Monday, February 22
7:00-8:00 pm
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) &
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
with Bennett Simon, MD, Roberta Apfel, MD, and Deborah Choate, MD
“…These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature - individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics;
the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figuration of death and hell - are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.”
-Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
“NOTICE:
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted;
persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
PER G.G. CHIEF OF ORDINANCE”
-Mark Twain, epigraph, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The consequences of our 400-year history of slavery and racial oppression are pervasively embedded in language, appearing in American literature, as well as in our psychoanalytic literature. The conscious pressure to dismiss or the unconscious pull to ignore the underlying bias in such works is profound.
Using Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an example, Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, argues for the pervasive influence of race and slavery in shaping the nature of the “American Character” as portrayed in canonical American literature: white, masculine, and ruggedly individualistic, ready to “light out for the territories”. Huckleberry Finn became a source of contention as a school text, first principally because of what was considered the dubious morality of its White characters toward each other, and only later, because of its depiction of slavery and Twain's use of language now considered deeply troubling. Morrison’s 1992 analysis treats the work as a brilliant, probing and ultimately problematic portrayal of slavery and being black in ante-bellum America.
Linked below are excerpts from Playing in the Dark and some chapters from Huckleberry Finn which illustrate some of Morrison’s main points. Crucial is that White is normative, is good, and is fragile, depending heavily on Black as inferior, defective - naturally and inevitably so. White - in this instance, Huck Finn - can grow and mature, up to a point, only by virtue of his close interdependence with Jim, an escaping slave. He comes to appreciate and cherish Jim’s deep love and remarkable humanity, but the definition of humanity remains White. He suffers deep pangs of conscience, not because Jim is a slave, but because he is helping Jim escape bondage.
Beyond these excepts, we hope people will have a chance to read both books in full. A re-reading of Twain may find it surprisingly different from what you remembered; a first encounter, surprisingly relevant to the times in which we now find ourselves.
The hour will be structured as thirty minutes of presentation by Bennett Simon, then thirty minutes of audience discussion with all three hosts.
Roberta Apfel, MD, now a retired psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, previously worked as a Public Health physician in the South. From childhood she was aware of and concerned with racial disparities in her milieu and in the practice of medicine. Years of teaching first year medical students highlighted the crucial role of ensuring that physicians and health care givers be recruited from, and be representative of, the actual diversity of our country and the world.
Bennett Simon, MD, is now a retired psychiatrist and Training Analyst Emeritus. Political consciousness and activism crystallized in early teenage years and these have remained an integral part of personal and professional identity. He has taught courses to undergraduates and trainees on literature and psychoanalysis, including Toni Morrison's Beloved.
Robbie and Bennett were recipients of the Kravitz Award for their work on children-in-War and co-edited Minefields in Their Hearts: The Mental Health of Children in War and Communal Violence. They helped found BPSI’s Social Awareness Committee.
Deborah Choate, MD, is a child and adult psychiatrist and adult psychoanalyst on the BPSI faculty. She is co-chair of the Social Awareness Committee, and received the Kravitz Award for work with homeless women and unemployed single mothers.
We are pleased that Bennett, Robbie, and Deborah will host our conversation on February 22 - Please join us.
This BPSI READS Drop-in group is for members of the BPSI Community,
and all interested guests.
One tap mobile: +16465588656,,92867193088#
Dial by your location: +1 646 558 8656; Meeting ID: 928 6719 3088
Passcode: BPSI2021
Curious about Training Opportunities at BPSI?
Please join us at 8:05pm by staying on the link after the program,
for an informal Q+A with members of the Training Outreach Committee.
