Wooster becomes culturally sensitive
Another entry under the heading “publisher tweaks wording of pop fiction writer”:
Jeeves and Wooster books have been rewritten to remove prose by PG Wodehouse deemed “unacceptable” by publishers, the Telegraph can reveal.
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The disclaimer printed on the opening pages of the 2023 reissue of Thank you, Jeeves states: “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated.
“In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.”
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An examination of the revised Wodehouse novels reveals that racial terminology has been removed or replaced throughout.
In other words they’ve removed “nigger” and similar disparaging words.
Again, I don’t find it all that objectionable. A Berty Wooster who lived now wouldn’t use those words – he’s an amiable nitwit, not a malevolent bully. The overtones and implications of those words were different 80 or 90 years ago – they shouldn’t have been, but they were. And, again, this is pop fiction, not literature. It’s good, skillful pop fiction, but it has no ambitions to literature.
In Thank You, Jeeves, whose plot hinges on the performance of a minstrel troupe, numerous racial terms have been removed or altered, both in dialogue spoken by the characters in the book, and from first-person narration in the voice of Bertie.
I do have to wonder how well that actually works, seeing as how Bertie and his friends will sound pretty odd if they’re suddenly using 2023 vocabulary when they’re not 2023 characters.
I feel rather uneasy making allowances for memory holing only some writing that isn’t the most important or whatever. It’s too close for comfort to making allowances for treating TIMs as women in situations where biology isn’t the most important or whatever. Such limits always seem to find a way to shift. Once they have, moving them back to their nominal places is difficult at best, and in the mean time, things are lost that can’t be recovered.
But I was raised on a steady diet of anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian stories from both history and dystopian fiction, so maybe I’m just hypersensitive.
Probably about how it sounded when the local theatre removed all the curse words from A Few Good Men. Strange and unnatural. Hearing these marines saying Darn instead of Damn was…awful. I did that for one of my plays that was being produced here; the first time I heard the lead actor say the substituted word, I restored the words my bosses don’t like to hear. The theatre director on our Columbus campus got in trouble for leaving the word “hell” in The Glass Menagerie.
I understand the motivation behind this, and it is laudable in some ways. But bowdlerizing literature isn’t the answer. I think cleaning up our history runs the risk of forgetting our history, and I also think some good discussions around race, sex, and so forth, could arise from these older works that depicted their time more accurately than they depicted our time.\
I use a couple of quotes in my lecture, one of which refers to ‘men’ in a way that means ‘men’ not inclusive of ‘women’ and said today would be totally insulting. We briefly discuss how things have changed, and move on. The women in my class (and I) are able to say what we think, the men get a lesson in how language can affect those who are not white males, and I find that useful.
Huckleberry Finn
Need I say more?
Yeah, no, we shouldn’t be bowdlerizing any texts ever, pop or not. That’s 1984 shit. I see why publishers would want to do it but it doesn’t make it ok.
I’m not against the idea of putting disclaimers in books which contain material modern readers might find offensive.
The British Library does this with their “Crime Classics” and “Tales of the Weird” series of reprints. Understandable since some of the authors the BL reprints, like R. Austin Freeman and H. P. Lovecraft, were not the most tolerant of folk even by the standards of their respective times.
What the BL *doesn’t* do, AFAIK, is re-write any of the texts in their reprinted books.
Don’t forget, though, editors often make far more than minimal changes to authors’ books and articles before publication. The published work is not necessarily 100% the author’s choice of wording, to put it mildly. In the case of books written to entertain and amuse I just can’t get all that worked up about publishers’ removing “nigger” and the like (and then telling us they’ve done it), unless they replace it with something stupid and jarring.
#6, I understand that, but I worry about where it would stop. Next thing, we are removing women from books because they upset trans.
I have rewritten some of my books in a way that removes the word “black” from things that are negative, but I made the choice to do it, and I left a word that means effectively the same thing – the black cloud is a black cloud, but nothing is lost if I refer to it as a thundercloud, or something else.
I imagine with many texts, removing certain words would make it more culturally sensitive, but I still think that’s heading in a bad direction. I’m usually suspicious of slippery slope arguments, but in this case, we’ve seen things like that happen. Okay, we’ll let Gideons in to give Bibles to the students; what can it hurt? The kids don’t have to take them. Next thing you know, we’ve got coaches baptizing players, and we’ve got kids being abused when they don’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
We’ve seen it over and over in politics, as the smallest concession eventually grows to a huge, irreversible change. And we don’t notice it, because it’s like the proverbial frog boiling.
If the book’s language is so very jarring, then it may take more than a simple disclaimer, but I still think it’s important to keep the original work as-published. Put in an entire forward, if you have to–hell, break it up with commentary on each chapter. But let the text stand, if it’s worth re-publishing at all.
I’m more ambivalent about author-dictated changes to the work for later editions. I often decry specific instances of such (Han Solo didn’t just shoot first, he’s the only one who shot, and that fact is what makes his character arc an actual arc, rather than simply a monotone ‘snarky good guy’ from start to finish). But I’m not so adamant that I don’t think an author should ever be allowed to revisit a work.
But of course the original work still exists. A new edition doesn’t erase the existing editions.
Here’s a fun fact: the “Hamlet” we read is not the “Hamlet” that Shakespeare wrote or the one that the Chamberlain’s Men performed. There is no one “Hamlet”; there are versions, and the one we read is a combination of the versions. The one we read was never performed at The Globe.
See also: Montaigne. He was always tweaking his essays, with the result that there is no one definitive version of them, but rather layers of them.
Henry James went back and rewrote some of his early work…and made it worse.
Books aren’t always sacred and set in stone, not even to their authors.