‘Times change’: what authors think about rewriting older books ( www.theguardian.com )

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

Even the people who seem to be in favor of it all seem to be talking about how they’ll write going forward.

With that said, editing older works to fit different contexts isn’t new at all. I remember reading my grandmother’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and cable companies routinely overdub curse words in movies and cut out sex scenes. Different edits for different audiences. It’s weird (it’s not weird) how we only start getting pissy about it when it comes to editing out slurs and stuff.

I don’t think anyone’s arguing for completely banning books that use shitty stereotypes and nasty racial language. The “unabridged” versions, much like the “theatrical releases” of movies, aren’t being thrown into a giant shredder. If someone wants to read an anti-semetic rant by Dahl, it’s out there. But we’ve never once at any point in the past gave two shits about editing content to make different editions for different people, and I haven’t heard an argument about why we should care when it comes to this specific version of the practice.

frog , 10 months ago

I tend to agree with this. Why not have multiple editions of a book available, one that is the original and the other that has received some edits to reflect modern values?

I’ve been reading HP Lovecraft recently. A lot of his stories are horrendously racist, and I’ve found that more uncomfortable to read than the actual horror. I’d have quite happily purchased a version (rather than downloading a free ebook) that had received a light touch of editing, of the kind that removed the racist slurs while keeping everything else intact. I genuinely can’t see that the actual story or vibes of “The Rats in the Walls” would have been any different if the cat had a different name.

I also find it bizarre how many people get pissy about sensitivity readers being “censorship”, while also insisting that editors are absolutely essential to making a book as good as it can be. Surely if a sensitivity reader is “censoring” a book by giving some suggestions (not orders or demands) on how to make a book better, then an editor is also “censoring” a book when they do the exact same thing? The truth is authors have always had fellow authors, beta readers and editors who read their work, react to it, and give suggestions on how to improve it. A wise author should seek out feedback, and getting feedback from people who actually know the subject matter is pretty damned valuable.

phoenixes , 10 months ago

I’m not really making an argument, but describing something I’ve heard and seems like a reasonable point to consider: One potential issue with “cleaning up” stuff like HP Lovecraft is that a lot of his horror is, in fact, horror about race. So cleaning it up would interact weirdly with that topic — would it mask the racial nature of it by making it less overt? Would it make it a different story? Or would it still basically be intact, but less immediately distracting, just because our modern ear recoils when we read certain words? (I don’t know which of these it would be; it probably varies depending on the story)

frog , 10 months ago

I actually think the stories would be stronger without the racial elements, because a common theme in many of the stories I’ve read so far (bearing in mind I’ve only read about 25% so far) has been the discovery of something hideous and bestial within the human. I’ve actually not interpreted the horror as being exclusively about race, because Lovecraft assumes all characters are white unless explicitly stated otherwise (as most authors do), and ghastly heritage is not reserved only for the non-white characters. I suppose one could argue that it’s intended to be a metaphor for discovering that one’s “bloodline” isn’t as pure as they believe (I wonder if Lovecraft had, or feared he had, non-white ancestors?), and that’s where the racial horror comes into it.

The interesting thing is that so many of the stories I’ve read so far don’t even mention race (except in passing), which makes racism stand out even more in the stories it suddenly appears in. The “what if we aren’t who we think we are?” and “what knowledge would drive us mad if we learned it?” themes stand just fine on their own in the stories where race isn’t mentioned; and these themes would be maintained if the racist slurs were edited out of other stories. Lovecraft’s horror is cosmic and existential, and is more so when presented as racially neutral, because it leaves all humans equally powerless in the face of the unnameable.

shrugs That’s just my interpretation, anyway, which is of course 100% subjective. I may change my mind when I get to Lovecraft’s later works. The dude is absolutely an awful racist, and my experience with bigots is they become more extreme, and less cautious about hiding their hatred, as time goes on. So we’ll see. But as it stands, the stories I’ve read so far would not change significantly if the racism was removed, and they’d be better reads without that enormous distraction.