It Became Necessary to Destroy Huckleberry Finn in Order to Save It

Our literary 2011 got off to a contentious start with the news that NewSouth is about to publish an edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a certain racial slur expunged from its vocabulary; instead, Huck and the adults around him will consistently refer to Jim as a “slave.” (It also includes a version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with “Indian” instead of “Injun,” but that’s not where all the attention is going.) Auburn professor Alan Gribben explained to the New York Times that he felt awkward having to say a certain word in front of students, and he didn’t think they much liked it either; as he writes in the introduction to his bowdlerized edition, “Even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative.” Getting rid of that word, he insists, is the only way he can put the book in front of students to make them appreciate Twain’s incisive social critique.

Well, very few people apart from Prof. Gribben and his publisher seem to think this was a good idea. Perhaps Ice-T says it best:

As Ishmael Reed observed in The Wall Street Journal, “Twain used the words with which he was surrounded and to insist that he omit words is not only to put a gag on his characters but a gag on the Age.” Tayari Jones, in an op-ed piece for AOL News, echoed Reed’s point about Twain’s deliberate reflection of a painful and historical reality, adding: “The solution is not to fight willful ignorance with willful misrepresentation.” They’re both right: It’s one thing if the brutality of race relations in the United States in the years before the Civil War makes Alan Gribben uncomfortable—it’s another thing to create a deliberately false version of that society so he and like-minded educators can feel good about themselves. Gribben and NewSouth have not only done American literature a disservice, they have failed the students in any educational institution shallow enough to buy into their debased product.

6 January 2011 | theory |