Something new in the land of sensitivity readers.
After Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, it is Agatha Christie's turn to be in the sights of these outrage professionals.
According to the
Telegraph
, The Adventures of Detectives Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, which are due to be published or have been published since 2020, have been rewritten and edited by Harper Collins to remove any potentially offensive language. of the modern reader.
Brand new editions of all of
Miss Marple
's investigations and some novels with Hercule Poirot have therefore been created.
According to the newspaper, these versions include many changes in the texts published between 1920 and 1976, in particular concerning descriptions, insults and ethnic references.
Thus, any mention made of a black, Jewish or gypsy person was cut off.
Thus in
La Mystérieuse Affaire de Styles
, Agatha Christie's first novel published in 1920, when Hercule Poirot points out that a character is "Jew", the word no longer appears in the new version.
In the same book, a young woman having "a gypsy style" simply becomes a "young woman".
Other sentences have simply been rewritten for no apparent reason.
In the novel
Death on the Nile
from 1937, Mrs Allerton's character complains about a gang of children harassing her and explains "they come back and look, and look, and their eyes are just disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don't believe that I really love children.”
It becomes in the new edition: “They come back and look, and look.
And I don't think I really like children."
In addition to paragraph cuts, certain vocabulary words have been modified or even deleted.
The term “oriental” has disappeared, references to the Nubian people – inhabitants of the region linking northern Sudan to southern Egypt – have been deleted from
Death on the Nile
.
Certain completely banal formulas have likewise been erased in
Le major parle trop
.
This is the case with the expression “beautiful white teeth”In the same book, the description of a woman with “a torso of black marble” was erased.
In
Miss Marple bows out
, an Indian judge demanding his breakfast no longer does so with an “Indian temperament” but simply with a “temper”.
Finally, in this same work, the newspaper reports that the word “indigenous” has been replaced by “local”.
The censorship of Roald Dahl's editions caused a worldwide stir last February.
Writer Salman Rushdie and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were notably on the front line, calling for literary works to be
“preserved”
rather than
“retouched”
.
This time and concerning Agatha Christie, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates relayed the information on her Twitter account by predicting the next target of sensitivity readers.
“Next Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
»
In an interview published by
Le Figaro,
about the rewriting of the works of Roald Dahl, the linguist Franck Neveu deplored the "moralization of the language" of sensitivity readers.
“We are in the process of moralizing the language, but there is no morality in the language, they are two different entities.
To consider that we must remove certain words from the dictionary or from certain game rules such as in Scrabble or words in the novels of Roald Dahl, comes from the most crass ignorance of the functioning of language.
And to remember that this is less a question of censorship than of a commercial strategy in order to continue to sell the books of the author who died nearly fifty years ago.
This is not the first time that Agatha Christie's works have been talked about.
In 2020,
Dix Petits Nègres
had become
They were ten
.
This decision had been made by the great-grandson of the writer, James Prichard, so as not to
"hurt"
.
"When the book was written, the language was different and we used words that are now forgotten..." Let's remember that already,
when it was released in the United States in 1940, the title of the book had been changed to become
And suddenly there was none left
.
What to wonder, with all this, if Agatha Christie is still the author of her own novels…
