Category Archives: 20th century

Roald Dahl and His Posthumous Editors: Send in the Crocodile…

Posted on by

Roald Dahl told painter Francis Bacon in 1982 that he did not wish to be edited posthumously. “I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!” he announced.   “When I am gone, if that happens…I will send along the ‘enormous crocodile’ to gobble them up.”  He had no intention of passing along control over his texts to anyone else: he would decide if editing himself was necessary and execute the job himself.

He famously characterized his audience as “much more vulgar than grown-ups.  They have a coarser sense of humour.  They are basically more cruel.”   Not everyone will agree with this (although those who protest may need to watch children play unsupervised) and even those who are sympathetic have grounds to fault him for the extent to which he stooped to engage them.  It’s fair to ask if he might have put his gifts to better use than he did, but perhaps the truth is he deployed them perfectly.

Critics have found it easier to attack Dahl’s anti-Semiticism, racism, and misogyny than  his  craftsmanship. . Yet the wild word play, tumbling energy of the prose, and ability to conjure up extravagant characters in few words are not within the powers of an indifferent or careless writer, any more than is the creation an instantly recognizable fictional world where downtrodden children overcome monstrously cruel adults.  It’s a world which recalls the rise fairy tale and Dickens, with the knock-about humor of a Punch and Judy show punctuated with the gleeful cautionary alarms of Struwwelpeter.

As the years have passed, Penguin has found its star children’s book author’s unpleasantness more problematic.  No one released a crocodile last week when Puffin Books, a division of Penguin-Random House and Roald Dahl Story Company announced that  the author’s most popular works for children would be published in new texts revised to be more accessible and inclusive, a decision made on the basis of a routine  reassessment of steady-selling older stories that contain elements likely to offend a new generation of prospective purchasers, according to Rick Behari, a Story Company spokesman.  The study began in 2020 before Netflix  purchased the Story Company to obtain the film rights to Dahl’s books in 2021.

The announcement raised as many questions as it dodged.  Not a word was said about the release dates of the new editions.  According to a British and an American bookseller I spoke with, they had no copies for sale and had no idea when the books would be shipped.  Another interesting conundrum: would the revised and original texts both be available simultaneously, or would the originals be withdrawn, following the precedent of the six Dr. Seuss picture books judged in 2021 unacceptable by today’s standards.

Yesterday Puffin retreated in the face of criticism from PEN, Sir Salman Rushdie, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and a host of Dahl defenders in the media.   A set of the seventeen novels in the original versions will be reissued as “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection” at the end of the year alongside “the newly released Puffin Roald Dahl books for young readers, which are designed for children who may be navigating written content independently for the first time.”  The various stakeholders in this venture seemed to be avoiding the mistake of Hachette’s  attempt to alter outdated language and gender-role stereotypes in Enid Blyton, the only other children’s writer whose popularity approaches Dahl’s.  Her “Famous Five” series was tweaked, but the publisher withdrew the improved texts some years later when it became clear that readers had not responded enthusiastically.

The Daily Telegraph published the changes detected by four staff writers after collating the 2001 and 2023 texts of ten Dahl titles. (The Telegraph also sprung the story that the sensitivity consultant  Inclusive Minds, an organization dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion in children’s literature, was secretly engaged to edit the stories.)  Eliminating the shaming adjective “fat” was a obvious target, given Dahl’s delight in creating grotesques whose bodies are as overweight as their personalities are repellent.   In the passages devoted to Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,  the word  “fat” no longer appears, “enormous” having been substituted for it.  The comparison of his face to “a monstrous ball of dough with two small greedy curranty eyes” now reads simply a “ball of dough.”

