March 5, 2023

"It was only later in the 19th century, with the Romantic cult of the author and the rise of academic textual scholarship, that the notion of a sacrosanct authorial vision began to take hold."

"But even then, such standards tended to apply only to established authors. The most common English editions of many 19th-century French novels were still heavily bowdlerized.... In comparison with the familiar sanitized versions, Dumas’s original ['Three Musketeers'] is an obscure, slightly seedy French romance...  The question we should be asking ourselves is not whether it is ever reasonable [to make changes] but who should be able to do so — and in what spirit and with what purpose.... In the Dahl case... it was a company treating Dahl’s beloved creations as if they were merely its assets....  I, for one, do not believe that philistines should be allowed to buy up authors’ estates and convert their works into 'Star Wars'-style franchises, as Netflix now seems to be doing, having purchased the Roald Dahl Story Company...."
 
Writes Matthew Walther, the editor of a Catholic literary journal, in "The Truth About the ‘Censorship’ of Roald Dahl" (NYT).

I'd say the key question is whether the original works remain available, and, obviously, they do. The only problem with art based on other art — derivative works — is whether you've violated intellectual property law. You can make junk of whatever sort you want based on works that are in the public domain or where you own or have licensed the rights or are engaged in "fair use." This is part of free speech.

I don't see why the "Star Wars" material is or should be any less protected than Roald Dahl's writings. And this shouldn't be about what is "allowed." You're allowed to make bad art! This is about criticizing bad art as bad. As long as the original works remain available, all we need to do is talk — wisely or stupidly — about how good or bad this new stuff is. That is to say: more speech.

72 comments:

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

Yes. Good questions such as: did Disney screw up Mary Poppins? Song of the South? Everything he/they touched?

Walther is interested in protecting the real Dahl (maybe without the anti-Semitism, which Dahl agreed to cut?), but he is fast and loose with a lot of books. It may be true that some great authors were amazingly (to us) indifferent to "posterity" (i.e. us if we read). Shakespeare seems to have given no trouble to protecting editions of his plays for after his death, but he was surely scrupulous about such matters when he was alive. Swift published anonymously in order to protect his reputation and career (as a clergyman!), but he shares with us some arguments about who screwed around with the text he approved of for Gulliver's Travels.

Kirk Parker said...

Let me resume my quixotic campaign to retire the phrase "intellectual property" and replace it with the much more accurate "intellectual monopoly".

Randomizer said...

"I'd say the key question is whether the original works remain available, and, obviously, they do."

Is that so? It was my understanding that Kindle users were having their Roald Dahl books automatically updated to the altered version.

Editing a book shouldn't be an issue if they are honest about the new edition and the original is still available.

Louie the Looper said...

"It was only later in the 19th century, with the Romantic cult of the author and the rise of academic textual scholarship, that the notion of a sacrosanct authorial vision began to take hold."

It was only late I the 19th century that copyright laws were enacted after campaigns by many authors, such as Dickens. Romantic cults and academic textual scholars had little to do with it.

Yancey Ward said...

Given how much Netflix paid the Dahl family for the rights, they are "allowed" to do with those rights what they wish, as the Dahl family itself was "allowed" to do in selling them in the first place. In other words, "allowed" isn't a proper word to use here. Now, I think the changes Netflix is doing to the new versions are a clown show, but they are bowdlerizing their own property when doing so. In case, there are millions of copies of Dahl's originals in print, and they will be out there for a long, long time. If you don't like what is being done in the new versions, just don't reward Netflix by buying any of it.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

They can’t help it. The Left ruins everything they touch eventually and always to serve their Marxist agenda. Always.

Jaq said...

I point to The Three Penny Opera, but that was not done to bowdlerize, it was done because Brecht was inspired by a new German translation of The Beggar's Opera, which was written in English two hundred years previously, but which had a successful run in London at the time.

Brecht simply stole it, and four songs, BTW, and wrote a version in German, that got translated back into English, and we had a new piece of art that was a huge hit on Broadway.

