OK, so here’s as good a place as any to weigh in with my take on the Huckleberry Finn business.
UPDATE: At commenter Dan M’s suggestion, I have put in a jump cut here, for reasons of length and to facilitate a “trigger warning”.
TRIGGER WARNING: Contains literary criticism. Also, text involving racial slurs.
I’m sure you all know the issue: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is widely regarded as one of the seminal novels of American literature (Hemingway: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” – but read the rest of the quote from the link above – a much truer appreciation). It’s beautifully written in many parts (badly in others), deals with important themes in American history (notably slavery, but also Westward expansion, North/South and city/country tensions, and others), and is also lively, amusing, and easily readable, and has young boys as major characters – for all which reasons it is commonly assigned reading in primary schools. It also reflects the attitudes of its times regarding race and slavery – including the changing attitudes toward emancipation, but more prominently the racist attitudes of the deep South; in particular, it constantly uses the word “nigger” in reference to the central character of the slave Jim, both casually and as a slur, and even frequently as part of his name (“Nigger Jim”). By count the word appears 219 times in a book that typically runs about 300 pages of printed text. There have been many complaints about its use in schools: that the book itself is racist (a bad misunderstanding of Twain’s obvious intention); that it conveys racist attitudes (inevitable, since it treats those attitudes as a theme); that it is offensive, especially to minority students, to see the racism expressed toward the character Jim and to continually read the word “nigger” on every other page (understandable); that it is harmful, or an expression of the slur itself, to make students read the word “nigger” even if it is only in a literary context (plausible). The defense usually given is that it is such a good book in literary terms that it deserves to be read anyway, and that it actually expresses valuable attitudes regarding race that it is good for the students to be exposed to (almost invariably, the scene where Huck chooses to “go to hell” by not turning in Jim as a runaway slave is held up as a moral triumph). In general, it seems to me, critics of the book (usually black) can’t abide having their children ordered to read about a black man being called “nigger” over 200 times, and defenders of the book (usually white) can’t understand that anyone wouldn’t be overjoyed at seeing Huck slowly question the racist assumptions of the society that does so.
I don’t actually have a dog in this fight, directly, but to the extent that I cared about the issue I tended to side with the inclusionists, on the vague grounds that Huck Finn is a good book and good books should be read, and that anybody who doesn’t understand that Twain was satirizing the attitudes expressed in the book isn’t to be trusted in their literary opinions. But slowly I have changed my opinion on the matter. I have never said so out loud because nobody ever asked me. But stupidity, as so often it does, provides an impetus otherwise lacking in the form of open invitation.
One publisher is now producing an edition of Huckleberry Finn in which the word “nigger” does not appear at all. I suspect this is a bit like an edition of Hamlet from which the word “father” has been removed. I also suspect the publisher is attempting to corner the market on school sales, by satisfying both sides (and also producing a copyrightable edition of a work otherwise in the public domain – thus becoming the only publisher in that market). All they’ve achieved is idiocy. Whether or not you think the complaints about the book are compelling, Huckleberry Finn is what it is in its original form. It’s not just misleading to re-write it; it cuts the heart out of one of the book’s central themes. You don’t have to like the book, and it’s also true that the social salience of the word “nigger” has changed over time, but there’s no question Twain knew what he was doing and did it for a reason. Erasing the way he did what he did also partly erases what he did.
So, OK, this is just stupid. But what about the general issue of reading Huck Finn in the first place? As I said, I have changed my mind on this issue; I now feel that there is not only good reason to object to the book being assigned in schools (nobody objects to people choosing to read it on their own), but there are good reasons why it should not be assigned.
First of all, I think the “on balance” arguments in favor of it (it has good qualities that, on balance, should override people’s objections) are wrong. It’s not actually that good a book. Yes, there are spectacular textual set pieces within it, and there is remarkable thematic complexity (critics especially wax rhapsodic about the significance of the Mississippi River in the book, and there’s something to that). Its reflections on American social structures and attitudes are deeper than they look. But there’s a lot of just plain bad stuff in it as well. Jim, who carries most of the book’s moral gravitas, is servile and childish. Most of the characters are silly caricatures. The last third of the book – where Tom Sawyer turns up in the story – is a frank attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the earlier book by adding in more hijinks, with the result that Jim winds up treated as both slave and pet by the two 10-year-old white boys supposedly saving him, and the plot disintegrates into stupidity. It’s a good book with some very good things in it; it would be indispensable in a college-level survey of American literature. But there’s no reason it has to be one of the very small handful of books students are assigned in primary school; there are lots of good books available, and there’s nothing about this particular one that makes it necessary.
