Huckleberry Finn: Sanitizing literature

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might be the seminal work of American literature, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, but that hasn’t protected it from being “banned, bowdlerized, and bleeped.” The latest assault comes from Auburn University English professor Alan Gribben, who has “sanitized” Mark Twain’s masterpiece by replacing all 219 uses of the word “nigger” with “slave.” Gribben and publishers NewSouth Books say they cleaned up the language to make a great book available to schools and readers who couldn’t get past the profligate use of the “N-word.” Gribben is “well-intentioned” but “mistaken,” said Rich Lowry in National Review. Twain’s subversive intent in using the word so often in everyday speech was to depict the casual cruelty with which whites treated blacks in antebellum America. And nothing better captures the “racial ugliness of that time and place than Huck Finn’s deadening, inescapable use of the N-word.”

But the novel achieves nothing if it isn’t read, said Rob Anderson in The Boston Globe. And the reality is that all those N-words have led many schools and parents to ban Huck Finn. In 1884, the word “nigger” was not freighted with the same “historical, cultural, or political baggage” as it carries today. Maybe getting rid of it “is not that big of a deal.” TV networks do similar editing of great films all the time, said Keith Staskiewicz in Entertainment Weekly. TBS, for example, frequently presents The Godfather and its sequels with the F-word and ethnic slurs taken out. The edited version of Huck Finn—like TBS’ Godfather—is for those “not mature enough” to handle the original.

Huck Finn is not a novel for second-graders, said Akim Reinhardt in HuffingtonPost.com. This is “one of the most highly regarded pieces of American fiction ever written,” and it’s usually taught in high school English classes. These same teens are exposed to the N-word every day in hip-hop music, casual conversations among African-Americans, and TV shows. That’s why the novel, in its uncensored form, provides young people with “a crucial insight,” said The Economist. You can’t really understand why it’s taboo for whites to use that now-commonplace word until you squirm at Twain’s vivid dialogue and language, and see how “nigger’’ was a means for whites to deny black people their humanity. In its proper historical context, it’s a horrible word indeed—but that’s why Twain used it, all 219 times.

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