Huckleberry Finn: Liberty with language

• History lessons: The new edition of NewSouth Books' version of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn

Yet Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn has been a source of outrage and hostility from the day it was published 125 years ago. Banned almost immediately by the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts as "the veriest trash, suitable only for the slum", it was criticised at first on the grounds that Huck's wilful behaviour sent out the wrong message to young people and then, as sensibilities changed, for perceived racism in its depiction of Jim and its use of the word "n****r".

Now the book is once again at the centre of a controversy. Last week NewSouth Books announced a new edition of Huckleberry Finn was to be published with the N word, which appears 219 times, replaced by the word "slave". The aim, claims Professor Alan Gribben, head of the English department at Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama, who is behind the initiative, is to make sure young people keep reading it.

Some literary experts claim the book, once required reading in 70 per cent of US high schools, was being shunned because black pupils were offended by the use of the offensive epithet and that teachers were embarrassed to use it."My daughter went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it," Gribben said.

Then, while giving readings of the books across Alabama, he was approached by teachers who told them they would love to teach the book, but felt the use of the N word was not appropriate in a modern classroom.

His decision, however, has been branded a travesty by devotees who say Twain was vehemently anti-slavery and was using the language of the time to demonstrate the mindset of contemporary society.

They point out that many black writers, including the late Ralph Whiley, who once wrote that "there is not one use of (the N word] in Huck Finn that I consider inauthentic", have been inspired by the book. "This is a terrible idea because it whitewashes the history of racism that is embodied in the offensive epithet," says Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a Twain expert and author of the book Was Huck Black? "The book requires readers to confront the racism that was part of its past and part of its present. Changing that word does not change the history but makes it more palatable in a way that is not at all helpful or good."

The argument has caused a furore in the US and elsewhere.

Film critic Roger Ebert was forced to apologise after his remark that he would prefer to be a called a n****r than a slave was met by disbelief and anger, with many suggesting that as a white man he had no idea what he was talking about. "You know, this is very true. I'll never be called a n****r or a slave, so I should have shut the f*** up," he tweeted later.

The intensity of the debate shows how much power the word, which aided the subjugation of black people in the US by portraying them as inferior, still holds.

So offensive is it deemed, particularly when uttered by a white person, that it has been almost entirely expunged from the mainstream media. Throughout the OJ Simpson trial, it was referred to as "the N word" or "the N bomb".

Indeed, even writing this article presented a dilemma, as it is has long been the editorial policy of Scotland on Sunday that the word be printed with asterisks, one of only three words that fall into that category, the others being two commonly used swear words.

Some black people, particularly rappers such as the band NWA (N****** With Attitude), have tried to reappropriate the word, using it as a term of camaraderie, while the comedian Chris Rock famously used it as a slur against a certain section of the black community which he perceived as detrimental to the image of African-Americans as a whole.

Others, however, feel the word can never be stripped of its offensive connotations and should be excised from the language.

So is Gribben right to strip the word out of Huckleberry Finn in the hope this will allow the book to be enjoyed by a new generation? Or is tampering with the text of a man who once said "the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug" an act of literary vandalism which deprives students of an opportunity to confront their country's past?

Ever since Thomas Bowdler "edited" the works of Shakespeare - excising the raunchy bits to make them more "suitable" for women and children - self-appointed moral guardians have been toning down books deemed too risque or politically incorrect.

During the prohibition, attempts were made to eliminate all references to alcohol in the Bible (thus Jesus turned the water into grape juice).

Abridged versions of the Grapes of Wrath are often taught in US schools, with the last scene, where Rose breastfeeds a starving man, omitted. A page of Roger Hargreaves' Mr Silly in which the eponymous hero meets a pig with a cigar was redrawn because it was felt it might encourage smoking.

And though when Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published, the Oompa Loompas were a pygmy tribe from Africa, Dahl bowed to pressure and changed the text so they were merely little people from Oompa-land.

