I scrolled into an interesting article/headline the other day: Big-Five publisher Puffin is implementing “extensive changes” across legendary author Roald Dahl’s catalog of children’s books. Some strike me more as modernization — replacing masculine plural nouns with gender-neutral ones — while others explicitly aim to remove offensive language.
This is a thought-provoking issue for me as an author. It’s also one I expect to be seized upon by both political poles. Regardless of where you stand, I think this news raises some interesting questions. As an author, I have to wonder how I would want my work to be evaluated, and possibly even altered, decades after my death. As a reader, I think it’s important to reflect on past favorites and consider why and how I think they should endure.
My own decades-old writing hasn’t always aged well
I’m old enough to be able to read my own decades-old writing and hold it up against current standards. It is a humbling exercise, to say the least. I would love to believe I’ve reached a destination of sorts, in terms of enlightenment or worldview or even precise command of the English language. However, it’s simply not the case. I’m an average person and a product of my time. Also, a writer. This remains as true in 2023 as it was in 2003.
As a personal experience writer, I’ve chronicled several of my life’s most uncomfortable, most cathartic transitions in real time. The most polished example is my 2018 book Order from Chaos: The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD. Order from Chaos is only five years old, and yet surely I would write some pieces of it differently today. The zeitgeist has changed. I’ve changed. I can’t imagine how this book will read to me, let alone anyone else, fifty years on.
Do we expect fiction to endure forever?
Fiction can be a bit of a different beast. For me, fiction and memoir often age better than straight non-fiction. That said, novels too are a product of their time — as are their fallible authors.
I’ve gone back and forth on the amount of detail I want to get into here. This post started out a lot longer than it’s finishing. My generation grew up positively relishing Roald Dahl’s books, so it’s tempting for me to ramble on a bit about them.
That magic is part of what many of us are reacting to, I’m sure. We want not only to hold onto the magic for ourselves, but to pass it down to the next generation.
Sometimes that’s just not possible. When I was a kid, my parents would occasionally pull out a book or TV show from their elementary-school years and laugh at how offensive it was in the harsh light of the 1980s and 1990s. And yet those of us who came of age at the turn of the millennium know it wasn’t an endpoint. Even as my parents taught me to laugh at outdated attitudes from their youth, they still gave me an opportunity to do the same with my own child. I, too, became a product of my time.
What’s the real problem with updating old books?
I fear the debate around these changes will revolve around their perceived scope and gravity. Are we witnessing censorship? (No.) Do the changes go too far? Not far enough? In essence, is the publisher doing harm to the work (and by extension its audience) with these changes?
These arguments miss the point for me. My question is would I, as an author, want a publisher to try to alter my books to fit social norms over a half-century beyond their first printing? Is it possible to do this well, and does it serve the work and the readers?
Books, like people and other beings, grow old. Those of us who love them will naturally try to cling to them. Who could blame us for wanting to use every tool at our disposal to keep them with us for as long as possible? However, letting go eventually becomes the only humane choice.
Some minor updates can preserve a book’s longevity and essence
Hear me out. I’m all for no-brainer updates that prevent a book from aging or even disappearing before its time. Some of the Dahl edits fall into this category. Changing Cloud Men to Cloud People feels insubstantial to me, like updating instances of thou to you. Language around gender, especially when referring to groups of otherwise-undistinguished people, has evolved. The standards of the 1950s will now feel dated, and modern-day kids won’t connect to this language the same way.
In other words, this change alters the language but not the essence. In some ways this preserves the essence.
Replacing enormously fat with enormous is entirely different. This is an edit I would never wish to see made to my own work.
You can change what the author said, but not how they said it
This is not because I think doing so amounts to censorship (which, again, it is not). It’s because I see no way to edit oneself out of the true problem, which is in the author’s intent and mindset.
Again, I loved Dahl’s books as a kid and I still feel very warmly toward them. My own child has read and loved these books.
All the same, Dahl exemplifies an issue I see in too much children’s literature, even to this day. He uses people’s bodies and appearance as shorthand for their character. We are taught to read characters as inwardly grotesque when they are portrayed on the page as outwardly grotesque.
This cannot be solved by sensitivity readers decades after the fact. We can agree not to use the word fat as a slur, we can replace it with the word enormous, but the full meaning and intent remain unchanged.
Sometimes it’s good to move on
In this way, I think for certain books and authors we might take a page from the non-fiction world. I know Order from Chaos will eventually feel irrelevant. Society’s ideas and expectations, both generally and about adult ADHD in particular, will change. I hope they’ll change. If women like me are still dealing with the same set of issues forty years from now, I’ll be pretty depressed.
When this progress (hopefully) happens, I won’t update Order from Chaos for a fortieth-anniversary reprint. If anything, I’ll write a new book.
Some voices in the literary community, including elder statesman Philip Pullman, have suggested it would be best for everyone — books included — to simply let Dahl’s work go out of print. I don’t know we need to go that far, but I do agree sensitivity readers like those employed by Puffin for this reprint are better applied to new work.
We in the publishing world make much of it not being a zero-sum game. There’s room for everyone, even in a saturated market. I believe this wholeheartedly. That there is room for everyone at a major publishing imprint like Puffin, not so much.
There is a bright new generation of middle grade books and authors out there
I know it sucks, but I would rather see us make room for new books and leave Dahl’s as is. I’m sure Puffin wants to remove body-shaming from his books so they can continue to profit from time-tested cash cows. However, I personally think this is as impossible as going back in time and changing the person Dahl was.
Meanwhile, I’ve read some truly great middle grade novels over the past few years. Yes, it hurts my elder Millennial heart to remove some of my favorites from their pedestals. But there are so many excellent middle grade books — and authors! — who deserve attention and investment from publishers.
And as an author, I would much rather see a book fade into obscurity than be altered as a token accommodation to changing social norms without actually removing its harmful aspects. As long as I’m alive, I can always write another one.
And if I’m dead? Still a no. I respect my readers and the integrity of my work too much. Modernizing language, sure. However, satisfying the letter of the law regarding slurs while ignoring the intent feels greedy at best. At worst, it keeps harmful content in wider circulation while diverting resources from new books and authors who deserve the same chance I had.
There’s nothing wrong with having loved Dahl’s books. There’s also nothing wrong with letting nature take its course. I think that’s the fair thing to do here. To Dahl, to his work, to the readers, and to all the middle-grade authors looking for a place on the shelf.
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