152 The Nation. August 31, 1985

deeply implanted in him than in re-spectable children like Tom Sawyer.

In moments of crisis, accordingly,Huck comes up against the discrepancybetween the standard conception ofblack people as "niggers"—a concep-tion he shares—and what he has learnedas a result of his direct experience withJim. During such crises his inner strug-gle characteristically begins with an un-questioning endorsement of the cul-ture's stock prejudices, but then, whenhe tries to enact them, he balks and, inconsequence, he inadvertently revealstheir inhumanity. When, for example, itsuddenly occurs to him that his journeywith an escaped slave will determinewhat people back home think abouthim, his first reaction is wholly conven-tional: "It would get all around thatHuck Finn helped a nigger to get hisfreedom; and if I was ever to see any-body from that town again, I'd be readyto get down and lick his boots forshame.*' He knows what he is supposedto do if he wants the respect of law-abiding citizens, but the thought ofturning Jim in calls up vivid memoriesof Jim's loyalty and friendship, and hefinally decides that he can't do it; hewould rather go to hell. The conflict be-tween Huck's stock racist ideas and hiscompassionate nature exemplifies theway the controlling irony works: whenhe thinks he is behaving ignobly, we areinvited to recognize his innate nobility.What makes the outcome so powerful isthat the novel's readers are compelled toeffect the ironic reversal. That Huckcan acknowledge Jim's humanity onlyby violating the moral code of a racistsociety is an implication that the boy isunable to grasp or put into words. It is athought that Mark Twain's readersmust formulate for themselves.

But of course the centrality of thatirony also explains why some readersconsider Huckleberry Finn a racistbook. For whatever reason, and onecan imagine several, they mistake thehero's flagrant if erratic racism for thenovel's—the author's—viewpoint. Itmay be difficult, admittedly, for ad-mirers of this wonderful book to believethat an average, reasonably competentreader could fail to recognize that itssatirical thrust is directed against slaveryand racial bigotry, but it does happen.Leaving aside the incontrovertibleevidence that some adult readers domiss the point, it must be emphasizedthat Wallace and those who share hisviews are not chiefly concerned about

the novel's effect on mature, competentreaders. They are concerned about itseffect on schoolchildren, all school-children, but especially black Americanchildren, whose special experiencemight very well hinder their respion-siveness to the ironic treatment of racialoppression. How much do we know, ac-tually, about the ability of teachers, orof children of various ages and socialbackgrounds, to make sense of ironicdiscourse? I have taught this book withpleasure to hundreds of college stu-dents, but I'm not at all confident aboutmy ability to persuade a class of inner-city adolescents—or any literal-mindedadolescents, for that matter—that abook can say, or seem to say, one thingand mean another; or that in this casewe should not be troubled by the factthat the hero calls black people "nig-gers" because, after all. that's what allwhite Southerners called them backthen, and anyway, look, in the end he isloyal to Jim.

And besides, what does one say aboutJim? There can be no doubt that MarkTwain wants us to admire him; he is asympathetic, loving, self-abnegating.even saintly, "Christ-like" man. Butwhat does one tell black children abouthis extreme passivity, his childlikecredulity, his cloying deference towardthe white boy? Aren't these the traits ofa derisory racial stereotype, the fawningblack male? To overcome objections onthat score, one would have to stressJim's cunning and his occasional refusalto play the minstrel darkie, especiallythe great episode in which he drops hishabitual pose of docility, if it is a pose,and angrily denounces Huck for mak-ing him the victim of a cruel joke. "Itwas fifteen minutes," Huck says abouthis reluctant apology, "before 1 couldwork myself up to go and humble my-self to a nigger—but 1 done it, and Iwarn't ever sorry for it afterwards,neither." It is a splendid moment, but isit splendid enough to offset the inescap-able doubts of black readers aboutJim's customary pliancy? Is it enoughthat Jim, the only black male of anysignificance in the novel, asserts hisdignity in this one moving episode?

