Roald Dahl: Original books to be kept in print following criticism
bbc.com
bbc.com
> The company said it would publish 17 of the author's books in their original form as The Roald Dahl Classic Collection along with the planned edited versions so "readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl's stories they prefer."
To me, it feels like a way to quell anger but still proceed forward and possibly even make money. I bet that the “classic” editions will be quietly discontinued in a few years.
So buy them now, before they go out of copyright.
This feels like a way to drum up publicity and sell more books. Many grandparents will be reading this outrage in the express and buying the full original set for their children this christmas.
(it seems that copyright will last until 2060, which is crazy - 100 years after they were written)
I think copyright should last long enough to encourage the following type of creation: An author writes a fantasy book series. The author publishes books in this fantasy world for the next 25 years. Then she signs a deal for the movie rights and the studio spends 15 years producing a trilogy. If copyright only lasted 50 years, the entire fantasy world would still be under copyright for a decade after the last movie was released (and that movie would be protected for 50 years).
Now think of the benefit to society. The '60s and '70s produced a wealth of cultural content, and modern culture would benefit from seeing that material enter the public domain.
Nonsense. Disney would make plenty of money on Frozen 17 with Snow White in the public domain. Extreme copyright lifetimes just stifle public creativity and are an excuse to implement draconian and authoritarian practices.
Though I'm not sure that Disney would have been deterred in every case.
[1] I presume the copyright holder here is doing the changing
Shocking!
When it's culture warriors vs Capitalism - who do you put your money on?
If they dont sell they will be discontinued, if they sell they will continue to be published.
> possibly even make money
Of course. Publishing is a business. If they dont make money they will stop existing.
There is no mystery here.
In my country publishing existed without any concern for making money for decades. State funding.
I've got plenty of issues with modern literature written to confirm the readers opinions rather than challenge them. Reducing books from the past to fit the same modern views just history-washing. Let us all naively believe that all authors in the past have our same identical values so we are never challenged to look beyond them.
It's revolting and frightening. No one is ever going to learn anything outside of their narrow world view if this trend continues, and I have a bad feeling that it will. Who's next? C.S. Lewis? Tolkien? I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
I would truly be happier if these books got censored. Let them remain on the list of corrupting literature because at least then the bold reader can seek them out.
If Dahl was writing today, and his editor said they had to change some phrasing, of course he would have done it. The important thing is getting kids to read his marvelous stories, not insisting on some form of literary purity.
This whole issue only exists because of a generation of people trained to fear criticism and to avoid anything that might attract it.
It was always about selling more books, not making them "better" or "less offensive"(1).
(1) the move sure seems to have offended many people.
It was done so poorly that this thought had already crossed my mind. A bunch of the changes were obviously unnecessary by any standard, and they didn't even pay attention to things like meter when editing poems.
I'm not even necessarily against this (we do this to kids' literature all the time and basically always have—as longs as the originals can still be had, not a big deal) but this was so lazy and awful that it's hard to believe they were serious—this was straight-up an illiterate editing effort.
Exactly. If they weren't artless hacks they'd write their own books instead of butchering others.
All that to say I am actually surprised they went back on their announce.
If you want another sad-making observation, the teachers say teens are increasingly finding late-20th-century kids' books hard to read, because the language is too complex for them to follow—they're used to first-person with very simple sentences with redundancy for anything important (so it's harder to miss), and publishers are chasing simplicity/clarity-at-all-costs hard for fear of alienating any of their shrinking reader-base, which of course re-enforces that decline in ability to handle sentence- and paragraph-level complexity—even goes for "advanced" readers, I'm told. This part's been heading that way for a while, but I guess has gotten much worse fast over the last 5ish years.
Basically, the genres that people still read (YA and romance) are trending hard toward first-person and very simple language. If you write in third publishers and agents will either tell you to switch outright, or you'll get a lot of "seems too distant and impersonal" and such, which is just them asking for first person without saying it. Some get through anyway, especially from authors who got their start 10+ years ago and have more sway, but first is strongly preferred.
That doesn't surprise me at all, I'm sure 20th century teachers found the same trend in 20th century students trying to read 19th century books. It's a shame, but it is what it is. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from this, except that we should do what we can to encourage kids to read the classics despite (or even because) of the difficulty.
I have a suspicion that the trend dates back much earlier (60s? 70s?), and owes to de-emphasizing poetry in English classes, since reading poetry requires heavy tracking of complex context over long stretches of text, making even fairly-complex prose mostly seem easy by comparison. This may just be a continuation of that trend—kids' lit gradually getting simpler in response to declining literacy that is itself due to shifts in curriculum focus, causing an ongoing, further decline.
Or take Shakespeare for example; he wrote for the unwashed masses yet his writings are considered sophisticated and challenging today. I have an anthology of English renaissance drama from various playwrights that I revisit from time to time. The stories are usually quite crude and funny (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Tis_Pity_She%27s_a_Whore), but understanding them well enough to appreciate that humor can be a chore. I don't think these stories were considered difficult originally, but became so over time.
I read this as: editors are changing just some words in order to save Dahl, who should be banned completely. And Salon author calls their own stance “against censorship”. Hm.
Based on what?
As I said on reddit about this:
Warner Bros. have done fine with the pre-amble to their older cartoons that says something to the effect of "yo, this was written back when attitudes were different, they were shitty attitudes, but to erase them is to pretend it never happened."
