Cover to a U.S. paperback edition of LIve And Let Die
The Washington Post, in an editorial, has come out against revisions to decades-old novels. One of the editorial's prime examples is Ian Fleming's Live And Let Die.
The Post's editorial said such changes are "a threat to free expression, to historical honesty and, indeed, to readers themselves for contemporary editors to comb through works of fiction written at different moments and rewrite them for today's mind-set, particularly with little explanation of process or limiting principles."
The editorial covers a number of examples, including alterations made to the works of Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie. To illustrate the changes, the editorial includes original passages, with changes made in red.
"The trend raises uncomfortable questions about authorship and authenticity, and it ignores the reality that texts are more than consumer goods or sources of entertainment in the present," the editorial says. "They are also cultural artifacts that attest to the moment in which they were written — the good and the bad."
What follows is an excerpt about Fleming and Live And Let Die. Changes were made as part of new editions to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Fleming's Bond novels.
In the case of Fleming's Bond novels, the rewriting is more substantial. In one scene in "Live and Let Die," the dashing and debonair Bond walks into a nightclub in swinging Harlem. The original text reads that the audience in the club that night was "grunting like pigs at the trough." The new version reads, "Bond could sense the electric tension in the room." The new version contains neither a simile as Fleming's original does, nor any attempt to describe the audience members. This is not striking a certain word; this is the imposition of a different literary voice. Who, in the end, is the author, Fleming or the sensitivity reader?
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