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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33954 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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A follow up to the Roald Dahl censorship story from last week for those who haven't been following UK news. Apparently the publisher as (partially) backed down and agreed to keep the original books in print, along with the modernised versions. Apparently criticism from the Prime Minister, the queen, global authordom and the French was enough to swing it.

Prediction: The classic versions will quietly disappear from print and sale at some point in the next year with no fanfare nor announcement. If they were ever offered at all; I'll need to see these Classic Editions in an actual store to believe it.

This is not a win for those against newspeak, this is delaying the publisher's plans for a little while, at best. A win would have been the total scrappage of the censored versions.

As a kid, I read the version where the Oompa-Loompas were African pygmies. When did that version go out of print?

I believe that change was made by Dahl himself. He decided to make them hippies instead.

I suspect it will go the other way. I think the classic editions will remain on shelves while the new editions will be hard to come by. Parents buy books, and parents will remember reading the originals as children. I doubt there are many parents that think it vital that their children aren't exposed to black cloaks or fat children in their reading material.

My prediction is that the publisher will keep the bowdlerised versions on sale in a limited quantity to save face, but the market will drive them to sell the original books predominantly.

I think most parents won't even know that there are multiple versions, much less notice which one they're buying. How many people know about this now, when it's making the most news, and how many will have forgotten about it or never heard of it in the future? I doubt Penguin will stamp "New Bowdlerized Versions" on the covers of the Bowdlerized ones, or even something like "Improved and Updated for a Modern Audience." At best, it'd probably be mixed in inconspicuously in the block of text at the back. Parents will just buy whatever is available, and I'd fully expect that all the best marketing and shelf spaces would be devoted to the New and Improved versions.

Against your point: I've seen the original "Dahl's getting rewritten" story in right-aligned print newspapers and online on The Guardian (original story, more criticism, "collection of Roald Dahl’s books with unaltered text is to be published"). That's both sides, online and in print.

What fraction of parents do you think are actually reading these articles, or even seeing the headlines? I'd estimate less than 10%.

Parents buy books, and parents will remember reading the originals as children

Interestingly, this has only been generally accepted since the success of Harry Potter. Pre-HP, publishers and authors behaved as if they thought children’s books were bought by schools (or by parents in response to teacher recommendations). Since children with options won’t read anything that has been through the average scholl librarian’s filter, YA fiction wasn’t really a thing.

Your typo made me think: how does the Scholastic Book Fair (which I think is still a thing even today) figure into this? That's one avenue in which a kid has a lot of input into what books they want to get and read.

Granted, this is assuming your claim that books aimed at kids did indeed find more success in institution purchases than in normal retail sales back then.

We're having one at my school next week, so I suppose I'll look if there's anything like Roald Dahl's work there. I didn't look very closely at longer stories last year, but my impression was a lot of pop science kinds of things with slime or toys attached. I got something about the ocean because there was a shark with moving jaws on the cover. If a publishing company is trying to get more book fair or B&N money out of parents, toys, magnets, pop-ups, furry covers, and fun gimmicks generally seem like the way to go, especially for older works that are easy to check out from the library.

  1. YA fiction is considerably older than Harry Potter. Heinlein's juveniles and L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time books, for instance.

  2. Harry Potter wasn't YA fiction, being aimed slightly younger. At least the first few books, anyway.

I think they got much more widespread criticism than they expected and will quietly step away from the bowdlerized versions. I doubt they will fly off the shelves, so I don't predict that they will be unavailable for sale in a year, but I predict that the original versions will continue to be widely available.

I agree with your prediction. There are many ways to not make something available while making it "available," and I see little reason to believe that the same people who wanted these Bowdlerized editions to be created to begin with wouldn't go with one of those ways. If they made some sort of public announcement and/or contractual commitment to print at least as many copies of the original versions as the Bowdlerized ones and to enforce some sort of mechanism by which the former are always accompanied wherever the latter are available, that might be one thing, but they didn't. Barring further developments, I fully expect the state of the books in 2025 to be virtually identical to what would have happened if there had been no pushback at all.

This is not a win for those against newspeak, this is delaying the publisher's plans for a little while, at best. A win would have been the total scrappage of the censored versions.

Also agreed. I'm not even sure this counts as even a step towards a win. The fact that Bowdlerizing any old work of fiction like this was seriously considered shows a deep rot in the system, and anything short of firing every decision maker who signed off on this to serve as an example to what happens when you make a mockery of the industry and annihilate Penguin's reputation wouldn't be a win, IMHO. Coming short of that, just scrapping the Bowdlerized versions would have been something close to a win, but even that didn't happen.

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