Perhaps these smallish changes would be improvements if the rest of the passage had been carefully edited as well, but his mother still tells the journalists that “He eats so many candy bars a day that it was almost impossible for him not to find one.  Eating is his hobby.”   He still steals down to the chocolate river and kneels “scooping hot melted chocolate into his mouth as fast as he could.”   “Deaf to everything except the call of his enormous stomach” now reads “Augustus was ignoring everything” as he still sprawls down “full length on the ground with his head far out over the river, lapping up the chocolate like a dog.”   How many readers, regardless of age, will fail to agree with the Oompa-Loompas when they sing that  Augustus Gloop is a “great big greedy nincompoop”  by the time he blocks the pipe?   Will the  ninety-year-old Sir Quentin Blake be asked to redraw his two illustrations so that Augustus no longer personifies gluttony?   And Penguin is powerless to soften the even more hateful representation of Augustus Gloop in Tim Burton’s film, which leaves nothing left to the imagination and reinforces distasteful stereotypes of Germans.In The Witches, the edits in the scene where the grandmother teaches the little boy how to tell a witch from a real woman has received a good deal of publicity.  When the grandmother explains that  a real witch is bald and conceals her bare head under an expensive wig, the boy no longer responds with “Horrid.”  His suggestion that he’ll pull the wig off is flatly rejected.  “Don’t be foolish,” she says.“You can’t go round pulling at the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves.  Just you try it and see what happens.”  This has been struck and replaced with “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”   Would the grandmother, an old Norwegian witch hunter say anything like this in the middle of revealing her secret knowledge about these diabolical creatures to her grandson, who is completely enthralled?  Was the intention to remove triggers for women stricken with aleopecia or cancer?  By the way, why wasn’t the grandmother’s dirty of smoking “foul” black cigars that “smell of rubber” eliminated?

If the revisions were supposed to neatly and unobtrusively excise offensive elements from Dahl without significantly altering the ethos, then the exercise was indeed a success, although a Pyrrhic victory, because largely cosmetic changes were not enough to dismantle his fictional world. Parents made uncomfortable by his nastiness may feel pressured to introduce their children to the books because they rank among the classics of children’s literature for the moment.  But if the stories are not consistent with their values, they can vote with their pocketbooks or library cards.    A classic for children does not live forever, but has a life span, contrary to received wisdom.  When it no longer finds an audience, it will go out of print.  As Philip Pullman suggested, let Dahl’s books run their course and in the meantime encourage children to explore the works of other better writers who are not household words..  There may be no perfect solution to this conundrum, but for my money the home is a better place to ban or censor books than the publisher’s offices.

 

 

 

 

 

An Image of Japan and its People in 1920s Soviet Children’s Literature

Posted on by

Polina Popova, our roving correspondent on Russian- and Ukrainian-language children’s books, has written a new essay for the Cotsen curatorial blog based on her research when she was in residence at Princeton several years ago.  In this post, she looks at how Japan has been represented in the former Soviet Union.  Thank you, Polina, for bringing our attention to many different dimensions of illustrated children’s books in the Russian language.

Russia and Japan—there have never been the easygoing political relationships between the two countries. In the early 20th century, Russia was defeated in the Russo-Japanese War —the war ended with the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905. At that time, in 1905 and later in 1911, the Japanese allied with Britain and maintained good relationships with the United States, but tensions with Russia continued because Russia controlled (not legally but de facto) parts of Manchuria, for example, the Chinese Eastern Railway and the regional capital city of Harbin.

Russia and Japan signed a series of treaties in 1907 and later—first, about fishing rights for Japan within Russian territorial waters; and in 1916—a treaty of mutual defense. However, in the 1910s, especially after the American entry into World War I, public figures in Japan embraced phrases like jikan no sūsei (“trends of the times”) and sekai taisei (“world situation”).[1] The 1917 Russian revolution greatly influenced Japanese foreign affairs: the coming to power of the Bolsheviks in Russia both unnerved many Japanese but made others “dizzy” with the potential collapse of Russian central authority opening the door to the extension of Japan’s political reach on the mainland.

