This is the most retarded, gay, niggardly decision I’ve ever heard.
No, but it’s almost as bad.
The conflict between the racism of the time, and Huck’s conflict with it, are the essential theme of the book. If you edit out the racism, the conflict becomes that much less stark. And the drama of the decision that Huck makes, to reject racism and “go to hell” is lost.
What are they going to do with the speech of Huck’s father near the beginning of the novel, where the father confronts a freed black who is educated and a professor, and “spoke all kinds of languages, and knowed everything”. Huck’s father has to call him a nigger - otherwise you lose the dramatic irony of this abusive drunk, with nothing to recommend him but a history of lying, stealing, abuse, and neglect, who is calling an educated man derisive names because that is the only way he has to feel superior.
I guess people who say that literature should challenge our assumptions and be subversive don’t always mean it. Big surprise there.
Regards,
Shodan
The word is supposed to be offensive. Twain thought it was offensive. That’s why it’s in there. Unless you’re producing an abridged excerpt for a 7th grade class, this is stupid. More stupid than the cleaned-up version of Romeo and Juliet that I read in ninth grade.
What the fuck? Huck Finn’s “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” speech loses it’s meaning without him using the word nigger at the same time. It is Huck’s, and societies, attitudes about blacks that makes his transformation as powerful as it is. Change it to slave and it suddenly becomes nothing more than ‘My buddy here is in a tight spot what with being a slave and all, I’ll help him out…’
I understand some words make readers uncomfortable, but those who want to censor ‘nigger’ just don’t understand what Twain was doing.
Injun Joe at least is a more understandable change. IIRC he was basically a stock stereotype to serve as a threat and never got portrayed in a good light like Jim did. Although it’s hard to think what Injun could be replaced with really. Maybe he’ll do like colleges with indian mascots did a few years ago and become Redhawk Joe or Stanford Cardinal Joe.
I suppose To Kill A Mockingbird is next, though it has the best answer I’v ever heard to the argument "everybody says it"ever written:
Atticus: Scout, don’t say nigger. It’s common.
Scout: But Atticus, everybody says it.
Atticus: Well, now it’s everybody minus one.
Seth Grahame-Smith should rework the whole thing changing ‘nigger’ to ‘zombie’ everywhere.
Perhaps they’ll next ‘correct’ Shakespeare. Shylock is now Methodist, Juliet is now 24, and Taming of the Shrew ends with the men being sentenced by the court to sensitivity training.
Jim already things Huck is a ghost when he sees him on the island, so a zombie would work well.
"Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in." Mark Twain, 1876, from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
I completely agree with you and I’m a nig-DING!
Hey, cut that out!
I can’t agree with this.
One can argue that it’s supposed to make people feel uncomfortable, thus forcing the reader to examine his own attitudes and prejudices. But if any school district feels it’s too much for 13 and 14 year-olds, they are free to simply choose not to include the book in their curriculum. And I have no problem with that.
But teaching a watered-down version takes away the point of teaching it at all.
*Tom Sawyer *and *Huckleberry Finn *are very different books in tone and content. I daresay Twain probably didn’t include a similar disclaimer with Finn.
You are somehow overlooking the Nazis.
While I think the idea of removing “nigger” from Huckleberry Finn is a deeply stupid and offensive one, I would immediately buy a version where they are escaping on a zeppelin from dinosaur-riding Nazis.
In* Little Big Man* it’s Indun. I wonder what’s going to happen with that.
Black teenagers can’t bring themselves to say “nigger” out loud? Really? Could they have been shining him on?
I imagine the problem is that they are reading the words of a white person who is saying the word.
Hey, watch your mouth. This ain’t the Pit!
He says the sheriff is near!
More seriously, while I think it’s a stupid idea, people have a right to be stupid with public domain stuff. I hope, for all that is good and decent, that the edition makes it very clear that it is an edited edition (the cover in the linked story, if it’s real, doesn’t make it obvious at all), and that nobody ever, ever buys it.
Or that they’re reading the actual hateful word and not the version they’re used to, which - whether you accept that it’s a separate idea or not - means something different to them. But I can see this might turn into another debate about nigger vs. nigga, and I’d rather gouge my eyes out than do that one again.
If the problem is with students having to read the offensive language aloud… why don’t teachers just not have them do that? Or tell them that they can skip over the offensive words?
I might be biased, because when I was in school listening to my classmates read from any book aloud was torture regardless of the material, but it seems like that’s something one could get rid of fairly easily.