the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

I've been reading a lot. It's my new time-sink, but it can be enriching, so I view it as a step in a positive direction, even when I take a break from Paradise Lost or The Crying of Lot 49 to read Twain's Excerpts from Adam's Diary or, today's thriller, Huckleberry Finn.

I've never read Huck Finn. My boss at the Academy--Tom McGuire, a man I respect and admire more than I can or should express because people tend to get embarrassed when you tell them how powerfully they have affected your life--mentioned to me long ago that Huck Finn was one of the great works of literature that plays on the fisher king myth/motif.* When he mentioned Huck Finn, I said I hadn't read it. He stopped and stared at me for a long minute. Then he clarified. I confirmed.

* Other well-known works that play with the same idea are Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Homer's Odyssey, and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Months later, when we were talking about the possibility of my applying for a PhD, he told me that he was concerned with my preparation for such a program (squeezed into 3 years, no less) because I had not read some basics of American literature, like Huck Finn. He was probably right, too. I wasn't inclined to argue with him then, and I'm still not. There are all sorts of gaps in my reading experience. Embarrassing ones, considering how much of my life and education has been committed to appreciation and enjoyment of good literature.

I go through Mark Twain phases. The last one, which I went through when I first arrived here, consisted of my reading The Innocents Abroad, and starting something else by him, I think, but getting bored and moving to something different, as I am wont to do. Innocents, incidentally, is brilliant and almost sinfully funny. It is also nonfiction; he took a cruise of several months aboard a steamer from New York to visit ports in Europe and the holy land, and wrote a series of letters to a magazine as he went. Those letters became The Innocents Abroad. If you like Twain even a little but you've never read this book, amend your oversight immediately.

Anyhow...I recently got heavily back into reading. I tried and tried to read Frazer's The Golden Bough (the 1922 one-volume version, only 800 pages, and failed. The anthropological observations/myths were engaging enough, but I simply couldn't digest the social Darwinist assumptions needed to float the whole theory, so I finally just gave up and put the book back on the shelf. I read a bunch of borrowed books--memoirs, mostly--then picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez), which I loved. Then I noticed that I have a copy of the Autobiography of Mark Twain.

Of course, you know I had to go there immediately.

In case you're out of the loop on this, he wrote his autobiography (dictated most of it, actually) with the requirement that it not be published (or selected parts of it, at least) until 100 years after his death. That magical year was 2010. Admit it: the very notion is intriguing, isn't it? :)

He struggled for a while with how to approach the project. He finally settled on what was, at the time, a crazy idea. From the Introduction:

As he put it in June 1906, he had finally seen that the “right way to do an Autobiography” was to “start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.”

That's right. He did what Dave calls a "core dump." And it's wonderful to read. It's random but so very...Twain.

Mark Twain, it seems, invented the blog. You may, if you wish, read the whole of Volume 1 online here.

When I finished that (Volume 1), I wanted more twain, so I read a couple of essays and shorts, then struck out into Huck Finn. It's high time I corrected this oversight in my education, you know.

I'm only about a quarter of the way through, but I have to say...I don't really care for it. I'm fine with the perspective, the language, and the dialects; they fit the period and the characters. I like the characters of Huck Finn and Jim, as well, of course. What rubs me the wrong way are some of the philosophies that Twain inserted in the form of dialogue. They don't fit. The dialogue is unnatural and obviously contrived. Twain clearly just needed to get something out of his teeth so he flossed right there in front of everyone.

Understand that I enjoy philosophy as much as or more than the next nutjob. What I abhor are thinly-veiled attempts to pass philosophy off as dialogue in fiction--particularly when they have nothing to do with the story, as was the case here.

I speak of the bit where Jim decides to tell Huck about the time he was "rich" and "invested" money here and there until he lost it all. Buried in this "dialogue" is a snipe at preachers who promise ten- or twenty- or a hundred-fold returns on money given to the Lord. Obviously, I find the sentiment itself worthy, but it simply did not belong in the story, there or anywhere. When I read that, the crotchety and cranky Sam Clemens interrupted the flippant and skeptical Twain, and it wasn't pretty.

Maybe I notice stuff like this because I do precisely that, and seeing someone else do something I hate in myself is uncomfortable. Maybe.

So anyway...I'll finish Huck Finn. It'll be a quick read. But...the more Twain I read, the more I am convinced that his true skill was in nonfiction/memoir sort of work--not in fiction.

What do y'all think?

d