about the malaise of teenagery and their distaste for adults being boring. Blah.
– “Git up and hump yourself, Jim! There ain’t a minute to lose!” (81)
Har. This is funny because I’m a twelve-year old.
– “I seen it warn’t no use wasting words — you can’t learn a nigger to argue. So I quit.” (95)
Wow, Twain, thanks for the lesson in hateful racial assumptions.
– “Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.” (216)
Oh, the irony. He says this about two assholes who get tarred/feathered and right before he viciously goes along with Tom’s plan to make Jim’s imprisoned life a complete hellish misery.
Huck and Mark Twain TRIED to be good. They really did, and they even were, for a little space in a misguided time. But it’s just like Homer Simpson said, “Son, you tried your hardest and you failed. The lesson here is, never try.”
“because I guess under-educated abused children of alcoholics are hilarious?”
Why the hell do you think I’m funny? (:
Fair enough. Why haven’t you been immortalized in fiction yet?!
I *still* remember the time we had to read part of Huck Finn out loud in English class – and in the whole excerpt, there was only one instance of the n-word, and guess who got to read that section? And guess who the whole rest of the class (including the teacher) snickered at for refusing to say that word? Assholes. And yeah, HF sucks, although I only had to suffer through it in two classes, so I guess I got off easy.
My, what a thoughtful group of troglodytes you went to school with. That book should never be read out loud — it’s pure excrement. My husband went to school with a guy who insisted on referring to Jim as “N****r Jim” the entire class and the teacher didn’t bother to correct him until like the test date. Why, oh why does this terrible fucking book somehow allow latent racism to rear its ugly head?!
What the fuck?! Are you serious?! It’s like fucking “Heart of Darkness” the entire thing is a bunch of trite that paints Africans as total savages, and yet we still read it alongside fucking “Cry the Beloved Country”. Do they intend to instil hatred in the hearts of African American Students, towards the English Department– do they hope to further encourage the skin head students to remain idiots? Do they hope to give the rednecks an actual book to hold up to their beliefs.
That sort of shit is totally obsolete and shouldn’t even be under suggested reading. I don’t believe in censorship, but it seems a no-brainer that they’d simply remove the totally backwards and irrelevant literature from our core curriculum.
Toni Morrison wrote a great book a few years back called “Playing in the Dark” . In the book she discusses Huckelberry Finn and some other works. She concludes that “American” literature is frought with this kind of racism because: Caucasians NEED to have the contrast between free and unfree people to feel their own freedom. I agree with that. I think in some ways we are still dealing with these issues. The physical chains may be gone but there are all kinds of other unseen chains. Thes messages usually broadcast about Black people NOW is that we are lazy and oversexualized, and criminals. Just turn on BET any time of day.
Excellent remarks, makeitplain. I did read a portion of “Playing in the Dark” which no doubt underpinned this essay in some subconscious way. Your comment at the end, about black people being portrayed as over-sexualized, criminals, et al made me think of a critical essay I once read on the bizarre prevelence currently of male black actors dressing like women in fat suits in popular movies (see: Madea, Big Momma, Norbit, etc). I cannot recall the author, but the point was that white America is made content by seeing emasculated men (rendered further impotent by the fat suit, supposedly) as well as by other stereotypes, like you point out. Canonizing “literature” that does the same is just criminal.
Canadian – correct, not forced to read this book (phew). I did, however, watch the two part Disney movie… I feel ashamed.
You’re right Sass, this kind of ‘classic literature’ is way too far out of date to be ‘required material’.
I can’t understand why everyone thinks the canon can’t be changed. Or maybe aging English teachers just can’t be bothered with learning a new book to teach? Who knows….
If the teachers actually wanted us to understand the dilemma of the black man back in the primeval United States– why don’t we get to read any Frederick Douglass?! It’s like reading a tourist’s travel diary in hopes of getting the raw cultural experience of some foreign place– rather than reading the actual accounts of the kids who live there behind the scenes. I wish people would get it together.
But why would you change something that makes you feel as if you have power over others? The book keeps people’s minds enslaved (the teacher’s and the student’s unfortunately). Therefore I think there is little motivation to change it. We, the people, have to change it. We have to join school boards, the PTA whatever. This is great consciousness raising happening here, but now we have to go and do something.
Very true. I think that the younger members of our readership should also focus on staying aware of what their (future) children will be reading and WHY. Too often we leave things the way they are out of pure forgetfulness. When I was teaching public school, I refused to teach Twain, and I think a lot of other educators do the same with texts they find distasteful. You can’t be afraid to make a stand, and I hope the information here will help arm people with a new perspective to fight back against the old and out-dated.
