Tweaking Twain

New Edition Of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Will Eliminate Offensive Words : The Two-Way : NPR.

Read the story linked above and see what you think. Here’s what I think:

For years, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been banned in many schools because it contains the n-word. To rectify that, some scholars are coming out with an edition that replaces the n-word with “slave.” It also does away with “Injun.” I understand the motivation–to get Huck back into the schools of Backwater, Alabama, where it can do some good. But I think it does a disservice to the literature itself and to history, and it waters down the whole transformation Huck undergoes when he begins to see Jim as a full-fledged human being in a world of conflicting moral codes. In Huck’s world, the moral thing to do was to return Jim to his rightful owner. But in the end he couldn’t do it, declaring that he would “burn in hell” and help Jim go free.  “I knowed he was white inside,” Huck says,  in his own ethnocentric sense of humanity. This is not a racist book; it is a story about racist people.

Conflicted a bit, at first, about this tweaking of Twain, I decided to ask the author, Mark Twain, what his feelings on the issue are, and then ask a high school student in Backwater, Alabama, his take.

First up, Mark Twain:

“The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Ah, good point. Now the student:

“What the f-word? Do they think we’re G-word d-word babies? What a bunch of s-word.”

And if that’s not a good enough indication of the general sentiment, you can refer to NPR’s poll asking readers if they think it is okay to change the text if it will introduce more young people to Huck Finn. With more than 12,000 readers participating, 4.19% say it is okay and 95.81% think it is still the wrong thing to do.

This isn’t the first time the n-word has been expunged from a prominent book. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None was originally Ten Little Indians in the US and Ten Little Niggers in the UK. You can go here for more information about that. The use of the n-word in that book was unimportant–merely referring to an old nursery rhyme that gives the book its murderous structure (the verse that the guests mysteriously receive became “Ten Little Soldiers”).  The title was also racist in every sense. But in Huck Finn, the n-word is used some 219 times; it’s part of the book’s fabric. It makes the characters who they are, the times what they were, and the book what it is. The fact that the story is narrated by Huck, himself, makes things even more complicated. When you alter these words, you alter the character of the storyteller. Who do we think we are, the author?

For additional insight, here’s a good article on the San Francisco Chronicle blog: The N-word, Huck Finn and You