The Fan's Dilemma

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Secret World of Roald Dahl

Episode: The Fan’s Dilemma
Host: Aaron Tracy
Date: March 9, 2026

Overview

This episode tackles the complicated question of how fans should engage with the work of beloved but problematic artists—specifically, Roald Dahl, whose legacy as a children’s author is shadowed by personal and public antisemitism. Aaron Tracy is joined by author Claire Dederer (“Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma”) and philosopher Eric Hynal Mathis to explore whether it’s ever possible—or appropriate—to separate art from the artist. Along the way, they address how we reconcile childhood nostalgia with adult values, the role of public apologies and institutional responses, and the heated controversy over posthumous censorship and “updating” of classic works for modern sensibilities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Personal Reflections on Dahl

[02:44] Aaron Tracy begins with an anecdote:

• Receives a framed photo for his birthday, mistakenly thought to be Billy Wilder, his creative idol, but actually a photo of the French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
• This “mislabeling” becomes a metaphor for his complex feelings about Dahl:
  • “It’s hard to escape the feeling now that there’s been a bit of a mislabeling. It’s hard to see Dahl as the sweet creative hero I want him to be, and instead I now sort of see him as this darker figure.” (Aaron Tracy, 04:08)
• Wonders if he should hide Dahl’s books, just as he hid the Le Pen photo, and questions how to square cherished childhood reading with adult awareness of antisemitism and bigotry.

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2. Claire Dederer: Living with the Artist’s “Monstrosity”

Claire Dederer, author of "Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma" shares her approach:

Motivations for Exploring the Subject

[06:45] Claire Dederer:

• Started writing about Roman Polanski, a filmmaker whose work she admired but whose biography deeply troubled her.
• “I found to my surprise that I could still watch the films. And this seemed hugely interesting to me... There was something happening here that was complex and sort of upsetting.”
• Her book isn’t about providing answers or rules, but honestly describing what it feels like to engage with art by artists we now know to be, in some sense, “monsters.”

The Role of the Audience

[08:57] Claire Dederer:

• Emphasis on the audience’s biography as being just as important as the artist’s; our personal experiences and sensitivities affect how we engage with problematic art.
• “We can’t just make these universal or hard and fast rules... it really, to me, comes back to the subjective lived experience of the audience member.”

Art for Children: Parental Responsibility

[10:22] Claire Dederer:

• Parents, like institutions or curators, have an extra layer of responsibility when choosing art for their children.
• Suggests that context and conversation may matter more than censorship: “If you’re going to consume this work, you can also talk to your kids about what’s going on. Maybe not when they’re 4, but maybe when they’re 10. Kids can handle all kinds of complex discussions.”

The Inescapability of Biography in the Social Media Era

[12:13] Claire Dederer:

• Today, biography is “happening to us all the time; we can’t not know.”
• The ease of accessing biographical information about artists makes it nearly impossible to separate “the work” cleanly from “the life” anymore.

Apology, Responsibility, and Remorse

[16:13] Claire Dederer:

• Distinguishes between true remorse and institutional apologies (like those by estates).
• “I sort of treasure every apology because they are so rare and because they remind us that it can be done.”
• Discusses the importance and power of apology—even when posthumous or institutional—as a step toward accountability.

The Artist’s Bigotry in the Work

[19:53] Claire Dederer:

• Sometimes the artist's prejudices are visible in the work (e.g., Woody Allen, Cosby); sometimes they're not (Polanski). Dahl occupies a complicated middle ground.
• “There is some part of the landscape of my psyche that belongs to Roald Dahl... and when you learn these biographical pieces, there is this sadness that comes with it. It’s a very specific sadness, and I think it cries out to be discussed.”
• Most people, she argues, “live in the middle” of the debate—and we should acknowledge that.

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3. Eric Hynal Mathis: Is Separation the Right Framework?

[26:20] Guest: Eric Hynal Mathis, Chair of Philosophy at Wellesley College

Reframing the Debate

[26:38] Eric Hynal Mathis:

• “Can we separate the art from the artist?” is the wrong question; instead, ask: Should we, and if so, how?
• Engagement with problematic artists must be context-specific, taking the artist’s moral life seriously, but not obsessively so: “It’s really more of a question about, given what we know, how should we confront that knowledge?”

How Much Should Audiences Investigate Artists’ Biographies?

[28:36] Eric Hynal Mathis:

• Argues against mandatory “investigative work” into every artist’s biography—it’s impractical and unnecessary.
• Instead, it's about responding thoughtfully to information that is reasonably available and present in public discourse.

What To Do With Newly Found Knowledge?

[31:39] Eric Hynal Mathis:

• Case study: Roald Dahl’s adult story “Genesis and Catastrophe” complicates reader sympathy (you’re concerned about a newborn baby who turns out to be Hitler).
• Knowing about Dahl’s antisemitism, “adds even further intrigue” and complexity but does not necessarily answer the moral question of how to treat the work: “It makes it sometimes even more complex and complicated – and that’s a real opportunity for us to engage.”

