We are relaying here the text published on March 10, 2023 by the mediator of France Culture which takes up the scandal of the remarks made by Tiphaine Samoyault, essayist, translator and literary critic, director of studies at the EHESS. Literature must therefore be rewritten for the people and left intact for the elites.
“Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Godard… Should we adapt the classics to their time?” The debate of this March 10 on France Culture with Tiphaine Samoyault, essayist, translator and literary critic, director of studies at the EHESS and Marc Weitzmann, journalist, writer, producer of Signes des Temps on France Culture, made listeners react:
Thank you for your ardor and your critical spirit. I am worried about this new sentimentality in literature when daily life offers us much more violence and stupidity than books. On the other hand, my children and I have read Roald Dahl and laughed a lot, but also the wonderful book “Hannah's Suitcase”, seen “The Dictator” by Chaplin, “To be or not to be”, “The Diary of Anne Frank” and later “Nights and Fogs”… So many supports to “reestablish the truth”. Literature therefore offers us the means to develop our sensitivity, our critical spirit. We must talk about things, expect from the literary, historical past that it gives us material to educate, to awaken awareness of others in their otherness, of nature, of good or beauty, to confront the difference with what we know and think is universal.
This disguised censorship, this political correctness, is increasingly creating "irritation" among people who feel that they can no longer say what they think and who are censoring themselves (and this is dangerous) and becoming even more "radical", it seems to me.
Well, I prefer to hear what will be a horror for me and say:
1) that I strongly disagree,
2) provide convincing arguments,
3) or even – this happened to me – never being invited again, but going out with my head held high. I learned a lot from these “woke” or cancel culture movements, from Judith Butler, from my children, too, and I think it is important to reread these writings in the light of the spirit of our times and raise people’s awareness of unconscious bias, but soon we will no longer be able to do so with this tabula rasa… everything will have disappeared. Where will we find the material that will allow us to educate? Have we forgotten the Preface, the footnotes, the warning to the reader as in the cinema? On Netflix, Disney+, we read warnings about tobacco consumption, scenes that may shock… etc.
Thank you if you took the time to read this message.
I hope I have been clear, I am not a writer and I would not want there to be confusion but I am concerned about what I consider to be a new form of censorship.
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A huge thank you to Marc Weitzmann for his interventions this morning. We are fed up with the current discourse on so-called elitist culture, fed up with this ideology which, under the pretext of being egalitarian, destroys culture and denies people the ability to think for themselves. Thank you to the true critical minds who are not afraid to grapple with reality.
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For my part, I would say that NO, we must not and we are not legitimate in rewriting works, whatever the messages and ideas disseminated in the context of an era.
The works are indeed the historical testimony of an era, of a way of thinking… and I agree with Marc Weitzmann who describes this enterprise as “moronic”; it is enough to contextualize the writings, to put them into perspective as Marguerite Yourcenar would have said, who would certainly have been shocked by this nonsense. Like cancel culture and “wokism”??? Do we have to beat ourselves up for 150 years to ask for forgiveness?
What about the chronology? And what hypocrisy? It is to consider readers as uneducated masses who would not have any critical sense. As Guillaume Erner says, we can give explanations at the bottom of the page…
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I was stunned, dismayed, to hear Tiphaine Samoyault declare that she was glad she didn't have to teach 19th century literature on the grounds that these novels no longer correspond to today's values! And this is a university professor saying that! May I point out to Ms. Samoyault that this is an insult to the intelligence of students or ordinary readers: they are not capable of seeing that they are reading a work from a bygone era? They might as well rewrite history on this account!
Another remark: does erasing the words “grosses” or “crasseux” in a novel intended for young people erase reality? One last question: must all novels conform to the rules of “feel good literature” as they say in good French? Is there no room for diverse and varied literatures? I will stop there, it would take too long to answer your guest and I have neither the courage nor the time to listen to the show again but I am worried about university!
