|
|
 | MARK TWAIN'S AMERICA
SHELLEY FISHER FISHKINApril 11, 1997 |
|---|
Click here for Shelley Fisher Fishkin's answers to your questions on the legacy of Mark Twain.
NewsHour Links
April 1, 1997:
David Gergen talks about the legacy of Mark Twain on American Society.
OUTSIDE LINKS
The Complete text of "Huckleberry Finn"
The Complete text of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"
The Mark Twain Resources on the World Wide WebThe Premise of Shelley Fisher Fishkin's latest work on Mark Twain, "Lighting Out For The Territory," can be summed up as follows: If Mark Twain was "a young boy who accepts slavery as natural and right and grows up to become a man who asserts that civilization began when slavery was abolished," how would the exploiters of his name and work deal with so complex a story? In visiting Twain's home town of Hannibal, Missouri, Fisher Fishkin found little evidence of the work of a man who in "Huckleberry Finn" wrote some of the most significant anti-racist literature in this country's history. What she found instead was a town that devoted itself to Twain's more innocent look at childhood, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." In searching for an answer to why this was, Fisher Fishkin was told, "We only promote the little boy who played with marbles and whitewashed fences. We don't promote the time when he was--when Huck was down the river with Jim."
For Fisher Fishkin, this is indicative of a society that is still in denial about issues like slavery that Twain bravely brought up 100 years ago. As she told David Gergen, "Well, I think that slavery and its legacies still pack an enormous punch (in this country). They're very difficult subjects... I think that Twain gives us an opportunity to keep those issues on the table. I think that that's something that we should seize as an opportunity, rather than reject."
Our Forum asks: What does Mark Twain's legacy teach us about the state of our society? What would Twain's "sharp" pencil write about where this country finds itself today? What role does Twain play in the history of American literature? What can we learn from the differing styles of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn"?
Our guest is Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. She edited the 29 volume "Oxford Mark Twain," wrote the award winning book "Was Huck Black: Mark Twain and African American Voices" and is President-elect of the Mark Twain Circle of America.
Scroll down for Prof. Fisher Fishkin's answers to your questions.
Questions asked in this forum:
- What is your view on the frequent use of the word Nigger in "Huckleberry Finn?"
- How does Huckleberry Finn compare to 19th century slave narratives?
- What sparked your interest in Mark Twain?
- How has Huckleberry Finn been treated differently in the different parts of the country?
- Would it be so wrong to replace the word nigger with something less offensive in Huckleberry Finn?"
Additional Questions:- What turned Twain's mind so decisively away from the conventional and toward the unconventional?
- Why does Twain end the novel with slapstick burlesque?
A question from George F. Brown, Jr. of Long Beach, CA:For my entire life, it seems, a raging debate has continued about whether the frequent use of the word "nigger" in "Huckleberry Finn" makes it a racist book, or unsuitable for the education of children. What is your view on this? Do you see a time that this debate will finally end? I may be prejudiced, but I believe that Huckleberry Finn" may be among the finest pieces of United States literature extant. Is it hyperbolic to think so?
Shelley Fisher Fishkin responds:
The question of whether the presence of the word "nigger" makes "Huckleberry Finn" racist should be looked at in the context of the novel as a whole. Throughout the book, Twain portrays a racist society through the eyes of a child who buys that society's assumptions. The book is the compelling saga of how, on a personal, existential level, that child ends up choosing to violate his culture's norms by not turning Jim in and by coming to recognize that he is, indeed, a human being rather than a mere piece of property. Twain presents a devastating critique of the racism of a society that classifies Jim as less than human. The word "nigger" is central to portraying both that society and the people in it with chilling accuracy.
