Hypersensitive reader | The Press

I just survived a move in the middle of winter, which I hope will be the last. Even though I got rid of a ton of books, there were still a hundred boxes to carry containing only books. “The weight of culture”, said the movers, laughing. I suspect they routinely pull this joke on customers who drive up the bill with their libraries.

Many people ask me: but why do you inflict this torture on yourself? Because it reassures me, and you can probably measure my level of anxiety by the number of full shelves in the house. Recent events have confirmed to me that it may be a good neurosis, after all.

Surely I’ve read too many dystopias and science fiction novels, but surrounding myself with books is the promise of having reading for the rest of my life in case of an apocalypse. Electricity and internet can fail, I have enough to take care of for a long time. To this, I could add that I will have in my possession the original, unexpurgated editions of the contentious words according to the “sensitive” readers of our time.

We prepare for the worst in life, and the worst always comes as a surprise. We won’t burn the books like in Fahrenheit 451, we will rather modify them. In Britain, it was decided to rewrite the children’s books of Roald Dahl and the spy novels of Ian Fleming to bring them up to date. If I’ve never opened a Fleming book, because I’m not a James Bond fan, I loved Dahl’s stories as a child, especially the Big Big Giant who ate “delicious schnokombres”, and the wicked witches who turned children into mice. But now in both cases, to spare today’s readers, we have corrected or rewritten extracts that may sound racist, sexist or grossophobic. And we end up wondering if in two or three generations, readers will believe that James Bond is a feminist character… Why not Louis-Ferdinand Céline as an anti-racist, for that matter?

These are of course more business decisions than benevolent decisions. The rights holders of these works do not want to lose the money of the public of the future who might rightly raise their eyebrows at certain sentences. In doing so, they don’t give a damn about the sensitivity of readers who hold to the original texts, including myself. There is no question of me re-reading Dahl in his clean new version. It would be an insult to my memories and, above all, to my work.

I recognize, however, that the case of children’s literature has always been apart. These are readings that have never ceased to be watched by parents and authorities – this is the main reason why it must be left one day. In any case, my life as a reader changed when I discovered the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, which inspired the works of Disney, which were much more violent at the start.

If there is one job what I will never do, with that of bailiff, is to rewrite the works of dead authors to sanitize them. I would have the impression of committing heresy and even, worse, of participating in this heartbreaking enterprise of erasing the evidence of the past. However, there is nothing more enlightening than to discover the avant-garde or limited side of an author from another century, his groping in the dark, his self-confidence when he writes the worst bullshit.

I’m a hypersensitive reader when it comes to the integrity of original texts and I’m offended by this new trend. Nothing will convince me that rewriting the works of yesterday will be able to move us towards a better world. Revisionism leads nowhere by distorting memory. The only situation where rewriting a work is acceptable is when the writer himself retouches his texts during a reissue. And even there, there will always be maniacs like me to brandish his carefully curated first version in his face.

Mind you, the “trauma warnings” that start appearing at the beginning of the books don’t bother me too much, even though the last thing I want as a reader is to be warned of anything. Moreover, according to a recent report by the Duty¹it seems that they are not very effective.

I see a possibility of play there, because the good writers are often excited by the constraints. Very soon, we’ll probably read a lot of false trauma warnings that will be part of the work, and we might have a lot of fun.

But sifting through the texts of a writer who is no longer there to defend himself, in order to extract from them what one judges problematic on a moral level is the opposite of sensitivity. If you respect the craft of a writer at all, you should know that the choice of your words is your only privilege – mine, as a reader, is to decide whether I like it or not, to read the result or not.

There are several, and rather easy, ways to approach the problem. First, we can not read Fleming or Dahl and prefer our contemporaries, because there is no lack of authors. Create new incarnations of an old hero, why not? I like him, the new James Bond played by Daniel Craig. We can put works in context, discuss them and, yes, add warnings. But to redact a book is to completely cut yourself off from the style and soul of a writer, however infrequent he may have become. It is to cut oneself off from the language of the time when he wrote. I never read just to get a story told, but to see the world through someone else’s eyes. With its faults, its qualities, its blind spots. When “sensitive” proofreaders rewrite the works, we break the implicit contract between the authors and the readers, this direct link between them, this dialogue which sometimes persists through the centuries.

Finally, if this practice spreads, I hope as a reader that I will be warned by a warning like: “The original text of this book has been corrected to be adapted to the sensibilities of our time. This is what will allow me not to waste my time and my money. Anyway, I have libraries full of books in their original versions, like so many witnesses to the evolution of our humanity.