I doubt that the original creators of The Beggar's Opera would experience much consternation over this turn of events, but buying an author's work produced of his unique vision, and making changes based solely on commercial considerations? It seems like a crime; we live in a dystopia.

There are a lot more people who want to be artists than there are people blessed with the kind of creativity that distinguishes great art. Capital must be served, however, and if there is a huge pile of money out there to be invested in making entertainment, it isn't going to sit around waiting for interesting new artists with interesting visions, to appear.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

And long long before they went woke and pissed away Walt’s vision for family friendly fare, they cozied up to government to abuse copyright laws and extend their control. Like every other law, doling out exceptions to laws is the key to the Left’s fascist control of corporations and favored groups.

Jaq said...

How many times as the "problem play" The Taming of the Shrew, been re-staged to make it more palatable to modern audiences? The Proposal, Ten Things I Hate About You, Adam's Rib, Kiss Me Kate, etc, etc... Nobody really sees that as a problem, because it creates enough separation for the movies to be seen as distinct works of art, maybe that is really the issue.

Elf is a total ripoff of that Rudolph stop action movie we all loved as children, but it leaves the original intact. I guess what really grates is the immolation of the original work.

Jaq said...

Here's a good rule, BTW, when an article begins with "The Truth About...," read it as "My Opinion About..."

Marcus Bressler said...

If a Woke version is issued, you can rest assured that they are not doing it to give readers a clear choice between the original and the "progressive" re-write. The fact that there are original books out there or still for sale is immaterial. The Wokesters have done their work and the public can buy their con, knowingly or not.

I have no idea, but I wonder how many shows Netflix has begun with existing character casts that are all white and, in some cases, all male (The Dirty Dozen main leads for example would be all male) that in their version have POCs and/or women in those roles. Versus the same representation as in the original works.

MarcusB. THEOLDMAN

Joe Smith said...

How many black authors or women authors have been censored?

Just white guys?

Fuck 'em.

tim maguire said...

It’s a matter of truth in advertising. If it says it’s by Roald Dahl, it should be by Roald Dahl. If someone else has messed with, that should be acknowledged. And if Netflix creates entirely new books intended to reflect the world of Roald Dahl, good for them. Just don’t claim they’re by Roald Dahl.

Paddy O said...

Are the sometimes vast changes that a screenplay makes to a book adaptation censorship? Sometimes whole plots and such are changed but I'm told it's because directors want their own artistic visions.

Sometimes like LOTR the changes are there but done in keeping with the basic author vision. Others like the Narnia adaptations basically told entirely different stories. Jack London's books are usually unrecognizable when they become movies.

Movies used to be heavily edited for time and content for TV.

Books that are translated are also often highly edited or interpreted.

It's not new.

typingtalker said...

And if I was fortunate enough to buy a home or church or commercial building attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, Phillip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Neutra, or Gustav Eiffel I shouldn't be allowed to make any changes? Or if "limited" changes were to be permitted, who would decide what "limited" meant.

Box of worms.

(I changed "can of worms" to "box of worms" without seeking approval of any person or organization or government. So sue me!)

Kate said...

"In the Dahl case... it was a company treating Dahl’s beloved creations as if they were merely its assets...."

Walther makes an assumption about intent. Dahl's grandson may genuinely believe that changing the wording is important, not just a moneymaking scheme. I have Millennial children; Wokeness is their civil rights. I may disagree, but I certainly don't get to denigrate their motives because I don't like the mindset.

Richard said...

They can publish a new addition as long as they include the following disclaimer in bold print on the cover. “This is the changed version of the original content because we are assholes who have no respect for the author edition.“

Lilly, a dog said...

George Lucas himself ruined the original Star Wars trilogy by inserting painfully awful CGI. He then made the original versions unavailable. He completely ruined his legacy by selling the franchise to Devil Disney.
Dahl can no longer choose to wreck his own material, and his heirs betrayed him for cash. But as long as people can purchase his original versions, there's no issue.

