I'm sure many of you have heard by now of the forthcoming edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in which Auburn University English Professor (and Twain scholar) Alan Gribben substitutes "slave" for each occurrence of the word "nigger" (and also transforms the half-breed Injun Joe into the "half-blood" "Indian Joe"). (If not, google it, or see the NPR coverage here). After listening to a couple of interviews with Professor Gribben, I found myself more sympathetic to his goals (which include sparing African-American schoolchildren the pain one of his daughter's friends voiced, and facilitating community discussion of the text by removing the tension surrounding a single word) than I expected. But I still think it's a bad idea; my instinct is that, if a person or group is not ready to deal with the presence of "nigger" in the text, they're not really ready to discuss other, related issues Twain's novel raises.
But maybe I'm being elitist and/or insensitive (especially since, though I live below the Mason-Dixon line, my perspective is more northern than southern)? Or maybe, in a 21st-century context, the issues raised by the text are simply too complicated for most high school students to grapple with (but if so, how do they grapple with them in the music they listen to, and/or in actual, day-to-day interactions)?
More to the point for this particular blog, I wonder whether having students read the bowdlerized version in high school will lead to better or worse discussions of Huckleberry Finn -- and other literature that uses the word "nigger," and (African-) American history, and current race relations -- in college classrooms.
Your thoughts are welcome below.
Life would have gone on if Twain had never existed and Huckleberry Finn had never been written. This is just another issue for academics to talk about. Let Gribben have his day; no harm done. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world have never even heard of Huckleberry Finn, and 97% of people in the U.S. have never read it. Millions of Americans (including lots of adjuncts) are struggling to get through this recession on food stamps. Who gives a damn whether or not people are using "the n-word"?
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, it fucking ticks me off that educated people actually want to deprive students of the Huck Finn experience. Why do we have to infantilize them all the time? It's sad.
But there are lots of people down here below the Mason-Dixon Line who like a good book-burning. Fuck Twain, right?
I'm of two minds about this. First, I absolutely believe that we must learn about our history, and that includes knowing about the social strain of slavery and racism. Too many people these days think that minority groups are making a big deal over nothing, precisely because they don't understand how entitled they are. The lack of awareness increases this racist tension.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, though, it seems mean to create this white v black dichotomy in children. Will they understand how bad it was and how much better it's gotten? Or will they assume that there was (and is) a cultural reason for treating some people differently than others? Is studying racism a way to teach racism?
For now, I'd like to see how this new edition goes. But I'm wary of it, just as I am wary of the Commonwealth of Virginia erasing the word "slavery" from all its high school history textbooks.
To be clear: the first paragraph "entitlement" was not referencing minorities, but majorities.
ReplyDeleteThough I haven't researched this, my suspicion is that one thing that is getting lost in references to the long history of banning Huck Finn is that it originally fell under suspicion (in many parts of the country, not just the south) for its sympathetic but irreverent narrator, and/or for Twain's generally questioning/satirical approach to religion, school, parents, attempts at social welfare, etc. etc. (there's some good work out there on Huck as an abused child/child of an alcoholic, and of course he's also a less-than-thankful recipient of charity, which seems pretty current given the conditions you mention, Bubba). I think some of the longer-standing objections come down to the fact that Huck is sympathetic, but not necessarily a role model, and that makes some adults with a fairly simplistic view of the role of reading in education uncomfortable.
ReplyDeleteI'm also pretty sure that, when it was first written, the novel wouldn't have been studied in school because students didn't read contemporary novels in school (the Modern Language Association got its name because it was still unusual to study non-classical literature in any serious, systematic way at the turn of the 20th century). It would be interesting to know when it first became a "classic" taught in schools; I'm sure somebody has written about that.
The constant in attempts to ban the book, and/or restrict its readership, is probably that people have a tendency to mistake a book with a boy-narrator for a boys'/children's book, which of course _Huck Finn_ isn't. But I think most adolescents can handle it, with appropriate guidance (and plenty will do just fine reading it on their own; in fact, I'd guess that many problems arise in part as the result of adolescent self-consciousness in group discussions, which can be magnified -- by the adolescents themselves and/or by adults -- when difficult topics are in play).
And yes, it's quite possible that none of the above matters. But some of the adjuncts living on food stamps are doing so specifically because they don't want to give up the chance of teaching _Huck Finn_, and similarly complex works, now and then (in between comp sections).
