One way of depicting and defending Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, increasingly popular during the period of its hypercanonization which coincides with the Cold War, is as the slow moral epiphany of a white boy which mimics the (alleged) triumph of the United States over systemic racial oppression. The thrust of this popular reading, encountered by nearly everybody who set foot in a US school during the second half of the twentieth century, is succinctly summarized by the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, “Huck sees that Jim is a human being, and that Jim deserves to be free. Because of that, we know that Huck deserves our love. And so does America.”
This vapid, lazy, feckless interpretation of Twain’s novel is dispensed with almost instantly in Percival Everett’s James. Huck cannot discover James’ humanity nor the injustice of enslavement, because he intuitively recognizes both, and so Huck cannot become an avatar of young America heroically overcoming racial prejudice, entitled to the forgiveness, admiration, and even gratitude of the formerly enslaved. It is the first of the many critical controversies surrounding the source text which Everett is going to engage, and sometimes dispel, through his complex work of adaptation.
As Toni Morrison writes in the final lines of her 1996 introduction to the Oxford edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “For a hundred years, the argument that this novel is has been identified, reidentified, examined, waged and advanced. What it cannot be is dismissed.” For Morrison, Huckleberry Finn has become inextricable from its reception, from the mega-corpus of criticism which now surrounds it. Rather than bemoaning the harm critics have done in their ceaseless, often contradictory interpreting, Morrison makes the inextricability of the creative and critical acts the very definition of “classic literature.” The hypercanonical novel is like a monster catfish, omnivorous and impervious, metabolizing everything in its path, predators and all, a roaring river demon growing ever stronger.
Nowhere is the fusion of criticism and creative writing more literal than in the work of adaptation. In James, an adaptation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, every narrative choice Everett makes is always already a commentary upon Twain’s novel. And, as source text, it is evident that Everett accepts Morrison’s definition. He’s read the criticism. James will be many things to many readers, among them a series of position statements in Twain Studies which will be instantly recognizable to scholars in the field, but even to many who have read critical editions of the novel or encountered it as students through the pedagogical practice of “teaching the conflicts” as advocated by Gerald Graff. In several cases, questions raised by living critics become crucial catalysts for Everett’s narrative.
