How To Reckon With Your Problematic Faves, Pt. 1

Is it better to be righteous or right?

I really hate the term problematic.

Or, if we want to get cute about it: I find the term problematic to be problematic. 

My reasons are probably best articulated in this article from the Atlantic, the tl;dr version of which is: the term problematic has become a way of labeling something as objectionable without having to go through all the bother of defining what it is you’re objecting to. 

Which brings us to Roald Dahl. 

Roald Dahl’s UK publisher recently edited his books to make them more inclusive. There was, of course, backlash, after which the publishers announced they will now be selling both the edited versions, and the “classic” editions (if nothing else, you have to admire the corporate hustle of it all).

I’m honestly not all that interested in the changes themselves. As a writer, I obviously object to the idea that people should put words in the mouths of dead authors. Especially words that, in the case of many of these edits, don’t match the original meter of the rhymes they’re replacing, and don’t offer much in the way of an organizing ethic beyond a frantic covering of bases. But better writers than I have written explanations of why they are both silly and counterproductive to their stated goal of inclusiveness––I recommend Lincoln Michel, a reliably excellent diagnoser of cultural complaints.

What I am interested in is the questions that underpin them: what does it mean for a book to be problematic, and how do we reckon with books that are?

To find out, let’s revisit the term problematic. In modern parlance, it is used most often as a diagnosis: This, it says, has been deemed problematic, and thus we must dispense with it. It’s also, as Bejan points out, often a shorthand to avoid having to say more polarizing words: racism and misogyny, for instance, both of which have been (fairly) leveled against Dahl’s work. But the original meaning was more of a conversation starter: it referred, quite sensibly, to something pertaining to a problem, and was used to describe situations that were doubtful, questionable, uncertain, or unsettled.

So the first order of business, I would argue, in reckoning with a problematic book is to take the time to articulate what its actual problems are.

If Dahl’s publishers ever attempted to do so, they haven’t chosen to share that thinking with the public. Neither of the two explanations I found from Dahl’s publishers shed much light on the matter.

First, the introduction to the new editions:

“Words matter. The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvelous characters. This book was written many years ago and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”

And second, in response to the backlash:

“We've listened to the debate over the past week, which has reaffirmed the extraordinary power of Roald Dahl's books and the very real questions around how stories from another era can be kept relevant for each new generation.”

For a company that apparently believes that words matter, both of these statements are remarkably vague. Nowhere does it explain what language is being reviewed, the context for why it is being reviewed, or by what standards it is being judged to ensure that it can be enjoyed by all. The second one in particular is a masterpiece of corporate nothing-speak, somehow managing to avoid both defining the problems with Dahl’s work, and the problems with the edits that were meant to rectify them. Instead, it relies on the classic covers-all-manner-of-sins phrase that companies the world over use to avoid talking directly about issues like racism and misogyny: relevant. 

The edits themselves reveal the problems with this kind of surface-level thinking. When the concern is about staying relevant (aka: continuing to make money), instead of naming and addressing actual problems, the solutions that are offered will almost always be meaningless. To wit: replacing the phrase “enormously fat” with “enormous” as a descriptor for Augustus Gloop is hardly a victory for the body positivity movement, given that his character arc still ends with him getting semi-drowned in a chocolate river for his crime of “gluttony” (it is a literal factory of made of candy!! What did Willy Wonka expect, bringing a child to a chocolate river??)

Even if the reasoning behind these edits had been more thoughtful, they probably would have failed. You can’t simply excise the problematic from Dahl’s work, or anyone else’s, because they are a reflection of the perspective of the writer who wrote them. Roald Dahl was, among other things, an unapologetic anti-Semite whose work, while it made many children feel seen, also trafficked in racist and misogynist tropes. We can’t pretend like his work can be divorced from that perspective, simply by doing a Find+Replace for a few key words or phrases.

We’ve established that editing a dead author’s work after the fact to make it less problematic for modern readers is probably a bad idea. What are our other options?

One option that is both easier and cheaper than editing the books themselves: don’t read them. You will find no arguments from me, if that’s your preference. The world is wide, and there is a lot out there to read that doesn’t involve wading your way through racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and a general disdain for fat people.

But I’m a writer, and I believe that books––even problematic books––can teach us something about the world we live in. 

Let’s take, as an example, E.M. Forster’s Passage to India, a book that is entirely about the morally corrosive effect of British colonialism. Forster himself was a rabid opponent of colonialism. But because he, like Dahl, was a product of his race, his class, his country, and his time, the narrative also occasionally engages in the kind of orientalism to which he is writing in opposition.

You could, of course, avoid reading Passage to India, and you wouldn’t be wrong to do so. If you want to understand the impacts of colonialism on the actual people of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, there are better books you can read (Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie comes to mind). But if you want to understand the kind of contaminated mindset that justified centuries of brutal colonialism, I can’t think of many better examples than Forster’s.

