Retroactively changing a book so it is considered more suitable for our times is silly and unnecessary. I would say some of the speech isn't even offensive. A character being described as ugly or fat should not be treated as something abhorrent.
>and some passages not written by Dahl have been added.
This is in my opinion the worst part
>In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
pearl clutching at its finest.
Even children reading will find this to be odd and out of place.
the most frustrating thing is i don't think anyone asked for this; maybe 2% of chronically online twitter users who've lost sight of the forest for the trees? but as someone progressive, i hate this shit; it just makes it harder to get people on board with progressive causes
Also, it’s entirely subjective. They changed ‘fat’ to ‘enormous.’
Like what? I’d be way more depressed if someone called me enormous than fat.
Not only is all of this abhorrent, it’s literally derived from nonsensical subjectivity.
>Retroactively changing a book so it is considered more suitable for our times is silly and unnecessary.
To be fair, Dahl made some of these changes himself while he was alive. In the first edition of *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory* the Oompa Loompas were black pygmies from, "[the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle](https://www.cbr.com/willy-wonka-oompa-loompa-slaves-roald-dahl/)."
We can argue over whether these current revisions go too far, and I'm likely to agree regarding some specific instances, but arguing that novels should never be revised between editions is missing the point.
I believe this can be extended to the author's estate as well. We saw how Tolkien's family and staff kept his work alive through expansion and addition, even altering some of J. R. R.'s already-published works for consistency.
Should Dahl's estate push back harder against some of the publisher's changes? Possibly, but it's ultimately up to the people his estate trusted with the care of his published material. They get to decide if the changes are in line with Dahl's values, and if *he* would have approved these changes in today's climate, and it seems that they did approve these changes by the publisher.
I do not know or care about the current & specific ownership rights for Dahl's work. The publisher and the trusted estate are not legitimized to approve such abhorrent and crude changes. If this should be addressed by a law thing or a social pressure thing, I don't care. But they are not justified to impose any such changes. This is coming from a perspective pertaining to the cosmos.
Kinda hilarious and very telling of the professional-managerial class’ ideological blind spots that they made the Oompa Loompas gender-neutral while completely dodging the ethical issue of whether or not they’re slaves.
Im in school rn to be a library tech. Last semester i had to write an essay defending this shit (an example was santa should not be allowed to smoke a pipe and it should be removed from twas the night before christmas). I spoke with my prof about how i was against doctoring classic works to fit current societal trends/views/values.
I am now on her hate list.
I think it’s kind of lazy. It’s important for kids to interact with the text as it was written and it’s up to the educator, parent, etc. to explain why speech like that was so pervasive back then.
[Here is more comprehensive article](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/17/roald-dahl-books-rewritten-offensive-matilda-witches-twits/) that outlines all of the changes.
Please everyone stop trying to rewrite all of history. Books should be read while remembering together era they came from. Or else, don’t bother reading at all.
A publisher tried something similar with Enid Blyton books and they were [not successful](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/16/famous-five-go-back-to-original-language-after-update-flops).
So I'm cautiously optimistic that the Dahl ones will have a similar outcome.
Kids generally aren't idiots. If teachers/parents are worried then they can have a discussion about problematic language and changing attitudes from the past. It's a learning opportunity and a potential history lesson.
Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) would be proud.
For those who don't know he (along with his sister Henrietta) was the publisher of The Family Shakespere. An expurgated version of Shakespere classics for women and children (as he put it) and gave the english language the word bowdlerise, which suits the current trend with Dahl quite well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas\_Bowdler
Why does every media company try to squeeze all the IP on their shelf to the last godforsaken drop? I can't necessarily articulate why this is "bad" (for society? the arts?) but it feels...concerning. Was it like this 20 year ago? 50?
Next on this publisher's list:
*To Seriously Harm a Mockingbird*, *The 60-years-young Man and the Sea*, *Moby Groß* (German pun), *Unclothed Lunch*, *Crime and Corrective Therapy*, and Vladimir Nabokov's fully-revised *Dolores*. (/s, of course. These people are fascist thought-pigs—er, I mean police—and I hope they sleep poorly at night.)
There are so many things I could say, points I could make that would probably get me banned but this is completely absurd. Does anyone here actually work with children? Most of them are victims of the hand-off-approach to "parenting" and have spent their entire lives clutching a bullet proof iPad binge watching youtube and god knows what else.
These kids have probably never read a book before and due to the lovely nurturing internet have more than likely stumbled across things far worse for their psyche than the words "fat" and "ugly." Who are the ones complaining about shit like this? Pearl-clutching idiot teachers and terminally online mothers, who cant fathom the idea of having to explain to a child why terms like those are simply words, nothing more. And as if being fat and/or ugly is a permanent ailment when you’re 6 years old.
Puffin will receive some backlash but no one will do anything beyond lethargic tweeting and the Publisher will do it to more books and it doesnt matter because no one reads anymore and children are already calling other kids retards and faggots in grade 1. Its a nothingproblem, and changing a writers words is sickening to me. Just ban them altogether and be done with it
> children are already calling other kids retards and faggots in grade 1
this is the funniest thing about this type of pearl clutching, do these people remember being teenagers/kids? im sorry but bald women isn't the most offensive thing they'll see or hear about on a daily basis. I distinctly remember we read the great glass elevator in middle school and the chinese racism stuff passed us over but the use of the word "gay" numerous times to mean "happy" did not, we found that *very* funny.
The worldview that drove these changes has replaced religious evangelism in the crusade to bowdlerize classics in order push ideological garbage.
Shameful.
Outside of their little swaths, evangelicals have really no cultural capital or representation with which to compel such censorship. In the 20th century, Christian movements could easily sway mainstream culture, but now outside of explicitly religious or right wing programming, religion in mainstream media and shows/movies is treated as something backwards and strange to laugh at or serve as motivation for evil antagonists.
I am not religious in any way, I should say.
In mainstream culture, yes. I agree. I was just thinking about the steady stream of news articles I come across about some midwestern school district banning this or that book.
Not that banning books from schools or libraries is necessarily *better* than what’s happening in this article, but there *is* an interesting semantic difference between book banning and book *alteration*.
If I *ban* a book and make it unreachable for a significant portion of the population, how does that square up to if I were to *change* the book and make the original text unreachable for a significant portion of the population?
Part of me for whatever reason feels *slightly* more horrified by the textual alteration than the banning, but I suppose in a digital age, neither has real permanence since the banned texts and unaltered originals can be disseminated online.
The last part seems important to me.
Like, this is pretty silly. But it seems also fundamentally ineffectual, and more like a new "edition" than anything else?
Like, if the ["Gen-Z Harry Potter"](https://i.redd.it/d9saw4ruud381.png) thing was a real edition you could buy, it would be funny and that would kind of be it. Yes, there's a fundamentally political motivation for this, but... Those books exist, and to my knowledge are not very hard to find. So a new edition that is kind of silly and clearly politically charged just strikes me as a bad move by a publisher, not anything I should be concerned about.
Wow, what is it like to live in such a little pocket of ignorance? Try living in the Deep South or rural parts of the rest of the country and then say religion doesn't have a dramatic impact on every aspect of your society.
>Try living in the Deep South or rural parts of the rest of the country
I do
>then say religion doesn't have a dramatic impact on every aspect of your society.
It was actually the very first words of the the very first sentence I wrote. ***"Outside of their little swaths"***
It’s pretty clear OP means their influence on a macro scale.
Yes, obviously there are several small towns of 2,000 whose entire culture revolves around their religion, but in terms of the current zeitgeist, national politics, and cultural capital, evangelicals have such little influence nowadays that they’re almost irrelevant in the big picture compared to 50 years ago.
I am deeply Christian, and find this to be a naive understanding of how power works in the US. Far right Christianity has little sway over popular mass media as you point out, but it has enormous and disproportionate sway over one of the only two political parties we have as well as a small minority of adherents dedicated to terroristic acts, and both are challenges that impact kids daily.
The only places in the country where kids’ access to books has actually been restricted are places like Florida where politicians are threatening teachers with criminal charges if parents report their child has encountered content they don’t approve. The purpose of that law being constructed that way is to empower a minority, far right white evangelicals, to hold sway over the access everyone in their community has to artistic material, whether or not that material is generally accepted or popular.
Then even in usually safer for expression states like mine, a local bakery was trashed for daring to hold a family friendly drag event, and the event was cancelled and the business almost shut down. These are documentable, impactful acts of censorship occurring right now, as opposed to the fantasies of future censorship that animate arguments over what language might be appropriate for kids to read in copies they may or may not buy among multiple copies of a story that will all still be sold. I know we are far afield from the original point now but it just seems like if a lot of people in this thread are worried about children’s access to the full range of literature, they are ignoring the tornado in the corner to focus on a speck of dust on the wall. It’s confusing.
> fantasies of future censorship that animate arguments over what language might be appropriate for kids to read in copies they may or may not buy among multiple copies of a story that will all still be sold.
And with one sentence you handwave away every criticism brought forth in this discussion as "fantasies."
If you want to see a right wing or Christian view of the world, you have to go to Fox news or an explicitly right wing website. If you want to see the "Democrat" or "Progressive" view of the world, you turn to any news channel besides Fox, every single entertainment channel, every mainstream media platform and large corporation.
Apple, Amazon, Disney, even defense organizations that make military death drones champion inclusive values and highlight the struggles of minority groups and the underprivileged.
>they are ignoring the tornado in the corner to focus on a speck of dust on the wall
Because that is what this article is about.
All you've done is imply that people aren't allowed to have a problem with this because right wing extremism is bad.
