If there’s any further reason needed to stick to my indie-publishing, it’s this.
I mean, it’s almost OK if libraries decide to take ‘banned’ books off the shelves. Libraries in the ‘western’—meaning not theocratically ruled—world have to curate anyway; nowadays mostly for economic reasons and because so much is being published these days that they really don’t have any choice in the matter. That they should put away books that are non-Zeitgeist-conformant seems understandable; though that they should have them destroyed is a different matter. If there are space/storage issues, the very least they can do is digitize them before destruction of the physical copies.
Note: This has been done for the works of Edgar Wallace, which are littered with objectionable materials and stereotypes; e.g. the colonialist/racist elements in his Africa stories as the worst examples. Nonetheless they are worth reading, if only for their style. You can find them on Kindle.
So, removal of books from library shelves, or publishers just not publishing them because either they won’t sell or else they’re going to get the publisher into trouble with the representatives of the current Zeitgeist… I can live with that. But taking an authors vision of his/her world, the characters inhabiting them and the plots and screwing them up by censoring their terminology? Not cool! Especially if the changes are really… Well, I’m struggling with the right adjectives. Right now I’m having a hard time choosing from: vapid, pathetic, irrelevant, disrespectful, arrogant, ignorant… And these are the less objectionable ones bouncing around in my head.
Like here’s Roal Dahl… Yes, I know he was an anti-semite and seriously screwed up in the head in a lot of ways. But tweaks like changing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Augustus Gloop from “enormously fat” to “enormous”, The Twits Mrs Twit from "ugly and beastly"to "beastly" and—here comes the crowing glory—Matilda’s"mother and father" to "parents"…
Are they also going to screw up his incomparable Revolting Rhymes? Or maybe they’ll want to tackle Jack Vance next! Wouldn’t out it past these zealots.
Here’s a description of a Witches Sabbath from Tsais, one of the Dying Earth stories…
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Etarr gestured T'sais to great caution. They stole through a gap between two towering rocks; concealed in the shadow, they surveyed the congress below.
They were overlooking an amphitheater lit by two blazing fires. In the center rose a dais of stone, as high as a man. About the fire, about the dais, two-score figures, robed in gray monks-cloth, reeled sweatingly, their faces unseen.
T'sais felt a premonitory chill. She looked at Etarr doubtfully.
"Even here is beauty," he whispered. "Weird and grotesque, but a sight to enchant the mind." T'sais looked again in dim comprehension.
More of the robed and cowled figures now were weaving before the fires; whence they came T'sais had not observed. It was evident that the festival had just begun, that the celebrants were only marshalling their passions. They pranced, shuffled, wove in and out, and presently began a muffled chant.
The weaving and gesticulation became feverish, and the caped figures crowded more closely around the dais. And now one leapt up on the dais and doffed her robe —a middleaged witch of squat naked body with a great broad face. She had ecstatic glittering eyes, large features pumping in ceaseless idiotic motion. Mouth open, tongue protruding, stiff black hair like a furze bush, falling from side to side over her face as she shook her head, she danced a libidinous sidelong dance in the light of the fires, looking slyly over the gathering. The chant of the cavorting figures below swelled to a vile chorous, and overhead dark shapes appeared, settling with an evil sureness.
The crowd began to slip from their robes, to reveal all manner of men and women, old and young—orange-haired witches of the Cobalt Mountain; forest sorcerers of Ascolais; white-bearded wizards of the Forlorn Land, with babbling small succubi. And one clad in splendid silk was the Prince Datul Omaet of Cansapara, the city of fallen pylons across the Melantine Gulf. And another creature of scales and staring eyes came of the lizardmen in the barren hills of South Almery. And these two girls, never apart, were Saponids, the near-extinct race from the northern tundras. The slender dark-eyed ones were necrophages from the Land of the Falling Wall. And the dreamy-eyed witch of the blue hair—she dwelt on the Cape of Sad Remembrance and waited at night on the beach for that which came in from the sea.
