DAILY Le Figaro recently devoted two full pages to a phenomenon that has already taken the United States by storm and is threatening France currently.
The so-called “sensitivity movements” are not interested in the literary qualities of a novel or a book of poetry, nor do they care about grammar or elocution. Their only interest are what they qualify as signs of political incorrectness, sexism, homophobia and other recently invented terms that put an end to all intellectual discussions in a single shot.
Such was the case recently with two American writers, Keira Drake and Laura Moriarty, whose books The Continent and TheHeart respectively, underwent harsh scrutiny and were allowed to be published only after changes could be made as ordered by “sensitivity critics”.
This threat is not too far away from France either. Weekly literary magazine Livres gives the example of a recently published detective novel from which the writer was forced to drop the character of a lame dog under the argument that this could hurt the sensitivities of handicapped people.
Le Figaro interviewed Teresa Cremisi who has the rare privilege of having directed two most respected French publishing firms, Flammarion and Gallimard. She says: “Sensitive reading is obviously nothing else but pure nonsense. I hope this contagion never makes its way into France.”
But it has already started happening. One victim is the famous cartoon serial writer Hergé whose adventures of Tintin are undoubtedly the most read works of comic strips and have been translated into practically all the languages of the world. A current movement through blogs and so-called social networks has launched a campaign to ban all the books by Hergé. Their argument is that his work Tintin in Congo makes fun of the African people.
But an even more threatening sensitivity raid concerns Pierre Loti, a French writer who as a naval officer had visited many overseas countries and had written some forty books of prose and poetry that had turned him into a literary legend.
Loti also visited India and his book India without the English appeared in 1903 soon after his famous work The Last Days of Peking.
Loti was a passionate collector of art pieces and his house in the city of Rochefort in southwestern France is full of furniture, paintings and statues from all the countries he had been to.
Following a recent announcement by a cultural organisation to start work on the restoration of Loti’s residence, many groups have raised a movement to force the government to stop it.
Their argument is that Loti was a racist.
Le Figaro also interviewed writer and intellectual Patrice Jean who says: “This sensitivity censorship is nothing else but an adolescent mentality. If we accept all these absurdities we’ll soon be saying goodbye to Pascal, Molière, Chateaubriand, Flaubert and all the rest, in fact to our civilisation itself.”
Allow me to end this letter on a musical note, even if you find it a bit out of tune. It concerns Georges Bizet’s fabled opera Carmen, the most popular musical chef-d’oeuvre in the world and, according to verified statistics, always being played somewhere in the world anytime of the day or night.
In Bizet’s magnum opus Don José, a Spanish soldier, falls in love with a gypsy girl named Carmen and abandons his carrier and the woman he is supposed to marry. At the end of the performance Carmen leaves José for a bullfighter. Jealous and unable to bear this treason, José kills her in the final scene.
A sensitivity movement is currently striving hard to change the end of the opera that it considers too “sexist”. As a matter of fact it has even succeeded in arranging a performance in which José is shot dead by Carmen.
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, June 24th, 2018
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