Virgina Tech, Huck Finn, and the Novel of Purpose

(x-posted from the Valve)

Like everyone else this week, I’ve lost more than a little sleep thinking about what happened at Virginia Tech.  I fret over the university context one minute, the comparative one the next—two hundred people died senselesly in Iraq yesterday—but more than anything else, it is the professional context that dogs my mind.  Cho Seung-hui was an English major, after all, and thus an example of the abject failure of the liberal arts to humanize the troubled souls who study them.  His plays are compelling evidence that Plato was onto something in Book X of The Republic: literature originates in the base, irrational place to which it appeals; and the production and consumption of it succours the worst in us.  Put mildly, Cho’s work was not cathartic.  He fell prey to the vicious cycle of unreason Socrates described. 

As a senior English major at Virginia Tech, he could have taken courses that appeal to the most hardened culture warrior—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Augustan Literature, Romantic Literature, Renaissance Literature, &c.—or those the cultural studies side considers morally edifying—Ethnic Children’s Literature, Introduction to Women’s Literature, Introduction to African-American Literature, Literature and Ecology, Postcolonial Cultural Studies, Contemporary Horror, Women in Sport, &c.  My intention is not to declare a pox on both houses, but to point to how thin this justification of our work is.  One course in postcolonial literature does not a progressive make, nor will reading Shakespeare transform a troubled soul into a humanist.  On one level, we know this—witness the photograph of the SS officer, feet on desk, reading Goethe—but on another, our professional identity intertwines with the notion that good books make good people, so long as someone teaches them how to read. 

Which is what we say we do, careful as we are to pepper our conversations with “critical thinking” whenever we interact with the outside world.  All of which dovetails with a long, unsatisfactory post I’ve written on The Novel of Purpose.  In her discussion of Mark Twain, Claybaugh addresses Huck Finn‘s belated purposiveness via Jonathan Arac’s Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target.  I have written previously of my admiration for Arac, but Idol and Target has always bothered me.  Arac is right to say that the book has always been an exercise in self-congratulation—it is an abolitionist novel published in 1885—but as someone who has taught the novel three times now, I think his critical distance shows here.  Students latch onto Huck’s declaration of war against Southern custom: “All right then, I’ll go to hell,” Huck says after recognizing his shared humanity with the captured Jim.  It is a powerful epiphanic moment, even if it leads to the odd fact, as Claybaugh writes, “[g]enerations of readers have identified with Huck and have in the process congratulated themselves as if they were alone in recognizing that slavery was wrong, that African Americans are human beings” (175). 

Huck Finn may only obliquely be a novel of purpose, but its characterization of Jim is perhaps the finest argument for the novel as a moral tool.  As Claybaugh notes, when Huck Finn opens, Jim is little more than a caricature; over the long middle section of the novel, Jim displays ever more intellectual and emotional complexity; when Tom Sawyer returns, so too does the caricature.  Only now, it is mediated by effects of the Bildungsroman that supplanted it.  Jim is not a flat character, but a flattened one.

Claybaugh’s emphasis on the reformist tradition leads her to follow Arac and consider Huck Finn a belated antislavery novel.  Though still central, I would say that “All right then, I’ll go to hell” is less significant as an antislavery sentiment than a promise broken by the horrors of the final act.  Huck’s declaration makes Tom’s dehumanization of Jim all the more harrowing, which points to the moral content of the novel: it is one thing to say words—no matter how hard-won—another to act upon them when faced with cultural precedent. (Which is what Tom represents for Huck, as established in the opening chapters.) The perfidy of the otherwise sympathetic Huck bothers readers not because Twain conned them into self-congratulation, but because it demonstrates the weakness of Huck’s conviction. 

This is not to say that I disagree with Claybaugh’s reading of the novel overall—Twain toys with the conventions of reformist literature throughout the novel—only that the focus on the belatedness foregrounds the issue of slavery, such that it is difficult not to read the novel as self-congratulatory con.  She is correct to insist on Twain’s reluctance to consider literature morally edifying: Huck Finn‘s unfinished sequel, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, a realist counterpart to what he would later call “Fenimore Cooper’s literary offenses.” 

The sequel picks up where Huck Finn left off, with Tom applying what he has learned—from “Cooper’s novel,” as he admits to Huck—only instead of imposing generic conventions on life, Huck and Tom learn that such conventions aren’t drawn from it.  They expect to meet honorable “Injuns” Fenimore Cooper portrayed, and reality seems to conform with literature at first.  As Huck says, “we was all stuck after the Injuns, kind of in love with them, as you may say, and I reckon I never had better times than I had then.” The good times came to a quick close, however, when the Indians betray them, killing all but one member of the party Huck and Tom had befriended and kidnapping Jim.  This is when Huck discovers Tom learned “about Injuns, how noble they was” from Fenimore Cooper; the rest of their journey to find Jim is an exercise in perpetual disabuse.  The symmetry is telling: in Huck Finn, Tom uses literary convention to enslave Jim; in Among the Indians, Tom must shuck literary convention in order to free him.  In neither book, then, can a case be made that Twain thought much of the novel of purpose.

