Septembrie, 2009
Civilizaţia  romanului. O istorie a romanului de la Ramayana la Don Quijote. Cartex, 2008

Civilizatia romanului https://archive.org/details/civilizatia-romanului-2008-full-text

O carte de felul Civilizaţiei romanului de Mirela Roznoveanu e un fenomen rar în zilele noastre, cînd specialistului i se reclamă exhaustivitate, insă în arii de competenţă din ce în ce mai limitate. A cuprinde întreaga istorie a romanului premodern într-o perspectivă realmente universală, incluzînd pe lîngă antichitatea greco-latină, culturile afro-asiatice,de la Egipt la Sumer şi Iudeea, de la Persia la India, China si Japonia, urmărind  apoi, cu metodă şi scrupul, metamorfozele şi devenirea genului în cursul mileniilor, pînă la Don Quijote – este o întreprindere pe cît de temerară, pe atît de riscantă. Autoarea, care a studiat literatura comparată şi teoria literară la Universitatea din Bucureşti şi a desfăşurat  o intensă activitate de critică literară între anii 1970-1990, colaborînd la principalele reviste culturale ale ţării, a muncit 25 ani ca să-şi realizeze proiectul ; a publicat un prim volum în 1983(ed.Albatros), un al  doilea, în 1991 (Ed.Cartea Românească) iar după emigrarea în Statele Unite (1991), a dat o versiune larg remaniată şi adăugită,într-un singur volum, de 680 pagini, format mare, în 2008 (Ed.Cartex).

Cele 14 capitole în care e divizată cartea ne fac cunoştinţă, pe rînd, cu principalele forme romaneşti, caracteristice marilor arii de cultură ale umanităţii. O simplă examinare a sumarului ajunge spre a ne da seama de orizonturile largi ale studiului şi, în consecinţă, de enormele dificultăţi de informaţie, limitare profesională şi comprehensiune a alterităţii, cu care a trebuit să se confrunte autoarea. E neîndoielnic că orice  capitol, cel despre romanul arab al lui Antar ori cel japonez, creat de nobilele, instruitele şi rafinatele doamne de la curtea imperială din Kyoto, în proximitatea anului 1000, poate fi nuanţat, contrazis într-una sau alta din afirmaţiile sale ori, îndeosebi, completat de specialistul culturilor respective.Totuşi, pe cît pot judeca prin prisma  unui control de validitate în sfera propriei mele competenţe, autorea se înscrie mereu în hotarele consensuale ale cunoştinţelor pe care le posedăm azi. Incursiunile în diversele civilizaţii au la bază o selecţie rezonabilă a datelor factuale  şi a monumentelor literare, sprijinită pe o bibliografie nu doar etalată spre a lua ochii, ci parcursă metodic, adusă la zi, asimilată şi orientată prioritar spre sursele esenţiale. Chiar pentru specialistul erudit, suveran în sectorul său de muncă dar profan în celelalte, ca să nu mai vorbim de cititorul de formaţie mijlocie cu curiozităţi intelectuale, contactul cu o asemenea viziune globală, transversală, interdisciplinară, e extrem de stimulativ şi infinit profitabil.

De notat că autoarea denumeşte formele romaneşti de care se ocupă prin conceptul de „arhitectură epică”, suficient de generos, deci de incluziv, dar şi de explicit, deci de lizibil, pentru a permite studierea nu doar a romanului, ci şi a nenumăratelor varietăţi care-l preced ori cu care îşi interferează dezvoltarea, cum ar fi epopeea,călătoria iniţiatică, mitologia, textele biblice, într-un cuvînt, orice modalitate coerentă de a povesti despre oameni şi zei, iubire şi moarte, natură şi eternitate, despre păcat, suferinţă şi răsplată, despre înălţarea şi prăbuşirea împărăţiilor ş.a.m.d. Terminologia adoptată evită chestiunea oţioasă de a şti ce este şi ce nu este „roman”, discriminare greu, dacă nu imposibil de făcut în epocile primitive, de confuzie şi hibridizare. E adevărat că dilatarea conceptuală foarte permisivă introdusă de „arhitectura epică” schimbă unele cutume  bine încetăţenite şi, cel puţin în prima clipă, ne surprinde, mai ales cînd e vorba de Biblie ori de Confesiunile lui Augustin.Cine ar putea însă contesta îndreptăţirea autoarei de a modifica parametrii noştri de lectură, într-un spirit, cel puţin incitant şi plauzibil ? De vreme ce tendinţa actuală e de a estompa rolul esteticului în definirea literaturii (dovadă că acceptăm jurnalul intim şi corespondenţa, refuzate pînă mai ieri ca aparţinînd documentarului) nu există niciun motiv principial care să ne oblige să respingem o încercare reuşită de a o rupe cu vechile exclusivisme.

O atenţie deosebită e acordată ambianţei culturale în care se înrădăcinează arhitecturile epice, în ideea că a le înţelege deplin statutul şi funcţia depinde de escaladarea propriei noastre viziuni despre lume, de deplasarea în spirit spre imaginarul diferit al altor vîrste mentale, unde stăpînesc alte credinţe religioase,alte idei moral-politice,alte modalităţi de a reprezenta frumosul. Pe acest teren, autoarea se străduieşte să ofere o documentare amplă şi actualizată asupra naturii şi caracteristicilor dominante ale diverselor culturi. Pagini dintre cele mai atractive sînt dedicate astfel concepţiilor filozofice, estetice, politice etc. dar şi simbolurilor, limbajelor, arhetipurilor şi reciclării lor în marile opere de creaţie. Această excelentă deschidere spre culturologie e stimulată şi stimulează, la rîndu-i, o adevărată eflorescenţă comparatistă.Cititorul e surprins şi vrăjit cînd află, de pildă, că ideea vieţii ca vis ori ideea vieţii ca spectacol, atribuite curent artei baroce a secolului al XVII-lea, sînt ambele prezente încă în Ramayana, cînd e pus în faţa contrastului dintre funcţia timpului în epica vedică ori greco-latină şi cea orientală ori cînd e introdus ca martor în procesul fără sfîrşit al circulaţiei şi metamorfozelor temelor, motivelor, ideilor, tehnicilor narative ale arhitecturilor epice  bizantine. Mijlocirea participării la fascinantul dialog al culturilor, urmărindu-le corelaţiile şi întrepătrunderile, cu ajutorul unei bogăţii de exemple, care de care mai semnificativ, constituie o însuşire  din cele mai preţioase ale cărţii M.R. Cititorului obişnuit, sechestrat într-o existenţă îngustă şi plicticoasă, conştientizarea legăturilor care-l unesc, fără să ştie, cu strămoşi îndepărtaţi şi exotici, îi frapează spiritul, îl însufleţesc şi-l înalţă în veritabila-i demnitate umană, obturată de cotidian.

Dincolo de toate cele spuse pînă acum, ţin să subliniez că interesul central al autoarei se concentrează,cum e şi firesc,asupra prezentării şi analizei concrete,la firul ierbii,a celor mai importante creaţii epice produse înainte de Don Quijote. Cercetarea e făcută cu spirit pedagogic, fără prea multe tehnicisme, în acea manieră a abordării prietenoase a cititorului,din păcate, tot mai rară azi printre criticii terorizaţi de metode şi dezechilibraţi de creşterea exponenţială a cererii de noutăţi. Mirela Roznoveanu rezumă în linii esenţiale operele despre care vorbeşte, le exemplifică tonalitatea şi stilul prin ample extrase şi le comentează într-un discurs interpretativ colocvial, deschis, captivant, sprijinindu-se pe cei mai de autoritate specialişti, dar operînd fără ezitare şi cu propriile impresii de lector pasionat, atent la nuanţele ideilor şi la coloritul scriiturii.

In intregul ei, lucrarea e admirabila prin volumul bibliografiei, elanul speculativ, profunzimea analizelor dedicate operelor, prin larga evocare a contextelor culturale de care e legata fiinta romanelor cercetate, prin accentul personal, mereu prezent şi plin de farmec. Mirela Roznoveanu a dat  criticii româneşti şi, in genere, comparatismului, o carte cum n-avem alta la noi şi sint convins ca nu prea exista modele nici in strainatate.

Încheind această succintă şi cu totul imperfectă prezentare, ţin să subliniez că ea nu s-a voit o exegeză, ci doar o atragere de atenţie asupra unei cărţi mai mult decît merituoase, argumentînd necesitatea de a i se oferi cea mai largă expunere.

                                                                                           Paul  Cornea  
Paul Cornea este profesor asociat la Facultatea de Litere din Universitatea Bucureşti şi unul dintre cei mai importanţi interpreţi ai fenomenului literar (critică, teoria şi istoria literaturii, comparatism) din România. In 1990 a devenit secretar de stat în Ministerul Educaţiei Naţionale iar între 1990 şi 1993 a fost decan al Facultăţii de Litere  a Universitatii din Bucuresti. In prezent este Presedintele Asociatiei de comparatistica si teorie literara din România.
Bucuresti, Septembrie 2009

June 15, 2009

Mirela Roznoveanu is a well-known Romanian literary scholar, novelist, poet and journalist, who since 1991 has resided in the US, teaching at NYU. One of her major works published in Romanian is the two-volume The Civilization of the Novel: A History of Fiction Writing from Ramayana to Don Quixote (vol, 1, 1983; vol. 2, 1991). In 2008, this monumental work was republished in a revised one volume edition by the Cartex Publishing House in Bucharest.
Civilizatia romanului https://archive.org/details/civilizatia-romanului-2008-full-text
As the title announces, this is a wide-ranging history of the development of the novel as a generic structure, a cultural horizon of expectations, and as a narrative mode of representing different civilizational projects and paradigms: Oriental (Ramayana, Gilgameš, The Book of the Dead, the myth of Zarathustra, the Arab epics, the early Zen initiation narratives) and Western (the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Odyssey, the Greek protonovels, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the medieval romances, the Renaissance picaresque, ending with Rabelais and Cervantes).  From the very beginning, the book emphasizes the multiple origin of the novel, focusing on the civilizational impact of this supergenre that traverses many different cultures, marking their moment of maximum development.

The method used is broadly comparative and interdisciplinary, covering an impressive range of cultures and narrative projects in a construction that, like the diversity of narratives covered, weaves a rich tapestry of possibilities rather than a singular evolutionary grand narrative. The very boundaries of the novel are continually challenged as the book casts its net widely, to discover epic structures both in the prehistory of the novel and in subsequent stages that defy easy summation under our more conventional definitions of the novel. The concept of the novel is thus returned to its multiform and undecidable origins. Roznoveanu’s recreation of these mixed roots can throw a new light on and explain many of the present mutations in the narrative genre through the incorporation of new technologies (hypertextual fiction, hypermedia and performative narrative, virtual narrative).

In the current context in which theorists of the novel and of narrative in general  are struggling to accommodate the new forms of electronic narration,  Roznoveanu’s book reminds us that the novel was from the beginning multilinear, illustrating an associationist and rhizomatic rather than a streamlined  structure, and containing even multimedia elements, as in certain Oriental and Middle Eastern (Arabic) narratives that mixed verbal with visual text, message and ornament. Against our conventional expectations of mimetic/realist novels, Roznoveanu’s book draws attention to the much richer ontology of the proto-novel, mixing fantastic and realistic elements, philosophic and linguistic exploration, existential and cultural journeys. Structurally, the author suggests, the narrative tradition was no less multiform, mixing the large epic sweep with a spider-web or dispersed structures, under the sign of Arachne.

The author’s own method weaves together successfully many different strands, both theoretical (narrative and historical poetics, philosophy, literary and cultural theory, theory of science and communication) and practical. The type of comparatism she illustrates is truly global, mixing Oriental and Western paradigms to the point where the distinctions between them break down. The various narrative traditions sustain and modify each other, but they also bleed into one another, questioning conventional typologies of the novel.

In spite of the rich information in this book, The Civilization of the Novel offers an exciting reading experience, inviting the reader to explore the meandering history of the novel into many unexpected nooks and crannies, while allowing the reader to discover the larger patterns that weave this history together. Roznoveanu’s book presents a fresh view of the multiform history of the novel, maintaining the alternative paths rather than reducing them into a single evolutionary narrative that privileges the Western poetics of the novel. Both directly and indirectly, Roznoveanu’s book questions the dichotomous framework within which the history of the novel has been discussed, calling into question traditional definitions of Orientalism and Occidentalism and the novel’s need to clarify its cultural legacy by taking sides. The novel in her view remains hybrid, multicultural, always on the verge of negating itself, becoming something it was not supposed to be.

