Crimes Against Humanity (or maybe just Literature...which is the same thing): Huck Finn

So they've just announced the publication of a new edition of Huckleberry Finn in which the "N" word will be censored and replaced by the word "slave." Of course every major website with two brain cells to rub together has commented on the news (as you can tell, I've only read the ones against the censorship...I'm sure there are those in favor of it, but just the thought of them make me scared for the state of humanity.)

The Faster Times had this to say:

"This edition alters the original text, changing the word “nigger” to “slave,” which, we guess, teaches children the important  false lesson that Southerners once owned slaves but didn’t call them by mean dehumanizing names, which apparently is worse on the moral relativity scale, or something..."

And I must say I wholeheartedly agree. Everyone's argument against the censorship so far seems to be that the book is actually meant to discourage racism, not encourage the use of the N word - children should read it and learn how not to be racist. This is definitely great, and a valid reason not to censor the book in this way. But, while I appreciate anyone willing to speak out against literary censorship, this is not the reason the book should stay in it's original form. That would be um...because that's the ORIGINAL FREAKING FORM of the text. You can't just change an author's writing 115 years after it's been published because it doesn't suit the times anymore.

Books are time capsules - proof of times past, moments frozen in time for the memory of society as a whole. Just because society has finally got on the whole black-people-are-people-too bandwagon doesn't mean that 115 years ago people didn't use the N word.

We all know I'm a literature nerd and so text is sacred to me, so it's no surprise I'm against censorship like this. (Since when are the thoughts occurring inside an author's mind subject to changes and edits simply because those thoughts were born 100 years ago? It's misrepresentation of the author and his or her intent.) But it's not just literature that's being threatened with something like this, it's history itself. As shameful as it is, those words were said. Changing Huckleberry Finn doesn't change that fact...it's simply a way of running away from it.

Now I don't want to attack the scholars who have come out with this book too much because I don't think they're actually trying to be the big bad wolves of this situation. They told NPR that the reason for the new edition is so that the book won't be banned in schools and more children can be expose to Mark Twain's masterpiece. But my question is, what are they really being exposed to? It's not Mark Twain's work, but merely these scholars' version of it. It should be slapped with their names as author, since Mark Twain probably wouldn't claim the rights to it.

Wouldn't it be more helpful to read this book with children and then discuss why using the N word is wrong? Why slavery and prejudice is wrong? How can you have this discussion when the blunt ugliness of the situation is softened by taking the word out?

And finally I will close with a literary nerd rant:

NPR says:
"One of the scholars, Alan Gribben of Auburn University, tells PW that 'this is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind. ... Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.'"

What I have to say to this scholar is...Are you freaking serious?? How you express it in the 21st century? Write a book about it. Don't change a book written in the 19th century to express the 21st century's tastes. Does that make sense to anyone? I mean, really??
We might as well change all of the Jane Austen novels - and the Brontes' for that matter - to reflect that women can, in fact, own property and hold jobs. Why not let everyone marry for love without impediments as well? I mean that's not fair or very 21st century of those books to be putting women down like that, right?

Let's change every single Dickens book because poor people shouldn't be put in prison simply because they don't have the means to survive. That's wrong!! Oh wait, now Little Dorrit doesn't exist. 

And poor little Holden Caufield is losing pieces of his story because we all know the whole male-mentor-hitting-on-him scene has to go from The Catcher in the Rye. If we just take that part out, maybe the schools will allow it and all those children can be exposed to the joys of Salinger. Except it won't be Salinger anymore.

It is at the very least re-writing and destroying the purity author's work. At the very worst, it would be a crime against humanity (or maybe just literature...which to me is the same thing).