"Don’t gobblefunk around with words."
February 20, 2023 12:04 PM   Subscribe

New editions of the works of Roald Dahl are having some words changed or omitted and some readers and writers are displeased.
posted by twsf (144 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Leaving aside any specific discussion of Dahl's work or these edits: If you're at the point where you'd need an author's fiction has to be rewritten substantially to make it appropriate for children, you're at the point where you're better off treating it as an artifact and finding something better...or making a full-on adaptation and calling it that.

Regarding these edits: There are plenty of elements of Dahl's work that are not stuff children in the 2020s should absorb uncritically, and there's a reason adaptations change those things. But some of the edits being made are less about replacing offensive language and stereotypes and more about making this marketable as children's entertainment today. The whole thing is much more about saleability than standards.
posted by kewb at 12:13 PM on February 20, 2023 [56 favorites]


All I know is, The Fantastic Mr. Fox is not a great book, but it is a great movie.
posted by nushustu at 12:20 PM on February 20, 2023 [10 favorites]


If you're at the point where you'd need an author's fiction has to be rewritten substantially to make it appropriate for children, you're at the point where you're better off treating it as an artifact and finding something better

Agreed, more or less. when my son was in the 2nd grade he brought home "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator" to read and I was disconcerted to find a long passage that's a racist depiction of a Chinese politician, complete with horrible dialect/accent. I didn't make him stop reading the book, but we did have to have a talk about it, plus I emailed his teacher to say "hey maybe don't assign this one for book reports, etc." She apologized a lot and said she had no idea that part was in the story.

Changing and removing specific words just makes it easier to uncritically absorb the books, but Roald Dahl is definitely an author whose attitudes towards non-white people and women aren't...wonderful, and probably they're due for some amount of reevaluation/recontextualization.
posted by daisystomper at 12:23 PM on February 20, 2023 [30 favorites]


All I know is, I'm getting pretty sick of confected culture war outrage over this kind of "censorship".
posted by flabdablet at 12:24 PM on February 20, 2023 [12 favorites]


As Michael Hobbes of the You're Wrong About, Maintenance Phase, and If Books Could Kill podcasts summed it up:

This is going to be invoked as "woke censorship" for years to come despite no one asking for it and the publisher receiving widespread criticism from the left.

The publisher is being silly, but it's not censorship if a publisher changes the wording of the books they own the IP to. The problem you have is with ridiculously long copyright terms that allows publishers a monopoly on classics written by long-dead authors.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:25 PM on February 20, 2023 [35 favorites]


So much sturm und drang over a few small edits that nobody would fucking notice if they weren't explicitly pointed out.

ONOZ OUR SACRED TEXTS ARE BEING CORRUPTED IT'S THE THIN END OF A POSTMODERN MARXIST WOKE WEDGE WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN

Fuxache.
posted by flabdablet at 12:31 PM on February 20, 2023 [9 favorites]


More culture war bollocks that's ignorant of history.

The Oompa Loompas Were African Slaves In The 1964 Book

Roald Dahl himself edited his books in the 1970s as he became more aware of the world that he lived in.
posted by happyinmotion at 12:31 PM on February 20, 2023 [57 favorites]


I honestly don't care if the estate wants to rewrite the books in the hopes they will sell better if they're less gratuitously nasty to, well, all non-English people. (It would be different if this meant that the prior editions ceased to exist or, of course, if this were dictated by a government.) At a certain point, books like his, if not changed, become unusable as children's literature. So, I guess if your position is that it's better to stop encouraging children to read these books than to cut out some bullshit because that bullshit is so essential to your beloved author's vision...okay?
posted by praemunire at 12:32 PM on February 20, 2023 [9 favorites]


Yeah, whether you agree with the edits or not the whole narrative about “censorship” is completely bogus. The owner and publisher of the books are making these changes for their own reasons. No one is forcing them to do this. There is no slippery slope here, despite people quoted in these articles speculating about what book the “censors” will come for next. No. There are no censors. The owners can change every bit of these works if they so choose, just like George Lucas can make Han shoot second or third or be eaten by a Rathtar in the Super Special Edition (or he could before he sold Lucasfilm anyway).
posted by dellsolace at 12:34 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]


Still and all, I'm looking forward to seeing at least one of the Serious Talking Heads on Fucks News stare earnestly down the barrel of the camera and knit his little eyebrows while explaining at length just how intolerable it is for the Woke Left to Cancel our beloved Ronald Dale.
posted by flabdablet at 12:38 PM on February 20, 2023 [24 favorites]


when my son was in the 2nd grade he brought home "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator" to read and I was disconcerted to find a long passage that's a racist depiction of a Chinese politician, complete with horrible dialect/accent

We started reading this right after Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but noped out at this part. It reads like Dahl saw Dr Strangelove and decided that’s just what kids like, but also he had to add some really vile racism on top. Swing and a miss on both counts and completely impossible to read aloud these days.

I 100% edit books I read aloud to my kid, or make commentary describing why you shouldn’t talk about things in these ways or with these words. Editing Dahl is a good idea. They’re good stories (Glass Elevator excepted) marred by a number of Dahl’s unpleasantries, to put it mildly.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:38 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]


And, honestly, if I were Tolkien's granddaughter, would I have a problem cutting "black men like half-trolls" from the latest edition of The Lord of the Rings? Nope. It's either gratuitous or it's misunderstood, and either way it's unnecessarily hurtful. Now, the far deeper problem posed by the Orcs and their subhuman nature...that is essential to Tolkien's vision and you just have to wrestle with it as best you can. But "half-trolls" would be no loss at all, and in the present day I don't think he would've written it like that.
posted by praemunire at 12:39 PM on February 20, 2023 [4 favorites]


There's no reason to expose a young child to Roald Dahl with or without edits.

We have better books now. Heck, we even have books written by women and people of color (gasp!) This isn't the 20th century any more. We have options.
posted by splitpeasoup at 12:42 PM on February 20, 2023 [30 favorites]


It’s been a long time since I read Danny, the Champion of the World, but I really loved that book and dearly hope I haven’t forgotten about something in there that would make me regret giving it to my nieces and nephews.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 12:46 PM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


Jeez. The people who are getting all upset about these edits should just purchase the rights to Roald Dahl's copyrighted works and exploit the unedited versions for profit. And quit whining!
posted by snofoam at 12:48 PM on February 20, 2023 [9 favorites]


> We have better books now.

Nonsense. Whether books, movies, music, or video games, our culture reached its peak coincidentally when I was 14 years old.

Also coincidentally, it has been in decline ever since.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:49 PM on February 20, 2023 [33 favorites]


I guess we had the original 1964 version of Chocolate Factory in my home. I 100% remember the ink drawings of the Oompa-Loompas as an African tribe. This was the first "real book" I ever read around age 7 in approximately 1978.

I remember being surprised that the Oompas were different in the book.
posted by SoberHighland at 12:49 PM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]




i am...saddened. if you don't like the text as-is, don't buy it and don't read it.

roald dahl makes for great read-alouds and that's a great time to dive into debunking outmoded thinking with young people.

I'm not outraged, not at all engaged in 'woke outrage censorship'. would you have the n word stripped from the autobiography of malcolm-x?

there's a lot of other fucking books to choose from.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:55 PM on February 20, 2023 [5 favorites]


roald dahl makes for great read-alouds and that's a great time to dive into debunking outmoded thinking with young people.

“Now, I’m going to tell you that fat bodies are disgusting and shameful 600 times over the next week. But maybe they’re not? I dunno, guess I gotta read all these shitty words because they’re in this sacred text and it would be disrespectful to change them!”
posted by uncleozzy at 1:03 PM on February 20, 2023 [25 favorites]


Maybe it is all a setup so later they can triumphantly re-release the restored racist versions of his books.
posted by snofoam at 1:03 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]


roald dahl makes for great read-alouds and that's a great time to dive into debunking outmoded thinking with young people.

Quite depends on the age and the complexity of the problem.

I am not going to read the Little House books to seven- or eight-year-old kids (the age I read them), because there's no getting past the effect of reading, well, I think we know what the "saying" is, at that age.

I'm not outraged, not at all engaged in 'woke outrage censorship'. would you have the n word stripped from the autobiography of malcolm-x?

C'mon, man, this is just embarrassing. Like sub-101-level argumentation.
posted by praemunire at 1:10 PM on February 20, 2023 [31 favorites]


snofoam has it!! Look for "classic edition" in $45 hardcover at your local bookseller some three months from now.
posted by potrzebie at 1:11 PM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


I'm old enough to have read the original version of "Charlie". I read a lot of Dahl, and even as a child, I was amazed children were allowed to read him. Then I got to be an adult and read his short stories and understood that his is a... special voice. He's a good writer, but not unique, and all of these decades later some of his not-objectionable details are beginning to become hard to understand. This is all about him as a brand, not publishers worrying about kids.
posted by acrasis at 1:13 PM on February 20, 2023 [4 favorites]


What's most embarrassing about this is how many prominent figures -- looking at you, Rushdie & Philip Pullman -- have piled on the "censorship outrage" bandwagon without thinking about the issue beyond the headlines.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:25 PM on February 20, 2023 [7 favorites]


um...your last observation is as close as you can get to an ad hominem without touching. it's sub-101 quality mefi commenting.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:30 PM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]


praemunire said: I honestly don't care if the estate wants to rewrite the books in the hopes they will sell better if they're less gratuitously nasty to, well, all non-English people. (It would be different if this meant that the prior editions ceased to exist or, of course, if this were dictated by a government.) At a certain point, books like his, if not changed, become unusable as children's literature. So, I guess if your position is that it's better to stop encouraging children to read these books than to cut out some bullshit because that bullshit is so essential to your beloved author's vision...okay?


I guess I come from the perspective that, at a certain point, we discover that the author's vision itself is not essential, at least not essential to some popular canon of children's literature.

There's plenty of once-popular children's literature we've stopped reading for all kinds of reasons, and plenty of children's literature to pick from if Roald Dahl's stuff has too many problems in it.