@monkey: I hadn't heard about a quest to remove "slavery" from VA high school history textbooks. Where did you see that? And how in the world do they propose to discuss the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, and/or the events leading up to it (e.g. the Civil War), without using the word?
ReplyDeleteI have seen/heard pressure to replace "slave" with "enslaved person" in various conversations and written works; I get the point behind that one, too, and think that it's probably a good idea to make more use of "enslave(d)" as both an adjective and a noun. However, as someone who can remember a time when the docents at places like Mount Vernon and Monticello still followed the famous original owners of the properties in saying "servant" rather than "slave," "because it was more genteel," I still think there's a place for the bluntness of "slave."
Teach it the way it is, or don't teach it. I don't think HS students are up to it, personally.
ReplyDelete@Stella: I read it in high school and enjoyed it. That's not exactly what you meant, though, is it? Still, I think it's good to read it in high school and then read it 20 years later and understand it (and your old teenage self) in a different light. Maybe it's worth reading every 20 years to learn not about Twain, but about yourself. Something about not going down the same river twice. Or returning to the place you started and knowing it for the first time.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I'd want my seven-year-old kid watching Deep Throat, but it's great to see a 12-year-old want to read Huck Finn.
I didn't read "Huckleberry Finn"; in Crazy Xtian School my 6th grade teacher read it to the class, and she bowdlerized it by calling Jim "N-word Jim" or "Slave Jim." I can't remember what she did to all the references by other characters to Jim as a "ni---r".*
ReplyDeleteI am opposed to censoring or mutilating great works of literature, but "Finn" has been banned in certain places since it was published in this country, and not for the racist language; libraries and "concerned citizens" hated the fact that the protagonist was a child freebooter and not grateful to live in the Widow Douglas' house, and that it made running away from home somewhat of an adventure. It was only after the Civil Rights struggle that people began objecting to the language in the book, thinking that it was meant for children and like "Gulliver's Travels" totally forgetting that it is a work of SATIRE. All that written, if this edition can get the bluenoses away from the book, that's fine AS LONG AS the instructors admit that the book has been changed due to politcal reasons.
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* Yes it is chickenshit for me to censor the offending word in a post on censorship, but I don't want to read "XXXXXXXXXX used the N-word" in the next installment of "Real Goddamned Mail."
If even Strelnikov won't say "nigger," then what is this blog coming to?
ReplyDelete@Cassandra
ReplyDeleteNot deleting slavery exactly, just claiming the slaves sure loved being slaves and then fought for the South, despite the fact that they didn't:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/curriculum/the-rich-irony-in-virginias-hi.html
@Strel
Your self-censorship reasons made me laugh.
For the record I also didn't want 15 people swooping down from the ether to denounce me for using that miserable word; I've been jumped on for far less.
ReplyDeleteSouthern Bubba, you just don't get it, I'm not a racist. I only hate `flakes, and `fakes come in all the skin tones of the world. If the `flakes tried to be good students then I would avoid the talk of gassings, naked puzzle basements, KGB interrogations, executions in the quad, squashing them with tanks. And don't get me started on the administration.....
Dammit...second "`flakes" is mis-spelled.
ReplyDeleteA famous quote of Ernest Rutherford's to a student was:
ReplyDelete"If you can’t explain to a barmaid in five minutes what you’re doing, you don’t really know what you’re doing."
I might get yelled at for perpetuating stereotypical sex roles, particularly since Rutherford almost certainly said this to a male student. I therefore considered bowdlerizing the quote in my notes, by turning "barmaid" into "bartender."
I decided not to do this. If science can't be factually accurate, what can it do?
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ReplyDeleteBack in the Stone Age, I taught freshman comp with a bunch of sweaty-palmed first year English grad students. During one of our "support group meetings" where a bunch of first-year-comp-teachers got together, he asked how he should deal with "the n-word" in Cane.
ReplyDeleteEveryone gasped and said "You should just say that! The N-word!" Okay, they didn't all gasp, many looked uncomfortable and some gasped.
Being my normal bellicose self, I looked around at all of them and said "What the hell, people? Say the damn word! It's in the text!"
The original questioner said "But I can't say it without...you know..."
I guessed wildly at what he meant and said "Okay, look, I had to teach a text that made frequent use of 'nigger,' and of its relative 'kaffir,' which in some places is just as bad, if not worse. I stood in front of a mirror and said the word over and over and over again until I could do it without flinching. My students never had a problem with it."
You would have thought that I'd suggested he bludgeon baby seals with frozen fetuses or something.