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I wish this was some kind of a joke. The publishers of the next edition of Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn plan to replace the “n” word with “slave.”
What is a word worth? According to Publishers Weekly, 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.”
Jonathan Turley shows how this “edit” could complicate the book:
Replacing this word with “slave” can change the meaning and certainly the intent of Twain. Consider the following line:
“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free
niggerslave there from Ohio – a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see…The difference may be subtle but Twain clearly could have used slave. The word existed at the time. Twain chose the n-word to convey something beyond captive status. It was a word used widely. It is still used in literary works to say something about the people who use it.
In my book, changing loaded, powerful words in a literary classic to better “express it in the 21st century” is no better than George Lucas “updating” the original Star Wars films to some bastardized, unrecognizable iteration of itself. You ruin the original intent of the book and force new readers to run from the reality in which the book was written and the historical context that followed.
68 Comments
With regard to Lucas bastardizing, you mean like inserting Jar Jar Binks??
I’m sure Twain would appreciate the gesture if he knew about it.
Uhh, how does it make sense to say “there was a free slave?” No, Twain couldn’t have used “slave” in that context.
I know the use of the word is what gets the book complained about so much, especially by African-American parents, but changing it makes it a different book.
To me, the whole point is that Huck is so indoctrinated, like most Americans who weren’t active abolitionists when the book was written, that he accepts using all these pejorative terms as normal, accepts the arguments of black inferiority *in theory* because that’s what he’s been taught, but on coming to know Jim and to see what reality is like for him and others, slave *and* free in America of the time, he changes his mind, but *feels guilty* about it because it defies what he’s been “thoroughly taught.”
I guess “Huck Finn” is in the public domain by now, so this publisher can do it if it wants to.
I note that the publisher’s name is “New South,” so to me, this is another Haley Barbour-like whitewashing of the reality. See, it wasn’t that bad, see how respectful whites like Huck were of “slaves.”
Congratulations on getting the point, which is apparently more than we can expect from NewSouth Books. Too bad the novel is public domain–if I were Sam Clemens, I’d raise myself from the dead just to sue these idiots.
Nah, if Sam Clemens/MT could raise himself from the dead, he might as well haunt all the New South execs/editors etc. all day and all night.
Much more fun!
I’m sure that publishers can write much better than authors, and specifically hire better writers than Mark Twain could ever have been. /s
sounds like a perfect book for the TX school board to add to their curriculum.
No one has said it bettetr than Twain himself:
Golden rule, don’t fuck with an artist’s work!
What’s next, adjusting Mona Lisa’s smile?
Dontcha think Mona Lisa would look a lot better with a bouffant hairdo? That plucked forehead is sooo declasse today.
I’m not literarily clever, but this strikes me as a self-mocking topic that could spawn no end of knock-offs. The Onion: we’re waitin’ on ya.
How about natty dreads?
But seriously, censorship burns me up, don’t like it as is? Don’t watch it, look at it or read it, but don’t mess with the artist’s intent.
There ya go. Everyone knows a corporate hack can write much better than good ol Mark. Besides, he’s dead. How’s he gonna know? /s
Solo shot first.
I disagree strongly. Huckleberry Finn is one of the greatest books ever written and every child should read it. And yet, the use of the n-word does give offense to children for no reason at all.
This is a good thing even if the book does teach children that its acceptable behavior to help slaves escape their owners simply because it feels like the right thing to do. :o)
What about “The Nigger of the Narcissus”?
What do you do with a movie like “No Way Out,” (1950) starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier, which is about racism? Or various movies about anti-Semitism, including “Crossfire,” (1947) with Robert Mitchum, Robert Young, and Robert Ryan, in which Ryan murders someone essentially for being Jewish.
“Anachronism” is the term. “Inaccurate” is another term.
This is terrible. I can’t stand the “n” word but it was used then and Twain wrote of his time. We should not pretend these things didn’t happen because it’s re-writing history. Our history should be faced and dealt with but not erased. Just think what the future hacks will write about the time we’re living now – probably no one would recognize it at all.
And everyone knows children are the best literary critics & we should let their tastes & judgments determine what appears in books.
LOL. twain was a racist bastard but its no reason to alter his work without his (unavailable) consent.
maybe they should replace it with the phrase “the n word” as is done everywhere else these days. and lets not complain about the awkwardness of that, censorship is a big red band of tape over the mouth. its not possible to alter and censor someones work gracefully.
Well, duh, dontcha think an English lesson on HF maybe ought should include some discussion of why Twain chose to use the word nigger, including the circumstances at the time instead of hiding what went on. I thought school was about learning, not ignoring. But perhaps I live in a quaint world. I find that more true every day.
This is bullshit. This is like changing works of Shakespeare to include references to space travel. Clemens, like all of the rest of us, was a product of his times. You can’t go back and alter history in such a way. Time is linear and changing dialogue in classic books won’t change that.
