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maltatoday | SUNDAY • 12 MARCH 2023 8 INTERVIEW Raphael Vassallo rvassallo@mediatoday.com.mt Roald Dahl, and the 'challenge There has been a lot of contro- versy, recently, surrounding Puffin Books' decision to 're-ed- it' Roald Dahl's children novels, to make them 'less offensive'. First of all, do you agree with the assessment of many aca- demics, that this is represents a case of 'political correctness gone too far'? "This is a tactless re-editing intervention." That was my first reaction. It was the kind of instinctive response articu- lated by Salman Rushdie in a tweet: "Roald Dahl was no angel, but this is absurd censorship." (He also added, "Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed" – those are strong words.) Without equating this with other, more oppressive forms of censorship that we've read out about in the past few days (for instance, Russia making it a criminal offence to publicly crit- icise the Wagner group, which amounts to a wholly different order of speech control), I'm uneasy about Dahl's texts being re-edited as they were. In my own work with edit- ing – admittedly, of a different kind and in a different sphere – changes made to an author's text happen according to certain protocols (interestingly, just this week R. L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps series, was report- ed as not having agreed to edits, similar to those on Dahl's text, made to his books). From that standpoint, what Francine Prose, the former Pres- ident of PEN American Center, had to say in an article in the Guardian last Monday – "Yes, Roald Dahl was a bigot. But that's no excuse to re-write his books" – pretty much expresses, better than I could, my imme- diate perspective. She refers to groups of "censors" ("let's call them that", she notes), on the left and the right, "who pursue tighter control over what kids read". There are all kinds of thin wedges and slippery slopes there, we could say. As Prose asks, "And where would all this end?" However – because there's al- ways a "but", or multiple ones – we have been hearing a lot about critical thinking. Everybody in- vokes it (which perhaps should make us suspicious). But critical thinking, if we're going to com- mit to it, is not there merely to find vindication, from noted commentators, for the positions and perspectives we're inclined towards. We should not be sur- prised to find that other writers and critics who disagree with our opinions will be quoted, counteringly, back at us. It's curious, and amusing, how quickly it's overlooked that "critical thinkers" (an inelegant term, but anyway) will not nec- essarily align with each other's ideas. Who are we happy dele- gating our critical thinking to? Critical thinking, surely, should confound us and trouble our certainties. Or, at least, give us a more rounded, empathet- ic background to the ideas we hold. So I ended up asking my- self, what ought I also to keep in view, in this controversy around the edits of Roald Dahl's work? And where did that question lead? Well, I wanted to see how some broader issues might come in- to play. Readers can decide for themselves if they might con- ceivably nuance the case of the Dahl edits. The text of children's books has always been up for revisitation and re-editing. The best-known practice, and a very intrusive one, is that of abridgement. Gen- erally speaking, abridgement is uncontroversial. I remember my own curiosity, as a child, in see- ing the word "Abridged" in the paratext of a book I was reading. It would make me quite cross! What had been left out? What was this other material that was not coming my way? What was I not being allowed to read? And what was this 'safe space' – to use modern-day idiom – that I should stay in just a bit longer? There is always a cultural pol- itics to abridgement – start- ing from the fact that it is anonymous (you rarely read, "Abridged by …"). It comes with a set of cultural, pedagogical and editing assumptions, themselves worth scrutinising. I've been looking at some old and some recent abridgements of classic texts. Let's just say that there are various other talking points that emerge there. If nothing else, about why it was that cer- tain passages and episodes were not, so to speak, 'abridged away', whereas others were; or about the dubious elegance and reach, for instance, of some "transla- tions into modern English". And then, Thomas Bowdler. His name keeps coming up, also around the Dahl edits. We read in his 'Family Shakespeare' that "nothing is added to the original text" (interesting), "but those words and expressions are omit- ted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family". That "aloud" is more interesting, but let's take the word, "propriety", here. Being "proper": the connota- tion of primness is inescapable. Is this, by extension and anal- ogy, what the edits in Dahl re- duce the books to? Conformity to a set of contemporary pieties? Even when invoking the power of literature and the arts for sub- version and radical thought? But Swinburne (hardly a strait- laced writer, of course) defended Bowdler's work, for helping to disseminate Shakespeare among child readers. Are there any les- sons there in how we perceive the Dahl edits? What is it that's salutary: if not in the Dahl edits themselves, then in the broader tendencies to revisit texts? In fact, Roald Dahl is far from the only example of literary "revisionism". More recently, there has been talk of re-edit- ing Ian Fleming's James Bond novels – now deemed "offen- sively racist and misogynis- tic" – and in the United States, there have even been sporadic calls (by academics) to remove classics such as Homer's The Odyssey from the university curriculum, altogether. What are your thoughts on that? I'll come to Fleming and Hom- er soon. There is a broader drive to what you describe. To stick with Shakespeare for a second: Prof. IVAN CALLUS – who lectures contemporary fiction and literary theory at the University's English Department – argues that 'tactless' re-editings of children's classics, might be a sign of 'culture wars to come'