Centrul De Cercetare

MINISTERUL EDUCAŢIEI, CERCETĂRII, TINERETULUI ŞI SPORTULUI UNIVERSITATEA „DUNĂREA DE JOS” GALAŢI FACULTATEA DE LITERE

CENTRUL DE CERCETARE

COMUNICARE INTERCULTURALĂ ŞI LITERATURĂ

COMMUNICATION INTERCULTURELLE ET LITTÉRATURE NR. 2 (14) Aprilie-mai-iunie

Editura Europlus

2011

Editor : Centrul de Cercetare Comunicare Interculturală şi Literatură, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea “Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi Director : Prof. univ. dr. Doiniţa Milea E-mail: [email protected] Redactor-şef: Prof. univ. dr. Simona Antofi E-mail: [email protected] Secretar de redacţie: Lect. univ. dr. Nicoleta Ifrim E-mail: [email protected] Redactori : Lect. univ. dr. Alina Crihană, Conf. univ. dr. Carmen Andrei, Lect. univ. dr. Gina Necula E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Rezumat în limba engleză / franceză : Lect. univ. dr. Gina Necula, Lect. univ. dr. Alina Crihană, Conf. univ. dr. Carmen Andrei Administrare site şi redactor web : Lect. univ. dr. Nicoleta Ifrim Corectură: Lect. univ. dr. Alina Crihană, Conf. univ. dr. Carmen Andrei Difuzare: Lect. univ. dr. Alina Crihană, Conf. univ. dr. Carmen Andrei Tipar: Editura Europlus E-mail : [email protected] Consiliul consultativ: Academician Eugen Simion, Prof. univ. dr. Silviu Angelescu, Prof. univ. dr. Mircea A. Diaconu, Prof. univ. dr. Nicolae Ioana Adresa redacţiei: Centrul de Cercetare Comunicare interculturală şi literatură, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea “Dunărea de Jos”, Str. Domnească, nr. 47, Galaţi Cod poştal: 800008 Telefon: +40-236-460476 Fax: +40-236-460476 ISSN : 1844-6965

Communication interculturelle et littérature Cod CNCSIS 489 / 2010 Abonamentele se fac la sediul redacţiei, Str. Domnească, nr. 47, Galaţi, cod 800008, prin mandat poştal pe numele Simona Antofi. Preţurile la abonamente sunt: 3 luni – 30 lei; 6 luni - 60 lei ; 12 luni – 120 lei. Abonamentele pentru străinătate se fac achitând costul la redacţie.

După achitarea abonamentului, aşteptăm prin fax sau e-mail adresa dvs. de expediţie pentru a vă putea trimite revista.

Coordonatori de volum: Lect. dr. Gina Necula Lect. dr. Ionel Apostolatu

COLEGIUL DE REDACŢIE

Academician Eugen Simion, Institutul de Istorie şi Teorie literară „George Călinescu” al Academiei Române, Bucureşti Prof. univ. dr. Silviu Angelescu, Institutul de Istoria Artei „George Oprescu” al Academiei Române, Bucureşti Prof. univ. dr. Alain Milon, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense Prof. univ. dr. Michèle Mattusch, Institut für Romanistik, Humboldt – Universität zu Berlin, Germania Prof. univ. dr. Antonio Lillo Buades, Facultatea de Filozofie şi Litere, Universitatea din Alicante, Spania Prof. univ. dr. Ana Guţu, Universitatea Liberă Internaţională, Chişinău, Republica Moldova Prof. univ. dr. hab. Elena Prus, Institutul de Cercetări Filologice şi Interculturale, Universitatea Liberă Internaţională, Chişinău, Republica Moldova Prof. univ.dr. Mircea A. Diaconu, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea „Ştefan cel Mare”, Suceava Prof. univ. dr. Nicolae Ioana, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi Prof. univ. dr. Anca Gâţă, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi Prof. univ. dr. Elena Croitoru, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi Prof. univ. dr. Michaela Praisler, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi Prof. univ. dr. Floriana Popescu, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi Prof. univ. dr. Virginia Veja Lucatelli, Centrul de Cercetare Teoria şi Practica Discursului, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi Conf. univ. dr. Cătălina Iliescu Gheorghiu, Departamento de Traducción et Interpretación, Diretora de la Sede Universitaria „Ciudad de Alicante”, Universitatea din Alicante, Spania Conf. univ. dr. Angela Coşciug, Universitatea de Stat „Alecu Russo”, Bălţi, Republica Moldova Conf. univ. dr. Pierre Morel, Institutul de Cercetări Filologice şi Interculturale, Universitatea Liberă Internaţională, Chişinău, Republica Moldova Conf. univ. dr. Diana Vrabie, Universitatea de Stat „Alecu Russo”, Bălţi, Republica Moldova Conf. univ. dr. Petru Iamandi, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi Conf. univ. dr. Carmen Andrei, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi

3 Prezentul volum cuprinde lucrările Conferinţei internaţionale Paradigma discursului ideologic, ediţia a III-a, desfăşurată la Galaţi în perioada 5-6 mai 2011, sub egida Centrului de cercetare „Comunicare interculturală şi literatură”, proiect finanţat de ANCS, prin Contractul nr. 16M/14.04.2011

Comitetul ştiinţific al manifestării:

Prof. dr. Marius Sala, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan-Al. Rosetti”, Membru titular al Academiei Române, Vicepreşedinte al Academiei Române. Prof.dr.hab. Anatol Ciobanu, Universitatea de Stat din Moldova, Chişinău, membru corespondent al Academiei de Ştiinţe a Moldovei. Prof. dr. Stelian Dumistrăcel, Institutul de Filologie Româna „A. Philippide”, Iaşi. Prof.univ.dr.hab.Elena Prus, Universitatea Liberă Internaţională, Chişinău. Prof. dr. Dorin Uriţescu, Glendon University College, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Prof. dr. Rodica Zafiu, Phd Professor, Universitatea din Bucureşti – Institutul de Lingvistică “Iorgu Iordan –Al. Rosetti” Prof. dr. Nicolae Ioana, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi. Prof. dr. Anca Gâţă, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi. Prof. dr. Michaela Praisler, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi. Prof. dr. Elena Croitoru, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi. Prof. dr. Floriana Popescu, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi. Prof. dr. Doiniţa Milea, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi. Prof. dr. Virginia Lucatelli, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi. Conf. dr. Simona Antofi, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi. Conf. dr. Angelica Vâlcu, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi.

Comitetul de organizare:

Preşedinte: Lect. dr. Gina Necula, [email protected] Vicepreşedinte: Lect. dr. Ionel Apostolatu, [email protected]

Membri: Prof. dr. Nicolae Ioana, [email protected] Prof. dr. Simona Antofi, [email protected] Lect. dr. Cătălin Negoiţă, [email protected] Lect. dr. Alina Crihană, [email protected] Lect. dr. Nicoleta Ifrim, [email protected] Asist. dr. Cătălin Enică, [email protected] Asist. drd Rodica Apostolatu, [email protected]

Secretar: Asist. drd Matei Damian, [email protected]

4 CUPRINS

Literatură şi interculturalitate

Simona Antofi – Jocuri ale memoriei feminine – Annie Bentoiu: Timpul ce ni s-a dat 9 Carmen Andrei – Facettes du discours fictionnel postmoderne dans la littérature québécoise contemporaine 14 Ruxanda Bontilă – On Narrative Modes: Or What Happens When Fictional Pain Cuts Too Deep 21 Anca Călin – Le chercheur, le personnage conceptuel de Maurice Blanchot 29 Ana-Elena Costandache – Les limites des influences européennes sur le discours littéraire des écrivains roumains au XXe siècle 38 Alina Crihană – Le contexte socio-culturel totalitaire et les fictions identitaires de l’écrivain: une analyse des entretiens narratif 43 Matei Damian - Particularităţi discursiv-narative în câteva schiţe ale lui I. L. Caragiale 51 Mirela Drăgoi – L’influence de la pensée positiviste sur « l’esprit scientifique » d’Émile Zola 56 Nicoleta Ifrim – Des stéréotypes idéologiques dans les textes littéraires : La vie roumaine 1956 61 Mara Magda Maftei – L’écriture politique de Cioran et Céline 65 Doiniţa Milea – Voix et espaces narratives dans l’écriture engagée. Le pouvoir formateur du discours 74 Simona Mitroiu – Walter Benjamin. Short Notes on the Memory of Fragmentation 78 Steluţa Stan – (Post)Modernist Levels of Authority in Reflexive Fiction 85 Angela Stǎnescu – Ideological Illusionism and the Media of Illusion: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children 92 Andreia Irina Suciu – Malcolm Bradbury between Critic and Novelist 99 Roxana Udrescu – Le métadiscours dans l’écriture de soi 112

Interferenţe şi conexiuni lingvistice

Brînduşa-Mariana Amălăncei – Le discours répété en tant que manifestation de l’intertextualité dans la publicité 119 Ionel Apostolatu – Două încercări de sistematizare a proceselor de analogie în lingvistică. Pe marginea concepţiilor lui J. Kuryłowicz şi Witold Mańczak 129 Rodica-Cristina Apostolatu – Double and Multiple Negation in English and Romanian. A Contrastive Approach 135 Oana Cenac - On Circumstances in the English Language. A Study Case 138 Ştefana Ciortea – Discursul publicistic despre criză 142 Gabriela Dima – Aspects of Interpreting the Lexicon. Ideological Words 147 Sofia Dima – ‘Meta’ modalities in a testimonial fiction production 150 Corina Dobrotă – Rolul metaforei în discursul economic şi în subtipurile acestuia 158 Stelian Dumistrăcel, Doina Hreapcă - Competenţa expresivă şi «discursul repetat» în etno- şi sociotexte: efecte ale «cunoaşterii elocuţionale» şi ale «competenţei idiomatice» 165 Alina Ganea – Les verbes de parole comme caractérisants de l’énonciation originaire dans le rapport des dires 189 Angelica Hobjilă – Communication and Elements of Discourse in Children’s Literature 197 Arthur Mary – La performativité de la propagande: qui s’agit-il de convaincre ? 205 Antoanela Marta Mardar – Idiomacity vs. “Repeated Discourse”: Comparative Approaches In English and Romanian 211 Mădălina Georgiana Matei – The Discursive and Interactional Functions of Discourse Markers in Casual Conversations 220 Cristinel Munteanu – Viaţa cuvintelor şi selecţia lor naturală (sau despre influenţa biologiei asupra lingvisticii) 230 Gina Aurora Necula – Sarcasmul şi ironia ca formă de schimb intercultural în discursul politic 240 Carmen Opriţ-Maftei – Frecvenţa eponimelor în discursul jurnalistic 247 Floriana Popescu – Foreignisms in the Romanian Linguistic Terminology 251 Petronela Savin – A Typology of Cultural Aspects Underlying Romanian Eating Phrasemes 256 Gabriela Scripnic – Eluder la responsabilité des propos avancés: le cas de la prétérition 262 Dan S. Stoica – Fraze care au fost... 268 Daniela Ţuchel – A Translator's Answer to Meta-Challenges 275 Marius Velică – ‘Our Father’: praying cognitively 280

5 Istoria mentalităţilor, comunicare interculturală şi cultura media

Carmen Alexandrache - Le discours du pouvoir politique roumain et ses formes d’expression dans les actes et les documents à caractère juridique du XVIIe siècle 291 Valerica Anghelache – La Communication Interculturelle - Une Modalité De Prévention Des Conflits 296 Ioana-Paula Armăsar – L’Orientation culturelle des Principautés Roumaines du XIXe siècle vers l’Occident 301 Valeriu Bălteanu – Romanian Folk Feasts: Linguistic and Spiritual Interferences 305 Cristina-Corina Benţea – Mechanisms of Persuasion in Didactical Communication 307 Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă – The Grand Tour: National Identity and Intercultural Communication 312 Andreea-Roxana Constantinescu – The Public Body and the Rhetoric of Status in the Early Modern Culture 318 Ana Guţu – La liberte, les philosophes et la creation des mentalites sociales 328 Petru Iamandi – Terrorism in 21st Century American Cinema 336 Claudia Talaşman Chiorean – Un axiome de l’espace public roumain: Politique + mythe + médias = Un public manipulé 341 Angelica Vâlcu – L’usage des documents authentiques dans l’enseignement/apprentissage de la traduction à l’université 351

Recenzii 357

Literatură şi interculturalitate

8 Jocuri ale memoriei feminine – Annie Bentoiu: Timpul ce ni s-a dat*

Simona Antofi**

Rezumat: Formula memorialisticii feminine asociază, în scrierile de această factură ale lui Annie Bentoiu, particularităţile structurale şi productivitatea semantică, specifice discursului autobiografic şi construcţia identităţii problematice a unui personaj care, pândit în permanenţă de tentaţia de a-şi supraevalua existenţa, în sensul exemplarităţii, rămâne, totuşi, un motor credibil al istoriei. Cu o cultură solidă, poliglotă, Annie Bentoiu trăieşte în vecinătatea marilor personalităţi ale perioadei ante- şi profund comuniste şi simte în plin toate loviturile morale, sociale şi pecuniare ale epocii. Tocmai de aceea este martor (in)comod a cărui scriitură construieşte o lume simili-reală, autentică prin vibraţiile afctivităţii feminine, adesea ultragiate şi prin forţa reconstructivă a memoriei. Cuvinte cheie: memorialistică, istorie, discurs, feminitate textuală Abstract: The formula of female memoirs is meant to associate,in this kind of Annie Bentoiu’s writings, the structural and semantic productivity specific to the authobiographical discourse and the problematic construction of a character, always watched for the temptation to overstate the existence in an idealistic pespective, who is still perceived as a credicle engine of history. Having the attributes of a solide poliglot culture, Annie Bentoiu lives around great personalities of the pre-communist epoque and she is deeply afected by the social and pecuniary troubles of the era. Therefore, she is an (in)convenient witness whose writings build a simili-real world. Keywords: memoirs, history, speech, textual femininity

Scriere cu o specificitate aparte, înrudită îndeaproape cu autobiografiile şi, la ceva distanţă, cu jurnalul romanul autobiografic sau romanul indirect, precum şi cu cartea-vorbită, memoriile fac obiectul unor solide studii teoretice – ca, de altfel, întregul spectru al genurilor biograficului, cum îl numeşte criticul Eugen Simion, studii a căror relevanţă şi eficienţă aplicativă se regăsesc la nivelul cartografierii spaţiului textelor confesive cu funcţie recuperatorie şi explicit restauratoare a unor vremuri, fapte şi oameni din trecut. Intră în această categorie cărţile lui Eugen Simion, intitulate Ficţiunea jurnalului intim [1], respectiv Genurile biograficului [2], care încearcă să contureze, prin gen proxim şi diferenţă specifică, particularităţile de structură şi mecanismele textuale producătoare de semificaţie ale memoriilor şi ale autobiografiei, criticul identificând explicit determinările şi condiţionările scriiturii şi ale lecturii pe care aceasta o programează, pe baza unui pact de lectură. „Autobiografistul – afirmă Eugen Simion – programează o carte, are un scenariu, are timp, nu-l sileşte nimei, este atent la nuanţe, gândul că va fi citit şi judecat cu severitate îi întăreşte vigilenţa. Pe scurt, autorul este atent cu stilul său, după cum este foarte atent cu imaginea lui: imagine de marcă, imagine emblematică.” Lucrurile sunt perfect valabile şi petru memorialist. Mai mult, memoriile şi autobiografia mai au în comun „un grad sporit de artificialitate” datorat destinaţiei lor precise – tipărirea şi deschiderea către publicul larg. [3] În Ficţiuea jurnalului intim Eugen Simion comentează principalele scrieri despre ipostazele eului - autor, scriptor şi obiect al confesiunii, despre constituirea scriiturii confesive şi despre (anti)regulile pactului de lectură pe fondul unei posibile poetici a jurnalului intim şi a (pseudo)regulilor acestuia. În acest context, pornind de la distincţia operată de Lejeune între obiectul scriiturii diaristice – diaristul însuşi, şi cel al scriiturii memorialistice – istoria comunităţii de care autorul aparţine, criticul român insistă pe orientarea distinctă a pactului ce-l leagă pe scriitor de textul său, pactul cu istoria, de pactul autobiografic. [4] Pe de altă parte, raportate la autoficţiune, scrierile de tip autobiografic re-costruiesc realitatea prin ficţionalizare şi se bazează pe pactul autobiografic al lui Lejeune, văzut ca o scriitură în substanţa căreia autorul, naratorul şi personajul coincid. În această ordine de idei, se cuvine amintit aici pactul alternativ propus de Serge Doubrovsky, care arată că autoficţiunea are la bază o

* Ce travail a été élaboré et publié grâce au financement obtenu par le projet CNCSIS IDEI II 947 – IMPACTUL TIPOLOGIEI PERSONAJULUI FEMININ DIN PROZA LITERARĂ POSTBELICĂ ASUPRA MODELELOR COMPORTAMENTALE REFLECTATE ÎN PLAN SOCIAL (L impacte de la typologie du personnage féminin de la prose littéraire de l'après-guerre sur les modèles de comportement reflétés au niveau social).. ** Prof.univ.dr., Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos” din Galaţi

9 persoană cu biografie istoriceşte databilă, pe baza căreia se construieşte o istorie inexistentă altfel decât ca univers de discurs. [5] Apărut în colecţia Jurnale. Memorii a editurii Humanitas, primul dintre cele două volume intitulate Timpul ce ni s-a dat. Memorii 1944 – 1947 [6], semnat de Annie Bentoiu, reconstituie o perioadă de mari prefaceri la nivel social şi politic, în România, catastrofale pentru populaţie, şi traseul sinuos al formării prorpiei personalităţi, într-o formulă explicită de Bildungsroman. Pendulând între două repere spaţiale percepute şi descrise ca repere identitare centrale, în geografia afectivă a memorialistei, Bucureşti şi Olteniţa, adolescenta din anii 40 îi împrumută naratoarei ad- hoc perspectiva sa când inocentă şi uşor superficială, când privirea ei gravă asupra realităţii, o intuiţie corectă, ulterior verificată, a mersului istoriei mari, şi o receptare neliniştită a evenimentelor care se prăbuşesc asupra oamenilor, schimbându-le brusc şi radical destinele. Dubla perspectivă a adolescentei este completată de cea a femeii mature, care alege să-şi scrie cu deplină responsabilitate memoriile, cu scopul de a propune o reconstituire pe cât de obiectivă posibil a perioadei 1944 – 1947, şi o imagine anume despre sine şi despre familia sa. De vreme ce „în orice carte de memorii” există „totdeauna o temă a povestitorului” [7], este de la sine înţeles ca aceasta să acopere fie direct, prin evocarea istoriei individuale, fie prin exploatarea raportului dintre le dedans şi le dehors [8] în favoarea celui de al doilea termen, dar cu mărcile subiectivităţii specifice celui dintâi, cea mai mare parte a spaţiului scriiturii.Uneori, cele două perspective se pot întâlni şi coabita în mod firesc în aceeaşi frază, ca în această nostalgică descriere a Bucureştiului interbelic ce face parte, cu tot cu emblemele sale încărcate afectiv, din rezervele identitare ale trecutului colectiv şi individual: „[...] apartamentul, în întregime mobilat, îmi amintea de iarna petrecută în copilărie într-un apartament similar la «Hôtel Esplanade», un hotel în stil Belle époque, vizavi de «Cartea Românească», adică la intersecţia străzii Academiei cu Bulevardul Elisabeta; clădirea există şi acum.”[9] Vocea avizată şi spiritul femeii mature – pe care undeva, un personaj al scriiturii îl numeşte, deloc măgulitor, masculin - şi care a cunoscut din plin experienţa comunismului, ancorează mereu în prezentul actului de a scrie oameni, fapte şi evenimente. Educaţia riguroasă, primită la Şcoala Centrală de fete, îşi pune amprenta asupra evoluţiei adolescentei şi explică opţiunea ei pentru studiile juridice, în dauna talentului literar şi a sensibilităţii recunoscute de toată lumea. Circumspectă cu ea însăşi, memorialista întrerupe uneori şirul reconstituirilor pentru a dialoga cu cititorul său, oricare ar fi acesta, şi cu sine însăşi. Teama de a nu-şi putea zăgăzui subiectivitatea alimentată de nostalgie şi de dorul după cei dragi, după propria copilărie, este sincer exprimată şi pe deplin justificată. Căci Annie Bentoiu pare a vedea lucrurile doar în alb şi negru. Familia sa – în special tatăl, model secret de comportament social şi de masculinitate – Pascal Bentoiu şi memorialista însăşi sunt produse, în mare măsură, ale ficţiunii memorialistice, intens idealizate şi conturate cu obsesia pozitivităţii ridicate la rang de principiu existenţial şi de modus vivendi. Prea puţine elemente, neesenţiale, întunecă luminozitatea, chiar dacă artificială, a acestor figuri masculine tutelare ale copilăriei şi ale tinereţii – unchii din partea tatălui, verişorii primari, dar şi feminine – a se vedea compatibilitatea perfectă, pe plan spiritual, cu mama. Grija pentru a-şi detalia - şi construi, de fapt – itinerariul spiritual iniţiatic se reflectă într-o cronologie reală, verificabilă, chiar dacă, şi ea, aburită nostalgic. Bucuria de a le fi cunoscut pe unele dintre personalităţile feminine de înaltă clasă ale momentului este, fără îndoială, sinceră. Iar frumuseţea encomiastică a portretelor se răsfrânge, implicit, şi asupra memorialistei. Este vorba, de pildă, despre Anina Rădulescu-Pogoneanu, fiica lui I.Al. Rădulescu-Pogoneanu, discipol al lui Maiorescu, şi soţia filosofului Mircea Vulcănescu. Revelaţiile curg una după alta, la vîrsta formării şi maturizării intelectuale, Annie hrănindu-şi mintea cu texte de primă clasă ale literaturii europene şi exersându-şi disponibilităţile analitice pe principiul afinităţilor elective. Naraţiunea autobiografică este presărată, pe alocuri, cu digresiuni descriptive în care, pe baza spiritului de observaţie şi a culturii umaniste solide a memorialistei, se re-constituie secvenţe din realitatea arhitectonică, artistică şi culturală a Bucureştiului. Le dehors rămâne, însă, impregnat de le dedans, în virtutea unui pact al autoarei cu sine: „Anca Şteflea, care cu puţin timp înaintea tatălui îşi pierduse logodnicul într-un stupid accident de aviaţie, s-a căsătorit cu arhitectul Mihai Ricci, fratele arhitectului Tiberiu Ricci căruia îi datorăm Sala mare a Palatului, precum şi ansamblul arhitectural care o înconjoară, cu perspectivele sale deschise spre biserica Kretzulescu şi cea luterană. Incapabil să colaboreze cu Ceauşescu, Tiberiu Ricci s-a expatriat curând, urmat de

10 întreaga sa familie. Anca şi Mihai Ricci, fiinţe de mare înţelepciune, cultură şi bunătate, au avut o fiică şi un fiu: [...]” [10] Figura tatălui – pe latura sa publică, oficială - „în calitate de ţărănist fusese deputat, senator, prefect de Ilfov şi secretar general în Ministerul Sănătăţii”, enumeră cu nestăvilită mândire fiica – dar şi particulară, se constituie dintr-o acumulare de mici istorioare care vădesc ataşamentul fiicei şi efectul de ficţionalizare al privirii ei retrospective. Membru al unui club exclusivist din Bucureşti, selectat prin vot secret - „datorită firii sale împăciuitoare şi acelei afabilităţi de care am pomenit”, tatăl îşi va pierde, treptat, valoarea de reper absolut în viaţa lui Annie, pe măsură ce vremurile se schimbă. Îi ia locul, în chip firesc, soţul Pascal, căruia Annie îi recunoaşte inteligenţa superioară şi talentul înnăscut de compozitor. Conştientă de existenţa unor mecanisme şi strategii specifice scriiturii memorialistice, care o apropie de literatură, Annie Bentoiu face tot ce poate pentru a le compensa. Se documentează riguros, urmărind retrospectiv evoluţia evenimentelor pe care le descrie în ziarele din anii 40, inserează citate semnificative în corpul memorialului şi construieşte, fie că vrea, fie că nu vrea, din date certe ale realului, personaje vii ale scriiturii. Aşa se naşte, pentru cititorul secolului al XXI-lea, profilul demn al generalului Rădescu, ofiţerul român care încearcă, sub presiunea exercitată de prezenţa, la Bucureşti, a emisarilor sovietici, şi, în ţară, a trupelor Armatei Roşii, să salveze ţara de la dezastru. Aproape fără putere executorie, generalul este silit, în scurt timp, să-şi dea demisia şi dispare de pe scena istoriei pentru a lăsa loc liber guvernului Petru Groza, total aservit sovieticilor. Într-o privire comparativă asupra raportului Occident – Orient, memorialista surprinde ataşamentul românilor, prin tradiţia lor culturală, faţă de Franţa, şi resentimentele puternice faţă de Rusia. Remarcă, de asemenea, contrastul puternic dintre gradul înalt de civilizaţie al nemţilor, răsfrânt în toate activităţile lor publice, şi mentalitatea întârziată a ruşilor. Deşi, faţă de aceştia din urmă – oameni simpli, săraci, prizonieri ai istoriei şi ai dictaturii staliniste, simte adesea înţelegere şi compasiune. Ambele perspective narative menţionate mai înainte se întâlnesc sub pana memorialistei şi pactizează sub semnul autorităţii scriiturii care reuşeşte să dea sens superior faptelor şi contur de destin unei vieţi particulare. Spaţiul matricial al Olteniţei trimite până târziu reverberaţii asupra vieţii memorialistei, care îl rememorează dureros, cu dificultate. O foarte frumoasă reconstituire – evocare a oraşului aduce în prim-plan o lume idilică, şi pagini de adevărată literatură. Calmul, echilibrul, armonia conturează un oraş cvasi-mitic, din afara timpului şi a capriciilor istoriei. Prezervat în memoria afectivă, oraşul îşi adaugă, la efigia inimitabilă, imaginea Dunării văzute de pe ambele ei maluri: „Cerul era oglinda Dunării şi nu invers; aerul de deasupra apei nu semăna în nici un fel cu cel de pe mal, se amestecau în el mirosuri de peşte şi smoală, fâşii de răcoare îl străbăteau ca nişte panglici jucăuşe, picături de apă clipoceau în el şi-l făceau să pară mai greu. Aerul acela scânteietor nu cunoştea praful şi punea la îndoială până şi distanţele; malurile păreau când apropiate, să le apuci cu mâna, când învăluite într-o ceaţă de nepătruns. ” Modelele livreşti ale iniţierii spirituale sut deplin convergente şi imediat corelate cu universul ficţional de gradul al doilea pe care scriitura memorialistică îl construieşte. Basmele germane şi cărările copilăriei fac corp comun cu jurnalul străbunicii, cu propriile carnete de însemnări intime şi cu maeştrii spirituali din literaturile occidentale, în special din cea franceză. Toate alcătuiesc o „experienţă concretă a paradisului” şi, în pofida refuzului explicit al autoarei, istorisirea vieţii sale. Treptat, pe măsură ce ocupaţia sovietică se face tot mai dur simţită, pe toate planurile, imaginea paradisiacă a ţării, cu reperele ei identitare individuale şi colective, rămâne sub semnul unei normalităţi pe cale de dispariţie. I se adaugă cea a Eleveţiei, rămase în amintire ca un spaţiu al sobrietăţii, al muncii constante, responsabile, şi al misterului datorat viziunii edenic-infantile, asociate naratorului. Părţile bune şi părţile rele ale comunismului, ca model şi practică societală, sunt aduse în discuţie şi comentate cu maximum de obiectivitate posibilă: Istode Maria, colega din clasele primare a memorialistei, premiantă, are din start soarta hotărâtă. Pentru ea lucrurile sunt limpezi – nu i se permite să meargă la liceu, ci doar să înveţe o meserie de pe urma căreia să-şi câştige existenţa. Şansele pe care un guvern şi o orientare socială de stânga le asigurau copiilor inteligenţi, supradotaţi, sunt cu totul altele, şi sunt resimţite ca reparatorii. Pe de altă parte, cadrele pe care

11 partidul unic începuse să şi le formeze ilustrau prototipul robotizat al omului nou, iremediabil îndoctrinat şi cu „sentimentele umane parţial atrofiate.” Etapele studenţiei sunt jalonate de evenimentele politice care se precipită. Unii profesori dispar în mod misterios, tatăl îşi pierde treptat independenţa financiară şi oameni de altă condiţie socială ies în prim-planul vieţii politice. Chiar dacă, pe care raţională, memorialista înţelege mecanismele psihologice ale urii de clasă, şi o face cu luciditate şi cu destulă obiectivitate, nu poate înţelege şi nici accepta atitudini extreme precum antisemitismul şi naţionalismul de tip Garda de Fier. Prieteniile, simpatiile şi iubirile memorialistei se desfăşoară pe fondul tot mai nesigur al vieţii politice, fraudarea alegerilor de către comunişti deschizând calea directă către instalarea, la Bucureşti, a supravegherii sovietice. Încercările de autodefinire a personalităţii au, în această perioadă, rolul benefic de a o izola, fie şi temporar, pe Annie într-o lume a-istorică, dependentă de o cronologie afectivă cu alte coordonate, alţi actori şi alte reguli. Viaţa culturală încă activă îi umple şi ea existenţa, căci, aparent, lucrurile încă merg pe făgaşul lor. Nu pentru multă vreme. Cursurile de la Institutul francez din Bucureşti – poartă spre cultură şi spre arta literară – vor fi suspendate. Cu toate acestea, literatura română rămâne una dintre preocupările memorialistei, o preocupare constantă, care susţine definiţii riguros-corecte ale actului de creaţie, funcţii ale cărţii şi o grilă perfectă de lectură pentru cititorul implicit creat de memoriile lui Annie Bentoiu: „În cărţi – în orice carte – găseşti nu o oglindă a vieţii ( ce plictisitor ar fi!), ci un material selectat şi organizat pentru transmiterea unui anume sens, la care ţi se solicită implicit adeziunea. Şi nu descoperi doar unul singur, ci o varietate de sensuri, intelectuale, afective, metafizice chiar, organizate în sinteze ce se suprapun la rândul lor spre a forma fascinante edificii abstracte. Apare astfel o plăcere suplimentară, cea de a savura (sau de a respinge) construcţia de sinteze, echilibrul şi forţa ei de coeziune. Îi poţi depista faliile sau zonele incerte, dar te poţi lăsa şi subjugat, vrăjit, când este cazul, de măreţia, proprorţiile şi armonia întregului: utilitatea practică a «înţelegerii» cedează atunci locul bucuriei de a contempla.” Neavând vocaţie filosofică, nefiind nici fire anxios-meditativă, Annie Bentoiu îşi încheie primul volum al memoriilor cu o redutabilă sinteză extinsă asupra părţilor bune şi asupra aspectelor profund negative ale comunismului, expunându-şi intenţia explicit moralizatoare şi miza cărţii: „Ştiu că mă adresez mai degrabă unor necunoscuţi mai tineri decât mine, cărora istorisirea mea le va părea poate un basm ciudat. Îmi doresc să-i pot reînvia chipurile şi întâmplările până la capăt.”

