Hucked :: The Trouble with Twain

Any time I read in a news report that "The blogs are on fire today with opinions on..." I usually zone out.  This is a defensive response since my wife hates it when I yell at the radio, and this isn't that kind of blog anyway... most of the time. 

But this time it was one of my favorite books at the center of the storm.

I grew up in Missouri, immersed in the legendary shadow of Mark Twain.  I spent a lot of time pretending to be Tom Sawyer (I found Tom more relatable than Huck)  so an incredible amount of my parent's and grandparents' twine and twigs were sacrificed to my adolescent experiments with raft building.  One of the reasons I focused on Tom rather than Huck was that I never quite knew what to do with the escaped slave narrative.  I knew what to do with "River Pirates", but not what to do with Jim.

I grew up knowing that the black kids were every bit as human as the white kids, so Huck's slowly-dawning revelation about that fact seemed a bit daft to me.  It's a mindset that I cannot fathom... but I knew people, all too many people, who had no trouble whatsoever thinking of dark-skinned people as less.

I wasn't going to comment on this because, let's be honest with ourselves, this is not the first time Huckleberry Finn has had its language whitewashed.  When was the last time you heard young Huck say "Nigger Jim" on the silver screen?  Why?  Because we don't say that anymore.  And to put those words in a young actor's mouth in our racially-charged culture would be anathema to our sensibilities.

And if you cared to look, there are a dozen "condensed" or "young reader's editions" of the book for sale in which that troubling racial epithet is suspiciously absent.  Why we're arguing about it this time is anyone's guess.  I suspect it's that the imprint putting it out is called "New South" just puts an unfortunate spin on the story with southern states holding events to celebrate their secession from the union.  Timing is everything, I guess.

And while the reasons for the Civil War was more-or-less an argument about state's rights, the "state right" at the center of the fight was undeniably the right to own people because they have a darker skin color than yours.

I'm not a sociologist and I'm not a Twain scholar.  I'll leave the socio-political wrangling over this mess to those as have the academic credentials to back up their arguments.  But my friends in the American Library Association tell me that Huck Finn is at or near the top of every list of books that have been challenged or banned and has been pretty much since it came out.  Maybe we can take some solace in the idea that the reasons for challenging Huck have (we are told) evolved from "This is too accurate about how we are now" to "This is too accurate about how we were."

That is progress of a sort, I suppose...

Unless, we're lying to ourselves.

Unless, as Salon said, this is viewed from the standpoint of America photoshopping the flaws out of its history like a magazine airbrushing the character out of an aging starlet's face. 

Wait... Did I just say that our turbulent racial history is akin to "character lines"?

Yes, and I think that's an apt description.  Every wrinkle on your face is the track of past moments of joy or anger or grief.  Just as every muscle showing in your torso is the record of hard hours at the gym, every blemish or bloat are the remnants of indulgence or negligence or sloth. To wave them away with the stroke of an editor's pen is to lie about who you really are and worst of all, to lie about the past that got you to where you are.

This is less about the excision of a word from a single book (as I've noted, it's not the first time) and indicative of something that's a resurgent trend in our books and classrooms.  When textbooks are being rewritten to make our founding fathers seem more pious than they were, or our forefathers seem more enlightened than they were, it's a lie.  And the most troubling part of that lie isn't the lie itself, but how it hides the progress we've made (or the ways we've regressed) since the incident we are sanitizing to fit a current ideological desire.

History is what it is.  It's what happened, not what we wish had happened.  It's about what our forerunners believed and taught and thought and how it impacted the way that they acted.  It's how we measure our progress from one state to another, from one mindset to the next, from the barbaric to the civilized and all too often, back again.  It is how we learn not to repeat mistakes past and what we point to when we have. And every time we put a coat of paint over the past in the interest of keeping people comfortable, something valuable is lost... the wisdom that comes with the lines on our collective face.  Wisdom that we will soon forget if we bury the lines under layers of airbrushing.

This is what we are doing with Huck Finn.  Lying to ourselves, to our children especially, about how we got from a place where we required a journey through cold, dark waters to arrive at the conclusion that that people with darker skin tones are just as human as we are to a point where we're uncomfortable admitting that we ever thought that they weren't.

And worst of all, it reminds us that we're not as far down that road as we would like to think.

Banned Books Week Starts Tomorrow

Books Aflame

There's an unwritten contract between writer and reader: The author is here to challenge you, to hold up a mirror and show you what they see, a new viewpoint different from your own.

It is in the nature of any reflection that we will not always see what we expect to see. At its worst it is merely titillating, but at its best this is the beginning of a conversation. The juxtaposition of different viewpoints, one set beside the next, interlocking reflections of life in our times (or past times in some cases) adds depth and understanding because no single image can be the entire picture. In the words of the oft-censored author Douglas Adams: "The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough..."

