Erik Nelson

                                             How It Happened That I Became An English Major In The Early Years Of The Twenty-First Century

            The notion of a tactful deconstruction and repair of art is not one that is new, nor unique to our generation. After all, great art has been forced to withstand for centuries the ravages of fashion and formality- draperies on statues, chaste touch-ups on the nude Venus. And in recent years filmmakers and writers have begun to do the same, 'improving' on the original piece of art and making it better with small or even large alterations.

            Regardless of how staid and boring Moby Dick is, however, or however much we hate Vanity Fair's infinitesmal digressions, the fact of the matter remains that these 'boring bits' are an essential part of the work in question. How can we be so arrogant as to claim we can 'improve art'? Shall we revisit the Mona Lisa and turn that mysterious smirk into a smarmy grin? Return to classic Western celluloid and replace the 'ravaging bands of red Injuns' with more legitimately offended and politically correct tribal elements? I cannot imagine what travesty we would endure if the Beatles redid the White Album every few years, as a popular pair of political satirists observed.

            The fact of the matter is that art and music may belong to the world as a whole, but that does not give us the right- as viewers or readers- to alter it to suit ourselves. Great art isn't made such because it panders to us, because we agree with what it says or because it falls nicely into our pre-conceived worldviews and opinions. It is such because it forces us to endure those words which we would rather avoid and those emotional turbulences we may otherwise shy away from.

            Moreover, the dangerous realm of posthumous editing opens us as writers into the savage and untameable wilderness of censorship and disfacement. It may begin with 'dumbing down' Shakespeare for teens, or editing Moby Dick for clarity, but where does it end? At what point will the red ink stop flowing? The danger then moves into the questionable area of 'at what point do we stop?', which is altogether too far.           

            The first time red ink is set to paper, we have destroyed the author's vision of the work. We can no longer claim it as original, because we have altered it to suit our purposes. I would say that -no- work should be edited for clarity or brevity. It is better to be left wondering at a fragment of Sapphic verse than to have some pop-art writer substitute the remainder for us. We must accept the works- boring, unpleasant, full of digressions and plot holes- as a complete work and base it off those internal merits- or abandon it completely. As no contemporary writer wants to see his words changed after being set to print, those long-dead authors must surely be spinning in their graves at that which is being done to their masterpieces in the name of progress.