Mike Petrik said...

Agree with Randomizer. Edit to your hearts' content as long as (i) unedited editions remain fully available and (ii) the editing is fully disclosed.

Leora said...

I first read Les Miserables in a 19th century British edition that had a long treatise about the Corn Laws in it. I was several years older before I realized it had been messed with.

Ambrose said...

"Bowdlerized" used to be a pejorative not a precedent to be reinstated.

Leora said...

I'd be happy if the edited version had a new copyright and author attribution and it voided the old copyright so the originals could be widely available.

Narr said...

Reminds me of the colorization controversy--how dare modern philistines mess with the products of Hollywood genius. Give classic movies the same care and consideration that their makers gave to the themes, plots, and characters of the great plays and books that they adapted to the screen.

I.e. precisely Zero. Nought point nought.



William said...

Guaranteed that the next movie version of The Three Musketeers will feature one musketeer who is Black. I guess that's as it should be. Dumas, after all, was Meghan level Black. I'm okay with it as long as Eliot Page isn't one of the other musketeers....Eliot Page would make an interesting Viola or Rosalind, but he's not an action hero....Maybe Ophelia should be played by a Black woman. That would dramatize how oppressed women were by dicks like Hamlet and Polonius. Of course that would require casting some Black guy to play Polonius and play him like an Amos n Andy character and that can longer be done.
There are some conundrums in adapting the classics to fit our current sensibilities.......Isn't it a shame that people like Shakespeare and Dickens weren't as enlightened and perceptive as our current generation but we're stuck with them. What a shame the court poets of Benin and Dahomey didn't write great soliloquies and novels.

Marcus Bressler said...

After I die, I pretty much know what my daughter will do with copies of my published work and that which was not published: she will shitcan them.

MarcusB. THEOLDMAN

Jaq said...

"Are the sometimes vast changes that a screenplay makes to a book adaptation censorship?"

Exactly. Anthony Burgess was so offended by the film version of A Clockwork Orange that he refused to sell the rights of any of his other novels, even as he recognized that he had sold the rights to that one for filthy lucre.

Trevanian refused to sell any more movie rights after people were killed in the making of The Eiger Sanction. A spectacular movie with a nonsensical plot, not sure it reflected the original, but Trevanian did not feel that the movie was worth the cost of a human life.

Ian Fleming was amused at what moviemakers did with his novels, even telling them, in the case of The Spy Who Loved me, that they could do anything they wanted except use the original plot of the written work. He actually wrote it as kind of a "bodice ripper" (Nobody Does it Better..) and though it was his most popular novel with female fans, his core fans hated it. It's worth a read on that account alone.

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

For the sane side of the argument listen to Episode 27 of Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn’s podcast.

The idea, if allowed to take hold, will destroy though itself.

alfromchgo said...

Matthew Walther does the bible next; he is afraid to do the koran.

Fritz said...

And if I was fortunate enough to buy a home or church or commercial building attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, Phillip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Neutra, or Gustav Eiffel I shouldn't be allowed to make any changes? Or if "limited" changes were to be permitted, who would decide what "limited" meant.

Box of worms.

(I changed "can of worms" to "box of worms" without seeking approval of any person or organization or government. So sue me!)


In my experience, worms come in something like a tupperware container. Except for blood worms, that come in a little baggie full of seaweed.

Kai Akker said...

The Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books were bowdlerized in the name of modernization in the '60s. They're awful, truncated things with no rhythm, tempo or anything else that might provide a reader pleasure. Just the plot, simplified, and updated here and there, and all the accoutrements made "contemporary."

They used the same titles, IIRC, and of course authors "Carolyn Keene" and "Franklin Dixon" were always corporate property as pseudonyms for various hired guns.

