His name is James Bond, we are beginning to know that.
But for how much longer?
Purists of the adventures of 007 might raise a few eyebrows in April when they read the new English edition of the novels by Ian Fleming (1908-1964).
The opportunity to republish these spy books is wonderful, as this year marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of
Casino Royale
, the first novel to feature Her Majesty's Spy.
But a formality was necessary, however, before the arrival in bookstores of these recomposed works.
As is now the custom in the United States and the United Kingdom, the publisher had the writer's prose proofread by
"sensitivity readers"
,
proofreaders and cultural consultants supposed to flush out terms likely to shock the modern readership.
And they found material to draw.
As the English daily The Telegraph
noted on Saturday
, sensitive censors had their hands heavy.
Produced under the control of the British publishing house Ian Fleming Publications, the redaction of Ian Fleming's work would concern racist passages around African and African-American characters.
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Thus, in
Live and Let Die
,
released in 1954 and whose action takes place in particular in the New York district of Harlem and in Louisiana, a passage in a strip club almost completely waters down an entire sentence of Ian Fleming.
The line in question,
“Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the watering hole.
He felt his own hands grab the tablecloth.
His mouth was dry”,
becomes in the new edition:
“Bond could feel the electrical tension of the room”
.
Ian Fleming (1908-1964), the creator of James Bond, at his desk in Jamaica.
The writer released his first book,
Casino Royale
, in 1953. In all, he wrote fourteen novels and nine short stories devoted to the adventures of 007. Farabola, Bridgeman Images
Generally speaking, all occurrences of the word "nigger" have disappeared from Ian Fleming's novels;
a hardly surprising retouching insofar as this highly connoted racist term is now unpronounceable in English-speaking countries, where we now speak of an “N-word”.
The term is replaced with "black person" or "black man" in the new edition of the book.
In the same spirit, the title of Agatha Christie's novel,
Ten little niggers
had been renamed in 2020, in favor of an alternative title.
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Other passages, still in
Live and Let Die,
have simply been crossed out from the new text.
A James Bond reflection on a gang of criminals goes from
"they're pretty law-abiding guys, except when they've had too much to drink"
to just
"they're pretty law-abiding guys"
.
An argument between a resident of Harlem and his girlfriend, written by Ian Fleming with the phonetic accents of their language has also been omitted.
Indignation with variable geometry
In the other novels, several racial qualifiers were changed or deleted.
A black bartender becomes a bartender, a black gangster becomes a gangster, and so on.
However, according to the
Telegraph
, none of the similarly racist protrusions that affect other people of color, such as Asians, have been retouched.
Ditto for homophobic remarks.
Of course, a usual "trigger warning" - a "warning" - completes these publications.
“This edition has undergone a number of updates, while ensuring that it remains as close as possible to the original text and the time of the action
,” reads one of the first pages of each reissue.
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For the English publisher, Ian Fleming Publications, these modifications are made in the spirit of what the author had already authorized during his lifetime.
It was a question, at the time, of attenuating scenes of sleeping around to spare the American readership.
"Following this approach, we examined the occurrences of different racial words in the books and made the choice to delete some of them or replace them with equivalent and more accepted terms today", said on this subject
. the publishing house for our colleagues at the
Telegraph
.
The details of these re-edited and corrected reprints of Ian Fleming's James Bonds surface a few days after the controversy that erupted in the United Kingdom on a similar subject: the purification of children's books by Roald Dahl - the author of Charlie
and the chocolate factory
- of any
“offensive”
content .
The British Prime Minister and a string of authors had stepped up to worry about it.
The publisher concerned has, for its part, fully assumed.
