Do Word Changes Alter 'Huckleberry Finn'?

Do Word Changes Alter 'Huckleberry Finn'?

What's wrong with altering a classic if some readers feel assaulted by offensive words?

Part of Our Lexicon

Jill Nelson  is the author of “Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience” and, most recently, “Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island.”

I live in a city where I probably hear the word “nigger” 50 times a day from people of all colors and ages, though primarily from young people on public transportation. It is a salutation, a term of affection, occasionally an epithet, but most often, I think, verbal filler, a younger generation’s equivalent of their elders use of “like” or “you know.”

What’s next? Substituting orange for red in a painter’s work because some observers find red too aggressive?

Like it or not, and you know, that’s another conversation, the word is part of our public and private lexicon, and the notion that contemporary readers of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are surprised or offended by the word seems questionable. Yet even if they are, one of the intentions of art is to provoke and unsettle. Surely Mark Twain did not intend the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to have the equivalent effect on readers of Margaret Wise Brown’s lovely and lulling children’s classic, “Goodnight Moon.”

There are vast differences between calling a character “nigger” and calling them “slave.” They are not interchangeable. Writers choose their words thoughtfully. Our words create, color, layer and texture and contextalize the stories we tell. The notion that one can change one of those carefully chosen words -- much less 219 of them -- to suit their perception of contemporary mores and eliminate the possibility of hurt sensibilities is an abdication of a teacher’s responsibility to illuminate and guide students through an unfamiliar and perhaps difficult text. What’s next? Substituting orange for red in a painter’s work because some observers find red too aggressive?

 

A Teachable Moment

Timothy Jay, a psychology professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, is the author of “Cursing in America” and “Why We Curse.”

Who doesn’t want the world to be a better place or for our children to be well educated? Taking the word "nigger" out of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” won’t do either.

Leave the book as it is and let each community decide; that’s what they already do.

Cleaning up literature is never a solution. We should inform children and prepare them to make their own decisions about information. Uncomfortable topics like sexuality, racism, harassment and prejudice need to be confronted rather than tucked away.

“Huckleberry Finn” is one of the most frequently censored books in schools because of the language in it. Our schools have developed many ways for children to avoid the book if their parents don’t want them to read it. Leave the book as it is and let each community decide; that’s what they already do. Besides, it's naïve to believe that anyone who is old enough to read “Huckleberry Finn” would not know the racial epithet or why it's offensive.

Americans do not like content-based censorship; that’s why we have the movie and television rating systems. Censoring a word fails to address deeper problems with racism in our society. "Huckleberry Finn" is a classic that can provide a kind of “teachable moment” for children if we are willing to deal with it openly.

 

What Would Frederick Douglass Say?

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and a fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the author of "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future."

Awhile back, after a freshman class on “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” a text amply sprinkled with n-words, a black student came up and rebuked me for one particular passage.

Take away the insult and we lose the full measure of Jim's character.

“It’s a bad word,” he said, “really upsetting.”

“I know, I know,” I replied, “but it’s there, and Douglass wrote it for a reason, and people in 1835 used it all the time.” He glanced down and shook his head. I thought of commiserating, but took a firm line.

“Listen, you’re in college now, and that’s going to put pressure on you. In many courses you’ll have to face some awful facts of history, and to handle them well you can’t let them offend you so much.”

He walked away and I never saw him again — a bad outcome for him, me, the class, and, let’s not forget, Frederick Douglass. What would Douglass think of a man who closed his book because of that word? “I’ve been torn from my mother, beaten regularly, and I’ve witnessed rape and murder,” he might say. “You can’t take the ordinary label of the day?”

Most of all, Douglass understood that dignity can endure even at the bottom of a slave society no matter the abuse. Twain did, too, showing that in spite of all the cruelty and the racial epithets, Jim remains the noble figure in the novel. Take away the insult and we lose the full measure of his character.

Worse, Alan Gribben’s hesitation over the the epithet has a terrible effect, producing the anti-intellectual attitude of many students. “I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Tom Sawyer,’” Gribben has said.

Stop being so fussy. Political correctness is bad tutelage, validating thin skins and selective inquiries. The more students read sanitized materials in high school, the more they enter college inclined to dispel things they don’t want to hear.

 

Why Is 'Slave' Less Offensive?

Francine Prose is the author, most recently, of “Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife.”

I think that the time and care Mark Twain put into choosing the words Huck Finn and those around him speak, into choosing the words they think, should be respected. If language is a bridge connecting us to the mind of the writer and the historical moment he is describing, then to tinker with that language — for whatever well-intentioned reasons — undermines not only the design but the solidity of that bridge.

The understandable discomfort of students and teachers in discussing the word is part of a conversation.