But it was hardly a case of both editions being out there and available -- let the free market in art render its verdict. Children's libraries often jettisoned the old and the librarians, or someone, thought they were making an improvement by acquiring the "new" "updated" editions. I saw this firsthand in one of my children's schools. Though the publishers still present this as a successful scheme, and I'm sure it was, for them -- they shortened to reduce printing costs, for example -- the "new" editions were as devoid of character and interest as it's possible to get.

They have continued to modernize and update the franchise and apparently there are computer games and graphic-novel versions. They can't all be horrible, can they? Yes, they can, but I haven not seen anything since those first awful "new and improved" 1960s editions. Poor Nancy Drew also has to cope with the eager editors among the feminists.

But... enterprising literary people out there.... the first three Hardy Boys books are, as of 2023, in the public domain.

Rusty said...

The difference between Readers Digest and the real thing. I think Readers Digest got permission from the authors first. In any case the Readers Digest version was motivation to go and get the full length version.

rhhardin said...

My edition of The Temptation of St Anthony comes without the chapter with the encounter with Crepitus. A ban on fart jokes.

rhhardin said...

My high school The Human Comedy came without the whorehouse chapter.

Jamie said...

"The notion of a sacrosanct authorial vision" only took hold in the 1800s... therefore it's fair game to question, today, whether changing an author's work is appropriate.

Other "notions" that only took hold a couple of centuries ago - they existed as ideas but didn't get popular until the Enlightenment: that slavery is immoral, that there is only one species of human being and therefore all humans are the beneficiaries of natural rights, that women can, and ought to have the right to, do most things that men do, that children are not chattel, that universities ought to be open to hoi polloi, that ordinary citizens ought to be represented in the government that exercises authority over them, that universal basic education is more or less a right of citizens, that laborers have the right to bargain on their own behalf. Should we call all these into question, because they only relatively recently took hold?

bobby said...

Any change should mean the changer owns the copyright in the new work, and abandons it in the old.

For works out of copyright, that won't have much effect. Anyone can create the new Romeo and Julian. But they ought not be able to label it as having been written by Shakespeare.

wild chicken said...

Do they still care about anti-Semitism? Because there's a lot of it back there.

God forbid we learn how people thought back in the 19th.

Darkisland said...

In the last week or two I read about Winnie the Pooh being reimagined. They are taking the WtP characters and making some really dark horror tales out of them.

A movie as well, called "Blood and Honey" From the Wikipedia description:

The film serves as a horror retelling of A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard's Winnie-the-Pooh books and stars Craig David Dowsett as Winnie-the-Pooh and Chris Cordell as Piglet, with Amber Doig-Thorne, Nikolai Leon, Maria Taylor, Natasha Rose Mills and Danielle Ronald in supporting roles. It follows Pooh and Piglet, who have now become feral and bloodthirsty murderers, as they terrorise a group of young university women and an adult Christopher Robin when he returns to the Hundred Acre Wood many years later after leaving for college.


I don't remember ever being much of a WtP fan and have never been a big fan of horror movies. But I'll take a look at this when I can stream it.

John Henry

MadisonMan said...

Why is 'censorship' in quotes.

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

Now a better answer to me nagging question’How will we know the difference from a bot 🤖 author and a human author, is coming into view.

The bot 🤖 writes like an NPR broadcast and the human author will have unapproved thoughts. The number of which will only increase with time. That’s the nature of the beast. Thought that is perfectly woke today will be rejected tomorrow.

In one “edit” they exchanged an author named in a book for the name of another author who it can only be surmised had a better woke score than the author the original author of the book had picked. If only Hitchens was still alive.

Burning a book rather than defiling it this was is exponentially more ethical.

BUMBLE BEE said...

This was discussed in my programming language class back in the early 90s. A generation from now nobody will care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjLqpIq01nQ

Yeah Peter... Oh Well.

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

There must’ve been a good reason why the first passage of the Bible is dedicated to “the word”.

We orient ourselves with words, and we manipulate them at our peril.

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

People who don’t have the words to usher in their ideas must find a way to quash, to lay low the mountains people who had the words erected in their in their way.

