The Huck Finn controversy has popped up in USA Today, CNN, ABC (with a teacher of mine quoted), AP, the New York Times (here and here and here), and in John’s post at Brainstorm, but as far as I know, the controversy began with a blog post by Cynthia Haven here. Interesting, it didn’t start with the new edition of the novel, but with a controversy over censorship in a school in Brooklyn. It seems that Charles Barron, a New York City councilman and former-Black panther, was angry because the principal tried to ban a set of sexually-explicit poems written by a student who is Barron’s god-daughter.
“I find it interesting that Huckleberry Finn is a classic when it says [the n-word] 200 times,” Barron said. “Tylibah’s book is the opposite. It’s very inspiring. I’d like to see Huckleberry Finn banned.”
That prompted an op-ed by Shelley Fisher Fishkin (linked to in Haven’s post) defending the book and decrying censorship. One day later, Haven added another post that included this comment by poet Sam Gwynn:
“Frankly, I just can’t teach it any longer. I know it’s great, and I can lecture for a day or so about how Twain is being faithful to the dialects and to the way that people spoke back then. But trying to lecture about its literary merits takes a back seat when I see how African American students (I’m talking about teenage sophomores, taking the class for core credit) are reacting to the iterations of THAT WORD. The problem is that Twain doesn’t distinguish between those who are using the word in a ‘kindly’ manner (we could probably assume that this is the only word for black people that Huck has ever heard) and those who are using it an an epithet. Used indiscriminately in these ways, it just makes everyone in a classroom uncomfortable. Maybe if I were a better (or younger) teacher I could use this book to challenge all kinds of assumptions about language and art. I just don’t find myself up to the fight anymore, at least at the sophomore level. I think this is a pretty good 2/3 of a novel, but I really wonder why it has become canonized as the GAN.” Haven adds this note on GAN: “That’s the Great American Novel for the uninitiated.”
After Haven quotes Gwynn, she cites “a constant reader” who alerts her to the coming edition of Huck Finn without “THAT WORD.” She then quotes Gribben explaining that the book “can be enjoyed deeply and authentically without those continual encounters with those now-indefensible racial slurs,” then wryly comments, “It is the first volume to wash out Twain’s mouth with soap.”
Haven’s selections are illuminating, for in Gribben’s and Gwynn’s explanations the whole problem crystallizes. When Gwynn puts the n-word in CAPS, he registers its force, which explains why he feels justified in deleting it. This is, however, to give the term a moral meaning that it does not deserve. Yes, the n-word has moral meaning, but in the classroom it should be circumscribed by its historical existence. To grant it so much power today, at this moment, is to be captive to the power it possessed in 1884 and in 1950.
Likewise, when Gribben terms the n-word ”now-indefensible,” he assumes a moral stance toward it that is misdirected. No teacher should approach the language in a book written more than 100 years ago as in a condition of defensible or indefensible. Assigning a work is not the same thing as endorsing it. It is to hold the work up to analysis. Furthermore, one of the lessons of the assignment should be to recognize that one can analyze something that one deplores. Simply deploring it is not enough, we should tell our students. The deletion of the n-word in the novel does the opposite, teaching students to consult their sensitivities more than their intellects. Thanks, Cynthia, for bringing the action into the light.
43 Responses to More on ‘Huck Finn’ and Censorship
livefreeordie2 - January 11, 2011 at 10:31 am
Mark – Your last two paragraphs are extremely powerful and really say it all. Nicely done.
marktropolis - January 11, 2011 at 11:02 am
Mark, you and I don’t often see eye-to-eye on things, so when we do, I feel the need to say so. The word should make people unfomfortable. And kids need to face that discomfort – or at least have a chance of facing it. Part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in when it comes to race in this country is because we keep avoiding having difficult conversations. If there was ever a teachable moment, Huck would be it.
It occurred to me earlier that censoring Huck is like teaching the history of film while ignoring Birth of a Nation.
marcbousquet - January 11, 2011 at 11:38 am
I’m not a fan of censorship, and I don’t think this edition is censorship. I find the analogy to censorship rather naive about the role that language choice plays not only in editing, but in the whole social & political process of making works eligible for canonization or K-12 curricular consideration.
