Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with a memorable and frequently unheeded warning:
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
There’s no good way to talk about James, Percival Everett’s retelling of Huck Finn, without considering the many ways critics have looked for (or bemoaned the absence of) morals and motives in Twain’s novel since it was published in 1885. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of ways in which people have approached Huck Finn over the years:
The Moralizing Lens. This method asks the question: “Will Huck Finn provide proper moral education for a young reader?” It’s not hard to see why the type of person who would ask this question would focus their attention on the satirical, picaresque sections of the novel and find them immoral or obscene. Huck’s independence and rejection of communal norms simply reinforces the novel’s vulgarity. Jim is at best ignored in this reading, at worst viewed as stolen property contributing to Huck’s delinquency. These are the folks that were working to get Huck Finn banned back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I would argue that they are missing the forest for the trees.
The Great American Novel Lens. Here the question is: “How does Huck Finn capture the essential qualities of the American spirit?” Instead of seeing the novel as particularly episodic or satirical, the whole trip down the river becomes a heroic journey. This interpretation focuses on how Huck’s growth embodies a kind of mythic American individualism. This reader’s favorite line in the novel? “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” In this reading, Jim exists as a prop that allows Huck to grow and change. Any harm done to Jim along the way can be casually shrugged off; you can’t hurt a prop. This sort of reader is highly protective of the Western canon, typically blind to the need for a diversity of perspectives and voices.
The Racial Lens. A version of the moralizing lens for a different, more modern age. Its goal is to determine an answer to the question: “How damaging is the racism contained within Huck Finn?” It’s possible to approach this question by considering the damage done by racism to the character of Jim; the racial lens also demands that we consider the damage done by the racist language and racist events of novel to the children reading it. Here the focus is on racial epithets, the use of dialect, and the dehumanization of Jim, who exists as something of a symbol of oppression. This lens has given us an updated version of Huck Finn that replaces the N-word with “slave.” Your views on the politics of this sort of thing may vary, but as a way of interpreting literature, I’d argue that we’re once again missing the forest for a very different set of trees.
The Relational Lens. Paradox is at the core of literary analysis, and this approach focuses on the various paradoxes and contradictions in the plot and creation of Huck Finn. I’d posit the question: “Why does the novel Huck Finn (plot, motives, morals and all) seem to be at war with itself?” To answer this question requires a focus on the relationship between Huck and Jim, both the transformative power of the novel and its many flaws, particularly in the final chapters. This reading is, to a certain extent, an attempt to reconcile methods two and three by rejecting the contrasting impulses to glorify or demonize Twain’s novel.
George Saunders’ wonderful essay, “The United States of Huck,” embodies this fourth method. Just as Twain was approaching something transcendent about race and parentage and love and loyalty, Saunders argues that:
Some part of Twain realized what he had brought himself to the brink of, and great talent that he was, he did not tarry on the brink of that cliff, or pretend that there was no cliff, or that he was not standing on the edge of it: instead he ran at high speed back the way he’d come, causing a disaster, but one that is on as grand a scale as the novel itself.
And so we are left with the ending of Huck Finn, where Huck abdicates to the whims of Tom Sawyer, Jim is dehumanized once more, and only some nifty deus ex machina can save the day.
It’s easy wonder why no one has previously attempted to retell Huck Finn from the point of view of Jim, as Percival Everett does in James. There are some stunning works of literature written from the point of view of a minor character in a major work. My favorite is Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, which recasts Jane Eyre from the point of view of Antoinette Cosway, the mad wife Mr. Rochester has locked away in his attic. The problem that Everett encounters is one of artistic freedom: Jim is constantly speaking and acting and part of the action of Huck Finn in a way that Antoinette is not in Jane Eyre. How much of Jim’s story can you create anew when he has to appear in certain places and act in certain ways? This notion of literary freedom parallels nicely with the question of human freedom that is so essential to Jim’s story; Everett defines it as the opposite of slavery in this lovely moment near the end of the novel:
“Looks like you’re my slave for a little while.”
This offended him. “I’m no slave.”
“Do you want to be rowing?” I asked. “No,” I supplied his answer. “Are you getting paid for rowing? No Are you rowing because you’re afraid of me and what I might do to you? Yes, Judge Thatcher.”
“I’m no slave.”
I pointed the barrel of the pistol at his face. “Row faster,” I said.
