Literature and Censorship: Who Does It Benefit and Where Does It End

Imagine you are in a dimly lit library. A door behind you slides open. Behind it is a single gelatinous person bulging through an office chair, hunched over a pile of old books and a laptop. His skin is almost translucent. His hair is dirty and filled with bits of fried chicken. Tomorrow, all of this description will be deemed offensive to translucent-skinned people who identify as bulging adjacent, so reread it now and enjoy it while you can. He is biting into a large jam doughnut. The jam is dark red and thick like blood. It falls onto the pages of a very rare copy of Alice In Wonderland. In fact, the jam has landed precisely on the Wafer/Water misprint which makes this early edition of the book so valuable. It is ruined.

Welcome to the 21st century. We’ve all decided that burning books is (mostly) bad, so we’ve got a new solution for literature we don’t like. We change it.

The censorious worker is unaware of your presence, engrossed in his activity.

“Hmm, a cake labeled EAT ME? Offensive. Some people don’t have cakes,” the person says. He bites into a giant slice of Black Forest gateau and types a new passage on the laptop. He pauses, reaching a pile of Spring Rolls and Tarka Dhals. After eating the rolls and dhals, he reaches for a Roald Dhal, specifically, Matilda.

Now, a New York cheesecake in hand, the censorious creature grapples with the aging tome. The book falls open at the cake scene. “No! This is horrific!” he says. A lanyard escapes from underneath an unexplained part of him and you read his name.

Slobworth.

The offending scene is redacted, replaced instead by a laborious passage that carefully patronizes the reader into a stupor, explaining that Miss Trunchbull only fed the boy so aggressively because she wanted him to become his true, brave, authentic, powerful, self.

Slobworth then turns his attention to Miss Trunchbull herself. He gropes in a stationery drawer for his stickers. The word ‘female’ is covered by stickers with the word ‘woman’ on them. Slobworth smiles. He likes stickers.

After Slobworth is finished with Matilda, he moves over to The, a story about a little boy child who visits a [redacted] [redacted] after winning being gifted a [redacted] [redacted].

(In the future, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has since had offensive words removed from its title. It is now called THE. The name Charlie was removed because it is a bad drug. And was removed because it implies some people have more than others. Chocolate was removed because it is expensive and not everyone can eat it. Factory was removed due to connotations of unsafe working conditions. Golden was removed because it implies wealth, which some people don’t have. Ticket was removed because not everyone has one).

Slobworth takes a scalpel to the book, etching around each instance of the word ‘fat’. Once he is done, he sprinkles the words onto a giant banana split and eats it. This activity makes him [redacted]. Being [redacted] can lead to some health problems such as [redacted]. But it can also make you really beautiful, and brave.

At this point you notice an energy drink teetering atop a pile of books marked ‘to be softened’. You realize that this is the Chekov’s gun [non-violent friendship device] of this story and commit it to memory.

You have been no-platformed and you must scream. Slobworth is chiseling away, not just at a giant chocolate rabbit that you didn’t notice earlier, but at the very fabric of literature, and by proxy, reality. You wonder if this desperation to alter the past has some deeper psychological reasoning behind it, but then you remember you are in a satirical article about censorship and don’t have the time to think about it right now.

Finally, Slobworth notices you. “Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right,” Slobworth explains. This is the only line from literature that he has agreed to keep, the only one he respects.

“Oh my god, that’s literally 1984,” you reply.

Classic books, one by one, are having their prose smoothed down, modernized, enblandened.

This image is in black and white, which is also probably not okay.

Slobworth turns the laptop screen to face you. On the screen is a heavily edited quote by Salman Rushdie.

“Roald Dahl was no angel but [and] this is absurd censorship [beautiful editing]. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed [proud]. [And it is good to be proud of yourself when you change history. It is good to be proud. Everyone should be proud. History does not exist. There are many reasons why someone might be proud. Being proud is nice.]”

“You can’t do that,” you say, “That’s not the real quote.”

“The ‘real’ quote was harmful,” Slobworth claims.

“Why did you put air quotes around the word real?” You ask.

“Because nothing is real without my permission.”

“That’s gaslighting.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s gaslighting.”

“It’s brave.”

Realizing you will never agree, you leap forward and take the energy drink, pouring it over the laptop. But the damage is done, soon there will be children reading the softened versions. Who does this benefit? And where does it end?