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Re: Spam: Re: Fwd: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
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----- Forwarded message from Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com -----
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 10:54:04 -0500
From: "Brown, Andrew" <Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com>
Reply-To: "Brown, Andrew" <Andrew.Brown@bbdodetroit.com>
Subject: RE: Spam: Re: Fwd: Re: VN on Huckleberry Finn?
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
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
Chrysler Integrated Marketing
248.293.4391
BBDO DETROIT
> ----------
> 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 -----
>
>
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