Let's dunk on the publishing industry

[sabotabby]

So I find myself agreeing with the free-speech absolutists and the Tories about Puffin Books' rewrite of Roald Dahl's books, which is odd company to be in. Though, I want to point out that this is not an "Ironic! It's the left doing Bowlderization, not the right. The left are the real scolds, etc." This isn't a left thing, this is a capitalist thing, because Puffin is in the business of selling books, and it's harder (though not impossible) to sell racist, sexist, and fatphobic books in the Year Of Our Lord 2023. At least to children. As it should be.

Unpopular opinion: Roald Dahl's books are fundamentally cruel. I've seen the rewrites and they don't actually change that—they just soften some of the language and representation in them. But the appeal of them, let's be honest here, is their cruelty.

It's like if you edited Lovecraft and took the racism out. Sure, there are some cool things in Lovecraft that we all love, but the fear of the Other is baked in. Taking that out is misrepresenting the books. It's better to riff off of his stuff or to write something new than go back and try to rehabilitate them.

Dahl's writing is vicious and sadistic, and that's why I loved those books as a kid. They're not healthy and wholesome. They're an outlet for the worst urges that children have.

I think if you want your kid to grow up to be a loving, wholesome, kind person, you give them something else to read, not Bowlderized Dahl. Or you sit down with them and explain what's wrong with them. But you don't rewrite them to be nice.

ETA: Never mind, I found the best solution. 

Comments

[blogcutter]

Wow - it looks like we were both on the same wavelength this morning!

[sabotabby]

Yep! I encountered two other discussions and was like WELP TIME TO WEIGH IN, I think almost at exactly the time you did.

[highlyeccentric]

I very much agree, and also can't figure out the point of some of the edits. Like the one changing "you can't pull the hair of every woman you meet, even if they wear gloves" to "besides there are lots of reasons women wear wigs". If the problem is that the bald+wig has antisemitic undertones (is that even practiced among UK Orthodox Jews? I've only heard of it in the US, but that could be a media bias thing), the problem is the characterisation of witches as bald beneath wigs, not the "even if they wear gloves", which is a nicely turned comic sentence!

[sabotabby]

I read it as sensitivity to women with cancer. It could be antisemitic, but it's a relatively obscure thing for an antisemite to know.

But yeah, that's kind of my objection to the Euphemism Treadmill in general. Changing the language doesn't change the stigma, and thus that new language just becomes the new weapon for the stigma.

[highlyeccentric]

Right. I'm in favour of changing out obvious slurs, or filing off the REALLY egregious bits (eg the oompa loompas lost their chocolate skin decades ago), but making Dahl books sensitive? That's both a vain effort and fundamentally misunderstanding how the humour works.

[sabotabby]

Or even putting a foreword in the book. That's fine, and has been done with some others. They can be recast as an historical artifact.

But I think what we neglect when we talk about children's lit in general is that children don't spontaneously know which books are classics and which are new. We can just give our kids other books if we want. It's not like they're going to grow up longing to read the same books that we did. The attachment to Dahl, the need to make him into something palatable in 2023, is all coming from adult industry professionals and adult readers, not because children inherently need this literature.

[ioplokon]

But acknowledging that this is an obvious marketing stunt exposes the fact that virtually all "cancel culture" projects around famous people/IP are also... (shout out to JKR's publicist btw; despite actively blocking basically everything about her & her work due to lack of interest, I still learned about her new podcast!!)

[sabotabby]

Yup. Or at least that we conflate two different things (treating people as disposable in leftist communities in acts of lateral bullying, and critiquing or boycotting famous people/IPs in acts of punching up that are nevertheless still tied to capitalist consumption) when we talk about cancel culture.

[ioplokon]

right?

also obvs the real answer is to have stuff enter the public domain sooner; then anyone can do whatever they want. and there'd be less incentive to resuscitate old ips to keep the rights...

[sabotabby]

Also that. And making room for new authors instead of licking the boots of the classic canon.

[misbegotten]

Never mind, I found the best solution.

Perfect!

[sabotabby]

To be fair, I'd like that at the beginning of each of my books as well.

[rdi]

You could put it in you biography, I suppose :-)

[sabotabby]

I just might.

[dissectionist]

I also hate agreeing with right-wingers, but agree with your agreement with them on this. I’m all for putting a foreword about it and then also just finding other books. I didn’t buy any of his books for my kids when they were small (and after finding out today what Dahl said in 1983 - during my lifetime! - about Hitler, I’m really glad about that) because his books just didn’t interest me as much as many other books that are available. Like, they were all right, but there’s better ones I wanted to get for my kids.

[sabotabby]

I really hope there are books that are edgy and naughty and transgressive for weird kids like me out there. It's funny because I think the same right-wingers were upset back in the day because Dahl's books are also disobedient to authority, and rude. I wouldn't give them to a kid now, regardless of whether someone is called "fat" or "enormous" in them. That's missing the point entirely.

