About the Necessity of a World Literature by Maja Panajotova

The history of mankind - or at least the history of that part of mankind living in Europe - can be conceived as the succession of several long periods, characterized by the presence of a predominant type of community consciousness, demanding full identification and loyalty from the individual. Broadly speaking, we can distinguish three successive types of community consciousness. First, there was the community of Christians, which nursed universal ambitions, attempting to unify all mankind all over the world in one single community, led by the Pope of Rome or the ecumenical Patriarch of Rome. From the beginning, however, they consider each other as rivals, and later, their ambition was thwarted by the emergence of Islam, aspiring to universality as well. The dismemberment of the Catholic world during the Reformation created several new communities, but all of religious nature: Protestants of different denominations.

The Eighteenth Century marked the end of the era of religious communities in Europe. During the Enlightenment, there was an attempt to restore universalism, as presumably universally acceptable rational philosophical and political concepts were proposed.

At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Europe feel apart in national communities or nations. Religion was reduced to only an attribute of national identity and universalism was, particularly in the German variant of nationalism, explicitly rejected.

Towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, a new form of community spirit was propagated: class-consciousness. Socialist society should be organized and how it should develop. The Christians had no clear idea about the way they should be governed on earth, more concerned as they were with the Kingdom of Heaven. Nationalists, who like to feel the omnipresence of their coveted national state, tend to be supporters of an authoritarian, bureaucratically or even military administrated society. The communists thought to be well informed about the final aim mankind was pursuing - classless society - and about the economic and social measures to be taken in order to achieve this aim.

However, the fundament of community consciousness seems to be the acceptance by all the members of the community of a common moral value system. The supreme loyalty of the individual was felt to be due to the community. Sacrificing his life to God, the nation or the working class was considered to be the highest duty of the individual. At the same time, God, the nation or the working class provided each member of the society with a set of moral values, which should be strictly observed. Offenders risked to be ostracised, what, in the three mentioned cases, had very serious consequences.

In the past, community allegiance was considered to be self-evident. The feeling of loyalty to the community as a group, as well as to its moral value system, came down from generation to generation and was accepted without question. Of course, there were cases of apostasy or conversion, but they seem to have been the result of historical events or changed social circumstances, and not of reflection on the qualities and shortcomings of the different creeds.

But man is more than the product of the community he is born in alone. He becomes even more human as his capability to distance himself from community he belongs to grows, as he gets more aware of himself as a critical, thinking individual, as his readiness to put into perspective the hereditary values of his community increases. Since every community is based on a set of moral values, distancing oneself from a given community or identifying with it is - or should be - a seriously made moral choice, Catholics in Western Europe became Protestants and Protestants became Catholics; Russian thinkers of Orthodox origin as Chaadayev and Solovyov embraced Catholicism and - a curious phenomenon in recent years - some Western European intellectuals espoused Islam, thus accepting a new moral values system and identifying themselves with another community. Marxist thinkers have discussed at length the issue of members of the working class, who, making a career for themselves, adopted the life style and the Loral attitudes of the bourgeoisie, thus identifying themselves with the exploiters and forgetting their proletarian origin. But there were also intellectuals of bourgeoisie origin, siding with the proletariat against their own class, making a choice for social justice against political iniquity. More obviously than in the case of religious conversion, class solidarity proves to be linked with moral choices.

But what about national consciousness. One cannot, nowadays in Western Europe, choose his national identity, because this depends on more or less objective, unchangeable factors as mother tongue, native area, citizenship, etceteras. How far should one go in identifying himself with his nation and with the political aims of this community? What if these aims and the means to achieve them seem to be morally reprehensible? Aren't there legions of examples of people, defending their nationhood and thinkers no longer dividing humanity in religious communities or nations, but in two classes: the exploiters and oppressors on the one hand, and the exploited and oppressed on the other. They rehabilitated universalism, not only by demonstrating the occurrence of these two classes all over the world, in all societies, but also by proposing, just as the Enlighteners in the Eighteenth Century did, political solutions to the problems that were, as they believed, universally applicable.

Class-consciousness proved to be incapable to wipe out national distinctions and was granted only a short life, at least as a force, able to organize society. In large parts of the world, it was replaced recently by national consciousness again, especially there, where national identity had been suppressed on behalf of proletarian internationalism.

The succession of these communities throughout the ages can easily be detected on the basis of certain outward appearances, namely the symbols with which the respective communities used to represent and confirm themselves. The symbol of the Christians was the cross, they had their martyrs for the faith and their holy days, when the most important events in the history of Salvation were celebrated and the martyrs venerated as saints. Nationalists replaced the cross by the national flag, the holy days by national holidays, the martyrs for the faith by national heroes. And the spokesmen of the proletariat replaced the national colours by the hammer and the sickle, the national holidays by May Day and the national heroes by leftist revolutionaries, fallen for the cause of socialism.

But these are only the outward appearances of the subsequent kinds of community consciousness. More important are the respective ideologies they brought about, their views on how their presumed national interests not in a democratic and peaceful, but in a violent way. Obviously, totalitarianism is not the monopoly of universalism: societies, which submit everything to the nation state as the supreme source of moral and cultural values, can with good reason be branded as totalitarian too.

How legitimate the search for national self-identification may be, mankind has always been longing for universality. And though mankind has often been cruelly deceived, this longing, rid of naive expectations and dangerous illusions, remains wholly justified. How reprehensible and even criminal the attempts to create universal empires may have been, we should not, in this age of unstoppable and understandable disintegration of universality, deny the moral values universality contains. Let us recall the simple, old-fashioned truths that nations are only local varieties of universal mankind, that we can communicate with other national cultures only thanks to what people all over the world have in common.

The fact that world literature - in the sense Goethe gave to this world - exists, may be clearest evidence of the existence of universal moral and aesthetic values. We, as Western Europeans, can enjoy a Japanese and South American novels, and Japanese and South Americans read Western European poetry. Catholics can enjoy Islamic Sufi poetry, and Hindu's can enjoy Shakespeare's plays. Members of the "high society" can enjoy Gorki's stories, defending the rights of the proletarians, and a factory worker can be charmed by a romance of chivalry. Thus literature exceeds all community bondages and makes every human being aware of the universality of humanity. More than anyone else, translators seem to be aware of the universality of human feelings and emotions. Speaking of the untranslatability of literary work, they never mean a literary work might be incomprehensible to the community of speakers of an other language, but always have in mind mere technical feature of the literary work concerned.

Translating is demolishing the walls people are emprisoned by, and building a new intangible, and therefore indestructible Tower of Babel.

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About the Necessity of a World Literature by Maja Panajotova