Publishers are capitalist corporations – they are not literary afficionados. They couldn’t give a rat’s ass about culture, critical thinking, language or sociological context. They just want ORDERS to pile up, want to see the book being put on kid’s reading lists.
I suspect the Modern American Parent has little or no interest in culture, critical thinking, language or sociological context either. Maybe the world needs a Wiki-Lit to ‘release’ authentic versions of classic works that have failed the PC test.
BTW, the next edition will eliminate the word slave because everyone knows the U.S.A. is the best country ever in the history of the world and would never have tolerated anything like slavery.
When and where I grew up “Nigger” was used to describe the locals. Typically with the word “Ignorant” in front of it.
And WOG, and Darkie, and Paki, and Mick.
1860? No 1960.
Even in 1982, when we moved to the South, the was a elderly lady who lived across the street said, “You have to watch those Nigras when they work for you”.
Language is a reflection of the times. I’d like to see to publishers take on Jane Austin, and put the word “Prospects” in modern use.
Then: “This Uncle, do you have any prospects?”
Now: “This Uncle, will he leave you any money?”
No better than George Lucas updating Star Wars? What an insane thing to write. It is much, much worse. We may disagree with the decisions of Lucas, but he is tarnishing his own work and legacy. This would only be comparable if it were Twain himself making the changes.
I’ve not read the aforementioned work by Joseph Conrad. The introduction is famous: Conrad discusses his art.
The word for what this editor is doing is “bowdlerization,” an eponym for an earlier practitioner.
Well, what the fuck, Mark?
You ran “from the reality” yourself and couldn’t say “nigger”. Why should some publisher, or any of us, give your offense with any worth when it is overloaded with a mountain of PC bullshit?
This a false description of Twain – a huge point of the book is Huck’s growing understanding that “n” Jim is a real, valued friend. The “n” word thus becomes a marker for the wrongful dehumanisation of blacks and slaves as Huck comes to see Jim as a real person.
I liked Gore Vidal’s approach to banned words in “Myra Breckenridge” – he replaced each banned (sexually explicit) word with the name of a different Supreme Court judge. It was very clear what he meant. Perhaps we should lobby for the publisher to replace the “n” word in Huck Finn with “Barbour” everywhere is appears.
Dancing with the senators is upstairs.
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/01/04/filibuster-by-dance-competition-a-modest-proposal-for-the-senate-reform/
I think that was intended as sarcasm.
Oh my goodness. I’m afraid y’all are getting it all wrong. Twain knew exactly what he was doing. He was deeply anti-slavery and humanist, not a racist, and wrote Huck Finn after putting it aside for many years. He picked it up again after becoming horribly disillusioned at the post-Reconstruction. I took a class at Stanford for the centennial of his death (great class, stunning guest speakers) and will try to find some links.
I just started reading his autobiography, so can’t add anything from there yet. But basically, what I learned from the class was that his own attitudes were quite radical for the time and he did a masterful job of showing the society how wrong they were in their treatment of the freed slaves. If he hadn’t set it in the racist society as it was, he would never have been published.
Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885, although it is set between 1835 and 1845.
Time to throw the complete, unabridged, uncensored work up on the interwebs, if it isn’t there already. Same goes for any other works that these Orwellian drones feel the need to fuck with. PDFs, anyone?
Why is that relevant? That word wasn’t used a pejorative until the 20th century.
“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…”
In Turley’s example, Twain, a committed anti-imperialist, was using the n-word to describe a white man.
Am I the only one who sees the irony of using the “N” Word in a headline about censorship?
It did not work.
Here are some links.
The guest speakers who addressed the Huck Finn controversy were Drs. Jocelyn Chadwick and David Bradley. Both have them have published widely on the topic.
Essay on why Huck Finn belongs in classrooms:
https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/publicprograms/event.php?eid=20102_EVT%20289
About teaching Huck Finn with the n-word in it (best parts are towards the end of the article): http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/110107dnmethuckfinn.1c65c58d9.html
There was an outstanding PBS program called Born to Trouble: Adventures of Huck Finn about the novel and the controversy that started from its initial publication and (obviously) continues. I can’t find a link to a video, but here is the website.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/beyond/huck.html Definitely worth a watch if you find it offered anywhere.
And in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (I hope I can use that title in public) Simon Legree’s knuckles were toughened up by shaking hands with gentlemen and ladies of the African persuasion, so that he could politely greet any an person of African persuasion with a hearty handshake. And at the end of that story, Uncle Tom was inconvenienced. And the Civil War was just for kicks.
What cowards Americans have become, to be so fearful of the truth. How they despise their Constitution that tried to guarantee their right not to be misled. How undeserving this society has become of its freedom. They should use the word “slave” to describe everyone in that new edition.
