ABSTRACT
If religion or politics look like this, they’re mere ‘arrangements of rules’. Unable to give depth and meaning to life, their social, boundary-marking (hermetic) activity fails. Culture-myths, religion and politics define and determine power gradients: who is master, who is slave, who says playing a harp all day is ‘paradise’. Huck, a ‘real’ kid, values friends over ideas, ‘here and now’ over ‘pie in the sky’. For him, as a young hero, the archetype, ‘religion and politics’ meant action. He bravely helped Jim, a runaway slave, to escape: an intensely political act in the pre-Civil War slave-owning Deep South where his story is set. To do so, he uses his own ethical boundaries and meanings about human rights: choices about exercising his own rights were stolen by his violent alcoholic father. As a street-kid, Huck lived on the threshold of society, liminal. Analysts are involved in individuation, for which a prerequisite is civil rights. But,
It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted, To speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer…
(William Blake, ‘The Price of Experience’, in Blake 1977)
If that’s all the meaning-enhancing work of analysis amounts to, it’s worse than useless. We have nothing to say to people like Huck Finn.