Note : [1] Eugen Simion, Ficţiunea jurnalului intim, vol. I – III, Ed. Univers enciclopedic, Bucureşti, 2001 [2] Eugen Simion, Genurile biograficului, Ed. Univers enciclopedic, Bucureşti, 2002 [3] Idem, p. 30 [4] Idem, p. 114. Referirile se fac la Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, Seuil, Paris, 1975, Je est un autre. L'autobiographie de la littérature aux médias, Seuil, Paris, 1980, Moi aussi, Seuil, Paris, 1986 [5] Apud Yussuf Khalid, Autobiografia şi autoficţiunea – contract de lectură şi modalitate textuală, text disponibil la adresa http://yussufkhalid.blogspot.com/2010/02/autobiografia-si-autofictiunea-contract.html. Şi tot aici se regăseşte o sintetizare a particularităţilor fiecărui proiect referenţial în parte: „dacă autobiografia este un tip de scriitură cu funcţie explicativă prin raportare la realitate, la viaţă, aşadar (scriitura şi viaţa sunt două lumi distincte, dar contigue), autoficţiuea îmbină realul şi scriitura.” În ceea ce ne priveşte, subscriem opiniei lui Eugen Simion, pentru care însuşi actul de a scrie reprezintă un prim nivel al autoficţiunii; oricum am privi lucrurile, distincţia autoficţiune – memorii, autobiografie este parţial operantă întrucât, în dimensiunea referenţială a scriiturii (prin care înţelegem acel univers ficţional care este produsul semantic al mecanismului textual) se îmbină, în proporţii diferite, atât elemente de real, cât şi barthesiana iluzie de real. [6] Annie Bentoiu, Timpul ce ni s-a dat. Memorii 1944 – 1047, Ed. Humanitas, 2011. Prima ediţie a ambelor volume a apărut la editura Vitruviu, în 2007. Autoarea este soţia compozitorului Pascal Bentoiu şi autoarea mai multor volume publicate în limba franceză – traduceri din literatura română, poezie şi proză poetică, şi în limba română – romanul de debut, Strada mare, şi traduceri din limba franceză. Ca fiică a unei elveţience şi a unui român, este bilingvă prin naştere. Toate citatele din lucrare au fost preluate din ediţia editurii Humanitas. [7] Eugen Simion, Ficţiunea jurnalului intim, vol. I, p. 31 [8] Idem, capitolul [9] Annie Bentoiu, op. cit., p. 15 [10] Idem, p. 33.

Bibliografie: Bentoiu, Annie, Timpul ce ni s-a dat. Memorii 1944 – 1047, Ed. Humanitas, 2011.

12 Khalid, Yussuf, Autobiografia şi autoficţiunea – contract de lectură şi modalitate textuală, text disponibil la adresa http://yussufkhalid.blogspot.com/2010/02/autobiografia-si-autofictiunea-contract.html Lejeune, Philippe, Je est un autre. L'autobiographie de la littérature aux médias, Seuil, Paris, 1980. Lejeune, Philippe, Le pacte autobiographique, Seuil, Paris, 1975. Lejeune, Philippe, Moi aussi, Seuil, Paris, 1986. Simion, Eugen, Ficţiunea jurnalului intim, vol. I – III, Ed. Univers enciclopedic, Bucureşti, 2001. Simion, Eugen, Genurile biograficului, Ed. Univers enciclopedic, Bucureşti, 2002.

13 Facettes du discours fictionnel postmoderne dans la littérature québécoise contemporaine

Carmen Andrei*

Rezumat: Perioada postmodernă contemporană se caracterizează prin mutaţii majore care se reflecta în reinventarea unor noi valori dominante (recunoaşterea individualităţii, personalizarea stilului de viaţă, spiritul de toleranţă etnică, religioasă şi sexuală, raportarea individuală la Istorie etc.) la care a contribuit semnificativ dezvoltarea noilor tehnologii ale comunicării şi informaţiei. Specificitatea discursului ficţional modern din literatura quebecheză contemporană rezidă în construirea unei meta-povestiri despre Istorie şi Timp, despre Identitate individuală şi colectivă, bine ancorate în contextul politic, social şi cultural al Canadei francofone. Ne propunem să trecem în revistă constantele poeticii postmoderne argumentând cu exemple din literatura feminină şi feministă (Nicole Brossard, Louky Bersianik, Yolande Villemare, Francine Noël, etc.). Continuăm cu o scurtă analiză a unui clasic al genului, Jacques Poulin şi încheiem cu o prezentare succintă a noii generaţii de postmoderni – „romancierii disperării” (Christian Mistral, Louis Hamelin, Louis Beauchemin, Monique Proulx, Gaétan Soucy, etc.) atât pentru a evidenţia evoluţia paradigmei noţionale postmoderne, cât şi maniera în care aceasta se reflectă în literatură. Cuvinte-cheie: discurs, postmodernism, literatura quebecheză, identitate, Istorie, fragmentare Abstract: Contemporary postmodern period is characterized by major changes reflected in reinventing new dominant values (recognizing individuality, customizing lifestyle, the spirit of ethnic, religiuous and sexual tolerance, individual reference to history,etc.). These changes were determined by a significant development of new communication and information technologies. The specificity of modern fictional discourse in quebeqoise literature lies in biulding a metastory of History and Time, and Individual and Collective Identity as well. All these, very well rooted into the social, political and cultural francophone Canada. Our aim here is to review the constant elements of postmodern poetics exemplifying with samples of feminine and feminist literature (Nicole Brossard, Louky Bersianik, Yolande Villemare, Francine Noel, etc.). Then we continue with a brief analysis of a classic such as Jacques Poulin and conclude with a summary of the new generation of postmodern “novelistsof despair" (ChristianMistral, Louis Hamelin, Louis Beauchemin, Monique Proulx, Gaetan Soucy, etc.) Keywords: discourse, postmodernism, literature quebecheză, identity, history,fragmentation

0. Liminaire Avant les années ’60, les valeurs dominantes dans la société canadienne étaient l’épargne, la religion, la chasteté, la conscience professionnelle, l’esprit de sacrifice, l’effort, la ponctualité, l’autorité, etc. Dans les années ’60, on a accordé beaucoup d’attention au nationalisme, à la justice sociale, à la nouveauté. Suit la Révolution Tranquille qui apporte des changements majeurs dans la mentalité et les mœurs. Dans les années ‘80 d’autres valeurs sociales sont promues, telle que la spontanéité, l’accomplissement de soi, la jouissance, la permissivité, l’humour, qui deviendront des marques distinctives.

L’air du temps est à la différence, à la fantaisie, au décontracté ; le standard, l’apprêté n’ont plus bonne presse. Le culte de la spontanéité et la culture psy stimulent à être « plus » soi-même, à « sentir », à s’analyser, à se libérer des rôles et des « complexes ». La culture postmoderne est celle du feeling et de l’émancipation individuelle élargie à toutes les catégories d’âge et de sexe [1].

Par conséquent, l’être postmoderne doit être cool, décrispé, flexible, décontracté, permissif, tolérant. La personnalisation – on choisit sa vie à la carte, selon ses intérêts – serait une valeur importante dans la société contemporaine. Il n’y est plus question de se fondre dans la masse, bon gré mal gré. Chacun choisit de s’exprimer, de décider en fonction de ses propres intérêts, chacun veut organiser sa vie à sa façon. L’individu postmoderne craint les grands ensembles dépersonnalisés et préfère les petites associations, plus susceptibles de satisfaire ses besoins : regroupement des veufs, des parents avec enfant fugueur, des hommes violents, des femmes battues, des alcooliques, des motards en Harley Davidson. Les mots d’ordre, les lignes de partis, les dogmes à observer apparaissent de plus en plus comme des entraves qu’il faut éviter. L’individu

* Maître de conférences, dr., Université « Dunarea de Jos », Galati

14 s’intéresse à la politique, mais de loin, plus par intérêt que par idéal ; il ne s’investit pas émotionnellement dans des grandes causes sociales, il préfère garder sa liberté. Il fuit les associations rigides qu’elles soient politiques, religieuses, syndicales. Un autre effet de ce courant envahissant de la personnalisation : l’individu postmoderne recherche une meilleure qualité de vie, il s’occupe de sa santé, celle de son corps et celle de son esprit. L’augmentation de la pratique des sports liés au bien-être du corps (le jogging, le « work out », la danse aérobique, le « nautilus »), les nouvelles modes alimentaires (le végétalisme, la macrobiotique, la « nouvelle » cuisine), les nouvelles thérapies (les médecines douces, l’homéopathie, l’acupuncture, l’algothérapie, voire la rigolothérapie) et toutes les nouvelles « philosophies », ésotériques ou orientales, font dire à certains que le narcissisme serait la figure symbolique la plus représentative de notre époque. Soi, toujours soi, voilà la grande règle de toutes les règles. Aucun mode de vie, aucune mode ne sont rejetés a priori. Notre société fait de plus en plus de place à la diversité : elle est multiethnique, toutes les orientations sexuelles sont acceptées, toutes les formes de spiritualité sont tolérées, plusieurs modèles familiaux ont cours, plusieurs types de musique, de mode vestimentaire cohabitent. Toutes les marginalités s’expriment au grand jour, dans un désir exacerbé d’être « reconnues », selon le mot de Charles Taylor. Cet esprit de tolérance est tel que dorénavant tout un chacun doit s’en tenir à la « rectitude politique » et aux euphémismes quand il est question de désigner les marginalités (le malade est un bénéficiaire, l’assisté social est un prestataire, le clochard, un itinérant). Cet esprit de tolérance explique la grande place de l’humour dans notre société. Les médias sont pour beaucoup dans l’avènement du postmodernisme. Les chaînes de télévision se sont multipliées et ce faisant, ont multiplié les points de vue, les prises de parole où s’expriment les différences, les individualités, souvent jusqu’au chaos. Chacun veut que sa parole soit entendue, que son mode de vie ait sa vitrine d’où la grande popularité des émissions où l’on étale sa vie privée au grand jour. L’internet, le dernier venu, favorise l’individualisme plus que tout autre média : seul devant sa machine, l’internaute peut joindre sans implication émotive des groupes de discussion (forums ou autres), étaler ses goûts sur sa page « web », sinon sa vie privée par le biais des «webcams », entretenir des relations virtuelles sur des réseaux de socialisation. Certains y voient un progrès dans la société postmoderne: l’être humain jouit d’une plus grande liberté, devient plus tolérant, plus autonome, plus responsable ; d’autres craignent que la cohésion sociale ne se dissolve, que nous ne sombrions dans un certain chaos :

Le danger ne réside pas tant dans un contrôle despotique que dans la fragmentation - c’est-à-dire dans l’inaptitude de plus en plus grande des gens à former un projet commun et à le mettre en exécution. La fragmentation survient lorsque les gens en viennent à se concevoir eux-mêmes de façon de plus en plus atomiste, autrement dit, de moins en moins liés à leur concitoyen par des projets et des allégeances communes [2].

1. De la poétique postmoderne Après le séisme culturel des années ‘60, un phénomène nouveau surgit dans la littérature québécoise : le désir d’être heureux tout de suite, à tout prix. L’émergence de l’individualisme, de l’ego sacro-saint qui doit vivre dans l’expérience immédiate anéantit le dilemme de l’identité collective. Le modernisme s’affirme d’abord en poésie. Dans le domaine du roman, il y aura un passage direct et accéléré du réalisme au postmodernisme, comme le souligne M. Lemire :

Le roman de l’intériorité, qui commence à peine à inventorier l’abîme intérieur du Québécois pour tâcher d’y voir un peu plus clair, se trouve lié au « stream of consciousness » d’où ne surnage que l’écriture [3].

L’hyper-thème fétiche du courant est l’identité, recherchée dans la « quotidienneté », dissipée dans des sous-thèmes comme la création et l’intimité intime qui convergent afin de mieux faire saisir au lecteur le sens ultime de l’histoire. A partir d’un élément déclencheur, le personnage intériorise l’action et devient son propre objet. Jeux de langage, ludismes, symboles, éclatements et multiplicité foisonnent et s’entrecroisent. La traduction simultanée en français « standard » des

15 québécismes et du langage vernaculaire, ainsi que les vocables anglais qui pimentent les commentaires sont les marques d’un discours ironique. [4] La littérature moderne fait place aux dissidents : les femmes, les groupes ethniques, les Noirs, les homosexuels réclament des droits égaux. Naissent les Ethnic Studies et les Gender Studies. La libération sexuelle passe des gestes ordinaires du refus de l’emprise amoureuse à l’affirmation sans vergogne des déviations sexuelles et des violences physiques (le viol, l’inceste).

2. Emergence de la littérature féminine et féministe La présence des femmes dans les débats concernant la langue, dans les lettres, quasi gommée dans la première moitié du siècle, se fait entendre en même temps que l’essor du courant féministe. Longtemps refoulées dans leurs cuisines, dans des emplois subalternes et sous-rémunérés, les femmes font enfin surface. Les auteures, licenciées en lettres dans leur majorité, poursuivent la réflexion sur l’identité féminine et arrivent à en ébaucher un tableau cohérent. Elles sont animatrices des revues comme Les Têtes de pioche (1976-1979), La Vie en rose (1980-1987). Une parole-manifeste s’exprime au théâtre avec La Nef des sorcières (collectif, 1976) et Les Fées ont soif (1978) de Denise Boucher. Certains textes sont plus violents, revendicateurs, lyriques ou parodiques. Citons quelques titres représentatifs pour cette audacieuse démarche : Pour les femmes et toutes les autres (1974) de Madeleine Gagnon ; L’Amer (1977) et Le Sens apparent (1980) de Nicole Brossard ; Bloody Mary (1977) de France Théoret. Les années ’80 voient naître une littérature féministe plus feutrée qui exploite plus profondément les registres de l’intime. L’écriture change de technique, l’esthétique est fragmentaire, hybride, éminemment subjective et romantique par endroits. Passons en revue les productions représentatives pour ces années, sous la réserve, certes, qu’il s’agit d’un inventaire éminemment subjectif. Il y a d’abord, L’Euguélionne (1976) de Louky Bersianik, un roman triptyque incontournable qui aborde tous les sujets concernant la femme, dénonçant le sexisme du discours quotidien, scientifique, les ridicules de la culture patriarcale, etc. L’auteure y oppose un contre-texte assumé par un narrateur-Dieu qui parle avec la femme des injustices dont elle victime. Pastiche des textes sacrés pimenté d’humour, ce livre prend le moule de l’essai qui cherche à changer de vision et d’attitude des rapports entre les sexes. Un autre exemple illustratif est La vie en prose (1980) de Yolande Villemare, un roman de la fragmentation urbaine qui met en scène 12 femmes, animatrices d’une maison d’édition qui juge de la valeur d’un manuscrit. Chacune d’elle a en gestation un texte littéraire (un essai, un roman, une pièce) d’où la pluralité des voix, la multiplication des intertextes et le dialogue critique sur l’acte d’écriture. C’est un roman spéculaire dans le sens qu’il ébauche une poétique immanente du récit moderne, des rapports entre les signes et les idéologies qui les sous-tendent. Un roman à thèse radicale en dernière instance : les femmes n’ont nul besoin d’hommes pour être heureuses. Apologie de l’amour saphique, de la femme : « être femme, c’est la dernière réincarnation ». Citons également Maryse (1983) et Myriam première (1987) de Francine Noël. Grands succès de librairie, ces livres rassemblent les discours d’une époque où les destins individuels tentent de s’affirmer avec une calme ténacité. C’est une prose humoristique et vivante qui joue de façon programmatique sur les ruptures de ton et de registres. A part l’interrogation explicite sur l’Histoire comme texte, ces romans projettent une image inattendue de la femme libérée du carcan des stéréotypes culturels. Dans Myriam première, attendri, le personnage homonyme dresse un bilan de sa vie :

Elle est maintenant irrémédiablement en retard, avec le sentiment délicieux de se forger une belle situation inextricable, elle pacage dans les parterres où flottent des nuées de mannes parmi des fleurs d’érable qui tourbillonne mollement dans l’air et tombent en faisant de petits bruits frisés. Elle se dit: « Je suis pas tellement une sorcière finalement je contrôle pas l’amour. De ma véritable identité, je serai plutôt Une Sultane, que ça ne m’étonnerait pas. Je suis la Sultane bleue de vingt-cinq mai, nageant dans les fleurs d’érable, c’est le matin, j’ai bientôt huit ans et je ne vais pas à l’école parce que j’ai la peine d’amour [5].

16 L’exemple le plus convaincant d’écriture féminine (féministe) postmoderne est, sans, doute, Nicole Brossard, fondatrice de La Barre du jour (1965). Son écriture est originale et déconcertante par l’abolition des frontières entre les genres. Elle remet en question les formes acceptées du langage, voire de la langue dans son code même. Son écriture quitte toute linéarité par un ensemble de stratégies modernes : ruptures syntaxiques, permutations lexicales et grammaticales. Elle invente un « centre blanc », un « lieu d’aimant » où se jouent le tout et le rien de la reconnaissance de soi. Elle prêche une utopie de l’Amazone où les femmes réinventent le monde afin de démontrer la mise en échec radicale de la réalité patriarcale. La lutte pour l’intégration d’un jeu femme et lesbien, exprimé par le hologramme « la pensée de l’émotion », l’érotisme, l’espace et les lieux urbains sont les constante de cette œuvre riche. Dès Un livre (1970), en passant par French Kiss (1974) jusqu’au roman Le désert mauve (1987), elle forge un imaginaire fictionnel dépourvu de toute référence à la réalité. Elle lance la problématique du refus des tabous et de la liberté du corps de la femme. 3. Sur un grand classique du roman postmoderne: Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen blues (1984) Avant de souligner les portées postmodernes de ce roman devenu un classique du genre, il nous semble nécessaire d’en donner un résumé. Le personnage principal, Jack Watterman, un écrivain méconnu en panne d’inspiration, arrivé dans la quarantaine, part à la recherche de son frère disparu depuis quinze ans, muni d’une seule carte postale que celui-ci lui avait envoyé de Gaspésie, carte sur laquelle figurait un texte de Jacques Cartier. La rencontre fortuite d’une grande fille mystérieuse, la Grande Sauterelle, sera une chance : un été durant, elle sera sa compagne de voyage et son guide éclairé. En voiture, tous deux traverseront plusieurs Amériques panoramiques: l’Amérique moderne, l’Amérique des colons, l’Amérique mythique des héros de Far West, l’Amérique des Indiens. Jack part donc rechercher aussi l’américanité francophone. Le roman propose des figures du personnage et du double. Le minibus Volkswagen [6] est l’image symbolique tantôt du refuge (où il se protège contre le monde quand il est atteint du « complexe du scaphandrier » : il s’enferme pendant trois jours dans sa voiture), tantôt de la décadence physique (il se sent vieux). Dès le début, le lecteur comprend que, suite à une crise identitaire (manifestée par la peur, l’insécurité, un manque de confiance accru, de petites manies) , il partira dans une quête de soi dont le prétexte est la recherche de son frère Théo, le « dieu perdu » de son enfance. Même si la quête semble fortunée, il retrouve son frère, elle est déceptive (celui-ci est une épave humaine paralytique et inconsciente) et pleine d’espoir à la fois. Dans cet itinéraire initiatique, le double et le guide de Jack, Pitsémine, partagée entre deux cultures et deux races, part elle aussi à la recherche de sa paix intérieure (« essayer de faire l’unité et de réconcilier avec elle- même »). Elle est son double postmoderne dans le sens qu’elle est munie d’instruments et de solutions pour faire progresser le récit et le personnage. Lectrice avertie, en « mécanicienne du corps et de l’âme », elle sait débloquer la panne d’inspiration de l’écrivain-protagoniste, le pousse à passer du passif à l’actif [7]. Autant dans l’espace clos, sécurisant du vieux Volks (symbole et double de Jack) que dans l’espace énorme qu’ils traversent dans leurs parcours, tous deux complètent et changent de vision du monde, de soi et se familiarise avec l’Autre. Ils tirent parti des enseignements de l’Histoire. Jack s’est retrouvé, Pitsémine continue seule la route. Le récit d’El Dorado fonctionne comme une mise en abyme, comme les références à The Oregon Trail Revisited de Gregory M. Franzwa permettent un nouvel éclairage sur l’archétype du bon pionner blanc conquérant. Clin d’œil intertextuel au 4e chapitre qui raconte dans le registre parodique les pérégrinations hallucinantes de l’écrivain idéal. Les grands thèmes du roman sont : l’américanité, l’enfance comme âge d’or, la recherche de l’identité, du bonheur, le voyage, les affres de l’écriture. Les protagonistes reconsidèrent le présent et le passé personnels et collectifs : sur le plan individuel, Jack ne se croit plus l’écrivain stérile et découvre que le mythe dont il entourait son frère fond ; sur le plan collectif, le passé historique (des bons pionniers blancs qui ont traversé l’Atlantique en civilisant cette terre et les Amérindiens) n’est pas si idéal ; de son côté, Pitsémine, assume sagement son métissage et prend conscience des horreurs de la colonisation forcenée des Indiens. Deux solitudes opèrent une ouverture finale sur le monde [8].

17 4. Les « romanciers de la désespérance » Au cours des années ‘90, de nouvelles plumes émergent et donnent au roman une orientation différente : Christian Mistral, Louis Hamelin, Jean-Yves Dupuis, Louise Desjardins, Lise Tremblay deviennent les voix violentes de l’exclusion sociale. Intellectuels au chômage, à la merci de l’aide sociale, ils crient leur isolement, l’état d’âme (le « trip » intérieur) d’une vie dégradée par l’alcool, la drogue, le sexe. On les appelle « les romanciers de la désespérance » (A. Boivin), Bof génération ou encore génération vamp :

Les personnages arpentent les artères de cette ville [Montréal] comme de véritables désœuvrés, de tavernes en bars, de bistrots enfumés en appartements sales et mal famés, dont ils sont familiers, à la recherche de leur propre visage [9].

Les romanciers post-postmodernes ont appris de leurs prédécesseurs que le regard microscopique porté vers l’objet, le mouvement infime, donne lieu à de curieux échanges entre réalisme et fantastique. La nouvelle, comme genre apte à explorer les limites du réel et à capter les instants privilégiés, prend un nouvel essor. Citons quelques noms de grands nouvellistes: Gaétan Brulotte, Monique Proulx, Marie-José Thériault, Daniel Gagnon, André Berthiaume, Gilles Pellerin. La science-fiction renaît de ses cendres. Ses adeptes se nomment Esther Rochon, Milovan Rajic, Elisabeth Vonarburg. Il y a place pour la redécouverte des petites formes telles que la lettre et le journal, genres de plus en plus flous, oscillant entre prose et poésie. Dans Vamp (1982), Christian Mistral fait le récit des faits divers du quotidien étourdissant (y compris des histoires amicales ou amoureuses manquées) géré par une hyper conscience lucide qui les commente. La narration donne cette impression de narcissisme qui erre volontiers. Le narrateur prend le visage d’un être excessif et sensuel. Le second personnage est son double positif, un saint. L’univers circonscrit touche la jeune génération, abusée idéologiquement et sans repère aucun, qui se vampirise et vampirise la vie d’autrui (voir le célèbre déménagement du 1er juillet) et la vie nocturne de la ville. Son congénère, Sylvain Trudel publie Le Souffle d’harmattan (1987), un roman de début sur la quête identitaire d’Hugues, un enfant adopté / « adapté » qui cherche sa place dans le monde des adultes. Sa relation d’amitié fusionnelle avec Habéké Axoum, un Africain lui aussi « adapté » devient légendaire. Les jeunes adolescents en fugues vivent des expériences paradoxales, hors limites qui les mènent à un dur apprentissage de la contingence. Trudel étonne la critique par érudition et naïveté, poésie et humour, un imaginaire mythique. Dans La Rage (1989) de Louis Hamelin, nous avons affaire à un autre début romanesque qui met en scène un personnage original, Edouard Malarmé, ancien agronome et biologiste qui abandonne tout pour se réfugier sur les terres abandonnées de Mirabel. Il squatte un vieux chalet, passe son temps à jouer à la machine à bille et à boire jusqu’à la rencontre de Christine Paré, qui déclenche en lui une passion enragée. Il devient une machine détraquée qui confond tout et pousse à l’extrême les abus (alcool, sexe, violence) quand il ne se fige pas en états léthargiques de contemplation de son nombril. Pari « d’écrire compliqué » que l’auteur gagne. A la fin du siècle, Gaétan Soucy donne La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes (1998). On découvre un univers étrange, noir où vivent deux enfants élevés dans les lubies d’un père tyrannique et misogyne, sous une fausse cloche protectrice. La narratrice est une jeune adolescente (le Secrétarien) qui se forge son réseau sémantique afin de comprendre le monde. Un discours riche fait de néologismes, des termes du français populaire et argotique. L’écrivain continuera son entreprise dans l’affirmation d’un discours littéraire postmoderne par L’Immaculée Conception (1994) [10]. Dans le roman québécois de l’an 2000 dicte l’autofiction, déclarée ou non, le roman du je- me-moi. Exutoire ou thérapie personnelle des vécus plus ou moins déchirants.