But what puzzles me most about the debate — I’m not trying to sound willfully naïve — is why the word “nigger” should be more freighted, more troubling, the cause of more (to paraphrase the edition's introduction) “resentment” than the word “slave.” Racial epithets are inarguably disgusting, but not nearly so disgusting as an institution that treats human beings as property to be beaten, bought and sold. “Nigger” and “slave” are not synonyms by any stretch of the imagination. Jim’s problem is not that he is called a “nigger” but that he is chattel who can be freed or returned to his master.

Instead of excising the word from the novel, students should be reminded that however uneasy the word makes us, what should make us much more uneasy is the fact that we — the United States — were a slave-holding society. One of the beauties of the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is that it plunges readers so deeply into an era in which black people could be legally trafficked by whites. In addition to portraying the mind of a young person trying to develop a moral conscience, it reminds us of where we come from and consequently who we are, of a brutal history that continues to affect us. The understandable discomfort the word “nigger” causes students and teachers is part of a conversation; part of the point of reading that book in school is to have that conversation.

Finally, though, there’s another, more practical consideration: Knowing the history of censorship in our libraries, knowing how often Huck Finn has been removed from a school’s curriculum because of the word “nigger,” I’m almost inclined to say that if it takes censorship to insure that the book is still widely read, it might not be the worst thing. Let students experience Huck’s consciousness and discover the cruel realities that his culture took for granted. After that they may be inspired to read what Mark Twain actually wrote.

 

Dumbing and Numbing Down Jim

David Matthews is the author of “Ace of Spades,” a memoir, and "Kicking Ass and Saving Souls: a True Story of a Life Over the Line," a forthcoming biography.

The word is the word. In many ways, it's America. It's confounding, infuriating, degrading, and, sometimes, necessary. Even lyrical (in the right context, one need only listen to early Richard Pryor, or Biggie Smalls, or Dolemite).

Removing that single word from the text relieves the reader of doing any heavy lifting.

The word "nigger" should sting. It's part of the bloodied soil of America, yet another legacy of slavery still with us a hundred-plus years after the fact.

Huck Finn is an historical document. What a tragedy if a modern reader, deprived of the context the word provides, were to conclude that 'Slave Jim' was the equal of 'Nigger Jim.' A slave, without the proper historical guideposts, could conjure the lowly born, the unlucky member of the wrong caste, or maybe victim of some feudal system. There is no equivalency between slave and "nigger," which is an American invention. It's a word that denies humanity, and along with it justice and mercy.

Dumbing and numbing down 'Nigger Jim' to 'Slave Jim' etiolates the crushing, dehumanizing institutional forces against the character, and minimizes Huck's enlightenment. The reason Huck is such an enduring character is that he represents the best and worst of his time. He was able to skewer the inherent absurdity of slavery, while ostensibly being a member of the ruling society.

Removing that single word from the text, while sparing those too sensitive to get past it, relieves the reader of doing any heavy lifting. Great books -- or any work of art -- require that the reader meet the author half-way. Huck Finn is a serious literary work. It is not a children's adventure book, nor a Rockwellian portrait. As intended, it is a scathing indictment against slavery, hypocrisy, gender roles (sure, why not), and class.

It is the successor to the Odyssey, and the precursor to "Catcher in the Rye." I understood little of Huck Finn when I was in high school, a little more in college, and still more is revealed to me, when I pull it from the shelf every few years. I'll run out of capacity before Huck Finn runs out of lessons.

These books -- and others like them -- should not be retrofitted to make modern readers comfortable. Modern readers are already too comfortable. Lazy, even. If the word "nigger" keeps one from reading Huck Finn, then one lacks the critical skills to appreciate all the book has to offer.

Bringing Context to the Page

Gish Jen is the author, most recently, of "World and Town."

It is, of course, perfectly fine to change the texts of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, so long as the cover reads, by Mark Twain* with a footnote: *as bowdlerized by Alan Gribben.

The reader’s failure is not remedied by changes to the text; it is remedied by education.

Twain has, after all, collaborated with others before; did he not, for example, write "The Gilded Age" with his neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner? This would just be the first time he has collaborated while dead.

As to the merits of this posthumous arrangement, I have no doubt that Professor Gribben means well; that he loves these books; and that he brings to his extraordinary action classroom experiences others of us have perhaps not had. But what are we to make of the fact that it is not only "nigger" which has been expunged, but "injun"?

Does this not make one wonder, why stop there? Or why, indeed, stop with Twain? I only wish, as an Asian American, that someone might, say, do something about T.S. Eliot’s line: “Now the Peke, although people may say what they please,/Is no British Dog, but a Heathen Chinese.” How about “a noble Chinese” instead? And though it’s a bit more work, might someone not do something about "Heart of Darkness" while we’re at it? A little more nuance, a little less horror?

