Happy Banned Books Week (a little late)
Tomorrow is book club (and not the kind where we do spells to get good mortgages, either).
With this in mind, I have spent the day reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Day They Came to Arrest the Book. For the past three months we've been doing a series on censorship. We started with Fahrenheit 451, (which came during a busy time at work, so I didn't get to go and so haven't finished reading it. I will, though, eventually) and for September read Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which is the children's book Salman Rushdie wrote for his son while he was in hiding because of the death threats he got after writing The Satanic Verses. (I liked that one a lot, by the way.)
Now we're wrapping it up with Huck Finn and The Day They Came, chosen during Banned Book Week, which ended Oct. 3. I had not read Huck Finn before. I read Tom Sawyer and remember liking it, but not much else. And I LOVED the Disney movie version if Huck Finn, with Elijah Wood, back before he was Frodo. But that version was slightly sanitized. The Day They Came is a really dumb, after-school-special sort of young adult novel about a high school where they want to ban Huck Finn. Really, it was pretty bad, and I don't have even middling standards in literature. But it was topical and a quick read, so it made sense for our discussion.
I had not realized that Huck Finn was a controversial book. I liked it, more and more as I went along (though the dialects were a bit of a chore sometimes and I could have done with less description of every house they came upon). I loved and adored the Huck/Jim relationship, and Huck's and Jim's characters, period.
But I'm white. In my reading, it doesn't seem like the excessive use of the N-word was meant to be insulting -- more like a product of the time and an accurate enough historical representation. There's no question, however, that I'm not the one who has the right to say whether it's insulting. So what do y'all think? Is it insulting? And if so, is insulting reason enough to ban it? Is there ever justification for banning a book? Or if not altogether banned, reason enough to say it shouldn't be required reading for school children?
(Here are my problems with the The Day They Came book. I think most people will come down on the side of no, Huck Finn does not deserved to be banned altogether. But they have it being used as a history text in the book. I don't see enough historical value in it to require kids to read it if they find it offensive. I think it's a great story and definitely belongs in an American literature class, but probably should not be the main text of a history class. Maybe I'm missing something, but the book didn't even try to defend what kids would get out of reading it, and I think some things that are offensive are worth offense if what you get out of them justifies it.
The other thing is that I think Huck Finn is too easy of a case. If you really want to get into a discussion about whether censorship is justified in school libraries, choose a book that's roundly hated. Mein Kampf, for instance. I think there is a good historical case to be made for reading Mein Kampf (though, not being a responsible learning from history sort of person, I haven't), but I bet you could put together a better case for banning it than you could for Huck Finn.
That, and, like I said, it was just a really horribly done book. Didn't bother to let us get to know any of the characters. Didn't show any points of view from the opposite side. Contained dialog that started with, "You see ...")
So. What do y'all think? Book club is at 6:30 p.m. Central tomorrow, so you've got more than 12 hours to help me sound smart and thoughtful.