Brian,

I guess I'm wearing down in my certainty about the Vera & VN remarks about Huck Finn. Possibly, as Jansey has suggested, I somewhere picked up the Tom Sawyer anecdote Ole Nyegaard mentioned yesterday and confused it.

But I'm not sure I can agree with Mr. Booth. It has to be asked, is the treatment of Jim really any worse, qualitatively, than the treatment of the white Southerners, most of whom are stupidly violent (the Grangerford/Shepherdson feud), wholly corrupt and conniving (the Duke and the Dauphin), and/or chronically dim-witted? Aside from the daughters that the duke and dauphin conspire to rob, one or two of their family friends, and Huck himself (who is prone to cruel practical jokes, and an almost pathological liar), their isn't a white person in the book who is as civilized, compassionate, and intelligent as Jim.

He may be the victim of darkie jokes, but his responses are always sensible, and the people playing the jokes are clearly his inferiors.

The last third of HF is certainly a mess. But, to me, Jim comes off as by far the most sane and least ludicrous of the characters. Tom Sawyer is not the vivid character he was in his own book, and is just a device for Clemens to illustrate his own disgust with the romantic chivalric ideas Clemens believed had done the South enormous harm.

This was a recurring theme with Clemens. In "Life on the Mississippi" he describes the novels of Sir Walter Scott as a ruinous influence. Not fair to Scott, and I think he meant more to blame the South for its susceptibility to nonsensical Quixote-like ideas of romance. In a later, and quite mediocre novel "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" Clemen's returned to, and dealt at length with the ideas that corrupt the last part of HF.

Andrew Brown

ANDREW BROWN
ACD: Copy
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----------
From:   Vladimir Nabokov Forum on behalf of Donald B. Johnson
Reply To:       Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent:   Tuesday, March 8, 2005 10:05 PM
To:     NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject:        Spam: Re: Fwd: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?

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 -----