Finn
by Jon Clinch
[spoiler warning]
Eight months after putting Finn aside I took the novel up again and finally finished this dark and incredibly creative novel. Jon Clinch tells the back story of Pap Finn, following faithfully much of Mark Twain’s narrative in Huckleberry Finn: we see Judge Thatcher, Widow Douglas, the Preacher. Interestingly, Huck is but a shadow in this story. Finn’s family is wealthy, staid, and racist in the manner of the South during the 1860s. Throughout the novel Finn is simultaneiously drawn to and repulsed by a former slave, Mary. Finn’s self-hatred takes the form of vicious abuse; Finn’s father is a judge who disowns Finn for taking up with Mary.
True to my earlier post on November 2, 2009, the novel continued in a raw and brutal manner.The novel opens with a gruesome scene: a black and bloated corpse floats down the Mississippi, covered in blowflies. This image will continue to haunt the novel and, in bits and pieces we learn that Finn has murdered and flayed the woman in an effort to rid himself of what he sees as his essential weakness–miscegenation. In a complicated twist on Twain’s work, Mary is Huck’s mother. Huck Finn is black.
In his author’s note, Clinch references an scholarly work by Shirley Fisher Fishkin, “Was Huck Black?”. Fishkin’s premise is based largely on Huck’s dialect, which was more black vernacular than Southern white, and the fact that Huck seemed to be based on one or two black children Twain knew. While audacious, the re-reading of Twain’s work made this novel compelling.
But Finn’s rationalization of his murder of Mary, the encroaching insanity of his alcoholic delirriums, his participation in the brutal rape of a young black boy, and his imprisonment of Huck are written almost poetically, only adding to the the novel’s horror. Here is Clinch after Finn begins his dismemberment of Mary: “Fastidious in his methods, he arranges each portion upside down or inside out, its inner surface made outer to show red and slick and fibrous but never allowed to reveal the dark curse of its hidden face. He arranges the pieces thus to speak of death and death only … as if by such transformation he can alter all that has gone before and begin anew, clean and pure and washed in the indiscriminate blood.” Finn–homeless, dirt poor, abusive, alcoholic–seems to have no trace of humanity left. Yet it is Judge Finn–respected, educated, wealthy–who chills the reader perhaps even more. For in facing his mortality, the aging Judge Finn summons his son with one last request–that Finn murder “The creature. The child. The boy” because “I cannot tolerate my blood passing through mulatto veins … I am relying on you to end the life of that bastard creature. And bring me evidence.” The Judge’s blood runs cold in Pap’s veins.
Some sort of justice (or perhaps it’s just more violence) is meted out at the novel’s end–another black woman ties Pap to the rape of her son and kills him in his sleep … with the same knife that flayed Huck’s mother. Inventive and audacious–difficult to read–but in the end, Finn is well worth the effort.
This is my symphony 