A better question in this whole debate might be: “Why is it so desirable for schoolchildren to read the ‘n word’ a couple of hundred times–even when it makes them feel far more than uncomfortable–but not desirable for them to read words beginning with ‘c’ for male and female genitalia?”
Another question: Doesn’t anyone find it at all ironic, or at least interesting that television, print and online media with strong speech codes for their contributors are all howling about this adaptation as if it were censorship?
In the Chronicle–a journal few young people read–you can’t even use texting expressions referring to “obscenities” (eg WT_)–even though these are in fact used by millions of schoolchildren daily without psychic harm.
markbauerlein - January 11, 2011 at 11:59 am
The censorship part in this post applies directly to Barron’s remark, marc, but only indirectly to the new version of the novel. You are, however, correct in that, strictly speaking, censorship can only be carried out by an official of some kind.
I don’t think it is “so desirable for schoolchildren to read the ‘n word’ a couple of hundred times.” Nor do I think it desirable for students to read c-words–but if they do appear in a significant work of literature, I would keep them in. Plus, I think that canonization is not just a “social & political process”–other judgments come into play that are not reducible to social and political factors. Finally, the word “adaptation” is a euphemism, and you must agree if you apply your own criteria of “the role that language choice plays . . .”
v8573254 - January 11, 2011 at 3:49 pm
Who is a white person to say that kids should just shape up and face the word?
Kids — Mr. Gwynn speaks of sophomores – many barely 16 – in a required course.
Bottom line: I am still ambivalent about the proposed change.
rtally - January 11, 2011 at 3:55 pm
One can imagine an “edited for TV” version of Huckleberry Finn for use in junior high and high schools, which would not necessarily mean “censorship” of a classic. (Just as I can watch “The Godfather” on network TV, knowing that some words have been “bleeped” [or changed] and naked breasts blurred or cut from view.) If a movie used the N-word 200 times, it would likely get an “R” rating, and be considered inappropriate for students under 17. I do not agree with bowdlerizing Twain altogether, but I could see the usefulness of having a PG-rated version available for schoolchildren. (As long as no one mistakes that version, or Coppola’s original Godfather, for Twain’s original.)
mickfan - January 11, 2011 at 3:58 pm
It’s not that the book was written in 1884, published 1885 here, but that the book is set, with its first-person narrator (shattering narrative style forever), in the 1840s. . . .To have Huck use another word would have been as fake as the Duke and the King.
11182967 - January 11, 2011 at 4:34 pm
The very fact that this edition has become such a big issue–indeed, the fact that the edition was created–is strong confirmation that issues of race are by no means settled in America. That in itself ought to cause those who insist that we are all now “beyond racism” to take pause. My primary concern in this and similar cases of focusing on specific terms is that it easily becomes a subsitute for real confrontation of the racial issues which Americans still face. There is a sort of underlying notion that if we stop using certain words in public the ideas and emotions behind them will disappear. I do believe that words create as well as reflect emotions, and the elimination of certain words from current public discourse is valuable, but only if those words are eliminated from private discourse as well, and only if the emotions which engender them are eliminated. (This does not happen, by the way) if the term.) “the n-word” simply becomes another way of saying the word itself.) This kind of hullabaloo over Twain’s book becomes an easy excuse for people to claim that they’ve elimnated racist thoughts and feelings by not saying a particular word: “What more do you want? We don’t call you, or let you be referred to, by the n-word anymore! So there’s no more racism–case closed!” You can’t exorcise a devil by pretending it’s not there.
amcneece - January 11, 2011 at 4:54 pm
We have become such a politically-correct nation that even Congress would not read the Constitution in its entirety last Thursday (such as the provision regarding the enumeration of slaves). Perhaps we should just pretend that slavery never existed. Perhaps the holocaust never happened. Perhaps there never was an n-word…
rick1952 - January 11, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Again, I believe common sense is what is called for in this matter. We need to think about the appropriate age and context for introducing this text to students.
