N*****Berry Finn

Lots of you have probably heard about the new version of Huckleberry Finn with all the n-words taken out.

To the left you'll see one of the guys responsible, Alan Gribben. I picked this red-eyed photo because the news has taught me that when you're going to disagree with someone, you should find an unflattering picture of him. Gribben figures that, because it's such a controversial word and causes trouble in classrooms, he could go through and clean it up, leaving an alternative for people who don't want to have to deal with naughty words.

The most reasonable point made is that there are still many, many publishers who will continue to publish the unedited version, so all he's doing is creating another version available for those who want it. But to be honest, I think that's sort of defeating the point of reading a book.

For one thing, who the fuck is Alan Gribben? He's an English professor who has written a couple articles and one book, the biography of Harry Huntt Ransom. It's somewhere around the six-millionth most popular book on Amazon with exactly zero reviews. The original Huckleberry Finn is somewhere around 20,000.

What I'm saying here is that we have a guy who wrote what I highly suspect is a boring -ass, research-heavy book about some guy that nobody even knows, and this guy has decided to go ahead and edit a book that is widely considered a piece of Americana and a masterpiece. I feel like he's a little out of his depth here. He's an expert on Twain, apparently, but that doesn't make him any sort of artistic force. So who is he to say that this word, which appears over 200 times in the original text, is not an important part of the text itself.

If Mark Twain were alive today, and if someone asked him whether he wanted to release a clean version, that would be his decision. He could stroke his insane mustache for a while and think it over. But after the dude's dead, he's dead, and cutting it out changes the text. Why not go through Moby Dick and change all the character names? Why not have them harvesting crops as killing whales is controversial and different in today's context? I understand that Eminem releases a clean version of an album because he knows half his fans are 12, but I don't think that's the case with Twain.

Which brings us to another point: Not everything needs to be for kids. There's a comepletely misguided idea that classics are the books that kids should be reading. This is absolutely untrue. There is really no reason to read classics until maybe, MAYBE, late high school, and even then it is my opinion that you'll actually get something out of them if you wait a little longer. The problem isn't that there's this great kids' book out there, if only it didn't have bad language. The problem is that there is a book out there with contextually-understandable language that is being presented to an audience that's too young.

And how are we supposed to understand the context of the time if things are presented unrealistically? A big draw for that book is that it's a look into a time and place that none of us will ever experience first-hand. To change that view would be like changing a book about 1980's New York to reflect a cleaner, more friendly New York of today. It loses meaning and purpose.

In the last few years we've been treated to a lot of updated classics, specifically ones that feature monsters, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies here. I think you could make a lot of the same above arguements against these types of books. They remove the context, they try to appeal to an audience that is not of best fit, and they are written by a team-up between a respected author and a nobody.

What's the difference? Well, for starters, as someone who thinks that context DOES matter, this is comedy. This is not an acedemically-minded attempt to stop giggles from the back row. When you see the cover, you can pretty much guess what you're going to get.

Furthermore, the changes are very obvious. Pretty much anything concerning zombies or kung-fu sticks out quite a ways from the thrust of the original. In the Huckleberry Finn update, the idea is to make the change seamless, which I find to be silly and disrespectful at the same time.

The really odd part of the whole thing, which I will never understand as a white male who has yet to hear an effective racial slur against himself, is why removing that one word is supposed to make things better somehow. Because is it really the word that's the problem, or is it the context in which the word referred to someone who was paid no money and whipped to do work and could never escape? If I could choose between continuing my current life while being referred to as "Asshole" all the time, OR being a slave, I think I would make some calls to get business cards changed. The point being, changing the word doesn't really change anything, and in fact softens the harsh reality of the time.

Finally, by softening the book for the classroom, you are removing a difficult and important conversation. How are we supposed to understand our past if we remove catalysts to its discussion?