5. Pour conclure La spécificité du postmodernisme québécois est la création du métarécit dans son acception de discours sur l’Histoire, bien ancré dans un contexte politique, social et culturel. C’est la grande découverte de la possibilité de cohabitation des différences. Il hérite ainsi d’une situation tributaire de la situation sociopolitique particulière du Québec se définissant par une certaine québécitude,

18 par rapport à soi, aux autres, au temps et à l’espace. Il s’auto-réfléchit au niveau de l’écriture par les voix du narrateur, par la présence de multiples références à la lecture, à l’écriture, à l’acte de la création, par une intertextualité latente. Le discours narratif moderne n’est plus linéaire, certes, il s’éclate à plusieurs niveaux de la diégèse, mais il ne s’anéantit pas. L’éclectisme et l’humour sont les stratégies textuelles privilégiées. Une caractéristique importante du postmodernisme est le questionnement perpétuel sur tout ce qui porte atteinte aux Savoirs humains: l’Histoire, les sciences humaines et exactes, la subjectivité, les idées reçues, les stéréotypes. On revisite tout sous une autre optique, dans le registre du pastiche ou de la parodie. La quête du moule fictionnel parfait qui reflète la nouvelle approche du monde s’accompagne de la quête identitaire de l’écrivain, qui débouche le plus souvent sur une ouverture sur l’univers et l’autre. Identité se définira donc par rapport à l’altérité. Temps et espace auront des portées symboliques: cyclicité des récits, plongée dans le Temps de l’Histoire, exploration et conquête de l’espace intime de soi et de l’Autre (l’espace physique reflète l’espace mental du personnage, lieu catalytique par excellence. La proximité étasunienne amène les romanciers à s’inscrire délibérément dans l’axe nord- sud. Les écrivains québécois s’approprient le rêve américain, ne serait-ce que pour mieux le démy(s)tifier, en déjouer les séductions. Le thème du voyage est récurrent, voyage spatial par le truchement duquel s’accomplit aussi le voyage intérieur du protagoniste. Le type récurrent, le personnage-écrivain, est du genre narrateur racontant, écrivant et protagoniste à la fois ou, en extrapolant, un intellectuel, un artiste. Sous ce masque sont autorisées toutes les interrogations, ouvertes et faussement naïves. C’est un professionnel qui doute fort de sa propre activité, de sa finalité qu’il remet sans cesse en question.

Notes : [1] Gilles Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide, cité sur http://www.litterature-quebecoise.org/p-modern2.htm. [2] Apud http://www.litterature-quebecoise.org/p-modern2.htm. [3] DOLQ, t.III : 1940-1959, Montréal, Ed. Fides, 1982, p. XXV [4] Voir Maryse de Francise Noël et Pélagie-la-Charrette d’Antonine Maillet, deux romans représentatifs dans ce sens. [5] Francine Nöel, Myriam première in Anthologie. [6] Volkswagen Blues de Jacques Poulin jouit d’une traduction en roumain et d’une préface par Denisa-Adriana Oprea, Cluj-Napoca, Limes, 236 pag., 2010, ISBN: 978-973-726-455-8. En outre, le titre fait allusion à la vieille voiture qui est chère au protagoniste et aux chansons tristes, françaises ou américaines que les deux entonnent ou écoutent le long de leur voyage et continue le On the road de Jack Kerouak (1957). [7] L.-M. Magnan, et Ch. Morin, Lectures du postmodernisme dans le roman québécois, Montréal, Nuit Blanche Editeur, 1997, p. 73-74. [8] Un autre roman de Jacques Poulin, Les grandes marées (1986) finit sur un constat pessimiste : le protagoniste dont le nom codé en registre parodique est Teddy Bear (traducteur de bandes dessinées). Vaguement misanthrope, il se réfugie avec son chat Matousalem sur l’île Madame pour devenir plus créatif. Là-bas, il est envahi par le vacarme progressif d’une micro-société envoyée par son patron : Marie, son double, la lectrice, Tête Heureuse, sa femme, l’Auteur et le professeur Mocassin, l’Homme ordinaire et l’Animal social. Il en est chassé pour sa marginalité. Mais, en quittant son cher nid, à la nage, pour l’île des Ruaux, il subit le phénomène de « peau de chagrin », sa peau pétrifie, comme celle du vieillard qu’il y rencontre. La leçon finale du libre est que seule la mort garantit la solitude. [9] A. Boivin, « Les romans de la désespérance » dans Québec français, printemps 1993, no 39, p. 97. [10] Pour les intéressés, quelques propositions de lectures postmodernes : Yves Beauchemin, Un Matou (1981) ; Robert Lalonde, Une belle journée d’avance (1986) ; Jacques Godbout, Une histoire américaine (1986) ; Monique Proulx, L’homme invisible à la fenêtre (1993) ; France Daigle, La vraie vie (1993) ; André Major, L’hiver au cœur (1992) ; Nelly Arcan, Putain (2001) ; Guillaume Vigneault, Chercher le vent (2001) ; Yann Martel, L’histoire de Pi (2003).

Bibliographie: Boivin, Aurélien, Pour une lecture du roman québécois. De Maria Chapdelaine à Volkswagen Blues, Ed. Nuit Blanche, Montréal, 1996. Boivin, Aurélien, « Les romans de la désespérance » dans Québec français, no 39/ printemps 1993. Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires du Québec [DOLQ], sous la direction de M. Lemire, tomes I-VII, Fides, Montréal, 1978-2007. Frédéric, Madeleine, Polyptique québécois. Découvrir le roman contemporain (1945-2001), Bruxelles, P.I.E. Peter Lang, coll. « Etudes canadiennes », no 4/ 2005. Gauvin, Lise et Miron, Gaston, Ecrivains contemporains du Québec. Anthologie, éd. Augmentée, Montréal, l’Hexagone- Typo, 1998. Hamel, Réginald (s.l.d.), Panorama de la littérature québécoise contemporaine, Montréal, Guérin, 1997. Imbert, Patrick, Roman québécois et clichés, Ottawa, Ed. de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1983. Kwaterko, Josef, Le roman québécois et ses (inter)discours, Québec, Ed. Nota bene, 1998.

19 Kwaterko, Josef, Le roman québécois de 1960 à 1975 : idéologie et représentation littéraire, Longueuil, Ed. du Préambule, coll. « Univers des discours », 1989. Lamontagne, André, Le roman québécois contemporain. Les voix et les mots, Montréal, Fides, coll. « Nouvelles études québécoises », 2004. Laurin, Michel, Anthologie de la littérature québécoise, 3e éd., Ed. CEC, Québec, 2007. Nepveu, Pierre, Ecologie du réel. Mort et naissance de la littérature québécoise contemporaine, Montréal, Boréal, 1988. Magnan, Lucie-Marie et Morin, Christian, Lectures du postmodernisme dans le roman québécois, Montréal, Nuit Blanche Editeur, 1997. Morel, Pierre (éd.), Parcours québécois. Introduction à la littérature du Québec, Chişinău, Cartier, 2007. Simon, Sherry, L’Hérault, Pierre, Fiction de l’identitaire au Québec, Montréal, Boréal, 1991.

Sitographie: o L’île : http://www.litterature.org/ o La littérature québécoise : http://www.litterature-quebecoise.org/, cours interactif de Jean-Louis Lessard o Bibliothèque électronique du Québec : http://jydupuis.apinc.org/; http://www.ibiblio.org/beq/pdf/index.htm o Association internationale des études québécoises : http://www.aieq.qc.ca/

20 On Narrative Modes: Or What Happens When Fictional Pain Cuts Too Deep

Ruxanda Bontilă*

Abstract: Writers must concern themselves with the degree in which dramatic illusion can manage the right proportion between the reader’s co-participation and affective involvement in, and torturous exploitation by the textual mechanisms of the fictional ontology. They believe in the necessity of poetic faith as much as they believe in the necessity of emotional safety/stability for the reader—whose stance is perceived as being that of an ally-into-emotion rather than that of a guinea-pig or scapegoat who takes onto them the ordeal of emotion poured through the text’s texture. The major claim, which I exemplify and discuss, relates to the solution some writers come up with when they feel that the fictional pain their writing produces can cut unbearably deep. Bringing forth four differing examples, I suggest that when writers begin to panic as to the possibility of inflicting irreversible mental, or even physical, pain upon their readers, they appeal to several textual face-saving devices: glosses (as in the case of S. T. Coleridge’s Rime); genesis explanation (as in the case of E. A. Poe’s Philosophy of Composition); forewords (as in the case of V. Nabokov’s “Introduction” to Bend Sinister); revisitations (as in the case of S. Dunn’s re-reading of The Guardian Angel). The four writers’ paratextual solutions to the problem of fictional pain management may also bring some illumination to the present day philosophical and psychological debate on narrative/counter-narrative vs. paradigmatic discourse, in terms of fictional aesthetics and human life too. Keywords: textual face-saving devices; narrative; counter-narrative; paradigmatic discourse; fictional aesthetics

Résumé: Nous ne saurions pas douter du fait que les écrivains prêtent attention à líllusion dramatique censée maintenir l´équilibre entre la co-participation voire límplication du lecteur et les tribulations lui étant éventuellement infligées par les mécanismes textuels forgeurs dóntologie de la fiction. Ils se fient aussi bien à la nécessité dáccepter la convention fictionnelle qu´à celle de maintenir l´état émotif stable du lecteur vu en tant qu´ allié sur le territoire de la sensibilité et dépourvu de tout ce qui pourrait le rapprocher dún cobaye ou dún croquemitaine auxquels on appliquerait une correction, fût-elle par líntermédiaire du texte. Lárgument prioritaire à láppui de ce que nous venons dávancer, repris et développé par lóuvrage, pointe vers la solution adoptée par certains écrivains au moment où ils sáperçoivent du danger couru dans leur écriture susceptible de blessure, dóutrepasser des limites supportables. La piste que nous poursuivons à travers trois exemples différents se veut illustratrice dúne série de solutions textuelles adoptées par les écrivains flairant déux-mêmes línduction au lecteur dún dérèglement mental ou de possibles douleurs physiques. De tels procédés sauve-face seraient: les gloses (S. T. Coleridge, Ballade du Vieux Marin); les explications génétiques (E. A. Poe, Philosophie de la composition); re-lecture (S. Dunn sý applique dans son poème Lánge gardien). Selon notre opinion, ces moyens paratextuels adoptés dans le cadre de la gestion de la douleur provoquée par lápproche dangereuse des sujets profondément humains sont à même de faire voir plus clair et dénrichir le débat philosophique et psychologique contemporain contre/narration vs. discours paradigmatique car ils touchent aussi bien à lésthétique de la fiction qu´à la vie humaine. Mots-clés: moyens textuels sauve-face; narration / contre-narration; discours paradigmatique; esthétique fictionnelle; théorie cognitive

Introduction: On Narrative and Paradigmatic Modes In the past few years, “narrative” has become “coin of the realm” in many domains—most spectacularly in journalism, but also in the fields of psychology and sociology—, and from thence, as Carroll nicely puts it, it has become “an artefact of ordinary parlance by way of chattering classes” (2009, 67 (1): 2). Philosophers, who, among other things, are in charge of the examination of the conceptual network of our ideas and categories, have lately joined the forum of ideas, thus spreading the discussion to the diverse regions of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical psychology. Since my concern is with questions about the relation of narrative to the emotions of both the author and the reader, and the management of these emotions in the case of highly emotionally charged texts, I propose, first, to look into a parallel two psychologists, Allan Cheyne and Donato Tarulli, draw between paradigmatic — i.e., psychological discourse —, and narrative discourse — i.e., fictional discourse —, and then, into a narrative inquiry by philosopher Aaron Smuts, concerning the conditions for re-identifying instances of the same narrative. Although the two

* Associate Professor, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

21 readings have significantly different goals to meet, I charge them instrumental in my subsequent construction of a metaphysics of reading of three different fictional texts whose common denominator is the impossibility of coping with the terror of pain—physical, spiritual, moral. Allan Cheyne and Donato Tarulli’s argumentation (1998) purports to show that narrative descriptions of person, place, and time, as reflected in Bakhtin’s taxonomies of novelistic genres (1986)—narratives of adventure and ordeal, and the bildungsroman—, find their parallels in the paradigmatic discourse of scientific psychology. As it comes out from the demonstration, Bakhtin’s description of travel romances and ordeal romances finds application in naturalistic and experimental reports in psychology. While Bakhtin’s historical typology of the Bildungroman has relevance in the application of the notion of development in the theoretical discourse of psychology. The two psychologists’ structural and conceptual parallels regard the explicitation of how implicit narrative structures and themes enable and constrain practice and theory in paradigmatic discourse. For the sake of my own demonstration, I shall mention Bruner’s (1986) concise summary of the characteristics of the different modes of thought—paradigmatic and narrative—, as presented in the above mentioned article (1998: 2-3). In brief, paradigmatic or logico-scientific mode of thought, according to Bruner, is characterized by: clear reference, well defined categories, rigorous observations, events explained by nomic subsumption—cause and effect relation falling under strict deterministic laws —; and it aims to be formal, logical and, if possible, mathematical. The paradigmatic dialect seeks for completeness, validity, closure, and agreement in the answers to explicit questions, which makes paradigmatic discourse, transparent, non-ambiguous, and language, denotative and rational. Narratives, on the other hand, are said to dwell on the local, temporal, historical, and emergent conditions of actions and experience, as they aim to be “good stories, gripping dramas, [and] believable …historical accounts” (Bruner, 1986, p. 13). They rely on particular examples and tend to sacrifice transparency of reference so as to communicate the meaning and importance of events. These listings of differences create an impression of radically different modes of discourse or thought. While it is true that the paradigmatic style/stance of writing maintains a certain methodological rigor the narrative style lacks, the two psychologists’ argument points to the idea that these apparent differences are largely matters of style and that the paradigmatic style is simply a specialized development of the narrative, as the paradigmatic continues to be structured and deeply informed by the narrative. Aaron Smuts’s argument (2009) about story identity and story type builds on the distinction between the story and its telling, which is in fact the basic premise of narratology. According to Chatman (1978), the basis for thinking that such a distinction can be drawn is what he calls the “transposability of the story,” which means that the same story can be told in a different way, even in a different medium. According to the transposability thesis, no matter the medium, if it is capable of narration, it can tell “Cinderella”—Chapman’s exemplification of narrative transposition. Smuts’s philosophical demonstration refuels the debate concerning the conditions for re-identifying instances of the same narrative. He examines alternate solutions to the query whether the selfsame story can be retold and expresses his worries that, on a strict theory of story identity, the putatively same story can never be told again, whereas, on a more lenient theory, it will be difficult to differentiate between a general story type and the putatively same story. Smuts argues that Chatman’s theory, according to which the preservation of the same kernel events represents the necessary condition for a telling to count as a retelling of the same story, may not hold true since many character and setting details also need to be present in order for something to count as a retelling of a story. In his view, any element of the story, kernel or satellite, could potentially be essential for story identity, since the salience of any given character or setting detail is the result of the presentation of the story and not the story proper. Smuts’s dilemmatic stance about the possibility of a plausible theory of story identity bases on two divergent views: (1) If the story is the complete set of events and existents included in the work, then the same story can rarely be told twice and can never be transposed; and (2) Not all the event, character, and setting details presented are part of the story; that is, some are part of the discourse. What I consider relevant from the above philosophical inquiry into the (im)possibility of story transposability, for my own discussion on the treatment of fictional pain is the reinforcement of Plato’s idea about the inflexibility of a text, its fatal inability to change its story (Plato, 275e, p.

22 141-147). Thus, Socrates’ say to Phaedrus — that a text is repetitive, unaddressed and unprotected, its author (father) being unable to reclaim his words once they have gone from him—is not very different from Smuts’s cautious conclusion to an emerging plausible theory of story identity, when he says: “that we can base a work on another story and that we can tell something very similar, but it is rare to tell the same story twice” (2009, p.12). As the story is rarely divorceable from presentation/discourse, then any misdescription by the discourse needs to introduce a plausible theory of fictional reference that would allow us/the author to misdescribe but not to fail to refer to fictional events, characters, and settings.

For a metaphysic of reading: On the treatment of fictional pain My own argument regarding the possibility of constructing a metaphysics of reading of texts whose common denominator is the terror/horror of physical, spiritual, moral pain bases on the following hypotheses: (a) Writers must concern themselves with the degree in which dramatic illusion can manage the right proportion between the reader’s co-participation and affective involvement in, and torturous exploitation by the textual mechanisms of the fictional ontology; (b) Writers believe in the necessity of poetic faith as much as they believe in the necessity of emotional safety/stability for the reader—whose stance is perceived as being that of an ally-into-emotion rather than that of a guinea-pig or scapegoat who takes onto them the ordeal of emotion poured through the text’s texture. The subsequent claim, which I will exemplify and discuss, relates to the solution some writers come up with when they feel that the fictional pain their writing produces can cut unbearably deep. By bringing forth three differing examples, I here suggest that when writers begin to panic as to the possibility of inflicting irreversible mental or even physical pain upon their readers, they appeal to several textual face-saving devices: glosses (as in the case of S. T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner); philosophical explanation (as in the case of E. A. Poe’s Philosophy of Composition); re- visitation (as in the case of S. Dunn’s re-reading of The Guardian Angel). I further claim that these paratexts may have the same function as the paradigmatic genres of psychology — i.e., naturalistic, experimental, and development reports —, in that they are meant to, first, evince, and then, assuage, if possible, the drama of human estrangement the fictional discourse stages. As diverse as they seem, these writers share several common features: they all believe in the animating power of language to either foreground or dissimulate the truth of human nature; they favour the symbolic over the allegorical as the former allows the union between the human word and the divine spirit/power of creation/ de-creation; they fuse the questioning spirit of philosophy/science with either religious faith/mysticism/belief in humanity; they create their own critical jargon they practice on famous readings in literature or even develop their own critical theories in the hope of defining the workings of the poetic and imaginative mind (i.e., Coleridge, Poe); they all seem to dismiss the allegorical, which is certainly consistent with their method of observing the mind, that of focusing on ‘the relations of things’ and not on ‘things only’; they all have a preoccupation with the nightmarish side of human consciousness under different guises (explorations of the dream-world, the mysterious, the supernatural—in life and beyond life—, the sensational, the horror of the known and the unknown); they all possess the psychology of attention as they are masters of detail maneuvering in order to validate their fictional ontologies; they all fight/protest against the mutilation of the human personality, against the transformation of man into a helpless marionette; they all intermingle humour with terror, the grotesque, social criticism, ethic behavior, and humanism; they are concerned with images of the double, which make possible the existence of masks of reflexivity, metastability, anamorphosis (Coleridge, Poe, in particular). They all, as cognitive theorists would put it, imagine intricate designs for their works with the purpose of, first, pointing out the process of imagining a new thing out of what is already known; and then, making a full display of the human mind at work. For instance, Coleridge’s prose glosses, added after seventeen years to his already famous poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, seem to enact the two arguments I mentioned in the introduction. They highlight, on the one hand, the differences between narrative and paradigmatic modes of thought, and, on the other hand, the arbitrariness on which the linguistic sign operates. Both instances favour my contention that Coleridge adds the glosses so as to assuage the drama of human estrangement the poetic discourse stages. If we assimilate the glosses to the psychological

23 experiential and development report partaking of the paradigmatic style of writing, then the impact of the terror, desperation and desire of a man enslaved, in mind and body — as transmitted by the poetic conflation of elements of romances of travel, ordeal and bildungroman, at the level of story and discourse—is muted since the facts only cannot literally speak for themselves, and no amount of transparent, referential description can bring them to life. In Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14 (1817/1986, pp 397-398), Coleridge admits that his aim in “The Rime” is to imagine “persons and characters supernatural,” and he was to make the supernatural seem so rooted in human psychology that readers would choose to “suspend their disbelief” during the act of reading. To this purpose, Coleridge chooses to make good use of the accounts of sea voyages in the epoch, but, very perceptively, he inverts Cook’s feats of courage into the mariner’s journeys into the sin, guilt, alienation and living death. The mariner’s voyage into a living death of superstition begins with a casting-out ritual, that of the arbitrary killing of the albatross. The mariner accepts the role of scapegoat because he knows that he has violated the crew’s taboo. Thus, becoming a pariah, he suffers from a worse plague since he has to work with the living dead. The many superstitions imbuing the poem help confer the mariner the aura of being haunted, and the poem the aura of haunting power. The mariner spellbinds those who come into contact with him. So, Coleridge had minutely planned, in De Quincey’s words, “a poem on delirum, confounding its own dream imagery with external things, and connected with the imagery of high latitudes” (qtd. in Fulford, 2002, p.52). In the 1800 edition, Coleridge most suitably subtitled the poem “a poet’s reverie” as he contends that a “night-mair is not properly a Dream; but a species of Reverie… during which understanding and Moral sense are awake tho’ more or less confused” (from Coleridge’s Notebooks III, 4046, in Fulford, 2002, p. 52). Coleridge is here referring to both narrator and narratee, since, as Fulford also remarks, “Poetry of this kind becomes like obeah, like a wizard’s spell or shamanistic rite, making an imaginary world seem real enough to affect readers physically – their spines tingling and hair standing on end. It places the ‘civilized’ reader among the ‘savage’ people he would like to feel superior to, making him experience the mental enslavement that is the superstitious imagination” (p. 53). The enslavement is performed through verse techniques, the result being that enmeshing effect of story and story-telling/poetic discourse purported to inexorably draw the reader inside. By having the prose glosses added in 1817, Coleridge makes explicit the difference between an experiential approach to the poem—wherein its meanings may be unfolded through the temporal process of storytelling — and a paradigmatic approach to the poem, which tempts completeness, validity, closure through the use of transparent, non-ambiguous, denotative language. Suffice it to take one example to see how the required reader involvement varies in the two modes of thought. In the verse, words acquire symbolic value which, in turn, confers them virtual memory, endangering thus the reader who can become as unstable, insecure as the wedding guest or the mariner of the story (I fear thee, ancient Mariner!/I fear thy skinny hand!/And thou art long, and lank, and brown,/ As is the ribbed sea-sand.// I fear thee and thy glittering eye,/ And thy skinny hand, so brown.’/ Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!/ This body dropped not down.// Alone, alone, all, all, alone,/ Alone on a wide wide sea!/ And never a saint took pity on/ My soul in agony. Part Iv, ll. 224-235). In the additional gloss or paradigmatic mode of thought, the reader is informed — through a narrative — about the psychological dilemma the two protagonists confront (The Wedding-Guest ‘feareth that a Spirit is talking to him; But the ancient/ Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to relate his horrible Penance. Part IV, gloss to ll. 224-235). Coleridge’s discursive power in the poem—causing the reader’s spine tingle and hair stand on end, as he looks with the eyes and listens with the ears of the wedding guest—is muted, or, at least, diminished in the glosses as far as terror of sense/mind annihilation of the reader is concerned. The glosses, partaking of the paradigmatic dialect, offer then some rational order in the development of the narrated events the verse narrative deliberately avoids to the purpose of constructing the gripping drama of human estrangement—the haunting auspices under which man was born. Poe’s explanatory text, The Philosophy of Composition, added one year after the publication of his poem The Raven in the New York Evening Mirror on Jan. 1845, besides constituting itself in a poetic cosmogony, is also a demonstration of the power of narratives to shape interpretations of causality by controlling the sequence in which information is revealed. My claim is that, along with other stories, this philosophical essay stages, on the one hand, Poe’s theory

24 of ‘the demon of perversity’— that which gives man the power to defy death if this allows him to investigate the unknown —, and, on the other hand, Poe’s contradictory nature, which reflects in the way he conceives of inspiration—at once a mysterious, absurd and strange act (The Raven) and a positive and calculated ‘investigation’ (The Philosophy). If, in the poetic discourse, Poe sets free the subconscious mind so as to create strange and terrible images of the unknown, in the essay, the poet-essayist demystifies the fear of death/superstition through the use of paradigmatic discourse aiming at validity, completeness, and clarification. My subsequent proposition, if I were to use Poe’s paradigmatic dialect from his scientific poem in prose Eureka (1848), is that in The Philosophy, Poe manages, in fact, to show what at a much larger scale he will try to show in Eureka, namely that, “in the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation” (2005, p. 24). In Eureka, Poe admits that he purports “to speak of the Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical – of the Material and Spiritual Universe – of its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny” in such a way “that the mind may be able really to receive and to perceive an individual impression” (2005, p. 24). In The Philosophy of Composition, Poe renders it manifest that no one point in the composition of his poem The Raven “is referable either to accident or intuition,” in the sense that “the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (1986, p. 482). Poe’s plea for the import of logic and the defiance of any “intuitive leaps” in the composition of the poem is rather hard, if not impossible, to accept from the poet who, only two years later in Eureka, under the guise of a controversialist, expresses his admiration for Kepler’s putative reply to the dogmaticians of truth about how he guessed, that is, imagined his vital laws: “Had he been asked to point out either the deductive or inductive route by which he attained them, his reply might have been – ‘I know nothing about routes – but I do know the machinery of the Universe. Here it is. I grasped it with my soul – I reached it through mere dint of intuition’ (2005, p. 40). Whether Poe, in his poem The Raven, like Kepler, in his laws foundation, has gone “intuitively and thus unbecomingly” or “decorously and legitimately,” as he feels obliged to demonstrate in his Philosophy, is of no special import to us. What is indeed relevant about the deductive-inductive reasoning behind the composing stages of the poem, is Poe’s unmasking of the impossibility “to confine the Soul – the Soul which loves nothing so well as to soar in those regions of illimitable intuition which are utterly incognizant of ‘path’” (2005, p. 38). The “progress of the construction” in terms of the degree of both the character’s and the reader’s gripping self-indulgence and despair, in the poem, is explained at length by Poe, in The Philosophy:

I saw that I could make the first query propounded by the lover--the first query to which the Raven should reply "Nevermore"--that I could make this first query a commonplace one--the second less so--the third still less, and so on--until at length the lover, startled from his original nonchalance by the melancholy character of the word itself--by its frequent repetition--and by a consideration of the ominous reputation of the fowl that uttered it--is at length excited to superstition, and wildly propounds queries of a far different character--queries whose solution he has passionately at heart--propounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture--propounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac character of the bird (which, reason assures him, is merely repeating a lesson learned by rote), but because he experiences a frenzied pleasure in so modelling his questions as to receive from the expected "Nevermore" the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow. Perceiving the opportunity thus afforded me--or, more strictly, thus forced upon me in the progress of the construction--I first established in my mind the climax, or concluding query--that query to which "Nevermore" should be in the last place an answer--that query in reply to which this word "Nevermore": should involve the utmost conceivable amount of sorrow and despair (pp. 486-7, my bolding).