Is Roald Dahl so essential, so singularly brilliant that it's worth the effort of editing it just to keep it around for today's kids? Or is keeping Dahl around just taking up space that could easily be filled by less problematic purveyors of wickedly arch, but less racist, sizeist, etc.-ist narratives for kids?
posted by kewb at 1:31 PM on February 20, 2023 [10 favorites]


I see no reason why these things need to be canonized and rendered forever untouchable and irreplaceable in the schools and libraries. I recently had the experience of deciding to name an RPG character, an uplifted bear (i.e. a bear made sentient), "Fuzzy Wuzzy" after an old nursery rhyme, only to find out that the name itself had... problematic origins. So, out that went.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:37 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]


Maybe it is all a setup so later they can triumphantly re-release the restored racist versions of his books.
Ah... The New Coke™ Strategy of problematic works.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 1:39 PM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


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posted by clavdivs at 2:03 PM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


This kind of editing, or the decision of the Theodore Geisel estate (Dr. Seuss) to stop publishing a couple of his books, including To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, makes me think of Gilbert & Sullivan. I am an old G&S fan, and for as long as I have been part of that community, one word in one song in The Mikado has been permanently changed. It used to have the N-word in the Lord High Executioner's "Little List" of people he will kill off should it ever become necessary to carry out his work.

The Mikado is a really problematic work, increasingly understood to be so, but in general the guideline for G&S productions is that you can cut things (poor Katisha's song, "Hearts Do Not Break," is nearly always cut from productions of The Mikado) but that for the most part, there is faithfulness to the original text and its original context. Tthe production company whose productions I most often see has a tradition of singing God Save The Queen before the overture. The whole audience, I mean, sings it. I think we'll still sing it that way next time because I am pretty sure we're still singing in honor of Queen Victoria.

Anyway, as works age, there's this calculation to be made between fidelity to the original and understanding of more modern sensibilities. I am 100% on board with cutting the N-word from The Mikado; I am less sure about cutting it from Huckleberry Finn. That was a digression; I meant to say, that calculation changes all the time.

Fantastic Mr. Fox isn't the only one of Dahl's books I like less than the movie—Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is another one. (The Gene Wilder version, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I mean.) I'd be happy to let the books drift into the past. But there's also nothing wrong with updating a beloved book to be accessible to a new generation. I remember some years ago when Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was updated so that the pads she was given for her period no longer had belts. Even when I read it in the 1970s, belted pads were already off the shelf, though recently enough that boxes still said, "Beltless Maxi Pads," in much the same way you can still see the occasional very old motel whose sign advertises its color TVs. My mom explained belted pads to me, but I doubt most parents these days know much about them, if anything at all.

I'm definitely tired of fake right wing outrage about cultural items like children's books that they definitely haven't thought of in decades and don't really care about.

I have a headache so I'm rambling. I'll stop now. Might re-watch Fantastic Mr. Fox later.
posted by Well I never at 2:09 PM on February 20, 2023 [16 favorites]


I think there is a question regarding the moral rights of the author not to have their work changed without their permission. If it happens to be that after death that a creator's work is not basically Bowdlerized to meet shifting mores, and that then means the work is decreasingly relevant to consumers and to the culture: so be it.

There's nothing wrong with old, culturally irrelevant books falling out of print. People are writing new books all the time, and books by living authors can use the oxygen taken up by books that should fade to oblivion, or become artifacts of study for older readers who have the ability to contextualize the work.

Kids basically never read Little Black Sambo anymore, and maybe they don't need to read Dahl's works anymore, either.
posted by tclark at 2:11 PM on February 20, 2023 [9 favorites]


Next Up: "A clockwork Beige" A misguided band of milk drinking lads decided to spray paint the local council office with "physical graffiti' causing grief for mum and Da only to be hauled into a film festival of art-deco and palladian architecture that turns into Into a nightmare of lawn dart mumblety peg.

K. rewrite Charlie and the great glass elevator were spies, space hotel and age reducing drugs don't confuse the kids.
posted by clavdivs at 2:20 PM on February 20, 2023 [5 favorites]


Grandpa Joe looks forward to an image makeover from lazy shithead who lays in bed for 20 years buying tobacco while the rest of the family subsists on cabbage water to a sufferer of an invisible disability that is only cured by a golden ticket winning grandson to the Wonka factory.
posted by dr_dank at 2:35 PM on February 20, 2023 [11 favorites]


This is going to be invoked as "woke censorship" for years to come despite no one asking for it and the publisher receiving widespread criticism from the left.
This is definitely what I’ve been seeing. So many right-wingers whining about imaginary “wokeism” and none of them are honest enough to consider that this has more to do with a rights-holder not wanting to endanger their Netflix deal measured in hundreds of millions of pounds.
posted by adamsc at 2:36 PM on February 20, 2023 [7 favorites]


aside from the basic foolishness of the edits in principle, they’re also terribly written. dull, generic, at odds with the tone and voice of the rest of the work. thin gruel indeed.

Is Roald Dahl so essential, so singularly brilliant that it's worth the effort of editing it just to keep it around for today's kids? Or is keeping Dahl around just taking up space that could easily be filled by less problematic purveyors of wickedly arch, but less racist, sizeist, etc.-ist narratives for kids?

who among us is not ‘just taking up space that could easily be filled by less problematic purveyors’ of something or other. i know i am.

part of the reason he has been (and as far as i know continues to be) gigantically popular is that he is gleefully nasty, frequently grotesque, violent and macabre, which lots of children find very entertaining (children, of course, being highly problematic). and from what i remember of his stories, they didn’t (until now!) pander or lecture, which most children can spot a mile away and quite often resent, as you would. that’s not to mention the other less prickly standout qualities of his stories.

obviously it’s possible to do all of that without also being a giant racist, etc, but you have to (a) actually be good at it and (b) be filling the same niche. most children’s writers who might be blurbed as ‘wickedly arch’ today are more likely to think sarcasm (or worse, snark) is the same thing as wit, and not many of the rest are trying to take the same tone and approach as dahl. so i’m not sure he would be so easy to replace.
posted by inire at 2:54 PM on February 20, 2023 [41 favorites]


Speaking as someone who recently did a read-aloud of Matilda with my child, I've got to say, it didn't surprise me that this editing specifically targeted Dahl's blatant loathing of fat people. Raising a kid in America you simply can't have them thinking fat people are inherently bad. Many of the people they encounter in their day-to-day lives are fat - their families, teachers, friends, and of course the children themselves. In some communities, most are. It just comes across so nasty.

I think kids these days are primed to notice and think past racism and sexism in older books they read, but the sizeism really jumped out at me as something I hadn't specifically talked over with them, and something they absolutely shouldn't internalize or repeat.
posted by potrzebie at 2:59 PM on February 20, 2023 [14 favorites]


As long as I can still call people twits idgaf.
posted by phunniemee at 3:19 PM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


I understand an author tweaking his own stuff to fit the changing times (as Dahl himself did) but I have a real problem with others coming in after an author's death and just adding and elminating whatever they see fit. If aspects of a work are dated and shitty I think we just have to deal with that. Include a disclaimer, include an essay about why the shitty stuff is shitty, stop selling it as children's entertainment or stop selling it at all, do what you have to, but don't treat art like some product where you can just swap out parts when they go bad.

This kind of stuff unfortunately feeds right into the Fox News-y right wing outrage machine. They're over there looking like idiots, hollering about Woke M&M's or some shit, and then these publishers come along and serve them up some juicy red meat. This really is a case where a big company is trying to protect its IP by tampering with something widely beloved and inserting a lot of namby-pamby, PC stuff. When the conservative ninnies howl about this they won't be totally wrong, for once.

I'm in a weird position with Dahl. His work wasn't really part of my childhood, then when I was a teen I learned he was a vicious anti-Semite (and general nasty person) and then I saw Willy Wonka and other adaptations and grew to appreciate his work. I came at everything backwards, so instead of being disillusioned that the guy who wrote this great stuff was shitty, I'm always more like, "Gee, it's amazing this shitty guy wrote all this great stuff." Or sometimes I'll hit a shitty bit and it's like, "Yep, there's Dahl letting his shittiness show."
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:34 PM on February 20, 2023 [29 favorites]


I haven't read any of the versions of the books recently enough to remember any details, but I do know that the original text published in the Hardy Boys novels was greatly watered down over the years. And that the end result is a collection of stories that aren't really that interesting outside of the plot. And a lot of the joy of a lot of books is their ability to paint a picture that extends far beyond "and then he said, and then she did" sort of storytelling.

Maybe some of the revisions of those novels was due to cultural insensitivity, but I remember reading quite a while ago is that it was because the vocabulary and the use of colloquial language made reading them "too hard" for the then-modern younger reader so they dumbed the books down for their new audience.

I sort of stand on the side of "if you don't like the book's content, stop recommending it/assigning it to people". Changing the books away from the author's words to suit a modern audience is gross. There are plenty of other things to use for texts if these are no longer suitable.

(Alternately, using them to teach about the things that upset you is probably the best way to bring those subjects up in a way that feels organic to the instruction.)
posted by hippybear at 3:38 PM on February 20, 2023 [9 favorites]


Ok, Do C. S. Lewis next.
posted by chromecow at 3:46 PM on February 20, 2023 [7 favorites]


What's most embarrassing about this is how many prominent figures -- looking at you, Rushdie & Philip Pullman -- have piled on the "censorship outrage" bandwagon without thinking about the issue beyond the headlines.

Huh, weird how Salman Rushdie is very passionate about censorship. I wonder what might have caused that.
posted by doctornemo at 3:47 PM on February 20, 2023 [35 favorites]


Yes, he really did have a thing about fat and bald people, didn't he? And I had forgotten about the gendered boy vs girl dreams in The BFG, which bothered me as a boy who hated gender roles, though generally I loved the book.

Also, it's kind of grimly funny that if you did an honest review, you'd probably just pull the "Charlie" books entirely? It's basically just an extended middle-aged man rant about "these kids today" with their TV and their candy and their gum and lack of old-fashioned discipline. Calling Augustus Gloop "enormous" but not "fat" in the new editions doesn't change the fact that his whole thing is that he's a fat kid being punished for being fat? Like, for his appetite or an eating disorder or something we'd (hopefully) nowadays see as a medical or psychological issue, not just a lack of self-control.

It's especially weird, because the principal in Matilda (which feels like Dahl's true classic) is rightfully cast as a villain for doing a lot of the same kinds of sadistic things that Wonka does, down to punishing the fat kid for eating cake. And like, just generally, you have Wonka, a guy who owns a candy business he promotes through a massive media spectacle who wants to... punish kids for liking candy and gum and TV? As he searches for a virtuous, self-effacing member of the white working class he can elevate to rule over the Oompa-Loompas, who are self-evidently unworthy of promotion, etc. But it's presumably the cash cow of the Dahl estate, so it has to stay in print in some form.

And yes, some of the edits are hamfisted. I was thinking of the Hardy Boys as well, hippybear. I assume there's a reluctance to put modern words and ideas and jokes in dead authors' mouths, which means that these kinds of edits are generally going to make books more bland, whether they're taking out the orientalist bits in the Queen-calling-Baghdad section of the BFG or the Hardy Boys struggling to crank up the ol' jalopy, or whatever.

