Yet another Huck Finn post

This has been eating at me for over a week now, so here comes my two cents on the newly released edition of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. First, the facts. New South Books has released a new edition of two of Mark Twain's books in one volume: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are both contained in one book. I'm not sure this is controversial or necessary; I think not. Tom Sawyer is one book, primarily a nostalgia and adventure book, and Huck Finn is broader, more expansive, a critique against society as a whole.

More importantly, this edition has replaced all instances of the n-word (and there are 216 of them) with the word 'slave.' I'm not sure if this is a simple find-and-replace job or if it's more sophisticated - I'd like to think Dr. Allen Gribben put a bit more thought into it than just a ten-minute Word macro, but professors are pretty lazy people sometimes, and my guess is he's just a front-man for the publisher. More on that later.

The stated motivation is to remove the discomfort associated with teaching a book that has the n-word to groups of high schoolers. My initial reaction was Fine, let him do what he wants. Abridged versions of Huck Finn abound; there are dozens of knock-off versions for kids and young adults all over Amazon.com (including a manga version!), none of which have the word in question. I recently attended a junior high school play version of Tom Sawyer where Joe was played by a girl, and Injun Joe had been replaced with a non-native American character named Jack-knife Joe. What was one more version going to hurt?

But according to the cover, this version isn't being sold as an abridgment or an adaptation; it's being sold as, more or less, the real thing, which is inexcusable. It should have big stickers on the front: "N-word Free!" or "Now with 20% less racism!" It's not the real thing, and any attempt to teach it in class will be met with more derision than the original did, at least among students who care (and there are more of them than you'd think.) Besides, teachers who are ill-equipped to deal with using the n-word will no doubt be even less equipped to lead discussions on censorship or authorial intent. Why would black students, offended by the n-word, be less offended when it's gone to avoid offending them? Unless they never know it's gone, and no one ever knew it was there, which would just be sad and Orwellian.

In the flurry of accusations of censorship, no one has much mentioned another motive for publishing this edition: Money. I have no doubt that people will buy this edition for teaching, at least on an experimental basis. And because it has been edited, it is subject to copyright, meaning New South Books has an exclusive distribution right to all copies of Huck Finn where the word Slave has replaced the more offensive one. So: Ka-Ching! New South Books has a cash cow.

Which means that if their book is successful, other publishers will have to copy their success, which means there will be one edition with the word Negro, and another with n***, and another, perhaps, with the word 'homey.' Eventually, because of sales to high schools, these will be more common than the un-edited (and less profitable) original editions. Huck Finn as Twain envisioned it dies a slow, nasty death because of some college professor and his find-and-replace final solution to appease squeamish teenagers and prudish parents.

Other books will be censored. All cigarettes will be removed from Raymond Carver and F. Scott Fitzgerald. They'll take the drug use out of Burroughs, the sex from Updike. And it won't be censorship, really, it'll be profit motive, because these books wouldn't be in high schools without a bit of cleanup. Soon we'll be awash in counterfeit Huck Finns, Moby-Dicks, and Jane Austens, and eventually no one will ever know where the truth lies. The new editions will be pushed silently out to our kindles and nooks, and people who know there was once a gun in ET will be dismissed as crackpots. We'll be in an Orwellian un-truth state, unable to discern naughty words from good words for ourselves, and we might as well edit anything that makes us feel ishy, just to be safe. It's a worst case scenario, I know. And not to go too far afield from Huck Finn here, but think about it: when will you ever see the original theatrical release of Star Wars again? Will you ever see Han Solo shoot first again? No, you won't.

I can't help you with the theatrical release of Star Wars; but I can direct you to Project Gutenberg, which has the original 1885 edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn available for download in HTML, plain text, Kindle, nook, and ePub format. Read it as it was, and keep it safe.