A similar preface in the books would have worked much better, but wouldn't give you any amount of PR like this.
Then the PR statement came out, and anti-woke people are up in arms about it, and everyone else is going “huh that’s just weird to do”.
I feel like it surely has to be just a push to get the books back in the public mindshare if sales were slipping.
Should we edit Shakespeare to remove all that hard-to-read 'olde English'? Maybe edit Romeo and Juliet to give it a happier ending, and get rid of that nasty violence with daggers and poison? (that's much worse than Roald Dahl describing characters as 'fat' or 'female' isn't it?)
It's been done. Multiple times. Yet somehow we didn't have the same sort of performative outrage.
Hell, even the bible has been rewritten multiple times with lots of infighting about what the right version is.
I liked his books quite a lot as a kid, and haven't prevented any children in my care from accessing them. But on revisiting as an adult there is a kind of... meanspiritedness to them. It's hard to describe but almost like, spiritual viciousness or a deep nasty pessimism about people.
Part of this may be why they appeal to children anyway. I didn't consciously notice as a kid but I suspect they registered as slightly transgressive in some way, and were alluring for that reason. Anyway none of the edits really address that, or could. To a significant extent that feeling is a fundamental part of the books and can't be removed.
Yes, I felt this way about his books when I was a kid. I did like the books despite it, but there was always an element of grotesque cruelty to his books that I didn't particularly care for.
Still, removing that from the books is wrong. Read different books, or write your own books. Editing his books to remove the author's distinctive style is just plain wrong. What's the objective, to trick kids into thinking Roald Dahl was a different sort of man? To what end? Whatever the problem, deception is not the answer.
Oh, yeah, that is absolutely why they were so popular. This is arguably an example of what TVTropes calls "Seinfeld is unfunny" (the inventor of a new style of media seems derivative or at least uninteresting to modern audiences); today it maybe doesn't stand out so much, but Dahl was probably the first modern childrens' writer to write stuff like this.
Personally I didn’t mind it. A lot of British comedic writing and entertainment was similar in vein. There’s a lot of emphasis places on barbed wit in a lot of their media (even as far back as Shakespeare), and I think Dahl essentially took that and formed it into a kids book.
Even when I was a child though, I felt any mean spritidness was always directed in a way towards the antagonist or received from a bully. It was largely in adversarial relationships. Maybe I misremember though.
Either way, I think his overall stories are almost always so incredibly charming , coupled with Quentin Blake’s wonderful art, that they’re a must read for children.
Im basing this on the fact that anti-woke usually is considered right-wing/libertarian etc
Whereas nobody I talked to who opposed these changes would consider themselves “anti-woke”.
Im not trying to pick a bone with you, but I’ve been lately thinking about a common trope where if someone opposes a change/policy , they get labeled “anti-this” or the worst is they get hit with a question of “why do you care” Where the goal isn’t to debate the merits of the change but simply shun the other person.
(also it definitely happens from both sides)
Maybe the problem you're trying to point out is that, like most labels, anti-thing leaves no nuance. To what level is a person against something? Are they questioning that thing to gain better understanding? Or are they trying to justify their bias?
Maybe in your mind but not mine. Good liberals are anti-woke because woke is anti-liberal. It's a coercive force that any decent person should be against. At least anyone who critically examines it and the methods it uses to manipulate and gain unjust and unearned power over others.
I personally agree with you wholeheartedly but I think your opinion is in the minority
People like you have always existed, suited in different skins, based on whatever gullible plebs could fall for or cowards could be frightened into.
It's funny that you mention religion, because yes I am a christian and so I understand that one day I will stand before god in judgement of my actions. I have no certainty that I am able to do what is required of me, only that I must try and this is what drives me to fight for "the least of these." Why do you lick the boot?
That’s not a label I’m applying to them without their consent. It’s a term they use themselves as a matter of pride.
I did also mention that other people found it odd too, which was meant to imply that nobody was really for this change.
can you be up in arms but not be considered anti-woke?
I get what you’re trying to say, I just wonder how many people decided not to be up in arms about this and other subjects similar to this and decided to keep quiet so they would not be considered anti-woke.
I say this cause in my work env, people are heavily pushing language shift recommendations and it seems like nobody dares speak up about it (me included) to stay polite/be considered part of the good ones. But in reality most people are not for the change at all.
And it’s usually a minority of people pushing for changes like this.
If the problem is that you want to have a thoughtful conversation about an issue but are worried about being labelled, first identify if being thoughtful or critical is the what the group wants or has the propensity to do. If you're lucky then you will be around people willing to have a discussion and can frame a lot of the conversation around you filling in your understanding (when in fact you're trying to get others to start thinking critically). Asking a lot of questions about the results of outcomes is also a great way to stop people from auto-piloting into popular opinions.
It seems like you’re conflating objecting to something with being up in arms about it.
A reasoned objection is very different than the over the top reaction from some people, even on here, saying “wokeness is the end of literary freedom etc”. Analyzing it on a case by case basis vs jumping to extreme conclusions based on one’s biases.
You're right that one of these is unfair, but it is the latter not the former. "Woke" is the progressive fringe, not the mainstream. Opposition to woke is a set that includes both the moderate mainstream and the right fringe. Liberal enlightenment values, which represent the moderate majority today, are distinctly "anti-woke".
