Mark Twain, Alan Gribben and the Sanitizing of Huck Finn: or Is there enough room on this bandwagon for me?

        Honestly, I don’t know where to start on this one.
        Everyone, I’m sure, has heard about Alan Gribben at Auburn editing a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and removing every single instance of the word “nigger” (and the word “injun”) (If not, here) because use of the words, even within the limited context of a work of fiction, makes white people so squeamish that they have stopped reading the book.
        Do I start with the bastardization of one of the most important works of American Literature, possibly the closest thing we have to a Great American Novel?
        Do I start with the apparent loss of literary nuance represented by the readers (not Gribben) who can’t seem to understand the novel within the simple literary context of a first person, fictional narrative, or even the more simplistic context of a story set in antebellum America, when slavery was still legal?
        Do I start with the American media’s utterly ridiculous reliance upon the phrase “The N-word” as if even the utterance of the word “nigger” within a discussion of the use of the word means they’ve called every African-American within earshot a “nigger”?
        I guess I’ll start with what no one ever seems to start with: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written in the first person.
        To me, that’s all that needs to be said in defense of the use of the word “nigger” in the novel, but judging by the big media storm swirling over this, that doesn’t have the same amount of impact for other people, including a supposed Mark Twain scholar. Maybe Professor Gribben never really studied that much creative writing after all.
        A writer (in this case Mr. Samuel Clemens - staunch anti-racist curmudgeon) who writes a piece of fiction in the first person engages in the process of mimesis, which is the assumption, or mimicry, of the character who then tells the story (telling a story is diegesis) (in this case one Huck Finn, bratty, insensitive, racist runaway). This is, in essence, “acting” on the page. Sam Clemens, as Mark Twain (in the early 1880’s), pretends to be Huck Finn, a boy who uses the word nigger frequently because he is a southerner in pre-Civil War America. What other word would a boy like Huck Finn use to describe Jim?
        That’s what gets lost, in my opinion, in all of the stink raised when anyone complains about the word “nigger” in Huck Finn. It’s what gets lost any time someone gets offended by any word used by any character in a fictional work. The moment the offended person calls for the book or movie to be boycotted, censored, or shunned I want to drag them into a creative writing classroom, or an acting classroom, and show them how, in order to accurately portray certain characters a writer or actor has to actually use the words that character would use - even if they are insensitive, mean, or racist words. It would be comical (and dishonest) for an actor portraying a racist character to edit the dialogue to avoid saying a bad word: imagine the movie Mississippi Burning with the word “nigger” removed from script.
         And then I’d retell the story I once heard about a little old lady confronting Ernest Hemingway about the “foul” language he used in one of his stories and Hemingway said he was only telling the truth about how men talk on Saturday morning in the barber shop.
        “I’ve been in the barber shop on a Saturday morning and they never talk that way,” the woman said.
        “I was writing about the Saturday you weren’t there,” Hemingway replied.
        Removing this one word - nigger - from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn not only fundamentally rewrites Twain’s text, it alters the character of Huck Finn himself. It alters the characters whose dialogue is reported by Huck Finn. And to what end? To keep a bunch of squeamish white people from feeling icky every time they have to read the book?
        Ridiculous.
        One of the many reasons the issue of Race in America is so hard to talk about is because people, apparently ones like Gribben, can’t seem to separate the act of talking about a word like “nigger” from actually calling another human being a “nigger.” Instead, we get euphemisms and the comical over-use of the phrase “the N-word.” Well, F-word that, you B-word, S-word for brains, R-word, M-F-word.
        
        But on a positive note, think about how far we’ve come as a society. The word “nigger” was once so ubiquitous and accepted that is was plastered on consumer products (see this fake commercial from the movie Confederate States of America for a real product distributed until the 1950’s), and now, some white people can’t even get the word out of their mouths in a conversation about the word. Must mean racism is dead, right?

Hardly.