Once translated into English and/or French, this book will make a major contribution to the theoretical and historical reconstruction of our understanding of the novel and its hybrid legacy. Roznoveanu’s book displays astonishing erudition, imagin­a­tion, and an incisive understanding of the intricacies of literary and cultural interaction. I hope that you will consider the possibility of publishing an English and/or French translation of this major attempt to rethink the origins and evolution of the novel along cross-cultural paradigms.
               Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope
            Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary PHD in Media, Art and Text
June 15, 2009

Marcel Cornis-Pope is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. His publications include Anatomy of the White Whale: A Poetics of the American Symbolic Romance (1982), Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting: Narrative Interpretation in the Wake of Post-structuralism (1992), and Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After (2001). He has also published numerous articles on contemporary fiction, narrative studies, and critical theory in journals and collective volumes. His current project is a multi-volume work (coedited with John Neubauer) entitled History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Century,” which explores East Central European literatures from a comparative-intercultural perspective, cutting across traditional national partitions. Vol. 1 of this work, on “Nodes of Political Time” and “Histories of Literary Form,” was published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in 2004. His awards include a Fulbright teaching and research grant (1983-85), an Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University (1987-88), a year-long Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Wassenaar, The Netherlands), and the 1996 CELJ Award for Significant Editorial Achievement for his work as editor of The Comparatist.

In the Whirlpool:  Mirela Roznoveanu, A Rumanian Writer in New York By Aurora Cornu
 Mirela is long-armed and smiley and she wears eyeglasses in and out, a different pair for reading, for writing, for watching TV. She wears Gap jeans, and a Gap blouse. From profile, with the knotted hair, she looks somehow like Virginia Woolf. She was born in April 10 (8) 1947 and built 5 careers in one life: from 1971 to 1991 she was in Romania a recognized literary critic, novelist and journalist. Starting in 1996 she made herself in the USA a respected specialist on foreign, comparative, and international law research, and a renowned professor in this field, teaching around the world. Her struggle right now is to be recognized as a writer – a novelist, a poet and a literary critic – in the English language. At 44 she saw herself as an exile not just from her country but from her tongue language too.

 

When Mirela Roznoveanu was not twelve years old she became ill with rheumatic fever. She was hospitalized in the Children’s Hospital from Constantza, Romania, a city by the Black Sea where she lived together with her parents and a brother. One evening while in the hospital bed, with high fever, she overheard her doctor’s conversation with her mother. “Your daughter is not allowed to experience any kind of strong emotions. From now on, she cannot climb any kind of stairs and go through difficult school tests; high school is the most for her. She is forbidden to marry and have children, her heart is too weak. She will develop degenerative arthritis. At twenty-eight she will have heart surgery and she will die in her early thirties.”  
The thought of being handicapped and dead so soon crashed her. The next morning, laid out on the hospital’s bed after more blood tests, she prayed for a long time. She kept her eyes pointing to the cloudy sky seen through the windows across her bed while saying over and over the Lord’s Prayer. She implored God to have mercy on her; at one moment, mostly asleep, the little girl felt that from among the white clouds and light’s sky God’s hand came down and touched her left shoulder.  Over the next years she did all things she was not supposed to; she even surpassed the last prediction.

In the field of Rumanian literature, Mirela’s books represent an out of the norm bibliography. The Rumanian literary custom did not accept, until recent years, that an author could excel in more than one literary field. It was actually looked down upon to write in another literary genre other than one initially acknowledged. A novelist, playwright or a literary critic, for example, could not be taken seriously as a poet and vice versa, with perhaps very extreme exceptions accepted with sour smiles as pure singularities. Also a journalist’s literature had to be stigmatized for it could not be anything but a populist compromise.

Mirela has published in Rumanian three books of literary criticism (one of them being the acclaimed History of Fiction Writing from Ramayana to Don Quixote, an essay on comparative literature); three novels discussed in PhD thesis; a poetry book praised by histories of Rumanian literature. She has been an active literary critic in Rumanian literary magazines as well as a cultural commentator on the Rumanian television, and a political and cultural journalist in newspapers and cultural magazines. While in the US she wrote in English poetry books, short stories, novels. As a renowned researcher on foreign, comparative, and international law and tenured faculty at New York University School of Law, she published a book on her field, Toward a Cyberlegal Culture (Transnational Publishers, 2001, 2^nd 2002). She has been for ten years (2005-2015) the Editor of GlobaLex http://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex/ , the finest in the world online publication on foreign, comparative, and international law research, and from 2015 the Honorary Editor.

Her first book called Lecturi Moderne/ Modern Readings is a collection of essays about Rumanian contemporaneous writers and a few topics of comparative literature. The second book was a monograph devoted to a prestigious Rumanian writer, Dumitru Radu Popescu.  I was curious to know in her words about the frame of the History of Fiction Writing from Ramayana to Don Quixote. I read this book back in time in its first edition and I strongly advised her to have a second edition, reuniting both volumes in one single tome.

“It’s not a history in the traditional way’, she said. “What we call ‘novel’ in our cultural civilization existed under other names and displaying different epic architectures in other cultural civilizations. I use ‘epic architecture’ in general while ‘novel’ is the term used in our western cultural civilization naming this aesthetic reality.”

The second edition has seven hundred printed pages (1,600 computer pages) in a book of a big format (a sort of a ‘Bible” size).
          “I consider it an event for the theory of the novel, but unfortunately it is only in Rumanian.”

Her novels (Timpul celor alesi/ The time of the Chosen Ones; Viata pe fuga/ Life on the Run/, Platonia) were differently written, they do not resemble one another, and it is difficult to label them. Each of them brings a different aesthetic and complex universe. Those in the Rumanian language have as main characters creative and intelligent women living under the Communist and post-Communist eras that brought so much devastation; strong, tragic women who do not compromise with the repressive power.

Roznoveanu’s fiction attributes are profound introspection, breath taking narratives, complex plots with philosophical implications, and an unmatched power of description akin to the magic realism.

“My mother was the one that told me ancient stories of her Vlach clan; my father told me stories from World War II; my grandparents from my father’s side introduced me to Western civilization – my father’s father was an engineer who studied in Berlin and belonged to the Polish and Hapsburg aristocracy – while my mother’s parents passed on to me the Balkans highlands tales. Because in my family were spoken beside Rumanian other languages such as German, Vlach (Armân), Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish (my mom spoke with her siblings only in Armân language; the grandfather from the mother’s side had been a businessman and he spoke all Balkan’s languages while the other grandfather mixed Rumanian with German) I decided to choose Rumanian and only Rumanian. It was the only way to have good grades in school. I remember my classmates’ mocking me whenever I made language mistakes, and this had been hard on me.”

Why did you start with poetry in English? I was curious. We had begun our dialog at the Smith & Wollensky’s restaurant on 49th Street & Third Avenue, in New York City. We ate there a few times in the past, sharing a lobster, a Cajun steak and a half of a bottle of Cabernet or Pinot Noir. I thought that this place full of memories of so many writers and groups of talkative journalists from surrounding newspapers would be inspiring. We were about at the end of our late lunch and sipped slowly from the remaining red wine.

“As you know, when I arrived here, I did not know English. I learned it at work, in a few classes of English as a Second Language at Hunter College, and on my own. During this time, English words came to me cocooned in beautiful sounds and meanings close to Latin and French. I was in love with those words so profoundly imbedded in lyricism! I understood why poetry had been the first literary genus in the history of cultural civilizations…”

 I myself wrote somewhere about Mirela’s books:” She flies with a cosmic speed over the earth while I and my fellow writers are hardly traveling by chariots…” Marian Popa, a Rumanian literary critic living in Germany, wrote about Mirela’s poetry in his History of Modern Rumanian Literature: “to take knowledge as it comes, to try keeping one’s head up midst impending doom: Accept everything that’s given to you, / even in jest. Whatever you receive / will be to your advantage … And so one advances toward atrocious stridency when one’s anatomy is used as a means for getting situated in the center of things. The lyrical self is variously tortured, spat at, bitten, and devoured, tortured and dismembered, crucified even.” Heathrow O’Hare alias Professor Stefan Stoenescu, the Rumanian renowned translator and essayist, noted that: ”Translating Mirela Roznoveanu one cannot help being reminded of intensities and flights of the imagination from such distinctive poetries as those of Emily Dickinson or Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop or Sylvia Plath.” Poet William James Austin, the author of the classic UNDERWORLD, wrote that “Mirela Roznoveanu’s poetry is “innovative” where it counts, I think — the imagery is really stunning. I can’t imagine anyone with any sensitivity reading her work, and not experiencing a strong emotional response.” Elizabeth Gamble Miller, Professor Emerita of Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas and Literary Translator of contemporary poetry, fiction and essays from Spanish into English endorsed Mirela’s Elegies from New York City:  “What I find fascinating are the startling images gleaned from such a breadth of human experience. The poetry is of such depth and complexity while not in the least hermetic. It is as if the image is the precise one to stir the conflicting emotions that permeate the poems. Mirela Roznoveanu’s world travels and breadth of literary experience carry a resonance that inspires further exploration into the poetic line.”

About Mirela’s novel The Time of the Chosen Ones, published in the second uncensored edition in 1999 in Romania, Jean Parvulescu, a well-known French writer born in Romania wrote about it in Contraliterature, a French literary magazine: “The inside time of this novel being, after an expression of Mirela Roznoveanu, ‘a pyramidal time’, invites to an exploded reading and continuous exploration of religious believes expressing a new attitude of the European novel.”

The characters in The Time of the Chosen Ones are intellectuals interested in philosophical issues; their conversations and introspections are intellectually intense; the critics considered this an overloaded aspect of the novel.

“But this was the spiritual life of those of us trying to survive in the communist era,” Mirela said. “We were like that. Our pretentious provincial intellectualism, the inclination to speculate, the subtleties of our minds were real. The metaphysical background had been always there. Perhaps in these aspects my novel reminds of the Argentinean’s Borges, Cortazar, and Juan Jose Saer.  My characters as myself were worlds apart from reality for social and political reasons. We struggled to exist in a terrible communist dictatorship, a sort of civil war, when a big part of the Rumanian society made a pact with the devil in order to oppress the other part of society. And the mixture of the harsh reality and the high intellectualism gives to the main characters a violent trajectory.”   

About The Life Manager and Other Stories, written in English, Annie Gottlieb, the author of “Do You Believe in Magic?” wrote: „Mirela takes us there in the imagination, and it feels as if we are there in the flesh, because of the incredible power of description, the incredible love for nature so sensuous, which is in some ways so much more reliable than the human love always there. They are magnificent stories. And I admire Mirela so much for making that leap across the ocean. I wrote down some words from one of her stories that I thought were “suspended, vulnerable, and daring.” That’s Mirela. She is like the woman on the flying trapeze. She is suspended over the Atlantic. And I admire her so much for having always been ready to take that leap or to let herself be pushed. And I admire her very much for taking the leap to be published here in America, and to fight for her stories. And insist that they be read, and seen, and that they not sink into the ocean without a trace”. And Marylin J. Raisch, Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University wrote in a book review about Toward a Cyberlegal culture: “She had the courage to pitch her claims high even if the more practical mission of the book prevented her pursuing all of her philosophical speculations. (…)  Certainly ubiquity and the penetration of the Internet with simultaneity have opened up unique opportunities for training and legal/intellectual exchange as never before.”

I read Mirela’s novels and I was struck by the fact that no one has ever expressed before in fiction as she did the scenery, the running of the time, the smells, the real nature through words; she posses the unique talent of getting the reader into the plot through a net of intelligent sensations, a powerful atmosphere impossible to forget or avoid by the reader’s mind and heart. I had been trapped in there; I ultimately became a character and experienced the impact of whatever was around. This power of her narrative is like a narcosis and a sort of neurosis that lingers forever in the readers mind.

“Ideas fade in time, as well as history events. What remains?” Mirela smiled. “The inner feelings of characters and the ambiance they are embedded in. That’s why we still read Iliad, Daphnis and Chloe, The Golden Ass, War and Peace, and the novels written in Japan in the eleventh century. The desperation of Achilles viewing Patroclus corpse is there, forever in my heart.”

Mirela is harsh against the Communist regime. The secret police searches on her parents’ house were traumatic. Visions of her mother spitting blood after secret police interrogations left a deep wound in Mirela’s memory. Armân or Vlach clans kept their valuables not in currencies or properties but in gold, so mother got as dowry a lot of gold, ancient coins from the time of Alexander the Great, all confiscated by the communist regime. The mother’s father, once a rich man having stores in Thessaloniki and Tulcea had no money to buy bread for everything he had had been confiscated. In this time, he had been declared a bourgeois, an enemy of the country and his children were expelled from schools. Uncle Dumitru Limona, the mother’s brother, who protested against the Soviet Russia occupation of Hungary in 1956, had been jailed for many years as a political detainee. The other side of the family lost also everything, a toy factory and a movie theater. The communist regime seized all private property. To own a house was viewed as a crime.  

Mirela’s novels have roots in her own life. Involved in a plot aiming to publish an anti-Communist newspaper in Ceausescu’s era, she was caught by the secret police in early 1989. Interrogated, demoted, forbidden to publish, her books expelled from publishing houses, and threatened by the establishment with a few years in jail she had been under the permanent secret police surveillance.  “All my friends were gone; they were told they would be fired if were to contact me. Even my boyfriend was happy we were not married and distanced himself from me. My son helped me stay alive. I was pushed to the point to end it all and if the Revolution did not happen in December 1989, I would be dead by now.  I own my life to those that died in those days of December and I will never forget it. When I wanted to see my secret police file in Romania in 2008, I was given an almost empty file. The real names of informants were missing as well as their reports about me. “The process of journalists” was missing too. The director of the Institute of the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania apologized saying that my file had been laundered. The names of former informants and collaborators are still protected there.”

