Leave the Books Alone, Please
If books such as Roald Dahl's are rewritten so as to not offend, the original ideas are lost.
Children's author Roald Dahl once remarked in an interview 40 years ago that he would frown upon any attempts to rewrite his works.
In a conversation with artist Francis Bacon in 1982, Dahl minced no words when it came to his thoughts about having his books rewritten in any way.
"I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!"
Dahl even referenced the title character of his book The Enormous Crocodile in terms of what he would do in response to publishers rewriting his work. He was engaging in hyperbole but had a point: Don't rewrite my books because certain people get upset about the content.
But it seems that Puffin, the current publisher of his books that remain in circulation, didn't get the message. This past week, The Guardian reported that Puffin planned to release new versions of his books, meaning the publisher did exactly what Dahl didn't want.
The re-written passages in Dahl's books range from changing Fantastic Mr. Fox's three sons into three daughters, to Matilda reading Jane Austen instead of Rudyard Kipling, to Augustus Gloop being described as "enormous" instead of "fat," to quotes being rewritten in ways that make characters sound generic.
Dahl, like every human being in existence, had his faults. For example, he made multiple remarks about Israel's 1983 war against Lebanon that were anti-Semitic. It's a flaw that can't be easily dismissed, but that's no different from the flaws that exist in the characters in his books.
Yet here we are, going through Dahl's books and rewriting passages because we're worried that we might upset somebody regarding a character’s flaw.
The biggest problem here is that we are taking the words the author intended to use and turning them into something the author didn't intend. What makes the book unique is therefore lost, because it no longer reflects what was in the author's mind and, instead, reflects what's in the mind of people other than the author.
I've talked about this before regarding Ray Bradbury, another author who strongly objected to having words changed in his writing after publication. His point was that taking elements out of an author's story that one thinks are offensive means no distinct stories and no authors with unique styles.
Puffin might have now announced that they will offer two versions of the book, but the problem remains: The publisher decided to take his original works and rewrite them, when most people would just prefer they be left alone. It was essentially the same thing when Coca-Cola executives decided to change the formula of its most popular beverage when that wasn't what Coke fans wanted at all.
As Kat Rosenfield pointed out, the problem comes with the rise of the sensitivity reader. The idea behind such readers was they would review author manuscripts before publication and suggest changes to avoid stereotypes about certain people. However, they've become less a means of offering such suggestions and more a means of mostly white publishers showing their industry is now diverse, all without having to pay a lot of money to do so.
"To understand why publishing would go all-in on a practice that not only interferes with an author's creative autonomy but traffics in crude stereotyping to boot, you need to know one crucial fact about sensitivity readers: They're cheap. The average cost of a sensitivity read is a few hundred dollars per manuscript, and it's a freelance job. This made it a godsend to publishers who wanted to merely look like they were giving people of color a seat at the table but didn't want to go to the trouble of buying all those additional chairs. Retaining a freelance stable of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities created the appearance of diversity for a fraction of the cost."
The problem is that the influx of sensitivity readers have led to some publishers unwilling to publish a book featuring a main character of one ethnicity written by an author of another ethnicity. Rosenfield illustrates this by noting that a Filipino author wrote a book in which the main protagonist is a black man and said author is told he should make that protagonist Filipino instead.
It's bad enough that we have publishers who are suggesting authors only write about main protagonist who share every trait the author has. But now we get the same sensitivity readers stepping in to suggest rewriting books that were published decades ago, yet remain popular, and we go further past the line. It's not enough, these publishers say, that we ensure yet-to-be published authors not upset anybody, but that previously published authors, many who have long since passed away, shouldn't upset anybody, either.
For books that were written in the past, they should remain as they were originally written, not just to reflect the time period in which they were written, but to ensure that the author's original ideas remain intact.
And while some advice may be helpful for authors seeking to get a book published, to tell authors that they may only write characters who are exactly like the author does a lot of harm to the author's original ideas. This practice forces authors to only think like they do, instead of thinking like somebody other than the author — and if an author comes up with a compelling character who doesn’t think or act like the author, yet connects with a large audience, the author has done a great job.
Rolling out readers who are supposed to give authors advice, but instead turn every work into a generic template, means there's less incentive for people to read books and, thus, less incentive for people to write books.
The best thing for publishers to do is this: Let the author's words speak for themselves. If a book fails to sell, the publisher is free to pull the book. But if the book sells, year after year, stop worrying about who might get upset about the book and think more about those who have made it clear that this book, and thus the author, speaks to them.