In part because we haven not managed to eradicate racism in our society today, the word "nigger" still packs a painful punch. It is a word that can hurt, that can be used to deny the personhood and humanity of the person to whom it refers. I feel for black parents who are pained by the racism that their children still confront on a daily basis; in the face of their sense of helplessness vis a vis the larger dimensions of this problem, some parents decide that the least they can do is go out and ban a book that contains this offensive word. That is shortsighted and counterproductive: this is an enormously important book to keep in our nation's classrooms, an important weapon in the ongoing battle against racism--if it is taught in the context of the history of American race relations, and if students are taught to grapple with the book's irony. When will people cease to debate the presence of this offensive word in this "classic" work of literature? Probably only when racism has been so completely eradicated that the pain that word inflicts will be a subject of historical interest only. And no, I do not think your view of the book is hyperbolic. I share it. It is an extraordinary work of literature.
A question from John Harvey of Houston, Texas:
Dear Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin,
You observe that "Huckleberry Finn" contains "some of the most significant anti-racist literature." How would you compare and/or contrast Clemens' work with the earlier anti-racist/anti-slavery narratives of Frederick Douglass in "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" or Harriet Ann Jacobs in "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl?"
Shelley Fisher Fishkin responds:
Frederick Douglass's "Narrative" and Harriet Jacobs's "Incidents" are two extremely important books. Rooted in their authors' lives, they provide a testimony to the brutal degradations of slavery. In writing these eloquent autobiographical texts, Douglass and Jacobs provide irrefutable evidence of their worthiness to sit at the table of culture, and graphic proof of the ludicrous usurpations of the system that enslaved them. Huckleberry Finn", in my view, addresses some of the same issues that Douglass and Jacobs do, but from a different angle of vision. By choosing as his narrator a child who fails to judge his society as wrong, Twain force readers to make that judgment themselves. Twain's irony casts that world into bas relief with special effectiveness. I would hope that every American college student would have read all three of these fine books before graduating.
One of the intriguing dimensions of Twain's novel is the ways in which it comments on American race relations during the period when Twain was writing the book (1876-early 1880s) rather than solely on during the period when the book is set. I explore the nature of this commentary in "Lighting Out for the Territory"--but suffice it to say here that no other work of literature, in my view, provides such a canny and disturbing sense of both the dream and the betrayals of that dream that the post-Reconstruction era engendered. The obstacles placed in the path of free blacks who wanted to exercise the vote, for example, were just as ornate and ridiculous as the grindstone (a free) Jim is forced to carve in that shack on the Phelps farm.
A question from Marco Gravina of North York, ON:
What sparked your interest in Twain? In light of all your studies and scholarly work, does that initial spark still exist or has it been supplanted by other aspects of Twains work.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin responds:
My mother read "Tom Sawyer" to me as a bedtime story when I was eleven. People sometimes told me that I looked like Huck Finn. "It's the freckles," they'd explain--not explaining anything at all. I didn't read "Huckleberry Finn" until junior year in high school when it was assigned in my English class. It was the fall of 1965. I was living in a small town in Connecticut. I expected a sequel to "Tom Sawyer". So when the teacher--Anthony Arciola in Staples High School--handed out the books and announced our assignment, my jaw dropped: "Write a paper on how Mark Twain used irony to attack racism in 'Huckleberry Finn.'"
The year before, in the summer of 1964, the bodies of three young men who had gone to Mississippi to help blacks register to vote--James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner--had been found in a shallow grave; a group of white segregationists (the county sheriff among them) had been arrested in connection with the murders. America's inner cities were simmering with pent-up rage that began to explode in the summer of 1965, when riots in Watts left 34 people dead. None of this made any sense to me. I was confused, angry, certain that there was something missing from the news stories I read each day: the why. Then I met Pap Finn. And the Phelpses.
Pap Finn, Huck tells us, "had been drunk over in town" and "was just all mud." He erupts into a drunken tirade about "a free nigger...from Ohio--a mulatter, most as white as a white man," with "the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in town that's got as fine clothes as what he had."
"...they say he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there: but when they told me that there was a state in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote again. Them's the very words I said. And to see the cool way of that nigger--why he wouldn't 'a' give me the road if I hadn't shoved him out of the way."
