Bastardising Ronald Dahl

[Pasithean]

Is it not really wrong to change his descriptions in his books as reported in the guardian today. I’m so cross that people think they can change the classics

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I'm in favour of updating books to appropriately reflect the time. 90% of what's there in the classics is incredibly wonderful writing, marred and made unreadable by stuff that was totally acceptable at the time but not anymore

And who is the arbiter of what is no longer acceptable? Dahl's works have now been enthusiastically and randomly butchered. Are you saying you want to see adult works given the same treatment?

What on earth needs updating with Georgette Heyer?

Don't get me wrong, I adore Georgette Heyer. My comment comes from binging on them again, after a gap of a couple of decades.

Obviously the whole thing is based around gendered stereotypes, with every female other than the heroine, dismissed and ridiculed as 'simpering' etc.... and the entire dynamic is about nothing other than the women getting successfully married. But that doesn't bother me, and I think can be read as something from that time, that somewhat reflected reality of how infantalized and constrained women actually were.

What really robs my enjoyment and makes me decide not to recommend them to my daughter for example, is the way women are treated by the heroes we are meant to admire and root for.

Eg: Devil's Cub hero, kidnaps a woman, putting his hands around her neck and threatening to strangle her if she does not come on board his ship and travel to France with him. He only stops trying to physically advance on her when she shoots him. The premise is that he thought she was a wanton, lower class woman. When he discovers she is a lady, he is horrified by his behaviour and insists on marrying her to defend her honour. Now in many ways, this is reflective of the value is the times and if it were social history, or there was some attempt to portray the hero as a negative character, it would be fine. But this is the guy we're genuinely meant to be delighted ends up with the magnificent heroine.

In Venetia, the hero introduces himself to the heroine, by walking straight up to her in a field, unintroduced, grabbing her and kissing her on the lips.

I think Georgette Heyer was in many ways a feminist for her time.... she tried to write plucky, intelligent women characters who had a strong drive for independence over and over again....and honestly, I think SHE would want these little bits rewritten, if she was around to have a say. I think she would most likely rejoice that we were now allowed to condemn sexual harassment, assault and kidnap of any woman.

Better I think to trust her basic intent, and tweak a few bits, than allow her at some point to be picked up and condemned, cancelled and banned by the morality police!

I'm in favour of updating books to appropriately reflect the time. 90% of what's there in the classics is incredibly wonderful writing, marred and made unreadable by stuff that was totally acceptable at the time but not anymore

How is it even possible to do this without changing the sentiments of a book? Books are often set in the time they were written- so to change the attitudes of the characters to make them have modern values, or to change language to reflect current usage is to lose the authenticity of the setting. Imagine trying to rewrite something like Pride and Prejudice with a modern view of relationships- how would that work?

@BraveGoldie that would essentially be a completely different plot then.
Maybe you could write some fan fiction or something.

Just to be clear, policing and editing language microscopically, so it's constantly updated to reflected the latest trends is a totally different thing - certainly nothing I would advocate! So don't lump me in with all that!

I think they could be tweaked intelligently without reinventing the book.

And the problem me writing new ones is I wouldn't do it nearly so well!!!!! Why throw the baby out with the bath water. They are amazing books! We restore and redecorate incredibly national monuments all the time so that they can liver and thrive for future generations....!

Maybe I just posted on the wrong thread. I haven't looked into the RD changes, and some of them sound really dumb- so my argument is not necessarily in favour of what these guys did.

Meh, if it’s be abridged/redacted or fade into obscurity and be forgotten, I’d go with sanitise away. This has been going on for centuries. A classic example is the diary of Samuel Pepys….famous for writing on the Great Plague of London and the subsequent Great Fire of London. For decades now, his diary has been published and sold without his accounts/confessions of near incessant sexual harassment, stalking and sexual assault of various women from maids in his household to a woman who caught his eye in church. It’s a hair raising read to see the real Pepys diary…he would be on the sex offender register today.