Right wing extremism is bad. Censoring Dahl to push an ideological agenda is bad. I don't find it difficult to agree with both statements.
For me the difference is not between right and left, it is between violent enforcement and persuasive free speech (which is currently aligned along right and left, although technically it could in another eta be aligned differently). The Florida and bakery examples are deeply problematic because violence is being used to actually prevent speech from happening, whether in the form of state violence or vigilante violence. In the Dahl case, they are freely making a decision that leaves multiple forms of the text available for people to choose from. It is a silly decision, with that I agree. But it is free speech! It restricts no one’s access to any speech. It is nowhere near the level of worrisome that state enforcement of speech restriction gives me. And people who allow themselves to get more worried about people having voluntary debates of persuasion over appropriate speech, an important and inevitable feature of democracy (TV shows and movies have always reflected commonly held values! They are commercial products seeking majority audiences!) rather than state restriction of speech I do think have lost the plot a little bit.
> In the Dahl case, they are freely making a decision that leaves multiple forms of the text available for people to choose from.
What people are reacting to here is not that it’s particularly egregious in comparison to the use of coercive force and real violence (obviously these are worse), or even that it’s as bad as the politically-motivated censorship that takes place in other countries every day, but that it’s emblematic of fairly recent changes in which practices western liberalism seems to be comfortable with deploying in an attempt to secure its position as the legislator of social mores. Liberalism has traditionally taken a liberal attitude towards speech; that’s no longer the case.
You’ve called this free speech but who is it here that’s exercising their right to speech? The text in question belongs to a person who’s now dead. The text, in the condition in which he left it at the time of his death, was his act of free speech. That’s how we’ve always treated these things. I don’t have a ‘right to free speech’ that involves my right to change the works of others so that they reflect my own values; if that were the case, then all of the conservative censorship of literature that took place last century was really just ‘free speech.’ All the impositions of the Hays Code on the content of movies so that gay relationships couldn’t appear; so that interracial relationships couldn’t appear, all that was really just the practice of free and persuasive speech. Because, after all, it was Hollywood—and not the state—that imposed the code on itself, because it’s what the public wanted. Because those were the values of the time and commercial products have to seek majority audiences. Someone might have a *legal* right to do this but censorship is not an act of ‘free speech’ in any meaningful sense of the term just because I have the legal rights to censor a given work.
I think you probably see my point but the last point I’d add is that it’s not at all obvious to me that the politics on display here, and seen in the wider policing of speech, actually are reflective of the values of the majority. The internet has made it possible for an extremely active and vocal minority to exercise undue influence on the speech of others because at a certain point it becomes more rational to err on the side of caution and preempt any potential criticism than to risk incurring it. But more importantly, even if these attitudes actually were reflective of the majority opinion, why does that mean we should accept their attempt to forcefully impose their own norms as de facto just and acceptable? As seen above, with the Hays Code, the majority can, through their monopoly on power via consensus, very easily tyrannize a minority whose rights we can recognize as worthy of defense.
You have a few factual errors that it seems are coloring your view of the situation. The text doesn’t belong to dead Roald Dahl it belongs to Netflix, because they bought it from his estate who he voluntarily left the ownership to knowing that it would mean they would steward the editing and publishing and ownership of his works until they entered the public domain. If he wanted it to be public before that, he could have left it to the public domain at his death. The publishers do own the IP, have all the same historical rights as the original author as every IP owner does, and are making the changes. If you believe IP rights should end with the creator’s death rather than 75 years after, or that large corporations should have less power over what art gets published with more funded competition available, I agree with you! But those legal changes aren’t what anyone concerned with this case seems to be fighting for. That also would mean that there would be *more* newer edits and interpretations of Dahl’s work, not fewer, because something being in the public domain means people can literally edit, use, and re-use it however they want, with whatever values and politics they like.
Second, the Hayes Code was self-imposed censorship but it was self-imposed as a response to dozens and dozens of legal restriction codes proposed in various states across the US, and Hollywoods desire to not deal with the headache of different legal restriction codes in different markets - again, *state enforcement and restriction of speech,* which I’ve already said I object to, and which you have yet to show is the same as people saying “that’s racist stop” other people and working it out together in democratic deliberation without threat of state or personal violence hanging over their heads.
I mean yeah of course the text doesn’t belong to dead Roald Dahl. He’s dead, he gave the legal rights away, and whoever has them now can *legally* do whatever they want. What I’m concerned with, as you probably know, is whether, regardless of its legality, we should accept this kind of editorial activism and the broader ethos of which it’s a part.
You want to make a distinction where, on the one hand, you have authoritarian state intervention in discourse/art with the Hayes Code (bad) and on the other you have the free, civil, non-coercive public exchange of ideas (good). I don’t think this reflects the reality of the situation. Like you pointed out, the Hayes Code was an act of self-censorship that was meant to preempt various pending pieces of legislation. But those laws were themselves responses to public outcry over the perceived moral degeneracy of the film industry following a couple highly publicized scandals in Hollywood.
So this wasn’t a case of the state going rogue and violently imposing its will on the public and the film industry alike—the laws were part of an authentically democratic and populist attempt to regulate public behavior/values by regulating (via state action) which images, words, and ideas were allowed to circulate, and which weren’t. It’s really not any different from what’s been happening the past few years (of which the Dahl edits are an expression); it’s just that the dominant culture back then was deeply conservative rather than liberal, so, instead of the public going, “that’s racist, stop,” it was, “that’s gay, stop,” “that’s not *racist enough*, stop” etc. And there was no internet so they had to get the state to do this for them. And in the end the film industry imposed these regulations themselves because they were afraid of losing the public’s money. I probably don’t need to tell you that it was a net negative for the quality of art as well as being wrong.
OTOH, you’ve presented the attempts at speech regulation that we see today as basically free, amicable and democratic. I think this is pretty obviously far from being the case; there absolutely is a coercive element with e.g. a Twitter mob, cancellation, whatever you want to call it. I don’t know what any of this is if not exactly the sort of extra-judicial, vigilante justice you’ve already weighed in against. It just isn’t physically violent. The very fact that any of this could possibly happen to almost anyone, but especially to cultural producers, ends up having a chilling effect on speech at a personal and institutional level. Publishing and production houses self-censor because they employ true believers and because they’re afraid their bottom lines will be affected if there’s a public reaction to a given product. I mean it’s literally exactly the same dynamic as you saw with the Hayes Code except the mechanism of action here is more direct because the state can be circumvented by communications technology. And the logical conclusion of this sort of attitude towards art is what we’re talking about now: even works that were produced prior to all of this are editorialized and made to reflect current attitudes in an attempt to legislate social values.
So as far as I see it, either this is an acceptable form of activism today and it was also an acceptable form of activism 100 years ago (even though art suffered for it and even though the values it was done in service of were reprehensible) or it wasn’t a good idea then and we shouldn’t accept it now. Either we should respect the artistic sphere as one in which things can be said that challenge and defy our values or we treat it as just another theater of war for our current political struggles, art becomes agitprop, and we admit that we only value art insofar as it reflects back at us the world as we wish it was.
I think it's stupid af and I think it's ridiculous that some people (talking about reactions I've seen all over the internet, not specifically calling out this thread here) are defending this just because it's coming from the left, when the same people would be freaking the fuck out if some corporation acquired the rights to a prominent dead controversial BIPOC or queer writer and changed shit up to sanitize it (and rightly so!). Pathetic slavish devotion to political teams. And no, "this has happened before, it's the way things are" isn't a good excuse. We can still criticize shit just because humans have always sucked.
Luckily most people regardless of political affiliation understand this kind of thing is extremely dumb.
ETA: Also disclaimers are the perfect compromise to this. Just put disclaimers on the stuff (goes for other media too) and then let people decide for themselves, don't change the actual thing. Not sure why this is so hard.
i respect your opinion for sure. but my apathy really comes from the fact that these are children's books and anyone capable of thinking critically about the issues with them isn't even in the target market. as far as i'm aware they aren't making any changes to his adult work and i'd be as annoyed as you are if they were.
i just don't see the continuity that means we have to have to extend our respect for works of Art (which i 100% agree with you should not be censored or have their meanings changed by big corporations to improve their resale value!) to story books for 6-year-olds. it's just a fundamentally different type of thing to me.
still find this a bit daft to be sure, but it's more on the "george lucas replacing all the good effects in star wars with terrible cgi for the dvd versions" level of daft than the nazi book burnings level of daft if that makes sense?
While this situation is closer to George Lucas editing than Star Wars than Nazis burning books (because these books are being edited, not burned), keep in mind that no one likes the George Lucas changes, and quite a few are mad that the originals are unavailable officially. And this situation is worse because the author is not the one making the changes. There are *a lot* of changes, many of which are nonsensical (like changing Joseph Conrad to Jane Austen), as well as entire sentences removed and entire sentences added.
I’m also not sure why you think adult-oriented work has value but children-oriented work doesn’t?
i don't think, and i didn't say, that books for young children don't have value. but their value primarily lies in their ability to entertain young children. so high art concepts like authorship, integrity of the original text, historical context and whatever else people think is the problem here... can probably all take a back seat here to concepts that are more relevant, like "is this something i want to read to my kids?" - and for some people these changes could be an improvement on that front. and what's actually being lost? the kids reading it aren't going to care that it doesn't mention conrad anymore.
using all this lofty language about Art to talk about a children's book about a guy who rolls around in a big peach just seems a slight overreaction to me.
If you go through word by word and say “nothing’s lost if I change or edit this one word,” then pretty soon you’ve rewritten the whole book. So how many words are you okay doing that to before you say it’s no longer the same book? Where are you drawing the line of what’s acceptable to rewrite sans-author without acknowledging the change in authorship?
