By now, readers are probably aware of the outrage over the soon-to-be published Bowdlerizations of the works of both Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming. Two very different authors, the first is the writer of several well-known children’s books, especially Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the second is the author of the James Bond novels.
To make perfectly clear where I personally stand, I detest the work of both these men. James Bond is a disgusting pig of a character; I have hated every Bond movie I’ve seen, and when I read Casino Royale to give Bond one more chance to entertain me, I found it boring as well as disgusting. And as for Dahl, I have always found him too mean-spirited for a children’s author.
But that isn’t the point. Disliking these men’s work does not give me or anyone else the right to change what they wrote. Trying to eliminate “offensive” content from them would utterly change the character of their books: If Dahl is no longer allowed to call anyone fat and ugly, and if Fleming is no longer allowed to write about a drunken, philandering misogynist, then all of their novels will be reduced to about two pages in length.
The jackbooted censors who are in charge of the new, bloodless editions of these men’s work have their excuses, of course. They always have excuses. Puffin (Dahl’s publisher) has pointed out that Dahl himself revised his work over the course of his life, but that is obviously a motte-and-bailey argument: The censors are destroying the man’s work on the thin excuse that he himself sometimes revised it. Given his importance in the history of children’s literature, it is obvious that what they ought to do is release critical editions comparing and contrasting the changes Dahl made, not release a censored edition in which they make further changes themselves.
The excuse for altering Fleming’s work is even thinner: The first American edition of Casino Royale was censored, so we might as well turn around and censor everything else, right? That argument is too stupid even to rebut.
Notably, the tabloid Daily Mail discovered that the chief censor working on the Dahl books describes herself as a “non-binary, asexual, polyamorous relationship anarchist who is on the autism spectrum.” That is enough to demonstrate that the alterations to Dahl’s work were not done innocently without ideological motivation. Note especially the pairing of asexual and polyamorous: The English language is allegedly this woman’s job, but she has no concern with the actual meaning of words.
And as for Fleming, the Telegraph reveals some of the alterations. In Live and Let Die, Bond visits a strip club, giving Fleming occasion to write:
Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.
The new version instead reads:
Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.
Whatever one thinks of Bond, the new version is nerveless and clichéd. This is why you don’t mess with other people’s books. And what exactly is the reason for this change? What exactly offended the “sensitivity reader”? I thought feminists liked to call men pigs, and Bond is especially deserving of such an epithet, so what is the problem here? The answer is that there is no answer: “Non-binary, asexual, polyamorous relationship anarchists” do not have actual principles; their offendedness is as random as their self-descriptions are.
We can say this, at least: Things are not yet as bad as they are going to get, so there is still time, but the time is growing short. Right now, the censoring of two famous authors is enough to cause widespread outrage, but it should also provoke some questions: How many other, lesser-known authors have been similarly censored without outrage? How many more authors will be censored? How long until the outrage peters out and the censors can march forward unimpeded?
We must buy physical books. We must build ourselves collections of the works we want to preserve. Every one of us must become an archivist. And it is not important only to save literature. We must save older dictionaries and grammar books as well because these same censors are working to corrupt the language, and they have been wildly successful. Get dictionaries and grammar books from 1989 or before; that seems to be the cut-off point after which the institutions were captured.
And as for older copies of now-censored books or books out of print, my opinion on this matter is rapidly changing: I once opposed any violation of copyright, but I now suspect that some copyright-holders do not have a moral right to the properties they own. So now I am tempted to say, scan and share the banned Dr. Seuss books. Scan and share your Roald Dahl novels, your James Bond novels. Bit-torrent the despecialized editions of the original Star Wars movies. And thumb your nose at the copyright holders.
I am not quite there yet. But I am rapidly approaching.