Fat or enormous: does it matter?

 

I wrote about censorship on 4 September 2022, prompted by the attack on Salman Rushdie. Recent events set me thinking about this question again.

 

There has been a minor controversy here in the UK because Puffin, the publisher of  the estate of Roald Dahl had his books reviewed by a sensitivity reader. The plan was to reissue the books with changes, such as removing references to somebody being fat. Enormous, it seems is OK, but fat not. In many cases, the changes involved replacing one term with another deemed innocuous, sometimes to the point of blandness. Other changes, for example to a short rhyme in one book, lost the rhythm of the original and were definitely inferior from a literary perspective. But then a sensitivity reader’s skillset may not require literary talent. In any case, all the changes should have been a matter for editorial judgement. The sensitivity read was prompted because Netflix had bought the rights to the book from Dahl’s estate for a large sum. Evidently, contemporary Netflix standards of propriety were applied to the books to protect the new owner’s reputation.

 

I’m not quite sure that Dahl ranks as such a classic author that his work should be inviolable on those grounds. And, of course, the proposed changes are not the equivalent of the book banning promoted by conservative groups in the USA which seek to eliminate all copies of books from local libraries. There are already large numbers of copies of Dahl’s work in homes and libraries in which “fat” survives. Dahl’s work as originally published would certainly not be lost if all new printings adopted the recommendations of the sensitivity reader.

 

Certain sections of the media latched on to this story and decried the censoring of “classic” works as yet another example of “cancel culture” (a phenomenon which I suspect lives in the minds of conservative commentators as much as in the real world). The Prime Minister told journalists that he disapproved of the changes. But it seems that the person whose view prompted the publisher, Puffin, to backtrack was the Queen Consort, who decried the changes.

 

Puffin subsequently announced: “the release of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, to keep the author’s classic texts in print. These seventeen titles will be published under the Penguin [an adult imprint] logo, as individual titles in paperback, and will be available later this year. The books will include archive material relevant to each of the stories [to make them classics editions].  

 

The Roald Dahl Classic Collection will sit alongside the newly released Puffin Roald Dahl books for young readers, which are designed for children who may be navigating written content independently for the first time. 

 

Readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.”

 

There are many circumstances in which a book may be altered for quite sensible publishing reasons. Book covers, and sometimes book titles, are an obvious example. For instance, American publishers frequently refuse to adopt a British publisher’s cover design, and vice versa, because the preferences in both markets are entirely different. Book covers are designed to attract attention and sell a book, but they can unwittingly cause offence. I recall once negotiating a large sale of Albert Bacell’s Catalan Nationalism: Past and Present with the Catalan government. The official I dealt with seemed unconcerned about price, which made me very happy, but insisted that the book’s cover be changed. It seems that the cover of the original UK edition was unwittingly designed with the colours of an Anarchist movement, which offended Catalan nationalists. I was happy to oblige.

 

There are circumstances in which it would be perfectly sensible to edit text to avoid causing unnecessary offence. For example, a colleague once told me the story of an Oxford University Press educational book, edited and published by the Oxford office. The book included the word “spade”, which in the USA is an offensive slang term for an African American. The entire American edition had to be pulped and reprinted, replacing “spade” with “shovel”. This was certainly not an instance no “cancel culture” avant la lettre.

 

However, on my bookshelf is Conrad’s novel The Nigger of the Narcissus (the now offensive word occurs on the cover and throughout the text). Partly because Conrad is a writer of considerable literary merit, and partly because in 1897 (the date of first publication) the term was commonly used, I do not think a publisher should sanitize the title or the text for a modern audience. I would certainly approve of a note in the front matter explaining to the reader the rationale for retaining the title and not editing the text. Other publishers might take a different view, as apparently in 2009 a US publisher did: the firm issued the work under the title The N-Word of the Narcissus. What that publisher did about the occurrences of the term in the text I do not know.

 

An interesting case concerning terminology that is no longer considered appropriate is the online catalogue of the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. Before one can search the following statement pops up: “Collections records may contain language, reflecting past collecting practices and methods of analysis, that is no longer acceptable. The Peabody Museum is committed to addressing the problem of offensive and discriminatory language present in its database. Our museum staff are continually updating these records, adding to and improving content. We welcome your feedback and any questions or concerns you may want to share. Please email us with your comments.” I assume that the notice refers to items such as a DVD entitled Primitive People: Australian Aborigines or a 1910 photo of an Atorai and Negro man.

