In Honor of Banned Books Week: Mark Twain

This is a re-post of one of my favorite posts from the past year. It's an argument against "cleaning up" the N-word from Twain's classics The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. What I realized when writing the post is that sometimes people want to restrict literature out of love, out of an attempt to protect a legacy that appears in danger because of issues of...I guess the only way I can put it is...political correctness or the lack thereof. (Though evoking the that terminology can get  me in trouble, too, I suppose.) The question remains, is it worth re-making a work of art so it's inoffensive and therefore more likely to be appreciated by a larger audience? Or do we preserve art as it was meant to be by the artist or writer, warts and all?
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The Mark Twain Debate

So, I've been thinking about the soon-to-be-released version of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer all day. The story in a nutshell: Professor Alan Gribben of Auburn University in Alabama, who is a Mark Twain scholar, has collaborated with a publisher to produce an edition of Twain's novels that excises the "n-word" from the texts. That's a deletion of over 200 uses of the term "nigger" from the books (219 in Huck Finn and 4 in Tom Sawyer) and the deletion of the term "injun" from Huck.

When I read the article about this version of Twain's novels this morning, I knew immediately what I thought about it: bad idea. As a teacher myself, I understood Gribben's reasoning: it is too hard to teach this book to high school students because the word is so historically offensive and, because of this difficulty, fewer schools include Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in the curriculum. Even understanding what prompted Gribben to want publish this version, I still had the same reaction: bad idea.

The question is how to explain why I think this is a bad idea. As a lover of literature, don't I want to encourage the reading of literary classics? Wouldn't it be better to make American treasures like Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn palatable to parents and students rather than seeing them gradually drop off the curriculum? Do I want my own children to be exposed to heinous terms, like "nigger," when they serve no other purpose than to dehumanize?

Well, yes, of course, I want students to read classics and teachers to teach them. But I want them to be taught and read as classics, not as a sanitized version of the originals that are easier on our modern sensibilities. Twain wrote these novels, especially Huck Finn, to protest the treatment of blacks during the time in which he lived. What does Huck learn from his association with Jim and his newly opened eyes to the ways that Jim and other slaves were forced to live? He learns compassion. He learns that there is injustice in the system of slavery and racism he had never questioned before. The fact that this novel was popular during Twain's time and has endured decades of censorship and banning shows that it does what Twain intended: it causes readers to think, to react, to be moved to question the status quo.

If the repeated use of the word "nigger" make us cringe, then good. It should. We should read this novel as is and cringe every one of those 219 times. And we should read it closely, with hairs rising on the backs of our necks, to analyze not only the plot but also the evidence of the social norms of those times. We need to ask questions like: is this character's use of the "n-word" an insult? Is that character's use of the "n-word" a backasswards attempt at a term of familiarity, not meant as an insult? (Even though to us it still is. And rightly so.)

I believe that Twain's original works are true to the time and place from which they come. And that includes the language. I think we should let them remain so. To readers in 2011, the word "slave" is certainly more palatable, more comfortable, more unemotional than the word "nigger" is. And therein lies the problem I have with the idea of sanitizing the language in a new version.

Jim's situation in the book is not palatable, comfortable, or unemotional, even when packaged as a boy's adventure story. People say, "But it's just one word. It doesn't really change the story." It does change the story. It takes away the punch in the gut that we feel when we have to observe a casual and habitual demeaning of a central character, one for whom we have affection and sympathy. When Jim is called a "nigger," we want to defend him. When Huck, a boy who symbolizes the American Spirit, casually tosses out the term with no animosity connected to it, we cringe.

The study of literature is not supposed to be easy. Some of our very best literature is a mirror. It forces us to look at ourselves and at our culture with a critical eye. It causes us to question the way things are and the way things were. Classics force us to remember where we have been as a culture and, if we are young and historically unaware, it teaches us for the first time about eras in our history that we have (thankfully) missed but shouldn't remain ignorant of. Can the students who read the new versions of these novels still learn about slavery and racism without the "n-word" staring them in the face? Sure. But can they feel the discomfort on a physical rather than a simply cerebral level? I doubt it. And that, for me, is the purpose and value of closely studying classic works of literature, offensive language or not.