Culture Shock/Fintan O'Toole:The whole notion of cleaning up artworks to remove 'offensive' words or images betrays a deep cultural illiteracy
Here is a triply offensive sentence: "Keep the lash knotted; keep the brand and the faggots in waiting, for prompt work with the next 'nigger' who may be suspected of any damnable crime!" It contains two appallingly insulting words. "Faggot" is, as we were reminded when the BBC briefly deleted the word from the Pogues' Fairytale of New York before Christmas, a term of abuse directed at any man suspected of being gay. "Nigger" is a deliberate denigration of a large swathe of humanity. And the whole sentence is clearly an exhortation to racist violence. So should it be censored? No. The use of "faggots" here reminds us, for a start, that words have no fixed relation to concepts - here it clearly refers to small sticks. The use of "nigger" is intended by the author (Mark Twain, writing in the Buffalo Express in 1869) to tell us much more about the people who carry out lynchings than about the victims of such crimes. And the context of the sentence is a bitterly sardonic reflection on lynching itself. Context, in art and literature, isn't incidental. Art is context, and the whole notion of cleaning up artworks to remove "offensive" words or images betrays a deep cultural illiteracy.
It's easier to say this, of course, if you don't belong to a minority that is on the receiving end of the insults. We need to recognise that words can wound even when they are not intended to do so.
To stick with Twain for the moment, his novel Huckleberry Finn is one of the great anti-racist works of art. Huck's decision to contravene the morality of the society in which he lives and help the slave Jim to escape is much more moving and meaningful because Huck himself accepts those racist standards. If Twain did not give us a racist society, complete with its language and assumptions, the novel would have none of its moral and aesthetic power. That language includes, of necessity, the repeated use of the word "nigger".
It is not as if Twain does not know that the word is dehumanising. On the contrary, it is that very knowledge that makes its use so potent. To take one small example, Aunt Sally is told at one point of a steamboat explosion. "Good gracious! anybody hurt?" she asks. "No'm," comes the answer. "Killed a nigger." A "nigger" is nobody. The word is used, not innocently, but with the full intent of obliterating the humanity of people of colour. It is precisely as offensive as it ought to be.
This is not to say that the book's language might not be deeply uncomfortable for black people. Repeated, and sometimes successful, calls in the US for Huckleberry Finn to be removed from classrooms or for the word "nigger" to be deleted from the text don't come from nowhere. I got some sense of this when my children were small and I started to read them a children's classic that is regarded in England as a warmly innocent fantasy, Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies. I had to stop because it is full of the most vile anti-Irish imagery.
There's the fisherman Dennis, who always tells his masters pleasant lies "but, instead of being angry with him, you must remember that he is a poor Paddy, and knows no better". There's the "wild Irish" who "would not learn to be peaceable Christians" but prefer to "brew potheen . . . and knock each other over the head with shillelaghs, and shoot each other from behind turf-dykes". There's the ape-like Doasyoulikes, a thinly veiled metaphor for the Irish, whose ugliness is explained by their diet, for "when people live on poor vegetables instead of roast beef and plum-pudding, their jaws grow large, and their lips grow coarse, like the poor Paddies who eat potatoes".
English readers presumably drift over this stuff. To us, it is not just deeply racist but also, written as it is in the context of the Famine, a horrific exultation in our greatest human disaster.
If Kingsley helps us to understand the reactions of some black people to Twain, he also presents a much harder case in relation to the kind of retrospective censorship that the BBC tried to impose on Fairytale of New York. These three examples in fact give us a kind of ascending scale of ultimate insult. Twain uses racist language in the context of a great and anti-racist work of art. Shane MacGowan uses insults like "faggot" and "slut" precisely in the context of a narrative in which two people are insulting each other, as the kind of words they really would use. But Kingsley uses racist language and concepts in a proudly racist book. Neither the ultimate purpose of the work, nor the need to be convincingly realistic, justify the kind of insult that The Water-Babies contains.
Should Kingsley's book then be cleaned up by editing out the anti-Irish slurs? I think not. Those slurs actually draw attention to the racist ideology of Social Darwinism that underpins Kingsley's narrative. Without them, the book merely becomes more subtly and effectively nasty. I stopped reading it to my kids as an innocent fantasy and started reading it for myself as a gripping expression of a particular ideological pathology. That, I would suggest, is the best way to deal with genuinely offensive art.