Re-Writing Democracy

Written By Francesco Vecchi
Re-Writing Democracy

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a RadioFrance emission dealing with the delicate subject of re-writing classics to adapt them to the contemporary sensibility. In particular, the debate was inspired by the recent re-publications of Roald Dahl’s and Ian Fleming’s novels and short stories with relevant editorial interventions, e.g. the removal of racist, sexist, and bodyshaming expressions. Both operations were authorised by influential cultural societies related to the conservation of the authors’ heritage, i.e. the Roald Dahl Story Company and the Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. Nevertheless, an intellectual debate inevitably burst.

In fact, the French cultural panorama hastened the British literary scene. In the last twenty years, Gide’s masterpiece The Immoralist has received strong criticism for its implicit praise of pedophilia, while Céline’s Pamphlets republication by Gallimard was blocked twice because of the author’s explicit allegiance to anti-semitist and racist positions. Therefore, it is not surprising that literary censorship is a cogent topic in the French cultural arena. 

However, the emission hosted two counterparts. On the one hand, Marc Weitzmann (writer and producer of France Culture “Signes des temps” emission) thought that textually modifying works that were willfully approved by their authors means killing the very essence of culture. He argued that adapting their works to the supposed contemporary ethical stance equals performing censorship, thus contradicting what culture should be: freedom of thought, critical spirit, impartial study and contextualisation, as well as confrontation with different standpoints. 

On the other hand, Tiphanie Samoyault (essayist, translator, and literary critic, director of studies at EHESS) said that re-writing the classics adapting their messages and forms to new social needs is a common practice in literary history. Every literary translation is indeed an act of rewriting and customising the original text for a different cultural context. She also added that, when it comes to modifying literature, a distinction must be drawn between  ‘high-literature’, whose emancipatory power must be protected from the cultural frameworks it is produced in; and ‘mass literature’ (classics included), whose values are ‘normative’ and must then be adapted to contemporary society. 

Now, both are partially right and partially wrong. Weitzmann’s position shows an ‘illuministic attitude’ and assumes that reason works independently from the (cultural) context, which has been severally contradicted by neuroscience, neurobiology, and sociology. Nevertheless, his view of culture as the ability to critically address one’s own psychological frames and prejudices to find common ground with other traditions, remains the best definition of democratic and inclusive culture. Conversely, Samoyault is broadly right in remarking how literature has always been concerned with adaptation and not just original creation (which is, in fact, a legacy of romanticism). On the contrary, her assumption that literary classics play a normative role in society is questionable, since  it denotes a classist and patronising attitude.

Actually, Samoyault's remarks on literary re-writing are slanted, too. It is true that many classics have been copiously re-written, re-interpreted, and modified to fit modern times, sometimes giving birth to new masterpieces. Just to give a few examples, this is the case of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Corneille’s Medea, Molière’s Don Juan, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and many others. And think about the impressive fortune of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, or Romeo and Juliet. Occasionally, the rewriting process explicitly questions the euro-centric and white-suprematist implications of some Western renowned authors, as in Jean Rhys’ White Sargasso Sea. This novel, indeed, reinterprets Jane Eyre from the postcolonial and feminist perspective of Antoinette Cosway, Mr. Rochester’s former Caribbean wife who was imprisoned in the lord’s attic because she was considered mad (1). 

So, what’s the point? In all these cases, those who performed the re-writing process not only did create new original works that resonated with their times; they are also accountable for their adaptations. On the contrary, Fleming and Dahl’s very texts have been censored, but their editors lay unknown. What is truly at stake is the extent to which  societies can impact on culture rewriting literature (and history), the authority whereby societies do so, and the democratic consensus that sustains such operation. 

Nevertheless, literary history has seen a few cases of literal re-writing. For instance, the Moralised Ovide - a 14th Century Christianised version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses - was one of the most popular books in the Middle Ages, and it deeply influenced the Renaissance artistic imagination. Most interestingly, in 1536, churchman Girolamo Malipiero published his Spiritualised Petrarch, a completely re-written version of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, that systematically changed any element related to the lascivious love for Laura to the sacred love for God. Most importantly, both literary operations were not claimed by their authors as their own works, but as the ‘right version’ of the classics that inspired them. Still, these occurrences are far minoritarian than the ‘original’ form of re-writing I mentioned above, and they are nowadays considered nothing more than interesting historical documents.