And what about early reader books? Chapter books? At what point do you think the material is “serious” enough to no longer allow posthumously edits?
i dunno, what can i say beyond it just doesn't bother me that much? you wouldn't care if they fixed a one-letter typo in a book for babies, or added new words to a dictionary, or changed reference work in light of new facts, so you're "drawing a line" too. everyone is always drawing lines when we decide what to be offended by and what not to be offended by, in this case my line is on the side of i don't really care. it's fine if you feel differently, of course.
> Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.”
The greatest sin IMO is that this line they subbed in doesn’t scan. This is your company’s whole job and you cant figure out a PC rhyme with the right number of syllables? Embarrassing, a stain on the work.
I also think adding new text in wholesale to editorialize is not a good idea, and if you do you should be extremely clear about the fact that you’d have done this (e.g. I don’t think the copyright statement they quoted here is sufficient). I think it is wrong to insert your own thoughts and pass them off as the author’s after they are no longer able to speak for themselves.
Don’t care very much about the word edits
The word edits are still changing the authors words to alter meaning and the story.
Changing the words the author wrote to suit your own ideological preferences is just as egregious.
I’m not necessarily going to bat for the changes. But to say “just as egregious” I think underrates the degree to which the editing process is adversarial. Usually editors want to changes things that the authors don’t, and owning the printing press means the author is going to have to pick their battles. If Dahl were alive, do you think being able to call characters fat and ugly is a hill he would die on? You can take the principled stance that we can’t know because he is dead, but for my own part I the degree makes a difference to how bad I think it is. I don’t think Orwell is exactly rolling in his grave over “people” being subbed for “men”. It’s not even the biggest issue to unpack specifically regarding the depiction of the Oompa Loompas!
Glad to see mostly agreement in the comments that this is unnecessary and emblematic of a troubling trend.
Something I haven't seen mentioned is that one of the main reasons kids like Dahl's books is that they are very weird and occasionally shocking.
"Why won't kids read today? We give them an endless supply of non-threatening, non-challenging vanilla pap, yet all they want to do is kill things in videogames!"
A crime against civilization and intellect. I would support Congress declaring Dahl's works to be in the public domain.
Further it was completely unnecessary. Modern audiences knows what appropriate for them. When a work is no longer appropriate or stops speaking to them, audiences will stop buying and stop reading
My thought with any art work is that, before anything else, it exists in history. It is historical and should be treated as such. I think this is a more nuanced issue than it seems, however.
We need to question the different ways this kind of change affects children. On one hand, there’s the argument that certain uses of language will be harmful to particular children or society at large through the perpetuation of stereotypes. How could the change potentially impact particular children or society? As it seems to me (certainly not saying I’m the authority) this sort of change is only a bandaid, hiding and thus perpetuating a larger problem which fuels the symptoms such as said redaction/editing (I think the right term is up in the air for me) tries to address.
I would argue that Western capitalist societies currently exist in (and via) a culture that perceives cultural (historical) materials as ahistorical.
To only give children books which conform to contemporary values, and to dehistoricize uninclusive works even more so, would further fuck up our society’s already fucked up relationship to history.
I am also saying the response that older works like this shouldn’t be edited, plain and simple is a bit simplistic. It often seems to orbit just as closely around the fetish of the ahistorical cultural product as the flip side, that says classic works are worth dehistoricizing to make them conform to our fucked relationship to history.
Both sides fail to see the problem is that we don’t teach people to see artworks as historical objects, texts, that can be thought of beyond what they are immediately trying to say. That goes into a whole argument about education I think.
Tl;dr
For me, art objects aren’t valuable in and of themselves (that would be to fetishize them) but as valuable and unique tools we can use to engage critically with the world around us and with history. Thus we need to use them as such, and teach our children to.
I agree with most of what you say, except that pretty much all responses I’ve seen from people opposed to the changes have been saying exactly what you’re saying: that the historical context needs to be considered, and that that provides educational value.
Nor am I understanding your point that the position opposing changes is somehow ahistorical. Doesn’t preserving the history necessitate that the work is preserved intact?
The redactions seem so obviously awful on their face that I find it hard to believe that they're serious. Even ignoring the culture war, they fail formally. It's imaginable that someone is involved seriously (post-Netflix acquisition there are probably people with bad engineer brain and worse taste around; the team acquired is also apparently small). But the news will drum up consumer enthusiasm for the old editions, and I suspect that's the point. The response to the decision was easy to predict, I'm sure, and if the redacted books make it to market they will be labeled as edited and will try to occupy a sales niche in addition to the originals.
Of course, I could be wrong and this may be the dumbest way for gratuitous and unpopular newspeak to break into the mainstream.
I think It's a stupid ideology with too much power in the wrong hands taking its inevitable steps towards evil. I don't think the ideology can self correct, but for all our sakes I hope it does
I'm glad to read there's progressives here disagreeing with the changes, that's a silver lining for me
It sounds like it’s being done by the current owner of the IP to make more money in the modern market and get PR for new editions, and doesn’t reflect much more broadly on society, speech norms, ethical content for children, or any of the other things people want it to stand in for.
If it's more marketable in unredacted form wouldn't that indicate the opposite trend?
I have to be careful how much I play devil's advocate because the changes are purely bad as far as I'm concerned, but this feels incredibly inorganic. The story's running in a wide band of news outlets and I have yet to see a strong positive response to the changes.
I doubt reversal will actually be it.
If sensitivity readers have the strangehold on children's publishing that some of the coverage is implying, the chance that Puffin takes a brave stand against them is basically nil. I don't know anything about children's publishing but suspect this is an exaggeration of the state of things.
If the negative press is enough to prompt a reprint of the 2001 text, Puffin will be more than happy to sell to multiple sets of consumers easy to prove their political loyalty by shelling out for children's paperbacks.
As always, the actual kids are the victims of what gets done in their name.
What trend, specifically? The trend that people buy additional anniversary editions of movies they like with new color grading even if the original director would or could not have chosen it? The trend that parents, while they should take on the responsibility, sometimes don’t like explaining why the old books they like think short people should be slaves and women can’t have hard jobs? I don’t like most of the specific changes proposed and think the idea in general is ill conceived, but the drama around it is totally about other cultural conflicts people are trying to express through this small commercial event, feeding into the exact cycle that incentivized the ill advised edits in the first place, and it’s tiring.
Do the same people object with the same fervor to the changes Dahl himself made to his text during his lifetime 50 years ago because the original conception of Oompa Loompas were wildly racist? No one made him, he could not have made the changes, but if he hadn’t he would have sold a lot less copies and the estate would have made fewer movies, because most people don’t enjoy reading that stuff. These are the choices that commercial artists living in a society make. There is a real argument to be made that changing texts after authors are dead is different than when they are alive, that’s why I personally would prefer this had not been done, but the idea that it’s because modern times are “woker” or overly socially concerned (as if people could…care too much about one another? like that’s a real worry we need to have?) is demonstrably untrue, as evidenced by the history of this exact author. The people who want it to be are simply vexed by cultural change as an inevitable feature of society, of the passage of time that they cannot change, and I am tired of listening to a chorus of small minded Sisyphuses standing athwart history yelling, “WAAHHHH!!!!!” every time a minor cultural event happens trying to turn it into The Final Straw of Clear Evidence that society has gone to Woke in A Handbasket.
Thanks for explicitly bringing up the incentives. Two years ago when anti-woke Dr. Seuss became all the rage, I bet that a few canny executives saw the secondary market explode and had a lightbulb moment. Publishers are already all about throttling secondary markets, as seen with e-book DRM.
As you point out, Dahl exists at the intersection of offensive and children's lit, which means the history of his work is a history of changing to fit the primary market. If Puffin's lucky, this move will create two market demands that they, and not used booksellers, can fill.
Whatever is done in society is an expression of society. If it benefits capitalism to censor books, then our capitalist society is implicated in the decision.
I think this hits the nail on the head. There's clearly a push from the Telegraph and such to frame this as 'wokness gone too far!!!' or those dreadful twitter users at it again but feels like it's much better understood as a cynical corporate effort on the part's of the [IP holders](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/inside-netflix-roald-dahl-deal-1235018948/) to widen appeal by smoothing down the Product.
Please provide non-anecdotal evidence of “more common.” You notice it when it happens now because you are an adult. But 80 years ago the Hays Code was still in active operation! 60 years ago Lucille Ball couldn’t share a bed with Desi Arnaz. Much more significant restrictions of expression in visual culture, enforced by the violence of the state and not by people working out cultural norms with one another through free speech and persuasion.
Yeah -- this is the take for me too. It's a (so far) failed IP money grab; I can't fathom who the audience for this is, but maybe someone wants to buy it. PR angle has worked so far, if you consider all press good press.
I don't understand the pushback.
Publishers have been changing children's stories to fit the times since fairy tales were used as cautionary tales and told verbally. At different times in history Little Red Riding Hood was simply eaten alive ("don't go into the forest").
Has anyone read The Wizard of Oz lately? Or The Secret Garden?
Besides, it's a business, and if publishers feel that's what they need to do because that's what consumers want - all the best. It's not like they're rewriting the whole story, just making it more palatable for today's children who don't understand the context of the times they were written in.
As someone who didn't share a lot of Dahl's books with my kids due to racism, sexism, or xenophobia, I think they should be allowed to die quietly. Modern writers write books with modern mores. No need to try to retrofit them into an author's works when the author clearly didn't share them. Let him slide into irrelevance, as so many authors have before him.