To raise these complex issues, it needhardly be said, is not to condone thedenunciation of the novel as racisttrash. But even if that opinion is aswrongheaded as I believe it to be. itdoes not follow that those who hold itare necessarily wrong about the inap-propriateness of requiring high-school

teachers to teach, and students to read,the Adventures of Huckkberry Finn.The point at issue, then, is the justifica-tion for that requirement. To claim thatit should be required reading because itis a great American book is unconvinc-ing: we don't require students to readmost great books. Objections to the re-quirement become more understandableif we recognize the unique character ofthe niche Twain's novel tends to occupyin the high-school English course. Itoften is the only book that is centrallyconcerned with racial oppression.

All of which suggests that educatorscould take a large step toward resolv-ing the current controversy simply byeliminating the requirement. This wouldoptx\ the way for the ideal solution:allow each teacher to decide whether hisor her students should be asked to readHuckkberry Finn. It is the teachers,after all, who are best qualified to makea sensible and informed decision, onethat would rest on their confidence intheir own ability to convey, and theirstudents' ability to grasp, the irony thatinforms every word of this matchlesscotnic novel. D

A H T.ARTHUR C. DANTO

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

w e erect monuments sothat we shall alwaysremember, and buildmemorials so that we

shall never forget. Thus we have theWashington Monument but the LincolnMemorial. Monuments commemoratethe memorable and embody the mythsof beginnings. Memorials ritualize re-membrance and mark the reality ofends. The Washington Monument, ver-tical, is a celebration, like fireworks.The Lincoln Memorial, even if on a rise,presses down and is a meditation instone. Very few nations erect monu-ments to their defeats, but many set upmemorials to the defeated dead. Monu-ments make heroes and triumphs, vic-tories and conquests, perpetually pres-ent and part of life. The memorial is aspecial precinct, extruded from life, asegregated enclave where we honor thedead. With monuments we honorourselves.

Memorials are often just lists of thosekilled. Herodotus describes a megalith

August 31. 1985 The Nation. 153

that carried the names of all 300 Spar-tans slain at Thermopylae in a defeatso stunning as lo elevate their leader,Leonidas, to what Ivan Morris oncecalled the nobility of failure. Lists figureprominently in the hundreds of CivilWar memorials, where the names offallen townsmen bear the iconographicsignificance that those who were lostmeant more than what had been won.The paradox of the Vietnam VeteransMemorial in Washington is that themen and women killed and missingwould not have been memorialized hadwe won the war and erected a monu-ment instead. Among the sp>eciricationsfor the memorial's commission was thestipulation that it show the names of allthe U.S. dead and missing (the battle-stone of Thermopylae only memorial-ized the Spartans, not their Theoan orThespian allies) and that it make nopolitical statement about the war. Butjtisl being called a memorial is as elo-quent as not being called a monument:not being forgotten is the thin compen-sation for not having participated in anevent everyone wants to remember. Thelist of names, as a collective cenotaph,situates the memorialized war in theconsciousness of the nation.

The Washington Monument is anobelisk, a monumental form with con-notations of the trophy in Western art.Augustus carried obelisks to Alexan-dria, whence they were in time borne offto London and New York; Constantinebrought one to Rome, where it was ap-propriated by Pope Sixtus V for SanGiovanni in Laterano; Napoleon wasobliged to cart an obelisk to Paris. TheLincoln Memorial is in the form of aclassical temple, in which Lincoln is en-throned like a brooding god. It is ametaphor for sacrifice and a confes-sion of the limits of human power. TheVeterans Memorial carries no explicitart-historical references, though it con-sists of two symmetrical walls, mirrorimages of one another, right trianglessharing a common vertical base, whichpoint, like a pair of long wings, east, tothe obelisk of triumph, and west, to thetemple of submission. Everything aboutit is part of a text. Even the determina-tion to say nothing political is inscribedby the absence of a political statement.A third stipulation for the memorialwas that it harmonize with its surround-ings. U does more: it integrates the twostructures it points to into a moral land-scape. Because the two wings form an

, the Veterans Memorial together

with the Washington Monument andthe Lincoln Memorial compose a largetriangle, with the long reflecting pool asa segment of the base.

