The Huck Finn flap
 

I don't really know which board is right for this, but it seems to me that a discussion attracting so much attention elsewhere should at least be acknowledged here--especially when one of our own is a significant voice in that discussion.

I hope it's possible for us to discuss this in a reasonable way.

Huck Finn and the N-word

I haven't dealt with the book in the classroom in a very long time, so I pay careful attention to the opinions of someone actually teaching the book now.

Interesting topic. I heard the editor yesterday on NPR, and his intention, as he stated it, was for this edition to be an alternative available to high school teachers. In other words, the book is intended for young readers in a public forum, not for private reading by those of us who love Twain.

It's easy to imagine the repeated presence of the N-word (and "Injun" as well) simply overwhelming every other consideration of the book in a high school classroom, where students often have to read aloud, or where the teacher reads aloud, where lectures have to be given, etc.

During the radio interview yesterday, people called in decrying his replacement of the N-word with the word "slave", but I noticed that no one actually uttered that incendiary word on the air. That's what this edition is intended for, as far as I can tell: to take that word out of the actual text, while stating its presence in an introduction. Students will know, every time they see the word "slave", what the word actually is, but it won't have to be read.

Alas, Maryann, no matter how good our intentions are, I'm a little skeptical. This seems most likely to devolve into a group of educated white people saying "How awful! Censorship! Revisionism!"

Perhaps I'm wrong. I would very much like to be wrong.

Thanks,

Bill

A war against a word is a tacit acknowledgment
of a failed war against an idea.

This drive against N-word (as many other such drives) is
predicated on the idea that
distorting truth is a tool for a betterment of the humanity.

In 21 century, this idea is inexcusable.

It seems that to most people the inflammatory idea is the edition that changes the word.

I'm more interested in the question of whether HF is really the best book to teach, and to what level of students, given the challenge of its real words. Curriculum does change.

I have yet to check out the link Maryann included in her post, but I did see a report on the national evening news yesterday. In my opinion, the push for removing the word nigger from Twain's Huck Finn is awful. It is censorship and it is revisionism. And, from the little I've heard thus far, this current assault on Twain is coming from "educated white people."

As a former English and humanities teacher in public high schools for 32 years, I taught Huck Finn many times. It was a standard part of the curriculum. I don't have time for further comment now, but I will follow this discussion as it develops.

Richard

Let's leave aside the question of whether censorship is a bad thing. I think most of us agree that it is. Those of us who oppose censorship would naturally object to what has been done on that ground alone, even if we believed that the changes to the book somehow brought about an improvement in the text or cured a literary defect. But leaving aside censorship, do the suggested changes make any sense at all? Would a book in which Nazis scream "Kill the kikes!" be improved if the Nazis screamed instead, "Kill those gentlemen of Judaic persuasion!"?

We shouldn't pretend that this edition is being promoted because the editors want the book not to be offensive to African Americans. It's hard to imagine a book that is more anti-slavery, and more attuned to the humanity of slaves and the horror of slavery than Huckleberry Finn. Huck is just like all his neighbors when the book starts, fully embracing slavery and never considering slaves to be true human beings, but by the end of the book he movingly rises above these attitudes and, by his own reckoning, chooses to go to hell rather than let Jim return to slavery. If you sugar-coat the world Huck lives in, and the way he and everyone else spoke and thought, then you are minimizing the grandeur and power of Huck's evolution, and the anti-slavery, pro-human themes of the book become diluted.

The name of the press, "New South," provides a hint to what the publisher's intentions probably are, beyond, of course, making money by catering to what I presume must be a market big enough to provide financial temptation. As I'm sure we've all read about from time to time, there are textbooks being marketed in the South these days that discuss the entire Civil War without so much as mentioning slavery, and states like South Carolina are planning official celebrations of the Confederacy and the principled heroism of those who died trying to destroy the Union so they could continue to enslave other human beings. To such people, portraying slave owners and other white people in the South as having actually used the n-word would be an insult to the warm and fuzzy revisionism they are promoting, and to me it is clear that the sensitivies being protected by the expungement of the n-word are those of white Southerners and not African Americans.

Recall, as well, the "Explanatory" note that Twain prints immediately before the first page of his novel:Shouldn't that count for something?