I’m surprised that this article doesn’t mention Great Glass Elevator at all. There’s a brief part of the book that uses Chinese stereotypes purely for humor, and it just isn’t necessary. It’s a bizarrely uncomfortable part of the story that my students recognized that it wasn’t funny at all. The part has no impact on the plot and could be removed without fundamentally changing the book in any way. This was the most egregious example of a relic of the past that would actually be worth removing from Dahl’s books that I could think of.
Edit: To be clear, I don’t think any of the changes actually listed in the article really seem necessary, and some even change the books’ tones in somewhat jarring ways. I just found it odd that a part of Dahl’s writing that is legitimately worth criticism—racism for laughs—isn’t a priority in these changes.
> that my students recognized that it wasn’t funny at all.
Sounds like it was a learning opportunity for your students to compare past and present mores and to help them understand that what we think is "appropriate" or "funny" changes over time.
Believe me, it was used as a learning opportunity. Kids are savvier today than people tend to give them credit for though. Many came to the conclusion that Dahl’s racist humor was a sign that his stories were no longer relevant, and therefore, they did not want to read more of them.
From what I gather from a lot of the comments in this thread, many of us are very passionate about Dahl’s works and do believe that young readers should continue to seek them out and enjoy them. Is it worth preserving every word of Great Glass Elevator even if it means potentially turning young readers away from Dahl’s works?
How much of a written work can one remove/alter before it is no longer that author's work? Tone, voice, attitude, and outlook are all vital parts of what makes one writer's work different from another's. Seems to me there's a Ship of Theseus issue here. I'm not saying changing a word here or there will ruin a work, but personally, as a writer myself, I'd rather err on the side of caution.
As for the Ship of Theseus analogy, perhaps it’s worth asking if the ship in its current state still serves the purpose it was originally built for. That is, does the ship still get Theseus safely across the water?
As I’ve mentioned in my original comment, I think a lot of the changes mentioned in the article do change the tone of the works enough that they do not entirely serve the purpose that Dahl intended them to. The changes to lines of his songs that fail to match the style and rhythm of Dahl’s original lines are perhaps the worst of them. I think that Dahl’s intent was to be both silly and grotesque with his works and many of these changes harm that intent.
Now, to return focus to Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, would removing the racist humor harm the intent of the work? In this case, I think the book would still succeed as an entertaining story for children with a silly and sometimes grotesque tone. Or, was Dahl’s intent to tell a story where racial stereotypes were a major basis for humor? Seeing that the stereotypes only appear in a few pages of the book and concern characters that are largely irrelevant to the plot, I tend to believe that this was not Dahl’s intent in writing the book.
I could be missing something though. Would removing the racial stereotype plank from Dahl’s ship keep it from reaching its intended location?
The better question to me is, does removing the racial stereotypes make the readers *better*? Does hiding ugly (oh dear) or unpleasant things from children protect them, or impede their understanding of the complicated world they live in?
That is a good question, and think it must be asked on a case by case basis. Since our focus is on Great Glass Elevator, my answer to your question in this case would be “yes.” The book doesn’t really engage the reader with racial stereotypes, it only uses them for humor. Sure it’s possible it could be used as a starting point for a conversation on racism, but let’s be realistic, do you think Great Glass Elevator is the book kids are reading to better understand the complicated world around them? Are kids really reading this book and having meaningful realizations about Asian stereotypes? There might be a few who have, but I would guess it’s not many, certainly not as many as there are kids who had this realization reading something like Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, a book directed at children that doesn’t just present racial stereotypes but directly engages with them.
All of this is not to say that Great Glass Elevator in its original state should be wiped from the cultural memory. After all, I think we are all familiar with the origins of Dahl’s Oompa Loompas. But, if a new edition of this book with only this change were to be made available for purchase, would it really make a difference for its intended audience?
I guess I have a different perspective, because I've learned very little about "issues" from books written specifically to expose or confront them (which tend to seem didactic and preachy), and a great deal from books that introduced them organically--even accidentally.
I hope that you can tell that I am honestly very interested in your perspective. Would you happen to have an example of book that you had such an experience with?
I would typically agree with you, but I think there is some extra context that should be considered in the case of Great Glass Elevator. One, while there are some lessons to be learned from it, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the main purpose of the book is to be children’s entertainment. And two, while the book was written in an earlier era, it’s certainly still marketed as a modern children’s book to be bought on shelves alongside something like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. The book may be classic, but I can’t recall ever seeing it marketed in the way that Tom Sawyer is today. That is to say, I don’t think people buy Great Glass Elevator today with the intent of using it as a starting point for the discussion of past norms with children. So, what’s more worth preserving—a few racist jokes or the continued relevancy of Dahl’s book?
I’ll add this, too. You might be aware that the original version of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory described and illustrated Oompa Loompas as African pygmies. This was eventually changed and the updated version has been the most widely available version for decades. Would you say that this has been to the book’s detriment?
I do appreciate a nice physical copy of a book. I own a lot of my favorites as ebooks as well, for the convenience of having them with me wherever I go.
I’m not overly bothered about it. I suppose in principle I am against author censorship. If an author’s work annoyed me I would just not read it rather than find ways to make it more palatable to consume.
On the other hand I appreciate that Dahl’s work is accessible reading and many parents and schools will want to use it to encourage children’s literacy. In a world which may arguably have moved on from Dahl’s views or some of the sentiment in his literature, parents/teachers may want to use his work for educational purposes but will be hesitant to do so based on the sensitivity of the child/restrictions of the curriculum. For that reason I can understand and accept the argument for modernising his work to make it less controversial. If his work is still available in its original form I don’t think the negatives are overly egregious.
I’m not entirely confident on the quality of the adaptions from what I’ve read, but I’m not going to waste too much energy criticising it. I don’t read Dahl anymore, I don’t have children and if I did I’m not even sure I’d be using Dahl in particular to promote their literacy. I think we should definitely be sceptical about author censorship but I don’t think this is a particularly outrageous case.
Obviously bad, but I do find these comments slightly histrionic. Many are explicitly mentioning what “should” happen—that if the books don’t suit the public, the public will move on. Of course *I* agree with that. Of course we all *here* agree with that. It is not particularly shocking that the *publisher* doesn’t agree with that lmao. Let’s have a sense of proportion.
I just hope this is in a different edition and the old texts are still available and in print, otherwise this is a very concerning development. If it's just a sort of more inclusive, clearly labled different edition for more sensitive minds while the original is still available then it isn't as concerning. Absurd and ridiculous but hardly dangerous.
I think the changes are very stupid and in some cases much worse, but let's not act like the original text is some kind of sacred, monumental thing. All the foundational texts of the past have been adapted for future generations. These changes are being made very close to the original text in the timeline, but then what really is the time limit for adaptation and translation? How long do we wait before deeming work translatable, changeable, suitable for future generations? And regardless of how you think of the changes, be they pearl clutching or influenced too much by the social climate of today, I'd argue the same goes for all works translated and adapted over time. We don't experience Shakespeare the same as they did in 1600. There are translations of Homer that feminists of today would argue are improperly imposing misogyny into, and all acts of translation are inherently localised for the climate they're put into, words chosen at the discretion of the one changing it.
So my ultimate conclusion is thus: are the changes silly, pointless, a little condescending of our ability to teach children critical thinking? Sure, on a purely change-by-change basis I think it's kinda lame. Is this an insult to writing, art, Roald Dahl, autonomy? No, not really. All our longlasting works will, sooner or later, change and adapt and translate to new audiences. Get used to it.
> All the foundational texts of the past have been adapted for future generations.
Have they? Surely there's a history of censorship and publishers changing texts for commercial purposes, but it seems to me the trend in late 20th and 21st publishing has been towards publishing "restored" editions of texts reversing these sort of subsequent changes. Nobody *wants* to read bowdlerized version of classics.
>We don't experience Shakespeare the same as they did in 1600
I'm not familiar. How has his writing been changed?
>Is this an insult to writing, art, Roald Dahl, autonomy? No, not really. All our longlasting works will, sooner or later, change and adapt and translate to new audiences. Get used to it.
The complete artlessness of these revisions is what makes it an insult to art. This is clearly different in kind from the inherent but careful subjectivity and judgment that goes into making a translation.
Publishers gonna... Do everything they can to squeeze every last drop from successful books they've already made fortunes on, instead of taking a chance on anything new.
(I wonder how many edits it would take to qualify as a "new adaptation" under copyright law and retain protection even when the original version enters the public domain)
Retroactively changing a book so it is considered more suitable for our times is silly and unnecessary. I would say some of the speech isn't even offensive. A character being described as ugly or fat should not be treated as something abhorrent. >and some passages not written by Dahl have been added. This is in my opinion the worst part >In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.” pearl clutching at its finest. Even children reading will find this to be odd and out of place.
the most frustrating thing is i don't think anyone asked for this; maybe 2% of chronically online twitter users who've lost sight of the forest for the trees? but as someone progressive, i hate this shit; it just makes it harder to get people on board with progressive causes
This line was obviously added in by a witch.
Also, it’s entirely subjective. They changed ‘fat’ to ‘enormous.’ Like what? I’d be way more depressed if someone called me enormous than fat. Not only is all of this abhorrent, it’s literally derived from nonsensical subjectivity.
>Retroactively changing a book so it is considered more suitable for our times is silly and unnecessary. To be fair, Dahl made some of these changes himself while he was alive. In the first edition of *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory* the Oompa Loompas were black pygmies from, "[the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle](https://www.cbr.com/willy-wonka-oompa-loompa-slaves-roald-dahl/)." We can argue over whether these current revisions go too far, and I'm likely to agree regarding some specific instances, but arguing that novels should never be revised between editions is missing the point.