The memorial was dedicated onNovember 13, 1982—Veterans Day—when there were only the walls and thenames, each wall composed of seventygranite panels, with about 58,000 namesand room for several hundred more.Two years later a bronze statue of threeservicemen, done In an exacting realism,was added to the site. Their backs are tothe axis that connects the Monumentand the Memorial, as though they areoblivious to the historical meanings towhich the walls return us by pointing.Like innocents who look at the pointerrather than that to which it points, theysee only rows and columns of names.They are dazed and stunned. The wallsreflect their obsessed gaze, as theyreflect the flag to which the servicemen'sback is also turned, as they reflect theMonument and the Memorial. The gendyflexed pair of walls, polished black, islike the back of Plato's cave, a reflect-ing surface, a dark mirror. The reflec-tions in it of the servicemen, the flag,the Monument and the Memorial areappearances of appearances. It alsoreflects us, the visitors, as it does thetrees. Still, the living are in it only as ap-pearances. Only the names of the dead,on the surface, are real.

The reflecting walls constituted theVeterans Memorial at the time of itsdedication, but before they were inplace a concession was made to a fac-tion that demanded figurative realisminstead of what it perceived as anabstract monument to the liberal estab-lishment. Thus the bronze servicemen.Those walls could have stood on theirown, artistically, but the bronze groupcould not have. As a piece of free-standing sculpture it is intrinsically ba-nal. Its three figures belong to obliga-torily distinct racial types: a black andsomeone vaguely ethnic—a Jew, per-haps, or some Mediterranean type—stand on either side of a Nordic figure.The central figure has a holstered pistol,but the end figures carry more powerfulweapons—though not held in a positionfor use—and there are no empty spacesin the cartridge belts: fighting is sus-pended. The garb and gear of this warare precisely documented: visitors willlearn how many eyelets were in G.I.boots and that soldiers carried two can-teens. More realistic than the militaryfigures that guard the honor rolls in

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154 The Nation. August 31. 1985

Civil War memorials, they look toomuch like specimens for a militarymuseum, at least when consideredalone. But they are greatly enhanced bytheir relationship to the great walls. In away, the harmonization of their pres-ence in the triangle generated by thewalls is a monument to the triumph ofpolitical compromise rather than amemorial to artistic strife. The dead areremembered in their gaze, even whenthere are no living to look.

The walls are the design of Maya YingLin. who won a competition against1,421 contestants when she was 21 and astudent at Yale University. An Asian-American from Athens. Ohio, she wasa child at the time of the memorializedconflict, too young to remember thetumult and the protest, which for herare simply history, like the War of In-dependence or the Civil War. Thebronze group was done by FrederickHart, a Washington sculptor, who was,ironically, a demonstrator against theVietnam War. The irony is that artisticrealism was associated with patriotismand endorsement of the war in theminds of those who insisted on figura-tion. They regarded the walls as a sym-bol for peaceniks. "A waiting wall forliberals"; "a tribute to Jane Fonda";*'a degrading ditch*'; "ihe most in-sulting and demeaning memorial to ourexperience that was possible *': thesewere among the t\asty things said. Thewalls are nonfigurative, of course, butthey are deeply representational, giventhe textual nature of memorial art (ofall art, when it comes to that), and thequestion of the meaning of Lin's textwas acknowledged by those who re-jected what they took to be its supposedrepresentation of reality. Its beingblack, for example, was loudly read as asign of shame until a black generalbrought an abrupt end to that effort topre-empt the language of color.

