Seamas O'Reilly: Roald Dahl edits more about corporate ownership than a 'woke elite'
Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan
This week, it emerged that the works of Roald Dahl had been revised for their new editions, and the press ran riot with the story that the greatest canon in children’s literature was being vandalised by the wokerati.
Some of the proposed changes are inelegant, to put it mildly. Some are merely artless while others are almost provocatively strange. Changing “How I’d love to walk in and slosh it all over old Grandma and watch the ticks and fleas go jumping off her” to “How I’d love to walk in and slosh it all over old Grandma and give her quite the fright” feels needless to the point of absurdity, especially when one considers that the plot of George’s Marvellous Medicine - the deliberate poisoning of an old woman using household liquids – remains in place. The choice to remove a sentence like “the machines were both black” is so garbled, it’s tempting to think it was done by an over-enthusiastic AI, trained to find problematic key words on sight. But, even here, we rarely venture beyond head-scratching territory, and reading the full list of changes does give one the sense that examples are thinner than the outraged commentariat would prefer.
Presenting them one after the other, as breathlessly as one might catalogue an index of erasures scribbled in Stalin’s famous blue pencil, is presumably intended to increase their power, creating a sort of death by a thousand cuts. I find it has the opposite effect. Calling Cloud-Men Cloud-People or reassigning the genders of some minor characters in Fantastic Mister Fox, are not exactly necessary changes, but neither do they appear particularly outrageous. Changing “chambermaid” to “cleaner”, or “Mummy” to “Mummy and Daddy” are edits so inert as to be unremarkable.
Almost none would be noticeable were they the result of translation into another language. We are assured that there are many more changes than those we’ve been shown but, at the risk of being presumptuous, one might guess that if there were more egregious examples to be found, we would have seen them liberally quoted.
I speak as a fan. I spent my childhood inhaling everything Dahl wrote. And I do mean everything; he is one of very few authors whose catalogue I could probably claim to have read in its entirety. I read them voraciously, and repeatedly. The ones I did not multiple times are few and far between (Vicar of Nibbleswick, I’m looking at you). When, at the age of ten or eleven, my appendix burst, the only thing I requested from home was my copy of The Witches, prompting a house wide manhunt for a book so well-thumbed, it had long since lost its cover. So, believe me when I say that I loved his books and, if I’m being honest, their occasional bursts of fizzing nastiness were a large part of the reason why.
Dahl himself, as the originating exposé notes to its credit, changed many things about his books during his lifetime, not least the appearance of the Oompa-Loompas, who were originally depicted as enslaved people of explicitly African appearance. I never saw those incarnations since, by the time I began reading his work in the early 90s, Dahl had already redrafted their descriptions twice himself, not from any pangs of genuine guilt, but self-evidently to make them more saleable in a world of shifting cultural mores.
These cuts obviously happened for the same reason; so that millionaires could make their product more commercial to a world, and consumer base, that’s changed. Changed how it feels about calling children “fat” or African languages “weird”. Changed how it feels about mothers doing all the cooking and cleaning. Changed how parents feel about reading books by an author for whom Google immediately prompts the word “antisemitism” when you search his name. The cuts are said to have been undertaken a year or so before the sale of Dahl’s rights to Netflix for $686 million, a chronology that makes the entire thing a little less of a head-scratcher.
Within hours, The Telegraph had invoked critical race theory, and the Mail had drawn a direct link between the cuts and the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie.
A lot of those outraged seem to want Dahl’s books frozen in amber from a time and climate when their market was mostly people like them. The current Dahl Estate has a larger audience of readers in mind. Some might be Jewish people with access to Google. Others might speak “weird” African languages. Many are likely to be working mothers. Some might even, perish the thought, be fat. Until it is legally mandatory for people to buy books containing things they don’t like – sports, romance, racial caricatures – any company in the business of selling them to a wide audience will work with this in mind.
There are good, healthy discussions to be had here, about Capitalism’s ownership of culture, or the editorial largesse of Copyright holders, hoarding the works of long-dead authors, so they can milk their carcass like a vampire squid. But these issues always seem to dodge the sniper’s bullet, which whizzes straight past them and right into the head of the press’ usual target; a shadowy, woke elite hell bent on turning your children stupid, weak and, quite possibly, communist.
Whether you hate these changes or merely find them a bit odd – in a week’s reading, I’ve found almost no one who said they were long overdue - the true culprit is a company that makes hundreds of millions of dollars selling books and films and is trying to protect their massive investment. Telling the story of Dahl’s revisions without including the context of who made them is, for me, a cut too far.