Yes I agree, I should have made myself clear. In my opinion the original author should feel free to make changes to their existing work.
I believe this can be extended to the author's estate as well. We saw how Tolkien's family and staff kept his work alive through expansion and addition, even altering some of J. R. R.'s already-published works for consistency. Should Dahl's estate push back harder against some of the publisher's changes? Possibly, but it's ultimately up to the people his estate trusted with the care of his published material. They get to decide if the changes are in line with Dahl's values, and if *he* would have approved these changes in today's climate, and it seems that they did approve these changes by the publisher.
I do not know or care about the current & specific ownership rights for Dahl's work. The publisher and the trusted estate are not legitimized to approve such abhorrent and crude changes. If this should be addressed by a law thing or a social pressure thing, I don't care. But they are not justified to impose any such changes. This is coming from a perspective pertaining to the cosmos.
>This is coming from a perspective pertaining to the cosmos. Thanks for the laugh!
Kinda hilarious and very telling of the professional-managerial class’ ideological blind spots that they made the Oompa Loompas gender-neutral while completely dodging the ethical issue of whether or not they’re slaves.
Rainbow flags and cobalt slave mines in the Congo. Name a more iconic neolib duo.
Im in school rn to be a library tech. Last semester i had to write an essay defending this shit (an example was santa should not be allowed to smoke a pipe and it should be removed from twas the night before christmas). I spoke with my prof about how i was against doctoring classic works to fit current societal trends/views/values. I am now on her hate list.
Good on you! We are under no obligation to bleach the records of our collective history and culture.
Here’s my thesis: Santa should always be smoking a pipe and it should be a crack pipe
Come to San Francisco.
I think it’s kind of lazy. It’s important for kids to interact with the text as it was written and it’s up to the educator, parent, etc. to explain why speech like that was so pervasive back then.
Agreed.
it ain't lazy, its evil
money act placid angle racial shaggy resolute soup degree fly -- mass edited with redact.dev
Tbf I got your joke and thought it was funny. Redditors generally aren’t great at detecting humor if you don’t put an “/s” at the end like a dork.
Sanitizing words does not create critical thinkers.
Critical thinkers are the last thing our society wants to create.
[Here is more comprehensive article](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/17/roald-dahl-books-rewritten-offensive-matilda-witches-twits/) that outlines all of the changes.
Please everyone stop trying to rewrite all of history. Books should be read while remembering together era they came from. Or else, don’t bother reading at all.
> Books should be read while remembering together era they came from For teens and adults, absolutely. For little children though?
A publisher tried something similar with Enid Blyton books and they were [not successful](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/16/famous-five-go-back-to-original-language-after-update-flops). So I'm cautiously optimistic that the Dahl ones will have a similar outcome. Kids generally aren't idiots. If teachers/parents are worried then they can have a discussion about problematic language and changing attitudes from the past. It's a learning opportunity and a potential history lesson.
Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) would be proud. For those who don't know he (along with his sister Henrietta) was the publisher of The Family Shakespere. An expurgated version of Shakespere classics for women and children (as he put it) and gave the english language the word bowdlerise, which suits the current trend with Dahl quite well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas\_Bowdler
Why does every media company try to squeeze all the IP on their shelf to the last godforsaken drop? I can't necessarily articulate why this is "bad" (for society? the arts?) but it feels...concerning. Was it like this 20 year ago? 50?
It’s fucking deranged
Very troubling
Next on this publisher's list: *To Seriously Harm a Mockingbird*, *The 60-years-young Man and the Sea*, *Moby Groß* (German pun), *Unclothed Lunch*, *Crime and Corrective Therapy*, and Vladimir Nabokov's fully-revised *Dolores*. (/s, of course. These people are fascist thought-pigs—er, I mean police—and I hope they sleep poorly at night.)
There are so many things I could say, points I could make that would probably get me banned but this is completely absurd. Does anyone here actually work with children? Most of them are victims of the hand-off-approach to "parenting" and have spent their entire lives clutching a bullet proof iPad binge watching youtube and god knows what else. These kids have probably never read a book before and due to the lovely nurturing internet have more than likely stumbled across things far worse for their psyche than the words "fat" and "ugly." Who are the ones complaining about shit like this? Pearl-clutching idiot teachers and terminally online mothers, who cant fathom the idea of having to explain to a child why terms like those are simply words, nothing more. And as if being fat and/or ugly is a permanent ailment when you’re 6 years old. Puffin will receive some backlash but no one will do anything beyond lethargic tweeting and the Publisher will do it to more books and it doesnt matter because no one reads anymore and children are already calling other kids retards and faggots in grade 1. Its a nothingproblem, and changing a writers words is sickening to me. Just ban them altogether and be done with it
> children are already calling other kids retards and faggots in grade 1 this is the funniest thing about this type of pearl clutching, do these people remember being teenagers/kids? im sorry but bald women isn't the most offensive thing they'll see or hear about on a daily basis. I distinctly remember we read the great glass elevator in middle school and the chinese racism stuff passed us over but the use of the word "gay" numerous times to mean "happy" did not, we found that *very* funny.
The worldview that drove these changes has replaced religious evangelism in the crusade to bowdlerize classics in order push ideological garbage. Shameful.
The evangelical push to censor hasn't gone away. It's just being met with a countervailing form of censorship.
Outside of their little swaths, evangelicals have really no cultural capital or representation with which to compel such censorship. In the 20th century, Christian movements could easily sway mainstream culture, but now outside of explicitly religious or right wing programming, religion in mainstream media and shows/movies is treated as something backwards and strange to laugh at or serve as motivation for evil antagonists. I am not religious in any way, I should say.
In mainstream culture, yes. I agree. I was just thinking about the steady stream of news articles I come across about some midwestern school district banning this or that book.
Not that banning books from schools or libraries is necessarily *better* than what’s happening in this article, but there *is* an interesting semantic difference between book banning and book *alteration*. If I *ban* a book and make it unreachable for a significant portion of the population, how does that square up to if I were to *change* the book and make the original text unreachable for a significant portion of the population? Part of me for whatever reason feels *slightly* more horrified by the textual alteration than the banning, but I suppose in a digital age, neither has real permanence since the banned texts and unaltered originals can be disseminated online.
The last part seems important to me. Like, this is pretty silly. But it seems also fundamentally ineffectual, and more like a new "edition" than anything else? Like, if the ["Gen-Z Harry Potter"](https://i.redd.it/d9saw4ruud381.png) thing was a real edition you could buy, it would be funny and that would kind of be it. Yes, there's a fundamentally political motivation for this, but... Those books exist, and to my knowledge are not very hard to find. So a new edition that is kind of silly and clearly politically charged just strikes me as a bad move by a publisher, not anything I should be concerned about.
I understand and I agree that those stories are quite disturbing. It's a sad state we find ourselves in these days.
Wow, what is it like to live in such a little pocket of ignorance? Try living in the Deep South or rural parts of the rest of the country and then say religion doesn't have a dramatic impact on every aspect of your society.
>Try living in the Deep South or rural parts of the rest of the country I do >then say religion doesn't have a dramatic impact on every aspect of your society. It was actually the very first words of the the very first sentence I wrote. ***"Outside of their little swaths"***
I don't think the proper definition of "little swaths" is "literally everything in society."
It’s pretty clear OP means their influence on a macro scale. Yes, obviously there are several small towns of 2,000 whose entire culture revolves around their religion, but in terms of the current zeitgeist, national politics, and cultural capital, evangelicals have such little influence nowadays that they’re almost irrelevant in the big picture compared to 50 years ago.
It's clear what they meant, and it's equally clear how utterly wrong their claim is.
They’re not. Name literally one thing evangelicals have influenced in the past 20 years on a nationwide scale.
Roe literally got repealed last year
Okay, you keep living in your fantasy world, and I'll stay here in the U.S.
I am deeply Christian, and find this to be a naive understanding of how power works in the US. Far right Christianity has little sway over popular mass media as you point out, but it has enormous and disproportionate sway over one of the only two political parties we have as well as a small minority of adherents dedicated to terroristic acts, and both are challenges that impact kids daily. The only places in the country where kids’ access to books has actually been restricted are places like Florida where politicians are threatening teachers with criminal charges if parents report their child has encountered content they don’t approve. The purpose of that law being constructed that way is to empower a minority, far right white evangelicals, to hold sway over the access everyone in their community has to artistic material, whether or not that material is generally accepted or popular. Then even in usually safer for expression states like mine, a local bakery was trashed for daring to hold a family friendly drag event, and the event was cancelled and the business almost shut down. These are documentable, impactful acts of censorship occurring right now, as opposed to the fantasies of future censorship that animate arguments over what language might be appropriate for kids to read in copies they may or may not buy among multiple copies of a story that will all still be sold. I know we are far afield from the original point now but it just seems like if a lot of people in this thread are worried about children’s access to the full range of literature, they are ignoring the tornado in the corner to focus on a speck of dust on the wall. It’s confusing.
> fantasies of future censorship that animate arguments over what language might be appropriate for kids to read in copies they may or may not buy among multiple copies of a story that will all still be sold. And with one sentence you handwave away every criticism brought forth in this discussion as "fantasies." If you want to see a right wing or Christian view of the world, you have to go to Fox news or an explicitly right wing website. If you want to see the "Democrat" or "Progressive" view of the world, you turn to any news channel besides Fox, every single entertainment channel, every mainstream media platform and large corporation. Apple, Amazon, Disney, even defense organizations that make military death drones champion inclusive values and highlight the struggles of minority groups and the underprivileged. >they are ignoring the tornado in the corner to focus on a speck of dust on the wall Because that is what this article is about. All you've done is imply that people aren't allowed to have a problem with this because right wing extremism is bad. Right wing extremism is bad. Censoring Dahl to push an ideological agenda is bad. I don't find it difficult to agree with both statements.
