This week, a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was released. What’s different about this edition from previous editions is the N-word has been removed wherever it occurred in the original text, and replaced with the word “slave.” It also, incidently, replaces the ocurrances of “injun” with “Indian.” The man responsible for this re-written version, Alan Gribben, a professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, has been spending a lot of time explaining that he did this so the book would no longer be banned in schools by concerned parents, etc., who didn’t want their kids exposed to the N-word (a word, I guarantee you like assorted F- and S- words they all learned far earlier than almost any parent is comfortable with). Now, without that word, reasons Prof. Gribben, people can just read the book and discuss this seminal work of American literature for what it is.
The cries of censorship have been loud, and immediate. And not entirely correct. What Prof. Gribben has done is not censorship. It’s something more insidious. It’s bowdlerization.
Censorship is the banning outright of material deemed offensive by some agency of official authority. Bowdlerization is the editing down and tidying up of portions of a piece of material deemed offensive or unsuitable by some private individual. The edited material is then passed off as being just as good as the original, maybe even better, because the new version doesn’t force anybody to deal with the icky bits.
Now, I will not deny that the N-word is unique in the English language as spoken in the US. How a single word came to embody all the inequality, struggle, and complexity of the long history between the descendents of African and European Americans is incredibly long and could fill books. In fact, it has. If there is a single word that excites stronger emotion and more vociferous debate, I don’t know what it is. It is also the most frequently cited reason for the removal of Huck Finn from school libraries and reading lists.
So I can see where Prof. Gribben is coming from, especially when he argues that this one word is not the whole meaning and essence of Huck Finn. He’s right, it’s not. And it sounds perfectly reasonable that if a single word is keeping kids from being allowed to study one of the most important novels in American literature, just take out the BLEEPing word. Bowdlerize the book and everybody can relax and get onto analyzing the social satire, the humor and that weird tacked on ending with Tom Sawyer staging an appopriately dramatic escape for Jim that almost gets Jim killed.
Except. And what I’m about to say here is nothing new, or surprising, but I’m going to say it anyway:
Words are important. With all due respect to the Bard (the original target of Bowdlerization in the 19th century, BTW), a rose by any other name does not smell as sweet. Ordinary, everyday words, especially in the hands of a great author, convey precise meaning and emphasis. Change the word, and you change that meaning, that emphasis. You change the work, and the effect of the work. If this is true with ordinary words, how much more true is it going to be with the most hated and feared word in the language?
Then there’s the other problem. Say it’s okay to take out that one word. It’s a bad word, a nasty word, a degrading and demeaning word and kids can’t handle the nuances of its history and badness, and incidently, might go around repeating it. So, what’s the next word to go? The next book to clean up so it can be read without worrying the parents too much? If one word is bad, what about one sentence, one paragraph, one page? One religion, one culture, one amemendment, one character, one line of argument?
These things never, ever stop with one word.
Now from Book View Cafe:
PATHS TO CAMELOT, the first complete collection of Sarah Zettel’s sweeping romantic series, including the final volume CAMELOT’S BLOOD.
When I was a teacher, and we read that book, one of the most important discussions that year was about civil rights, and the power of words, and how culture can, and in this case, must change. This could be an uncomfortable lesson, but a necessary one.
Bowdlerization is obviously nothing new, and in fact went on much earlier, when the Lambs cleaned up the fairy tales of the rough and rowdy 1700s for kids, and so forth. What bothers me is that this kind of sanitizing can mean that that important discussion won’t happen–everyone can feel good about not reading “bad words” while skipping the inconvenience of facing why they are bad.
I’ve just started reading “Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury. In the coda, he talks about more than one way to burn books. Take out a word here, a paragraph there, make this scene less graphic, change the emphasis of another so the entire meaning of the book fits the current political “Agenda.”
The purpose of literature, IMHO, even the literature of genre fiction is to allow us to look at life sideways and THINK. How can we approach the human condition and change it for the better if we aren’t allowed to see it because books have been edited for our own good?
Perhaps it is translation. The way of speaking of the characters in Finn, and the way of thinking that went with it, is now confined to a small minority of the USA. Perhaps…
Like you, I worry about the precedent.
I think the professor had a good intention — to save a book he loved from being lost as a “classic everyone reveres and no one reads” as Twain himself approximately said. However, I’m with Sherwood on this — those words sum up a world that is distant for most of us, and it’s one that it’s good to visit once in awhile — because every year we see new groups being turned into new versions of the “N-word.”
