Enid Blyton. Reissues with controversy?

This article is not current because Reissues of Enid Blyton's classics have been in bookstores for a while. First came the original two-volume compilations on the most famous childhood boarding schools of many girls like me: Malory Towers y Casa Particular in Santa Clara. Then the new editions of these collections and also those of The five.

I keep about four or five books of The fiveOne of them is in the photo, and I was fortunate that a few years ago they gave me those two volumes that I mentioned. I devoured them in one summer, well into my forties. At the time there was talk of the adaptations of his texts to the new politically correct times of today. The first to do them were the British, of course. But it was not long ago that I read this article. And anyway ...

I try to be just and minimally concerned (a matter of principle and a certain hives that I suffer) when I see the terms "correctness" and "politics" in the same sentence. If, in addition, the correction is linguistic, type "housing solutions", the urticaria leads me to allergies of different degrees. So I am careful before any kind of pirouette or linguistic makeup that I am.

I read Blyton -or the Tintin comics (which also dropped his own a while ago) - when we were not so correct and language was not a political instrument as it is now. I read it as a girl in the seventies and eighties, from a town of La Mancha and from a school of nuns. And in La Mancha we are ordinary people, like the terroir.

So at nine, ten or eleven years old, logically one reads with no other approach than to spend (or not) a good time with that reading. Y I had the best moments with the gingerbread cakes, the evening excursions, the lacrosse and the thousand and one messes, mischief and tricks that the English girls of Santa Clara and Torres de Malory made to each other. And I hid in all the caves and investigated all the mysteries of Kirrin accompanying Jorge, his cousins ​​and their dog Tim on their adventures.

I will add that I had the same fun with Richmal Crompton's William Brown, another contemporary British Blyton. I inherited a book of his that was from my father and it fascinated me. Later they gave me more. I imagine that now Guillermo Brown is the most politically incorrect child there can be.

Anyway, the fact is that one gets older, keep reading and learns that misogyny or racism abound in Blyton's books. Besides, her literary quality was doubtful and that is why she was considered a second class writer. It had also been born in the nineteenth century in the Great Britain of empire and colonies here and there. He died in the 60s, very away from the mentality and new vision of current concepts.

In other words, once again, the eternal debate applied to any writer with, let's say, some blemish on his file continues. Did that style and way of telling stories influence in the minds of children and youth that we read it then? I can only answer for myself: no idea. Could you do it unconsciously? Perhaps, but it seems to me that not as readers, but as people, we are a product of what we read, live and observe apart from our education and environment.

I also read that Blyton's books they are still selling well, because its universe and design have order. Its structure is classic and its essence has not changed, although it has been done what some call "adaptation", others "pruning" and others "censorship". I simply ask myself these questions:

That I had fun with their stories? Undoubtedly. What could improve my reading? Also. That I had a problem of misunderstood or interpreted concepts? Well no. That I recently noticed these literary and personal weaknesses of this writer? Either.

I read the stories of Lane, Andersen or those of the Brothers Grimm, that with censorship are just as creepy. A very illustrative example: my mother, a primary school teacher, at lunchtime would put on the radio cassette those wonderful tapes of dramatized stories that were available. One of them was Blue Beardby Perrault. The dramatization was fantastic, with magnificent actors and terrifying music. Today I would give anything to find her out there again.

But I am not less or more afraid of it. Nor do I think that, at this point in my film, I will become a psychopath or an alcoholic detective (Inspector Hole, always his ...) because I am passionate about the black genre. So I end with a simplicity: the context in which you have to put everything. Life is already explicit enough in language, facts and images. What matters is reading, whatever and whatever, but read.