Another day, another battle in the culture wars. This time, the topic is Roald Dahl. Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter. He wrote such wonderful children's books as Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The publisher Puffin hired sensitivity readers from Inclusive Minds to bowdlerize Dahl's works. To bowdlerize is to remove or modify content thought to be vulgar or otherwise objectionable. The term bowdlerize comes from the Bowdler siblings who infamously expurgated (edited) William Shakespeare's works to make them more appropriate for women and children. You would think we have that reached a point in history where we did not have to cave into the most prudish and puritanical members of society, yet this is 2023. Why would I expect anything less?
So what exactly transpired? Per the Associated Press, "some passages relating to weight, mental health, gender, and race were altered." In defense of its edits, the publisher Puffin said "it's not unusual to review the language alongside updating other details...any changes have been small and carefully considered." An argument for "a sensitive consideration of whether the word-choice matches current sensitivities" was made in The Sydney Morning Herald by children's author Andy Griffiths. Griffiths opines that "children's books are not sacred texts; they are living breathing collaborations between the writer's words and the active imagination of the reader. Words that might reasonably be predicted to upset or offend sections of the audience are, in most cases, better off being replaced."
"Reasonably be predicted." Let's see what is so offensive that it would be considered reasonable to edit. Augustus Gloop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is called enormously fat, and the editors changed it to enormous. His "great flabby folds of fat" were similarly bowdlerized. The famed Oompa Loompas went from being "small men" to "small people." This is one of the multiple linguistic shifts towards gender-neutral language to not offend transgender or non-binary individuals. Mrs. Twit from The Twits is no longer called "ugly." The words "mental" and "crazy" have been replaced to not insult those with mental health issues. In The Big Friendly Giant, the giant doesn't wear a black jacket, and the characters do not turn "white with fear." Let me get into why I, along with greats such as Salman Rushdie, take issue with these edits.
One of the issues of bowdlerizing the text is that it distorts works of literature and introducing ideas that were not in the original text. One such example is Augustus Gloop. Dahl was not making a statement about obesity in his text per se. Gloop was overweight because of his gluttony for food. It was his greed that got him stuck in a factory pipe and presumedly made into fudge. Dahl used Gloop's fatness as a metaphor for what happens when we have excess consume our lives.
Diluting the language means diluting the power of the story. Literature is a part of culture and history; it is meant to be a reflection of the times in which it was written. You can add a forward or introduction to contextualize Roald Dahl's writing style and word usage. If you want something more in alignment with your values, buy an author's book that is reflective of those values. If Dahl's work is truly that offensive, his work will fade in the background and will be forgotten. There is no need to bowdlerize.
I find the call to bowdlerize to be hypocritical given that the side of the political aisle that is for these revisions is also clamoring for critical race theory (CRT). Forget for a moment that CRT is a dangerous bait-and-switch that only serves to erode race relations and K-12 education. CRT proponents advocate for CRT because we should not whitewash history. That much they are right about: we need to teach the good, bad, and ugly of history. But here is where it goes awry. The woke Left want us to understand racial injustice in spite of alleged "white fragility," but describing the physical appearance a fictional character as "fat" or "ugly" is too triggering? The people on the woke Left cannot acknowledge their own fragility, but I will digress from the woke Left's intellectual inconsistency.
What exactly are we teaching children when we take out certain words because they are too offensive? Children are bound to meet people who think and act differently than they do. This sort of behavior encourages children to complain and strong-arm when they do not get their way, i.e., act like children instead of adults. Instead, we should be encouraging future generations to be more emotionally resilient. Similar to comedy, literature is meant to be surprising and provocative. If you remove the content that could be offensive, you remove its potency.
Plus, the idea that children cannot understand a book simply because it was written in the past is insulting. Especially as they get older, children learn to understand the difference between literal and figurative language. People are capable of reading a text from the past without judging it by modern standards. We should not talk down to or patronize children because they will not learn better.
Dahl's style includes dark humor and unexpected twists, which has been part of his appeal enough to sell over 250 million copies of his books. As Ben Shapiro astutely points out, Roald Dahl's books teach a lesson about the world: "Life is a rough place where people are mean to you and social expectations are set for you." Life is not sugar-coated, certainly not the way Augustus Gloop would have liked. The beauty of Dahl’s works is that the protagonists develop resilience and find creative ways to navigate brutal realities. To reiterate, trying to shield children from life's brutishness or unfairness does not do any favors to prepare them for living in the real world.
Forget that Roald Dahl did not want anyone to change his texts. It is not the job of publishers to remove discomfort from its readers because life is not one big safe space. Nor is it a practical endeavor to bowdlerize. A similar censorship debacle happened a couple of years ago with Dr. Seuss. As I asked then, "who determines what is too offensive?" Is it a worry about offending everyone or a select few? The CEO at PEN America, an organization dedicated to free expression, rightly stated that "the problem with taking license to re-edit classic works is that there is no limiting principle." I brought this up with political correctness: the list of potential triggers is subjective and never-ending. If we take this need to not offend to its logical conclusion, it would mean banning fiction all together. This leads to the crux of why I take issue with this latest attempt in censorship. To quote PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel:
Rewriting novels, like efforts to rewrite history, has origins in authoritarian playbooks. While editors and publishers might be tempted to try to excise ideas or words from he past that offend us today...we can't go about ridding regrettable ideas and words from the past without potentially diluting the original text and the story itself. We need to learn from the perspective of the past, not eliminate viewpoints we no longer accept. Much of literature could be construed as offensive to someone, based on race, gender, religion, age, economic or other status or myriad other factors...[If we bowdlerize], we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society.
Fortunately, there was pushback as I was writing this piece. It was not only other publishers throughout Europe that decided they were not going ahead with this bowdlerizing nonsense. Even better, this pushback resulted in Puffin announcing a Roald Dahl Classic Collection to keep the author's original text in print. I am happy to see this take place, but it is also a partial victory. Why? Because they are still going to sell the bowdlerized version alongside the original version.
As a writer at Forbes pointed out, it very well could have been Puffin's plan all along to stir up controversy and create both versions to boost sales. On some level, I suppose it gives greater consumer choice, which helps maximize Puffin's bottom line. Maybe Puffin really was making a business decision to take advantage of the current culture war we are in.
As much as I would rather not be in the midst of a culture war, c'est la vie. Roald Dahl and his children's books ended up being another battleground. In George Orwell's Animal Farm, freedom was abolished not through violence, but by changing meaning of words and the record of the past. Sadly, Orwell's dystopian fiction is becoming more real by the day.
As I pointed out last month, the woke Left is on the warpath to control language. They will not stop at Roald Dahl. They will continue with the attempts to bowdlerize texts and cancel anything that does not agree with their worldview. The fight is for much more than a book.
As comedian John Cleese points out, this level of wokeness and political correctness sets the bar according to those who are the most touchy and most emotionally unstable. If we do not take a stand or draw a line, they will continue to let their unfounded sense of moral indignation continue to erode literature and indeed all forms of artistic expression.
What gives me hope from the latest Roald Dahl controversy is that there are plenty of people who do not care for the bowdlerizing and fought back. Yes, advocates of freedom of expression can claim a victory with Roald Dahl's work. But the fight is hardly over. If anything, it is only beginning. If we want to emerge victorious from the woke Left's relentless crusade to sanitize art and speech, we will need to push back and we will need to push back hard. Anything less will result in the loss our freedom of expression in a way that would turn the Orwell's fictitious 1984 to reality.
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