Which leads to my real objection to the book. Why is it that so many teachers seem to think reading this book is one of the few absolutely necessary experiences American kids must have before they finish high school? It appears to me that many of them believe that the book is not just a good piece of literature – it provides a good reading experience, if you choose to read it – but conveys something kids should experience as a positive and necessary good. Specifically, many teachers, swooning over Huck’s moral evolution, seem to be convinced that Huck Finn is actually a great and needful contribution to race relations – that reading it will convince kids to be like Huck and embrace the humanity of downtrodden blacks in a sudden access of tolerance and racial harmony. They are flabbergasted that black parents object to the book calling blacks “nigger”, when obviously the book teaches white people that they should like the black people that they call “nigger” almost as much as they like whites; the book promotes tolerance for poor helpless niggers – what more could anyone ask? And it’s that self-congratulatory bullshit that finally turned me against the book.
At bottom, the book regards blacks as inferior and rightly subjugated; at best it casts every positive view of blacks, or move toward freedom for Jim, as personal and idiosyncratic. Huckleberry Finn is a book written shortly after the Civil War, about social conditions surrounding the practice of slavery just before the Civil War. Race permeates every aspect of the book, and, directly or indirectly, every step of the plot, and its view of race implicitly challenges, but never escapes, that setting. Positing its view of race as a lesson worth learning means positioning the Civil War South as the jumping-off point for a contemporary understanding of race, and the moral achievements possible for the lowest members of that society as a standard to be aspired to today.
The book demonstrates Jim’s humanity and the deepening of Huck’s understanding of it (the fact that the most enlightened person in the book is an illiterate child is not an accident), but the basic message is no more than, essentially, “blacks are people, too”. Even at that, that message is mostly implicit. The characters in the book – even Jim himself – never quite get that far. Jim’s great epiphany – “I owns mysef, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’.” – is predicated on his value as chattel; the irony is that that value can only be realized by his being sold as a slave, and he will not get the money. Huck’s decision to “go to hell” comes when he decides not to tell the Widow Douglas where to send the slave catchers to take Jim into bondage and sell him for that same $800; the scene on the raft where he tricks the slave hunters into giving him $40 and going away without catching Jim is essentially the same decision, and prompts the same misgivings. Huck’s great moral change is a shift from shock, at the beginning of the book, at the idea that Jim would be so “bad” as to run away from slavery, to grudging acceptance of his own badness at helping Jim out of friendship; he spends the entire book helping Jim escape but is convinced the abolitionists are wrong. The Widow manumits Jim in her will, but there is never the suggestion that it was wrong of her to have him as a slave in the first place, or to try to sell him down the river; his freedom is her gift to him, and in fact he never actually succeeds in claiming it for himself. (He spends the last chapters of the book playing bufoonish games for Tom Sawyer, who knows Jim is actually free at that point but doesn’t tell him, and making no attempt to escape on his own initiative.) Besides Jim himself, nobody else ever suggests there is any problem with slavery. Jim assumes Huck will understand when he says he wants to come back South to help his wife and children escape from slavery; Huck does not, and in fact never comes to. What Huck achieves is simply a resignation to the fact that his personal feelings of friendship for Jim will lead him to break the law to help Jim – not a belief that that slavery is wrong, or even that it is not wrong on Jim’s part to want to escape it. And this is the book white liberals hold up as the one indispensable contribution to racial understanding in 21st-Century schoolrooms.
Of course the book was more shocking in its own times. It may be that the message of personal appreciation of individual black people, rather than of principled dedication to equality, was as much as Twain could have hoped to put across (still less sell profitably, which was at all times a concern to him) in that day. But we’re not in Reconstruction Mississippi anymore. After 125 years, we ought to be able to do better than “be good to your friends even if they’re black”.
