Posted on 01/04/2011 2:08:14 PM PST by Artemis Webb
Acclaimed by critics, scholars, and -- of course -- readers, Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is one of the great American novels. The book has been reprinted countless times, adapted into movies, and translated into just about every language under the sun. But should it be updated for today's times?
News that the manuscript would undergo some changes sent shockwaves through the Search box. According to Publishers Weekly, NewSouth Books plans to release a version of "Huck Finn" that cuts the "n" word and replaces it with "slave." The slur "injun," referring to Native Americans, will also be replaced.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I'm disgusted.
Me too. We can probably thank the "enlightened" Marxists of the Modern Language Association. Political correctness will be the death of America.
Hmmmm....so my copies of the original version just went up in value.....I collect old books for this reason...to protect HISTORY and TRUTH. I’m really getting tired of this idiocracy.
It’s bitterly ironic that some miseducated critics condemn HUCK FINN as a racist novel, when, in fact, it is a masterful condemnation of slavery. At the end of the story, Huck decides he will not turn Jim into authorities, even though Huck’s culture has convinced him that he will go to hell for freeing a slave. After their river journey, Huck realizes that Jim is a human being too, and Huck decides to risk hell rather than turn in his friend. Read passage below.
I thought till I wore my head sore, but I couldn’t see no way out of the trouble. After all this long journey, and after all we’d done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him
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a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.
Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven,whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I
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could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”
It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie — I found that out.
So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter — and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:
Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.
HUCK FINN.
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I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking.
And got to thinking
over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never
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thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
I just sent a friend a 1915 book....because it contained the truth about someone she was talking about.
This is the start of sanitizing books to protect the children. You wouldn’t want little Johny asking questions which may give him context to a different time and moral concepts. It’s just an old piece of classic literature anyway. It’s about due for a progressive update.
Next up, Atlas Shrugged.
You're just a nagger. /s
How dare they change an American literary classic.
Very strange that many people who are shocked, offended and ready to riot when “the N word is used have no problem with some other words being used.
For instance; the “MF” word, the “CS” word, the “MFB” word, the going to “FUuptheA” word. My 78 year old Christian mother hears this last one at red lights from the car in the lane next to her. You know, when that “boots in the dryer” song is being played really loud. But do not say the “N” word.
Maybe they just want to change “Nigger Jim” to “Nigger James”.
Newspeak. There is truth and there is untruth. Holy Crap!
What bothers me is that Mr. Krumboltz actually seems to think this is a GOOD thing since, “more people might read it”. It’s kind of like saying more people would read To Kill A Mockingbird if they just made the trial of Tom Robinson a little happier. Maybe instead of being accused of raping a white woman he could be accused of having an overdue library book.
The Soviet Union: Our Changing Past.
This is how government and the PC crowd distort and change history.What our children and grandchildren are taught in school and college very seldom resembles the real truth.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. George Orwell
The term refers to "Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), who published an expurgated edition of Shakespeare in 1818" according to Answers.com. He apparently thought that the "naughty bits" were too much for women and children.
I've always seen the term "to Bowdlerize" used as a term of scorn and derision. I supposed the teaching of literature has changed a lot in the last 30 or so years since I took a class. Then, we were expected to read with the context of the writer's time and setting in mind.
When I was growing up there was a saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.” Kids soon found out that nothing could make a bully melt in his shoes faster than reciting that little rhyme, smiling and walking away.
Now it’s “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will scar me for life and force me to seek therapy and someone has to pay!”
Our parents also taught us Plan B. That was if the bully hit or attacked us, we had our parents full permission(and sometimes orders) to either whale the daylights out of them or take an honorable beating if we were unable to do so.
The world was a much better place then, believe it or not, and bullies, without exception, soon met that kid who put them to shame in front of everyone. Presto! A reformed bully that never grew up into a Liberal, lawyer-happy namby pamby. How times have changed!
I’ll take my Mark Twain straight, thank you very much.
This novel delighted me as a child. Even as a kid, I had the sense to know that the terminology was emblematic of a particular era and that the story actually extolled Jim’s virtues.
What’s next? Will these do-gooders go all the way and also expunge the novel of its “gender stereotypes.” After all, Huck dresses up as a girl but his male mannerisms betray him (by the way he threads a needle, throws things, and catches something in his lap). We wouldn’t want today’s kids being exposed to gender differences, now would we? After the PC police get done with this novel, there will be nothing left except a couple of boys on a raft. Oh wait, THAT’S dangerous, so better excise that part too!
I believe it is on much more higher moral plain in this life for our Nation to acknowledge the bumps and corrections made with time than to hide these as never happened. I was learning about Huck Finn in grade school. Not only because Twain at one time lived in my home town but because the parochial school I attended was God oriented. We at one time lived in a house which was next door to a Negro church. The sunday morning and evening music and songs were a joy to the neighborhood as much as I knew and remember.
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