The ongoing situation with COVID-19 and the remote learning environment, calls for a particularly challenging and potentially exciting type of collaborative response. Parents and teachers are now working together even more closely to ensure that the education of young people continues in a rich and positive way. From a literacy perspective, teachers are ensuring that students are experiencing quality instruction and receiving helpful support and feedback which will ensure ongoing learning. The two most important things students can be doing at home at this time are reading and writing. Exposure to rich and engaging stories and regular writing opportunities will benefit them greatly. 

I believe very strongly that our young people are in need of experiences of awe, imagination and authentic engagement. Reading is critical here. C. S. Lewis says that we read ‘to know that we are not alone’ and that stories have the power to ‘take us into other worlds and transform us.’ The ‘uniquely portable magic’ that Stephen King speaks of explains why at the end of a good story, we will not be where we were at the beginning. Stories provide imaginative engagement with readers beyond their immediate time and place. They help young people acquire important values which enable them to be human beings capable of love and empathy. A narrative imagination allows a reader to think what it might be like to be in someone else’s shoes, to be a perceptive reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and desires that someone in that particular situation may experience. 

As promised over the holidays, I read Mark Twain’s 1884 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – for the fourth time. It had been fifteen years since I read this book and I was keen to see what might unfold with this new reading experience. I was not disappointed! As I mentioned in my last Literacy Links article, the reading of a book is a collaborative process which sees the reader co-author the text by bringing to the words on the page their own life experiences, beliefs and assumptions. The fifteen years of life in between encounters with this book, has afforded me the opportunity to bring an enriched set of expectations and knowledge of the world to this particular reading experience. Even in most recent times, we have had bushfires, the Black Lives Matter movement and, of course, COVID-19. These events and situations in themselves can have a considerable impact on one’s mindset and perspective – as does age and time. Consequently, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was such a ‘new’ and enthralling encounter. I couldn’t put it down. Each morning I would eagerly continue where I had left off the day before and soon found myself laughing out loud one minute and then reeling in horror the next. Twain’s writing focuses, repeatedly, on universal aspects of the human condition. And while physically constrained by COVID’s lockdown restrictions, I found myself travelling with Huck Finn down the Mississippi River, experiencing new adventures and meeting very different people along the way.

‘Mark Twain’ was the pen-name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens who was born in the American state of Missouri in 1835. At the age of 11 his father died, which ended his school education and began his education in life. After a number of jobs, including writing articles for newspapers in New York, he embarked on a career as a riverboat pilot. ‘Mark Twain’ are the words that the leadsman on a boat would call out to signal that the steamboat was in two fathoms of deep water and therefore safe. Piloting a riverboat could be dangerous work as river waters and currents shifted and swirled. In fact, Clemens’ younger brother was killed doing just that. The Civil War put a stop to the steamboats for a time. Clemens joined the Confederate Army and then later tried his hand at silver mining. When he didn’t find his fortune as a miner, Clemens went on to gain fame as a writer and soon became known as the ‘father of American literature’. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters of the University of Oxford in 1907 and died in 1910. 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain’s most famous novel. It tells of the adventures of a young boy, Huck Finn, who travels down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave, Jim. Twain’s father and uncles had owned slaves and, as a child, he had spent time playing in slave quarters and listening to their songs and stories. He captures cleverly the dialect of Jim and the speech of the South in his book, and has been praised for creating an American literature that is heard as well as read. Huck and Jim meet many colourful characters on their journey, with whom they have all sorts of adventures. Although Huck doesn’t seem to learn a great deal along the way, the readers undoubtedly do. We are treated to a powerful moral commentary and witty satire on the American South in the late nineteenth century. 

The central idea of Twain’s novel of a physical journey of adventure, with new worlds to explore and experiences to be encountered, is at the heart of the ‘American’ quality of the book. The journey of the adventure represents the idea of life itself as an adventure, full of challenges for the young. This is associated with the optimism which inspired the opening up of the North American lands in the nineteenth century, to the south and the west. The youthful character of the story suggested in the name of the narrator, ‘Huckleberry Finn’, captures this sense of new life, adventure and discovery. Huck’s journey, through time and space, is focused on the image of the Mississippi River, which flows through the book, as a symbol of freedom and security. Throughout the journey, Twain explores the complex nature of moral decisions and the challenges of leading a thoughtful and good life. Twain is a critic of hypocrisy, particularly of the religious kind where people claim Christian ideals but fail to live up to them in their actions and lives. On the other hand, he celebrates the innate good nature of several of his characters, such as Jim and Huckleberry himself, while realistically acknowledging their faults as well. The developing bond between Huck and Jim unfolds in the course of the journey and the trip northwards, away from the slavery of the southern states, gives an historical and political dimension to the concept of journeying to freedom. 

Over the years, I have kept a reading journal close by whenever I have read a really good book. If some word or phrase or reaction catches my attention, I enter this into my journal as a record of my appreciation for the ‘magic’ of the expression or the concept captured in the ‘grab’. These ‘magic grabs’ have filled many, many reading journals over the years and are a source of great delight when I revisit them. One of the magic grabs I included in my latest reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn captures the joy of freedom and travel when Huck says, ‘You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft’. Another grab highlights Twain’s wit when he has Huck decide that ‘I reckoned, that with her disposition, she was having a better time in the graveyard.’ Beautiful description is evident in the river being described as ‘lonesome’, the steamboat as ‘coughing’, the leaves ‘shivering’ and the lightning as ‘whimpering’. Some quite profound statements were made in the following grabs: ‘It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race’ and ‘Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.’ I could go on… But I will leave you with an extract which caught my eye with its message. 

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right… it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing…but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie – and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie…

Mrs Clare Murphy
English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach