Deliver Us From Evil: Clemens, Grass, and the Past that Refuses to Become History
2009; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/arq.0.0046
ISSN1558-9595
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoClemens, Grass, and the Past that Refuses to Become History C ru e l t y, judith shklar insists, is the most hateful of human vices. 1 It follows that self-deception cannot be far behind, for the perpetrators of cruelty almost invariably strain to forget their misdoings, or to construe them as a species of virtue.But self-deception is a froward vice, and the state of mind from which it draws back is that of being un-deceived.This inward yoking of selfdeception with intimations of morally intolerable knowledge produces intermittent assaults of guilt that are likely to persist so long as their origins remain ambiguous and unaddressed.No sooner has Injun Joe-the dread half-breed who terrorizes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer-been found dead in McDougal's cave than the community petitions the Governor for his pardon."Many tearful and eloquent meetings had been held," Clemens writes with evident scorn, "and a committee of sappy women [had] been appointed to go in deep mourning and wail around the governor, and implore him to be a merciful ass and trample his duty under foot.Injun Joe was believed to have killed five citizens of the village, but what of that?" (255).Neither the author nor his fictional actors seem to recognize that this baffling behavior is the reflex of unacknowledged guilt for the myriad acts of cruelty that produced the monster in their midst.Over time, Clemens approached more nearly to a conscious reckoning with the vexed memories of racial injustice that surfaced with increasing regularity in his work."I wonder why we hate the past so," his good friend William Dean Howells once asked him."It's so damned
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