I didn’t read Roald Dahl growing up. I think they were too full of rude noises and overdrawn grotesque adults. Can a story be good when the adults are the worst?
I saw a snatch of the movie Matilda and was instantly enchanted, then read the book while babysitting years later. It brings up the point, what to do if everyone is dead to the magic of the world and the grown ups are being controlling or petty or mean or just disinterested. And it is the adults because they couldn’t live up to the world as it is. The adults have sin all grown up in them. They are completely themselves and are taken over in their self obsession.
Charlie is Inferno in a chocolate factory. Each child becomes the thing he is given to when the hand of restraint is removed. The glutton drowns in a chocolate river; the greedy explodes with her grasping.
My current favorite is the Fantastic Mr. Fox. Because Dahl does believe there can be great courage and resourcefulness in man, if the world is against him, if he has to save everyone, and if the man is actually a fox. Boggis and Bunce and Bean are as comedic, petty, and cruel as everyone is in their own sin.
They're destroying their own land for spite.
And they are matching in this by the valor of Mr. Fox working by tooth and claw to feed his family. They nearly starve to death – children included, but it all ends in the feast where fox serves rabbit carrots. Natural enemies become friends. And in the world of the English countryside the lion laid down with the lamb.
Dahl also wrote trash for adults, but I think – sight unseen, mind you – he began to resemble his own remarks. What is one to do after writing parables and Proverbs, fairy tales of the modern kind? He has broken innocence and does not know what to do but go full bore into filth himself. Tragic, he sails a fiery fetid sea.
Burn the pornography – yes.
But don’t change a word of the rest of it. Struggle. It is more true than it is comfortable.
Retroactive edits are a sneaky way to rewrite the past so it always validates our modern feelings. It leaves no room to see past our present errors. He isn’t so far in the past that he has joined the Clean Sea Breeze of the Centuries. We are in a room stuffy with ideology and someone popped open the window and Dahl floated in and everyone was irritated we didn’t keep the air envelope closed and turn on the AC.
Our only problem with Dahl is that we’ve grown up to look like his adults.
Further up and Further in
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