Richard,

Thanks for your note. I'm not sure that most observers would say the conflict between Hurston and Wright depended on a single word, or even on larger issues of diction. Perhaps it's better to say it had more to do with voice, with the issues of gender and class wrapped up within, and even divergent views of segregation and its results. Henry Louis Gates treats this issue very succinctly, and I believe this link will take you to the heart of his discussion. The entire essay, in fact, is worth your time, and it's only about ten pages long.

And you're right, I do think this is actually where the debate should be taking place, within that conflict itself, its precedents, antecedents, and results. I think centering it there would lead to a far more profitable discussion of the issues involved. If this led to a discussion of the signifying monkey, we'd all be better off... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

I seem to recall that Hal Holbrook, in his "Mark Twain Tonight" performances, avoided the N-word altogether by referring to Huck's companion simply as "Miz Watson's Jim. " Though not 100% Twain, this made the essential point: Jim is someone's property, which he wouldn't be if he were white.

That's not even 1% Twain, Gail. Even still, it's very different when what you are presenting is, by definition, a more or less free-form adaptation rather than something that masquerades as the real thing.

The solution also suffers from one of the main defects of using the word "slave," i.e., it simply isn't accurate throughout most of the book when Jim was no longer in bondage.

One of the many virtues of the book, I think, is to provide a deeper understanding of why the n-word is now considered so offensive and taboo, and if you remove it even from the mouths of white slaveholders, you are to a large extent removing the reason the word is taboo in the first place.

The word was part and parcel of the mistreatment of blacks, so removing the word actually minimizes and somewhat sugarcoats the horrible crime that was committed on the race. What's next? If someone feels it is degrading to portray blacks in chains, are we to eliminate that detail from the book as well? If someone feels it is degrading to have blacks portrayed as illiterate, are we to rewrite the book to show Jim knows how to read? Is it okay for the book to show blacks held in chains and beaten with whips, but not to show them called bad names?

Here's a serious, non rhetorical question. Do most secondary teachers get to choose editions? In other words, would it be entirely up to the individual instructor in most cases?

Nobody seems to have taken up Stephen's provocation, thrown in at number 23 in this thread. I read Jane Smiley's essay and thought it a very fine defence of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which has always struck me as a much better novel than its popular reputation would have it, but I don't see the need to praise it by denigrating HF. Sure, HF has all the structural faults that are pointed out and it is well-described by Sam as two-thirds of a great novel. But those two-thirds are truly great, and for all the reasons described in this thread - most effectively by Roger.

What is clear in Smiley's essay is that she fails to take in the full significance of Huck's "all right - I'll go to hell" - in particular, the fact that Huck really does believe that he will go to hell for his action and yet persists in it all the same. She dismisses this as "Huck's paltry good intentions", saying that the message of the book seems to be that "if Huck feels positive toward Jim, and loves him, and thinks of him as a man, then that's enough. He doesn't actually have to act in accordance with his feelings." That strikes me as a real failure in understanding and in imaginative sympathy.

I'd be interested to hear what others make of Smiley's essay. Maybe Stephen could enlarge on his corroboration of it.

I can't really contribute in any significant way to the discussion of the problems of teaching the novel and dealing with that word. I've taught it, but in Italy, where obviously the word does not arouse the same problems; it is obviously a question that has to be raised but the students do not feel it as directly as a class of American students naturally does. I can certainly understand Sam's weariness but obviously the answer is not (and I know Sam does not suggest that it is) censorship.

I must interrupt for this important announcement.

The title of this thread is "The Huck Finn Flap." I have determined that "huck finn flap" must be changed, because if you say it ten times fast there is a strong likelihood that you will end up using an objectionable word. The process can be accelerated slightly if you say "flap huck finn" instead, but the point remains.

Just to be extra careful, I think the editors at NewSouth should change Huck's name to something more like "Steve." You can't be too careful with our children.

Early in my teaching career, my English department colleagues told me an anecdote about a former instructor in the school. One day in class, during his animated presentation, that teacher referred to Twain's novel Fuckleberry Hinn. The class erupted with laughter, and the puzzled teacher didn't know why until the students told him what he had said. True story.

Richard

Ah yes, denigrating. Not that I imagine for a moment that Gregory intends a slur, even unconsciously, but there you are. What is it like to find yourself at the wrong end of the spectrum in a culture that speaks of denigrating a book, of having a black heart, of holding woolly ideas in a woolly head, of living in darkness and ignorance, and so on? No offence intended! comes the hurried reply. And of course, most of the time, none indeed is. But that doesn't mean it can't be given all the same. I'm not advocating some form of neurotic political correctness here, mind you; I just think that sometimes we white folks (raise your hands!) underestimate how deeply certain assumptions pervade our language and cultural habits, and how those assumptions affect (emotionally, spiritually, psychologically) those of our fellow citizens who have traditionally been stigmatized by them.