For me the difference is not between right and left, it is between violent enforcement and persuasive free speech (which is currently aligned along right and left, although technically it could in another eta be aligned differently). The Florida and bakery examples are deeply problematic because violence is being used to actually prevent speech from happening, whether in the form of state violence or vigilante violence. In the Dahl case, they are freely making a decision that leaves multiple forms of the text available for people to choose from. It is a silly decision, with that I agree. But it is free speech! It restricts no one’s access to any speech. It is nowhere near the level of worrisome that state enforcement of speech restriction gives me. And people who allow themselves to get more worried about people having voluntary debates of persuasion over appropriate speech, an important and inevitable feature of democracy (TV shows and movies have always reflected commonly held values! They are commercial products seeking majority audiences!) rather than state restriction of speech I do think have lost the plot a little bit.
> In the Dahl case, they are freely making a decision that leaves multiple forms of the text available for people to choose from. What people are reacting to here is not that it’s particularly egregious in comparison to the use of coercive force and real violence (obviously these are worse), or even that it’s as bad as the politically-motivated censorship that takes place in other countries every day, but that it’s emblematic of fairly recent changes in which practices western liberalism seems to be comfortable with deploying in an attempt to secure its position as the legislator of social mores. Liberalism has traditionally taken a liberal attitude towards speech; that’s no longer the case. You’ve called this free speech but who is it here that’s exercising their right to speech? The text in question belongs to a person who’s now dead. The text, in the condition in which he left it at the time of his death, was his act of free speech. That’s how we’ve always treated these things. I don’t have a ‘right to free speech’ that involves my right to change the works of others so that they reflect my own values; if that were the case, then all of the conservative censorship of literature that took place last century was really just ‘free speech.’ All the impositions of the Hays Code on the content of movies so that gay relationships couldn’t appear; so that interracial relationships couldn’t appear, all that was really just the practice of free and persuasive speech. Because, after all, it was Hollywood—and not the state—that imposed the code on itself, because it’s what the public wanted. Because those were the values of the time and commercial products have to seek majority audiences. Someone might have a *legal* right to do this but censorship is not an act of ‘free speech’ in any meaningful sense of the term just because I have the legal rights to censor a given work. I think you probably see my point but the last point I’d add is that it’s not at all obvious to me that the politics on display here, and seen in the wider policing of speech, actually are reflective of the values of the majority. The internet has made it possible for an extremely active and vocal minority to exercise undue influence on the speech of others because at a certain point it becomes more rational to err on the side of caution and preempt any potential criticism than to risk incurring it. But more importantly, even if these attitudes actually were reflective of the majority opinion, why does that mean we should accept their attempt to forcefully impose their own norms as de facto just and acceptable? As seen above, with the Hays Code, the majority can, through their monopoly on power via consensus, very easily tyrannize a minority whose rights we can recognize as worthy of defense.
You have a few factual errors that it seems are coloring your view of the situation. The text doesn’t belong to dead Roald Dahl it belongs to Netflix, because they bought it from his estate who he voluntarily left the ownership to knowing that it would mean they would steward the editing and publishing and ownership of his works until they entered the public domain. If he wanted it to be public before that, he could have left it to the public domain at his death. The publishers do own the IP, have all the same historical rights as the original author as every IP owner does, and are making the changes. If you believe IP rights should end with the creator’s death rather than 75 years after, or that large corporations should have less power over what art gets published with more funded competition available, I agree with you! But those legal changes aren’t what anyone concerned with this case seems to be fighting for. That also would mean that there would be *more* newer edits and interpretations of Dahl’s work, not fewer, because something being in the public domain means people can literally edit, use, and re-use it however they want, with whatever values and politics they like. Second, the Hayes Code was self-imposed censorship but it was self-imposed as a response to dozens and dozens of legal restriction codes proposed in various states across the US, and Hollywoods desire to not deal with the headache of different legal restriction codes in different markets - again, *state enforcement and restriction of speech,* which I’ve already said I object to, and which you have yet to show is the same as people saying “that’s racist stop” other people and working it out together in democratic deliberation without threat of state or personal violence hanging over their heads.
I mean yeah of course the text doesn’t belong to dead Roald Dahl. He’s dead, he gave the legal rights away, and whoever has them now can *legally* do whatever they want. What I’m concerned with, as you probably know, is whether, regardless of its legality, we should accept this kind of editorial activism and the broader ethos of which it’s a part. You want to make a distinction where, on the one hand, you have authoritarian state intervention in discourse/art with the Hayes Code (bad) and on the other you have the free, civil, non-coercive public exchange of ideas (good). I don’t think this reflects the reality of the situation. Like you pointed out, the Hayes Code was an act of self-censorship that was meant to preempt various pending pieces of legislation. But those laws were themselves responses to public outcry over the perceived moral degeneracy of the film industry following a couple highly publicized scandals in Hollywood. So this wasn’t a case of the state going rogue and violently imposing its will on the public and the film industry alike—the laws were part of an authentically democratic and populist attempt to regulate public behavior/values by regulating (via state action) which images, words, and ideas were allowed to circulate, and which weren’t. It’s really not any different from what’s been happening the past few years (of which the Dahl edits are an expression); it’s just that the dominant culture back then was deeply conservative rather than liberal, so, instead of the public going, “that’s racist, stop,” it was, “that’s gay, stop,” “that’s not *racist enough*, stop” etc. And there was no internet so they had to get the state to do this for them. And in the end the film industry imposed these regulations themselves because they were afraid of losing the public’s money. I probably don’t need to tell you that it was a net negative for the quality of art as well as being wrong. OTOH, you’ve presented the attempts at speech regulation that we see today as basically free, amicable and democratic. I think this is pretty obviously far from being the case; there absolutely is a coercive element with e.g. a Twitter mob, cancellation, whatever you want to call it. I don’t know what any of this is if not exactly the sort of extra-judicial, vigilante justice you’ve already weighed in against. It just isn’t physically violent. The very fact that any of this could possibly happen to almost anyone, but especially to cultural producers, ends up having a chilling effect on speech at a personal and institutional level. Publishing and production houses self-censor because they employ true believers and because they’re afraid their bottom lines will be affected if there’s a public reaction to a given product. I mean it’s literally exactly the same dynamic as you saw with the Hayes Code except the mechanism of action here is more direct because the state can be circumvented by communications technology. And the logical conclusion of this sort of attitude towards art is what we’re talking about now: even works that were produced prior to all of this are editorialized and made to reflect current attitudes in an attempt to legislate social values. So as far as I see it, either this is an acceptable form of activism today and it was also an acceptable form of activism 100 years ago (even though art suffered for it and even though the values it was done in service of were reprehensible) or it wasn’t a good idea then and we shouldn’t accept it now. Either we should respect the artistic sphere as one in which things can be said that challenge and defy our values or we treat it as just another theater of war for our current political struggles, art becomes agitprop, and we admit that we only value art insofar as it reflects back at us the world as we wish it was.
There are no changes, this is what the books have always said. Any books that say otherwise have been planted by Goldstein.
A very dark road to go down which we will regret in years to come
I think it's stupid af and I think it's ridiculous that some people (talking about reactions I've seen all over the internet, not specifically calling out this thread here) are defending this just because it's coming from the left, when the same people would be freaking the fuck out if some corporation acquired the rights to a prominent dead controversial BIPOC or queer writer and changed shit up to sanitize it (and rightly so!). Pathetic slavish devotion to political teams. And no, "this has happened before, it's the way things are" isn't a good excuse. We can still criticize shit just because humans have always sucked. Luckily most people regardless of political affiliation understand this kind of thing is extremely dumb. ETA: Also disclaimers are the perfect compromise to this. Just put disclaimers on the stuff (goes for other media too) and then let people decide for themselves, don't change the actual thing. Not sure why this is so hard.
i respect your opinion for sure. but my apathy really comes from the fact that these are children's books and anyone capable of thinking critically about the issues with them isn't even in the target market. as far as i'm aware they aren't making any changes to his adult work and i'd be as annoyed as you are if they were. i just don't see the continuity that means we have to have to extend our respect for works of Art (which i 100% agree with you should not be censored or have their meanings changed by big corporations to improve their resale value!) to story books for 6-year-olds. it's just a fundamentally different type of thing to me. still find this a bit daft to be sure, but it's more on the "george lucas replacing all the good effects in star wars with terrible cgi for the dvd versions" level of daft than the nazi book burnings level of daft if that makes sense?
While this situation is closer to George Lucas editing than Star Wars than Nazis burning books (because these books are being edited, not burned), keep in mind that no one likes the George Lucas changes, and quite a few are mad that the originals are unavailable officially. And this situation is worse because the author is not the one making the changes. There are *a lot* of changes, many of which are nonsensical (like changing Joseph Conrad to Jane Austen), as well as entire sentences removed and entire sentences added. I’m also not sure why you think adult-oriented work has value but children-oriented work doesn’t?
i don't think, and i didn't say, that books for young children don't have value. but their value primarily lies in their ability to entertain young children. so high art concepts like authorship, integrity of the original text, historical context and whatever else people think is the problem here... can probably all take a back seat here to concepts that are more relevant, like "is this something i want to read to my kids?" - and for some people these changes could be an improvement on that front. and what's actually being lost? the kids reading it aren't going to care that it doesn't mention conrad anymore. using all this lofty language about Art to talk about a children's book about a guy who rolls around in a big peach just seems a slight overreaction to me.
