Roald Dahl is in the news because some of his books are being re-printed with edits that tone down the nastier, or in some cases gendered, language. Something similar happened with Dr. Seuss’s more racist caricatures, and mark my words, when J.K. Rowling dies whoever controls her estate will release a version of the Potter books with less semitic goblins.
Should children’s classics be revised to reflect our more sensitive and/or thoughtful times? I simply can’t imagine having a strong opinion about this, but here’s what I can say: art of any significance, no matter how heinous it seems in retrospect, should always be publicly available—it’s part of our history and those interested in that history have a right to access it. Banning or censoring books is bad. Obviously. A publisher ceasing to print racist, offensive, or otherwise out-of-date books is within their rights, and since there’s no shortage of new children’s books published every year and libraries exist, I don’t see the societal harm in new copies no longer being available for purchase. The publisher of these new editions, Puffin, is trying to split the difference here, keeping Dahl’s undeniably important and widely beloved books in circulation while dulling some of the edges that, frankly, make Dahl’s work kind of thrilling to kids. It’s been a while but I remember there being a distinct sense of menace in, for example, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Willy Wonka sometimes comes off as a malevolent demon, and this helped ground the story in its otherwise fanciful setting. The menace, in other words, was part of the appeal, as was an element of the grotesque, particularly with regard to size and shape.
Children are, famously, mean. They also experience their lives, no matter how benign, as a series of cruel, incomprehensible injustices. Dahl shot this childhood brutality through the prism of his imagination, and children like myself responded with a mix of fear and enchantment. Making the language more gentle is, I guess, an attempt to prevent kids from being bullied by removing the language that might be picked up and used against them (words like “fat” and ‘“ugly”). I really have no idea how effective this will be. But I’m not currently a child or a parent. If people keep buying and enjoying these watered down books, whatever, who cares, there are bigger problems in children’s literature. Fewer and fewer kids are reading for pleasure at all these days. And if some kids are spared certain forms of bullying? It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing.
Some of the online commentary I’ve seen is about how this is disrespectful to Roald Dahl, the person, the man, the author, the artist. It’s likely that Dahl, who was born in 1916, would find many of the changes made by the Puffin editors baffling. He died in 1990, but if he were still alive today there’s a good chance he’d never agree to such alterations. He might even write an op-ed about how the woke mob is destroying children’s capacity to think or some other such bullshit. The guy, however, is dead—and his surviving family members sold the rights to his work to Netflix for £370,000,000.
Now, this could have all been avoided if Dahl had simply left the rights to his work to the public. Here’s where I start to have some strongly held minority opinions. I believe that when an artist dies their work should automatically enter the public domain. As soon as the death certificate is signed, let the work free. A surprising number of people I have told this opinion to are very against this idea. What about the artist’s family, they say, don’t they have the right to profit from the artist’s work? Well, they do currently have that right, and it causes all kinds of cultural issues that I, personally, find annoying. This Dahl situation is one such example. If, in 1990, his work had become available for anyone to distribute, alter, or adapt, a few good things would have happened:
Publishers, who make decent amounts of money re-printing non-copyright works, would make some extra revenue while, at the same time, dirt-cheap editions would proliferate. And, of course, with the internet the work would be available for free on websites like Project Gutenberg. This would be good for readers and good for Dahl’s legacy!
There would probably be an initial glut of movie, tv, theatre, dance, opera, and comic book adaptations of varying quality. While this might be initially a bit annoying for audiences, it would better the odds that some of the adaptations would be good or great, and would give the performing arts in particular some well-known content to build productions around. Eventually that glut would subside, and adaptations would arrive subject to demand and/or artistic ingenuity.
The stories, as much as the books themselves, would quickly become part of our shared cultural mythology. In my opinion this is where the more interesting work happens— Romeo and Juliet becomes West Side Story, Emma becomes Clueless, etc. The artist’s ideas, if they’re good, can freely feed artists of the future in ways that are generative and fun.
Puffin might still have released re-written Dahl books with kinder language, but it wouldn’t matter because other publishers would still be free to release the original versions. Ultimately the reading public would get to buy whatever they wanted. That might include a version that some people think is worse than the original, but these are subjective opinions no different than choosing which book to buy in the first place.
But Kevin, you ask, how does this address the need for the author’s family to profit? What if your long-forgotten play becomes a summer stock classic after you die? Don’t you want your future widow, her new husband, and his three kids from a previous marriage to secure the bag?
I don’t think works of art should be treated like trust funds. The artist and the artist’s work is fed by the culture they live in, and that culture has the right to that work once the artist no longer needs to profit from it (because they’re dead). This is a battle I know I will never win. The average person could care less about copyright law, and the average corporation cares about this stuff immensely. Intellectual property, these days, is acquired and held as an investment from which profit is extracted regardless of the author’s original intention or cultural benefit. This is why Disney, notoriously, has spent so much to lobby the U.S. government over the decades, which ends up affecting the law in places like Canada via free trade agreements. In the U.S. and Canada copyright now lasts for “the life of the author plus an additional 70 years,” which means it won’t be until 2060 that James and the Giant Peach enters the public domain. That’s 99 years after it was first published. It’s too long! Free James now, I say, and his giant disgusting peach!