The Other ‘N-word’
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day I: The mild feelings that accompany your presumption have no bearing on the mildness of your presumptions. Even Nazis wonder about all the fuss.
Aphorism of the Day II: If a word offends thee, pluck it, sure. If a word really offends thee, say it over and over again, until its nonsense is revealed. So, repeat after me: deconstruction, deconstruction, deconstruction, deconstruction…
Censoriousness is part of the human floor-plan. Everybody thinks certain people shouldn’t be allowed to say certain things. We instinctively understand that controlling actions–power–turns on controlling beliefs. If you let the latter get out of hand…
When I was studying in Nashville, one of my classmates married this Polish guy who got a job working in construction. Shortly after getting the job he apparently approached one of his coworkers and said, “Excuse me. Please. Could you tell me? What is the difference between redneck and white-trash, and which one are you?”
On another occasion, I found myself debating two fellow PhD students, both from the deep south, who argued that the word ‘nigger’ was simply the word they grew up using, that they didn’t ‘mean anything’ by it. The resulting argument, as you might expect from philosophy grads, led nowhere, though it did sketch a couple of interesting circles. I argued that what they thought they meant had precious little to with anything. Words were social and historical–and most importantly, bearers of value. In other words, words were huge, and some were larger than others. ‘Nigger,’ I suggested, was about as big as they come.
They argued a variety of face-saving things before petering out. The social authority gradient was skewed against them, and they could feel it. This is what shuts most people up, when you think about it. Numbers, not reasons. There was just more of me.
I mention this because of all the hoopla surrounding the new edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where the word ‘nigger’ has apparently been replaced by the more palatable ‘slave.’ Whatever you think about sanitizing works like Huck Finn, trimming and tucking them to facilitate the ease of consumption or whatever, what you can’t say is that its ‘just a word,’ you’re taking out. ‘Nigger’ is a social historical bearer of value, a monstrously huge one. So huge that we’ve invented a name–the ‘N-word’–for the name, to spare us the back-breaking effort of actually lifting the thing.
If you concentrate on the ink of the word, you can convince yourself that the stakes are low, insignificant compared to the various advantages, such as not having to worry about irate mothers on parent-teacher night and the like. If you concentrate on the meaning, you suddenly find yourself trying to wrestle history itself to the mat.
Where the ink is externally related to the text, the meaning is internally related. Plucking the former is like fishing a bagel out a bakeshop bin. Plucking the latter is like ripping a skein of nerves out of meat. Imagine going through the Bible and replacing every instance of ‘knew’ with ‘fuck.’ “And Abraham came unto Sarah and fucked her…” Gonzo scripture, baby. Everything changes where charged language is concerned.
This asymmetry, the lightness of the ink versus the heaviness of the meaning, explains the inevitability of censorship, as well as its attraction. It’s powerful stuff: all you need is a Sharpie and you can black out whole swathes of the world. The beautiful is rendered ugly, and the ugly, beautiful. It’s just too damn easy not to be utilized. As any parent who spells words rather than speaking them knows, there’s nothing like managed ignorance to keep a child on task.
Which brings me to my point: the good and the bad of it depends on the task. The question of removing ‘nigger’ from Huck Finn, I think, ultimately turns on how you define the task of literature. Is it supposed to do, or is supposed to be? If you see literature as a kind of tool, as something to be judged according the utility of its effects, then who cares how you modify the thing, so long as it gets the job done. If you see it as a sacrosanct object, as quasi-scriptural, then modification becomes sacrilege. What? Change the Prophet’s words?
(I can’t help but pause and think just how gnarly all the competing intuitions are: purity, utility, respect, courage, pollution, embarrassment, guilt… And here I am, trying to dress them up with ‘reasons’ like everyone else!)
“Believe!” the blockbuster cries. “Believe!” the commercial whispers. “Believe!” the schoolteacher smiles. Self-deception has become our greatest cultural good, and in an age when we can least afford it. Given my commitment to cultural triage, I’m inclined to chuck principle, and to say that anything that gets more kids reading Huck Finn is a good thing–if this indeed is the consequence. There’s plenty of gristle to chew on, otherwise. The original is always there.
And anything that popularizes Twain, the Great Sage of Human Stupidity, is even better.
Otherwise, I find myself wondering what Twain himself would think. As hard as he’s laughing at all the semantic hygienists, my guess is that a part of him would be both heartened and honoured. Heartened that things have changed so much as to make an international issue of the role language plays in bigotry, and honoured that after all this time we’re still paying so much attention to an old fool such as him.
Ultimately, his genius was to write books that show us for the tender idiots we are.
Again and again and again.
Three Pound Brain 
This was a great read. During my time in an experimental psychology lab we dealt with proof that words, even if they were just words, tangibly and involuntarily altered meaning. Utter the word ‘nigger’ to a black person (actually, just remind them of their race by having them fill out a simple form) just before they took an intelligence test and their score would drop. Remind a white man of his race before he stepped on to the court and he would (unconsciously, involuntarily) jump a little lower when he took his shots.
Words can impact us on levels we can’t control and don’t always intend. I’m sure you’re familiar with this research given the content of Neuropath, but it’s something 99% of the population either doesn’t understand or violently rejects.
Buh, by ‘meaning’ I meant ‘behavior’. The whole phenomena is called stereotype threat and is pretty fascinating.
Does that mean that any time someone reminds me that I’m hispanic I’m going to feel a little sleepy and yearn for a siesta? I’ll remember that next time I have insomnia.
Reading this reminded me of some of your points from the segments involving Kellhus teaching Esmenet about scripture from The Warrior Prophet.
