RUTHFULLY YOURS

Political correctness has much to answer for in the state of the culture but seems to have hit a new high—or low, depending on one’s point of view—in the news that “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has been found to be offensive because it actually uses the word—gasp!—“nigger,” right there in black (no pun intended) and white. Never mind the context, the word must go lest anyone’s sensibilities be hurt. And so a new edition of the Mark Twain classic is about to be published with the N word omitted, replaced by the word “slave.” Now that ought to make everyone feel better.

At least it will make a professor English at Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama, feel better. Professor Alan Gribben says that as a graduate student he found himself “not wanting to pronounce that word.” And so he approached a local publisher, ironically named NewSouth Books, and the rest is about to become literary history.

The sheer nonsense espoused by everyone involved in this plan is staggering. How did Professor Gribben graduate with a degree in English and go on to be a teacher without having encountered the concept of irony and its uses in imaginative literature? How did he and his publisher manage to miss the entire point of Huck’s vocabulary as a means of characterizing him? Have they spent years of study without grasping the difference between a novel and a political speech?

Books should be imagination-stretchers, with a touch of the foreign, of another time and place, not just the child’s own world, his own neighborhood…and what they read should encompass some larger truth, as literature does, without being didactic, which real literature never is.

Students of literature learn to recognize and appreciate the uses of tone, such as irony. We see the essential humanity of Huck Finn when he decides to go to hell rather than turn Jim in to the authorities, even though he has been brought up to think of Jim as a “nigger.” In this context the word is not offensive—it serves to expose the inhumanity of the laws Huck is breaking and of the beliefs he has been exposed to all his life, but which he transcends through his sympathy for his friend, the “nigger” he has come to know as a fellow man. When Huck makes his decision we see all this because of the way Mark Twain has written it. Would it have the same effect if he said something like, “After much thought Huck decided that it was wrong to treat a person of color (or an African American) that way”? Will it have the same effect if he says, “After much thought Huck decided that it was wrong to treat a slave that way”? Of course not. It’s the way the scene is written, from inside Huck’s mind, that makes it literature and not propaganda, art and not journalism.

Books that have stood the test of time–have become classics—form the literary patrimony of our culture. If we do not pass them on to our children, the culture will be poorer—for who will there be to extend it into the future?—and so will they. A good book opens windows on the world, suggests other ways of looking, seeing, feeling and remembering. Literature enlarges the individual, enriches life. It is not only wrong to censor literature, to confine children’s experience to what they already know of the world around them, it shows a terrible and malforming distrust of their ability to form judgments about people and about ideas.

Truth in literature does not always correspond to today’s way of looking at things—it is human truth, not political truth. So Huck uses a word we don’t use today (and which polite people didn’t use in his day either) to reveal his character—and show us the real nobility of the decision he makes despite his upbringing and his language. Language is a sign of upbringing and is used in literature, as in life, to characterize individuals, to place them in the world the artist creates. Start censoring them and rewriting great authors and you are in real trouble. The art is gone, leaving nothing but a well-meant lecture—dry and lifeless and not likely to impress, let alone to change, the reader.

It may not always be apparent at first glance when an author is using irony, but education is about mastering the difficult, not about recognizing what’s popular. The publisher of the influential Library of America says of 19^th century American authors like Mark Twain, that they must be read “because they are essential to our culture’s shared vocabulary and intellectual frame of reference…[and] explore the issues central to the history and mission of American culture.” He cites as an example James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, which are full of violence “because they are about the battle over who owns the land—Native Americans or the various new immigrants…a central and still unresolved issue of American history.” Similarly, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are boys coming of age in a nation struggling with issues of civil and human rights still being resolved. Nothing can illuminate these issues more poignantly than the way Mark Twain tells their stories and the language in which his characters express themselves. It’s the job of teachers—as well as parents who read to their children—to illuminate these themes and show how issues are raised and resolved.

In the end, if we are to have a common culture we must have a common literature, subtle rather than formulaic, fearless rather than simplistically political. And if we do not have such a common culture based on the best that’s been written in the past and come down to us in the present, we abandon our children to Disney and MTV, to rap lyrics and the images of video games.