The critics of a canon, who speak from multiculturalist or feminist positions, are right when they stress, that any canon has always inevitable persuasive and educative functions. It belongs to someone, expressing the values – esthetic, ethical and social – which are accepted by some community, and even more important, it is often, or always, used to support and protect these values.1 So when we now speak about the canon of European literature, in the same moment we define the community which is it's creator and guardian, and receiver, we define and affirm the values, which are supposed to distinguish this community from other. But so far it isn't even obvious that the very concept of the European culture refers to any consistent reality and is something more than a proposition. Since ages European literature used to be studied as a sum of national literatures, just like the European history used to be studied as the sum of the histories of its nations, as Ernst Robert Curtius noticed almost sixty years ago.2
1 J. Szacki, O kanonie kultury europejskiej uwagi sceptyczne, « Znak » 46 (1994) 7, p. 19; H. Markiewicz, O kanonach literatury , « Przeglad Humanistyczny » 2006, 5-6, p. 15.
2 Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948); Pol. transl. Literatura europejska i lacinskie sredniowiecze , transl. A. Borowski, Kraków 1997, p. 13-14.
It seems even more difficult when we recall that in the beginning of the 21 st century Europe supposed to find its new identity, more just and opened to what was earlier suppressed and neglected, it supposed to find a better balance of different areas of its experience and to recognize them as its own richness. In that underestimated area of the European experience there is an experience of the nations “of secondary importance”, “barbarian” ones; the very fact that in their beginnings they were not included into the boarders of the Roman Empire became their original sin, and so they found themselves in a strangely undetermined area of the “younger Europe” (if I were to use Jerzy Kloczowski's term) or in the area of “weak forms” (if I were to use the term of the famous Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz's).
Since ages these nations of the “younger Europe ” have felt at home in the area of the European canon of culture (and of literature), and they also used to nourish quite naive conviction that they participate in its creating. The conviction would perhaps be true, if we were thinking about the canon (as one of the Polish researchers proposes) as of “a polyhedron or a crystal of some complex form; its objective shape isn't accessible to anybody, because one can see it in a different way from each perspective”.3 But such a canon would be quite useless for us, if it were to be perceived only from the positions which are inaccessible to a man. God doesn't need a canon...
The frustration of not a very big nation of Central Europe (and of course I mean the Poles) comes therefore from the fact that no matter how we approach this polyhedron, we can see only isolated traces of more than a thousand years of participation by Polish writers in creating European heritage. The questionnaire prepared by the Università degli Studi “ La Sapienza ” didn't give more optimistic results; the names and the works of Polish writers appear quite rarely, taking the last places and getting single votes: Stanislaw Lem, Witold Gombrowicz, Adam Mickiewicz, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska among the most important, and some of them among the most cosmopolitan authors, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz i Jan Potocki among the most transgressive writers, Maciej Kazmierz Sarbiewski among those unjustly undervalued, and Quo vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz among the books for teenagers (though the author himself, the first Polish Nobel Prize winner, was definitely much more serious about his work...). Anyway it's quite significant that though we can find Polish names on the presented lists, we can't find any Polish titles among the most important literary works. Perhaps politically correct awareness of multinational and multicultural Europe is getting weaker, when we think not about our erudition, but about the concrete reader's experience. In one of the best known canons of world literature, published by Harold Bloom in his book The Western Canon. The Books and School of the Ages, this Polish representation is more extraordinary: Brunon Schulz, Czeslaw Milosz, Witold Gombrowicz, Stanislaw Lem, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski; and one doesn't need great perspicacity to realize that probably it doesn't come from the critical opinion about Polish literature in general, but from a lack of acquaintance with it and above all with its tradition.
3 J. Jarzebski, Metamorfozy kanonu , « Znak » 46 (1994) 7 , p. 16.
How does it happen that literature of one nation becomes widely known, full of masterpieces, and its great part gets included into the canon, while the other one stays known only to the users of a given language and a narrow group of specialists? There are many reasons for it, but above all, one should stress the language, the context of civilization and culture, and – no doubt – politics. To a certain degree this is a changing popularity of languages that determines a canon. The Latin is, of course, the best example, and in modern canon we will not find any Neo-Latin masterpieces, as in the 17 th century, no one could find Shakespeare among the most popular European authors. In that time his place was taken by John Barclay and John Owen.