Several of Enid Blyton's books have been altered: Golliwogs were turned into teddy bears or goblins and the story of The Little Black Doll (who wanted to be pink) was turned on its head. A few classics, including Rudyard Kipling's How the Leopard Got Its Spots, have had the N word removed.

What makes Huckleberry Finn so controversial, however, is that there the N word is neither being used maliciously by a racist nor inadvertently by someone who doesn't understand it will cause offence - but deliberately in an attempt to portray the entrenched racism of the time.

That Huckleberry Finn continues to cause Afro-Americans distress is indisputable. In an article entitled "Huck Finn: Two Generations of Pain" Margo Allen described her negative experiences with it: "I need not tell you that I hated the book! Yet, while we read it, I pretended that it didn't bother me. I hid, from my teacher and my classmates, the tension, discomfort and hurt I would feel every time I heard that word or watched the class laugh at Jim," she wrote.

Because it has this potential, former children's laureate Michael Rosen has some sympathy with Gribben's aims. Pointing out that what children read in the classroom has always been controlled by schools, Rosen - the author of books such as We're Going on a Bear Hunt - says the new edition might work so long as the changes are set in context.

"It's very difficult because the American experience is so different to our own," he says. " The word was used so oppressively in the States and they experienced the colour bar. The word is like a red light. You would never be able to teach a book in schools with the F word or C word here, and this is the equivalent of a swear word. People in this country don't [always] understand it was a word connected with lynchings, an obscene word, so I do sympathise. I just hope that in the new edition, he [Gribben] reveals his hand; that he explains in a preface or whatever, that whenever the word slave appears, Mark Twain used the word n****r. What I don't like is people tampering with books and not saying why they have done it."

When Matt Haig, author of the vampire novel The Radleys, published his children's book Shadow Forest in the US, he was put under pressure to change a section involving rabbits who believed they were heading for the promised land, but were in fact destined for a chopping block owned by a troll, because it was feared it might offend religious sensibilities.

"I did the bare minimum of changes, but at least it was allowed to be at the author's discretion. I think it's a different issue after the author has died to go into their work and start editing it," Haig says.

"What I feel instinctively about Huckleberry Finn is that those words should stay. If you judge every work in the past by the values of the present then very few hold up because obviously in an age where slavery was still there, in an age where women didn't have votes, the values are always going to be different. As soon as you take anything out of a classic it's almost like playing literary jenga. You could be taking out bits that alter the rhythm of the prose or anything and it wouldn't work."

Benjamin Zephaniah, the British- Jamaican Rastafarian poet and author of teenage books including Face and Gangsta Rap, doesn't believe n****r can be reappropriated as a term of camaraderie, but says that if an author is using it in the context of portraying a racist society, then it's valid. "What bothers me is that I did something with the BBC not so long ago and they wouldn't let me say n****r, I had to say "the N word". I thought it was really strange as a black person struggling for years and years trying to get white people to stop calling me n****r that now I wanted to use the word in context I had white people telling me I couldn't use it," he adds.

In the US, Gribben continues to be vilified for trying to make Huck Finn more classroom friendly, with Twain experts out in force to insist his original text should stand.

"Huckleberry Finn is a very challenging book to teach, and if teachers are not prepared to engage in the history of racism in America then they probably shouldn't teach it," says Fishkin. "But I think a better strategy than bowdlerisation is to give teachers the tools to teach it effectively. For the last three decades I have been involved in doing that."

Worst of all, she believes, editing out the N word patronises teenagers who are quite capable of understanding the way Twain uses his narrator to criticise, rather than endorse, slavery.

Way back in the Eighties, I was debating a man who wanted to ban Huck Finn from being taught in high schools on a call-in programme, and a young black girl from South Carolina said to him: 'You are insulting my intelligence saying I can't understand the use of irony.' She was right. Students have no trouble understanding the difference between the character's voice and the author's and it is a marvellous opportunity to get them to think about how literature works and how history transpired."