CONTRAPAGINA
Mirela Roznoveanu: A Few Notes on Romanian Literature as World Literature, edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 374 pages.
The Romanian version of this article: Revista Caiete Critice Nr.10, 2018, pp. 39-55 http://caietecritice.fnsa.ro/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/CC-10-2018.pdf ;
https://vetiver2.wordpress.com/2019/10/01/cateva-insemnari-despre-literatura-romana-ca-literatura-universala/
This anthology, meant to explain to the world the greatness, individuality, and beauty of Romanian literature as part of world literature, is a unique work in many ways. According to WorldCat, this is the third effort in the history of Romanian literature and the first in the twenty-first century to present Romanian literature to the English-speaking world. The two previous works were translations of Romanian originals: The Personality of Romanian Literature: A Synthesis, by Constantin Ciopraga, translated from the Romanian by Ștefan Avădanei, published in 1981; and History of Romanian Literature by George Călinescu, translated from the Romanian by Leon Levitchi, published in 1989. The current work is presented as an original effort brought into the English by ten translators and a team of editors who perhaps learned English from people who have never spoken the language.
Unfortunately, most of the contributions to Romanian Literature as World Literature are difficult to get through. Abounding in parentheses, subordinate clauses, and run-on sentences that run on and on, countless pages discourage the reader. Another characteristic of the new book is that most of its authors aim to rewrite Romanian literary history from the perspective of globalist, anticolonialist, and other currently fashionable theories, not to present Romanian literature as it is according to the Romanian literary canon. The methodology practiced by the authors of Romanian Literature as World Literature rests mainly on the latest, most eccentric, and fanciest theories spread on American university campuses by professors of globalist, anticolonialist, feminist, and Marxist orientations, theories employed by academics and not by the literary critics featured in leading literary publications of the U.S. and U.K. (such as The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books). Permeating many of the texts, an overwhelming inferiority complex actually impedes Romanian literature from being seen as a thriving, compelling world literature. Also, for reasons I cannot understand, writers who do not belong to Romanian literature are forced into the canon. If language does not define a place in a national literature, how about the declaration of nationality? The right to determine and assert one’s nationality is written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 15: “(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” Andrei Codrescu has declared many times that he is an American. I insert here one of his confessions:
Vă simţiţi american 100%?
Da, mă simt american, sunt american. Sunt şi sibian şi român şi american, dar în cea mai mare parte sunt american. Mă simt acasă în America. Îmi place sensul spaţiului, îmi place libertatea care este reală în America. Când călătoresc în Europa, în România sau chiar în Franţa, după vreo două-trei săptămâni, încep să simt graniţele invizibile ale unei istorii şi tot felul de lucruri care mă apasă, fără să ştiu de ce. Când mă întorc acasă, mă simt uşurat, îmi pun cum se spune picioarele pe masă, că e mai mult spaţiu. —Ion Mihai Ionescu, “Interviu cu Andrei Codrescu,” Reteaua Literara, May 5, 2011, http://reteaualiterara.ning.com/profiles/blogs/interviu-cu-andrei-codrescu
My colleague and friend Andrei Codrescu, born in 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, emigrated to the U.S. in 1966. His first book of poems, License to Carry a Gun, won the 1970 Big Table Poetry award in the U.S. Not only are Codrescu’s books written in English, his editorial debut is in English, his academic and editorial activities have all been in English, and he didn’t produce any literature in Romanian until one book of poems published late in his writing life. If language and the declaration of nationality are not enough, then what are the criteria for belonging to a literature? One’s birth certificate? Geography? Andrei Codrescu, an important American poet of Romanian origin, is forced into a schema that pleases one of the new theories on display here. Doris Mironescu tells us in her essay “How does Exile Make Space? Contemporary Romanian Émigré Literature and the Worldedness of Place: Herta Müller, Andrei Codrescu, Norman Manea” (p. 289):
For not only is the connection to space paramount within this body of work, whether we talk about confining, protective, exclusionary, out-of-bounds, or longed-for areas or territories, but driving this flourishing literature is a complex topological, cultural, and political mechanics of displacement that inherently and emphatically undoes, amends, and reworks spatiality and associated ideas and representations while maneuvering identity into new positions and meanings. Here, strange, uncomfortable, improbable, evasive, forbidden, or open spaces are never given. Instead, they are constructed or, better still, continuously reconstructed, quintessentially shape-changing, and what happens to them—how space is made and remade under the auspices of exile, migration, and the like—illuminates and largely parallels the situation and resituation of selfhood in the world.
According to these words, Dimitrie Cantemir must be a Russian author, for he lived in Russia in exile, and a Turkish writer, because he lived in Constantinople in exile and wrote about the Ottoman Empire, but not a Romanian author; Marquez must be a Mexican and not a Colombian author, for he spent most of his life in Mexico, while Vasile Alecsandri, who traveled for twelve years all over the world, wrote his travel diaries in French, and lived in exile in France, is a French writer.
Another issue is that only 3 of the 16 contributors have the training and qualifications to propose a new narrative of Romanian literature; they are the literary critics and professors Mircea Martin, Mircea A. Diaconu, and Paul Cernat, all of whom have written books and monographs on the history of Romanian literature and its leading authors. The remaining 13 specialized mainly in the theory of literature, comparative literature, and in marginal aspects or single authors of Romanian literature. Strangely, the most important literary critics and historians of present-day Romanian literature did not contribute to this anthology.