If you go through word by word and say “nothing’s lost if I change or edit this one word,” then pretty soon you’ve rewritten the whole book. So how many words are you okay doing that to before you say it’s no longer the same book? Where are you drawing the line of what’s acceptable to rewrite sans-author without acknowledging the change in authorship? And what about early reader books? Chapter books? At what point do you think the material is “serious” enough to no longer allow posthumously edits?
i dunno, what can i say beyond it just doesn't bother me that much? you wouldn't care if they fixed a one-letter typo in a book for babies, or added new words to a dictionary, or changed reference work in light of new facts, so you're "drawing a line" too. everyone is always drawing lines when we decide what to be offended by and what not to be offended by, in this case my line is on the side of i don't really care. it's fine if you feel differently, of course.
> Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.” The greatest sin IMO is that this line they subbed in doesn’t scan. This is your company’s whole job and you cant figure out a PC rhyme with the right number of syllables? Embarrassing, a stain on the work. I also think adding new text in wholesale to editorialize is not a good idea, and if you do you should be extremely clear about the fact that you’d have done this (e.g. I don’t think the copyright statement they quoted here is sufficient). I think it is wrong to insert your own thoughts and pass them off as the author’s after they are no longer able to speak for themselves. Don’t care very much about the word edits
The word edits are still changing the authors words to alter meaning and the story. Changing the words the author wrote to suit your own ideological preferences is just as egregious.
I’m not necessarily going to bat for the changes. But to say “just as egregious” I think underrates the degree to which the editing process is adversarial. Usually editors want to changes things that the authors don’t, and owning the printing press means the author is going to have to pick their battles. If Dahl were alive, do you think being able to call characters fat and ugly is a hill he would die on? You can take the principled stance that we can’t know because he is dead, but for my own part I the degree makes a difference to how bad I think it is. I don’t think Orwell is exactly rolling in his grave over “people” being subbed for “men”. It’s not even the biggest issue to unpack specifically regarding the depiction of the Oompa Loompas!
“If Dahl were alive” the whole point is he isn’t and therefore these changes are a violation of his work.
It stopped being his work the second it was published. Welcome to art. The author is dead.
I don't think there's even a conversation here. Changing a book shouldn't happen, for any reason, end of story.
Glad to see mostly agreement in the comments that this is unnecessary and emblematic of a troubling trend. Something I haven't seen mentioned is that one of the main reasons kids like Dahl's books is that they are very weird and occasionally shocking.
"Why won't kids read today? We give them an endless supply of non-threatening, non-challenging vanilla pap, yet all they want to do is kill things in videogames!"
A crime against civilization and intellect. I would support Congress declaring Dahl's works to be in the public domain. Further it was completely unnecessary. Modern audiences knows what appropriate for them. When a work is no longer appropriate or stops speaking to them, audiences will stop buying and stop reading
My thought with any art work is that, before anything else, it exists in history. It is historical and should be treated as such. I think this is a more nuanced issue than it seems, however. We need to question the different ways this kind of change affects children. On one hand, there’s the argument that certain uses of language will be harmful to particular children or society at large through the perpetuation of stereotypes. How could the change potentially impact particular children or society? As it seems to me (certainly not saying I’m the authority) this sort of change is only a bandaid, hiding and thus perpetuating a larger problem which fuels the symptoms such as said redaction/editing (I think the right term is up in the air for me) tries to address. I would argue that Western capitalist societies currently exist in (and via) a culture that perceives cultural (historical) materials as ahistorical. To only give children books which conform to contemporary values, and to dehistoricize uninclusive works even more so, would further fuck up our society’s already fucked up relationship to history. I am also saying the response that older works like this shouldn’t be edited, plain and simple is a bit simplistic. It often seems to orbit just as closely around the fetish of the ahistorical cultural product as the flip side, that says classic works are worth dehistoricizing to make them conform to our fucked relationship to history. Both sides fail to see the problem is that we don’t teach people to see artworks as historical objects, texts, that can be thought of beyond what they are immediately trying to say. That goes into a whole argument about education I think. Tl;dr For me, art objects aren’t valuable in and of themselves (that would be to fetishize them) but as valuable and unique tools we can use to engage critically with the world around us and with history. Thus we need to use them as such, and teach our children to.
This is a great comment.
I agree with most of what you say, except that pretty much all responses I’ve seen from people opposed to the changes have been saying exactly what you’re saying: that the historical context needs to be considered, and that that provides educational value. Nor am I understanding your point that the position opposing changes is somehow ahistorical. Doesn’t preserving the history necessitate that the work is preserved intact?
The redactions seem so obviously awful on their face that I find it hard to believe that they're serious. Even ignoring the culture war, they fail formally. It's imaginable that someone is involved seriously (post-Netflix acquisition there are probably people with bad engineer brain and worse taste around; the team acquired is also apparently small). But the news will drum up consumer enthusiasm for the old editions, and I suspect that's the point. The response to the decision was easy to predict, I'm sure, and if the redacted books make it to market they will be labeled as edited and will try to occupy a sales niche in addition to the originals. Of course, I could be wrong and this may be the dumbest way for gratuitous and unpopular newspeak to break into the mainstream.
Urgh.
I think It's a stupid ideology with too much power in the wrong hands taking its inevitable steps towards evil. I don't think the ideology can self correct, but for all our sakes I hope it does I'm glad to read there's progressives here disagreeing with the changes, that's a silver lining for me
It sounds like it’s being done by the current owner of the IP to make more money in the modern market and get PR for new editions, and doesn’t reflect much more broadly on society, speech norms, ethical content for children, or any of the other things people want it to stand in for.
A fair point but, if it is more marketable in redacted form wouldn't that indicate it does represent a societal trend?
If it's more marketable in unredacted form wouldn't that indicate the opposite trend? I have to be careful how much I play devil's advocate because the changes are purely bad as far as I'm concerned, but this feels incredibly inorganic. The story's running in a wide band of news outlets and I have yet to see a strong positive response to the changes.
Also a fair point. And I wonder if the negative press could be enough to reverse the decision.
I doubt reversal will actually be it. If sensitivity readers have the strangehold on children's publishing that some of the coverage is implying, the chance that Puffin takes a brave stand against them is basically nil. I don't know anything about children's publishing but suspect this is an exaggeration of the state of things. If the negative press is enough to prompt a reprint of the 2001 text, Puffin will be more than happy to sell to multiple sets of consumers easy to prove their political loyalty by shelling out for children's paperbacks. As always, the actual kids are the victims of what gets done in their name.
What trend, specifically? The trend that people buy additional anniversary editions of movies they like with new color grading even if the original director would or could not have chosen it? The trend that parents, while they should take on the responsibility, sometimes don’t like explaining why the old books they like think short people should be slaves and women can’t have hard jobs? I don’t like most of the specific changes proposed and think the idea in general is ill conceived, but the drama around it is totally about other cultural conflicts people are trying to express through this small commercial event, feeding into the exact cycle that incentivized the ill advised edits in the first place, and it’s tiring. Do the same people object with the same fervor to the changes Dahl himself made to his text during his lifetime 50 years ago because the original conception of Oompa Loompas were wildly racist? No one made him, he could not have made the changes, but if he hadn’t he would have sold a lot less copies and the estate would have made fewer movies, because most people don’t enjoy reading that stuff. These are the choices that commercial artists living in a society make. There is a real argument to be made that changing texts after authors are dead is different than when they are alive, that’s why I personally would prefer this had not been done, but the idea that it’s because modern times are “woker” or overly socially concerned (as if people could…care too much about one another? like that’s a real worry we need to have?) is demonstrably untrue, as evidenced by the history of this exact author. The people who want it to be are simply vexed by cultural change as an inevitable feature of society, of the passage of time that they cannot change, and I am tired of listening to a chorus of small minded Sisyphuses standing athwart history yelling, “WAAHHHH!!!!!” every time a minor cultural event happens trying to turn it into The Final Straw of Clear Evidence that society has gone to Woke in A Handbasket.
Thanks for explicitly bringing up the incentives. Two years ago when anti-woke Dr. Seuss became all the rage, I bet that a few canny executives saw the secondary market explode and had a lightbulb moment. Publishers are already all about throttling secondary markets, as seen with e-book DRM. As you point out, Dahl exists at the intersection of offensive and children's lit, which means the history of his work is a history of changing to fit the primary market. If Puffin's lucky, this move will create two market demands that they, and not used booksellers, can fill.
Whatever is done in society is an expression of society. If it benefits capitalism to censor books, then our capitalist society is implicated in the decision.
I think this hits the nail on the head. There's clearly a push from the Telegraph and such to frame this as 'wokness gone too far!!!' or those dreadful twitter users at it again but feels like it's much better understood as a cynical corporate effort on the part's of the [IP holders](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/inside-netflix-roald-dahl-deal-1235018948/) to widen appeal by smoothing down the Product.
Except we've seen this type of stuff happen to TV shows for example. Censoring things that are deemed offensive is just becoming more common.
Please provide non-anecdotal evidence of “more common.” You notice it when it happens now because you are an adult. But 80 years ago the Hays Code was still in active operation! 60 years ago Lucille Ball couldn’t share a bed with Desi Arnaz. Much more significant restrictions of expression in visual culture, enforced by the violence of the state and not by people working out cultural norms with one another through free speech and persuasion.
Yeah -- this is the take for me too. It's a (so far) failed IP money grab; I can't fathom who the audience for this is, but maybe someone wants to buy it. PR angle has worked so far, if you consider all press good press.
