Apologies for Oompa-Loompas

Revised and expanded Tuesday morning with added vitamins and iron.

I've never read the original version of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory so I didn’t know until today that the Oompa-Loompas didn’t start out their literary existence as strange little homunculus creatures from a land so far away and bizarre they might as well be from Mars or Oz.

In Dahl’s first telling the Oompa-Loompas were clearly from the planet Earth and a very particular and real spot on that planet. 

According to Philip Nel, in a post at Nine Kinds of Pie, Can Censoring a Book Remove Its Prejudices?:

In the 1973 edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas are no longer African Pygmies — they’re from Loompaland.  Illustrator Joseph Schindelman changes their colors from black to white, and current illustrator Quentin Blake keeps them white in his 1998 edition.  Inasmuch as Willy Wonka’s workers are human beings imported from another country, the whitened Oompa-Loompas remove the original book’s implication that a person of European descent had enslaved people of African descent, and that the latter group had gladly accepted their new lot as his slaves.

The question for Nel is whether changing the Oompa-Loompas changes the story, but he doesn’t mean did it change it for the better or the worse or even if it made it a different story.  The question is did the the change change the story from a piece of racist and neo-colonialist propaganda.

The conclusion he comes to is, Probably not.  No more than changing Prince Bumpo in Doctor Doolittle from black to white changes that book.  Kids still know, and their thoughts and hearts might be subtly corrupted as a result.

One could also make a case for “no, they do not alter the ideological assumptions of the original,” claiming that the new versions instead more subtly encode the same racial and colonial messages of the original versions.  After all, the Oompa-Loompas still live in “thick jungles infested by the most dangerous beasts in the entire world,” and are still a “tribe” who do not learn English until they come to Britain.  Even though the animals are now nonsensical (“hornswogglers and snozzwangers and those terrible wicked whangdoodles”), it’s not unreasonable for a child to assume that a “tribe” living in “thick jungles” are Africans living in Africa.  And they still happily acquiesce to being shipped to England “in large packing cases with holes in them,” and find life in a factory preferable to life in their native land.

Which is would seem to imply that well-meaning adults should step in an intervene.  Nel doesn’t out and out suggest making sure kids don’t get their hands on the books.  Intervention could come, I suppose, in the form of a lecture.

How would that begin though?

“Now, children, I know you think the pushmi-pullyu is funny…”

But do that many kids read Doctor Doolittle books on their own?

I don’t remember reading Doctor Doolittle when I was young.  If I did, it didn’t stick with me.  When the Mannion boys were at that in-between stage, past picture books but not ready to tackle chapter books all on their own, I “auditioned” Doctor Doolittle for reading outloud at bedtime and turned him down flat.  I think I had the same reaction to Hugh Lofting’s prose as I had to Thornton W. Burgess’.   Too formal and too old-fashioned and too full of the sound of a patient adult talking down to very dim children.

Doctor Doolittle is the product of an age of colonialism, empire, and the presumed righteousness and beneficence of taking up the White Man’s Burden.  The books are suffused with the spirit of their age, and because of that they are virtually unreadable.  It’s not just that they contain attitudes about race and culture that are offensive.  They contain attitudes about everything that are old-fashioned and out of style, and that includes, foremost, the proper way to write in English.

As off-putting as the racism and paternalism are, I can’t see how contemporary readers can get far enough in the books to have to deal with them because of the attitude Lofting adopts towards his audience of young readers and towards the language.  The prose is cloying, stuffy, and dull.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is something else.

Kids will find their way to it, even if it’s not on their summer reading list.

A well-meaning teacher attempting  to start a discussion by bringing up how callously Willy Wonka treats the Oompa-Loompas is going to have to go a long way before reaching the subjects of colonialism and slavery because the first thing the brighter kids in the class are going to point out is that Willy Wonka treats everybody callously, including Charlie!

