So what’s going on in the small world of children’s literature to drive off both British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Salman Rushdie against censorship? It’s quite simple, explained the Daily Telegraph on February 17, “Roald Dahl is becoming politically correct”. At issue: a real rewrite. At the request of the Roald Dahl Company, which manages the estate of the cult author, the publisher Puffin Books is indeed republishing a handful of classics expurgated of words or descriptions deemed offensive to contemporary sensibilities…
The obnoxious Augustus of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a kid whose name “Gloop” suffices to suggest gluttony, is no longer referred to as “fat”, while the baldness of the Holy Witches is not to be held against them – that harm can affect people “for all sorts of reasons,” reads a sentence added to the original text. James’s “Cloud People” and the Giant Peach are converted into “Cloud People”, inclusiveness obliges. A profession envisaged for a woman (still in Sacrées Sorcières) changes completely: we replace “cashier” by “high-level scientist”.
” It’s frightening ! reacts the writer and translator René de Ceccatty, whose translations from Italian (Pasolini, Moravia) and Japanese are authoritative. “The great danger is in wanting to flatten literary expression. As if a literary expression had to be aligned with a dominant ideology! We are the first to be shocked when freedom of expression is prohibited in dictatorships, but what happens in our democracies is akin to censorship. Literature is not made to defend a common sensibility. What I do not understand in these revisions – concerning sexual orientation, political positions or the role of women – is that it is acted as if the writer had a dominant opinion which would force the reader to think like him. No ! The function of literature has never been to force people to think like the writer. On the contrary, it is the diversity, the plurality of thoughts, experiences, writings that make its interest and its strength. »
With what happens to the work of Roald Dahl, continues René de Ceccatty, we join an ancestral belief in the educational role of literature: “We always thought that there were dangerous books for children, that, s If they read them, they were going to think in a certain way… But the characteristic of children’s imagination – or adults, for that matter – is to have recourse to excesses. We are touching on the realm of dreams, of the unconscious… Evacuating aggressive tendencies through dreams and through reading is obvious, it is part of education, of culture. Can you imagine a children’s literature without ogres or witches? »
Would it be enough to read an author to immediately absorb the worldview? Is Roald Dahl’s admittedly caustic stare enough to make the kids who read him mean? “It seems our age is terrified of the power of literature. This reminds me of the controversy over the 18th century novel, comments René de Ceccatty. Bourdaloue [Editor’s note: the most famous preacher of the century of Louis XIV] explained that the novel was dangerous, corrupting, that it was absolutely necessary to prohibit the writing of it… His whole idea was that novels had no place because they urged readers to have immoral visions. We come back to that today. »
In his Sermon on the Entertainments of the World (1758), Bourdaloue enjoins the faithful not to allow themselves to be contaminated by the spirit of the world which the novels transmit to them as surely as a virus… “Having such books every day under the eyes, and these books being as infected as they are, it was not of course possible that you would not take the venom from them and that they would not communicate their contagion to you”, he writes, before exclaiming: “You have children. […] It’s still just entertainment for them, but wait until the fire is lit. […] Will it be time then to stop the conflagration? A question that could be returned to right-thinking minds who see fit to manipulate the works to rewrite them to their liking.
Gallimard Jeunesse, which publishes the work of Roald Dahl in France, has undertaken to leave the texts of the British author intact, despite the rewriting in English requested by the rights holders.
