Censoring Twain

Library of Congress

Should teenage students read novels filled with n-word references? Is that even appropriate for public school curricula? At least one publisher doesn’t think so.

New South has put together a volume of Mark Twain’s two most famous novels that bucks several publishing traditions. Here’s how they describe it:

In a radical departure from standard editions, Twain’s most famous novels are published here as the continuous narrative that the author originally envisioned. More controversial will be the decision by the editor, noted Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben, to eliminate the pejorative racial labels that Twain employed in his effort to write realistically about social attitudes of the 1840s.

Gribben points out that dozens of other editions currently make available the inflammatory words, but their presence has gradually diminished the potential audience for two of Twain’s masterpieces. “Both novels can be enjoyed deeply and authentically without those continual encounters with the hundreds of now-indefensible racial slurs,” Gribben explains.

So, is this political correctness run amok? Another example of how easily we destroy our cultural heritage and fictionalize our collective history in service to presentist hyper-sensitivities?

Or does Gribben, a professor at Auburn University, make a reasonable point about the importance of not glorifying gratuitous deployments of racial epithets, not even under the protective cover of art?

The publisher and editor argue that nothing is lost when we translate Twain’s characters’ uses of the word “nigger” into something less discordant to our modern sensibilities, less racially charged: slave. But couldn’t we consider that discordance valuable to any contemporary reading of the work, maybe just as important as Twain’s literary virtuosity?

And slave? Was that the best choice? Not “colored,” not “negro,” not “nigga” (for the hip-hop high schoolers), but slave. What’s lost in translation from nigger to slave? The two aren’t really equivalent, even if Twain himself did eventually renounce the word. (Who knows, Twain might be smiling in his grave.)

Is this a mere distortion of American history? Or a valuable lifeline to high-school teachers who want to assign this classic but fear that its liberal use of the n-word would be far too dangerous and explosive for their contemporary students to productively negotiate. Indeed, there are over 200 nigger references in Huckleberry Finn alone. And the book has allegedly been removed from the curricula of several school districts specifically because of its racist language. Some parents have been demanding no less. (Though maybe we should be just as worried about what a Twain-like depiction of contemporary conversations between youngsters might find them saying.)

But de-niggerizing Huckleberry Finn doesn’t necessarily inoculate teachers from the danger of teaching that 19th century text in an offensive way. If anything, it might just give us all an inflated sense of protection from the most dishonorable aspects of our nation’s history.

Is this what we mean by post-racial? If so, it is a good example of the difference between repression and transcendence.