In the new modalities of our public conversation, where two or three controversies flare up every day, it has become difficult for the honest observer to know, on such and such a subject, whether to linger or let it slip away. In three days, the case is closed. The algorithms of attention – which need novelty like our lungs need air – enjoin us to quickly move on to the next controversy; and to speak too late is not to speak at all: the audience is a dish to be eaten hot.
Suffice to say that I am about to return here to a prehistoric affair, since it dates from February 17th. That day, the daily The Telegraph reveals that for its latest edition of Roald Dahl’s books, the British house Puffin had rewritten the original texts of the cult author (in agreement with his successors in title), in order to purge them of terms that could be perceived as offensive. Thus Augustus Gloop, a character from Charlie and the chocolate factory, originally described as “big” had he become “enormous”, and had the famous Oompa Loompas, who populate the kingdom of Willy Wonka, been “degendered”, going from “little men” to “little people “. I won’t dwell here on the dozens of other nitpicky warnings from trackers of hurt sensibilities: they now constitute a classic of cultural polemics.
What seemed to me the craziest and the most novel in this affair was less noted, and concerns the novel Matilda, written by Roald Dahl in 1988. Among the many textual adjustments, it had been decided that the young heroine no longer read a book by Kipling, as she does in the original version, but a novel by Jane Austen. Mise en abîme treasure: a publishing house has expurgated from a children’s book the book that the heroine (a little girl) is reading there. Admit it, it’s genius. Since Puffin did not detail the reasons for his rewrites, we cannot document with certainty the reason why the author of the jungle book – whom I personally hold to be one of Britain’s greatest writers – was to be ‘cancelled’ from Roald Dahl’s novel. But we can guess. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a strong supporter of the British Empire. Which has earned him the episodic target of a culture of cancellation today – like four years ago, at the University of Manchester, when students painted over one of his silkscreened poems. on a faculty wall.
Hidden intentions of big money
Look no further: the “sensitivity readers” Puffin editions have probably also judged that the reference to the old imperialist (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905, nevertheless) had become too offensive… This made me think of a splendid text that George Orwell devoted to Rudyard Kipling*. Very committed to decolonization, Orwell confesses in it an ambivalent fascination for his contemporary, whom he fights politically, but whose detractors he thus castigates: “The bourgeois on the left hate him as much for his sense of responsibility as for his cruelty and vulgarity All left-wing parties in industrialized countries are fundamentally based on hypocrisy, because they claim to be fighting something that they deeply do not wish to be destroyed, they have internationalist objectives, and at the same time, they are determined to maintain a standard of living which is incompatible with these objectives. The judgment is harsh. Too much, surely. But one cannot help but read there a criticism from beyond the grave inflicted by Orwell against this contemporary inclination to pay for itself with words, to exhibit its progressivism, while reinforcing its social privilege, even, sometimes, by cultivating its business.
Because behind these new struggles of the industry in general and the cultural industry in particular often nest intentions of big money and market shares. In this case, Puffin even seems to have found the martingale: after a week of controversy, the house announced on February 24 that the two versions would now be published, so that “all readers are free to choose which is their favorite. “. Original text for some, rewritten version for others, who will therefore be able to follow the adventures of Matilda reading Jane Austen… Until the great Jane Austen is also, one day, considered too sulphurous – at the end of January, the university from Greenwich (London), decided to warn her students about the “gender stereotypes” that could offend them in the work of the famous novelist…
Really, what will Matilda be able to read? She will only have to stop with her “damned books”, as her parents enjoin her. Because that’s all the salt of this business: Matilda narrates the adventures of a little girl who persists in reading novels, which infuse her with an evil spirit, according to her parents. This is the strongest thing about literature: it has already foreseen all the dirty tricks we would like to do to it, and manages to respond to them in an echo that took decades in advance.
*The Collected Essaysquoted by Simon Leys in Orwell or the horror of politics (Plon).