No, it is most ironic. It is just another attempt by this idiotic society to present a reality that is not real by any means. If you look at T.V. commercials and sitcoms you will think that everyone works, lives and is friends with at least one member of each minority group in perfect harmony. Negativity does not sell products. Never let reality get in the way of the myth that we’re all in this together, all getting along. Euphemisms are nothing but lies in pretty clothing. Anyone who preaches the Twain doctrine today is considered unAmerican, anti patriotic and anti capitalist.
Twain supported the Filipino “insurgents” and would support the locals in Pakistan and Afghanistan against the illegal and immoral drone strikes which murder many innocents. Don’t fuck with Mark Twain!
What’s most dumb about this effort is Twain’s use of the word wasn’t him expressing the prejudices of his age. It’s not as though the book is perfect, and just marred by the occasional use of the word “nigger.” Twain was far ahead of his time, a true progressive, and the story says a LOT about race and hypocrisy in antebellum America. He’s not using that language to insult or denigrate people.
Removing the word just isn’t true to the story, or the society Twain was writing about. It’s literally whitewashing the tale.
It’s semantically crazy and non-sensical to change ‘nigger’ to ‘slave’, as you’ve pointed out. Why not simply change it to ‘negro’?
Doing so would not change the meaning (hardly) at all, since in the book ‘nigger’ is simply presented as the common everyday term (in that part of the country) for African Americans.
There is a real problem teaching a class full of 11-12-13 year olds or thereabouts a book riddled with the word ‘nigger’. And ‘negro’ would handle that problem fairly well, without distorting Twain’s meanings.
I’m Jewish, but you gotta do “The Merchant of Venice” as Shakespeare wrote it. What are you gonna do, make him a WASP?
So will Nabokov’s [i]Lolita[/i] be changed into a lighthearted relationship between a mentor (Humbert) and a student (Dolores)?
I understand, but disagree. The word should be used in its rawest, ugliest sense precisely to show how such despicable concepts can be accepted through ignorance, and driven out by knowledge. Rush Limbaugh or Laura Schlesinger should be allowed to use the word every day, and excoriated for being the racists they truly are and using it -every day.
I understand the temptation for teaching, but maybe that just means that 11-13 year olds are the wrong age for this novel. I don’t see how you really *teach* HF without Huck’s use of “n—-r.” Neither he nor the society he was raised in would have said “Negro,” and changing it would make the book false.
It was not Twain choosing the word to describe people, it was his characters. See below, in this comment from Turley’s site:
“I wonder what Mr. Gribben would do with Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi”; where the word “nigger” is used when quoting someone else, but when Twain is speaking in the narrative he uses “negro”?”
In HF, Huck is the narrator.
Part of the power of HF is in the casual use of this word that 160 years later, is horribly offensive. Why and how that was so, and how it changed, is part of the reason for teaching it.
Yeah, kinda makes the story pointless there, too. Although I have occasionally heard of folks objecting on those grounds to its being taught at all.
And Naked Lunch was about a hamburger and Coca-Cola.
Oh, hey, and you know she was going out of her way to be very, very polite, *not* saying “ni****r”. Nigra was the “acceptable” genteel way of referring to the “colored.”
Perhaps Shylock could be a Methodist.
It was the best of clock, it was the worst of clock.
Dude, you Ishmael?
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my junk.
I am an invisible person.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a happy meal coming down along the road.
Somewhere in L.A., in a place whose name I do not care to remember, someone lived not long ago, one of those who has a taser and body armor on a shelf and keeps a chicken and a pitbull.
In the beginning, sometimes I texted.
I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Challenged” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Speech Impaired,” or “Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life.
In the late summer of that year we lived in a condo in the burbs next to a recycling center and a strip mall.
LOL!
“The word should be used in its rawest, ugliest sense …” But that, I don’t think, is true to the connotations Twain meant to imply by using the word. The ‘n word’ simply means and implies different things today than what it ‘meant’ to a boy growing up in Hannibal, Missouri in the mid/late 19th century.
My guess is that Twain was just being authentic about how African Americans were referred to in that time and place by people like Huck. A good thing, but not an indispensable element of the book.
So, in my humble opinion,, we’re really making too big a deal about a word that legitimately is a very big deal today but likely was not quite as big a deal (or a very different deal) in the late 19th century.
Yes, let’s teach kids that no American would ever use a derogatory word to describe the people they enslaved.
And then there’s Shakespeare’s “Othello,” a very great play marred by the common racism of Shakespeare’s day; but don’t remove the racism, teach about it.
Oh, come on. How much of Twain’s work have you read? Next thing you know, you’ll be correcting The War Prayer as if Twain were somehow pro-war.