But, book banning ultimately keeps the kids– like me– blinder than even the blindly written books. Blinder than Huck himself.
Hehehe, “Huck Himself”.
See what I mean?!
“Come back to the raft ag’in, Huck honey!”
fuck you huckleberry finn
Quite.
UPDATE: There is a book from 2007, “Finn” by John Clinch that is a scream. He writes the story from Huck’s father’s point of view, and it’s like a cross between Sling Blade and Faulkner. The author makes Huck a mixed-race child, making Huck’s latent racism all the more baffling.
You do realize that Twain injected the seemingly racist sentiments into the text for the very purpose of dismantling them? It’s like setting up his counter argument, and the actual meaning is buried beneath the southern speech and beliefs of the era. Honestly, Twain was quite intentionally presenting the reader with such racism with the very intent in having them come to their own realization of their wrongs–as does Huck! Jesus Christ! This entire novel was a commentary on racism, and how it is WRONG! He knew it was wrong. Huck was a product of his time and culture, yet through his own experiences comes to his own realization– Huck defies authority and civilization through out the novel, and he would rather be damned than give up his friend in the end. He believes that he is going to hell, but he would rather go to hell than betray Jim– he gives value to a person that is not even regarded as a person by most of their society! This is far from racist!
Woot, go Mixed Raced Children!
I love this sort of legit fan fiction!
Defo gonna Amazon this.
Well, YOU obviously haven’t read the book!
*sigh*
I think that Twain comes close to attempting a criticism of racism, but he bungles it. That’s the point/problem. He does not have any fucking follow-through. The passage you mention, about choosing hell? Sure, I would buy that if Twain actually had his chacter FOLLOW THROUGH. Instead, Tom Sawyer shows up and the last ten chapters is a nightmare cross between minstrel show and children’s book. Whatever Twain wanted to say (and I would argue that it’s futile to debate authorial intent about any text), he didn’t do it WELL. That’s my problem. There are much, much better books about race and the South. This one is just shitty, but we cling to it, I think, because it’s easy and it makes slow readers feel good about themselves.
Seriously, are we to simply assume he goes to hell? He’s already claimed that religion is bunk, and then he out and says ‘well, I’ll be damned so that an innocent man isn’t worked to death on my account’; this sounds like a lot! But, then HE’S ALREADY SAID RELIGION IS BUNK, SO HE ISN’T REALLY DOING IT AT THE COST OF ANYTHING!
Stop reading the sparknotes, Emily.
You obviously haven’t read this article! She says that Twain TRIED to be the big white hope, but failed.
Um, you do realize Twain was satirizing the antebellum South. The whole book, despite the comparatively weak last third, is an attack on racism. Why do you think Jim is the most likable character in the book? Maybe keep in mind historical context when reading a novel from 1885.
Also, your logic seems to be that if a work depicts racism, then the author must be racist and the work not worth experiencing. Using your logic, I watched Schindler’s List again and realized how anti-semitic Steven Spielberg is because the movie clearly depicts anti-semitism.
Indeed. I simply recognize that he fails miserably in his attempt at satire. You cannot judge just part of a book — you have to take the entire package, and the weak ending completely undermines any potentially positive message he might have inspired. Twain isn’t a racist because he depicts racism; he’s a racist because he was too fucking lazy to make a real stand in the face of racism (re: last 10 chapters). Perhaps you should work on your reading comprehension.
wow youre fucking stupid.
I will take that as a compliment from a retard who cannot spell “you’re” correctly. Get off the internet, asshat.
You obviously don’t know how to appreciate good literature… Twain was actually trying to SAY something that was WORTH it… Unlike you…
Oh, I appreciate good literature. Sorry you think that this piece of shit qualifies. It’s ok — head trauma is a serious issue. Hope you’re getting that looked at.
You guys speak of your younger readers and whatnot, but some of you people have the inability to write criticism with any kind of civility, often using foul language in every other sentence and in extremely vulgar ways. This kind of opposition will not get you anywhere, because you erase any credibility your statements may have had with your ridiculous language. To those of you who have the inability to express anger without cursing or saying nasty things about other people, grow up.
This is a humor blog, you retard. Sorry you failed to catch that. What’s ridiculous is believing that the Victorian-era determination of “bad” words is still a legitimate reason to not use profanity when you feel like it. Go shit in the ocean, asshat.