Key points from article:
“The estates of several revered literary figures are altering portions of well-known works to conform to current sensibilities, stirring a heated debate among readers and the literary world over whether, and how, classics should be updated.”
“While older texts regularly get updated when they are reprinted, publishers and estates have in recent years begun to search literary classics more systematically to find and alter passages that might offend readers. In many cases, publishers say, the interventions involve a handful of words, and don’t impact the overall story.”
What’s your take? In many of these cases it is the estates of the original authors that are making, requesting, or authorizing the changes, primarily to ensure the marketability ($$$) of the works today.
While critics believe that it is distorting the author’s original intent and creative license.
I personally don’t find it irksome or problematic. In many cases it was a different culture and time when these works were originally published.
Eh, I belong to a religion where my Holy Book has been revised, recanted, revised, rebuilt, re-edited, and is probably a translation of a translation of a translation of a poorly-remembered story… and yet people try to tell me that it is, literally, God’s inerrant word.
But this could be taken as a reason why it is problematic. One of the perks of reading works from other times and cultures is that you get to see how people from those other times and cultures spoke and acted and thought and saw the world. If you change them to be more in line with modern sensibilities, you risk losing that, and whitewashing the past or promoting the misconception that people in other times and cultures thought just like us.
She’s a good example of someone who needs some gentle editing. I’ll be reading along, absorbed in a story, and then…WHAM!..some casually racist/classist comment wrenches me completely out of the story. Saying “woman” instead of “Jewess,” or “black man/African/Caribbean” instead of the n-word, wouldn’t have any impact on the quality of the book, other than positive.
Oh, and before it is asked, yes, I would be perfectly fine if my shit was edited to meet suitability requirements in the year 2123. You know what that means? It means I’m being read in 2123!
You’d have to be careful, though. Although I don’t know of anywhere that this is true of Christie, such things could be deliberately included as characterization, and might even be an Important Clue to the mystery.
I mean, Agatha Christie’s been edited like that for years. The book that we know as And Then There Were None originally had a different title. Many people are aware that it was once called Ten Little Indians. But even that wasn’t the original title. The original title was Ten Little N-Words (except, of course, it wasn’t phrased as “N-Words”). That was changed immediately for the American release, and definitively changed even in the UK by 1985. It’s nothing new.
I do have some sympathy for Thudlow_Boink’s point. I often do community theater. Not too long ago, I was in a production of Cheaper by the Dozen, based on the real life of efficiency expert Frank Gilbreth, his wife, and their twelve children. Mostly a pleasant enough domestic comedy. But in the middle of Act Three, out of nowhere, Frank entertains the kids by doing his “one man minstrel show,” complete with “comical” minstrel show dialect.
We cut those lines, of course, but it did make me think. This was not meant to be seen as negative. We were supposed to like these characters, and the scene was intended to be simply a portrayal of the family having fun, like you might show a father today telling Dad Jokes. I wouldn’t have wanted to actually perform those lines. But I think to some degree it’s important to be aware that at one time, not so very long ago, that sort of casual racist humor was no big deal, and could be included in a comedy play without anyone blinking an eye.
I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t want people to continue performing one-man minstrel shows, but I do think that we should somehow maintain awareness that it used to be no big deal for “nice” people to do just that.
The types of books mentioned are hardly classics, except in the sense that they are still read a lot, decades after they were published. These are not writers who are known for the quality of their prose, the integrity of which might be shattered if a word is altered. Removing such casual bigotry is probably something they would do themselves if they were still alive.
I often see now, in e-book editions of older books, a preface page where there is a warning about such language in the book, for anyone who finds it distasteful. These are not best-sellers, however.
In the version of Great Expectations my niece read, Pip receives a large sum of money via the Venmo app from an anonymous benefactor and assumes it’s from that old woman Ms. Havisham whom he visits regularly.
This is exactly how I feel about it. There are stories that aren’t useful reflections of history or culture that could be edited without diminishing their value as literature in any way, but I still feel changing words the author chose to use should be resisted.
Children’s books might be an exception, but I think people’s perceptions of the value of some children’s books are nostalgic in nature and some stories containing what we consider offensive language and concepts now can be put away unedited for the historical record and not given to children anymore.
I wonder how hard it would be to include some sort of toggle switch in e-reader software, to allow readers to see their choice of the original vs. the sanitized version of a book.
One of the great things about books was they didn’t usually come with any ratings systems or warnings like movies did. As a 13 year old, I could walk out of the B. Dalton Bookseller’s with a copy of The Stand or IT whereas I couldn’t have gone to see Born on the 4th of July without a parent or guardian.
Sure, but sometimes the original language was meant to achieve characterisation, but today has the opposite effect.
For example, I remember reading one Christie book, I think “Death in the Airt”, where a young couple are having tea or a meal and getting to know each other, romantically. It’s clear that Christie means this to be a positive experience, that these are two nice young people, doing the timeless dance of possible romance. Warm and fuzzy. It read to me that Christie wants the reader to like this couple. As it turns out, the possibility of romance between these two attractive young folk was important to the plotline overall.*
And then there’s a sentence about how they start comparing likes and dislikes and finding they have a lot in common. Again, an “isn’t that sweet” reaction.
But the sentence includes a reference to how they both disliked “n-word” people and that was seen as a further indication that they were simpatico.
I was something like 15 when I read it and thought “what ?!?”
Keeping that word in that paragraph today would have totally the opposite effect of what Christie was trying to achieve in terms of story-line and characterization. Today’s readers would be less likely to find them sympathetic.
Yes, I agree that it’s useful to go back to the original editions if one wants to study the mores of a century ago.
But if you’re just interested in reading a Christie murder mystery, editing out that short phrase from one sentence arguably preserves what Christie was trying to achieve in that paragraph in terms of character development.
Explanation of the significance to the plot, spoilered, of course, since the book is only a century old and some of you may not have had a chance to read it yet, what with those lengthy to-read lists you mention in the Khadaji threads.
The good nature and likeability of the young man in the story is classic Christie misdirection. The relationship with the young woman is one indication that he’s a nice young man. He’s actually the murderer.