The classic liberal stance is "don't be shitty to people", and, in turn, "call out people for being shitty". But "shitty" is pretty subjective, and it runs the gamut from "going out of your way to be specifically, personally aggressive and hurtful" to "using a word that in a different context might potentially be understood as critical to someone". It seems like the most vocally anti-woke people clutch their pearls in equal dismay for any attempt at avoiding either case.
I think there is a performative element to a lot of "woke" efforts, but I have to be very careful about saying that, lest I inadvertently carry water for someone who wants to use my words to justify racial slurs or deliberate mis-gendering or any number of other things that I think are shitty. It should not be "this self-described liberal said that 'woke' is performative, therefore there's no real objection to me calling black people [racial slur]".
How so? Enlightenment values include the commitment to universal human dignity and the rejection of prejudice and discrimination. This is consistent with the goals of social justice movements.
The publisher does not have a rational unified will. It is made of up people and its actions are a product of internal politics.
In this case, as is usual, a tiny group of hyper-motivated woke ideologues would have banded together to push for these changes, and deployed the usual array of ideological superweapons that the woke have access to in our culture-space (there are no antibodies to their power plays unlike traditional religions, and pushback against woke ideas in institutional contexts is often legally punishable by various mechanisms related to civil rights law).
This tiny group swung the publisher to its will, because they care with the self-destructive fervor of religious zealots, and everyone else is just trying to get along, so they win despite being a microminority.
It's another step in the long march through the institutions; basically all our academic, corporate, cultural, military, and scientific establishments have fallen under woke control by the same mechanisms.
Ref: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
This may result in some additional sales, as people scramble to get the old versions. But it also puts egg on Puffin's face, and may hurt their reputation among buyers and authors. Overall, it seems more like inertia and incompetence rather than a finely-tuned publicity stunt.
Are people looking for the Oompa Loompas as African Pygmies from the original version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before they were removed in the 1972 edition?
And that, compared to references to African pygmies, some of the things that have been changed in this new edition are totally baffling.
The reasonable answer is "they should still be something people can readily access but not endorsed/actively reprinted" but usually these arguments boil down to very partisan takes on speech unfortunately.
Earliest known variant: Hana, man, mona, mike; Barcelona, bona, strike; Hare, ware, frown, vanac; Harrico, warico, we wo, wac.
The rhyme potentially comes from old English.
That is, the parent is saying they won't be surprised if Florida requires the line "catch a tiger by the toe" to instead be sung as "catch an [racial slur] by the toe".
(Before the 1923 addition of "the Flag of the United States of America" and the 1954 addition of "under God")
https://groovyhistory.com/oompa-loompas-the-original-ones
There are a lot of wonderful things in his works that don't change because of minor edits to bring things in line with a modern zeitgeist.
It shouldn't be terribly surprising that an old British guy was a bigot, nor that some of that bigotry crept into his works.
I'm not sure why this instance of censorship feels particularly egregious, though. It's ultimately for children, and we censor content for kids all the time. We do it with movies and TV shows and music, and I don't see much rage directed toward that practice.
Is it because it's a book? Is it because it's a medium that hasn't really been censored like this before? Is it because it was done posthumously? Is it the specific content being censored?
Something feels different about this one. Maybe it's just the fear that what was once sacred is now fair game for defilement, or the sinking realization that the dam is now broken and this will become the new norm.
It's because it is fraud. I want to buy a copy of Roald Dhall's original work - unadulterated by leftist wankers.
If censorship is required when reading to my children, I'll be the one to decide how to do it.
If they want to tone police literature, let them produce their own dull sanitised works and see if anyone wants to buy them. But they know that noone does want to buy them, hence why they have to mutilate someone else's work instead.
I'm not even necessarily agreeing with the publisher's approach here, but I can certainly see there being a market for "modernised" versions of older books that tired parents can relax into reading aloud as a bedtime story, without that constant low-level unease about the possibility of some dodgy dated stuff popping up out of nowhere.
We don't know if Dahl would have been convinced of the need to make any of these new edits, because he died over 30 years ago. These unknown editors peddle their changes using his name, they trade on his popularity, rather than write their own unloved, status-quo compliant stories.
We the public are so lucky that the publishers deign to keep selling his original books in addition to their Bowdlerised versions. But if they felt like it, thanks to copyright law, they could stop that at any time for the next 40 years or so. It's ludicrious!
It doesn't sit right to me that there is someone owning the rights of the deceased author's work and should try to profit maximize the catalog. That is kind of what is happening here, trying to change the text to sell a slightly different book. It is their incentive to try to keep their sales alive, but it feels like an artificial thing. I guess I'm not used to how this particular sausage is made.
This was probably just a money/publicity grab. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reissues of the originals were the original goal, but copyright didn’t have anything to do with it.
(Though the antiwoke mob strangely seems to want to ban any modifications to classics).
https://reason.com/2022/07/05/rise-of-the-sensitivity-reader...
Edit: oh, someone else did go to the trouble to quote the problematic part of the parents link, but they, too, where downvoted.
Known as sensitivity readers, or sometimes authenticity readers, consultants like Sally are a growing part of publishing, hired to correct the pre-publication missteps of authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/08/stop-m...
The Guardian might be closer to your views. Fine. But why try to appeal to some notion of the center of society instead of just posting the link? I'd wager outside of HN and Twitter, the Guardian article is obnoxious and trite.
