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.