Juan Villoro
Political correctness and the culture of cancellation are gradually bringing modernity closer to the Middle Ages. In Poland, a women’s rights activist has just been sentenced to eight months in jail for giving away abortion pills that a woman had not used. In Duluth, Minnesota, the land of Bob Dylan, books by Mark Twain were withdrawn from schools for alleged racist references.
Contemporary prohibition-ism is exercised in the name of ethics, which forces us to remember that the work of the Inquisition was also done under the pretext of saving the soul.
The most recent victim of moralistic censorship is Roald Dahl, author of formidable children’s stories with rude, cruel, and stinking characters, who has sold 300 million copies in 63 languages. Everyone knows he was a genius author; unfortunately, certain right-thinking inspectors think he was also a pig.
It is worth insisting that literature does not deal with human defects to recommend them but to understand them. Knowing the problems is the first step to solving them. Good stories include reprehensible beings that make them not only more exciting but also more plausible. Is there anyone who doubts that horrible people exist?
Contemporary censors seek to turn the Good into an ideology of domination that excludes anomaly and diversity. Can art survive under such conditions?
Dahl died in 1990, so his four children and the publisher Puffin had to approve changes to his texts. The association Inclusive Minds carried out the posthumous correction of the Welsh classic, a curious name for the cultural police that alters the original intention of the text.
I mention some of the modifications. The fat characters became “huge”, the tiny Oompa-Loompas lost their male gender to become “little people”, Mrs. Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but exclusively “beastly” and the little foxes of The Fantastic Mr. Fox became little vixens. These tweaks do not affect the plot; the curious thing is that it was deemed necessary to make them.
Other alterations are more significant. Matilda no longer reads Rudyard Kipling, a genius suspected of colonialism, but Jane Austen, a precursor of the gender perspective in English high society. As if that were not enough, specific explanatory phrases are added. In The Witches, Dahl comments that his protagonists wear wigs because they are bald. In order not to allude to a physical defect, the inclusive curators add: “There are many reasons for women to wear wigs, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that”. Peculiarly, the justification leaves out men who suffer from alopecia. Can’t we, too, wear wigs without there being anything wrong with it?
The changes to Roald Dahl allow us to suppose other transformations: will even Shakespeare get his turn? Will the jealous Othello stop having dark skin, and the politically correct cosmetology will give him a “mixed epidermis”? To avoid a biased interpretation of the Jew in The Merchant of Venice, will the play be retitled The Entrepreneur of Venice? And what about The Taming of the Shrew? The title is ironic since the play is about impersonation, but the police mind is literal. And now that I am in the mood to make changes, I propose to eliminate from that title the macho eagerness to tame a woman and baptize the piece as a broad-spectrum pedagogy: Tutorial for nonconformists. It is not a bad motto, although it has the defect of being alien to the playwright, who never had an app.
Roald Dahl was in life a person who was not lacking in flaws. His character was undesirable and he had racist, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic outbursts. He was not the best companion to share a beer with in a pub, in the same way that Johnny Depp, who played the famous Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is not the most advisable company either. But it is scandalous that contemporary censors judge the work by the author’s personal conduct and feel empowered to judge what offends others.
The Enlightenment defended the autonomy of the work, separating it from the coercion of the Church and State. How modern that past seems!
It is urgent that the eighteenth century begins.
This piece was published in Spanish by Reforma on March 17, 2023
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