PS-- I just looked at their catalog, and to my surprise they seem to feature many books celebrating African Americans and civil rights. This doesn't affect my view of the Huck Finn matter, though.

If they bowdlerize Twain, they might as well bowdlerize the Bible as well. Will book burning be next? :rolleyes:

This is troubling, but I wonder if there could be any better way to encourage teenagers to get the actual book -- and talk about yet another example of the timidity and hypocrisy of adults -- than handing them a clearly expurgated version and requiring them to read it.

Ed

Sam Gwynn makes a good point, based from his teaching experience, in the Book Haven article. Because the word is so loaded it's nearly impossible to use Huck Finn in the classroom. In a world in which Texas rewrites history to replace Thomas Jefferson with Rush Limbaugh because of a letter Jefferson wrote about separation of church and state, and Virginia uses "textbooks" claiming African Americans fought for the South, it's hard to call the word change PC run amok. If the change will make it easier to teach Huck Finn it's probably worth it, regrettable as it is. It can always be changed back.

But John, the word is used as part of the fabric of a work of literature. The use of the "N" word makes Huckleberry Finn what it is. The word is not used in a racist way. Indeed, it's historically correct. It's part of the character's name. Must Huckleberry Finn be sanitized for modern sensibilities? If so, what are we coming to?

Chris

If you can't introduce it to college students--my son is reading it in high school right now--because of one loaded, dehumanizing word, it is worth considering if the sacrifice is worth it.

I'll keep up with my son's classroom progress. Try to find out how much time is spent discussing one word. Time that might be better spent discussing "You can't pray a lie."

If children cannot be exposed to the word without all hell breaking loose, then they should not be exposed to books that use the word. I'm not suggesting that Huck Finn must be taught in any classroom, only that, if it is taught, it should be taught the way it was written by a genius, not the way it was bowdlerized by a bureaucrat. I don't think you can have it both ways, i.e., insist that the book is too important not to be taught, but too unimportant not to be changed and edited.

Hi All,

It's a very interesting discussion, and one I've thought about a number of times with different authors.

My usual way through it is the one that Sam mentions, to teach the language controversy as a way of opening up a larger discussion of race in America, the history of slavery, and the transformation of Huck's character to the point where he loves Jim so much that he tears up the letter to Miss Watson and says, "All right, then, I'll go to hell." He'd rather go to hell than betray his friend, color be damned.

John H. Wallace in "The Case against Huck Finn," calls the book "the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written," as in the moment when a steamboat explosion is discussed and the question is asked, "was anyone hurt? " and the answer comes back, "No, killed a nigger."

But clearly the intention of the author was to parody and ironize the attitudes that could produce such a dehumanizing respose.

Samuel Clemens, after all, married the daughter of a prominent abolitionist and put at least one black student through college, and he writes in his autobiography about his mother that "kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand; her ears were familiar with Bible texts that approved it, but if there were any that disapproved it they had not been quoted by her pastors; as far as her experience went, the wise and the good and the holy were unanimous in the conviction that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for."

In some sense, Huck IS Clemens, the boy who grows away from the values of his community and family to be more human, or humanistic.

One of the key problems with the book is that Jim is portrayed as childish, superstitious, dumb--a minstrel show figure. Ralph Ellison writes that "writing at a time when the black-faced minstrel was still popular, and shortly after a war which left even the abolitionists weary of the problems associated with the Negro, Twain fitted Jim into the outlines of the minstrel tradition, and it is from behind this stereotype mask mask that we see Jim's dignity and human capacity -- and Twain's complexity -- emerge." Ellison also wrote however, that he identified with Huck Finn but not with Jim "who struck me as a white man's inadequate portrait of a slave."

Many characters in the book are in this same mode (the low mimetic mode in which the characters are made slightly denser and more ignorant than the rest of us, for the sake of humor), but given the history of race relations in America the humor in the case of Jim is likely to strike some as falling flat, like a bad taste racist joke.

