Opinion: Let 'Huckleberry Finn' Stand

You've probably heard the news by now: Mark Twain is getting an extreme makeover. An Auburn University professor, Alan Gribben, has decided to whitewash the 219 instances of the N-word right out of "Huckleberry Finn," and while he's at it, he's going to remove "Injun," too, for good measure. The new and supposedly improved version is to be published by NewSouth. The impetus behind it? To get the book back into the many classrooms from which it's been banned in recent years precisely because of those words. Is this a good idea?

Short answer? No.

But since "no" may not be enough of a reason for most people, let's try this:

Art, and fiction is an art, does one of two things: It depicts the world as it is, or it depicts the world as it should be. Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" depicts the world as it was at that time. Of what benefit is it to modern schoolchildren to read softened versions of the past? Where is the learning?

Of course those words make people uncomfortable today. They should make people uncomfortable today. But in a misguided attempt to make a classic novel more contemporarily accessible, Gribben is producing one that is a gross, inaccurate and misleading representation of its time period.

Back when I was 12 and 13 years old, my best friend was black. We were extremely close, close enough for her to declare me an "honorary black person," making me feel very flattered, given this was the era of "Roots." I, in turn, declared her "an honorary Jewish person," which probably didn't carry as much weight, but it was all I had to offer at the time.

My friend and I were so close we practically lived inside each other's skins, as people are prone to do when they are young and best friends. No matter how much I felt that, though, often it came home to me that I could not actually live inside her skin. I did not know what it was like to be black in 1970s America.

Every time we studied a Civil War-era text in U.S. history, every time we went to a movie like "Blazing Saddles" together and heard the N-word employed as part of a comedy, I was reminded yet again by the stung look on her face that whatever she was experiencing, and as stung as I might feel by those things myself, her experiences were both qualitatively and quantitatively different than my own. What she saw when she looked at "Roots" was somehow different than what I saw when I looked at "Roots."

So -- what, then? Should we have been protected from the harsh realities of the past, and even the present, as depicted in texts and fiction and popular culture? Hardly. We both needed to see things as they were so that together we could re-create the world as it should be.

Kids today don't need new-and-improved versions of the past any more than we did. Reading Twain -- as is -- while it may be uncomfortable at times, offers kids the opportunity to examine the flaws of the past and discuss what still needs to be changed in the future. Kids need to know the truth, and adults need to stop misguidedly fretting over whether to teach kids the truth.

I believe that fiction is the last bastion of truth. Nearly everything else has been discredited on some level or another. Memoirs are often shown to be embellishments at best. History is only as accurate as the subjectivity of the chronicler. Even science, which is in so many ways reliable, has revised the food pyramid and taken back Pluto's status as a planet.

But then there's fiction, which, amidst all its swirling fancies, can still manage to let us truthfully glimpse the past, thereby shining a light on the present and guiding the future.

When you're a writer, as I am, there's an editing term you quickly learn, STET, written in all capitals just like that: STET. It's a Latin word meaning "let it stand," and it's used as an instruction that whatever particular change has been made by the proofreader or the editor to that part of the text should be disregarded.

The time to edit any book of fiction is before it's been published, not afterward. It's not Twain that needs to be edited, but rather the attitudes of the people who would now tamper with his texts, the attitudes of the people who wrong-headedly ban that which can still teach so much.

Someone needs to get a fat red pencil and write across the cover of the original "Huckleberry Finn" the single word:

STET.

Let Twain stand.

Novelist Lauren Lise Baratz-Logsted is the author of 19 published books for adults, teens and children. Her most recent books are "The Twin's Daughter," a young-adult gothic mystery that Booklist says "is rife with twists and moves swiftly and elegantly," and the sixth volume in "The Sisters 8" series for young readers that she co-writes with her husband and daughter, Greg and Jackie Logsted. Read her blog on Red Room.