Imre József Balázs specializes in the avant-garde in Transylvanian Hungarian literature, tendencies in contemporary literature, the interculturality phenomenon in Transylvania, and international networks of Surrealism. Bogdan Creţu’s work focuses on the theory of literature, literary hermeneutics, the history of modern literary criticism, autobiographical writing, and contemporary Romanian literature. Caius Dobrescu teaches literary and cultural theory, lately showing an interest in exploring the connections among literature, terrorism, secularization, and cultural tourism. Teodora Dumitru’s research concentrates on the relation between meta-literary and scientific discourses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary epistemology, and the history of modernity, modernism, and postmodernism. Alex Goldiş shows an interest in digital humanities, and in quantitative cultural history, literary theories, methods, and critics. Mihai Iovănel (co-editor of the General Dictionary of Romanian Literature, 2nd edition) has written about Mihail Sebastian, the detective novel, and the ideologies of Romanian post-communist literature. Doris Mironescu teaches and specializes in the theory of literature, comparative literature, and M. Blecher. Ovidiu Morar’s interests include literary theory, modern poetry, the avant-garde, and Jewish literature. Christian Moraru writes and teaches about cosmodernism, globalization, global imagination, geoaesthetics. Carmen Mușat teaches literary theory and cultural studies, her primary areas of research being the interplay of literature and culture, modernism, postmodernism, narrative, intellectual history, and critical and political theory. Bogdan Ștefănescu teaches and writes about British literature, critical theory, the rhetoric of nationalism, and the comparative study of postcolonialism and post-communism. Andrei Terian specializes in and writes about cultural theory, the history of modern criticism, and comparative and world literature. Mihaela Ursa teaches and writes as a comparatist in the fields of critical theory, fictionality, and gender studies.
Reading Romanian literature as it does through the lenses of radical theoretical trends in the field of comparative literature, this book doesn’t do any service to Romanian literature. The perfect example is the introduction (“The Worlds of Romanian Literature and the Geopolitics of Reading,” by Christian Moraru and Andrei Terian), a parade of erudition written in Marius Chicoş Rostogan fashion, which could be successfully used for the pulverization of any literature on the planet. (I would like to remind you that Ion Luca Caragiale’s character in A Pedagogue of the New School / Un pedagog de şcoală nouă “started his career through a memorable didactic conference” full of pompous nonsense. However, in the abovementioned introduction to this anthology that aims to be a presentation of the Romanian literature, the above editors, unable to express their own views, as they confess,
considered initially annexing an illustration, perhaps even a poster of sorts to an earlier draft of this introduction on the contaminating juxtaposition of literary works and the culture-spawning interfolding of geoaesthetic systems, but it also forefronts this worldedness and its wordings, this world-heavy “intersectionality” . . . pursuing a worldly revisiting of Romanian literature. That is, what we seek to accomplish is a rereading of this literature as world literature. Reaching this goal is premised, with some notable provisos across the collection, on several defining and correlated interpretive routines, theoretical notions, choices, and claims. . . . Or, conversely, this implies that worldedness translates into these ensembles’ telescoped, scaled down, condensed, or encrypted presence inside the literature’s and the country’s own idioms, traditions, and space—the small, presumably “peripheral” world of Romania in the bigger world and vice versa, or, more likely, both at once, in proportions that fluctuate historically. This copresence of the national and the worldly, their mutual and multilayered imbrication, is the very matrix of intersectionality and, by the same token, an adequate modality of mapping out national identity, its much-debated uniqueness, and literature as a reliable vehicle for this distinctiveness. Make no mistake: while we insist, as we do repeatedly, on the crisis of the nation-state and its analytic paradigm, in no way does dealing with Romanian literature as world literature along these “nodal” lines assume the complete obsolescence or irrelevance, in Romania or elsewhere, of the nation-state, nationhood, national literature, and of their “smaller,” precisely circumscribed places and local histories.
Following these sentences, without any connection to the matter under discussion, the authors turn to deploring Brexit:
In this sense, the essays in Romanian Literature as World Literature should be read as an argument against today’s Brexits as serviceable models or solutions for literature, literary criticism, culture, as well as for the world at large in the twenty-first century . . .
Ponderous lines trying to defend “marginocentric” Romanian literature follow:
What we witness in “marginocentric” nodes such as Romania’s southwestern province of Banat or even in Romania as a whole, then, is not so much a complete collapse of the rigid center–margin (Western–Eastern) binary but its “loosening.” In turn, this allows for a stretching out of the cultural-historic fabric that, in a particular knot or node (Banat’s main city of Timişoara, Banat itself, or Romania), “blows up” almost photographically and thus brings into view a complexity of texture, shape, and color, a worldedness that, back at the “strong” artistic and academic center (Vienna, Austria, Paris, or France), may be elusive, invisible, and, in extreme situations, inexistent.
Then an argument about the provincialism of Romanian literature is voiced:
Bearing out a hypothesis advanced by world-systems scholars from Moretti to Nirvana Tanoukhi, the Romanian case study goes to show that, when reframed intersectionally, as nodal subsystems of a vaster, ever-fluid continuum, so-called “marginal,” “minor,” or “small” literatures acquire an unforeseen and unorthodox centrality. Counterintuitive because obtaining liminally, on the margins, and contrary to the misconceptions tied into the cliché of “provincialism,” this position, we propose, affords some of its writers uniquely perceptive prismatic refractions of the wider world-as-world and these writers’ critics insightful problematizations of some of the most defining aspects of world literature as a cultural-aesthetic phenomenon and discipline alike. Needless to say, this is hardly an argument for a Romanian “exceptionalism.”
The national tradition is condemned, as well as the existence of nation-states:
So what we are talking about is a twofold crisis, to which our book reacts in a number of ways. This crisis affects nation-states actually existing in the “real world” but also how we make sense of literature and of culture more broadly, how we place aesthetic production and reception on the map of the world and of the critical mind. But, we submit, like any crises [I think that ‘any crisis’ or ‘all crises’ would be better English!], this one also presents us, and perhaps especially those of us working in self-perceived “minor” or “marginal” literatures, with unprecedented opportunities. Very basically, what we have observed apropos of the nodal overhaul of traditional supranational systems occurs on the smaller, national scale: the more one opens up the classical—and classically territorialist—nation-state model, that is, the more one decenters it critically and pursues the textual and intertextual trajectories running through its ethnolinguistic and geo-administrative nodes, the more one is forced to reckon with literature’s worldly presence, with literatures’ and their authors’ home in the world, be they presumably “major” or “minor,” “central” or “peripheral,” “capitalized” or (supposedly) lacking, as Casanova says, “cultural capital.” A different currency system and axiological geography, a countergeography of alternative assessments and arrangements become possible at this point, a cartographic cure for various misperceptions, presumptions, and anxieties . . .