 

There are many reasons why a publisher might reconsider the use of certain terminology. This does not mean changing terminology now considered offensive without considering each case on its merits. However, there are often good reasons to adopt new terminology to avoid causing gratuitous offence. For example, I recall that when I was publisher of The Dictionary of Art from 1985-1996, we changed to terminology used to refer to many native American peoples because the tradition terms offended them. For example, one Native American people was called in the past Anasazi, but this was the term used by the Navajo to describe people who prefer to be known as Ancestral Puebloans.

 

A similar phenomenon occurred in colonial Mexico. The Spaniards encountered a large number of people who live in small polities and spoke many different languages. The Spaniards would often ask a group what they called themselves, but also to tell them the names of their neighbours. If the neighbours happened to be out of favour, a very derogatory term might be used and often it stuck. There was once, for example, a people whom the Spaniards were told to call the Cuitlatec, meaning excrement. The last individual who spoke the Cuitlatec language died in the 1940s, so the name still sticks. However, the people often referred to as Mixtec, never called themselves that in their writings: they were the Ñudzahui. Mixtec scholars tend to prefer the latter term, while generalists like me tend to use Mixtec on the grounds that it is widely used in the literature and seems not to cause offence.

 

Censorship can, of course, go in reverse. When I was a schoolboy in the 1960s, my school used a mixture of books for studying Shakespeare. Some boys had modern Bantam editions, others a very old school edition in a blue hardback binding. When we read the play aloud in class, boys with the blue edition called out every so often “That’s not in my book.”  The blue books were expurgated editions published decades earlier and made suitable for schoolboys of that time. The modern editions were unexpurgated: a sort of reverse cancel culture.

 

The press coverage of the Dahl issue reminded me of reading to my sons a Just William story, William and the Nasties, many years ago. Macmillan were the publishers of Richmal Crompton, so we had a sizeable home library of William books that I picked up in the office.

 

Crompton (1890-1969) wrote much more genteelly than Dahl. She portrayed the irrational foibles of adults and the puzzled responses of children in an engaging, amusing and elegant prose. The books are redolent of the respectable middle-class English society of their time. For example, William’s mother insists that it is quite unthinkable to invite the butcher’s boy to his birthday party. William, to his credit, fails to understand his mother’s reasons for doing so. The books portray a society which was very much alien to 1990s boys, but they are written engagingly and seemed to entertain them. Until I came across William and the Nasties, I was comfortable reding the books to my sons.

 

William and the Nasties was first published in 1934. As often happens in Crompton’s stories, William and his friends were bored and looking for something to do. After much discussion William hits upon just the thing. They could play at being Nasties and persecute the Jewish shopkeeper. It was at this point that I began to censor the story as I read, but fortunately, when William and his friends arrived at the shop to torment its owner, they found him tied up by a burglar who was busy robbing the store. The boys rescued the shopkeeper and detained the thief. I don’t know whether this story reflected sympathy for the Nazis, or was intended as a satire, but If I were the publisher reissuing Crompton’s work, I think I would quietly drop this title, although my 1930s counterpart evidently considered it perfectly acceptable.

 

In my September piece, I recalled having to consider whether I was willing to publish images of the Prophet Muhammad. I was recently alerted to a controversy about such an image by friends who specialize in Islamic art. An adjunct professor at Hamline University, in St Paul, MN, had been contracted to teach an online course on Islamic art history. One class included an important work that depicted the Prophet as part of a comparative discussion of the depiction of prophets from various faiths. The professor told her students in advance that this image would be shown and allowed them to be absent when she displayed the image and during any discussion. However, a Muslim student attended the class, saw the image, and declared herself offended. The university terminated the professor’s contract. The Hamline student newspaper described the showing of the image as an “incident of hate and discrimination." The university administration stated that showing the image was “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” The Chair of the Department of Religion, however, wrote a scholarly essay explaining the incident and Islamic stances towards figural imagery, which argued that showing the image was not in the least disrespectful or Islamophobic. However, after two days the letter was removed from the newspaper’s website.

 

The image that caused the controversy at Hamline University

The affair has caused outrage in the scholarly community in the USA and overseas. A petition signed by almost 19,000 people stated that:

“This masterpiece of Persian illustrated book arts is considered an authentic, rare, and priceless work of global artistic patrimony. It is well studied and published, and professors often include its text and images in classroom discussions in order to teach Islamic history, the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, the nature of Qur’anic revelations, and religious iconography, including how notions of the prophetic and divine are represented in various religious traditions across the centuries. Some of us also show the manuscript’s paintings in our lectures in mosques, while others are tasked with displaying such paintings in museum galleries or preserving these types of paintings and manuscripts in libraries.”

