Aaron Tracy

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.

He's dead.

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.

Outrage 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.

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.