CANCEL IT: MAKE IT GO AWAY

February 27, 2023

​Vale writer identity, creativity and context, again. The Roald Dahl debacle really pushes my buttons on multiple levels.
 
If you’re not aware, there was a move, apparently initially supported by the Roald Dahl foundation and publisher, to ‘clean up’ Dahl’s stories by eliminating prejudicial and offensive language. This link covers a little of the issue: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/proposed-roald-dahl-books-spark-backlash/story?id=97350999 Salman Rushdie was quick on Twitter to condemn the editing censorship and I have to agree. Fortunately, Penguin the publisher has rolled back the proposed alterations to keep the original language in Dahl’s tales. But the debate around ‘cancel culture’ and rewriting literary history remain.
 
Like it or not, Dahl was a writer of his era with acerbic and entertaining observations of adults and children, creating texts within the context of the culture of his time and place, and his language and prejudices are part of his creative voice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl). Critics have highlighted comments Dahl made about Israel in the 1980s and the racial and sexist stereotypes in his works as reasons for not commemorating the writer in the same way critics have highlighted J K Rowling’s prejudices. The criticisms are valid within specific moral contexts. Does that mean we should rewrite Dahl’s stories or Rowling’s books, or possibly even burn them?

​Altering his language to suit the latest context, in itself is not necessarily wrong to do – how many modernisations of Shakespeare’s works exist so that contemporary audiences can access his plays? Removing ideas and prejudices and observations of characters in the context of Dahl’s cultural time presents a very different problem, however. If we retain the story, but we lose Dahl, we are censoring the writer. And, then, are the stories Dahl’s works any longer?
 
I learned a great deal about cancelling culture aka censorship from studies in Shakespeare way back in university. In the Nineteenth Century, Shakespeare’s plays were bowdlerised. “To bowdlerize a classic means to expurgate or abridge the narrative by omitting or modifying sections that are considered vulgar.
 
In fact, the term “bowdlerized” comes from Henrietta “Harriet” Bowdler who edited the popular, “family-friendly” anthology The Family Shakespeare (1807) which contains 24 edited plays. The anthology sanitised Shakespeare’s texts and rid them of undesirable elements such as references to Roman Catholicism, sex and more. The anthology was intended for young women readers.
Multiple ambiguities in Shakespeare are replaced by a more definitive interpretation. Ophelia no longer commits suicide in Hamlet. It is an accidental drowning. Lady Macbeth no longer curses “out, damned spot” but instead she says “Out, crimson spot!” Prostitutes are omitted, such as Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV Part 2. The “bawdy hand of the dial” (Mercutio) in Romeo and Juliet is revised as “the hand of the dial.” (source: Alexa Huang https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2016/06/censure-wisdom-bowdlerized-shakespeare-nineteenth-century/ )

Censorship of a piece of writing in our ‘democratic’ communities is not as simple as someone in a position of authority deciding what can and can’t be read. It is far more complex. It may well begin with a nation or state setting laws about what is morally acceptable for publishing/reading and what is not, but after that there are many players who make choices and decisions:
 
1.     First, the writer will choose what they want to write about – the language, the characters, the moral content, the actions. One colleague told me she is happy to write dark content for her teenage readers but she will NEVER kill a cat in her stories.
2.     Sometimes, the writer’s beta readers – family, friends, trusted colleagues – will influence the content before the final manuscript is completed.
3.     If the manuscript arrives at a publishing house, trusted readers employed by the publisher will have their input as to what should or should not be published.
4.     The publisher’s editor (or editors) will choose what will be published and what might need to be edited/changed/removed from the original.
5.     Then the publishers booksellers sometimes have influence, especially of dealing with a bookshop owner who can only stock some but not all the books being offered by the publisher.
6.     The bookshop owner and staff then introduce their level of preference for which books will get shelf exposure and recommendations and which will be silently stowed on the shelf. This extends to the amount of shelf life a book receives before it is removed and replaced.
7.     Then the buyer makes choices based on personal interests, moralities, and what is available and recommended.
 
If the book is sold into schools, another raft of people are involved in the book’s ‘censorship:’
 
8.     The school is likely to have a book selection policy determining what is acceptable and what is not.
9.     The school librarian and possibly the key leader of the English department will choose what books will be purchased for specific class study
10.  The school librarian can choose to promote, display obviously, or ignore general books in the library
11.  Parents will weigh into book selection based on their values and beliefs
12.  Finally, students will make choices on non-class texts when they browse the library.
 
I began a PhD in 2002 based on censorship of teenage fiction in Australia and proved through research with writers, publishers and bookshop owners (right down to not being able to complete my PhD) that censorship in Australian publishing is ‘silent’ but powerful, and based on the steps and processes listed above.
 
Roald Dahl’s writing exists. He wrote the right material at the right time within the cultural and historical context of his time, in the same way as Shakespeare and thousands of other writers wrote tales that reflect the attitudes and issues of their times. Efforts to update, sanitise, change the original work may have good intentions – I don’t doubt that – to keep good stories alive across generations and cultural changes, but it is censorship, and it is an attempt to rewrite history to suit our own needs, and we have to be blatantly honest about doing that if we feel there is a genuine need for it.
 
Then the cynic in me is wary of the people who want to sanitise Dahl’s works for selfish reasons:
 

• It enables the books to keep earning money for the people invested in them
• It allows people who loved the books as children to share them with their children but without having to address the culturally inappropriate bits
• It satisfies current cultural priorities

 
To the point: if Dahl’s books are not to your taste, seriously, choose to read another writer. Thousands of new and fascinating stories for children are published every year, most within the current cultural context and written specifically to fit the contemporary ethical and cultural trends/tastes/changes we want to embrace. Maybe the truth is that Roald Dahl’s time has come and gone, much like Enid Blyton’s, Edith Nesbitt’s, J M Barrie’s, Erich Kastner’s popularity came and went within their times. Time and tastes might invalidate the sales popularity of a writer, but it should not invalidate the writer’s works, only highlight their cultural contexts and readers’ choices.
 
We have multiple levels of censorship in place and thousands of current and amazing writers seeking to be read: there is no need to sanitise the past to satisfy the present.