**Note, CB’s opinions do not necessarily reflect The Webcomic Factory as a whole.**
Hey Factory Fans, CB here. I wanted to bring to your attention a travesty that is happening in the United States. According to PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY a new version of the classic novel Huckleberry Finn will be released completely censored of several words that are deemed “offensive” here in the year 2011.
From the PW article: Twain himself defined a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Rather than see Twain’s most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the “n” word (as well as the “in” word, “Injun”) by replacing it with the word “slave.”
“This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind,” said (Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he’s spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. “Race matters in these books. It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”
No Gribben, in CB’s opinion you are dead wrong. This is simply a matter of you seeing an opportunity to sell a ton of books to school systems. This is not an altruistic move, but a capitalistic one. If you truly wanted Huckleberry Finn to reach new audiences you would instead put your efforts towards getting the original edition off of banned book lists.
Factory Fans, we are fortunate to have autonomy here on the web. We can write and say what we want. We must remain vigilant of such acts of aggression against literary works. Huckleberry Finn represents a snapshot of American history that needs to be preserved, not watered down for basic consumer consumption in this dark dark age.
Mark Twain, arguably our greatest satirist, was not spreading a message of hate. He was telling a story and what the reader takes from it is up to them. It’s a book worthy of discussion in its purest form. Let’s keep it that way.
Discussion (8) ¬
Thank god you called it what it is: a money grab. That seems to have escaped a lot of people.
That said, the print run is only 7500 copies, so while it might be available for schools, it would be up to them to order it, as 7500 isn’t going to cover a lot of schools.
The people who told NewSouth they wanted such a thing (which is why they made it) are bound to mess up their children in other ways beyond this, I’m sure.
And if a school does choose to order these versions, it’s ultimately the school’s fault.
Thankfully, there are still about a million other additions of the book out there for the rest of us.
I also want to point out what my friend David Fairley wrote to me: “You can’t simply hide or gloss over something because it makes people uneasy. Image a movie like ‘Mississippi Burning’ or a documentary on civil rights that censored that word. It would lose it’s impact. The more we pretend like ugliness dosent exist, the easier it will be to say ‘Well, racism couldn’t have been all that bad back then.'”
Yes, I think the issue, for me, isn’t so much that this book is being published, as it’s the company’s choice to do so, but the fact that Gribben is trying to convince people that what they’re doing has some kind of educational merit. Aside from the insanity of capitalism and/or the insanity of certain segments of our population, this edited version isn’t remotely educational.
I think it’s the spin that has made this an issue, as I’m sure other classics have been modified far more than this one.
It’s ridiculous and pathetic. Twain would not want his words censored. By changing words like that, you completely change the meaning of the story and the book. This is an edition for school administrators without the guts to remove the book from their library. Ugh. It’s like a musak version of Rage Against the Machine. What’s the point?
Huckleberry Finn is in the public domain and this is a derivative work. If there is a group who would otherwise be unable to read it because it has the word nigger in it, wouldn’t it be better that they *could* read an abridged version? As many people have stated, changing the word nigger to slave isn’t going to have much of a difference in meaning for the book, but for the subset of americans that would prefer this form, why not make an accomodation?
Making abridged versions of stories doesn’t supplant the original, nor make it unavailable. Disney’s version of Snow White cut the killing of the witch with red-hot metal shoes that was in the Grimm’s original. Did that make the original version unavailable? No…it did not. Does the disney version undermine the original artistic integrity of the Brothers Grimm? It doesn’t matter because it was in the public domain and they had every right to create something based off of that story.
Similarly this publishing company has every right to create a derivative work (if you don’t understand that then you don’t understand public domain or the concept behind it). Second, just because you find it important to read the word nigger 219 times in the original version, that doesn’t mean that people who don’t want to read it, or have their kids read it at a certain age, shouldn’t have access to an abridged version. It’s stunning that people like you take the attitude that a derivative work should be censored because it has “censorship” in it! You are espousing an argument that you are strongly against this abridged version of the book because of it’s content! You are taking a censorship-based stance!
What utter hypocrisy to be against this “politically correct abridgment”, because you want the word nigger to stay in the book to show how bad white people treated blacks (what’s more politically correct than that?)! What hypocrisy to decry derivative works because you think it is censorship! Unbelievable.
Fair enough, but this version is not the Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain wrote. Perhaps it should be called Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Alan Gribben.
Absolutely…it isn’t the same version…it is an abridged or modified version and that should be made clear on the front. But as someone who thinks that copyrights should go back to 7 years and that public domain material is critically important to society, I am outraged by this Internet shitstorm about a company using public domain material to create a derivative work.