And here is the climacteric stanza, which, as Poe says, should not be surpassed in rhythmical effect towards creating that fatal dénouement wherein the fantastic tone is replaced by the most profound seriousness:

25 "Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore— Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore." Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." (ll. 86-91)

“The profound seriousness” of tone Poe claims for the remaining two stanzas is surely capable to produce a cumulative, disintegrating terror of agoniser, agonised, creator and observer. The poetic discourse then iconically enacts its meaning through minute handling of versification and application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration—Poe so pedantically explains in The Philosophy. The “revolution of thought, or fancy, on the lover's part,” is intended, Poe tells us, “to induce a similar one on the part of the reader,” who by now has realized that there is more to this story than a mere fantasy about a bereaved lover-in-mourning entertaining a talking bird. The “suggestiveness” of meaning, which Poe also calls the “under-current of meaning” producing richness in a work of art (491), becomes pervasive throughout the narrative with the lines: "Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"/ Quoth the Raven "Nevermore!” (ll. 96-7). Poe concludes his essay, by pointing out the discursive power of the metaphoric expression “from out my heart,” which eventually permits the suggested meaning—that of the Raven as emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance—to come in the open. And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,/ And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,/ And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;/ And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/ Shall be lifted— nevermore. (ll. 98-103) In the vein of my demonstration on fictional pain assuagement, I take Poe’s essay as an exemplary textual face-saving device, which, paradoxically, reenacts the poet-theorist’s dramatic vacillation between reality and infinity, between two modes of thought or “discussion”—the ascendant and the descendent —, to use Poe’s own jargon with reference to the choice he has in discussing his thesis— the Universe —, in Eureka. If The Raven is the work of the soul in pain, The Philosophy of Composition is the work of reason which strives, through paradigmatic discourse, to bury those places that cannot be found out by means of reason, and thus bring some comfort to the endangered reader. In 2009, Stephen Dunn, a contemporary American poet, writes and publishes in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, a re-visitation of his poem The Guardian Angel, written in 1989, titled “The Poem, its Buried Subject, and the Revisionist Reader: Behind "The Guardian Angel." While acceding to the adage “Trust the tale, not the teller,” Dunn voices in the essay his old and new allegiances to a poem he, like Poe or Coleridge before him, had certainly not written “without guile or strategy” (2009, p. 6). But unlike Poe, for instance, he still allows his poem to surprise him, and, twenty years later, confesses to having come across “the buried subject—hiding like much of the world itself, not far from the surface” (p. 5). What I find compelling and in tune with my argument in Dunn’s re-visitation of his own poem is his admittance to the element of the unconscious that the poetic form/discourse brings to the poetic content, which may take over/deter the poet’s best of intentions. Thus, the series of allegiances, old or new, the poet endears are subject to modification and refinement as soon as the language starts to make its own demands. Starting from this premise, the poet’s “retrospective foray into the making of a poem” becomes “a recreation, thus a fiction, which is to say it's interested in approximating the truth” (p. 6, my italic). The revisionist poet-reader’s argumentation also builds on the assumption that eventful events are performed in a world, in which there are multiple possibilities, in which some things that could happen do not. The poem then becomes the result of false starts and false bottoms until poetic discourse finds its way into a yet to be disclosed meaning. A “what if” poem, as Dunn calls it, The Guardian Angel enacts the drama of choice, first, of the angel, and, then, of its writer, who cannot set up their minds to pre-established truths. The poem thus starts in disaffectedness: "Afloat between lives and stale truths,/ he realizes/ he's never truly protected one soul" (ll. 1-3), continues in reformation: “The angel of love/ lies down with him, and loving/ restores to him his pure heart” (ll. 13- 16), and ends in the angel’s return to duty, which proves no more effective than before: “Yet how hard it

26 is/ to descend into sadness once more” (ll. 1-18). The hard choice the Angel makes is given an extended explanation in the poetic discourse: When the poor are evicted, he stands between them and the bank, but the bank sees nothing in its way. When the meek are overpowered he's there, the thin air through which they fall. Without effect he keeps getting in the way of insults. He keeps wrapping his wings around those in the cold. Even his lamentations are unheard (ll. 19-28) As the poem is dragging its way into inevitable closure, the poet — creator and responder in one — chooses, consciously or not — upon his confession —, to have the guardian angel live with his ineffectualness, which might well mean, acceptance, resignation, or desperate hopefulness. Leaving the difficult choice to the Angel, the poet is admitting now to new allegiances: “to the poem's adjusted original impulse; to the texture, sounds, and rhythms of the language used so far; and to the unknowns of this new, governing drift” (2005, p. 8). Whatever the new governing drift is, it has to do with that illusion of orderliness and authority arising from some concordance between the “poem’s surface felicities” and the “pulse of its undercurrents;” that is, the poet’s determination to let the poem as a whole hold up “its revelations and concealments” (p. 9). The poet confesses, in retrospect, that he “only half-knew where [he] was going,” which allowed him to “avoid the perils of purposefulness,” or to “ride some uncodified energy” (p. 8). It is this “uncodified energy” or purposefulness avoidance which allows for as many “buried subjects/stories” as readers are. Such an example is the poet’s own story of the “buried subject” he discovers while reading the poem to some undergraduates: “I remember smiling as I told the class that the poem is an analogue of the poet's condition in America. The poet does his job, I said, and hardly anybody listens or cares. All his life he lives with his ineffectuality, his invisible presence, the reality that there's little evidence that he makes anything happen” (p. 9) — just one story, among so many other stories, of: “ineffectuality,” disaffectedness, desperate purposefulness. I take Dunn’s re-visitation as instrumental in my demonstration inasmuch as it functions as a defuser of subjectivism in the sense Bernard Williams (1972) gives to the concept, namely, it emphasizes the distinction while rejecting the supposedly consequences of it, by trying to show either that they are not consequences, or that they are not disquieting. In Dunn’s vein of thinking, buried subjects — the most elusive, opaque narrative —, whether the products of inattention or avoidance, can give poems a “behind-the-scene radiance” (p. 6), which a re-visitation — a paradigmatic type of writing — can bring to the fore. However, Dunn’s re-visitation, like Coleridge’s glosses, or Poe’s genetic writing, works as a reminder of Socrates’ words to Phaedrus, that a text is repetitive, unaddressed and unprotected, its author (father) being unable to reclaim his words once they have gone from him. Plato’s words, paradoxically, encapsulate the two directions my argumentation has followed: (1) the poetic/narrative text says its tale, holding up its revelations and concealments; (2) the author/teller, always well meant, strives to recover it, and the putatively endangered reader.

Epilogue Truth is, irrespective of how well an author blends his intentions with his discoveries, the reader always completes his poem, as a poem like a person emerges along with the world and it reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. This is to say that each paratextual solution, or textual face-saving device, as I call it, to the problem of fictional pain (i.e. pain caused by/through fictional discourse) we looked into can bring illumination not only to fictional aesthetics, in terms of the present-day philosophical and psychological debate on narrative vs. paradigmatic discourse, but it can say something about human nature/life too. Trust the teller/writer, not the tale/poetic discourse, and then you can keep safe from fictional pain.

27 References Bakhtin, Mikhail, Speech genres and other late essays, C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds, V. W. McGee, Trans.), Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1986. Bruner, Jerome, Actual Minds, possible worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Carroll, Noel, “Introduction”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67 (1), 2009, pp. 2-4. Chatman, Seymour, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Cornell University Press, 1978. Cheyne, Allan and Donato Tarulli, “Paradigmatic Psychology in Narrative Perspective: Adventure, Ordeal, and Bildung”, Narrative Inquiry, 8 (1), 1998, pp. 1-25. Coleridge, Samuel, Taylor, Biographia Literaria, in Abrams, M. H. (general editor), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986, pp. 386-405. Dunn, Stephen, Between Angels, New York: Norton, 1989. Dunn, Stephen, “The Poem, its Buried Subject, and the Revisionist Reader: Behind "The Guardian Angel," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 33, Issue 1, 2009: 5-10, published on line: 25 Sept. 2009. Fulford, Tim, “Slavery and superstition in the poems.” In Newlyn, L. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 45-59. Plato, Phaidros (Phaedrus), trans. Gabriel Liiceanu, Bucuresti: Humanitas, 1993. Poe, Edgar, Allan, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, London: Penguin Books, 1986. Poe, Edgar, Allan, The Philosophy of Composition, in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, London: Penguin Books, 1986, pp. 480-492. Poe, Edgar, Allan, Eureka: A Prose Poem. An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe (editie bilingva), trans. Donose, Maria, Bucuresti: Editura Didactica si Pedagogica R.A., 2005. Smuts, Aaron, “Story Identity and Story Type,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67 (1), 2009, pp. 5-13. Williams, Bernard, Morality. An Introduction to Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1972/1978.

28 Le chercheur, le personnage conceptuel de Maurice Blanchot

Anca Călin*

Résumé: Nous proposons d’aborder la question du personnage conceptuel chez Maurice Blanchot à travers une analyse critique du personnage Thomas qui apparaît dans les ouvrages Thomas l’obscur et Aminadab. Notre étude part de la grille que les philosophes Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari proposent pour l’analyse de ce type de personnage dans leur livre Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? Selon Deleuze et Guattari, la construction d’un concept suppose trois éléments : un plan d’immanence à tracer, un personnage à inventer et un concept à créer. Ainsi, du champ illimité de possibilités, toujours en mouvement, représenté par le plan d’immanence, le concept tire ses traits avec l’aide d’un personnage. Ce personnage qui contribue à la définition du concept, qui sert à la création du concept, devient ainsi un personnage conceptuel. Dévoiler Thomas en tant que personnage conceptuel qui aide Blanchot à la création du concept d’espace littéraire, telle est l’intention de notre travail. Mots-clés: personnage conceptuel, Thomas l’obscur, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari

Rezumat: Ne propunem să abordăm problema personajului conceptual la Maurice Blanchot printr-o analiză critică a personajului Thomas care apare în lucrările Thomas l’obscur şi Aminadab. Lucrarea noastră pleacă de la grila pe care Gilles Deleuze şi Felix Guattari o propun în vederea analizării acestui tip de personaj în cartea lor Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? După spusele celor doi filozofi, construirea unui concept presupune trei elemente: trasarea unui plan de imanenţă, inventarea unui personaj şi crearea unui concept. Astfel, din câmpul ilimitat de posibilităţi, în permanentă mişcare, reprezentat de planul de imanenţă, conceptul îşi extrage trăsăturile cu ajutorul unui personaj. Acest personaj care contribuie la definirea conceptului, care serveşte la crearea conceptului, devine personaj conceptual. A demonstra că Thomas este personajul conceptual care-l ajută pe Blanchot la crearea conceptului de spaţiu literar este intenţia lucrării noastre. Cuvinte-cheie : personaj conceptual, Thomas l’obscur, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari

Maurice Blanchot, quel statut dans le champ de la littérature? Critique littéraire et romancier ? « Maurice Blanchot fut romancier et critique », c’est la phrase qui ouvre presque toutes les éditions de poche de ses œuvres. Mais est-ce qu’on peut ranger Blanchot, un écrivain assez singulier, dans une catégorie ? Essayer de l’enfermer ainsi dans une classe va même à l’encontre de ses propos sur la littérature. Pour lui, les formes, les genres et toutes les répartitions n’ont pas de significations véritables. La poésie ou, plus généralement, la littérature représente pour lui la « décision [même] d’échapper à des contraintes » [1] qui « cherche à s’affirmer dans son essence en ruinant les distinctions et les limites » [2]. Les véritables créateurs, par leurs œuvres, s’écartent de la règle, des canons et réalisent quelque chose de nouveau, d’original, d’unique. L’œuvre de Blanchot s’oppose par elle-même à toute répartition dans une catégorie littéraire. Elle est d’un accès difficile, requiert une lecture exigeante et cause de l’embarras au lecteur à son premier contact avec ses textes. Le lecteur ne sait pas au début quel type de texte a sous ses yeux : est-ce de la littérature ou un commentaire critique ? Si Blanchot écrit des essais, des romans, des récits, des écrits d’ordre théorique, sous une forme unitaire ou fragmentaire, son œuvre reste plutôt difficile à fixer. Quoique la plus grande partie de ses commentateurs le lisent en tant que critique ou romancier, Blanchot n’est pas, à proprement parler, critique ou théoricien de la littérature, et romancier non plus. Est-ce que par ses études, Blanchot porte des jugements sur d’autres œuvres ? Est-ce que par son travail il met en discussion la valeur d’autres œuvres ? Ses nombreux essais ne représentent pas des interprétations et d’évaluations de certaines œuvres. Ils sont consacrés seulement en apparence à divers écrivains, prosateurs et poètes, comme Mallarmé, Kafka, Proust, Artaud, Rousseau, Beckett et plusieurs autres. En réalité, il utilise ces auteurs comme des exemples d’expériences qui confirment ses propos. Blanchot prend les écrivains sur lesquels il écrit plutôt pour ses partenaires, ses amis intellectuels « avec » lesquels il accomplit ses projets.

* Maître-assistante, Université « Dunarea de Jos », Galati

29 Ceux qui le considèrent romancier se rapportent aux ouvrages: Thomas l’obscur, Aminadab et Le Très-Haut, qui portent la mention de « roman » sur la couverture de quelques éditions, pas toutes [3]. Mais le rangement de ces textes sur les rayons « romans français » est-il juste ? Est-ce que Thomas, Anne, Irène qui apparaissent dans Thomas l’obscur sont vraiment des personnages, des type psycho-sociaux ? Est-ce qu’il y a là effectivement une narration fictionnelle, une intrigue ? Pour un lecteur superficiel, la réponse à toutes ces questions est positive. Même pour un lecteur avisé, cette réponse pourrait être affirmative, mais seulement au niveau de la forme. Parce que formellement, apparemment, Thomas et les autres sont en effet les personnages d’un roman. Mais le lecteur instruit se rend compte dès les premières pages que Thomas l’obscur, le chef-d’œuvre de Blanchot, est en réalité une ample métaphore qui illustre les frémissements, les vacillations intimes d’un individu dans l’acte de création. Au centre de ce texte se trouve l’effort de la pensée. C’est le travail et la concentration qui se cachent derrière toute œuvre, l’effort de l’esprit par lequel l’écrivain essaie d’obliger les mots à exprimer les pensées. La situation est semblable pour les deux autres textes, Aminadab et Le Très-Haut et aussi pour la prose plus courte, comme par exemple L’arrêt de mort, Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas, L’attente l’oubli, L’instant de ma mort, etc. En apparence, ils sont des romans ou des récits, mais, en essence, ce sont des textes philosophiques. C’est peut-être ici l’explication du fait que l’œuvre de Blanchot, et surtout ses romans, ont été catégorisés comme « illisibles », parce que normalement elles doivent être lues en tant que textes philosophiques, bien que l’expression soit littéraire et le roman ait une apparence de fantastique. Ils ne sont que des portes d’entrée dans la philosophie parce que Blanchot s’exprime sur un plan général qui caractérise la philosophie. Nous considérons que la plus importante contribution de Maurice Blanchot à la littérature et à la culture est la réalisation du concept d’espace littéraire, vu comme espace de construction. Et si nous prenons en considération les propos de Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari selon lesquels la philosophie est « l’art de former, d’inventer, de fabriquer des concepts » [4], dans ce cas, Blanchot prend sa place à coup sûr parmi les philosophes.

Thomas, chercheur conceptuel Selon Deleuze et Guattari, la construction d’un concept suppose trois éléments : un plan d’immanence à tracer, un personnage à inventer et un concept à créer [5]. Ainsi, du champ illimité de possibilités, toujours en mouvement, représenté par le plan d’immanence, le concept tire ses traits avec l’aide d’un personnage. Ce personnage qui contribue à la définition du concept, qui sert à la création du concept, devient ainsi un personnage conceptuel. Et le personnage conceptuel qui aide Blanchot à la réalisation de l’espace littéraire est Thomas qui apparaît dans les ouvrages Thomas l’obscur et Aminadab. Selon Blanchot, l’entrée dans la littérature se fait exclusivement par la lecture et la sortie, obligatoirement, par l’écriture. Les variantes ‘lecture sans écriture’ ou ‘écriture inspirée par un talent inné’ sont inconcevables pour le penseur français. Le processus qui a lieu entre ces deux limites (un texte, avant d’être lu, est une limite, ainsi qu’un texte après avoir été écrit devient toujours une limite) représente l’essence même de la création littéraire. Il s’agit d’un processus de lecture-réflexion-écriture, trois pôles d’une même démarche, que Blanchot illustre complètement dans son chef-d’œuvre, Thomas l’obscur. Comment s’appelle le sujet de cette démarche de lecture-réflexion-écriture ? Comment nommer l’individu qui accomplit en même temps le travail de lecture, de réflexion et d’écriture ? Nous apprécions que le terme le plus adéquat pour exprimer la qualité de l’individu dont parle Blanchot soit lecteur-chercheur-écrivain. Dire simplement lecteur, nous trouvons que c’est insuffisant. Dans l’acception contemporaine, l’acte de lecture est un acte passif qui n’implique pas nécessairement un acte d’écriture. Le nommer écrivain seulement, c’est toujours insuffisant puisque l’acte d’écriture n’est censé être qu’un acte de rédaction. Nous retiendrons toutefois le terme chercheur, non pas en tant qu’intermédiaire entre lecteur et écrivain, mais comme instance supérieure, parce que sa fonction implique simultanément travail de lecteur et d’écrivain. Le sens du terme chercheur utilisé dans ce travail est donc « tout individu qui cherche, qui étudie » et non pas celui, plus limité, utilisé couramment aujourd’hui de « titre donné à un spécialiste, le plus souvent attaché à un institut, à un organisme de recherche ».

30 Dans l’œuvre de Blanchot, le personnage conceptuel qui contribue à la construction de l’espace littéraire est donc le chercheur Thomas. D’habitude, dans une œuvre, le personnage conceptuel n’est pas nommé, il n’est pas du tout évident, il est même caché, le lecteur a le devoir de le reconstituer. Les choses se passent de la même manière avec Thomas, qui se dévoile en tant que personnage conceptuel au fur et à mesure que les textes de Blanchot sont lus. Bien que le lecteur puisse avoir la tendance à réduire le personnage Thomas à un type psycho-social, en réalité, Thomas n’est pas un personnage classique de roman qui participe à n’importe quelles intrigues, ni au moins un personnage bizarre, poussé vers la marge de la société. Apparemment, l’intrigue de Thomas l’obscur est banale en présentant quelques épisodes habituels de la vie d’un personnage comme des promenades, des rencontres, des amours, mais tous cela s’avère finalement se passer uniquement dans la tête de Thomas, dans ses pensées. C’est ce qui remarque aussi Jean Paulhan par l’analyse qu’il fait pour Gallimard:

« [Cet ouvrage] raconte les aventures de Thomas : bains, voyages, amours, rencontres. Les aventures seraient en soi banales si chacune d’elles n’était marquée par une suite d’horribles ou étranges métamorphoses où Thomas devient (non par façon de parler, mais véritablement) un mot, un grain de sable, un mur, un rien : une pensée, n’importe quelle pensée (et prend toutes les formes qui peuvent faire cesser le Thomas particulier, qu’il commençait d’être) » [6].

Thomas est donc personnage par sa pensée et non pas par ce qu’il fait. Toutes ses recherches, toutes ses hésitations, tous ses bégaiements se passent dans sa pensée, dans son for intérieur et non pas dans ses mouvements extérieurs, dans sa manière de parler, dans sa langue. Son corps est fait « des pensées et des désirs les plus intimes » [7], dit Blanchot lui-même de son personnage. Thomas est une pensée par son mouvement permanent qui ne permet pas au lecteur de l’arrêter, de le stabiliser comme il le fait d’habitude avec n’importe quel personnage classique de roman. Il est impossible de caractériser Thomas, de tracer son parcours parce qu’il est une pensée qui va dans toutes les directions, qui bégaie, qui hésite. Thomas est conceptuel parce qu’il « fait du bégaiement le trait de la pensée » [8], il oscille et cherche dans sa pensée et ainsi il devient une autorité par sa pensée. Comme « les personnages conceptuels sont des penseurs, uniquement des penseurs » [9], Thomas représente, pour le lecteur avisé, le chercheur conceptuel. Le personnage conceptuel et le type psycho-social renvoient toutefois l’un à l’autre, ils se conjuguent, mais ils ne se confondent jamais. Plus précisément, les traits de Thomas pourraient se retrouver dans un type psycho-social, chez un chercheur quelconque, à une époque et dans un milieu historique concernés. Mais ce chercheur en chair et os ne fait que vérifier et évaluer les traits du chercheur conceptuel. Et l’inverse est aussi valable, les frémissements physiques et mentaux du chercheur type psycho-social, ses attitudes relationnelle, existentielle peuvent devenir, comme disent Deleuze et Guattari, « susceptibles d’une détermination purement pensante et pensée [mais] qui les arrache aux états de choses historiques d’une société comme au vécu des individus » [10]. Le lecteur peut avoir aussi la tendance à dire que le personnage conceptuel est le représentant du philosophe, que Thomas est l’image de Blanchot. C’est même le contraire, le philosophe n’est qu’un exemple de son personnage, le nom Blanchot est seulement le pseudonyme du personnage. Par rapport à son concept, le nom Blanchot n’est pas historique, il est comme une « masque » [11] pour le devenir de son concept. À l’intérieur du texte Thomas l’obscur, le personnage Anne représente en fait le type psycho-social du chercheur. Au fur et à mesure que le lecteur entre plus profondément dans le texte, il se rend compte qu’Anne est le double du chercheur conceptuel Thomas (suggestion donnée par Blanchot lui-même, par le choix de ce nom, Thomas, qui en araméen signifie « jumeau »). C’est grâce à cette structure double que Thomas arrive à créer. Pour lui, chaque individu a « deux visages collés l’un contre l’autre. […] deux yeux […]. Et ainsi pour tous mes organes » [12], dit-il. Nous avons tous une partie consciente et l’autre inconsciente, comme dit Thomas :

« j’eus de moi une partie immergée, et c’est à cette partie perdue dans un constant naufrage que je dus ma direction, ma figure et ma nécessité. » [13]

31 Blanchot fait une dissociation, à l’intérieur de l’individu, entre la partie réelle, qui vit, homme en société, et la partie écrivain qui est plus abstraite et indépendante de l’homme social. Cela ne veut pas dire que l’écrivain ne vit pas, mais que cette partie de la réalité ne compte pas. Un bon écrivain oublie sa partie sociale quand il se trouve dans l’acte de création, il sort de soi-même pour entrer, s’immerger dans sa recherche créative. De l’autre côté, un bon lecteur lui non plus ne voit pas la partie sociale, humaine de l’écrivain, il ne voit pas du tout l’écrivain, il voit seulement le texte à partir duquel il crée à son tour. Le personnage Anne pourrait être interprété, d’un côté, comme la partie ‘écrivain’ de Thomas, son double, comme un « être qui était lui-même et qui se séparait de lui » [14] et qui, à la fin de l’histoire, meurt, comme tout auteur qui ne laisse pas de traces dans son œuvre. Ou, de l’autre côté, Anne se transforme dans l’œuvre de l’auteur parce que finalement l’œuvre est celle qui importe, l’auteur n’apparaissant plus dans son texte. L’auteur est l’œuvre-même. Au fur et à mesure que le lecteur lit Thomas l’obscur, il voit comme Anne se révèle, plus que Thomas peut- être, comme un personnage énigmatique. Le lecteur se demande sans arrêt que représente Anne, c’est un autre écrivain, c’est une œuvre, une langue peut-être. En réalité, elle est tout cela en même temps. Elle bouge, se transforme, se décolle de Thomas en devenant sa partie ‘écrivain’ pour qu’après elle devienne l’œuvre qui vit au moment que l’écrivain écrit ou le lecteur la lit (dans un même acte) et que finalement elle meure comme toute œuvre finie. L’œuvre, selon Blanchot, une fois lue, meurt, mais aussi si elle n’est pas encore lue, elle n’existe pas. Par rapport au type psycho-social, le personnage conceptuel est l’agent d’énonciation du concept, c’est comme une troisième personne qui exprime l’idée du concept et qui fait l’acte de parole, qui dit Je. En philosophie, les choses se font par la pensée et non pas par la parole:

« on ne fait pas quelque chose en le disant, mais on fait le mouvement en le pensant, par l’intermédiaire d’un personnage conceptuel » [15].

En conséquence, si un chercheur en chair et os lit-recherche-écrit, il le fait par l’intermédiaire du chercheur conceptuel, il le fait donc en tant que partie de Thomas. Selon Deleuze et Guattari, le personnage conceptuel, de même que le concept qu’il crée, se forme constamment, il n’est pas, mais il devient et « devenir n’est pas être » [16] parce que devenir, c’est la transformation incessante, le mouvement naturel des choses. C’est pour cela que tout essai de définition est loin d’être exhaustive, tout essai d’identifier des traits spécifiques ne fait que limiter l’envergure du personnage. Toutefois, pour pouvoir parler de ce type de personnage, les deux philosophes délimitent quelques traits qui le caractérisent, une sorte de grille par laquelle nous essayons de définir Thomas.

Traits dynamiques Le dynamisme vient de la pensée-même de Thomas. Les recherches qu’il entreprend, comme elles se passent toutes dans sa tête, dans ses pensées, lui confèrent ce caractère dynamique. L’image de la pensée est dynamique. Deleuze et Guattari disent qu’elle est même violente:

« Quelle violence doit s’exercer sur la pensée pour que nous devenions capables de penser, violence d’un mouvement infini qui nous dessaisit en même temps du pouvoir de dire Je » [17].

Le chercheur perçoit cette violence comme un mouvement qui vient de l’extérieur, une pensée, une voix qui est hors de soi. Il sent se retrouver dans un milieu qui lui provoque cette agitation intérieure. Le champ littéraire où Thomas fait ses recherches lui se montre comme une mer, parfois tranquille, où il trouve des éléments connus et où il a l’habitude de « nager longtemps sans fatigue » [18], de lire donc sans que quelque chose lui attire l’attention. Comme il ne trouve rien dans ce paysage, il prend le courage d’essayer un nouvel itinéraire. Et cette fois quelque chose le captive et il ressent en ce moment comme la mer devient tourbillonnante, la littérature donc plus intéressante. Il a peur d’être avalé par la nature, par la mer. Autrefois, le chercheur Thomas ressent la nappe infinie de la littérature comme un bois sans limites qui l’oblige à poursuivre des chemins inconnus et obscurs pour découvrir des réponses

32 ou pour se découvrir soi-même parce qu’il vit avec « la pensée incessante de l’inconnu » [19], comme l’appelle Bataille dans un fragment sur Blanchot. Thomas cherche sans arrêt, et au fur et à mesure qu’il trouve quelque chose il se rend compte qu’il est encore loin, mais en même temps il sait que ce qu’il cherche se trouve en lui. Tous ces milieux où il cherche (la mer, le bois, etc.) représentent sa pensée. C’est seulement une impression que cette recherche est faite à l’extérieur, en réalité tout se passe en lui-même. Cette agitation donne au personnage la vitalité et la force d’avancer et de descendre dans ses recherches qui ne finissent plus parce que la pensée est dans un mouvement sans arrêt:

« Ce qui est en mouvement, c’est l’horizon même : l’horizon relatif s’éloigne quand le sujet avance, mais l’horizon absolu, nous y sommes toujours et déjà, sur le plan d’immanence. Ce qui définit le mouvement infini, c’est un aller et retour, parce qu’il ne va pas vers une destination sans déjà revenir sur soi. » [20].

Traits relationnels et pathiques Tout chercheur ne peut pas rompre les liens avec l’extérieur, « prendre une liberté trop grande » [21] par rapport aux autres littéraires. Il ressent le besoin de connaître les opinions d’autres chercheurs qui confirment ses pensées, lui donnant ainsi du courage à les transmettre. Dans « la nappe sans fin » [22] qui est la littérature, Thomas retrouve d’autres chercheurs, ou plus précisément d’autres œuvres. Le chemin de quelques-uns lui paraît trop simple:

« Il prit pied à un endroit qu’utilisaient quelques nageurs pour plonger. La fatigue avait disparu. » [23]

Mais il y a aussi d’autres qui lui attirent l’attention, desquels il se sent plus proche. Ces derniers le sollicitent beaucoup parce qu’au début il ne les comprend pas et en même temps il sent qu’ils disent ce qu’il veut entendre. Ils l’obligent ainsi de réfléchir.

