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Dahls and Don'ts
Feb. 21st, 2023 09:21 amWell, no one's been asking my opinion of the latest Roald Dahl controversy, so here it is. Or rather, here they are, for I have several.
First, context. Here's a link to the original Telegraph article, which lists all the emendations. Let's just acknowledge that the whole issue has been very consciously taken up by the Tory press as a culture-war issue because they have nothing but culture wars on which to fight the next election. Their own deputy chairman has said as much. So, expect a lot more of this sort of stuff, wherever they can find it. Even Rishi Sunak has weighed in. Clearly, Dahl is the new J. K. Rowling in terms of right-wing white-knighting.
As for me, although I've edited an academic collection on Dahl, and almost the first thing that happened to me on arriving at Cardiff University was being involved in a conference to mark his centenary - Cardiff being his birthplace - I've never been a particular fan, either now or in childhood. As a stylist he seems uninteresting, and his humour just wasn't to my taste, though clearly it appealed to many others. (I'm not even a huge fan of Quentin Blake's illustrations. He's one of those figures, like Anthony Browne and Charles Keeping, who seem universally beloved - and indeed they may all be lovely people - who somehow don't do it for me. But I am not a very visual person. My loss.) Unfortunately, what I do like about Dahl is intimately connected to his less pleasant qualities - such as the comment on Mrs Winter, the teacher in The Magic Finger who is made to grow a tail by the protagonist-narrator: "if any of you are wondering whether Mrs Winter is quite all right again now, the answer is No. And she never will be." I've got to admit that I did laugh at that.
So anyway, I have a number of hats.
Hat the First. As a children's literature teacher, silent emendations are bothersome. From now on, for example, if I want to teach Matilda, I'll have to check whether my students are reading the 2023 edition (in which she reads Jane Austen) or one of the earlier ones (in which she reads Kipling). I'm aware this is a niche problem for a niche demographic, however.
Hat the Second. As someone with an academic interest in reception history, the emendations and the row they've engendered are quite interesting. I'll certainly be using the article I've linked above in classes.
Hat the Third. As a parent and general reader, I'm well aware that this kind of 'updating' goes on, and has for decades if not centuries. Looking down the list of emendations, I see some that have an obvious point and others that seem silly or senseless. But I'm aware that this is a reflection of my own sensitivities and blind spots. If I'm more sensitised to racism than sexism or fatphobia, for example, then this will affect my view of what seems like overkill or conversely complicit. Bearing that in mind, I'd find it hard to divide those emendations into sheep and goats, as it were - but an absolutist stance seems no more satisfactory.
Hat the Fourth. As a children's writer and someone with many friends in that field, I can't shake the suspicion that children's books get this kind of treatment more than books for adults, and while there may be good reasons for this (adults are generally better equipped to take an author's prejudices and cultural/historical situation into account) there are also bad ones that rub a raw spot (children's books are insignificant as literature and can be mucked about with sans cultural loss). Of course, adult books are sometimes amended in this way too - it's currently possible to buy Joseph Conrad's The Nice Guy of the Narcissus on Amazon, for example - but it's undoubtedly rarer.
The online dislikers of Dahl seem to have settled on two rather contradictory positions. One group thinks that the books should be amended, and that this fuss is just an opportunistic culture-war issue (in which latter contention they're certainly right). The other, that they should, as it were, have a Do Not Resuscitate order placed on them and be allowed to slide out of print, to replaced by better, more recent books. I have sympathy with both positions, but both make me uneasy, perhaps because both assume the integral relation of books to a capitalist/market model. On the one hand, the publishers amend books (and the Estate allows it) so that they can continue to make money out of a very lucrative author. On the other, reading - viewed as a zero-sum game - allows for only a certain number of books to be 'in play' at one time (those Waterstone's tables only have so much space!), and Dahl's are seen as hogging shelf-space at the expense of younger pretenders.
