I just read William Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun”. It’s an odd book – a combination three act play, with extensive prose introductions of each act providing a stream of consciousness history of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, Faulkner’s imaginary country which is the site of much of his writing. The play (a sequel to his earlier novel “Sanctuary”) involves the strange tale of a bad marriage (with an interesting, and disgusting, back story), which results in two children. The couple hire a Black mother’s helper (with a rather sordid back story of her own), who recognizes that her employer’s main problem is her six month old child, and for this reason she cannot leave her marriage. To “help her out”, she smothers the child, and is convicted of murder. The mother is aghast, but wants the murderer forgiven and her death sentence curtailed.

OK, that’s that. And that’s not what I am writing about. I am writing about Faulkner’s use of the “n-word” throughout the book – not in his narrative, but in the dialogue that appears in the play. I am sure that, if this fantastic sounding story were to have actually happened, this would have been how the characters would have been talking.

My questions, of course, are: Should this book be banned? Should it continue to be published, read and possibly even discussed in literature or theater classes, and if so at what level? Should it be edited, replacing the “n-word” with something more accepted?

This came to my attention once again this morning is a front page New York Times article, “Readers Torn by Push to Revise Classics for Modern Sensibilities”, with references to Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Mark Twain, Ursula LeGuin and Dr. Seuss. Do you rewrite books so that offensive words won’t be read?

It isn’t that different, is it, than certain other of today’s trends? Do you destroy statues of Confederates or which honor dead Confederate soldiers? Do you take names off academic buildings, because the names relate to people who owned slaves? And so forth.

One of the facets of western society today that is striking to me is our willingness to avoid dealing with important problems (of which there are many) and our willingness to spend untold hours and energy dealing with relatively unimportant matters. Not that these are totally unimportant, but related to climate change, nuclear threats, etc., they clearly rank lower.

My own position is pretty straight forward: as to the books, don’t change anything. Whatever was written must be viewed as of the time when it was written, and not rewritten to make things more acceptable today. This is all part of understanding and coming to grips with history. I think we can all deal with this.

Look at the title of this post. Look at the author of this post (that would be me). After stating unequivocally that we can deal with leaving things as they are, it looks like I may give myself very good advice, but clearly I don’t all the time take it. That is worthy of an entirely different discussion.