« Il découvrit un homme qui nageait très loin, à demi perdu sous l’horizon. À une pareille distance, le nageur lui échappait sans cesse. Il le voyait, ne le voyait plus et pourtant avait le sentiment de suivre toutes ses évolutions : non seulement de le percevoir toujours très bien, mais d’être rapproché de lui d’une manière tout à fait intime et comme il n’aurait pu l’être davantage par aucun autre contact. Il resta longtemps à regarder et à attendre. » [24].

Thomas a besoin de lire d’autres œuvres qu’il transforme en ses partenaires intellectuels pour qu’il se rende compte si sa démarche fonctionne. Ce qu’il fait, c’est une sorte de vérification selon les réactions des autres chercheurs. Il fait connaître son travail et il attend des réponses.

« Il préféra donc adopter une attitude moins franche et avança de quelques pas pour voir comment les autres accepteraient sa nouvelle manière d’être. » [25]

Parfois les commentaires ne le satisfont pas. Ses critiques se veulent bienveillantes, mais il les sent hypocrites. De toute manière, il a besoin de connaître d’autres positions.

« Évidemment, elles [les critiques] ne se montraient pas à son égard franchement hostiles, il pouvait même compter sur leur bienveillance […] ; mais il y avait aussi dans leur attitude quelque chose de sournois qui n’autorisait pas la confiance, ni même des relations quelconques. » [26]

Toutefois, Thomas réussit à attirer l’attention de quelqu’un ou plutôt une œuvre inconnue jusqu’à ce moment-là le séduit. C’est Anne, qui au début donne l’impression d’être elle-aussi une chercheuse, et qui est d’accord avec lui et admire sa démarche. Il est à remarquer qu’une sorte d’empathie s’établit entre eux dès le premier moment, avant même qu’elle fasse connaître son enthousiasme:

« À observer sa voisine, Thomas en fut frappé : c’était une grande fille blonde, dont la beauté se réveillait à mesure qu’il la regardait » [27].

33 Il serait agréable pour un chercheur d’écouter seulement les personnes qu’il aime et dont il se sent attiré ou plutôt de lire seulement les œuvres qu’il plaît :

« Tout en écoutant, il songea à l’éloignement de tous ces gens, à leur mutisme absolu, à leur indifférence. C’était pur enfantillage que d’espérer voir toutes les distances supprimées par un simple appel. C’était même humiliant et dangereux » [28].

Mais cela est impossible, même risqué et contreproductif. Connaître surtout les opinions contraires, cela lui permet d’avancer. Ces relations de partenariat, d’amitié que Thomas établit avec d’autres chercheurs ne sont qu’intellectuelles, parce qu’elles se font par l’intermédiaire de leurs œuvres. Ainsi, Thomas devient lui aussi un ami, mais « un ami qui n’a plus de relation avec son ami que par une chose aimée porteuse de rivalité » [29]. Cette « chose aimée porteuse de rivalité », comme la nomment Deleuze et Guattari, est l’œuvre-même qu’il aime, mais qui lui a retiré l’essence de ce qu’il aurait dû dire en tant qu’écrivain. Le chercheur Thomas est donc un ami, mais non pas dans l’acception ordinaire de type psycho-social, il ne s’agit pas de l’état privé d’un individu, mais de ce qui revient en droit à la pensée et seulement à la pensée:

« C’est la pensée qui exige que le penseur soit un ami » [30]

C’est même le contraire de l’ami psycho-social, c’est un ami qui s’isole en réalité, qui cherche la solitude. Ce refuge dans ses pensées donne à Thomas des traits pathiques. Pour pouvoir comprendre, penser et transmettre ses pensées, le chercheur a besoin de silence, de rester seul, s’isoler dans sa chambre avec ses livres au risque de paraître anormal aux yeux des autres. Sa manière de lecture, qui n’est pas une simple lecture, mais une véritable lutte intérieure entre mots et lui-même, déterminait ceux qui entraient dans sa chambre, et qui voyaient son livre ouvert toujours à la même page, à penser « qu’il feignait de lire. [mais] Il lisait. Il lisait avec une minutie et une attention insurpassables » [31]. Thomas était « si absorbé qu’il ne faisait pas un mouvement lorsqu’on ouvrait la porte » [32] de sa chambre. Il est seul en tant que lecteur, mais aussi en tant qu’auteur. Une fois son œuvre finie, il est content si les gens la lisent. Il désire que l’œuvre soit en première ligne et non pas sa personne. L’auteur se retire, veut rester solitaire. Dans une œuvre littéraire, il est impossible d’identifier l’auteur parce qu’il n’y laisse aucune trace. Sa vie privée et sociale ne se voit pas et la vie intérieure qu’il consacre à l’œuvre non plus. L’auteur est sans corps. Aucun élément d’une œuvre ne garantit la présence de l’auteur:

« Immobile contre la cloison, le corps mêlé au vide pur, les cuisses et le ventre unis à un néant sans sexe et sans organe, les mains serrant convulsivement une absence de mains, la figure buvant ce qui n’était ni souffle ni bouche, elle s’était transformée en un autre corps dont la vie, pénurie, indigence suprême, l’avait fait devenir lentement la totalité de ce qu’elle ne pouvait devenir. » [33]

Plus une œuvre est belle et bonne, plus l’auteur n’est pas senti.

« Le silence, le vrai silence, celui qui n’est pas fait de paroles tues, de pensées possibles, avait une voix. Son visage, d’instant en instant plus beau, édifiait son absence » [34].

La solitude et l’isolement deviennent pour lui un exercice risqué parce que, déconnecté du réel, il peut entrer dans une pathologie particulière comme la folie. Mais la même solitude se passe aussi dans la compagnie des autres:

« c’est la solitude qui créait autour d’elle le doux champ des relations humaines où, entre d’infinis rapports pleins d’harmonie et de tendresse, elle voyait venir à sa rencontre son chagrin mortel » [35].

34 Chez Thomas, les traits pathiques dus à la solitude et les traits relationnels dus à la compagnie des autres se mélangent d’une manière paradoxale en se complétant l’un l’autre.

Traits juridiques Deleuze et Guattari confèrent aussi au personnage conceptuel des traits juridiques pour autant que:

« la pensée ne cesse de réclamer ce qui lui revient en droit, et de s’affronter à la Justice. » [36]

La raison forme un tribunal où le personnage conceptuel devient juge. Le chercheur Thomas a du mal à comprendre au début si les idées, les mots, les images sont les siennes, lui viennent de par la lecture ou s’il les possède déjà et la lecture ne fait que les lui confirmer,

« c’était comme un creux imaginaire où il s’enfonçait parce qu’avant qu’il y fût, son empreinte y était déjà marquée » [37].

Il comprend finalement que ce n’est pas lui l’auteur de son œuvre. Les œuvres se nourrissent les unes des autres :

« non pas Socrate mourant, mais Socrate s’augmentant de Platon » [38].

Les idées, les pensées de plusieurs auteurs s’entrecroisent. Qui est l’auteur finalement ? Il n’est pas.

« Une jeune fille était assise sur un banc, je m’approchai, m’assis auprès d’elle. Il n’y avait entre nous qu’un faible intervalle. Même quand elle détournait la tête, elle m’apercevait tout entier. Elle me voyait par mes yeux qu’elle échangeait contre les siens, par mon visage qui à peu de chose près était son visage, par ma tête qui prit facilement place sur ses épaules. Déjà elle m’épousait. En un seul regard, elle se fondit en moi et, dans cette intimité, découvrit mon absence » [39].

Les auteurs ne se voient pas les uns les autres. Ils ne se distinguent pas :

« Elle [une autre chercheuse] avait pitié de cet homme sans tête, sans bras, complètement absent. » [40]

Les hommes sont comme une boîte de résonnance, ils reçoivent des paroles qu’ils transmettent plus loin, « des mots inintelligibles résonnèrent à mes oreilles » [41], dit Thomas. Ils réunissent toutes les connaissances, tout ce qu’ils entendent et voient, des mots et des images qu’ils digèrent, analysent, pensent donc et renvoient plus loin marqués par leur propre être. Le chercheur reçoit tout et renvoie la même chose dans une forme, sa forme, sans que sa personne y reste imprégnée. C’est comme s’il refait l’essai grossier de Noé, sans que Noé reste dans la vie de ses animaux auxquels il a donné une autre vie :

« [Il] renferme dans [son] absence le principe de totalité » [42].

Traits existentiels La manière de lire, de réfléchir, d’écrire qu’adopte Thomas n’est pas une auto-imposition, il ne se dit pas « que je lise, que je travaille comme ça ». Cette façon de travail est pour lui un mode d’existence, une possibilité de vie. C’est comme un métier qu’il aime énormément et qu’il fait par tout son être. Bien que cette occupation soit risquée et lui fasse peur parce qu’il doit affronter l’inconnu et il ne sait jamais son point d’arrivée, cette angoisse l’obsède et l’aide en même temps. Le personnage Thomas aime cette manière d’existence dont il est devenu dépendent parce qu’elle lui donne une certaine sécurité, le stabilise. Il y a une sorte de compensation entre les deux sentiments paradoxaux [43]. Il s’agit d’un cercle vicieux qui donne de sens à l’existence du chercheur Thomas.

35 Cette recherche permanente dans l’inconnu est l’expérience intérieure de chacun, ou, comme l’appelle Georges Bataille, la « nouvelle théologie » [44] du chercheur qui a comme seul but de « trouver dans les choses la part qui l’oblige d’aimer » [45]. La recherche de Thomas est son existence, son monde intérieur, qui occupe toute sa vie.

« Un monde est à ma portée, je l’appelle monde, comme, mort, j’appellerais la terre néant. Je l’appelle monde aussi parce qu’il n’y a pas d’autre monde possible pour moi. » [46]

Ce monde se détache du monde réel, il devient une sorte de « un film parallèle, ayant la consistance du rêve » [47], comme l’appelle Mircea Cărtărescu, écrivain qui traite la même question du dédoublage de l’homme-écrivain.

Conclusions Le mouvement infini de sa pensée fait de Thomas un personnage vif qui, ne cesse pas de changer. Les traits identifiés au-dessus sont limités, mais parce qu’ils sont pris seulement comme parties et cela ne veut pas dire que le personnage dans sa totalité est fini. Il ne peut pas être mesuré dans son ensemble parce qu’il bouge sans arrêt sous les yeux du lecteur, le même ou d’autres.

« Il est infini par son survol ou sa vitesse, mais fini par son mouvement qui trace le contour des composantes. » [48]

Ces traits représentent seulement les traces laissées par le mouvement du personnage. Plus il bouge, plus il laisse d’autres traces. Cela veut dire que plus il est lu, plus le lecteur en identifie d’autres. Chaque lecteur délimite ses propres caractéristiques de Thomas. Le personnage conceptuel Thomas trouve donc son territoire dans un espace littéraire, concept que Maurice Blanchot définit par l’ensemble de son œuvre. L’espace littéraire est un espace de recherche dans la littérature et de construction de la littérature, c’est « la recherche sans mesure qu’exige des hommes leur nécessité et la nécessité d’unir l’incompatible » [49] par lecture, réflexion et réécriture où l’écriture devient la trace de la lecture, sa mission ayant pour but que l’œuvre apparaisse et soit libérée. Le lecteur rassemble des idées diverses qu’il rencontre sur son chemin de chercheur, et il les tisse, les unit en réalisant ainsi son propre agencement d’idées.

Notes [1] Blanchot, Maurice, L’espace littéraire, Paris, Gallimard, 1973, p. 237. [2] Ibid., p. 294. [3] Bien que tous les livres soient parus à la même maison d’édition, chez Gallimard, il y a toutefois une inconstance ou une hésitation d’une édition à l’autre, ou plutôt d’une collection à l’autre. Ces textes, publiés au début dans la collection Blanche portent sur la couverture la mention de « roman », mais republiés dans la collection L’Imaginaire, ils ne portent plus la même indication. [4] Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991, p. 8. [5] Cf. Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, « Les personnages conceptuels », Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, op. cit., p. 74. [6] Extrait d’une fiche de lecture qui fait partie de l’archive de la maison d’édition Gallimard. Nous l’avons consultée à l’exposition Gallimard, 1911-2011 : un siècle d'édition, organisée à Paris, à la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, entre 22 mars et 3 juillet 2011. [7] Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur. Première version, 1941, Gallimard, Paris, 2005, p. 32. [8] Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, « Les personnages conceptuels », Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, op. cit., p. 67. [9] Ibidem. [10] Ibid., p. 68. [11] Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, « Qu’est-ce qu’un concept ? », Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, op. cit., p. 29. [12] Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur, Paris, Gallimard, 1950, p. 111. [13] Ibidem. [14] Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur. Première version, 1941, op. cit., p. 47. [15] Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, « Les personnages conceptuels », Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, op. cit., p. 63. [16] Ibid., p. 64. [17] Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, « Le plan d’immanence », Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, op. cit., p. 55. [18] Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur, op. cit., p. 9. [19] Bataille, Georges, L’expérience intérieure, Paris, Gallimard, 1954, p. 119. [20] Deleuze Gilles et Guattari Félix, « Le plan d’immanence », Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, op. cit., p. 40. [21] Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur, op. cit., p. 13. [22] Ibidem. [23] Ibid., p. 12.

36 [24] Ibid., p. 13. [25] Ibid., p. 21. [26] Ibid., p. 23. [27] Ibidem. [28] Ibid., p. 26. [29] Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, « Les personnages conceptuels », Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, op. cit., p. 69. [30] Ibid., p. 68. [31] Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur, op. cit., p. 27. [32] Ibidem. [33] Ibid., p. 71-72. [34] Ibid., p. 102. [35] Ibid., p. 79. [36] Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, « Les personnages conceptuels », Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, op. cit., p. 70. [37] Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur, op. cit., p. 12. [38] Ibid., p. 103. [39] Ibid., p. 116-117. [40] Ibid., p. 117-118. [41] Ibid., p. 114. [42] Ibid., p. 126-127. [43] « Écrire me fait très peur et j’adore écrire, les deux vont de paire », dit Herta MÜLLER, lauréate du Prix Nobel pour la littérature en 2009, dans la conférence soutenue à EHESS Paris, le 19 octobre 2010. [44] Bataille, Georges, L’expérience intérieure, op. cit., p. 120. [45] Ibid., p. 119. [46] Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur. Première version, 1941, op. cit., p. 311-312. [47] Cărtărescu, Mircea, « Gemenii », Nostalgia, Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2009, p. 170, (n.t.). [48] Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, « Qu’est-ce qu’un concept ? », Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, op. cit., p. 26. [49] Blanchot, Maurice, Lettre à Georges Bataille, le 24 janvier 1962, in BATAILLE Georges, Choix de lettres 1917 – 1962, Paris, Gallimard, 1997, p. 596.

Bibliographie Bataille, Georges, L’expérience intérieure, Paris, Gallimard, 1954. Blanchot, Maurice, L’espace littéraire, Paris, Gallimard, 1973. Blanchot, Maurice, Lettre à Georges Bataille, le 24 janvier 1962, in BATAILLE Georges, Choix de lettres 1917 – 1962, Paris, Gallimard, 1997. Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur, Paris, Gallimard, 1950. Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur. Première version, 1941, Gallimard, Paris, 2005. Cărtărescu, Mircea, « Gemenii », Nostalgia, Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991

37 Les limites des influences européennes sur le discours littéraire des écrivains roumains au XXe siècle Costandache Ana-Elena*

Abstract: The influence of foreign cultures on Romanian cultures has brought along the renewal and reorganization of existing, traditional patterns. The organization of political, cultural and literary life has adapted the European influences to the local realities. In the context of the plethora of influences in the XIXth century, everything that we had culturally “borrowed” was an useful asset for the national spiritual wealth, but within certain limits. Thus, we want to know where the European culture stops exerting influence on the literary discourse of Romanian writers from that époque. Key-words: influences, literary discourse, culture, limits, literature.

Pour mieux comprendre l’originalité et l’esprit de la littérature roumaine du XIXe siècle, il faut mettre en question les sources d’inspiration, leurs interférences et leurs influences qui se sont manifestées dans les œuvres publiées, mais surtout dans la manière de penser des écrivains de 1848. Paul Cornea observait que les recherches comparatistes étaient nombreuses en ce qui concernaient l’exploitation « des influences » et « des sources », en laissant de coté ou en ignorant les implications d’ordre psychologique et social de « la réception » [1] des œuvres étrangères dans l’univers littéraire roumain. Le concept de « réception » était perçu à l’époque de manière différente par rapport à celui d’ « influence », car l’on faisait référence aux « liaisons » entre les œuvres littéraires, les auteurs, les lecteurs et les éditeurs. On visait, en fait, les domaines de la création et de la diffusion de l’écriture, en même temps que la popularité et la manière où le livre était reçu par le lecteur. Dimitrie Bolintineanu faisait quelques observations sur les transformations et le rôle des influences étrangères, surtout des modèles français : « L’esprit de la restauration de Francia… créait des imitateurs chez le Roumains. La poésie classique grecque fut oubliée et l’on adoptait la poésie lamentée, selon le modèle français. Les poètes roumains s’inspiraient des livres des poètes étrangers. » [2] (notre trad.) Les influences étrangères ont été ressenties à tous les niveaux de la vie sociale, politique et culturelle. Dans ce sens, D. Bolintineanu notait : « Heliade fut le maître de la versification des poètes de ce temps-là. Ses traductions furent réussies. […] Chaque jour, la langue roumaine se transforme et l’on oublie ce qui tient à la spécificité nationale ; un esprit de cosmopolitisme, né de la corruption des traditions et des coutumes… » [3] (notre trad.) En observant les nombreuses influences de l’époque, influences que les écrivains roumains « ont reçues » afin de renouveler leurs œuvres, Gheorghe Asachi notait dans ses Ecrits : « Depuis que le sort favorable des Roumains a ouvert les voies vers la civilisation, beaucoup de jeunes gens, animés d’une certaine volonté, se donnent la peine à enrichir la langue et les idées des compatriotes. » [4] (notre trad.) En outre, Asachi observait que la langue roumaine, était « appauvrie » de certains mots et il plaidait pour les emprunts des autres langues, telles que l’italien ou le français, afin de les adapter au roumain : « …Les mots qui manquent, les phrases et les dictons seront empruntés de l’italien, en leur donnant la forme et le sens du roumain. » [5] (notre trad.) Cezar Bolliac rejetait l’idée des influences étrangères qui attiraient l’attention du public lecteur et qui n’apportaient aucun bénéfice aux écrits en roumain. En outre, « le mélange » des langues « nuisait » au fond lexical roumain dans la mesure où les lecteurs ne comprenaient plus leur propre langue : « On est mecontent car nos lecteurs ne lisent plus les publications en langue roumaine. On n’écrit plus en roumain. Prenons, par exemple, les publications politiques, littéraires, les discours des députés, les projets de lois, ce ne sont qu’un mélange de roumain et de français ! » [6] (notre trad.) En continuant l’idée des influences étrangères, Cezar Bolliac condamnait radicalement l’influence française : « Pauvre notre langue… la langue de nos parents… qu’est-ce qu’elle est devenue ! Comme elle l’était autrefois noyée de mots grecs, aujourd’hui « oppressée » de termes

* Université « Dunarea de Jos » de Galaţi

38 français. Les écrivains, en même temps que les hommes politiques, ne font qu’adapter les termes du français en roumain. » [7] (notre trad.) C. Bolliac faisait des observations concernant le manque de critères sélectifs des influences étrangères qui mettaient leur empreinte sur le fond lexical roumain de sorte que la lecture des œuvres littéraires soit difficile. « C’est l’élément étranger qui nous attire à présent. On adopte le modèle étranger, mais c’est un modèle qui n’est pas à suivre. [...] Le mélange linguistique n’est pas utile; on ne comprend rien de tout ce qu’on parle...” [8] (notre trad.) Les partisans et les adversaires des influences étrangères ont visé la manière dont les écrits étaient compris par le public lecteur, compte tenant de la politique éditoriale. Les relations culturelles des Pays Roumains avec les pays européens visaient surtout la vie sociale et les activités culturelles « La littérature et l’art de l’autre ont suscité une certaine curiosité grâce à une mutation du système des valeurs. » [9] (notre trad.) Le climat intellectuel était favorable aux relations avec les pays étrangers. Quant aux influences, Dan Grigorescu prenait en considération l’idée de faire répandre les informations, idée liée à celle de « faire circuler les images », ce qui pourrait être interprété comme une variante neutre du concept d’« influence ». En outre, Grigorescu établissait la distinction entre deux éléments : « la ressemblance » et « la causalité ». [10] La culture roumaine a trouvé ses sources d’inspiration dans l’univers des cultures étrangères grâce aux reprises thématiques, aux modifications, aux traductions qui ont représenté la base assise de la modernité roumaine. Pourtant, tout se liait à la spécificité roumaine qui devait être conservée, même si l’on a apporté des nouveautés dans l’univers littéraire. Eugen Simion notait dans son étude Fragmente critice (Fragments critiques) : « Si l’on fait une analyse du phénomène littéraire roumain, l’on observe qu’il n’y a aucune influence qui soit entièrement nouvelle. La langue est un modèle qui fait modeler à son tour… » [11] (notre trad.) L’association avec l’idée de « l’européanisation » a été faite un peu plus tard par rapport à d’autres cultures et la littérature roumaine « a reçu » de nombreuses influences au niveau du rythme de son développement et surtout au niveau de ses recherches artistiques. Les critiques littéraires considèrent que la culture roumaine était à ses débuts, jeune, débarrassée de toutes les conventions qui avaient influencé d’autres littératures. [12] (notre trad.) L’orientation vers des renouvellements et la tendance radicale de synchronisation avec les pays européens économiquement et culturellement développés a été la caractéristique principale de l’époque des années 1848. Duţu a traité le problème des transformations de la culture roumaine, en le qualifiant comme un problème à double articulation, car la culture roumaine « se trouvait au carrefour d’une littérature ancienne (élaborée jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle) et une littérature moderne, romantique, du XIXe siècle. » [13] Pendant son évolution, la littérature roumaine a établi des liens avec des modèles littéraires étrangers en recourant aux acquisitions thématiques, à la traduction, ou même à des éléments originaux qui constituaient la base littéraire moderne, mais ayant également une continuité avec la littérature roumaine ancienne. Tout en conservant ce qui était considéré comme original et purement roumain, on a réussi à créer des pré-requis pour une européanisation spirituelle représentée par des intellectuels instruits et formés en Occident, intellectuels qui ont compris la nécessité d’une modernisation radicale de la société roumaine et qui ont réussi à ramener des nouveautés dans tous les domaines, surtout dans les domaines culturel et littéraire. Leurs résultats ont été surprenants, comme une conséquence positive de tout ce qui a été entrepris comme un acte de culture et de modernisation dans les Pays Roumains. Les modèles culturels des pays voisins ont été repris et adaptés au contexte socioculturel roumain du XIXe siècle. D’ailleurs, l’influence étrangère sur la langue roumaine a été bien ressentie, alors qu’il est connu que les frontières politiques n’ont jamais coïncidé avec les frontières linguistiques ; on ne peut pas les délimiter avec précision et le roumain s’est enrichi, grâce à son vocabulaire diversifié et hétérogène. La modification des formes culturelles a favorisé l’interpénétration des cultures, afin que l’on puisse identifier certains « concepts et images similaires au niveau des cultures apparemment différents. » [14] (notre trad.) Les influences venues de l’étranger ont principalement porté sur la satisfaction « des besoins d’illusions des gens » [15] et les intellectuels roumains formés à l’étranger (comme par exemple Gheorghe Asachi – qui a étudié à Vienne, ou Vasile Alecsandri et

39 Ion Heliade-Rădulescu et qui ont fait leurs études à Paris) ont adapté leurs écrits conformément aux attentes des lecteurs des Pays Roumains. Pour les écrivains de la génération de 1848 la modernité a représenté un problème de recherche identitaire. Les transformations importantes de l’époque ont été générées par les groupes d’intellectuels animés par les idéaux révolutionnaires de la culture roumaine dans son ensemble. En rentrant des pays européens où ils avaient étudié ou s’étaient perfectionnés, les intellectuels ont créé des sociétés culturelles et littéraires affiliées, dans leur majorité, aux différentes orientations politiques ou ayant certains objectifs politiques. Les écrivains roumains ont oscillé entre l’idéal d’écriture romantique, selon le modèle de l’Occident et les réalités imposées par le pouvoir politique de Roumanie. À cet égard, Cornea consacre tout un chapitre au phénomène élans et inerties littéraires de l’époque de 1848, en s’appuyant sur la littérature de la noblesse – une littérature „rationaliste”, classique au niveau du thème, de l’image, de la composition, qui aspirait à atteindre un tel plafond de la rhétorique, mais aussi sur la littérature traditionnelle, des villages, où le folklore occupait sa place à part, comprenant des mythes et des coutumes profondément enracinés dans l’esprit des masses. Selon les observations de Cornea, il était difficile de préciser exactement combien de traductions ont été source d’inspiration pour certaines œuvres originales. Dans cette perspective, l’influence peut être considérée comme une intention artistique particulièrement visible dans le vocabulaire utilisé par les écrivains traducteurs de cette époque-là. Toutefois, les problèmes des traductions n’ont pas été si simples, car les traducteurs – écrivains de la génération de 1848 – ont oscillé entre deux mondes, c’est-à-dire deux cultures, plus ou moins différent(e)s. D’ailleurs, l’idée de traduction et interprétation a été certainement connue par ceux qui ont osé franchir les formes littéraires roumaines et lexicales nouvelles. La lutte contre les imitations et contre les traductions médiocres, d’une part, et, de l’autre, le souhait de créer une littérature nationale en stimulant les écrits originaux inspirés de l’histoire du pays, de sa beauté et des habitudes populaires pittoresques ont conduit à l’originalité littéraire. Le désir d’une synchronisation avec d’autres cultures considérées comme élitistes et le transfert d’idées – tout s’est accompli par l’intermédiaire des traductions. Les aspirations des écrivains de l’époque étaient de créer de nouveaux modèles littéraires en se confrontant, d’une part, avec les grands classiques de la littérature mondiale, dont la valeur était déjà reconnue et, d’autre part, avec les traducteurs qui s’étaient déjà imposés aux lecteurs. Mais les traductions ont influencé de manière significative les changements des formes littéraires et des sens, qui se sont radicalement transformés. Ces modifications se sont produites surtout si le traducteur ne maîtrisait pas la langue du texte d’origine et si « la personnalité du traducteur était trop forte et influençait le texte traduit. » [16] (notre trad.) Toutefois, « la traduction n’est pas vue comme un bénéfice pour l’œuvre traduite, ni pour l’œuvre originale. » [17] (notre trad.) « Les inconvénients de la traduction étaient nombreux et les écrivains cherchaient à traduire en retraduisant certains textes. » [18] (notre trad.) Les nombreuses traductions réalisées dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle ont représenté un acte symbolique par lequel on marquait le transfert littéraire sous forme d’imitations de la langue française. Les imitations traduites gardaient l’empreinte des traducteurs, car elles suggéraient plutôt l’état d’esprit de l’artiste qui imitait que l’état d’esprit de l’artiste imité. De ce point de vue, l’influence peut être comprise comme intention artistique à la fois. « Les influences indirectes étaient plus fréquentes que les influences directes: on imitait les imitateurs. » [19] (notre trad.) Les relations littéraires se sont intensifiées grâce au fait que la littérature occupait une place importante dans la vie sociale et que les activités intellectuelles, concrétisées en études faites à l’étranger s’étaient multiplies: « La littérature et l’art ont éveillé un intérêt plus grand grâce à la modification du système des valeurs.” [20] (notre trad.) Le climat intellectuel permettait l’intensification des relations et leurs interférences ont été nombreuses et décisives. Les influences françaises du XIXe siècle représentent, d’une part, le résultat des événements de l’époque, dans une période de réorganisation politique et, d’autre part, la demande spirituelle du public lecteur, assoiffé de connaître les réalités étrangères : « Son but, (de la littérature) sera, particulièrement, de populariser le plus possible la culture des lettres et le goût des arts …” [21] (notre trad.) Pour conclure, on pourrait affirmer que la plupart des écrits de l’époque portaient le signe des influences étrangères, avec des éléments originaux, novateurs. L’abondance des œuvres

40 étrangères dans l’espace culturel roumain du XIXe siècle, soit qu’on se rapporte aux premiers romans roumains, ceux du début, encore en quête du genre, de la forme et du moyen d’attirer le public nouveau (celui d’après la révolution de 1848, habitué surtout avec ce qu’il trouvait en bas des pages des journaux du temps), soit qu’on considère le grand nombre de romans populaires parus vers la fin du siècle et au début du siècle suivant, justifie l’essai d’élaboration d’une possible typologie des écrits roumains. L’influence des cultures étrangères sur la culture roumaine a signifié des modifications au niveau de l’organisation de la vie et les cultures étrangères, d’emprunt, ont été ressenties comme un capital étranger, qui mettait en scène une richesse qui devait être cultivée.