The authors maintain that:
Simply put, the spaces of the nation and of literature, with everything they imply, no longer coincide. They never quite did, of course. But it was a top ideological priority throughout modernity to premise critical analysis, literary history, and even cultural studies a bit later on the strategic overlay of nation-states and literatures, chiefly on the overlap of national territoriality and national literature, and subsequently of ethnicity or “race,” as wrote Romanian literary historian George Călinescu, and native statal turf, language and soil or land (land as native ground), all of them beholden to the same monist rhetoric of one language, the national idiom, which in turn bore out the assumed homogeneity of a single, dominant, and all-defining ethnic group inhabiting one geographically stable homeland. . . .
One way or the other, all Romanian literary histories and most national literary histories rest, to this very day, on the coterminality of the nation-state and literature, for they all have been harnessed to a vaster, more urgent, and arguably higher-stake enterprise: nation-building, modernity’s defining priority. . . .
Consequently, George Călinescu’s History of Romanian Literature from the Beginning to
1941 is of a “‘hysterical’ Herderianism of which Călinescu’s mystique of oneness is conspicuously redolent.”
In the authors’ words,
Călinescu presses into service anthropological clichés of immutable racial exceptionalism, explicit or implied ethno-racial superiority, and barely veiled anti-Semitism, all of which were mainstream in National Socialism and would be so again in Romania’s Socialist nationalism of the 1980s. By then, his work would become the uncontested gold standard of Romanian criticism. Moreover—and this is the darkest side of his legacy by far—his example would be obsessively invoked by the proponents of so-called “protochronism,” a quasi-official, autochtonist, and ethno-supremacist doctrine of Romanian cultural, historical, and territorial “precedences.”
Călinescu’s racial exceptionalism is an absurd incrimination. Authors here are actually against exceptionalism. But why do we have to be against exceptionalism? Romanian literature is exceptional as any literature on the planet is exceptional on its own way. Exceptionalism is viewed today in politics as a way of reconciliation of patriotism with internationalism. For literature, exceptionalism means to reconcile the national dimension with the universal one, the worldedness in the authors of this anthology terms; worldedness is commonly called “universal.”
How is the foreign reader to understand the exceptional importance of the History of George Călinescu, its unique place in Romanian literature? Soon, there follows the execution of Nicolae Manolescu:
post–Second World War Romania’s most influential critic, sets about a similarly compensatory cartography, and he does so still on behalf of the ever-besieged nation-state. The latter’s existence, presumably borne out by its representation in traditional historiography, is now threatened by globalization, to wit, by “Americanization.”
I want to stress at this point that while Eugen Simon, a literary critic as important as Nicolae Manolescu, does not exist for the authors of this book, “planetary” theoreticians such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (the Index displays 8 citations and dedicated pages) and Pascale Casanova (25 citations in the Index with dedicated pages) are abundant. Great Romanian novelists of the second part of the twentieth century—Marin Preda and Nicolae Breban—are not mentioned at all. The book under discussion could be read as a blacklist of those disliked by Romanian globalists. Is this anthology then a political manifesto carrying an anti-national message? The introduction desires to captivate the foreign reader with paragraphs hard to follow. I will quote extensively because I do not want to be regarded as having a parti pris:
Countercultural because cross-cultural or culturally intersectional, a reading of national literature with the wider world exposes, first, the compilation itself, the outsourcing of nativist allegories, the heteroclite underbelly of the putatively all-of-a-piece, the palimpsest quality of the nation’s textual patrimony; second, the worldliness of the bricolage, the nomadic, peripatetic archive fixed into, and temporarily settled as, national literatures; and third, the historically produced and oftentimes epistemologically counterproductive “state-centrism,” which, in aggressively territorializing—in limiting to statal territoriality—the genetic-interpretive play and overall domain of literary-cultural and humanistic discourse, jars with actual cross-cultural and cross-territorial scenarios through which this discourse comes into being, evolves, and spreads. As Neil Brenner maintains, the epistemological impasse one faces here has to do with institutions as much as with political cartography and space. “The epistemology of state-centrism,” he says, can be understood in terms of a number of several “geographical assumptions,” including the postulate “that social relations are organized at a national scale or are undergoing a process of nationalization,” which in turn has “generate[d] a methodical nationalism in which the national scale is treated as the ontologically primary locus of social relations.”
In this frenzy,
culture and cultural analysis are cover-up operations. As “streamlined” in schools, textbooks, and standard readings, culture in general and national culture in particular conceal, disregard, or short-shrift the many, the others, and the other places, geographies, and itineraries that have gone into the building of the one, of the same, of the “we,” of the “here,” and ultimately of the nation, complete with its collective mythology, solipsist fantasies, and institutionalized territorialism.
Soon we are explicitly told that “one of Terian’s aims in his 2013 book Exporting Criticism and elsewhere is, in fact, to set up such supra-, extra-, and transnational sites of expression, commerce, and interchange as foci of a ‘new history of Romanian literature.’”
Is Terian qualified to rewrite the history of Romanian literature?
He is the Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Arts at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Andrei Terian has published three books: Critica de export: Teorii, contexte, ideologii (Bucharest: Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2013); Teorii, metode și strategii de lectură în critica și istoriografia literară românească de la T. Maiorescu la E. Lovinescu: O abordare comparativa (Bucharest: Editura Muzeului Național al Literaturii Române, 2013); and G. Călinescu: A cincea esență (Bucharest: Editura Cartea Românească, 2009). He has published chapters in multi-author anthologies and articles in academic journals. Is this all that is required to rewrite the history of a literature from a supra-statal, anti-autochthonist, posttraditional and postethnic, non-ethno-supremacist, and geoaesthetic point of view with a planetary vision? I guess not.
The most important referee in Terian’s online file, also his anthology partner, Christian Moraru, an admirer of the radical Slavoj Žižek, is Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the U.S., specializing in contemporary American literature, critical theory, and comparative literature with an emphasis on narrative, postmodernism, and the relations between globalism, culture, and planetary studies. His books are about postmodernism, cosmodernism, globalization, geoaesthetics, geomethodology, and so on. Mircea Martin, the third name on display on the cover of this anthology that seeks to rewrite the history of Romanian literature, is a sort of casualty; his name was chosen to endorse the eccentric corpus fashioned by Moraru and Terian. Why are today’s important Romanian literary critics and specialists in the history of Romanian literature not present in this book? We are told in the introduction that Romanian literary criticism is in very bad shape and needs to be saved from itself:
Breaking the epistemological mold of methodological nationalism and thus marking, in Romania as well, a new stage in literary and intellectual historiography, young critics such as Caius Dobrescu, Oana Strugaru, Alex Goldiș, Adrian Lăcătuș, Paul Cernat, Teodora Dumitru, Carmen Mușat, Alexandru Matei, Andrei Bodiu, Mihaela Ursa, Crina Bud, Mihai Iovănel, and Andrei Terian canvas more and more systematically these networks and their geoaesthetic nodes.