Better that they started a campaign — where classes signed up to read the book, and then the kids talked about it online. A brand new dialogue of the new generation could have started because they took the step forward and said: “Parents must not be frightened of this book, these words. They must teach their children why these words were weapons, and are never acceptable — are even dangerous.”
That word appearing in rap songs, etc. — do teens today realize that in some places you could be killed for using that word? Hummm…maybe if a few men were knifed for casually calling a woman a whore or using the “C-word,” we might all be reminded of the power and danger of misused language.
Unless kids understand how ubiquitous the racial epithets were–often spoken casually and without venom, as mere descriptive labels–how can they understand the level on which slavery was built into the culture at that time? One of the things that Huck Finn opened my eyes to the first time I read it was the extent to which even non-slaveowners in a slave state were complicit in the system–Jim isn’t just escaping from his owner, he has to escape from the entire damned country in order to be truly safe–because to everyone around him he is a “nigger” before he is anything else. And you need that word to really get it.
It is no longer possible to teach the original text in US schools below college level. Do we therefore drop this important and influential work from secondary education?
Madeline, Twain makes it very clear in the book: the characters only understood African-Americans as slaves and inferiors and used the word nigger as synonymous with “slave.” The book contains savage satire of racism, and I am astonished it has stayed in the high school English curriculum as long as it has.
Publisher’s Weekly< article on this edition, with interview with Auburn Professor Alan Gribben. Quote:
IMHO, yes. If the book cannot be read as written then the book cannot be read. If the book cannot be taught as written, then the book cannot be taught.
So, the question becomes, should a single word be deemed so powerful that its history, its relevance, its context cannot be discussed? My answer would be no, but a lot of other people clearly have reached different conclusions.
I heard about the bowdlerization of the book by catching an NPR interview with Prof. Gribben. He spoke with great feeling about talking with a student who felt like she was being slapped in the face with the word, and that his edition was for people who couldn’t get past the word.
I submit nobody should get past the word, and further, nobody should be _permitted_ to get past the word. There it is, it’s that word, in all its banality and its crushing and complex hold on us and our culture. Look at it, up close and personal. This book will help you understand why it was and is such a problem.
I also submit that if you don’t want Huck Finn taught in your community because it’ll create so many problems substitute another Twain work. How about The Mysterious Stranger? Or The War Prayer? Those don’t use the N- word.
I too am concerned about the precedent and the effects of making changes to the text acceptable. We start with an earnest attempt to make books accessible and politically correct. Or comfortable and “nice.” How big a step is it to changing elements that challenge current political ideology? Or to making it a crime to read the original?
If a book cannot be taught, the thing to change is the teaching restriction, not the book.
I’ve taught Huck Finn a number of times in sophomore English. I’ve also taught OF MICE AND MEN lots and lots to freshmen. My school district doesn’t strike out “difficult” language.
In both cases, I read large segments of the work out loud in class, and I don’t skip over the word “nigger.” I have African-American students in my classes, too. Like all good teachers, I do preface it with a discussion about why the author used the word and what the appropriate use of the word in class is.
The only problem I’ve come across are occasional parents who object to the use of “son of a bitch” and “god damn” in OF MICE AND MEN.
I taught the book in a college class with diverse students, with one of the main points being the question of whether the book should be censored. The students finally decided that it should be read by adults who can understand the context, not by children or even middle-school aged students. They also thought that Twain was condemning racism with his portrayal of Jim’s treatment–until the last section, which seems to undercut all the rest. It’s a strange book, but I think I agree with them. The problems for mature readers are not the occasions when obviously racist people (or even Huck under their influence) use the N word, but the ending, where Jim who has been represented as an intelligent and sympathetic character, entitled to respect and freedom, suddenly is reduced to a mindless joke in one of Tom’s games.
Yeah, I’ve never figured out that ending. It does not fit at all with the rest of the book. To me it’s much more troubling than any of the language, precisely because it blows up what has come before into a farce that is without any of Twain’s satire.
A friend of mine, who is African American, objects to teaching the book in school. I think this is because she was one of the few (or perhaps the only) African American in a class where the book was taught without any effort to put it in context.
But bowdlerizing it won’t solve that problem. The book should be read, but, as Steven said, not without putting it in context. Young people of all races should be aware that it was considered perfectly acceptable for white people to use the N-word in referring to blacks up until about 1960, and that its use was accompanied by contempt and disrespect, not to mention such things as lynching and slavery. This is an ugly chapter in our history, and trying to pave it over with euphemisms is not going to make it go away.
Somebody in the 60s wrote a different ending for the book. The author argued that Twain saw that the story was going to someplace dark and unpleasant, and so took a sharp right turn into farce. The proposed ‘true’ ending ended with Jim’s death.
