Absurd Romania: Revisiting Tristan Tzara and Eugène Ionesco
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Absurd Romania: Revisiting Tristan Tzara and Eugène Ionesco Adela Beiu-Papanastasiou in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of East Anglia The Department of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing Ghent University Department of Literary Studies February 2017 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognize that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. February 2017 Adela Beiu-Papanastasiou Absurd Romania: Revisiting Tristan Tzara and Eugène Ionesco Abstract: “Absurd Romania” revisits Romanian history and politics, and their intersection with the literary scene out of which both Tzara and Ionesco emerged, in order to better situate the diverse roots of European modernism and transnational avant-garde. I examine how their radical aesthetics developed in response to the specific political issues and cultural debates, which animated and inspired Tzara, Ionesco and their contemporaries. In the first chapter, I show that the writings of literary critic Titu Maiorescu and playwright I.L. Caragiale, two important exponents of a specifically Romanian ironic mode of cultural criticism, are highly relevant for an understanding of Tzara’s and Ionesco’s aesthetics. By revealing the points of contact between Ionesco’s cryptic forms and Caragiale’s seemingly more traditional dramaturgy, Chapter Two showcases the important aesthetic mutation at work in the theatre of the absurd. In Chapter Three, I document Tzara’s affiliation to a Romanian tradition of left-wing radicalism and engaged symbolism. The final chapter demonstrates that Ionesco’s theatre dramatizes a problematic Romanian modernity fraught with identity/cultural anxieties and political extremism. Ionesco’s aesthetics is both a continuation of the avant-garde project towards a critique of the ideology of language and a formal resolution of Romania’s identity qualms. Tzara and Ionesco’s forms, I argue, have deep roots in a Romanian tradition of social criticism which makes surprising use of irony in order to articulate conflicting visions of the nation. ii List of Contents Chapter One Introduction: Absurd Romania or “How Can One Be Romanian?” 1 Chapter Two The Nation and the Absurd: A Romanian Story of Modernity 41 Chapter Three An Absurd Rendezvous: Ionesco, Caragiale, Tzara 74 Chapter Four Avant-Dada: Tristan Tzara and the Romanian Modernist Left 112 Chapter Five The Romanian Eugen Ionescu: Dramatizing the Nation in Nu and The Bald Soprano 153 Conclusion: Identity Neurosis, Irony and Modernity 191 Bibliography 204 iii List of Illustrations Figure 1 Eugène Ionesco, Littérature Roumaine, illustrations de l’auteur, Fata Morgana 1998 81 Figure 2 Claponul, no. 1 (1877), front cover 93 Figure 3 Claponul, no. 1 (1877), back cover 94 Figure 4 Simbolul, no. 1, (25 October 1912), cover page 116 Figure 5 Viaţa Socială, no. 11-12 (December 1910) 125 Figure 6 Facla, no. 41 (18 October 1912) 136 Figure 7 Chemarea, 4 October 1915 146 Figure 8 Eugène Ionesco, Nu (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2011), facsimile 1 175 Figure 9 Eugène Ionesco, Nu, facsimile 2 176 Figure 10 Eugène Ionesco, Nu, facsimile 3 184 iv Acknowledgements A version of Chapter Two of this thesis has appeared in Modernism/modernity, 21.4 (November 2014) as “The Nation and the Absurd. A Romanian Story of Modernity”. Many thanks to Nick Walterman, who managed the publication process. I am particularly grateful to my primary supervisor Lyndsey Stonebridge for her generous support and insightful advice. Marius Hentea and Pierre Schoentjes, who supervised my research at Ghent University, have also been incredibly committed to this project, and deserve my deepest gratitude. v Chapter 1: Introduction: Absurd Romania or “How Can One Be Romanian?” How strange and how ironic if it should be that France owed the germination of its most portentous literary currents – Dada/Surrealism and the theater of the Absurd – to the grotesqueries of a simple, unpretentious Romanian court clerk, who promptly committed suicide in 1923 when his first prose pieces were published!1 Michael Impey muses here on the posthumous legacy of the Romanian writer Urmuz (pen name of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău). Alongside Romanian playwright I.L. Caragiale, Urmuz is an acknowledged precursor of Tristan Tzara and Eugène Ionesco, two of the most important names of the European avant-garde.2 Impey was right to launch this proposition provocatively because while Ionesco and Tzara were comfortably assimilated in the French and modernist canons, very little is known about the Romanian modernism they emerged from. The fact that they left Romania before they produced