Really.  Willy Wonka essentially kills off Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop, and Violet Beaugregard, or he at least lets them die, and what happens to Mike Teavee might be considered a fate worse than death.  It doesn’t matter that we’re assured they survived.  Kids aren’t fooled.  When Veruca, Violet, Augustus, and Mike are seen again they are so much not like themselves that they might as not be themselves.  They are practically new characters.  For all intents and purposes, the originals have been killed off and they died gruesomely while Willy Wonka looked on without a trace of sympathy or remorse.  He doesn’t accept any responsibility for what happened to them, even though he allowed them to proceed through his factory, knowing how each one was likely to behave.

The most intriguing thing about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is what a strange and creepy character Willy Wonka is.  (He is even stranger and creepier in the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.)  The question is why do children love him even though they recognize that he is strange and creepy?

If I was going to worry about what pernicious ideas young readers might pick up from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before I’d worry about a neo-colonialist attitude that may not be there anymore, I’d worry that they were learning that antic sociopathy is a likeable trait.

I don’t worry about that, and I didn’t worry about it when our kids were discovering Roald Dahl, because I trust kids after a certain age to know it’s only a story.

Academic arguments like this have always struck me as overly-intellectualized versions of Fundamentalist Christian fretting about Harry Potter.  They treat books as if the primary purpose of literature is indoctrination and the point of reading is for children to be instructed in the ways and ideas of the adult world.  If well-meaning adults don’t get in the way, the children will be instructed by the wrong adults.

The Fundamentalists worry that reading books with witches as the heroes is going to make kids want to be witches because they believe that a single uncorrected thought poisons the well forever. 

This isn’t exactly the same as worrying that references in books in which animals talk and children are turned into giant blueberries to a political system that is dead and which have to be intuited because direct references have been expunged will teach children that racism and colonial expansionism are ok.  The big difference, of course, is that racist and neo-colonial attitudes exist and witches don’t.  But the arguments are alike in that they treat young readers as tabula rasas who bring nothing of their own to their reading and do not, because they cannot, think for themselves.

But the first and most deciding thing kids bring to a book is their own experience. 

Confronted with Willy Wonka’s treatment of the Oompa-Loompas, rather than picking up and unquestioningly accepting assumptions about paternalism and the oppressive treatment of childlike aboriginal little people in faraway lands, they’re more likely to associate the Oompa-Loompas with the childlike and oppressed little people they know best here at home, themselves.

They’re not going to see the Oompa-Loompas as child-like but as children.  Very strange children.  But still children.

And Willy Wonka’s high-handed and dismissive attitude will remind them of the way adults in their lives often treat them.

But they won’t stop there. 

They’ll associate the Oompa-Loompas with other small people ordered about, terrorized, or callously ignored by mean or indifferent grown-ups they know well in their imaginations, like Munchkins and Whos.

Which means that whatever else they’re thinking about when they’re thinking about the Oompa-Loompas, they are hearing a gentle but firm voice in their heads reminding them, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Wise teachers will jump on this and follow up by leaving their copies of Edward Said in their desks and taking out Horton Hears A Who! to read out loud.

And Nel doesn’t seem aware that very few kids these days---few American kids, at any rate---are going to read these books before they’ve seen the movies. 

Nowdays kids aren’t going to read the revised editions of Doctor Doolittle and inevitably conclude that Prince Bumpo is black.  A lot of them are going to be too busy getting their heads around the idea that Doctor Doolittle is white.

And teachers determined to use Charlie and the Chocolate Factory teach their kids about the evils of racism and colonialism would have to work awfully hard to convince their students that the Oompa-Loompas are really African Pygmies and not a chorus of white English dwarfs in weird make-up.

There’s no recognition in Nel’s post of the part TV and movies play in children’s reading.   Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Wizard of Oz, and Mary Poppins do not exist apart from their movie adaptations anymore.  Some day soon the same will be true for Harry Potter.

The challenge for teachers is to get kids who haven’t been brought up to read to read and see how books can be better than movies and television.

For that, questions about the origins and meaning of the Oompa-Loompas are irrelevant.  There’s another character right there to be enlisted for the job.

Although, frankly, I don’t think teachers have to go far away of their way to get their students to see the point behind Mike Teavee.

