“No one teaches Mark Twain any more for fear of losing their job.” Far from being in crisis, ‘woke’ has become common sense

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a Mark Twain scholar and lecturer at Stanford, compares Huckleberry Finn to fugu, the Japanese fish containing a deadly neurotoxin in its internal organs, which makes it potentially lethal to eat unless it is gutted and filleted by highly specialised chefs with a special licence. “If prepared properly, it’s phenomenal; otherwise, it can be toxic.” Far from being in crisis: ‘woke’ has become common sense. Not because it waves flags or occupies squares, but because it has won the quietest and most effective war – the one over the Canon. It doesn’t need to burn books. All that is needed is for no one to teach them anymore. All you need to do is read a long essay in the New York Times by Ruth Franklin, literary critic and biographer, author of The Many Lives of Anne Frank.

It tells the story of the disappearance of a classic of American and Western literature. Until a few years ago, Huckleberry Finn ranked third in a national survey of the works most frequently taught in American secondary schools. In a recent survey conducted by the National Council of Teachers of English, only 77 out of 4,000 teachers now cited it as a book they use. It did not disappear because of a ban. It has simply vanished. Mark Twain is no longer widely read. This is not because the story of a white boy and a black slave travelling down the Mississippi on a raft is not a great novel (“Before Twain there was nothing; since then there has been nothing as good,” said Ernest Hemingway). It is because the book contains the word “negro”. Not as a racial slur: it’s a book from the mid-19th century and Twain was an abolitionist, but that was the language of the time.

Alan Gribben noticed that his students tended to skip classes when he taught the novel. He decided to create a new edition in which he replaced ‘Negro’ with the word ‘slave’. When the revised edition of Huck Finn was first announced in 2011, it came under fierce criticism. Twain’s biographer Ron Powers accused him of having ‘gutted’ a classic. Huckleberry Finn is banned by school boards in at least twelve states. At the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, the book occupies a central place on a shelf of banned books, literally displayed inside a cage.

According to The New York Times, schools and teachers now say that “the book is less often formally removed from the curriculum than simply set aside by overworked teachers, who lack the intellectual energy required to tackle a text widely regarded as toxic and who fear that a mistake could cost them their jobs”. Thus, Huckleberry Finn is “dying a silent death”. There is no need to refute offensive classics. It is enough simply to quarantine them. And in the world of culture, quarantine is a final verdict.