And like I get modernizing the professions mentioned in The Witches but "Even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business?" Kids will smell that self-congratulatory #girlboss energy from a mile away. Why not just "whether she's working in a lab, a restaurant, or behind a desk," or something?
posted by smelendez at 3:54 PM on February 20, 2023 [12 favorites]


Agreeing with AlSweigart about one aspect of this: "ridiculously long copyright terms that allows publishers a monopoly on classics written by long-dead authors."

And also agreeing with adamsc that "this has more to do with a rights-holder not wanting to endanger their Netflix deal measured in hundreds of millions of pounds." Also a good way to ward off bad publicity from new readers getting into these stories as a result of the show.

As a parent, I sometimes edited or elided stories I read aloud. This was for various reasons. The kids loved Tolkien, but got too sleepy during the endless walking bits in Fellowship. A babysitter gave us a Disney book which was hyper-sexist, so I quickly arranged things for balance. Etc.

But I'd rather not see Puffin go CleanFlix on these texts. Perhaps it's the instinctive dread of creators hating to see their stuff edited beyond our control. It's good that used print copies are around, so we can get earlier versions. I wonder what happens to ebooks.

I am mindful of Suzanne Nossel (CEO, PEN America) and her concern:

[S]elective editing to make works of literature conform to particular sensibilities could represent a dangerous new weapon. Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl's work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.
posted by doctornemo at 3:57 PM on February 20, 2023 [8 favorites]


I mean even as a kid you kinda can't miss that Dahl is kind of a shitty person. It's not hard to tell. Part of why kids like him so much is that his work is transgressive. It's violent, shocking, gross, and weird. I remember kids talking about him being sexist and racist and kind of an all-around terrible guy on the playground in 1993. These edits are by people who want to continue making money off these books, to appease their parents, who would rather not have little Avery come home in trouble for calling their teacher fat as an insult because the author did it in [name literally any Roald Dahl book] so it must be okay.

I love the idea of living in a world where parents are reading along every book with their kids and having heartfelt discussions about the content. Sometimes, as a parent, I even have the chance to do that! But sometimes I don't have the time or the energy, and these books are still widely recommended to children. The rights owner can't control whether people are still reading or recommending these books (presumably they would like the answer to be "yes" on both counts) but at this point they own the rights and it's their choice whether they publish content they consider problematic. I'm sure they see that the books are less recommended now by library associations and the like than they were, and are making correct guesses about why, and would like to protect their investment.

In general, I don't ever support postmortem editing of an author's work. I'm not for this. But I'll admit that in this case, I really think the books lose very little of their appeal to children with changes of this nature, and become much easier to sell to the people in those children's lives who buy them books. I'm not at all surprised that the rights owner figured it was worth doing, and as I said above, it's a win-win for them if they then release the hardback $45 unexpurgated edition with a cautionary note at the beginning for people who need their children's literature extra racist.
posted by potrzebie at 4:01 PM on February 20, 2023 [5 favorites]


Sanitized editions for very young children are ok with me. But the revised versions should be clearly designated as such.

Like it’d be fine to read a Disneyfied version of Charlie to you children if you really feel the need. Pretty sure have been “clean” versions of Huck Finn, etc. for decades.

But once a kid starts to really engage with literature they should either read the unbowdlerized versions (after developing an understanding regarding why the new versions were needed) or just skip it altogether.

I think authors like Rushdie and Pullman are legitimately concerned that future generations will not be able to read what they actually wrote.

Those are my thoughtful comments. My gut reaction is that revising books in this matter is gross, bad and wrong. And unnecessary. If you feel a book isn’t appropriate for your kids, give them a different book to read instead of a sanitized version.
posted by lumpy at 4:05 PM on February 20, 2023 [18 favorites]


I feel the same about this as I do about the renovations to Splash Mountain: a little sad that something from my childhood is changing, I might’ve rolled my eyes once or twice but overall it’s probably a good thing. I loved Dahl as a kid and I always felt like I was getting away with something when I read one of his books. His stuff was dark and unlike anything else I read.

Dahl runs straight into the “separate the art from the artist” wall for me. His work had an undeniable impact on me and I try to reread my favorites every few years but he had some problematic views that can’t be ignored. There’s probably better stuff out there for kids nowadays to read anyway.

(Oh and every single one of the movie adaptations is trash and pales in comparison to the source material. I will die on this hill.)
posted by Diskeater at 4:09 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]


Ever read Ursula Le Guin's criticisms of Dahl in Hornbook, back in the 1970s?

...That Mr. Dahl’s books have a very powerful effect on children is evident. Kids between 8 and 11 seem to be truly fascinated by them; one of mine used to finish Charlie and then start it right over from the beginning (she was subject to these fits for about two months at age 11). She was like one possessed while reading it, and for a while after reading she was, for a usually amiable child, quite nasty. Apparently the books, with their wish-fulfillment, their slam-bang action, and their ethical crassness, provide a genuine escape experience, a tiny psychological fugue, very like that provided by comic books.

Perhaps we all need an escape vent now and then, whether it’s Charlie, whisky, Goldfinger, or righteous indignation. Anyhow, kids are very tough. What they find for themselves they should be able to read for themselves. But I boggle at the thought of an adult-parent, librarian, or teacher — actually sitting down to read such a book to children. What on earth for? To teach them to be good “consumers”? The idea of education is a leading forth, isn’t it? — not a stuffing with endless candy, on the model of Mr. Dahl’s factory.

posted by doctornemo at 4:36 PM on February 20, 2023 [30 favorites]


De-canonize! Shakesphere didnt write one strick version of Hamlett and then enter into a binding contract with the universe whereby no feature could ever be changed and updated. And if Dahl thought thats what he was doing, well, he's dead and we live and we can tell ourselves whatever stories we want.

Half of the "oh noes, you can't have black mermaids" nonsense is a habit of ill founded canonization of "the way things were is how they must stay" hence how conservatives got the moniker. The other half is "conservatives hate some peoples as much/more than they hate change"

A useful task of academia and hobbyists would be exactly this task of adapting what was old to new times.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 4:37 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]


*sadly puts document proposing a reboot of Tales of the Unexpected into archive folder*
posted by thatwhichfalls at 4:38 PM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]


Matilda would have loved Le Guin.
posted by smelendez at 4:40 PM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]


Some changes are just no-brainers, like Cloud Men to Cloud People. Men no longer means people, nor should it, and it hardly defaces the text.

Some of these, though, I dunno. The first rule of altering texts is that the new text can never be worse than the old text, and the prosody alone of those new lines in James and the Giant Peach is insipid. I'm with smelendez on the disingenuous #girlboss energy on that CatCF line. And in general I'm left wondering why it's considering so taboo to annotate children's texts with footnotes or highlighted sections for discussion. Instead of including a cringy line about there being nothing wrong with wigs, maybe we could ask children to consider that storytelling tropes like to depict villains as having non-normative bodies, and heroes as traditionally attractive. Why is this misleading? Why is it hurtful? How does The Witches contradict itself by depicting witches as using beauty for a disguise (taking advantage of these human tropes), only to reveal that actually, they were "ugly" all along (playing right back into them)?

Obviously, I am not writing these questions in the way you'd write them for young kids, but that is not my bailiwick. Children are capable of thinking about these things. Really, I think adults forget that kids don't know what is normal yet, and in some ways, they take more interest in deconstructing texts than older people do.

On a personal level, I was always extremely annoyed, as a child, to realize I was reading an altered text. In my case, it was usually updated references to pop culture and daily life in older books, like Judy Blume's Fudge series. I would've appreciated explanatory notes far more than simple exchanges, which only served to confuse the text. A child is capable of finding out or imagining what a clock radio is. Wondering why the hell people who clearly live in the '70s* are talking about modern-day toys and electronics was far more baffling, and placed the story in a floating nowhereland more than anything.

*middle-class family living on Central Park! poor people in SoHo! housewives and saddle shoes! the kid mentions he knows how to behave during a mugging!!
posted by desert outpost at 4:41 PM on February 20, 2023 [17 favorites]


*sadly puts document proposing a big budget movie adaptation of My Uncle Oswald into increasingly large archive folder*
posted by thatwhichfalls at 4:47 PM on February 20, 2023 [7 favorites]


But once a kid starts to really engage with literature they should either read the unbowdlerized versions (after developing an understanding regarding why the new versions were needed) or just skip it altogether

Yeah, my chief complaint here is that they've done it... so completely badly.

Original:
Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire,
And dry as a bone, only drier.
She was so long and thin
If you carried her in
You could use her for poking the fire!
Revised:
Aunt Spiker was much the same
And deserves half the blame
Ta-ra, Aunt Spiker!
(Though we never did like her)
It's sad but true.
If only she knew,
How the absence of charm
Can do so much harm
With thoughts so frightful
One can't be delightful
And now worms will have Spiker for tea!
Like, what even is that revised version? If you're going to do this, at least find someone clever to handle the rewrites. It reads like it was revised by a committee of MBAs.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 4:47 PM on February 20, 2023 [28 favorites]


Metafilter: [R]evised by a committee of MBAs.
posted by riverlife at 4:58 PM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]


Am I the only person not outraged by this? Dahl was born more than a century ago. Things have changed. Some of these changes are a tan inartful, but there's none of them draw blood. It's not a big deal, and it seems like a *good* idea, to make some very slight alterations when the books are reprinted.
posted by Doug Holland at 5:03 PM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


anecdotal_grand_theory said: Half of the "oh noes, you can't have black mermaids" nonsense is a habit of ill founded canonization of "the way things were is how they must stay" hence how conservatives got the moniker. The other half is "conservatives hate some peoples as much/more than they hate change"

Oh, I love when something is truly adapted or reimagined. Like, get in some great writers and do modernized, adapted versions all day long! We have loads of great works that are reimaginings of older, cherished stories that put new spins and new angles on them.

But edited versions of the original just falls between two stools. It's at once too reverential of the problematic original and too willing to treat everything down to the prose style as a fungible commodity.

I tend to agree with desert outpost and blue jello elf that these -- like so many other "sanitized-after-the-fact" works -- become genericized and dull.

