Subject
Re: Fwd: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
From
Date
Body
I still doubt whether VN voiced an opinion on Huckleberry Finn and think
we should not presume that he disapproved of it until we have evidence.
Vera's disapproval of Tom Sawyer is hardly VN's of HF.
As for the artistic and moral merits of Huckleberry Finn itself, we can
judge and value for ourselves regardless of whatever VN's attitude may
have been.
I would suggest, like many, that the first two thirds are a comic and
moral masterpiece and the last third an ethical and artistic disaster. I
came to this conclusion on my own, but was very interested to see Wayne
C. Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1989) coming to
rather similar conclusions, against Booth's own expectations. Booth
dedicates his whole book to a black colleague who in the 1960s had
objected to HF, saying he would not be able to teach it because of its
racism. Booth, who is one of literary criticism's great pluralists,
thought this an absurd response at the time, when his reaction was akin
to Thomas Szasz's. But in the course of writing The Company We Keep he
realized that in fact the book does have two contradictory attitudes to
Jim, in its earlier and later movements: the first positive and
sensitive, despite Huck's supposition that he is deeply wrong in wanting
to help a "nigger" to freedom, the second crassly and insensitively
treating Jim as simply the appropriate object of demeaning "darkie"
jokes. I would love HF to have been only the first two thirds of the
novel: then it would be a triumph. Alas, it is flawed and, while
unequivocally anti-slavery, quite stolidly racist.
Brian Boyd
-----Original Message-----
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On
Behalf Of Donald B. Johnson
Sent: Wednesday, 9 March 2005 11:57 a.m.
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Fwd: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
----- Forwarded message from STADLEN@aol.com -----
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 15:45:32 EST
From: STADLEN@aol.com
Reply-To: STADLEN@aol.com
Subject: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
To:
In a message dated 08/03/2005 20:27:16 GMT Standard Time,
chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu (i.e. Andrew Brown) writes:
> Huck Finn may well be a difficult book for non-American readers to
> cope with
>
"Huckleberry Finn" is surely a morally complex work. It seems fatuously
anachronistic to object to it because it accurately reproduces the word
"nigger".
Also, there is surely an ironic distancing between author and narrator
in relation to many of the less than socially approved activities of the
latter and his friend Tom Sawyer. But my friend Thomas Szasz has told me
how moved he was as a boy reading the book in Budapest in Hungarian
translation, and again as a man in the United States in English, by its
showing how an "ignorant child"
can see through the evil of slavery when none of the adults around him
can.
The occasion when Huck Finn risks, as he supposes, going to hell for not
turning his friend, the escaped slave Jim, in to the authorities is one
of the great existential moments in literature.
If the Nabokovs disapproved of the book for DN, it would seem that they
were underestimating his sensibility.
Anthony Stadlen
----- End forwarded message -----
----- End forwarded message -----
we should not presume that he disapproved of it until we have evidence.
Vera's disapproval of Tom Sawyer is hardly VN's of HF.
As for the artistic and moral merits of Huckleberry Finn itself, we can
judge and value for ourselves regardless of whatever VN's attitude may
have been.
I would suggest, like many, that the first two thirds are a comic and
moral masterpiece and the last third an ethical and artistic disaster. I
came to this conclusion on my own, but was very interested to see Wayne
C. Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1989) coming to
rather similar conclusions, against Booth's own expectations. Booth
dedicates his whole book to a black colleague who in the 1960s had
objected to HF, saying he would not be able to teach it because of its
racism. Booth, who is one of literary criticism's great pluralists,
thought this an absurd response at the time, when his reaction was akin
to Thomas Szasz's. But in the course of writing The Company We Keep he
realized that in fact the book does have two contradictory attitudes to
Jim, in its earlier and later movements: the first positive and
sensitive, despite Huck's supposition that he is deeply wrong in wanting
to help a "nigger" to freedom, the second crassly and insensitively
treating Jim as simply the appropriate object of demeaning "darkie"
jokes. I would love HF to have been only the first two thirds of the
novel: then it would be a triumph. Alas, it is flawed and, while
unequivocally anti-slavery, quite stolidly racist.
Brian Boyd
-----Original Message-----
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On
Behalf Of Donald B. Johnson
Sent: Wednesday, 9 March 2005 11:57 a.m.
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Fwd: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
----- Forwarded message from STADLEN@aol.com -----
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 15:45:32 EST
From: STADLEN@aol.com
Reply-To: STADLEN@aol.com
Subject: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
To:
In a message dated 08/03/2005 20:27:16 GMT Standard Time,
chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu (i.e. Andrew Brown) writes:
> Huck Finn may well be a difficult book for non-American readers to
> cope with
>
"Huckleberry Finn" is surely a morally complex work. It seems fatuously
anachronistic to object to it because it accurately reproduces the word
"nigger".
Also, there is surely an ironic distancing between author and narrator
in relation to many of the less than socially approved activities of the
latter and his friend Tom Sawyer. But my friend Thomas Szasz has told me
how moved he was as a boy reading the book in Budapest in Hungarian
translation, and again as a man in the United States in English, by its
showing how an "ignorant child"
can see through the evil of slavery when none of the adults around him
can.
The occasion when Huck Finn risks, as he supposes, going to hell for not
turning his friend, the escaped slave Jim, in to the authorities is one
of the great existential moments in literature.
If the Nabokovs disapproved of the book for DN, it would seem that they
were underestimating his sensibility.
Anthony Stadlen
----- End forwarded message -----
----- End forwarded message -----