147. NOT ALL GOBSTOPPERS ARE EVERLASTING - Why I'm OK With Changing The Words of Roald Dahl

After writing before half term about gender-pronouns in the Bible, more language changes abound.  This time it’s the work of Roald Dahl.  The Telegraph reported that hundreds of changes have been made across all Dahl’s children’s books to appease a new “sensitive” 2023 readership in any future reprints.  Augustus Gloop is no longer “fat”, just “enormous”, and while the evil Witches wear wigs over their bald heads it is also made clear that there are many legitimate reasons a woman might be wearing a wig and that not all wig-wearing women are witches.

A predictable uproar followed.

In the past, I might even have been part of it.  No meddling with art - keep the author’s words intact! No more censorship! If you’re offended, you don’t have to read it…

But…

Maybe it’s the fact that I have been working my way through the complete stories of Sherlock Holmes recently, and time and time again been taken aback by some of the casual racisms and sexisms of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous character? (Or even by the sheer number of times Watson “ejaculates” in his old-fashioned language, most notably being awoken “by an ejaculation”? If you want something to take you right out of the story in 2023, it’s that image!)  Maybe it’s the fact that I have also been working my way through some recordings of old movies my wife and I have kept on our TV recently and been take aback by similar antiquation of attitudes and language found in films like Short Circuit, Victor/Victoria and Airplane II?  Easy for me to shrug off as “of their time”, these attitudes of racism, homophobia, and sexism don’t directly affect me as a cisgender white man, but they still jar, and if I was one of the groups directly impacted by the language and attitudes, it would not be so easy to shrug off. Not just jarring but full-on assault! I’ve also been teaching Mackie’s “argument from queerness” this LGBTQ+ History month and wondering how hard it would be for the exam boards to decontextualise the argument as one from “strangeness”? (Instead, I have contextualised it in terms of the LGBTQ+ reclamation of the word: Mackie called ethical properties/facts “queer” to mean “strange”, and just like the Q in LGBTQ+, ethical properties/facts have fought back and we can make the case that what Mackie dismissed as “queer” are, in fact, perfectly normal features of the universe Mackie, and others like him, need to learn to deal with and accept… but I digress).

Maybe…

But I don’t think my change in attitude towards the tampering with Dahl’s words actually has anything to do with those recent confrontations I’ve had with how the world once was clashing up against modern mores.  It has much more to do with my understanding today of how commercial publishing actually works.

The premise that the author’s words should never be tampered with rests upon an assumption that the words we read in those first editions are, in fact, the untampered words of the author.  But that assumption is usually in error.  While true of self-published literature, maybe, anything that comes out of a major publishing house is no solitary effort.  Agents and editors will have first had their suggestions and ideas incorporated into the final text that we, the readers, see.  Decisions will be made to change the author’s original words based on completely subjective perspectives on language and on ever-changing ideas of commercial appeal, passed on by a rotating array of individuals giving different views and suggestions.

In the books we read, dark endings originally written by authors have already been made happy, characters have already changed their gender or race, entire pieces of plot have already been altered or completely scrapped.  The entire notion of drafting and the committee process of editing which happens for every commercially published book means that the thing that makes its way to the reader’s eyes is, already, never the original work as intended by the author.  It is always, already, a compromise. A group effort. Just read any acknowledgements page.

Dahl, himself, was famous for angry back and forths with his editors.  But if Dahl was merely ignoring all the suggested changes of those editors there would be no anger needed, nor any back and forth.  The angry exchanges imply that compromises of some kind were always made in the end, and that the final printed version was never entirely Dahl’s original language. If not, he would have simply sent the same curt reply each time: “no edits please. I wrote what I wrote.”

And I shall take the argument further: such interventions and collaboration are possibly (not always, but possibly) beneficial to a text.  I know, myself, I have not had anything published by others which has not had some editing interventions.  In the majority of cases those interventions have vastly improved what I originally wrote, even better articulated something I was trying, but failing, originally to say in my own original words.

Take philosophy as an example.  It is entirely common for an academic philosophy paper to go through several rounds of suggestions and edits before publication.  That’s often after the paper has been given at conferences and talks where audience questions also influence the final draft of what is submitted to the journal. To say a work of philosophy is entirely the author’s own words is disingenuous at best.

But Dahl was not a philosopher, he was a writer of fiction. Well, I have friends who write fiction and have published what they write with major publishers too.  Not a single one has had their first draft put to print without significant changes and re-writes.  Some have had their initial ideas radically altered by agents, editors, and, yes, sensitivity readers.  Importantly, they do not feel the final version published is not the story they wanted to tell.  Because they wanted to make a commercial work, and are not self-publishing in a DIY effort for total author authenticity, they are happy to make their work more inclusive to readers.  Taking advice on pacing a thriller so that it is more likely to appeal is no different than taking advice on choosing a different word so that it appeals to diverse readers too.

