This year, NewSouth Books will publish Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with some editorial changes. The word slave will replace nigger and injun will also disappear. Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben apparently led the charge to alter Twain’s masterpiece, on the grounds that the change would better express Twain’s ideas in the 21st century, and that the new version would be more friendly for use in classrooms. Suzanne La Rosa (of NewSouth Books) said, “we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain’s works will be more emphatically fulfilled.” [sic]
Gribben is correct that the new version will be more friendly for use in classrooms, but it’s not necessarily a good thing that that is true. He is dead wrong and extremely arrogant in suggesting that the new version will better express Twain’s ideas, though. I cannot imagine a better way to express Twain’s ideas than by publishing the book the way Twain wrote it. Moreover, Twain did not write the book in the 21st century, and it is not necessary to update it. He was very pointedly describing a time and a place. We teach Shakespeare in schools despite the fact that Elizabethan England isn’t much like our society. La Rosa’s suggestion that NewSouth Books was interested in sparking a debate about censorship is laughable because such a debate would require discussion of the word nigger and would thus render the censorship completely futile.
Of course, as it stands now the censorship is futile, because the idea that we can protect children from their own cultural history (a task that in itself seems immoral) by removing nigger from the text doesn’t quite hold up logically against the fact that the book still portrays a society in which African-Americans are slaves! Call me crazy, but I always thought the most abhorrent aspect of slavery was slavery, not racial slurs. It seems unbelievably insulting to suggest that students can handle learning about slavery but that they cannot handle a word that signifies it.
Mark Twain was quite self-conscious about his employment of the word in question. In its original publication, he wrote a foreword that addressed the language he felt was necessary to tell the story he wished to tell. Even at the time, he knew that nigger was a bad word, but he felt it was an important part of conveying the culture in which the novel occurs. A rather important part of the novel is the recognition by Huck and Tom that Nigger Jim is inherently deserving of freedom and dignity, in opposition to a society that considers him little more than an animal. The censored version undermines Twain’s intention and sugarcoats the shameful history of the portrayed region.
Those responsible for censoring Twain’s masterpiece undoubtedly have their hearts in the right places. They would rather see a censored Huck Finn taught in schools than see a resistance to controversy remove it from the curriculum entirely. Excuse the clichés, but two wrongs don’t make a right, and the road to hell is paved with good intention. If there are school districts populated by parents whose heads are jammed so far up their asses that they would rather raise a generation of philistines than confront a nasty word (and, in the process, learn something indispensable about their own history), then that’s a shame, but it does not mandate the censorship of a truly great novel.
You may have noticed that during this blog post, I have deviated from the culturally normal euphemism N-word and instead opted to use nigger. I did this quite consciously, and the reason is that I am an adult. I don’t say F-word; I say fuck. It is obviously a good policy to avoid using a word that offends people so much, but it is an even better policy to refuse to let a word own your emotions. I do not think that I have used the word in an offensive context, and I refuse to participate in the hysterical social infantilization overwhelming our culture. We cannot erase our past, and we should not want to. As disgusting as the treatment of African-Americans in North America has historically been, we are only contributing to the horror by pretending it never happened. Totalitarians cleanse their history of the inconvenient bits; democracies preserve their histories out of a twofold desire to be honest and to learn their lessons.
