Writers who have since disappeared have their works retouched because they contain remarks deemed offensive.
Like Roald Dahl, whose children's books are in the sights of
"sensitivity readers"
, readers responsible for flushing out comments that could hurt ethnic or sexual minorities.
Augustus Gloop would be vexing to fat people and Oompa Loompas, an insult to short people.
Le Figaro
devotes its front page this Thursday, March 2 to this phenomenon and Caroline Fourest is invited this evening by “C à vous” to provide her analysis.
"We are in George Orwell, in the novel that Orwell had imagined where there were people in charge of rewriting the books"
declares the essayist before developing his thought:
"It goes with the disease of the time which is already to decontextualize everything, to lose track of things a bit”
.
For Caroline Fourest, this tendency to correct the artistic productions of the past is
“a way of considering works as products
”
.
“
But these are not products, they are creations and therefore they belong to their creators”
she corrects
.
She then clarifies:
Roald Dahl is no longer there to defend them.
He was not a likeable character.
He was anti-Semitic.
He said horrible things, all you want, but who cares.
Works should be judged for themselves and respected for themselves
.
"It's a matter of business"
Still questioned by Anne-Elisabeth Lemoine, the journalist recounts an ubiquitous situation observed in England.
In the novel
Mathilda
, written by Roald Dahl and published in 1988, Jane Austen's name was added to the hitherto exclusively male list of authors read by the gifted girl and heroine of the book.
However, the irony is that the English author is also threatened
"to be canceled by English universities which find that Jane Austen, retrospectively, 200 years later, is a little sexist and a little stereotyped on gender issues”
, as Caroline Fourest tells it on the set of France 5. She then underlines to support her point that
“200 years earlier, Jane Austen, it was revolutionary”
.
The solution, for the journalist, would come not in the rewriting of the past, but in the creation of new works which
“give more space to women, which are no longer racist
”.
She insists
:
"
Let's not rewrite the past
".
“It's a matter of business.
We are only talking about that, marketing.
Once again, a publisher, instead of looking for new authors, who will write children's novels that are precisely the bearers of new representations on the question of gender, more anti-racist, they will use products that already work.
They will adapt them a little to avoid controversy,”
she explains.
An intellectual danger which, according to her, will lead us to
“a sanitization of culture, in addition to a loss of memory which is absurd”
and which, alas,
“does not make anyone grow”
.