No student in this country should be forced to read or listen to the use of the “n-word” in any required assignment given the long, sad and tragic history of that word in the USA, until that student is emotionally and intellectually ready. We shield young people from other forms of verbal harm (note the reference earlier about words related to sexual organs) so it seems like this may be one of those times when similar care needs to be exercised.
Maybe “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is really intended only for a mature audience, to use current parlance. That does not require censoring or editing or otherwise altering the novel; it does require careful judgment and concern for the young reader. No easy answer but there rarely are easy answers in life – isn’t that part of what Huck Finn learns as he completes his odyssey with Jim?
markbauerlein - January 11, 2011 at 8:40 pm
A historical point to add: Huck Finn was banned in certain places, including Concord, MA, when it was published.
princeton67 - January 11, 2011 at 8:42 pm
To me, defending Twain’s use of “Nigger” in “Adventures” on the grounds of censorship, intended audience,or other philosophical grounds demeans Twain’s theme: a semi-literate young redneck can, by association, learn that a Nigger is a Negro, a human being. When the novel opens, Huck has only a biological, not a moral, father, whom he escapes not though the door but by digging under the wall. Amoral, or immoral, Huck sees Jim as a Nigger, the butt of jokes and laughter. But when he is thrown together with Jim, he learns that a man can care for others. After playing one last joke on Jim, and being chastised, Huck makes up his mind and apologizes. When Jim shields Huck from Pap’s body, he becomes the father Huck never had. By the end of the novel, Huck is ready and willing to free Jim from another improvised jail, to break the same laws dehumanizing Negroes that he had initially accepted.
To eliminate the ignorant Huck’s initially labeling Jim a “Nigger” would destroy the start of Huck’s realization that a black man, not any white – not Pap, the Duke, the Dauphin, Aunt Sally, even Tom – is the moral center of “The Adventures.”
Huck is no more Twain’s voice than Bob Ewell is Harper Lee’s.
rsgwynn1 - January 11, 2011 at 11:08 pm
I should add that I was talking about college sophomores, not high school students; the novel is ordinarily taught in 11th grade, and good teachers can and do make a good case for its historical accuracy (as far as its language is concerned). But the n-word has become so emotionally charged in our time that it’s hard to get around, given its numerous iterations in the novel. In a college sophomore lit class, the subtleties of what Twain is doing may be hard to explain. I have found this to be the case, and that is why I have chosen not to teach it anymore at this level. It is a personal choice, nothing more. I would teach it to advanced classes or graduate classes with no hesitation, for at this level I assume that irony can be understood. But I am surely not saying that dedicated teachers, who have the patience to deal with the usual objections, shouldn’t teach it at lower levels if they can find a way to make Twain’s intent plain. More power to them!
I will reiterate one point: “nigger” is probably the only term for black people that Huck, our narrator, has ever heard. He is, after all, an indifferently educated kid from a particular time and place. Those in the novel who use it as a racial slur have probably heard other terms but refuse to use them–especially Pap Finn.
In a story like Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” we hear both “nigger” and “negro” used. The former is used in dialogue (spoken by whites in the Reconstruction South); the latter by the third-person narrator. This distinction should be clear enough to an intelligent reader. But Huck’s story is all told in his own uninformed, naive voice.
Teaching a story like Ralph Ellison’s “A Party Down at the Square” gives me no problem because the word is employed by a naive youth who witnesses a lynching and because the story was written by an African American writer. It’s the same thing as hearing the “forbidden word” coming from Chris Rock. It has become proprietary. That’s just a fact of where we are now. Nothing is permanent.
Several years ago, watching late-night tv, I tuned to an episode of the 70s hit show Medical Center. The episode focused on two college athletes, one black and one white. The white athlete referred to his teammate as “my nigger friend here,” and the black athlete said something like “That’s what the honky says.” The black athlete was played by O.J. Simpson. Think about that.