But yes, to say that somebody is a "Guardian reader" is say they are somewhere in the left to center-left part of the spectrum.
I wouldn't even call Guardian center-left. Center-left is like the furthest right it goes. The average article is well left of center-left.
From what articles I've seen from Reason, they seemed to clearly lean right to me, that's why your comment came across as odd, albeit technically correct (it is slightly closer to center than the Guardian). Your comment suggested to me that they are a lot more in the middle than that, though.
Encouraging the sort of thought police present here sets off all sorts of alarm bells.
I would argue this idea is fundamentally contrarian to a true liberal value set.
Being liberal (in the traditional sense) means being willing to engage with all sorts of content - especially content that you might not agree with.
Simply disagreeing with content is a poor, poor excuse for removing it from the public space. Instead it should be countered with a compelling set of ideas that help the public understand why you don't agree with it.
Basically - policing books like this is WRONG. It's exactly the same thought process that leads to people calling for the ban of books they don't like. It's an authoritarian thought process that doesn't actually provide a compelling argument against an idea to win - instead it claims victory by removing any trace of the argument in the first place.
It's whitewashing in the extreme. It's the good intention that paves the road to Fahrenheit 451. It's a fucking disgrace of an approach.
If you don't like what those books say... buckle up and explain that to your kids. Don't hide it from them. You aren't doing them any favors that way.
What is the difference between "thought police" and simple editing?
For example, if I wrote a book and used a word like "gypped", I would appreciate an editor saying "Change this word to something like 'swindled'. 'Gypped' is derived from 'Gypsy' and is inherently an insult to the Romani people." Is that the editor being the "thought police" or them doing their job well?
Is the objection to the Dahl changes simply that this is happening after the books were already published?
And why did the Cloud-men become Cloud-people? Why is it sexist to call a group of men men? Why was the Trunchbul's description changed from horse face to just face? How does that help? Some people are ugly. It's a byproduct of the genetic lottery.
Overall I think sensitivity training is nonsense. All it does is force people to censor themselves before speaking at the risk of getting canceled. From your example: I'm not a gypsy, but even if I was don't you think the correct reading of that would be something akin to, "Gypsies in the past used to swindle, but now we can be cognizant of that behavior and not do it, thus being a better version of ourselves." I don't see why offense would necessarily be taken. Getting offended by reminders of the past that we didn't even live seem like nonsense to me.
I'm not going to go through every example you mentioned because this comment shows the exact problem with that. You are putting the origin of the term on some fault with the Romani people. Have you examined why that is? Are you sure that they did actually swindle people more than other groups? If they did, why did they do it? Was that a byproduct of their position in society? I admittedly don't know much Romani history, so I can't speak to it directly. However I know Jewish people were similarly thought of as swindlers because they were often bankers, and they were often bankers because that was one of the few jobs non-Jewish society would allow them to have. The fault doesn't lie with the Jews, it lies with the rest of society.
That same concept applies elsewhere. Like white generally being used to represent good and black bad. That is such a fundamental aspect of our culture that it seems silly to try to change it, but the silliness originates in a lack of examination of the origin of those standards.
My point is exactly that by not washing out these words, we allow ourselves to have conversations about and raise exactly those points you mentioned. It allows us to think about the root causes of these terms and reflect on our own behavior.
> That same concept applies elsewhere. Like white generally being used to represent good and black bad. That is such a fundamental aspect of our culture that it seems silly to try to change it, but the silliness originates in a lack of examination of the origin of those standards.
Have you considered that the white/black differentiation of not about color but about what humans can perceive? To me it seems as if it would have been established because humans can see during the day vs. can't do so well at night. There are many reasons outside of race where light/dark, black/white make sense.
Why do we assume that these books are always accompanied by these conversations and these conversations wouldn't happen without these books? Many times kids read these books alone and no one ever talks to them about these words. Other times they are read in specific classes in school in contexts that aren't ideal to address these issues. An English teacher shouldn't have to spend all their time teaching history to keep these things in context. Let those conversations happen in social studies and history classes.
>Have you considered that the white/black differentiation of not about color but about what humans can perceive? To me it seems as if it would have been established because humans can see during the day vs. can't do so well at night. There are many reasons outside of race where light/dark, black/white make sense.
Yes, but whether the origin lies in racism or not isn't necessarily the only deciding factor. Just the question of whether it originates in racism is often enough to distract from a book. Like an editor might suggest an author change phrasing to avoid an unintentional rhyme or pun, sometimes a word should be change to avoid distracting the reader with considerations about whether a term is racist or not. The obvious example is the word "niggardly"[1]. Its etymology has nothing to do with race, but editors will still warn you against using it because the distraction is causes makes it a poor word choice in most situations even if the word itself is inoffensive.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...
The value of a book is that you experience the world through a viewpoint that is different than your own.
That viewpoint may not be pretty, or fun, or something you agree with. Honestly - most of the books that I value challenge me by exposing me to something raw and unfiltered that I have not experienced myself.
---
That editor also doesn't have the experiences of the author, and changing word choice is changing the world that author is speaking about.
If the author's goal is to actually tell a genuine story that they connect with - to expose the world to their own thoughts and feelings and history - then changing those things is not trivial.
---
I don't want to read a bland mash of "editor approved" stories. I want to read stories that are told by individuals, with all their quirks and intricacies.
