The Back and Forth on Updating Classics Like Matilda (or, The Volley of the Dahls)
There has been, understandably, a lot of coverage and discusssion of a recent decision from Penguin (in conjunction with the author’s estate) to update classic works by Roald Dahl.
What would be changed is “triggering” language and concepts. This was throughout the books, which include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, and The Witches.
There was strong, public protest from well-known authors and many other people.
The solution? The publisher will now release two editions, one with the original language (“classic”) and one with the updated language, which the publisher suggests is for contemporary children.
I wanted to talk about this idea generally. There are two main reasons why I think this will become more common.
One, particularly appropriate to this blog, is the e-book format. That makes it much easier to make changes: publishing a new physical edition is an expensive proposition.
The other one?
Artificial intelligence.
As my followers on Twitter and readers of my other main blog, The Measured Circle, know, I’ve been playing around with text-generating artificial intelligence…a lot.
I chat with ChatGPT frequently. We look at What If scenarios in fiction, for example, and I discuss it with it the way I would with a human. I do a game where both ChatGPT and I answer a question in one tweet, and readers try to guess which one the computer wrote (over the course of seven games so far, players have been on average 48% correct in identifying ChatGPT’s work…whether that says more about me or about it, I don’t know 😉 ).
It understands qualities of writing…you can ask it to be optimistic or pessimistic, for example.
This means, certainly for public domain works but I think it could be done for individual consumption without the rightsholder’s permission, that in the future, you could have an e-book reader that you would tell you didn’t want to read the “n word”, and it would smoothly update it. I think you could tell it to make a book less racist or sexist…at some point in the future.
I’ve written before about the complicated issue of reading books written in another time:
The Chronological Cultural Context Conundrum
Let me give you an example with a TV series I’ve been watching (AI will also, hypothetically, be able to do the same thing for visual media). There are parts of it I’m enjoying very much…clever, funny, even with social commentary.
However, there is also straight up racist humor. It jars me every time. One of the characters is Japanese and while one character is a jerk to various characters (which we are supposed to think is wrong), more than just that character deliberately mispronounces things in a stereotypical Japanese accent.
It’s important to note that the Japanese character has a subtle accent. When others use that stereotype, it is making fun of the character because they are Japanese, not because of an individual peculiarity.
I’m not naming the show here and this keeps me from recommending it to others. I would love it if just those jokes could be redubbed to be eliminated.
That said, though, I would still want the original to be available.
That’s the key for me.
I don’t want the original work to be “erased”.
This also applies for me to things like colorizing black and white movies. I wouldn’t do it myself, but I understand why someone might do it. I just don’t want the only choice to be the altered version.
That was a visual media example: let’s look at a very popular book.
Agatha Christie has a mystery: I appeared in the stage version of it.
You may know it as “And Then There Were None…”.
Americans may have known it with another title, that starts with “Ten Little…”.
So might Britons…and in their version, the title was what we might render as “Ten Little ‘N-words'” (yes, back to that).
Very simply if that title had not been updated, the book would be virtually unavailable, especially in public schools.
I doubt that the original title is being commercially published currently, although I don’t know for sure.
It also seems to me that the outrage is due in part to this being done post-publication.
In traditionally published (tradpubbed) works, the author’s words are routinely changed before publication…and the intent is often exactly what the intent was here, to make them more marketable.
People say that they are protecting the author, and I get that. I think that they are also trying to protect our shared culture. They want their kids to be able to read what they read.
I want that, too.
I just get antsy when society is telling rightsholders what they can and can not do with their intellectual property. Until it falls into the public domain, it isn’t owned by society. After it falls into the public domain? Well, anything goes, and it has. Winnie-the-Pooh fell into the public domain recently, and we’re getting a slasher film.
That said, it’s also how we got West Side Story (based on Romeo and Juliet) and Forbidden Planet (based on The Tempest).
I guess where I am on this is urging rightsholders to keep the as published originals available, even if updated versions are also published. I’m not like some people who were offended when Classsics Illustrated would shorten (& yes, alter) literature into comic books. I’m sure that actually encouraged kids to read those books later.
I’m curious as to what you think. You can reply to this article, or, and I’ll probably see it sooner this way, let me know on Twitter:
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