PASCAL BRUCKNER
245
Nights," just as reading Pushkin or Gogol has not brought us any closer
to the Russians. We do not care for immigrants because we dance to Al–
gerian ral music, any more than the young who dance to music with an
African beat are freed from racist views concerning these same Africans
when they meet in the street or must live with them. In addition, what
we appreciate in Garcia Marquez or Tanizaki is not Colombia or Japan,
but the particularities of a fate or a village able to elevate itself to the uni–
versal. What is a great novel? A bellringer's quarrel, an intimate adventure
that grips the entire world. Worse still: the war in the former Yugoslavia
has been prepared and is sustained by writers, novelists - Dobrica Cosic,
the principal architect of Serbian nationalism, Milorad Pavic, Vuk Drask–
ovic (who has since courageously joined the opposition) - and especially
poets of whom the most famous, Radovan Karadjic, is a notorious war
criminal. In present day Serbia, murderers versify, hatred is borne upon
the wings of epic poetry, literature is put directly in the service of ethnic
cleansing. We must abandon the idea that the cultural world with its suc–
cesses and beauties can serve as a criterion or guide for the statesman or
the moralist. Neither the most moving collection of poetry nor the
sweetest music can offer any ethical truism, any gauge of just or unjust
behavior. For a long time now, the true, the beautiful, and the good have
parted ways.
There are things more serious still. We can ask if this indiscriminate
eulogy of multiplicity does not conflate
cosmopolitanism
with
universalism.
Because of the "intertwining of all peoples in the web of the world mar–
ket" (Karl Marx) because of the internationalization of merchandise and
the media - which potentially brings all people into contact at all points
on the globe - universalism is certainly the
vade mecum
of the new plane–
tary world. It forms that universal sub-culture intended to replace all
others, that mish-mash based on fast food, uniformity of clothing, televi–
sion series, and muzak that claims to place all men under the same yoke,
whether in Los Angeles, Caracas, Bombay, or Lagos! In this sense, Dis–
neyworld and its miniature reconstructions of all the eras, mythologies,
and cultures - albeit faded and toothless - is the epitome of universalism:
a staging at once ridiculous and fantastic of universal brotherhood, of
sweet human harmony. And even if world music is merely a pirating and
recycling of all the rhythms of the planet geared towards consumption, it
is in the midst of the theme park that Africa, Asia, Europe, the Wild
West, the twentieth century and the future can coexist amicably under
the banner of the new pidgin English, an impoverished language, a jargon
for illiterate humanity. Yet universalism is nothing if not cosmopolitan. It
can engulf, classify, and digest everything, because it destroys cultures by
disemboweling and dismembering them, only to reconstitute them, em-