Notes [1] Cornea, Paul, Originile romantismului românesc [Les origines du romantisme roumain], Ed. Cartea Românească, Bucureşti, 2008, p. 84. [2] Bolintineanu, Dimitrie, Opere alese [Œuvres choisies], vol. II, Ed. pentru Literatură, Bucureşti, 1961, p. 556. („Spiritul restauraţiei din Francia... crea la romîni imitatori. Poezia clasică greacă fuse uitată şi se adoptă poezia plîngîndă dupe malurile Senei. Poeţi romîni se inspirau din cărţile poeţilor streini.”). [3] Ibidem, p. 559. („Heliade fuse profesorul în versificaţie al poeţilor din timpul acela. El reuşi în traducţiunile sale poetice. [...] Din zi în zi tot se dezromîneşte; un spirit de cosmopolitism, născut din corupţiunea datinelor...”). [4] Asachi, Gheorghe, Scrieri alese [Ecrits choisis], Ed. de Stat pentru Literatură, Bucureşti, 1967, p. 332. („De cînd soarta, romînilor favorisitoare, au deschis căile pe care au a păşi pentru a agiunge la scopul dorit a civilizaţiii, mulţi tineri, însufleţiţi de o vrednică de laudă dorinţă, ostenesc în deosăbite ramuri, cu ţintire de a înavuţi limba şi ideile compatrioţilor.”). [5] Ibidem, p. 146. („...Cuvintele ce ni lipsesc, frazele şi diciile nouă, au a se împrumuta de la cea italiană, dîndu-li forma şi terminatul romînesc.”). [6] Bolliac, Cezar, Pagini alese [Pages choisies], Ed. de Stat pentru Literatură şi Artă, Bucureşti, 1959, p. 210. („Ne plîngem de ce publicul nu mai ceteşte foile şi cărţile româneşti. Nu se mai scrie româneşte. Vedeţi gazetele politice, literare, discursurile deputaţilor, proiectele de legi, tot ce se scrie încă, dacă aceste lucruri sunt scrise în limba română; dacă această romîno-franceză o mai poate întelege publicul romîn!”). [7] Ibidem, p. 210. („Biata limbă a părinţilor noştri este astăzi ceea ce era sub fanarioţi, atît că atunci era înecată de vorbe grece, şi astăzi este înecată de vorbe franceze. Zgîrietorii de hîrtie, sau în dominul politicei, sau al literaturei şi altele, nu mai fac decît să ia toate vorbele franceze şi să le pună o coadă romînească.”). [8] Ibidem, p. 211. („Vîntul bate la străinism. Luăm tot ce are străinul rău la dînsul. [...] Păcătuirea cu vorbele franceze este desfrînată pînă a nu se mai înţelege ce a vrut să ne zică. Traducătorul nu este poet. [...] Poporul nu mai înţelege nimic în această limbă a veneticilor; nu mai înţelege nimic în literatură; nu mai înţelege legile făcute de oamenii cari nu au alt merit decît să traducă rău din limba franceză într-o limbă păsărească şi să nu înţeleagă nici chiar ei ce traduc.”). [9] Duţu, Al, Literatura comparată şi istoria mentalităţilor [La littérature comparée et l’histoire des mentalités], Ed. Univers, Bucureşti, 1982, p. 160. („Literatura şi arta celuilalt au stârnit o curiozitate mult mai mare datorită schimbării sistemului de valori.”). [10] Grigorescu, Dan, Introducere în literatura comparată [Introduction dans la littérature comparée], Ed. Universal Dalsi, Semne, Bucureşti, 1997, p. 159. [11] Simion, Eugen, Fragmente critice, I, Scriitura taciturnă şi scriitura publică [Fragments critiques, I, L’écriture taciturne et l’écriture publique], Ed. Grai şi Suflet – Cultura Naţională, Bucureşti, 1998, p. 117. („Dacă analizăm fenomenul literar românesc observăm că, exceptând cazurile minore, nici o influenţă nu este integral modelatoare şi nici total catalitică. Limba este, ea însăşi, un model care filtrează, îndepărtează, modelează un model modelator…”). [12] Duţu, Al., Umaniştii români în cultura europeană [Les humanistes roumains dans la culture européenne], Ed. Minerva, Bucureşti, 1974, p. 45. („Cultura română se înfăţişa tânără, nealterată de convenţiile ce maturizaseră alte literaturi...”). [13] Duţu, Al., Literatura comparată şi istoria mentalităţilor [La littérature comparée et l’histoire des mentalités], éd. citée, p. 53. [14] Ibidem, p. 150. („concepte şi imagini similare în culturi aparent distanţate.”). [15] Drăgan, Ioana, Romanul popular în România. Literar şi paraliterar [Le roman populaire en Roumanie. Littéraire et paralittéraire], Ed. Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, Cluj, 2001, p. 63. [16] Grigorescu, Dan, œuvre citée, p. 114. („...personalitatea traducătorului e prea puternică şi îşi pune pecetea pe textul tradus.”). [17] Ibidem, p. 12. („traducerea nu e în avantajul operei de transpunere literară şi nici a originalului.”). [18] Vatra [L’Âtre], nr. 4, aprilie 2008, Târgu-Mureş, p. 24. („Dezavantajele sunt numeroase, astfel încât se ajungea „în situaţia de a-l traduce (limbajul) în propria noastră limbă.”). [19] Grigorescu, Dan, œuvre citée, p. 170. („Influenţele indirecte erau mai frecvente decât influenţele directe: se imitau imitatorii.”). [20] Duţu, Al. (1982). Literatura comparată şi istoria mentalităţilor [La littérature comparée et l’histoire des mentalités], éd. citée, p. 160. („Literatura şi arta celuilalt au stârnit o curiozitate mult mai mare datorită schimbării sistemului de valori.”).

41 [21] Piru, Alexandru, Istoria literaturii române de la început până în prezent [L’Histoire de la littérature roumaine du début jusqu’à présent], Ed. Univers, Bucureşti, 1981, p. 49. („Scopul său va fi mai ales de a populariza cât mai mult cultura literelor şi gustul artelor sale…”).

Bibliographie - Asachi, Gheorghe, Scrieri alese, Ed. de Stat pentru Literatură, Bucureşti, 1967. - Bolintineanu, Dimitrie, Opere alese, vol. II, Ed. pentru Literatură, Bucureşti, 1961. - Bolliac, Cezar, Pagini alese, Ed. de Stat pentru Literatură şi Artă, Bucureşti, 1959. - Cornea, Paul, Originile romantismului românesc, Ed. Cartea Românească, Bucureşti, 2008. - Drăgan, Ioana, Romanul popular în România. Literar şi paraliterar, Ed. Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, Cluj, 2001. - Duţu, Al, Literatura comparată şi istoria mentalităţilor, Ed. Univers, Bucureşti, 1982. - Duţu, Al., Umaniştii români în cultura europeană, Ed. Minerva, Bucureşti, 1974. - Grigorescu, Dan, Introducere în literatura comparată, Ed. Universal Dalsi, Semne, Bucureşti, 1997. - Piru, Alexandru, Istoria literaturii române de la început până în prezent, Ed. Univers, Bucureşti, 1981. - Simion, Eugen, Fragmente critice, I, Scriitura taciturnă şi scriitura publică, Ed. Grai şi Suflet – Cultura Naţională, Bucureşti, 1998. - Vatra [L’Âtre], nr. 4, aprilie 2008, Târgu-Mureş.

42 Le contexte socioculturel totalitaire et les fictions identitaires de l’écrivain: une analyse des entretiens narratifs [1]

Alina Crihană*

Abstract: Within the post-totalitarian debate of the “conservators” against the “revisionists” focusing the cultural resistance issue, the study of retrospective biographic interviews enhances the role played by writers in the totalitarian socio-cultural milieu. Rooted in a specific “ideology” pointing to the “biographic illusion” ((P. Bourdieu) and identity “re-evaluation” (P. Ricoeur) deeply related to covert mechanisms, the life stories of the “spoken books” (E.Simion) mirror both the “internal” historic scenario and the identity quests experienced by writers as social actors (always subjected to the Great History) from the Otherness point of view. This mechanism of focusing personal experience is linked to the temporal and affective narrative profiles (narrated time vs time of narration) as well as to “the investigator’s” discourse “pre- centring” the interview. Mots-clés: entretien biographique rétrospectif, pacte autobiographique, identité narrative, mise en intrigue,

Rezumat: În contextul posttotalitar al bătăliei dintre „conservatori” şi „revizionişti” vizând legitimitatea rezistenţei prin cultură, analiza interviurilor biografice retrospective furnizează date importante privind poziţionarea scriitorilor în câmpul socio-cultural totalitar. Structurate în raport cu o „ideologie” şi o „iluzie biografică” (P. Bourdieu) şi având drept miză o „reconfigurare” identitară (P. Ricoeur) dependentă de mecanisme latente, povestirile vieţii incluse în aceste „cărţi-vorbite” (E. Simion) oferă atât o imagine „din interior” a segmentului istoric ipostaziat, cât şi una a traseelor identitare asumate de scriitori ca actori sociali (aflaţi „sub vremi”), din perspectiva celui care se vede pe „sine ca [pe] un altul”. O atare poziţionare în raport cu experienţa personală este condiţionată de medierile impuse atât de coordonatele temporale (şi afective) ale naraţiunii (timp narat //vs// timp al naraţiunii), cât şi de miza demersului „anchetatorului” care „pre-centrează” interviul. Cuvinte-cheie: interviu biografic retrospectiv, pact autobiografic, identitate narativă, punere în intrigă

Repères théoriques et préliminaires méthodologiques

Les entretiens narratifs se trouvent dans une situation particulière à l’intérieur des « genres du biographique », dans la mesure où, selon Eugen Simion, ici la « vedette de la confession » n’est plus « l’auteur traditionnel (sous sa triple identité) » [auteur-narrateur-personnage, n. n.], mais « un scripteur qui pose les questions et enregistre ce qu’il entend » [2]. Ce « personnage étranger invité dans le discours », comme le décrit E. Simion, fonctionne comme un « philtre », selon l’expression de Dan Lungu, qui reprend dans son approche de l’entretien narratif l’opinion de Daniel Bertaux (Les Récits de vie. Perspective ethnosociologique): « Ce philtre est constitué par l’intérêt du chercheur pour un certain monde ou situation sociale et se laisse envisager tant dans la modalité par laquelle il sollicite à une personne de donner une interview (lorsqu’on énonce le thème majeur de la recherche) que dans le moment où l’on lance la question inaugurale. Il pré-centre l’entretien, ce qui conduit à ce que le récit de vie soit non-total dans les deux sens. » Outre la médiation de l’interviewer, il y en a d’autres qui interviennent dans l’équation « histoire réelle – histoire vécue – histoire racontée », soit « les schémas de perception et d’évaluation » qui « s’interposent entre un contexte social ou un évènement et la manière dont ces dernières sont „vécues” par le sujet », « la médiation des significations que le sujet attribue d’une manière rétrospective par le truchement de la totalisation plus ou moins réflexive des expériences (une totalisation qui tient compte inévitablement des perceptions et des évaluations qu’ont ses intimes sur les mêmes évènements et actions) » et, enfin, les médiations « entre ce que le sujet a vécu et a totalisé et ce qu’il consent à raconter à présent [...] » [3]. Précisons d’emblée que, tout en faisant appel aux repères théoriques fournis par la démarche sociologique, notre approche de l’entretien narratif ne s’inscrit pas dans un tel type d’analyse. Les outils tributaires de la sociologie seront intégrés à une démarche interdisciplinaire, préoccupée, entre autres, par les types de stratégies identitaires appropriées par les écrivains interviewés dans le champ socioculturel totalitaire, (re)vues de la perspective ouverte par leur engagement dans le contexte post-totalitaire. L’entretien en soi ne sera pas envisagé en tant que

* Chargée de cours, dr., Université « Dunarea de Jos », Galati

43 méthode d’enquête sociologique, mais comme un genre du biographique dont les structures sont susceptibles de se prêter à une analyse tributaire de la théorie et de la critique littéraire (narratologie, sociocritique, théorie de la réception etc.), mais aussi de la phénoménologie et de l’herméneutique. Ce qui nous intéresse en premier lieu c’est la narration autobiographique et l’histoire qui en résulte, racontée de la double perspective du narrateur-personnage. Du point de vue de la sociocritique, par exemple, tout en s’intéressant aux modalités par lesquelles les écrivains interviewés ont « donné la réplique », dans le passé, aux stratégies identitaires du pouvoir dictatorial (qui, par le truchement de la censure, ont engendré des habitus [4] visant - par-delà le contrôle des œuvres littéraires - la « restructuration identitaire » [5] de leurs auteurs), on étudiera en particulier les reflets de ces rapports (entre l’artiste et le pouvoir) au niveau de la structuration – thématique et narrative - de l’histoire racontée. Ces « répliques » seront discernées à l’intérieur de la dynamique des rôles réels et symboliques – imposés par le pouvoir et assumés / intériorisés ou non par les écrivains – telle qu’elle apparaît, d’une manière manifeste ou latente [6], dans les ainsi-dites « livres- parlés » [7] publiés après la chute du « rideau de papier » [8], pour employer la belle métaphore de Monica Spiridon. S’agissant de récits de vie écrits où, de plus, les interviewés sont des écrivains ou des critiques et des théoriciens littéraires, il nous semble légitime une approche fixée sur les éléments qui y témoignent du fonctionnement d’un « principe d’écriture » [9], qui n’est pas sans relation avec les modalités de « mise en intrigue » [10] (P. Ricœur) et de « mise en affectivité discursive » [11] des événements racontés. Celle-ci doit obligatoirement prendre en compte le coefficient de fictionnalité qui peut être envisagé, outre la sélection et l’organisation textuelle des éléments du récit témoignant d’une « (re)configuration » [12] particulière de l’histoire personnelle et de « la grande histoire », lors de l’analyse narratologique des instances / « masques » impliqués dans la structuration du récit : l’auteur (l’interviewer) et le narrateur-personnage (l’interviewé).

En quête de l’identité « perdue » : les enjeux identitaires de l’« enquête » [13] dans l’entretien narratif post-totalitaire

Raconter son parcours c’est évoquer des situations vécues et en passer d’autres sous silence, c’est mentionner des expériences personnelles et en laisser d’autres dans l’ombre. Ainsi, c’est par la sélection, l’agencement et l’organisation des épisodes, auxquels participe toujours l’intervieweur à travers ses postures et relances, que le parcours prend progressivement une direction, et du sens. L’histoire racontée est une histoire personnelle, non seulement parce qu’elle est autobiographique, mais parce qu’elle est une prise de position sur ce qui s’est passé, une appropriation spécifique. Elle n’est pas un compte-rendu objectif, fidèle, décliné dans des catégories impersonnelles, elle inclut un voir-comme, un compter-pour […]. A partir des ingrédients que constituent les événements qu’il a vécus, l’interviewé compose un parcours, raconte une histoire à propos de sa biographie, une histoire parmi d’autres possibles. Son récit est donc une reconstruction, hic et nunc, susceptible de varier avec les conditions d’énonciation, les nouvelles expériences vécues, le moment où le regard rétrospectif est sollicité [14].

Le conditionnement contextuel de la reconstruction identitaire consubstantielle à tout récit autobiographique fonctionne d’autant plus dans le cas de l’entretien biographique rétrospectif [15], où aux contraintes infligées par l’enjeu de l’enquête s’ajoutent celles redevables aux types de contextes socioculturels (y compris ceux de la réception) où s’inscrivent le temps de la narration et le temps raconté. Comme l’observe l’auteur de l’article cité ci-dessus, Didier Demazière, « le poids du présent apparaît exorbitant dans le discours biographique rétrospectif, puisque la situation présente, tout en étant le point d’arrivée, forcément temporaire et provisoire du parcours, est aussi le point de départ de sa mise en récit, de sa mise en cohérence » [16]. Le présent, soit le temps de la narration, constitue, dans le cas des « livres-parlés » (et des tous les écrits mémoriels) parus chez nous après 1989, le repère temporel par rapport auquel on opère le retour (post- traumatique) à « une ère de l’oubli forcé » [17] et de l’identité fragmentée, à un contexte psycho- social schizoïde dont les traces ne cessent de conditionner la configuration globale du champ socioculturel post-totalitaire. C’est dans un tel contexte que s’inscrivent et les démarches des interviewers – agissant dans le cadre des champs épistémologiques multidisciplinaires (histoire,

44 histoire des mentalités, sociologie, critique et histoire littéraires etc.) - et les réponses des interviewés, dont les récits personnels s’avèrent les dépositaires des traces mémorielles collectives. En ce qui concerne notre champ d’investigation, celui-ci est limité aux témoignages des écrivains qui, en acteurs principaux sur la scène socioculturelle et littéraire circonscrite du passé totalitaire, ont été la cible privilégiée de la stratégie du remodelage mentalitaire poursuivi par le régime dictatorial. Comme le remarquait Dan Lungu, lors de son analyse sociologique du fonctionnement de la censure pendant le communisme roumain, « les instances censoriales, tout en contrôlant la conformité des produits artistiques, dirigent, de fait, le sens de restructurations identitaires. […] Grâce aux journaux, aux mémoires, aux témoignages, aux entretiens, l’impacte de la censure sur le créateur est plus facile à investiguer, surtout dans le cas des écrivains. » Ce sont quelques aspects liés à cet impacte qui attirent l’attention du sociologue : tout premièrement, « la censure s’exerce notamment sur les auteurs qui accèdent à la visibilité sociale (littéraire), car tous les textes publiques peuvent blesser la constitution du habitus idéologique en tant que projet du pouvoir. » En second lieu, « étant donnée son intention de discipliner simultanément et l’écrivain et le lecteur, la censure ne concerne pas seulement le texte (destiné à l’éducation du public), mais aussi la biographie de l’auteur, son comportement publique. » Troisièmement, « face au projet identitaire du pouvoir, les acteurs sociaux agissent de manières différentes, en déployant, de façon pratique et contextuelle, des stratégies identitaires personnelles. C’est ainsi qu’on a parvenu à éluder, « duper », négocier, intérioriser la censure en partie ou entièrement (l’autocensure). » Enfin, « l’autocensure se développe tout premièrement chez les auteurs qui accèdent à l’espace publique (roumain) et agit non seulement au niveau des pratiques littéraires, mais aussi au niveau du comportement (en particulier, le comportement public) ou, plus largement entraîne des modifications des schémas d’action, des manières d’évaluer, interpréter, sentir etc. » [18]. Ce sont les coordonnées du champ sociopolitique où les écrivains roumains ont été forcés d’accepter parfois des positions (des rôles) plus ou moins compromettantes, afin de pouvoir publier leurs livres, ce qui a été une stratégie aux effets bénéfiques pour la configuration du canon littéraire de l’après-guerre (le canon authentique, fondé sur le critère de la valeur esthétique), mais a affecté, par contre, leur image publique, en particulier dans le contexte du « révisionnisme est- éthique » [19] qui a entamé des débats virulents dans la presse culturelle et littéraire post- totalitaire. C’est ainsi que, hors le contexte totalitaire, le phénomène de la « résistance par la culture / écriture » - presque omniprésent dans les « questionnaires » des entretiens narratifs d’après la Révolution de décembre 1989 - a été souvent condamné, de cette perspective révisionniste, en tant que mythologie légitimatrice sous laquelle se dissimulerait la « trahison » des intellectuels, et des écrivains en particulier, engagés dans un pacte « méprisable » avec le pouvoir. Illustratifs pour ces attitudes antinomiques concernant le phénomène en cause sont les entretiens donnés par Eugen Simion, en défenseur de la « dissidence politique par l’esthétique », entretiens réunis dans le volume În ariergarda avangardei (convorbiri cu Andrei Grigor) [À l’arrière-garde de l’avant-garde (entretiens avec Andrei Grigor), notre trad.] [20] et, par opposition, ceux de Gheorghe Grigurcu, dont nous retenons celui intégré dans le recueil de Daniel Cristea-Enache, Sertarul Scriitorului Român. Dialoguri pe hârtie [Le Tiroir de l’Écrivain Roumain. Dialogues sur le papier, notre trad.] [21]. On n’insistera plus sur une polémique déjà célèbre, voire exemplaire pour la dispute post-totalitaire entre les « conservateurs » et les « révisionnistes » : outre les perspectives critiques différentes, tributaires des idéologies esthétiques opposées (l’une fondée sur le primat du principe esthétique dans l’évaluation de l’œuvre littéraire, l’autre, par contre, centrée autour de l’« est-éthique »), les valorisations susmentionnées sont redevables, certes, aux fictions identitaires des interviewés. En revenant au « tableau » d’ensemble des récits de vie inclus dans les livres-parlés parus dans le post-totalitarisme, il faut remarquer qu’une première série de « contraintes » - au-delà de celles imposées par l’interviewer (selon les buts de sa recherche) - qui régissent la reconstitution autobiographique des interviewés est redevable à l’horizon d’attente du présent, crée par ce type de réception / valorisation critique de leurs rôles socioculturels du passé. La mise en intrigue de ces récits de vie est accomplie d’une double perspective : celle du narrateur qui vit dans le présent post-totalitaire et celle du protagoniste de l’histoire racontée, dont l’expérience est inscrite dans le passé totalitaire. Entre ces deux instances et coordonnées temporelles de la narration autobiographique il existe un double écart. Avec les mots de Martine Renouprez, qui reprend en

45 cela une idée de Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani [22], « […] l’énonciateur n’est pas exactement identique à la personne qu’il était et qui fait l’objet de son discours lors de son énonciation. L’énonciateur se dédouble donc, devenant à la fois sujet et objet de son discours; la distance qui s’instaure dans le récit de sa propre vie n’est donc pas seulement le fait d’un écart temporel, mais aussi d’un écart d’identité » [23] [n.s.]. Confrontés à une situation doublement traumatique – du point de vue du passé où l’on a subi la pression totalitaire, et du point de vue du présent où l’on nie leur rôle essentiel dans la préservation des valeurs littéraires authentiques -, les écrivains roumains qui ont choisi de se confesser, par le truchement dé l’écriture mémorielle, après 1989, ne peuvent pas se soustraire, dans leurs projets de reconstruction identitaire, à l’emprise de ce scénario de la « résistance ». Soit qu’il s’agisse d’une validation manifeste du phénomène en question, soit qu’il s’agisse, par contre, de sa déconstruction - valable, bien des fois, seulement pour les autres et non pas pour soi-même (c’est le cas, par exemple, d’Adrian Marino, qui se confesse dans Al treilea discurs. Cultură, ideologie şi politică în România. Adrian Marino în dialog cu Sorin Antohi [Le troisième discours. Culture, idéologie et politique en Roumanie. Adrian Marino en dialogue avec Sorin Antohi, notre trad.], mais aussi celui de Gheorghe Grigurcu), on a affaire, dans ces confessions publiques, avec la mise en discours d’une « idéologie [auto]biographique » (engendrant une « illusion [auto]biographique »). Selon Pierre Bourdieu, celle-ci consiste à une « inclination à se faire l’idéologue de sa propre vie en sélectionnant, en fonction d’une intention globale, certains événements significatifs et en établissant entre eux des connexions propres à les justifier d’avoir existé et à leur donner cohérence, comme celles qu’implique leur institution en tant que causes ou plus souvent, en tant que fins […] » [24]. C’est que, par le biais du récit mémoriel – autobiographie, journal destiné à la publication, essai autobiographique, mémoires, entretien biographique -, l’écrivain fournit à un public affecté par la « fragmentation de la mémoire » [25] une « présentation officielle de soi » [26] qui est incompatible, certes, avec l’appropriation du rôle de « compromis ». D’autre part, une mise entre parenthèses de l’histoire de la résistance, à laquelle les récits personnels de ses partisans servent d’illustrations exemplaires (au moins du point de vue de l’intentionnalité auctorielle), ou, pire, une « abjuration » quant à celle-ci, aurait pour effet une déstructuration identitaire incompatible avec l’enjeu de tout récit de vie. On parviendrait, de cette façon, à délégitimer, voire à vider de sens toute une existence passée. Par conséquent, la plupart des récits de vie post-totalitaires finissent par valider, même si cela se passe parfois dans le sous-texte, au niveau des significations latentes et des trous du discours, ce type d’engagement dans une époque de la duplicité généralisée. D’une autre perspective, dans ce cas particulier des récits de vie post-totalitaires, le mécanisme de la fictionnalisation de soi – la mise en intrigue du « soi-même comme un autre » [27] -, inhérent à toute entreprise autobiographique, fonctionne d’une manière d’autant plus « efficiente », compte tenu du phénomène de l’autocensure, dont les traces subsistent, plus ou moins dissimulées (latentes), dans les narrations identitaires du présent. Les écrivains interviewés se trouvent dans la situation d’une double fictionnalisation : celle circonscrite par le passé, où l’on oppose à une biographie fabriquée la fiction identitaire du résistent par l’écriture, vouée, dans le contexte totalitaire, à la latence, et, d’autre part, celle du présent de la narration autobiographique, où l’on est amené à contrecarrer de nouveau, cette fois-ci d’une manière manifeste, une biographie tout aussi compromettante, fabriquée elle aussi par les détracteurs contemporains de la résistance. Entre le désir de « dire le vrai » sur soi et sur la « grande histoire » – le postulat sous- jacent du double pacte sur lequel se fonde la narration mémorielle, soit le pacte « référentiel » et « le pacte autobiographique » [28] -, et l’emprise de la fictionnalisation de soi, nos mémorialistes d’après 1989 cherchent leur identité, à travers une tentative de s’approprier l’histoire en tant que « récit vivant, à [leur] portée » [29].

De la « terreur de l’histoire » à la « terreur de l’illusion »… (auto)biographique

« Nous racontons des histoires parce que finalement les vies humaines ont besoin et méritent d’être racontées. Cette remarque prend toute sa force quand nous évoquons la nécessité de sauver l’histoire des vaincus et des perdants. Toute l’histoire de la souffrance crie vengeance et appelle récit » [30].

