Hi All,
It's a very interesting discussion, and one I've thought about a number of times with different authors.
My usual way through it is the one that Sam mentions, to teach the language controversy as a way of opening up a larger discussion of race in America, the history of slavery, and the transformation of Huck's character to the point where he loves Jim so much that he tears up the letter to Miss Watson and says, "All right, then, I'll go to hell." He'd rather go to hell than betray his friend, color be damned.
John H. Wallace in "The Case against Huck Finn," calls the book "the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written," as in the moment when a steamboat explosion is discussed and the question is asked, "was anyone hurt? " and the answer comes back, "No, killed a nigger."
But clearly the intention of the author was to parody and ironize the attitudes that could produce such a dehumanizing respose.
Samuel Clemens, after all, married the daughter of a prominent abolitionist and put at least one black student through college, and he writes in his autobiography about his mother that "kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand; her ears were familiar with Bible texts that approved it, but if there were any that disapproved it they had not been quoted by her pastors; as far as her experience went, the wise and the good and the holy were unanimous in the conviction that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for."
In some sense, Huck IS Clemens, the boy who grows away from the values of his community and family to be more human, or humanistic.
One of the key problems with the book is that Jim is portrayed as childish, superstitious, dumb--a minstrel show figure. Ralph Ellison writes that "writing at a time when the black-faced minstrel was still popular, and shortly after a war which left even the abolitionists weary of the problems associated with the Negro, Twain fitted Jim into the outlines of the minstrel tradition, and it is from behind this stereotype mask mask that we see Jim's dignity and human capacity -- and Twain's complexity -- emerge." Ellison also wrote however, that he identified with Huck Finn but not with Jim "who struck me as a white man's inadequate portrait of a slave."
Many characters in the book are in this same mode (the low mimetic mode in which the characters are made slightly denser and more ignorant than the rest of us, for the sake of humor), but given the history of race relations in America the humor in the case of Jim is likely to strike some as falling flat, like a bad taste racist joke.
On the other hand, this becomes a particularly useful aspect of the book for the class, because it opens up a larger discussion of aggression and humor, and of what Frank Chin calls "racist love," the opposite of racist hate, but no less demeaning and insidious. Racist hate reduces blacks to criminal, brutal, monkey-like subhumans filled with primitive emotion and lacking the capacity for intelligence, reason and civilization. Racist love depicts the socialized, partially-integrated, innocuous minority figure as a clown or buffoon, laughing at his speech and appearance. Willie Horton vs.. Aunt Jemima & Sambo; Ming the Merciless vs. Charlie Chan. Both figures are racist, and both attempt to undermine the humanity of the minority person. (see:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sourc..._20UFg&cad=rja)
Here is Langston Hughes on the issue of the offending word: "The word nigger to colored people of high and low degree is like a red rag to a bull. Used rightly or wrongly, ironically or seriously, of necessity for the sake of realism, or impishly for the sake of comedy, it doesn't matter. Negroes do not like it in any book or play whatsoever, be the book or play ever so sympathetic in its treatment of the basic problems of the race. Even though the book or play is written by a Negro, they still do not like it. The word nigger, you see, sums up for us who are colored all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America."
Yes it does. That's why eliminating it from the book is a "whitewashing" of American history and American literature. If we are too afraid to face our awful past, we can't even begin to resolve it. I'm uncomfortable with that word, and teaching
Huck Finn makes me uncomfortable, as well. Exactly like Sam, I find it exhausting and troubling and difficult, and I don't second-guess his decision to stop teaching the book. I don't teach it all that often myself. After all, I want to be a nice guy whom everybody likes, not the bearer of bad news. But kids go to college to learn critical thinking and to be transformed, and they don't get that if I avoid the hard issues, so I do fit it into a course now and again.
Incidentally, it's exactly the same problem that comes up with the teaching of
Heart of Darkness, and the solution I've come up with is the same: teach through the controversy instead of ignoring it.
If I were to teach this surgically-altered version of the book, I would teach through the issue here as well, ask the students what they think about a book that takes out all racial epithets because of a fear that they won't be smart enough to understand that Twain is using them to distance the reader from racism, not to ask the reader to embrace it.
Side-note: this is exactly the opposite of the issues that come up with teaching Hemingway and Gabriella Mistral and T.S. Eliot, among others. Mistral, for example, was an out-and-out racist who hoped for a Latin America washed clean of all those of African descent, who talked of "saving the white man" and "the purity of the race." There is no question of teaching irony and how to read an unreliable narrator with Mistral. She believed this stuff.
All Best,
Tony
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