And yet, the third act of Huck Finn brutally enacts a failure of conviction.  I can think of no other discussion in which the students become as enraged at a character than the one spanning the last two classes on Huck Finn.  They feel betrayed by Huck—so betrayed, in fact, that I wonder whether that anger is a permanent bequest.  Has reading the novel increased the thought they put into a promise?  Has literary study improved them, even if only in this smallest of ways? 

Comments

[The Management]

[Nazis -- I mean actual, honest-to-God Neo-Nazis -- posted a link here earlier. Must not have known I was Jewish.]

[SEK]

Just what I wanted ... Nazis!

[Anthony]

I really wish I hadn't followed that link...

[todd.]

Man. Reading this blog makes me glad that I switched majors from English to CS after freshman year. There was simply no way I was ever going to learn to read with such a nose for nuance, or to write nearly so well.

[The Necromancer]

It's a novel about boyhood and adventure...Isn't it "supposed" to "enact a failure of conviction"? That and describe fucking around with rafts on the Mississippi...

[Tim Lacy]

Although I admire the analysis of Huck Finn, I want to focus on a few larger ideas in your post.

SEK said: "Cho Seung-hui was an English major, after all, and thus an example of the abject failure of the liberal arts to humanize the troubled souls who study them."

I too have been troubled by a variation of this very point. In fact, before learning the details I assumed, since Seung-hui shot folks in an engineering building, that this was a liberal-arts-challenged engineering student that turned on his classmates. Because like you (SEK), I believe "that good books make good people, so long as someone teaches them how to read," I was disoriented after learning Seung-hui's area of study. In some ways I still can't believe he didn't absorb the lesssons of humanity contained in the books he likely was required to read.

This conundrum unfortunately proves that, as humanities folks, our modus operandi (that "literary study improve[s] them, even if only in this smallest of ways") is partly just a mere hope. We can't control the listener, or the way one chooses to read.

But we can, strangely, take hope in the fact that college students operate in check-list fashion in order to obtain a credential. They're not violating the sacred nature of reading on purpose: it's a function of their environment. They read not for the beauty or philosophy of a book, but to get a grade. The humanities are still alive (woo hoo!), but not fully in higher education as it exists today - no matter the major of study (even in the core liberal arts disciplines).

If higher education's present-day utilitarian functions kill the desire to be a lifelong learner, then we're in for more tragedies like Virginia Tech. But I've observed that people do maintain their love for books in spite of their schooling. Sometimes they return to that love when the credential is done, or after a pause. - TL

[Jesse A.]

Tim,
It was my impression that the proprietor disagrees with that statement, thus the first half of the sentence "On one level, we know this—witness the photograph of the SS officer, feet on desk, reading Goethe—..." The idea that reading certain books, even reading them well and with pleasure will somehow create good people, or still whatever homicidal urges they may have, strikes me as wishful thinking, which I believe was SEK's point. On a different note, I'm not quite sure I'm reading the end of your post properly. It seems to me that you're implying that a person who loves books will not commit murder, that somehow "a desire for lifelong learning" inoculates a person from violent tendencies. This seems to me to be a fairly naive perspective.

[SEK]

Todd, I wrote like this as an undergrad. Whatever "skill" I now possess is the result of years of laboring on it. In other words: no reason to be hard on yourself.

Necromancer, I'm not following. Are you calling all children perfidious liars? (Not that I'd disagree, mind you.)

Tim and Jesse, I think you're responding to my dilemma of conscience here. I believe that literature is no guarantor of morality and that it improves the moral conscience of its readers. My hypocrisy aside, Jesse, I think Tim's responding to the two-part solution I discussed: it's not enough to read literature, a person needs to be taught how to read. "Sympathetic identification" often seems like the "natural" reaction to narrative, but to develop a sophisticated moral barometer takes concerted effort. This is why you have many clever, soulless readers of science fiction: spend all the time on the gadgets, the humanity suffers. (The obverse, however, isn't true. Or, maybe it is for something like Updike's Couples, but not for the run-of-the-mill Harlequin Romance.)

[DaveL]

There is another possibility: that the guy was just plain ol' mentally ill. Literature is great stuff, but it's not much of an antipsychotic.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"This is why you have many clever, soulless readers of science fiction: spend all the time on the gadgets, the humanity suffers."

