Click HERE to read the post, and thanks to PlannedOb supporter Fozzie for passing this along to me.
Turley ends the post by saying, "I find the editing of a great literary work to be nothing short of shameful and shocking."
I don't know about this move being shocking, but I find it silly.
8 comments:
Actually, the introduction to the new edition is thought-provoking. I certainly hadn't realized that the n-word (referred to here as "linguistic corruption of 'Negro' in reference to African American slaves") was used 218 times in Huck Finn, and in one chapter title.
But I thought you might be particularly interested in it as an example of rhetorical argument.
Here 'tis: http://www.newsouthbooks.com/twain/introduction-alan-gribben-mark-twain-tom-sawyer-huckleberry-finn-newsouth-books.html
That is a really interesting argument and thank you for passing it along.
Gribben has certainly found a market for his edition as his use of personal experience attests to. He does seem to paint a "(un?)fair and (un?)balanced" portrait of scholars' reactions of the use of the word in the novel. I would suspect that many Twain scholar (I am not one of them, but if I would have done my PhD in lit I would have probably focused on Twain) would side with the original manuscript. At least that's what I'm betting on.
His argument, at the basic level, is that Twain's audience has changed, so in turn he needs to change portions of the text to suit them. While he notes that Twain was very interested in the cultivating a readership like all authors, his implication that Twain was relentlessly opportunistic rings hollow for me.
One thing I really like about his rationale for the publication is that he couples Tom Sawyer with Huck Finn. When I read Tom Sawyer again in grad school, I found it to be much richer than critics tended to paint it. The depiction of the school competition in the novel, for example, is a wonderful satire of the educational system. Tom Sawyer is neglected work.
Regardless, to me the main part of the story of Huck Finn is the main character's "sound heart and deformed conscience," and the use of word "nigger" to depict the realism of the day is relevant to present a deformed or lack of conscience writ large as Aunt Sally Phelps' reaction bears out quite well. The use of the word in the novel could take up a whole college class period I think.
His employment of anecdotes about what teachers said to him and his own experience in the Deep South is a sophistic move of sorts since the use of that example plays on the perception of rampant racism in the South to this day (as though Northerners don't have those issues) that aptly transitions into a new edition that will tiptoe around the loaded nature of the word and its use in that milieu rather than face the racism squarely.
So I guess I side for the realism that the novel presents rather than scrubbing the work to avoid uncomfortableness.
For a more humorous take on the situation, follow this link (The Daily Show) to watch Stewart and "Senior Black Correspondent" Larry Wilmore discuss the edition: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-january-11-2011/mark-twain-controversy
Clarence Page and Kathleen Parker support my position too, which is an odd coupling of support.
Page's column: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-oped-0109-page-20110109,0,2376473.column
Parker's column: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/views/os-ed-kathleen-parker-120911-20110110,0,4174510.column
In addition, Gribben is a Professor at Auburn. I have my own set of prejudices about that little fact.
Okay, I'm working my way through the links.
1. Daily Show, always funny & thought-provoking. Rhetoric all over the place. Like the idea of advertising "uncut" edition.
2. I like Page's argument, but would want us to take a minute to consider and honor his position in light of the "unsettling startling pain of seeing the N-word used so casually in print." I don't know that I read anything in school that assaulted me in this way, so I am not comfortable arguing that it's okay for other people to suck it up. That's why I hesitate to argue against those who express concern about teaching Huck Finn. (This hesitation does not extend to people who reflexively avoid anything controversial without doing a real cost benefit analysis.)
On the other hand, it does seem to me that it may be possible to teach this book now that "nigger" has become one of the two words many people simply won't say.
Young readers are almost certainly going to see its use here as powerful. Readers who lived in times and places where the term was more common would not be shocked by its very use, so people are already reading the book somewhat differently than Twain imagined they would. Readers in more unselfconsciously racist contexts would require the context provided by the rest of the book to approach that level of understanding of its oppressive power.
3. But here's something to think about. Kathleen Parker wrote her stirring and well-researched defense of Twain's diction in an article in which she refused to use "the 'N' word." Irony much? Give another point to Clarence Page for--if you'll excuse the expression--calling a spade a spade.
P.S. I think that the Langston Hughes quote in the editor's rationale is from a letter to Carl Van Vechten, the white author of the Harlem Renaissance novel *Nigger Heaven*, which I have taught. Certainly Hughes told Van Vechten, who was a friend and patron (he introduced Hughes to his publisher), that he really might want to re-think his title.
The experience of teaching this novel was eye-opening to me. I ordered the book without considering how things might go when student workers at Textbook Rental handed it over to students in my classes (I've used it in an undergrad Harlem Renaissance class and a grad course on literature of the 20s). One student worried about the cover being seen by high school students in the school where he was doing observations. Others felt weird having it in their rooms. And in the grad class, students decided to refer to it as "N Heaven." I feel justified in teaching it at this level, but it was dumb of my not to realize that the novel has a life outside my classroom as well. (I also regularly teach a children's picture book titled Nappy Hair, which reverberates in similar ways.)
And here's the latest, from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/opinion/16moore.html
from a smart fella on the child_lit list serve (Michael Joseph), who has his own analysis of the conversation. He does capture my own discomfort with any and all of the positions expressed thus far in public debate:
I think that Moore isn't letting herself ponder the urgency that Alan Gribben and other Twainians feel about rescuing Huck Finn for a broad audience. Gribben has a bardolotrist's faith that anyone who gives Huck Finn a chance will be infinitely better for it. That good will triumph over error and human failing. For him, revising Huck Finn is like translating the Bible. I understand his excitement, but I am not a spiritual person; I believe that the book's value is in the body of the text. I don't Huck nip & tucked.
To argue, as Lorrie Moore does, that Huck Finn should be saved "for college," and that "Twain's obsession with the 19th-century theater of American hucksterism ... can be discussed ..." here (in the sterilized operating theater of a seminar) frustratingly (for me) denies Huck Finn's value as a work of prose fiction designed to give pleasure, in part as a virtuoso performance of the art of the novel. That astonishing literary achievement is in part what inspired Gribben into an act that will surely earn him an enduring reputation as a laughingstock; it is part of what has been repeatedly overlooked in the discussion (which seems to collapse into an argument over whether the book's pedagogical value compensates for its offensiveness), and it is what makes the book so problematical for me. I think, if we read Huck Finn correctly, we have to love it as well as hate it.
Of course, one can read it incorrectly, either by rationalizing Twain's egregious representation of Jim, to allow it simply because one isn't offended by it, so that one does not hate it, or by minimizing Twain's literary accomplishments, to dismiss them, even ironically by calling them "great literature," simply because one isn't moved by them, so that one doesn't love it. Moore's response falls into the latter category, and that's just the way things go sometimes. I was glad that she recommended Sherman Alexie's ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY, which is a fabulous book, slight as it is. But I did feel uncomfortable with her phrase, "Huck's voice is a complicated amalgam of idioms and perspectives and is not for the inexperienced contemporary reader." Who exactly is the "inexperienced contemporary reader" and shouldn't he or she get to decide for himself or herself?
Huck is an "astonishing literary achievement" for the first two-thirds of the novel, and then it goes to hell plot-wise.
I could see how the use of the word could create problems in high school classrooms, but I also can see kids combing the novel to find instances of "slave," which would then distract them from the messages in the book.
People who teach the book need to set up Twain's realism and why he chose that word.
So what is Gribben going to do to the work of Hughes or Jean Toomer's Cane?
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