Later on in the novel, when the runaway slave Jim gives up his freedom to nurse a wounded Tom Sawyer, a white doctor testifies to the stunning altruism of his actions. The Phelpses and their neighbors--all fine, upstanding, well-meaning, churchgoing folk, "agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some notice took of it, and reward. So every one of them promised, right out and hearty, that they wouldn't curse him no more. Then they come out and locked him up. I hoped they was going to say he could have one or two of the chains took off," Huck tells us, "because they was rotten heavy, or could have meat and greens with his bread and water, but they didn't think of it."
Why did the behavior of these people tell me more about why Watts burned than anything I had read in the daily paper? And why did a drunk Pap Finn railing against a black college professor from Ohio whose vote was as good as his own tell me more about white anxiety over black political power than anything I had seen on the evening news? Mark Twain knew that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, a black man could do--including selflessly sacrificing his freedom, the only thing of value he had--that would make white society see beyond the color of his skin. And Mark Twain knew that depicting racists with perfect pitch would expose the viciousness of their world view like nothing else could (It was an insight echoed some eighty years after Mark Twain penned Pap Finn's rantings about the black professor, when Malcolm X famously asked, "What do white racists call a black man with a Ph.D.?" and answered, "Nigger!"
Mark Twain taught me things I needed to know. He taught me to understand the raw racism that lay behind what I saw on the evening news. He taught me that the most well-meaning people can be hurtful and myopic. He taught me to recognize the supreme irony of a country founded in freedom that continued to deny freedom to so many of its citizens.
As I came to understand "Huckleberry Finn" and "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as commentaries on the era now known as the nadir of American race relations, those books pointed me toward the world recorded in nineteenth-century black newspapers and in fiction by Twain's black contemporaries. My investigation of the role black voices and traditions played in shaping Mark Twain's art (in "Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices") helped make me aware of their role in shaping all of American culture. My research underlined for me the importance of changing the stories we tell about who we are to reflect the realities of what we've been.
I still find Twain's use of irony stunning. As I've become aware of the full scope of his opus, I'm awed by the range of genres he experimented in, and by the energy and excitement he brought to so many of them. Twain's playful treatment of the subject of gender roles in "Eve's Diary" and "Extract from Adam's Diary" interests me more now than when I first read these pieces as an adolescent.
A question from John Ashmore of New York, NY:
"Huckleberry Finn" has been a controversial book for generations. What I'd like to know is how it has been treated differently in different parts of the country. I'm guessing that part of the reason that Hannibal, MO is reluctant to embrace Huck Finn is because of it's own real history of slavery. But I imagine that in New England, for example, the history of scholarship and censorship of Huck has been markedly different.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin responds:
The question you raise is a very interesting one, and I'm not sure I have a very concrete answer. I think you are quite right when you suggest that a region's own history informs the way the book is taught. There are parts of the South that have still not really made slavery and its legacies a part of the curriculum; in those contexts, it would be very hard to teach "Huckleberry Finn" responsibly. I consider myself fortunate to have moved to New England from New York by the time I was in high school: had I stayed in New York City, I would not have encountered "Huckleberry Finn" until college, since it was banned at that time from the public schools. New England was Twain's home when he was asking all those tough questions that he did not ask as a youth in Missouri. It is probably easier for Connecticut to "claim" the Twain who, at age 50, launched such an effective challenge to the moral norms of the world in which he grew up, than it is for community of his childhood to come to terms with the Twain who as an adult trained such a skeptical eye on the world of his youth.
A question from Orde W. Lawrence of Victoria, BC:
Words in the bible have been changed over the years to fit in with the social mores of the times without changing its over-all tone and importance. Would it be so wrong to change the multiple use of the word "Nigger" (in "Huckleberry Finn") into something less offensive to African-Americans, such as negro which was also in the vernacular of the time?
