While I find the quotation from Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Article
'Contingencies of Value,' interesting and worth considering (her work always
is worth considering), I want to ask what after all is the article stating?
That contemporary responses have a tendency to 'contemporize' ideologies
from the past? I suspect that such is often the case, but it seems to me
that to 'purify' past texts (Chaucer's anti-feminism, Shakespeare's
anti-Semiticism, S. Johnson's anti-Scotsism, Twain's supposed "racism") is
to patronize the works and the authors involved. To gloss over or
reintrepret past ideologies seems to me to diminish the impact of some of
these ideologies, and that I believe can be terribly dangerous. The facts
that the medieval world was anti-feminist and that the Elizabethans were
anti-Semitic are true and as we approach these works we should recognize
these awful truths and acknowledge that most of us have moved, it is to be
hoped, beyond these limiting ideologies. In Twain's case, his supposed
racism arises to a great extent from the frequent use of the N-word. But
would any serious reader suggest that Twain should have and ought to have
falsified the realities and the language of the day so as to appease our
contemporary values. I deplore the use of racist terms, whoever the speaker
or enabler may be, but I do not believe we must falsify or rewrite the
past--its literature or its history. To do so, is I believe to do an even
greater injustices to ourselves.
        One further comment,  most who read Huck Finn realize that the work
is truly revolutionary in its attitude to race and that the noblest and most
human character in the novel is Jim. Earl Stevens.




>I do hope the following isn't woefully beside the point; I think that,
>actually, the following is applicable, and an opinion worth scholarly
>consideration (note: I'm no book banner--I say, read _Huck Finn_). The
>quotation (a very interesting one, although it almost cries 'conspiracy
>theory!') is from Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, "Contingencies of
>Value," as it appeared in _Critical Inquiry_ 10 (September 1983):
>        [W]hen the value of a work is seen as unquestionable, those of its
>features that would, in a noncanonical work, be found alienating...will be
>glozed over or backgrounded.  In particular, features that conflict
>intolerably with the interests and ideologies of subsequent subjects (and,
>in the West, with those generally benign "humanistic" values for which
>canonical works are commonly celebrated)--for example, incidents or
>sentiments of brutality, bigotry, and racial sexual or national
>chauvinism--will be represented or rationalized, and there will be a
>tendency among humanistic scholars and academic critics to "save the text"
>by transferring the locus of interest to more formal or structural
>features and/or allegorizing its potentially alienating ideology to some
>more general ("universal") level where it becomes more tolerable and also
>more readily interpretable in terms of contemporary ideologies.  Thus we
>make texts timeless by suppressing their temporality.  (It may be added
>that to those scholars and critics for whom those features are not only
>palatable but for whom the value of the canonical works consists precisely
>in their "embodying" and "preserving" such "traditional values," the
>transfer of the locus of value to fromal properties will be seen as a
>descent into formalism and "aestheticism," and the tendency to alegorize
>it too generally or to interpret it too readily in terms of "modern
>values" will be seen not as saving the text but betraying it.)
>
>...Rivka Swenson
>
>