Creative reinvention is lot different that hacky patchwork of something whose core is still the same problematic twaddle. But it's not as cost-effective.
posted by kewb at 5:12 PM on February 20, 2023 [4 favorites]


Blue Jello Elf: those changes SUCK. Sigh.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:13 PM on February 20, 2023


As long as they take out references to Snozzberries, because we all know what those taste like


And we can't worry about what the rabids on the right wing will get all frothed up about. They started by being upset that people were acknowledging other holidays than Christmas. Or that Starbucks had holiday cups. Or that schools stopped forcing children to acknowledge a God.
posted by Jacen at 5:23 PM on February 20, 2023 [5 favorites]


Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire,
And dry as a bone, only drier.
She was so long and thin
If you carried her in
You could use her for poking the fire!


What's even wrong with this that needed that dreadful rewrite? I'm lost.

The racism and uglier things...much more to argue about there but I am pretty much like leave things you find ugly alone and young kids don't need it, Road Dahl isn't a requirement. Fine. And yes, the commercialization is why the changes, at root. And it's okay I think to be annoyed by that reason why while recognizing the parts he created that are awful and understanding that.

But changes like this? Drivel. Actually insulting to the artist. Don't get it.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:24 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]


This is a topic of principle, not "well, just do it better and then it's ok."

Looking back at the history of figurative painting, there is all kinds of awful stuff being depicted that we find heinous today. Should museums bring in a 'conservator' to repaint those works?

Yes, this isn't censorship and this isn't illegal, but it is literally a bowdlerization of a creator's work of art. I'm amazed that anyone in the uncommonly artistic, creative community that is MetaFilter is OK with that.

We've seen the other side engaged in similar behavior within the past month, purging books from libraries and demanding edits. This is a topic where principles matter, not just execution.
posted by twsf at 5:40 PM on February 20, 2023 [12 favorites]


So, I'm reading CatCF to my younger one (at his explicit request, because chocolate) at the moment, and we've just finished up the "grinding poverty" third of the book and are about to get to the "let's put down the book for a minute and have a conversation" bits. I'd love to have a version with a parent/teacher's guide to help navigate those parts. That seems like a much better solution.

I agree that there could and should be a new canon, but I have to remind folks that parents are really busy, so returning to classics they're familiar with from their own childhoods is not blameworthy. Recommendations appreciated!
posted by phooky at 5:48 PM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


Jeez. The people who are getting all upset about these edits should just purchase the rights to Roald Dahl's copyrighted works and exploit the unedited versions for profit. And quit whining!

And if authors like Rushdie and Pullman are that worried about their estates or publishers editing their works without their consent or after they're gone, why not release things into the public domain? These edits are really is about keeping Dahl's works relevant and profitable, and as long as we're cool with copyright terms being what they are, I really don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I keep thinking about what James L. Brooks said about not including the Michael Jackson episode of The Simsons on Disney+:
“I’m against book-burning of any kind. But this is our book, and we’re allowed to take out a chapter"
If Dahl's estate wants to edit his works to make them less horrible and more marketable, then go for it. It's not like Dahl didn't already do the same thing in anticipation of the 1970s movie.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:48 PM on February 20, 2023


I hated Roald Dahl's books as a child, and this was in the UK in the 1980s when they were everywhere. I may not have had the vocabulary to describe ableism or fatphobia or racism, but I knew they were mean spirited, nasty, bullying little stories. The Captain Underpants stories my 7 year old is obsessed with today might be crude and gross, but they are never mean.

I did try to read some Enid Blyton to my kid recently, and honestly I'm grateful for the updated language. I mean... I'm guessing the people bleating about censorship haven't read the original Famous Five books to a kid recently! Do you wanna share a nice story or do you want to deal with a bunch of 'Dick' and 'Aunt Fanny' jokes?

You have to make a choice with these older stories. You either update them, and let them continue to be read and enjoyed by children. Or you decide that there is so much you'd have to change, it wouldn't be the same story anymore. I loved Tintin books as a kid, but I couldn't just give them to my kid to read now as a fun story. You'd have to sit down and explain the context of the colonialism and racism, but colonialism is so central to the character and his adventures, there isn't enough left afterwards to make it worth while. Roald Dahl is kind of the same - at least for me. To enjoy them I'd have to take out all the meanness, but that's kind of the point of his stories.
posted by EllaEm at 5:49 PM on February 20, 2023 [8 favorites]


I meant to give a shout out for The Magic Faraway Tree! The adventures of Jo, Bessie, Fanny Frannie, and Cousin Dick Rick still make for delightful reading :-)
posted by EllaEm at 6:01 PM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


I grew up with Dahl's books. They're a big part of the reason I read for pleasure as an adult. I think it's fine to do some edits to keep these books in kids' lives. I also think it's important to preserve the original text, and make it accessible. If I had my way, the new edits would have a little message in them saying "this has been edited from the original because we found we could remove overt sexism and body shaming without making the story less delightful, scan this QR code for a link to the original text at the internet archive/library of congress"
posted by signsofrain at 6:54 PM on February 20, 2023 [4 favorites]


Ok, Do C. S. Lewis next.

Several people above have already mentioned the poor quality of Dahl’s writing, but Charlie and the Glass Elevator and the Narnia books are both so bad I never even got to the offensive parts when reading with my kids. They just weren’t good, and there are so many good books.
posted by mrgrimm at 7:04 PM on February 20, 2023


desert outpost: In my case, it was usually updated references to pop culture and daily life in older books, like Judy Blume's Fudge series. I would've appreciated explanatory notes far more than simple exchanges, which only served to confuse the text. A child is capable of finding out or imagining what a clock radio is. Wondering why the hell people who clearly live in the '70s* are talking about modern-day toys and electronics was far more baffling, and placed the story in a floating nowhereland more than anything.

I had a few editions of SuperFudge side by side and the Christmas scene stands out the most in this regard. Peter started about with a gift certificate for record albums in one edition, CDs in another, finally ending up with an MP3 player in an early 2000’s reprint. Cutting edge for its time but would definitely have a modern ten-year-old asking what the hell that was.
posted by dr_dank at 7:11 PM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


Yeah, I'm on Team Original. If there is something in a book that is not palatable for kids, that is a great reason to use that as a teaching moment, a context-setting exercise, a historical lesson, or any of a number of other ways to frame it. And if none of those feels appropriate, there are thousands and thousands of other books to choose from.

If there must be an alteration to the original to keep it on shelves and in the zeitgeist, I would be perfectly fine with a foreword explaining some of the problematic stuff, or footnotes if that's more effective. Parents or indeed children can engage with these however they see fit.

This type of "Reader beware, author is an asshole" warnings aren't going to put anyone off. Sometimes they even improve the content. I honestly wish that I had learned more about Lovecraft before I read him. Knowing he was a xenophobic shithead really offers genuine insight into his work! Being primed to consider some of Dahl's choices in light of his personal beliefs or those of people like him at the time would, in my opinion, be quite valuable to understanding and enjoying his books.

Meanwhile it also avoids the pitfall of "political correctness gone mad!" into which the media and political pundits seem to trip with increasing regularity.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 7:31 PM on February 20, 2023 [12 favorites]


This does sort of boil down to editing the N word out of Twain, doesn't it?
posted by hippybear at 7:40 PM on February 20, 2023 [5 favorites]


I find the idea that this constitutes a form of censorship quite baffling. This isn't making edits to a old painting, it's making a new copy of the painting that isn't quite the same. The original still exists and will continue to do so, in likely millions of copies for these books. They're not going anywhere, as Pullman points out in the linked article. That's a feature!

If you agree that copyright on a work should expire at some point, then you're already on board with allowing these kinds of edits, it's just a question of when that becomes allowable, and by who. I don't think it's possible to meaningfully distinguish this sort of thing from other uses that copyright protects like remixes and re-imaginings.

In terms of the author's moral rights, well. I certainly think the author, after death, retains the right not to have their work mis-represented. We should always be clear if a particular version has been edited without the author's involvement. But I don't think that right extends to preventing edited versions from existing any more than it prevents say, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies from existing.

I'm indifferent to this particular set of edits. But as a principle, there's nothing wrong with it. The original work isn't going anywhere.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 7:57 PM on February 20, 2023 [5 favorites]


Several people have blamed the "publisher" here, and I think it should be clear that the publishers don't own the IP, the Dahl estate does. (I checked a couple books on Amazon, and they are copyright by Roald Dahl.) This isn't a Disney situation with corporate-owned stuff.

Of course I have no idea how these editions actually got made-- maybe a conversation which started "Do you want to keep making money?", but that's just a guess-- but the estate had to approve it, at least.
posted by zompist at 8:21 PM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


I read new editions of old books to my kid, and this is much more common than people seem to think. In the Famous Five books they now use decimal currency, wear jeans instead of shorts in the text but not the illustrations, and the word "traveller" is used as a substitute for the old term now. At the end of C.S. Lewis "The Last Battle" there's no longer any mention of Susan not going to Narnian Heaven because she likes lipstick and nylons now. Most old children's books seem to be edited to some extent now.

In general I think it's probably a net positive if it keeps kids reading the old books. You can censor if you're reading to them, but kids want to read the books themselves. I don't think it's the same as traditional Bowdlerization because Bowdler was editing an adult author ("The Family Shakespeare") not a children's one.

I do have misgivings over some of these Roald Dahl examples though, because despite his prejudices Dahl was a great stylist with unique language, and some of these changes are distinctly worse.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:24 PM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]


Honestly, these rewrites look like someone asked ChatGPT to come up with versions of the books in line with HR best practices.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:28 PM on February 20, 2023 [14 favorites]


Honestly, these rewrites look like someone asked ChatGPT to come up with versions of the books in line with HR best practices.

My guess would be that somebody, maybe the consultants they mention, came up with a list of potentially problematic areas of the text and first draft/placeholder replacements.

And that all got approved by the Dahl estate and whoever else needs to sign off (Netflix? Publishers across the English-speaking world? Who knows), and any further revisions would require like 200 emails, 30 faxes, and a dozen lawyer bills, so here we are.
posted by smelendez at 8:38 PM on February 20, 2023


The problem I have with this is that it doesn't remove the author's vile racism, misogyny, homophobia, fat phobia, antisemitism, and etc., it just makes them harder to notice.

And when they’re harder to notice in a context, such as ours, in which the vileness of such things is widely recognized, that makes them more likely to be passed on to the reader rather than less.

Serving up blandified, deodorized Dahl to your kids makes it more likely they will be poisoned by him, not less.
posted by jamjam at 8:41 PM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]




ABC Radio National's Andy Park does his best to gin up a bit of outrage (RN Drive audio, 11m5s) over this. Andy Griffiths isn't having it.
posted by flabdablet at 9:36 PM on February 20, 2023


Roald Dahl himself edited his books in the 1970s as he became more aware of the world that he lived in.