Roznoveanu’s writing achieves effects through a vast repertoire of epic and theatrical means. By the time she started university she had read prolifically. In her home library she found anything she wanted from Homer to Durrenmatt. Her father loved to read plays for he wanted to write one on his own. Her first productions written in the fourth grade were plays. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Schiller were her first readings. However, in high school, Mirela dreamt of becoming an opera singer. She had a soprano voice. She took private classes of piano and opera singing but her voice not mature yet she was advised to wait; instead of the Academy of Music (Conservatoire) she went to the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philology where she graduated in 1970, postponing her opera dream. While at the university she spent her free time reading and attending opera and classical music concerts. She became interested in linguistics and history of languages, because in that Communist era the linguistics’ domain was the terrain of innovation and freedom from the oppression of censorship. Her master in romance languages was a thesis on the history of Rumanian language in the XVI century.

 Around 1968 she wrote her first literary essays and short fiction, and this had been influential. After her graduation she worked as a literary critic and columnist for “Tomis”, a cultural magazine in Constanţa. Fired after a few years because she refused to attend the Communist Academy Stefan Gheorghiu in Bucharest, she had a job at the National Library in Constantza for one year, and after being told that the Regional Communist Party, the Education Department from Constantza wanted to fire her, she resigned and moved to Bucharest. By that time a law forbade citizens to change their residency from a city to another one. The capital of the country had been a closed city. Not having an ID with residence in Bucharest, she could not find a stable job. She published literary criticism in literary magazines and worked for the Rumanian Television as a free lance cultural commentator. Years later, she worked as a senior columnist for the weekly cultural and scientific weekly publication called Magazine, a sort of Newsweek published by the Free Romania (România Liberă) newspaper.  She published book reviews in Free Romania (România Liberă) and wrote for Magazin anything from scientific reportages and essays on the philosophy of science to ancient civilizations, while contributing to Rumanian cultural literary journals and writing her books.

 “How you did it?” I asked not sure I could grasp so many things at once.

”I trained my brain to switch from a sphere of writing to another and to work fast and without flaws.  I usually start my day around five in the morning and I go for more than 12 hours straight into work. Creativity can exercise itself in any domain of life once you have it within you. I am curious, therefore I am. I can do many things at once. In this way my lifetime line became a sort of spiral, so I lived longer. I stretched the time as a rubber band. I lived many lives at once; perhaps I am 210 years old in the objective line time?”

Mirela left Romania in January 1991. Her flight ticket had been for the beginning of December 1990, but a strike of Rumanian Airlines postponed her leaving.  When I asked her why she did it after the December 1989 Revolution, she said:

 “It was not fear only, for I lost much of my fear of death in 1989. It was another kind of fear, of wasting my life; of not being ever able to fulfill my life time projects: to read for a few years in a big European library for the second edition of the Civilization of the Novel, for example. Fortunately, I had that library here at New York University! To be able to travel in all Balkan countries and extend the documentation for Vlachica – and my sabbatical and university vacations allowed me to do that. One of my dearest wishes was to teach in a university. It happened in my new country. By that time in Romania I realized that I will not be able to leave in a normal country there during my lifetime.”

She had been rehired by the newspaper Free Romania (România Liberă), now under the management of her former colleagues and dissident journalists in the first days of the December 1989 Revolution. She worked in the Cultural Department of the newspaper, but she wrote anything necessary in those times such as editorials, political reportages, cultural essays, book reviews, and interviews. 1990 had been a dramatic year but also a very rewarding one. She was invited to visit Switzerland in April 1990 and for the first time in her life she crossed the border of a democratic country; while there she met in secrecy King Michael of Romania and had an interview with him, never published by her newspaper scared of repercussions coming from the neo-communist regime.

Then the Council of Europe invited her to a special summer session in Innsbruck in late June 1990 where there were hearings regarding the political situation of the Rumanian state after the barbaric miners’ invasion in Bucharest. She was chosen to be the intermediary between the Council of Europe and the Rumanian Government representatives there; she did this job so impeccably that the parliamentarians of the Council of Europe wanted her to be the first Rumanian ambassador to the Council of Europe, a request denied by the Rumanian President. “After talks with King Michael and the parliamentarians I became aware that what I wanted to believe was not the true reality of my Romania.”

In August 1990 she arrived in the USA to inquire about and to find out about the delivery stage of a promised new typography for the newspaper she worked for. She met Paula Jon Dobriansky, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State at the State Department in Washington, DC and a group of Human Rights Caucuses in the Congress. “I understood where my country was on the USA agenda; nobody cared in 1990 that the power had been taken back by the neo-communists. The US wanted stability for the American business and not thoughtful about what kind of regime would provide a safe business environment. Romania had been a battlefield between those that wanted an anticommunist country and the secret police and the former nomenclature trying to preserve their privileges. Those journalists writing against the communists were subject to death, accidents or defamation.”

 When the miners invaded in June 1990 Bucharest, called by the President of Romania Ion Iliescu, it was meant to tell that Romania was on the road to the perestroika and to a velvet revolution not to a real democracy. Anti-communist journalists were savagely beaten and inside the Free Romania newspaper the former secret police informers and officers became aggressive. She was told to shut up or leave the country if she wanted to stay alive. She was told how and when she would be raped, disfigured or shot. The typographers, meant to prepare her book for publishing, wanted to destroy in September 1990 the manuscript of the Civilization of the Novel. They were angry on her for she worked for a newspaper against the Communists. “It was saved by a miracle; it was the only copy I had.”  The same with her book of poetry kept in the Eminescu Publishing House for 10 years. “I was told in 1990 it will be soon published. In 1991 the manuscript was discretely sent to be burned, saved miraculously again from the pile of manuscripts prepared for the crematorium.” She showed me this saved manuscript as well as the novel Platonia “published” in one single copy. “As you see, the dark forces followed me continuously in Romania. But I had been always saved.”

Early September 1990, after a group of neighbors’ search in her apartment for they considered her, under the neo-communist media propaganda (there were articles published against her), an ‘enemy of the good communists and of the country’ and a ‘foreign agent paid in dollars’, and after the third tentative of the same active secret police to destroy Free Romania (România Liberă) offices and hammer the redactors, she accepted the entire truth.

She was back from the USA and had been invited to a cocktail to the American Embassy in Bucharest when Adrian Dohotaru, her former colleague and journalist, a recognized playwright, by that time State Secretary in the Rumanian Foreign Office, approached her. She was designated to attend, as the representative of her newspaper Free Romania (România Liberă), the end of September 1990 United Nation General Assembly opening ceremony, with the group of journalists of President Iliescu. She was told that President Iliescu did not want her with him, and he replaced her with a former secret police informant still working for the newspaper Free Romania (România Liberă). She found out about this and confronted Adrian Dohotaru who advised her: “Be quiet and listen to me. You are again on the black list. If you want to be alive shut up or leave the country.” She heard these words not believing what she was hearing. “I value your writing,” he continued on a very low voice; ”save your son. Don’t say anything for we are listened and my bodyguard is right there,” Dohotaru made a sign with his eyes to a man.

Dohotaru died soon mysteriously when he became the Grand Master of the National Grand Lodge of Romania. “He had a conscience,” Mirela said. “He saved my life.”

I wanted to know why the secret police was so much after her.

“One of my distant acquittances (the nephew of Ion Tugui) who worked after the Revolution in the special troops defending the American Embassy in Bucharest, told me that he had access to my secret police file and browsed it. It was written there that I had been extremely dangerous for I had the power to influence people’s minds in meetings or gatherings. He said that this was equivalent to a death sentence.”

“Did you influence people’s meetings?” I asked her. It was your power real? I was curious to understand this statement.

“It seemed it was true. I did it before and after the Revolution. I influenced the outcome of many meetings with destructive agendas. At one meeting for example I asked why we have to destroy the old villages – it had been Ceausescu’s plan to move all peasants in buildings. I asked the representative of the Central Communist Committee Party who came to Free Romania newspaper to convince the journalist to start a campaign in the favor of this plan, to explain how this will happen. How villagers will live in buildings without running water, heat and toilets, how they will preserve grains and keep their animals without barns and stables and the entire meeting had been compromised to the fury of the person sent by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Octavian Paler, by then the redactor in chief, was very upset and confronted me. After the miners’ invasion in Bucharest in June 1990 I confronted the nomenclature hardliners and secret police informants gathered in the newspaper’s offices; they wanted to take over the newspaper under President Iliescu’ order while the armed miners were lingering around the building. One day before, the typographers devastated our offices under the same active secret police guidance. I was the only one there from the group of former dissidents. I told the gathering that history will record their spinelessness decisions. I reminded them that our children called those working for the Communist press ‘sh…t eaters’ and that it was up to them to continue to eat sh…t or not. And they could not do it.”

I wanted to know what gave her courage to come to a country where she had no job and did not know its language.

“The teacher of my son convinced me at a teacher-parent conference as well as my son, he was the one. And if I were to die anyway, I preferred to die in a foreign land instead of the country I was born.”

“Why the US?”

“Europe wasn’t safe for me.”

 Roznoveanu lives in Sunnyside, Queens, New York, in a one-bedroom apartment, a sort of an artist’s retreat full of paintings and books.

“I do not understand why American writers go to faraway retreats or in the middle of forests to write. My ‘forest’ is there where I live.” Her son graduated from medical school and he is now a specialist in gynecology working in a hospital in Florida. She was married to the boy’s father, a Rumanian literary critic and journalist, but shortly divorced and never remarried. She had lived her life together with her son and mother who died in 2001 in New York. Visiting her apartment, I realized how small her kitchen is.

“I rarely cook.  Cooking, as my son said, is not my major.”

One of the paintings in the living room is her portrait in an early Picasso style by a friend, Rumanian painter Razvan Neicu, done around the end of 2000. Another portrait in an expressionist manner by a Rumanian painter Petru Pavel hung in the hallway leading to her bedroom and it was painted in the early 70s; around it there are photographs of her son, her two granddaughters and the babies’ mother.

A small computer is on a wooden small table in the living room, close to the huge TV screen watched mostly for political news – CNN, Fox, BBC, and France24. Another computer stands on an ergonomic desk in her bedroom, also full of books, while an IPod is by the bed’s night stand. The laptop around too. Dressed sporty in jeans and a comfortable blue blouse, her hair tied up she made coffee. “Caesar said that blue is the color of serious people,” she laughed when I made a comment about the colors. “I am sure Caesar thought of committed people …those stubborn that accomplish their projects against all odds.”

Shortly after coming to the US she went back to school; she had been in school from March 1991 to December 1996 while also having a full-time job. She obtained a Master on Information Science from Pratt Institute in 1996 and in the same year had been hired by the NYU School of Law. Her field: international, foreign and comparative law research.  She became a tenured faculty in 2005. She had been invited to teach all over the world.

“I love teaching. I had always felt I had a precious message to pass on to my students.”

When did you write?

“My writing had been my first and most precious task of each day.”

 Are you happy now? How did you afford to retire?

“I worked an entire life for this moment. I had never had a grant to allow me concentrate only on writing. I was the bread winner of my family and having a child I could not afford to live like a bohemian. Mirela Roznovschi worked hard for Mirela Roznoveanu. Mirela Roznovschi provided to Mirela Roznoveanu a grant for the rest of her life. Just to write and be out of any worries. Let’s hope I can do it, I am pretty old now…”

We sat on the coach in the living room by the crystal table set on three Buddha babies holding blue flowers on their hands stuck on the side of their hearts.

“I wrote books that I wanted to read but I could not find them for they were never written, so my books actually came out of a necessity … that’s why I worked for 20 years on the Civilization of the Novel. The project of Vlachica’s novel started by the time I was 28. On her death bed, my mother asked me to draw to a close this novel. Professor Virgil Nemoianu, by 1991 the rector of Catholic University from Washington, D.C. urged me to write the novel of the Rumanian emigrants in America, and I wrote Life on the Run.  One of my friends in Romania, mezzo-soprano Lucia Cicoara-Dragan, soloist at the Bucharest Opera was preparing Carmen for the stage in 1988-1989; we talked a lot about this opera’s musical subtleties and her rehearsals, the way of singing her part; I wanted to read, by that time, a novel built on an opera composition, it was never written and so I wrote Platonia.”

Vlachica, which I read it in the manuscript, is a powerful and never-before told story taking place 300 years ago in the Balkans when Vlach clans, in hiding for centuries on the top of the highlands, were confronted with the Imperial Ottoman power threatening their very existence. Life on the Run, / a sort of a Fugue of Life is more than the author’s translation of her Rumanian novel Viata pe Fuga. It contains an eulogy for her Romania and it also contains a kind of eulogy for Roznoveanu herself. The novel is about a journalist and writer living in two worlds, about redemption, about exile, and the pain of reinventing of another self here in the US. It was based on many points on Mirela’s life, in a fictionalized kind of realism.