I want to hear their opinions and words. Not some filtered, white washed, toned down version of them.
I want to make up my own mind about whether that story was valuable, or touching, or compelling, or horrible, or repelling. I don't want to never hear it in the first place because an editor decided they didn't like it and struck it out.
---
Basically - if the author doesn't give a shit and is just trying to sell the most books... fine. Go with the editor's picks for the words. Let them control the narrative and story. They have the most experience with selling books and their advice is probably decent.
If the goal is to write down a story that is meaningful to the author... don't change the author's words.
I'm not acting as thought police because I literally didn't police their thoughts - I left them the fuck alone.
---
I'm struggling to tell if your comment is satire or not, because it's pretty dense (and not in the "filled with words" kind of way).
But this is fundamentally what editing is which brings me back to the original question of how is "thought policing" different from editing. In what situations is it acceptable to edit words that someone wrote?
>I'm struggling to tell if your comment is satire or not, because it's pretty dense (and not in the "filled with words" kind of way).
I'm just trying to understand your position by asking questions.
When the author is present and engaged in the process.
Would Dahl care about these changes? We don't know. And that's the problem. It's no longer his book - it's the diluted version.
Alternatively - if the author is gone... when the story is no longer bound by copyright seems a sane approach. If you want to edit his words, make them compete with the original versions (or other folks edits). If the edits are genuinely better - they will win out.
Does this mean you would be fine with this process if it involved the author even if they approved of changes to a book decades after it was originally released?
>Would Dahl care about these changes? We don't know. And that's the problem. It's no longer his book - it's the diluted version.
>Alternatively - if the author is gone... when the story is no longer bound by copyright seems a sane approach. If you want to edit his words, make them compete with the original versions (or other folks edits). If the edits are genuinely better - they will win out.
Does this mean that in situations in which the author is dead and the books are still under copyright that you are ok with a publisher that decides to stop publishing the book, basically the Dr. Seuss situation?
That's what I'm not getting; this isn't an external entity, it's the people who own the rights. Shouldn't they be allowed to do what they want with their property, even if you disagree with it?
This book should be public domain. The author has been dead for 33 years. I honestly don't give a flying fuck about who "owns the rights" to this story at this point.
But my broader point is salient outside of this - I think you're removing value from stories by trying to remove ugly parts. The world is ugly, hiding that and papering over it doesn't do anyone any favors. It's also beautiful and wondrous. How can we experience the highs without the lows? The good without the bad?
How can we know what the past was like when we change it to suit our mood? When we wash it away and drown it out. When we cannot to learn from it, because we have no idea what it even was? When we have nothing but a caricature of it hanging out to dry, with the complexity and nuance tossed aside, wrung out from it like it was a rag to be cleaned.
Nothing is being taken away here, only new things are being added. That's what I don't understand; why would you be upset about that?
If you want to write a book that doesn't call folks ugly, go knock yourself out. I'm all here for that and I support you. You may or may not find success, and that's life.
If you want to edit the words of a story because you find them unpleasant... if you want to censor an author after his death because you might sell more books... Then I find you ugly. You are willing to throw away content you disagree with, instead of tackling it head on, so both ugly and cowardly.
Where does it stop? What content is "you approved" in a way that we can all live with?
If we happen to live in a spot where those words are also owned, and we've decided that I don't have the rights to copy and distribute the original words because of the greed of Disney... then I find you both ugly and authoritarian in ways that are uncomfortable. I strongly dislike you.
You retain access to the original work, and I get a watered down version that's easier for me to read to my kids at bedtime. Feels like a win/win?
Why don't I have the same freedom of expression in your mind that you seem so intent on protecting on behalf of a dead guy?
Does it? If a library has a copy of the offensive censored one, they might not buy the original. There's only a limited amount of money available, every censored copy purchased means one less good copy.
But I don't, and that's the point.
Also, you can currently purchase every single Roald Dahl book on Amazon for at most ~$10, so in so many ways it's incorrect to say you lose access to Roald Dahl's original works.
"Original books to be kept in print following criticism".
Seems like that solves all of your issues…
That is not and has never been the problem. If you are a parent of a young child, then you should absolutely be aware of the content your child is seeing/reading. I doubt you will find anyone that disagrees.
The problem is the revisionist approach to rewriting works to appease modern readers' (apparently delicate) sensibilities.
Personally, I see this as shielding readers from harsh truths of the past (and in some cases just reality). Mr. Dahl is long dead, and yet we feel like we need to rewrite his words to ensure we don't accidentally offend someone. I mean, can you imagine a child reading the word <looks around> "fat"? Or "female"? My god, they would never be the same.
Or is it only your personal values you want reflected in books?
I'll help you, you wrote: publishing a “clean” version
What if your version of clean is my version of horribly offensive?
Are you really unable to see that people might have different opinions of things? If that's really true, I fear your have been "cleaning" your content far far too much.
You should be able to publish Animal Farm or the Communist Manifesto without being "edited" until your book simply affirms the status quo.
You can.
It isn't like you can't publish your book. Some publishers just decided to implement this workflow. I think it's pretty dumb but it definitely isn't anything new.
> Known as sensitivity readers, or sometimes authenticity readers, consultants like Sally are a growing part of publishing, hired to correct the pre-publication missteps of authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.
