Slapping a fig leaf on David doesn't change
the facts of the matter

“The long memory is the most radical idea in America.”

--U. Utah Phillips

THIS WEEK BOTH SALON and Open Salon have been abuzz with articles and letters discussing the plan by a Montgomery-based publishing outfit called NewSouth Books to issue a new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn that replaces the word “nigger” with “slave.” This “bold” and “compassionate” move supposedly makes the book more attractive to American school districts, which are otherwise likely to resist buying the book in a kind of “preemptive censorship.” Remarkably, the company claims that “If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain’s works will be more emphatically fulfilled.” Indeed, the book's introduction is far more interesting than the purged text will ever be.

There is a lot of money to be made in producing a marketable version of a perennial bestseller that has long topped the “most frequently censored books” lists. But is such an edition good for education, let alone good for literature?

Call me ignorant, but I’m one of those rare individuals who somehow managed to get through school without ever cracking the cover of Huckleberry Finn. The Great Gatsby? Yes. The Catcher in the Rye? Yes. Shakespeare? Oh yes! But somehow, in the pseudo-enlightened 1970s, Mark Twain never got onto the curriculum in my almost exclusively white Midwestern school district where race was literally never a topic of conversation (even though it undoubtedly should have been). As a result, I have no idea how well or poorly present-day teachers and students handle discussions of the dreaded “n-word.”

Teaching Huckleberry Finn demands a lot from a teacher – George Orwell called this sort of ability “a power of facing unpleasant facts.” I suspect that many teachers are overwhelmed by it all. My own feeling is that a book as controversial as this one – controversial not because of one insulting word but for the entire issue of race and slavery that it revolves around – should only be put into the hands of high school seniors and, perhaps, advanced placement classes. It seems to me that if an English teacher does not have the necessary teaching skills and historical competence to tackle Twain’s classic, and the study of the entire book is going to focus on a single word, it would make more sense to bypass this book and find one that is more appropriate to the students, in the hope that its sheer notoriety will drive the more motivated students to explore it on their own. It’s not an ideal solution, but it’s better than censoring the original book. Or Disneyfying it – which is what this whole exercise appears to be about.

Why trouble your head about Huckleberry Finn when
you can enjoy Uncle Remus instead?

If the Disneyfication of literature began with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Disneyfication of history was already long underway by the time Song of the South came out in 1946, literally “whitewashing” America’s slaveholding and segregationist past. Pack vexing problems into colourful images and poof! They’re gone! Or so many people in the media – and not just at NewSouth Books – have desperately wanted us to believe. Unfortunately, history doesn’t work that way. As William Faulkner put it, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Historical issues have a tendency to linger on long after the movie lights have come up and we have shut the TV set off.

In recent years it has become popular to bash both the book and movie versions of Gone With the Wind. (It’s a popular pastime here at Open Salon.) You know the arguments: many readers and viewers object to the happy, devoted slaves who linger around Tara and that unfortunate business about “birthin’ babies.” The criticism is fair enough: the story is an egregiously racist and manipulative narrative, a fact which its many virtues (particularly the strong and edgy female character of Scarlett O’Hara) fail to outweigh. And yet, the novel and movie are at least honest works in the sense that they accurately reflect the racial prejudices of the late 1930s, which were not all that far removed from those of the 1860s and 70s. As such they provide excellent learning opportunities about where we have come from and how far we’ve come (and how far we still have to go). In today’s jargon, they represent “teachable moments” that skilled teachers can use in order to jump-start their students’ minds.

Do you think the movie version of Gone With the Wind is “offensive”? Hold on, I’ll give you “offensive”: Imagine a modern remake containing all the PC conceits of our own time. There are no more “darkies”: the slaves will be respected and streetwise “African Americans.” Prissy will be a poised, well-educated young lady with a couple of obstetrics classes under her belt. Slavery, I suspect, will be left out altogether, as will that unpleasant scene about the Ku Klux Klan. I imagine such a movie would be a big hit in the South this year, the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, which, some would have us believe, was exclusively about “honor” and “states rights” and had nothing whatsoever to do with civil and human rights. I can imagine Haley Barbour watching it five times in a row. Now such a film, gentle reader, would indeed be offensive, don’t you agree?

 
Is Prissy intellectually challenged or subversive?