For her, reality is the prime matter of fiction writing. The separation from the mother tongue language became, for the main character of this novel, a true ontological cataclysm. Life on the Run dramatized, without any compromise, Romania’s crisis – one of the most destructive moments of the Communist era as well as the troubled post-revolution time.  The novel’s narrator is a lot the writer’s alter ego, marked by the hardship of her origins and the difficulty of her leap away from them. Reading this novel, I remembered many times Alexis de Tocqueville’s On Democracy in America. The French intellectual discovered America on its top levels; the European intellectual called Mirela came to know America starting from its bottoms. The conclusions are the same. I will paraphrase a famous sentence of Alexis de Tocqueville about democracy and socialism (“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”): while democracy seeks equality in liberty, communism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. And the learning to become free is another meaningful and symbolic level of this novel: “Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville.

Mirela sees, analysis critically her former country and the actual one. But the former impoverished life, with obstacles contrasts with the new one; she said that she had been in her former country a horse with legs tied up at the starting gate of the competition. Born in a little city by the Danube and brought up in a village in a lost place as Dobroudja, Romania, she fought not only with the communist casts but with class casts. In the US the snobbery of American writers, impossible to meet and talk to them is another harsh reality. When trying to teach comparative literature in the academy, nobody wanted her. Sometime her voice becomes angry; displacement, homelessness are other powerful feelings I felt during our conversation. When interviewing for a job with the academy in the US she was asked: why didn’t you cooperate with the communist nomenclature? Don’t you think you would have a great life full of privileges?

No two pictures of her look at all alike. In one, on Rumanian Wikipedia, she looks as sexy and mysterious as Greta Garbo; in another one, on the cover on a book about her, Mirela – a Paradox, her tragic profile seems of Iphigenia; the picture on her web site shows a stern professor while teaching.  Looking around I realized that her portraits did not make justice to the real Mirela.

“Beauty is a curse and it is also a door. With intelligence and talent together, beauty was a recipe for disaster in a conservative country forced by the communist regime to go back to the eighteenth century. Being beautiful I was not taken seriously by my Rumanian peers; for them it was impossible, I was a contradiction, for such a woman could not be creative and intelligent.  Especially in the 70s in the field of literary criticism led only by men this had been seen as an abnormality. That’s why I signed at the beginning my book reviews in “Tomis” only with M. instead of Mirela. When my first literary criticism book had been published, it was said it was written by three prestigious literary critics. I cried but my mom said that it meant the book was good: ”It does mean that your book is as good as their writings!” my mom put it.”

I asked Mirela why she views ‘beauty as a door’.

“Well, trying to talk to prestigious writers about criticism, poetry, and novel, they were all men in Romania, they were attracted to my beauty and allowed me to approach them, while I was attracted to their genius. Unfortunately, I could not enroll in a PhD program exactly for this reason! The door was closed for me! In exchange for accepting me as a PhD candidate, one of my professors wanted me in bed with him while the other one asked me to wait until my 50s when my beauty would fade…”

Roznoveanu does not drive and has no car. In New York City this is not a must.

“It is said in Europe that beautiful women cannot drive,” she laughed jokingly. “I actually have no sense of direction; I am distracted by what I think, and I cannot drive.” She laughed again. “It has also been said I am too competitive! I am not at all; I do what I want to. The field of literature is unlimited, there is room for all. I do not compete with anybody!”

She visited every summer in the past years the Balkan’s countries to see those places about which she wrote in Vlachica. She likes to travel to Asia. She visited twice India. She dislikes her name Mirela – “three musical notes!” while her real last name is not Roznoveanu but Roznowski – in Rumanian transliteration being Roznovschi.

“I like only ‘La’ from my first name, the note of Hydrogen; the Universe’s song.”

I wanted to know how she succeed in America, how the life of the emigrant had been for her.

“I did not come as a Fulbright scholar or invited by a university, although I could have a Fulbright. I came here on my own as a refugee unable to explain myself in the English language. I went to evening courses, paid from my small wages, for seven years of my life. At the beginning I had to wash hair in beauty parlors and clean houses to survive, while going to English as a second language evening class. After that I was a translator and a file clerk in a busy law office, not being allowed to rest on a chair for a single moment. For many months I even had a full time and a part time job, leaving at 8 in the morning and coming home at 12 am and attending school over the weekend. I was lucky to be hired by the NYU School of Law Library. While there, I enrolled in a master of information science school and after graduation I was able to obtain a professional job in the same place.”  

Roznoveanu’s personal life had been unusual by Rumanian standards. She refused to attend a political academy; she dared to stay without a permanent job for five years in an era when people without a permanent job were sent to labor camps; in her TV shows she did never pronounced words such as ‘political’, communist’ ‘communist party’ and this was another grave charge against her; she gave birth to her son before marriage. During pregnancy, she was forced to hide, stop working, for she was not married, and her boyfriend worked for another newspaper. The personal issues of journalists were on the Communist Party agenda. “I was afraid for my unborn baby life. An accident could happen any time. To be unmarried and pregnant had been a crime when working for the media; the Communist Party wanted the journalists have a perfect file; any deviance from the ‘communist morality’ had been harshly punished. For six months I saw the light of the day through a window and I walked out only during the night. I delivered my baby having by my side in the hospital a close friend to watch over me. ” She had fallen in love after divorcing her husband with a writer and journalist. They never married and never lived together in the same home, which had been another unaccepted issue of that time.  She left him after 10 years when their home to live together had been ready, finding he was on the side of the neo-communist regime in 1990.  By that time he pushed her hardly to resign as a journalist and public figure, to give up her career and become a housewife.

“As soon as I left Romania, he became an official of the regime, he urged me to resign in order to get this position…”

After the Revolution, as Romania took the path of forgiving the crimes of the Communist dictatorship, Roznoveanu’s fiction became a sort of confrontation. Viata pe fuga/ Life on the run was uncomfortable for the establishment in 1997 and never distributed in book shops while the publishing house went bankrupt at the time of the publication. Platonia was published in one single copy in 1998, sent to her to New York to make her believe the book had been published. Discovering the truth, she managed to have it published in 1999. It was said her books wanted to ‘divide’ the country, and servile critics, former collaborators supporting the communist era authors, diminished her writing. As in politics the same people and values stayed in place in the literary life. “Even today it is uncomfortable for many to acknowledge the fact that I exist. I am someone who did not cooperate with the secret police and my life attested that it had been possible. I also did not perish in the USA. I proved myself here. I learned that the most an oppressive system wants to coerce a person, the highest is the jump when this pressure is lifted. However, freedom is not easy; it reclaims its victims too. I am the lucky one who survived.”

In one instance she said something about the future, about her books being better understood after the passing of time.

“Am I writing for the future generations of readers? I am perhaps ahead of my time? I have no idea. The truth is that my novels are better understood today as my essay on the history of the novel.”

Although she had been harsh about her former country, her book on the history of the novel received in 2008 (the second revised edition) the highest award in the Rumanian culture, the Award of the Rumanian Academy, while in December 2000 Mirela Roznoveanu was honored by outgoing President of Romania Emil Constantinescu for exceptional contributions from abroad in the service of Rumanian culture and democracy. Mirela has been named an Officer of the National Order for Faithful Service.

“When things come too late in life it is hard to feel happiness. It is like a void in the heart trying to be filled but emptiness does not go away. In my new country everything came at the right time, I had been acknowledged, and I am grateful for that.”  

She does not like to talk about many of those past events. I knew it is hard to forget painful things:

 “I discovered a forgetting protocol. I erase one thing at a time. But still does not help.”

What motivates you to write in the English language?  There is a sacrifice, an effort, and tenacity in a person learning a language late in her life, and who wanted to write literature in a new language.

“I thought I had something important to say. That’s why I did not give up. Other writers such as Conrad and Nabokov could do it, why not me? It meant it had been possible and I was supposed at least to try. The pain of not being understood gave me much suffering. Imagine a mature writer of forty-four having the linguistic baggage of a five years old. It had been a torture from which I had grown a lot inside. There is a tale in 1001 Nights about a prince that had to be silent despite dreadful trials in order to succeed. I had a similar experience.”

 I asked her who would be the author that had an impact on her life and what question would ask him if alive.

“I would like to ask Homer in what resided his tremendous enthusiasm of telling over and over Iliad and Odyssey to his listeners on the Ionian Islands and how he dealt with loneliness. He died alone on a beach of an island. And Ovid, I would ask him how he dealt in the ice-covered Tomis, today Constantza, with another language and the exile. And I would question Dante about his choice to leave his beloved city and die also in exile. They are my close friends. I learned a lot from them.”

What do you want the readers to be left with after reading your books?

“Perhaps the last image of Platonia by the Black Sea in the winter night, her way of being consistent with the  inner freedom of the artist; the belief in the sacred that is around us, the main thought in The Time of the Chosen Ones; the truth that what we have within ourselves it is impossible to be taken away from us despite any difficulties of our lives and this is Life on the Run; another way of seeing an accepted universe just stepping out from it and looking anew to it and this is The Civilization of the Novel.”

Despite talking about pain, frustration and sweating blood Mirela was smiling.

“I feel that fate wanted to restore here my broken path in the country I had been born.  God had sent angels on my behalf, maybe even archangels working hard to keep me breathing. I don’t believe in miracles. I rely on them.”
New York City, May 2015

SCRIITORI ROMÂNI: Grupul de la New York

                                                               Mirela Roznoveanu

                                                      Interviu realizat de Gabriel Pleşea[i]

Stabilită în Statele Unite din 1991, Mirela Roznoveanu este membră a Facultăţii de Drept de la New York University, în a cărei Bibliotecă îndeplineşte funcţia de Cercetător în dreptul internaţional, străin şi comparat cu rangul de Profesor Asistent, predând cursuri de cercetare în dreptul străin, internaţional şi comparat. Semnează în volume şi reviste de specialitate, iar ghidurile ei electronice de date din Home Page-ul de la New York University School of Law au devenit un punct de referinţă pe plan internaţional. O “reorientare” professională remarcabilă, aşadar, pentru cineva care nu a pus mâna pe un computer înainte de a pleca din România. În ţară, înainte de emigrare, dar şi dupa stabilirea în S.U.A., Mirela Roznoveanu, licenţiată în filologie a Universităţii Bucuresti, a publicat, în volume proprii ori în publicaţii de renume, articole de critică literară, monografii, eseuri, poeme şi romane. Un deosebit interes a stârnit apariţia în 1997 a romanului Viaţa pe Fugă, o palpitantă descriere a “reaşezării” pe alte meleaguri.  Dar mai multe despre preocuparile curente şi complexitatea Mirelei Roznoveanu aflăm din interviul ce urmează.

Locuiesti, traiesti, lucrezi in New York. Practic, ai devenit o new-yorkeza. Cum te-ai considera din punctul de vedere al creatorului: româncă, americancă, româno-americana?

Statele Unite ale Americii este o tara binecuvântată de Dumnezeu unde am realizat in sapte ani lucruri destul de greu de imaginat chiar si de mine. Practic, am avut posibilitatea de a-mi verifica puterea de a ma implini ca fiinta completa, atit cit ne este dat, fiecaruia de destinul sau, intr-o lume necunoscuta si dura. Nu am avut burse de studii, relatii, prieteni care sa-mi ofere stipendii, dar acest impact cumplit m-a imbogatit imens din punct de vedere filosofic si estetic, pentru ca m-a obligat la o reevaluare radicala. Am invatat ce inseamna, ce este lumea, si ma referer la lumea normala, pentru ca eu veneam dintr-o societate anormala.

Cind am ajuns la New York nu stiam decit citeva cuvinte in limba engleza. In toti acesti ani am urmat cursuri serale (pe care le-am platit din banii mei), am muncit, am scris. Sint recunoscatoare tarii in care traiesc si careia ii apartin pentru sansa pe care mi-a dat-o. Sunt americanca cu aceasta parte a sufletului. Dar scriu in limba romana, si prin limba romana apartin deopotriva poporului roman, faţă de frumuseţile şi suferinţele căruia sunt legată. 

Dar vezi tu, mai este ceva foarte ciudat care vine din configuratia multirasiala a orasului in care traiesc, ca si a faptului ca am sansa sa calatoresc (in tara in care m-am nascut nu am avut voie sa detin un pasaport pina in 1990). Inteleg tot mai mult ca un ginditor si artist adevarat apartine azi lumii in totalitate. Conceptul de Aglobalizare@ ni se aplica deci si noua. Am observat in numeroase imprejurari ca “vocea romaneasca”, exprimata prin glasul meu , trezeste interes.Lumea de aici , foarte receptiva la multitudinea de opinii, percepe si accepta pozitiv si acest punct de vedere.

Ce mi-ai putea spune despre cronologia creaţiei tale. Ma refer şi la modul în care cărţile tale au fost receptate de critică. Opinia criticilor contează sau o ignori?