It’s as simple as that.

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

Words are the next set of monuments on the hit list.

Why would I trust people who fear monuments?

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

Just because an idea is new that doesn’t make it disposable.

Most of the ideas enshrined in our constitution are relatively new.

What are we talking about?

wildswan said...

There are two versions of the Folger Shakespeare Library. One was for informed readers who wanted to know even more about staging, about past versions of the play and about the meaning of obsolete words. The current one is for high school students who want to know why they should even read Shakespeare considering how difficult his language is and how wrong many of his statements are. This second version is an education in how idiotic the teaching of English literature has become but other wise serves no purpose. The Folgers don't seem to be changing the language yet but I expect they will in the third version, or else we won't be allowed to read Shakespeare. He's kept his hold through all ages - cut, bowdlerized, romanticized - because he showed human life as an interplay between different people with different characters. Some were careerists, some ambitious, some amoral, some arrogant, some in love, some cynical. The totalitarians among us won't accept that but Shakespeare uncut gets better as they spread.

Narr said...

I think we should distinguish between "the sacrosanct authorial intent" as a legitimate interest of readers and scholars, and an author's legitimate interest in getting money and credit for their works. New or old, those are positive things.

Issuing new and improved versions of proven franchises (even if they forget to improve them) is legitimate too--in a capitalist, profit-driven system there's no law against it and probably can't be.

The Godfather said...

My guess is that my introduction to "The Three Musketeers" was the 1948 movie version. (I was born in 1943.) That was -- and remains -- my standard for the story. So when I read the book several years later and discovered that D'Artagnan was committing adultery (or perhaps just lust), I was disturbed. I suppose that the young French readers were attracted by that aspect of the story. As a descendants of Puritans, I wasn't.
But I oppose changing the story -- ANY story.

n.n said...

There is a long-standing tradition of respecting original works and paying tribute to their authors.

Jaq said...

Orwell’s estate gave permission for a feminist retelling of 1984.

Bunkypotatohead said...

Some future woke owner of the rights to today's rap music is going to edit out all the N-words. It will be interesting to listen to the arguments both pro and con.

gpm said...

>>There must’ve been a good reason why the first passage of the Bible is dedicated to “the word”.

Huh??? The first passage of the Bible in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is (King James version, I think): In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In the Vulgate: In principio, creavit Deus caelum et terram. OK, I think I know the French: Au commencement, le Dieu a cree le ciel et la terre (I mostly know the latter from a discussion of the linguistic changes between Latin and French). Can't do the Greek or the Hebrew.

You're perhaps thinking of the beginning of the Gospel of John:

In the begging was the Word
And the Word was with God
And the Word was God, etc.

culminating in:

And the Word was made flesh/And dwelt amongst us

The Gospel of John stuff is, shall we say, a bit mystical version of some Greek philosophy.

--gpm

takirks said...

I don't object to you writing your own new feminine/gay/whatever hero archetypes at all. I welcome them, as a matter of fact. Just... Do them right, is all I ask.

What I object to is the cultural vandalism/appropriation going on when someone says "Oh, James Bond 007 isn't inclusive enough... We need to make him gay/a woman/black/whatever..."

Look... You write or film that dreck, all you're doing is standing on top of someone else's hill and screaming triumphantly "We on top!!". How about going out and finding your own damn hill? Do you really think anyone really buys Rey as the new and improved Luke Skywalker? Or, really likes the character? I wince every time I see that crap. They didn't even really give her a good "path to power", which they absolutely could have. She's purest driven Mary Sue, and fake as hell.

These assholes don't need to destroy or supplant that which was; what they should be doing is writing their own new crap, and leaving everything else that already exists alone. If Roald Dahl is objectionable? Fine; do something new, all on your own, original. Be better than he was; don't steal his work and paper over it all.

Nobody today reads or sells Bowdler's reworks of Shakespeare except as a joke. Nobody reads Bulwer-Lytton, either. Despite his contributions to the culture with a few of his choicer wordings.

