When last we checked in on publishers changing the content of already-published works, it was Roald Dahl’s publishers at Puffin “updating” their customers’ electronic copies of his books with modernized and apparently less offensive versions. (The first part of this saga was discussed on our delightful podcast, here.) Also of note, the people in charge of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels have recently forced the spy books—written in the 1950s and 60s—through the Is It Racist? Machine and will be publishing editions updated to remove instances of the bad racist word and other racially-unpleasant framings. Also also of note, R.L. Stine, the author of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series that dominated much youthful reading in the 1990s, has reworked many of his books to remove references that might jump out at today’s readers as offensive.
Which is to say that many stakeholders extremely concerned with the value of their portfolio of intellectual property moving forward are interested in maintaining a positive cash flow by attempting to mitigate against the possibility of cultural purge on the basis of some TikTok idiot compiling a two minute video where they run through all the times James Bond says something extra gross about the finer points of distinction between Black and Asian pussy. (Don’t get mad at me! James Bond is the gross one, here.) It isn’t even “giving in to the Woke mob” so much as it seems like it’s caving to some finance or insurance company stooge who’s insisting that these changes be made in order to shore up the brand valuation for it to be sold off or borrowed against. It is the reevaluation of art as asset, or—considering that we’re talking about James Bond and R.L. Stine, here—it is an attempt to update a preexisting asset so that it will maintain its marketability in the near-to-medium future.
I devoured the Goosebumps books as a kid, and I don’t remember any of them. I’m sure I was wildly entertained, but I don’t think I was overly impressed, or concerned, with the artistry of Stine’s sentences. Considering he has published more than 500 books under his name, and not all of them actually written by him, it’s fairly clear that he is also not particularly concerned with the artistry of “his” sentences. If the author himself is editing his previously-published works to maintain their marketability, who am I to object? Put another way—if the artist doesn’t think of their work as art, but as product, who am I to argue with them?
I will argue, anyway, though. Who am I to argue? I am me! It’s what I do!
R.L. Stine may see his old books as little more than mere products that need to have slightly different words or story beats than they did thirty years ago in order to maintain their marketability, but I see them as books! As works of expression of a particular time and place, whose popularity and ubiquity in the culture of a specific time and place can speak directly to the reality of that time and place. Even if Stine is content to change them in a way that would horrify Roald Dahl, it seems wrong to do so because I should be able to pick up a copy of Stay Out of the Basement or Say Cheese and Die! and know that I’m reading the same thing I read when I was ten years old. This is actually important to me! In a similar vein, the fact that it’s nearly impossible to get the original edits of the Star Wars movies as they were released in the 70s and 80s is a crime against our cultural heritage. Once the work goes out for public consumption—especially once the public has chosen to make the work a success—the author effectively loses the right to modify it. It no longer belongs to them. It belongs to us.
If Stine wants to sell books to this generation and believes his old books won’t do the trick, he should write books for this generation, or pay some roomful of MFAs to write the books for him. The same goes for the James Bond people—it matters that Fleming’s books had such a place of prominence in the culture, and it’s informative of that culture to read what they were actually reading. These are primary source documents of a time before my time, full of racist and sexist stuff that helped build the world of today, and which we are collectively improving upon. Sanitizing the pop culture of our forebears only makes it more difficult to see all the ways we’ve progressed—and when you’re erasing proof of progress, it can be even easier to forget that progress is possible at all. Leave the goddamn books alone.
Matthew Walther wrote an opinion piece in the NYT this past Sunday about this topic. The Truth About the ‘Censorship’ of Roald Dahl, it was entitled, and it left me rather mystified as to what, exactly, he was trying to say. The only time the word “truth” shows up in the piece is here, bold mine:
Despite the indignation of the critics and the high-mindedness of the revisers, the truth is that most of the edits to the Dahl books are of very little importance. Many are slight (replacing “old hag” with “old crow”) or inscrutable (“taught him how to spell and write sentences” for “volunteered to give him lessons”). Others are needlessly “sensitive” (changing “black” to “dark,” even when the connotations are not racial, or “attractive” to “kind”) but do not seriously affect the author’s meaning. A handful of the edits are unintentionally hilarious: Insisting that “man-eating giant” be replaced with “human-eating giant,” as in the new edition of “The BFG,” sounds like an unclever right-wing parody of wokeness. But the most worrisome thing about this is the stylistic ineptitude.
The assumption that there is an urgent debate here, one of the utmost importance to the future of culture, society and so on, is politically useful to both sides. But what both sides are really arguing about is not whether it’s ever OK to make posthumous edits, but who gets to make them and why.
