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From: hoffman@hdsvx1.UUCP (Richard Hoffman)
Newsgroups: net.legal,net.books,net.social
Subject: Re: Re: Banning Books and Bibles
Message-ID: <432@hdsvx1.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 13-Aug-86 17:27:27 EDT
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Posted: Wed Aug 13 17:27:27 1986
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Tim Maroney writes:
> It is a total mystery to me how anyone could miss the message of Huckleberry
> Finn with respect to racism ... At one point there is an accident.  The
> dialogue goes pretty much like this:
> 
> 	Southern Lady: "Oh, my goodness!  Was anyone hurt?"
> 	Man: "No ma'am.  A nigger got killed."
> 	Lady: "Well, that's good, because sometimes people do get hurt."
> 
> A fairly unambiguous interchange, no?

I'm sorry, I don't understand.  Are you saying this passage demonstrates the
racism of Twain (because these are really his sentiments) or the anti-racism 
of Twain (because he is satirizing the racist attitude)?  It's clear from the
rest of the book and from his other writings that Twain was against slavery,
and in general believed that Negros are entitled to fair, human treatment,
but it's not at all clear that Twain believed that blacks and whites were
equal in all respects.  In any case, my point is that satire is often
confusing, because it allows ideas to stand on their own idiocy.  A Klansman,
shown merely the passage you quoted above, might come away with a warm feeling
about Twain.  To appreciate the passage as satire, you have to have the moral
sense to know that the Southern Lady has the wrong attitude.  

A lot of passages in Twain present the same difficulty to young readers.
(I knew of some parents who were so scandalized by Jonathan Swift's 
"Modest Proposal" that they tried to have the assigning teacher fired for
advocating Satanism).  But this difficulty cannot be remedied by banning
the book from school libraries, because then, when the student encounters
the book later on, he will *know* that there is something scandalous about
it because it was banned!  The solution is to educate students so that they
can recognize devices such as satire and parody, and to make sure difficult
(because ambiguous) passages are discussed under proper guidance.  After all,
we don't study literature to learn how to read -- we study it to learn how
to understand what we read.
-- 
 Richard Hoffman                | "Oh life is a wonderful cycle of song,
 Schlumberger Well Services     |     A medley of extemporanea.
 hoffman%hdsvx1@slb-doll.csnet  | And Love is a thing that can never go wrong
 PO Box 2175, Houston, TX 77252 | ... And I am Marie of Roumania." --D. PARKER