A recent article in Publisher’s Weekly controversially announced that a new version of the Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will censor the “n” word and replace it with the word “slave.” The “n” word, of course, is detestable and, as the article points out, has caused many school-boards (i.e. worried parents) to ban the book completely. Yet, I agree with the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri ’10, who had this dramatically awesome response:
“It would be like renaming 1984 2084, “because the current title does not reflect how pleasant life was under the Reagan administration. This is like changing War and Peace to Peace, because war is unpleasant to remember, or removing World War I from All Quiet on the Western Front.”
There’s more I would post, but it’s really just worth reading the whole thing.
Besides my general opposition to book censorship (it’s an insult to the author, where does it stop, it deprives people of access to the actual work, etc.), my main issue with this particular word, as Petri mentions, is its importance to the greater work. The word is essential to the meaning of the book. The removal of “n” word from the text severely impacts both Twain’s critique of racism and his representation of American life in the last half of the nineteenth century. It essentially ruins the traits that make the work a masterpiece.
Granted, Huckleberry Finn constantly comes under attack for its material, partly from its prominence in the literary canon as a cornerstone of American literature. Yet, this change is unprecedented in its extent. This is not just removing the book from reading lists (still wrong, but easily avoided with a trip to the library or Amazon), this is outright changing the original text. This is what makes it so wrong. At the very least, it denies people the ability to enjoy and study the actual classic text.
School boards and parents are not helping their children by sheltering them from the realities of the world and our past. To move forward from the injustices of the past, we first have to understand it. And we cannot ignore the past for fear of offending anyone or sheltering their innocence. Granted, we need to make sure that children who read this are mature enough for the material, but this censorship essentially impedes the school’s ability to educate and cultivate that maturity, which in turn affects our children’s ability to become knowledgeable adults. I just wish Twain were alive to hear about this. His biting, witty, and uncensored response would probably be enough to settle the issue of censorship permanently.