Dahl will likely be read in the original for a long time. Centuries, even. This crapfest? Years, if they're lucky.

gpm said...

>>So when I read the book several years later and discovered that D'Artagnan was committing adultery (or perhaps just lust), I was disturbed.

If I were being mean, i might say that even I wasn't quite that naive. FWIW, I think I may have read the book before seeing that version of the movie. And maybe the one with Michael York playing D'Artagnan.

--gpm

Gahrie said...

It’s a matter of truth in advertising. If it says it’s by Roald Dahl, it should be by Roald Dahl. If someone else has messed with, that should be acknowledged. And if Netflix creates entirely new books intended to reflect the world of Roald Dahl, good for them. Just don’t claim they’re by Roald Dahl.

Tom Clancy has been "writing" and "publishing" new books for at least a decade after his death.

Both of Anne McCaffrey's children have "co-authored" books with her in the Pern universe after she died.

Left Bank of the Charles said...

“I'd say the key question is whether the original works remain available, and, obviously, they do.“

But not in print, that is the key to this scheme. Creating a derivative work also has the effect of extending the copyright period. Mark Twain had a great scheme to do that for the benefit of his heirs. He kept back several chapters of his autobiography with instructions that they be published, in effect that his autobiography be republished, at various intervals after his death. He believed that copyright should be forever. In those days, copyright ran from publication, now it runs from when the work is fixed in a tangible medium, so Twain’s scheme would no longer work.

Dave said...

I think there should be objection if you can no longer purchase new printed copies of the original works. And especially if people have purchased the original work in electronic form, and then Amazon or the like goes in and changes it without the purchasers consent or even knowledge.

Freeman Hunt said...

A translation says it's translated. It seems like these books would need to be labeled with something like, "Modernized by..."

boatbuilder said...

Fritz--When I was a kid, the seaworms came in cardboard boxes of seaweed, kind of like chinese food containers.

Robert Cook said...

"Yes. Good questions such as: did Disney screw up Mary Poppins?"

Yes, P.L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins book, hated Disney's movie.

Robert Cook said...

"Anthony Burgess was so offended by the film version of A Clockwork Orange that he refused to sell the rights of any of his other novels, even as he recognized that he had sold the rights to that one for filthy lucre."

Incorrect.

"Myth: Anthony Burgess hated Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film of A Clockwork Orange.

"Fact: Anthony Burgess thought the film was a masterpiece and that Kubrick was a great filmmaker. But Burgess resented having to defend the film on television and in print as it was not his own work."


https://www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/did-anthony-burgess-like-stanley-kubricks-a-clockwork-orange/

stlcdr said...

The quoted part seems like they are saying that modification of an artists work is acceptable because....it was done before.

and, "we aren't censoring the original, we are just making sure you cant find it"

Robert Cook said...

"'Other "notions' that only took hold a couple of centuries ago - they existed as ideas but didn't get popular until the Enlightenment: that slavery is immoral, that there is only one species of human being and therefore all humans are the beneficiaries of natural rights, that women can, and ought to have the right to, do most things that men do, that children are not chattel, that universities ought to be open to hoi polloi, that ordinary citizens ought to be represented in the government that exercises authority over them, that universal basic education is more or less a right of citizens, that laborers have the right to bargain on their own behalf. Should we call all these into question, because they only relatively recently took hold?"

Some are being called into question, or are even being undone, while others have only been minimally fulfilled (see bolded above).

Other of the ideas listed are "accepted," but are often ignored or subverted or only paid lip service, (e.g., slavery is still rampant around the world, including in the US; many people do still effectively consider humans to be composed of many "species" (i.e., "races"), each with its own talents and defects, each often treated better or worse, accordingly).

Jaq said...

Thank you for that comment Left Bank, Twain has always interested me, maybe because the (locally) famous meeting of Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain took place in my home town. What did two of the greatest writers of the 19th century find to talk about? Royalties and copyright laws. I thought that Twain had postponed the publication of his autobiography so that he could write about living figures and tell the truth as he saw it, but I suppose that was only one of the motives.