The context of civilization and culture allows to create better or worse conditions for developing talented writers, and the talents – I do believe – are born everywhere. And though it might sound almost marxist, one can't deny that the welfare of a society, as a factor affecting education and institutions of culture, does matter in stimulating artistic work. The writers of the past ages knew the idea of otium, regarded it as a necessary sphere of creative work. Otium means freedom from any duties, means liberty, peace, but also welfare, and these conditions all together become the source of any literary exercise.
And so we come to politics as a factor deciding whether the literature of a given nation is in its most part and interest included the symbolic structure of a canon. Now it seems quite self-evident that since ages the literature of politically strong nations and groups appear especially attractive. In the last three decades the discussion concerning the canon made this fact quite obvious. Politics determines canons in a significant measure, and canons in the same measure support political orders of different kinds. Since Roman times all the Empires used to have quite large representations in the canons.
But even if it is so, should we use political criteria to reduce political incorrectness of the canon, or to make it better balanced in political sense? Should small nations, neglected in the canon, present their own lists of geniuses and claim to include them into the Parnassus of European masters? And should they then exact the knowledge of the changed canon from the next generations of pupils and students? And what proportions should we accept in such a canon?
Modern Polish history can teach that political manipulation with a canon is one of the most cruel and the most wretched actions of social engineering. The politicians installing communist order in postwar Poland, while being quite aware of its total inconsistency with Polish tradition and historical experience, were trying to change the national canon and then use it to rebuild social awareness. And thus history of literature was radically transformed, and those authors who could by no means be interpreted as politically progressive, were excluded from the school-books and book-stores; even research work, if it concerned their works, became very risky, sometimes an impossible task. Political interference in a canon is always a crime against culture, and doesn't matter who does it and for what reasons. And that's why the Poles, whose literature is so vaguely reflected in the canon, should oppose using political criteria in correcting it.
A canon is always constructed in a difficult balance between aesthetical values and political ideas. The presence of the latter ones is inevitable, but replacing one idea by the other doesn't make the canon better. Aesthetical values should always remain the principal aim, because literature is itself, no thanks to its political or moral values, but thanks to its beauty. But one must also admit that our recognition of aesthetical values is determined by so many factors that usually we are just in the situation of that mentioned in the beginning, a spectator of a polyhedron, a prisoner of one's own point of view.
Small nations, whose literature didn't attain an honor of being included into the canon, have also their point of view, their own perspective. As in other cases, it's imperfect and partial. “Polish mirror of literary fames” doesn't say much about these fames, but more about the criteria of valuation, used in constructing a list of European masterpieces. Such lists exist quite objectively as curricula of different educational institutions, but they also have their secret lives on numerous levels of public discourse and as such they affect social awareness.
If it's true that – as Czeslaw Milosz, Polish Nobel Prize winner, once said – canon exists thanks to high schools, one must admit that the young generation of Poles will have very limited knowledge about the European canon. When I look at the list, which is a result of Il canone Europeo program, the list of “the most European authors”, I'm aware that of all of them the young Poles obligatorily used to read only Shakespeare and Goethe, and those more ambitious were also acquainted with the portions of the Divine Comedy. Polish pupils were also obliged to read other authors highly ranked in our questionnaire: Sophocle and Horace, Moliere and Dostojewski, and – others much less appreciated in this questionnaire – such as, Joseph Conrad and Albert Camus. The works of Kafka and Bulhakow were not obligatory but still recommended and that's all.