The same is true with Veruca, Augustus, and Veronica.  The point---the “lesson”---is so obvious that it’s not worth pointing out.  Dahl doesn’t care about the lesson.  He cares about the fun, and the fun is in watching those four brats get their just desserts or getting turned into desserts.

This gleeful maliciousness strikes me as something more worth worrying about than whether or not the Oompa-Loompas might still be perceived as enslaved Africans (since, obviously, I don’t think they are by most children).  And I would worry about it, except, as I said, it’s only a story.

Nel doesn’t address the questions about the nature of storytelling.  Why do people tell each other stories?  Why do we need to hear stories?  What are we listening for?

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle are stories for children or, since Dahl didn’t think of what he was doing as writing just for children, stories children have taken to heart.  Why?  What do they get from them?  They learn things from stories but I don’t know many children who read to learn the things adults think they should know.

The Doctor Doolittle stories teach lessons.  Not about colonialism and paternalism and the White Man’s Burden.  Those are background assumptions.  The lessons are about kindness, and decency, and tolerance, and open-mindedness, and, also, not incidentally, the importance of learning.  But, although Lofting was an old-fashioned moralist, he didn’t write to teach lessons.  He wrote to tell stories.  The lessons are there because he was that kind of a writer.

Dahl is another kind.

He writes more in the nature of dreams and dreams are not always nice and rarely have morals.

If children read Doctor Doolittle and find reassurance that the world can be an interesting and pleasant place full of adventures but little real danger, they read Dahl’s stories and find that the world is a strange and often unpleasant place full of meanness, nastiness, and pain, but also full of fun and adventure.  In other words, life is confusing because it is simultaneously threatening and pleasant, and a lot of things in life make no sense.

It seems to me that trying to figure out what the Oompa-Loompas really are is reading the story as if it’s meant to make sense in the way other books make sense.  Those other books being school books.

The Oompa-Loompas though only make sense within the larger sense made by Dahl’s story.

Something needs to be gotten out of the way.  Whether or not the Oompa-Loompas original incarnation as Africans is still there, they are not in “enslaved.”

They are hired.

Willy Wonka comes to them and offers them paid work in his factory.  They are free to turn him down.  They don’t because life in Oompa-Loompa Land is no fun and Willy Wonka’s offering to pay them what they regard as top wages, all the cocoa beans they can eat.  For the Oompa-Loompas, Willy Wonka isn’t an imperialist invading.  He is literally opportunity knocking.

Which is exactly what he is for Charlie.

Willy Wonka is not Charlie’s fairy godfather.  He didn’t arrange for Charlie to find the golden ticket and he doesn’t save Charlie in the end or help save him along the way by doing him special favors.  He simply offers Charlie the same chance he offers to the other children and to the Oompah-Loompas.  Charlie saves himself by not blowing his chance.

Dahl wasn’t a moralist, but he had a theme he returned to in book after book.  It’s there in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and in Matilda and in James and the Giant Peach.

And it’s this:

When the time comes, you’ve got to be ready to save yourself, because they adults in your life aren’t going to be of any help.

Did I say Dahl worked in the nature of dreams?

More in the nature of every child’s recurring nightmares.

_____________________

The Story of the ‘Storyteller’:  At NPR, an interview with Donald Sturrock, author of a new biography of Roald Dahl.

Comments

[Rana]

The question is why do children love him even though they recognize that he is strange and creepy?

I don't know about "loving" Willy Wonka. I thought the factory was impressive, and I really liked Charlie and his grandpa, but Wonka himself? Not so much.

I have to admit, though, that I don't remember much about the stories in the two books, and more I remember the illustrations. My edition had illustrations of the Oompa-Loompas that made it quite clear that they were little African pygmies, with curly hair and loincloths. That's how I always remembered them, fondly, and thus I found the movie versions creepy and frightening. (You don't feel that the movie Oompa-Loompas are exploited by Wonka; if anything, they're right in there with him doing the scary stuff.)

The other thing I remember vividly (too vividly) were the Venomous Knids. Those were the stuff of nightmares!

