In perusing the nigh-on-400 comments made on The New York Times’ website concerning Lorrie Moore’s article “Send Huck Finn to College,” one gets a taste of the immense can of worms that was opened when NewSouth Books announced their new, “n-word”-free edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The commentators – and the author – bring up good points: Does the American canon need revision? Yes. Is the literature on the average high school curriculum racially biased? Sometimes. Is the infamous “n-word” a sensitive term connoting centuries of racism and atrocities? Of course. Should Huck Finn be censored? Absolutely not. Censorship is the worst enemy of literature. But Moore’s point in writing her article is not questioning whether or not the book should be censored – she stands unequivocally against it – but whether or not Huckleberry Finn should be taught in high schools in the first place.
In her article, Moore answers in the negative. Students in high school are largely not invested in the literature they read and not given to taking literature seriously. The high school social scene is already given to enough prejudices and stressors without adding apparent racism in the English classrooms to the list. Moore thinks that Twain’s classic should be reserved for college, where students are more mature and more likely to look past the surface meaning of Huck Finn and see how Twain’s use of the “n-word” works as a part of the novel’s artistry.
I agree with Moore that Finn should be saved for a more mature audience, but there is a slippery slope inherent in her argument. Nothing can make everyone happy, and there is no book out there that is completely inoffensive. Moore suggests that Finn is “not an appropriate introduction to serious literature,” because it “[takes African-American 10th graders] back right then to a time when a young white boy slowly realizes, sort of, the humanity of a black man, realizes that that black man is more than chattel even if that black man is also full of illogic and stereotypical superstitions.” She also condemns the high school stand-by To Kill a Mockingbird because of its “social-class caricatures and racially naïve narrator.” Both Mockingbird and Finn are told from first-person point of view – in the voices of Huck and Scout, respectively – and their “racial naivety” is born out of this fact. Both are young children dealing with themes bigger than themselves. But where is the line drawn between making high school reading lists more user-friendly and dumbing down the literature students are exposed to?
If Huck Finn is to be erased from high school curriculums because it is either too difficult to comprehend or too racially insensitive, then perhaps Othello (another hallmark of high school literature) should be removed? After all, Othello is full of racial tension, not to mention scenes of intense violence. Like Huck Finn and Mockingbird, is Othello too difficult for students to read, or is Shakespeare simpler to digest than Twain?
The argument that Twain is not an appropriate introduction to serious literature is not going to go far. Dante Alighieri said that interpretation takes place on four levels: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. Any novel can be taught in simply the first two levels, and any student who cannot understand the simple plot, images, and symbols of Huck Finn has only their teacher to blame. Students who are expected to have read Julius Caesar by 11th grade should be able to read Huckleberry Finn. Let’s face it – the real issue is the “n-word” and the maturity levels of the high school readers. Perhaps the novel should be saved for college (Moore’s proposal of holding off until grad school is ridiculous) where it can be appreciated as the work of art that it is.
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