When news broke that Roald Dahl’s books had been quietly rewritten to excise potentially offensive language, a number of astute observers were quick to note the commercial motivation.
The rights to Dahl’s hugely profitable estate had recently been sold to Netflix for an eye-watering sum. The sanitising process had begun before the sale, much as one might hose down a pig before taking it to market.
The Roald Dahl Story Company — a thing that exists — maintained the alterations were no big deal: the texts were simply being updated to reflect contemporary sensibilities, make them a little more accessible. “When publishing new print runs of books written years ago,” it claimed, “it’s not unusual to review the language used.”
This is untrue. It is highly unusual to retrospectively rewrite the work of a long-dead author. And the motivation aligns with the most conservative, cynical and cowardly tendencies of mass consumerism. Dahl’s name is bankable, an established brand, but to maximise returns we must give the people what they want. Who cares what he actually wrote when there is a fat cash cow just standing there waiting to have its udders squeezed?
Being mean is his whole schtick
In keeping with the long ignoble tradition of censors, the omissions and rewrites are every bit as cloth-eared and ludicrous as one would expect. They have been justly ridiculed. The idea that it might be possible to sanitise Dahl by rewriting some sentences is itself ludicrous: his reactionary moralism is built into the structure of his plots. Being mean is a central component of his whole schtick. His books are constantly conflating what he sees as moral badness with physical grotesquery and doling out punishment to the wicked.
The controversy has quickly divided along predictable culture-war lines — some of the outrage is at least attributable to people’s sentimental attachment to books they read as children — but there are other issues at stake. What it exposes is the convergence of corporatised, profit-driven culture and the branch of contemporary progressivism that regards the policing of language as a driver of social reform. Publishers hire sensitivity readers for the same reason university courses have trigger warnings: because offending customers is bad for business.
Now, I do not admire Dahl as a person or a writer. His opinions were lousy and his books are laced with racist tropes and vindictive moralism. He was a hack who knew what his audience liked and stuck to the formula.
But there is still something disturbing about casually rewriting a dead author to make his work more palatable to some hypothetical contemporary reader, whose opinions and cognitive abilities have been intuited by whatever occult means. You are, in effect, making him into someone he was not, attempting in a hamfisted way to make him better than he was, which he quite frankly doesn’t deserve. Nor do we, as readers, deserved to be served up anything other than what he actually wrote.
Censorship smacks of paternalism
It is the presumption that is most galling. In every act of censorship, however small, however well intentioned, there is paternalism. A small group makes a decision to restrict access to information and prevent everyone else from making their own judgment. Let us do the thinking for you.
What is fascinating is what the anticipated offence reveals about the assumed relationship between reader and text. At the bottom of it all are very traditional and deeply conservative notions that literature should be a mode of moral instruction and that correct language will cultivate correct values.
The assumed relationship between reader and text is one of passivity. The reader encounters a bad word; the reader is automatically harmed. This is a kind of magical thinking. It treats words as if they were spells, as if their manifestation tangibly alters the world — to write the word “fat”, even if the word is being applied to a corpulent mouse.
But reading is simply not like that at all. It is an active process of interpretation. When you read a book, you are thinking about it — or at least you should be.
Cynical though the commercial motivations may be, the changes reflect one of the persistent delusions of our time: that an intrinsically reactionary practice like sanitising an author’s work might be harnessed to a progressive end.
Dahl was an unpleasant man with unpleasant ideas, but you can’t censor your way to a better world. His young readers are far better off being exposed to what he really thought. Ignorance is not bliss and readers are not fools, even when they are children.
Literature — even ideologically unsound children’s literature — is about being exposed to unusual things, difficult things, learning how to interpret them in context and seeing them for what they are. Reading is not about making you feel comfortable by reflecting values you already hold back at you. If that is what you want, you don’t need a book. Go kiss a mirror.
Would Dahl be turning in his grave? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