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4. The Censorship Controversy: Editing the Dead

Background

[34:00] Aaron Tracy:

• Recounts the 2023 incident where Dahl’s publisher revised his books by removing words considered offensive (e.g., “fat,” “crazy,” “mad”), changing character profiles, and systematically deleting “black” and “white” as color descriptors.
• Notes that such revisions often occur posthumously, e.g., Agatha Christie (“And Then There Were None”), Mark Twain (“Huckleberry Finn”), Dr. Seuss.

Critical Reactions

• Salman Rushdie called Dahl's revisions "absurd censorship."
• Philip Pullman argued it is better to let such books go out of print than to edit them without the author’s approval.

Alternative Views

[37:46] Margaret Atwood (audio clip):

• "If you don’t like this tale, turn over the page and read something else."

[38:09] Wes Anderson (quoted):

• “When the piece of work is done and we participate in it... I don’t think even the artist... should modify their work. Certainly no one who’s not the author should be modifying somebody’s book.”

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5. The Morality of Censorship: Eric Mathis Responds

[39:50] Eric Hynal Mathis:

• Expresses deep concern over how legitimate sensitivity can slide into censorship.
• “Children need morally complex literature in order to develop into morally sophisticated adults... If you take away that content, you’re also taking away the opportunity for moral growth and discussion and development. And that’s not a great way of raising our kids.”

On Word Removal in Kids’ Books

[41:48] Eric Hynal Mathis:

• Rather than redact or erase problematic language, suggests adding a preface or guidance for parents and readers.
• Removing such language “puts the skeletons back in the closet,” preventing a genuine reckoning.

The Value of Confrontation and Conversation

[43:52] Eric Hynal Mathis:

• It’s not about endlessly discussing every problematic thing every time—it’s about making those moments available for reflection, now or later in life.
• “Having it there in a child’s set of intellectual resources allows them the opportunity to then think carefully about it... whether it happens then or whether it happens down the line.”

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Notable Quotes

• “It’s hard to escape the feeling now that there’s been a bit of a mislabeling. ...Can I square Dahl’s much-loved, broken-spine books scattered throughout our house with the mezuzah on our front door? Should I hide his books like the Le Pen photo was hidden in the back of our closet? I really don’t know the answer, but I want to. I really want to.”
  — Aaron Tracy, 04:08

• “What happens to the audience member? Is the art changed? Is there something immoral in that moment? Does it matter? ...This is what it’s like to consume work knowing what we know.”
  — Claire Dederer, 07:52

• “We can’t just sort of make these hard and fast rules about what ... could be consumed based just on the artist’s behavior. ...It really ... comes back to the subjective lived experience of the audience member.”
  — Claire Dederer, 08:57

• “In your role as a parent, in a sense, you’re an institution. ...You have different pressures ... than as a single person making his own decisions.”
  — Claire Dederer, 10:22

• “Can we separate the art from the artist is ... the wrong question. ...We should be taking seriously what we know about the moral life of the artist... every time.”
  — Eric Hynal Mathis, 26:38

• “Children need morally complex literature in order to develop into morally sophisticated adults. My worry is that ... [editing] deprives kids of the opportunity to wrestle with challenging moral questions.”
  — Eric Hynal Mathis, 39:50

• “When the piece of work is done... I don’t think even the artist... should modify their work. Certainly no one who’s not an author should be modifying somebody’s book.”
  — Wes Anderson (quoted), 38:09

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:44-06:45] – Personal story as metaphor for the “mislabeling” of artists, and the emergence of fan’s dilemma with Dahl.
• [06:45-12:13] – Claire Dederer on why and how we still consume “monstrous” artists, the role of the audience, and the unique challenges of children’s literature.
• [16:13-19:53] – On apologies, biography, and whether the artist’s flaws infect the work itself.
• [26:20-34:00] – Eric Hynal Mathis frames the debate: not “can we?” but “should we” separate art and artist; discusses depth and limits of audience responsibilities.
• [34:00-39:09] – Censorship controversy: details of Dahl’s posthumous edits, examples from other authors, strong opinions from public intellectuals.
• [39:50-44:48] – Eric Hynal Mathis on how editing or erasing problematic content can limit children’s moral growth, and why direct engagement is preferable to censorship.

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Memorable Moments

• The birthday mis-gift (Le Pen for Billy Wilder) encapsulates the confusion and disappointment of realizing a beloved figure holds—or is mistaken for having—dangerous views ([02:44]).
• Claire Dederer’s relatability as she describes audiences desperately seeking ethical “rules” but forced instead to live with ambiguity ([07:52]).
• The pointed discussion of modern censorship, with real edits to beloved children’s books, and opinions from heavyweights like Atwood and Anderson ([37:46-39:09]).
• Mathis’ defense of allowing kids to wrestle with difficult content as a path to moral maturity ([39:50-41:48]).
• Aaron and Mathis riffing on the reality that while prefaces or disclaimers may be provided, parental engagement with those tools is often inconsistent but still essential ([43:25-43:52]).

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Episode Takeaways

1. There are no easy answers: Every attempt to set strict boundaries around “cancelling” or excusing problematic artists breaks down under scrutiny.
2. Audience context and biography matter as much as the artist’s.
3. When it comes to kids, parents act as cultural gatekeepers and have added responsibility for context and discussion—not just curation or censorship.
4. Censorship and bowdlerization can impoverish the moral and literary experience, depriving readers—especially young ones—of meaningful engagement and growth.
5. Wrestling openly and emotionally with discomfort, sadness and ambiguity is itself a critical part of being both a reader and a responsible citizen.