“After drawing a detailed comparison between Romanian and Western literary historiography” it is concluded:
that the lingering allegiance of domestic historiography to the ethno-territorial and nationalist paradigm hinders progress in a discipline largely stuck in nineteenth-century methodologies and ideologies [. . .] a twenty-first-century history of Romanian literature should deal with medieval literature in idioms [WHICH IDIOMS?] other than Romanian, with translations [REALLY?], with Romanian literary works produced in the Republic of Moldova, with Romania’s “minority” literatures, and with the writings of Romanian exiles and emigrants irrespective of the languages they have used in their new countries.
So, I will repeat: what are the criteria for belonging to a national literature? The birth certificate, geography, or the language? More on this line of thought follows:
“We need,” as Dimock further argues, “to stop thinking of national literatures as the linguistic equivalents of territorial maps. . . . [WHY SHOULD WE EMBRACE THIS?] [H]andily outliv[ing] the finite scope of the nation, [literature] brings into plays a different set of temporal and spatial coordinates. It urges on us the entire planet as a unit of analysis.”
These critics, however, mean to have it both ways: bursting the bounds of nation, language, and tradition, memes of a certain origin may gladly abandon their moorings, but they do not exactly lose their distinctiveness in the planetary melting pot. This is not a “glocal” synthesis, no “recipe for globalist homogeneity and . . . its implicit universalism,” but rather an “allocentric model of nodes” from many literatures, which “remain distinct and yet intimately co-present, with one another . . . [d]etached from themselves in order to reattach themselves to others according to novel, posttraditional and ‘postethnic’ attachments, allegiances, and affiliations.” (Note that such selective quotation can make this jargon-heavy “manifesto,” as the editors explicitly call it, seem more lucid than it in fact is.)
Not only does Romanian literature now participate in such an “intersectional and unstable” cross-fertilization, the editors assert, but it always has:
. . . ever since their early medieval rebirth more than a millennium after Dacia’s Roman colonization, written culture and literature in Romania have been nurtured by and actively participated in regional, trans-regional, and even intercontinental communities, systems, and routes of learning, mentality, discourse, and style. From the religious literature in Old Church Slavonic to Romania’s belated Renaissance and its erudite authors such as Dimitrie Cantemir to the thinkers and activists of the early-nineteenth-century Transylvanian School (Şcoala ardeleană) to the revolutionaries of the “1848 Generation,” who spearheaded modernization in Romanian territories, examples abound. . . . in some of its most defining moments and works, this literature has come about by asserting its planetary belonging, its being in the world, for it, and of it.”
But who ever denied that?
Even the supposed “derivativeness” or “imitative drive” of Romanian literature (only when it is trying hardest not to be uniquely Romanian!) that provokes the editors’ inferiority complex is enlisted as predisposing and predestining this literature to participate, even lead, in the global postmodern free-for-all: imitation “accounts not only for [Romanian writers’] modernization and ability to produce singular works but also for the built-in multiplicity—for the ‘many,’ for the literatures—of the national literary patrimony.”
Not only did the historically important Romanian literary critics of the “long” nineteenth century fail to highlight these progressive and transnational harbingers, and thus to prophesy the present, but Romanian literary critics of the twenty-first century have failed, till now, “to move forward . . . to leave behind [their predecessors’] epistemological paradigm and its heavily ideological and political baggage,” as the editors want to do. “Romanian literature has been and is still being read at home within an ingrown critical culture stuck in an outdated Herderian mode and its ‘aestheticist’ corollary,” they complain. Their catalogue of sins of the “old-fashioned comparatists” includes “uncritical nostalgias”; “conservative and right-wing political op-eds” in magazines such as Revista 22; “ill-informed rejections of cultural studies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and other identity parameters”; “self-disqualifying charges of ‘political correctness’”; “an antiquated formalism and the fetish of ‘aesthetic criteria’”; “disregard of contextual factors so as to police the boundaries of a narrow and ahistorical canon”; and, generally, pretending literature exists in an empyrean realm of its own in order to protect the power relations it cloaks.
In their attempt to rewrite the narrative of Romanian literature on a more inclusive and power relations–conscious theoretical scaffold, Terian and Moraru “did not steer clear of detailed textual analyses of ‘major writers,’” but for the most part these are relegated to “survey, overview, and historical sketch” for the sake of “world audiences unfamiliar with Romanian literature.” The reader “with a modicum of knowledge of Romanian literature” will notice “that the majority of our references are to modern writers. . . . these choices do speak to a certain agenda.” Part of that agenda (as is the case worldwide) is to compensate for past hierarchical oppressions and exclusions by centering the formerly marginalized or overlooked, the experimental, minorities, pop as well as high culture:
more peripheral figures; entire trends and movements such as the fascinating cluster of early Romanian postmoderns known as the “Târgoviște School”—Radu Petrescu, Mircea Horia Simionescu, Costache Olăreanu, and Tudor Țopa—and the “2000 Generation” of poets and novelists; male and female authors, already established or waiting to be discovered or rediscovered; writers residing in Romania or elsewhere; “world texts” that address world audiences deliberately but also more “world-shy” voices; high-brow and popular literature; works that do and do not take up explicitly “international” and “planetary” issues (the environment, geopolitical conflicts, etc.), and so on. . . . . On the whole, “established ‘classics’ . . . are not discussed here at length.”
How is this possible? If this book does not cover the Romanian classics, the task of rewriting Romanian literary history makes no sense. Where are Rebreanu, Macedonski? Looking at the Index, Macedonski is not cited at all; Ion Barbu is cited 6 times, Bacovia cited 4 times in enumerations, Slavici cited 5 times, all tossed into different chapters; Rebreanu is cited 5 times, compared with Norman Manea, 11 times with dedicated pages; Papadat-Bengescu is cited 5 times, Mariana Marin 4 times; Maiorescu 10 times compared with Cărtărescu, 17 times with dedicated pages, and so on.
