Posts Tagged ‘James Fishkin’

Stanford English Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin has written lots about Mark Twain, and the Book Haven has written about it here and here and here, among other places. She’s just published a new book – and we mean new, only a few weeks out with Yale University Press: Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade.

Her birthday was celebrated today with a party with her husband Prof. Prof. James Fishkin, a Stanford politics and communications scholar. They share a birthday, so I thought I’d celebrate both with a post about Shelley’s new book, breaking the Book Haven’s long four-month silence. (Yes, there’s a story; we won’t tell it here, today.)

Shelley read from her afterword at the celebration, and she has allowed us to whet your literary appetite with it, as she talks about Huck and Jim, the runaway slave:

I am filled with humility when I realize even a writer as gifted as Mark Twain had such trouble getting his fellow Americans to look at themselves in the mirror. The more I study American history, the more I am persuaded that Huckleberry Finn evokes – perhaps as only a work of art can – both the boldness of founding a nation on the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the brazen hypocrisy that allowed those ideals to be violated so fully from the start. It is perhaps unsurprising that the persistence of racism in our world has fostered a myopia that has prevented many – including myself – from recognizing Jim’s full humanity until now.

After immersing myself in the historical conditions surrounding Jim’s life, the experiences Twain had that led him to challenge prevailing myths about race in the novel, the debates among critics about who Jim really is, the ways in which actors and directors have portrayed him on stage and screen, how his words and his character have been depicted in some of the sixty-seven languages in which we can encounter him, and the controversies surrounding him in the ntion’s high school classrooms, I find myself returning to the text itself with fresh eyes.

I am awed by Jim’s astute ability to weigh the complexities of any situation. By his compassion. By his sense of justice. By his creativity. By his strength. By his integrity. By his refusal to let a world that denies that he is even human constrain his ability to love.

And I am still stunned by Twain’s daring experiment of presenting Jim only through the eyes of a chlld with such a limited understanding of what he is seeing.

And then I realize what trust Twain had in us, his readers. He trusted in our ability to read between the lines and understand things that Huck never did. He trusted us to see through the whitewashed history of America’s racist past that was being presented as truth even at the time he wrote and that has continued to be foisted on each new generation ever since. He trusted us to read the story he placed before us and to recognize the phenomenon that he would later call the “lie of silent assertion” – “the silent assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested … and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.”

Do we have the courage to honor that trust, to be the readers he hoped we could be? The jury is still out.