Huckleberry Finn, Censor-style: Removing the N-word from Huck Finn

The following post could also be retitled "In Which I Hop on the Bandwagon and Defend the Original Huck Finn." But I can't help voicing my opinion, which is why I have my own blog, in which I play writer, editor and publisher.

In case you all have completely missed it, after years and years of fighting on and off the banned books list, an editor has actually succeeded in publishing a version of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn with the n-word replaced with "slave" throughout the text. A bit shockingly, the editor of the text is a professor and Mark Twain scholar - two groups notoriously against censorship in literature. In the introduction to the new edition, published by New South Books, Dr. Alan Gribben defends his decision:

"We may applaud Twain’s ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers."

He goes on to assume that Mark Twain "presumably would have been quick to adapt his language if he could have foreseen how today’s audiences recoil at racial slurs in a culturally altered country." The only solid "evidence" he has that this version is, in fact, better than the original is an anecdote about teaching a class in which both he and his students were uncomfortable when discussing the word.

Quite honestly, I don't even know where to begin. Ultimately, the new "edition" of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn seems to amount to little more than censorship. If censorship is defined as the "suppression or deletion of anything considered to be objectionable," and Dr. Gribben has removed the n-word because it is repulsive to modern-day readers, I fail to see how this is not censorship. If the word was objectionable during the time of writing - which historians as well as Dr. Gribben argue - and the word is still objectionable now, I fail to see how we can assume that Mark Twain would now choose to write a different, less-offensive version.

I have not read any of Twain's work since high school - though I hope to remedy that soon - but the main takeaway that I recall from his work was precisely that in a very pro-slavery time, in a pro-slavery area, Twain himself was remarkably anti-slavery - and not afraid to discuss it. His incorporation of the derisive word falls in with his use of a whole host of inappropriate or objectionable slang (both then and now), and this, we are taught, was precisely the point. To feel the need to remove the objectionable bits is to fail to understand the text. That, and as readers, it is never our place to assume what the now-dead author would prefer now. That is overstepping our boundaries.

Or so my high-school English teacher would say. What about you? Is this censorship, or a reasonable way to make a dated text more acceptable to a modern audience? Is this a one-off incident, or the starting slide down a slippery slope?

For more information (and some solid entertainment), check out the following:

• Amanda defends Twain - and rants against the new edition - in her excellent and well-articulated post on Dead White Guys (a blog worth following any day of the week, I should add).
• Huckleberry Finn is a trending topic on Twitter (Is this the first time this has happened for a literary topic? And no, "literary" does not include Twilight, Harry Potter, or Snooki.
• Colbert offers his opinion on the new Huck Finn. He's absolutely pro-censoring the book. Hysterical, as all Colbert clips tend to be.
• A bookseller at Boswell and Books takes a different stance: the edited Huck Finn may not be great, but the book is public domain and therefore the original text is still available.
• The Guardian has an excellent article by Peter Messent (author of the Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain) on Twain's very explicit choice of words, even bringing to light this quote from Twain himself: "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."