Can anyone play? I come across things that offend me at a rate of one every twenty minutes. May I please banish them, too?
Wednesday 5 January 2011
Mark Twain memory holed
Can anyone play? I come across things that offend me at a rate of one every twenty minutes. May I please banish them, too?
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Deleted comment after some coffee. Comment was. A: this is some loony-left outfit, so what do you expect? B: how much "N-word", from the actual article, reminds me of "F-word" back in elementary school. "Tommy said the F-word! I'm going to tell on him!" B': it is possible to say words when discussing them and not directing them at anyone and be within the bounds of politeness, and to cuss effectively without saying any banned words at all.
What I heard is that they did this so the book would be included in public school curriculum again. So it's a toss-up between a bowdlerized school edition or none at all.
I think the motivation was nothing more altruistic than selling their own edition.
Any school curriculum that bans Huckelberry Finn is simply stupid. Consider: unlike Umbopa (Noble Savage), or Uncle Tom (patronizing), or most of the trash that comes out of Hollywood these days (overcompensating), HF presents Jim as a human being, who happens to be black. Not a symbol with arms and legs, but a person. There's education---real education---to be had here, I think. But PC has never been about anything other than avoiding danger, and for some reason all the worst of PC seems to end up in the education system. Man, I was glad to finally be out after grad school.
I think I was lucky - I didn't read Huckleberry Finn until my mid-thirties (just prior to student teaching, and well-after my high school years). Sergej, your analysis of Jim as a character is wonderfully accurate (that's part of the beauty of Twain's novel). The n-word is incendiary to many people, inherently connected with racism and bigotry...but do we (society, that is) really believe we will provide a workable solution to racism in our society by simply excising a single word (albeit, one used 200+ times) from a novel that the author himself intended to counter racism through the person of Jim?! If society does believe this, then we are as stupid as most of the other characters in Twain's great novel.
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