Serving up blandified, deodorized Dahl to your kids makes it more likely they will be poisoned by him, not less.

I read the books as a child sometime in the late 70s, after seeing the movie on TV, and my library must have had the original version. I definitely developed some cynicism about the world I lived in from reading that...

Regardless I have fond memories of the books/movie. But when my kid was growing up I let him read whatever he wanted and he had no interest in reading dusty old kids' books. He read modern stuff like Harry Potter instead, and got exposed to almost the same prejudices...
posted by mmoncur at 10:25 PM on February 20, 2023 [5 favorites]


Since nobody has mentioned — Lemony Snicket hits many similar notes (cruelty, wry humor, complete lack of pandering) — with very little of the gross stuff. The man himself seems decent (although still a Gen Xer wrt certain things, for sure).

Plus the prose is an absolute delight to read aloud. I’ve read literally hundreds of books aloud in the last few years, and all of the Snicket books stand out as having some of the most musical prose. (That’s not to say the plot doesn’t occasionally drag; it sure does.)
posted by uncleozzy at 10:26 PM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


If you’re looking for* a controversy free alternative to Roald Dahl, Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) would not be my first choice.

(Note: I’m not. I’m also surprisingly unsettled by these edits if only because I didn’t realize we’re now shielding children from maybe accidentally hearing from one novel the even the names of other problematic authors. Also Ps: if we’re removing Joseph Conrad‘s name from a children’s book for racism/colonialism reasons shouldn’t we also be removing Hemingway for sexism)
posted by thivaia at 10:40 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]


As far I could tell, Pullman was taking the same position as many in this thread, that perhaps it would be better to just let Dahl's work fade into irrelevance than trying to 'update' it.

I agree that a lot of the appeal of Dahl to a young tween reader is the transgressive nature of it; his most famous book is one where four little shits get nearly murdered in a factory, to general celebration. While I feel like there's a lot more options out there, I do also think that the 90s and 2000s scrubbed a lot of children's literature of a child's first taste of the nasty shit, and I think exposure to some nasty shit is good for a young child lest they get through their entire childhood thinking depiction is endorsement. (Even now, I'm not sure Roald Dahl didn't endorse maiming a child for life because they watch television.)
posted by Merus at 10:49 PM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]


I hate Dahl's bigoty and when I tried reading him (as an adult, not feasible to read him as a child), I wasn't interested. And then I read the discussion here, and I see an underlying principle that parents (at least parents who agree with you) should control childrens' minds as much as possible, and I just want to scream. I grant that wanting to scream isn't an argument, but perhaps visceral reactions are informative in their own way.

My parents weren't that bad, but at least they let me read what I wanted. And I could read it in peace without everything being discussed. The emotional relationship wasn't good, and I hate the idea of reading with my mother.

Your argument for parental rights is the same sort of premise used by parents who want to prevent their kids from being gay.

You are wrong about something. Who knows what? I'm a modern person, too, so I'm in the middle of the culture, and there are presumably things it's getting wrong that we aren't seeing. Contact with the past, the actual past, to the extent it can be seen from what it produced, is at least an additional point of view.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:51 PM on February 20, 2023 [9 favorites]


I forgot to mention that I like Le Guin's point of view. Let children read what they want, but don't require pernicious stuff. I think "censorship" is a fuzzy concept, but making books not available to some category of people, and making unmarked changes, is some degree of censorship.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:54 PM on February 20, 2023


My experience with my 9yo is that in terms of bedtime reading, he actively wants to read the old books.

I try to get him interested in new books. We slogged through a couple of Katherine Rundell's and one Michael Morpurgo, but when I try to interest him in further books in the series or by the author, he's not interested. But he actively begs me for the next Famous Five or the next Narnia.

The only modern ones I've been successful with are "The Beast and Bethany" series, which he loves. But even they are the exception that proves the rule because they're self-consciously Dahl-esque with grotesque and immoral characters.

I think the main problem with modern Children's Fiction is that it doesn't exist. It used to fly under the radar enough that it could just appeal directly to children without adults taking much interest. But in the modern era there is only Parents' Fiction which is written with a strong eye on giving the parents paying for the books what they want: strong moral lessons and nothing too disturbing.

E.g. in "The Explorer" by Katherine Rundell three children are the victims of plane crash in the Amazon basin. They survive a few days before encountering The Explorer who is initially reluctant to help but eventually devises an escape plan. Or in her book "Rooftoppers" a foster parent takes their child to Paris, where they try to locate child's lost mother.

So the problem is obvious.

In those modern books, the adults are driving the plot. Nothing passively happens to the Famous Five. They decide to go exploring. They choose to take down a ring of black marketers. Adults exist in the background to supply slap-up cream teas and arrest the baddies at the end. James isn't taken on a journey by one parental figure to find another: James' parental figures are crushed to death by a giant fruit at the start. In classic Children's Fiction, the children are the active agents driving the plot.

So, I find it's preferable to make some changes to Children's Fiction and read the kid that, rather than try to interest him in Parents' Fiction now he's aware of the alternative.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 12:38 AM on February 21, 2023 [24 favorites]


I was hoping we'd ban JK Rowling long before going after Dahl. Oh well.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:36 AM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]


I’m a bit fascinated that in this discussion the assumption seems to be that if kids are reading Roald Dahl, they must have parents who will explain things to them the right way. In my experience, kids who read RD include kids with racist or fat-phobic parents, BIPOC kids, first-gen immigrant kids including those whose parents aren’t fluent enough in English to read them in advance, etc. That’s before you even get to the issue of time.
posted by warriorqueen at 3:20 AM on February 21, 2023 [15 favorites]


maybe we could ask children to consider that storytelling tropes like to depict villains as having non-normative bodies

See Jane interpellate the Ideological State Apparatus. Interpellate, Jane, interpellate.


Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the one Dahl book I didn't read. I saw the movie first and wasn't interested, but I mostly loved the rest. I found out about the antisemitism years later, and it was pretty disappointing.

I don't have a strong opinion on the edits, but the debate is sure a headache.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:40 AM on February 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


The Oompa Loompas Were African Slaves In The 1964 Book

Dahl also originally intended Charlie and his family to be African. If his publisher hadn't rejected the idea, it might have been clearer that Willy Wonka handing over control of his factory to Charlie was a metaphor for decolonising the European-controlled African oil industry (Dahl had worked for Shell in Africa for several years in the 1930s). That's why there are all of those pipes full of melted chocolate going everywhere. It's an oil refinery.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 4:03 AM on February 21, 2023 [16 favorites]


That is, I think these edits are badly done; but don't have a strong opinion on the practice. And the discussion here is illuminating, but the wider discourse is frustrating.

Plus the irony of cultural conservatives harping on things like this while simultaneously stripping school libraries of anything that offends their sensibilities.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:05 AM on February 21, 2023 [3 favorites]


TheophileEscargot: I texted your comment to a friend who works in Children's publishing (as do I, but as an artworker), as I thought it might be something he has sympathy with. He suggested (FWIW) Terry Pratchett's Nation and an author called M J Leonard. He also says: "There are a fair few [Children's books with active protagonists] in the last few decades. But a most disappear into the hidden backlist. If you are a parent shopping for kids books there’s the well known classics or the immediate front list being pushed by Waterstones and publishers. It’s hard to find and discover the best/most interesting of the last few decades. Unless you happen to be a scholar of recent children’s fiction"

The thing is children, on the whole, don't buy books, so they're designed to appeal to parents and librarians.

This hoo-hah stems from a sensitivity read. I don't have any problems with it (apart from anything else, it makes work for me, and I'm a freelance), but the reader is employed to find as many things as possible that might be problematic in the current climate, and given the climate as it is currently that can run to a very long list. The editor, in turn, feels pressured to respond to all those comments (however tenuous some of them might be), the author feels upset about their book being rewritten without their permission (obviously not a problem with Roald Dahl), and the media, smelling a fracas, pounce. Which makes the editors and their publishers even more jumpy.

(By the way, I thought the deal with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was that the children's fates were tied to their self-indulgence, but the blame for that was laid at their parents' door for permitting or even encouraging that self-indulgence. But I'm old and it's over forty years since I read the book, a bit less since I watched the film.)
posted by Grangousier at 4:33 AM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]


I’m a bit fascinated that in this discussion the assumption seems to be that if kids are reading Roald Dahl, they must have parents who will explain things to them the right way. In my experience, kids who read RD include kids with racist or fat-phobic parents, BIPOC kids, first-gen immigrant kids including those whose parents aren’t fluent enough in English to read them in advance, etc. That’s before you even get to the issue of time.

I can't favorite warriorqueen's comment enough. This is not about carefully curating books that are getting into kids' hands and fostering frank discussion, unless you are a very particular kind of parent or teacher.

Selling children's books has taught me that a lot of the people who are outraged about this kind of "censorship" haven't really read a children's book lately. When Dr. Seuss Enterprises pulled a handful of books, the customers who were the most outraged about it couldn't quote you anything from any of his books beyond a few jingles of a dozen words; they certainly had no idea of the content of the particular books that were pulled. They are giving these books to their children and grandchildren because they have an idea that they are canonical and deserve some kind of unquestioning attachment. We did make a lot of money selling copies of the Seuss books that were not being cut because a large percentage of customers were under the impression they were all going out of print so they ran in to buy them all; that's how carefully people read and respond to news about this sort of issue.

The usual thing that's happening with books that have retrograde shit in them is that, gradually or suddenly, they are not being sold anymore, and I think that's a good thing. But that would be the alternative for books like Dahl's.
posted by BibiRose at 4:50 AM on February 21, 2023 [12 favorites]


He suggested (FWIW) Terry Pratchett's Nation and an author called M J Leonard.

Thanks! He's resistant to Terry Pratchett but will definitely try M.J. Leonard!
posted by TheophileEscargot at 5:17 AM on February 21, 2023


I thought the deal with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was that the children's fates were tied to their self-indulgence

The first movie is basically that kind of parable. I did try to read Glass Elevator as a sequel to the movie, and put it aside pretty quickly.

(I also found Narnia extremely boring when I tried to read it; but by then had already read The Dark is Rising which handily kicks its ass as an adventure tale, and the sources were more interesting to me than Jesus as a lion.)

I never read Boy, but I did read Going Solo. I can't remember the particulars, but I do recall being a little disconcerted by some of Dahl's portrayal of himself and other actual people (rather than his over-the-top characters). I think it was the last book of his I read, as much due to age as anything else. But it was a weird place to end with him.