46 Dans un recueil d’entretiens intitulé Teroarea iluziei. Convorbiri cu Crisula Ştefănescu [La terreur de l’illusion. Entretiens avec Crisula Ştefănescu, notre trad.], Augustin Buzura, l’un des plus importants prosateurs de la génération des années ’60, avouait son désir d’« être utile » en même temps et « au moment » (au contexte historique) et « à la littérature » : « L’idée qu’il faudrait y renoncer, par l’option, je la ressens comme une rupture, comme une terrible douleur » [31]. Le livre-parlé qu’on a choisi d’analyser dans les pages qui suivent a un statut particulier parmi les textes de notre corpus, organisé selon le critère de la remémoration post-totalitaire du passé totalitaire. Il s’agit d’une longue interview que l’écrivain a donné à Crisula Ştefănescu [32] à Munich en décembre 1989, peu avant la chute du régime communiste en Roumanie, lors d’une expérience de deux mois en Occident, ressentie comme éclairante, voire rédemptrice, dans la mesure où elle avait permis au narrateur de se « détacher des facteurs stressants » : « Quand on est dans une situation stressante, on se borne beaucoup l’horizon. C’est pourquoi j’ai voulu venir ici, afin de me détacher des facteurs stressants. Pour que je puisse penser à ce que je dois faire dans l’avenir, par-delà ce que je devrais écrire dans ce moment. Pour que je m’arrête et que je m’aperçoive si ce que je fais j’en fais bien. Je voudrais connaître aussi ce qu’on écrit à ce moment en Occident. La voie vers laquelle s’oriente la littérature. […] Ces deux mois ont été extrêmement importantes dans ma vie. Ce fut une sorte de ré-méditation, […] sur ce que j’avais pensé chez moi, dans mon pays ». L’interview se situe donc dans un contexte de la relative liberté en ce qui concerne le positionnement du narrateur, tout en restant fortement ancré dans les réalités de la dictature : c’est la raison pour laquelle on l’a sélectionnée en vue de l’analyse. Même si Augustin Buzura prévoit les changements politiques consécutifs aux événements récents de Timisoara, son récit reste celui d’un intellectuel qui, après avoir expérimenté la liberté, affirme son intention de retourner dans son pays totalitaire. La déclaration citée ci-dessus a une valeur illustrative par rapport au rôle symbolique (mais également réel) assumé par l’écrivain roumain confronté aux réalités de la dictature, dans la mesure où elle circonscrit la conduite d’un partisan hardi de la résistance par la culture, en l’inscrivant sur les coordonnées d’un engagement dont Augustin Buzura n’a pas abdiqué jusqu’aujourd’hui. Il s’agit d’une conduite assumée aussi par une bonne partie de ses collègues de génération – des écrivains et de critiques littéraires – qui, tout en acceptant les « petits compromis » avec le pouvoir dictatorial, ont réussi de « duper » la censure et de publier leurs grands livres. Augustin Buzura veut passer (si l’on croit à ses propos concernant les choses vraiment importantes pour un romancier) pour un écrivain totalement désintéressé par la configuration de sa biographie dans l’histoire. L’important, c’est le destin de ses livres, plutôt que celui du romancier en tant qu’individu empêtré [33] dans l’histoire : « Ce qui m’intéresse c’est d’être content d’avoir fait le tout possible, d’avoir été moi-même depuis ce moment-là. C’est ce que j’ai pu faire. De mon esprit et mon talent. Je n’aime pas les excuses, les justifications, je n’ai pas besoin de compréhension pour le contexte où j’ai écrit. Ma biographie n’a pas d’importance. Je suis mes livres et c’est tout. » Si pour l’auteur des Orgueils (Orgolii) la biographie personnelle n’est pas importante, au moins à un niveau déclaratif, celui du discours identitaire (manifeste), pour le lecteur de l’entretien situé sous le signe de la « terreur de l’illusion » le parcours biographique raconté par Augustin Buzura est vraiment fascinant. Par-delà l’idéologie autobiographique rendue explicite par le discours du narrateur dans les citations que nous avons sélectionnées, l’histoire de l’homme inscrite dans la peinture de son époque s’avère même plus intéressante que les fictions romanesques avec des personnages confrontés à la « mort psychique ». De fait, on y trouve la « matière » des romans déjà écrits par le prosateur qui avait fait du principe de « dire le vrai » non seulement le postulat de son ontologie romanesque, mais aussi une forme de la révolte contre une idéologie qui se voudrait la dépositaire de la vérité suprême, et, par cela, une modalité de conquérir la liberté : « À mon avis, personne ne détient la vérité, mais chaque homme doit avouer ce qu’il est et ce qu’il croit, parce que la vérité est la somme de toutes ces opinions. Durant la vie, on découvre beaucoup de vérités, mais il y a des vérités généralement humaines, qui sont obligatoires. […] Les hommes véritables doivent transmettre ce qu’ils croient, ce qu’ils ressentent, ce qu’ils pensent, parce que c’est seulement à partir d’un dialogue libre qu’on peut avancer ». La réflexion du narrateur-écrivain nous fournit à ce point tant un pacte de lecture visant ses fictions romanesques, en insistant sur le principe de la vraisemblance, mais aussi sur la portée

47 parabolique des expériences identitaires y projetées, qu’une clé d’interprétation pour sa propre narration identitaire. Pour le romancier qui veut transmettre la vérité par le truchement de ses avatars littéraires, la narration de sa propre vie n’est qu’une modalité d’illustrer d’une manière exemplaire l’idée-force qui légitime sa démarche romanesque. La vie réelle devient, dans le récit autobiographique, un miroir de la littérature, après que les aventures donquichottesques des chercheurs de la vérité tels que Mihai Bogdan, le héros de Absenţii [Les Absents, notre trad.], Dan Toma de Feţele tăcerii [Les Visages du silence, notre trad.], Ştefan Pintea de Vocile nopţii [Les Voix de la nuit, notre trad.], Ion Cristian des Orgueils, Adrian Coman de Drumul cenuşii [Chemin des cendres] eussent incarné les fantasmes d’une vie vouée à l’(auto)mystification et à la recherche de l’identité perdue, les destins exemplaires des intellectuels en « sujets totalitaires » [34]. En lisant les confessions de La Terreur de l’illusion, on a l’impression d’avoir découvert parfois les sources, parfois la continuation des vies fictionnelles racontées dans ces romans hantés par le thème de la vérité individuelle confrontée à la « vérité » du pouvoir. On se rappelle, à ce point, l’observation de Eugen Simion concernant la narration / l’écriture mémorielle : « il existe quand même une fiction dans toute narration mémorielle : celle qui rejette la fiction de la littérature » [35] Augustin Buzura est l’un de ces romanciers qui refuse la fictionnalité même pour ses fictions : qu’en est-il de ses récits de vie censés restituer la vérité de soi-même et de son époque ? En narrateur de sa vie, l’écrivain ne cesse de souligner le continuum entre la réalité vécue et ses fictions [36] non seulement dans le sens de l’ancrage de ces dernières dans l’histoire réelle dont l’acteur ou témoin a été lui-même, mais surtout dans celui de leur investissement avec des significations généralement humaines qui, tout en restant intimement liées au contexte historique, s’emparent d’une visée universelle. En décrivant l’expérience de quelque activiste de parti, construit dans Les Visages du silence à partir d’une histoire réelle, découpée de sa propre biographie, Augustin Buzura déclare qu’il avait été intéressé par « la relation entre l’homme réel et celui de l’imagination », entre la réalité et le mythe et, avant tout, par la condition humaine conçue du point de vue de ses rapports avec l’histoire et le mythe. Ce thème du rapport entre la fiction et la réalité, qui avait hanté ses propres romans-enquête, tout comme ceux de ses collègues de la génération des années ’60, en général, revient donc, d’une manière obsessionnelle, dans la narration autobiographique. Il nous semble que la méditation du narrateur-écrivain sur son écriture fictionnelle n’est pas seulement une auto-interprétation de l’œuvre, mais aussi une méta-narration censée expliquer son parcours existentiel : l’identité narrative du personnage des récits de vie réunis dans La Terreur de l’illusion se construit incessamment par rapport aux identités de ses personnages de fiction. Il en résulte une « métahistoire » identitaire qui, tout en restant redevable à une « ontologie personnelle » [37] fondée sur le scénario de la recherche du centre – ce qui représente l’enjeu fondamental de toute entreprise autobiographique -, parvient à rejoindre son ontologie romanesque. Provoqué par son « enquêteur » (qui lui rappelle son ancienne idée selon laquelle « le saut de l’humiliation à la dignité est plus difficile que celui du singe à l’homme ») à une méditation « sur la déchéance morale st sur la capacité de régénération des Roumains », le narrateur reconnaît qu’il est difficile « de „reconstruire” un homme à 50, à 60 ou même à 30 ans, d’en remettre sur ses fondements normaux, mais il n’est pas impossible. Il reste toujours quelque chose de l’humiliation, des angoisses, de la dégradation, des limites imposées par la terreur. […] Même si les facteurs stressants disparaissent, cela reste dans le subconscient. Mais, au fur et à mesure que s’installe le changement, les préoccupations de l’homme changent et il apparaît la possibilité de récupérer quelque chose de ce qu’on a perdu. » Quant à la « renaissance morale » (dont parle Crisula Ştefănescu) en tant qu’enjeu de la reconstruction identitaire, celle-ci ne serait possible qu’à la condition d’« un sage regard sur l’histoire, sur ce qui se passe sous nos yeux. La vérité sur nous- mêmes. La vérité et beaucoup de lectures. » [n. s.] La vie réelle conçue comme parcours de l’homme à travers l’histoire s’avère, pour Augustin Buzura, indissociable de celle de l’être « empêtré » dans … des fictions. Tout comme ses révoltés donquichottesques incarnant la résistance intérieure contre une histoire obsédante, le narrateur-personnage de La Terreur de l’illusion construit sa fiction identitaire à partir du principe qu’« on est jugé selon ses livres, non pas selon ses actes d’héroïsme ». En dernière analyse, dissocier entre l’engagement en tant qu’acte de dissidence politique et l’engagement par le truchement des « livres survivantes », entre une résistance « réelle » de l’homme confronté à la

48 terreur de l’histoire et la résistance par l’écriture, n’est pas une option à valider dans le cas d’un écrivain qui vit dans et par la littérature. La « terreur de l’illusion » s’avère une condition de la résistance authentique, de la seule forme d’héroïsme qui compte pour le gardien de la mémoire – et de son temps et de la littérature.

Notes [1] This paper is supported by the Sectorial Operational Programme Human Resources Development (SOP HRD), financed from the European Social Fund and by the Romanian Government under the contract number SOP HRD/89/1.5/S/59758. [2] Simion, Eugen, Genurile biograficului, Bucuresti, Univers enciclopedic, 2002, p. 36, notre trad. [3] Lungu, Dan, Povestirile vieţii: teorie şi documente, Iaşi, Editions de l’Université „Al. I. Cuza”, 2003, pp. 29-30, 31 (notre trad). [4] « Les conditionnements associés à une classe particulière de conditions d’existence produisent des habitus, systèmes de dispositions durables et transposables, structures structurées prédisposées à fonctionner comme structures structurantes, c’est-à-dire en tant que principes générateurs et organisateurs de pratiques et de représentations qui peuvent être objectivement adaptées à leur but sans supposer la visée consciente de fins et la maîtrise expresse des opérations nécessaires pour les atteindre, objectivement « réglées » et « régulières » sans être en rien le produit de l’obéissance à des règles, et, étant tout cela, collectivement orchestrées sans être le produit de l’action organisatrice d’un chef d’orchestre. » (Bourdieu, Pierre, Le sens pratique, Paris, Minuit, 1980, p. 88). [5] Cf. Lungu, Dan, Cartografii în tranziţie. Eseuri de sociologia artei şi a literaturii, Bucuresti, Liternet, 2003, p. 19. [6] Cf. Molitor, Michel, « L’herméneutique collective (1) », dans Rémy, Jean, Ruquoy, Danielle (dir.), Méthodes d'analyse de contenu et sociologie, Bruxelles, Publications des Facultés universitaires St. Louis, 1990 (pp. 19-36), p. 26. [7] Simion, Eugen, ibidem. [8] Spiridon, Monica, « Le rideau de papier », dans Caietele Echinox, t. 7. Literatură şi totalitarism, Cluj-Napoca, Dacia, 2004, pp. 11 – 22. [9] Boyer, Henri, « Les temps dans la mise en scène du vécu. Le récit de vie comme écriture », dans Pratiques, mars 1985, no. 45, p. 53. [10] Ricœur, Paul, Temps et récit I. L’intrigue et le temps historique, Paris, Seuil, 1983, p. 127. [11] Carcassonne, M., « Sens, temps et affects dans des récits de vie recueillis en interaction », dans Vox Poetica, 1/11/2007, URL: http://www.vox-poetica.org/t/pas/carcassonne.html (document électronique, sans page). [12] Cf. Ricoeur, P., ibidem. [13] Notre emploi du terme « enquête » ne vise pas l’enquête sociologique, pour laquelle l’entretien narratif sert d’outil méthodologique, mais a plutôt une valeur métaphorique, renvoyant aux enjeux identitaires de la démarche heuristique que partagent l’interviewer et l’interviewé. [14] Demazière, Didier, « Quelles temporalités travaillent les entretiens biographiques rétrospectifs ? », dans Bulletin de méthodologie sociologique, no. 9 » / 2007, pp. 5-27, [En ligne], Mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2010. URL : http://bms.revues.org/index506.html. Consulté le 16 septembre 2011. (sans page) [15] Ibidem. Précisons que l’auteur de l’article cité fournit une approche de ce type d’entretien conçu exclusivement du point de vue de sa relevance en tant que méthode d’analyse sociologique (avec une application sur les milieux professionnels), dont on retiendra seulement l’échafaudage théorique. [16] Ibidem. [17] Connerton, Paul, How societies remember, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 12. [18] Cf. Lungu, Dan, Cartografii în tranziţie, op. cit., pp. 19-20 (notre trad.). [19] Voir, entre autres, Cernat, Paul, « Iluziile revizionismului est-etic (I, II, III) », dans Observator cultural, no. 539, 540, 541 / 2010. [20] Simion, Eugen, În ariergarda avangardei (convorbiri cu Andrei Grigor), Univers enciclopedic, Bucureşti, 2004, p. 304. [21] Grigurcu, Gheorghe, « Toute forme d’opportunisme, tout compromis en faveur de la carrière implique, au fond, une réduction de l’intelligence », dans Cristea-Enache, Daniel, Sertarul Scriitorului Român. Dialoguri pe hârtie, Iaşi, Polirom, 2005, pp. 80-98. [22] Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle, La scène judiciaire de l’autobiographie, Paris, PUF, 1996. L’auteure de l’étude citée décrit « le double écart qui marque le récit de vie. Un écart temporel: je parle de celui que je fus et que je ne suis plus [...]. Un écart d’identité: celui qui parle est autre que celui dont il parle [...] » (op. cit., p. 61). [23] Renouprez, Martine, « L’autobiographie en question: Poétique d’un genre », dans La Philologie Française à la croisée de l’an 2000. Panorama linguistique et littéraire. Estudios reunidos de la Asociación de Profesores de Filología Francesa de la Universidad Española (IX Coloquio, Granada, 5-7 de abril de 2000), Montserrat Serrano Manes, Lina Avendaño Anguita y M. Carmen Molina Romero (éds.), 2 vol., Universidad de Granada, p. 117. [24] Bourdieu, Pierre, « L’illusion biographique », dans Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, juin 1986, Vol. 62- 63, p. 69. [25] Antohi, Sorin, Oglinzi retrovizoare. Istorie, memorie şi morală în România. Alexandru Zub în dialog cu Sorin Antohi, Iaşi, Polirom, 2002, p. 116. [26] Bourdieu, Pierre, op. cit., p. 71. [27] Ricœur, Paul, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1990. Selon Ricœur, « La personne, comprise comme personnage de récit, n’est pas une entité distincte de ses „expériences”. Bien au contraire: elle partage le régime de l’identité du personnage, qu’on peut appeler son identité narrative, en construisant celle de l’histoire racontée. C’est l’identité de l’histoire qui fait l’identité du personnage. » (op. cit., p. 175) [n. s.] [28] Cf. Simion, Eugen, op. cit. ; cf. Lejeune, Philippe, Le pacte autobiographique, Paris, Seuil, 1975.

49 [29] On a emprunté les beaux mots d’Adriana Babeţi, l’auteure du récit autobiographique Sarsanela, inclus dans le volume Tovarăşe de drum. Experienţa feminină în comunism (coordonné par Radu Pavel Gheo et Dan Lungu), Polirom, Iaşi, 2008, p. 18. (notre trad.) [30] Ricœur, Paul, Temps et récit. La configuration dans le récit de fiction, Tome II, Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 115. [31] Toutes le citations, dont la traduction nous appartient, sont tirées de Teroarea iluziei. Convorbiri cu Crisula Ştefănescu, Iaşi, Polirom, 2004. [32] L’interviewer se présente dans l’« Avant-texte » qui fonctionne comme un pacte de lecture : « J’étais à ce moment-là chercheur-analyste dans le département de recherche du poste de radio « L’Europe libre » et je m’y occupais de la culture et du phénomène de la dissidence dans la culture. » [33] On a emprunté le terme de Wilhelm Schapp (Empêtré dans des histoires. L’être de l’homme et de la chose, Avant- propos, traduction de l’allemand et postface par Jean Greisch, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1992) qui, en phénoménologue, est convaincu que « le monde externe et tout ce qui s’y rattache n’est qu’un dérivé d’histoires » et « le lieu où nous devons chercher le réel et le réel ultime est l’être empêtré dans des histoires ». (op. cit., p. 5, apud Jean Greisch, « Empêtrement et intrigue. Une phénoménologie pure de la narrativité est-elle concevable ? », dans Vox Poetica, 2005, URL : http://www.vox-poetica.org/t/pas/greisch.html (document électronique, sans page). [34] Cf. Todorov, Tzvetan, Face à l’extrême, Paris, Seuil, 1994. [35] Simion, Eugen, op. cit., p. 14. [36] Cf. Pavel, Thomas, Univers de la fiction, traduction française de l’auteur, Paris, Seuil, coll. « Poétique », 1988 [1986]. [37] Gusdorf, Georges, « De l’autobiographie initiatique à l’autobiographie genre littéraire », dans Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, no. LXXV/6 / 1975, p. 971, apud Camarero, Jésus, « La théorie de l’autobiographie de Georges Gusdorf », dans Çédille, Revista de Estudios Franceses, no. 4 / 2008, p. 69.

Bibliographie sélective

Ouvrages cités Bourdieu, Pierre, « L’illusion biographique », dans Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 62-63 / 1986 Bourdieu, Pierre, Le sens pratique, Paris, Minuit, 1980 Boyer, Henri, « Les temps dans la mise en scène du vécu. Le récit de vie comme écriture », dans Pratiques, mars 1985, no. 45 Camarero, Jésus, « La théorie de l’autobiographie de Georges Gusdorf », dans Çédille, Revista de Estudios Franceses, no. 4 / 2008 Carcassonne, M., « Sens, temps et affects dans des récits de vie recueillis en interaction », dans Vox Poetica, 1/11/2007 Connerton, Paul, How societies remember, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989 Demazière, Didier, « Quelles temporalités travaillent les entretiens biographiques rétrospectifs ? », dans Bulletin de méthodologie sociologique, no. 9 » / 2007, pp. 5-27 Lejeune, Philippe, Le pacte autobiographique, Paris, Seuil, 1975 Lungu, Dan, Cartografii în tranziţie. Eseuri de sociologia artei şi a literaturii, Bucuresti, Liternet, 2003 Lungu, Dan, Povestirile vieţii: teorie şi documente, Iaşi, Editions de l’Université „Al. I. Cuza”, 2003 Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle, La scène judiciaire de l’autobiographie, Paris, PUF 1996 Molitor, Michel, « L’herméneutique collective (1) », dans Rémy, Jean, Ruquoy, Danielle (dir.), Méthodes d'analyse de contenu et sociologie, Bruxelles, Publications des Facultés universitaires St. Louis, 1990 Renouprez, Martine, « L’autobiographie en question: Poétique d’un genre », dans La Philologie Française à la croisée de l’an 2000. Panorama linguistique et littéraire. Estudios reunidos de la Asociación de Profesores de Filología Francesa de la Universidad Española (IX Coloquio, Granada, 5-7 de abril de 2000), Montserrat Serrano Manes, Lina Avendaño Anguita y M. Carmen Molina Romero (éds.), 2 vol., Universidad de Granada Ricœur, Paul, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1990 Ricœur, Paul, Temps et récit I. L’intrigue et le temps historique, Paris, Seuil, 1983 Ricœur, Paul, Temps et récit II. La configuration dans le récit de fiction, Paris, Seuil, 1984 Simion, Eugen, Genurile biograficului, Bucuresti, Univers enciclopedic, 2002 Spiridon, Monica, « Le rideau de papier », dans Caietele Echinox, t. 7. Literatură şi totalitarism, Cluj-Napoca, Dacia, 2004

Corpus Buzura, Augustin, Teroarea iluziei. Convorbiri cu Crisula Ştefănescu, Iaşi, Polirom, 2004 Cristea-Enache, Daniel, Sertarul Scriitorului Român. Dialoguri pe hârtie, Iaşi, Polirom, 2005 Marino, Adrian, Al treilea discurs. Cultură, ideologie şi politică în România. Adrian Marino în dialog cu Sorin Antohi, Iaşi, Polirom, 2001 Simion, Eugen, În ariergarda avangardei (convorbiri cu Andrei Grigor), Univers enciclopedic, Bucureşti, 2004

50 Particularităţi discursiv-narative în câteva schiţe ale lui I. L. Caragiale Damian Matei*

Abstract: Many critics have shown the status of I. L. Caragiale as one of the greatest “men who hear things” in Romanian literature. Along with Marin Preda, Caragiale has delicately observed the speaking particularities of people he met, splendidly turning them into neverdying characters and building unique speech situations. This rapidly turned out as being the very genesis of Caragiale’s literary flair; a fluid that drives the act of building the story itself, vital for any move of any character in his literary work. This paper, therefore, aims at bringing forth the auditory features of the characters in some short stories, and everything that comes with them: a feast of literary sight and hearing. Key words: Language, narrative discourse, character, plot, dialogue. De nombreux critiques ont défini IL Caragiale comme un des écrivains les plus grands « qui entendent les choses » dans la littérature roumaine. Tout comme Marin Preda, Caragiale a finement observé les particularités du langage des gens qu'il a rencontrés ; il les a magnifiquement transformés en personnages immortels et a construit des situations de langage uniques. C’est la genèse-même du flair littéraire de Caragiale ; un fluide qui pousse l'histoire elle-même, vital pour le mouvement des caractères dans son œuvre littéraire. Par conséquent, cet article vise à mettre en évidence dans certaines nouvelles les caractéristiques auditives des personnages et tout ce qui en découle: une fête du regard et de l'ouïe littéraire. Mots-clés: Langage, discours narratif, caractère, intrigue, dialogue.

Demult, când specia Athenaïs Grégoraschko era doar previzibilă, s-a născut mărturia istorică numită Telegrame. Avem încredinţarea că vremurile acelea erau măcar ingenios morale, de vreme ce „infatigabila silfidă” a lui Turturel era atunci expusă tot de un condei ziaristic drept „madam Atenaisa P. al cărui nume trecem sub tăcere”. Toate personajele schiţei amintite sunt, de fapt, discursuri, astfel că privim Telegrame ca pe o apoteoză a celebrei descripţii discursive caragialiene. Aici găsim necesară o ilustrare, prin opinia lui Tudor Vianu: „Caragiale nu este un descriptiv-vizual. Impresia atât de vie a mediului […] provine din implicaţiile vorbirii personajelor, surprinsă cu o mare acuitate a auzului şi reprodusă cu o asemenea exactitate în notarea vocabularului, a intonaţiilor, a particularităţilor sintactice şi stilistice, încât ni se pare a vedea aievea oamenii şi înconjurimea lor, numai pentru că suntem puşi în situaţia de a-i auzi atât de bine. […] Pentru scriitorul astfel înzestrat, poet dramatic în primul rând, evenimentele narate sunt mai ales un schimb de replici. Dar în afară de dialoguri, în care se rezolvă o bună parte din schiţele sale, scriitorul îşi face oamenii să gândească în faţa noastră, reproducând monologul lor interior…” [1] În Telegrame, aşadar, vorbim despre amprenta supremă a acestui uz de monolog interior; auzim personajele, nu şi dialogul, fiindcă ele scriu stihuri grele, cu limba între dinţi a efort, pentru a le trimite ca demers întru remedierea situaţiei. Dăm un exemplu, luându-ne îngăduinţa de a transforma discursul telegrafic într-unul poetic, prin dispunerea diferită a secvenţelor: „Onor. prim-ministru Repet reclama Telegrama No… Petiţionat parchetului. Procoror Lipseşte oraş mănăstire maici chef. Substitut refudat pără vini Procoror. Tremur viaţa me, Nu mai putem merge cafine. Facem responsabil guvern.” [2] Discursul e interior, dospit, însă – ciudat – relatează aceleaşi palme, picioare şi pumni pe care parcă le-am mai întâlnit undeva, mai ales privind menajul Raul Grigoraşcu-Atenaisa Grigoraşcu (În Telegrame, deocamdată, Atenaisa P.). Ne lămurim îndată: Marea Patroană a

* Asist. drd., Universitatea ”Dunărea de Jos” din Galaţi.