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In conclusion, “The Fan’s Dilemma” offers a compassionate, searching look into the uneasy love for tainted works. Rather than providing a universal rule, Tracy and his guests model the hard, honest work of grappling with the past, the legacy of our favorite storytellers, and the way we choose to share their art with the next generation.

Transcript

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[Aaron Tracy]

The night before my birthday this year, I had a late flight home from Los Angeles. I arrive back in Brooklyn and go to bed without seeing anyone. I sleep late into the morning. Then I come downstairs, not having seen my family in several days. And there's my wife and my 2 year old daughter, so excited to wish me a happy birthday and give me my gift. So sweet to be reunited. And they bring out this giant box. My wife has been talking about it for weeks. Would the box arrive in time? She's been thinking about it and worrying about it. It's the perfect gift. She's been talking up how much I'm going to love it and how brilliant she is for coming up with the perfect present. Very exciting buildup. They give me this giant box and I open it and it's a big, beautiful, fancy framed photograph. Something that looks like it should be in a museum. It's of an old man in a black suit with a giant black dog next to him. And I look at it like, oh, wow, this is really something. And my wife says, yeah, it's Billy Wilder. I looked so hard for it. I found it at this auction house. So incredible. I know he's your favorite. How cool is that? And I don't quite know what to say because this is not a photograph of Billy Wilder. So I just sort of say, oh, my God, I've never quite seen him look like this before. I didn't know he had a dog like that, but then I had to. So I said, but I'm not sure it's. It's actually not. This isn't Billy Wilder. And my wife got so embarrassed. Really not a great scene. She bought it from this auction house that labeled it as Helmut Newton photographing Billy Wilder. Later that afternoon, she texts me from her office after doing some research. And not only is it not Billy Wilder, it is a photograph of Jean Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far right party, who many consider to be a fascist. So we now have a giant, beautiful black and white Helmut Newton photograph of an antisemite in our home. Happy birthday. I tell this story, of course, because Roald Dahl is and always has been part of the fabric of my life. He helped shape my worldview just like Billy Wilder did. But it's hard to escape the feeling now that there's been a bit of a mislabeling. It's hard to see Dahl as the sweet creative hero I want him to be, and instead I now sort of see him as this darker figure. Can I square Dahl's much loved Broken Spine books scattered throughout our house with the mezuzah on our front door? Should I hide his books like the Le Pen photo was hidden in the back of our closet? I really don't know the answer, but I want to. I really want to. For My Heart Podcast, Imagine Entertainment and Parallax. I'm Aaron Tracy, and this is the Secret World of Roald Dahl. Episode 8. On our last episode, Roxane Gay suggested we speak to the author Claire Dederrer. Let's do that. Now, Clare has very different feelings from Roxanne on the subject of separating the art from the artist. Claire is a prolific writer whose work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic, the Nation, Vogue, Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, you name it. Her book, A Fan's Dilemma, has become something like a definitive text on this giant, controversial issue that we're all grappling with. It's brave and it's honest and it's personal and it's really funny. In its rave review, the New York Times wrote, this is a book that looks boldly down the cliff at the roiling waters below and jumps right in, splashes around playfully, isn't afraid to get wet. I started off by asking Claire to tell us a little bit about monsters.

[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

I came to write this book. I started it many years ago, in 2015 or so, because I'd been thinking and writing a lot about Roman Polanski. And I started my career as a film critic. And Polanski is one of my top five filmmakers of all time. I love his work. I was researching him for a previous book where I was writing about predation of young girls in the 1970s. And so Polanski came into that story and I, you know, I really began to learn a lot about what had happened in his not even just alleged rape of Samantha Gailey, or Samantha Geimer, as she's sometimes known. I read depositions. I read a lot on the subject. And when I finished reading, I found to my surprise, that I could still watch the films. And this seemed hugely interesting to me that there was something happening here that was complex and sort of upsetting. And I began to think about this problem. And in early moments of writing, I was just sort of looking for someone to tell me what to do, which now is a dynamic I'm very familiar with. As the author of this book. People just want me to Tell them what to do. The book is not. That's not really what it's trying to do. What it's trying to do more is look at what was happening to me in that moment when I was consuming the Polanski films. Knowing what I know it was talking about what's occurring there. What happens to the audience member? Is the art changed? Is there something immoral in that moment? Does it matter? I was trying to be descriptive of the problem. This is what it's like to consume work knowing what we know. You know, I do have some ideas of what people could or might do, but the book is more interested in how we live through this problem.

[Aaron Tracy]

I'm curious, is there a difference in your mind between consuming the work of artists who committed crimes against people versus those who just said, big into things? Merle Dahl was a bit of a jerk to the people who were closest to him. But he's not accused of any sort of actual physical abuse like so many of these artist monsters are. His crimes were what he said. Do you think that there's a difference there?