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I listen to your show, I am very surprised that it is considered legitimate to rewrite literary texts, or others.
Can we imagine rewriting the Greek philosophers under the pretext that they claimed the earth was flat? Rewriting Mein Kampf under the pretext of the Holocaust? Sartre and Céline under the pretext that…? Etc…
This is indeed a dictatorial attitude, and what will our children and grandchildren think of these corrections, and of our era which is not capable of understanding the context and sensitivities of an era?
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Marc Weitzmann was very relevant and as always passionate, honest and authentic, driven by an ethical (different from moral) perspective. This is unlike the other guest, Tiphaine Samoyault, who was often dishonest and whose argument was flawed on several points. The disputatio would have been easy if there had been more time. Marc Weitzmann's final words perfectly summed up the problem posed by this movement of rewriting and censorship. As we know, to use a trivial, yet true expression: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The debate “Should we adapt the classics to their time?” was for me fascinating, profound and… chilling. Mrs. Samoyault’s argument seemed to me to be terribly false. Yes, it was relevant to mention Orwell and a certain definition of totalitarianism, probably the most relevant. And it is about today, the present (and the future that we are building). Thanks to Marc Weitzmann for his argument, polite, clear, and uncompromising. This radio exchange is important, and “to be shared”. Which I did.
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Thank you Marc Weitzmann for your remarks during this show. How strange this word of offense is when if I understood correctly, it is purely (I weigh this word) and simply (idem) a question of modifying the work, we erase it, we make it… disappear. Since when does only the first degree rule everything? Finally I am very offended by Tiphaine Samoyault's remarks. Finally what! I feel so offended! Thank you for your shows.
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Dear Mr. Weitzmann,
Thank you for your intervention this morning on Guillaume Erner's show in front of the complacent Tiphaine Samoyault. She showed shocking demagogy by reserving transgressive literature ("the one I prefer") and leaving to the vulgum pecus literature rewritten to suit present "values", this by constantly playing on a deliberate confusionism (Racine would have rewritten the Greek classics! Dahl would have rewritten the tales, translation has always rewritten, etc.) and by passing off the proven "presentism" of her position as a search for "historicization"... That this person is a teacher at the EHESS and resigns in advance in the face of her teaching duties, that is most worrying.
I believe – by the way – that you made a mistake in referring to a practice of “moral” rewriting in the Soviet era: in the USSR, the complete works of Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov and many others (George Sand or Shakespeare as well – translated by Pasternak) were published without intervening in the texts. Moreover, Marx and Engels on Balzac or Sue, Schiller and others (then Lenin on Tolstoy) precisely stated a certain number of principles regarding the classics from which current “censors” would do well to draw inspiration. They limited themselves to not publishing certain works. On the other hand, new productions were asked to conform to the values of the day.
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I am truly shocked by the remarks of your guest this morning. Rewriting the classics? Open door to totalitarianism, so many little auto-da-fés.
However, I do not agree with Marc Weitzmann when he states that it is "stupid" to be disgusted by a work. I read "Journey to the End of the Night" quite recently, and yes, I was disgusted. For nothing in the world would I have wanted this work to be rewritten. Each work of the mind is a witness to its time and offers insight into it with the benefit of hindsight. Contextualized, this allows us to appreciate the path taken, with its comings and goings...
Rewriting the classics? Writing the history in progress in the hope of becoming tomorrow's witnesses seems to me to be a much better use of energy.
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The comments of your guest Tiphaine Samoyault are quite simply scandalous: it is very (very) worrying to hear these censors, moreover Directors of recognized institutes, have leverage over texts that are certainly dubious but fundamental.
Don't read if you don't like it, but don't let these new censors, steeped in woke Anglo-Saxon ideology, scar the past, as others have done before, with their inconstant and variable-equation moralizing. I start my day as a librarian, disgusted.
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I listened with interest to the second part of this morning's debate on "rewritings of sensitivity."