I got curious and turned up this (grad student?) essay on the topic (Berkeley, 2012) — it's a little heavy on the cultural studies greatest hits cut-and-paste, and un-ironically cites the Mustache Man to define globalization in one paragraph before Marx in the next and then Gramsci; but still collects some useful information and draws helpful connections, including on previous revisions (comparing texts, and the movies).

Such as:
[click to expand]
Hamida Bosmajian recognizes the power dynamic between Wonka and Oompa-Loompas to be a “master-slave relation” calling it “sweet” with Wonka as beneficiary (Bosmajian, 1985), while Clare Bradford roots the 1973 text within the history and politics of the UK in the 1960s as a reaction to "Third World immigration. By placing this narrative within the decolonization process Bradford identifies the power dynamic between Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas as one between the colonizer and the colonized."
...
"The British Nationality Act of 1948 opened the labor market and British citizenship to the New Commonwealth, “men and women from the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent who came to sell their labour power for a wage in British factories.” (Miles & Phizacklea 1984). Upon arrival to Britain they were perceived as usurpers of rightfully white British jobs. "They were immediately understood as inferior, separate from the white race, and questionably human."
...
Grandpa Joe’s story of the rise and the closing of Wonka’s factory connects to the white UK workers who perceived the threat of losing their jobs to the immigrating populations. Wonka fires his entire workforce and restarts his chocolate manufacturing with a new hidden workforce, the Oompa-Loompas. This translates to personal strife for Charlie Bucket’s family as they are denied employment at Wonka’s factory.
...
The fact that Wonka “smuggled” the Oompa-Loompas out of Africa in crates and into this factory speaks to its illegality and takes on the characteristic of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade (Dahl 1964). Moreover, Veruca Salt demands that her father buy her an Oompa-Loompa and none of the golden ticket holders questions the selling and buying of a human being
...
The US was in a post Civil Rights political climate when American Director, Mel Stuart, released Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factoryin 1971, the first cinematic adaptation of Dahl’s 1964 novel. To combat the depictions of slavery connected to the black Oompa-Loompas in the 1964 text and in response to flak from the NAACP, discussions occurred between African American actors and the film’s production team to change the Oompa-Loompas (Higgins 1971) (Stuart & Young 2002).
...
The major change from the 1964 written text to its 1971 cinematic adaptation occurs within the Oompa Loompa origin tale. There are subtle but significant changes within the Oompa-Loompa tale specifically in language. Instead of being “imported” in “crates with holes” as printed in the 1964 text, in the 1971 film the Oompa-Loompas are “transported” (Dahl 1964) (Stuart 1971).
...
The Oompa-Loompa’s place of origin undergoes a significant change. Africa in the 1964 publication, is replaced by the fictional Loompaland. Although the switch from African to Loompaland removes the racial association with blackness it also obscures the narrative of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. Loompaland, “what a terrible country it is, nothing but desolate wastes and fierce beasts” according to Wonka (Stuart 1971). Dahl’s relationship as the primary screenwriter in the American 1971 cinematic production influenced the 1973 revision of his written text.

Dahl buckled to the public criticism and changed the Oompa-Loompas and their literary illustrations from black to white (Sturrock 2010). The narrative, its stratifications, Wonka’s rise and closing of the factory, and the origin tale stay consistent with the 1964 text, again with subtle
changes. Consistent with the 1971 film, Africa is changed to Loompaland [in the 1973 text].
...
In 2005 US film director Tim Burton released Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the second cinematic adaptation of Dahl’s novel. The depiction of the Oompa-Loompas is manifested as one brown miniature male who is multiplied through computer generated images to create Wonka’s 3000 person workforce. By adhering closely to the original written texts of 1964 and 1973, the 2005 cinematic narrative reveals itself as an American anxiety tale within the context of globalization and the emergence of the internet in 2000....the 2005 Oompa-Loompas, like their prior depiction in Dahl’s 1964 text can also be explained as connected to white anxiety and labor. In the case on the 2005 film, instead of the people immigrating as expressed in the 1964 text the jobs are migrating due to outsourcing.
...
The textual whitewashing of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1964 text also prevents audience interpellation and recognition of the master-slave narrative. Constructed through a master-colonizer gaze readers, viewers, people of color, Third World citizens, and people who share
a similar existence of exploitation as the Oompa-Loompas are unable to recognize their own similar plight and connection to the OompaLoompas. The audience is realigned with Willy Wonka and his ideologies. "is broken interpellation works as a propagandistic force on behalf of the dominant class to continue dominating ideology through media. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is more than just a children’s story.


Given that typical postcolonial reading, I'd be very interested in sources for the idea that the original book was meant to be set in Africa as some kind of Dickens-for-Tots on decolonialization. (Or Dahl's Animal Farm.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:26 AM on February 21, 2023 [7 favorites]


Am I the only person not outraged by this?

Are you the only person who didn't read the first dozens of comments on this thread?
posted by doctornemo at 5:53 AM on February 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


I loved Glass Elevator! Aliens!

I also haven't seen mention of another favorite, Danny, Champion of the World. I loved the alone nature of the child's perspective in that book. So much happens in the woods, at night. I looked up the wiki and it says this:

"The book ends with a plea to the child who has just finished reading the story, that when they are grown up with children of their own, they be as exciting a parent to them as William was to Danny."

It should be noted William did some illegal things in the book. But I found this interesting in the context of the part of the discussion about adults driving the story in book vs it being about the child and their inner world.

I also loved his short stories and read them over and over as a kid. I remember one about a man who was a pickpocket, who tried to learn telekinesis type powers from a meditation guru. I remember some kind of horrible comeuppance and now will have to find those stories again because can't quite remember.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:56 AM on February 21, 2023


Another Glass Elevator fan. Wild stuff - even with a trip to the underworld (parody of Odysseus?).
posted by doctornemo at 5:59 AM on February 21, 2023


Huh, weird how Salman Rushdie is very passionate about censorship. I wonder what might have caused that.

Things that are an appropriate comparison to Rushdie and are actually censorship campaigns:

* Being the victim of attempted murder as part of a nation-state's religious war

Things that are not an appropriate comparison to Rushdie or actual censorship campaigns:

* Inciting violent transphobia worldwide and being criticized for it by trans people and their allies (cc: Pamela Paul)
* A rights holder making a decision independent of any sort of "censorius" organization, especially one that is disagreed with across the political spectrum
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 6:11 AM on February 21, 2023 [9 favorites]


tiny frying pan: that's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which apparently is going to be made into a Wes Anderson movie this year! (That was the last Roald Dahl book I read with my sister and my mother when I was seven, after going through about a dozen of them. I was traumatized by the story "The Swan" in the same collection, but I thought "Henry Sugar" was pretty neat.)

If not for nostalgia and the endless hunger for adapting classic books to movies and TV, I figure we could just forget about Dahl. Aesthetically I don't like a lot of these changes much - Dahl's appeal seems to be so much in his weirdness, nastiness, and irreverence that his work seems badly suited to being tidied up by his estate. I'd rather give kids different books to read, and leave Dahl in the dusty attic of history.
posted by Jeanne at 6:18 AM on February 21, 2023


First of all, I don't have children. I am aware that this fact has a huge bearing on my outlook in this case. I am not worried about my 21stC children reading the benighted books of, by some accounts, actual Nazi Roald Dahl, because my children do not exist, and never will.

With that in mind: These books are retrospectively a historical document of attitudes held and deemed acceptable at the time they were written. I believe that it is spectacularly dangerous to revise history. I am made very uncomfortable by efforts to sanitize the past. I also do not think we should look uncritically at works from the past; while they can be read for pleasure, in some cases, they are necessarily, and maybe more necessarily, subjects of study.

Children don't read critically. I don't expect children to read this way. So while we're talking about what are ostensibly children's books, I'm not really thinking about a child reader when I say this.

The people who are making these changes aren't really thinking about child readers either -- they're thinking about getting paid. They want to perpetually strip mine these books for IP. That's hard to do if the books are too offensive to sell to children.

I have very little sympathy for any of that. There are plenty of contemporary children's books to draw on for movies and TV series. I personally would rather see living authors make money from their works than see the distant progeny (or, more likely, unrelated rights holders) draw vampirically on the tit of a long dead writer until the end of days.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:28 AM on February 21, 2023 [5 favorites]


Roald Dahl himself edited his books in the 1970s as he became more aware of the world that he lived in.

Authorial privilege.

Slightly better that they at least admit upfront what they're doing, unlike Grosset and Dunlop who bowdlerized Booth Tarkington's Penrod back in the seventies and claimed that the new edition was complete, even as they shortened the title of this chapter and did a little cosmetic surgery elsewhere. (See The Purging of Penrod, in The Boy Scout Handbook and other Observations by Paul Fussell).

Mostly the Puffin changes just strike me as tin-earred, underscoring just how good a writer Dahl was. The effect is much like putting fig leaves on naughty bits of a nude painting. In the long run, you're bound to look foolish.

They won't do it, but what would be interesting would be to put out two new editions, Dahl Classic and Dahl for Our Times and see which one sells most. (Or has someone above suggested this already?)
posted by BWA at 6:44 AM on February 21, 2023


Oh, and for a good laugh, see if you can find Kingsley Amis's recollection of his one encounter with Dahl, described here.
posted by BWA at 6:55 AM on February 21, 2023 [4 favorites]


This is an interesting conversation because it touches on so many different things and it is really unclear what the "sides" of the debate on the topic might be. For starters, these edits seem to be something done proactively by his estate and people selling the works to make them more commercially viable. There didn't seem to be any movement to force these works to be changed, and no effort to prevent the original (or previously edited) versions from being produced. To me, this seems to fully undermine any sort of censorship argument. Realistically, the only people limiting expression would be people who want to prevent the editing.

There's definitely an argument to be made that the edits are poorly done, but to me that's like the George Lucas Star Wars movies with the bad cgi stuff added. With the very big difference that the original books are still available.

If copyright terms were shortened so family or whoever didn't have the ability to do these kind of edits, then other people would. In that scenario, updated versions might actually be a lot better, but it wouldn't keep people from creating new versions.

Music gets remastered, new translations are made of existing works, and as mentioned upthread quite a few times, re-editing books is not a new or unusual thing. I get why someone might really prefer the "original" version of their childhood thing (original depending on whether it had already been changed). I find it harder to see any justification for wanting to prevent someone from producing a different version.

And I guess it's fine to say, "I don't like that someone's doing this." But that's kind of like saying you don't like that anyone puts pineapple on pizza or something.
posted by snofoam at 7:01 AM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]


tiny frying pan: that's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which apparently is going to be made into a Wes Anderson movie this year!