Does Twain sometimes make fun of black people? Well, in the deleted chapter published some years ago (in The Atlantic?) he certainly plays on their superstitions and fears, and there’s a story in Life on the Mississippi that does the same thing–both for comic effect. But this has been done over and again in the history of American humor. Drunk Irishmen, stingy Jews, double-talking Italians, laconic Indians, and, yes, stupid rednecks and too upwardly mobile WASPS are part of our cultural history. In recent years we’ve become more sensitive to these things, maybe to an absurd degree. Are racial/ethnic stereotypes a legitimate source of humor? A lot of people would say no: so long to Redd Foxx, Henny Youngman, and Chico Marx. Thirty years ago I once astonished a group of fellow graduate students by saying that sooner or later Amos ‘n’ Andy would become respectable again. Now even Henry Louis Gates says the same thing.
If I keep teaching long enough, maybe even I can teach Huckleberry Finn with no hesitations.
dylanc - January 12, 2011 at 1:35 am
A new edition of Mark Twain’s classic book “Huckleberry Finn” is causing controversy. The said novel is the famous one in which Mark Twain has been noted for. Many of his works though have been suppressed for various reasons. The publisher, NewSouth Books, has made some startling omissions. The book has had all the words some people discover offensive left out. Classic novel Huckleberry Finn censored in new edition. Twain used dialog that was very common, and was really fervently against racism in any form. Let’s hope that payday loans were not used to fund the censorship of an excellent novel.
willynilly - January 12, 2011 at 9:52 am
Mark, I am sure you will recall that about eight months ago you saw fit in one of your Braincramp essays to praise and glorify Fox News Network. Knowing, as I do, of your propensity for digging through dumpsters and laboring through landfills looking for old discarded material upon which you can construct an essay; I was wondering whether you had found the material on the recent University of Maryland research project on the lack of accuracy in reporting eminating from The Fox News Network. I look forward to the essay you will certainly write, wherein you will fully disclose the embarassing percentages of misinformation the network routinely perpetrates on its gullible viewers. Please end that essay with your considered opinion as to whether the misinformation is a deliberate attempt to mislead the public or simply shoddy and incompetent reporting. Thank you.
ddonner641 - January 12, 2011 at 10:14 am
willynilly:
I think you may have transformed the nonsequitur into a legitimate art form.
pmackey - January 12, 2011 at 10:50 am
Comparing this censored edition of Huck Finn to R-ratings or fearing its impact on the sensitivities of students is an insult to child, teacher and writer alike and an ironic denial of our history. The learning experience of the novel’s main character hinges on his confrontation across the novel with a dehumanized Jim becoming human to him. Without the n-word, Huck’s transformation is lost, and so is the commentary on American sins that make this book what it is. The book changes, the characters change, the history changes, and so does the societal meaning. It is not a term used casually, like bad language in a movie. It is a term used fundamentally as an expression of a value system. Those who want to protect our children from it, even, maybe especially, our African-American children, rob them of learning through that child’s eyes to see evil for what is, regardless of the power structure. It is whitewashing in the most ironic way. If educators can’t help our children learn about American genius and American sins through its art, what is the point?
dank48 - January 12, 2011 at 11:01 am
Fine. Let’s also bring back the Victorian “family” Bible, sans Song of Solomon, mention of drinking and eating bodily wastes, incest, gang rape, and other disturbing subjects.
Btw, for those offended by irreverent treatment of religious subjects, Huck’s agonized decision on the raft could be bowdlerized too: “All, right then, I’ll go to heck.”
Some people would stick pasties on the Venus de Milo.
markbauerlein - January 12, 2011 at 11:21 am
“praise and glorify Fox News”? Not that I recall.
joechill - January 12, 2011 at 11:55 am
What I, as a college professor, have learned from this controversy is that Huck Finn is taught in middle and high school. That surprises me since it’s such a sophisticated work that is beyond the sensibilities of these students to appreciate. They (and a lot of their teachers) are really the Tom Sawyers of the audience, trying to transform a battle for the soul of a man, a boy, and a nation into an adventure story. I can completely understand why many would refuse or feel they don’t have the energy to teach it to these students because of its racist elements. Mein Kampf is, in its way, a very instructive book to read because it reveals the fascist, anti-semitic mind in such stark terms, but I wouldn’t teach it to K-12 students.