The winning design was the unani-mous choice of a panel of eight experts,and it was accepted by the group thatpushed the idea of a memorial as an ex-pression of the feelings they wanted tohave objectified. It gave a form to thosefeelings, as public art is supposed to do:the issues are never solely esthetic. Itwas accepted by 150.000 participants atthe dedication. No one has defaced it.no one has tried to blow it up. thoughthere was a threat of this once. It hasbeen accepted by the nation at large,which did not even know it wanted sucha memorial. It is now one of the sites

most visited in the capital. Still, it waswholly appropriate that the designshould have been put in question whena schism opened up. that intense emo-tion and antagonism should have raged,that terrible and foolish things shouldhave been said by everyone. Linmounted the same high horse favoredby artists whose work is publiclycriticized and accused the critics of sex-ism. Even so, her design held. It was notreplaced by a monument, as though thetacit rules that govern the distinction be-tween monuments and memorials final-ly prevailed. Those who wanted realismfinally got their mannequins, not exact-ly where they wanted them, with thewalls to their back and a proud flag fly-ing at the vec. but off to one side, up agentle slope, and at a certain distance,with the flag still farther away. By amiracle of placement. Hart's shallowwork has acquired a dignity and even acertain power. The complex of wallsand figures reminded me of a memorialsculpture of Canova. in which a singlefigure sits in white silence outside apyramidal sepulcher. A dimension iseven added to the triangular walls,wonderful as they are. The entire com-plex is an emblem of the participationof the public in the framing of publicart. It did not, to paraphrase RichardSerra. cost the government a dime.More than 275,000 Americans respond-ed to the call for funds with contribu-tions in small denominations—thosebearing the faces of Washington andLincoln.

Lin's instructor told her that theangle where the walls meet had to meansomething, and I asked myself, when Ipllgrimed down one hot Tuesday inJuly, what its meaning was. A writer inthe "Talk of the Town" section of TheNew Yorker described it as "a longopen hinge, its leaves cut vertically intothe ground, which descends very grad-ually toward the vertex." The hinge is apowerful symbol—we speak of "thehinge of fate"—and it has the myste-rious property of opening and closingat once. Still, that is something of amisdescription. A hinge 140 feet longsounds too much like Claes Oldenburg,who might, consistent with his oeuvre,have submitted the Vietnam VeteransMemorial Hinge had he entered thecompetition. The New Yorker writerdoes better on a nearer approach: "alittle tike facing a huge open book withblack pages." The book lies open nowthat the episode is closed and all or

nearly all the dead are known. A bookof the dead. And that would fit withtheir being listed in chronological order,from the first one killed in 1959 to thelast one killed in 1975, when the remain-ing Americans were evacuated fromSaigon as the Republic of Vietnam sur-rendered, on April 30.

This brings me to my chief criticismof Lin's work, which concerns an in-congruity between narrative and form, iAn effort has been made to make the Islight angle meaningful by having thenarrative begin and end there: RICH-ARD VANDE GEER is at the bottomright of the west panel and DALE R. [BUIS is at the top left of the east pan- }el on either side of the joint. As thougha circle were closed, and after the endis the beginning. But a circle has thewrong moral geometry for a linear con-flict: the end of a war does not mean,one hopes, the beginning of a war. As itstands now. we read from the middle tothe end, then return to the other endand read again our way to the middle.This means that the terminal panels, ar-chitecturally the most important, carryone name each, but the end points ofthe walls are not the end points of thelist. If the first were first, we would readthrough to the last, from left to right.The panels grow larger, which is to saythe space in which the walls are set growsdeeper, as we approach the center. Sothere are more names on the centralpanels than on the rest. But that exactlyreflects the shape of the war itself, ourinvolvement being greatest in the late1960s. So the angle could represent ahigh point and a turning point. And youwould leave with the Monument beforeyou. as you entered with the Memorialbehind you, and the whole complexwould acquire the direction of time and,perhaps, hope.

You can read a chronicle of the mak-ing of this singular work in To Heal aNation, by Jan C. Scruggs and Joel L.Swerdlow (Harper & Row). The me-morial would not exist without Scruggs,a veteran of that terrible war and aman of great vision. I like to think thatthe voice of the book, optimistic, en-thusiastic, conciliatory, is his. whoeverdid the writing. It also contains somephotographs, but there is really no wayto imagine the memorial from them, orfrom any pictures I have seen. For thatyou must make a visit. If you knowsomeone who was killed, an attendantfrom the National Parks Service willhelp you locate his or her name. They

1

August 3h 1985 155

are all listed alphabetically in directoriesnear the site.

