That awkward moment in 11th grade when your teacher reads a passage from “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” aloud in class. She stumbles through, her eyes apologetic and shifty.
The offensiveness peaks with Huck’s racist father, Pap: “I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold? ““ that’s what I want to know,” he says in a drunken rant about an educated black man.
Ouch. It’s no wonder parents, teachers, librarians and occasionally students feel uncomfortable with Huck Finn: for its legendary 219 instances of the word “nigger.” And you thought Dr. Laura used them all up from the English lexicon.
But frankly, there is too much of a fuss being made about the name change.
The publishers have been assaulted with e-mails ever since news of the new edition broke. As if it’s the herald of censorship and the end of our ever sacrosanct First Amendment. Relax, guys. It’s just not. Tasteless, yes, but nobody’s making you read the bastardized edition ““ not yet, anyway.
As an English student at UCLA, in my heart of hearts I feel that to replace “Nigger Jim” with “Slave Jim” is nothing less than to disembowel the novel. But apparently Alan Gribben, a Twain expert at Auburn University, has come to terms with it.
Teaming up with NewSouth Books, Gribben is taking this sanitation business into his own hands. Freshly motivated from a lecture tour across the small towns and big cities of Alabama, Gribbens is convinced that his long-standing habit for using “slave” on speaking tours should be carried over into print.
As he described in the introduction to his version of Huck Finn, he ran into countless middle and high school teachers who felt they couldn’t even teach the novel because of the prevalence of the n-word.
Essentially, Gribben is trying to save the novel by killing it.
I understand that a lot of other Americans, especially us student types, are with me on this issue. But upon really considering Gribben’s intentions ““ to make Twain accessible to the more sensitive types ““ I find it a bit difficult to condemn him.
In the pre-Civil War world of Huck Finn, the n-word was more of an epithet than a full-blown racial slur. Its journey into modern times was rough, slugging through the mires of all the ugliness and the people of the Jim Crows and the Birminghams and the Scottsboros.
Back then, “nigger” just didn’t carry the same guilty punch. Twain would have thought twice about including it 219 times if he could see us cringing today. “Slave” is probably how Twain would have written it if he were alive today.
But the beautiful thing about literature is that it shouldn’t matter how Twain would have written it. Our interpretation of the novel should take into account all the historical events that have happened since.
We don’t view literature like a frozen snapshot of history; we view it like a film.
Literature forces us to examine the evolution of such an ugly word by making us confront our ugly past. The original Huck Finn poses those challenging questions to any honest reader willing to engage with it. What makes it so difficult for a boy like Huck to see past society’s assumptions about its people?
I am convinced that no university would adopt Gribben’s version. But let’s face it: anyone who chooses to would probably be too dishonest to appreciate Huck uncensored anyway.
People are squeamish. In the end Gribben and NewSouth Books have a right to publish any edition they want, provided they tack on a fat “as told by Gribben.”
For the rest of us, there are still dozens of editions out there to choose from.
Let them publish the novel. Just don’t read it.
But don’t be so black and white on this issue.
Approve of the newly edited Huck Finn? E-mail Hu at rhu@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu.