If only Mark Twain were alive to skewer the censorious protectors of modern sensitivities who have taken to banning Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the classroom and now to excising its offensive words.
A new edition published by NewSouth Books will expurgate all 219 uses of the N-word, and the use of the word “injun,” for good measure. Twain probably wouldn’t be surprised, since bluenoses have been after his masterpiece from the beginning. The Concord, Mass., public library rejected the book upon its publication in 1885. It considered Twain’s handiwork “rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”
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The good librarians of Concord must not have read far enough into the novel to realize that it satirizes many of the “rough and coarse” people with which it deals. Just as today’s critics of the book miss that it condemns racism, brilliantly and movingly, although much too subtly for the witless commissars of offensiveness.
The editor of the NewSouth edition, Alan Gribben, isn’t among them. To his credit, he wants the book’s audience to widen rather than shrink in the controversy over one word. So he’s well-intentioned in replacing the N-word with “slave,” but mistaken: Rewriting Twain is wrong on all levels.
It does violence to Twain’s artistry. Part of the genius of the tale of the runaway Huck and his slave friend Jim is how it reproduces the speech of the time. According to The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, he experimented with five different spellings of “something” to capture how Jim said it: “suffin,” “sumfin,” “sumf’n,” “suthin,” and — the finalist — “sumfn.”
Twain uses the N-word so much because it was inescapable. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. joked about genteel Southerners who still couldn’t quite get their mouths around the word “Negro,” saying “Nigra” instead. And that was about 120 years after Huck set out with Jim on a raft down the Mississippi.
What was the Mississippi River Valley like around 1840? Consider the fate of Elijah P. Lovejoy, who was killed by a mob in the town of Alton, Ill., for the offense of publishing an abolitionist newspaper. Add a darkly comic twist, and the story could appear in Mark Twain.
This is the irony of sanitizing Huck Finn. Those who rail against the novel’s antiquated vocabulary are usually the same people who revel in America’s failings. But they’re effectively whitewashing our history. Nothing better captures the quotidian racial ugliness of that time and place than Huck Finn’s deadening, inescapable use of the N-word.
Editing out the word eases the sting of Twain’s rebuke of mid-19th-century conventions. It is Jim, the character who is demeaned and hunted like an animal, who is most humane. While Huck’s father is an ignorant drunk who beats and robs him, Jim desperately misses his own family, and his conscience lashes him for having once hit his daughter unjustly. Huck reflects on this and remarks, “He was a mighty good n——, Jim was.”
Strike the offending word from the text and you lose the point. The attitudes of the time kept Huck from seeing what was obviously in front of him — simply a man, and a better one than most. Twain said that Huck had “a sound heart and a deformed conscience.” The boy’s triumph is rising above the forces that shaped him and deciding to help Jim run away, even though it’s supposed to be wrong. “All right then, I’ll go to hell,” he tells himself.
Huck thought — because he was told by every adult around him — that it was a sin and a crime to free Jim and treat him as equal, and resolves to do it anyway. It’s hard to imagine a more devastating critique of antebellum America, or a more affecting portrayal of the power of human fellow-feeling, than that. Please, don’t try to improve Huck Finn.
Which is more coarse and demeaning, the use of the N-word, in a great piece of literature which puts down racism, or the incessant use of it by today's black comics and rappers which only accentuates racism? Which would MLK approve of, Huck Finn or some throw away rap song?
I completely agree. Leave Twain the hell alone.
Having read the new edition of Twain's autobiography, you get a real sense the he was more clever than most those around him, and capable of deep humor and sarcasm. The re-writing of classics should be seen as a crime against humanity (or the humanities). While we are at it, let's start editing all literature that may, in some small way, upset some small population of the most "tolerant" of Americans.
Is the term “whitewash” still ok and if not how should we describe it without using it? Maybe we could just misspell it (whytewash, witewash), the dictionary definition could then be edited to explain/define without using the term itself. Wasn’t it Tom Sawyer with the fence and all that? You see how confusing things can get?
Come on, Mr. Lowry. You show a singular lack of courage yourself when you can even recapitulate an unedited quote from the book: “He was a mighty good n_____, Jim was.”
Of course this comment software would, as most others do, automatically delete a plain spelling of the word.
The irrational fear of this word is beyond parody.
cloudbuster
i see yr pt but the word has attained the status of a semi-obscenity, so i dont spell it, or f---, or a number of other words, out. and of course not spelling the word out in a newspaper column and going in and removing it from twain's text are two very difft things...
Since the open-minded and frank discussion here begins by doing exactly the thing that is objectionable (banning free speech, but only for whites), I'll just use alternate terms.
How about substituting my choice for their choice, even in "polite" (i.e., vocabulary controlled by black racists) language: I'll just refer to them as "coloured boys" instead of "black men".
Let's see if Sharpton's greasy head actually catches fire.
Here's a hint: as has been said by many observers (including Chris Rock), "there are black people, and there are n*ggers".
One way in which they differ:
Those with whom a discussion and exchange of opinions is possible are black people.
Those screaming hysterically about the "N word" (while identifying all whites are racist crackers) are the n*ggers, and they're not going to like ANYTHING you say.
While I fully agree with Mr. Lowry and the sentiments expressed by other readers, I feel that a key point has been missed. The sanitization of great literature in the name of political correctness is simply the next logical step on the march towards the tyranny of a progressive, socially conscious society.
