One of the fun things about the Internet is that you can be happily browsing along in The New York Times or some other site, and before long, you’ve followed a series of links only to find yourself deeply entrenched in a new topic that you were not expecting. This happened to me recently as I was reading a story on Mark Twain and the 100-year anniversary of his death when I started down the path of thinking about Huck Finn and from there I ended up happily spending a good couple of hours exploring an array of sites. Here are a few of the sites that I stopped at along the way:
I started, as I do most mornings, with The New York Times, (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/books/10twain.html?ref=books) and a story on the forthcoming publication of an Autobiography of Mark Twain. The books (it’s a multivolume series) sound very promising. Twain has such an authentic American voice, and as the author of this article, Larry Rohter, points out, he is “strikingly contemporary.” As the extracts included here illustrate, this is the real Twain with all his caustic wit and irreverent commentary on life that will surely make a lot of readers quite uncomfortable.
Once thinking about Mark Twain, it is hard not to jump from there to Huck Finn. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is number 14 on the list of most banned books of the decade 2001–2020 and number 5 for the 1990s (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedbydecade/2000_2009/index.cfm). Ernest Hemingway said of the book, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ … it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” I didn’t read the book until I was a graduate student in history and American Studies, and I still remember feeling the power of the story pulling me in.
It’s easy on a superficial level to understand the discomfort modern readers have when confronted with the raw racism that Twain portrays. The usual reasons given for challenges to the book are its perceived racism and inappropriate language, even though the book was a critique of the racism of its time. One of the most interesting sites that I came across on this topic was a discussion thread started by the Montgomery Blair High School’s online student newspaper, Silver Chips Online (http://silverchips.mbhs.edu/story/5187), started back in 2005 on whether the book should be banned. The discussion thread now has hundreds of respondents—the vast majority of whom appear to be high school students. As the last respondent, in May of 2010, wrote, “Wow, this discussion started in 2005, five years later, we’re still talking about it. Lovin’ it. Huck Finn—untamed.”
The Montgomery Blair discussion, wild and wooly though it is at times, also gets to the essentials of the debate. There are many thoughtful comments and here is just one by a student,
We as kids learn all of our lives about the history of the whole world, we spend most of our teenage life focusing on what history went down here in American where we live. There are a lot of things that we as Americans aren’t proud of, but that doesn’t mean we should try to hide it from the world, we should live and learn. I believe that “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” should not be banned from schools i believe it is an important part of history. Not something we should be proud that we did but you know, that makes us “young adults” learn from our elders. We look back on the history our ancestors have made and we learn from them. If we ban this book from school how will we ever learn what to do and not to do from the past?
This young student reminded me of a statement made by Tony Judt, the historian who died this week. “The historian’s task,” Judt claimed, “is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly … A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/books/08judt.html?pagewanted=2) Books such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn do provide the uncomfortable truths in very effective ways.
I am always saddened by the annual list of banned or challenged books that the American Library Association puts out (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/index.cfm). While it is probably true that the fastest way to get a young person to read a book is to tell them that it is banned, attempts to limit what people read is hugely problematic. I don’t care about some of the books included on the list (Captain Underpants, for example), but others are important classics including: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year). Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t matter which books I care about; a challenge to any book is a challenge to freedom of inquiry and a disservice to the free exploration of ideas.
Schools are very much on the front lines of preserving the freedom to read as most challenges occur either at schools or libraries. Often, well-meaning parents or patrons ask that a book be removed because it is, in their opinion, unsuitable in some way for children—or even adults. The reasons challengers give for asking for a particular book to be banned include profanity, language, sexual references, homosexuality, drugs, violence, religious viewpoint, among others. Generally speaking, such challenges are often part of a broader cultural discomfort with an issue. I understand the impulse of parents who want to protect their children from a particularly offensive piece of writing—and, let’s face it, there are writings that we all find offensive in one way or another. There are also books that are more appropriate for older students than for younger ones—and this is very much a judgment call. It’s an issue that I struggle with each year when we try to find an all-school reading that will work for 9th graders as well as seniors. But teachers need to have the discretion to be able to set the books that they believe will generate the most learning, and students have a right to explore the full range of ideas. Education is not always comfortable, and, indeed, the most learning often takes place when our own ideas and values are challenged.
This year’s all-school reading (very appropriately, given this blog!) is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (http://www.raybradbury.com/books/fahrenheit451.html), a dystopian novel about a fireman, Guy Montag, whose job it is to locate and burn down the houses where books are found. When confronted by a woman who refused to leave her house as it was burning, he began to question what he was doing: “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.” And from there, the story evolves. I’m looking forward to the conversations that it will encourage among our students and faculty. Not only is it a passionate defense of books, it also is prescient in its depiction of the future that we now inhabit (this book is also celebrating its 50th anniversary). I hope that you, too, will pick it up and read along with us.
