Why rewriting books by Roald Dahl is wrong
WASHINGTON — Few literary reputations have suffered as great a reversal as that of Thomas Bowdler, and even fewer so deservedly. The “family” edition of Shakespeare that he and his sister created, methodically stripping out the faintest trace of “profaneness or obscenity,” was for a while the bestselling edition of the Bard’s works. Over time, however, people noticed that he had removed some of Shakespeare’s most vivid and enduring phrases, such as “the beast with two backs.” Bowdler’s work fell out of print, his name forgotten except as a synonym for all the purse-lipped virtue vandals who would “bowdlerize” great books in the name of protecting children.
Let us hope a similar fate awaits the literary lobotomies recently performed on the works of Roald Dahl by Inclusive Minds, an organization that describes itself as “passionate about inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility in children’s literature.” Judging by the edits they recommended, their actual passion is altering books to suit the most oversensitive and historically illiterate lunatic imaginable. Oops, I meant to say “person experiencing lunacy.”
The changes made range from the predictable — the word “fat” has been effaced — to the stupid, such as changing “denizen” to “resident” — to the inexplicable: “She looked as though she was going to faint” was for some reason snipped out of “George’s Marvellous Medicine.”
The defenses of this defacement are also tiresomely predictable. It was ever thus, says the censorship caucus; in the 1960s, Dahl himself agreed to rewrite “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” to make the Oompa Loompas less offensive. The people at Inclusive Minds are merely updating the books to keep them in line with modern sensibilities, opening them to new generations of readers. Coincidentally, this is exactly how the poet Algernon Swinburne defended Bowdler back in 1894.
Though he was no stranger himself to “profaneness or obscenity,” Swinburne nonetheless derided the “foolish cant” of Bowdler’s critics, declaring that “no man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children.” And hey, he might have added, we know that the immortal Will himself must have practiced some pretty heavy self-censorship to stay on the right side of the murderous Tudor dynasty. How is that different from updating him to the more enlightened standards of the 19th century?
Glad you asked, Mr. Swinburne.
As any poet should understand, there is a difference between writers rewriting their own work and someone else taking liberties after the authors are dead. Even in the case of translations, where it’s unavoidable, something is inevitably lost, particularly when a lesser writer tampers with the work of a genius. The tin-eared tinkerers who rewrote Dahl might have made his books marginally less offensive, but also significantly less engaging.
Their work also embodies a kind of Year Zero thinking that we find foolish in the case of Victorians slicing off the racier bits of Shakespeare. Why would it be more admirable to surgically alter texts to fit our own moral preoccupations? Because we’re better people than they were?
If so, that’s all the more reason to give children a window into the real past, as the people living there saw it, rather than compress their reading material into an eternal now. If our moral ideas are so self-evidently correct (and to be clear, I think that in many cases they are), then it should be easy to train children to recognize the past’s mistakes. In the process, we can teach them that even people they love and admire are capable of grave errors.
This gives children a richer understanding not only of history but also of today, because we, too, are probably making mistakes that will one day seem obvious in hindsight. We might like future generations to understand us as the complicated people we are, rather than cartoon characters in some future morality play, neatly edited into good people who thought exactly as they do, or bad people who inexplicably did horrible things. We should pay our own past the same respect.
We should also respect present humans as rational beings capable of independent thought, rather than weak-willed zombies susceptible to crude verbal mind control. In our culture, fatness and baldness and mental illness are stigmatized. That’s bad. But the problem cannot be solved by getting Inclusive Minds to snip the words “fat” and “crazy” out of Dahl’s work — any more than the Victorians managed to control teenage sexual urges with a steady diet of literature edited down into Sunday school tracts.
At best, all this bowdlerizing is useless. At worst, it distracts from the actual work of improving lives, while alienating older and less-educated people who don’t want to spend their days keeping abreast of the latest word bans or neologisms. We’ll have to hope that some later, more enlightened generation will rectify our mistake, step off the euphemism treadmill and confront literary history in all its messy, unexpurgated glory.