And, actually even the sacred Word of God has been sanitised repeatedly for centuries. Yes, for example, the Bible itself has been slowly rewritten to take out most of the slavery in it. Slave women get rebranded as “handmaidens” or “wives” because some Pope decided Christians shouldn’t enslave other Christians…so all the fine upstanding christian forefathers were sanitised to be husbands or employers instead of masters. (I know this as the daughter of a vicar who spent hours in a seminary library fascinated by the different Bible translations and how they compared to the Dead Sea scrolls & other early Bible manuscripts.

I think censoring books is weird in general and I certainly don't agree with it when the author is deceased and no longer around to defend his artistic vision. Not everything has to be a happy-clappy, sanitised moral tale. It's okay for books to contain dated language or challenging themes. Imagine if Salman Rushdie died and his publishers came out with a bowdlerised version of the Satanic Verses with all the controversial passages removed just because they made some people feel uncomfortable. Censorship spits in the face of the author.

I've read over the changes to Dahl's work and many of the edits seem absurdly arbitrary to me e.g. changing "fat" to "enormous" (as if that's somehow less insulting) and removing the word "black" when used to refer to clothing. I wouldn't choose to read a censored book nor would I buy one for my children. Why don't these publishers promote living authors instead of censoring older works?

It's ridiculous but then far too many people have far too much time and far too little going on their lives so make this sort of thing important. They can then all pat themselves on the back about how much of an ally they are having made zero contribution that actually benefits society. Inevitably it's middle class white people leading the charge on these types of things and they have no idea about the actual struggles that go on in this world.

Now.. if they were going to discuss Stephen King's IT book, then maybe they'd have a point as underage orgies are creepy as hell but even then noone is forced to read it.

The best opinion I read was that actually you're better off letting books like this simply go out of fashion as they were gradually anyway, but by doing stuff like this they've simply given them a new lease of life.

Thinking on this more, the Lord of the Rings film and TV adaptations massively toned down the racism that Tolkien had in his books. (To Tolkien elf, dwarf, human, etc were the individual races.)

This happens quite frequently when books are made into films or TV- various potentially offensive threads or themes get removed or rewritten substantially.

If we are ok with that, then why not similar for other books not suited to being made into films/TV?

That's a very good point.

I mean look at the other media that children are exposed to. Set Dahl against that. Is it wicked? No.

He would have written a good story about this himself.

I think I’d feel differently about the changes if these weren’t books for children (primarily, 7-9 year olds).

The stories are classics but there are certainly segments that I probably wouldn’t want my young child reading, to the point where I’d just buy them a different book.

I don’t see that including editorial notes about changes in attitudes is a great idea; these are meant to be fun, engrossing stories for kids and frankly I think having the original text present, but deconstructed with explanatory notes, would rather sap the fun out.

Similarly, I think saying “well, just use the old or offensive sections as a teaching moment, and have a discussion with your child about it” ignores the fact that many of the target audience will be reading these books themselves, without adult supervision.

If adults still want to buy the original texts then I doubt it would be difficult but having a somewhat ‘sanitized’ version, that’s PG by modern standards, seems like a sensible way to maintain the popularity of the stories.

The more I think about this, the more enraged I become. Who the f* do these people think they are??!! What gives them the right to decide what I can read? When you control what people can read, you control what they can think (one of the things Orwell warns about in 1984). And how can they get away with changing an author's words and then presenting them as if they're what he wrote? How can that be legal? They are putting Dahl's name above words he didn't write. Imagine if somebody did that to you!!

One of the most shocking edits is in Mathilda, where they've changed the book she reads from Kipling to Jane Austen. So not only are they editing Dahl, they are also removing the name of another author they don't want you to read. Kipling was a genius. By coincidence, I happen to be reading Kim atm, and it's a masterpiece.

This attack on literature is the beginning of the end. The canon is the centre of civilization. It's the best that has been thought and expressed over the last 3,000 years. Once you remove that, we're finished. We're in a new dark age. Make no mistake, these bastards aren't going to stop with Roald Dahl. Their end goal is to create a new literary canon filled with writers they approve of. Whether those writers were any good will be irrelevant. All that will matter is that they tick certain boxes. The great literary critic Harold Bloom warned about this before he died. He'd seen the way the hard left had got control of the universities.

