There is a furore in this country at the moment about the decision on the part of his publishers to change the wording of some of Roald Dahl’s books to accommodate contemporary standards of non-discriminatory language.* This kind of thing really does make me feel quite angry. When I was in school we were required to study Latin, and the justification given for reading the classics was that our minds were opened to the possibilities of other ways of being human, and of experiencing the world. Nobody intervened to say that the slaying of Cyclops was a dreadful example of “speciesism”. I have yet to hear the case made that the Bible should be banned (or at least, severely edited) because of the grotesque incident of the slaying of Holophernes by Judith. Let’s face it, there is far too much “smiting” in the Bible, but that his hardly the point.
When I was ten I actually fell off a chair laughing while reading Little Women. The circumstances and experiences of a group of teenage girls in Middle America were readily accessible to an English lad in East Lancashire. Treasure Island remains a classic, in my mind, despite its portrayal of a blind man as the portent of a deadly threat. Are we expected to remove Dostoievski’s Crime and Punishment from the shelves because in it an old women is hacked to death with an axe? I could go on.
The concept of “offence” is one of the most misused words in the English language at the moment. Being offended is one of the most effective ways of challenging our comfortable, taken for granted world. We need to be offended, and often the only way in which we can penetrate the mental armour of those who are comfortably entrenched in their taken-for-granted worlds is by offending them.
I can only hope that in some respect and open some occasion my series of studies of the Green Man might have offended some with closed minds in relation to religious belief …. provided, of course, that their experience of offence actually leads them to think about the things they have taken for granted.
*Otherwise known as “political correctness”.