The satirist who accidentally predicted Roald Dahl-gate
Like many satirists, James Finn Garner has become something of an accidental prophet. In the 1990s he published three volumes of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories – classic fairytales and stories rewritten to suit modern mores, including “The Duckling That Was Judged On Its Personal Merits and Not On Its Physical Appearance” and “The Three Codependent Goats Gruff”. The books were hugely popular – even Bill and Hillary Clinton endorsed them - and have sold more than three million copies worldwide.
In Garner’s version of Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf dresses up as Grandma because his “status outside society had freed him from slavish adherence to linear, Western-style thought” and he is “unhampered by rigid, traditionalist notions of what was masculine and feminine”. Garner was exaggerating the influence of PC on children’s publishing for comic effect; but his burlesques now turn out to have a pre-echo of reality, with Puffin Books having hired “Inclusion Ambassadors” to rejig Roald Dahl’s books for our easily offended times.
Talking to Garner, who lives in Chicago, over the phone, I ask him how it feels to be hailed as a prophet. “Yeah, my mother thought I would never amount to anything and here I am! I know publishing has always been a mealy-mouthed industry, but now I have writer friends whose books get sent out to sensitivity readers. It’s really quite amazing that [political correctness] is still floating around after all this time.”
Garner, 62, recalls that two things prompted him to come up with the concept of the Bedtime Stories back in 1994. “One was a speech code that was implemented at my alma mater, the University of Michigan – you could be reprimanded for talking about certain topics in class. The other was an article I found in The New Republic talking about political correctness in the kindergarten classroom. A group of educators were saying: ‘If we read Cinderella to our class, we should interrupt and say things like: “Don’t you think Cinderella shouldn’t wait around for a man and should be more interested in being fulfilled in her career?’”
“I decided fairytales were a really ripe way to explore political correctness because everyone’s ugly or fat or beautiful – all these extreme descriptions – the fun was in the challenge of: how can you get to the end of the story without offending somebody?”
At the time James Garner was a professional comedian in Chicago (he added the Finn, a maternal family name, to distinguish himself from the star of The Rockford Files) and first performed the stories as a cabaret host filling in time between the acts. He steeped himself in the lexicon of PC by reading handbooks such as The Elements of Non-Sexist Usage.
His idea for a book was initially turned down by 27 publishers, some worried about causing offence. “And then others said, ‘PC has peaked, it’s over now’. I thought, ‘Really, man, you’ve got a lot of faith in people.’”
The books were so successful, Garner reckons, not because the world is full of frothing PC-gone-mad types but because “so many people were worrying about how they could be sensitive to other people’s backgrounds and sensitivities – trying to be good neighbours, basically – and so they related to the humour, which was pretty gentle I think.”
Garner is suspicious of those who make media careers for themselves by denouncing anything they don’t like as “woke” – “the word ‘woke’ is carrying a whole lot more weight than ‘politically correct’ ever did” – and thinks the concerted effort by the American Right to ban books they don’t approve of is a more serious threat than PC.
“But I do think [the Left] have better priorities to attend to, [instead of] screaming that somebody wrote a book from the perspective of somebody who’s not of their own cultural background, which is just a big pat on their own back and a big waste of time.”
He loathes any form of censorship. “If you cut out references from Roald Dahl about, say, Kipling, it’s like you’re forgetting who Roald Dahl is – for better or worse, he is who he is. I’ve always loved Roald Dahl even when he offends me. I find his offensiveness bracing and hilarious, but then I like being offended.”
Dahl’s publishers “want his irreverence but they don’t want all of it. If you make a movie and you rewrite it that’s fine, but if you’re going back into the books and snipping pieces out, where do you stop? If you do that with Huckleberry Finn, start sanitising the language, you lose the world that Mark Twain grew up in. It may be tough to read, but if you’re not offended at least a couple of times a day by what you read, you’re not reading widely enough.”
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: 25th Anniversary Edition is published by Souvenir Press