[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

I don't mean to be Yoda like, or cagey, but I think that it's interesting that your question cites the answer to the problem in the nuances or differences in the behavior of the artist alone. And I guess what's most interesting to me is the audience member. This is really the nexus from which I look at this problem. I guess the question is, who are you? Who is the person who's consuming the art? You know, the person who's able to withstand their knowledge of someone's biographical shittiness. It's largely dependent on their own life experience. You know, so you have the biography of the maker, but then you also have the biography of the audience member. I think that somebody's experience of Dahl's antisemitism, for instance, might be coming to that work with their own experiences of that. We can't just sort of make these kind of universal or hard and fast rules about what could or could not be consumed based just on the artist's behavior. It really, to me, comes back to the subjective lived experience of the audience member.

[Aaron Tracy]

Certainly everyone can make the choice for themselves whether they want to consume this work or not. But with Dahl, I think there's that added wrinkle of what about kids? Because it's not their choice, right? What I read to them as my kids grow up, I am, of course, terrified that they're gonna be subject to any sort of anti Semitism or bigotry of any kind but here I am, happily giving them Roald Dahl's books. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts about that.

[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

Yeah, I mean, I think this really has come to the fore also with Rowling. What do we do about J.K. rowling? Do we give her books to our kids? And it's different because she's alive and very much doubling down. Right. She's saying what she's saying, and they're. It's a very interesting and complex dynamic there with Dahl. You have someone who's dead where there's not this ongoing connection to the horrible things he said. This question's interesting because it's almost like when I think about this problem, I think about individual responses and institutional responses. Will I watch a Polanski film? Yes. Would I program or curate a series of Polanski films at my local art museum? More complex? If my local art museum were to do that on its own, would I hope that they would acknowledge some of the complexities of the biography also? Yes. In your role as a parent, in a sense, you're an institution. There's pedagogy involved. There's the person is. Can't escape the roof that they're under. So you have different pressures on you as an institution than you do as a single person who's making his own decisions about whether or not to consume the art. So I guess you just have to ask yourself, what kind of institution do you want to be, and what is it that you're saying to your kids? I mean, I don't know how old your kids are, but I do think there's a sense in which, if you're going to consume this work, you can also talk to your kids about what's going on. Maybe not when they're 4, but maybe when they're 10. Kids can handle all kinds of complex discussions. Part of the issue around this is this debate over levels of complexity. How much should people know? How much should they have to have to know? Is it somehow a disruption of some kind of innocence to share information with people, which is the institutional question?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

I think that for me, the reason this question is so pressing is the way in which there is no escape from that biography. The biography is what's happening to us all the time. We can't not know. I'm 58. When I was young, it was very difficult to find out biographical information about artists, certainly about pop artists or current pop culture figures. It was really incumbent on the audience member. And now biography happens to us as audience members for all of these different cultural reasons. But the reason it's really happening is because social media is built upon biography. Your biography, my biography. That's what it's made out of is people's stories. So we learn this biographical information whether we want to or not. Like to me, it seems like a real nicety to ask, do I need to go find this biographical information to share with my students? Because in most cases the biographical information is preceding the work almost always now. You know this is a question for the ages, but the reason that this moment is special or unique is because of this way biography is out there running the show.

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[Aaron Tracy]

Something else I grapple with is when the artist chooses to apologize. With Dahl, he was absolutely unrepentant in

[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

his lifetime, just so tracts.

[Aaron Tracy]

He called himself an anti Semite and had. He was totally fine with that. But a few years ago, right before, right around the same time that Netflix bought the Dull State for an incredible amount of money to turn those stories into films, the Dall estate issued an official apology for his anti Semitism. So I guess I'm trying to decide if that should make a bit of difference for me or not.

[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

That's interesting. I like how you just said that. You know, you're trying to figure out how you feel about it and how you feel about as a Jewish family, how you're going to relate to that apology. And the Wagner Festival went through a similar thing where there was some reckoning, and I think one family member apologized. I'm not sure where they are with that. I haven't done research on it in a few years. I think that, to me, we can't change what Dahl said. We can't change who Wagner was. But I think the estate or the institutional drive to apologize is actually meaningful. I think that apology, which is a little different from remorse, but I think apology within the context of the conversations we're having, is actually quite rare. It's not something people do a lot of. There's a lot of lack of repentance across the board around these issues. And I think that every apology begets more apologies. One hopes that it creates this idea that we can acknowledge that wrong was done and that has both emotional, maybe even aesthetic, and certainly legal meaning. I sort of treasure every apology because they are so rare and because they remind us that it can be done. So one of the things I'm thinking about a lot in the book is I really grapple throughout the writing of the book with should a person be written off or lost for having done a rotten thing or said a rotten thing? What is it to take responsibility for the crummy things we've done. Partway through the book, I'm dealing with my own sobriety. And becoming sober sort of creates this necessity for an acknowledgement that you've done something wrong, because if you hadn't done something wrong, you wouldn't quit drinking. Right. One's own monstrosity is kind of baked in to the act of becoming sober. What is your life after that? What is it to be a person after that acknowledgement? And that question, I think, aligns me with people who've done something crummy. Right. And what is it to be human in the face of that? So people do get. In my opinion, they do get to change or get better. And it's a little different within a state. But I think apology and remorse are such powerful tools, and if we don't take them in some kind of good faith, we start to make them even more extinct than they already are. Yeah.

