Four angles on that Huckleberry-Finn-with-the-n-word-removed controversy
Perhaps you’ve heard that a new edition of the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, is to be published with certain words removed. It’s been all over the internet for the last day and a half:
NewSouth Books’ upcoming edition of Mark Twain’s seminal novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will remove all instances of the “n” word—I’ll give you a hint, it’s not nonesuch—present in the text and replace it with slave. The new book will also remove usage of the word Injun. The effort is spearheaded by Twain expert Alan Gribben, who says his PC-ified version is not an attempt to neuter the classic but rather to update it. “Race matters in these books,” Gribben told PW. “It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”
There are four and only four ways in which to examine this story in a blog post. All four of these I present now.
Angle the First: Presenting actual quotes about the novel and the author, carefully edited and amended by me to ironically justify the new, edited version:
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. It’s only too bad it has ‘the n-word’ in it.” –Ernest Hemingway
“Although its language – sardonic, photographic, persuasively aural – and the structural use of the river as control and chaos seem to me quite the major feats of Huckleberry Finn, much of the novel’s genius lies in its quiescence, the silences that pervade it and give it a porous quality that is by turns brooding and soothing. It lies in the approaches to and exits from action; the byways and inlets seen out of the corner of the eye; the subdued images in which the repetition of a single word, such as “lonesome,” tolls like an evening bell; the moments when nothing is said, when scenes and incidents swell the heart unbearably precisely because unarticulated, and force an act of imagination almost against the will. It will be great literature if someone thinks to remove all the ‘n-words.’” –Toni Morrison
“The pictures of the mighty Mississippi, as the immortal Huck presents them, do not belong to buffoonery or to pretty writing, but to universal and almost flawless art. Where, in all fiction, will you find another boy as real as Huck himself? In sober truth, his equals, young or old, are distressingly few in the world. Rabelais created two, Fielding one, Thackery three or four and Shakespeare a roomful; but you will find none of them in the page of Hawthorne or Poe or Cooper or Holmes. In Kipling’s phrase, Huck stands upon his feet. Not a freckle is missing, not a scar, not a trick of boyish fancy, not a habit of boyish mind. Except it has ‘the n-word’ in it.” –H. L. Mencken
“I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find [Twain’s] works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire, but only if all of the foul language is removed from them.” –George Bernard Shaw
“I suppose I am the 10-millionth reader to say that ”Huckleberry Finn” is an extraordinary work. Indeed, for all I know, it is a great novel. Flawed, quirky, uneven, not above taking cheap shots and cashing far too many checks (it is rarely above milking its humor) – all the same, what a book we have here! And yet, I can’t recommend it until something is done about some of the mean words.” –Norman Mailer
“My job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But if anyone finds my language offensive I hope some enterprising person will have the good sense to remove any offending words so that everyone can enjoy my books.” –Mark Twain
Angle the second: Comparison to the “Clean Flicks” case.
Clean Flicks is a company that rents movies to people with delicate sensibilities (mostly Mormons, apparently). They used to sell edited versions of those movies, but they lost a court case in 2006.
A federal judge just ruled against CleanFlicks’ sanitizing of movies, editing out the allegedly naughty bits and then selling cleansed copies. The judge said this was a violation of copyright. The Salt Lake Tribune’s coverage adds: “The ruling does not affect another Utah company, ClearPlay, which has developed technology in DVD players that edits movies on the fly as they play.” So this ruling does come down to copyright — the right to copy — yet it also raises other issues.
…
On the one hand, I’m encouraging media people to submit their creations to the great remix out there: If you’re remixed, you’re part of the conversation, I say, and the conversation is the new distribution. But on the other hand, I would hate it if something I created under my name were mangled: I hate editors; that’s why I blog.
So get past the rights of ownership to the rights of authorship. When you create something, what rights should you have — ethically and legally — to maintain your creation in its full form, to protect your ideas and thoughts from bastardization?
The Clean Flicks case was about copyright. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is apparently out of copyright, so you can do anything you want to him, at least legally. But morally? At the time of the Clean Flicks court case, two different presidents of the Director’s Guild of America offered the following opinions on the rights of artists to protect their work:
“Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor,” filmmaker and Director’s Guild head Michael Apted told the press.
…
“These films carry our name and reflect our reputations,” continued Apted. “So we have great passion about protecting our work…against unauthorized editing.”
and,
”What these companies are doing is taking the hard work and creativity of filmmakers and changing them to suit their own whims and values — and all for profit,” DGA president Martha Coolidge told Reuters yesterday. ”To make things worse, these altered films are still identified with their creators and are being marketed as such.”
Just remove the word “films” and drop in “books,” and you have two compelling and profound statements in support of Mark Twain and against the editing of his work without his permission. How would he feel knowing that his most famous book was being altered so as not offend someone who might be offended?
Then again, if people want a copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but don’t want all “the n-words,” what should they do? Buy their own copy and blot out the words themselves? They don’t want to even look at that word!
Angle the third: Creating phony press releases implying the same editing-to-avoid-offense might be used on other works of literature, so as to highlight the absurdity and imply a “slippery slope.”
NewSouth books announced its intention to publish a new version of the book To Kill a Mockingbird, with all references to racial inequality, lynching, and “the n-word” removed. The new version, to be given the less provocative title To Kiss a Mockingbird, shall be a pamphlet about how much fun it can be to grow up in a small town in middle America.
NewSouth Books’s new edition of Pride and Prejudice, now called Self-Esteem and Refusing to Prejudge Others, is specially geared toward appealing to the modern sensibility. In the opening chapter, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett meet and have a wonderful, clear conversation in which each one completely understands the intentions of the other. They wed immediately. The remainder of the novel will be edited to show that women in Victorian England were in every way the equals to men.
