Being interested in Mark Twain, I've been reading up on the Huck Finn wars. In the American Library Association's list of the hundred books most often challenged or banned from school libraries or curricula in the 2000-2009 decade, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn comes in at #14. I think it's the best book in the top 20--sorry Harry Potter fans--and for sure it's the oldest. On the local front, about a year ago the school board in Duluth, Minnesota, made national and world news when it booted Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird from district classrooms, which should help Twain's masterpiece maintain it's ranking for 2010-2019, maybe even boost it into the top ten. Here is the Washington Post article on the Duluth school board's decision, Minneapolis Star Tribune here, Duluth News Tribune here, and the UK's Telegraph here.
As far as I can tell, the dispute is pretty much between those who are offended by the book's language, especially the frequent use of the n-word, and, on the other side, those who think the language might be hurtful to some though the novel has compensating merits and anyway that's just the way people talked back then. The head of the local branch of the NAACP in Duluth said the ban was "long overdue," since the book contains so much "oppressive language." Conservatives generally regard the ban as an instance of liberal snowflakery. Man up and read the book!--they're pro-Huck Finn to own the libs.
No one seems interested in the book as a work of literature. It seems clear, too, that the people who decide what books may be read for school must be unfamiliar with everything about Huck Finn except that it frequently deploys the n-word. If you read the book, only extreme obtuseness could prevent you from noticing that the author must be an ardent foe of slavery and the prevailing racist ethos of his day. It's as if the n-word has achieved totemic status so that when pronounced, including by characters in novels, it blots out all context as well as the last traces of human intelligence. School board members have to have an opinion about the book but can't spare the time to read it.
Here's something that happens toward the end of Huck Finn. I guess the passage is "objectionable" and "hurtful"--anyway the n-word appears. Jim has been sold back into slavery. Huck learns that he's being held at a certain "one-horse plantation" that turns out to belong to some relatives of Tom Sawyer. Tom is on his way to visit, but hasn't shown up on the steamboat yet, and the relatives have begun to worry. Now Huck turns up on the property for the purpose of stealing Jim back out of slavery. When Tom's Aunt Sally sees Huck, she thinks he's Tom Sawyer--she hasn't seen her nephew in years, maybe ever, so perceives only a white boy of about the right age. Huck, conscious of his guilty purpose--stealing a slave and freeing him!--is not expecting such kindness. He knows he's been mistaken for someone else and also that, considering his intentions, it's not in his interest to enlighten her. They talk.
"Now I can have a good look at you: and laws-a-me, I've been hungry for it a many and many a time, all these long years, and it's come at last! We been expecting you a couple of days and more. What's kep' you?--boat get aground?"
"Yes'm--she--"
"Don't say yes'm--say Aunt Sally. Where'd she get aground?"
I didn't rightly know what to say, because I didn't know whether the boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up--from down towards Orleans. That didn't help me much, though; for I didn't know the names of bars down that way. I see I'd got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on--or-- Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out.
"It warn't the grounding--that didn't keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head."
"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"
"No'm. Killed a nigger."
"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. . . ."
And she goes on a long jag that's apparently intended to persuade the boy that he shouldn't think a person can't get hurt in accidents of this kind, for she was once acquainted with someone who was injured in a similar mishap, and, now that she thinks about it, he had died when mortification set in. She uses the word mortification more than once to indicate a medical condition. If you were in eleventh grade, and the question was what does the author here reveal about the character of Aunt Sally, and how would you characterize said author's attitude toward her, wouldn't the answer be that he's shown her to be a fool and a bigot, and that he's more bitter about the second count than the first, although he likely thinks that the two are steady companions? Regarding Huck's answer to the question about injuries, is there another instance in the world's literature of an author having loaded into fewer words a similar volume of satiric indignation? And Aunt Sally just hurdles on by.
It helps if you've read up to this point with intermittent attention. For example, a few pages earlier Huck had debated with himself whether he should try to steal Jim off the plantation. His instinct is to do it, but he "knows" that would be "wrong"--stealing! against the law!--and he attributes his wicked inclinations to his poor upbringing and shoddy attendance record at Sunday school. He almost decides against it, on moral and religious grounds, but finally determines to rescue Jim anyway and risk hell fire in the event he actually pulls it off. Sunday School administrators, not the NAACP, should complain.
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