 

Fundamentally, the student who objected to the principle of showing the image espouses a view of the question which reflects the thinking of a vocal section of the Muslim community. However, her view is not accepted by all Muslims. Moreover, the artwork in question was made by a Muslim and is part of the history of Islam and of Islamic art.  Thus, one sectarian group has claimed the right to determine what other students, Muslim and non-Muslim may be taught and see about Islam and its history. The controversy has prompted publishers of college art textbooks to examine their books for possible offending images. I hope that none follow the example of the ignorant and cowardly administators of Hamline University.

 

Just to emphasize the point, in the collections of the University of Edinburgh is a striking image of the Prophet on a camel riding with Christ on a donkey towards a watchtower. The illustration is from an Iranian manuscript of 1307, Chronology of Ancient Nations by the noted astronomer and polymath Abu Rayhan Al-Buruni. The work was a compendium and chronicle of a vast number of calendars and chronological systems from a variety of different cultural and religious groups from throughout the late antique and medieval periods in the Hellenic world, Central Asia and the Near East, completed in 1000. This image is an interpretation of Isaiah 21, presenting it as a prophecy of the destruction of Babylon. Apparently, the university considered whether or not it should make the image available outside its locked vaults. To its credit, the university decided to make the image freely available on the grounds that it is an indisputably important work of Islamic and human heritage.

 

Just in case readers might conclude that book and content banning is the private preserve of Islamic groups and societies, the practice is alive and flourishing in the USA. The American Library Association keeps records of books challenged in public libraries, schools and universities in the USA. Top of the list in 2021 was:

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Reasons: Banned, challenged, and restricted for LGBTQIA+ content, and because it was considered to have sexually explicit images.

The same author topped the lists in 2019 and 2020 with another title:

George by Alex Gino
Reasons: banned, challenged, and relocated because it was believed to encourage children to clear browser history and change their bodies using hormones, and for mentioning “dirty magazines,” describing male anatomy, “creating confusion,” and including a transgender character.

 

Five of the Top Ten in 2021 were challenged for containing LGBTQIA+ content. Other reasons for challenges included explicit sexual content, depicting sexual abuse, providing sexual education, profanity, violence, promotion of an anti-police message and indoctrination of a social agenda, use of a derogatory term, and being considered degrading to women.

 

Books challenged in earlier years (often more than once) include:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Reasons: Banned and challenged for racial slurs and their negative effect on students, featuring a “white savior” character, and its perception of the Black experience.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Reasons: Banned and challenged for racial slurs and racist stereotypes, and their negative effect on students.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Reasons: banned and challenged for profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones.”

The Kite Runner written by Khaled Hosseini
This critically acclaimed, multigenerational novel was challenged and banned because it includes sexual violence and was thought to “lead to terrorism” and “promote Islam.”

To Kill a Mockingbird written by Harper Lee
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, considered an American classic, was challenged and banned because of violence and its use of the N-word.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon
Reasons: offensive language, religious viewpoint, unsuited for age group, and other (“profanity and atheism”)

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: insensitivity, nudity, racism, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit.

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group

His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Reason: racism Reasons: political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, violence

Harry Potter, by J.K. Rowling
Reasons: occult/Satanism, violence

 

My favourite was in the 2015 list:

The Holy Bible
Reasons: religious viewpoint

 

Publishers certainly need much more alert cultural antenna than was necessary when I started in the business in 1976. Fortunately, to some extent, this is because publishers have expanded the range of material which they publish. In the 1980s St Martin’s Press, the US subsidiary of Macmillan, was a pioneer of titles for the gay market, which at the time some publishers considered a rather eccentric venture. It is surely a healthy sign that in the 21^st century censorious American zealots have a substantial number of LGBTQ+ titles to target. I doubt that the books’ publishers are much concerned: the market for these books probably considers efforts to ban them as positive recommendations. On the other hand, the fuss about the Dahl books clearly took Puffin by surprise. However, the decision to issue the books in two versions seems to me eminently sensible and may well be more profitable. The question of images of the Prophet is clearly much more complex. I see no need to gratuitously offend anybody’s religious beliefs, but a combination of sectarian zealotry and ill-informed responses is very dangerous and must be resisted.