The most racist aspect of this whole mishegoss over the book is that its defenders really believe they’re saying something about race when they promote its message. But by this time, the message of grudging tolerance for some blacks because you like them, in a world that defines them in general as sub-human property, really ought to be off the table. What tolerance and understanding is in this book – and, make no mistake, that is its major theme – must go without saying in this day and age. In 1885, it was an example of what could be; in 2011, it is at best an example of what was . . . in 1885.
Today, the range of moral norms has shifted far enough that what was aspirational more than a century ago is – or ought to be – unthinkable today. Assigning Huck Finn means asking today’s children to think what is unthinkable – to feel the moral tensions besetting pro-slavery whites in a world that disappeared almost 150 years ago – and accept that as a live conflict. The idea that today’s children – especially black children – should regard as a moral hero a white boy who doesn’t betray a black man into slavery is just offensively oblivious. The idea that that represents tolerance as it needs to be understood today – that that is somehow still a live issue as understood in contemporary life – that that in any way corresponds to an issue these children are going to have to confront and make their own decisions on – is just evidence that for white people, even the most debased conception of black people is never really a closed issue.
We shouldn’t assign Huck Finn to school children because there’s nothing special in it they have to read that they can’t get from other sources, and more so because its attitude of racial enlightenment can only be seen as such from a perspective that is gone with the wind. Believing that Huck Finn conveys racial enlightenment to any modern reader proves that you didn’t understand the book.
Judd
Kevin
Kevin T. Keith
leanleft
tgirsch
Editions where he’s referred to as “Slave Jim” instead of “Nigger Jim” have been around for at least a decade.
Anyway, I read the book in pieces when I was too young to really “get” it, and need to read it again. I generally agree about not making it required reading, but then I’m generally opposed to making any particular piece of fiction required reading. The Scarlet Letter really scarred me in that regard, I suppose. It should by all means be available in school libraries, though.
All that said, I think you miss an important point here, one of the merits of the book that was certainly unintentional but still valid. As you allude, it should horrify any modern reader that the dubious “be nice to black people you like” message was actually the bleeding-edge progressive position at the time. But I think there’s implicit value in that knowledge and realization. It’s a good indicator of just how far we’ve come, and to a lesser extent, how we got here, and how much farther we have yet to go.
It’s also worth noting that while it may not seem like it, 1885, wasn’t all that long ago in historical terms. One of my big “eye opening” moments in life was the realization that I have friends, not all that much older than I am, who grew up under and lived with de facto segregation. Something can’t be some sort of ancient history, as many people seem to perceive pre-Civil Rights era America, if there are lots of people still alive who lived through it.
The scary implication here is obvious: if there are plenty of people alive today who suffered it, that means there are plenty of people alive today who imposed and perpetuated it. That fact is absolutely critical to remember, especially when people start pulling out bullshit about “post-racial” societies.
I don’t totally disagree. Though, like TG, I read the book when I was very young and never bothered to re-read it. But, I agree with TG in that the value of AHF is in understanding specifically what you point out. This was considered extremely progressive and contraversial in its day — and that day wasn’t really that long ago. Getting to here from there, is pretty important and worth praising, and at the same time, the idea that you could have gotten from there to post-racial utopia in a just a hundred years and change is absurd on its face.
A wise and astute teacher should be make those points and therefore help, ahem, color the reading experience in a way that appreciates the historical perspective. I was very lucky to have quite stellar teachers for most of my early adolescent education, and they regularly contributed to my appreciation and understanding of the books we read.
I can totally understand the objection to AHF being required reading, and I understand that the sentiments in the book aren’t morally triumphant by today’s standards, but books need to be within the context of the time at which they were written – many books are, themselves, moments in time, and that is where a good teacher comes in.