[dissectionist]

I was a huge fan of Robert Cormier when I was young, though his books were on the painful-reality side of transgressive/edgy rather than the fun-naughty side. (In hindsight, the fact that his book “I Am The Cheese” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_the_Cheese - was one of my childhood favorites probably says a lot about me.) I did buy his two The Chocolate War books (original and sequel) for my kids.

My kids ended up being much more into contemporary kid lit, and one that they liked when they were little were the Captain Underpants books. I think those fall well into what you describe as naughty and edgy, but (from what I remember) while generally lacking bigotry. (The author did remove one book from publication in 2021 due to its use of passive stereotypes, and donated all royalties from the book to Asian-American organizations.) There’s a married gay couple in the books. This is from the Wikipedia:

“According to the American Library Association, the Captain Underpants books were reported as some of the most banned and challenged books in the United States between 2000 and 2009 (13),[11] as well as between 2010 and 2019.[12] The books were named one of the top ten most banned and challenged books in 2002 (6), 2004 (4), 2005 (8), 2012 (1), 2013 (1), and 2018 (3).[13] The Captain Underpants series was explicitly banned in some schools for “insensitivity, offensive language, encouraging disruptive behavior, LGBTQIA+ issues, violence, being unsuited to the age group, sexually explicit content, anti-family content, as well as encouraging children to disobey authority.”[13]”

(I should add that anything sexually explicit is nowhere in the books; there’s no sex at all. But I’m guessing that that’s coming from people offended that a cartoon character literally called “Captain Underpants” is wearing only his tighty-whiteys.)

[sabotabby]

Oh yeah. I've heard of those and some of the controversies (as well as a teacher fired over it IIRC). But I think the sense of humour would not have been mean enough; it's more wacky than cathartic.

[ex_flameandsong751]

Yeah, I agree with this.

LMAO that solution is great.

[sabotabby]

I think we can all agree on it!

[eller]

Yeah, I've folllowed the debate, and I'm with Salman Rushdie on that one. (If anyone is qualified to have a strong opinion on censorship, it's that guy.)

"This isn't a left thing, this is a capitalist thing"

I would say it's both. While the publisher clearly wants to maximize the number of sold books, the way they do it is enforced by Left policies. If they know school libraries won't buy books with unpopular political opinions, they'll remove those opinions. And, let's face it, this is about schools and government-funded libraries and the people who officially buy all those books with public money. It's not about parents, who a) usually don't buy many books for their kids, and b) with only very few exceptions, don't read the stuff they buy for their kids anyway. (Mine sure didn't.) So, this is an example of Left censorship. Of course, the Right fingerpointing is hypocrisy at its best...

"Unpopular opinion: Roald Dahl's books are fundamentally cruel."

Of course they are. I thought that was the whole point?

"I think if you want your kid to grow up to be a loving, wholesome, kind person, you give them something else to read, not Bowlderized Dahl."

I think if you want your kid to grow up to be a loving, wholesome, kind person, you treat them in a loving, wholesome, kind way. I don't think the reading material matters as much as people think... I mean, my parents didn't censor my reading at all, and while that meant I ended up reading and enjoying some genuinely horrifying works, I don't think it warped my personality development all that much. Censorship isn't just morally reprehensible, it's also inefficient.

[sabotabby]

I'd say it's liberal censorship, at the risk of No True Scotsmaning. The euphemism treadmill without changes in material conditions, that sort of thing.

I think if you want your kid to grow up to be a loving, wholesome, kind person, you treat them in a loving, wholesome, kind way. I don't think the reading material matters as much as people think... I mean, my parents didn't censor my reading at all, and while that meant I ended up reading and enjoying some genuinely horrifying works, I don't think it warped my personality development all that much. Censorship isn't just morally reprehensible, it's also inefficient.

Very true. I mean, I read all this shit and turned out just a bit nasty. But while my mother didn't censor my reading, we did discuss what I was reading, which I think is also critical.

[frenzy]

Idk. As an abused child, Matilda was very comforting for me. I love that book.

[frenzy]

Oh the edit is the correct solution tho.

[frenzy]

Fuck YOUR edit. Not editing them in general.

[sabotabby]

Yes this.

The discussion that spawned this involved the fact that Dahl's books are all about bad people being punished, and this is cathartic for a certain type of kid.

[minoanmiss]

Word. I agree with you and with Sabs, and am too tired to say more. (probably a good thing)

[sabotabby]

Get some rest!

[spiderplanet]

Well said. I couldn't put my finger on what I didn't like about the rewrites, but that's it.

[sabotabby]

They read like they were done by AI as well, or by the equivalent of those 14-year-old boys who would reply to "don't say that's so gay" with "sorry Miss, that's so homosexual."

