New editions of two Mark Twain classics (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer) are scheduled to be published minus the common term from the era, "nigger," which many people find offensive, and which has been replaced with the more sanitized but also historically inaccurate term, "slave." The new edition also substitutes "Indian" for "injun."
My personal opinion is that these changes take the books out their cultural and historical context, which is wrong on more levels than I can name. Most obviously, however, this is an example of political correctness run amok. Fittingly, the idiot who came up with this idea is a UC Berkeley professor.
The issue has received a lot of attention, including this from the New York Times:
Alva Noë, writing at his 13.7: Culture and Cosmos blog for NPR, has some thoughts on this issue.A new edition of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is missing something.
Throughout the book — 219 times in all — the word “nigger” is replaced by “slave,” a substitution that was made by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama, which plans to release the edition in February.
Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery, approached the publisher with the idea in July. Mr. Gribben said Tuesday that he had been teaching Mark Twain for decades and always hesitated before reading aloud the common racial epithet, which is used liberally in the book, a reflection of social attitudes in the mid-19th century.
“I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Tom Sawyer,’ ” he said. “And I don’t think I’m alone.”
Mr. Gribben, who combined “Huckleberry Finn” with “Tom Sawyer” in a single volume and also supplied an introduction, said he worried that “Huckleberry Finn” had fallen off reading lists, and wanted to offer an edition that is not for scholars, but for younger people and general readers.
“I’m by no means sanitizing Mark Twain,” Mr. Gribben said. “The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact. I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone.” (The book also substitutes “Indian” for “injun.”)
Since the publisher discussed plans for the book this week with Publishers Weekly, it has been “assaulted” with negative e-mails and phone calls, said Suzanne La Rosa, the co-founder and publisher of NewSouth Books.
January 7, 2011
Astrid Stawiarz/Getty ImagesThis morning, after brushing, washing, feeding, dressing, and cajoling my two young boys into a state of readiness for school, I put on an old Wu-Tang Clan album. Music to send my kids out the door to. A recent NPR story had reminded me how much I liked Wu-Tang Clan’s dark, minor-keyed, pulsating music. I’d forgotten that the band’s lyrics would make Davy Jones himself blush in embarrassment.
Lots of bad words. As a father, what was I to do?
As it happens, the topic of bad words is one that interests me; and I’d been thinking about it anyway in connection with the publication of new editions of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, in which all occurrences of two insulting words had been removed. I myself would never buy such a bowdlerized edition of the book, not for myself, and not for my kids. And I’d frown on my children’s teachers if they selected such an altered version for the classroom.
Why? Basically for the same reason that I now stood here in my pajama bottoms trying to figure out how to explain to my children the extreme delicacy and dangerous apparent simplicity of the Wu Tang Clan’s use of proscribed language. This is a conversation that has to happen. Not once. But often. It’s a blessing.
And not only because of the history of racial hatred and conflict in America. There is a more general reason why we must encourage conversations, and conflicts, about the way we use words. Let me try to explain.
Philosophers, logicians, and other clear thinkers, recommend that we bear in mind the distinction between the use of a word, and its mention. “Boston,” to give one of W. V. O. Quine’s examples, has six letters. But Boston, which is a city in New England, does not. Cities, unlike words, do not have letters.
We generally put quotation marks around a word to indicate that we aren’t using the word, but mentioning it, that is, talking about it. Putting quotation marks around a word is like writing the word on the blackboard, pointing to it, and saying “this word.” When we use the word without quotation marks — maybe when we just write it on the board — we are using it to indicate whatever it is that the word refers to. For example, Boston.
From the standpoint of the use-mention distinction, anxiety about explicit lyrics and bad words seems misplaced, if not downright silly.
There was a case a few years ago — I remember reading about it at the time — of a teacher who was dismissed for using a proscribed word in the class room. The thing is , he hadn’t been using the word; he’d been mentioning it, and precisely in order to ban its use! He was telling kids what they aren’t allowed to say! — An injured student reported him to the principal.
