In recent years, publishers have hired more and more so-called “sensibility readers”.
Their task is to revise the authors’ texts so that they do not contain any statements that are “hurting” for the “minorities”. Or at least for activists who claim to speak on their behalf.
They are censors whose job it is to adapt the manuscripts they receive to the standards of multiculturalist and neofeminist ideology. We will ensure that they become “inclusive”.
charlie
It was only a matter of time before this censorship logic would take the next step and focus not only on future books but on those from the past.
That’s what just happened to the works of Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and to the entire universe as we know it.
The time had come to reissue his works. But the censorship of our time interfered. And we’ve seen them rewritten to erase phrases and words meant to shock our contemporaries.
Call it a form of literary hygienism.
Feminism intrudes: A woman who was a cashier or a secretary in the first edition is now a senior scientist or business leader. I don’t mind her being in a future book, but that wasn’t the case in this one.
Likewise, in the new version, an obnoxious old woman is no longer referred to as “old harpies, since they always have itchy tummies”.
This passage is simply crossed out.
A reference to Joseph Conrad, considered too manly and colonialist, is replaced by a reference to Jane Austen.
But there is more. Dahl talks for a moment about a little fat boy. In the original version he wrote that he had to go on a diet.
In the short story, this passage was deleted.
The “big brown mouse” simply becomes the “brown mouse”. Stop fat phobia!
I could multiply the examples.
Work doesn’t count anymore. It needs to be bleached.
As for the author, his book is nothing more than material to be revised by militant rewriters.
This endeavor to purify a work of literature is part of the purge. But it’s also about losing her own calling to serve the dominant ideology.
This destroys literature.
Who will be the next victims of literary correctness? Balzac? Flaubert?
censorship
In the days of our great-grandparents, we spoke of edifying literature designed to make us good Christians. Literature was the mainstay of morality. Morally forbidden books were blacklisted.
In the USSR, art was subject to the requirements of so-called socialist realism. It was about putting art at the service of the revolution and communism. Artists who did not comply with this requirement were perceived as dissidents.
Culture today must serve to promote “diversity”. Nothing will escape the empire of political correctness.
Keep your old issues, my friends. One day they will be worth a lot.
