Literary circles have been stirred to endless debate recently over editor Alan Gribben's forthcoming edition of Mark Twain's novel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," to be published in February by NewSouth, Inc., in a single volume with its oft-companion "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." In a radical effort to tone-down the classic tale, Gribben's version will replace all 219 appearances of the N-word with the word "slave," in addition to ditching the dated word "Injun" for the less racist "Indian."
The story of the young Huck, who runs away with the heroic fugitive slave Jim, offers a scathing reproach of Southern antebellum racism but is currently banned from many classrooms, and avoided in others, because of offensive language. Gribben hopes his edition will help prod the book back onto high school shelves. However, others wonder whether it's worth it to bowdlerize what some consider the central classic of American literature to avoid stepping on politically correct toes.
Alan Gribben
Editor, NewSouth's "Huckleberry Finn"
Alan Gribben, the Mark Twain scholar and English professor at Auburn University Montgomery behind the new Huck Finn edition, explained that his decision to make the contentious changes to the novel aims not — as some surmise — to denounce Twain's original wording but, quite antithetically, to prevent it from falling into cultural oblivion.
Upon participating in a public library tour designed to cultivate youth interest in classic literature, Gribben was shocked to discover that many school districts, including his own, had banned Twain's books from their classrooms.
"Apparently the success of our nation's effort to integrate public schools racially has resulted in a new sensitivity to negative and hurtful terms of speech. Parents are reportedly very uncomfortable with demeaning epithets appearing in books that are required reading," he said in an e−mail to the Daily.
In altering two of the contested words in "Huck Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," Gribben claims to have found a way to potentially usher the novels back into high school curricula.
"By this slight alteration — without removing any phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, or sections — students will perhaps again be able to study Twain's masterful satires and read his condemnations of social conformity," he said.
The outrage surrounding the NewSouth publication stems mostly from misinformation, Gribben explained. Members of the public seem to fear that Gribben's "Huck Finn" will entirely replace Twain's original work. But Gribben's copy will be sold alongside the many editions already in print that preserve Twain's original language. In fact, while the NewSouth version is optimal for high school teachers who cannot teach Twain's original literature, Gribben said, he encourages its more advanced readers to delve into other editions as well.
As for those who complain that the omission of the N−word bastardizes the book's takeaway, Gribben is confident that Twain's harsh critique of Southern racism lies too deeply in the text to be undone by his removal of two words.
"People who complain that the loss of the N−word will cost invaluable ‘teachable moments' about slavery and racism have clearly never read ‘Huckleberry Finn,'" he said. "It is difficult to find any chapter in the book in which Twain does not lay bare the harshness of the institution of slavery and the unsavory racial attitudes of the 1840s in many parts of the South."
Lisa Brewster-Cook
English Teacher, Somerville High School
"It makes me crazy when people try to edit what is unpleasant," Lisa Brewster-Cook, an English teacher at Somerville High School, told the Daily in response to NewSouth's cleanup job. "If that were possible, then I'd like to go back and touch up every photo taken of me in the '80s."
Brewster-Cook admitted that teaching a novel full of sensitive issues like "Huck Finn" to a classroom of teenagers has its challenges. But that's all the more reason to teach it, she said.
Allowing teachers to sidestep difficult issues rather than face them head-on condones a certain level of deliberate ignorance toward history, according to Brewster-Cook, that is counterproductive to education and to the possibility of evolving the contemporary mindset.
Additionally, she explained, context matters in the classroom. If students are taught to read critically, then literature containing racial slurs will inspire them to question bigoted language, rather than adopt it.
"People get upset that kids might get the wrong idea, that by teaching the book with that word in it is saying that it's okay to say it," she said. "They are missing the point. Prejudice can start with words, yes; but racism is carried out with actions. And as long as parents and teachers are explaining the culture of the time as well as explaining why it is not acceptable today — and never was, really — kids get it. [My students] admit that the word does make them uncomfortable. But they also say that it is part of what shows that ignorance does not have to be permanent."
Jesse Sheidlower
Editor-at-Large, Oxford English Dictionary
The N-word is considered so heinous by contemporary culture that it's banned from high school curricula, but the fact that other obscenities and racial slurs seem to coast by unnoticed is another issue brought to the forefront by NewSouth's urge to sterilize Huck Finn.
According to Oxford English Dictionary Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower, while there's nothing intrinsically worse about the N-word than any other provocative language, it belongs to a category of words that our culture has come to find particularly offensive of recent.
"Really in the last forty years, sexual and scatological terms have become more acceptable, but during that time, anything ethnic has been getting worse along with social changes," he told the Daily. "Right now we're at a point where anything racial or ethnic is much more offensive — not to say that it's newly offensive."
The reason for this shift has a lot to do with a denigrated group's social clout, Sheidlower said. As a group gains influence, it also gains the ability to be more expressive about its disdain for certain insults directed against it — to which society slowly attaches a greater social taboo.
"I think that there's no inherent reason why any other racial slur would be less bad, but it is partly because the African-American community is particularly vocal about this," he said. "A word like ‘gyp,' some people consider it bad, but on the whole, no one really cares about the gypsies, [or] the Romas, [as] they prefer to be called."
However vocally the black community has articulated its contempt for the N-word, though, Sheidlower thinks it's a big mistake to remove the word from Twain's text, where it was deliberately inserted 219 times to strengthen the book's stark anti-bigotry stance.
Moreover, he said, the edit makes the dangerous statement that some words are literally unspeakable.
"I believe that the editor is motivated by the right idea, but the fact that the [N-word] is considered so incendiary today means that you can't even mention it in classrooms," Sheidlower said. "And I think that's an extremely bad state of affairs. I don't think anything should be considered so offensive that you can't even teach it."
Neil Miller
Tufts Lecturer in English and author, "Banned in Boston"
An expert on Boston's history of banning "books, burlesque and the social evil," according to his book's subhead, Tufts Lecturer in English Neil Miller sees Gribben's parent-approved "Huckleberry Finn" as a noble attempt to save the classic — but a misguided one, nonetheless. The problem with any type of censorship, he explained, is that it's a slippery slope.
"I think it is a big mistake to start censoring and changing works of literature to suit our modern moral notions," he said. "As a teacher, you just have to use something like use of the N-word as fodder for classroom discussion and discussion of context. Once you start messing with classics — or any book — where does it stop? It is really a horrible precedent, no matter how well-intentioned the idea…."
Miller does think, however, that Gribben's brand of censorship should be distinguished from the type generally implied by the word. For Miller, Gribben aims to promote a text rather than condemn it.
"I think the censor here was trying to encourage people to read ‘Huck Finn,' which is different from trying to ban something outright, which is what censorship in the past was like," Miller said. "In the past, the reasons tended to be sex[ual] or religious, while this is a little different, I think — they would censor books over the mention of the existence of a prostitute, and in our society we've come so far from that."
At the same time, Miller said, censorship remains dangerously prevalent in contemporary society.
"There's always going to be someone around who's going to want to censor, and the person who does it always thinks that they're doing something good to protect people … Still, on network TV, every time the F-word is used, they'll bleep it out. Censorship definitely still goes on," he said.
