Sanitizing Literature

There has been a lot of controversy lately about a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain's most famous novel has long sparked debates about its suitability because of its frequent use of racial slurs. Well, now some enterprising and well-meaning soul has decided to side-step the problem by simply expunging the slurs from the text. He has replaced the "n-word" with the word "slave." (Although presumably he has done something more creative to deal with Huck's murderous and drunken father's rant against a free black man.) 

Language is powerful - no matter how often a postmodern deconstructionist wants to tell us it has no meaning. No matter how often someone chants "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." The truth is that words do mean something, and they can indeed hurt. This new version tries to make Twain's language less hurtful. The problem is that at the same time, it makes it less meaningful. 

I can understand why someone would prefer to read a nice clean, sanitized version of Huck Finn and avoid the awful implications of the oft-repeated n-word. Here's the question: is a more comfortable reading experience a better one? From my perspective, the casual and ubiquitous use of the word "nigger" tells us a whole lot more about the truth of American slavery than the sterile word "slave" does. Its very offensiveness expresses the moral repugnance of an institution built on racial superiority. It makes you shudder because it should make you shudder. If we are to receive moral benefit from our reading, we cannot avoid the hard truths. We cannot simply decide we don't want to be dismayed when it is our moral obligation to be dismayed. 

Of course, it takes maturity to understand the implications of using such language. I would never recommend Huck Finn as a children's book just because its main character is a child. (That is a mistake made frequently in literary classification!) But I also think we are robbing our older students of vital intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development by feeding them a sanitized vision of the past that doesn't require them to confront the horrible reality. In fact, I think meeting the n-word in the pages of Huck Finn is far more likely to help develop a righteous disgust of racism than listening to it repeated 46 times in the latest hip-hop music track.