Romanian folklore does not even have an entry in the Index—perhaps because it is national? It is just mentioned a few times in the article about Eminescu; Creangă gets 3 mentions in the Index. The authors of this book intend mainly to rewrite the history of Romanian literature from a perspective intent on “dismantling” it from within. (My guess is that Moraru and Terian handed a mandatory bibliography to the selected contributors of this anthology, for each contributor cites almost the same theoretical productions.)
A more pointed dismantling of nationalist epistemology supplies, along similar lines, Alex Goldiș’s chapter “Beyond Nation Building: Literary History as Transnational Geolocation,” which draws from Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystems theory and several historiographic traditions to unearth the “generative pattern” of historical descriptions of national literary systems in the European Southeast, especially in Romania. In a line of scholarship that runs through Tom Sandqvist’s landmark 2006 Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire, Moraru combines archival research, textual analyses, and Guy Scarpetta’s cosmopolitan theory to help us see how Tristan Tzara, Gherasim Luca, and other Jewish–Romanian–French members of the European avant-garde “deracinate” themselves so as to open up Romanian literature and redistribute its energies across vast geographies of language, ethno-cultural and national membership, and aesthetic creativity.
If to “deracinate” oneself is now the ideal, then it makes sense that Andrei Codrescu, a declared American, should be the paragon of inclusion in an anthology of Romanian literature.
The misrepresentation of Romanian literature is brutal. Part I, “The Making and Remaking of a World Literature: Revisiting Romanian Literary and Cultural History,” –jumps in bluntly with an incriminating presentation (written by the editors) of Romanian literature as nationalistic and poisoned by a so-called Romanian exceptionalism. However, we are told that there is hope. The first chapter of Part I, “Mihai Eminescu: From National Mythology to the World Pantheon,” by Andrei Terian, starts with the annihilation of Romania’s national poet:
“National poets”—what else could be more remote from world literature? Borrowing Christian Moraru’s terminological dyad here, the nation-world tends to emerge as a “globe” rather than as a “planet,” that is, as a world actively limiting or even lacking “worldedness.” And, from the standpoint of this effective or putative worldly “scarcity,” do not national poets come about and establish themselves—nationally—by turning their backs to the wide and diverse world of others, to the very domain of worldedness? . . . in what follows, I propose to reopen the case at the other end—not the end of national critics and literatures, but that of world literature.
Is this mandatory? It is said further that:
“The very status of national poet inevitably implies, then, a multiple if often elusive inscription into a global or, at least, transnational literary circuit.” …If exceptionalism is the opium of small literatures, then Romanian literature is a good case in point. Stronger than any other Romanian writer’s is the case provided by Eminescu, whom Romania’s critics regard as one of a kind, nonpareil, alpha, and omega of all things literary. “Eminescology” is still the name of a growth industry, and it is reputable “Eminescologists” who have proclaimed the author an absolute ending of a sublime era (“the last major European Romantic”), an absolute beginning (precursor of Symbolism, modernism, and even Existentialism), and also an irreducible exception (he is “the unparalleled poet” too). Interestingly enough, in trying to play up Eminescu’s originality in relation to major writers of Western literatures, the critics have overlooked precisely the rather atypical status of the writer not only relative to other “national poets” of his part of Europe but also within his own culture. . . . in the 1860s, when he stepped on the Romanian political and literary scene, the “national rebirth” of his country had already taken place. Unlike Solomos [Greece], Mickiewicz [Poland], Petőfi [Hungary], or Botev [Bulgaria], he did not participate in any of the armed insurgencies of his own people, nor did he carry out any revolutionary activities for that matter. No wonder he could not do that, for, by the time he reached adulthood, all the heroic moments of the rising modern Romanian State seemed to have already occurred. . . .
“His quick recognition as . . . “national poet” must have appeared odd because the position seemed to have been filled already by an elder and distinguished writer, Vasile Alecsandri (1819–1890). Alecsandri surely fit the job description. Truth be told, he was overqualified. Not only did he take part in the 1848 Revolution in Moldavia, but he also played a decisive role in the unification of the two Romanian Principalities . . . Besides, Alecsandri’s writing covered more than honorably all the literary forms of the era, checking off all the available generic boxes: comedies, historical dramas, folk-inspired poems, intimate poems, epic poems on historical themes, satirical poems, novellas, epistles, and more. . . . Last but not least, let us not forget that Alecsandri’s artistic talent, which went hand in glove with his diplomatic activity, seemed to render him the kind of cultural “personality” suitable for major international recognition.
The aesthetic is replaced by political, geographical, etc. criteria; the term “national poet” becomes derisive. Vasile Alecsandri, from the glocalization point of view, should be the “national poet,” and not Mihai Eminescu. The beauty of the Romanian language “ca un fagure de miere” / as sweet as a honeycomb is excluded, banished. Concordances between the complexity of the Romanian soul, built on the intricacies of the Romanian language’s complex syntax, and Romanian literature’s specific beauty cannot find a line in this book. Reading this anthology that was supposed to present to the world the core, the heart of Romanian literature, I understood Hannah Arendt’s harsh sentence, that Romanians are the most xenophobic people in Europe. With an amendment: they are not so because they hate foreigners, but because they hate themselves! With such an introduction to Romanian literature (nationalist, regionalist, provincial, marginocentric) written by Romanians, I wonder who on earth would be interested in reading it or studying it?
The last price of this book (published in 2017) on amazon.com was $80 without shipping charges (the initial price was $150) as of September 2018, while the online price on bloomsbury.com is $75.60 without shipping charges. With this price, not many Romanian critics have the money to buy it and not many libraries in Romania might have this book in their collections. Searching the main online Romanian library catalogs I found that after one year from publication only two libraries have it in their holdings: Biblioteca Centrală Universitară in Bucharest and Biblioteca Centrală Universitară „Mihai Eminescu” in Iasi. That’s why I decided to insert more citations from this anthology’s chapters.