Scriitorul are doua cronologii: una este data de nastere din registrul de stare civila, celalata este data la care incepe sa existe ca scriitor. M-am nascut ca scriitor in 1978 odata cu publicarea la Cartea Românească a volumului de critica Lecturi Moderne. Acest volum venea dupa opt ani de publicistica in revistele literare. In general, cartile mele au avut o buna primire. Respect si ma intereseaza parerea confratilor, cu atit mai mult cu cit eu insami sunt critic literar. As adauga insa ca la acest capitol, al receptarii, am avut mai multe nesanse.

Prima s-a datorat unor intimplari conjuncturale. Datorita textului despre Eugen Barbu din Lecturi Moderne (capitol  pe care Marin Preda l-a acceptat desi era in lupta deschisa cu Eugen Barbu) nu am luat premiul de debut al Uniunii Scriitorilor; aparitia nefericita a monografiei despre D.R.Popescu (editura Albatros) cu o saptamina inainte ca acesta să fie impus, in iulie 1981, Presedinte al Uniunii Scriitorilor de catre Nicolae Ceausescu a fost pentru mine o dramă (cartea a fost considerata un act de conformism, cind de fapt era un eseu inceput in 1979 despre un autor care la 45 de ani fusese clasicizat, sanctificat de critica românească, iar eu voiam sa stiu de ce, pe ce merite–cine va cerceta capitolul bibliografic al acestei carti va avea de ce sa se mire); din romanul Totdeauna Toamna (caruia cenzura i-a schimbat titlul original Timpul celor Aleşi) au fost scoase pagini si capitole, osatura metafizică a cartii, pe care le-am trimis in copie dactilografiata, odata cu volumul, multor confrati, dar niciunul nu a facut macar aluzie la acel nivel metafizic al romanului (am vrut sa-mi retrag manuscrisul din tipografie, dar Liviu Calin m-a avertizat ca daca o fac nu voi mai publica in România nici o carte pe timpul vieţii mele); Civilizatia Romanului, vol. 2, a aparut la începutul anului 1991, când nimanui nu-i ardea de exegeze critice; romanul Platonia, scris in 1989-1990 a fost publicat in 1996 intr-un tiraj mai mult decit confidential—probabil doar un exemplar pe care l-am primit la New York.

Ca intr-un adevarat roman grec antic, a doua mea neşansă a fost frumusetea, pe care am considerat-o un stigmat, care m-a vulnerabilizat, într-un sens chiar victimizat. Pentru scriitorul român o femeie inteligenta si frumoasa nu poate fi nici profunda si nici talentata. Evident, in Romania literatura apartine teritorial barbatilor care sint alergici la intruziunile feminine. Mai ales cind este vorba de critica si teoria literara.

Ca sa ma afirm, am muncit enorm, dar am observat ca intre o mediocritate masculina si o femeie talentata va fi comentat, preferat, primul. Scriitoarea s-ar putea sa fie acceptata spre sfirsitul vietii ei, daca nu face cumva parte dintr-un cerc masculin puternic, sau  comentata in doi peri. Ce e rau, e ca putinele recenzente imita atitudinea grupului compact si solidar masculin. Asta am facut si eu cind am inceput sa scriu critica. Am semnat primele recenzii in revista “Tomis” unde am tinut si cronica literara cu initiala M in loc de Mirela ca sa nu se stie ca in spatele numelui se ascundea o fata de 23 de ani. Asa ca nu e de mirare ca cele doua volume despre romanul universal, “Civilizatia romanului.Radacini”, vol.1 (Albatros) si vol.2. “Arhitecturi Epice” (Cartea Romaneasca) au fost, in plus, considerate un fel de jignire la adresa profesorilor de literatura universala si comparata. Trebuia sa fiu profesor universitar ca sa am indrazneala sa scriu acest eseu studiu de peste o mie de pagini. Colegii mei, criticii, nu stiau ca lucrasem in medie un an la fiecare capitol din cele doua volume. Au fost ani in care am dormit cinci ore, m-am sculat la patru dimineata (asta fac si acum, doar ca exista o licenta de o ora in plus) ca sa scriu si sa citesc. Nu am avut niciodata privilegiul sa stau acasa si sa scriu, sau sa ma bucur de stipendiile Uniunii Scriitorilor.

Ce crezi ca te defineste ca scriitoare? Activitatea, personalitatea, opera? Pe de alta parte ai o bogata activitate socio-politica. Ce ai putea spune despre aceasta latura?

Cred ca toate laolalta sunt importante in conturarea profilului meu de scriitor. Nu se poate face abstractie că autoarea cartilor de mai sus este  aceeasi persoana cu aceea care a tinut ani de zile o cronica de filosofia stiintei la revista “Magazin” (Prof. Solomon Marcus mi-a spus ca daca el era unul din putinii care veneau dinspre stiinta spre literatura, eu eram unica voce care venea dinspre literatura spre filozofia stiintei), ca si rubrica de “Civilizatii Străvechi” care m-a oblicat sa citesc enorm;  ca sint un ziarist; ca am fost in prima linie a publicisticii in anul greu 1990; ca acum scriu comentarii politice in “Lumea Libera Românească” din New York. Am fost anchetata in aprilie 1989 de securitatea lui Nicolae Ceausescu si pedepsita pentru amestecul in asa zisa “conspiratie a ziaristilor” din grupul Bacanu, care au incercat sa publice o foaie clandestina anticomunista. Sunt co-fondatoare a ziarului independent “Romania Libera”, preluat din mâinile echipei comuniste in 23 decembrie 1989. In 1990-1991 am indeplinit misiuni jurnalistice si politice speciale. In iunie 1990 am foat audiata impreuna cu doamna Doina Cornea de Consiliul Europei referitor la mineriada din 13-15 iunie si situatia democratiei din Romania dupa evenimentele din decembrie 1989. Am fost printre primii ziaristi romani care au ajuns la Versoix, unde i-am luat un interviu Regelui Mihai (aprilie 1990). Am fost audiata de Human Rights Caucus din Congresul SUA (iulie 1990) cu privire la situatia societatii civile din Romania. In aprilie 1991,l-am insotit pe Regele Mihai intr-o vizita de doua saptamini in SUA, prilej de a lua parte la dezbateri politice si intilniri diplomatice importante.

 Cum evaluezi şansele creaţiei tale de a pătrunde în conştiinţa ori literatura americană?

 Cita vreme scriu in limba romana aceste sanse sint reduse. Editurile americane isi asuma greu riscul de a traduce o carte, si in plus nu-i prea intereseaza Estul Europei. Poezia e mai norocoasa pentru ca ea costa mai putin ca sa o traduci. Dar romanul are o soarta diferita. Cred ca editurile romanesti pot face acest oficiu cu acele carti de exceptie care pot interesa editorul american, pentru ca o carte chiar daca e tradusa in engleza nu inseamna ca va fi si acceptata spre publicare de o editura americana. Viata pe Fuga a fost considerata de cititorii romani din SUA drept o carte care ar avea succes daca ar fi tradusa si publicata aici. Da, aici, Viata pe Fuga este un succes, si ecourile primite sint remarcabile. O editura americana din New York a dat cartea la un referent extern si referatul este foarte bun, dar asta nu inseamna ca editura s-a si angajat. Altfel ar fi stat lucrurile daca textul ar fi fost tradus in engleza.

 Cum ai descrie relaţiile cu editurile din tara? Oficial se afiseaza intentia de a-i recupera pe cei din afara.

 Vezi tu, nu am stiut nimic despre acest lucru pina in septembrie 1997 cind, la lansarea Vietii pe Fuga Dan Cristea a spus ca este regretabil ca romanul nu a fost publicat la Cartea Romaneasca. Mircea Martin a avut gentiletea de a-mi cere, tot atunci, un manuscris pentru Editura Univers, ca si Denisa Comanescu. Daca as fi stiut acest lucru, romanul Platonia nu ar fi fost compromis de tirajul minuscul, iar Viata pe Fuga nu ar fi trecut prin ce trece: editorul a dat faliment inainte de a trimite cartea in librarii. Viata pe Fuga a zacut nedifuzata luni de zile.  In fine, Editura Cartea Romaneasca s-a oferit sa o difuzeze prin librariile Uniunii Scriitorilor.

 Faptul ca traiesti in doua culturi iti influenteaza procesul creator?

Da, extraordinar de mult. Vad altfel, simt enorm, gindesc diferit. Este un privilegiu sa traiesti in capitala lumii, sa intilnesti oameni extrem de interesanti, fiecare o personalitate in domeniul lui, in tara lui. Calatorind, m-am schimbat, mi-am pierdut aerul puternic provincial, aer care face rau literaturii romane. Faptul ca pot avea acces la literatura anglo-americana este apoi inca un privilegiu al acestor ani. Inainte citeam fluent doar in franceza si italiana, chiar si spaniola.

 

Faci parte dintr-o promotie care nu s-a realizat in grup, ci fiecare scriitor a luptat pe cont propriu pentru a se realiza. E vorba de promotia ’70 care, dupa cum observam, este astazi in prim-planul vietii literare. Te mai simti in vecinatatea ei? Ce crezi ca a adus nou in câmpul literaturii române?

Cred că acest dezavantaj de moment, mă refer la momentul greu al debutului şi afirmării fiecăruia din cei ce fac parte din această promoţie, cum o numeşti tu, a fost până la urmă un avantaj. Artistul este un singuratic irepetabil şi această unicitate îi marchează existenţa de la debut.  Faptul că am luptat fiecare să ne impunem ne-a făcut mai puternici şi ne-a ajutat să ne descoperim vocea, să ne croim destinul individual. O promoţie formată din individualităţi artistice neafirmate in grup sau ieşite de sub pulpana unui mentor dictatorial, fie el si literar, într-o epocă de un puternic spirit gregar şi colectivism comunist, constituie o dovadă de vitalitate spirituală.

            Acum, aş vrea să-ţi mărturisesc ceva personal, care pare cumva în contradicţie cu întrebarea ta referitoare la promoţia 70, şi anume că niciodată nu m-am simţit făcând parte din vreo promoţie. Poate doar sub aspectul cronologiei. Şi asta pentru că această promoţie nu s-a constituit într-o generaţie de creaţie. Ca să se întîmple, ar fi trebuit să fim marcaţi de preocupări estetice mai mult sau mai puţin tangente şi să avem un câmp filosofic în care să ne regăsim. Vitregia anilor în care am debutat şi scris, cenzura din edituri, redacţii, Consiliul Culturii, hăituiala ideologică a propagandei comuniste venite pe toate canalele posibile, supravegherea de către securitate a oricăror întruniri, discuţii în grup, ne-au alterat comunicarea, ne-au mutilat cărţile, ne-au deviat gândirea de la estetic spre politic şi supravieţuire, furându-ne un lucru extrem de preţios, pierdut pentru totdeauna pentru literatura română.

Când vorbesc prea mulţi, se aud cei care tac. Nu prea ai ridicat vocea până acum decât prin cărţi. Ce-ai reproşa societăţii româneşti de astăzi, care încearcă iar să amestece valorile? Dar colegilor tăi de facultate, de slujbă, de viaţă?

 România trăieşte o tranziţie care pare că nu se mai termină, sau poate că nu e vorba de o tranziţie ci doar de un proces imaginar ce trebuie să-i facă pe români să creadă că merg spre ceva diferit de ce a fost, cînd de fapt pare că nu se întâmplă chiar aşa. Este apoi paradoxal câţi oameni remarcabili  sunt concentraţi pe teritoriul ţării şi cât de puţin eficienţi sunt ei atunci când este vorba de decizii vitale. Aş vrea să mai adaug că România aşteaptă marea cu sarea de la Occidentul care nu vrea decât să scoată cât mai mulţi bani din România. Este vorba doar de business şi legile lui, singurul interes al companiilor transnaţionale. Imaginea ţării în afară este deosebit de proastă. Sunt româncă şi nu mă simt bine când mi se spun în faţă lucruri care mă fac să roşesc despre ţara în care m-am născut. Departamentul de Stat, Consiliul Europei, Uniunea Europeană ştiu absolut totul despre ce se petrece în România. Faptul că sunt politicoşi şi pretind că nu ştiu face parte din prefăcătoriile diplomatice.

            Adevărul că România, în anul de graţie 1998, nu are încă legile necesare unui stat democratic este cunoscut de toate organismele internaţionale (fac comparaţie cu se petrece în celelalte state post-comuniste din Centrul si Estul Europei). Mai este apoi naivitatea guvernului român în tranzacţiile cu marile companii vestice, părând uneori de-a dreptul sinucigaşă. Nu ştiu dacă este vorba de neştiinţă, prostie, sau de mită. Tratativele cu IMF, EBRD şi alte bănci sau companii transnaţionale arată că echipa care guvernează nu ştie mare lucru despre acest proces şi pune România în situaţia unei ţări trase pe sfoară încontinuu. Societatea românească mai trebuie să ştie că dacă se vorbeşte de o tranziţie, ea nu este de la comunism la capitalism, ci la corporatism. Pentru asta e necesară o strategie economică şi politică adecvată.

