Robert J Binney weighs in on the controversy over updating Ian Fleming’s texts.

At least they’re being talked about.

Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl have both been in the headlines over cries of their material being “censored”; I don’t need to repeat the news. Despite the similarities of the stories, the issues – and the results – are not the same. This may seem hypocritical, but I believe people were right to cry foul at Dahl – and that the Fleming folks are right on.

First off, in both cases it’s a far cry from “censorship”. No legal entity forced these changes, and the only jackbooted thugs are in the imaginations, limited they may be, of the pearl-clutching pundits.

The edits to both authors’ work were undertaken by their rightsholders. I like to take things at face value, and though I’m not a lawyer, it seems to me that these are the people that actually hold the rights to the work. That is, they can do what they want with it. And the public backlash – including from the queen consort – prompted Dahl’s team to withdraw the changes.

Ian Fleming Publications has indicated no sense of backing down.

Regardless of who you agree with in this many-sided debate, the issues are different. At its core, the Dahl uproar is about censoring, er, redacting ideas, whereas the James Bond debate is about editing words. The concepts that Dahl wrote about are apparently so potentially upsetting to hypothetical victims that do not have the ability to express their own agency, that the very thoughts have to be excised.

Destruction such as this eliminates the very subversiveness of the work, but also, ironically, the very idea of consequences that he writes about. As well-intentioned as these editors may have been, removing mean-spiritedness helps no one. There is no fundamental right not to be offended – sticks and stones and all that. It’s unfortunate that someone might get their feelings hurt, but that’s an unfortunate part of life.

This is the kind of silly thought-policing that ignites overblown reactionaries who then – rightfully, in this case – can toss bombs at how asinine identity politics has become. Such bubble-wrapped sensitivity makes a mockery of real, difficult discussions we should be having.

Which brings us to Bond. Making any change to a published is a slippery slope, but the footing here is surer.

For all Ian Fleming’s character flaws – a famously misogynistic drunk with an inferiority complex – he was probably no more or no less “racist” than any other British effete of the 1950’s; that is to say, he was ignorant and bigoted, but not necessarily hateful. And the edits proposed by Fleming Publications don’t change the tone or the meaning of his work. From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of the changes simply omit “the N-Word”. That’s it. And that’s why I’m okay with this.

Fleming wasn’t using that language as a means to hurt or oppress, but that is what those words mean now. Then, it was an unfortunate label that was marginally acceptable; now, the only use of such vocabulary is to be harmful. That wasn’t his intent. By keeping the writing as is, it overlays a worldview that is inconsistent with the novels themselves.

Lots of books update archaic language in subsequent editions – even the King James Bible was a rewrite for modern audiences.

Literary Bond is still a brute and a bully, an anti-Asian colonizer who repeatedly expresses the idea that women like to be forced; in other words, no one is sanitizing the stories or the characters. They’ve changed a word.

Could the publisher have simply printed a modern-day disclaimer at the start, like the revised title card preceding Gone with the Wind? It comes back down to “ideas” versus “language”; any right-minded person finds the language in Live and Let Die jarring. The words themselves become a distraction, become the story. That’s not right.

This seems to be the right call, and people protesting it are either disingenuous, or get a secret (or not-so-secret) thrill at using hateful language.

It’s not an easy decision, and there never will be clear guidelines on the right way and the wrong way to balance art and the past. There’s a continuum between doing nothing and erasing the sins of the past. The Dahl folks seem to have moved much farther toward the dangerous end of that continuum.

Nevertheless, the market did what markets are supposed to do; they’re backtracking. That’s the exact opposite of censorship.

Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming will always be linked – friends and rivals from their time together in the war until long after Fleming died, and Dahl adapted several of his works for the screen. Fleming, who constantly tinkered with his work even after publishing, probably wouldn’t care about these edits; he’d much rather pour a stiff drink, sit down, and listen to Dahl rant. I can only imagine how gleefully offensive that would be.

Robert J Binney is a writer in Seattle. He has been a James Bond fan since watching Thunderball with his dad on the ABC Sunday Night movie in 1974. You can find him on twitter at @RJBThinks.