But that’s what we’re already getting. I cringe whenever a semi-historical film about the American South comes out, because I know what’s coming. Watch Benjamin Button and The Legend of Bagger Vance and you’d never know there was such a thing as racial segregation in the United States. While “whitewashed” movies like these are not the only depiction of American race relations around, I foresee a day when they will be the norm: when our history will be Disneyfied beyond recognition, and only academics will ever crack the cover of the unexpurgated Huckleberry Finn, which is, incidentally, about real issues and not just entertainment. (Incidentally, FoxNews notwithstanding, world events are also about real issues and not entertainment or “talking points.”)

I’ve been thinking about this issue lately because I live in Germany and on January 1^st the ARD TV network presented the movie Nordwand (North Face). This is an exciting mountain climbing film centering on the tragic failure of an attempt by a couple of German soldiers to scale the near vertical slope of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps in 1936. While the scenes on the rock face are exciting enough, the film predictably fails completely every time it leaves the mountain. How would the film’s director, Phillip Stölzl, handle the problem of making two young Nazis the heroes of an action movie, I wondered? Easy: Instead of dealing with the near universal appeal of Nazism in those heady prewar days, he instead depicts the two strapping, Aryan-looking heroes (who serve a Wehrmacht mountaineer division in Berchtesgaden, where the Führer had his vacation home) as merely too cool to be Nazis. They ignore the Hitler salute and always keep their eyes firmly on the girl and the mountaintop. The movie’s villains are two crap Nazi Austrian mountain climbers who speak in such an annoying Viennese dialect that you just have to hate them. (And they aren’t even evil, just unlucky.) Move on, viewers, nothing to see here. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

North Face - Lots of great action,
not many teaching moments

French director Jean-Jacques Annaud relied on the same method in his movie Seven Years in Tibet, in which Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer – who had enthusiastically joined the SS in 1938 – is shown as also being far too cool to be a Nazi. With Brad Pitt playing the role, this was an easy task. This move not only sidestepped a confrontation with history, it also made for a very boring plot, since Harrer/Pitt – who gets his life transformed by his encounter with none other than the Dalai Lama! – was now merely challenged by poor manners rather than by his dedication a genocidal ideology. Shhh, do you hear the sound of water? It's another teachable moment going down the toilet.

 
The Dalai Lama cures Brad Pitt of a
severe case of bad manners

I could name many more Disneyfied historical movies: “Schindler’s List,” “John Rabe,” “The Lives of Others”… It’s all just so much lipstick on a pig. Of course, Disneyfication is just business as usual for the movie industry. I mean, look at what it did for Disney! The lesson we're supposed to learn is that since the past wasn't such a big deal after all, neither is the present - regardless of what you might read on unauthorized websites or learn from terroristic, America-hating "traitors" like Julian Assange. Or as Professor Pangloss put it in Voltaire's Candide: "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." But when this mentality starts infesting literature, which is pretty much the last repository of our cultural memory, it’s a sign that it might be time to start fighting back.

And yet, I suspect that the Huckleberry Finn project will prove self-defeating. You see, with censorship, as with Pringles, once you pop you can't stop. In his introduction to the new edition, Professor Alan Gribben justifies his elimination of the term “nigger” by pointing out that “[t]here is no equivalent slur in the English language” and “as a result, with every passing decade this affront appears to gain rather than lose its impact.” Why, a skeptical reader might ask, stop with “nigger”? In fact, Gribben did not stop there, but also replaced “Injun Joe” with a more respectful “Indian Joe,” while conceding that “the very name ‘Indian’ itself commemorates a misnomer dating back to Columbus.” He also substituted the discriminatory term “half-breed” with “half-blood,” “which is less disrespectful and has even taken on a degree of panache since J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”

 
A power of facing unpleasant facts?
Fearing the feminine charms of "The Spirit of Liberty,"
former Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered
that her breasts be draped in cloth

Speaking of which… I’m sure NewSouth Books could sell plenty more copies of Harry Potter to their clientele if they took out all those godless references to “witchcraft,” and the same goes for A Wrinkle in Time as well. There’s nothing new about any of this. In the early nineteenth century, Thomas Bowdler removed all references to sex from Shakespeare, leaving us with the verb “to bowdlerize.” The Mormons have picked up where Bowdler left off, whittling down Hollywood movies until they are palatable to their religious doctrine – “The word ‘ass’ was removed from a reel of Much Ado About Nothing even though it referred to a donkey.”

But while this is a noble intention, once the censors lay down their scissors and fig leaves we’re still left with sex, Nazis, donkeys, and the legacy of slavery and racism. If we’re serious about getting rid of such things, we’re going to have to do a lot more than chop up our movies and books. We need teaching moments, not teaching copouts, which is what NewSouth is peddling.