There used to be a motor inn in my hometown called the "Tom Sawyer Motel" but Twain's heirs forced the motel to change its name, since they owned the name "Tom Sawyer," so the sign came down. That' was in the 1960s.

Jamie said...

In those days, copyright ran from publication, now it runs from when the work is fixed in a tangible medium,

Take note, online-only authors! Print one copy! With a date!

Jaq said...

Thank you Robert, I probably misinterpreted a throwaway comment he made on the movie in some interview, apparently I was not the only one; he may well have been being ironic, IDK. But I did learn this after going down the Clockwork Orange rabbit hole:

In an interview with the Village Voice, Burgess said: “It was the most painful thing I’ve ever written, that damn book… I was trying to exorcise the memory of what happened to my first wife [Lynne], who was savagely attacked in London during the Second World War by four American deserters. She was pregnant at the time and lost our child. This led to a dreadful depression, and her suicide attempt…

It was based on something that happened to his wife! I am not sure I will be able to watch it again.

Jamie said...

The quoted part seems like they are saying that modification of an artists work is acceptable because....it was done before.

That's what I was saying above. He seems to say that if an idea (a "notion," he says) only gained prominence relatively recently, we can hark back to the past and ignore the modern idea, no harm, no foul. But there are LOTS of modern ideas, some much newer than authorial ownership of work, that I feel certain he wouldn't say we can readily ignore.

I wasn't actually commenting on the "updating an author's work for modern sensibilities" idea itself. I was only saying that that's a weak argument for doing it.

As for the "updating" idea - if the work is from the (relatively) modern era, say 1700s on as a general guide, I don't think it ought to be "updated" without clear attribution. The English language, at any rate, hasn't changed so much since then that we can't understand the author's intent, if we're willing to put in a little time researching period context and such.

It's funny to me that the same people who believe that Western civilization is forever stained by its past sins seem to want to render those sins invisible - to make it seem as if the artists of the past had no racist, sexist, whateverist ideas. Is it that they want to pretend that the zeitgeist of the time was actually more enlightened than it was, so that when (white) (male) historical figures did something racist, sexist, whateverist, they can be seen as defying social norms? I don't get it.

Jamie said...

Other of the ideas listed are "accepted," but are often ignored or subverted or only paid lip service,

No argument from me. Though we probably disagree on which ones, and how.

Michael McNeil said...

As noted up thread, the problem isn't really that new editions of newly expurgated books are being published, but more significantly owners of earlier, unexpurgated editions of ebooks such as Kindles are having their books be automatically updated under their noses to the new, censored versions. For those desirous of evading such a fate, Kindle users at least can do this:

Go to your Amazon account, then to:

Manage Your Content and Devices / Preferences / Automatic Book Updates

Then turn "Automatic Book Update" OFF.

Ernest said...

I would challenge the statement that “the notion of a sacrosanct authorial vision” is recent. In 1521 Martin Luther wrote this: “I want the words of this man Paul [the Apostle] to mean exactly what they mean in their original context.” “Answer to Latomus,” in Luther: Early Theological Works, J. Atkinson ed and trans, Library of Christian Classics 16, Westminster 1962, p. 357.

Robert Cook said...

"It was based on something that happened to his wife! I am not sure I will be able to watch it again."

Moreover, Burgess wrote it and several of his early novels in hopes of creating a source of income for his wife, as
"In 1959, Burgess was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor and given less than a year to live. Insuring his wife's posthumous income after his death, Burgess returned to England and produced five novels during that period."

Rocco said...

Bunkypotatohead said...
Some future woke owner of the rights to today's rap music is going to edit out all the N-words.

So, instrumentals then.

Rocco said...

Robert Cook said...
"... many people do still effectively consider humans to be composed of many "species" (i.e., "races")..."

"Species" and "Race" are not synonymous, Robert.