God, what kind of a horrible person would take up such a job. Jesus Christ I mean just don't publish the book don't hire some couch sjw to "fix" it. I guess the author can still choose to not publish
Take a job as an editor? That is all this person is doing. It is something that publishers have done forever except this editor has a more narrow scope of what they are editing.
I get that the publishers want to preemptively strike down / appease those outragers, but Jesus Christ, to like reading and to become a full-time “holier than thought”-er. This is so depressing
The publishing company holds the copyrights, they make a lot of money from Roald Dahl, but they're worried about the long term prospects for that revenue stream due to social change. Maybe they have additional feedback from retail buyers or customers. They decided to take an approach of retooling their product to fit with changing mores, and either went too far or made a poor PR job of releasing the information.
As far as I know, nobody asked for this. It's fairly well known (at least in the UK) that Dahl harbored many prejudices typical of his generation and demographics, and himself watered down some of them to make his books more salable, eg the original Oompa-Loompas were modeled on African pygmies.
If they were following public demand, then why did they get so thoroughly blindsided by public opinion? They were clearly listening to a handful of fringe nuts and didn't actually have their finger on the pulse of the mainstream zeitgeist.
They have now realized their error and are trying to backtrack from it.
I am not privy to their sales data; perhaps it looks terrible and they panicked. While there has been a big backlash, I don't think adult nostalgia is as profitable as childhood enthusiasm; parents might buy Roald Dahl for their kids, but there are plenty of other authors competing for their attention.
You seem to be projecting some idea of your own onto me.
Or they're capitalizing on the backlash by offering both options, with the added benefit that they'll get to A/B test what direction the market wants them to go.
> If they were following public demand, then why did they get so thoroughly blindsided by public opinion?
Hey, if that's what you want to believe...
A canny publisher wouldn't quietly discontinue the "original" (ignoring the fact that the books have been revised before) editions. They're merely announce that they're a limited run and that stocks are running out...
No: I am not defending it. I am just explaining it.
>"The rise in demand has been even more extreme at Wob, an online seller with a reported catalogue of two million. It has seen a 600 per cent surge in sales of Roald Dahl compared to the week before, while the author accounts for eight of the 10 top-selling children’s books since Saturday. Not bad for someone who died more than three decades ago."
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/roald-dahl-books-s...
Similar example: Tintin in Congo is by today's standards absolutely racist, but reflects the era when it was published. The last decade the (Belgian) publisher was sued multiple times to try and force it off the shelves.
Also: calls to remove statues of King Leopold II (who committed horrible atrocities in "his" Congolese colony).
In both cases, why not leave access to the original books/statue/... intact but add an introductory section on why this is no longer appropriate today. Or place a contrasting statue, opposite King Leopold II, that embodies the struggle for independence / the colonial horrors / the blight that is racism / etc.
Overall it feels like there's a drive to remove "inappropriate" materials from society, instead of leaving them accessible as living proof of the mistakes that were made, and to provide backstory, context, and the "appropriate" contemporary view.
I share this view, but I also recognize that as a white dude, what is to me a learning opportunity about the things that folks (who mostly look like me) have done in the past isn't necessarily seen that way by everyone.
Unfortunately, even if you get a whole mess of folks of different backgrounds to have an honest and meaningful conversation about what to do about these many things, you aren't going to please everybody. The easiest solution is to just remove the materials rather than having to continuously justify leaving them available and reinterpret the historical context for them from a contemporary standpoint.
The easiest solution is to just remove the materials
It is racists, more than anyone, who wish to hide the historical roots of racism. That we might find it impossible to recognise it's impending revival.
Society has larger problems if a few kids books and some statues were all that was preventing a slide into violent racism.
2. Mao stated himself in his revolutionary speech that they would indoctrinate the next generation if the current one was unwilling, and this is a perfect example of that applied.
Leopold II isn’t far down the list from Hitler and Stalin.
P.S. Leopold II came to power because he was the heir in a hereditary monarchy, we don’t need a statue of a genocidal aristocrat to know hereditary monarchy with actual governing power is bad.
Edit: I didn't want to litter the thread with copypaste, but my reply to a similar comment was:
In 1960s Germany, students where so outraged by the absence of Nazism from their history curriculum that they turned violent. They rioted, bombed, and killed because they felt they where being denied their right to learn their recent history. And they blamed this on the fact that their teachers and parents had been Nazis and thought they where trying to erase their crimes. In a flash of cruel irony, the state's desire to shelter the students from political violence ignited it again in the streets and in the hearts of their students.That’s fine, but putting up a statue of someone is usually seen as celebrating them. We aren’t hiding from what Hitler or Stalin did, so why don’t we have statues of them?
Perhaps it is the reason why the Reichstag still today has a mailbox with Hitler's name on it.
Another really cool feature is the this hall of mailboxes which was designed by a french artist and includes a mailbox for every democratically elected official in German history. The hall also contains officials such as Hitler and Goebbels because they were democratically elected but they often have to repair the box because people visiting will often punch and kick their boxes
The only place a statue of him belongs is in an exhibit on the worst actions taken against fellow humans.
Mind you, Leopold was a horrible person, did horrible things and the Belgian monarchy and state have only recently begun to issue apologies for their atrocities. The debate on statues is settled, except in the minds of those who glorify wrongdoing.
