Arthur Rackham’s illustration of Jack and the giant, from the collection “English Fairy Tales”.
So they sate down to breakfast, the giant gobbling down his own measure of hasty-pudding, while Jack made away with his.
“See,” says crafty Jack when he had finished. “I’ll show you a trick worth two of yours,” and with that he up with a carving knife and, ripping up the leather bag out fell all the hasty-pudding on the floor!
“Odds splutter hur nails!” cried the giant, not to be outdone “Hur can do that hurself!” Whereupon he seized the carving knife and ripping open his own belly and fell down dead.
Thus was Jack quit of the Welsh giant.
The preceding is an extract from Jack the Giant Killer, from the collection “English Fairy Tales” (1918, republished 1979) with illustrations by Arthur Rackham.)
Laughed? I almost cried. Disembowelment in a fairy tale wrought by a young lad against a terrible giant? Par for the course. Jack had already done for two other giants, one into a pit and the others by hanging and stabbing. No tears lost. They were evil.
And more importantly, they were fantasy. They did not exist. They were the figments of the imagination. Clouds made real, given substance in a story. As they were in the tales by the Brothers Grimm, grim in name and nature.
And yet here in this world of wonders, we enter the new age of puritanism, a lesser dark age. Let’s call it the present.
And who ushers us into this darkened reading room. Let’s call them sensitivity editors. Now some may say, ‘Oh shut up! Really, a sensitivity editor. Who gave them the freedom to judge my level of sensitivity?’ Well, quite. And, just so you know, you can’t say shut up anymore in some books, it might scare the children. You know like send the wrong message. When the child says shut up they really mean Oh please can you stop communicating to me. I entreat you. Yes, that’s it. Laughed? We almost died.
In recent weeks acclaimed children’s authors Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl have been subject to the sensitive knife. In Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, cousins Dick and Fanny have become cousins Rick and Franny. In her Famous Five books, shut up has gone, as has idiot and ass.
I’m sure the children of the world were consulted. Perhaps not.
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In Dahl, one is not enormously fat, just enormous, one cannot have lovely pink skin, but lovely smooth skin, and the terrible tractors have been whitewashed. In Matilda, that wretched imperialist Rudyard Kipling has been replaced by the altogether benign Jane Austen. (And as one who had to do Austen for first level English in high school, there are different forms of torture. Thanks Jane.)
In a sort of concession, Dahl’s publisher Puffin says the changes will not occur in the print versions.
Author and educator John Marsden was reported as commenting on the latest incisions: “It’s an insulting attitude to believe that children will be so easily brainwashed.”
Marsden is right. Kids are smarter than many give them credit for. As Loudon Wainwright III sang: “Be careful there’s a baby in the house, and a baby can you’re spot your shtick.”
While everyone needs an editor, writers don’t need them when they are dead. While every book is born of its time, and is risen from the well of the each creator’s beliefs, it is not Play-Doh. Every change, however subtle, is still a step away from the writer. And if society has moved on, then teach your children, well, this is how it was in those days, we can learn from this or that writer’s use of language. It isn’t like that now, but once it was. Imagine that.
The shadow that threads it way through this whole discourse is power and memory. Words are a large part of a society as it was, how it is. Take them away, alter them, then memory is the victim. History changed.
This shadow also runs through all the vile instances of book burning and banning. Good morning, America. A recent report by Pen America found more than 1600 book titles had been banned by school districts in 32 states. Australia, of course, like other nations, is not innocent to this. Many books have been banned down the years. In recent days, a memoir aimed at teenagers has been referred to the Australian Classification Board. Gender Queer: A Memoir was written by non-binary author Maia Kobabe, from California.
Best alter that second word in the title.
And what became of Jack the Giant Killer? Well, after he presented the head of the giant Galliganta to King Arthur, it turns out he had nothing else to do. So Arthur gave him a castle, a duke’s daughter for marriage, where he lived in great happiness with said wife and children.
The End.
