Two weeks ago, the world learned that Puffin Books, publisher of the late Roald Dahl oeuvre (am I allowed to say oeuvre?), unleashed a pack of ravenous sensitivity dogs on the dead author’s sixteen volumes and the upshot of their efforts is a squeaky clean oeuvre with all the naughty words scrubbed so that even those with the most delicate sensibilities need not worry about being offended. Well Jesus Fucking Christ and shit in my grandma’s mouth! You can get paid to be a sensitivity reader? There’s one more to add to the list of jobs that didn’t exist when I was growing up.
I wasn’t going to blog about this because, personally, I couldn’t give a bleeding rat’s ass about Roald Dahl’s books. I never read them as a kid. In fact, I never heard of Roald Dahl until Tim Burton converted his books into screen plays and my kids begged me to take them to see the resulting films. If it weren’t for my kids, I might still be happily ignorant of Roald Dahl and his books with their naughty words.
But then sensitivity readers got their hands on Ian Fleming’s oeuvre (oeuvre sounds a little bit crude, don’t you think?). A little over a week after Augustus Gloop became “enormous” instead of “enormously fat”, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd announced its own raft of changes. This suggests a trend within the publishing industry and perhaps deserves closer scrutiny.
It might be fruitful to look at the matter with one eye on the traditional triadic relationship that braces the literary experience: author, book, reader. We tend to assume that this triangle represents a stable relationship, so when one of its corners falters, we respond with surprise and maybe even with dismay. At the present moment, the primary point of instability lies with the book. People propose changes to written texts that enjoyed a certain fixity. A challenge to that sense of fixity sends tremors to the other two points as well and soon we doubt the stability of authorship and readership, too.
Let’s consider each corner of this triangle:
The Author
On the author corner, I can’t help but think of Roland Barthes’ seminal article, “The Death of the Author” first published in 1967. There, Barthes challenged the idea that we depend for our knowledge of a given text on the stable identity of its author. In fact, there are times when the idea of an author is illusory or at least limits our apprehension of the text. The easy case arises when the author can’t be identified at all, as when ancient texts emerge from an oral tradition in which various forgotten tellers and scribes had a hand in their transmission (think Homer or the Bible), as when authorship is contested or fraudulent (think Jerzy Kosinski), or as when the author publishes anonymously. But even when we can identify a book’s author, its provenance is more complicated than the name on a cover. A text doesn’t spring ex nihilo from an author’s mind, any more than the author’s mind springs ex nihilo from the author’s circumstances, their native language, local dialect and idiom, religious formation, cultural habits. The milieu precedes the author. The milieu forms the author. The author internalizes the milieu and, like automatic writing, allows the milieu to write through the author.
When Roald Dahl wrote the word “fat” in 1964, he wrote from within a cultural perspective that treated the word as neutral. There was no “outside” perspective he could leverage that would allow him to view his word choice critically. But it would be a cop out to suggest that Dahl’s perspective was his alone, or the consequence of a defective personality, or somehow reflected an unenlightened state of mind. Augustus Gloop sprang from a cultural moment which may or may not have ascribed to the word “fat” more heft than it carries today. It was a moment that Dahl shared in, but he didn’t determine that moment. His word choice fell squarely within the limits of what was acceptably transgressive at that time. Two generations on, Augustus Gloop is “enormous” rather than fat. His enormity springs from another cultural moment no less contingent than the moment that gave rise to his fatness, which suggests that in another two generations the word “enormous” might fall out of favour and we will have to find something new. Augustus Gloop will be “very big” or some as yet unimagined word which nicely captures his bulk.
New technologies have ratcheted the conversation about the contingent nature of authorship. News agencies have stated that ChatGPT or similar AI algorithms will likely replace most news gathering and basic article writing functions. For the time being, op-eds, reviews, and investigative journalism are safe from digital disruption, but even those functions may be vulnerable some day. In a way, this returns us to ancient times when authorship was ascribed to non-human actors like gods or quasi-mythical blind men.
The Book
On the Book corner of the triangle, I think it’s worth making explicit an underlying cultural assumption we bear towards text. It’s especially true in the arts that when we write poetry or novels, we think of text as fixed, as if we’ve carved our words into granite. Our laws reflect this assumption. Copyright legislation protects the precise expression—the exact words—an author chooses to give form to their ideas, but it gives no protection to the ideas that prompted those words in the first instance. We have a highly granular approach to originality and anything as numinous as inspiration has no place in our conversations about literary production. It’s hard to say why, collectively, we have chosen to treat our words in this way. Maybe it has to do with Western culture’s fetishization of individual effort and its fear that anything produced through cooperative ventures will slide us down the slippery slope of socialism. Whatever the reason, it’s worth noting that our choice is purely contingent, and the fixity we ascribe to texts is less stable than we would care to admit.
We can draw an analogy between the current hand-wringing over changes to beloved texts and the controversy around dismantling statues. In the case of toppled bronzes, more conservative voices have sounded an alarm that we are engaging in a kind of desecration that erases our sense of history. In answer to these voices, I commend a Guardian piece by Gary Younge who responded to the destruction of the Bristol monument commemorating a pillar of the slave trade. As Younge argues, such monuments reflect a secular idolatry and, as with their sacred counterparts—statues of the Virgin Mary, and such—they are erected with one eye fixed on eternity. They assume a singular and unwavering understanding of historical fact and reflect that assumption in the inflexible bronze that holds them fastened to their plinths.
