The Finn Substitution

Some have brewed a ha-ha about a new edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that removes what is euphemistically called "the N word" and replaces it with the word, "slave." This has brought all kinds of interesting trivia to light ("the N word" is used 219 times in Finn, "slave" is not actually a synonym for it, Finn is the fourth most-banned book in the country, etc.). But as I read the ever-increasing attempts to be the most offended by this, I can only think: what's the big deal? It was done twenty years ago, too, and no one thought anything about it. In fact, it's been done multiple times.

The one with which I'm most familiar is part of the Great Illustrated Classics series that takes well-known (and public domain) novels and repackages them for young readers, simplifying the stories and adding illustrations on every facing page. We have a shelf of them, and I've enjoyed reading them aloud to my kids (my oldest son's favorite is Journey to the Center of the Earth). And we've read both Finn and Tom Sawyer. Finn was published in 1990, and to my knowledge has never stirred the least bit of ire.



Now I admit, in reading Sawyer, it annoyed me that villainous Injun Joe was now "Crazy Joe." I understood the impulse to change it, but I disagreed with it. Similarly, in their version of Finn there's no "N word," and the dialogue has been rewritten so that no one-for-one substitution is needed. Jim is a slave, and that's enough.

So why all the outrage about this new edition that boldly goes where...well, many have gone before?

Probably for two reasons. First, the recent release of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, a volume he stipulated could only be published a century after his death. It's both a best seller and a critical darling, so Twain is back in the public eye.

And two...well, now there's the internet, and people on the internet love to be offended. Any time there's an issue like this, people rush to show how outraged they are, in a pile-on usually as distasteful as whatever the original offense might've been.* You can see some of it here and here. Even Roger Ebert, who should really know better, chimed in with a particularly crass and tasteless tweet.

Yes, rewriting Finn bugs me, but I'll respond in the proper adult fashion: by not buying this edition. That's all any of us need to do, to register our disapproval. I won't rant and rave about the greater social ills its existence reveals, or try to show how much more it offends me than it does anyone else.

I'm not defending this editorial bowdlerizing by any means; I disapprove of it, and think the concepts behind it are both shallow and wrong. But it's not real censorship as long as the original text is available. And I'm pretty sure it still is.

*(And yes, I recognize the potential hypocrisy in saying this in the context of a post that could be interpreted as doing exactly that. If you think so, please disregard anything I say.)

Are You William Faulkner? Check Yes or No

An article in the current issue of The New Shetlander made me recall a writing teacher in college who, when asked about composing in the vernacular, gave this response. "You should ask yourself one question: Am I William Faulkner? If the answer is 'no,' then you should never write in the vernacular."

I'm not sure where the contempt for writing in the phonetic language of the people you're depicting comes from, but it's definitely a deeply-ingrained idea. Any time a writer tries to accurately transcribe the dialect of a particular American subculture, he or she runs the risk of appearing deliberately amateurish (or, as Raymond Chandler said about James M. Cain, "faux naif"). It's assumed, I guess, that the writer simply doesn't know better and is writing the way he or she speaks and thinks. There are exceptions, I'm sure, but I can only think of one: Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

In contrast, poet Mark Ryan Smith, in the aforementioned New Shetlander article ("Shetland Poets, Learn Your Trade: The Kind of Poetry I Want"), says, "Poets and writers should try and find the best language for their own ideas and should be encouraged in their search . . . There is nothing inherent in any medium of speech or writing that makes it superior to any other medium."

In speaking to him about the article, he added, "We are lucky in Scotland that we have such a strong vernacular literature. This is probably due to the fact that our two greatest poets, and two of the world's greatest, Burns and MacDiarmid, both wrote extensively and brilliantly in the vernacular. Their work gave writing in the Scots languages validity and worldwide recognition. I don't know how many other countries have vernacular poets of such importance and I suppose all vernacular poets in Scotland are, in a very broad sense, following on from the beginnings these two poets made."

Here in the US, comparable claims could be made for the prose of not only Faulkner but of Mark Twain*, yet it seems to have had the opposite effect: instead of encouraging others to emulate them, it has set standards that most writers cannot achieve; therefore, the reasoning seems to be, it's a sign of presumption and immaturity to even try.

As a Southerner, elements of my native dialect creep into my writing, often times without conscious intent. And yet when I write a Southern character, I back away from truly reproducing the speech patterns and rhythms that are genetically as much a part of me as my blue eyes (for example, "I don't know" pronounced as one word, "iowntno," as well as one-syllable words ["damn"] turned into two-syllable ones ["dayum"]). Instead I try to suggest the dialect, which is like tasting the flavor of a steak without sinking your teeth into the meat.

Clearly, I'm not William Faulkner. Therefore, if that college professor was correct, his tools are essentially off limits to me unless I want to risk ridicule and being thought an amateur. Eventually, as our society fragments and each culture embraces its own artistic language, will we then see these vernacular expressions as legitimately sound as anything written in grammatically proper terms?

I don't know. That is, iowntno.

*Ironically, Faulkner had a low opinion of Twain, calling him, "a hack writer who would not have been considered fourth-rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy." (as quoted in Bad Press: The Worst Critical Reviews Ever.)