Joseph Harker: ‘Changing the words can bring a story into line with the original intention’

The Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, says he would never remove offensive words from the title of an artwork on display in his gallery. His views contrast with those of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has changed the titles of several of its paintings to take account of modern sensibilities. For example, Young Negro Girl, painted around 1900 by the Dutch artist Simon Maris, has been retitled Young Girl Holding a Fan. Serota says he would only do this if the artist gave permisison to do so – which means that for historic art he’d do nothing.

We should tread with extreme caution before taking such a drastic step as renaming art, and there’s a clear danger of oversensitivity in making any decision. But for Serota to say “never” is wrong. There are many words and phrases which, while accepted in their day, are clearly insulting and derogatory in the modern context and distort or confuse our understanding of the art itself.

For example, when Huckleberry Finn was republished a few years ago its liberal use of the N-word was replaced with the word “slave”. In the white-supremacist era in which the book was written, just 20 years after the abolition of slavery, the N-word was clearly acceptable among its mainly white readership. The story’s underlying liberal message, though, could be lost if the modern reader was distracted by language which, today, is only used by bigots. In fact, if the original story wasn’t meant to be hate-filled, changing the words can actually bring it into line with the original intention rather than distorting it with words now out of context.

Stephen Moss: ‘Wrenching art from its context is a barrier to seeing and thinking’

That’s a very clever argument on Huck Finn – bringing the book more into line with what Mark Twain intended. But ultimately I don’t buy it. We have no right to change any of the original words written by the author – unless we present the book as a translation or adaptation. One of the things we should treasure about a book is that it is a time capsule that preserves the way an age thought about itself. Once we start tinkering with it to bring it up to date, we lose much of what makes it unique and valuable in the first place.

If we start by censoring Twain, where do we stop? Clearly, The Merchant of Venice is antisemitic. Do we rewrite it or just not stage it? Fagin in Oliver Twist is another antisemitic caricature. Another rewrite. And what on earth do we do with all the antisemitic lines in the poetry of TS Eliot? “The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs.” Out with the blue pencil. But that way madness lies, because once you’ve started, where do you stop? Everything written before our conformist PC age is fair game.

As for works of art, who cares what they’re called? Gallery-goers need to get thicker skins. Gauguin’s entire oeuvre is western colonialist, his depictions of Tahitians exploitative and patronising, but that doesn’t mean we ignore him or write off his work. We judge it in its context. Censorship and wrenching art from its original context are barriers to seeing and thinking.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Gauguin’s Vairaumati te ioa (Her Name is Vairaumati, 1892). Photograph: Georgios Kefalas/EPA

JH: Stephen, you’re missing the point. If art really does seek to stereotype or demonise certain groups or genders then, yes, we do have to think about whether we want to display, publish or broadcast it. If the Merchant of Venice had little artistic value we’d probably have ditched it decades ago – and even today it’s worth evaluating whether we still consider its antisemitism to be a secondary concern.

These are issues of the storyline and the essence of the work. With Huckleberry Finn it’s simply about a particular word, which can easily be replaced without losing the original meaning. This point is made even more clearly if you consider Agatha Christie’s original work 10 Little N—rs (later reprinted as both 10 Little Indians and as And Then There Were None). The book itself is a very good murder mystery – the title is taken from an old nursery rhyme – but it loses nothing by having its name changed. It merely makes the novel accessible to modern generations in the way the original version would never be.

SM: I’m afraid I’m going to be ultra-purist here, Joseph. I don’t want anything in the original changed on principle, because once you allow something to be doctored I think you open a Pandora’s box. It is what it is: a product of its time. I notice that Ronald Firbank’s Prancing Nigger, published in 1924, is still sold under that title. How come one rule has been applied to Christie and another to Firbank? Oddly, Firbank called the book Sorrow in Sunlight and it was the American publisher who opted for the title that we would now see as offensive.

At the heart of my objection to this renaming and revising of the past is the moral superiority we adopt. What gives us the right to edit the past? It’s the same with all those ludicrous apologies – for slavery or the Highland clearances or the destruction of native Americans. We can’t change the past and there’s no point trying to pass moral judgment; all we can do is try to understand what happened and why. Start editing the past and it becomes less easy to deconstruct. We have to see it for what it was, artistic warts and all.

JH: No point in passing moral judgment on the past?? I’ll remember you on the next Holocaust Memorial Day. And in citing Firbank’s book title switch (albeit not in the direction I would advocate) you show that in some circumstances you’re OK with name changes. So why get so hung up on this?

In truth, we rarely see anything “warts and all”. Everything is edited in some way, for the dominant sensibilities of the time – be they 19th-century Victorian or 21st-century Elizabethan. A name change, with some kind of footnote acknowledging the original, gives us the best of both worlds: we can understand the era in which the artwork was created and bring it to a wider public. Everyone wins. Why let ultra-pedantry get in the way of that?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Wagner is still effectively banned in Israel because of his antisemitism and Hitler’s adoration of his music.’ Photograph: Edward Gooch/Getty Images

SM: Ah, a “footnote acknowledging the original”. I feel I have wrung a concession from you. So we have the allegedly offensive words as if they are in very small type. Holocaust Memorial Day is a red herring: that is a necessary evocation of a genocide and a means of educating later generations as to what the Nazis were capable of. Yes, perhaps there is an element of moral judgment, but it is most powerful – as always - when it doesn’t harangue but merely shows and bears witness. It is a long way from that dignified memorial to changing the names of works of art, or not putting on productions of Wagner (still effectively banned in Israel) because of Wagner’s antisemitism and Hitler’s adoration of his music.

You are right that every age rewrites the past, but isn’t that another reason for not renaming? What we find offensive today might not be found offensive tomorrow. Hasn’t the word “queer” been appropriated by the very group that it was once used against? Let the past be exactly that – past. Don’t fiddle with it, or wish it wasn’t the way it was. Give people more credit than to suggest that somehow their minds could be poisoned from contact with the words, images and thoughts peddled in the past. That’s what Hitler did, with his suppression and reviling of “degenerate” art, and Stalin too, with his veneration of mythic representations of happy, smiling peasants.

What starts as relabelling and re-editing can end up as the official privileging of certain points of view. Better to leave what is done unchanged and let the public make their own minds up. As you said about The Merchant of Venice, if a work of art has lasting merit, its anachronistic language will be forgiven. Indeed, we might appreciate the writer all the more for being able to produce great art in a society riven with such prejudice.