On the other hand, this becomes a particularly useful aspect of the book for the class, because it opens up a larger discussion of aggression and humor, and of what Frank Chin calls "racist love," the opposite of racist hate, but no less demeaning and insidious. Racist hate reduces blacks to criminal, brutal, monkey-like subhumans filled with primitive emotion and lacking the capacity for intelligence, reason and civilization. Racist love depicts the socialized, partially-integrated, innocuous minority figure as a clown or buffoon, laughing at his speech and appearance. Willie Horton vs.. Aunt Jemima & Sambo; Ming the Merciless vs. Charlie Chan. Both figures are racist, and both attempt to undermine the humanity of the minority person. (see: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sourc..._20UFg&cad=rja)

Here is Langston Hughes on the issue of the offending word: "The word nigger to colored people of high and low degree is like a red rag to a bull. Used rightly or wrongly, ironically or seriously, of necessity for the sake of realism, or impishly for the sake of comedy, it doesn't matter. Negroes do not like it in any book or play whatsoever, be the book or play ever so sympathetic in its treatment of the basic problems of the race. Even though the book or play is written by a Negro, they still do not like it. The word nigger, you see, sums up for us who are colored all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America."

Yes it does. That's why eliminating it from the book is a "whitewashing" of American history and American literature. If we are too afraid to face our awful past, we can't even begin to resolve it. I'm uncomfortable with that word, and teaching Huck Finn makes me uncomfortable, as well. Exactly like Sam, I find it exhausting and troubling and difficult, and I don't second-guess his decision to stop teaching the book. I don't teach it all that often myself. After all, I want to be a nice guy whom everybody likes, not the bearer of bad news. But kids go to college to learn critical thinking and to be transformed, and they don't get that if I avoid the hard issues, so I do fit it into a course now and again.

Incidentally, it's exactly the same problem that comes up with the teaching of Heart of Darkness, and the solution I've come up with is the same: teach through the controversy instead of ignoring it.

If I were to teach this surgically-altered version of the book, I would teach through the issue here as well, ask the students what they think about a book that takes out all racial epithets because of a fear that they won't be smart enough to understand that Twain is using them to distance the reader from racism, not to ask the reader to embrace it.

Side-note: this is exactly the opposite of the issues that come up with teaching Hemingway and Gabriella Mistral and T.S. Eliot, among others. Mistral, for example, was an out-and-out racist who hoped for a Latin America washed clean of all those of African descent, who talked of "saving the white man" and "the purity of the race." There is no question of teaching irony and how to read an unreliable narrator with Mistral. She believed this stuff.

All Best,

Tony

Roger, I agree with you in the absolute, but should Huck Finn be left on the shelf, untouched and untaught?

Some Questions:

1) How many people looking in here at this discussion are or were teachers? How many ever taught Huck Finn? Did teaching the novel and its use of the word nigger present major or difficult issues during its reading and study?

2) How many people looking in here read Huck Finn when they were in high school? Was it a problem then?

3) For schools that choose to use the new, revised Huck Finn, will the instructor tell the students that the word nigger has been replaced by the word slave? Or will the "improvement" be kept a secret?

Some Comments:

I find it rather stunning that Mr. Gwynn says he "can't teach it any longer." The article in The Book Haven link goes on to quote him further: "Maybe if I were a better (or younger) teacher I could use this book to challenge all kinds of assumptions about language and art. I just don’t find myself up to the fight anymore, at least at the sophomore level."

What are we to make of this rationale? Should a major work in the literary canon be dropped because the teacher's age and ability aren't up to the task? That's part of Mr. Gwynn's explanation, and it's hardly a sound argument for booting a book from the curriculum.

During the three decades plus that I spent in the high school classroom, Huck Finn was taught at either the sophomore or junior level. I've experienced it being taught to classes of all white students and to classes of racially and culturally diverse students. In my experience, the use of the word nigger in the book never presented a problem, either in my classroom or the classrooms of my colleagues. I will tell you what I did notice as a problem. Increasingly over the years, more and more students would complain that the book was too hard to read, that it was too hard for them to understand the funny way Huck and Jim were talking.

I also find it quite shocking that Mr. Gwynn says it just doesn't work anymore to teach the book to sophomores. College sophomores! Are we at the point where a second year student in a college or university can't read or handle Huck Finn? Perhaps the problem, then, is with those students and not the book. How many times have those students likely heard and used the word nigger before they ever knew of Mark Twain or Huck Finn? Good Lord, year after year I taught Aristophanes' play Lysistrata (unexpurgated) to my high school seniors in humanities class. And we have university students who can't handle Mark Twain?

