Huck's conscience
My book club read The Secret Life of Bees last month. For an all-female club we indulge in minimal chick lit, but after a few months of meaty texts, Katie suggested this lighter fare. It's not quite light in that there's copious racism and a heaping helping of child abuse, but it all turns out fine in the end, putting it on the Comedy side of the Comedy/Tragedy line.
My sole criticism of it was its overreliance on the formulaic "magical negro"--the supporting black character[s] whose only real role is to protect and enlighten the young white narrator. My fellow clubbers were quietly horrified at my use of the term "magical negro," and after a couple minutes of looking at their dropped jaws I realized that I needed to vigorously deny coining the term. I can only thank God AJ was there to recall whom it is original with--Spike Lee. I think Mr. Lee is entitled to employ the term "negro" if he wishes.
Bees's main character, Lily, is motherless and her father is a dreadful man. The real action begins when Lily accompanies her cantankerous black nanny to register to vote, but the pair is waylaid by men who are cast from the same mold as Lily's dreadful dad. The resulting altercation puts the nanny in both the hospital and police custody, but Lily busts her out and the two go on the lam.
Now, the setup sounds a hell of a lot like a female Huckleberry Finn (white teenager absconds with runaway black person), and I got all enthused because there are few things I love more than a classic tale retold from the female perspective. See also: Pia Pera's Lo's Diary, which retells Lolita from Dolores Haze's perspective, and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, which gets into what Ulysses's wife and maidservants got up to while the putative hero was AWOL for twenty years.
The novel's not like Huck Finn at all, because Lily and the nanny wind up in the care of magical negroes in the first town they stop by. It did instill in me the desire to reread Twain's masterpiece, which I hadn't picked up since I was a kid and my mom handed me a library copy.
Whatever my parents' flaws, my mom did a great job of steering me toward classics. If I couldn't accompany her to the library, she'd always check out a couple of masterpieces for me. She wasn't into masterpieces herself, though, preferring television and Judith Krantz, so most of the time she had no idea what she was bestowing on me. When I was fourteen or so she came home with Slaughterhouse-Five. I'll give you a moment to reel.
Turns out I adore Vonnegut, but I can't imagine my ma knew about the Montana Wildhack scenes. (It should go without saying that I read her Judith Krantz novels while she was at work anyway, so I was no stranger to sex on the page.) And Huck Finn is hardly less subversive than Vonnegut. See, I don't understand why my mom can't figure out how her thoroughly middle-of-the-road self (she boasts that she has "never voted for a losing presidential candidate," as if clambering on a bandwagon were an admirable enterprise) raised a relatively radical daughter. She should've tried sticking her nose in my books the way I stuck mine in hers. The theme of nearly every great American novel is "Society stifles and your parents are wrong about everything. Rise up!"
Anyway, of the passages I marked off in Huck Finn for the purposes of revisiting and/or inflicting upon others, here's a favorite. Below, Huck meditates on his troublesome conscience, which he later describes as one of the most powerful things he has although it ain't done him no good.
To set up the scene: two men have stopped Huck and Jim's raft, and Huck's behavior leads them to suspect he's got a runaway slave on board, which in fact he does. Huck does his usual conversational duck-and-weave, eventually opting to falsely confirm the men's secondary suspicions--that the raft is infested with smallpox. The men feel so sorry for Huck's supposedly infected family, and likely future orphaning, that they each give him twenty dollars in gold. (An incredibly generous amount of money for the era, equivalent to several hundred dollars today.) After they depart, Huck is wracked with guilt for taking the cash:
They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little, ain't got no show--when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on--s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad--I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.
I fucking love Mark Fucking Twain. Can you see Holden Caulfield in the above passage? How can you not? (Unless you're not familiar with Holden, which I think everyone should be, except those with a predisposition toward assassinating public figures.)
One of the things I'd forgotten about the story was that Jim has a wife and children. (I cried when I read the passage where Jim hits his daughter for disobeying him, realizing only afterward that her recent bout of scarlet fever has left her deaf. I wasn't reading on my sofa, either; I was on a bus.) Almost immediately after learning this, I ran across the information that this year's Seattle Reads book is My Jim, a novel I hadn't heard of. It retells Twain's story from the perspective of Jim's wife. I picked up a reader's guide at either the library or a bookstore. The author seems to mistakenly believe that Jim's family was also owned by Miss Watson, which it wasn't, and I'm such a stickler for literary continuity that I therefore I have no plans to peruse it.
(It's supposedly very good, but man, I can't even read a comic book that lacks continuity. Like that one issue of Batman and the Outsiders where Batman reveals his secret identity to the team, and even Metamorpho is shocked, but Metamorpho actually knew that Batman=Bruce from an earlier issue of The Brave and the Bold.)
