Anything But the N-Word

A new edition of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” is to be emancipated from its dirtiest word. That’s a loss, not an improvement.

James Finn Garner, an American satirist, parodies politically correct speech based on classic fairy tales. He describes the poverty-stricken millers in Rumpelstiltskin as being “economically disadvantaged” and Cinderella’s charms as men’s “Barbie doll ideas of feminine desirability.” What Garner demonstrated corresponds to the occasional demand made in the United States, namely, a hygienic scrubbing of literary language. One book that still has to do battle with that idea even today is Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” It’s the book Americans love to hate the most since 1885.

The pious Puritans were the first to hate Huck, who in their view was “uncivilized and immoral.” For decades now, many politicians and activists have objected to the word “nigger,” a term that symbolizes the historic martyrdom of black Americans as no other word can. A new edition of the book banishes that word, replacing it with “slave.” Alan Gribben counted 219 instances of the n-word. Gribben is a professor at Auburn University and publisher of the new edition, scheduled to go on sale in February. Presumably, he expects to mollify a few shocked parents and relieve many a teacher from the disagreeable task of having to say the word in front of a classroom full of students. But what Gribben is really doing should be called revisionist history.

The vocabulary of the day belongs in every historical work. Although long since debunked, the belief persists in some literary circles that Twain was a racist. Twain was a chronicler. In his preface to “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” he particularly addressed the problems of slavery and racism. He did so in a unique way by using the vernacular speech, the grammar and the dialects common in the American southern states at the time. Given the book’s historical context, even the most faint-hearted reader should expect no less than that. To exclude the term in future editions of the book is to de-fang Twain’s biting social irony. When Gribben describes how he winces when he hears the n-word, one can assume that that is precisely the reaction Twain was trying for in his readers. The author was definitely aware at the time he was writing the book that there was a serious difference between using the right word and the almost-right word.

Removing these passages from Twain’s work and replacing them with less offensive words seems an easy way to try to liberate America from the burden of its own history. But in the book’s long publishing history, it’s nothing but another attempt to administer ideological punishment. In the former East Germany, anything that smacked of capitalism was expunged from school texts, and during the ‘70s children’s books were forbidden to refer to “fences.” In his day, Twain called such initial reactions to his books “moral gymnastics” and admitted he not only expected them, but that it had been his intention to provoke them from the start. But even such a misanthrope as Twain would never have suspected that his works would continue to attract the censor’s attention and be subject to editing for the sake of political correctness over such a long period of time. Nor that people would try to pretend the language of white barbarity had never existed.