In “Aux portes de l’Orient, and Through: Nicolae Milescu, Dimitrie Cantemir, and the “Oriental” Legacy of Early Romanian Literature,” Bogdan Crețu discusses The Hieroglyphic Story while deploring its language:
A similar argument can be made on the book’s language. The latter is, of course, a Romance and therefore European idiom, but it must have sounded to its contemporary reader, much as it does to us, artificial, “synthetic” in a sense evocative of trial-and-error laboratory experiments. Engineered in Cantemir’s literary-encyclopedic vitro, Hieroglyphic Story’s Romanian is chock-full of neologisms and imitates convoluted, Latin- and Turkish-inspired syntax and grammar structures. Beyond language, Turkish literature and culture, as well as Islamic written tradition, along with their stylistic patterns, have also influenced Hieroglyphic Story, particularly in the fragments of rhymed and rhythmic prose, which echo the Koran. These are some of the linguistic, cultural, and religious resources the author puts to use in his endeavor to do something about the conceptual and expressive limitations of his era’s Romanian. For, at the time, Cantemir’s mother tongue was far from ready to become a medium for sophisticated literary and scholarly projects, and so the novelist sets out to enrich and refine it through crosspollinations with Eastern and Western, ancient and modern idioms and with grammatical, stylistic, and rhetorical formulas of emblematic works written in those languages.
Luckily for Cantemir,
[his] linguistic syncretism is after all in no way detrimental to Romanian. Not only that, but it may well have sped up what Michiel Leezenberg calls the language’s “emancipation.” This process, through which the idiom becomes ripe for specialized, literary usage, was, according to the critic, part and parcel of broader, Europe-wide, “pre-nationalist,” and “vernacularizing” developments. “Cantemir’s literary writings,” claims Leezenberg, “mark an important phase in the emancipation of Romanian as a language of literature and learning; as such, they may be seen as an example of the vernacularization that generally preceded the rise of nationalisms in the strict sense of the word.”
In “‘Soft’ Commerce and the Thinning of Empires: Four Steps toward Modernity,” Caius Dobrescu explores the relationship between imperialism, interimperialism, paraimperialism, metaimperialism, and Romanian culture:
If critics have dwelled at length on empires’ politically oppressive, economically exploitative, and culturally reductive thrust, they have done so for obvious reasons that need not be rehearsed here. The havoc imperialism has wreaked throughout the world is a matter of evidence, and this observation too is a commonplace. But such truisms are exactly the point, more precisely, the jumping-off point of my essay: to this day, imperialism has been a major driving force of world history, part and parcel of the very fabric of history. Not only that, but, in all sorts of ways—some of them more egregious than others—empires have set in motion sociocultural and political processes without which, for better or worse, neither most of the national entities as we know them today nor supranational aggregates such as the EU would exist.”
One could suggest, in fact, that one of the less intended but enduring consequences of imperial advancements in areas such as the European Southeast was exposure to other worlds and, through characteristically imperial and imperialist ideologies, policies, and sociocultural practices of “holism,” “universalism,” “totality,” all-encompassing “order,” “commonality,” and the like, even to a certain vision of a “worlded” world beyond the local, the regional, the “provincial,” the “insular,” the ethnic, and the national. This is, in effect, the gist of my argument in the following critical sketch of modern Romanian cultural and literary history. As I further suggest by extrapolating from a sequence of case studies and succinct overviews of pivotal cultural movements and figures from Dimitrie Cantemir to Ion Budai-Deleanu, Nicolae Bălcescu, Titu Maiorescu, and Ion Luca Caragiale, Romanian modernity and principally its literature came into being at the crossroads of and amidst centuries-long conflicts among Euroasian empires and through dialogue with their “metropolitan” worldviews and discourses. This was, I also contend, a complex, multidirectional, and evolving engagement that went through several stages and cultural strategies and, around the turn of the twentieth century, ended up with a quasi-self-empowering, culturally differentiating, “transmetropolitan” moment—one that both asserts, powerfully and originally, Romanian culture’s European and planetary belonging and reminds us that this affiliation is, to a notable degree, the result of creative responses to imperial pressures in this part of the continent. In other words, such influences did not always have assimilationist or colonizing effects. Imaginative pushback against various empires’ hegemonies and tactical absorption of imperial cultural and political leverage set the stage, instead, for a gradual awakening to a sense of a worlding world, of vaster horizons beyond imperial actors and subaltern status and thus spawned new, nonderivative, and even anti-imperial cultural forms.
Again, Vasile Alecsandri fits well in the metaimperial scheme, much better than Eminescu; then is Alecsandri more important than Eminescu?
This metaimperial remapping and its agonal scenario are even better marked in the Romantic literature produced around Romania’s own War of Independence, most prominently by Vasile Alecsandri (1818–1890), the leading poetic voice of the 1848[Revolution- my note]. A politician and diplomat highly sensitive to the emerging international image of sovereign Romania, Alecsandri was involved in Paris and London, after the crushing of the 1848 Moldavian revolution, with a quasi-underground network of political radicals from all corners of Europe. He was a major player in Wallachia and Moldavia’s 1859 unification, which he supported as a foreign minister and ambassador to several European countries. Little surprise, then, that his poetry is the mise-en-scène of an entire “diplomacy” geared toward symbolic capital acquisitions meant to benefit Romania on the world stage, where the nascent nation advertises its proud self-determination in terms both derived from and transcending imperial discourses of exceptionalism. A telling example of his metaimperial poetics and politics of pride is the cycle of propaganda poems “Ostașii noștri” (Our Troops), which he penned in support of the 1877 war Romania waged alongside the Russian Imperial Army against the Ottomans in today’s Bulgaria. These texts exalt models of bravery over and against a lofty backdrop enlivened by Turkish feats of valor and the presumed gallantry standards of the Russian allies.”
Caragiale gratifies the transmetropolitan scheme:
Insistent, witty, parodic, and intertextually allusive, this suggestion and Caragiale’s energetic transmetropolitanism more generally have drawn generation after generation of innovative Romanian writers from Ionesco to the postmoderns of the 1980s and the young prose authors of the twenty-first century.