I recently read E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series. It's a fascinating 1950s-60s SF train wreck over four volumes. Part of the structure of escalation in this kind of space opera means that the hero must always be meeting new species of humanoid aliens, each of which contributes some technical knowledge or intellectual skill that the hero uses to eradicate the current enemy but which involves them in a fight against a new enemy. And there's a continual tension between the hero being "good" and between ever-larger acts of genocide being "necessary".

By the last book, one of the people hanging around the hero is a member of a warlike culture whose technical abilities have been surpassed a couple of books ago. This culture worships evolution, which they believe means, in part, moral evolution. So they realize dimly that while their first move in conflict is to completely wipe out their enemies, that this is a growth stage they are supposed to get over -- symbolized in the last book by them deciding to wear only one or two hand weapons at all times rather than always having many.

So, somewhere in the last book, it's "necessary" for an ultra-genocide of an alien race of trillions of individuals to take place. This is a bit too much for the hero, even though he sets up the machinery to do so. So the guy from two books ago is brought in -- to push the button. That's his special cultural skill, the ability to guiltlessly be the proximate cause of genocide. What a good thing that not everyone is yet fully evolved! There is a task for each of us, etc.

There's something really special about SF. I'm convinced that there's bits of our culture that you'd never get a clear inkling of otherwise.

[Simon]

In yesterday's Daily Telegraph (London) an idiotic MP had an http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/04/20/do2001.xml>opinion column suggesting that watching violent films (specifically, Chan Wook Park's Old Boy, John Woo's excremental Face/Off and - inexplicably - Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine) inspired Cho, and so film makers should think about the social consequences of their movies, particularly 'violence as entertainment.'
Utter nonsense, as plenty of responses have pointed out. But the inverse argument makes no sense either: if we think blaming violent films and video games for massacres is silly (and I think we can all agree that it is) then it is equally silly to expect reading novels to prevent them. Literature can be as lurid in its description of violence as film can, but drawing a connection between cultural consumption and behaviour is impossible; simply, the determining factors are far too complex. If they were all that simple, perhaps horrific crimes could be more easily prevented, but culture - and life in general - would be pretty dull.
Secondly, there is something a bit disturbing to me about the thrust of your argument in general. Of course we can all agree that killing innocent people for no reason is wrong, but I wonder where your argument about "improvement" is headed on less clear-cut matters. What I'm getting at is that there is a particular value system you seem to view as self-evidently superior. This is a value system broadly shared by those who engage in the production and criticism of literature - people who largely belong to a certain, relatively priveleged, social class. So there's a danger here of turning a particular set of values in to a tool of class oppression. As Zizek http://www.lacan.com/coalition.htm>has put it:
"For example, feminist struggle can be articulated into a chain with progressive struggle for emancipation, or it can (and it certainly does) function as an ideological tool of the upper-middle classes to assert their superiority over the "patriarchal and intolerant" lower classes."

[Rich Puchalsky]

I'm a few hours ahead of you, Simon. But Zizek is confused, as always. If you're talking class struggle, than the middle class is currently the more revolutionary class -- Zizek's attempt to have it otherwise casts him in his usual role of implicitly siding with fundamentalists, conservatives, and that avatar of belief in the absurd, Bush. There are fundamental reasons of justice why feminism is better than patriarchy. Therefore, it's good that this encoding of feminism as middle class takes place; that's the source of the relentless cultural propaganda that is making patriarchy less and less acceptible -- I'd say the current years of reaction are going to turn out to be its local high point. Zizek is in the odd position of thinking that revolutionary violence is a good thing but that ideological encoding is not.

[The Constructivist]

Rich, if you scroll down this link to sf posts at Mostly Harmless, you'll come across a few on Legend of the Galactic Heroes, which from what I can understand of the little I've seen attempts to bring characterization and ethical issues to the space opera genre. It's never been translated into English or marketed internationally, but you can find a few very badly subtitled episodes on YouTube.

Scott, that Twain post I promised you is half-way there--more coming tomorrow. I completely agree with your reading of the ending of AHF and in the longer chapter this post is based on argue that Huck's failure there is part of Twain's larger critique of the end of Reconstruction.