So... African pygmies and terrifying slug monsters. Not a whole lot of chocolate and candies in my memories! And, yet, I still count the books among those I would recommend to kids.

[Rana]

This man was the illustrator of the edition I had: Joseph Schindelman.

[Dylan]

Honestly, a lot of Dahl's work has some sort've questionable or possibly age-inappropriate material. I'm in my early 30's now, but I remember telling my mom all about James and the Giant Peach, which we were reading in school. The boy who grows a peach so big so he can runaway, killing his evil aunts in the process raised her eyebrow. I was enraptured with the story... that their deaths were "bad" never occurred to me.

Around that same age, I tried to stage a working of a play of Charlie and the Chocolate factory in which the Ooompa Loompas were clearly an African tribe. I don't know if that stuck with me through my childhood into adulthood or what, but my assumption was always that they were human in some way. In fact, until reading this post it never occurred to me that someone might view it differently.

[Bill Altreuter]

Hate Charlie. Wonka is mean, and capricious, and the racism always bothered me. On the other hand, I love Dr. Doolittle, racism and all, because it is recognizably a period piece, and because in the later volumes Prince Bumpo returns and is an intelligent stalwart. Also, talking animals.

Where I thought you were going with this was "it's only a story". The reason the people who condemn the Harry Potter books fail to recognize that it's only a story is that their entire world view is shaped by a similarly impossible, made-up book of make believe which they insist is literally true in the most profound sense of truth. This distorts their ability to distinguish reality from fiction, and compels them to attack books that are not the book they like.

Me? I believe in Moby Dick, but that doesn't mean that I think a whale is a fish.

[Lance Mannion]

Bill,

This is one of those posts where I lost track of my own point. "It's only a story" was supposed to be my point. I don't know how to get back to it.

I think my feelings about the Doctor Doolittle books is like my feelings about Thornton W. Burgress', which you also liked. I think you're a more open-hearted reader than I am.

[Bill Altreuter]

Am I an open-hearted reader? That's an interesting question. Maybe I'm just a guy who likes talking animal stories.

I do think that I have always recognized that attitudes about things like race have changed over time. I like Dr. Doolitle because he is genuinely kind, and sincerely tries to do the right thing. In the Prince Bumpo section, for example, his life and the lives of his animals are all imperiled, and he still has to be argued into turning Bumpo's skin white. He knows it is wrong (even if Hugh Lofting isn't entirely clear on this), and there is never any question about the humanity of the prince or the king of Jolliginki-- in fact, the king's grievances seem pretty legitimate. Bumpo is foolish, but it is because he young and romantic. Later he is more level-headed-- he grows. This doesn't really happen to Wonka, who remains a SOB. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is really about how money solves everything, which is an unlovely message (even if it's true).

[Batocchio]

Damn! Quite the post! I'm trying to remember if our edition of Chocolate Factory had the oompa-loompas as pygmies. (It was pretty old.)

Besides the imperialism issues, Roald Dahl did write a fair amount of horror or horror-laced fiction that I read as I got older, and almost all of his children's fiction has some touch of that. My favorite of his was James and the Giant Peach, which I read 5 or 6 times as a kid. Still, I wasn't crazy about the evil aunts being flattened by the peach, even if they were evil. Bleeding heart, I guess. Chocolate Factory was more cruel (when I got older I appreciated the dark humor more, but there's a lot of it) and the Great Glass Elevator may have been the spookiest. I suppose Dahl was just working in the Grimm tradition.

I might have to include this post in my Banned Books Week roundup, Lance, but perhaps there's more to come from House Mannion as well...

[DKF]

Wonderful post, Lance. Another noteworthy aspect of the book is Dahl's unsparing depiction of the realities of poverty and privation. I was deeply affected as a child by his raw descriptions of Charlie's wretched day-to-day existence, particularly the precarious state of Charlie's health due to chronic undernourishment. The Oompa-Loompas, of course, were frankly starving to death when Willy first encountered them, subsisting on diet of mashed caterpillars, as I recall. The imagery was powerful and indelible.