And as the squat witch with the black ruff and swinging breasts danced, the communicants became exalted, raised their arms, contorted their bodies, pantomimed all the evil and perversion they could set mind to.
Except one—a quiet figure still wrapped in her robe, moving slowly through the saturnalia with a wonderful grace. She stepped up on the dais now, let the robe slip from her body, and Javanne stood revealed in a clinging white gown of mist-stuff, gathered at the waist, fresh and chaste as salt spray. Shining red hair fell over her shoulders like a stream, and curling strands hung over her breasts. Her great gray eyes demure, strawberry mouth a little parted, she gazed back and forth across the crowd. They called and crowed, and Javanne, with tantalizing deliberation, moved her body.
Excerpt From Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance. This material may be protected by copyright.
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Lots of un-Zeitgeist-like material here and in most else Jack wrote.
But hey! What about what is published and still…venerated…I suppose.
Tolkien’s Middle Earth and its creatures? Not just in the books but in the Peter Jackson movies.
And maybe we should also start adjusting J K Rowlings. Not that I’m a fan of Harry Potter or anything associated with it, but there are some pretty seriously problematic—speaking here for the Zeitgeist mob—characters in there as well.
Bottom line: seems to me like the true hypocrisy of the Kafkaesque movement to adjust—sounds like something out of Orwell?—author’s writing to current ‘sensibilities’ lies in its cherry picking, usually among authors of times past; with maybe Tolkien excepted, even though I seem to remember there being loud objections from some quarters to Peter Jackson’s cinematic representations of the more grotesque creatures of Middle Earth.
The whole thing is absurd. But, as one of the contributors to the ABC Australia article notes…
…it's the job of Roald Dahl's publisher and estate to preserve the viability of his books going forward, as it is with most authors.
"I don't own my books anymore," [he] said.
"I've sold the rights to publish them to a publisher, and they can edit and tweak however they see fit. That's just the way that it works.
In other words it’s about money. The ‘job of Roald Dahl's publisher and estate to preserve the viability of his books going forward’ is just sugarcoating the violence done to the author’s vision. The author in this instance is dead—as by the way are Tolkien and Vance—and definitely doesn’t give a crap about his estate’s income. If asked, he might actually have declared that he preferred that the publisher’s did not dick with his words, even if that meant fewer people were going read them.
Let’s face it, everything, as the Bob Seger lyrics of Fire Inside go, ends in dust and disarray anyway…
Then you walk to the window and stare at the moon
Riding high and lonesome through a starlit sky
And it comes to you how it all slips away
Youth and beauty are gone one day
No matter what you dream or feel or say
It ends in dust and disarray
Like wind on the plains
Sand through the glass
Waves rolling in with the tide
Dreams die hard
And we watch them erode
But we cannot be denied
The fire inside
Looks to me that adjusting language and story and therefore the vision of an author is doing violence to him personally, even if this is posthumously. That also applies to their vision of the world at the time they lived and the Zeitgeist of that time. Maybe we don’t like it. But nobody forces anybody to read a book, or watch a movie or believe the myths of any given culture or tradition. Respect them instead, no matter how much they are not the ones that we hold to be true, dear and right. Doesn’t mean accept! It’s just about acknowledgment of difference.
You’re free not to read a book or watch a movie. You’re free to have your thoughts, but may have to refrain from expressing them because of the consequences such expression may have for you and your life. The Zeitgeist is constantly metamorphosing into something different than it was maybe even a year ago. Let us not become slaves to it.
Maybe an idea definitely not selling your rights to your novels to a publisher. As someone who’s has direct personal experience what happens then—but who, by sheer luck, was able to get out of the contract and end up publishing his vision of Keaen independently—I can assure you that, while sales of my novels aren’t exactly making me rich, those who read them seem to come away with sense of satisfaction and enjoyment. That will have to be enough.