The Unmitigated Dahl

When I was a junior in college, I took a class on Shakespeare. At one point, the Shakespeare Theater Center came to town and put on a production of Cymbeline. Except it wasn’t called Cymbeline. It was called Imogen. That’s because, in the words of their omniscient director, the play is actually about a “kick-ass” strong female lead, Imogen, and king Cymbeline features only in the background. 

In order to make this interpretation appear more true, the director altered and deleted certain lines from the script.

To me, the arrogance of this was suffocating.

Really? I thought. You know better than Shakespeare what his play is about? 

Whatever. It doesn’t matter what the play is “actually” about. The director can think what he wants. What matters is that, even if he were right, what he did was violative, unethical, and dangerous. 

I argued passionately against it at the time. My point was simple: there is something sacred and inviolable about a person’s art, and mutilating it for political purposes has evil consequences. 

Literature, I maintain, is not just a form of communication, but a form of art, and should be treated with respect as such. Shakespeare’s plays are not just words, they’re art -- his art -- and revising them violates not only the art itself, but his authority over it. 

This is true even if you think certain revisions would make the art aesthetically or morally better. For instance, would you dare add brushstrokes to the Mona Lisa? Would you change the lyrics in Abbey Road? Would you sculpt a bigger penis onto the Statue of David? Don’t answer that last one. 

You wouldn’t do these things not only out of respect for the author who produced them, but because they are agreed to be culturally and aesthetically invaluable, and altering them in any way would destroy that which ought to be honestly preserved for posterity. 

Then there’s the obvious political dangers. Look, I don’t like to use the word Orwellian, but at a certain point it’s inescapable. If you can’t see how molesting literature for political gain is fascist and dystopian, then frankly you can’t see anything. 

I was the only one in my class who felt this way. 

I knew at the time I was fighting a battle in a war that had already been lost. After all, you’re not going to convince many college kids today to care more about some dead-white-dude than virtue-signaling about representation, no matter how superficial or symbolic. But I stupidly hoped I could convince a room full of English majors to care about preserving the artform they dedicated their college-years to studying. And who can resist my infinite wit and charm? 

What really scared me at the time, however, was that these classmates would one day go on to influential positions in classrooms, newsrooms, and publishing. At which point the study and preservation of literature as a form of art rather than an extension of politics would effectively perish. 

That fear has seemingly sprung to life, as their equivalents have now infiltrated the offices of Penguin Publishing. 

Penguin’s decision to rewrite the works of Roald Dahl is disgustingly evil and dangerous, but it’s the predictable result of philistine progressives who see bowdlerism and revisionism as appropriate responses to any perceived offense. 

I’m not defending Dahl as a person, nor do I need to. Dahl is an anti-Semite. He’s admitted it. Much of his writing does not hold up under our 21st century moral microscope. That’s okay. It doesn’t need to. We can find something disagreeable or despicable without itching to sanitize or censor it. 

There is a library of reasons to find Penguin’s decision demented, but I think the first that jumps to mind is the fact that these rewrites are literally not what he said, yet are published under his name. Those aren’t his words. They’re probably the inserts of some insufferable, recent NYU grad.

That alone is genuinely scary, and should be to anyone who cares one molecule about intellectual honesty. 

This was done, of course, to make Dahl’s books more politically palatable. It’s pandering at its most degrading and repulsive. But it’s important to remember that revisionism isn’t liberal -- it’s illiberal. Liberal politics begins with the right to free speech. And free speech means nothing if it doesn’t extend to those with whom you disagree or despise. 

This goes beyond Dahl’s right to speak freely, though. It’s about everyone else’s right to read what he wrote. 

Free speech isn’t just about protecting some bigot’s right to blabber. It’s about protecting everyone else’s right to listen, and to hear information that they can analyze for themselves -- information that just might change our mind, teach us something new, or at the very least strengthen our existing views. 

That’s why, even if you detest Dahl, it’s important you read what he actually wrote, so you can hate him in an informed and proper way. 

On that note, who at Penguin Publishing do you trust to filter what you can or cannot read? To sift what is or is not appropriate for you to hear? Is there anyone on earth you would nominate to make these decisions on your behalf? I can’t think of anyone -- certainly not anyone who works at Penguin Publishing. 

I shudder to think of the world we’re hurtling toward where our youth -- even English majors, for god’s sake -- don’t have to read Shakespeare, or Dickens, or Keats, or, yes, even Dahl, because they made some outdated and immoral remarks. Censoring them prevents future generations from furnishing their mind with beauty and truth for the rest of their lives, and would make them functionally illiterate in a civilization that’s glued together by shared histories and literatures. 

Listen, as human beings, we should be outraged by meanness and cruelty; the same meanness and cruelty that can be found in Dahl’s yellowing books. But the proper response to that isn’t to massage his work into something it’s not. Rather, it’s to write new literature crammed with all the virtues that I’m sure the hunched and craven editors at Penguin embody every day.