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CODRIN LIVIU CUTITARU (la§i, Romania)

POSTMODERNISM: A ROMANIAN PERSPECTIVE

What has been called "" for more than half of a century, first in Europe and later in America, was essentially determined and condi- tioned by a number of cultural factors specific to advanced forms of capital- ism and, implicitly, to the Western world. If this is now common knowledge, the historical mechanism that led to it still remains a matter of scholarly de- bate. How can we define and properly describe the literary significance of postmodemism' when its manifestations are primarily and, according to some observers, solely cultural? Unlike most of the significant literary streams that started as ideologies and gradually influenced the collective mentalities of their time, postmodernism seems to be the end result of a group mentality, shaped in the socioeconomic context of the developed capitalist society at the end of the twentieth century. In a way, one may easily say that "postmodern- ism" was engendered by a sort of "postmodernity," which preceded, at a cul- tural and mental level, expressions of the movement in the disciplines of his- tory, political science, economics, and so forth. . The flourishing of capitalism during the last fifty years largely explains this paradox. The level of material progress reached by Western societies has ironically been deemed dangerous for the long-term moral and spiritual evo- lution of human communities.2 The feeling today is that science has slowly removed man from the center of the socioeconomic system and replaced him with the machine. This has naturally been providing anxiety and insecurity for decades, thereby activating man's inborn bent for alienation. It is not sur- prising that, in this century, the individual has experienced an acute es- trangement from his environment.

1. Curiously,although this term originatedin literature(Frederico de Onis used it in the 1930sfor a collectionof South Americanpoetry, and later CharlesOlson introduced it as part of the contemporarytheoretical terminology), its first manifestationsare in architecture(the AT&T buildingin New York,built in the eighties). 2. Recentsociologists and culturalanthropologists, such as AlexandreKoje3ve, Allan Bloom, , and FrancisFukuyama, who adoptedolder viewsexpressed by GeorgW. Hegelor FriedrichW. . Nietzsche(the so-called"end of history"and "the deathof God" or "the last man,"respectively), announce the possible spiritual and moral decay of the Western world due to its economic overexpansion;see FrancisFukuyama, The End of Historyand the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 30

Hence, a collective "mood" somewhat preceded the artistic experiment, since "anxiety" gradually transferred to literature and arts and not the other way around. Critics and theoreticians started speaking about "the death of the author,"3 which suggested the loss of creative identity, the disappearance of authorship inside an overwhelming maze represented by the literary creation as such. Consequently, the text is "personalized" and comes to live as an autonomous entity,4 sufficient unto itself. Later on, the development of com- puter sciences and led as well to the annihilation of the text. Step by step, the text was replaced by images and codess of all kinds, "the death of the author" being rephrased as "the death of literature."6 In this context, Jacques Derrida's "play of substitutions ,7 seems to be an acceptable concept. The dissolution of the originary centers - God, man, author - engaged a chain reaction within which the of reality functions as the rep- resentation of a representation. Naturally, the literary activity of recent decades has been characterized by specific cultural and psychological features, which were directly determined by the socioeconomic atmosphere of the Euro-American capitalist world. Postmodernist critics and writers introduced such concepts as intertextuality, the anxiety of influence, and gynocritics, all of which is related to the rein- venting of tradition. The text is now an "inter-text" since it culturally and aes- thetically reshapes prior texts. This reshaping, in turn, stemmed, according to Harold Bloom,8 from an "anxiety of influence" that the contemporary artist experiences when confronted with the literary past. Likewise, women writers

3. ' celebrated structuralistconcept had been anticipatedby the Russian FormalistSchool of the thirties whose representatives(Boris Eikhenbaum,Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Leo Jakubinsky)had dreamt about a "history of literary forms" in which creative "personalities"were to be neglected. Roland Barthes,"The Death of the Author"and "The StructuralistActivity," Critical Theorysince Plato, ed. HazardAdams, rev. ed. (NewYork: HarcourtBrace Jovanovich, 1992), pp. 1127-30. 4. Somehow,the "text" becomesthe literarysubstitute of the "machine,"that is, the creation that overtakesits creator. 5. One example is the well-knownfloppy diskette which graduallytends to replace both manuscriptsand wholelibraries. 6. Somerecent theoreticians, such as PhilipKernan, do not hesitateto announcethe "deathof literature,"similar to the Hegelian"end of history,"that is, the disappearanceof form but not of essence. 7. Jacques Derrida's "grammatology"stipulates that the deconstructionof centers in languagecan be easily transferredto otherphenomena in natureand society,"dissolution" being a key concept in postmodernism;See Jacques Derrida, ","trans. Gayatri ChakravortskySpivak, in Critical TheorySince 1965,ed. HazardAdams (Tallahassee: Florida State Univ.Press, 1986),pp. 94-119. 8. HaroldBloom believes that the postmodernistwriter fears the whitepage, since what he is to write may have alreadybeen written;Harold Bloom, The Anxietyof Influence:A Theoryof Poetry (NewYork: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).