[naomikritzer]

Yeah. I liked his books as a kid because they were transgressive and also unapologetically mean in a way that's so over-the-top I didn't have to feel guilty for cheering for it -- I mean James' aunts get squished to death by a giant peach as James consorts with enormous insects. Both the transgressiveness and the cruelty are essential. You have to either live with it or live without the books, and I agree that it's fine to just let books go, although honestly, I also think it's fine to give kids books that are transgressive and unapologetically mean and clearly problematic.

The thing that struck me about the rewrite in the Witches about how you couldn't go around yanking on ladies' hair was that in the original, part of what makes it so hilarious is the "just you try it and see what happens" bit (now excised) because part of what makes the grandmother such a terrific character is that she presents as deeply respectable but IN FACT is wildly transgressive. She would ABSOLUTELY be going around yanking on other ladies' hair if it weren't for the problem of all the gloved ladies who turned out not to be wearing wigs.

[naomikritzer]

I also think it's totally fine to NOT buy Roald Dahl for your kids, to be clear. There were a bunch of books I didn't buy for my kids just because I found them irritating and didn't want to have to read them (the Bearenstain Bears, Curious George, the Giving Tree, various other classics considered totally indispensable).

[minoanmiss]

gaaah The Giving Tree. I think that book actually did harm me, but that was partially my boundaries-are-punished childhood; it wouldn't''ve been nearly so dangerous on its own.

[sabotabby]

It's a fucked up book. I go back and forth about whether we should force kids to read it so that they can have a critique of it later in life.

[sabotabby]

The thing that struck me about the rewrite in the Witches about how you couldn't go around yanking on ladies' hair was that in the original, part of what makes it so hilarious is the "just you try it and see what happens" bit (now excised) because part of what makes the grandmother such a terrific character is that she presents as deeply respectable but IN FACT is wildly transgressive. She would ABSOLUTELY be going around yanking on other ladies' hair if it weren't for the problem of all the gloved ladies who turned out not to be wearing wigs.

That was absolutely the thing that pissed me off the most. They didn't just make it less offensive—and it's still not less offensive, because the underlying offence is that women who look different are not to be trusted—but they succeeded in making it way less funny.

[greylock]

I've bounced about this issue since the first time I saw they'd changed Little Black Sambo to whatever they changed it to. I was as outraged as young me could be purely because they changed it.

A few years later I got miffed because they renamed the kids in Enid Blyton books, and then came for the Golliwog, and I just decided the text should *tend* to be as it was written as it was, for the time, and you can slap a warning on it about how things have changed an on you go.

I have less strong opinions about And Then There Were None though. The entire meaning of the original title has so radically changed (I mean, it was antiquated when I learnt the rhyme it came from, however I learnt it) the "new" title is better.

If you don't understand the past, you'll repeat it was the old saying (Fox News seems to put a lot of effort in not understanding the present though, so maybe it's all different in this enlightened information age we live in.

OTOH, I still have my Dahl books, and the text won't change, and I am sure there will be ebooks out there with the original text, so there's no great real harm... it just changes authors words (and I guess tone and pacing of passages).

They can always sell both versions.

[sabotabby]

I wasn't given Little Black Sambo as a kid specifically because it was racist as shit. Like. We can just not give kids books. They don't have any money and can't make purchasing decisions for themselves. This is all about appeasing pearl-clutching, nostalgic adults.

[greylock]

To be fair, I first same across Sambo as a radio play, (or on Play School?). The story as I recall it is only 'terrible' because of the illustrations.

I can't even remember the specifics now (lazy kid, tigers who turn into butter?). I never saw it as racist because (a) kid and (b) I had a golliwog I never mapped to a race.

The world is 40 years on from that, but my point with that is I think we reflexively dislike change. Admittedly, back then the context was lost on me.

But times were different.

[conuly]

Well. The story itself isn't racist. A little Indian boy outwits tigers and turns them into butter.

But the book was saddled with a series of bad illustrations (none of which were done by Bannerman - that's not how it worked back then) and the names of the characters were offensive (and even more offensive if you read "black" as "African-American" instead of Indian, as sambo coincidentally happened to already exist as a slur in the USA, something I doubt she knew) and it all became a big thing.

But the story itself is just a cute story about a boy who outwits tigers and turns them into butter, which is why the two most well-known rewrites are so well-known. The Story of Little Baba-ji just updates the illustrations and changes all the names, and Sam and the Tigers is a full-on rewrite. I like the latter one better.

[sabotabby]

I didn't know! I had only ever seen the odd page with the horrible illustrations.

[conuly]

I've bounced about this issue since the first time I saw they'd changed Little Black Sambo to whatever they changed it to. I was as outraged as young me could be purely because they changed it.

I know of at least three rewrites of Little Black Sambo. There is no "they". There are different authors who have taken and reworked a public domain text.

[greylock]

They is OBVIOUSLY George Soros and the Elders of Zion, or Kurt Schwab and the elites at the World Economic Forum, or the lizard people.

Or possibly DemonRATS.

Whichever your poison.

And they did it for reasons too complex to understand. But somehow it's to do with freedoms and guns.

(ugh Twitter was a bad idea)