Huck Finn Needs the N-Word
One publishing company aims to remove it from the text, thereby ruining an important work of Civil War-era literature
It’s hardly of the magnitude of the Arizona massacre, but the upcoming massacre of Huckleberry Finn has got me in a lather.
Last week, NewSouth Books announced it will publish Mark Twain’s 1885 classic American novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, minus all 200-plus mentions of the N-word. Each use of the racist epithet will be replaced by “slave.”
Huck Finn by way of Britney Spears (“I’m a Slave 4 U.”)
Auburn University’s Alan Gribben, a Twain scholar and member of the PC Word Police, says he’s “updating” the book, not censoring it, in order to make it more compatible with 21st-century views on race. (Translation: It will be more compatible with public-school boards, who control textbook budgets.)
The irony is that Twain wasn’t defending slavery in Huck Finn; he was describing the bigotry of the times that made it possible. Moreover, the novel’s moral center is the decision by Huck, who is white, to help Ni … oops, Slave Jim escape from servitude.
To summarily “edit” a novel from an earlier century because it might offend contemporary mores runs counter to every tenet of artistic expression. Twain’s use of language from Civil War-era America — he was the first to use the American vernacular in his work — is a true representation of the period and should be preserved like any historical document, intact and untouched.
Otherwise, you run the risk of schoolkids growing up thinking that Kanye West invented the N-word, and that would be tragic, yo.
Today, Huckleberry Finn. Tomorrow, who knows? A quick search in Googlebooks for the N-word produced 1.06 million results. Some are titles, including The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), Joseph Conrad’s great tale of the sea; and Nigger, Dick Gregory’s acclaimed 1964 autobiography.
Harriet Beacher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), another American classic, contains numerous N-word references, as do Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and To Have and Have Not (1937); John Grisham’s A Time to Kill (1989) and Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights (1990), among many others.
You get the point. Like Aunt Sally, Alan Gribben is trying to “sivilize” Huck Finn, and it can’t be done. As Huck says in the last two lines of the novel, “…I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
