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Sanitizing Roald Dahl

The Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression has done a much longer article on the whole 'Sensitivity Reader' (aka Self-appointed Censorship Officer) phenomenon.


One of the points brought up in the linked article is just how inconsistent some of these changes can be, another is how it's ultimately rooted in the idea that 'Only X can Write about X' (To give the exaggerated example, only a murderer can write about murder.).



Anecdotally, I was speaking with someone while browsing through a bookshop, they had pretty strong opinions on Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, but could not understand why Roald Dahl & Enid Blyton had to be rewriten and I should note they were aware of Roald Dahl's less savoury aspects.



Remember censor bars? They were the black boxes often used in print and visual media to cover up words, phrases, or images deemed “inappropriate” or too “sensitive” for audiences.

The intention was to obstruct a graphic image, lewd gesture, or a taboo word. But, of course, they had the opposite effect. Nothing highlights a middle finger on TV like a big black bar, and nothing piques the interest of precocious children like redacted or bleeped out words.

But what if, rather than being covered up, they weren’t there at all? What if you read different words in your books and never even knew the original language was changed?
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https://www.thefire.org/news/why-sensitivity-readers-are-bad-free-speech-art-and-culture
 
And now they've come for Plum:

Jeeves and Wooster books have been rewritten to remove prose by PG Wodehouse deemed “unacceptable” by publishers, the Telegraph can reveal.

Original passages in the comic novels have been purged or reworked for new editions issued by Penguin Random House.

Trigger warnings have also been added to revised editions telling would-be Wodehouse readers that his themes and characters may be “outdated”.
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Heavens to Betsy! You mean the English aren't a bunch of wealthy fops sponging off their rich relatives and spending weekends at castles in the country?

My initial reaction is "touch not one word of the master's prose!" But the Telegraph mentions one novel in particular, Thank You, Jeeves, and here I tend to agree that some editing is actually beneficial. A major subplot of that story involves a minstrel group that several of the characters including Bertie refer to as you-know-whats. Someone reading the novel today would be struck by how racist and low-class they sound, and that's certainly not the characterization that Wodehouse was going for.

The editors claim to have only changed the wording, not the "story," which sounds fine, but I do wonder how, since the plot in question includes several characters (Bertie included) wearing blackface.
 
It always has seemed ridiculous to me (and it always will) that some in society feel the need to hide what these authors wrote, and pretend they weren't the abject ******* racists and bigots they actually were.

IMO, they shouldn't be sanitized at all because if we keep doing so, we help society to forget what these people wrote - writings which spoke to who they were, and what the times they lived in were like. Before you know it, a few generations later, then, no-one will believe a person when they try to claim that Dahl, Kipling et al were racists. We are already seeing people try to rewrite history w.r.t. the Holocaust and Nazi Germany (anyone up for the job of sanitizing Mein Kampf ?)

The writings and attitudes if the likes of Rudyard Kipling should be used as teaching points about colonialism, jingoism, bigotry, racism, misogyny, anti-Antisemitism and imperialist warmongering.
 
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smartcooky said:
It always has seemed ridiculous to me (and it always will) that some in society feel the need to hide what these authors wrote, and pretend they weren't the abject ******* racists and bigots they actually were.

IMO, they shouldn't be sanitized at all because if we keep doing so, we help society to forget what these people wrote - writings which spoke to who they were, and what the times they lived in were like. Before you know it, a few generations later, then, no-one will believe a person when they try to claim that Dahl, Kipling et al were racists. We are already seeing people try to rewrite history w.r.t. the Holocaust and Nazi Germany (anyone up for the job of sanitizing Mein Kampf ?)

The writings and attitudes if the likes of Rudyard Kipling should be used as teaching points about colonialism, jingoism, bigotry, racism, misogyny, anti-Antisemitism and imperialist warmongering.
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All these decisions are about keeping the works profitable. Some have even kept the original text in print, which demonstrates how much this is about maximising the potential for profit. Your appeal for historical purity isn't going to work unless you can convince them that way is more profitable.
 
Over in the Ukraine war thread there are plenty of excoriating comments regarding the behaviour of the Russians, and many of these remark that this is typical Russian behaviour.

It occurred to me that if Russia should manage to collapse itself into a long term failed state, all of that writing is going to look a lot like racist punching down to future generations.
 
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