[Aaron Tracy]

It's so hard to think of any, especially in today's climate. I'm just thinking about Kanye West's track, Heil Hitler. I mean, so many of these guys are just so unrepentant.

[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

Yeah. And like, if Kanye were to make an apology now, would that be meaningful? Probably not, because it has been so unrepentant. The performance of his own hatefulness has been so ongoing and so relentless. That apology would just be another performance. But there are contexts in which it's meaningful, I think.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah. I read your piece in Paris Review about Woody Allen this morning, and it seemed like one of the things that bothered you so much was when he said, the heart wants what the heart wants as his justification, which is the polar opposite of an apology.

[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

Oh, I love that. I'd never thought of it that way. Yeah. Yeah. I did try to title the book the Heart Wants what It Wants, and my editor just laughed me out of the room. She's like, no, I'm not calling it that.

[Aaron Tracy]

Something that I certainly think about a lot is whether or not the artist's personal beliefs or prejudices infects their work. And with someone like Roman Polanski, I'm not sure I see it. Which maybe is why it's easier to watch those movies with Dahl. It's complicated. Some people certainly do make the case that there are figures in the witches that can be construed as anti Semitic tropes. I don't know how I feel about that, but I don't really see his anti Semitism in his work, so that becomes much easier for me.

[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

Yeah, I think that there's kind of an interesting lineup of the way these things work. I think you have someone like Woody Allen, where the thing that people perceive as objectionable is so inherent in the work. When you watch Manhattan and the way that young women are presented and used in his films. So that's a place where the biography and the work are really close together. And that's disturbing in one way. And then you have, you know, something like Cosby where there's such an incredible chasm between Dr. Huxtable and what he is said to have done that that makes the work sort of upsetting in a different way. And so I think that Dahl is fascinating because there is a sense that he is somehow uniquely tapped into what makes a person ugly in their heart. And he's found a way to express that through these different characters. Sometimes the minor characters in a book, sometimes a more major character. And that is always fascinating when somebod has this darkness inside them or has this dark quality, and then they express it through character. It does make it more confusing because on some level, the ridiculousness of being a person who's against others is expressed in his work. There's a parodic, funny element to some of these characters. And yet, did he see himself as a comic figure because he had this hate that he was living inside of? I think probably not. I think there's something about authors who write work for children that has really withstood the test of time. And certainly that is work that I had a relationship when I was young, you know, that there is some part of the landscape of my psyche that belongs to Roald Dahl, just as there is that part of the landscape of my psyche belongs to Laura Ingalls Wilder. And she has her own problems. And I would say that when that's your experience and you learn these pieces of biographical information, there is this sadness that comes with it. It's a very specific sadness. And I think it's a sadness that cries out to be discussed, that needs to be acknowledged and talk about needs to be taken apart and looked at. We need to ask, why does this sadness exist? And too often in this discussion, I feel like it's too absolute. And there's either somebody saying, you should absolutely throw out the books, or there's somebody saying, these things are separate and we don't care and you shouldn't care. But what's most interesting to me is the fact that most of us live in the middle. And I think that we actually are helping each other. If we can say this is a bummer. And yet the work is meaningful. That is reality. And I think when we talk about that, we're living in reality rather than in some fantasy land where the work must be separated or some other fantasy land where the work doesn't have meaning or cultural valence, which it does. I mean, I'm just always really interested in acknowledging that our responses to this biographical information are emotional. And I feel like so often when we're supposedly having these ethical conversations around these issues and people are defending their point of view, what's really happening is they're having a feeling. This is art. We're audience members. We are deep in our own subjectivity. The art is giving us an emotional response. So is the biographical element. If we can acknowledge that's what's happening, I think we can get a lot farther.

[Aaron Tracy]

That was the great Claire Dennerer, author of A Fan Sauna. After the break, we'll talk to someone who sees the issue a little differently.

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[Bethenny Frankel]

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[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

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[Aaron Tracy]

Eric Hatal Mathis is the chair of the philosophy department at Wellesley College. He wrote a book called Drawing the what to do with the Work of Immoral Artists. From museums to the movies, it's all about what to do, think and feel when artists that we love do terrible things. I started off by asking him the

[Eric Hatal Mathis]

obvious question, so can we separate the art from the artist? Is a question that really dominates the space, but I think it's largely the wrong question. I'm not sure it really matters whether we can separate the art from the artist often, because the question we should be asking is should we separate the art from the artist? And when I say should we separate the art from the artist, what I mean is that we should be taking seriously what we know about the moral life of the artist and then asking the question every time how should what we know about the moral life of the artist factor in to my art consumption, or how I'm engaging with this art in public, or how I'm thinking about introducing my kid to this art, or broader policy decisions that we make about the arts? So I think it's essential that the question about the relationship between the moral life of the artist and their artwork remain a live question in all of these different contexts, one that we need to think about in those contexts and figure out how to answer. But when we try to separate, when we say, can we separate the art from the artist? My worry about that is it's often an attempt to say like, well, if we can, then we can sort of prize them apart and not be faced with this question. How should we engage with the moral life of the artist? And that concerns me. Right. I think that's a question that we should always be thinking about. And sometimes the answer will be that the moral life of the artist isn't particularly relevant in this context. That's certainly a possibility and that will happen in all kinds of different situations. But we'll have at least asked that question. That question will be front and center.

