I just got through a move in the middle of winter, which will hopefully be my last. Even though I got rid of tons of books, there were still a hundred boxes to carry that only contained books. “The weight of culture,” said the movers, laughing. I suspect they routinely pull this joke about customers who are pumping up their library bills.
Posted at 7:15am
Many people ask me: But why are you inflicting this torture on yourself? Because it calms me, and you can probably judge my anxiety by the number of full shelves in the house. Recent events have confirmed to me that it could be a good neurosis after all.
Sure, I’ve read too many dystopias and sci-fi novels, but surrounding myself with books is the promise of having read for the rest of my life in the event of an apocalypse. Electricity and internet can fail, I still have enough to do. To this I might add that I will have in my possession the original unabridged editions of the disputed words, according to the “sensitive” readers of our time.
We prepare for the worst in life, and the worst always comes as a surprise. We will not burn the books as in Fahrenheit 451, but will modify them. In Britain it was decided to rewrite Roald Dahl’s children’s books and Ian Fleming’s spy novels to bring them up to date. If I’ve never opened a Fleming book because I’m not a James Bond fan, I loved Dahl’s stories as a kid, especially the Big Big Giant eating “delicious schnokombres” and the wicked witches, the kids turned into mice. But now in both cases, for the sake of today’s readers, we’ve corrected or rewritten excerpts that might sound racist, sexist, or grossly hostile. And we end up wondering if, two or three generations from now, readers will believe James Bond is a feminist figure… Why not Louis-Ferdinand Céline as an anti-racist?
Of course, these are more business than benevolent decisions. The rights holders of these works do not want to lose the money of future audiences, who might rightly raise eyebrows at certain phrases. They don’t give a damn about the sensibilities of readers who stick to the original texts, myself included. There’s no question that I’m re-reading Dahl in his clean new version. It would be an insult to my memories and, above all, to my work.
PHOTO ANDREW BURTON, ASSOCIATED PRESS
The British children’s book author Roald Dahl died in 1990. The rewriting of his books caused outrage among many writers and readers.
However, I recognize that the case of children’s literature has always been separate. These are readings that parents and authorities keep watching – that’s the main reason it’s going to have to be abandoned one day. In any case, my life as a reader changed when I discovered the stories by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, which inspired Disney’s much more violent works at the beginning.
If there’s one job I’ll never do outside of the bailiff, it’s rewriting the works of dead authors to clean them up. I would have the impression of committing heresy and, worse still, participating in this heartbreaking endeavor to erase the evidence of the past. However, there is nothing more revealing than discovering the avant-garde or limited side of an author from another century, his groping in the dark, his confidence when writing the worst bullshit.
I’m a hypersensitive reader when it comes to the integrity of original texts, and I’m offended by this new trend. Nothing will convince me that rewriting yesterday’s works can lead us to a better world. Revisionism gets nowhere if it distorts memory. The only situation in which rewriting a work is acceptable is when the author retouches his lyrics himself during a reprint. And even there, there will always be lunatics like me smacking him in the face with his carefully curated first version.
However, the “trauma warnings” that appear at the beginning of the books don’t bother me too much, although as a reader I’m the last person to be warned about anything. In addition, according to a recent report by Le Devoir1, they do not appear to be very effective.
I see an opportunity there, because the good writers often get upset about the constraints. Very soon we will probably read a lot of false trauma warnings that will be part of the work and we could have a lot of fun.
But to sift through the texts of a writer who no longer defends himself in order to extract what one considers morally problematic is the opposite of sensitivity. If you respect a writer’s craft at all, you should know that your choice of words is your only privilege – mine as a reader is to decide whether I like it or not, whether I read the result or not.
There are several and fairly simple ways to tackle the problem. First, we cannot read Fleming or Dahl and prefer our contemporaries because there is no shortage of authors. Create new incarnations of an old hero, why not? I like him, the new James Bond, played by Daniel Craig. We can put works in context, discuss them and, yes, add warnings. But editing a book means detaching oneself completely from the style and soul of a writer, however rare it may have become. It means shutting yourself off from the language of the time he wrote. I never read just to be told a story, but to see the world through someone else’s eyes. With its flaws, its qualities, its blind spots. When “sensitive” proofreaders rewrite the works, we break the implicit contract between the authors and the readers, this direct connection between them, this dialogue that sometimes lasts for centuries.
Eventually, as this practice spreads, I hope that as a reader I will be warned by a warning such as: “The original text of this book has been corrected to suit the sensitivities of our time. This allows me not to waste my time and money. However, I have libraries full of books in their original versions, like so many witnesses to the evolution of our humanity.