But let’s change the angle. Let’s accept, for the sake of discussion, Samoyault’s argument on the ‘normative value‘ of classics. A rapid gaze on literary history tells us that classics change over time, for the simple reason that some become outdated while some others suddenly fit better the current Weltanschauung. Speaking of Italian literature, in the 17th and 18th century Giovanni Della Casa was considered among the greatest italian poets of all times, while now he is hardly known or studied in compulsory education’s programs (where classics are supposed to shape the public opinion’s ethical attitude, according to Samoyault). And yet, he wrote the first version of Galateo. Therefore, why should we modify existing texts, when we could simply discuss their position in our cultural pantheon and, eventually, replace them with authors that look more compelling to our contemporary society, like Amélie Nothomb, Philip Roth, Ian McEwan, and Sulman Rushdie? Why don’t we rearrange public schools’ programs, moving from our West-centered canon to a more global perspective, making our students read postcolonial writers like Arundathi Roy, Dereck Walcott, Léopold Sédar Sengor, or Aimé Césaire (2)? And why don’t we rediscover, along with the dominating male tradition, female (and feminist) authors such as Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Grazia Deledda, Katherine Mansfield, and Annie Ernaux? And I could go on with queer writers like André Gide, Jean Genet, and many others. Is it a weakness of the will, a lack of capacity, or something else to blame? 

Well, I believe that there are two main reasons why the modern way of re-writing the classics has gained such popularity. First, from an economic point of view, culture is not living an expanding phase and it is definitively not a promising business nowadays, at least in Western countries. Less and less people claim they read books, and even when they do so, traditional publishing houses face the unfair competition of e-books that can be easily downloaded from the internet for free.(3) Especially, the cultural market is shrinking among ‘masses’ (disappointing the expectations of the 1960s and 1970s), whereas ‘strong readers’ averagely read slightly more books than in the past, even though their quantity is declining. Besides, the most relevant part of these shares are held by educated people who broadly agree with ‘wokism’ and inclusivity policies. As a consequence, publishers are more confident about investing in products that will certainly have a market, rather than in new original works that may turn into economic losses. 

Second, since the effects of long-lasting racism, sexism, queer discrimination and classism are still far from being overcome, there is a comprehensible desire to solve these problems. The question is whether the proposed solutions just delete the most shallow symptoms of discrimination, or they really shake the very roots of the problem. For instance, generally speaking, inclusive solutions are adopted either by academic institutions, or by private publishers, and they are fostered as democratic educational policies even though they always come from ‘above’ and bypass popular ratification. One may then wonder if changing the classics’ texts really aims at questioning the discriminating culture they supposedly shaped, or if it is just a strategy for legitimising the existing cultural powers.

As I said before, these observations can undermine the contemporary practice of re-writing even if we accept that school-classics have a normative value. But do they have one, or should they? While it is true that some classics have stopped resonating with our times, their celebration might be legitimated as they represent - allegedly, at least - the roots of our culture. In this way, they are interpreted as they were stepstones in the definition of a common national identity, conveyed through each state’s public education system. But then, if this identity is shifting, there is no reason why we should give classics any normative ethical value, which does not imply discarding them as a whole. On the contrary, being free from any ethical allegiance, classics would be enjoyed for their aesthetic value - their ‘beauty’ and their ability to emotionally affect the reader - and their emancipatory potential - by making the reader get in touch with the other. 

In truth, these forms of ‘cancel culture’ tend to overlap literary authority (aesthetic normativity) and socio-political authority (moral normativity). In other words, the supporters of cancel culture  use the re-writing of classics to exert cultural and ideological hegemony. On a side note, no surprise, indeed, that educational systems follow notion-based programs, instead of focusing on skill-development. But who says that reading these classics means agreeing with what they imply, or with the social model they depict? They could actually be read with a different scope: we could use specific texts to understand that language is a multidimensional entity evolving through time, and to contextualise works coming from a completely different age or culture. Indeed, the emphasis on  what to read, is making us lose sight of the importance of how to read, and in doing so, it may both use classics, or other forms of texts, even giving some tips of the contemporary cultural market. 

Accordingly, the education system should focus on fostering individual critical thinking and skills rather than adopting an ‘ideological’, ‘ethic’, or ‘normative’ stance, which is always complex to determine and implement in democratic systems. Conversely, if we agree that public education must transmit moral values and not only means for self-realization, who is going to choose what this identity is like? With whose consensus and support? As we are speaking of democracies, shouldn’t this reform be realised by a Parliament democratically elected, rather than a private company, or a scientific commission of scholars? If any ‘normative’ policy is needed, or desirable, then it cannot bypass popular ratification, because in a democratic context of popular sovereignty it would basically mean coercion. And if we want to change the very identity of democracies by law, we cannot do that without involving the only true sovereign: the people, and their democratic representatives.

References:

Francesco Vecchi
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