Ok honestly that kind of bums me out to learn 😄
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:08 AM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]


I wonder if Gaiman will speak up again this time around. There's a strong palimpsest of Dahl in Gaiman's style, and he's mentioned the influence himself.

Also, maybe this is just by virtue of what UK fiction trickles into US school libraries, but in my mind the natural follow on to outgrowing Dahl was reading the Adrian Mole books. Looking back, I guess there's a sort of unintentional connection between the kind of main-character subjectivity imparted by Dahl to the kids and particularly the boys who read him uncritically, and the flummoxed encounters with actual society that immediately follow.

(Although if we're going to Bowdlerize young adult fiction to discourage that sort of thing, then the widely-printed works of R.A. Salvatore can be condensed to 'nope.')
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:29 AM on February 21, 2023


My additional thoughts as a parent are probably warped by the fact that I eventually had to come to terms with the fact that a vast swath of the books I loved as a child - the majority - The Horse and His Boy, Little House on the Prairie, Just-So Stories, Julie of the Wolves, and on and on and on were fundamentally tainted by colonialism and racism.

It actually took me down as a writer for about a decade because how do you write something in the face of that, especially as a white person? Finally I am tackling it but man, it's hard.

I also think in my generation, Gen X, we were given books that opened our eyes to things, or at least we thought they did. Sometimes I feel like I and my friends have conflated "being a reader" with "being a good person," and although I still kind of believe there's a good solid Venn overlap...it's possible that we became more active and aware despite the books we read, not because of them.

Luckily in the meantime it hasn't been that impossible -- not always easy though, the points about the front lists vs. the good books are strong ones, but a librarians and librarian lists are awesome -- to both let my kids read widely as they wish, talk to them about themes and issues, but also find different stories. (Akata Witch just came to mind.) Luckily their teachers have been leaders in this regard.

Anyways, I have no strong feelings about changing the language in Roald Dahl because although my kids did read and enjoy those books - speaking of the front list Costco had a boxed set for the longest time, eventually we had three because people kept buying that freaking box for us; I subscribe to the 'let them read' LeGuin thing - and I used to too, they just are pretty hard to invite into your beloved reading zone once you understand how much a child of British colonization Roald Dahl was and how much he built that into his stories.

Once you see the throughline it's hard to unsee it. Henry Sugar is exactly the colonial wish-fulfillment story: Find the book Mysteriously Acquired In India, steal the yogi's secret, become magical, make a shit-ton of money, create orphanages (for all the kids colonialism has orphaned maybe? Too close to residential schools for comfort.)

Editing the words is really the easy, insufficient part.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:33 AM on February 21, 2023 [13 favorites]


I think some of us aren't giving kids enough credit here.

I was a pretty free-range kid in the 70s-80s. I picked up and read my grandmother's original hardcover copies of Stephen King's The Stand, The Shining, and 'Salem's Lot. I think I started with The Stand probably when I was about eight or nine years old because I was intrigued by the cover art (a really old edition, with a painting that looks like Luke Skywalker with a sword fighting a Crow-Person... look it up... I was kind of annoyed that this sword fight never happened in the book).

I just grabbed the books and read them... we were temporarily living with my grandparents at the time, and grandma always loved horror movies and stuff like that... we used to watch Night Gallery together. I missed the point of a lot of those novels, and I skimmed lots of the "boring adult parts" with a lot of talking and stuff. I read it for the scary stuff, the gore, the violence and the mysterious sex-stuff. For some reason, my parents didn't care that I was reading King novels at such a young age... King was relatively new then and my folks may not have really known what those books were?

Anyway, I read all that lurid, gory, terrifying adult material at a young age. And I read the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (with the African Oompa-Loompas and references to fat people). I read Chocolate Factory around 1978 or so, and I remember thinking the movie was "old" and the book was "even older" and I was puzzled by the Oompa Loompa difference in the book.

I don't think we give kids enough credit. The world doesn't need to be sanitized for our protection.
posted by SoberHighland at 7:58 AM on February 21, 2023 [15 favorites]


They've also done that weird thing where random words are capitalized in BIG WHACKY FONTS. Sometimes just three letters to a page - see here (Twitter link with screenshots).
CatCF is over a hundred pages longer now.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:58 AM on February 21, 2023


Typeset in the style of Metafilter's other favorite children's writer, Dave Barry.
    WHIMSY!
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:07 AM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]


Given that typical postcolonial reading, I'd be very interested in sources for the idea that the original book was meant to be set in Africa as some kind of Dickens-for-Tots on decolonialization.

I don't think it was meant to be set in Africa, or to be anything like Dickens. It's just a metaphor, and this is just my interpretation, although I think the book makes a lot of sense if you read it this way. Especially all the melted chocolate; also the way Dahl portrays Charlie as earning the right to take over the factory through temperance and self-restraint, a kind of child version of the protestant work ethic. The Oompa Loompas also fit the way the British tended to use migrant or transported workers in Africa because they were, for various reasons, easier to exploit and could be made more dependent on their employers than local workers.

(Also, I got something wrong - it was Dahl's agent, not his publisher.)
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 8:14 AM on February 21, 2023


The world doesn't need to be sanitized for our protection.

I'll try not to keep hammering this home but - for whose protection? My son's class includes kids born in Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, and Iran.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:14 AM on February 21, 2023 [8 favorites]


I've been reading this with some interest but not a lot to say because 1. no kids and 2. weirdly for Gen X, did not read Dahl as a kid. I was an only child and my parents made a lot of conscious choices around raising me to be more enlightened/less bigoted than their generations had been. In particular when we cleaned out the family home so my mom could move to a smaller place a few years after my dad died, I remember finding a book about raising a feminist daughter, and along with that I had a lot of "not just the nurse kit but the doctor kit" in my toy choices, etc. (Not to say my parents made 100% great choices, just this was one that they made deliberately!)

Now I'm beginning to think my parents, particularly my mom, who put me on to Tolkien and medieval history and so on and so forth, may have deliberately excluded Dahl. I read Kipling during elementary school but I already had some context around it, so it wasn't just no racism/colonialism. Or maybe one or both of them just didn't like Dahl. Either way I may have benefitted by having my first exposure be the Gene Wilder film and not really getting back to it until the Fantastic Mr Fox movie.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 8:22 AM on February 21, 2023


I'm not arguing that Dahl be made into required reading for kids, but it belongs in a school library... right along with Mark Twain. And books that deal with racial tensions, diverse sexual and gender expressions, etc.

Part of my point about my reading Stephen King as a kid is that kids are gonna get into all kinds of stuff. And changing words to sanitize old books is just a bad idea. I wasn't being clear.
posted by SoberHighland at 8:46 AM on February 21, 2023


Things that are an appropriate comparison to Rushdie and are actually censorship campaigns:

If you're referring to my comment, I wasn't comparing what Rushdie went through to this Dahl story. I was referring to an early comment criticizing Rushdie for "piling on."
posted by doctornemo at 8:52 AM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]


by some accounts, actual Nazi Roald Dahl

Do you mean the Dahl who actually, literally fought Nazis as a fighter pilot and intelligence operative in WWII?
posted by doctornemo at 8:54 AM on February 21, 2023 [17 favorites]


like the George Lucas Star Wars movies with the bad cgi stuff added.
Good comparison. Reminds me also of Spielberg re-editing E.T. a bit to make it less violent.
posted by doctornemo at 8:58 AM on February 21, 2023


I just meant he hated Jewish people. But I'm glad you're here to stand up for Roald Dahl, friend to people everywhere, lol.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:06 AM on February 21, 2023


Calling Dahl an "actual Nazi" would be editing history. You could accurately call him an anti-Semite.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:11 AM on February 21, 2023 [12 favorites]


Is it fair to say that I'm actually rolling my eyes? My eyes are not literally rolling in my head.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:13 AM on February 21, 2023


Roll your eyes if you feel you need to, but calling him a Nazi (actual or otherwise) is not a statement really based in any kind of reality (at least as I know it). Feel free to acknowledge that or move on, I don't know?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:20 AM on February 21, 2023 [9 favorites]


(children, of course, being highly problematic)

I have a modest proposal...
posted by chavenet at 9:28 AM on February 21, 2023 [5 favorites]


I don't see a worthwhile distinction between an anti-Semite and a Nazi; American anti-Semites, for example, may not be members of the Nazi party, but I think it is safe and even important to call them Nazis.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:28 AM on February 21, 2023


I'm not arguing that Dahl be made into required reading for kids, but it belongs in a school library... right along with Mark Twain. And books that deal with racial tensions, diverse sexual and gender expressions, etc.

Sure, agreed. I just am wary of the "I wasn't damaged so..." argument. The older I get the more I see that damage to me didn't mean no damage, just that I was in the privileged class that could brush it off.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:32 AM on February 21, 2023 [5 favorites]


"I don't see a worthwhile distinction between an anti-Semite and a Nazi"

OK, at the risk of getting academic here, there obviously a Venn diagram overlap here.
But there are nearly 2000 years of Christians being antisemitic before European fascism became a thing.
And there are folks now who are antisemitic who aren't Nazis, like Louis Farrakhan.

I apologize if this is too pedantic, but in a thread about words, paying attention to words seems legit.
posted by doctornemo at 9:33 AM on February 21, 2023 [22 favorites]




I'm not going to speak to the feelings of parents concerned about what their kids are reading, because I have no kids (I was allowed to read whatever, and had the usual experience of coming back to books out of curiosity many years on and saying YIKES--usually because I hadn't had any historical frame of reference to process what I had read earlier). I am a little exasperated about the weirdly apocalyptic framing of what has always been standard practice with children's literature, and by "always" I mean "going back to the unmarked editorial changes in reprints of James Janeway's A Token for Children (1671)." Whether this should or should not be done is an entirely different line of argument from PEN's and similar takes. (For the record, I agree with those who are pointing out that the rationale in Dahl's case is entirely a matter of maximizing current profits.)
posted by thomas j wise at 10:13 AM on February 21, 2023 [5 favorites]


I just am wary of the "I wasn't damaged so..." argument. The older I get the more I see that damage to me didn't mean no damage, just that I was in the privileged class that could brush it off.

I'm sympathetic to that line of thinking. I certainly wouldn't let kids have access to many different things. Not even going to bother naming them here. But there's no such thing as life with no damage.

I do think "damage" or "damaged" is perhaps thrown around too easily these days. Sure, things can be damaging to kids. But sometimes damage is a growth experience. Sometimes it debilitates people for life. There's a gaping gulf between the two and a wide range of experiences between.

