[Maryann Corbett]

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.

[Jim Burrows]

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.

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Maryann Corbett

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

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

[Dmitri Semenov]

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.

[Maryann Corbett]

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.

[Richard Meyer]

Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry

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!"

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

[Roger Slater]

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:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

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.

[ChrisGeorge]

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

[Ed Shacklee]

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

[John Riley]

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.