You might be able to tell what I think of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by what we named our son. I think it is a masterpiece and a very important political statement, too. Now, I understand that little Huck Finn uses the word ‘nigger’ about fifty billion times in the book. And I know that that creates some challenges for both the teacher and the student here in the 21st-Century. I am also sympathetic to anyone who wants to make the book more widely read. So, I get why someone would release a copy of the book where the word “nigger” is replaced by the word “slave.”
But I think you lose something that’s essential in making the book more politically correct. Part of the point of the book is that Finn is conflicted and that he’s on an intellectual journey where he will eventually have to decide one way or the other. Is he doing the right thing by helping a runaway slave or would he be doing the right thing to turn him in to the authorities? It’s important that the reader recognize that Finn does not initially see Jim as fully human, and certainly not as his equal. He’s just a slave.
I mean, consider that Finn grew up listening to rants like this from his father:
“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. 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, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane — the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State.
And what do you think? 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. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me — I’ll never vote agin as long as I live.
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.
Haven’t most of us been privy to speeches like that at one time or another? It doesn’t improve the work to airbrush the ‘n’ word out. It’s less painful to hear from the mouth of Finn’s villainous father than from the hero of the story, but why shouldn’t reading a great book be a bit painful? And, in any case, when you see where Finn came from you better understand the distance he had to travel.
Slavery was a brutal system. I see nothing wrong with using brutal language to describe it. You’re supposed to flinch.
There is a technical term for this altering of an author’s work: bowdlerization. Sort of has the same spirit as John Ashcroft draping the statue of Justice at the Department of Justice so the aluminum boobs wouldn’t show up behind his head during press conferences. Or buying a set of briefs for Michelangelo’s David.
This country is getting very Victorian in its sensitivities. I’m surprised that folks can look at Gone with the Wind anymore. Rhett Butler using those bad words and all.
I don’t believe for a minute that it’s about racial sensitivity. The silence over FoxNews and Republican treatment of President Obama point to that.
It’s purely about the “bad words” and “naughty bits”.
If someone is using the word nigger in the correct context, I’m probably more offended when they say “the N-word.”
Censoring Huck Finn is like the vernacularization of William Shakespeare.
Grr, wrong video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuLrBLxbLxw&feature=fvw
Also, TNC talked about this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/to-conversate/66929/
“If someone is using the word nigger in the correct context, I’m probably more offended when they say ‘the N-word.’
Hear! Hear! I once was severely called on the carpet for using “the N-word” when I made the statement that Arabs and Muslims were the “new niggers”. Clearly in that context I was not denigrating Blacks (or African Americans if you prefer, though most Black people I know who were born in the Americas do not care to be called African Americans), and yet the Euro-Americans (aka Whites) in the group attacked me vociferously for my use of that word (the non-Whites were apparently not upset). I would never in my wildest nightmares use that word in a derogatory manner toward a person even in jest, and yet I consider it a perfectly useful and legitimate word in some contexts, and I, too, am offended when someone is coy about its use.
As Louis C.K. said, it’s just white people trying to get away with saying the word without actually saying it.
I got shit for saying it once, too, and I was not only using it in a correct context, but I was quoting someone else.
This white asshole Republican threw a fit about how I “dropped the n-bomb.”
ICAM
it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable.
censorship is censorship.
my parents were glad when they saw Huck Finn on my English reading list.
and both of them grew up in the Jim Crow South.
it’s a part of American fiction and should be read by and taught to as many schoolkids as possible.
You are being far too kind to the idiots that are trying to make the book more “acceptable” by changing the very language the author chose. It is the literary equivalent of sacrilege. It is inexcusable, and it also dilutes the message of the book, which is not only to do with a period in U.S. history, but is a universal human message. They are also robbing teachers and students of important opportunities. Reading the “cleaned up” version is utterly useless.
The book is a literary classic, and these people have the hubris to believe that they have the right to alter it? It’s a complete outrage.
I think it’s ridiculous that people think they should improve the works of the godfather of American realism by making his work less true to its setting. Frankly, I’d like to see classroom discussions comparing and contrasting the use of the word “nigger” in Huck Finn and gangsta rap.
The word ‘nigger’ is part of the history of the US and its vocabulary and prejudices. In the fifties you could still hear it used in the North—suburban northern New Jersey. The word is integral to Huckleberry Finn and was used by Mark Twain to define and describe his subject. It’s deletion is censorship plain and simple. Huck Finn uses the word neturally. After all, his whole ‘adventure’ is more about helping a black man escape than about escaping his nasty father. I’ve conincidentally been reading the book these days and still don’t know if Jim reaches freedom. I hope so. I hope we all do. The political climate in the US makes me long for the time when we could say with joy and pride ‘we are a free people.’ Joy and pride have turned to dust.
I need to add that ‘nigger’ referred and, if used today, still refers to African Americans anywhere in the country. The word is not synonomous with ‘slave’ of confined to the southern states. It’s deletion from the book distorts its meaning. The book was published some twenty years after the abolition of slavery. Obviously Mark Twain was calling out people of his time who still demeaned African Americans with the term. There is something thick-headed about replacing the word with ‘slave’. That’s NOT what it means.
“It’s deletion from the book distorts its meaning.“
Worse yet from the point of view of distorting the book’s meaning, I heard that they are also doing away with the word “injun” and substituting “slave” for that as well, which makes even less sense.
No. Injun is changed to Indian.
They’re going to read the constitution in the House of Representatives without the “offending” parts : ie, slaves were considered 3/5 of a person, etc. This is some pretty nifty whitewash, pardon the pun. Not much different than what you’re talking about. What an ostrich thing to do!
Is this one of the opening shots in the Civil War revisionism we are about to see on the sesquicentennial of the Civil War?
In etymology, “nigger”, “nigra”, “Negro” all come from the same source – Portuguese slavers who were using the Portguese word for “black”. It is the cultural reading of these words that made them different over time. Whites who imposed slavery and reformers who sought abolition and desegregation made the cultural distinctions in how the words were read.
In the 1950s, “Negro” was acceptable (it still is) and “nigger” was not (it still is taboo) and “nigra” was a regional variation that some suspected was a polite way of saying “nigger”. So you have in the 1960s the humor of a black comedian recounting LBJ’s attempts to correctly say “Knee-grow”. But all of that was before the fainting couch and the pearl clutching. And the Reaganite revival of acceptance of blatant racism.
I was sitting up at 2 am watching TV and Olberman was channelling you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65Ixz_M3rVE
Gotta just say this is stupid.
And I am not surprised at all that an professor from Auburn would take the position he did, and Princeton, she did.
Sorry but I have had a really bad experience with any and all Auburn grads I’ve met, including the good ol boys who ran my former employer into the ground. I’m sure it must just be my sampling.
Not just Auburn. Auburn at Montgomery, a regional campus.
Another example of the use of the Sarah Palin/Michele Bachmann marketing method to gain fame and (no doubt he hopes) fortune.
one of the biggest problems i have with excising the word “nigger” from HF is that it guts one of the pivotal moments in the book, when Huck fools Jim into thinking he’d drowned, and then watches Jim get distraught and cry.
after that, Huck treats Jim like an equal, and the word “nigger” really stings the reader after that. It’s intentional.
No surprise that the publisher is “newsouth press”. I’d be embarrassed too.