But, yeah, at the root of it all – you don’t need to a 300 page novel to understand the narrative that white people used to be unspeakably mean to black people, as time went on some white people began to opposed the dehumanization of their fellow human and did brave things to fight against them, eventually that more enlightened and humane worldview grew stronger, and began to prevail in most Western societies, though not without strong resistance – this resistance and the damaging generational effects of that past still linger today, even in ways that many are reluctant to recognize – it’s important to keep an eye out for those instances because they won’t always be pointed out to you, and many people deny such existence in order to further their self-interest. Appreciate where we are, but know we are not finished. Be critical observers and thinkers and strive to be humane to all those like you and those who are different from you.
There we go – 5 minutes, ring the lunch bell and let’s go eat a god damn snack. /Rex Ryan’d.
Digg:
Not sure what your sign-off had to do with foot fetishes, but okay.
Anyway, I agree. And to make it even more plain, you could easily draw parallels between the attitudes expressed in AHF and the attitudes of many nominally pro-gay-rights people (not to mention the antis) in today’s main civil rights battle.
First, KTK, this post is quite long, so it would be simply nice to put it behind a “Read more” link on the front page. Second, while we do assume an adult audience on this site, and and this sort of discussion is really hampered by being bound to circumlocutions like “the N word”, I think that is recognition of the emotional baggage involved, it would be considerate to preface the post with a trigger warning and keep any use of ‘nigger’ behind the jump. (I know trigger warnings get a lot of controversy, at least in the feminist blogosphere, but at least personally I’ve been convinced that their benefit to some people well outweighs the cost of putting in a jump; particularly on sites that don’t have a well-established expectation of triggering content.)
[A]nybody who doesn’t understand that Twain was satirizing the attitudes expressed in the book isn’t to be trusted in their literary opinions.
However true this may be, it’s not exactly dispositive when deciding whether to have kids read it; there’s no reason to presume that they can be trusted to have opinions that don’t take the wrong things from it.
Jim, who carries most of the book’s moral gravitas, is servile and childish.
To the same extent that the casual use of a racial slur is an expose on the thoughts of its speakers, isn’t this a depiction of the cost the culture incurs on the psyche of its victims?
Of course, the degree to which that interpretation is visible to the reader depends heavily on their education, be that education previous to or concurrent with reading the book. This in where a good teacher can make a largely harmful reading into a historically educational one, as TG and Digg have pointed out.
What Huck achieves is simply a resignation to the fact that his personal feelings of friendship for Jim will lead him to break the law to help Jim[.]
“Every German White has his good Jew nigger.” –Himmler
(Though actually searching for the origin of this quote (a) found me approving citations on Stormfront *retch* and (b) makes it appear apocryphal.)
[I]ts view of race implicitly challenges, but never escapes, that setting. Positing its view of race as a lesson worth learning means positioning the Civil War South as the jumping-off point for a contemporary understanding of race, and the moral achievements possible for the lowest members of that society as a standard to be aspired to today.
Quoted for Truth.
Anyway, like the others, I have to adult experience with the book, though I know my father read it to me when I was young enough to have books read to me in bed by my father (and have them edited on the fly in that reading). However, I did recently try to read Tom Sawyer
I couldn’t get past the first chapter, in which the protagonist randomly assaults a stranger, for no reason other than that the other person is a stranger to him. That’s simply appalling, and the tone of the narration is most certainly approving of it. It’s hardly surprising that “helping enslave other people makes you squeamish if you’re a nice person, and that’s okay” is a great moral victory when the baseline is “of course you should start a fist-fight with somebody the first time they’re in the public street in your home town”.
Dan:
Yes, I was going to put in a jump cut, and . . . didn’t.
I’ve never liked “trigger warnings”, but I understand them. I guess it’s a good idea, but sometimes it seems there are so many things that get warnings that it’s almost a joke. I have this kind of mental Jon Stewartish reaction, along the lines of: “I guess we could put up a generic warning on every piece of content in every medium, saying ‘Beware of triggering for everything and anything, including every bad thing that has ever happened to you or anyone else and things some people think are bad that most people don’t care about and whatever weird phobias you personally happen to have that noone could possibly anticipate.’, but . . . you might have shit to do.”
Yes, I suppose people who overreact to the book have feelings, too, but doesn’t that just mean that we’re granting a heckler’s veto to everyone who claims to be upset about anything? Think about who might abuse that.