Plans for Japan to intervene politically and militarily in Siberia began to form mid-November of 1917 as the news of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power spread around the world. Organizations like the National Destiny and the Amur River Society began to advocate Japanese intervention into Siberia and even the incorporation of some Siberian territories into the Japanese empire.[2] The international law professor Ninakawa Arata from Kyoto was one of the Japanese public intellectuals of the time who saw Japan as a future leader of the “new Orient.” In March of 1918, in an article (in English) for the Japan Magazine he wrote: “Now that China is helpless and Russia [is] on the verge of disintegration Japan has no formidable rival to prevent her rise to a supreme place in the Orient…”[3] However, Ninakawa’s plans came to naught as the Bolsheviks established Control of most cities of Eastern Siberia.[4]

In the late 1920s, and especially the early 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was mostly preoccupied with Soviet industrialization and the First Five-Year Plan, thus, the Soviets attempted to negotiate a Non-Aggression Pact (NAP) with Japan, similar to the ones signed with Germany, Finland, and the Baltic states). In early 1926, the Soviet Consul-General, Grigorii Bessedovsky, pursued negotiation of an NAP with the Japanese government, but without success.[5] In 1927, some commercial pacts were signed. In the 1930s, a new region—Mongolia (the Mongolian People’s Republic)—became a battlefield of Soviet-Japanese diplomatic relations. The Soviets won that battle, culminating in the 1936 pact of mutual assistance between the USSR and the MPR signed in Ulan Bator. But the Soviet leaders understood that Japan was not neutralized by the pact and, in fact, Russians grew increasingly worried about the growing closeness between Japan and Germany.[6]

The uneasy political and diplomatic atmosphere hanging over the early Soviet Union were reflected in the Soviet children’s literature of the time. And Cotsen Children’s Library has some unique materials that demonstrate how the literary and artistic imagination of Soviet children’s writers and illustrators imagined Japan and its people in the 1920s.

The 1924 fairy tale Mai i Oktiabrina (“May and Oktiabrina”) written by Lev Zilov and illustrated by Vladimir Orlov in grotesque black and white style shows an unsympathetic racialized image of Japanese children who are poor and malnourished. A Japanese boy explains to the Soviet boy and girl (Mai and Oktiabrina) who magially travel to Japan that Japanese children are exploited in sweatshops and factories and often become homeless.

Maĭ i Okti︠a︡brina. Moskva: Mospoligraf, 1924. (Cotsen 94477)

Illustration 1. Terrible working condition of the Japanese children in the 1924 Soviet fairy tale Mai i Oktiabrina.

With childish naïveté and boastful straightforwardness, the Soviet children reply that in the Soviet Union children—even those who are homeless—live in almost luxurious conditions. They conclude that in the USSR children always “go first” (“… у них вместо дома хоромы, И тепло, и сыто, и пригоже. У нас дети на первом месте…”). After that laudatory tirade, the Japanese children all decide they want to live in the Soviet Union. At the end of the book, Japanese children join others (Africans, Indians, etc.) who are led by Mai and Oktiabrina in a collective parade which demonstrates a simplistic internationalism that the early Soviet children’s writers promoted through racialized lenses of the “affirmative action empire.”[7]

Puteshestvie Charli (“The Travels of Charlie”) by Nikolai Smirnov and Galina and Olga Chigarova is another book from 1924 which also depicts Japan. The book is famous among scholars and collectors of Russian children’s literature for rendering, in avant-garde, absurdist style, madcap travels of Charlie Chaplin around the globe. The book contrasts dramatically with Mai i Oktiabrina both aesthetically and ideologically: Puteshestvie Charli is funny, amusing, and mostly apolitical. Charlie travels from New York City to Europe by boat, through Europe by plane, through the USSR by train, and to Vladivostok by submarine, before hopping on a rickshaw in Japan.

