In this post, Bambi will leave you with a quick English translation of Dr. Bock-Côté’s article, which was published yesterday in the Journal de Montréal (https://bit.ly/3IQ3WQA). Look at the sad, ridiculously absurd, and intellectually impoverished low level of censorship in today’s society… of course in the name of an inclusive society.
In recent years, publishing houses have increasingly hired so-called “sensitivity readers”.
Their function is to revise the texts of the authors to ensure that they do not contain “hurtful” remarks for “minorities”. Or at least, for activists claiming to speak on their behalf.
They are censors whose function is to conform the manuscripts they receive to the standards of multiculturalist and neo-feminist ideology. We will ensure that they become “inclusive”.
Charlie
It was only a matter of time for this logic of censorship to take the next step, looking not only at books to come, but at those from the past.
This is what has just happened to the works of Roald Dahl, the author of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, and of all the universe that we know.
The time had come to reissue his works. But the censorship of our time got involved. And we have thus witnessed their rewriting to erase expressions and words supposed to shock our contemporaries.
Call it a form of literary hygienism.
Feminism takes hold: a woman who, in the first edition, was a cashier or a secretary now becomes a top scientist or business executive. I would like it to become so in a future book, but in this one, such was not the case.
Likewise, in the new version, an obnoxious old woman is no longer said to be “old harpies as they always have itchy bellies”.
This passage is simply crossed out.
A reference to Joseph Conrad, considered too masculine and colonialist, is replaced by a reference to Jane Austen.
But it goes further. Dahl talks for a moment about a little fat boy. In the original version, he wrote that he had to go on a diet.
In the short story, this passage has been erased.
As for the “big brown mouse”, it simply becomes the “brown mouse”. Stop fatphobia!
I could multiply the examples.
The work no longer counts. It needs to be bleached.
As for the author, his book is nothing more than material to be reworked by militant rewriters.
This enterprise of purifying a literary work is part of a purge. But it is also a question of making it lose its own vocation to put it at the service of the dominant ideology.
This destroys literature.
Who will be the next victims of literary correctness? Balzac? Flaubert?
Censorship
In the days of our great-grandparents, we talked about edifying literature, supposed to make us good Christians. Literature was the support of morality. Morally prohibited books were blacklisted.
In the USSR, art was subject to the demands of what was called socialist realism. It was about putting art at the service of revolution and communism. Artists who did not comply with this requirement were perceived as dissidents.
Today, culture must serve the promotion of “diversity”. Nothing will escape the empire of political correctness.
Keep your old editions, my friends. One day they will be worth a lot”.
