Whenever I read Homer, I see ample evidence that women were treated abominably in ancient Greece, and I am very thankful that I live now and not then. In fact, I would rather pay a visit to Procrustes than marry any of Homer’s heroes. Fortunately, none of them is asking me. The invitation Homer offers me is a far broader one: to enter a world that was very different from ours, but that in its own “pretheoretical” [a phrase used in a finicky, feminist, politically correct letter referenced earlier in the chapter] way possessed nobility and beauty. If I had to step into a polling booth and vote on Homer’s sexual politics, I’d pull the NO lever strenuously. I am therefore glad that the Odyssey is a poem, not a referendum.
[…]
In a controversial 1996 article in Harper’s called “Say it Ain’t So, Huck,” Jane Smiley wrote that she was “stunned” by the idea “that this is a great novel, that this is even a serious novel.” According to Smiley, one of the book’s disqualifying flaws is Huck’s decision to take Jim down the Mississippi River instead of across it to Illinois. She sees this as a moral failure on Huck’s part, and therefore on Mark Twain’s part as well.
“So Jane Smiley would have crossed the Mississippi to the free state of Illinois with her Jim and freed him without delay,” responded a reader named Anson J. Cameron. (Mr. Cameron hails from Port Melbourne, Australia, and may thus be above the American fray.)
And if she kept her description of the river and the Southern sky to a minimum and the dialogue to just a few muttering about many slaveholder’s houses he was set to raze, she could probably free Jim inside of a page. Now, supposing she should keep writing (and Huck could keep rowing) at this pace, she might invent and free upwards of three hundred slaves in the course of her Huck Finn, whereas Twain, farting around with humor and other such distractions, only got around to freeing one.
I’m with Mr. Cameron. I’m very grateful that Huck Finn and Mark Twain were so inefficient and unethical that they didn’t manage to wind up their book on page 54, a few paragraphs after the raft sets off down the river. (And that Homer didn’t send Odysseus straight home.)
–Anne Fadiman
from “Procrustes and the Culture Wars”
found in At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