We all wish our literature were less riddled with racism, not to say anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, and other less than noble manifestations of the human spirit. In the end, though, it is up to the reader to bring context to the page. The reader’s failure is not remedied by changes to the text; it is remedied by education and its happy result, perspective.

As for this well-intended but misguided effort to help the challenged reader, I doubt Twain, if he were alive, would mince words. More likely he would be up like his Joan of Arc, “abroad at the crack of dawn, galloping here and there and yonder, examining the situation minutely, and choosing what [he] considered the best possible position for [his] artillery.”

 

We Want Readers

James Duban is a professor of English at the University of North Texas. He is the author of books about Herman Melville, Henry James, and college achievement. His book on Melville explores, among other concerns, 19th century attitudes about race.

My wife and I used to shop at discount stores and used-book shops for kids’ versions of classic novels to read to our children. Good stuff. Years later, they are avid readers.

In today’s wasteland of 'gaming' and other electronic distractions, I applaud any effort to perpetuate the reading and enjoyment of great fiction.

School kids should be able, at their teacher’s discretion, to read modified editions of classic works. We are, after all, talking about young people, and about many educators who would feel more comfortable teaching Mark Twain’s adventure stories with the NewSouth text.

There will be time enough in high school or college to study the original books and learn how those explore, and ultimately subvert, bigotry. In today’s wasteland of “gaming” and other electronic distractions, I applaud any effort to perpetuate the reading and enjoyment of great fiction.

Obscuring the Past

Thomas Glave, a professor of English at Binghamton University, is the author of “The Torturer’s Wife”, “Whose Song? And Other Stories”  and "Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent."

In 2010 (and always), we must be brave and honest enough to face the hard facts: replacing the word “nigger” with the word “slave” in Twain’s masterpiece "Huckleberry Finn" will neither erase nor vanquish the ugly history out of which the novel and the offensive word emerged.

The fact is that Huck simply would not have referred to Jim as a “slave.”

Substituting one word in a novel cannot possibly redress the centuries of harm and viciousness visited upon black people by white people who for so long, and well into the present, considered us inferior, stupid, lazy, ignorant, dishonest, animal-like in the worst possible sense, and generally oversexed. Part of Huckleberry Finn’s power, irrespective of Twain’s intentions at the time, is that it unflinchingly discloses the very blitheness with which Huck addresses and talks about Jim (or any other black person) as a “nigger,” and thus the attitudes of many white people at the time about black people as well as blackness and whiteness. Huck is able to come of age as a white male partly because he does so in the presence of a (fully grown, adult) black male who for him will always be the racial “other,” though an “other” for whom he cares and who cares for him.

The reality is that, to Huck and many white people of the time, Jim would have been both a slave – that is, property to be owned and abused at the owner’s will – and a “nigger," the accepted way one referred to that particular property in the South at the time. The nuanced and particular differences between those two words, while connected in some ways, cannot, at least in the case of Huckleberry Finn, be blurred or muddied.

But perhaps even more urgently, it is precisely this abominable history – that of racism, slavery, and the violation and dehumanization of black people over centuries – which must be made clear to schoolchildren, high school students, and university students – to everyone -- if they and we are to become responsible, clear-thinking citizens who will ultimately be unafraid of confronting and grappling with the truth of this country’s bitter, byzantine history.

Great literature that reveals truths about a society can enable such learning and thinking: the fact is that Huck simply would not have referred to Jim as a “slave.”

What does this unfortunate reality say to us today as we reflect on a history many of us would rather not contemplate? But an even more disturbing question might be: what will it mean for our future as a nation, and our futures as compassionate, humane people, if we refuse to take into account the violence of this history and its paradoxes and counternarratives?

An insistence on obfuscating the past and obscuring the truth of real events is itself violent; such obfuscation does violence not only to the memories of those who suffered, but to our own potential as human beings to remember, and who must be charged, toward our own greater humanity, never to forget.

 

The Words of Pap Finn's Rant

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of American Studies at Stanford University is the editor, most recently, of "The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his Life and Works."

Racism is ugly. The history and legacies of American racism are our nation’s own peculiar brand of ugly -- and the n-word embodies it.

It is the persistence of racism in America that makes the n-word in Huck Finn a problem in the classroom.

To understand how racism works in America it is necessary to understand how this word has been used to inflict pain on black people, challenge their humanity, and undercut their achievements. Leading black writers in America from Frederick Douglass to Ralph Ellison have understood this: to criticize racism effectively you have to make your reader hear how racists sound in all their offensive ugliness. When Malcolm X famously asked, “What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?” and answered “Nigger,” he was testifying to the destructive power of this word and the world view it embodied.