He then goes on to discuss the ways other classic (and much more important, in his estimation) works of literature have endured a similar fate to Dahl’s work, often much more substantially so. And if we put up with that, why are we now so upset about stupid kid-lit like Dahl and Dr. Seuss? He is extremely dismissive of what he deems to be “both sides” of a culture war fight that I’m not sure actually exist, seemingly just so he can get to the following point, which is one I wholeheartedly endorse, and kinda expand upon above:
I, for one, do not believe that philistines should be allowed to buy up authors’ estates and convert their works into “Star Wars”-style franchises, as Netflix now seems to be doing, having purchased the Roald Dahl Story Company. In a saner world there would be a sense of curatorial responsibility for these things. “Owning” works of literature, insofar as it should be possible at all, should be comparable to a museum’s ownership of a Caravaggio. Clarify and contextualize, promote and even profit — but do not treat art like you would your controlling interest in a snack foods consortium.
His framing is basically: everybody is being dumb about these dumb books getting changed, but really the problem is that these are works of historical importance that shouldn’t be changed based on the whims of the moment. This is a stupid framing! What you are saying is that you agree with the vast majority of people that have spoken out on this topic that the books should not be changed.
There’s also something in the dismissive tone of the whole piece that smacks of Walther’s Catholicism, though that may well be my own bias. He thinks of these books as silly things, not worthy of the “controversy” these edits of “little importance” has stirred up. Concern yourselves with more serious things, you idiots, says the editor of a Catholic literary magazine.
Moving on from the Opinion section of the Sunday New York Times to a blog/content farm called “Giant Freakin Robot,” here’s a blog that insists that Bladerunner is far superior to the source material that inspired it that proceeds to list a bunch of cool shit the book did that the movie ignored. I hate this stupid article so much that I felt the need to point at it and say how much I hate it even though I have no particular desire to tear it down piece by piece. I hate this blog so much that I went searching for the author on Twitter so that I could make fun of him, but the only person I could find with a matching name has their account locked down to private, so I’m left to rant here.
At a minimum, it must be acknowledged that movie versions of Dick’s works have much better (and shorter) titles.
Even this sentence is bullshit! PKD’s titles are great! What the fuck is a BLADERUNNER, besides a cool-sounding word?
But it is also a Dick novel in the sense that it is meandering, full of bizarre ideas that go nowhere (like a collective VR religion that may or may not be fake), and frankly, in terms of prose quality, the work of a writer whose only published non-science fiction novel was titled Confessions of a Crap Artist.
This from a hack writing poorly-edited content farm trash on a site called “Giant Freakin Robot!”
But perhaps most importantly, Blade Runner wholly flips the central idea of empathy that occupies Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and turns it into something more than “humans should care about humans.”
And what is far more interesting than a novel whose central, pleading thesis (according to this guy, anyway) is that humans should care about other humans?
In contrast, the replicants of Blade Runner show more empathy and feeling for their fellow artificial beings and humans than anyone else in the movie, while still being capable of incredible violence and cruelty. While Dick’s novel was obsessed with empathy as an answer, the movie turns the nature of empathy and what it means for humanity into a question. Questions always linger more in the mind than answers, as anyone who has ever read a mystery novel could tell you — or anyone who has ever seen Blade Runner and forgotten exactly what happened in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
This fuckin’ guy wrote off the entire Mercerism religion throughline as a bizarre idea that didn’t go anywhere and then wants to tell me that he prefers his art to “show, not tell.” If “questions always linger more in the mind than answers,” my dude, consider the possibility that you have not in fact found the answers you think you have found in this PKD book.
Paul Krugman has been writing regular columns for the New York Times for nearly a quarter century, and really almost any random selection of them would do for this point, but get a load of these two pieces and explain to me why he should continue to have this place of prominence in The Discourse when valuable space in the paper could be filled by literally almost any idiot writing for even prestigious outlets like, say, Giant Freakin Robot:
In the first one, Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate in economics, explains that we should not panic about the fiscal problems of the Social Security program because, like, people like Social Security and we can just add to the ballooning national debt or raise taxes to maintain the status quo. Raise the retirement age? No. Raise the income cap, or eliminate it? No. Just relax and let the politicians figure it out, which they will, because everything works so well in this country? Yeah, that!
And meanwhile, don’t worry too much about your future benefits. Social Security isn’t a Ponzi scheme, it isn’t going bankrupt, and it will probably continue much as it has.
Thanks for the great insight, Paul, you fuckin’ dope!
In this other piece, Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate, points to some silly shit he saw on Twitter about how some people think that “walkable cities” are a New World Order plot to enslave humanity. He rebuts this claim by pointing out that living in Manhattan as a multi-millionaire is actually pretty awesome, and that sometimes it’s good to have laws, like the ones that penalize people for driving cars across farmland. I can’t believe this guy gets paid to do this shit.