[Aaron Tracy]

That leads me to wonder, how much investigating are we supposed to do? I've been reading Edgar Allan Poe my whole life. I didn't know that he married his 13 year old cousin. How much responsibility do I have consuming art to really look into the potential really awful, disgusting behavior of the artist?

[Eric Hatal Mathis]

Yeah. So I mean, I don't think that we need to become the cops and private investigators of the art world. I think that the questions that the moral life of the artist poses for everyday art consumers are going to be dependent on the kind of information that's part of the sort of public discourse, part of the public domain, the things that we can reasonably expect people to know. I think that if we thought that there was some sort of strong moral obligation to do investigative work about every artist that we wanted to engage with, not only would that make a lot of art not fun for us, but it would be overly burdensome and not really sort of in the spirit in which we often want to engage with the artwork. I think it would prioritize the moral life of the artist over other kinds of considerations like our aesthetic engagement with their work. So I think it's really more of a question about given what we know, how should we confront that knowledge, not how much can we go find out about the moral life of the artist.

[Aaron Tracy]

It feels a little bit dangerous only because it almost feels like you get rewarded by burying your head in the sand, choosing not to read the articles that, you know, for a while seemingly appeared almost every day in the New York Times about how awful a lot of our artists were. If you don't look at those, if you don't read those stories, you're going to be able to enjoy a lot more art.

[Eric Hatal Mathis]

Yeah, it's true. I mean, I think there are questions we can ask about what people should reasonably know, and those are broad questions that include this conversation, but all kinds of other things. And I think sometimes people can be subject to criticism for not being aware of things that it's reasonable for them to know, given how pervasive they are in public discourse and how much attention they've received in the media. But I think that we should certainly approach these issues not in the spirit of blaming people. If you encounter somebody who doesn't know anything about Roald Dahl's antisemitism. Right. I don't think the response should be, how could you not know that? But rather, well, now that you know that, that opens up space for a conversation about how that is going to influence how we engage with the work.

[Aaron Tracy]

Eric brings up a really good question. How should we engage with the work? For me, especially after my conversation with Claire, I'm realizing a lot of it depends on whether I can locate the bigotry in the actual text. I'm not sure I see it in Dahl's stories, but what do we do when there's a really clear connection between an artist's problematic actions or beliefs and the work we consume by them? In our last episode, Roxane Gay talked about the Nobel Prize winning author Alice Munro, who stayed with her second husband despite apparently knowing that he abused her daughter. There's a strong case to be made that Monroe's guilt comes out in some of her short stories, which makes reading these stories for me now feel pretty icky. The same goes for a bunch of other artists, too. Some critics say that in everyone ranging from T.S. eliot to Ezra Pound to H.P. lovecraft, Picasso, Hemingway, Mailer, to even someone like Mel Gibson, you can see their sometimes monumental personal flaws come out in the work, which makes engaging with that work really complicated. I spoke more about this with Eric

[Eric Hatal Mathis]

Roaldahl has this very short story for adults, Genesis and Catastrophe. I'm going to spoil it. So if you don't want to hear it spoiled, you should stop listening. But it's a very short story, and it involves this kind of tense scene in a hospital where a mother is going through a complicated delivery. And in a very short space, the writing gets you very concerned for her and the life of her child. And then it's revealed towards the end of the story that the child is Adolf Hitler. And so you find yourself in this fascinating and uncomfortable position of having your concern about this child put into stark tension with your moral abhorrence of Hitler. And the thing about the story is that it seems very clearly designed in order to put you in that state of tension. It seems like you're supposed to have that feeling of, oh, my gosh, I was so concerned for this child, but it's Hitler. You know, how do I grapple with that? So once you then put that into this further context of knowing about Dahl's antisemitism, then it can make you feel even further tension. Sort of like, wait, was that interpretation I just gave the story the right one? Are you supposed to feel attention? Is it not actually creating that particular kind of tension? Because there's some sort of implicit endorsement of the idea that you should be concerned about the survival of baby Adolf Hitler? I think it adds even further intrigue to the story and enhances some of the aesthetic delight and weirdness of it. I think when you engage in this kind of process that I was just modeling here, you're sort of thinking through, how do I fit this knowledge with my experience of the story? It's not that we're always going to have some really specific answer that we come out with on the other end. We're not just going to say, like, oh, yes, actually, the story just sort of confirms Dahl's antisemitism. I think there's still space to think. No, it actually is the first interpretation. The story really is trying to get you to feel this tension. And that's the case independently of whatever feelings Dahl might himself have had. This kind of knowledge about the moral life of the artist often just enhances our experience of engaging with their work. It makes it sometimes even more complex and complicated. And that's, you know, that's a real opportunity for us to sort of think with that knowledge and engage with the work in light of it, rather than saying, oh, I'm not going to read this anymore because Dahl's anti Semitic.