As far as I'm concerned, this entire flap says more about the declining state of American education than it does about Mark Twain and his book.

Richard

Thank goodness! I just couldn't understand anything in Huck Finn because of that strange looking word which kept popping up! I would also like to see Lolita forgotten, Ulysses un-rejoiced, and Shakespeare -- author of that vile "Titus Andronicus" -- purged from syllabi everywhere.

Also, the word "niggardly" should be expunged from the dictionary. You're all gonna go to heck if you use that word, you know.

I don't agree with Tony that Jim is portrayed as a clown, though he is often treated like one. In fact, I think Jim maintains his dignity at all times that I can recall. Here's a passage that illustrates my point, I think, as well as the absurdity of expunging the n-word. It's too long to quote in full, but as a reminder, there had been a storm, and Huck was swept away into the river and separated from Jim who thought that Huck had died. Huck managed to return safely, and then insists that the whole thing had never happened but that Jim had dreamed it during a ten minute nap. Jim then "interprets" the dream before seeing some physical evidence that his "dream" was real and that Huck was just playing a practical joke:Jim is clearly the grown-up. And the n-word is what makes the passage so powerful and Huck's chastening so moving. I believe this is also the moment in the book when you first know that Huck is a real mensch.

The last three posts on this thread are simply wonderful, and say what I think in different styles. Thank you Richard, Walter, Roger!!

Roger:

Well said. How well I remember that passage, and how well I remember going over it with students many years in the past. Your citing of that selection from the book and your comments about it indicate why William Dean Howells called Mark Twain the Lincoln of our Literature, and why Huck Finn is our essential national epic, our Odyssey.

Richard

Our national Odyssey--Frank Stanford's the battlefield where the moon says I love you. Better read it before it gets expurgated! Lorenzo Thomas called it Huck Finn written by Andre Breton. Bill

As long as I have the text available, I won't bother making a point but will just go ahead and quote another passage that I love. Huck believes himself to be morally wrong to be harboring a slave, and pretty late in the book he actually writes a letter ratting out Jim to Miss Watson. After he writes the letter:What makes Huck such a hero is that he does what he does not to go to heaven, but believing that he'll go to hell as a consequence. Maybe it's the atheist in me that applauds this idea. I honestly don't know if this is psychologically accurate, or just heavy irony by a master humorist, but it strikes the right note with me and makes Huck one of the most admirable characters in all of literature. And what could be a greater moment in any book than "I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it."?

Say it ain't so, folks.

(For an edited-down, but more legible file, see here. Both files are pdf's for Acrobat Reader.)

I reread Huck just this last summer, and I have to say, my reaction was pretty much the same as Smiley's.

*

Editing back, 9 January, a.m. Found a regular webpage (html) version of the full essay, here. (Much easier to read than the photocopy/pdf.)

.

Basically I agree with Dmitri, but I don't know how to resolve the problem. Here in Louisiana, English classes often use the novel "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" by La. novelist Ernest J. Gaines.
For his historically relevant (and realistic) use of the said N-word, this black author has been called "racist"! So no wonder there's no escape for Mark Twain...

Gail:

I think one solution to the problem is to have school boards, school administrators, and teachers who exhibit academic integrity, who have spines made of something more solid than politically correct putty. But I'm afraid that's wishful thinking. The pendulum has swung too far, and I don't see any signs that indicate a reverse movement of that direction.

Richard

Sam's right. It's exhausting--if for no other reason that you as teacher realize how deeply confused and ill-informed our kids are. I've taught it several times, but I often spent so much more time preparing the linguistic and anthropological groundwork for the "N" word that the story received short shrift. My advanced IB, AP kids do better. Some underprivileged kids--who use the use the word themselves daily--bristle when Twain uses it. We must remember here that for some of these kids the idea that what they are reading fiction is not a viable concept.

That said: HF has to be taught. The Black youth especially need to know
what their ancestors suffered and how it was possible for men of different races to love one another.

So the question of level is critical. I would not recommend a ninth public school teacher to attempt the book. Possibly a teacher of seniors. I would be certain my principal was on board.

