Posts Tagged ‘Tom Sawyer’

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.

Michiko Kakutani adds her two cents on the n-word debate in the New York Times today:

Mr. Gribben’s effort to update Huckleberry Finn (published in an edition with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by NewSouth Books), like Mr. Foley’s assertion that it’s an old book and “we’re ready for new,” ratifies the narcissistic contemporary belief that art should be inoffensive and accessible; that books, plays and poetry from other times and places should somehow be made to conform to today’s democratic ideals. It’s like the politically correct efforts in the ’80s to exile great authors like Conrad and Melville from the canon because their work does not feature enough women or projects colonialist attitudes.

Radford's mini-bowdlerization

Authors’ original texts should be sacrosanct intellectual property, whether a book is a classic or not. Tampering with a writer’s words underscores both editors’ extraordinary hubris and a cavalier attitude embraced by more and more people in this day of mash-ups, sampling and digital books — the attitude that all texts are fungible, that readers are entitled to alter as they please, that the very idea of authorship is old-fashioned. …

Michael Radford’s 2004 film version of “The Merchant of Venice” (starring Al Pacino) revised the play to elide potentially offensive material, serving up a nicer, more sympathetic Shylock and blunting tough questions about anti-Semitism. More absurdly, a British theater company in 2002 changed the title of its production of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” to “The Bellringer of Notre Dame.” … According to Noel Perrin’s 1969 book, “Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America,” Victorians explained their distaste for the colorful, earthy works of 18th-century writers like Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding by invoking the principle of “moral progress” and their own ethical superiority: “People in the 18th century, and earlier, didn’t take offense at coarse passages, because they were coarse themselves.”

Actually, this headline came from Brandwine Books here, but we liked and so we stole it.  Commenting on the Entertainment Weekly article (not our first article which we posted on Dec. 31 here) about Alan Gribben‘s forthcoming NewSouth edition of Mark Twain‘s Huckleberry Finn, Mr. Brandywine  notes:

Every instance of the ‘n’ word (you know the word I mean) has been changed to ‘slave.’ And every instance of ‘Injun’ has been changed to… something. They don’t say what.

‘Is this really a big deal?’ the columnist asks.

Yeah, I kind of think it is.  …

My opinion (I could, of course, be wrong), is that if a student is old enough to understand the extremely sophisticated themes of Huckleberry Finn, he or she is old enough to understand that the “n” word, while always offensive, was in very common use in Mark Twain’s time, even by black people themselves. I think that’s a fact worth knowing. Educational, even.

‘Ah ha!’ says someone. ‘But you’re saying “n word” yourself! You’re a hypocrite!’

‘Silence, Imaginary Interlocutor!’ say I (I might as well. Anthony Sacramone isn’t using the phrase much these days [I just tried to link to his dormant blog, but now it won’t let you in without a Google account]). The truth of the age I live in is that the ‘n’ word is no longer in common use, except as an insult (and in rap lyrics). If I tried to use it in Mark Twain’s way, I’d be as false to my own world as it’s false to his to clean it up in Huckleberry Finn.

I hold (again, I could be wrong) that when it comes to speech, the Victorians were able to express themselves with far greater freedom than we enjoy today.”

I’m not so sure.  Didn’t the Victorians find it to risqué to mention piano legs, and isn’t that why they put those silly little doilies on them?  Be that as it may, I think the 19th century has taken a bum wrap for prudery, which was heavily localized in the upper middle classes.  The lower classes recruited for the workhouses and brothels knew little about it.

Among the blog’s commenters is “Phil,” who says:  “This is ridiculous, and I hope the book does not sell.”

Not a chance, sport.  I have only two words to say to Phil:  Textbook Sales.

The New York Times weighed in yesterday, contributing this to the discussion:

“I’m not offended by anything in ‘Huck Finn,’ ” said Elizabeth Absher, an English teacher at South Mountain High School in Arizona. “I am a big fan of Mark Twain, and I hear a lot worse in the hallway in front of my class.”

Ms. Absher teaches Twain short stories and makes “Huck Finn” available but does not teach it because it is too long — not because of the language.

“I think authors’ language should be left alone,” she said. “If it’s too offensive, it doesn’t belong in school, but if it expresses the way people felt about race or slavery in the context of their time, that’s something I’d talk about in teaching it.”

Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway notes that “it’s fairly obvious that Twain is condemning racial prejudice and that one of the central themes of the book is the process by which Huck discovers that the things he’d been taught by society by blacks were wrong, and that his companion him was, in fact, an heroic figure. Twain’s use of a word that, even in his time, was meant to be insulting and demeaning, was deliberate and removing it because of ‘sensitivities’ seems to me to detract significantly from the overall power of the novel.”

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones reads this and comes up with a different conclusion:

But the problem with Huckleberry Finn is that, like it or not, most high school teachers only have two choices these days: teach a bowdlerized version or don’t teach it at all. It’s simply no longer possible to assign a book to American high school kids that assaults them with the word nigger so relentlessly. As Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who led the bowdlerization effort, explained, “After a number of talks, I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach [Tom Sawyer] and Huckleberry Finn, but we feel we can’t do it anymore. In the new classroom, it’s really not acceptable.”

Given that choice, I guess I’d bowdlerize.