{"id":16,"date":"2007-12-15T17:34:25","date_gmt":"2007-12-15T17:34:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp\/?p=16"},"modified":"2007-12-15T17:34:25","modified_gmt":"2007-12-15T17:34:25","slug":"no_the_raft_im_referring_to_is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/2007\/12\/no_the_raft_im_referring_to_is.html","title":{"rendered":"No, the Raft I&#8217;m Referring to Isn&#8217;t George"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"huck%26jim.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/huck%26jim.jpg\" width=\"371\" height=\"220\" \/><br \/>\n<font face=arial size=1><em>Huck and Jim <\/em>by Thomas Hart Benton. That&#8217;s &#8220;Huckleberry,&#8221; not &#8220;Huckabee.&#8221;<\/font><br \/>\n<strong>Explainer<\/strong><br \/>\nI realized, after asking some cordial readers whether they got my &#8220;Huck Honey&#8221; reference in the last post (see directly below), that I am older than sin and, on top of that, think that a literary critic whose best work was written almost 60 years ago could be considered K-Fed famous.<br \/>\nHis name is Leslie Fiedler &#8212; born in Newark, New Jersey just after World War I, died in 2003, and was best known for a university-bookstore staple called <em>Love and Death in the American Novel<\/em>. But his 1948 Partisan Review essay, &#8220;Come Back to the Raft Ag&#8217;in, Huck Honey,&#8221; is probably the first bit of lit crit that acknowledged homosex as a theme and not just an aberration. Everyone yakked about it, at least in the (square) circles I ran in.<br \/>\nOh, that&#8217;s Jim talking, in the title. Jim is a runaway slave. Black, older Jim has a crush on white-boy Huck, and vice versa, which is the real reason they&#8217;re always trying to knock the Finn story off library shelves.<br \/>\n<strong>For an automatic alert when there is a new Out There post, email jiweinste@aol.com.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Huck and Jim by Thomas Hart Benton. That&#8217;s &#8220;Huckleberry,&#8221; not &#8220;Huckabee.&#8221; Explainer I realized, after asking some cordial readers whether they got my &#8220;Huck Honey&#8221; reference in the last post (see directly below), that I am older than sin and, on top of that, think that a literary critic whose best work was written almost [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/outthere\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}