23 1 / 2012
You go Toni Morrison, you go!
Morrison’s views on Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
“…it is significant that this novel which had given so much pleasure to young readers was also complicated territory for sophisticated scholars.
Usually the divide is substantial: if a story that pleases us as novice readers does not disintegrate as we grow older, it maintains its value only in the retelling for other novices or to summon uncapturable pleasure as playback. Also, the books that academic critics find consistently rewarding are works only partially available to the minds of young readers. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn manages to close that divide, and one of the reasons it requires no leap is that in addition to the reverence the novel stimulates is its ability to transform its contradictions into fruitful complexities and to seem to be deliberately cooperating in the controversy it has excited. The brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises.”