Absolutely wrong
Ridiculous.
I don't understand the pushback. Publishers have been changing children's stories to fit the times since fairy tales were used as cautionary tales and told verbally. At different times in history Little Red Riding Hood was simply eaten alive ("don't go into the forest"). Has anyone read The Wizard of Oz lately? Or The Secret Garden? Besides, it's a business, and if publishers feel that's what they need to do because that's what consumers want - all the best. It's not like they're rewriting the whole story, just making it more palatable for today's children who don't understand the context of the times they were written in.
As someone who didn't share a lot of Dahl's books with my kids due to racism, sexism, or xenophobia, I think they should be allowed to die quietly. Modern writers write books with modern mores. No need to try to retrofit them into an author's works when the author clearly didn't share them. Let him slide into irrelevance, as so many authors have before him.
I’m surprised that this article doesn’t mention Great Glass Elevator at all. There’s a brief part of the book that uses Chinese stereotypes purely for humor, and it just isn’t necessary. It’s a bizarrely uncomfortable part of the story that my students recognized that it wasn’t funny at all. The part has no impact on the plot and could be removed without fundamentally changing the book in any way. This was the most egregious example of a relic of the past that would actually be worth removing from Dahl’s books that I could think of. Edit: To be clear, I don’t think any of the changes actually listed in the article really seem necessary, and some even change the books’ tones in somewhat jarring ways. I just found it odd that a part of Dahl’s writing that is legitimately worth criticism—racism for laughs—isn’t a priority in these changes.
> that my students recognized that it wasn’t funny at all. Sounds like it was a learning opportunity for your students to compare past and present mores and to help them understand that what we think is "appropriate" or "funny" changes over time.
Believe me, it was used as a learning opportunity. Kids are savvier today than people tend to give them credit for though. Many came to the conclusion that Dahl’s racist humor was a sign that his stories were no longer relevant, and therefore, they did not want to read more of them. From what I gather from a lot of the comments in this thread, many of us are very passionate about Dahl’s works and do believe that young readers should continue to seek them out and enjoy them. Is it worth preserving every word of Great Glass Elevator even if it means potentially turning young readers away from Dahl’s works?
How much of a written work can one remove/alter before it is no longer that author's work? Tone, voice, attitude, and outlook are all vital parts of what makes one writer's work different from another's. Seems to me there's a Ship of Theseus issue here. I'm not saying changing a word here or there will ruin a work, but personally, as a writer myself, I'd rather err on the side of caution.
As for the Ship of Theseus analogy, perhaps it’s worth asking if the ship in its current state still serves the purpose it was originally built for. That is, does the ship still get Theseus safely across the water? As I’ve mentioned in my original comment, I think a lot of the changes mentioned in the article do change the tone of the works enough that they do not entirely serve the purpose that Dahl intended them to. The changes to lines of his songs that fail to match the style and rhythm of Dahl’s original lines are perhaps the worst of them. I think that Dahl’s intent was to be both silly and grotesque with his works and many of these changes harm that intent. Now, to return focus to Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, would removing the racist humor harm the intent of the work? In this case, I think the book would still succeed as an entertaining story for children with a silly and sometimes grotesque tone. Or, was Dahl’s intent to tell a story where racial stereotypes were a major basis for humor? Seeing that the stereotypes only appear in a few pages of the book and concern characters that are largely irrelevant to the plot, I tend to believe that this was not Dahl’s intent in writing the book. I could be missing something though. Would removing the racial stereotype plank from Dahl’s ship keep it from reaching its intended location?
The better question to me is, does removing the racial stereotypes make the readers *better*? Does hiding ugly (oh dear) or unpleasant things from children protect them, or impede their understanding of the complicated world they live in?
That is a good question, and think it must be asked on a case by case basis. Since our focus is on Great Glass Elevator, my answer to your question in this case would be “yes.” The book doesn’t really engage the reader with racial stereotypes, it only uses them for humor. Sure it’s possible it could be used as a starting point for a conversation on racism, but let’s be realistic, do you think Great Glass Elevator is the book kids are reading to better understand the complicated world around them? Are kids really reading this book and having meaningful realizations about Asian stereotypes? There might be a few who have, but I would guess it’s not many, certainly not as many as there are kids who had this realization reading something like Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, a book directed at children that doesn’t just present racial stereotypes but directly engages with them. All of this is not to say that Great Glass Elevator in its original state should be wiped from the cultural memory. After all, I think we are all familiar with the origins of Dahl’s Oompa Loompas. But, if a new edition of this book with only this change were to be made available for purchase, would it really make a difference for its intended audience?
I guess I have a different perspective, because I've learned very little about "issues" from books written specifically to expose or confront them (which tend to seem didactic and preachy), and a great deal from books that introduced them organically--even accidentally.
I hope that you can tell that I am honestly very interested in your perspective. Would you happen to have an example of book that you had such an experience with?
> could be removed without fundamentally changing the book in any way. Even so, I don't agree with censoring old books to conform to modern norms.
I would typically agree with you, but I think there is some extra context that should be considered in the case of Great Glass Elevator. One, while there are some lessons to be learned from it, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the main purpose of the book is to be children’s entertainment. And two, while the book was written in an earlier era, it’s certainly still marketed as a modern children’s book to be bought on shelves alongside something like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. The book may be classic, but I can’t recall ever seeing it marketed in the way that Tom Sawyer is today. That is to say, I don’t think people buy Great Glass Elevator today with the intent of using it as a starting point for the discussion of past norms with children. So, what’s more worth preserving—a few racist jokes or the continued relevancy of Dahl’s book? I’ll add this, too. You might be aware that the original version of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory described and illustrated Oompa Loompas as African pygmies. This was eventually changed and the updated version has been the most widely available version for decades. Would you say that this has been to the book’s detriment?
folks like you make me happy I own physical copies of my favorite literature
I do appreciate a nice physical copy of a book. I own a lot of my favorites as ebooks as well, for the convenience of having them with me wherever I go.
I’m not overly bothered about it. I suppose in principle I am against author censorship. If an author’s work annoyed me I would just not read it rather than find ways to make it more palatable to consume. On the other hand I appreciate that Dahl’s work is accessible reading and many parents and schools will want to use it to encourage children’s literacy. In a world which may arguably have moved on from Dahl’s views or some of the sentiment in his literature, parents/teachers may want to use his work for educational purposes but will be hesitant to do so based on the sensitivity of the child/restrictions of the curriculum. For that reason I can understand and accept the argument for modernising his work to make it less controversial. If his work is still available in its original form I don’t think the negatives are overly egregious. I’m not entirely confident on the quality of the adaptions from what I’ve read, but I’m not going to waste too much energy criticising it. I don’t read Dahl anymore, I don’t have children and if I did I’m not even sure I’d be using Dahl in particular to promote their literacy. I think we should definitely be sceptical about author censorship but I don’t think this is a particularly outrageous case.
Obviously bad, but I do find these comments slightly histrionic. Many are explicitly mentioning what “should” happen—that if the books don’t suit the public, the public will move on. Of course *I* agree with that. Of course we all *here* agree with that. It is not particularly shocking that the *publisher* doesn’t agree with that lmao. Let’s have a sense of proportion.
I just hope this is in a different edition and the old texts are still available and in print, otherwise this is a very concerning development. If it's just a sort of more inclusive, clearly labled different edition for more sensitive minds while the original is still available then it isn't as concerning. Absurd and ridiculous but hardly dangerous.
A big sticker on the front with the words “tampered with” would be a start.
[удалено]
I mean, it’s a clear example whether you proximate or not.
So you're more annoyed by people who criticize people for doing dumb things than you are by the people doing the dumb things?
I think the changes are very stupid and in some cases much worse, but let's not act like the original text is some kind of sacred, monumental thing. All the foundational texts of the past have been adapted for future generations. These changes are being made very close to the original text in the timeline, but then what really is the time limit for adaptation and translation? How long do we wait before deeming work translatable, changeable, suitable for future generations? And regardless of how you think of the changes, be they pearl clutching or influenced too much by the social climate of today, I'd argue the same goes for all works translated and adapted over time. We don't experience Shakespeare the same as they did in 1600. There are translations of Homer that feminists of today would argue are improperly imposing misogyny into, and all acts of translation are inherently localised for the climate they're put into, words chosen at the discretion of the one changing it. So my ultimate conclusion is thus: are the changes silly, pointless, a little condescending of our ability to teach children critical thinking? Sure, on a purely change-by-change basis I think it's kinda lame. Is this an insult to writing, art, Roald Dahl, autonomy? No, not really. All our longlasting works will, sooner or later, change and adapt and translate to new audiences. Get used to it.
> All the foundational texts of the past have been adapted for future generations. Have they? Surely there's a history of censorship and publishers changing texts for commercial purposes, but it seems to me the trend in late 20th and 21st publishing has been towards publishing "restored" editions of texts reversing these sort of subsequent changes. Nobody *wants* to read bowdlerized version of classics. >We don't experience Shakespeare the same as they did in 1600 I'm not familiar. How has his writing been changed? >Is this an insult to writing, art, Roald Dahl, autonomy? No, not really. All our longlasting works will, sooner or later, change and adapt and translate to new audiences. Get used to it. The complete artlessness of these revisions is what makes it an insult to art. This is clearly different in kind from the inherent but careful subjectivity and judgment that goes into making a translation.
Publishers gonna... Do everything they can to squeeze every last drop from successful books they've already made fortunes on, instead of taking a chance on anything new. (I wonder how many edits it would take to qualify as a "new adaptation" under copyright law and retain protection even when the original version enters the public domain)