47 replies to this topic

[Peter T Chattaway]

mrmando wrote:
: For pity's sake, if you don't know what a word means, don't use it. Replacing one word with another is not "annotation."

Quite so. And, as it happens, "annotated" editions of Huckleberry Finn do exist.

old wave wrote:
: Replacing the world "nigger" with "slave" isn't an appropriate substitution. Being a "slave" is changeable and impermanent. A slave can be freed, and then he is no longer a slave. Being a nigger is an immutable part of one's being and soul. It can't be transcended or changed. Further, anyone can be a slave, but only a black person can be a nigger. It really doesn't mean even close to the same thing, and its sort of surprising that Twain scholars would think it would.

Excellent point.

[mrmando]

Here is an excerpt from the edition's preface, which I guess will serve to cast light on the word-substitution, however it is handled in the text. A quote therefrom:

Quote

In the 1870s and 1880s, of course, Twain scarcely had to concern himself about the feelings of African American or Native American readers. These population groups were too occupied with trying, in the one case, to recover from the degradation of slavery and the institution of Jim Crow segregation policies, and, in the other case, to survive the onslaught of settlers and buffalo-hunters who had decimated their ways of life, than to bother about objectionable vocabulary choices in two popular books.

Pretty thin soup, this notion that Twain chose the n-word because he thought black readers were too preoccupied with other matters to take notice. He chose the n-word, rather, to paint an accurate picture of systematic racism.

I suppose next there'll be a version of All in the Family where epithets like "Meathead" are replaced with "person with a learning difference," or a film about the Civil War where the Confederate flag is replaced with "Have a nice day."

Edited by mrmando, 05 January 2011 - 02:19 PM.

[Thom Wade]

mrmando, on 04 January 2011 - 09:16 PM, said:

Oh, I agree that they're the same subject. Censorship is censorship, after all.

Not quite. It is not as if this is the government making access to to the original version illegal. Noone is removing the original version. The original is not banned, anyone can buy the original version in any bookstore. It can be published as it stood by any publisher. This is not true censorship.

I don't agree with this particular edition, but it is not replacing and erasing the original. The original is not being censored wholesale and hidden away.

[mrmando]

Pax, on 05 January 2011 - 02:25 PM, said:

So some here *can* be the authority on Twain's intent?

I think the point was to let Twain be the authority on his intent.

Quote

Did Twain specifically address his use of that word in a way that applies to this conversation?

Twain repeatedly addressed the use of words in general, and gave detailed attention to the choice of the correct words, in his own works and those of others:

Mark Twain said:

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

Quote

I'm also surprised that no one seems to think the word's usage has changed since original publication.

Which person commenting in this thread has said that, or anything like it? You're the one who is sowing confusion over the meanings of words, since you propose that words like "annotation" and "abridged" can be repurposed to mean whatever you want them to mean.

Edited by mrmando, 06 January 2011 - 07:04 AM.

[mrmando]

Nezpop, on 05 January 2011 - 02:40 PM, said:

Not quite. It is not as if this is the government making access to to the original version illegal. Noone is removing the original version. The original is not banned, anyone can buy the original version in any bookstore. It can be published as it stood by any publisher. This is not true censorship.

Not in the broadest context, perhaps. But: the book has been banned from many classrooms and quite a few school libraries, and the goal of this new edition is to get it back into some of those classrooms/libraries via expurgation. In the context of your average urban high school, the book will not be available except in its bowdlerized form. So within that context, it is indeed censorship or something very much like it.

Regarding Mark Twain's use of the n-word in his own voice, even the Virginia City excerpt contains a significant note of irony and disapproval toward the term. In Tom Sawyer he uses the then-more-genteel term Negro when speaking in the authorial voice, as he continued to do throughout the rest of his life.

To sum up: You can never hope to defeat racism if you can't even bring yourself to look at it squarely. General Grant's troops might not have much liked the Confederate flag, but they didn't blindfold themselves before going into battle.

Edited by mrmando, 05 January 2011 - 06:34 PM.

[mrmando]

You have a tin ear for irony.

Regarded as a man of his time, in his own cultural and historical context, Mark Twain was a progressive of the first order. Many of his ideas would still be considered radical today. You might want to read up on the Chinese Exclusion Act, which went into effect fourteen years after Twain made his "Chinaman" remark, and remained thus until 1943.

Edited by mrmando, 05 January 2011 - 04:40 PM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Pax wrote:
: How can you say that the intent of the use of the word to make us uncomfortable?

I'm not sure that it was, myself. Not on its own, at any rate; it presumably has to be seen in context, i.e. the depiction of inter-racial relationships in a particular time and place.

: I'm also surprised that no one seems to think the word's usage has changed since original publication.

Well of course it has changed. So what?

Just a couple days ago, I was watching a documentary about Harry Jerome, a Canadian athlete of African descent who was big in the '60s and '70s, and in there, there was some archival footage of reporters asking him about the "Negro" community, etc. As one who was born in 1970 myself, I can dimly recall how common the word "Negro" was in popular parlance at the time -- but these days hardly anyone uses it.

But again I ask, so what? Is the fact that word-usage changes over time -- sometimes quite rapidly -- any reason to censor the use of the word "Negro" in older texts and recordings? I would think not. If anything, we NEED the jolt of the unfamiliar when dealing with the past, to remind ourselves that everything we take for granted nowadays was not always so.

: Slave isn't a very nice word, either.

