Over the weekend, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph published a report revealing that they had found hundreds of changes made to recent publications of Roald Dahl’s books.
Puffin, the publisher of the books, and the Roald Dahl Story Company worked with “sensitivity readers” from an organization called Inclusive Minds to use more inclusive language. The edits are aimed to remove harmful or offensive language relating to gender, race, weight, mental health, and violence.
The updates were met with intense backlash. Renowned author Salmon Rushdie tweeted, “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the alterations made, it does beg the question: Why do we feel the need to modernize art? And do we have the right to modernize art?
Puffin and the Roald Dahl estate want to keep selling books and making money from Dahl’s works, so they have an incentive to make sure the books aren’t deemed too offensive and don’t fall out of favor with the general public. From a purely financial perspective, I can understand why they chose to make these revisions.
But without the author’s guidance or opinion on the matter (i.e., Roald Dahl is dead), it feels wrong on principle. The publisher would never make changes to the work without the author’s consent if the author were alive, so what makes it ok once the author is dead?
I have not read through the hundreds of edits that were made to the stories, and I don’t doubt that there is probably some questionable language used in Dahl’s works.
But at the same time, I also have to wonder if art should exist as it is in perpetuity or if it should be altered. I’m sure you could think of countless examples that support either argument.
Lastly, I find it interesting that these adjustments largely depend on the medium of the artwork. It’s easy to swap out a few words in a story. But if you wanted to change the lyrics in the recording of a song, you would need to record an entire new track. If the original singer is dead, that makes it pretty difficult to do so.
I think this goes to show that society has an increased sensitivity to language. Since it’s easy to modify which words are acceptable or not, we feel the need to change them. Instead of calling Augustus Gloop “fat,” we will instead call him “enormous” from now on. And eventually, “enormous” may be deemed offensive, at which point we will call him something else.
And so the cycle continues.
This is how society and culture evolve, for better or for worse.
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Over the weekend, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph published a report revealing that they had found hundreds of changes made to recent publications of Roald Dahl’s books.
Puffin, the publisher of the books, and the Roald Dahl Story Company worked with “sensitivity readers” from an organization called Inclusive Minds to use more inclusive language. The edits are aimed to remove harmful or offensive language relating to gender, race, weight, mental health, and violence.
The updates were met with intense backlash. Renowned author Salmon Rushdie tweeted, “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the alterations made, it does beg the question: Why do we feel the need to modernize art? And do we have the right to modernize art?
Puffin and the Roald Dahl estate want to keep selling books and making money from Dahl’s works, so they have an incentive to make sure the books aren’t deemed too offensive and don’t fall out of favor with the general public. From a purely financial perspective, I can understand why they chose to make these revisions.
But without the author’s guidance or opinion on the matter (i.e., Roald Dahl is dead), it feels wrong on principle. The publisher would never make changes to the work without the author’s consent if the author were alive, so what makes it ok once the author is dead?
I have not read through the hundreds of edits that were made to the stories, and I don’t doubt that there is probably some questionable language used in Dahl’s works.
But at the same time, I also have to wonder if art should exist as it is in perpetuity or if it should be altered. I’m sure you could think of countless examples that support either argument.
Lastly, I find it interesting that these adjustments largely depend on the medium of the artwork. It’s easy to swap out a few words in a story. But if you wanted to change the lyrics in the recording of a song, you would need to record an entire new track. If the original singer is dead, that makes it pretty difficult to do so.
I think this goes to show that society has an increased sensitivity to language. Since it’s easy to modify which words are acceptable or not, we feel the need to change them. Instead of calling Augustus Gloop “fat,” we will instead call him “enormous” from now on. And eventually, “enormous” may be deemed offensive, at which point we will call him something else.
And so the cycle continues.
This is how society and culture evolve, for better or for worse.
