To delete the word “nigger” from its 200-plus appearances in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and replace it with “slave,” is to evade the problem of education. It is to falsify a world as a precondition for teaching about it.
An Alabama-based publisher, NewSouth Books, is publishing the softer new edition next month because, it says, teachers have found the language in the original hurtful and injurious. It’s a fair point. It’s worth putting oneself in the shoes of black students who may be in the classroom minority. Toni Morrison, a Nobel Laureate for Literature, said she felt “muffled rage” when she read it in her youth. Others say they’ve felt conspicuous and ashamed in the classroom.
But that is why Huck Finn presents not merely a challenge but a marvellous opportunity. Everything about today’s world tells the children that books and “literature” (a word that most adults roll their eyes at) are of marginal relevance to them and everyone else. Entertainment? They can watch movies on their telephones. Understanding of themselves and their world? They have Facebook and Google for that. And suddenly, here is a book almost too hot to touch. This is a book with real power.
The problem of education is to teach impressionable and sensitive young people about a sometimes harsh world. The world as it is, in other words. And very much the world of Huck Finn.
That world is rendered in Huck’s vernacular that has preserved, for all times, the inner truth of the antebellum South. “Nigger,” used so frequently, reveals a reflexive, unthinking degradation of black people. In counterpoint is Huck’s own slow-emerging recognition that Jim is a human being worthy of respect. Huck is a creature of his time and place. His transformation is the subversive moral core of the book. If he spoke like a civil-rights activist, the essence would be lost.
Words wound, words enlighten. Satire often features a kind of bravura cruelty. It doesn’t flinch from exposing how stupid and horrible people can be. (People are exceptionally stupid and horrible in Huck Finn.) Readers do flinch; and so they should, if the satire is sharp enough.
Huck Finn is just that sharp, and touches on the sorest spot in United States life: race. “It is a book that puts on the table the very questions the culture so often tries to bury, a book that opens out into the complex history that shaped it,” an English professor in Texas wrote. Are high school teachers up to the challenge? If not, it makes more sense to strengthen them than to weaken the book.
To tame Huck Finn, to soften its voice, does no favours to young people.