Alex Goldiş’s reading framework in “Beyond Nation Building: Literary History as Transnational Geolocation” is that of Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystems theory:
… fresh readings of Romanian literature, attuned to our geopolitical, cultural, and theoretical moment, become possible. To that effect, I will rely on Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystems theory—in my opinion, one of the most convincing accounts of interaction, or, as he puts it, “interference” among cultures—to bring to light the generative pattern subtending most historical descriptions of national literary systems in Southeastern Europe and particularly in Romania, a pattern characteristically informed by structural correspondence. Embodying the latter analytically, literary histories illustrating the nationalist paradigm are more or less deliberately built on a closed system of relations involving rigid and discrete notions of time and space. Such notions and the historiographic approach they enable paint a fragmented, often isolationist, stationary, monolithic, and hierarchically organized panorama of world literatures and of the collective selves these literatures articulate. Instead, what I propose in rounding off my argument is an interactional model liable to reconstruct Romanian literary history on the premise that such a scholarly enterprise cannot overlook the worldly exchanges that, while they may be more visible today than in the past, have nonetheless given birth to Romanian literature, old and new. When such transnational traffic is factored in, it affords, I finally submit, an entirely new “geolocation” of national literature and identity, no matter how “marginal,” stable, all-of-a-piece, and well configured most literary histories picture them.
In this paradigm,
Călinescu’s history epitomizes, in Romanian culture, a nationalist literary historiography whose comparative thrust appears bent, oddly enough, on playing down the amount and significance of external stimuli. Even when he is forced to admit that local writers have been heavily influenced by outside authors, Călinescu does his best to deemphasize the impact of those authors by putting in place what Andrei Terian calls a “policy of minimizing and, sometimes, even negating the external influences on modern Romanian literature.” This is most obvious in the way Călinescu’s History deals with Romanian classics, whom he strives to “protect” from foreign associations, which is why the Ion Barbu chapter focuses on the hermetic poet’s emancipation from the “pure poetry” of Paul Valéry, while the fragment on Lucian Blaga does not even mention his affiliation with Expressionism. In the section on Tudor Arghezi, despite the poet’s explicit association with Charles Baudelaire in the volume bearing the telltale title Flori de mucigai (Flowers of Mildew) and elsewhere, the name of the French writer is nowhere to be found. Instead, the critic goes out of his way to “nativize” Arghezi. To do so, he “uncovers” the writer’s predecessors within national literature’s “internal circuit” by a critical sleight-of-hand equivalent to what Paul Ricouer terms “retrodiction”—that is, by reading backwards [Isn’t that what the authors are doing, reading globalization etc. back into the Romanian past?] , from the present cultural effect or echo (Arghezi) back to its (his) putative “cause” or “forerunner.” Likewise, Călinescu leaves no room for any potential dialogue with world literature when he discusses Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, a pioneer of the modern Romanian novel, who was familiar with Freudian psychology and Proustian narrative techniques. “Parallels between Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu’s writing and the ‘Proustian method,’” the critic acknowledges, “have been drawn.” Yet, he goes on, “they are all flawed. [In her work, t]he narrative is plain, continuous, oriented toward the outer world, and even if characters travel from one novel to another, this is an old technique that Duiliu Zamfirescu borrowed, through Zola, from Balzac.”
More about Lovinescu –much better placed from the geopositioning point of view and on the business and trade international arena– than Călinescu follows:
Lovinescu is also invested in repositioning national culture in the world through a critical foregrounding of international isomorphisms. As noted above, the presumed lack of “organicism” of Romanian culture called for a territorial solution, which, in Călinescu, translated into a thoroughgoing critical coverage of the entire area administered or claimed by the Romanian state. Instead, Lovinescu responds to the same problem with a temporal solution: where Călinescu’s approach is chiefly spatial and results in topological operations such as symbolic geopositionings and quasi-exhaustive mappings of national cultural space, Lovinescu’s tactic involves temporal charts and temporally relocating moves. A critical rationale for assigning Romanian culture a better place in the chronology of Western culture, his History of Contemporary Romanian Literature handles the thorny issue of its object’s comparative “belatedness” in European context by deploying concepts such as “mutation” and “synchronism.”
… This is how he retools the “belatedness complex” into a quasi-positive category by laying compensatory emphasis on the role of “modernism” in the country’s recent cultural history. Furthermore, as a social critic, Lovinescu openly advocates the infusion of foreign capital, and, many decades prior to Franco Moretti’s insights into the planetary spread of the novel, theorizes “[writers’] merging of foreign literary techniques with national topics so as to foster [new,] valuable pieces of art.” In this regard, his stance may seem different from Călinescu’s. On closer inspection, it becomes clear, however, that outside influences are referenced perfunctorily, in comments on literary movements and periods. When it comes to individual writers, one cannot miss Lovinescu’s reluctance to compare, juxtapose, and connect. Not unlike Călinescu in his discussion of external factors that have contributed to the formation of Romanian literature, Lovinescu too tends to discount them in order to “protect” the originality of domestic writers. He does name such European sources of inspiration, but, in these instances, his method could be described as “reference without comparison,” a technique specific to the construction of collective identity-oriented narratives and frequently used, among others, by the author of the most important early-twentieth-century histories of Estonian literature, Mihkel Kampmann. In Eesti vanem ilukirjandus (1908) and Eesti kirjanduseloo peajooned (1912–1936), Kampmann sketches out the evolution of Estonian literature by subsuming it under Romanticism and Realism but abandons these movements’ comparative contexts when he dwells on specific Estonian writers. Most likely, Lovinescu did not read Kampmann, but his reaction to Papadat-Bengescu, whom he saw as a pioneer of the modern Romanian novel, is akin to Kampmann’s response to Estonian writers, as much as it is, the reader will recall, to Călinescu’s own take on Papadat-Bengescu. “While [Papadat-Bengescu’s] name has been repeatedly linked to that of Proust, this association,” Lovinescu too argues, “should not be mistaken for an identification between the two, nor should it concern more than her knack for psychological analysis.”
