If France voted to cut the Mona Lisa into sixty-eight million pieces so that each Frenchman could possess a part of what he or she owns, would, “Hey, it’s their painting,” really cut it as a response? We owe a basic duty to art not to take a sledgehammer to it. The argument that the owners of an artistic work possess the right to do with it as they wish ignores responsibility. Rewriting these works quietly confesses guilt loudly. Presumptuous does not quite capture mediocre millennials rewriting Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and other talents to protect the eyes of people who so do not share their bridle that they buy enormous numbers of copies of what the publisher pretends is repulsive. Given that the same publisher did not merely bowdlerize but butchered Roald Dahl - bizarrely inserting, for instance, “ There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that,” into a description of the hairless harpies in The Witches - one cannot assume that Penguin Random House stopped with one ugly word with Wodehouse. So, readers not keen on undertaking a line-by-line comparison of editions can only go by what others discovered long after the word purge occurred. The publisher, conjuring another N-word that rhymes with Yahtzee, does not list its rewrites to the heretofore sacrosanct modern classics.
0 kommentar(er)