Without the conversation, without seeing as much of the picture as is available to you, all the reflections available to you, you cannot hope to have a fully-realized picture of our culture. Pull the mirror off the wall and the reflection will go away but it will not change what it showed. Only by taking all the images available -- even those we disagree with -- and overlaying them can we begin to see the whole interconnected collage of overlapping lives and loves and wonder that surrounds us.

The whole of creation laid out before us in the stacks of the world library.

 This past year, Judith Krug died, leaving behind a tradition of raising up those voices that others would silence. Ms Krug founded "Banned Books Week" at the American Library Association, which begins on Saturday. Art is supposed to be a challenge to your viewpoint. If all we ever read or hear are those voices which already agree with us, then we are stagnant and the conversation dies. And that... that would be truly tragic.

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Find out more: The American Library Association (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom Geoffery Chaucer, Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, JD Salinger... not to mention the Bible, the Quran and the US Constitution. Some of the greatest minds and influential works ever to pass from pen to page have all been censored, blocked, burned and banned. UPenn offers the following list of banned literature: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html And one of my favorite places to keep track of the current trends in banned and challenged books is the blog The Dangerous Pages Review

Google Books Un-Settlement

If you're not following this story, you should be... it has become so much more than an argument about digitization and copyright law. It's becoming a national debate (soon to become worldwide debate) about the future of information retrieval and access to research materials on the internet. Last week, the American Library Association and Association of Research Libraries got together to issue a stern "Shhhhhh!" to those noisy folks over at the Google table. (Just kidding, librarians, you know I love you.) Actually, they filed an amicus brief (opens in .PDF) in US District Court. If you're not a librarian or if you don't know any, let me give you some background. The publishing industry has been consolidating quite a bit in the past decade. This you are no doubt aware of since you are reading a blog about books and publishing. What you may not know is that the publishers of academic and professional journals have consolidated even more than the publishers you are familiar with. To the point where the publication of these important research materials is so concentrated in a few hands that the prices libraries pay to obtain them has gotten quite exorbitant. Additionally, many of the print editions have gone by the wayside to be replaced by electronic editions at not very much cost savings for the end-users. Libraries foot this bill in a time of ever-shrinking budgets. Academic libraries must additionally weigh the demands of various deans and professors for content immediately relevent to their classes with little or now additional help in their budget to offset the increases. This is simply a fact of life in terms of library budget management. Tack on the fact that the Google settlement does not in any way indicate what they will be charging libraries and institutions for this new electronic database to which their patrons and students will be demanding access. This is another straw on the camel. Additionally, the ALA and the ARL do more to safeguard our free access to information and the privacy of their clients than we'll ever know. If the access point to all (or even almost all) digital content is concentrated in the hands of a company that has shown themselves to be inconsistent in their protection of their users from interference by the state (censorship in China, but going to bat for user privacy in the US). Whilst librarians have, can, do, will go to jail to protect the Constitutional rights of library patrons. Will the people at Google be willing to do the same?

"The associations asserted that although the settlement has the potential to provide public access to millions of books, many of the features of the settlement, including the absence of competition for the new services, could compromise fundamental library values including equity of access to information, patron privacy and intellectual freedom. The court can mitigate these possible negative effects by regulating the conduct of Google and the Book Rights Registry the settlement establishes." - From the American Library Association press release

I wish them the best and I see their point. I'm just not sure their faith in the ability and willingness of the government to exercise oversight on something as complex and nuanced as global information access is well-placed. Meanwhile, Reuters is reporting that state Attorneys General are taking a look at the Google Books settlement with an eye toward doing something about it. What, exactly, remains to be seen. After the state-by-state battles waged by Microsoft in their antitrust suits (not to mention country-by-country since the Internet's global) this thing isn't going to be resolved anytime soon.

ALA Must-Reads List (Genre Fiction)

People ask me all the time for a recommended reading list of current fiction. I've been writing a novel, so my reading of late has been primarily non-fiction research materials and I am only now starting to catch up on the pile next to my chair. Nevertheless, when all else fails one can rarely go wrong going to the American Library Association for a recommendation... The ALA Best Genre Fiction list is an excellent place to start. Or you could ask your friendly neighborhood librarian. They're your friends and they live to talk about books... kinda like me, but with a professional credential in "Recommending Books" beyond just being a book blogger.

Is It Censorship Season?

To recap: It is not the responsibility of your librarians to parent your children. To protect the speech we like it is imperative that we protect all speech. Ban one ideology and yours is next. Peel back the protections of the authors you hate and the authors you like will be unprotected. No one wins these fights. I invite you to support the "West Bend Four". Because censorship hurts everyone.