Yeah, as I noted above, some politically-correct types want to censor THAT word, too. This PC version of Huckleberry Finn is ALREADY behind the curve.

: How many of us are comfortable using the (perfectly good and unrelated to N*) word niggardly in daily conversation?

Actually, quite a few people are okay with that word -- or would be, if it weren't for the ignoramuses out there raising a hue and cry over the alleged "racism" of that word. (Next up on the chopping block: "denigrate". You think I'm joking, but then, you probably haven't seen The Great Debaters.)

: Here, "reconciled" and "live through it" aren't exactly stirring. One can infer much from a writer so aware of word choice using precisely those terms.

Perhaps. One must also take into account a writer's sense of humour, his intended audience, etc., etc.

[Scott Derrickson]

I think the real question is if the motive behind the edited version has any merit at all. Doesn't this new effort to make the word such an extreme taboo in writing and speech -- so much so that it cannot be used in any context -- empower it far beyond all other words? It is a most foul word indeed, but it seems to me that such extreme prohibition radically increases and permanently solidifies the potency of the word. Often times when I see "N-word", I think of orthodox Jews who write "G-d" instead of God.

Edited by Scott Derrickson, 06 January 2011 - 03:15 PM.

[M. Leary]

Pax, on 05 January 2011 - 03:01 PM, said:

Quote

And at the fag-end of the procession was a long double file of the proudest, happiest scoundrels I saw yesterday--niggers. Or perhaps I should say "them damned niggers," which is the other name they go by now. - "Mark Twain on the Colored Man", Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, July 1865

Oh boy. The above italicized word needs to be censored also. I recommend replacing it with "very." Unless this was an actual procession that separated sexual proclivities into different sections, and this is simply a reflection of a sad age in which all homosexuals had to walk at the end of parades rather than the middle or the front.

Edited by M. Leary, 06 January 2011 - 03:20 PM.

[SDG]

It is interesting how homosexuals have so thoroughly embraced and subverted nearly all the words used to disparage or demean them (as well as even more successfully co-opting a previously perfectly good word, gay, into a universally used euphemism for themselves) that the former slurs are now no longer per se offensive at all, unless used with clearly pejorative intent -- whereas despite a similar subversive embracing of the n-word in black culture, it remains among the most taboo of all English words in America.

[mrmando]

Quote

It is a most foul word indeed, but it seems to me that such extreme prohibition radically increases and permanently solidifies the potency of the word.

Correct. No word should have that much power. There shouldn't be a magic word that somehow undoes all the expectations of a civil society and the constitutional protection of free speech. Teachers shouldn't lose their jobs for saying the wrong word (in a hypothetical or instructive context, anyhow). If it's true that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, then — in refusing to look with clear eyes upon a book that shows exactly how members of an oppressive society thought, spoke and acted — might we not be laying the groundwork for a future oppressive society?

On the other hand, it's not just a word either ... it's an absolutely unique word in the way it connotes the oppression of a particular race. No equivalent term applies to white people.

Perhaps the saddest statement I've heard in defense of the new edition is that teachers aren't prepared, for the benefit of their students, to put Huckleberry Finn in its proper historical context with the n-word in place. If they're not prepared to put a book in its proper historical context, what are they prepared to do?

Edited by mrmando, 06 January 2011 - 04:15 PM.

[mrmando]

M. Leary, on 06 January 2011 - 03:11 PM, said:

Oh boy. The above italicized word needs to be censored also. I recommend replacing it with "very." Unless this was an actual procession that separated sexual proclivities into different sections, and this is simply a reflection of a sad age in which all homosexuals had to walk at the end of parades rather than the middle or the front.

I thought it meant the parade had smoking and non-smoking sections.

[M. Leary]

Or bundle of sticks and non-bundle of sticks sections.

[Peter T Chattaway]

All this business about cigarettes and bundles of sticks is reminding me of how my third-grade teacher had to tell my classmates to stop giggling when we were reading Prince Caspian and there was a reference in there to "chinks" in a magic cave.

And I well remember my fourth-grade teacher reading something to us about Alfred Hitchcock, and then pausing to interrupt two tittering, joke-swapping boys with the words, "Quiet, Danny! This has nothing to do with penises!"

[mrmando]

I'm hoping Cornel West and Tavis Smiley will get into this on their public-radio shows over the weekend. I would very much like to hear what Dr. West thinks.

P.S. In case anybody's sincerely curious about a certain term, there's always the dictionary.

Edited by mrmando, 07 January 2011 - 12:48 AM.

[mrmando]

The latest installment of Kurt Andersen's radio show "Studio 360" quotes Mark Twain as saying "Censorship is telling a man he can't have steak because a baby can't chew it," and alleges that he said this in response to an early attempt to censor Huckleberry Finn.

Trouble is, this is a misattribution. The quotation is unsourced, although Robert A. Heinlein apparently wrote something similar to it.

It turns out that Twain did say the following:

"But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me." (Letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, 7 February 1907)

So perhaps there was, after all, a limited sense in which Twain didn't "give a flip" about a wholesale exclusion of a book. It would nonetheless be foolish to try to extrapolate from this quotation a similar indifference toward word-substitution. In fact, the interesting question becomes whether Twain would have preferred an outright ban to a bowdlerization. Available evidence, though thin, suggests that the answer is yes.

A point of curiosity: in the new edition, will Chapter 21 contain a reference to "slave-head" tobacco?

Edited by mrmando, 11 January 2011 - 04:58 PM.