We may be approaching the Roald Dahl controversy with a similar sense of idolatry which finds its correlate in attitudes towards sacred texts. Think, for example, of St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, called the Vulgate because, at the time, Latin was the language of the vulgar people. That became the sacred translation until it was superseded in Germany with the Luther translation and in England with the Tyndale translation and, later still, the King James translation. Now we have the New English Bible and The Message. And so it goes … Some authors, like Salman Rushdie, decry the adulteration of Dahl’s texts and ground their position in freedom of expression. It’s understandable that Rushdie would throw all his weight behind the “Author” corner of the triangle given his history with PEN and given his personal experience fighting those who would suppress his words. Yet Rushdie may have overstated his case. As the English language continues to evolve and as the cultures that support it morph in ways we can’t anticipate, Rushdie’s own novels will become less and less accessible and will require “translation” if they are to have any currency in future generations.
As with the Author, so new technologies have ratcheted our concerns around the contingent nature of the Book. Digital text is inherently unstable. I write the first draft of this post using Scrivener, an application loaded on my desktop which syncs to my other digital devices. In fact, I’m writing it using my iPad and syncing it via Dropbox. The app advises me that there is a conflict between versions on my different devices; I’ve lost track of which version counts as the “original” and, without version control, I risk losing a few of my precious words. When I finally post this piece online, I risk further version issues. Last year, a bot exploited a vulnerable WordPress plugin and inserted hidden text into more than a thousand posts, every one of them advertising certain pharmaceutical products. This mishap alerted me to the fact that, in digital environments, all text is vulnerable and there are few safeguards to insure that it reflects its author’s intentions.
The Reader
The curious thing about my experience with a malicious bot is that the adulterated text wasn’t human readable. It was an “author” bot dropping text to be indexed by “reader” bots. This is an extreme illustration of how even the third corner of this author-book-reader triangle has become unstable. Then again, there is an argument to be made for the proposition that never has there ever been a time when we’ve enjoyed a stable notion of the reader. Like the discrete author and the fixed text, the stability of the reader category rests upon a modestly conservative understanding of what it means to live embedded in a culture. Typically, when we think of a reader, we think of someone drawn from a homogeneous linguistic and cultural group who grasps the author’s words and lives within a shared frame of reference. The reader is an “insider” who gets the author’s “jokes.” But it’s questionable whether there can be a perfect overlap of the author’s weltanschauung and that of prospective readers. Maybe once, in close indigenous cultures, people lived within a deep mythos nurtured by communal story, but we have no access to such a world. Despite contemporary attempts to close borders and erect internet firewalls and police appropriation, cultural boundaries have never been so porous. The opportunities for linguistic and cultural confusion are limitless, and the passage of time only compounds those opportunities. In short order, a shared frame of reference becomes a quaint notion.
While we’re puncturing the notion of the reader as member of a homogeneous class, we may as well go on from there and puncture the equally conservative notion of the reader as passive recipient of the author’s text. The reader sits like an empty glass and the author sits above like a waterboarder and pours liquid words into that vacant space. The traditional configuration of our triangle imagines it as a hierarchy with the author sitting at the highest point and wielding text over and against an inferior reader. Hence words like authority and authoritative. But the times, they are a-changin’. Digital culture has democratized the publishing process, offering readers like me countless platforms to blur the lines that once marked clear boundaries between authors and readers.
I leave you, my reader, with one last (and very contemporary) illustration of the changing way in which authors and readers engage one another in relation to text. Last month, Zadie Smith published the script to her first play, The Wife of Willesden. In the introduction, she describes how she came to write the play. Brent won the bid to be London’s Borough of Culture for 2020 and the organizer contacted Smith to see if she would be up to making a contribution. Somehow, people on Twitter got it in their heads she had agreed to write a play and that social media misunderstanding exerted a pressure that converted a fiction into a fact. In other words, if it weren’t for readers writing on Twitter, the play wouldn’t exist. As for the play itself, The Wife of Willesden is a contemporary adaptation of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The adaptation stands as an acknowledgment that a work’s readers are no more static that the author or the text. There are few people left in the world who feel comfortable slogging their way through Middle English verse, but there are many people left in the world who would be heartened by the Wife of Bath’s narrative. So Zadie Smith has “translated” it into a mashup of North Weezy, Jamaican patois, cockney, bits of posh, and even, I would argue, snippets of rap.
When a general readership changes, we have a choice. We can allow those texts which once spoke to it to drift into obscurity and finally to die, or we can adapt those texts so that they become more accessible to contemporary readers. This latter choice requires us to set aside whatever scruples we have about the the sacrosanct position of authors and texts. However, in the long run, the decision to adapt texts may serve the author’s interests, giving them a longevity they wouldn’t otherwise enjoy. Of course, in the case of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, there is a more craven interpretation of events. It’s plausible to suppose their publishers have based their decisions solely upon economic considerations. Adaptation ensures a continued revenue stream from lucrative franchises, a revenue stream that might dwindle if their publishers preserved all the naughty words.