[Eileen A. Joy]

I'm mainly in sympathy with Simon on this discussion. I never thought reading literature humanized anyone or made them better citizens or better persons or more moral or whatever. My favorite two books on this point are James Anderson Winn's "The Pale of Words" and Bill Readings' "The University in Ruins" [Readings' book, especially, is a must-read, I think, for anyone planning a future working in the humanities at the university level--it is a pessimistic but also hopeful book]. Furthermore, what Cho did at Va. Tech. has nothing to do with his being an English major [or even a creative writer] and it really surprises me how many blog posts have been generated on academic and literary studies blogs hashing through the anguish of that fact. Art and literature attract devils as well as angels and both sane and insane men and women create art and literature. Of course, as a professor of medieval and other literatures and as a scholar of literature [and of literary and cultural thought], obviously I have to have some faith that what SEK might call the cultivation of good reading [and interpretive] practices might matter somehow in the inculcation of certain types of moral [and other] understanding in our students. It's just that, over the years, I've developed a hunch that we only really help students who are already hard-wired to embrace and open up to what we and literature have to offer. Remember that moment in the movie "Frankenstein" [not the book] where the monster is stumbling around in a field somewhere and he sees a girl throwing flowers into a well and he's like, "ooooo, ugh, oooo, cool" [said in his inimitable inarticulate way]? And then he's also throwing flowers in the well and having fun? And then said girl ends up at the bottom of the well. In any case, the incident at Va. Tech. does not indict the humanities; I thought we stopped carrying that flag a long time ago. You can never teach morality. You can only model it. And maybe live it.

[eb]

It's been a while since I read it, but Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities does a pretty good job showing that the tension between the highest ideals of humanistic teaching and the varied impact of such teaching on students was there even at the very beginning. Not being a Renaissance scholar, I couldn't follow some of the details of the Latin, but the comparisons between teachers' writings and students' notes were certainly interesting.

[Proteus]

What makes you so sure that the purpose of a liberal arts education is to humanize its students?

[Arlene]

I just read the two plays at the link provided above by Cho Seung Hui. I found it interesting how his heroes were outcast youths and the antagonist (or "evil" characters) to be adult authority figures...how original.
Overall, his works resounded like the whines of an immature, angst-ridden brat with deplorable vocabulary, which shocks me really. Someone who is an English major usually develops their "writing voice" to be a bit more sophisticated. How utterly disappointing.

[Skarl]

"This is why you have many clever, soulless readers of science fiction: spend all the time on the gadgets, the humanity suffers. (The obverse, however, isn't true. Or, maybe it is for something like Updike's Couples, but not for the run-of-the-mill Harlequin Romance.)"

Could you point me to your source for this? I was unaware that SF had been shown to cause or correlate with the loss of ones soul. And the characterization of SF as 'spending all the time on the gadgets' seems a little unfair, given how little hard-SF gets published or read these days (I know it bores me to death.)

In my experience, SF readers come in two types - people who read for the weird and wacky worlds, and people who read for the ideas (not that the two are unrelated.) I doubt reading SF improves ones moral character, but a shared background of SF can often be useful for discussing our future-shocked modern world (among other things - explaining 'cogito ergo sum' became easier for me when I could use The Matrix as an example.)

Returning to the subject at hand, I think that perhaps interactive narrative (i.e. computer games) have more potential to encourage moral behavior. The problem with books as a means of teaching morality is that they require no moral decisions from the reader. The worst a book can do is require us to occasionally re-evaluate our judgments of the characters (as in your example.) Virtual worlds force us to take a role, and make mistakes (I suspect that making mistakes, and feeling the unpleasant emotions that that produces, is largely what makes for a morally-useful experience.) Of course, current virtual worlds are essentially useless for this, except insofar as other human players create real moral decisions, but this may change in the future.

And yes, I think computer games could cause real moral harm as well. I don't think the computer games currently available do, for the same reasons they are not morally helpful.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Proteus, that's the classic ideal, and the one bandied about when the current roster of departments were formed at the turn-of-the-last-century. You're right that it's not necessarily so, nor need it be, but it's a common sentiment. More frequently, it pops up as the justification for any of the various multiculturalisms. They never say as much -- or they do so more sophisticatedly -- but it's still there.

Arlene:

Someone who is an English major usually develops their "writing voice" to be a bit more sophisticated.

I wish. "Sophisticated" is not the first word I'd used to describe the prose of an English major. Oftentimes, the pressure of trying to write like an English major makes students sound like mildly intelligent but perpetually confused non-native speakers. That said, Cho had a tin ear. I almost wrote a post mocking it, then decided -- correctly, I think -- "Too Soon."

Skarl:

Could you point me to your source for this?

My own experience as 1) a formerly soulless reader of science fiction, 2) teaching many currently soulless readers of science fiction, and 3) selling soulless books to soulless readers of science fiction for the four years I spent working at a used bookstore. Honestly, though, the comment was flip. Not that I don't believe that there is, in fact, a particular sort of voracious reader who -- despite engorging every SF novel to hit the shelves -- remains unchanged and unchangeable. I could go further and say they're also typically libertarian, a philosophy they adopted via Heinlein ... but this is still too gross and uncritical. Maybe I'll do something with it later.

[The Constructivist]

Scott, the post I promised you is closer to done. Letting you know here to avoid the other TC at The Valve.