Shelley Fisher Fishkin responds:
By the time Mark Twain wrote "Huckleberry Finn", he understood that the word "nigger" was a racial slur (as a child, he probably was oblivious to that fact, much as Huck is). If you "clean up" the language of the racists in the novel (basically, all of the white characters, including Huck), then you're "cleaning up" a messy, disgusting, dirty chapter of the past. The word "nigger" IS offensive. So was slavery. If we sanitize the past we forego the rawness of its pain, but also the force of its lessons.
I think it would be difficult for the book to have the impact that it can now have if one started tampering with Twain's language. Twain revised the manuscript meticulously. His cross-outs and corrections, for example, show the pains he took, in the concluding section of the book, to make Tom Sawyer look foolish and to make Jim look noble. I think we have to trust Twain, to give him the benefit of th doubt, on this one and assume that he knew what he was doing; if you don't let people use the racist language they would have used, you can't portray them accurately and convincingly.
The basic irony Twain addressed is, sadly, still too much with us: How can a society that considers itself "civilized" continue to deny the humanity of large numbers of people in it? Fiction can grab us by the throat and thrust our nose into foulness so deep the smell is suffocating. The tempers that Twain continues to rile are testimony to the power of his art--and to its ability to force us to engage the important issues it puts on the table.
Additional Questions:
A question from Ervin S. Duggan of Alexandria, VA:
Mark Twain springs from what might seem to many rather ordinary soil: Protestant Midwestern America. Yet he became a religious skeptic, an iconoclast (albeit with a sense of humor) and an enemy of slavery and racism. What shaping influences, in your judgment, turned Twain's mind so decisively away from the conventional and toward the unconventional--- away from the ordinary and toward the extraordinary?
Shelley Fisher Fishkin responds:
What an intriguing set of questions! First, some comments on the issue of Twain's religious skepticism: Clemens tells us that his first schoolteacher told him that if he prayed sincerely, his prayers would be answered. When young Sam Clemens prayed and his prayers didn't get answered, doubt began to set in. Indeed, later in life he would atribute to that early experience his conviction that Christianity and all religions are "lies and swindles." His mother and other members of his family sampled a variety of religious denominations during his youth, perhaps giving him further reason to doubt any one sect's assertions of its superiority over another. His first trip to Europe helped hone his skepticism about the contributions the Catholic church had made to civilization (imposing cathedrals did not, in Twain's view, justify the suffering imposed in the name of religion in European history). And when he married into the Langdon family, and learned the story of his father-in-law's founding of a new church in Elmira when his old congregation refused to condemn slavery, Twain must have recalled with some confusion the sermons he had heard in church throughout his childhood asserting that slavery was a system ordained by God.
Twain was not particularly unconventional during his youth. Indeed it was not until he was in his 30s that he began writing pieces that challenged norms widely accepted by those around him (I am thinking of his attacks on the persecution of the Chinese by the San Francisco Police that he wrote in the 1860s; these outspoken satires ran against the grain of popular opinion). And it was not until his late 30s, and his 40s and 50s that he began to challenge white Americans' racism towards blacks.
I've long been fascinated by the question of how this child of slaveholders came to write one of the greatest anti-racist works of fiction by an American. I think a number of key individuals helped teach Twain to re-evaluate and reject (years after the Civil War had ended) the pro-slavery views of the community in which he grew up. His abolitionist father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, and his family, were key. At time when Mark Twain's own father, John Marshall Clemens, had been sending "slave-stealers" to the state penitentiary, Jervis Langdon had been funding their activities. The proud anti-slavery heritage of Elmira, New York (where the Langdon family lived and where Twain would spend close to 20 summers) left its mark on Twain, as did the stories of the former runaway slaves and ex-slaves who made up Elmira's thriving black community. Twain listened to the story of Mary Ann Cord's separation from her child on the auction block, for example, and realized how outrageous was the suffering that she had endured. He told her story in his first contribution to the _Atlantic Monthly_ (it was a first: a black vernacular storyteller treated with dignity and respect rather than condescension). Twain's move to the East coast, and people he met not only in Elmira, but also in Boston and Hartford--including Frederick Douglass--helped shape his awareness of both the real nature of slavery, AND the continuing legacies of it in American society; they helped him understand the racism that prevented many African-Americans, even after slavery had been ended, from realizing their dreams and from living full lives. As Twain got to know ex-slaves like Mary Ann Cord, I suspect that he had occasion to recall a number of slaves of his childhood--such as Uncle Dan'l, whose storytelling had moved and inspired Twain, and Jerry, whose satirical orations had led Twain to remember him as "the greatest orator in the country." I suspect that Twain began to realize that some of the people who had taught him the most, as a child were people whom the "good" citizens of Hannibal had failed to classify as "people" at all. The absurdity of considering eloquent orators and storytellers like Dan'l and Jerry as on a par with pigs and goats must have struck Twain as particularly untenable after conversations with Jervis Langdon, Frederick Douglass, and others helped open his eyes.
