Feeling a bit sensitive? That’s alright. There, there, there. Hope you sort it out. Or, better still, look the other way. Just don’t impose your sensitivity upon me. That’s all I ask.
Alas, that is just what a bunch of ‘sensitivity experts’ do for living!. Or, as the telegraph’s Allison Pearson call them, ‘censortivity’ experts. If there was ever a league table of job titles that simultaneously combined the ridiculous with the dangerous, this lot would top it for a generation.
According to the marketing blurb of someone who self-describes as such, their role is to work with authors to “join you during (ideally, early in) your creative process to ensure your project not only doesn't offend, but also supports and validates the people you're talking about.”
In short, a censoring voice, like an uptight, po-faced Jiminy Cricket, whispering refusals and teeth-sucking disapprovals of the author’s literary bon mots.
This self-appointed language priestly caste, unheard of a decade ago, are very much in the limelight at the moment.
A number have been hired by the publisher Puffin not to ‘advise’ living authors, but to hack away at the words of a dead one.
As a result, some of the spikiest examples of the writings of the late children’s author, Roald Dahl, have been chiselled away and planed off. To be fair to the wordsmiths, this sanitising and cultural vandalism seems to been at the behest of the copyright holders of Dahl’s output.
Yet, regardless of the commercial imperative of the initiative, the result is a bowdlerised version of Dahl’s output. And a sorry sign of the times.
Across increasing acres of our lives, we are being subject to the diktats of an unrepresentative elite who wish to impose what we can and cannot read, say, and think in case someone else might be a teeny-weeny bit put out.
As someone who read Dahl’s books to my own children, and now grandchildren, I know they offer both a hilarious and, at the same time, uncomfortable reads. That’s their point. That’s their value. That explains their enduring popularity amongst many children, and dare I say, adults who won’t be browbeaten by the ‘niceness’ manifesto of humourless metropolitan arbiters of taste.
The latest modifications are frankly risible. They range from Mrs Twit’s ‘fearsome ugliness’ being relegated to mere ‘ugliness’, to Augustus Gloop being no longer ‘fat’, but ‘enormous’, suggesting he’s possibly been on a strenuous regime at the gym and is well ripped instead.
Some of the worst alterations actually seem to reflect some inner paranoia and even self-hatred on those suggesting and approving the changes. That the BFG’s cloak is no longer ‘black’ could lead some to assume that a load of white, middle-class types are over-compensating for their own lack of ‘inclusiveness’.
Why don’t these people allow us as readers to make our own minds up? I’m pleased to see that there’s been quite an outcry and not just from libertarians such as myself.
Sir Salman Rushdie, no stranger to crazed (oops – that’s another term given the chop. Oops ‘chop’ – might be misconstrued as well) and coercive control, has attacked the decision.
The Sunday Times’ deputy literary editor, a Dahl fan, went further: “I’ll be carefully stowing away my old, original copies of Dahl’s stories, so that one day my children can enjoy them in their full, nasty, colourful glory.”
She’s not the only one. Author Phillip Pullman suggested that Dahl’s works should suffer the slow death of going out of print, as opposed to the botched rewrite.
As a libertarian, I’d opt for a solution that maximises – shock! horror! - individual choice and responsibility. Why doesn’t Puffin print two versions of each of the author’s titles: unabridged and abridged/woke-complaint?
The publisher’s subsequent decision o do just that would suggest it is beginning to realise the error of its ways.
The Dahl case would be a subject of amusement rather than deep concern for those of us who really believe in free speech, were it merely an isolated example.
But the war on meaningful language is being intensified everywhere, including in our colleges and universities, where usually ‘Lefty’ students are forcing (bullying?) university faculties to rescind invitations to speakers with whom they disagree. Why is the Left so quick to censor, cancel and not debate?
The same now seems to be happening in our hospitals.
I read that some NHS trusts are replacing terms like breast feeding with chest feeding! Pregnant women are being de-sexed and described as pregnant people. Such gender neutral terms are actually insulting to cis women, and like Puffin’s silliness, such dangerous nonsense needs to stop.
Will it though? Not without more of our political and business leaders taking a stand. And, sadly, at the moment, there seems to be fat chance of that!
First published on Thursday, March 2, 2023 in the www.suffolkfreepress.co.uk & www.dissexpress.co.uk
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