by Kelly Pickerill
Many textual purists are balking at NewSouth’s decision to publish Alan Gribben’s edition of Mark Twain’s “companion boy books,” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In his edition, Gribben, a Twain scholar and professor at Auburn, has replaced the offensive terms, both “nigger” (so prevalent in Huck Finn) and “injun” (Tom Sawyer), with the word “slave.”
Gribben told Publisher’s Weekly that his reason for “emending” the novels, especially Huck Finn, was simply to get the books back in schools; he’d encountered too many teachers who wished to teach Huck but didn’t feel they could. “For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs,” he told the magazine. [read the article]
According to the American Library Association, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the fourteenth most frequently challenged book from 2000-2009. But of course it’s not a new thing to hear about Huck causing a ruckus; from the time of its publication the book has been under scrutiny. This is one of the earliest reactions:
“The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type.”
Article in the Boston Transcript, March 1885
While my first reaction to the new edition was, I admit, horror … well, I still am, really, horrified, if for no other reason than simply because the book that T. S. Eliot called a masterpiece, the book that all modern literature springs from, is going to be altered. I can’t get past the altering, though I do understand Gribben’s (and many other academician’s) frustration that a single word would keep readers from a book.
Yet there’s no single reason why the book is so often considered unteachable to students high school age and younger, and I have a hard time believing the changing of a word will magic any and all of them away. When Huck has seen through his dilemma of whether or not to turn Jim in, the moral climax of the book, he’s still so indoctrinated with the culture of slavery that he believes himself to be extremely wicked though he’s making the “morally right” choice. Calling Jim by another name will not change Huck’s prevailing belief system: that Jim is an inferior being because of the color of his skin.
In the eighties, John H. Wallace argued for an edition of Huck Finn sans the offensive word, saying, “Classic or not, it should not be allowed to continue to cause our children embarrassment about their heritage.” Well, our heritage is sometimes embarrassing, and the omission of a word won’t change that. There’s already too little discussion about challenging topics in our schools between teachers, parents, and children, and taking away a reason to have one doesn’t seem like the solution.
I’ll stop sharing my opinion now, though, to give you a few other interesting ones. The Huck issue is a thorny one, and my beleaguered attempt to think through it has caused me to respect those, like the author Michael Chabon, who have so thoughtfully expressed their reactions.
In an article in The Atlantic, Chabon writes about the dilemma he faced when reading Huck Finn aloud to his children, ages seven and nine. He had read them Tom Sawyer and, using Gribbon’s solution, substituted the offensive “N” word with “slave” in the handful of instances that it occurs, yet in Huck Finn, he knew that it was not only much more prolifically used, but also that “the word was going to mean so vastly much more, and less, than that.”
On the other side of the spectrum, check out Jon Stewart’s commentary; it isn’t PC but it is pretty funny.
Whether as a curiosity or teaching tool, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition will be published in February with a 7,500 first printing.
I am fearfully afraid this noise is doing much harm. It has started a number of hitherto spotless people to reading “Huck Finn,” out of natural human curiosity to learn what this is all about — people who had not heard of him before, people whose morals will go to rack and ruin now. The publishers are glad, but it makes me want to borrow a handkerchief and cry. I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves that got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you never can tell what a publisher will do.
Letter to the Omaha World-Herald, August 1902
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