Very surprised by Tiphaine Samoyault's point of view. Rather agree with Mr. Weizmann. But I think the problem was poorly posed, we should take specific examples.
1) The case of Ten Little Niggers. An English publisher reissued this work under the title They Were Ten, in an attempt to eliminate the word "nigger", which was considered an insult.
a) Does he have the legal right to do so? Apparently yes, with the agreement of the rights holders.
b) Does he have the "moral" right to do so, from a copyright perspective? I assume so, legally, since the rights holders own the copyright.
But in terms of what literature is? I suppose this is a commercial coup that is unacceptable from a copyright point of view? Could a conservative French Catholic publisher publish Emma Bovary, a book that no longer has any rights holders, under the title Le Triste Destin d'une femme adulteère? Because this book could offend traditional Catholic readers who would read it by mistake.
(c) is this adapted edition (since the title is changed) done surreptitiously, or is the adaptation explicit in situ, that is, in the book itself? Is it indicated in the "Editorial Information" section that the original title is "Ten Little Niggers"? Or are the sensibilities of potential readers too sensitive to tolerate the presence of the word "nigger", even in very small print?
d) What about the word "nigger" (which apparently can no longer be written as anything other than "n." in the United States, to mark oneself as anti-racist)? It is clear that in the statement "Ten little niggers", this word is not an "insult".
Is a black reader (a rather comical categorization in itself) (ontologically) too stupid to understand that the word "nigger" does not necessarily have the meaning of an insult? That Agatha Christie did not give it an insulting meaning? Is a black reader (in essence) necessarily stupid to the point of focusing on the sequence NIGGER, without seeing the context, and to be "hurt" by this sequence of characters (reacting like an Artificial Intelligence to which it has been indicated that the sequence of these five characters is one of the avatars of EVIL). Doesn't all this connote a form of racism towards blacks?
Isn't this really a coup by woke activists, black or white, or other categories, to "shut up" the "whites", and that "white" Agatha Christie? In reality, they probably don't care about black readers, they exploit their supposed (potential) "wounds" to impose their power in this area of culture.
2) Ms. Samoyault says that "if we want people to read certain works (Mark Twain, Roald Dahl), we have to adapt them to the tastes of the day." I point out to Ms. Samoyault that the Bibliothèque verte has long offered versions of classics adapted for children's reading (David Copperfield, for example). That's clear.
It is therefore appropriate to now create a specific collection “Works adapted to sensitive readers” (adults but idiots).
But in Ian Fleming's case, it's not about that. I suppose that Fleming is still read, indeed, by people who want to be entertained. And according to her, it is appropriate that these people, who are not part of the elite (another little stroke of class contempt), should not be confronted with passages where Fleming's racism would be expressed, for example. Or his machismo, or his misogyny, or I don't know what else (I have never read any of his books, but I think I will try, in the original version!).
It must be admitted that this is a strange conception of literature, because, sorry, the James Bond saga is part of literature, whatever she thinks.
There would be many other things to say.
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Is it possible to hear on France Culture someone who wants to rewrite great classics because, so uneducated, she is not capable of realizing its historical meaning while making believe that this is what she does ???!!! This is denial. So yes it must be said that this phenomenon exists, but can we give them the floor on France Culture? It's a bit stiff all the same.
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Thank you for giving the floor to Mr. Marc Weitzmann who castigated the morally correct in publishing and education.
I note, rightly or wrongly, that her counterpart was mocking the prejudices of the 19th century without apparently realizing that by campaigning for the generalization of moral standards she was reestablishing censorship with a clear conscience that ignored any search for truth on the grounds that each era has its own mental patterns.
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Great topic this morning, to rewrite or not to rewrite literary works. I think there were two angles missing from the discussion:
-the historical angle: if we rewrite passages to be more in line with the values of the time, aren't we rewriting history? And in return, aren't we running the risk of distorting political positions, political parties, which rely on authors, when they have been lukewarm?
-the economic angle: do publishing houses have an interest in making past works profitable again?