their most acclaimed work, means that continuities otherwise obvious were disrupted and that gestating concerns and connections did not materialize until later, when abroad, and were thus obfuscated. Their transnational careers and the subsequent (linguistic as well as cultural) “translation” into cosmopolitan French created an inhospitable distance between cosmopolitan form and Romanian context (content), which compounded the inherent abstruseness of their avant- garde aesthetics. Two emblematic figures of the European avant-garde, Tzara and Ionesco, spent their formative years in Romania. Tristan Tzara, the literary pseudonym of Samuel Rosenstock, 1 Michael Impey, “Before and After Tzara: Romanian Contributions to Dada” in The Eastern Dada Orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe, and Japan, ed. by Gerald Janecek and Toshiharu Omuka (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), pp. 126-36 (pp.131-2). 2 Urmuz’s short pieces were a source of inspiration for Tzara, Ionesco, and almost all other Romanian avant-gardists. See Impey and Tom Sandqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (London: MIT, 2006), pp. 219-21); and Pagini Bizare/Bizarre Pages in The Complete Works of Urmuz (London: Atlas, 2006). 1 was born in 1896 in the provincial town of Moinesti, Romania. When Tzara left Romania, at the age of 19, he was already a name in the literary circles of Bucharest. After having been briefly but very actively involved with two literary magazines, Simbolul [The Symbol] (1912) and Chemarea [The Calling] (1915), where he published his first neo-symbolist poetry, Tzara left for Zurich to join his friends Marcel and Jules Janco. He there founded Cabaret Voltaire with Hugo Ball, became the “manager” and writer of manifestos for the Dada movement and the rest of the story – Dada in Paris, Surrealism, and a life-long career in France – is already part of modernist history. Once in Zurich he never wrote in Romanian again, although his early pieces continued to be published in Romanian publications and later in the volume Primele Poeme [The First Poems] (1934). Eugène Ionesco’s maternal origins were French and Jewish but was born and lived for the most part in Romania, his father’s country, until 1942. Upon departure, at the age of 33, he left behind a career of writer and literary critic and two books. His volume of literary criticism, Nu [No] – an attack on Romanian literary institutions – received the prize for young writers in 1934.3 About his Romanian times, Ionesco reminisced: “I had behind me a proper literary career: tens and tens of articles published in Romanian periodicals, a small collection of poems which were not good, and most notably, a book, Nu, in which I was trying to blow up literary criticism. I wanted to reiterate a similar experience by blowing up theatre.”4 Before his departure to Paris, he had also drafted Englezeşte Fără Profesor [English without Teacher], the first version – in Romanian – of The Bald Soprano. His career in France started in 1950, the year when The Bald Soprano, his first play in French, was staged. What are the Romanian sources of Tzara’s and Ionesco’s innovative aesthetics? This thesis proposes a historical reading of Tristan Tzara’s and Eugène Ionesco’s forms through a 3 The prize was initiated that same year by the Minister of Public Education Dimitrie Gusti and was awarded through the Foundation for Literature and Arts “King Carol II”. See Eugène Ionesco, Nu, (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2011), p. 284. 4 Eugène Ionesco, Sub Semnul Întrebării [Under Question Mark] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994), p. 173, my translation of original text given below. Unless otherwise indicated all translations in this thesis are mine and will be accompanied by original texts included in footnotes. Aveam, de altfel, in urma mea un intreg trecut literar: zeci si zeci de articole publicate in periodicele romanesti, o mica culegere de poeme care nu erau bune si, mai ales, o carte, Nu, in care incercam sa arunc in aer critica. Voiam sa repet o experienta similara aruncand in aer teatrul. 2 revisitation of their early Romanian works and giving particular attention to the peculiarities of Romanian modernity, the cultural politics of the modern nation-state, and the strong connection between national identity and aesthetics. The complicated narrative of Romanian modernity and its identity anxieties – what I have called as a working pun Absurd Romania – are insufficiently acknowledged, yet major concerns of Romanian modernism, which informed their aesthetic projects.5 I will consider, on the one hand, Romania’s experience of modernity, specifically as it transitioned to the status of independent nation-state, and, on the other hand, the literary