Perhaps the problem with Dahl is that he is dead, and therefore is not part of the back and forth process anymore?  True, that does make some difference.  In all the other cases the author is, at least, signing off on the changes made in their text.

Except…

Dahl’s work has been translated into fifty different languages.  Even when alive, did Dahl speak all fifty and sign off on the nuances and changes of each translation?  We seem to accept translations of original works without qualm, fully understanding that this work will differ from the original manuscript in its native language and not feeling such translations to be sacrilege to the author. Why should one in English be any different?

Perhaps that is a bit of a straw man (straw person?) as it’s avoiding the specific issue of a dead author’s original words being changed in the language in which they originally wrote without their consent?

I guess it is important to remember that being published in perpetuity is not a given for any author.  Dahl’s original books exist, in their original form (save for the many pre-existing edits and changes in new editions which took place during Dahl’s lifetime, before the “culture war” uproar of today made such a big deal out of them), and will continue to exist as collector’s items.  Those of us who read the “originals” in our youth (myself including - I read all of Dahl’s work) have not had that formative experience taken from us at all by the decision for modern reprints to be altered.  But there are many other, less successful, books from that time which you can no longer buy new editions of.  The authors died, or fell out of fashion, and no publisher felt it was worth the money to keep the books in print.  If a publisher today decides to publish Dahl’s work and keep it alive for a new audience, then it would be expected that they treat the decision to publish it similar to other manuscripts they publish, and make sure the book is fit for a 2023 audience.  Doing so sensitively with an old story - keeping as much of the original alive as possible and tweaking only the most egregious bits seems like a fair price to pay to keep the books alive, and perhaps it would almost be negligent to just print them as was knowing the level of misogyny, anti-semitism, and racism within them that has been widely talked about in the intervening years since Dahl died?  Importantly, for the child reading Dahl today, they would know no different.  Their experience of the stories at the heart of Dahl’s work would remain exactly as ours was when we first read them: amazed, marvelled, gobsmacked!  James will still venture out in his Giant Peach, George will still poison his grandmother with his Marvellous Medicine, the Giant will remain Big and Friendly and place dreams into the heads of sleeping children, the Witches will still terrify, Matilda will still inspire, and Charlie will still tour Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Dahl consented, in his lifetime, to relevant changes needed to get his work published by commercial publishers. Given that, now that Dahl is dead, an argument could be made that this same consent lingers with his estate if they want the books to continue being printed. After all - the estate could opt not to give the publishers the rights to continue publishing Dahl’s work. They could self-publish them un-altered as an alternative.

Perhaps another reason I am not so precious about the language is remembering that stories like this - children’s stories - have a much richer tradition of being shared orally, passed from speaker to speaker and transformed in every telling, than they do in the relatively modern individualist tradition of personal intellectual copyright and atomistic authorship.  Remember, after all, if publishers decided Dahl was too old-fashioned for modern audiences and didn’t publish him at all anymore, that would be how we would pass these “tales of the unexpected” onto our children anyway.  We’d have to re-tell them ourselves, in our own voice, using language to suit our audience.  Dahl’s work changed my life as a little boy, but do I remember every word and phrase?  Not at all.  Yet could I tell a child any of his stories, given a bit of artistic license to do it in my own words? Of course! And I might decide to do so without wanting to pass on old fashioned stereotypes or antiquated observations that a child of today, and a parent, ought to have transcended.

So either Dahl remains published, but altered (again), for a modern audience (as he was when alive), or he goes unpublished and altered (again), this time verbally, by those of us who want to keep his wonderful stories alive. Words evolve. Language changes. Attitudes alter. They do so from first draft to first edition, and they will continue to do so if an author is lucky enough to continue to be published long after their death. The changes to the original text can be seen as censorship, sure, but they can very easily also be seen as what they say they are: sensitivity to a modern audience so very different from the audience Dahl originally wrote for.  The latest in a chain of tweaks and changes authors have always made in the collaborative venture known as commercial publishing, that it is all-too-easy to forget about when we see a book on the shelves with the name of a single author on the jacket.

Don’t let the illusion of sole authorship fool you.  Published writing has always been edited by many and influenced by audiences.  If you want to read the unblemished, pure and unfiltered draft straight from the author’s mind and onto the page, read something self-published (like this blog…although I do tend to do a few drafts).  Anything else you read, assume there have been drafts, edits, alterations, corrections, and the input of many. The author, often, is a group of authors. Dahl is no different.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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