I never intended my column of March 5 to turn into a series on “cancel culture,” but the issue has taken so many twists and turns.
On March 7, the Denver Post ran a New York Times article about the Seuss controversy. There was so much that was problematic about this article, from the authors’ editorializing to the fact that they had obviously not read all six Seuss titles in question. (Quite frankly I wonder how many people commenting on the Seuss books have read them. I re-read all six, and while two of them contained very offensive images, I struggled to see why the other four were on the chopping block.)
But where it got deeply troublesome was with this phrase: “how an author’s work should be posthumously curated.”
In a children’s literature book group I belong to, this topic has come up more than once, with some advocating for “thoughtful, sensitive and intelligent” edits of problematic passages.
The most cited examples come from the “Little House” series, specifically with regards to Ma’s anti-Indian racism. That Ma was racist is undeniable. But reality cannot be altered, and neither should an artist’s work, unless that artist chooses to do so.
People proposing these rewrites obviously believe that they are on the “right” side of the argument. I might even agree that they are. But who is to decide? The Taliban believed they were on the “right” side of the argument when they destroyed the Buddhist statues in Bamiyan, just as the publishers at Di Tzeitung believed they were “right” when they erased Hillary Clinton from a photograph.
The idea of “curating” the past is frightening. It is fundamentalist. It is Soviet, where there is potentially only one “correct” view of the world.
We cannot rewrite history. Rewriting an author’s words will not change reality, but obscure it.
What we can do is reinterpret history, which happens all the time. What I personally find very insightful is when a new edition of a children’s book includes a new foreword exploring the context of the book and its author. That is the right place and correct format to address problematic passages. It makes the reading experience much richer and insightful.
Posthumous “curation” goes beyond censorship. Posthumous “curation” posits that we can re-create reality. It’s part of the current, dangerous trend of conflation personal truth with factual truth.
I’ve re-read Seuss. Now it’s time to return to another classic: Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Shana Goldberg may be reached at [email protected]
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