I have come to believe that these ironies--ironies that Twain saw much more lucidly than most of his countrymen--were the ironies underlying Twain's iconoclastic stance towards a range of issues. They honed his awareness of the lies people tell themselves, and helped make him such a consummate analyst of lies in general. The Hannibal of Mark Twain's youth was permeated by what Forrest Robinson has called "bad faith"--by a propensity of people who daily violated the moral norms to which they paid lip service while pretending they were doing nothing of the sort. Twain eventually came to understand the phenomenon and would ultimately manage to penetratingly dissect the self-delusion and communal collusion required to sustain it. By probing the human relations that obtained in the world of his childhood, Mark Twain would become an acerbic analyst not only of "bad faith," but of its close cousin, the "lie of silent assertion," that could hold an entire nation in its thrall.
In an 1899 essay, he would write,
It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of the emancipation agitation in the North the agitators got but small help or countenance from any one. Argue and plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society--the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion--the silent assertion that there wasn't anything going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.
Most residents of Hannibal during Twain's childhood clearly bought the "silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop." Huck had bought it, as well, and out of Twain's probing of the implications of that fact, came a stunningly powerful and very American novel.
Twain's iconoclasm was also fueled by other lies to which his large and varied range of experiences exposed him: from the chicanery of the Nevada silver territory to the shamelessness of Gilded Age politics, there was no shortage of deception for Twain to expose. He worried that people less skeptical and sophisticated than himself might be taken in and defrauded. To this end, he did his best to teach all his readers to train a healthy skepticism on the "authorities" that held them in their thrall. (Being blessed with a fabulous sense of humor--and being a genius to boot--didn't hurt.)
Iconoclasm and irreverence were, I suspect, close cousins, in Twain's view. Both were the enemy of unchallenged orthodoxy and ossified assumptions. "Irreverence," he once said, "is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense."
A question from Natalie Goldberg of Chicago, IL :
Why does Mark Twain back away from his development of Jim's humanity at the end of the book? Why does he permit slapstick humor at Jim's expense? From being a father figure when he and Huck were on the river, Jim becomes just another slave on the Phelps Plantation who seems to cheerily go along with all Tom Sawyer's plans and agree with Huck that Tom knows best. Was Twain himself unable to face the implications of his novel or are we to take this ending as an example of Jim's peril in slave territory and his need to "play dumb" and go along with the outrageous escape plans?
Shelley Fisher Fishkin responds:
I have to confess that in my first readings of the book, I shared your puzzlement at the slapstick burlesque with which the novel concludes. Starting about twelve years ago, however, when I began to become more aware of what was happening in the South during the period when Twain was writing the book (1876 through the early 1880s), I began to have a rather different "take" on what was going on. I came to see Tom Sawyer's shenanigans as a satire on white Americans' willingness to turn "freedom" for the freed blacks into a travesty. I expand on this view in "Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices," and, most recently, in "Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture." Here are some further comments on the subject that draw on my discussions in these books: racism.
