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Home/Featured/Bruce Pardy: Agatha Christie Revisions are the Writing on the Wall

Bruce Pardy: Agatha Christie Revisions are the Writing on the Wall

Literary Revisionism is No Accident

Written by Bruce Pardy | Saturday, April 29, 2023

Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time. Which is precisely why her books are ideal for such treatment. Literature, along with other popular arts like music and movies, is called “culture” for a reason. It expresses narratives that tell societies who they are. In 2023, we are social justice nihilists, driven by cultural self-hate and morally panicked about any representation of historical prejudice.

 

Last week The Telegraph reported that Agatha Christie’s novels are being sanitized for re-release. HarperCollins, their publisher, is removing references to physique, race and ethnicity in new editions of Miss Marple and selected Poirot novels. Christie joins Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming on the list of dead literary icons whose works have met similar fates in recent weeks. Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss and Mark Twain have been curbed in other ways. If it seems like small potatoes, you may be missing the big picture. When publishers defile literature, you know the writing is on the wall.

These rewrites are not censorship, at least not in the legal sense. Governments don’t need to order it. Publishers are choosing to sanitize their literary icons on their own. Anyone who holds copyright can alter a work as they please, especially when dead authors are not around to object. Just as Christie had no obligation to write her books in the first place and no publisher was required to print and sell them, so these publishers today have no legal duty to reprint them in their original form.Why would they want to change them? After all, Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time. Which is precisely why her books are ideal for such treatment. Literature, along with other popular arts like music and movies, is called “culture” for a reason. It expresses narratives that tell societies who they are. In 2023, we are social justice nihilists, driven by cultural self-hate and morally panicked about any representation of historical prejudice.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but in high school the best thing I did for my education was skip French class to read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. In Bradbury’s dystopia, firemen don’t put out fires, but make them to burn books. “Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces,” Bradbury prophetically wrote. “Stand back from the centrifuge.”
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