More books to Gribbenize

Alan Gribben’s effort to make Adventures of Huckleberry Finn “acceptable” in the “new classroom” ought not to stop with Twain’s great novel. What about Moby-Dick? Wandering around New Bedford, Ishmael pushes into a building where he hears loud voices:

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.This passage is only marginally more allowable than what Twain is up to in Huck. But it is also more challenging to Gribbenize. How about something like this?It seemed the great African American Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred eumelanin-pigmented faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, an Angel of Doom that did not reflect light in any part of the visible spectrum was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a people-of-color church; and the preacher’s text was about the dark color of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.In Chilly Scenes of Winter, Ann Beattie commits a double fault when she describes a character as a “fat oriental nurse.” This should be Gribbenized to read: “clinically overweight Asian American or Pacific Islander nurse.” And of course, when warning that Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises would become the next American classic to be Gribbenized, I completely forgot about Brett Ashley’s famous line: “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.” This must be changed. Brett must not be permitted to call herself a bitch. She must say something like this: “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a self-empowered woman whose sexual freedom challenges masculine privilege to define women’s sexuality as ‘chaste’ or ‘promiscuous’ for the political purpose of controlling it.” After all, that will expose Hemingway’s ideology, won’t it?