[Aaron Tracy]

I'm going to come back to my conversation with Eric in a minute. Before I do that, I want to dig into a separate, somewhat related topic. And that's the giant, fascinating censorship controversy that swirled around Dahl a few years ago. In 2023, 33 years after Dahl's death, his publisher went through his books and removed all language that people might take offense to. The Hollywood Reporter laid it out really well in a long article. They explained that Dahl's fatphobia, for instance, was suddenly at odds with changing sensitivities around body image issues. So Dahl's publishers removed the word fat from all of his books and issued new editions. Augustus Gloop, the gluttonous boy from the Chocolate Factory tour, is now referred to as enormous in James and the Giant Peach Dahl's lines. Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat and tremendously flabby at that is. Now, Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute and deserved to be squashed by the fruit. And the censors didn't stop there. Any time Dahl wrote that a character was crazy or mad, they took it out. The Oompa Loompas in Willy Wonka's Factory are no longer tiny, titchy, or no higher than my knee, but just small. In Matilda, our hero no longer reads the problematic author Rudyard Kipling. In the revised version, she now reads Jane Austen. So in that instance, the censors kind of get a twofer. Not only changing doll, but also erasing the very existence of Kipling. Uh, what else? The fantastic Mr. Fox. He now has three daughters instead of three sons. I absolutely cannot explain that. The BFG, his famous cloak is no longer black. In fact, and this is real, the words black and white were systematically deleted throughout Dahl's catalog. Even when describing something like the color of snow, the very words black and white are treated as problematic. So how did these changes even come about? According to the New York Times, they were made after Dahl's estate hired a consultancy group to evaluate his work. The consultant's aim was to promote inclusion and accessibility in children's literature. Needless to say, fans of Dahl's and free speech advocates and many others were completely freaked out. To take just two examples, the writer Salman Rushdie called the revisions absurd censorship. Best selling writer Philip Pullman said it would be better to let Dahl's books go out of print than to alter them without the author's consent. And that's kind of the big issue, right? That these alterations were made without Dahl's approval. He was long dead, so he didn't have the option of signing off on them. Digging into this, I found a bunch of fascinating similar examples of artists estates grappling with this sort of thing. According to the New York Times, again, Agatha Christie, the best selling novelist of all time, had her books altered after her death too. The truly galling title of her top selling book was changed to and Then There Were None. Christie's great grandson says that without that change, it would probably be completely unpublishable. Now, he's not wrong. Similarly, an edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, arguably the great American novel, replaced a racial epithet throughout the text over concerns that such an offensive word was causing schools to stop assigning the book. Dr. Seuss's estate took a different tack and just stopped publishing half a dozen of his books because of the racial and ethnic stereotypes in them. Personally, I hate the idea of that amazing Agatha Christie mystery not being published anymore. And I genuinely think it would be a tragedy if Huckleberry Finn disappeared. But changing a dead author's words is the slipperiest of slopes. It's really complicated stuff for some. For others, it's easy. Here's Margaret Atwood, the great novelist of the Handmaid's Tale, a book about a dystopian society that encourages censorship, speaking to BBC News.

[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

Good luck with Raoul Dahl. You're just really going to have to replace the whole book if you want things to be nice. But this started a long time ago. It was the Disneyfication of fairy tales. What do I think of it? I'm with Chaucer, who said, if you don't like this tale, turn over the page and read something else.

[Aaron Tracy]

So if we follow Atwood's advice, no one should touch Dahl's books. Readers should just be allowed to choose which stories of his they want to read. Filmmaker Wes Anderson feels similarly to Atwood. Anderson, of course, adapted several Dahl stories for Netflix. He disagrees with me about the big issue here being that Dahl isn't alive to give his consent to changes. If it were up to Anderson, he wouldn't even let a living doll make any changes. You know, I'm probably the worst person to ask about this because, you know, if you ask me, should Renoir be allowed to touch up one of his pictures and modify it, I would say, no, it's done. Somebody bought it. It's in a museum. I don't think even the artist. I don't want even the artist to modify their work. I understand the motivation for it, but I sort of am in the school where when the piece of work is done and we participate in it, the audience participates in it, we know it. And so I sort of think when it's done, it's done. And certainly no one who's not an author should be modifying somebody's book.

[Eric Hatal Mathis]

He's dead.

[Aaron Tracy]

You hear Anderson's argument a lot in the world of film. If you're a Star wars fan, you probably remember the hubbub over George Lucas going back into the original trilogy years after its release and making changes. He re engineered a famous scene, for instance, so that Han Solo doesn't shoot first and kill someone in cold blood. Outraged fans didn't care that the person making the changes was the original creator to them. Like Anderson said, when it's done, it's done. But of course, this is all academic, having Read a lot about Roald Dahl. I feel pretty confident saying he would not have made the changes his publisher wanted. Let's go back to my conversation with Eric Mathis. I really want to know what he thinks about the censorship controversy.

