“No thanks—actually, sure.”
Both men were white and in their early thirties, with messy brown hair, mildly rumpled clothing, and a barely-but-always-burning glint of trouble in their eyes, like a pilot light. The minor mischief of the A-minus student was recognizable in each to the other as the two men nodded, smiled, and crossed one foot at a right angle over the opposite knee with a similarly delicate masculine casualness.
“It’s about Huckleberry Finn.”
“Yes!” said the editor. “What about it?”
“First: it’s important for me to say that I truly believe Huckleberry Finn is an American classic.”
“Yes.”
“And I love it.”
“As do I.”
“Well, I’m here to propose you make some minor changes to the version you issue to schools. But first I want you to know that I’m no fan of censorship—”
“Oh, but what you propose—‘minor changes,’ as you just put it—is actually far more destructive to a text than censorship,” said the editor, looking to ambush the teacher’s argument before it could assume its proper form. “In the face of censorship, a reader could hold out the hope of coming across the unaltered text at another point, through another means, and to experience it then with unbiased eyes. But when you change the material, and publish that as the material, you’re making it so that the material, in its true form, no longer has a chance to exist in any minds at all.”
“That is a very compelling point,” replied the teacher. “Except there are circumstances in which a work has been made stronger by its evolution through the different cultural periods and forces, aren’t there? Take, for instance, The Arabian Nights, evolving through centuries of oral tradition. Or the works of Shakespeare: thanks to faulty memories, plagiarism, and regional preferences, we now have variations across numerous quartos and folios, and perhaps we’re the richer for it—who’s to say?”
The editor smiled. This teacher seemed smarter than the usual Huck Finn controversialists, and was certainly the first one he had encountered who might be entitled to more than the simplest “please/no” exchange. Usually, the editor found those who sought him out to talk about Huckleberry Finn were the simplest-minded elitists who didn’t have the capacity to understand, let alone teach, historical context or irony—and yet who frowned sagaciously at him as though he were the literalist, the one who sadly just couldn’t get things like sensitivity and racial tensions and the way the world is today.
“In any case,” the teacher continued, “there is one word in the book that has a power today that it did not have in the time of the book’s publication, and, for that reason, this one word merits, in my opinion, special attention.”
“Are you talking about the word ‘nigger’?” said the editor, setting out again to shove his opponent off-balance by this blunt acknowledgment of the word his guest apparently considered so dangerous.
“That is exactly the word I’m here to talk about!” said the teacher. “Good, you saved us some time. Now, again I bring this up because I really do love the book, and I see it as my personal obligation to preserve the intention of Twain’s spirit for future generations—”
“As do I—”
“And I’m not even asking you to take this word out!” pleaded the teacher. “It’s the number of times the word is used in the book that feels so wrong to me. Did you know that this epithet is used in Huckleberry Finn two hundred and nineteen times?”
“Let me—please,” said the editor, pushing himself up from his chair to pace the room, upset at himself for having briefly gotten his hopes up for a less predictable discussion. “Let me end this conversation right now. There are uncomfortable words in Huckleberry Finn—no doubt. But it is our job to make sense of that. There is a well-earned cultural expectation that this book is not just a story of a boy and a raft but also a work that serves—in the way that only fiction can—as a truthful record, or at least a deeply truthful perspective, of the America of its time.”
“Yes, but times have changed—”
“Times always change! Our job is to make sense of this book in our own time. To try to wrestle with and understand the shades and meanings of its contrarianism, its ironies and ambiguities, its moral agenda and its amoral playfulness. For whatever reason they are there, the specific words of the text are inextricable from the spirit of the book, and my job,” announced the editor, surprised and a little moved to hear his purpose in life described in these terms, even by himself, “is to protect the spirit of Mark Twain. And so, while I am sorry that the word we are debating is such a tragic and loathsome and uncomfortable one, I refuse to publish an edition of Huckleberry Finn that takes the word out or even uses it any less.”