To Live Outside The Law, You Must Be Huck. (Alternative Version.)
(Note: this is an alternate version of this.)
What if the apocalypse came and went and things still ended up being interesting? Worthwhile? What if the rules by which infinity and creation are governed also happened to be governed in a deeply relaxed, chilled out way? What if we weren’t dealing with The Walking Dead, The Road, The Stand, Hunger Games, The X-Files, The Twilight Zone, JG Ballard, Kathyrn Schulz’s New Yorker piece on the coming earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, Y2K, The Cuban Missile Crisis, Cat’s Cradle, Always Coming Home, The Terminator, The Matrix, Mad Max, 12 Monkeys, I Am Legend, Radiohead’s “Idiotheque,” Dylan’s “A Hard Rain,” An Inconvenient Truth, La Jetée, or Zero K anymore (“Everybody wants to own the apocalypse,” Don DeLillo’s latest novel begins), but with a young man named Finn and a shape-shifting, talking dog named Jake? What if we stripped away all the referential dross and realized that — in watching this particular television show, that is, Adventure Time — we were also dealing with Huckleberry Finn and Jim?
Don Quixote was mocked intra-text when there had long since ceased to be the need for knights errant. Westerns have since transformed themselves from John Huston films into episodes of Breaking Bad. James Baldwin called for ‘the fire next time’ and Ta-Nehisi Coates has arrived with some of that fire. Things transform, oftentimes inexorably so.
Where is Mark Twain amongst all this? Admittedly, it’s a little bit like asking where Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry has gotten to in the middle of all this rock’n’roll, but unless we’ve forgotten, there is a slight degree by which Huck engages with the idea of the apocalypse almost as soon as the book begins: the story of Moses is invoked. Upon learning that Moses had been dead “a considerable long time,” Huck responds by saying that he “don’t take no stock in dead people.”
Soon he will run away with Jim, and the two of them will pass through incident after incident, adventure after adventure, each defined by its own set of insular rules and their subsequent response. The rules accumulate and seek to condemn. And then, the mob: “Le’s duck ‘em! le’s drown ‘em! le’s ride ’em on a rail!” The crowd aspires to seek the end of the world. They survive.
Why is it worth putting Huck Finn in the middle of the apocalypse as opposed to someone determined to carry the moral responsibility of what that world means? (By way of counterpoint example here, think of Cormac McCarthy’s concern in investigating an at-large metaphysical collapse seemingly everywhere and seeing signs of the sacrament everywhere, too, as Matthew Potts spoke of at Harvard last year. Think of how that translates into segments in his books where we read declarations where one thinks that “… the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower..”) And, for the sake of definitions, let’s say that when we use a term like ‘the apocalypse,’ we mean — as the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann put it (or so I’ve gathered from reading this) — “the inclusion of all exclusions.”
I think it’s worth putting Huck Finn (and, by extension, Finn) in the middle of all this because rather than “the inclusion of all exclusions” winning the day, we are instead met with radically persistent openness. That value is a strategic leverage against that particular inclusion of all exclusions, and strikes me as being a key to pursuing sensible future moral foundations. It’s a word that implies a musical full-stop for me, openness, and is connected to a kind of behavior that to my mind avoids the kind of doom that befalls Prince Myshkin in The Idiot.
…
In Adventure Time, Finn creates a bubble blower that blows bubbles in different dimensions. He and Jake enter the Land of the Dead to reclaim the soul of a flower they accidentally killed. They wait in line with demons in The Nightosphere. Finn becomes a lycanthrope, but one obsessed with hugs. A character that for all the world looks like a talking, intelligent game boy investigates a film noir-styled murder. A horse named James Baxter arrives balancing himself on a beach ball and declaring his name over and over again. An intergalactic figure takes selfies with a demonic ghoul in a room that exists beyond time and space. Finn and Jake see what the longest running high five they can do will be. Jake sings about making pancakes. And all this happens in a world that was previously destroyed in an apocalyptic, nuclear war.
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