I think Bauerlein errs in historicizing the pain of the n-word, which is acute today for students of color as it was in the 1880s and 1950s. Readers of Huck Finn have to recognize the continuing pain that word and the legacy of racism causes today or they’ve missed the point of the book. As Jim and Huck knew, the river of the past keeps flowing into the present, and as readers, we can’t just light out to some mythic post-racial world.
chuckkle - January 12, 2011 at 12:41 pm
marktropolois: “It occurred to me earlier that censoring Huck is like teaching the history of film while ignoring Birth of a Nation.” As a film teacher, I’ve never run into anyone who “ignores” Birth of a Nation, but for pedagogical purposes many might choose another DW Griffith film to actually screen in class or do an lecture of close analysis. Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will presents a similar problem (when screened for a class it is often shown in an abridged version that cuts down on all the Nazi speeches at the end).
Some of the comments above seem oblivious to the realities of K-12 education and where power lies for curriculum decisions. Given the US emphasis on local control of public education, school board members and parents have more of a say than educators and teachers in these controversies. We might ask if it is conservative parents or liberal ones (or both?) who are worried about certain words; is it black parents or white parents (or both?) who are objecting?
But to take this back to higher education: how do historically black colleges handle this matter? How do politically and religiously conservative schools handle it? People there must have been thinking about this and dealing with it for some time now.
And is there another “dangerous” or “objectionable” aspect to Huck Finn which hasn’t been addressed here: a certain homoerotic reading of the narrative? And if so, are Huck and Jim age-appropriate partners?
Chuck Kleinhans
marktropolis - January 12, 2011 at 1:10 pm
joechill – while I didn’t read Huck in high school, I did read Native Son and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Kids aren’t stupid, they just need a teacher who can intelligently present material.
I also think Mark is missing the mark on the history/impact of the word. But the other level of this is the ubiquity of the word – kids (well, Black kids, mostly) are being exposed to its multiple uses from a very early age. There is something to be said for giving kids a good history of the word – and what better way than through classic literature!
dank48 - January 12, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Chuck Kleinhaus, see George Steiner, “Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey.”
markbauerlein - January 12, 2011 at 2:24 pm
If you think I miss the historical meaning of the word, joechill, you might check the book “Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906.” And dank, I think you mean the Fiedler essay.
reality_chick - January 12, 2011 at 3:29 pm
The movement to eliminate the ‘n-word’ from classic and contemporary literature is a political exercise, not an academic exercise.
Many great writers have created characters who used the ‘n-word’, or have used the ‘n-word’ in a book title — including Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Joesph Conrad (“The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’: A Tale of the Sea” (1897), P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie (“Ten Little Niggers”, 1939), and Carl Van Vechten (“Nigger Heaven”, 1926)– which was praised and defended by Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, and James Weldon Johnson. Many black writers have also used the ‘n-word’ in their poems, stories, and books.
Many black comedians, including Richrad Pryor, Redd Foxx, Eddie Murphy, and Chris Rock have used the ‘n-word’ in their comedy.
Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia, distinguishes between the word ‘nigger’ and the word ‘nigga’, quoting various black celebrities and authorities, including the academics Cornel Ronald West, Arthur K. Spears (Diverse Issues in Higher Education, 2006), and Steven Kato (Nigger: Language, History, and Modern Day Discourse, 2002).
It is a great irony and a travesty that some people believe that it is unacceptable for ‘whites’ to use the ‘n-word’ in literature, yet acceptable for blacks to use the ‘n-word’ in their casual speach, music, and literature. The aforementioned is as ridiculous as allowing the Jews to have sole ownership of the word ‘holocaust’.
In Yiddish, ‘neger’ is neutral and ‘shvartzer’ (black) is racist.
In Russian, ‘negr’ is neutral, while ‘chyornyi’ (black) and ‘chernozhopyi’ (black-assed) are racist.
In Brazilian Portuguese, ‘negro’ is neutral and ‘crioulo’ is racist.
In French, ‘noir’ is neutral and ‘nègre’ is racist.
In Dutch, ‘neger’ is neutral and ‘nikker’ is racist.
In Hungarian, ‘néger’ is neutral and ‘nigger’ is racist.
