The Ugly Reality of Editing Books for the Times

I always find myself in the middle of a project, and that also pertains to how I spend my money.  I have recently been buying (for my library) books that meant something to me as a child, and one of the books I was attempting to buy was McElligot's Pool by Dr. Seuss, which I have not read since I was maybe 7 or 8, but is the only book I remember my grandfather, whom I am named after, reading to my brother & I when we were kids.  My grandpa was a fisherman, and liked to point out which fish in the book he most wanted to catch as color commentary during the reading.  I looked on some book websites, and then Amazon, and to my surprise it was next-to-impossible to find despite Seuss being a very popular writer.  I went to eBay, and was stunned to not see it listed.  The few copies I could find around the web cost on average $50, in some cases into the thousands, but none were as cheap as Yertle the Turtle and The Cat in the Hat, also in my cart (and not remotely in my budget).  I eventually went to the Wikipedia page, and discovered that the book (despite me not realizing it when I first began) was one of several books pulled from print as a reaction to its content.

That Seuss had had some books pulled from print was not news to me (though I hadn't realized that a book I'd grown up with was one of those pulled), as I remember the brouhaha around Seuss's books being discontinued due to its content, but it is part of a pattern in recent history of pulling content from the marketplace, or increasingly, editing books that have already been written to make them more "politically correct."  In the past week, Agatha Christie entered the news as her publishers were striking words, primarily those related to race, from her books, and we have seen this from authors like Roald Dahl & Ian Fleming in the past couple of years as well.  While both sides of the political spectrum were quick to rush to judgment here (neither of them getting this quite right), I think this is an issue that's not easy to summarize into just one tweet, and so I wanted to have the conversation (as I ponder it) on the blog today, where I can weigh in on the complicated issues at stake.

The first thing to acknowledge is that the idea of censoring art after-the-fact is not new, or something that has happened only in recent years.  Both taking a popular item off-the-shelf (rather than relying solely on public demand for it to dictate if/when you are going to stop selling it) and editing a piece of art to fit the morality of the times has happened before, and two good examples come from Disney.  Song of the South, the infamous movie about the South during Reconstruction, has not been seen (legally) in the United States since 1986, when it was last released in theaters and has never been released on home video domestically due to its content being deemed racist.  This isn't because people wouldn't buy it or wouldn't watch it on Disney+ (they undoubtedly would, likely to the point where Disney would make a profit if only because of the curiosity factor), but because Disney does not want to be associated with it.  One movie Disney does want to be associated with and is widely available, Fantasia, is not available in the way it was in 1940.  In the late 1960's, Disney edited the film to not include stereotypical drawings of two Black centaur characters (Sunflower & Otika) were edited out of the movie because they were drawn in the fashion of a Black stereotype (I'm not going to show the photos because they were clearly intended to offend, but you can google if you want).

So at least since the late-1960's, far before the word "woke" because a pejorative word for much of the country, this has been happening.  So we can put to rest on this being a new phenomenon.  But the question comes forward of whether this is appropriate or not.  And I think this invites a complicated question about the duty of corporations to their public and our duty to artistic vision.

The first question, I think, is the easier question even if it's the less-satisfying one because I think it's supposed to remain murky.  McElligot's Pool is not the first book to be taken out of print, and will not be the last.  Most books are pulled from print because they stop selling, but the hope is that libraries and educational institutions are able to keep them alive for future generations.  I think, from an academic perspective, that pulling a book solely because it might be deemed offensive gets into a weird area.  Most of the people who would applaud or celebrate a book like McElligot's Pool being pulled from publication, which features a drawing of a fish modeled after an Inuit person using a then politically acceptable phrase that is now considered offensive, would balk at books by say John Green or Becky Albertalli being pulled from public libraries...even though that is something that has happened in the past couple of years due to their queer or sexual content.  I think, personally, that while the companies and the estates have the right to pull these books from publication (I do think a conversation about corporations sitting on copyrights they aren't using is a convo worth having, but that's an idea for a different day), banning them all-together is the wrong decision, and instead you should look at it, like all books or movies, as an artifact of their time.  So I don't think this is unethical, but I do think it is shortsighted & doing a disservice to artists and our conversation about art.

The second question, though, I'm less ambiguous on even if it puts me on the politically conservative side of this conversation (a place I rarely am).  As a general rule, I don't think that editing art after-the-fact is a good idea once it has become part of the public memory.  George Lucas edited the Star Wars films and Steven Spielberg did this with ET: the Extra-Terrestrial to many complaining fans because they wanted to watch the film they grew up with and loved (South Park even did an episode about it).  But both of these men were living-people like Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, & Agatha Christie are dead, and cannot give consent to these changes.

In the cases of some of these authors, it's not even clear that what they're removing is offensive in the larger sense.  Christie's novels, for example, are removing dialogue spoken by a character, not the author or a narrator.  Are we to pretend or live in a world where we don't think people speak like this?  This, in my opinion, moves beyond trying to protect vulnerable young readers and starts to become revisionist history; Christie's era, like today, had racist people in it, and to edit her novels after-the-fact to remove this feels like you're taking away not only Christie's autonomy as an artist, but you are also trying to associate artistic output with an author's own belief system.  This has become a really gross part of art criticism & art appreciation in recent years, where consumers want to assume that the belief systems of a character (or even the narrative) are the same as the writers or actors who bring them to life, which is simply not the case.  If you want to know what an author thinks, read their essays or memoirs or public interviews.  By all accounts, Roald Dahl was a bigot & an antisemite...he is not a person we should celebrate even if you like his books, and if that means you don't want to buy his stories, you shouldn't.  But someone's books, and especially their characters, do not equal their personal beliefs, and we need to put this to rest because it makes artists too guarded, and in the process, gets us lousy, uncreative, formulaic art.  Art is meant to be complicated, and it means that you can have characters that are not all good or not all bad.

If what these publishers want is non-problematic, genial books, then they should publish them-I'm confident you could find writers that do not use any offensive words in their novels or who can craft characters that are in-line with the times and completely two-dimensional.  That publishers aren't willing to do that is proof that they view people like Dahl, Christie, & Fleming as brands, like Clorox or Oreo, rather than as flesh-and-blood human beings who crafted these tales as is.  They want to capitalize on the goodwill their books created, while also avoiding the involved back stories of their art.  That's wrong, full stop.  It is one thing to stop publishing their work-that's grey, that's ugly-but-reality at some point for all artists.  But to edit their work while they're cold in the ground, stealing away their creations and turning them into Mad Libs for the present time...that feels immoral to me.