But if we think about hitherto existing curriculum in Polish schools, can we recognize any vision of European literature which would be proposed to Polish young people? Let's notice at first that any foreign literature presented at Polish school is just... European literature. No American, no Asian, no African – one could say it's perfectly Eurocentric. But as a matter of fact it's perfectly Polonocentric, because a Polish pupil at high school is supposed to get to know the works of 11 European authors and no less than 47 Polish ones, to shore-up Polish linguistic culture. English, French and Russian authors slightly outnumber the other foreign writers; Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, modern Greek – these literatures don't exist. And one should also add that it looks that any serious literature seems to have been started around the late XVI century. The previous two thousand years of development of the European literature are only represented by portions of three literary works and not all of them are obligatory. If there's any vision of European literature in the high school canon, it is Western and modern literature; to be European means to be Western and modern, not even so much Mediterranean , as one could expect. If it is so, as Curtius wrote, that the European culture was created by an ancient-Mediterranean tradition and by Western-modern tradition,4 Polish awareness today reflects mainly the latter ones, neglecting the heritage of its own part of the continent. Similar tendencies can be noticed at the academic level. Józef Bachórz analyzed curricula used for the courses of comparative literature at Polish universities. Euro centrism is still obvious though on this higher level it's less sharp, and some American authors are allowed to enter the canon. As Józef Bachórz says: “Of the European literature there are only [...] ancient Greeks, Romans, French, Italians, Spanish, English, Germans, Austrians, Russians, Scandinavians, Czechs and... Nobel Prize winners. I was searching for vain Portugueses [...], Slovacks, Bielorussians; there is only Déry from Hungary [...], only Thomas Venclova and Valiunas from Lithuania , only Eminescu form Romania , only Kawafis from modern Greece , Kiš from Serbia , Krleža from Croatia , Ševcenko from Ukraine , and only recommended at a few universities...”5 The proportions of the literatures of different epochs are better than at the level of high school, but still surprisingly weak. The world literature till the end of the 18 th century is represented by 131 authors, while the 19 th and the 20 th century by 208 authors. So again we can recognize that the canon is more Western than European, and more modern than classical: Modernism becomes new Classicism. The absence of the Slavic world in these canons means the acceptance not only for the exclusion of the other Slavic literatures, but also for being excluded among them, and for the frustrating division between the “older” and the “younger” Europe. We mirror and repeat what in the same time we oppose and want to change.
4 Curtius, p. 15
5 J. Bachórz, O uniwersyteckim kanonie lektur polonistycznych , in: Polonistyka w przebudowie. Literaturoznawstwo – wiedza o jezyku – wiedza o kulturze – edukacja. Zjazd Polonistów Kraków, 22-25 wrzesnia 2004 , ed. M. Czerminska , Kraków 2005, p. 143.
As a reader and a historian of Polish literature I'm much more interested in opening a Polish canon of European literature than in opening the European canon to Polish literature. This is what I mean when I say, the first will cause the latter. Literature that accepts the fact, that it's only Polish, and closes itself in an untranslatable code of tradition and symbols, can't become the part of the European canon, because it needs to be universal. On the other side, one should still remember that artistic energy usually comes from the distinctness, and so the source of true universality is distinctness and identity. To find a balance is the real challenge.
One Polish researcher of modern literature, Piotr Sliwinski, proposes to make a distinction between a real canon, defined as “a space of community and agreement, which is represented by the widely known output of the past”, and its double, the accepted alternative, having certain superficial similarity, but existing in a form of literary rankings, competitions, awards of prestige, school and university curricula.6 If we accept this distinction, we can see that a real canon, defined as such, is nothing else but a triumph of actual artistic values, it is victorious literary tradition, which can be discovered in concrete texts, no matter what are the arbitrary appointments of critics and scholars.
But isn't this distinction idealistic in a fact? Literary values, if they are actually meant to affect and compete with the others, should be recognized first, so anyway one should go back to rankings and curricula produced by the elites, because they organize a process of a literary education. There's no escape from a canon; even if one can say that any masterpiece has anti-canonical potential, sooner or later, when it is recognized in its uniqueness, it is being petrified in a canon. This is one more reason to care for a canon, though in the same time we should be aware of its inevitably political and educational character, but also – fortunately – of its transitoriness. A canon is an imperfect instrument which we use to get to know literature. This instrument should being improved, as all others, but one should do it carefully, looking for a difficult balance between what is political and – above all – what is aesthetical in it. If we change the canon of European literature, we will not change automatically the awareness of common European heritage; it doesn't work in this way. But if we change this awareness, the canon will open.
6 P. Sliwinski, Kanon, hipoteza konieczna , in: Kanon i obrzeza , ed. Inga Iwasiów, Tatiana Czerska, Kraków 2005, p. 85-86.
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