My main point in this thread (and I admit I have not been expressing myself very well) is that some here are not giving kids enough credit. Even disadvantaged kids. I don't want to see anyone get hurt. But I don't want books to be changed or removed from libraries because some people think the books are mean-spirited or whatever. I'll leave it at that.

(And I too have noticed the recent-ish revival of Dahl's works getting made into teevee shows and movies and the specific case here of changing his books is entirely about eyeballs on screens and revenue and spinoffs and merchandising and nothing else, really)
posted by SoberHighland at 10:22 AM on February 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


I don't see a worthwhile distinction between an anti-Semite and a Nazi; American anti-Semites, for example, may not be members of the Nazi party, but I think it is safe and even important to call them Nazis.

You don't need to be a fascist (or genocidal) to be anti-semitic. It's important that we recognize anti-semitism that falls short of that mark, and not equate them. It's important to realize that you can be a literally militant anti-fascist, and still be anti-semitic. Can we end this derail now?
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:18 AM on February 21, 2023 [16 favorites]


You know, I’ve got the perfect Hollywood solution for this, and let me preface this by saying that I’m totally sick of this pattern in superhero form, but nonetheless, it’s the commercial solution…

Treat the Dahl books as an (IP) universe, or set of universes, stop selling the originals as children’s books, start selling updated original universe and secondary character books, release annotated originals for anyone who wants to study the original - most likely to be adults or older (bored) students.

Bam… that’s how you get to the profits, which reside on the IP / brand name, not the racism.

Plus, I’m thinking that the writers among you can imagine new and exciting stories with the main and secondary characters. If you can do that with Stormtroopers, you can certainly do that with an Oompa Loompa. (TBF, I did just watch Cruella a few weeks ago, and while not perfect, is another great example of this working, but maybe I just love Emma Stone too much after Maniac.)
posted by ec2y at 1:09 PM on February 21, 2023 [3 favorites]


ec2y: Please don't give them any ideas!

I mean, part of the charm of the Dahl books, and indeed most books that aren't airport thrillers, is the use of language. The rhythms, the word choices... The best example of this is how Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy survived until it was killed. It had several radio serials, a television series, several books, all of them using Adams' wonderful language. But then they made a movie, and I guess the script was too long because they shortened a lot of phrases. Didn't ruin the meaning at all, but UTTERLY DESTROYED the poetry of the language. It had been more or less intact with the same rhythms and expected/unexpected turns of phrase, and in one fell swoop they neutered that property so hard there will likely never be a new exploration of that series.
posted by hippybear at 1:19 PM on February 21, 2023 [6 favorites]


BEFORE:
“Each man will have a gun and a flashlight”
“Badger sat down and put a paw around his small son”
“Great flabby folds of fat bulged out from every part of his body, and his face was like a monstrous ball of dough”

AFTER:
“Each person will have a person and a flashlight.”
“Badger sat down and put a paw around the small badger.”
“Great folds bulged out from every part of his body, and his face was like a ball of dough.”

There's nothing wrong with updating a beloved book to be accessible to a new generation, but this reads like they just had an intern run Find-and-Replace in Microsoft Word without bothering to actually read the result.
posted by Lanark at 1:28 PM on February 21, 2023 [10 favorites]


It’s time for someone to revise the Hardy Boys books to remove all the ejaculations (Chet Morton is the biggest culprit).
posted by whatevernot at 3:20 AM on February 22, 2023 [4 favorites]


Chet also owns the dragster Queen, and many of his ejaculations occur with Joe riding in his backseat. But, that would be a second revision; they took the blatant racism out 60 years ago.
Take Frank and Joe’s friend, Chet Morton. One of the books’ most memorable characters, Chet has several distinguishing qualities: his skittishness, his where-does-it-all-go appetite, his playfulness, his sensitivity. These quirks—some of which American society tends to view as “effeminate”—offer up a more expansive vision of boyhood, one at odds with the traditional masculine ideal that prizes traits such as athleticism, unfeelingness, hard-nosed machismo, and, generally, being a man’s man (all to the detriment of boys as they grow up). “There was humor, there was friendship,” Greenwald told me in an interview, referring to the affable Chet. And in that way, she added, “there was a very minor subversive aspect to the books.” Think of it like this: While the franchise is named after the Hardys, it’s Chet who gives the books heart—and who gave my scrawny, closeted adolescent self a different boyishness to embrace. For instance, though I couldn’t put my finger on it when I was younger, there was always something delightfully transgressive about the fact that Chet’s car, depicted in the books as the “pride” of his life, is named The Queen. These days, I like to imagine that detail as a winking inside joke with the observant queer reader.

And yet, in part because of the obvious care with which characters such as Chet are presented, as a kid, I was startled by the books’ handling of characters who aren’t white—and who are frequently clumped together using overly broad, loaded terms such as natives and Indians...
...
Even these revised books are improvements on the originals in terms of how they portray marginalized groups. For instance, the 1935 version of The Hidden Harbor Mystery has as its archvillain a thickly accented black American man named Luke Jones, who’s the leader of a gang of troublemaking young black men. (A typical line from Jones: “Luke Jones don’t stand for no nonsense from white folks! Ah pays mah fare, an’ Ah puts mah shoes where Ah please.”) The 1961 iteration of the book, for its part, totally jettisons Jones’s character, and the characters who were initially black are made less racially distinct. I remember thinking, when I first learned about these changes as a young adult, that it would have been better to simply give the black characters more dimension than attempt to blot them out.

Still, while the Stratemeyer Syndicate scrubbed up a good chunk of the text when it began its 14-year revision process in 1959—a praiseworthy, intensive task—some of the original subtext lingered, at least for me. More specifically, I still had to contend with the way the books informed how I viewed myself, the kinds of messages I was internalizing. As I got older, snacking on Hardy Boys books increasingly involved a tricky negotiation. On the one hand, there was my enthusiastic identification with the series—with its refreshingly irreverent messaging about boyhood—and on the other, a sense of dis-identification—with its subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle denigration of people beyond the provincial world of the Hardys, who themselves arguably embody the ideals of mid-century white America.

Which isn’t to say that the books ought to be expunged from school libraries or disavowed by educators and parents. After all, the texts do have a lot of redeeming educational value. In addition to illuminating the key beats of a great story—well-defined characters, drama, a compelling narrative arc—they recognize kids’ intelligence, employing elevated language that stretches their vocabulary. (Chet, for instance, always drives a jalopy, a word that was lost on me as a preteen; other advanced words I learned include careening and impetuous.)

The Hardy Boys also offer a critical lesson on the importance of reappraisal—on how, with hindsight, it’s possible to see the cultural blind spots in art. In time, as I read more broadly and deeply, I learned to hold the books up to the light and separate out their derisions and elisions, their racist caricatures and sexist tropes (female characters, such as Laura Hardy, the boys’ mother, are often reduced to overly doting, self-effacing bit players).
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:15 AM on February 22, 2023 [4 favorites]


I loved Matilda as a bookish, brown-haired girl, and I've been reflecting on Agatha Trunchbull and yeah, I probably did/do have a harder time accepting the butch-er parts of me due to portrayals like that. I don't think the sorts of edits I'm seeing would really change that, though, it's integral to the all-good / all-bad characters. This certainly isn't exclusive to Roald Dahl, but his books lean pretty hard into creating unique, interesting villains in a way that a lot of children's books avoid.

I think having something to balance that (like Garnet in Steven Universe?) would have gone a long way, and the broader answer is more representation and more children's books so children get a reasonably-broad picture of the different ways people can be.
posted by momus_window at 4:10 PM on February 22, 2023 [2 favorites]


I've loved some Roald Dahl, notably Danny, the Champion of the World, The Twits, and The BFG. But it's okay to leave racist books behind.

The changes are bland, they are not the writer's voice. We leave some Seuss behind, too. Encourage new work and new voices.
posted by theora55 at 1:38 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]




Late to the party here, but as a non-white parent who loved Dahl's books as a kid: the racism in Dahl never bothered me when I was reading him, and I might not have even noticed it, even though he was like specifically making fun of Chinese people in The Great Glass Elevator for example.

However, I do remember very clearly the day I was reading Narnia and becoming acutely aware that I, an Asian person, did not belong in Narnia, which was for good white people only. And it bothered me quite a bit. (Others have already pointed at CS Lewis up thread.)

I think the main reason is that, while reading Dahl, even as a kid I knew it was a form of "moral escapism"; the whole point is seeing people be bad and rude and do unacceptable things, an escape from regular childhood where you're constantly told how to become a good person.

But Narnia read as a serious story. So seeing racism there felt way more upsetting. It's like the difference between your weird chain-smoking uncle saying the N word versus your prim and proper form teacher doing so. The latter feels like it is fundamentally reshaping reality.

Anyway, I guess my point is that I really don't have that much opinion on the changes to Dahl's words. I see the reason, but to me it also feels a bit pointless when the fundamental plots of so many other books are steeped in racist, misogynist and colonialist themes.

And honestly I think the most damaging thing to me as a child, was only reading stories set in some kind of England or America, that the universe was centered there, and not where I was.

Ultimately, if we want to address this, the right way would be to read and publish more children's stories from non-white, non-American/European authors.
posted by destrius at 7:29 PM on February 23, 2023 [7 favorites]


Roald Dahl: Original books to be printed by Penguin following criticism

Perhaps it was a publicity stunt after all
posted by plonkee at 5:29 AM on February 24, 2023 [6 favorites]


Original books to be printed by Penguin following criticism.
Penguin's managing director Francesca Dow said: "We've listened to the debate over the past week which has reaffirmed the extraordinary power of Roald Dahl's books, and the very real questions around how stories from another era can be kept relevant for each new generation."
Penguin said their latest decision to keep producing the original versions was because "we recognise the importance of keeping Dahl's classic texts in print".
posted by Lanark at 5:30 AM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


Why do I have a very strong feeling that that was exactly what they intended to do in the first place?
posted by Grangousier at 6:52 AM on February 24, 2023 [5 favorites]


I can’t stop laughing about this. Chapeau, Puffin!
posted by HandfulOfDust at 11:47 AM on February 24, 2023


"New Coke" marketing strikes again!
posted by mmoncur at 7:50 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


Lolol. Knew it!!
posted by potrzebie at 12:23 AM on February 25, 2023


Completely unsurprised by the latest twist as well as the usual "woke censorship is worse than bigotry" types falling for it. Not only that, as Michael Hobbes pointed out in the tweet posted up thread, expect to see this trotted out again and again (here and elsewhere) just like what happened with the Dr. Seuss non-troversy.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 4:58 AM on February 25, 2023 [3 favorites]


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