Be prepared to weep. Tears are theuniversal experience even if you don'tknow any of the dead. I watchedreverent little groups count down therows of a panel and then across to thename they sought. Some place a poign-ant, hopeless offering underneath: abirthday card, a flag, a ribbon, aflower. Some leave little notes. Mostphotograph the name, but many takerubbings of it on pamphlets handed outby the Parks Service. You can borrow aladder to reach the top names. Thehighest panels are about ten feethigh—or, more accurately, their bot-tom edges are about ten feet belowground level. Someday, I suppose,visiting it will be like standing before amemorial from the Civil War, where thebearers of the names really have beenforgotten and, since the theory is thatthe meaning of a name is its denotation,the names themselves will have lost theirmeaning. They will merely remain pow-erful as names, and there will only bethe idea of death to be moved by. Now,however, we are all moved by the realityOf death, or moved by the fact thatmany who stand beside us are moved byits reality. I copied down two of thenames of which rubbings were made:

EDWARD H. FOXWILBUR J. MILLER D

DANCE.MINDY ALOFFTango ArgentinoDance Theatre of Hariem^^ • am a desperate song,** goes

I one of the numbers in TangoI A rgentino, a smash revuem devoted to the tango which

played City Center for a week in Juneand should be brought back for amonth. "Poor and alone, you are with-out illusion, without faith.'' goesanother. "Life is an absurd wound,**goes a third. The male singers deliverthe lines in assertive baritones; thewomen in smoky contraltos. Yet despitethe existential bravado, even bathos, ofIhe. lyrics, the tempos are limber anddry. Underneath the plangent com-plaints are taut musical figures, walkingiwo- and four-beat phrases touched bylittle hesitations, like someone travelinga long, lightless alley in the dead of

night. The words tell you there's noth-ing to go on for, but the music recordsthe adrenalin pumping away. Thiscoupling makes popular theater thatcourts both the senses and the intelli-gence. One would like to know whethersuch complexity inheres in the tango orwhether it stems from the particular vi-sion of Tango Argentino's author-producer-designers, Claudio Segoviaand H^tor Orezzoli. (The two collab-orated on a similar revue devoted toflamenco and are putting together oneon black American jazz.) Do the tangopalaces of Buenos Aires routinely show-case such sprightly rhythm and techni-cal virtuosity, or are we witnessing amasterful transformation of a folk art,like Diaghilev's Russian Fauves orBalanchine's waltzing Viennese?

Although just half of Tango Argen-tino's thirty-five songs were choreo-graphed, the dancing was crucial to thesophistication and pace of the wholeevent. The tango's musical origins areobscure: one theory traces it to aSpanish - Indian ballad, another to adrum tattoo by African slaves. In thereview we follow instead the dance'sevolution from the nineteenth-centuryprototyjje, a challenge ritual for men("thugs" says the program), to a con-temporary bravura exhibition for mixedpairs. The idea of dance as the embodi-ment of local manners and sexual at-titudes recalls Ettore Scola's film LeBal, where the mores of twentieth-century Europe are traced through theactivities of a single dance hall. Butwhile Le Bat manipulates its dance an-thology in support of literary or politi-cal agendas. Tango Argentino keeps itsfocus on shifting dance values: displace-ments of accent; introduction of patter-ing, ornamental steps executed at ver-tiginous speeds; the late use of acrobaticfeats and balletic deportfnent.

The tango in the film is slowed down,camped up and otherwise deformed,and its sexual message is purely andsimply embodied by the move that alsoserves as Le Bal'% logo, a man ramminghis stretched leg between the stridingthighs of his female partner. The pene-tration of one dancer's walk by the ad-vancing leg of another is a staple of thetango, but Tango Argentino places it inso many different circumstances thatthe step is divested of fixed meaning. Tobegin with, it isn*t the aggressive begin-ning of a phrase, the way movies andTV normally show it. but the surpriseending of one, which usually comes

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