This reminds me of a joke I knew as a kid and that my boys still won’t tire of telling me: two boys, Pete and Repete, are in a boat. Pete jumps out. Who’s left? Answer: Repete (sounds like Repeat). Reply: two boys, Pete and Repete, are in a boat…
Don’t these people understand the use - mention distinction?
Actually, even a little reflection is enough to make our confidence in the distinction between use and mention begin to quiver.
Consider:
Boston doesn’t have six letters. But “Boston” does.
When we want to talk about the word, we write it on the board and point to it, or we write it down and put quotation marks around it.
So “Boston” is, in effect, a name of the word Boston.
But wait a second. Boston isn’t a word. It’s a city.
If the city has a name, then, it’s not Boston, it’s “Boston.”
And so the name of Boston doesn’t have six letters. It has eight, counting the quotation marks: “ B O S T O N “.
But this means that if we want to talk about the name of Boston, we need to talk about the word “Boston,” and to do this, it would seem, we need to put the whole thing it quotation marks like this: “ “Boston” .”
But this word — the name of the name of Boston — can also form a perfectly sensibly topic of conversation. We’re talking about it right now. But if we want to talk about it, rather than to use it to refer to the name of the name of Boston, we need to add on a third set of quotation marks. And so on and so on.
You see where this is going. It keeps on going. Philosophers call this a regress.
Can we clean up the mess? I like the mess. (Twentieth century philosophy taught me to like the mess. A topic for another day.)
One of the things that pops out from these confusions is this:
It isn’t an accident that we use words to refer to themselves.
We’ve got words on the tip of the tongue, after all. We can take them out and hand them around for consideration, like coins or jewels. We can use them for show, to show or exhibit or display themselves. This is what we do when we mention a word. Instead of using it to refer to an object of discussion, like Boston, say, we use the word as an object of consideration in its own right. Importantly, when we do this, it is the words themselves we put on display. Not mere sounds. Not mere marks on paper. The words themselves, with all their meanings, associations and gestural power. This is what we offer.
Suppose I say to the police officer: that man attacked me, he pushed me like this, giving the officer a push to illustrate my meaning. Now, in a sense, I didn’t really push the officer. I didn’t attack him. After all, I was only trying to show him how I had been attacked.
But to do that, I pushed him. And, critically: I might have hurt him. He might arrest me. With justification.
Even the mention of an erotically charged word — perhaps even the mention of the mention — can have the power to provoke an erotic response.
And so with offensive epithets. The idea that mentioning them, as distinct from using them, cordons off their normal power to injure is silly. Mentioning them, after all, is a way of using them.
Which is not to say that we can’t talk about them; or that every mention is or is intended to be insulting. It’s just to say that if we want to talk about words that are almost too hot to handle — or if we want to lodge assault charges with a police officer — we have every good reason to be very careful about how we go about doing this.
Maybe the teacher was vulgar and insensitive in the way he mentioned the bad words to his class. Maybe the class was oversensitive. Maybe they didn’t trust him, or couldn’t trust him. I don’t recall the details. Maybe (in my fictional example) the cop should have realized I meant him no harm and not taken offense. Maybe I didn’t need to push him to make my point.
To be a language user, which is to say, to be a human, is to be one who is forced to grapple with questions and conflicts such as these.
Crucially — and this really is a lesson of twentieth-century philosophy, one best appreciated and explored by Ludwig Wittgenstein — there is no way of stipulating your way free of such matters. Putting quotation marks around a word doesn’t turn off the light that burns within it, and explaining that you only intended to show what happened doesn’t excuse the push you give the officer.
There is no such thing as a formal language, not in logic, not in life. Notations, no less than spoken language, acquire their significance through the ways we use them. And these ways are complicated, as are the situations and circumstances in which we frequently find ourselves.
I mentioned at the outset that we need to have conversations about the sort of words recently expurgated from Mark Twain’s texts, or the sorts of words that still manage to shock (me at least) in the Wu-Tang Clan’s lyrics. We need to have these conversations not only because these words in particular happen to be embodiments of practices that have grown out of America’s racialist past. Although that’s enough of a reason.
We need to talk about words because words are not just words. To get clear about words is always, really, to get clear about ourselves, who we are, and what are doing.
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