So, what's my opinion? Having taken all these factors into account and done the sums, I think the end result is that I don't feel strongly either way. But at least my indifference is sophisticated.
First, context. Here's a link to the original Telegraph article, which lists all the emendations. Let's just acknowledge that the whole issue has been very consciously taken up by the Tory press as a culture-war issue because they have nothing but culture wars on which to fight the next election. Their own deputy chairman has said as much. So, expect a lot more of this sort of stuff, wherever they can find it. Even Rishi Sunak has weighed in. Clearly, Dahl is the new J. K. Rowling in terms of right-wing white-knighting.
As for me, although I've edited an academic collection on Dahl, and almost the first thing that happened to me on arriving at Cardiff University was being involved in a conference to mark his centenary - Cardiff being his birthplace - I've never been a particular fan, either now or in childhood. As a stylist he seems uninteresting, and his humour just wasn't to my taste, though clearly it appealed to many others. (I'm not even a huge fan of Quentin Blake's illustrations. He's one of those figures, like Anthony Browne and Charles Keeping, who seem universally beloved - and indeed they may all be lovely people - who somehow don't do it for me. But I am not a very visual person. My loss.) Unfortunately, what I do like about Dahl is intimately connected to his less pleasant qualities - such as the comment on Mrs Winter, the teacher in The Magic Finger who is made to grow a tail by the protagonist-narrator: "if any of you are wondering whether Mrs Winter is quite all right again now, the answer is No. And she never will be." I've got to admit that I did laugh at that.
So anyway, I have a number of hats.
Hat the First. As a children's literature teacher, silent emendations are bothersome. From now on, for example, if I want to teach Matilda, I'll have to check whether my students are reading the 2023 edition (in which she reads Jane Austen) or one of the earlier ones (in which she reads Kipling). I'm aware this is a niche problem for a niche demographic, however.
Hat the Second. As someone with an academic interest in reception history, the emendations and the row they've engendered are quite interesting. I'll certainly be using the article I've linked above in classes.
Hat the Third. As a parent and general reader, I'm well aware that this kind of 'updating' goes on, and has for decades if not centuries. Looking down the list of emendations, I see some that have an obvious point and others that seem silly or senseless. But I'm aware that this is a reflection of my own sensitivities and blind spots. If I'm more sensitised to racism than sexism or fatphobia, for example, then this will affect my view of what seems like overkill or conversely complicit. Bearing that in mind, I'd find it hard to divide those emendations into sheep and goats, as it were - but an absolutist stance seems no more satisfactory.
Hat the Fourth. As a children's writer and someone with many friends in that field, I can't shake the suspicion that children's books get this kind of treatment more than books for adults, and while there may be good reasons for this (adults are generally better equipped to take an author's prejudices and cultural/historical situation into account) there are also bad ones that rub a raw spot (children's books are insignificant as literature and can be mucked about with sans cultural loss). Of course, adult books are sometimes amended in this way too - it's currently possible to buy Joseph Conrad's The Nice Guy of the Narcissus on Amazon, for example - but it's undoubtedly rarer.
The online dislikers of Dahl seem to have settled on two rather contradictory positions. One group thinks that the books should be amended, and that this fuss is just an opportunistic culture-war issue (in which latter contention they're certainly right). The other, that they should, as it were, have a Do Not Resuscitate order placed on them and be allowed to slide out of print, to replaced by better, more recent books. I have sympathy with both positions, but both make me uneasy, perhaps because both assume the integral relation of books to a capitalist/market model. On the one hand, the publishers amend books (and the Estate allows it) so that they can continue to make money out of a very lucrative author. On the other, reading - viewed as a zero-sum game - allows for only a certain number of books to be 'in play' at one time (those Waterstone's tables only have so much space!), and Dahl's are seen as hogging shelf-space at the expense of younger pretenders.
So, what's my opinion? Having taken all these factors into account and done the sums, I think the end result is that I don't feel strongly either way. But at least my indifference is sophisticated.