Puteshestvie Charli. Moskva: Gosizdat, 1924. (Cotsen 46853)

(Cotsen 46853)

Illustrations 2 and 3: Charlie Chaplin travelling through Japan using different modes of modern transportation.

Charlie was sent by the Japanese to San Francisco on another modern kind of transport—a hydroplane; there the actor traveled by motor boat, automobile, and tram right to his house. The next morning, Charlie wrote thank you notes to all the sailors, pilots, machinists, and drivers who took him on his journey around the world. The book ends on a positive though ideologically straightforward note: “I send my hello to the workers of all countries!” (“Мой привет рабочим всех стран!”)

The last book is Japonskie deti (“Japanese children,” 1929), by Aleksandr Solodvnikov with realistic lithographic illustrations by Vasilii Vatagin and Mikhail Ezuchevskii. The book is quite unusual for its time, as it was one of the rare ethnographic and encyclopedic works created for Soviet children to introduce them to ethnographic origins and traditions of world regions. Solodovnikov, and one of the illustrators, Ezuchevskii, also teamed up to create a similar book about how children in China are raised, nurtured, and educated. (Ezuchevskii illustrated books related to the history of pre-historic times and about children of Africa, too.)[8]

I︠a︡ponskie deti. Moskva: G. F. Mirimanova, 1929. (Cotsen 22421)

Illustration 4: Reminiscent of the Japanese-style paintings of Claude Monet, the cover of the Soviet children’s book Japnoskie deti.

The book begins with an explanation of how Japanese parents carry their babies and then portrays different episodes in lives of the Japanese children—from how they play to how they help their parents and dress up for the occasions. The illustrations are orientalist and Monetesque, but with careful attention to details of Japanese clothing, traditions, and customs

(Cotsen 22421)

Illustration 5: First page of the Soviet children’s book about customs and traditions of Japanese children’s upbringing.

All three books exemplify different tendencies in the Soviet children’s writers’ representation of the Japanese people: one that presented Japanese children as political “others” living in the conditions where working class people, especially children, are treated badly (and Soviet children are represented as the saviors of all children of other races and ethnicities); another one that shows Japan neutrally as simply a geographical neighbor of the USSR near the city  of Vladivostok; and a third one, an ethnographic, almost scientific study of the Japanese children’s upbringing and family customs. To generalize, the books analyzed above represent three aesthetical and literary tendencies of the Soviet children’s literature of the 1920: explicitly ideological books that harshly criticized non-communist societies (and empires); experimental, avant-garde, somewhat absurdist books that had ideologically neutral tone; and encyclopedic books that were educational in nature.

[1] According to the historian Paul Dunscomb, “these phrases generally served as euphemisms for respect for constitutional democracy at home and an embrace of the spirit of Wilsonian internationalism in foreign relationships.” See Paul E. Dunscomb, Japan’s Siberian Intervention, 1918-1922: “A Great Disobedience Against the People” (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2011), 32.

[2] Dunscomb, Japan’s Siberian Intervention, 1918-1922, 33-36.

[3] Arata Ninakawa, “Japan’s Policy Positive,” Japan Magazine, vol. 8, no. 11 (March 1918), 625.

[4] Dunscomb, Japan’s Siberian Intervention, 40.

[5] Jacob Kovalio, “Japan’s Perception of Stalinist Foreign Policy in the Early 1930s,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Apr. 1984), 319.

[6] Brian Bridges, “‘An Ambiguous Area’: Mongolia in Soviet-Japanese Relations in the mid-1930s,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 54, no.3 (2020), 730, 746.

[7] Here, I am using historian Terry Martin’s description from his book, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

[8] This information was taken from the web site of the Russian State Children’s Library’s electronic database: https://arch.rgdb.ru/xmlui/discover?filtertype_1=illustrator&filter_relational_operator_1=equals&filter_1=%D0%95%D0%B7%D1%83%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9+%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BB+%D0%94%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87 (Accessed on January 14th of 2023).