So yes, there's a certain irony to "denigrating HF" in this context. And in case anyone's curious (I was, so I looked it up), the de- of denigrate has an intensive function here, meaning "thoroughly" or "completely" (as in to decry or deplore--to "protest/complain about intensely"), rather than the more familiar privative function in common use today (debug, deflate, deplete, etc.). To "denigrate," then, is to "blacken" something thoroughly, and in our culture, that's considered a bad thing. The word doesn't, at any rate, have anything to do with removing blackness . . . though it's an amusing thought to imagine a bowdlerized Huck Finn with the N-word removed being sold as The Denigrated Edition. How would that go over for a back-cover blurb!

Anyway, Gregory responds to my challenge above (I prefer to think of it as a challenge, rather than as a "provocation") with a challenge of his own. Why did I recommend Smiley's essay? It would take too long to put together a detailed case from the book itself, but essentially it comes down to how Jim and Huck are portrayed in those notorious last chapters of the novel.

Gregory says above of Smiley that "she fails to take in the full significance of Huck's 'all right - I'll go to hell' - in particular, the fact that Huck really does believe that he will go to hell for his action and yet persists in it all the same"--adding that this strikes him (Gregory) as "a real failure in understanding and in imaginative sympathy" on her part.

My response to that, however, would be that it is Twain, not Smiley, who is guilty of the failure of "imaginative sympathy" vis-à-vis that brave declaration, a failure that is painfully manifest in the decline his book takes into "Tomfoolery" in the chapters immediately following it. And of course, I am by no means the first to think so--no more than Smiley. Indeed, if Gregory's words remind me of anything here, it is Leo Marx's famous verdict on Twain's failure to live up to the moral implications of Huck and Jim's situation in the last quarter of the book: a "glaring lapse of moral imagination" (scroll down to page 10 of the pdf). Not everyone agrees, of course (what would criticism be without disagreement?), but Marx makes a powerful case, I believe, one that certainly resonates with the experience of this reader.

At any rate, in a sense I think the N-word stuff is a bit of a red herring here. The real issue, surely, isn't whether that one word appears in the book or not; as others have noted above, it has frequently been used by African-American writers themselves. (How could they possibly avoid it?) No, what is objectionable about the book is its portrayal of Jim himself: submissive, passive, cringing, comic, black-face stereotype. That isn't to say that Twain does not give Jim moments of great dignity as well, but he cannot seem to square those glimpses of underlying humanity with the day-to-day, page-to-page needs of his story. Again and again, he lapses from character into caricature, from Jim, as it were, to Jim Crow. And really, by the end of the book . . . as the song goes, That joke isn't funny anymore.

In other words, what is offensive is not the N-word itself, perhaps, but its application to a character that, however well-intentioned (I think we can grant Twain that much), nonetheless comes across as demeaning. And it is in the disastrous narrative meltdown of the Phelps episode at the end of the book that that failure comes out most clearly. Hence Smiley's reaction, and Leo Marx's, and mine. What can I say? Like Smiley, I was stunned--dismayed, disgusted even. (That's how I found her essay this summer, and Marx and the rest: I put the book down and immediately went online to see what others had said on the subject; I could scarcely believe what I'd just read.)

Is this a failure of "imaginative sympathy"--a failure to give Huck's great declaration of solidarity ("to hell and back") its due? I don't think so; I think on the contrary, it comes from taking its implications with all the seriousness they deserve. The problem is that Twain himself doesn't seem to do so. Immediately after Huck's "I'll go to hell" declaration, the book goes to hell in his stead, descending into slapstick and tedious farce. In the end, it even turns out that Jim was free all along. Tom gives him forty bucks "for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so good," and Jim goes into black-face raptures about his lucky hairy chest . . . and that's about it. It's hard to talk seriously about moral courage in such a context.

I can only guess, of course, but it strikes me that what troubles African-American readers about Huck Finn ultimately may not be the N-word, per se (though they certainly might object to that too), but more fundamentally, just the sense that Huck's redemption--that feel-good moment where white folks get to rise above their racist past and affirm the supremacy of their consciences, come hell or high water--just isn't worth four-hundred pages of playing the watermelon-eating sidekick for them. It's that difference of perspective, perhaps (something like it, anyway), that's at stake. And like all such differences, it may indeed be something difficult for others--others not grounded in that perspective by long, bitter experience--to understand.

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Nobody has taken up Steven's provocation because the thread isn't about whether Huck Finn warrants its accolades. It's about the idiotic censorship of a work of literature and the bullshit reasons behind it. And, yes, I believe that the claim that "nigger" rockets the book into unteachable heights is bullshit.

Whether or not HF is a masterpiece is erroneous.

Quite. I logged on to say almost exactly the same thing, but you beat me to it.
Rory