While posing, on the surface, as an unthreatening boys' adventure story, "Huckleberry Finn" is increasingly coming to be understood as a satire that voices encoded criticisms of American race relations in the Post-Reconstruction South. During the period in which Twain wrote the novel--l876 to l883--the gains that blacks had won during Reconstruction were being quickly overturned. In l877, the Federal troops that had been safeguarding the rights of blacks in the South were, in effect, withdrawn. The intimidation that white supremacists earlier had to carry out at night could now be accomplished in broad daylight; racists--organized and disorganized--pushed their ends through arson, murder, lynchings and mass assault. The official government policy was to look the other way, as African-Americans' civil rights were flagrantly violated, and as thousands of African-Americans were effectively re-enslaved through such means as sharecropping, lynchings, and the convict-least system. What Bernard DeVoto called the "chilling descent" of the novel's ending mirrors the equally chilling descent embodied in that chapter of history. As Du Bois put it in his book Black Reconstruction, "The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery."
Huck Finn presents itself as a simple boys' book as slyly as the traditional trickster tale presents itself as a simple animal story. Just beneath the surface, however, it dramatizes, as perhaps only a work of art can, both the dream and the denial of the dream, both the spectacular boldness of the promise of liberty and justice for all, and the nation's spectacular failure to make that promise a reality.
In her introduction the Oxford Mark Twain edition of the novel, Toni Morrison characterized the last third of the novel as Mark Twain's commentary on the "the collapse of civil rights for blacks" in the 1880s, a time when "the nation, as well as Tom Sawyer, was deferring Jim's freedom in agonizing play." As Frederick Douglass put it in his 1880 speech in Elmira (of which Twain had to be aware), "the old master class" had managed to triumph "over the newly enfranchised citizen." Impressed into chain gangs, "banished from the ballot box and robbed of representation," and forced to "work the farms of their former masters under the lash," "persons of color" throughout the South, Douglass stated, were living in a condition "but little above what it was in the time of slavery." The Supreme Court's decision in 1883 to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1875 rolled the clock back further when it came to social justice. As he watched these events transpire, Twain finished his novel--not in a slapdash or slopped-together manner, but making subtle and careful revisions.
In the book's famous ending--variously maligned as a failure, a mistake, a retreat, or worse--what do we find? Incarcerated in a tiny shack with a ludicrous assortments of snakes, rats and spiders put there by an authority figure who claims to have his best interests at heart, Jim is denied information that he needs and is forced to perform a series of pointless and exhausting tasks. After risking his life to get the freedom that unbeknownst to him is already his, after proving himself to be a paragon of moral virtue who towers over everyone around him, this legally-free black man is still denied respect--and is still in chains. All of this happens not at the hands of charlatans, the duke and the king, but at the initiative of a respectable Tom Sawyer and churchgoing citizens like the Phelpses and their neighbors.
Is what America did to the ex-slaves any less insane than what Tom Sawyer put Jim through in the novel? Where do we go for a window on the "contrast between our ideals and activities," that was "inescapable" after "the war to 'free the slaves,'" as Ralph Ellison put it in our 1991 interview? "People didn't want to talk directly about it," Ellison observed. But Twain did take it on: "One of the functions of comedy," Ellison said, "is to allow us to deal with the unspeakable. And this Twain did consistently." What is the history of post-Emancipation race relations in the United States if not a series of maneuvers as cruelly gratuitous as the indignities inflicted on Jim in the final section of "Huckleberry Finn?" Why was the Civil Rights movement necessary? Why were black Americans forced to go through so much pain and trouble just to secure rights that were supposedly theirs already? "Huckleberry Finn" may end in farce--but it is not Twain's farce: it is ours. Twain's book is not escapist. It is an escape from the denial of the farce we've made of what was--and still is--a noble social and political experiment.
Thank you for your thoughtful and stimulating questions!
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
 |
        |
|
| Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station. | ||
| ||
| PBS Online Privacy Policy Copyright ©1996- MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved. | ||
| ||