For years, children have been unable to enjoy Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel Lolita. NewSouth Books is proud to announce the publication of a new version which shall have any descriptions or implications of pedophilia removed, and replaced with descriptions of bunny rabbits being petted.
Noted William S. Burroughs scholar Gertie Mugwump has spent the last two years crafting a new version of Burroughs’s classic novel Naked Lunch, now to be called Mostly Clothed Lunch. The novel’s references to anus licking, which have proven difficult for many modern readers to accept, shall now be replaced with references to shaking hands. The word “jizz” shall be replaced with the word “milk,” and any references to people of other races shall be replaced with smiling emoticons. “We feel that these changes make the book more palatable to sensitive readers,” Mugwump explained. “And also make it even weirder. Burroughs, who wanted his books read by as many people as possible, would have approved.”
Angle the fourth: Hasn’t this kind of already been done before?
There are already “sanitized” versions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For instance, Dover has a “Children’s Thrift Classic” edition.
That edition is aimed at kids age 8-11, and comes in at 64 pages — and even includes 15 illustrations.
They took out a lot more than just “the n-word,” I suspect. Mr. Twain survived. Oh, wait. Sorry. Mr. Twain is dead. That’s why we can edit his stuff without worrying about it.
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It is not the n-word that is objectionable. It is the institution of slavery that was objectionable. And Twain painted a portrait clearer than any other American author, of what slavery in the Old South was.
The n-word should most definitely NOT be removed!!! Replacing it with the word “slave” is MORONIC. That is not the same.
Removing the n-word would be as ANNOYING and DESTRUCTIVE as putting a BLEEP in a movie where the use of some so-called “objectionable” word is CRITICAL to the meaning of the movie.
I can not believe how much I HATE censorship! It is so ANNOYING, stupid and destructive!
So what if people find Huck Finn upsetting. It is SUPPOSED to be F-word-ING upsetting! Otherwise, Mark Twain would have called it “Fishing on the Mississippi with Uncle Tom”.
Furthermore, the use of the n-word is CRITICAL to understanding Huck’s psyche. Even tho Huck loved Tom, he was still so much a part of his time to express contempt of the n-word Jim. Even tho Jim was his protector and more of a father than his father.
And most importantly, Huck comes to realize the unfairness of this.
Taking the n-word out of Huck Finn is a CRIMINAL ACT!!!
This is a brilliant piece, Mr. Sprague. Some comments:
I am a bit of absolutist when it comes to messing with someone’s creative acts, with freedom of expression in general, no matter the discomfort or even hurt it may cause people, myself included.
This latest business to remove “nigger” from Twain’s novel and replace it with “slave” is less, to me, of the proverbial slippery slope than a greased cliff. Once you go over it, Huck Finn in hand with its words changed, there’s no stopping so much more from toppling over. There’s Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus, the use of nigger in Faulkner’s work, the splendid autobiography of Dick Gregory’s titled Nigger. All other racial epithets follow. And then gender slurs soon after, if not all at the same time in one great stampeding herd over the cliff.
Using some language might cause some people to feel the sting of such words, but it is the price we pay for creating and receiving art. I might feel differently if I didn’t live in a country that protected free speech, but I do, and I have always felt fortunate about that.
The writer selects his words with care, being in the business of evoking a particular reality with language, and to have certain words denied a writer, to have them made taboo, unutterable, is the same to me as denying a painter a primary color or a musician a note.
But more to the point: I don’t know why it’s not more clear to those who want to erase nigger from Huck Finn and the like that by doing so ironically erases some of the horror of slavery itself, which is the classification of a person, no matter his qualities, with a single, denigrating label. As Mr. Orf says above, the word slave and nigger are not the same. To imply that they are is to say that all slaves down through history were the same.
The word nigger as used in the Old South is to describe a very specific person in a specific time in history in a specific part of the world, America; its use evokes that place and time and a particular exploited group in it. To change the word is to de-contextualize it, alter its meaning, so that a Greek slave in the Roman Empire, with his knowledge of medicine and philosophy, could be made equivalent to an American slave, which was hardly the case.
I am not African American, so I do not feel the full force of the “n-word.” At the same time, I agree with the two prior comments. I am reminded of seeing the movie “Gone with the Wind” dubbed in Spanish, shortly after the Franco era. The famous comment of Rhett Butler, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” was dubbed “Francamente, mi querida, no me importa.”
I think that the quotes from the “Twain expert” Alan Gribben are more damning than anything I could have come up with myself. They read like satire:
“Race matters in these books,” Gribben told PW. “It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was not written in the 21st century. It seems stupid to have to point that out, but Mr. Gribben is being stupid. And if “race matters” in these books, then doesn’t the manner in which the interactions between people are presented also matter?
As for replacing “the n word” with “slave” — it’s a thoroughly subliterate idea for the reasons outlined in the comments above. Shouldn’t someone who claims to be a “Twain expert” know that?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we go back and scrub from our history every single thing that makes us uncomfortable about it now? The vast majority of books go out of print and are forgotten, so we don’t have to worry about those. Unfortunately, there are some stubborn ones that simply refuse to die. Those we will apparently now edit so as to make them more palatable. At least, if the Gribbens have their way.
Speaking of censoring language it is interesting that Mailer thought it ok to remove certain words from Twain’s book when his own book, “The Naked and the Dead,” has been rendered something of a joke to modern reader with all of its “Fug Offs” and “Fug Yous.”
Here’s a piece that pretty much says it all: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07huck.html