I have new Insider posts up on the Wade Miley-Carson Smith trade and the Hisashi Iwakuma contract. My latest boardgame review over at Paste covers 7 Wonders Duel, the new two-player game that uses the theme and some mechanics from the outstanding original 7 Wonders.
I don’t normally post on books in series, since part of any series’ appeal is the familiarity you get from title to title, but Rex Stout’s Too Many Cooks
The story itself is one of the few that has Wolfe leave his famous brownstone, from which he solves most of the cases that come to him, usually in a climactic scene where all of the suspects gather in his parlor for the Big Reveal. In Too Many Cooks, Wolfe and Goodwin travel to a spa/resort in West Virginia for the festivities of the Quinze Maîtres, a collection of chefs (fifteen in name, with only twelve attending due to the deaths of three since the previous meeting) from around the world who gather every five years for enormous meals, presentations on food, and, in this case, murder. When one of the twelve is killed during a tasting experiment he’s running, Wolfe first has to clear the chef who invited him to the shindig, and eventually solves the murder when the killer takes a shot at Wolfe himself.
On the flip side, however, of all of the Nero Wolfe works I’ve read, I don’t think any used the n-word as frequently as Too Many Cooks does, even though most of the time it’s used it comes from the mouth of one of the southern whites in the book – such as the redneck local sheriff who shows up to investigate the murder. This prompted a question in my mind that I’ll pose to the group. In general, I don’t support the idea of bowdlerizing older works of art – film, literature, etc. – to remove language that was in the common vernacular of the time but has since become objectionable or effectively prohibited. This is how people talked and acted, and removing those words or actions (such as the awful blackface scene in Holiday Inn) not only reduces the works’ historical accuracy but has the possibly unintended effect of allowing us to pretend that this crap never happened. At the resort in Too Many Cooks, the kitchen staff members are mostly black, and everyone but Wolfe refers to them in derogatory terms, liberally sprinkled with that odious epithet. In reality, you could clean this text up, removing most of those uses of the term and replacing with less offensive words that still express the racism of the speakers, without materially impacting the text. Failing to replace those words makes the book much less enjoyable to read, and I would guess many if not most African-American readers today would find it unreadable. (Don’t even get me started on Gone With the Wind.) So what would you prefer: Leave these works as they are, as I believe we should, as testaments to our history, or “edit” them to be more culturally sensitive?
Next up: Stephanie Kallos’ 2015 novel Language Arts
Just looking at that link put the song back in my head. Thank you.
I’m of the “leave them as-is” school of thought, but with some caveats. I think if the author or the author’s estate wish to make a change to the text, then that’s within their rights. If an adaptation makes changes from the original text for the purposes of making it less offensive (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I’m looking at you), I’m mostly ok with that as well. Beyond that, though, I am of the opinion that the books ought to be left alone.
As a historian of American slavery, this is a question that comes up a lot, especially in teaching undergraduates. Should we avoid or somehow modify derogatory and offensive words that appear in the documents that we uncover or present to our students? Once when I was reading a particularly racist pro-slavery text for a grad school paper I was writing, I remember shaking at how vile it was. Even though I had read plenty of other pro-slavery documents before, I couldn’t fathom the depth of this man’s hatred of African Americans. But as I unpacked his arguments, I came to a better understanding of how he, and others like him, thought at the time.
I’m against modifying or changing texts to tone down the racist elements. They are reflective of the era in which they were written and if properly contextualized can provide a means to understand how and why people acted and thought in the past–not that we have to agree with them, of course.
Gone with the Wind is so virulently racist and entrenched in Lost Cause mythology about kindly plantation owners and gentle childlike slaves that I shudder any time anyone lists it as their favorite book or film.
Leave it as is. I read Too Many Cooks last month and struggled with the racist language, but that – my enjoyment of the novel – doesn’t justify its cleansing. I can imagine that some in publishing would have a differing view if they perceived a clean version as being more marketable (e.g., the clean Huckleberry Finn, which I think was a thing at some point).
I also agree that these books and movies should be kept as they were. The fact that seeing the n-word in text is jarring is good, it shows we have advanced. As Chris said above, leaving the words in makes us ask important questions like “Why did they think this way?” and “What can we do to prevent it from happening again?”. We can’t sanitize history because of the bad things that were done. We can eliminate these words from our use and future generations use. But we shouldn’t change the past when these words were used.
My preference is to leave things as they are. Interestingly enough Stout will bring back the main black character in “Too Many Cooks” (Paul Whipple) in a later work “A Right to Die” where Whipple is now middle age, a professor, and owes his inspiration to Wolfe’s words to him when he was a waiter in To Many Cooks. I think that if you start “cleaning up” texts then you run the risk of also covering up the past. You see in the older works exactly what the social settings were at the time.
I read A Right to Die earlier this year, but of course didn’t know the background. It was a pleasant surprise to run into Whipple again, even though I read them in the wrong order.
Never edit the text.. IF you are ever going to debate any document, you must start from the original source material.
Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe were the first mysteries I read as a child. I could not get through a Erle Stanley Gardner at all. As offensive as the language is today, and always was to this southern lady, I think it should be left as it is, but addressed in a preface about the period in our history. The term was never used in my home but we were likely an exception. I had a small crush on Archie Goodwin at age 9 or 10.
Do you have the “Nero Wolfe Cookbook?” If not let me know, I’ve got two copies, I’ll send you one.
It’s a fascinating question. I agree with the “let it stand” folks, if perhaps not for the same reason. Keeping in mind all the arguments on slippery slope and reductio ad absurdum, I think it’s a dangerous road to start down, as argued by the social media reactions to Trump’s call to register Muslims. If we rewrite to remove the n-word, what do we next turn our attention to?
I personally believe the original content should be retained, but if a decision is made to update the language, it’s important that the original still exist as a point of discussion. When the big debate happened around Huck Finn a few years ago, my argument was that the book gets to be not only great literature, but also a good entry point into a difficult conversation.
In the spirit of recent TV commercials, I’m going to throw in a blatant Star Wars tie-in: the outrage at George Lucas for the (terrible) “updates” to the original Trilogy is intensified in that you can ONLY get the updated versions; the classic, unedited versions are not available.
TL/DR Version: Create updated versions all you want, mark them as such, but have the original piece of art available.