The other difference is agency - there exists a legal successor to the belgian monarchy and a legal successor to the powers of the monarchy in the form of the belgian state. These have power today to acknowledge and right the wrongs of the past. In contrast, Georges Remi and Roald Dahl are both dead, unable to correct their errors.
Roald Dahl is a very interesting target here, editing "fat" out of the description of Augustus Gloop, I assume, was to be more gentle towards more portly folks. The character seemed to have a real eating disorder though, those are real issues that real people also suffer with. Does a discussion of bulimia and anorexia need to accompany Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Is it read at an age appropriate for that? Was this edit even material? It seems like the real theme is one of greed and humbleness and the eating disorder is just a foil.
(Probably because they judge Joseph Conrad by the outdated language he used, rather than by the ideas and values he presented. Because they are shallow fools.)
> A certain enormous buck n*** encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the n*** I used to dream for years afterwards.
Nowhere in it do I find any sort criticism of the harms that were done. He describes the awful conditions in the Congo, but does not necessarily oppose them
The language he uses to describe the Africans is hostile at best. A poignant example is the part about the "insolent black head" peaking through the doorway while Kurtz lay dying
Not saying that Penguin should've removed his name because that's a different argument, but I have no idea how/where you're getting anticolonialism out of Conrad and I'd genuinely like to know
Edit: what did I get out of HOD? The death of God. Kurtz goes out to a corner of the Earth that was yet to be corrupted by capitalism. Marlow goes on a journey with no message in particular, he's a witness to the historical event
Have a look at the later criticism and counter criticism. Chinua Achebe and then Cedric Watts in particular. It turns out to be complicated.
Wikipedia editors dedicate an entire article to one persons essay on racist themes in Conrad's book. While Karl Marx racism is ignored, dismissed as anachronism or rebuked as irrelevant. Even worthy of forgiveness, in light of the greater good his work bestowed on the world.
People say, “You claim to be Marxists, but did you know that Marx was a racist?” We say, “He probably was a racist: he made a statement once about the marriage of a white woman and a black man, and he called the black man a gorilla or something like that.” The Marxists claim he was only kidding and that the statement shows Marx’s closeness to the man, but of course that is nonsense. So it does seem that Marx was a racist.
Now if you are a Marxist, then Marx’s racism affects your own judgment because a Marxist is someone who worships Marx and the thought of Marx. Remember, though, that Marx himself said, “I am not a Marxist.” Such Marxists cherish the conclusions which Marx arrived at through his method, but they throw away the method itself—leaving themselves in a totally static posture. That is why most Marxists really are historical materialists: they look to the past to get answers for the future, and that does not work.
If you are a dialectical materialist, however, Marx’s racism does not matter. You do not believe in the conclusions of one person but in the validity of a mode of thought; and we in the Party, as dialectical materialists, recognize Karl Marx as one of the great contributors to that mode of thought. Whether or not Marx was a racist is irrelevant and immaterial to whether or not the system of thinking he helped to develop delivers truths about processes in the material world. And this is true in all disciplines. In every discipline you find people who have distorted visions and are at a low state of consciousness who nonetheless have flashes of insight and produce ideas worth considering. For instance, John B. Watson once stated that his favorite pastime was hunting and hanging n*****s, yet he made great forward strides in the analysis and investigations of conditioned responses.
Huey P Newton
Maybe there's someone around you can ask who Kipling is, but there's a good chance they either don't know the issues or are going to be unwilling to have a conversation about the historical context of racism with some child over a one sentence mention of Kipling. More likely, the child will continue reading the book gaining at most a recommendation for future reading.
I don't know if that small recommendation should be changed, but I don't see it's inclusion as some potential learning moment. The line has been in the book for thirty years, and I doubt it's taught many children about the historical context of racism.
The line has been in the book for thirty years, and I doubt it's taught many children about the historical context of racism.
This sounds like critical race theory. That gets people far more fired up than changing a few words in some kids books ever will.
Because the copyright holders (Netflix, in this case[0]), decided it would be more more profitable.
This wasn't the result of an outside public campaign; it was initiated by the rightsholders.
Netflix makes money if they can market an entire franchise (akin to the MCU, albeit less crossover). If they feel that a more "palatable" version of the books helps them do that, they will.
[0] The editing began before Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl company, but it continued under them and they're the ones who decided to publish them (and now walk back the decision)
To get people talking about these books again with the intend of increasing sales.
Hate to say it, but I think this is the only reason why.
Thank the absurd copyright laws that grant a piece of work two lifetimes of money extraction (70 years after the death of whoever made it) for whoever "owns" it.
The publishing industry has been taken over by a certain kind of person. The same kind of mildly privileged, free of adversity person who is looking for something to suffer from and fight against who is pushing this kind of "woke" nonsense all over the place.
Let's say that I believe that past authors are problematic. Ok, then why reprint their works? Why not print children stories from modern and more sensitive authors? The job of the publisher is not to keep history alive, it's to provide customers with a good selection of children's content.
On the other hand the publisher knows that these books are cherished by the general population and are indeed immortal classics. So it would be stupid not to print them and leave a good chunk of money on the table.
So here comes the contradiction: we need to publish this author because we want the money, but at the same time we don't agree with him. The solution? Editorialize his works, not with footnotes but by destructively changing the verbiage of the stories! This way we can both get rich and alter history to our liking!