Sometime in the 1990s, Political Correctness reached Estonia. Consequently, we no longer use the N word (which held no negative connotations in our culture), we use ‘black’. Sad thing is, the Estonian word for ‘black’ also means ‘dirty’. None of our PC pounders ever noticed . . .
Re-writing books? Oh for laughing out loud, good old Soviet Union did it all the time. Can’t disturb our brave Working Class with ideas and concepts purely of the Decadent West, now can you?
Does anyone remember “Li’l Black Sambo”? In the mid-sixites he became “Little Brown Sambo”. The African motif was changed to India and the language “cleaned up”. As if a smaller minority can be belittled by childish pranks but more numerous (in our country at the time) African’s can’t.
Disney can’t play “Song of the South” anymore — we can’t even buy a DVD or video of the magnificent movie because Joel Chandler Harris had his characters talk in the dialect of the deep south, correct for the period but now demeaning. My mother did her masters thesis on the evolution of the language in that book from the original, which was almost unreadable to her Boston trained mind, to more modern editions that had no life according to my Alabama raised Aunt Bec.
This is actually a bit frightening.
Companies produce “political correct” classics. Apple decides what their customers can read, listen too, watch. Amazon deletes “1984″ and “Animal Farm” via their DRM-system.
What next? A political correct version of “Lord of the rings”? Because “Dwarves” may abuse smaller people?
We short people prefer the term “hobbit,” not “dwarf,” in reference to our LOTR stature. (grin)
About five years back, one publishing company decided to rewrite all the NARNIA books to get rid of that pesky Christian symbolism. The outcry was so loud they changed their mind.
The road to hell is paved with the good intentions of people who Bowdlerize classics.
Teaching in the context of the period or mindset is the way for adults to share the classics, not sanitizing the life and the lessons out of them.
“About five years back, one publishing company decided to rewrite all the NARNIA books to get rid of that pesky Christian symbolism.”
*head-desk*
I am fascinated by this discussion, but troubled somehow by the basis of the arguments expressed here.
I ask myself, why did people want to ban the book? Was it to protect contemporary readers from exposure to something which might hurt them? Was it because they fear that teaching the book might corrupt some readers into adopting racist attitudes or embolden those already racist? Was it for some other reason and the focus on the N-word provided an easy excuse?
This may be an unanswerable question – but my sense is that the basic motive is well-intentioned if poorly reasoned. We find – I find – Twain’s work troubling in much the same way that I found my parents embarrassing when I was a teen. Bowdlerizing him is an attempt to smooth away what is disturbing so that we can read him without mental abrasion.
But the very fact that he is disturbing points (obviously!) to the fact that the issue he addresses, racism, is not an issue of the past, but one still very much alive in our society. We are still phenomenally insecure about race. It isn’t just a matter of a word that has been deprecated or excised from our vocabulary. The word couldn’t trouble us so if the issue weren’t still very much alive.
There are many factors that make a book a classic, but one is surely relevance to the issues of the time. The fact that racism is still an issue in our society means that this book is contemporary. Now here’s the rub: it is both a classic and a contemporary work. We want it to be part of our curriculum as a “classic” but its contemporariness is getting in the way.
Is the professor right to change the words? The book’s identity/role as classic literature is more important to him than its volatility as a social statement. To me, however, that volatility is more important, at this time in history, than the book’s non-volatile elements. Huck Finn will become “merely” a classic when the issues it deals with have been, finally and thank god, resolved and forgotten. Therefore, to take away its contemporary power for the sake of serving its classic stature is a literary decision and not a social one.
Let’s keep fighting over it. That is the book’s power in the here and now.
To me, the question isn’t whether the book should be taught. It absolutely should be taught, with all its text intact. Perhaps the better question is – At what level is it appropriate to teach this book?
In one high school program that I’m aware of, the AP English students simply took home a permission slip explaining the content’s possibly offensive word use, and that the teacher felt strongly that discussion of racism in literature was important for students. If the student’s parents didn’t sign the slip, the student went to the class next door to do work with that class which was altered to reflect the AP grade they would be learning.
If the book is inappropriate for a particular level of student, and for the skill set of a particular teacher, then it simply is higher up the scale of difficulty. We don’t ask high school seniors to read ‘Little Bear Goes to the Moon’, nor do we ask second graders to try to grasp ‘The Scarlet Letter’.
Bowdlerizing reduces the challenges and richness of the text. We shouldn’t ‘dumb down’ books to make them more palatable. There’s plenty of dumb out there already.