Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s “1984, is charged with rewriting (really falsifying) history to conform to Party doctrine. This is what Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben is doing in rewriting “Tom Sawyer” and especially “Huckleberry Finn”. He is replacing the N-word with “slave”, thus taking the text away from Twain and misinforming a whole generation of students. First of all, everyone knows what the N-word stands for and is really too antediluvian to be used by anyone today. But Twain was writing in 1885 before immigration and before any racial sophistication. This guy Gribben also changed the name of the villain in Tom Sawyer from “Injun Joe” to Indian Joe. When Smith found some bit of information that annoyed the Party, his job was to toss it down the “memory hole” for permanent destruction. His girlfriend Julia works for Pornosec, a division of the Ministry of Truth which provides “literature” of a sort for the Proles. Her novels are written by machine , and have only six possible plots which are shuffled around to distract the readers. “We’ll let the readers decide,” Gribben said. Actually I’ve just emailed him with my suggestion for another offensive book: Joseph Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus”.
How about “ African-American of a ship that is overly vain”. Let the readers decide.
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