When I was in public school, the adults got sick of kids using the word "retarded" as an insult so they renamed the class for people with actual disabilities to "special education". So kids started calling each other "special" as an insult synonymous with "retarded". Euphemism treadmills always lag, they're reactive and can't keep up with the rate at which people can invent new insults.
Full throttle mode (and)
Grandma mode.I know no Grandmas that like when things they had on their youth are changed.
Speaking of Oompa Loompas, they were even originally tiny black people, but Dahl changed them to white himself in a later revision.
I don't know what the right balance is, but it seems the recent Dahl changes missed the mark.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/so%E2%80%A6-willy-wonka-and...
like the oompa loompas aren't just a whoopsie, didn't realize that was racist thing. dude said some racist grandpa shit, there's no beating around the bush on that one lol... and boy he had some thoughts on the jews too... in 1983.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20160912-the-dark-side...
(stolen from down-thread:) https://groovyhistory.com/oompa-loompas-the-original-ones/2
so like yeah this is basically the "difficult literature from 50 years ago" question. Dude was kind of a racist and wrote some shit that would be pretty offensive to write today. On the other hand it's also good entertaining literature that's beloved by a lot of kids, minus some offensive pages and occasional themes. what do you do with that? answers vary - don't teach it, edit it to tone down a few things, or just teach it unfiltered with some flavor of "yeah, product of its time"?
I guess I personally fall into the "teach it as a product of its time" camp but I'm also not the one personally affected either, and over time it may fall more and more out of favor as sentiments on casual racism change, I'm sure there was a "teach it as a product of its time" for huck finn too and nowadays ehhhhhhh maybe we just find a better example for english lit. And that's really the danger if you don't want to tone it down (which, I'm not saying that's a good idea either), that it just falls into obscurity over time as people decide "nah african pygmies are a little too racist for 2050".
But also — I mean, I guess nowadays there’s YouTube and TikTok, but some kids still read for fun, right? They are fun stories, so it is nice to produce a version that can be read lightly without having to address weighty historical issues.
Imagine I created an annotated critical text of Oliver Twist. My new annotated text would be copyrighted from the date of publication, but Oliver Twist would still be in the public domain.
I suppose someone could create a second censored version, but if the changes they made were too close to the current publisher's, they might lose a copyright case on that. So all the publisher has to do is keep up with the mores of the time on what must and must not be airbrushed out.
Modern book "cancelling" is not (yet?) so effective as that. Huckleberry Finn is a popular target for cancelling, yet is still widely available. Being in the public domain gives the book relative safety; even if one publisher gets cold feet, another will jump in to fill the demand. The real threat is to books which aren't in the public domain and won't be for a long time.
People should be exposed to all types of views on things, so they can better empathise with other people.
Score one for Library Genesis (et al.), -1 for these rewriters of history (et al.).
Personally I've stopped buying online books because of this kind of shenanigans and reverting back to having local music and movies for similar reasons.
The idea that some remote working technocrats can change words of a book while I'm reading it just creeps me out.
What a fragile Society.
Music (used to?) do something like this. One version for Al Gore’s PMRC and one version for everyone else.
So long as the original is also available, why not?
In the case of deceased authors, ensuring your work is treated the way you want is why you put a literary executor in your will. In the absence of direct instructions, the literary executor gets to decide, and it's not relevant if there's no mention of changes in the will.
I have published books. They'll likely never be worth anything. But the absence of any terms about them in my will is intentional: Once I'm gone, I don't give a shit what my inheritors do with the rights for them. That's their business.
As for authenticity, the originals still exist. Nothing has erased them. Deposit laws means the original editions will be on file at relevant libraries even if every customer got rid of theirs. I'm all for ensuring original editions remain at least somehow accessible, but this obsession with changes to books now just strikes me as comical given how long abridged, simplified or simply reimagined versions of classics have existed.
Though chances are good that what you've read and consider "authentic" wasn't the original anyway, but one of the earlier revised editions. E.g. the version most people will have read was revised to change the Oompa-Loompas from African pygmies.
Any alteration to his work after his death is no longer his work.
I should add: that may or may not be important to someone. To me it is. I don’t consider the altered version his work any longer but rather a derivative work or more accurately, a vandalization of his work.
I may be simple-minded but I would have thought that people either want to read a book or they don't. But now is there really a market for people who want to read a book but only if that book's content is made different from what it actually is? (I'm worried if that's the case).
On the other hand, I fully understand that the aim of a publisher is to sell more.
But what the publisher did in this case was not like that; these modifications weren't designed to make the books more accessible to people with low reading skill ('fat' is not a hard word.)
People have been willing to pay for this kind of thing for a long time.
It's a little different now in that it's the original rights-holder doing it but money talks and why argue over fair use when you can do it yourself?
Tipper Gore.
You're making the assumption that rightsholders will continue to publish or allow others to publish the old edition. Maybe this time when it becomes a big deal in a news cycle, but the next time it happens, it won't be as big a deal. The tenth time it happens, nobody will know or care:
"Old news. Fascists trying to make a big deal out of something that happens every day. You didn't see them crying when they censored all of the atheist books, so why are they crying now when we're censoring all the Nazis? This is just foreign propaganda trying to exaggerate the differences between us, most normal people are united in their support of The Homeland against Eastern Mind Control." --comment on RedditHN circa 2035.
The thing that alarms me most is that these are people censoring extremely successful masterworks from revered authors. The stuff being written today, by nobody-yets, is being pre-corrected.