This problem of literary freedom is pervasive in the first section of James. We follow Jim around as he dutifully shows up to be tricked by Huck and Tom, bitten by a snake, and tricked again by Huck when they are separated on the river. You can feel Everett tire of this sort of thing; even his characterization of Jim feels flat. At one point, he reflects on the disconnect between how Jim (representing Everett) and Huck (representing Twain) view the adventure:
Huck told me the story of the feuding Shepherdsons and Grangerfords with much relish, about the ongoing battle between the families, about how he’d been taken in. Exhausted, I listened without much interest.
And then, without much warning, James diverges sharply from the events of Huck Finn. Jim and Huck are once again separated, and, delighting in his sudden freedom from the source text, Everett begins inventing characters and scenarios that bring to mind the sharp satire of the original while remaining focused on the issues that likely drew him to this project in the first place. It felt to me like the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the film switches from black and white to color: here we are at last, here’s something new. I caught myself wondering if Everett had done it on purpose: write the first section that tracks more closely to Huck Finn so that it pales in comparison with the next, Jim’s section, and shows that it should have been his story all along.
This is a reminder that James is as much a critical rereading of Huck Finn as it is anything else, and Everett’s critique lands solidly in the domain of the racial lens. He spends a great deal of narrative space addressing all the problems that the racial lens cares about and adding a few of his own: dialect, dehumanization, racist language, blackface, the hypocrisy of the Enlightenment. In doing so, it feels like Everett is speaking directly to the folks in camp two: look at how your Great American Novel has whitewashed history, look at what it’s missing.
However, in emancipating Jim from the action of Huck Finn, Everett creates a problem for anyone who wants James to tackle the relational problems of the fourth lens. He simplifies some of the complexity of the relationship between Jim and Huck with a twisty plot device, and then banishes Huck from much of the remainder of the book. There are other characters, of course, but there is nothing to replace what happens to Huck in Huck Finn and so a great deal of what makes the original novel compelling and challenging and worth it even with all its flaws is lost. Jim’s last words to Huck in James are mundane, unmemorable, they say nothing about the relationship between the pair.
Ironically, at the end of the novel Everett finds himself boxed into the same kind of corner as Twain was at the end Huck Finn. Saunders, in “The United States of Huck,” lays it out in this way:
[W]hat should happen is something deeply sad. Jim cannot escape, not for long, and Huck cannot remain unpunished for having helped Jim escape: the country Twain has made is too cruel and sure of itself and methodological in its slavery for either of these things to happen. And Twain understood the book—as we do—to be a comic novel, and the prospect of Jim being sold down the river or lynched, and Huck being bullwhipped and/or sent to a reformatory, say, does not gibe with our expectations of a comic novel, where violence happens only to side players, and generally off-camera, and usually because they deserve it.
Everett’s novel depicts far more acts of brutality and violence than Twain’s, but no matter how far he’s traveled from the source material, it’s hard to imagine him disposing of Jim and Huck in such a manner. And so he replaces one flawed ending, a fantasy of Tom Sawyer’s imagination, with one of his own, a fantasy of Jim’s.
To answer the question at the top, James is clearly a substantial literary event; any attempt to retell as story as embedded in the American psyche as Huck Finn is as a matter of course. If the point of this novel is to get a lot of people to read it as “a necessary corrective to both literature and history” (to quote Ann Patchett’s blurb on the back cover), well, goal accomplished. But as a work of art the lack of some deeper moral center was a real problem for me. Huck Finn has made a lot of readers uncomfortable over the years; you don’t try to ban works unless you find them deeply unsettling. James will make people sad and angry and at times a little hopeful, but in a way that likely leaves them more comfortable in how they see the world, rather than less so.
In my view the novel was quite wanting as a novel.
As a polemic, or at least a didactic work, it was successful. The gag is clever -- let's find out what Huck Finn would have been like from Jim/James's point of view. But once that's been established as an idea, the novel rests on the laurels of clever idea.
In particular, the idea that slaves were perfectly adept at the language skills and philosophical works associated with the white families is absurd and distracting to the point of leaving me disinterested in the rest.
I would also argue that it was counterproductive. A novel that shows me how slave life was terrible accomplishes something, and there are many such novels. A novel that says "You don't even know what secret things were going on that white literature would never publish" falls down because those things were not actually occuring. It's almost comforting to imagine that slaves all had a parallel diction. That would have been easier for them, and almost indicate that their lives had more hope. In reality, slaves did not get to know what the Enlightenment thinkers had to say, and did not have any language but that which they could work out for themselves, rather than constituting some secret society of so-called received English.
Similarly, the more dramatic reveals, such as Huck being James's son, were done for the theme, not for the plot. I find writing that sacrifices one for the other tedious.