I don’t think the problem with Jim is that he’s depicted as a beaten-down man as the result of slavery, but rather as just not a man. He has the gumption to make a break for freedom and plan to bring his family North, but he still takes orders from 10-year-old boys, without realizing the things they are asking him to do are stupid? One of the great themes in the story is his claim on himself as his own man – then he gives it away before the end.
I liked Tom Sawyer very much as a kid (it’s certainly easier to take than Huck Finn), but you’re right that Tom is basically a real asshole. Not only does he challenge a kid to a fight for no reason, but in other famous “funny” scenes he tricks his friends into doing his chores for him, and runs away from home and lets his family think he is dead for days before popping up like a joker at his own funeral. But I think Twain’s picture of childhood was more realistic – even if idealized – for its times than we recognize. Boys were expected to fight; it wasn’t regarded as a bad thing. And Twain spent a lifetime extolling rapscallions and mocking “good” stick-in-the-muds.
I also get an diffuse annoyed feeling about trigger warnings. Reading the the discussions about them on feminist sites has convinced me that that diffuse feeling is the sensation of being told to check my male privilege. I assume there’s the obvious analogy to white privilege that would apply to the use of ‘nigger’. Basically, that ultimately means it’s not it’s not our place as white males to say that they’re unnecessary, and our negative feelings about them at best don’t matter.
As to the warnings becoming pallid with over-use, it seems that there’s a continuum of emotional fraught-ness: There’s a lot of room for debate about whether to warn about an audio clip in which a woman is called ‘bitch’; there’s really no debate on what harm comes with suddenly reading a graphic depiction of rape. By the same token, ‘nigger’ has a well-documented history of causing hurt.
But again, I’m not really one who gets the last word on this matter. Though it is perhaps a disconcerting sign that of the regulars on this blog the nearest we have to a black personI think Digg (ha!), and then only by dint of cultural osmosis.
Yes, I suppose people who overreact to the book have feelings, too, but doesn’t that just mean that we’re granting a heckler’s veto to everyone who claims to be upset about anything? Think about who might abuse that.
I’m honestly not sure how you understood me to advocate for a heckler’s veto. My point was that “You’d have to be very ignorant to think X.”, when applied to kids doesn’t mean “No important population will think X.”, because perfectly healthy kids can still be dangerously ignorant.
Boys were expected to fight[.]
And adult whites were expected to hate blacks. My point is that not only is Twain’s context of racial ethics too primitive to be useful today, so is his context of other ethics.
Apropos of not much, what is up with the sudden resurgence of the word rapscallion?
Very eloquent! Please provide a list of books you want banned from schools and libraries. I’ll deliver it immediately; I have both a school and a library within 2 miles of me.
tgirsch:
It’s a great word! And as to why we don’t have a “Talk Like a Jane Austen Character Day”, I can’t imagine. Consider it my contribution.
“Truth”:
You’ll notice the article doesn’t call for banning any books. It specifically states there are no objections to people choosing to read this book. The issue is whether it should be required. Perhaps you will agree that not being required to do something you don’t want to is not the same as being prohibited from doing it if you do?
I daresay almost all junior-high or high-school libraries have copies of Huckleberry Finn; I’m sure virtually all general public libraries do. Very few people object to the former, and their objections are almost never indulged; nobody I am aware of objects to the latter. And the text is easily available in almost any general bookstore, and for free on the Internet. There’s really no barrier to anybody reading the book who wants to, and nobody is trying to erect such barriers. That’s not what this is about, and not what the post says.
Students have to read certain books in school. Somebody has to choose those books. The matter ought to be given some thought. And there are long-standing arguments against choosing this particular book instead of some other. I think those arguments make sense. That hardly portends the downfall of freedom.
KTK – Thats Great news! Now I only need to make one stop. Please provide me with a list of books that you approve and I will take it to the school straight away.
Truth:
Thanks for providing such a clear example of Conservative Reading Comprehension Disorder.
tgirsch, you are sometimes both funny AND witty. I read KTK loud and clear, it simply took FAR less typing for me to make my point. You didn’t actually think anyone cares what books KTK thinks should be in a library do you?
[...] of posts by KTK and Kevin, The Daily Show has its own take, which is very much worth [...]