This is timely in that it coincides with the reading of the Constitution in the House of representatives. A caller to the Michael Medved Show expressed that the reading of the Constitution was deeply offensive to him, and likely to all African-Americans, as the constitution was a document written by slavers that encouraged and endorsed slavery. When Huck Finn and the Constitution of the United States of America are offensive documents due to *perceived* racist undertones, so much so that they should be censored, there is a much larger problem than the manipulation of great literature.
How far are we from the Orwellian Ministry of Truth?
Said it before and I'll say it again: Next thing you know these nitwits will be removing all references to God out of the Bible. Don't want to offend anyone.
I was surprised to hear my 10th grade students talking about this. Many agreed that the book should be left alone. Twain must be rolling in his grave. It was the humanizing of Jim and Huck's ultimate decision to not turn Jim in that got the book banned so many years ago as well, not just the use of the n__word.Twain was way ahead of his time in social commentary and the failure of humanity.
It would be interesting to know if there are any publishers left who would print Huck Finn exactly as Twain wrote it. Or, have all already gone the way of Yale Press and other publishers who won't print books because they might offend someone. George Orwell, or at least Winston Smith, must be chuckling somewhere. PC has gone further than most realize.
I recommend to anyone offended by Mr. Clemens writing; read "The Autobiography of Mark Twain,Volume 1"
You will not consider changing a single word of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer or any of his works.
We have in our area of the country a great artist that illustrated life as it was back then, pictures of slaves or free slaves doing work around the "plantation".
I guess that using the same reasoning used to strike the "N" word we will have to round up all these paintings and paint the people white.
The justification for doing this is to get around censors and school boards because the kids need to read this. Why do they need to read this? Because it was an accurate portrayal of that time and place? Buzz! Sorry, people didn't go around calling black people slaves. So the kids, not being stupid, wonder what else they were lied to about. Mixed messages? But the important thing is, that this Gribben has re-introduced the word "slave" into pop culture, instead of the "n'word", even if it is wrongly used. Why choose that word? What are we hearing about in socio-politics these days? That the right is "whitewashing" the whole slavery and civil rights thing. What better way to make a new generation have that 'slavery' thing running around in their heads than to put it in a novel 219 times and distribute it all across the land. Reparations, my good Jim?
I agree with Cloudbuster... it seems to somewhat defeat the argument that you omit the word "n_____*" from your article when that is the word in question you are arguing should be kept.
I think that the word should be kept, for all the reason you cite, but mostly because that was what the author intended to say.
There is a context to which certain words are used and are offensive or should be considered offensive -- not strictly just the singular use of the word alone. Sadly, my guess is that no one will read my comment because I have chosen to use the word and it will be deleted (or never posted) by the NRO monitors.
If we erase these words -- this historical taint -- from our language and literature as if they never happened, then what does that mean for African-Americans? Aren't you erasing, what I think is at least in part, the identity of what it means to be African-American? Surely both whites and blacks alike can look at this history and recognize the inhumanity of slavery and treatment of blacks from this time period, take resolve to not let it happen again -- but doesn't it show how far we've come? Doesn't it show how far blacks/African-Americans have come? Isn't this history what we point to when we try to explain why African-Americans perform lower in school and have higher crime rate, out-of-wedlock births, drug use, etc? What explains this if we sanitize and erase slavery and the poor treatment of blacks from the history books?
I would think that this is a reason that even the likes of Jesse Jackson would want to keep this history as it is.
*note: I was unable to post the original word, so I have copped out to the NRO policy and placed the spaces instead. I disagree with NRO as the word is relevant here, but I'd like to make my point.
Leave it alone, for Heaven's sake. By the logic of the censors The Bible should be redacted in a lot of places.
I grew up on a Mississippi River boat and I learned to steer one using many of the same Day Marks and Lights that Sam Clemens used. The light at the upper end of Baton Rouge Harbor, mile 232.1, was named Free N**** Point. About 20 % of the rest of the nav aids between there and Memphis had similar names all of which had to be changed in the 1970s. Those were official government, Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers insults to Black people.
The boneheads who have rewritten and ruined Huckleberry Finn...and Tom Sawyer too I assume...work hard to ignore what Mark Twain did to destroy that official stupidity. He succeed about 90 years after he started the effort with these masterpieces. It is a repetitive disgust that our PC "leaders and thinkers" are among the most ignorant...and usually stupid too...people alive.
BTW...most people know the "mark twain" means that the heaving line used to measure the depth of the river shows two fathoms...12 feet of water. Maybe they don't know, however, that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredges the river to maintain only 11 feet...another reason for Sam to arise from the dead and "give 'em a whack" as N**** Jim would say.
Editing the offending word is a little like painting the face of a "lawn jockey" white. We all know what it is, but now it's a joke rather than a leftover of the ugly reality of slavery treating humans as property. The kids reading the book will no doubt whisper to each other what "slave" REALLY means in the book, just as they keep score at organized sports where the adults won't keep score, and everyone gets a trophy. What word did he use to replace "Injun"? Native Americun? Winston Smith has clocked in.
Huzzah, Rich! Fine article. To all those who would like to scrub Twain clean, I say start with your own! Rap, hip-hop, as has been mentioned, and even Malcolm X's autobiography, which uses the N word frequently.
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