            În ceea ce priveşte colegii de facultate, nu am amintiri prea plăcute. Mariana Ionescu a acceptat să fie distrusă cartea de poeme Învăţarea Lumii care a stat cu intermitenţe zece ani la Editura Eminescu şi la Editura Cartea Românească.  Acest lucru s-a petrecut în mai 1990 când eram ”legionara” de la România Liberă. Deci mai întîi s-a dat bunul de cules la începutul lui 1990, apoi s-au distrus plăcile tipografice, manuscrisul fiind trimis la incinerat în 1991. Am recuperat manuscrisul printr-un miracol, datorită lui Ion Ţugui care la insistenţele mele telefonice (eram la New York) a ajuns la Editura Eminescu în ziua în care manuscrisul cu bunul de tipar mergea la topit.

S-a încercat acelaşi lucru cu volumul doi al Civilizaţiei romanului (Cartea Românească) în septembrie 1990, când iarăşi, manuscrisul a fost salvat ca prin minune de şeful secţiei linotip. Paginile culese au fost sfărâmate de tipografii furioşi de la secţia linotip a tipografiei Casei Scânteii devenite prin reciclare post-decembristă Casa Presei Libere, pentru că lucram şi scriam la România Liberă.  Manuscrisul a fost transferat la o altă secţie (monotip) a aceleiaşi tipografii, unde muncitorii au acceptat să îl culeagă şi de aceea volumul a apărut în februarie 1991, într-un tiraj mai mult decât confidenţial. Îmi mai vine apoi în minte un alt coleg, Alex. Ştefănescu, care are o voluptate specială (nu mă voi apuca să o psihanalizez) de a-mi distorsiona fiecare apariţie editorială.

Ceea ce aş fi vrut să aud de la colegii mei de redacţie în cei douăzeci de ani de muncă în ţară, ar fi fost un cuvânt de încurajare, de laudă pentru ce am făcut bine, critică pentru ce am făcut prost. Asta este extraordinar în Statele Unite, fiecare răspunde în fiecare zi pentru ce face şi dacă face acel ceva bine, excepţional, acest lucru va fi remarcat şi lăudat. Încurajarea, recunoaştereea de către colegi şi şefi fac parte din stimulentle vieţii de zi cu zi. Dar Doamne fereşte să nu fii la înălţime!

Trăieşti sub zodia de foc a Berbecului. Crezi că scânteile şi flăcările ce se ivesc în urma unor lupte te avantajează? Ce ţi-ai reproşa din punct de vedere literar?

Am învăţat în ani că trebuie să-mi exprim opinia despre lucrurile pe care le consider esenţiale din orice sferă a vieţii: estetică, socială, politică. Tăcerea face parte din acceptare. Noi, scriitorii, modelăm existenţa prin cuvânt, care este spada noastră. Nu ma gândesc că voi fi mai avantajată sau dezavantajată de un punct de vedere exprimat, câtă vreme acel punct de vedere face parte din esenţa mea. Dace e ceva de reproşat, este faptul că am stat deoparte şi am lăsat multe să treacă de la mine. Viaţa nu este decât un segment temporal ridicol de scurt ce ne e dat numai o dată şi la capătul căruia se află o piatră de mormânt. Depinde de noi cum să întrupăm în viaţa reală, în această puţinătate temporală, atât de zbuciumată, esenţa care ne-a fost dată, căci fiecare are de îndeplinit o misiune, şi, de fiecare depinde la ce tensiune o îndeplineşte.

Din creatiile tale, care este “favorita”, pe care o consideri reprezentativa?

 Îmi iubesc toate cărţile în mod egal, pentru ca fiecare dintre ele este diferită, cu fiecare carte am încercat să construiesc un alt univers pe care am dorit să-l exprim într-un mod estetic diferit. Un creator se schimba cu fiecare carte, ea reflectind o alta virsta estetica, spirituală,reflexivă. Trecind prin vârste şi experienţe ne îmbogăţim la un mod faustic. Goethe şi Eminescu au fost modelele mele din copilarie. Amândoi s-au exprimat în cele mai diferite genuri literare, au citit enorm, au trait metamorfoze estetice si filosofice profunde. Apoi a venit admiraţia pentru Virginia Woolf.

Poţi să-mi dezvalui la ce lucrezi acum? Ce proiecte ai de viitor?

Lucrez la un roman pe care sper ca il voi termina curând. Vreau între timp să public volumul de poeme “Învăţarea Lumii” care a aşteptat optsprezece ani să vadă lumina tiparului. A fost o  traumă care a ucis în mine pentru mult timp izvorul poeziei. Am revăzut textul şi am adăugat câteva poeme noi. Fireşte, doar pe cele în româneste, nu şi pe cele scrise în engleză, pe care nu le-am tradus, pentru că vreau să las acea parte a misterului să fie exprimată numai în limba noii mele ţări.

Aprilie 1998, New York

[i] Gabriel Pleşea. Scriitori Români la New York, Editura Vestala, Bucureşti, 1998.

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

CONTRELITERATURE. NUMÉRO 4 AUTOMNE 2000.
Jean Parvulesco. La confirmation boreale. Investigations. Paris, Les reflexives Alexispharmaque, 2007, pp 69-77.

 La contrelittérature frappe à l’Est
JEAN PARVULESCO

 

Le temps de ceux qui sont élus… Est-ce enfin le nôtre? Laissons à Jean Parvulesco le soin de nous le dire. Mais si le lieu de l’élection sera nécessairement contrelittéraire, le vent de la contrelittérature, lui, souffle où il veut… Et singulièrement en Roumanie, où le “Temps de ceux qui sont élus “se dit Timpul celor alesi. C’est le titre d’un roman de Mirela Roznovéano que Jean Parvulesco a lu pour nous.

JE SUPPOSE QU’ON L’AURA DEJA COMPRIS. L’HORIZON A L’INTÉRIEUR DUQUEL SE POSE DéSORMAlS, ET DE PLUS EN PLUS ACTIVEMENT, LE CONCEPT DE CONTRALITERATURE, NE SAURAIT EN AUCUN CAS SE REDUIRE À CELUI DE LA SEULE LITERATURE FRANCAISE. LES OBJECTIFS DU COMBAT, CLAIREMENT ARRETÉS, DE LA CONTRELITÉRATURE CONCERNENT TOUT L’ENSEMBLE DES ACTUELLES LITTÉRATURES GRAND EUROPÉENNES OUI, À L’HEURE PRÉSENTE, SE TROUVENT ENQAGÉES DANS L’ENTREPRISE ONTOLOGIQUEMENT RÉVOLUTIONNAIRE DE CEUX OUI ONT PRIS LE PARTI DU RETOUR FINAL À L’ÊTRE. D’UNE CONTRE-OFFENSIVE À LA FOIS TOTALE ET TOUT À FAIT DECISIVE CONTRE LES CONJURATIONS DU NOM-ÈTRE ACTUELLEMENT AU POUVOIR, CONTRE LES DOMINATIONS ALIÉNANTES ET LA TERREUR DES INTERDICTIONS PERMANENTES DE PENSÉE ET D’EXPRESSION QUE CELLES-CI EXERCENT DEPUIS LONGTEMPS DÉJÀ SUR LA MARCHE DE L’HISTOIRE EUROPÉENNE DU MONDE, SUR L’ÊTRE MEME DE LA LIBERTE EUROPEENNE.

Aussi le problème des affirmations présentes de la contrelittérature se pose-t-il exclusivement entre nous autres, à l’intérieur de notre propre camp retranché, le camp du combat grand-européen pour le retour à l’être, et ne saurait donc nous concerner que nous autres, mobilisés comme nous nous trouvons en première ligne par l’épreuve finale de notre commune prédestination révolutionnaire. Épreuve finale qu’il nous faut à présent assumer, tragiquement, d’une manière plénière, crucifiée comme nous nous trouvons tous, personnellement aussi bien en tant que communauté de combat que génération prédestinée, au-des- sus des précipices sans fond de l’actuelle confrontation suprêmement décisive de l’être et du non-être, sur la ligne de rupture de deux mondes ontologiquement antagonistes irréductibles.
    Le camp de la contrelittérature qui n’est autre que celui de l’impérialisme ontologique de l’être, impérialisme originel, archaique, en appelle donc, aujourd’hui, à nouveau, à l’espace propre du développement historique de la conscience originelle de l’être, à l’espace grand- continental européen, l’espace eurasiatique des commencements, retrouvé par nous, encore une fois dans son ensemble, ou secrètement en voie de l’être; et cet appel mobilise, en les sur- activant de l’intérieur, toutes les littératures de conscience et d’expression grand-européennes vouées au renouvellement abyssal du nouveau grand cycle suprahistorique, impérial et polaire, qui s’annonce à l’horizon de nos attentes encore inavouables.
    Les zones d’intervention souterraine provocatrice et de reprise en main, d’investisse- ment foncier de l’action contrelittéraire de pointe vont ainsi devoir Suivre de près les délimitations géopolitiques intérieures, les zones de mainmise du projet de l’Empire Eurasiatique de la Fin, projet qui recouvre à nouveau l’espace de l’émergence originelle de la conscience européenne de l’être: l’Europe de l’Ouest, l’Europe de l’Est, la Russie et la Grande Sibérie, l’Inde et le Japon.

DE QUELS BUTS DE SAUVEGARDE SECRÈTE

    C’est la raison pour laquelle je voudrais m’arreter aujourd’hui sur une œuvre contrelittéraire des plus exemplaires en provenance de l’Europe de l’Est, l’oeuvre d’avant-garde d’une jeune romancière roumaine, Mirela Roznovéano. Il s’agit d’un roman qui vient de paraitre, à Bucarest, aux Éditions Univers, Le temps de ceux qui sont élus (Timpul celor alesi). En effet, peu d’écrits européens d’aujourd’hui peuvent se prévaloir de leur entière appartenance à la contrelittërature en action autant que ce roman de Mirela Roznovéano : on y trouve, comme on le verra, non seulement la doctrine – dodécaphonique en quelque sorte – de cette appartenance, clairement et même exhaustivement exprimée, mais le roman lui-même n’est en fait rien d’autre que le compte rendu de l’existence conçue — i’l s’agit des existences supérieures – comme une expérience contrelittéraire, la littérature véhiculant – en tant qu’expérience littéraire – l’existence supposée réelle de ses personnages en action, existence qui, tendue en permanence vers un au-delà secret de l’existence immédiate, n’en finit néanmoins plus de retourner à la littérature, la part de mémoire vécue de la romancière dédoublant elle-meme le roman elle-même le roman par la réalité, et cette réa-lité elle-même prouvant ainsi qu’elle n’avait eu d’autre fin qur de furnir sa substance chiffrée au roman.

Ainsi le roman de Mirela Roznovéano, Le temps de ceux qui sont élus, apparait-il comme étant le territoire expérimental d’une approche révolutionnaire, renouvelante et tout autre, de la dangereuse aventure qu’est à chaque fois l’engagement dans les voies propres de la contrelittératur, de la littérature au-delà de toute littérature. On détient, avec celui-ci, une entrée certaine vers le noyau polaire des nouvelles littératures grand-européennes ayant subi l’appel occulte des grand recommencements.

   Et ce vertige tournant sur lui-meme allant très loin, jusqu’au bout. Jusqu’à ce que la réalité devienne elle-même roman, et le roman, lui, réalité. Réalité finale, seule réalité, parce que dedoublee, par en dessous, par la réalité que le roman s’est approprié, qu’il a expropriée jusqu’à ce qu’il n’en reste plus rien, et ce rien lui-même happant au passage le non-dit du roman, ses espaces de dissimulation en meme temps que de respiration ontologique propre, ces trous dans la glace de la fause réalité qu’il pousse en avant, de quelle manière traitresse. Divinisant, même.