In “After “Imitation”: Aesthetic Intersections, Geocultural Networks, and the Rise of Modern Romanian Literature,” Carmen Mușat offers a reading of the Romanian culture as a creole culture:
As we approach the twenty-first century, more and more Romanian critics come to the realization that this place is a geocultural crossroads. Practicing Orthodox Christianity, speaking a Romance language in a region dominated by Slavic nations, lodged at the intersection of Western and Eastern influences, forced to contend for centuries with the brutal expansionism of the Ottoman Empire, on one side, and of Russia, on the other side, Romanians have evolved a culture by steadily assimilating, adjusting, and combining various outside tendencies and inputs. A series of internal and external factors, both intra- and extra-literary, have worked together over the course of time to give birth to an eclectic yet original culture characteristically marked by a créolité of sorts, by an amalgam of literary styles, typologies, forms, and procedures. Numerous studies dedicated to modern-era literary schools and movements from humanism to the Enlightenment and from the Baroque to classicism, Romanticism, realism, modernism and its derivatives such as Parnassianism, symbolism, the avant-garde, expressionism, and, more recently, postmodernism dwell consistently on what appears to be a characteristic of Romanian culture: given the time gap between the moment when various literary trends arise in Europe and when they are received in Romanian culture, the latter habitually treats all these directions and their corpuses as if they were coeval, hence its tendency to absorb multiple aesthetic doctrines concurrently even when, in their birth countries, they were articulated at different historical moments and, what is more, from positions hardly compatible with one another, as in the case of classicism and Romanticism, for example. In point of fact, this is why, in Romanian literature, classicism sometimes presents features specific to Romanticism and there are no literary works that can be classified solely as products of the Enlightenment. For the same reason, the Romanian Enlightenment is difficult to distinguish from humanism and the Baroque, and so are classicism and Romanticism and Romanticism and modernism. In effect, one would be hard pressed to find any Romanian canonical writers who belong exclusively to a certain movement such as Romanticism or Symbolism. This may also explain why these authors’ response to influences and internationally circulating, doctrinal, thematic, and formal repertoires has been largely interpretive and creative, frequently yielding original works. The situation differs especially where less important literary figures are concerned, who have been inclined to reproduce mechanically, closely and recognizably, ideological tenets, themes, genres, and devices emblematic to a given literary movement. This mimeticism is one of Fondane’s main arguments in his assessment of Romanian culture as a “French colony”.
In “Romanian Modernity and the Rhetoric of Vacuity: Toward a Comparative Postcolonialism,” Bogdan Ștefănescu discusses the Romanian culture as a postcolonial one:
Around the mid-1990s, I stumbled across an unexpected topos of Romanian culture: the void. As I learned during the research I was doing at the time, this recurrent figure comes in different guises as members of modern Romania’s cultural elite keep referring to the country’s “absence” from history and to its various “wants” and “deficiencies.” These critics and philosophers ply the trope of “foundational void” to talk about a cultural trauma supposedly lodged at the core of the Romanian “soul” and “destiny.” At some point, I even gave a paper on this subject, but then I dropped the issue, for I thought there was not much to it. However, I came across it again more than a decade later as I turned to the comparative study of postcommunism and postcolonialism. Suddenly, the persistence of the void motif in the identitarian imaginary of formerly colonized cultures from distinct world-systems became an eye-opener.”
“….wrestling with this theme and with the world dynamic of trauma and postcoloniality more broadly, it dawned on me that an entire comparative remapping of Romanian culture might be possible, and, what is more, that such an undertaking need not follow nationalist or universalist orthodoxies’ overemphasis on the supposed untranslatable singularity or on the aspiring, decontextualized, and generic nature of the country’s aesthetic patrimony, respectively. (…) Thus, in what follows, I will be focusing on the imagery of vacuity and bareness in Romanian and other postcolonial trauma cultures around the globe. The literary and critical inflections of this imagery occur, I argue, in a counterintuitive yet conspicuous pattern shared by the otherwise loosely interconnected subsystems of what development theory used to identify as the “Second” and “Third” World.” Etc.
I would salute this anthology if there were at least four or five recent essays in English about Romanian literature as a whole. As this is the only such survey ever in English (the word “translation” does not appear anywhere), the entire project miscarries in its claim to present to the world the essence of Romanian literature. I have nothing against fresh readings. I like new points of view. However, most of these texts (displaying a strong infatuation with new methodologies) do not merit being presented as an introduction to Romanian literature. They award that status, rather, to a Romanian counter- or anti-culture retrospectively constructed by their agenda. It is important to mention that in one year, in Romania, only one article has been published (Observatorul Cultural, “Literatura română şi lumea ca voinţă şi reprezentare” I and II nr. 930 and 931) about Romanian Literature as World Literature; the author, Alexandru Matei, declared that another book should eventually be published about this book. Does that mean that the book cannot stand on its own feet?
To change the paradigm, this book is revealingly parallel to another effort of distortion made by the autochthonous communist collaborators after the Russian occupation of the country in 1944. Socialist realism, and the Soviet cultural paradigm exported to Romania, excluded classic authors from the teaching of Romanian literature, and threw many masterpieces on the blacklist. Romanian culture was required to become a communist-socialist culture reflecting the socialist realist criteria imported from the USSR. Isn’t the globalist agenda trying to do the same—to rewrite Romanian literary history from a glocal, intersectional, transmetropolitan, geopositioning, cosmodernist, postcolonial point of view?
A literature and its aesthetic objects are created according to a forma mentis, the language, tradition, society, and cultural civilization to which they belong, and from which they emerge. The Romanian cultural civilization is specific, original, and unique, just like any other cultural civilization of the planet, be it French, American, Colombian, or Chinese. I am also convinced that we cannot understand ourselves if we do not understand others. Learning from and identifying with the thoughts and practices of others, as in this case, no matter how alien they might at first appear, it is important. At the same time, differences in ways of thinking can be both deep and subtle.
I believe that literature is deeply tied to the language and its roots; that literature is rooted in the language, the way the psyche is shaped by the language and the language, in turn, is originally shaped by the landscape and the human relation to/translation of it in folklore and intimate culture. Anyone living in that land and speaking that language as their native tongue (or one of them) would be imprinted by it and would contribute to it. The language and psyche are then further reshaped and complicated by history, developments in culture, communication and coexistence with others, but it is the unique stamp of the language that defines the literature, that is the line or the spine that runs through it. Since the language shapes the psyche, exile becomes much more problematic—and rich. How is what a Romanian native such as Codrescu writes in English shaped by his mother tongue? On that basis only, maybe such writers do belong in Romanian literature.
New York
October 2018