I believe a word’s offensiveness depends entirely on the situational context, like the bit where you mention some deep south raised students felt the word ‘nigger’, when spoken by them, didn’t mean anything. To them, and among their families, it likely means very little. Add just one person to the conversation that does believe it means something, and it’s meaning is changed for everyone present.
It’s surely one of the most purely ‘offensive words’ in our language, but it’s not nearly as potent as it would have been in 1870, and it will be even less so in 2150.
I argued that what they thought they meant had precious little to with anything. Words were social and historical–and most importantly, bearers of value. In other words, words were huge, and some were larger than others. ‘Nigger,’ I suggested, was about as big as they come.
Jeez, didn’t you have a post awhile back about readerly fallacies, where the person confuses their psychological reaction to an object for being a physically inherent quality of the object? And here you are, trying to say sound waves are social and historical?
I don’t know if you’ve changed your policy since then. But it’s a great example of the sort of bullying people come up with – it’s not like THEY are asserting the word means something (which would be disarmed by simply saying that’s their assertion/opinion/etc), it’s that the word just magically means something all by itself. Armed with this ‘authority’ who can’t be questioned for not fucking existing, who the fuck doesn’t become the power who be? All it takes is that slightly manic, crazed zeal of voice ‘it’s social and historic!‘ and additionaly at an animal level the other person becomes too scared to argue. Because the animal level is probably the more asstute in this case. It doesn’t register some greater meaning, it just thinks this guy is nuts, and he’s stuck in my social group/I’m stuck in his social group.
Or if you’ve decided that’s the case already – I dunno. Maybe you were being subtle in saying it – from my side, I just dunno. Though your still calling ‘nigger’ a monsterously huge bearer of something.
It is just a word being taken out. A particular media configuration being taken out. There, I said what can’t be said.
I realise I have this urge to explain my policy on whether it would or not. And by explain I mean explain and be understood – though I realise if the other party does not deign to understand, I’ll keep trying to explain until either they crack to my policy or I crack to their policy.
So instead of lurching into that abyss, I’ll just horribly say it’s just a word. A media configuration. Ink. Dark pixels. Sound waves.
Is it supposed to do, or is supposed to be?
Or one step even earlier; is it an it at all?
I think our brains are so used to dealing with physical things, if we deal with an arrangement between humans long enough, we start to treat the arrangement, which is merely supported (if at all) by the humans involved motives, as an ‘it’, like something there exists beyond merely the currently held motives (weddings are an example of that). Maybe not saying anything new to you there, but hey.
The mild feelings that accompany your presumption have no bearing on the mildness of your presumptions.
Bit dodge the phrasing there? The person who hears it, how they hear it has no bearing on whether it was a mild assumption in the speaker, either? Two parties have no bearing on the matter here, not just one.
“And Abraham came unto Sarah and fucked her…”
Jeez, that porno’s got it in the wrong order…Bocx wouldn’t approve…
Damn right, Callan. The difference between euphemizing Twain and replacing “knew” with “fuck” in the Bible is that “fuck” would be closer to what the Bible’s writers meant than “knew,” whereas euphemizing Twain would be a pointed and deliberate perversion of his meaning. If I fixed Prince of Nothing so that mommies were more comfy with it, more kids might read your book, Bakker… but then it would no longer be the book you wrote, would it? Habeas fuckin’ grippus, white man.
Wow Scott — a very impressive blog entry. I had a knee-jerk reaction the moment I heard of the edition (“no way man!”…), and before I finished your entry I went and read a little of what the editor had to say about why he would presume such a thing. Then I finished your entry, and now I must admit that it’s not as simple as I thought. I still don’t LIKE it, but yeah, the original is always there. And it’s true that many kids who would never be exposed to it at all will in fact get a chance to read it in school — and if this change helps that happen, is that a bad thing?
Will they note they made a change, somewhere in the book? Like near the front or such?
If they don’t, it doesn’t matter if there’s the original somewhere. The person will never be aware they are reading a modified copy, to go look for the original. They will assume they are reading the original. Which is a lie.
If they do note it, I’d be interested in the language used. I’d guess some sort of phrasing like ‘modernised’ will be used, which is so ill informative as to simply not inform.
The irony is, I guess, unless they say nigger, as in ‘from the original, we switched nigger to slave’, then they can’t change without simply slipping a lie in. You either say the ‘N-word’, and thus presumably screw up the goal of PC cleansing the book, or you don’t say nigger and the person reading it is uninformed of the change made, and those that present this as ‘Huck Finn’, as in the verbatim body of text, present a lie.
Or maybe they wont try to hide behind words like modernisation or such and say they changed a word used, but wont specify. Which perpetuates WTF rather than a lie. But what’s new?
And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may fuck them. (Gen 19:5)
More ‘coming/came’ there…it actually starts to make sense as a porno…
Censorship issues aside, you come to realize how much power lies within a word when other words that merely resemble the one in question find themselves being edited out of your writing. I work in the localization division of a Japanese video game company, and was recently asked by our North American publishers to remove an occurrence of the word “niggardly” from my submission, on the grounds that they did not want to have to deal with the barrage of complaints which would have eventually rolled in (supposedly the word’s appearance in a previous game had provoked the ire of parents across the US). Even though I had “facts” on my side (niggardly being a much older word than nigger, with completely different etymological roots), I was defeated by emotion–emotion instilled by a single word.
Sorry if that was a bit off-track. I’m new to this.
Seems dead on to me. Even worse is when the original text is not released at all, only the cleansed version. A second, un-named author speaking to people under the guise of the named authors.
If the goal in having schoolkids read Huck Finn is to TEACH them something, than I hope regardless of whether the word “nigger” is excised from the text or not, teachers use the controversy as a way to explore the racial and social issues associated both in the time period of the novel and in present-day.