LES TROIS NIVEAUX DU RÉCIT

   Après avoir traversé tant bien que mal, écartelee en elle-même, la longue et terrifiante saison communiste de la Roumanie, Mireia Roznovéano vit actuellement aux États-Unis où elle enseigne à l’Université de New York. Dégagée de ce passé-la.
    Mais ce n’est pas du tout, comme on pourrait le croire, sa rencontre avec la liberté qui a déclenché en elle l’ouverture assomptionnelle envers les pouvoirs et le mystère de la contrelittérature active. Le processus de la création, toute influences occultes mises en jeu, est né en elle dans les termes d’une opposition clandestine, résolue, inconditionnelle et désespérée, du temps où sans qu’elle ne puisse aucunement réagir, elle subissait au tréfonds d’ellememe l’oppression du régime communiste, destituante, jour apres jour. Son écriture s’en ressent-elle? Certainement, encore que d’une manière fort peu ostentatoire, son centre de gravité étant ailleurs pas du tout politique. Paradoxalement, la politique, là, n’y est pour rien.
Son roman organise ses agencements intérieurs autour de trois niveaux différents du recit, don’t je parlerai séparément, qui se répondent entre eux pour établir, par réverbération intime, l’espace propre de ses développements, de son affirmation d’ensemble; qui postulent une unité reconstituée, l’unité même de la vie et de ce qui parfois porte la vie au-delà de la vie.  Trois niveaux d’existence.
     Le premier de ces trois niveaux différents du récit est constitué par la dénonciation, plus ou moins voilee, de l’action permanente de deux personnages que l’on pourrait appeler mythologiques, alors qu’en réalité ils participent – d’une manière directe, plénière – d’une réalité, d’une surréalité même, ontologique, tout à fait certaine, ‘pas du tout mythologique, ni illusoire’, un couple d’anciens dieux – et actuels aussi bien, parce qu’éternels, immortels – ou soi-dissant tels : un certain M. Constantinesco alias Konstantinos et une jeune femme fort riche, intelligente, d’une beauté éblouissante, étrange, fascinante, nommée Fausta; italienne, à ce qu’il paraitrait. Ils représentent donc, ces deux-ci, un couple de dieux – dans le sens antique du terme – dissimulés parmi les humains, comme si de rien n’était, où ils agissent a leur guise, parce qu’ils en ont pris l’apparence et ont su faire semblant d’avoir entierement épousé les préoccupations secretes, les délires et les songes les plus inavouables, toute la mentalité. Des dieux, au premier d’abord, d’un niveau assez subalterne mais qui, en y réfléchissant mieux, apparaitront tout de même comme des dieux – voire meme les dieux suprêmes, Jupiter lui-meme peut-être, et Vénus. Ils vivent secretement dans un temporalite totale – allant de leurs souvenirs du temps de l’empreur Tibere jusqu’à l’époque présente, en passant par la cour impériale de Byzance, et ensuite, plus tard, par celle des Sultans etc. – et disposent de pouvoirs cosmiques inconditionnels sur le temps et l’espace, qu’ils utilisent pour surveiller et conduire l’humanité suivant un desein incomprehensible, occulte, infiniment insaisissable, mais dont on finira quand meme par comprendre les tenants et les aboutissants.
    En effet, dans le roman de Mirela Roznovéano,  Konstantinos et Fausta semblent ‘être donné la mission de préparer, sur une tranche d’une dizaine d’années, le devenir initiatique supérieur de deux personnages clefs de celui- ci, Maria Margaritesco et Dimitri Vtzanti, qu’ils savaient destinés l‘un à l’autre depuis toute éternité  et dont la rencontre nuptiale finale, et “accomplissement de leur grand amour predestine, devaient avoir des conséquences insoupçonnables pour l’actuelle marche de l’his- toire, pour le devenir actuel du monde, établissant, dans tes profondeurs, comme un ébranlement sismique, comme un premier mouvement secret de redressement ontologique de l’humanité, à l’heure présente en crise, engagée dans un vertigineux processus de déchéance finale, prisonnière des puissances négatives du non-être. Le deuxième des trois récits principaux constituant la substance vive du roman de Mirela Roznovéano, concerne l’historial aussi détaillé qu’épouvantable et fascinant des manigances internes, essentiellement criminelles mais sachant bien le cacher, d’un groupe

En dernière analyse, le roman de Mirela Roznovéano va-t-il donc se laisser surprendre comme étant un mystère moderne dans le sens où l’on parlait de religion à mystères? Dans l’actuelle situation d’un monde en perdition, en phase terminale, seule peut encore sauver I ‘humanité, déjà condamnée, une intervention divine, effectuée depuis l’extérieur de ce monde et de son histoire en cours. Mais les dieux eux-mêmes, pour qu ‘ils puissent y intervenir — ce qu’ils ne sauraient faire directement, de par eux seuls–, ont besoin de la complicité eschatologique des humains.

relativement important de personnages appartenant à l’élite intellectuelle du régime communiste installé en Roumanie, du temps plus particulièrement de l’ère de Nicolas Ceausesco. Ce groupe de personnages se manifeste autour de l’Institut de linguistique générale de la Faculté de Lettres de Bucarest, où apparait aussi Maria Margaritesco qui avait tenté passer un doctorat de linguistique, pour se trouver par la suite prise dans un tourbillon fatal lui ayant fait frôler la mort – la première fois lors d’un faux accident de voiture, en fait une tentative d’assassinat politique, et la deuxième fois lors d’un internement abusif dans un des hôpitaux psychiatriques à la disposition de la police politique du régime où celui-ci réglait clandestinement ses comptes- et dont elle n’arrive à se débarrasser qu’à travers la mystérieuse intervention de Fausta.
    Parmi bien d’autres y apparaissent aussi un diplomate de haut niveau, Popa, et sa femme Ariane ; Popa, étant un important agent à couvert du ‘Service d’Information Extérieures’ qui sera appelé à mettre en scène son propre assassinat final, afin de pouvoir ainsi disparaitre de la circulation, devenir quelqu’un d’autre, pour mieux pouvoir poursuivre ses nouvelles affectations (‘une très importante mission de renseignements en Extrême-Orient, au Moyen-Orient et en Amérique du Nord’), le tout dans le cas d’une mystérieuse opération spéciale.

 Les mouvements d’approche des centres du pouvoir secret, les manigances en cours et les rapports de forces dans l’ombre, les manipulations souvent mortelles, les longues discussions politiques et intellectuelles de ce groupe de a puissants supérieurs du régime soviétique alors en place, constituent donc, en fait, la substance même, la trame de fond du roman. Mais en réalité, autant de psychopathes avancés’ dangereux, que ces a ‘puissants supérieurs’, secrètement déstabilisés dévastés par les exigences convulsionnaires d’un régime aux buts inhumains, obscurs, dont la seule légalité reconnue était celle de l’illégalité active permanente, totale, que ceux-ci ‘arrogeaient dans l’exercice de leurs tâches stratégiques souterraines. Cependant, ce démontage des sphères politiques supérieures du régime communiste n’y présente qu’un intérêt de diversion, établissant l’horizon à l’intérieur duquel s’y passent les autres choses, vraiment décisives, vraiment caches. Encore une fois malgré les apparences, la politique est, en fait, pour rien, ou Presque. Le vrai niveau de ce roman est d’un ordre exclusivement transcendantal.
    Enfin, le troisième niveau intérieur de ce roman de rupture et de surélévation concerne son ‘couple nuptial’, Maria Margaritesco et Dimitri Vizanti, celui-ci exprimant d’ailleurs aussi, bien assurément, une puisante dimension autobiographique, à la fois sans doute directement existentielle etsymbolique, du parcours personnel de l’auteur, de Mirela Roznovéano elle-même. Aussi la rencontre amoureuse finale du couple nuptial, ayant lieu après une dizaine dannées d’aveuglement réciproque, d’errances, d’attente inconsciente, rencontre ayant eu lieu au somptueux manoir de Fausta, près de Bucarest, qui ravait en quelque sorte mis à leur disposition, préside un des nœuds paroxystiques du roman, la clef de voûte de tout l’ensemble.
     Enfin, encore quelques années après, avant réussi à s’évader de la Roumanie communiste – ou bien déjà après la chute du communisme – le couple nuptial de Maria Margaritesco et Dimitri Vizanti réapparait en Italie, au bord de la mer Tyrrhénienne, sur la plage en face de la Grotte de Sperlunga qui avait été si chère à l’empereur Tibère. Or, à paroles d’amour excitées quelque peu folles répond, avec peut- être une certaine ironie, celle de Konstantinos et de Fausta, qui les surveillent, depuis l’invisible dans leurs jeux amoureux parmi les rochers éclatés, les pieds dans l’écume de l’eau montante. Un cycle se referme, qui avait déjà accompli la mission occulte, abyssale, qu’il avait portée en avant. Entre eux, sous leur tente qu’ils venaient de rejoindre, veillait la superbe rose mystique, illuminant l’air autour d’elle, comme une flamme brûlante, inextinguible. Et ce cycle qui se referme, donne sa fin au roman, de même qu’il avait signifié la fin de la mission secrète, en ce monde, de Konstantinos et de Fausta: faire que la flamme de l’amour revive dans un monde qui avait été sur le point de se perdre définitivement.
   En dernière analyse, le roman de Mirela Roznovéano, Le temps de ceux qui sont élus, va-t- il donc se laisser surprendre comme étant un mystère moderne dans le sens où l’on parlait de religion à mystères? Dans l’actuelle situation d’un monde en perdition, en phase terminale, seule peut encore sauver l’humanité déjà condamnée, une intervention divine, effectuée depuis l’extérieur de ce monde et de son histoire en cours. Mais les dieux eux-mêmes,

Le camp de la contrelittérature qui n’est autre que celui de l’impérialisme ontologique de l’être, impérialisrne originel, archaïque, en appelle donc, aujourd’hui, à nouveau, à l’espace propre du développement historique de la conscience originelle de l’être, à l’espace grand-continental européen.

pour qu’ils puissent y intervenir – ce qu’ils ne sauraient faire directement, de par eux seuls–ont besoin de la complicité eschatologique des humains. Ainsi Maria Margaritesco et Dimitri Vlzanti avaient-ils été choisis par ‘Konstantinos’ et par Fausta, par les dieux supremes chargés de cette tache d’urgence fatale pour que longuement mis l’épreuve, instructés par eux dans le plus grand secret et bénéficiant, au depart, de leur propre prédestination nuptiale divinisante, ils puissent prendre sur eux de ranimer en ce monde le feu de l’être qui s’y était éteint. Et cela, de par le renouveau cosmique provoqué par leur propre accession finale au feu de l’amour retrouvé, qu’ils eussent su retrouver et ranimer en eux, abyssalement, à l’heure prévue; ainsi, d’ailleurs, qu’ils avaient été amenés à le faire.
    Le sujet central, voile, du roman de Mirela Roznovéano se montrera-t-il donc, à la fin, comme un sujet fondamentalement eschatologique, celui du salut et de la libération, au dernier moment, d’un mondesur le point de se perdre, de s’engouffrer dans le néant? Le mouvement intérieur de ce roman apparait ainsi comme identique au mouvement directeur de la contrelittérature engagée dans le combat final pour le retour à l’être.

LES MULTIPLES PLANS DU ROMAN ET LES MYSTÈRES DE L’IMMÉMOIRE

Mais les trois niveaux de base de ce roman s’y trouvent également multipliés par des importantes citations du roman initiatique de Maria Maragaritesco, qui traite des relations amoureuses de Marie Madeleine et de Jésus de leurs attractions de leurs profonds et brûlants secrets.
Ainsi que par le récit des vies antérieures, en termes de dédoublements et de transmigrations, dont Maria Margaritesco se souviendra suivant les remontées de sa mémoire profonde, de son immémoire. quand elle revit ses aventures de jeunese – d’autres jeunesses d’autres vies – dans montagnes sauvages de la Macédoine du début du siècle, ainsi qu’en bien dautres circonstances analogues.
     Cette doctrine du roman à foyers d’attaque multiples sera examinée par Fausta de la manière suivante: ‘Pour chaque nœud tensoriel du roman, que l’on écrive cinq, six et meme plusieurs variantes encore. Le lecteur va prendre, en lisant ramification qui lui plait le mieux, qui lui convient le plus, son choix étant facilité par la matière de son expérience elle-même, par la matière du roman, parce que le roman, Messieurs, sent de par lui-meme, n’est pas du tout chose inerte. ‘ Et aussi: ‘Au fond, moi, ce qui m’intéresse, ce n’est pas du tout de construire un roman d’idées mais de moduler l’idée, trouver sans cesse des voies complémentaires l’une de l’autre. Les niveaux théoriques superposés vont ainsi offrir l’image même minera, par-derrière, comme un réflecteur, le champ entier de la création, de la composition, et ces dernières se trouvant ainsi être comme une clinique pratiquement inépuisable d’expériences Nouvelles.’ Le temps intérieur de ce roman étant, selon une expression de Mirela Roznovéano elle-même, un ‘temps pyramidal’ – ‘l’homme ne vit pas dans le temps, mais dans une pyramide du temps’ – ‘ce temps pyramidal’ invite a une lecture la fois éclatée et sans cesse intégrée qui définit, me semble-t-il, l’identité propre des nouvelles attitudes contrelittéraires du roman européen, une certaine direction opérative de ses recherches propres et de son actualité de pointe. Avec Le temps de ceux qui sont élus, la contrelittérature fait son entrée en force dans l’espace métaculturel de l’Europe de l’Est. “On nous suggère, écrit Mihaela Albu dans le Romanian Journal de New York en date du 12 avril 2000, que l’homme est l’etre qui, privé des puissances de la mémoire de sa race, peut subir la domination du temps et du destin. L’absence de la mémoire signifie la mort de l’esprit, qui ne laisse rien derrière. Mais paradoxalement, malgré le fait qu’ils se trouvent situés au-dessus du temps, des lieux et de la mort, les dieux tendent, aspirent, comme Hypérion, à la condition humaine.”  Vizanti se dit alors: ‘Telle est Fausta, qui veut à n’importe quel prix être semblable aux humains mais qui n’y arrive pas.’ Et ensuite: ‘Par sa vie intérieure, Maria aspire au pouvoir de maitriser le temps. Elle se souvient, et c’est bien pour cela qu’elle est choisie par les deux dieux du temps. Mais ses souvenirs ne se résument pas seulement aux moments directement vécus par elle-même, événements, lieux de son enfance. Elle retrouve aussi les souvenirs des chaines d’êtres d’avant elle-même. Maria dispose ainsi d’un double héritage génétique, ses ancêtres envoyant vers elle, du passé, le flux de leurs vies vécues et de toutes leurs experiences.’
     Ce sont en effet les pouvoirs de la souvenance transcendantale, les prédispositions à l’immémoire abyssale, qui constituent la marque décisive de ceux qui sont vraiment de la race secrètement choisie, des élus avant qu’ils ne soient venus au monde.

