We have turned politically correct expression into a trap. In the name of what must be politically correct, we have reinvented censorship. These are curious human paradoxes: we have the ability to transform an a priori positive concept (not wanting to offend others, being respectful of difference, attending to people's various sensitivities) into something nefarious. We become sick, aggressive observers, not at all attentive to other people's freedom of expression. The limits are very fine, like a thin rope that separates tolerance from intolerance, the desire to avoid injuries while cutting heads right and wrong.
Let me explain: the news of the revision/rewriting of Roald Dahl's work was only the tip of the iceberg. After the controversy that arose from rewriting the work by removing the adjectives ugly, fat, or making the bald witches disappear, for example, the following thoughts come to mind:
What will we do, now, with the characters of the ancient Greek tragedies? Medea, by Euripides, explains the rage the protagonist feels when Jason, the husband for whom she has betrayed her country, leaves her to marry another woman. Medea, a witch who controls nature, wise and forsaken, clever and cruel in a foreign land, kills her own children as revenge. It opposes the mother's instinct to the will to take revenge. Revenge wins, in a splendid work... that perhaps some would like to destroy.
And what would happen to Phaedra, from Seneca, where the protagonist goes mad with desire for Hippolytus, her stepson? And with Oedipus the King, by Sophocles, who masterfully draws human behavior, when he kills his father and has sex with his mother?
Perhaps to be politically correct, we should also review Shakespeare's work. Let's make new editions, then, where the delicious character of Ofèlia, who committed suicide in a river, does not appear. Lest we encourage the suicide of teenage girls, a worrying situation in our world that, I assure you, has nothing to do with literary characters.
Once done, we could delete the protagonist himself: Hamlet, which is not very correct from a current point of view. And, of course, let's change the ending of Romeo and Juliet, so that those who defend that healthy relationships do not generate dependencies cannot be scandalized. We should also review King Lear, because it ends in a carnage resulting from filial ingratitude, where evil is absolute victor, as often happens in life.
Oh, and following the criteria of the correction, it would be convenient to do a complete rewrite of El Quixote. How did Cervantes dare to talk about a beautiful and perfumed Dulcinea del Toboso, who was the idealization of a woman named Aldonza, whom he describes as short, ugly, smelling bad and Moorish?
Please, let's stop being ridiculous. We respect literature and all those works that, written in a specific time and circumstances, have built the collective imagination of our civilization. They have served to know human nature. They raised questions and gave answers.
Let's not be so elementary as to try to review everything from a current, stubborn and sectarian point of view, because we will only succeed in impoverishing ourselves culturally and humanly. And we are already poor enough.