So where does that leave us, then? If we’re not going to scrub problematic books of their offensive passages and we’re not going to toss them into the garbage heap of historical irrelevance, what do we do with them?

Treat them like what they are: problematic. Not in the sense that they are to be categorized and then either fixed or discarded, but in the actual, literal sense: as problems worth reckoning with.

When it comes to children’s books like Dahl’s, encountering the problematic in books can be a way of modeling for children how to name things like racism or misogyny when we see them, open up the conversation for them to ask questions, and hopefully, in the process, make them more alert to other places where these forces might show up in their lives or in the media they consume.

But the same can be true for adults. Two recent examples of writers reckoning with very famous and occasionally problematic works of the American canon––Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, and The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald––offer a beautiful model for how to be in conversation with the problematic in our books.

Moby Dick, a delightfully bat-shit masterpiece that is obsessed with race (among other things, including, famously, whale anatomy), was as radical for its time as it is occasionally problematic for this one. From the get-go, the narrator, Ishmael, is categorizing people into races, pointing out examples of racism, and exhorting the inherent equality of the races––all while gleefully engaging in racist stereotypes. As Gabrielle Bellot writes:

“Moby Dick is about many things, and racism is very much one of those, yet it is rarely discussed as a book about race. In many ways, it is a template for Melville’s, and our, America: a world populated as much with gestures towards racial equality as with casual racist assumptions.”

It’s tempting to disregard the racist elements, and pay attention only to the feel-good parts about racial equality. But to do so would be to engage in Bridgerton-like fantastical thinking: fun for an escape, or to make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately communicating nothing true about the actual world we live in. Better to read it as it is, in all its contradictions, and try to find meaning within them, as Bellot does. “Ultimately, Melville leaves us with a text that is deeply, inescapably complicated,” she writes in her conclusion. “It is America itself, then and now, where no single message about racial justice dominates.”

That’s one way of meeting the problematic in our books: considering it in all of its context and complexity, and trying to understand what it can tell us about the world we live in. Another way is to find new meaning in the text by radically reimagining it.

This strategy will be familiar to fan fiction writers the world over, who have built an industry out of writing representation (especially queer representation) into the gaps of texts. But it can also be a way of conversing with a text directly without the need to change or add to it, as Alonzo Vereen did in reimagining The Great Gatsby. 

The titular Jay Gatsby is, as Vereen points out, unraced in the novel. So when faced with the task of engaging a crowd of unimpressed students on F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s work, he asked them a question, based on Carlyle Van Thompson’s assertion that Jay Gatsby might be read as a Black character who passes for white: what if Gatsby wasn’t white? How would that change our reading of the novel?

“Suddenly they were invested. They began scouring the novel for evidence of Gatsby’s race. They were forced to look up words they didn’t know, in the hope that those words would yield more clues. The students parsed intricate sentences down to their essence to extrapolate a clear meaning. And soon they began probing for deeper interpretations…They delved more deeply into The Great Gatsby than they did into any other text I taught during those years— more deeply, according to some, than they did into any book in any school year. In sifting through pages and pages of textual evidence, they found room for themselves in one of America’s greatest novels—indeed, in American culture.”

It would have been easier for these students to dismiss the novel and its occasional racist asides as irrelevant (and listen, if anyone ever deserved to be canceled, it’s Tom Buchanan). But instead, they showed up and did the work of reexamining long-held assumptions––in this case, that every character whose race isn’t mentioned is white––and being curious about other possible interpretations. And they were rewarded for that work, by excavating meaning from a book they thought was irrelevant. 

Both of these models take work: the willingness to delve into the history and context of our books, the curiosity to imagine new interpretations of them. But it’s work worth doing, not just because it can help us understand ourselves. Noticing the contradictions in Passage to India can make us more alert to our own cultural blind spots. Considering the limitations of Melville’s conceptions of race can encourage us to wonder about where our own conceptions of race might be limited. Questioning our assumptions about The Great Gatsby and imagining new interpretations can help us look at history in a new way, and get a better sense of our own relationship to it. And doing all of these things makes us better and more nimble at doing exactly what reading is meant to help us do: thinking outside of our own perspective.

As Teresa Bejan writes: “Problematic may show our students and readers how to be—or rather how to sound—righteous. But it does not encourage learning or reflection on how to be right.” Labeling a book as problematic, and then either scrubbing it of anything that might possibly meet that description or tossing it in the garbage heap of irrelevance, can make us feel like we’re on the right side of history. But it doesn’t teach us anything about our actual histories, or our present, much less how to build better, less problematic futures. To do that, we have to be willing to do more than simply call out a book’s problems: we have to be willing to reckon with them.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I will attempt to reckon in action with my own problematic fave: The Charioteer, by Mary Renault.