Malcolm X’s quip echoes a key passage in Huckleberry Finn, where Twain uses the n-word to the same end. I have in mind the moment when Pap Finn, drunk and covered with mud, delivers this rant:

There was a free nigger there from Ohio — a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too….They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ’lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin….And to see the cool way of that nigger — why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold? — that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months.

The n-word is key to this rant. It underlines the irony involved: a repulsive, illiterate, alcoholic child-abuser is incensed not only that a well-educated, well-dressed free black man could vote in another state, but that he couldn’t be sold into slavery until he’d been in Missouri for six months!

Twain once wrote that “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter -- it is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” He chose his words with care. The “new edition" of Huck Finn is not new (John Wallace published an edition that substituted “slave” for the n-word over 25 years ago); and it is not Huck Finn.

It is the persistence of racism in America that makes the n-word in Huck Finn a problem in the classroom. We need to give teachers the tools they need to teach Twain’s book in the context of the history of racism in this country that is its central concern.

 

Why Read That Book?

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor, is an associate dean and the Carville Dickinson Benson Research Professor of Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice.”

My freshman year at Yale I had a white roommate whose favorite song was “Rock n Roll Nigger” by Patti Smith. He played it all the time. I liked my roommate, a liberal Jew from Brooklyn, but I hated when he played that song. I never complained. I didn’t want to seem like the overly sensitive black dude who doesn’t get the joke. Now I think I should have asked him not to play that song around me and, if he persisted, thrown the record in the garbage can.

I suffered through Huckleberry Finn in high school. The white kids kept repeating “Nigger Jim," while the teacher offered tortured explanations for its use.

That same year my mother, a public school teacher, called one day to complain that some kids had vandalized her school, which was in a poor, all-black neighborhood in Chicago. The hooligans stole stuff and poured paint on the walls. Mom said, about the perpetrators, “You just want to say ‘those dumb niggers’ but you don’t because there are white people in the room.”

Yale was wonderfully diverse, but sometimes my African-American friends and I needed a black space. We might listen to Richard Pryor’s hilarious album “That Nigger’s Crazy.” Or on weekends take the short train ride to New York City, where hip-hop was being born, and the word “nigger” gaining an artistic legitimacy it hadn’t had since ... well, since the days of Mark Twain.

It’s complicated, “nigger” is. I suffered through Huckleberry Finn in high school, with the white kids going out of their way to say “Nigger Jim” and the teacher’s tortured explanation that Twain’s “nigger” didn’t really mean nigger, or meant it ironically, or historically, or symbolically. Whatever. I could live my whole life fine if I never read that book again.

If some teachers have the audacity to believe that Mark Twain’s work is still meaningful, even absent the words “nigger” and “injun,” more power to them. If other teachers think keeping those epithets in is worth the pain they will cause students of color, I understand that too. This isn’t about censorship, it’s about choice. Either choice will have unfortunate consequences.

 

Literature's Dual Life

Jane Smiley is the author, most recently, of “Private Life,” a novel.

Literature — novels, plays, and poems — can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

Being honest about Huckleberry Finn goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and identity as Americans.

Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or Huckleberry Finn? Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.

I think that the choices teachers make in this regard depend on which side of the equation they want to emphasize — do we teach "Huckleberry Finn" or "The Merchant of Venice" because they are great or because they are accurate depictions of their times, including attitudes that were held then?

Personally, if I were to teach Huck Finn, I would want my students to be shocked and repelled by the use of the n-word, and I would then want to discuss the issues around that word, and how those issues are represented in the novel. Twain the author is by no means unaware of how Huck’s use of that word increasingly misrepresents his feelings toward Jim, and so the word is intentionally loaded. “Slave” doesn’t carry the same shock value, and so it tones down what Twain is getting at.

But since I am me, I would also teach other novels about race relations from the same era, and compare and contrast them with Huck Finn in both their attitudes and their sophistication of language and analysis. I would talk, too, about the comic veneer of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and the changing nature of what readers of different eras consider funny. It is much easier for a tragedy or an epic to transcend the time in which it was written than it is for a comedy to do so, because the shared values that the effect of tragedy depends upon are basic ones, while the shared values that comedy depends upon are often transient.

If students recoil — well, perhaps that is an educational opportunity, too, for both those who recoil and those who don’t. When a nation’s history is fraught with conflict, as our history is, the question always arises — can we talk with children and teenagers honestly about that conflict, or does that just generate more conflict?

The brave view is that talking it out helps work it out. Maybe the realistic view is that talking it out inflames the issues further. But that is America, especially these days.

My natural sentiments would be in favor of talking it out, of seeking the humanity behind the labels and helping students experience that. But while I was doing that, I am sure I would have my doubts. In many ways, being honest about Huckleberry Finn goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/01/05/does-one-word-change-huckleberry-finn/the-word-nigger-is-part-of-our-lexicon