Backlash against Gribbenizing

Since I first commented on it, Professor Alan Gribben’s edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been condemned from all sides. I have found not a single voice raised in its defense. If I did not believe that he deserved as much notoriety as Dr Thomas Bowdler—if I did not believe that the verb to Gribbenize was a deserving addition to the critical lexicon to characterize the editing of texts and speech for the sake of bringing them in line with political correctness—I would almost feel sorry for the man.

I do feel sorry for his critics, who cannot seem to understand why the Gribbenized Huck has them so worked up. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for example, columnist Tony Norman called it “linguistically and morally incoherent.” His standards are not literary, however. Stoutly maintaining that Huckleberry Finn “holds a mirror to our times just as it did Twain’s,” Norman says:Removing “nigger” from the pages of one of our most prophetic and subversive novels creates a space for even more glibness and self-deception by preserving the conceit that we’re a society that doesn’t “see” color.The hip use of the popular critical term space suggests that Norman is hardly a stranger to the dictates of political correctness. He merely disagrees that Gribbenizing the novel will serve the larger purpose of finding fault with “our” American society.

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani agrees that the Gribbenizing of the novel is similar to “the politically correct efforts in the ’80s to exile great authors like Conrad and Melville from the canon because their work does not feature enough women or projects colonialist attitudes.” But she goes farther, sounding as if Huckleberry Finn is holy writ:Authors’ original texts should be sacrosanct intellectual property, whether a book is a classic or not. Tampering with a writer’s words underscores both editors’ extraordinary hubris and a cavalier attitude embraced by more and more people in this day of mash-ups, sampling and digital books—the attitude that all texts are fungible, that readers are entitled to alter as they please, that the very idea of authorship is old-fashioned.Unless this passage is intended as a swipe at her own editors, it is extraordinarily unreflexive. Anyone at all who writes for publication has his words “tampered with.” Kakutani would not defend a colleague at the Times who used the word nigger in his copy. Such a religious attitude toward literary texts on the part of those who are not religious in any conventional sense is a testament to the awful lack of transcendence in their lives. Twain’s text might be sacred if Twain himself surpassed the limits of human understanding. And I would bet my first edition of The American Claimant that Kakutani does not believe the Hebrew Bible is “sacrosanct”—at least not in the way that believers believe it. Namely: as a meaning for their lives.

That’s the thing. Both the Gribbenized edition of Huckleberry Finn and the self-righteous condemnation of it are founded on the same premise. Both are distempered by the exaggeration of isolated words, while ignoring the novel’s complex word-system of meaning. On one side, the word nigger (and to a lesser extent the word Injun) are unacceptable under any circumstances; on the other, the words are “sacrosanct” because they are Twain’s or because they are “subversive.”

Yet Twain’s meaning can prove elusive, especially for those who are concerned to make it seem less offensive than it is. Thus Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review, rightly focuses on the novel’s meaning, but gets it upside down. The meaning he disseminates is earnest and poignant, but the meaning is not Twain’s:It is Jim, the character who is demeaned and hunted like an animal, who is most humane. While Huck’s father is an ignorant drunk who beats and robs him, Jim desperately misses his own family, and his conscience lashes him for having once hit his daughter unjustly.Getting Twain wrong in back-to-back sentences is a neat trick. Lowry has forgotten the passage in The Mysterious Stranger in which the narrator witnesses the torture of a heretic, and calls it a “brutal thing.” “No, it was a human thing,” Satan replies. “You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it.” Jim has done nothing to deserve being called “humane” by Rich Lowry.

And as for conscience! Huck is alert to its message, because he knows that what he is doing in assisting a runaway slave is immoral. As they float down the river, searching for the lights of Cairo, Jim remarks that he is “all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom.” Huck comes to with a start:Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that noway. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, “What had poor Miss Watson [Jim’s owner] done to you that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. That’s what she done.”Lowry is right that Huck is “lashed” by conscience, but not as he thinks. In Twain, conscience is the handmaiden of slavery, as are Miss Watson’s “book” (i.e., the Bible) and “manners.”

To be fair to Lowry, even Francine Prose—of whom I am acknowledged to be the World’s Biggest Fan—falls into the same error. In a New York Times symposium on whether “word changes alter Huckleberry Finn,” she says that the novel “portray[s] the mind of a young person trying to develop a moral conscience.” No, it doesn’t. It portrays the hopeless quest to escape from conscience and the rest of sivilization’s trappings altogether. As a novelist herself, Prose is merely rewriting Twain’s novel in the language that she would have written it in. And though she describes the sin of Gribbenizing better than anyone I have read (“If language is a bridge connecting us to the mind of the writer and the historical moment he is describing, then to tinker with that language—for whatever well-intentioned reasons—undermines not only the design but the solidity of that bridge”), she misses something far more important than language and historical moment.

A great novel is a disturbing comprehensive vision of the human experience. It persuades you, for a while, to watch the human parade from a weirdly angled window—to consider human life under the aspect, not of eternity, but of an odd and assertive particularity. This is what it means for a novel to be truly great: it changes your life. But not in any trivial self-improvement fashion. For a long time thereafter—if not forever—it affects the tone of every human encounter, the symbolism of every human gesture, the legitimacy of every human feeling. Even if you reject the great novelist’s vision, you are unable to shake the influence that it has upon the way that you view human actions.

No one who reads Huckleberry Finn can ever again use words like “nigger,” “humane,” “moral,” or “conscience” in the same way. And in that sense, Alan Gribben and his critics belong to the same fraternity of the fundamentally unchanged.