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Silencing Huck Finn

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By Douglas L. Howard

The semester had already started and still I was not sure how I was going to handle it. Should I say it or not? And every time I went through the text or went over my notes, the question kept coming back, nagging me, poking me, prodding me, daring me to answer it when every answer seemed so wrong.

I could not even get through the first chapter of the book without stopping short in front of it, like some obscene pothole out on the highway: "Miss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome. By-and-by they fetched the ---."

It all started last year when I pitched a course to the English department on "Banned Books: Literature and Censorship." The college library had put up a display for Banned Books Week and, out of curiosity, I had gone to the American Library Association's Banned Books list on the Web to see exactly what people were finding so offensive.

I discovered that so many old favorites and canonical titles were listed, along with a number of popular children's books and young adult novels. Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men were in the top 10, along with Judy Blume's Forever and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.

At times, the list seemed like a conservative attempt to protect teens and children from explicit sex and violence. At other times, it appeared to be a righteous response to social injustice, to drug use, to bigotry, to racism, and to emotional and sexual abuse. Still, at other times, the list made no sense at all and generally offended my sensibilities as both a reader and a professor of English.

Instead of asking students to read those books simply because they were assigned, I would now be asking them to read them because they were romantically "forbidden." (I knew how tempting that would be for students. During a previous semester, I had considered assigning Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho. I told the class that I took it off the list because I thought that it was too gory and graphic. By the end of the semester, roughly half of the students in the class told me that they had read it on their own just to see how bad it really was.)

Horrified or not, students in the end would have read Salinger and Twain and Steinbeck, authors who continue to challenge contemporary value systems and force readers to reevaluate their own moral judgments. And whether or not the students agreed with what those authors had to say, the fact that their books were banned would, ideally, force students to develop an opinion about the significance of the works and their place in the canon and in the classroom.

Maybe there was some legitimacy to banning some of the books on the list. Maybe there were lines that should not be crossed or limits that should not be tested. And so we would read the books and identify the lines and come away with a better understanding of censorship and book banning.

But, when the class started, something happened that I did not plan or expect. No sooner did I approach my first lecture on Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn than I began to think about censoring myself.

The novel has been a source of controversy, especially in recent years, for its consistent use of "the N-word" and for the racism that, its opponents charge, it either implicitly or explicitly endorses. For that reason, the book has been challenged, censored, or banned by a substantial number of school districts in the United States, it has been condemned by the NAACP, and it has even been the focus of a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case. According to John Wallace, a former public school administrator and one of the novel's fiercest critics, it "is the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written."

Hemingway, on the other hand, once called it "the best book we've had" and the critic Leslie Fiedler similarly described it as "our greatest book." Even Toni Morrison has defended it as "classic literature" that "cannot be ... dismissed."

Given such varying reactions, Twain's novel seemed like a good test case for the class. If the novel had inspired such strong sentiments in other readers, with any luck, my students would also be so engaged, and would weigh the book's value against the dangers that it posed as a racist text.

In order to analyze the novel in any detail, I would inevitably have to read key portions of the text out loud in class. And that is where my problem occurred. Since "the N-word" was so much a part of the text, I would, sooner or later, come across a section or a sentence that would make use of it. Should I say that word out loud in class?

As Randall Kennedy argues in his book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, it is not just "an insulting slur ... associated only with racial animus"; rather, it is "a reminder of the ironies and dilemmas, the tragedies and glories, of the American experience."

Although readers like Kennedy maintain that Twain's point "is to subvert, not to reinforce, racism," Wallace states that the word is offensive, "no matter what rationale the teacher may use to justify it."

Some of the more recent challenges to the book have also been based upon that argument -- that the word is disturbing and upsetting, regardless of the context in which it is used. To say that word in class, even as part of a quotation, then, would be to invoke its history and to risk offending some or all of the students even when no offense was intended.

On the other hand, if I did not say the word, then I would be guilty of the very thing that I was ultimately discussing: I would be censoring Twain. If I really believed in free speech and academic freedom, then didn't I owe it to myself and to my principles to read the words as they appeared on the page?

Heading into class, I was not thinking so much about the limits of my academic freedom or about the legal umbrellas that would suddenly open to protect me if the worst happened. I was thinking about what was right or, at least, about what felt right for me and what I could live with.

As professors and as teachers, we may well unintentionally offend or upset our students with what we have to teach them. We may give a reading assignment that appears harmless to us, but that speaks to traumatic, devastating issues in a student's mind. We may try to liven up our lectures with humor or sarcasm that seems so innocent, but that wounds in ways that we never imagine.

The ambiguous nature of language and the subjective, relative nature of perspective and experience are such that we can not always control how our words will be interpreted or how our lessons will be learned. When we do know, however, that what we have to say could be damaging or offensive, we have a responsibility to address it, not only to avoid the legal issues that might ensue, but also to open a dialogue that leads to understanding and that, ideally, prevents the offense from ever taking place.

In my case, I decided not to say it. When I talked my decision over with the class, most of the students thought that I should be true to the text and say it, while a few others admitted that they were bothered by the word, even though they were opposed to censorship or book banning of any kind.

One of the more interesting comments, though, came from a student who felt that, in not saying the word, I was guilty of a different crime: "Isn't that the point of this course," she asked, "to be controversial?"

There certainly is something strange about a professor who teaches a course on banned books and censors himself, but, ultimately, censorship and book banning, whether they take place in the classroom, the bookstore, or the local library, are, as Milton realized in his rejection of licensing in Areopagitica, all about the power of choice.

In those instances where we are responsible for the welfare of others, we may have to choose on their behalf, but, in the case of the college classroom, if we aspire to developing independent, critical thinkers, then we must give them that same chance to disobey. In making my decision, I do not think that I bowed to the combined might of the right and the left or that I heard the footsteps of the language police out in the hallway (although my response may well have been the by-product of years of politically correct brainwashing).

I did not say the word just because I did not want to hurt any of the students with it or risk hurting them with the extra-contextual power of it, regardless of what my rights were or what I could have done. That was my choice. I had assigned the text and Twain had used it and that was enough, enough for the lecture, enough for our discussion of the controversy, enough so that the students could make up their own minds and decide whether they would silence Huck Finn or not.