In Pursuit of Eschewing Surplusage

A co-worker recently directed me to Mark Twain's criticism of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales," a series about one ridiculous Natty Bumppo and quite a few historically inaccurate American Indians. I confess, I've never read much of Twain's work in general (aside from "Pudd'nhead Wilson," which I thoroughly enjoyed), so his criticism was a delightful surprise.

Twain's essay, titled "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," outlines a series of guidelines or prerequisites for "literary art in domain of romantic fiction" and one by one describes how Fenimore Cooper failed to even comprehend these guidelines.

I think what I love about Twain is his flexibility:
- He can be long-winded and blustery: "when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say" (paragraph 8)
- He can be incredibly to the point: "Eschew surplusage" (paragraph 18)
- He uses sarcasm and irony incredibly well: "I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn't strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the plain in the dense fog and find the fort. Isn't it a daisy?" (paragraph 25)
- He is generally in complete earnest beneath all the language and humor he employs: "I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that "Deerslayer" is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that "Deerslayer" is just simply a literary delirium tremens." (paragraph 51)

The above are just samples of Twain's wit and devotion to beautiful literature. For the full piece, visit it at the University of Virginia Library: Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

NewSouth Books and Professor Alan Gribben are editing Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  They are replacing the n-word with "slave" to protect the sensitivities of young readers. [For the record, they're also replacing "Injun" - because little boys from the deep South should never speak in dialect.]

I don't even know where to start with this ridiculous decision. My first inclination is, "Did anyone ask Mark?" Well, ok, he's dead, but he's already said how he feels:
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug. (Mark Twain)

Is "slave" even an accurate replacement of the n-word? Off the top of my head, I can think of three, four, even five connotations the n-word bears that have nothing to do with slavery.

Is changing literature like this a good idea? What kind of precedent does it set for those after us? It tells them that we can just over-write the bits of history we find distasteful: apply a little white-out, pick a different word, and ta-da! Same, but different. No one's found offense with the slavery and abuse in ancient Greek plays (not to mention the incest, murder, mutilation, and rape). But Twain hits closer to home because he's more recently dead? I don't see how that's relevant. He wrote about his time period as he saw it in the language that was common then. It's not our place to edit the past!

In a Publisher's Weekly article announcing the new version, Gribben says he heard teachers across America complaining that they couldn't teach Huck Finn anymore because of the "hurtful" language. I ask: What good is a teacher who can't adequately set up the context for a historical piece of literature? who can't encourage and then manage a healthy discussion of the changes in language between an insensitive little white boy 150 years ago and (overly?) PC little children in America today?

As a writer, a scholar, a reader, and an English degree-holder, this debate gets under my skin. The fact that Gribben is a Twain scholar and an English professor is even more frustrating. Thomas Wortham, a UCLA Twain scholar, told Publisher's Weekly that "a book like Professor Gribben has imagined doesn't challenge children [and their teachers] to ask, 'Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?'" Thanks, Gribben - as if we didn't have enough empty, cracker-like classes as it is.

It's lunch time. I can't stomach any more idiocy right now.