On 3/7/23 7:16 PM, Paul Rubin wrote:
Gary McGath <[email protected]> writes:
It's the new age of bowdlerization. Penguin Random House issued a
sanitized edition of Roald Dahl, then backed down halfway and said
they'd keep the original versions in print alongside them.
As I heard it, the sanitized version is a Puffin edition. Puffin is
Random House's line of kids' books. The Penguin line is adult fiction
and the backdown was to publish the unsanitized Dahl books under the
Penguin imprint, so you get to choose which one you want.
I figure that kids' books are only partly works of literature. They are
also instructional, since part of their purpose is to help kids learn to read. So in that sense they are like textbooks. Textbooks get updated
all the time, so updating kids' books to deal with changing environments seems legit to me.
"Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" was in the news recently. It was written in the 1950s and was about kids programming a vacuum tube
computer. An updated edition with modern computers would arguably be a
good thing. Cleaning up any outdated jargon and needless offenses seems
fine to do at the same time. A lot of 1920s-era blatant racism was
revised out of the original Hardy Boys mysteries starting in the 1950s,
and I don't think anyone made a fuss.
The main thing is to not try to suppress the original editions for those
who do want them for whatever reason. The big offender in that
department is George Lucas, who went to great lengths to stop anyone
from ever re-watching the original Star Wars movie where Han shot first.
The big villain is long copyright. Books from the sixties and even the
thirties are still in copyright, their authors are mostly no longer
around to defend them, and the copyrights are in the hands of people who
only want to maximize income from them.
When a work is out of print, anyone can produce a bowdlerized edition,
and someone else can produce an authentic edition, preserving every illustration, dirty word, and typo from the original.
Another issue is that there's too much focus on words rather than
content today. While researching my blog post on Dahl, I read the
beginning of "The Witches" and was horrified at how the authorial voice replicates the witch-hunt mentality of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The narrator stresses how any nice woman the reader meets
might actually be a murderous witch. He says, "Oh, if only there were a
way of telling for sure whether a woman was a witch or not, then we
could round them all up and put them in the meat grinder."
No amount of changing the words, short of completely rewriting the
story, takes that mindset away. The bowdlerized edition has witches infiltrating society while holding prestigious jobs rather than
low-level ones, but that changes nothing.
In the original version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the
Oompa Loompas were African Pygmies. He changed that one himself (under pressure), but nothing takes the creepiness away from having foreign
workers who can never leave the factory.
We need to understand these authors for what they were rather than
covering them up with cosmetic changes.
--
Gary McGath
http://www.mcgath.com
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