In the politically-correct lexicon of the USA prior to the 1970s, ‘negro’ and ‘colored’ were neutral and ‘nigger’ was racist. In the USA since the 1970s, ‘negro’ and ‘colored’ have joined ‘nigger’ as racist, and ‘black’ has become the acceptable neutral term. The redefining of ‘negro’ and ‘colored’ from neutral to racist may be succinctly described as “Much Ado about Synonyms.”
The movement to remove the ‘n-word’ from classic and contemporary literature is part of the movement to ‘dumb-down’ the public education system. When I was in the seventh grade at an American public school, I was punished for reading what the school called ‘adult novels’ by Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Mark Twain, Pearl S. Buck, and Philip K. Dick. Instead of encouraging me for ‘reading above my level’, the school punished me by banning me from the entire public library system, and I was required to read only ‘kiddie books’ that were approved by the school for me. The censorship of the ‘n-word’ is no different from the ‘dumbing-down’ that was forced on me by the public schools.
When Mark Twain was presented with criticism of his novel “Huckleberry Finn”, Twain replied with his characteristically sarcastic humor: “I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Huck Finn’ for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, and to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.”
If I want to train for a career as a slavish yes-man I can attend public school and a University to get a dumbed-down, politically-correct education.
If I want a real education, I’ll read classical literature — without the redactions dictated by the self-appointed guardians of good taste.
willynilly - January 12, 2011 at 10:50 pm
Mark, See your essay of October 18, 2008 entitled “Why people Love Fox News”. The last paragraph appears to reflect your personal view of the Network. If you hold that you are not praising and glorifying Fox News in your text, then what descriptive words would you ascribe to your remarks?
markbauerlein - January 13, 2011 at 7:14 am
Here is the last paragraph in full. No glorification at all, just a statement about why certain people love Fox: because they laugh at each other and themselves now and then.
“Yes, precisely, and that’s part of the appeal. Fox is more free-wheeling, and the people on it can laugh at each other. Spend some time with journalists and you realize that they take themselves very, very seriously. They have a hallowed sense of their activity, and it gives them a hallowed sense of themselves. And maybe the TV hosts feel the shadow of Murrow and Cronkite, and later Peter Jennings, who acquired a bit of a “national conscience” identity that forbade any levity except of the forced kind. Fox folks can take criticism with a smile, for instance when O’Reilly had Stephen Colbert on for one of the funniest interviews ever, and O’Reilly gave him lots of space and several straight lines.”
dank48 - January 13, 2011 at 8:25 am
Thanks for the correction, Mark. A mind is a terrible thing to have had.
willynilly - January 13, 2011 at 11:34 am
Mark,
Why wouldn’t any prudent person conclude that your direct quote “certain people love Fox” also includes you? You researched it, you wrote about it, you attempted to justify and defend it – and then you would ask me to believe that you personally dislike it or are neutral on the subject? I don’t buy it – but let’s move on. You now have the University of Maryland research report on Fox News Network. What say you now? PS. I hope you took to time to review the extensive reader posts that followed your Fox essay. There were many posters who questioned your assesment of the network. Are you sure that the Fox folks are “laughing at each other” or are they really laughing at their viewers who believe the misinformation they spew out on a daily basis. (Again, see the Maryland Study).
dank48 - January 13, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Certain people love basketball, soccer, square dancing, reality television, Ann Coulter, Matthew Reilly, and self-medication.
I don’t, and a prudent person would not conclude from that sentence that I do.
ejb_123 - January 13, 2011 at 6:29 pm
I do not agree with censorship. That said, I also understand that just because a book has become a “classic” does not mean that it should stay a classic. If it no longer speaks to contemporary generations, there is no need for it to stay on reading lists and curriculums. There are many books that focus on the antebellum South, including quality nonfiction texts. Perhaps, rather than reading Twain, scholars can replace “Huckleberry Finn” with slave narratives. These no doubt also contain the “n-word,” but as these are first-person narratives composed by the individuals who lived these lives, the use of this word would not be so inappropriate as it is in Twain’s fictional novel. As I said, I am no fan of censorship, but I also think that Ameican literature courses do not need to rely so heavily on novels to tell the story of the people of the United States.