il manifesto 11.1.2011
L’ultima pretestuosa polemica sul “politicamente corretto” che ci arriva dall’America è la riproposizione dell’annosa querelle sul linguaggio di uno dei capolavori di quella letteratura, Le avventure di Huckleberry Finn di Mark Twain (1885).: si tratta di proprietà di linguaggio perché nel libro compaiono parole indicibili; e di proprietà del linguaggio perché c’è oggi chi si adopera per sostituirle and more educated in their own words. It 's an old story, which begins at the very moment of the book, but it also speaks to us today revived.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the story of a Southern slave-boy, an orphan, vagrant and marginal, which runs along the Mississippi River with a black slave named Jim, both seeking their idea of \u200b\u200bfreedom. It is not at all sure that this research has finally happened, it ends the book so ambiguous and disappointing for many. But in a Western culture that has done little wrong and deal with his own ineradicable racism, it was enough to make Huckleberry Finn one of the few texts that describe the scene with a minimum of courage and articulation. This - plus the fact that he was traded from the start to a children's book - has helped to promote simplified and reductionist readings, in which the imaginative and disoriented vagrant Huck Finn is flattened into a kind of role model of good intentions and anti-racist icon.
But there is an obstacle from beginning to end, for more than a hundred times, Huck Finn uses the words of the racist American lexicon: "nigger," the term bubble insulting African Americans with contempt and disgust. E 'word was enough to exclude the book from many libraries and schools in the United States, until it's genius that removed the obstacle: a new edition of the classic Mark Twain edited by Professor Alan Gribben, in fact, remove the offending "word with the year-old" and replaces it with the apparently less offensive to "slave." It 's a bit like the Victorian editions of Shakespeare cleared of all swear words and double meanings: the Bard could be vulgar? Huck Finn and the icon may use profanity racist?
Yes: This is what people like him in those times and in those places and Huck would not be credible if he were speaking in a different way. An example: after a discussion in which he was defeated by the compelling logic of his fellow adventure, Huck concludes that "you can not teach a nigger a pensare”. Difficile pensare a una frase più razzista – ma se invece gli facciamo dire “non puoi insegnare a uno schiavo a pensare” o non ha senso o, se ne ha uno, è solo quello di confermare che gli schiavi sono intrinsecamente incapaci di pensare. A parte che un lettore minimamente attento capirebbe benissimo che quello che Huck realmente pensa è che “non puoi insegnare a un n- a pensare come me, come voglio io che pensi”. Quella che Huck scambia per inferiorità il libro ce la fa capire come differenza.
I ripulitori e i censori ben intenzionati sembrano non capire una cosa che dovrebbe essere ormai scontata per ogni insegnante, e per ogni lettore avvertito: una cosa è quello che dice un personaggio, and one thing is what the book says (if a character yells, "I'll kill you!" means that the book is in favor of murder?). The wonder of the book lies precisely in this space between the "conscience" and the language of a kid raised and socialized to believe that slavery is a natural and immutable as set by the natural inferiority of blacks and the Holy Scriptures (just feel like talking his father and what they teach in church) - and the mentality of players who have had the good fortune to be born when slavery had been abolished (but still no racism, and this is the point). So the book is based on the poetics and politics of alienation: Huck vede le cose attraverso lenti diverse dalle nostre, scambia la poetastra Emmeline Grangerford per una grande artista, e fino alla fine resta convinto che aiutando Jim a scappare lui non sta liberando uno schiavo ma lo sta rubando, sottraendo a una innocente vecchietta la sua legittima proprietà consistente in un essere umano. Huck non crede di guadagnarsi il paradiso degli eroi della libertà ma l’inferno dei ladri e dei vagabondi a cui si sente destinato fin dall’inizio: “e va bene, ci andrò, all’inferno”, dice dopo aver preso la sua decisione. Per rendere il libro rispettabile, bisognerebbe aggiustare anche questo e mandarlo in paradiso; o anche, tutte le volte che dice “rubare un negro”, fargli dire “liberare uno schiavo” (e dopo tutto, anche “hell”, inferno, è una parolaccia per gli anglofoni bene educati).
Ma Huck non agisce per convinzione antirazzista e antischiavista, ma per qualcosa di più profondo e più limitato – l’amicizia con Jim. Certo, questa è resa possibile dal superamento di certi stereotipi (ma pensa un po’, si dice a un certo punto, non avrei mai immaginato che anche i negri volessero bene ai loro figli!) ma non diventa mai una visione generale. “Ruba” Jim perché si accorge che è un essere umano ma non riesce a desumere da questo un rifiuto dell’istituzione che gli nega l’umanità. E’ questa contraddizione, this limit, which is a character of Huck, and then divided by modern ideological rather than a puppet, and his adventures is a book that asks us to think rather than reassure. How comforting it would be trivial and if in the end Huck "take conscience" and became a respected abolitionist hero - that is, if in the end there and then as we thought (or as we delude ourselves to think) we now. But Huck does not think and talk like us - but we really sure that the narrow, we act like him, in violation of every rule and law, there would play for the soul of an individual laborer Rosarno a migrant or a boat in the Adriatic?
Huckleberry Finn, therefore we can not due either to the category of political correctness or calming the even more hypocritical rhetoric of the politically incorrect folk as a sign of authenticity. Huck's language is a wake-up call: we feel that when racism is common sense comes to contaminate even the most "innocent", including our own, and therefore we must all be vigilant. Wipe it means to deny this looming danger, cover and leave intact the symptom of illness, and leave us more vulnerable to bad in front of common sense that besiege us.
few days ago I received an email from a Romanian student who had followed the seminars on Huckleberry Finn (and an anchor text more complicated, Melville's Benito Cereno). In short, an informed decision said today of slaves and blacks are no longer talking, but slavery and discrimination exist, just speak another language or be of another religion. So, it is true that there are separate things, but one thing is to pay attention to words, to pay attention to another way of thinking and relating the difference between hypocrisy and political correctness is that which exists between clean and think about clean. Because as long as we have inside, even if we delete the words, there are other drives to come to light. After all, until recently, the Italian language had no equivalent of questa parolaccia razzista inglese: anche “negro”, come ha ricordato sulla Stampa un americanista importante come Claudio Gorlier (autore negli anni ’60 di una pionieristica Storia dei negri d’America) è diventato un insulto solo quando abbiamo cominciato a trattare gli immigrati africani come esseri di seconda categoria. E allora abbiamo inventato le parole che ci mancavano (“vu’ cumpra’”) e riciclato quelle che avevamo: “albanese” è stato sinonimo di “scemo”, tutte le parole usate per designare i rom si sono macchiate di odio, e l’Italia è piena di gente che dice “gay” e pensa “frocio”.
In entrambi i grandi romanzi Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there is a scene where someone whitewashing a fence. It 's a very eloquent metaphor in its biblical resonances: a coat of white to cover the fact that inside of us, whitewashed fences, nothing changes, even if you do not see anymore.
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