I'm starting to realize I don't have a thesis here and should wrap it up. Tl;dr version: Bees good, but un-Huck-like in spite of early promise. Huck awesome; contemporary followup novel has questionable premise.
My sole criticism of it was its overreliance on the formulaic "magical negro"--the supporting black character[s] whose only real role is to protect and enlighten the young white narrator. My fellow clubbers were quietly horrified at my use of the term "magical negro," and after a couple minutes of looking at their dropped jaws I realized that I needed to vigorously deny coining the term. I can only thank God AJ was there to recall whom it is original with--Spike Lee. I think Mr. Lee is entitled to employ the term "negro" if he wishes.
Bees's main character, Lily, is motherless and her father is a dreadful man. The real action begins when Lily accompanies her cantankerous black nanny to register to vote, but the pair is waylaid by men who are cast from the same mold as Lily's dreadful dad. The resulting altercation puts the nanny in both the hospital and police custody, but Lily busts her out and the two go on the lam.
Now, the setup sounds a hell of a lot like a female Huckleberry Finn (white teenager absconds with runaway black person), and I got all enthused because there are few things I love more than a classic tale retold from the female perspective. See also: Pia Pera's Lo's Diary, which retells Lolita from Dolores Haze's perspective, and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, which gets into what Ulysses's wife and maidservants got up to while the putative hero was AWOL for twenty years.
The novel's not like Huck Finn at all, because Lily and the nanny wind up in the care of magical negroes in the first town they stop by. It did instill in me the desire to reread Twain's masterpiece, which I hadn't picked up since I was a kid and my mom handed me a library copy.
Whatever my parents' flaws, my mom did a great job of steering me toward classics. If I couldn't accompany her to the library, she'd always check out a couple of masterpieces for me. She wasn't into masterpieces herself, though, preferring television and Judith Krantz, so most of the time she had no idea what she was bestowing on me. When I was fourteen or so she came home with Slaughterhouse-Five. I'll give you a moment to reel.
Turns out I adore Vonnegut, but I can't imagine my ma knew about the Montana Wildhack scenes. (It should go without saying that I read her Judith Krantz novels while she was at work anyway, so I was no stranger to sex on the page.) And Huck Finn is hardly less subversive than Vonnegut. See, I don't understand why my mom can't figure out how her thoroughly middle-of-the-road self (she boasts that she has "never voted for a losing presidential candidate," as if clambering on a bandwagon were an admirable enterprise) raised a relatively radical daughter. She should've tried sticking her nose in my books the way I stuck mine in hers. The theme of nearly every great American novel is "Society stifles and your parents are wrong about everything. Rise up!"
Anyway, of the passages I marked off in Huck Finn for the purposes of revisiting and/or inflicting upon others, here's a favorite. Below, Huck meditates on his troublesome conscience, which he later describes as one of the most powerful things he has although it ain't done him no good.
To set up the scene: two men have stopped Huck and Jim's raft, and Huck's behavior leads them to suspect he's got a runaway slave on board, which in fact he does. Huck does his usual conversational duck-and-weave, eventually opting to falsely confirm the men's secondary suspicions--that the raft is infested with smallpox. The men feel so sorry for Huck's supposedly infected family, and likely future orphaning, that they each give him twenty dollars in gold. (An incredibly generous amount of money for the era, equivalent to several hundred dollars today.) After they depart, Huck is wracked with guilt for taking the cash:
They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little, ain't got no show--when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on--s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad--I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.
I fucking love Mark Fucking Twain. Can you see Holden Caulfield in the above passage? How can you not? (Unless you're not familiar with Holden, which I think everyone should be, except those with a predisposition toward assassinating public figures.)
One of the things I'd forgotten about the story was that Jim has a wife and children. (I cried when I read the passage where Jim hits his daughter for disobeying him, realizing only afterward that her recent bout of scarlet fever has left her deaf. I wasn't reading on my sofa, either; I was on a bus.) Almost immediately after learning this, I ran across the information that this year's Seattle Reads book is My Jim, a novel I hadn't heard of. It retells Twain's story from the perspective of Jim's wife. I picked up a reader's guide at either the library or a bookstore. The author seems to mistakenly believe that Jim's family was also owned by Miss Watson, which it wasn't, and I'm such a stickler for literary continuity that I therefore I have no plans to peruse it.
(It's supposedly very good, but man, I can't even read a comic book that lacks continuity. Like that one issue of Batman and the Outsiders where Batman reveals his secret identity to the team, and even Metamorpho is shocked, but Metamorpho actually knew that Batman=Bruce from an earlier issue of The Brave and the Bold.)
I'm starting to realize I don't have a thesis here and should wrap it up. Tl;dr version: Bees good, but un-Huck-like in spite of early promise. Huck awesome; contemporary followup novel has questionable premise.