[Eric Hatal Mathis]

So I'm really concerned about the ways in which legitimate and important concerns about how we take the moral life of the artist into account can easily slide into practices of censorship, which I'm very opposed to. I think it's crucial that we not ignore the moral life of the artist. What you do with that knowledge, I think, should not lead us to try to censor their work. So in the context of kids, for instance, and sort of children's literature and movies and things, I think that children need morally complex literature in order to develop into morally sophisticated adults. My worry is that when you take morally difficult content out of an artist's work, I mean, not only are you messing with their work in a way that feels artistically illegitimate, but you're also depriving kids of the opportunity to wrestle with challenging moral questions. Sometimes they're going to need help in wrestling with those questions. And that's why we often engage in practices of reading with our kids or talking with our kids about the books that they're reading. But I think that if you take away that content, you're also taking away the opportunity for moral growth and discussion and development. And that's not a great way of raising our kids.

[Aaron Tracy]

I guess just to push back for a second, or to Billy Devil's advocate some of the censorship they did, like removing the descriptors fat and ugly. They feel like the kind of thing. Like, if my kid was reading a book that had those words in them, I probably. And maybe this is my own moral failing, I probably wouldn't stop reading and explain to them why those words are problematic the way I would if there was something incredibly bigoted or anti Semitic. Those words probably do just get incepted by the child as normal. If the great majority of us are not going to turn those kinds of things into a lesson, is it still okay?

[Eric Hatal Mathis]

I mean, when it comes to terms like fat and gross, it's not as if taking these terms out of kids books are going to prevent kids from hearing these words as they go about their lives. While I grant that not everybody who's reading with their kids or talking with their kids about books is going to take the opportunity to think with them about the language being used, at least the opportunity is there on the table, and there are ways in which we can promote it. So clearly, the publisher in this case is taking action to address an issue, so they're committed. A different way they could take action would be to provide some guidance for kids or for adults on how to engage with that content. Throw a preface in the book, put in an appendix.

[Aaron Tracy]

Right.

[Eric Hatal Mathis]

There are different ways in which we can take these issues seriously without engaging in cutting or obscuring. This comes up also in the context of, you know, art and museums, especially when we know things about the moral life of the artist, and aspects of their moral life sort of come up in their work in really explicit ways. So, like in the case of Gauguin, some people say, like, oh, well, we shouldn't have space on our walls to display Gauguin. We should sort of like, take that stuff off the walls. That's not a very common view, but it has been expressed. My worry about that kind of approach to the problem is it's like putting the skeletons back in the closet. It's like not a way of taking the accusations and the moral life of the artist seriously. In order to take it seriously, you need to confront it. And then there's a question of what you do once it's on the table. But if you sort of take it away, then do you also take away this opportunity for a moral reckoning?

[Aaron Tracy]

My favorite book to read, my daughter. Our favorite book to read at night before bed is called Pout Pout Fish. The ending is all about a kiss that is not asked for. And there's a. Instead of changing it, there's simply a disclaimer on the very last page that says, you should always ask. I would say I read that disclaimer to my daughter. I have read it once, and we've read pow pow fish 1 billion times. That said, I'm very happy that they did not change the ending.

[Eric Hatal Mathis]

Well, I mean, you know, also these kinds of, like, interventions, they don't always have to happen in the moment or every time. Sometimes I think these are things that come up later in life. A kid might read some morally problematic content in a book as a kid and nobody talks to them about it at all. But then when they're a teenager, they think back and they say, huh, that was kind of odd that this happened in the book. Or I'm sort of raises some worries for me how this character was represented. And they have that there, right. As then a resource for thinking with. I don't want to sort of oversell the idea that it's about constant discussion and engagement. Right. That's the only way we can take the moral content of these works, the moral lives of the artist, seriously, is by talking the issue to death. But I think having it there in a child's set of intellectual resources allows them the opportunity to then think carefully about it, whether on their own or in conversation, and whether it happens then or whether it happens down the line.

[Aaron Tracy]

That was Eric Mathis, author of Drawing the what to do with the Work of Immoral Artists From Museums to the Movies. I'm so appreciative to Eric and also to Claire for coming on to talk about about these really thorny issues. Next week we're gonna lighten things up a little and get into a topic very dear to my heart. We'll talk about what doll might be most globally famous for these the film adaptations. Which means we get to talk about Spielberg and Zemeckis and Burton and Clooney and Streep and so many more. True or false? Quentin Tarantino once directed a Roald Dahl story starring Bruce Willis. We'll definitely get into that. And I'll speak to the man who just might be the single most recognizable voice in TV criticism. I can't wait. See you there. The Secret World of Roald Dahl is produced by Imagine Audio and Parallax Studios for iHeart Podcasts. Created and written by me, Aaron Tracy produced by Matt Schrader post production by Windhill Studios with editing, scoring and sound design by Mark Henry Phillips editing by Ryan Seaton music by APM Executive producers Nathan Klokke, Kara Welker, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Aaron Tracy additional voice performances and recreation by Mark Henry Phillips and 11 Labs. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review the Secret World of Roald Dahl on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Copyright 2026 Imagine Entertainment, iHeartMedia and Parallax.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through March 31st. Spring in for storewide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn uneligible items from Activia, General Mills, Nature Valley, A and W, Monster Energy Coffee Mate and Pete's Coffee. Then click the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy drive up and go pickup or delivery restrictions apply. See website for terms and conditions.

[Bethenny Frankel]

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[Podcast Host / Narrator (possibly Aaron Tracy)]

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