LA BOUTIQUE FANTÔME DE LA RUE DE RIVOLI

Or, il faudrait relever auss que l’action de ce roman se passe successivement à Bucarest, à Paris – l’inoubliable boutique fantôme de la rue de Rivoli, tenue par le fantôme de la vieille juive de Cernauti, dans laquelle it faudrait peut-être savoir reconnaitre une métamorphose de Fausta. Ainsi que l’assassinat, en plein jour, de la jeune danseuse devant les Folies Bergères – et ailleurs à Londres à Rome, à Pompéi, dans le Sud profond de l’Italie antérieure, à New York, dans les

Le temps intérieur de ce roman étant, selon une expression de Mirela Roznovéano elle-même, un « temps pyramidal » ce « temps pyramidal » invite à une lecture à la fois éclatée et sans cesse intégrée qui définit, me semble-t-il, l’identité propre des nouvelles attitudes contre littéraires du roman européen, une certaine direction opérative de ses recherches propres et de son actualité de pointe.     C’est une obligation incontournable pour le mouvement contrelittéraire actuel que de tout essayer pour que l’on arrive à la publication en français de ce roman.

Constantinople – et ensuite à Istanbul — ainsi qu’en Palestine, en Béthanie, dans les traces des pérégrinations de Jésus, ce qui inflige à l’ensemble du texte une sorte de déroulement, de tournoiement profondément onirique, ln istam dico vitam mortalem, aut mortem vitalem nescio? dit saint Augustin, Vivons-nous dans une vie mortelle, ou bien dans une mort ayant les apparences de la vie? Encore que l’extreme sensualité féminine de certaines descriptions d’intérieurs, des arbres, des fruits et des miroirs, des endroits et des personnages en action, prose au récit une réalité singulièrement ardente, vivante, immédiatement désirable, qui forcera insidieusement la participation directe, d’une manière meme, parfois qui en tient assez un travail d’hypnose: Maria, c’est un commerce hypnagogique avec la réalité.  Cette œuvre qui inaugure l’avènement – ou bien le retour -de ‘Europe de l’Est dans le camp retranché de la contrelittérature porte en elle un signe agissant d’une puissance redoutable, le signe d’une annonciation chiffrée qu’il n’est pourtant pas trop difficile de déchiffrer. Le signe même, peut-être. que nous attendions tous. C’est, à ce que je crois, une obligation incontournable pour le mouvement contrelittéraire actuel que de tout essayer pour que l’on arrive à la publication en français de ce roman. Le temps de ceux qui sont élus devient une pierre de touche des nouvelles directions à la charge de la contrelittérature.
    Je sais que, désormais tout nous est possible, que nous devons dire, avec Maria Margaritaresco, que l’on n’en finit plus de nous souvenir du « grand serpent vert védique, qui tout en avant engouffré en lui toutes les eaux de la terre, il avait suffi d’une seule flèche d’Indra pour en faire une guenille indécente.” Les forces immenses qui s’opposent actuellement à nous, désormais nous savons qu’elles ne sont qu’apparences illusoires, mesure non-pas de leur puissance fictive, de leur non-puissance ontologique, mais de notre propre impuissance du moment. Oui n’est surtout pas faite pour durer encore, qui est entrain de passer. Care “maintenant, d’autres temps viennent”.
      Nos armes secrètes, ce sont les armes de la mémoire antérieure, de notre propre immémoire abyssale retrouvée, le fait que nos retrouvailles encore clandestines avec les principes immuables de nos propres origines, avec le feu libérateur de la remontée de l’être pré-annoncée par Martin Heidegger. Car, si les temps qui viennent seront les temps de ceux qui sont élus nous n’ignorons plus désormais que le choix des élus nous concerne nous-mêmes, à la fois à titre personnel et en termes de génération prédestinée. Nous sommes les combattants de la mémoire antérieure, du Règne Antérieur.

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Artist and Scholar1

Book Review by Constantin Virgil Negoiţă*

(Origini/Romanian Roots, May-June, 2002)

Not long ago the divide between artist and scientist seemed impossible to cross. From Pascal, who remarked on the difference between l’esprit de finesse and l’esprit de la geometrie, to Borges, who crossed this border elegantly, the writer and the researcher seemed completely different human beings. One was writing books while the other took care of them.
Mirela Roznoveanu, novelist, poet, audacious literary critic and journalist, shows that times have changed. In a book addressed to law practitioners that need legal information located in virtual libraries and databases connected to the Internet, Mirela Roznoveanu has the courage to innovate.  She presents the process of legal research in the vast network of the modern world as a journey and a fairy tale. She introduces the dimension of time where there was none.
A manual, a treatise, a guide, as well as a scientific theory, a virtual catalog, a yellow book, and a picture are all together passive images. They do not tell a story.
Mirela’s book is a surprise.
First of all, it is written in a language the author acquired relatively late in life. This fact alone can amaze us. How many people coming to America with no knowledge of English write a book designed to teach others what to do in a field after only a few years? And how many artists succeed in making their art participate in a textbook’s standards? Therein lies the most powerful achievement of this book. The work is not only a textbook, but also a fascinating piece of reportage. It is alive like a movie, not a static picture. The author recounts how she has discovered and manipulated near-miraculous techniques and how she has managed to cooperate with her students. I call this achievement a post-modern literary feat of the first order.
Culturally sophisticated, Mirela Roznoveanu knows what’s going on in the world and she skillfully binds things together.  Here is a telling example. In the classification activity (the essential tool in locating items within the holdings of any established modern library), binary logic does not function very well. A book, an article, any text does not belong to only one class/subject heading but to several, in varying degrees. Classification prefers “fuzzy logic.” The poet fully recommends that lawyers apply this logic more befitting saints – as I have described it in my book, Fuzzy Sets.
On page 163 the author states: “History shows that any discovery has always had creative and destructive aspects, derived, I believe, from the binary structure of the universe. The latter is in its turn reflected in humanity’s perpetual ambivalence: mortals are continuously striving to decide their place in the eternal conflict between good and evil. But in the fuzzy logic of the cyberlegal world, which allows for no crisp borders, which side of the conflict you choose is decided by the degrees of your positive or negative attitudes. For my part, I have always striven to be on the side of the angels.”
When I first met Miss Roznoveanu in New York, she was attending English classes as well as a graduate school where she was exploring the mysterious field of cyberlibraries.  Cyber means built upon computers. Cyberculture involves having learned to make use of the advantages of fuzzy logic, and today Mirela Roznoveanu teaches those who dispense justice in the world how to get informed, where to go to learn about the law, and what is the logic of evaluating legal resources. I was thinking of these issues while reading a text published in Commentary (February 2002) on how historian Gertrude Himmelfarb assessed the work of Richard Posner, a great intellectual and a judge at one of the U.S. Courts of Appeals. He is also a professor at the School of Law of the University of Chicago. In his recent book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, he discusses morality, focusing on value judgments, which he says depend upon evaluations that cannot be demonstrated as being either true or false. I am sure that Posner would appreciate this postmodern textbook and essay in one, written by Mirela Roznoveanu who works at one of the most important law schools in the country, the New York University School of Law.
I am not very sure that Romanian intellectuals so active in Romanian media –  who are happy and glad to write exclusively about a marginal group,  a very small and carefully self-selected and proclaimed one to be representative of the Romanian Americans – would discuss this book. The Romanian Americans are very diverse, and they are not only “left-handed” but also “right-handed” (as Virgil Nemoianu pointed out a couple of years ago in an article published in the Bucharest-based review 22).
Many academies and foundations – like the soldier still fighting WW II   because he did not hear about the end of modern logic decided by binary logic – continue to be blinded by this “shiny” prolific group, very clumsy and noisy, self-centered and unrepentant, even when it switches from plaintiff to defendant. (Because they like diversion, the group started to oxidize. I affirm this after reading Robert Scholes, Professor at Brown University, who in an article “The Brothel of Modernism: Picasso and Joyce” shows the relationship between prostitution and modernism. The demonstration is done using the superb example of Les Mademoiselles of Avignon  and the extraordinary Ulysses, studying the other face of this relationship: the modern artist that prostitutes himself  because  when the brothel entered modern art in order to create masterpieces, art entered the brothel too in order to bring about subversion.)
Mirela Roznoveanu’s book deserves to get a magna cum laude commendation.
I hope that the Romanian-American Academy or the Romanian Cultural Foundation or someone else interested in the ties of the native Romanians and the ones living in exile will start to recognize the real authors, the cultural personalities that cannot be corroded by time.

*Constantin Virgil Negoita is a professor at Hunter College, the Department of Computer Science, where he teaches Computer Logic, Fuzzy Sets and Systems.

[1] Mirela Roznovschi, Toward a Cyberlegal Culture, Transnational Publishers, Ardsley, N.Y., 2001, second edition 2002.  http://www.transnationalpubs.com

http://www.thechildrensbookreview.com/weblog/2012/08/mirela-roznoveanu-talks-about-old-romanian-fairytales.html
Published: August 16, 2012
Romanian Fairy Tales Lecture Evening

Mirela Roznoveanu is a literary critic, writer, and journalist who has published novels, literary criticism, essays, and poetry. She was also noted as a dissident journalist during the turbulent period in Romania during the late eighties. We talked to Roznoveanu about her book Old Romanian Fairytales, in which she has translated the fairytales she loved as a child.

Bianca Schulze: Can you share a little on your background and describe the moments from your early days, which you would say define you as a writer?

Mirela Roznoveanu: I have always loved to read and this is the most important aspect of my life. I spent my early years reading intensely.  The books I came across in my childhood shaped my literary taste. I am grateful to my parents for this gift. From those books I learned not only the craft of writing but also the craft of living. The books I read have helped me win life’s battles and also helped me sustain hardships, go over obstacles, and deal with challenges. The story of my life is too complicated and complex, but it is part of my writing. For a writer, life is the primal matter of inspiration.

BS: In your book Old Romanian Fairytales, readers encounter fabulous fairies and Prince Charming, betrayal, competition and love; they also witness battles with dragons. The tales convey important lessons about morality and responsibility. What do you feel children who read your tales relate to the most?

MR: The fairy tales I have translated are the ones that I loved as a child. As I matured, they brought to me more and more meaning and significance. The rule of law is the most important lesson children learn from these stories. Through fabulous characters they also hear about kindness, courage, responsibility, respect, hard work that overcomes difficulties, and the way they have to relate to society by way of their actions as a whole. These are definitely crucial in shaping any child’s life.

BS: Which age group did you create this book for?

MR: In a way it could be any reader of any age. The older you are the more philosophical meanings you discover in them. Fairy tales were meant in olden times to convey to society and to its future not only the knowledge but also the deep meanings of existence. And these meanings are alive today as well.

BS: The artwork on the pages is colorful and imaginative. How did you select Alexandra Conte to be the illustrator?

MR: Alexandra is my friend and a wonderful writer. She illustrated her books for children and those illustrations mesmerized me; so I asked her to illustrate my book and she graciously accepted it.

BS: On December 2000, outgoing President of Romania, Emil Constantinescu, honored you for exceptional contributions from abroad in the service of Romanian culture and democracy. What did this mean to you?

MR: It meant that my anti-communist activity in Ceausescu’s Romania, my role in the Romanian Revolution and post-revolution had been recognized. And this is important.

BS: How important is it to you to share your Romanian heritage through literature?

MR: Enormously vital. Romania is a small country with a great folklore, mythology and history. I would love to make these known to American readers. Regarding my books, unfortunately, many of them are written in Romanian and I could not find the right way to have them translated into English and published in the US. I especially think of the Civilization of the Novel: A History of Fiction Writing from Ramayana to Don Quixote, a thorough study many scholars and readers would benefit from reading and studying.

BS: Which books from your own childhood have most influenced your life?

MR: There were first the oldest Romanian fairy tales, my mom had told me about or read to me; then the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, and the Greco-Latin mythology. I remember that BS: Which current authors would you consider your greatest influences?

MR: John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Below, Jonathan Franzen, to name only a few.

BS: Are you currently working on any new books?

MR: I work on a historical novel, and this work will take me a few years from now on in order to accomplish it. The core idea came to mind in my mid-thirties. However, now it has come the right time for this novel to come to life. As you see, many times an idea for a book stays on the back burner of the writer’s mind for a long time, until time comes for it to mature…..

BS: As a parting note, is there anything you would like to share with your readers?

MR: The readers are my dear friends. I nurture them, and value them. I do not want to disappoint them and for this purpose I am asking them to hang on and try to understand my books. Sometimes I might ask them to have patience until the end promising I will not disappoint them…

Add this book to your collection: Old Romanian Fairytales

For more information about Mirela Roznoveanu, visit her website.