I have to disagree with you, Lance, on your basic point. First of all, Mr. Gwynn, as I stated in an earlier post in which I criticized his position, is teaching at the college level. Based on the information contained in the linked article, I can only conclude that he is bailing out, taking the path of least resistance, surrendering to a declining academic culture. If teaching Huck Finn in colleges and universities is too exhausting and difficult, then we should run up the white flag on all of our academic institutions.

And as concerns doing the groundwork for the word nigger as used in the book, I don't know how much time other teachers in other high schools spend on the novel, but I would often take anywhere from four to six weeks on the entire novel, from start to finish. Just how much time is needed to deal with the language issue? If a teacher allows each class period for days or weeks on end to be consumed with the book's use of the word nigger, then I question the classroom management abilities of that instructor.

Finally, a question has occurred to me that I can not answer. In the way in which Twain's Huck Finn is viewed or approached, is there a significant difference in attitude between the northern and southern areas of the country? I don't know.

Richard

Lance,

This is compelling argument, but it's also one I don't understand. Couldn't this better be done by teaching Beloved? Why do some schools teach Up From Slavery, but not The Souls of Black Folk? Why don't more curricula include Their Eyes Were Watching God? When was the last time we saw The Ballot Or The Bullet in a high school classroom?

But instead of spending our energy on those, we have this same tired old argument. Now, I know, much has changed over the last couple decades, including the inclusion of a few of the texts above. But so often, it feels as if so little has changed.

Yes, I do know how it feels in some classrooms. I've taught black literature deep in the heart of Alabama, and white literature at HBCUs. It's exhausting in both cases, but for different reasons.

Believe it or not, the HBCU students were actually far more tolerant of diversity, but for reasons I never would have suspected. You know what white book went over the best with those students? Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man! Who would have guessed?

I asked a colleague about it. She turned to the very end of the book, and pointed out this line: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. "

Thanks,

Bill

I taught excellent literary novels that used the N-word in sixth grade to students of wildly diverse backgrounds. I encountered no problems. You know why? For the same reason that I am able, year after year, to successfully teach my kindergartners and first graders about adults screaming that same word at Ruby Bridges as she tried to walk to school, and how teachers degraded and humiliated Cesar Chavez for using Spanish words in class, and how police officers and firemen beat and turned hoses on children during the civil rights movement, etc., etc. Because the students are not idiots, and neither are their parents.

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. -- Jerome Bruner

That is all have to contribute on the subject.

David R.

Bill:

You recommend some good books here, but I don't know what you mean by saying "we have this same tired old argument." What argument is that exactly? The original point of discussion for this thread concerns the legitimacy of teaching Mark Twain's Huck Finn, his repeated use of the word nigger in the novel, and whether it's worthwhile to edit the word out of the book and replace it with the word slave.

If a school system decides not to include Huck Finn in the curriculum, that's fine. School districts and English departments should be free to fashion their own curricula. If a school system chooses to teach a different book, such as one of those that you mention, dealing with the black experience and race relations in American, that's wonderful. But none of this has anything to do with the essential point being debated here. The present controversy hinges on a word, Mark Twain's use of the word nigger.

Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God was one of the novels taught in the AP English course in my former high school. You've certainly read that book, Bill. Isn't the word nigger used in it? Would you recommend a revised edition that deletes the word before assigning it for classroom reading?

I'm aware that Hurston's novel was not universally praised by her peers when it was published. In fact, it was rather severely criticized by such notable writers as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright and by many other authors who were part of the Harlem Renaissance. Any novel that deals honestly and realistically with the race issue in America by using the word nigger can be and will be objected to by a variety of groups, large or small.

So why don't we get to the heart of the problem in this discussion and rake all the rubbish aside. Many excellent novels written by black authors could be taught instead of Twain's Huck Finn, and those fine books also use the word nigger. If those books are chosen over Twain's novel, I think it's a perfectly legitimate choice. But let's not be disingenuous and hypocritical in our arguments. If the word nigger is objectionable when Twain uses it, why is it not objectionable when other authors use it? The real issue here is not the word. It's Twain and the stature of his book. He's the classic and perennial target. And no one would laugh about it and love it more than Twain himself.

Richard

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