Queequeg, Pacific Islander, “savage” who, covered in tattoos, practices cannibalism blithely, to the point of suffering from indigestion only after a feast where 50 enemies were devoured, is the hero worthy of harpooning the white whale, a symbol illuminating American literature. But will the character be a victim of cancel cultureculture of cancellation, erasure, this new and implacable censorship?
The Quebec anthropologist Raymond Massé would ask himself the question, if we trust his essay Perverted Tolerance. Like many others, he is worried, he writes, about the growing influence, in the media, the arts, the universities, in political life, of “a sort of language police which, in the name of ‘Other, commands the greatest caution in the use of terms that may offend the sensitivities of minority groups (sexual, political, ethnic, religious)’.
Long professor of anthropology at Laval University, Massé defends tolerance against cancel culture, which he calls the “culture of banishment”. For him, tolerance, “new flagship value of secularized societies”, has “imposed itself as the humanist foundation of respect for diversity”. Driven by a critical sense and knowledge of cultural evolution, would she spare Queequeg, one of the heroes of the novel Moby-Dick (1851), by Herman Melville, the great American classic?
Another famous writer from the United States, Mark Twain, however, suffered recent censorship for his novel Huckleberry Finn (1884), once seen as a pioneering anti-racist work, whose popular verve caused Ernest Hemingway to say in 1935 that “all modern American literature flows from it”. But the current censors have only spotted the n-word there, pronounced about 200 times, so that schools are banning the book from students even if the disputed term appears there in a context that is not at all contemptuous.
No wonder Massé attaches importance to the text published in the United States on July 7, 2020 in the Harper’s Magazine and who rejects this form of censorship. He recalls that it was signed by many intellectual personalities, such as Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky. According to Massé, to avoid perverting oneself by sinking hypocritically into disguised censorship, tolerance should be accompanied by relativism and universalism, both of which are open to self-criticism.
On this point, the reflection of the anthropologist, too abstract, sometimes lacks concrete examples. But Massé excels by quoting Rushdie’s literary self-portrait: “I am a bombayist, from Bombay, the most cosmopolitan, the most hybrid, the most mixed city in India… I was already a mongrel, a bastard of the history, long before London made matters worse. »
Far from the idealized vision of the guardian of a purity of identity, this reveals a complex identity prone to mocking Westernization. In short, a nod to modernity around the world.