While I'm still free to do so, I'm going to list a few great books I love. I'm going to do it because I'm furious, and because it makes me feel better. Instead of other people telling me what I ought to read, I'm going to state what I think THEY ought to read, unedited:

Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Shakespeare: (everything he wrote)
Milton: Paradise Lost
Alexander Pope: Collected Poems
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
The poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice and Emma
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Dickens: David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Thackery: Vanity Fair
Tennyson: Collected Poems
Browning: Collected Poems
Kipling: Kim
Walter Pater and John Ruskin: writings on art and aestheticism
Grahame: The Wind in the Willows
Thomas Hardy: Tess, Return of the Native, and Jude the Obscure
H. G. Wells: The Time Machine and War of the Worlds
Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Robert Graves: Goodbye to all That
T. E. Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Wilfred Owen: Collected Poems
Siegfried Sassoon: Collected Poems
Virginia Woolf: Orlando
P. G. Wodehouse: every glorious word he wrote
Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall, Scoop, Sword of Honour trilogy, Brideshead
George Orwell: Collected Essays, 1984 and Animal Farm
Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point and Crome Yellow
Anthony Burgess: The Enderby novels
Philip Larkin: Collected Poems
Ted Hughes: Collected Poems
John Betjeman: Collected Poems
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim

Absolute fucking sick of this shit now. You cannot rewrite history. I'm absolutely sick to death of this woke shit now. Stop the planet. I wanna get off. I can't take anymore of this. Just stop, stop, stop. Stop trying to rewrite the past and change the past. Get over yourselves.

@JoonT Absolutely brilliant post (at 23.33) - and put way better than I could ever have put it ... Such a brilliant articulate post. I'm so impressed with what you have written. Thank you for that. 100% agree.

God that’s frightening

@JoonT - I don't hold out much hope for Kingsley Amis if Roald Dahl is unacceptable!

It's an interesting discussion, and I realize I jumped in without reading the full context.

I think one thing with my example of Georgette Heyer, is that her books are essentially delightful potboilers, designed for nothing more than mild pleasure. They are very cleverly written, but they are not literature, and I don't believe GH agonised over the choice of words or their arrangement into sentences. (She wrote at far too fast a rate for that!) Neither was she trying to make a point which was core to the messages and significance of the book in these sections which now really jar, So I really don't think she would be bothered by a few sentences in some books being tweaked (perhaps even grateful!) To me, it's like fixing a broken window in an old, beautiful church.

When it is unique literature (such as most of the texts you list, Joon) and/or the book is intending to grapple with difficult themes and the dark side of humanity, and the words chosen serve that purpose, messing with them feels very different and dangerous.

But I realize it is a slippery slope, and if the former case would encourage the latter case, then I'd much rather skip over the odd cringey moment in Georgette Heyer in order to avoid the thought police desecrating our literature.

I agree. I won’t buy the new versions. I’d have preferred they just stuck a note in to state that in this day and age some of the language used, and the beliefs are outdated and why. Discussion can then be had. Everyone can learn. Censorship teaches nothing.

Realistically though, how many 7-9 year olds, gifted a supposedly fun book to read, are going to want to have a follow up discussion on the way social attitudes have changed since the book was first written?

Yes you’re right… but they can have that discussion with their parents or in school, no?

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I’d have preferred they just stuck a note in to state that in this day and age some of the language used, and the beliefs are outdated and why. Discussion can then be had. Everyone can learn. Censorship teaches nothing.
This. Children learn lots.
Some of the Narnia descriptions are of their age, but I'll still let DC read them. If they have questions they can ask and when we're talking about our books it will come up.

They're not specifically linked but it find it really interesting how 2023 society thinks Dahl books need censoring because it's dangerous to children, at the same time a large percentage of parents are putting the content of the internet in their KS2 child's pocket.

But in this case I don’t think the words they have removed even need an ‘of its time’ conversation.
“Nowadays, dear, we know that referring to farm machinery painted black is racist…” er…
It’s not like the sexism in Famous Five books.

Admittedly there’s that one dodgy bit in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator which is all ‘jokes’ about Chinese people talking funny, where we did point out the racism. But that’s a crap book anyway. I wouldn’t weep for that one bit being cut. Otherwise it’s all just silly.