I doubt seriously that a resurrected Twain would tolerate a change in the wording of his carefully crafted novel for the sake of our misplaced sensitivities. Let’s leave it… and publish it… just the way Twain wrote it.
“Get your facts first then you can distort them as you please.” – Mark Twain
That’s my point. Change requires old habits and thinking to “die” out.
Next they’ll have to edit Muhammad Ali’s famous quote when he refused the draft to say “No Vietnamese ever called me African-American”.
This rewrite bull shit is an excellent example of the, “illusion of wisdom” and the end of literacy, that Chris Hedges speaks of in his book the Illusion of Empire.
There are no doubts that Twain was as progressive as they come and his mastery of the english language is such that his work is required reading today. Hence his words were deliberate.
Rewrites is how truth gets buried under bullshit.
How many N word people will that feed?
Love the Google – didn’t recognize every one – and confess I never heard of Dave Markson or “Wittgenstein’s Mistress.” But enough to get a good laugh – and the point.
Well, their parents taste & judgment, but yes I’d agree with that.
I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry. In the 60′s I worked in a University Library (no name to protect the guilty). I was suddenly charged with the responsibility to remove all the books that contained the word negro, and replace them with books containing the word black. Alas, this was not the end of it, for sometime later it became necessary for me to remove all the books containing the word black in order to replace them with books containing the word African American. I’m not complaining – lots of job security.
But it does remind me of that old saying that the more things change the more they stay the same.
He who controls the past controls the future.
The bowdlerizers of this new edition of Huck Finn didn’t even bother to do their homework. The term is “free Negro” or “free black”. The term “free n–ger” is used by Twain to show how brainwashed Huck is in the racist ideology of his culture.
Huck Finn is a book dripping in irony. The supposed last part of the book, where Huck and Tom Sawyer “capture” Jim and then make an escapade of “rescuing” him is supposed to be the weakest part of the book. But having reread the book recently, it is obvious that Twain does not want us to sentimentalize Huck.
When Huck is away from “civilization” he comes to correct conclusions about his fellow man, and about Jim (and doesn’t mind “going to hell” for it). But once he’s back among the civ’lized, his best impulses begin to be warped, and one sees how weak he, a child, is when placed back in “society.” In fact, unless one understands what happens in those last chapters, then Huck’s decision to “light out for the territories” doesn’t make sense. One leaves the book filled with disgust, as Twain meant one to feel, for the world he lived in.
Twain/Clemens was a racist in his youth, and an anti-racist in his maturity, a man who joined the Anti-Imperialist League and fought against the U.S. war in the Philippines, who believed in socialism as the way for society to move forward.
This latest attempt to bowdlerize Twain is nothing new, and he faced it in his lifetime. Thank god there are plenty of other editions of Huck around.
One can understand the impulses behind which African-Americans or others sensitive to the conditions of many, many black Americans, would want to shield their children from negative stereotypes, and it’s important to remember that one English class doesn’t shield a child or young person from the impact of the larger racism of the society.
Not being a black American, I can’t say with surety how I would feel. It’s a huge task to teach your children about the evil of the world, especially if you or your societal, ethnic group is one of the “despised” or oppressed groups in one’s society. Jewish parents are aware, for instance, of the difficulties of how one introduces one’s child to the fact of the holocaust, because of how a child internalizes such negative facts about the world they live in.
But believe me, I think most black children have already learned about racism, or experienced it, before Huck Finn is ever taught in their classroom.
America’s great novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is uniquely about race and man’s inhumanity to man. It is an important book, and speaks to core values, and the struggle for equality and justice in a world ruled by ignorance, brutality and fear. To censor it is a huge mistake.
Your point about Conrad’s book reminds me that when it first came out, the publisher of the first American version changed the title to Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, and that was circa 1897. So sensitivities around this question go back quite a way.
By the by, the Huck imbroglio is not limited to Twain. Wikipedia informs that Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Tale of the Sea was published in a new edition by WordBridge [in 2009]. Publishing under the title The N-word of the Narcissus in an effort ‘to remove this offence to modern sensibilities’: in this version, all occurrences of the word “nigger” throughout the text have been replaced by ‘n-word’.”
As with Huck, the publishers miss the point that Conrad was trying to juxtapose the racism of the crew with their inner humanity, even as he de-sentimentalizes that humanity to show the fear and selfishness that lurks in every man, even James Wait, the West Indian black who is the title character, who appears to be feigning illness — and maybe even thinks he is himself — only to in fact be deadly ill.
The giant storm in the book — the centerpiece of the main action — is meant to show how small and insubstantial human concerns and prejudices really are.
I think there is a kind of war on literary irony occurring here, in the name of political correctness, which even while usually well-meaning (see my comment below on Huck), rewrites history to disguise the attacks that were made against racism in the past, or disguises the racism itself, undermining the immensity of the problem for those of us alive today by pretending it didn’t exist before.