51 Mondenului din High-life este aici mahalagioaica uşor detectabilă ca Atenaisa Perjoiu, cea care provoacă, pentru moment, cutremure în urbe. Interesant de observat că, în afară de ea şi de Raul, mai există un personaj asimilabil unuia din High-life, anume cel ce iscăleşte Corespondent la sfârşitul telegramei trimise ziarului la care este amploiat. De fapt, este unicul personaj-discurs ce pare pierdut în continua detonaţie de lovituri a schiţei, iar motivul este cel consacrat: ingenuitatea individului, la care atât de des am făcut trimitere până acum. Să ne amintim acel superb „Nu mai înţăleg nimică, pi onoarea mé!”; avem revelaţia că această exclamaţie conţine o apoteoză. Fiindcă înţelegerea frazei de la care porneşte statutul cert de cronicar monden la oamenii lui Caragiale este sinonimă cu descoperirea unui nou Graal al Marii Confuzii, văzută ca prim pas spre inocenţă. Mai ales fiindcă Turturel are parte de şansa imensă de a lua contact – pe altarul creaţiei, fireşte – cu palmele şi pumnii între care se pare că-şi făcuse ucenicia în Telegrame. Să judecăm. Iată cum exploda „faptul”, relatat de toate celelalte personaje: „Ameninţat moarte. Viaţa onorul nesigure”, apoi „situaţia devenit insuportabilă. Oraş stare asediu. Panica domneşte cetăţeni”, spre „bandiţi regimului acest secol lumină bagiucurind constituţia ce aţi giurat voit ucidi di două ori cafine central şi piaţa endependenţi .” Imperturbabil, Corespondent relatează amuzat: „Azi pitrecut scenă nostimă piaţa noastră. Madam Atenaisa P. al cărui nume trecem sub tăcere, care părăsit soţul cetăţean onorabil, pentru romanse cu individ infam localitate, întîlnind nefericitul soţ, capatat bună lecţie moralitate în public, care aprobat. Această fimee fără inimă neroşind ameninţat cu sbiri puteri, deoarece complicele directoru prefecturi.” [3] (s.n.) Astfel, în spaţiul dintre cele două proze, directorul de prefectură devine subprefect, madam Atenaisa P. se vaporizează înspre „infatigabila silfidă”, iar Corespondent va deveni Turturel. Totul se pierde, totul se transformă. Rămâne slujitorul scrisului, pururi feciorelnic zeu al zăpăcelii, stăpân al unei evoluţii paralele, care le scapă tuturor celorlalţi. În Groaznica sinucidere din strada Fidelităţii [4] are loc o luptă între două gazete (deci, se va vedea, între doi ziarişti), pe seama comentării unui fapt de presă mondenă. Pe scurt, se naşte o idilă între domnişoara Porţia Popescu şi tânărul Mişu Zaharescu, cel din urmă fiind luat în pensiune de Zamfira Popescu, mama tinerei. Obosit de atenţiile fiicei gazdei, Mişu se hotărăşte să-şi găsească o altă locuinţă, mai ales că tocmai îşi luase licenţa în medicină şi căpătase un post de medic de plasă. Pentru a-şi aranja plecarea, tânărul medic pune la punct o mică stratagemă în vederea evitării „scenelor” inerente despărţirii: le însoţeşte la teatru pe mamă şi fiică, apoi, la câteva minute după ridicarea cortinei, pleacă, invocând un pretext oarecare şi făgăduind doar câteva minute de absenţă. Se iveşte fatala „bănuială neagră”, pentru ca partea feminină a familiei Popescu să descopere că Mişu plecase definitiv. După „scene” urmează o tentativă de sinucidere din partea domnişoarei Popescu; acesta este miezul relatărilor de presă şi de aici porneşte duelul celor două gazete. Detaşându-se nominal de cultura auditivă a „răcnetelor”, „vocilor” sau „ecourilor” presei caragialiene, cele două ziare sunt, nominal, vizual-diurne: ele se numesc Aurora şi Lumina. În condiţiile în care foile fac parte din tabere adverse, statutul protagoniştilor textelor de presă va avea de suferit: Mişu Zaharescu este, în Aurora, un tânăr „foarte vioi şi drăcos, limbut şi caraghios.”, în timp ce Porţia Popescu este cert o victimă care nu are altă vină decât aceea de a-i plăcea bobocii (de trandafir). Lumina îl prezintă pe Mişu ca: „tânărul doctor Mişu Z., care şi-a susţinut cu un succes strălucit teza sa despre Simptomele la diverse intoxicări violente” sau „tânărul nostru amic” (1), respectiv „băiat sărăcuţ” (2), în timp ce Porţia apare aici ca o „tânără” vicioasă, în vârstă de 44- 45 de ani, robustă şi având slăbiciune pentru boboci (studenţi debutanţi). Indubitabil, tentativa de suicid capătă în Lumina accente ridicole, fiindcă fosforul de chibrituri pe care-l înfulecă tânăra funcţionează mai degrabă benefic: în schimbul câtorva crampe, dispar cu desăvârşire durerile de măsele, iar tomnatica făptură părăseşte spitalul chiar în ziua internării. Paradoxal, tocmai reprezentanţii celor două gazete prefigurează finalul gen „pupat toţi piaţa endependenţi”, fiindcă, advers, ambii primesc demn pumni şi bastoane în contul celor scrise de ziarele ai căror reprezentanţi sunt. Primul redactor al Luminii, Mihail Constantinescu, obţine un pumn în obraz de la fratele Porţiei Popescu, iar directorul Aurorei, Constantin Mihăilescu, recepţionează un baston în plină pălărie de la Mişu Zaharescu însuşi. Ca orice ziarist caragialian (începem să întrevedem rolul privilegiat pe care îl joacă gazetarii lui Caragiale în contactul cu celelalte personaje), cei doi devansează conflictul cu naturaleţe. Ei îşi primesc agresorii fie calm, fie cu zâmbetul pe buze, dar sunt întotdeauna profund fairplay:

52 „– Mă rog, d-ta eşti d. Mihail Constantinescu, directorul pamfletului care se intitulează Lumina? – Eu! răspunde amicul nostru. – Eşti un mişel! strigă individul cu un ton şi mai provocător. – Şi cine eşti d-ta, mă rog, care-mi spui aceasta? întreabă calm amicul nostru, retrăgîndu-se trei paşi.” [5] (s.n.) Şi: „– D-ta eşti d. Constantin Mihăilescu, directorul Aurorei? – Eu! şi ce poftiţi? cum vă numiţi? cu cine avem onoarea? întrebă rîzînd amicul nostru şi retrăgîndu-se cîţiva paşi.” [6] (s.n.) Oricât ar desfide orice comparaţie între ei, cei doi directori constituie o dublă faţă a aceluiaşi personaj: fiecare este posesorul numelui inversat al celuilalt şi directorul unui ziar orbitor, ambii sezisează parchetul şi amândoi îşi jertfesc obrazul şi pălăria (elemente ale bunului-simţ şi distincţiei) pentru marele final al împăcăciunii şi al inevitabilului mariaj (vezi şi Telegrame, mai sus amintită, care prefaţează vigurosul menaj din High-life). Chiar dacă agresorii îşi primesc corecţia (directorul Luminii insistă chiar s-o aplice în persoană), celor doi şefi de gazetă nu li se poate nega o sfioasă aură eroică (un maximum la Caragiale), ce-i apropie, fie şi teatral, de una dintre virtuţile presei reale: aceea de a rezolva conflicte. E o dublare a happy-end-ului de captură din O noapte furtunoasă, care oferă unui personaj altfel complet inabil şi fără merite (Rică) şansa excepţională de a întemeia pe loc un praznic care parodiază însăşi esenţa presei, însă propulsează personajul (prin eliminare) la un nivel prin excelenţă salutar, inclusiv ca ziarist. Şi în acest caz mariajul este o pecete a unui final util şi convenabil, chiar dacă amănuntul ştrengar n-are cum lipsi: aici un tânăr student se căsătoreşte cu o femeie mult mai puţin tânără, iar în celălalt caz (al Nopţii furtunoase) căsătoria Ziţei cu Rică echivalează cu o cristalizare a triunghiului amoros Jupîn Dumitrache-Veta-Chiriac; ultimele „bănuieli rele” se spulberă. De observat că tot un gazetar (Nae Caţavencu) conduce „zelul” final din O scrisoare pierdută; şi aici – întâmplător sau nu – triunghiul conjugal îngheaţă în poziţia definitiv triumfătoare. Scena merită citată: „CAŢAVENCU: Sărut mîinile… devotamentul meu… ZOE: Cu o condiţie: după alegere, o să fie manifestaţie publică… d-ta ai s-o conduci. CAŢAVENCU (repede şi supus): O conduc… ZOE: D-ta o să prezidezi banchetul popular din grădina primăriei… CAŢAVENCU (asemenea): Prezidez… ZOE: O să chefuieşti cu poporul… CAŢAVENCU (acelaşi joc): Chefuiesc… ZOE: Şi o să vii aici cu toţii, să saluţi în numele alegătorilor, pe deputatul ales şi pe prefect… CAŢAVENCU: Da. ZOE: Ne-am înţeles? CAŢAVENCU: Da. ZOE: Du-te şi ia loc în capul mesii; fii zelos, asta nu-i cea din urmă Cameră! […] CAŢAVENCU: Mă duc, mă duc, şi să vedeţi dacă nu v-o plăcea…” [7] Autoritate este o schiţă prin excelenţă caritabilă, oarecum rudă cu O cronică de Crăciun. Un cunoscut dramaturg primeşte pe Nicu Ionescu, un tânăr deocamdată fără perspective: e sărac, fără maniere, nu ştie să lege două vorbe şi cu atât mai puţin să scrie. Pentru început, primeşte un loc de băiat de prăvălie (posibilă retrimitere la personajul Piccolino) la un negustor, cu un salariu acceptabil şi condiţii bune. Tânărul refuză net, motivând că doreşte să intre direct în publicistică, pentru a se desăvârşi ca poet. De aici legătura autorului dramatic cu proaspătul său protejat se rupe, până la premiera eşuată a unei piese, când, printre cronicile în mare parte ursuze, dramaturgul observă una de o virulenţă extremă. Voind să-l cunoască pe cronicar, el merge la redacţia respectivă, unde se ciocneşte de Nicu Ionescu (alias Hamlet), care devenise în răstimp o autoritate printre cronicarii dramatici din Capitală. Nicu Ionescu este unul dintre ziariştii „serioşi” ai operei lui Caragiale, fiindcă tuşele proprii unei false ori sforăitoare evoluţii sunt puţine aici. Atitudinea sa aproape dârză în faţa oricărei alte meserii în afara publicisticii literare se apropie considerabil de reticenţa personajului Titu Herdelea, în Ion, exprimată de Grigore Iuga:

53 „Grigore le spuse că tînărul Herdelea ar dori să-şi găsească un rost în ţară şi Dumescu, fiind vorba de un ardelean, îi oferi îndată un loc de funcţionar la banca lui, deocamdată modest, fireşte, rămînînd să se vază ulterior dacă va merita mai mult. Iuga mulţumi refuzînd […] Titu însuşi tăcuse, dar se bucură că Grigore n-a primit. N-a trecut el Carpaţii, ca să ajungă funcţionar la bancă. Mai curînd la vreun ziar ar fi să i se găsească vreo întrebuinţare, adăugă Iuga. „Da, da, la vreun jurnal”, repetă şi tînărul cu însufleţire.” [8] Iar despre Nicu Ionescu aflăm: „Voia să scrie poezii, voia să facă literatură, voia să se facă ziarist; pentru aceea refuza cu dignitate locul pe care i-l găsisem […] În zadar i-am dat poveţe să fugă de un teren de viaţă şi de luptă în care, chiar armat cum se cuvine, nu capeţi vreun succes de seamă, în zadar am încercat să-l fac să înţeleagă că merge la mizerie sigură. D. Ionescu a zîmbit iarăşi cu zîmbetul d-sale caracteristic, şi, aruncîndu-mi mult fum în nas, mi-a spus că o irezistibilă putere îl atrage în nobila carieră.” [9] Indubitabil, personajul e cinstit de propria perseverenţă, mai ales că aceasta nu e un apanaj al eroului caragialian; în acest registru, doar începutul e promiţător, în condiţiile în care Nicu Ionescu e, deocamdată, un tânăr plat şi insipid, luat sub paternitatea unei aripi solide. Nici dispariţia fără urmă a orfelinului nu ne buimăceşte peste măsură. Până la urmă, Caracudi însuşi e un dispărut al etapei, iar Piccolino apare de nicăieri şi se aşterne pe treabă. Mai mult, fiindcă Nicu refuză startul oficial, poate fi pedepsit cu dispariţia totală; însă nu e aşa. Din acest moment personajul se detaşează de cultura caragialescă a magnificului incapabil şi cunoaşte o evoluţie fulgerătoare, greu de explicat. El devine Hamlet, necontenit superior şi imperturbabil distrugător a toţi şi toate: „D. Ionescu s-a întors şi m-a invitat să luăm un aperitiv la băcănia din colţ. Mi-a mărturisit că el e Hamlet; am început să discutăm asupra piesei mele, pe care mi-a nimicit-o… Acţiune… caractere… pasiuni… tehnică… ideal… tendinţă… arta pentru artă… Shakespeare… Molière… mediu social… unitate… logică… Hartmann… Ibsen etc., etc. … şi m-a nimicit şi pe mine lîngă piesă.” [10] Schiţa este unică prin atitudinea de final a naratorului: ironia, dacă există, este atât de fină, încât pare că ar necesita instrumente speciale de decodare; finalul e mai mult cel al unei amărăciuni inabil ascunse sub o mustaţă care altminteri nu patronează altceva decât zâmbete. Întreaga parte secundă a schiţei învăluie o mustrare patern-publicistică, rezumată în dezolanta esenţă a senzaţionalului: lovesc mai tare tocmai cei care nu şi-au câştigat încă dreptul la ofensivă. Virulenţa poate fi temeinică prin conţinut, însă rămâne trivială prin circumstanţe; de aici presiunea melancolică a finalului: „M-am crucit de cîte a învăţat Hamletul meu în şase luni! Ce schimbare! Ce progres! Nicu Ionescu este astăzi o adevărată autoritate. Ce trecut! Ce prezent! şi încă ce viitor!” [11] (s.n.) Dacă în ce-l privea pe „bravul meu Caracudi”, paternitatea era o doar caricatură a unui accident („atunci am luat un reporter special”), de data aceasta „Hamletul meu” este posesivul unei duioşii cătrănite, al unei înrudiri ratate din cauza unei extravaganţe inferioare. De altfel, înşiruirea savantă de principii ale artei dramatice este un demers naiv prin excelenţă, de vreme ce ea vine dinspre un băieţandru ajuns mare cronicar dramatic în mai puţin de şase luni, spre un dramaturg demult consacrat. Ne amintim de amărăciunea maestrului Vasiliu din Travesti, de Aurel Baranga: „VASILIU: […] Azi circulă alte gusturi. Nu vezi dumneata? Unde te duci, unde te întorci: „piese de idei”. Ca şi cînd ar exista două feluri de piese: unele cu „idei” şi altele cu frişcă […] Băieţii de astăzi sunt nişte băieţi admirabili, au mult patos, pun în tot ce scriu o mare credinţă, dar cînd îi văd c-o iau cu ideologia… Ideologia, mon cher, e bună, dar în şedinţe.” [12] În paranteză fie spus, Vasiliu este singurul personaj de contur caragialian din Travesti: lejer, jovial, fără orgolii mari, întotdeauna gata să schimbe o piesă din temelii doar pentru a „prinde stagiunea”. Pentru el propriile piese sunt uşoare, aproape modeste („o spumă, o şampanie”), fără veleităţi-parazit, de glorie. Ultimul personaj-publicist considerat aici este Karkaleki, cel în cazul căruia schematismul caragialesc este dus la extrem, fiindcă omul reprezintă, în fapt, un principiu: slugărnicia. Proba este tot una auditivă, anume repetarea frazelor superiorului, într-o nostimă învălmăşeală a servilismului urlat la vreme, după principiul folosit atât de Pristanda, cât şi de Caţavencu, în O scrisoare pierdută:

54 „– Bine, mă! da nu vedeţi voi ce murdărie? Voi trăiţi ca vitele, mă! – Ca vitele, măria-ta! – O să vă dau afară, mă! – Să ne dai, măria-ta! – Mari ticăloşi sunteţi, mă! – Ticăloşi, măria-ta! – Afară!” [13] „Întemeietorul presei politice române” e, în realitate, un cronicar monden, printre altele (vezi Edgar): „[Karkaleki, n.n.] era însărcinat între altele să facă în Buletinul ofiţial dările de seamă despre petrecerile de la palat.” [14] Nu ne va ului, deci, peste măsură, profilul real al publicistului: acela de întemeietor al clasei caragialiene a ziariştilor de luptă. Fiindcă se pare că Venturiano, Caţavencu, Bostandaki, Constantinescu ori Mihăilescu, plus ploaia de pumni, palme, picioare, cravaşe, şpăngi ori bastoane îşi au originea în următoarea scenă: „Cum intră publicistul, vodă sare de pe divan şi, fără vorbă, şart-part! cîteva palme şi pe urmă trage-i pe spinare cu ciubucul.” [15] Trebuie să recunoaştem ciubucul ca element regal de corecţie, posibil mai demn decât instrumentele de tăvăleală ale supuşilor tronului, însă indubitabil strămoş al nesfârşitei păruieli de pe terenul presei.

Note: [1] Tudor Vianu, Studii de literatură română, Bucureşti, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, 1965, pp. 350-351. [2] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, Bucureşti, Editura pentru Literatură, 1969, p. 46. [3] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, p. 47. [4] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, p. 35-36. [5] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, p. 43. [6] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, p. 44. [7] I. L. Caragiale, Teatru, Bucureşti, Editura Minerva, 1980, pp. 155-156. [8] Liviu Rebreanu, Răscoala, Cluj-Napoca, Editura Dacia, 1971, p. 27. [9] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, p. 359. [10] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, pp. 360-361. [11] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, p. 361. [12] Aurel Baranga, Opinia publică. Cinci comedii, Bucureşti, Editura Minerva, 1971, p. 392. [13] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, p. 370. [14] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, p. 370. [15] I. L. Caragiale, Momente, p. 370-371.

Bibliografie: Baranga, Aurel, Opinia publică. Cinci comedii, Bucureşti, Minerva, 1971. Baranga, Aurel, Opinia publică, Bucureşti, Eminescu, 1980. Caragiale, I. L., Teatru, Bucureşti, Minerva,1980. Caragiale, I. L., Momente, Bucureşti, Editura pentru Literatură, 1969. Caragiale, I. L., Nuvele, povestiri, amintiri, Timişoara, Editura Facla, 1984. Papadima, Liviu, Caragiale, fireşte, Bucureşti, Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, 1999. Rebreanu, Liviu, Răscoala, Cluj-Napoca, Dacia, 1971. Rebreanu, Liviu, Romane, vol. III, Bucureşti, Cartea Românească, 1986. Vianu, Tudor, Studii de literatură română, Bucureşti, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, 1965. Vodă-Căpuşan, Maria, Dramatis personae, Cluj-Napoca, Dacia, 1980. Vodă-Căpuşan, Maria, Despre Caragiale, Cluj-Napoca, Dacia, 1982.

55 L’influence de la pensée positiviste sur « l’esprit scientifique » d’Émile Zola

Mirela Drăgoi*

Abstract: The development of industry, the scientific and the technical progress and the economical changes registered in France at the beginning of the XIXth century are determining factors for the dismissal of the old fashioned human mentality and ideas and the focus on new moral, religious and artistic values. Auguste Comte’s Positivism (1798 – 1857) dominates the intellectual’s philosophy in the Second French Empire. They focus on the supremacy of science and respectively on a manner of thinking devoid of conventions and prejudices. Also, Emile Zola considers that the “observation” of facts and then their “experimentation” are indispensable stages in the “modification of circumstances and mediums”. Keywords: scientific spirit, experimentation, social values, positivism, observation.

Résumé: L’avènement de l’industrie, les progrès scientifiques et techniques et les bouleversements d’ordre économique enregistrés en France au début du XIXe siècle aident l’homme à se débarrasser de ses idées vieillies et à se concentrer sur de nouvelles valeurs morales, religieuses et artistiques. Le positivisme d’Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857) domine la philosophie des intellectuels du Second Empire. Ils préconisent le règne de la science et implicitement une manière de penser indépendante des dogmes et des préjugés. A son tour, Émile Zola considère l’« observation » des faits et ensuite l’« expérimentation » comme des faits indispensables aux « modifications des circonstances et des milieux ». Mots-clés: l'esprit scientifique, expérimentation, valeurs sociales, positivisme, observation

Le XIXe siècle a cherché, à travers l’œuvre de ses penseurs et de ses romanciers, à mettre en évidence les lois qui régissent la société. Il a jeté les bases des sciences sociales, « construites » en étroite relation avec l’histoire et l’économie. Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857) formule dans son Cours de philosophie positive (1830 – 1842) la théorie conformément à laquelle la première étape d’une transformation de la société comporte une transformation des mentalités. Cette idée se trouve à la base de « l’esprit scientifique » qui domine la philosophie des intellectuels du Second Empire. Elle postule que la science exige une manière de penser indépendante des dogmes et des préjugés. Ce théoricien est l’auteur d’une fabuleuse construction politico-religieuse. Après avoir étudié « le développement total de l’intelligence humaine dans ses diverses sphères d’activité » [1], il publie Le Système de politique positive ou Traité de sociologie instituant la religion de l’humanité (1851 – 1854). Il se proclame lui-même prêtre de la Religion de l’humanité, fonde des églises positivistes et remplace les saints par les penseurs de l’histoire. Devenu secrétaire de Saint Simon en 1817, il en est fortement influencé [2]. A l’exemple de son prédécesseur, Auguste Comte lie l’évolution économique à la transformation des classes sociales, considère le progrès de l’humanité comme indispensable au devenir des sociétés et condamne la classe aristocratique de la Restauration [3]. Il proclame avoir découvert « une grande loi fondamentale » dans l’analyse de l’histoire de l’humanité. Selon lui, pour pouvoir suivre l’évolution humaine « depuis son premier essor le plus simple jusqu’à nos jours », il faut parcourir trois étapes « théoriques » : l’état théologique ou fictif, l’état métaphysique ou abstrait et l’état scientifique ou positif :

Cette loi consiste en ce que chacune de nos conceptions principales, chaque branche de nos connaissances, passe successivement par trois états théoriques différents: l’état théologique, ou fictif; l’état métaphysique, ou abstrait; l’état scientifique, ou positif. En d’autres termes, l’esprit humain, par sa nature, emploie successivement dans chacune de ses recherches trois méthodes de philosopher, dont le caractère est essentiellement différent et même radicalement opposé: d’abord la méthode théologique, ensuite la méthode métaphysique, et enfin la méthode positive. De là, trois sortes de philosophies, ou de systèmes généraux de conceptions sur l’ensemble des phénomènes, qui s’excluent mutuellement: la première est le point de départ nécessaire de l’intelligence humaine; la troisième, son état fixe et définitif; la seconde est uniquement destinée à servir de transition. Dans l’état théologique, l’esprit humain dirigeant essentiellement ses recherches vers la nature intime des êtres, les causes premières et finales de tous les effets qui le frappent, en un mot,

* Chargée de cours, dr., Université « Dunarea de Jos », Galati

56 vers les connaissances absolues, se représente les phénomènes comme produits par l’action directe et continue d’agents surnaturels plus ou moins nombreux, dont l’intervention arbitraire explique toutes les anomalies apparentes de l’univers. Dans l’état métaphysique, qui n’est au fond qu’une simple modification générale du premier, les agents surnaturels sont remplacés par des forces abstraites, véritables entités (abstractions personnifiées) inhérentes aux divers êtres du monde, et conçues comme capables d’engendrer par elles-mêmes tous les phénomènes observés, dont l’explication consiste alors à assigner pour chacun l’entité correspondante. Enfin, dans l’état positif, l’esprit humain reconnaissant l’impossibilité d’obtenir des notions absolues, renonce à chercher l’origine et la destination de l’univers, et à connaître les causes intimes des phénomènes, pour s’attacher uniquement à découvrir, par l’usage bien combiné du raisonnement et de l’observation, leurs lois effectives, c’est-à-dire leurs relations invariables de succession et de similitude. L’explication des faits, réduite alors à ses termes réels, n’est plus désormais que la liaison établie entre les divers phénomènes particuliers et quelques faits généraux, dont les progrès de la science tendent de plus en plus à diminuer le nombre. [4]

Dans la conception de Comte, les sciences ont suivi la même évolution, à travers ces trois étapes. En outre, cette approche historique fait ressortir une classification des sciences : mathématique, astronomie, physique, chimie, biologie et sociologie. Ce dernier domaine de la connaissance humaine a la fonction de régénérer et de gouverner l’ensemble du travail scientifique. [5] La philosophie positiviste d’Auguste Comte cherche à s’appuyer sur les faits réels, considérés comme « positifs » et envisage d’appréhender le monde à partir de certitudes précises, de « faits », pour ne pas donner lieu à des divagations inutiles. Ces idées jouent un grand rôle dans le contexte socioculturel du courant naturaliste, au moment où la nouvelle génération demande, elle aussi, une nouvelle forme d’expression littéraire. [6] Ce courant littéraire est fortement influencé par la révolution industrielle, le développement des sciences naturelles, la confiance dans la méthode expérimentale et dans le progrès. Il est également le produit de l’urbanisation, des conflits violents qui traversent la vie et de la déchéance que la ville précipite. Dès le XVIIe siècle, les savants utilisent le terme « naturalisme » pour désigner « l’étude rationnelle des phénomènes naturels ». Selon eux, rien n’existe en dehors de la nature. D’autre part, pour Denis Diderot, « naturaliste » est synonyme d’« athée » : « Les naturalistes sont ceux qui n’admettent point de Dieu, mais qui croient qu’il n’y a qu’une substance matérielle ». (L’Encyclopédie, 1765) Les romanciers du XIXe siècle reprennent ce terme pour désigner le roman dont l’objectif essentiel est la description exacte et scientifique des milieux sociaux. Zola utilise ce terme pour la première fois en 1868, lors de la publication de son roman Thérèse Raquin. Ce roman marque l’apogée de l’esthétique de la vérité (trait caractéristique des années 1860-1880), dans le prolongement du courant réaliste [7]. L’idéal des naturalistes est lié au goût de la recherche, appuyée sur « le plus grand nombre de sciences » et se trouve à la base d’un roman qui « est devenu une enquête générale sur la nature et sur l’homme ». Le roman naturaliste n’est plus seulement une reproduction fidèle et objective de la vie ; elle se propose de devenir l’instrument de l’observation et de l’expérience, du phénomène biologique et social, et permet de dévoiler les déterminismes héréditaires et les lois du milieu qui conditionnent le comportement humain. Ce mode de pensée implique l’élimination du hasard, car rien ne se produit sans avoir une cause. En outre, la connaissance des lois de l’évolution de l’homme permet de prévoir ses états futurs. Cette nouvelle démarche de création romanesque est mise en œuvre par la publication des Soirées de Médan, en 1880, dans une orientation scientifique traversée par le positivisme. Autour d’Emile Zola on trouve les frères Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896) et Jules de Goncourt (1830- 1870), Paul Alexis (1847-1901), Léon Hennique (1851-1935), Henri Céard (1851-1924), Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) etc. C’est par la préface de Germinie Lacerteux (1864) que les frères Goncourt font le lien entre les manifestes réalistes et le groupe naturaliste, figurant comme les précurseurs de la doctrine naturaliste. Ces deux écrivains veulent faire du roman un instrument et un champ de d’observation expérimentale, à la manière du grand physiologiste et professeur de médecine Claude Bernard (dont l’ouvrage essentiel est Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale, 1865). Leur

57 démarche consiste à placer des personnages, déterminés par une hérédité alcoolique, dans des milieux différents, considérés comme des champs d’expérimentation. L’observation des réactions et des comportements en cours d’évolution constitue alors les grandes lignes de structure du roman. Ils affichent un grand mépris pour « les petites œuvres polissonnes, les mémoires de filles, les confessions d’alcôve, les saletés érotiques » et portent leur attention sur l’évolution des « basses classes » et sur « ce monde sous un monde ». Pour les frères Goncourt, les éléments essentiels de la méthode naturaliste sont « d’immenses emmagasinements d’observations », « d’innombrables notes prises à coups de lorgnon » et « l’amassement d’une collection de documents humains », pour ne rien cacher de la nature humaine. Leurs romans (Sœur Philomène, 1861, Renée Mauperin, 1864, Germinie Lacerteux, 1865, Manette Salomon, 1867 et Madame Gervaise, 1869) mettent en scène les déviations de la sexualité, le crime, l’alcoolisme et la déchéance, la misère sordide etc. Le théoricien le plus important du naturalisme est sans aucun doute Emile Zola, même s’il répète dans tous ses textes théoriques qu’il n’y a pas d’école naturaliste en littérature : « Le naturalisme n’est qu’une méthode ou, moins encore, qu’une évolution » ; selon ce grand romancier français, le naturalisme n’est que l’aboutissement de l’œuvre d’un certain nombre de précurseurs et la conséquence naturelle d’un état nouveau de la civilisation. Zola réussit à créer dans ses romans une atmosphère hallucinante. Son œuvre majeure, le cycle des Rougon-Macquart, prétend être une étude des tares héréditaires qui se répercutent, à travers les milieux les plus variés, sur cinq générations successives d’une seule famille, repartie en deux branches: la branche légitime et la branche bâtarde. Une fatalité sociale primordiale distingue l’une de l’autre: la branche légitime, qui court à la richesse et aux honneurs, et la branche bâtarde, qui se confine dans la misère, le vice, la marginalité et le crime. L’univers romanesque des Rougon-Macquart fait de la succession des générations un principe de succession des œuvres dans le cycle (à l’Assommoir, le roman de Gervaise, de la mère, succède Nana, le roman de la fille, puis l’Œuvre, le roman du fils). Pour réaliser ces volumes, Zola se documente minutieusement; il fouille son univers social pour dévoiler tous les secrets d’un monde déchiré de contradictions. Chaque œuvre représente une étape d’un long périple qui traverse tous les milieux sociaux de l’époque. Germinal (1885), le chef-d’œuvre de Zola, est un roman d’enquête sur la condition ouvrière et sur le travail des mines aux alentours de 1880. C’est le treizième du cycle des Rougon- Macquart et a pour sujet la condition des mineurs, dont il évoque le mode misérable de vie, le travail pénible, douloureux, et les luttes syndicales. Étienne Lantier, fils de Gervaise Macquart, est un jeune ouvrier intelligent et sincère qui travaille dans une mine du Nord. Au moment où dans la mine éclate une lutte sociale violente, il essaie en vain de l’organiser. Les mineurs sont exterminés et Lantier comprend que son échec est dû à un manque de méthode et décide de se rendre à Paris pour tenter une action sociale plus cohérente. Pour réaliser ce roman, Zola séjourne deux mois dans la région minière d’Anzin et descend dans une mine. Zola définit véritablement les lois et les enjeux de ce mouvement littéraire dans ses romans - manifestes L’Assommoir, 1876 et Nana, 1879, dans ses articles de 1865-1866, recueillis dans Mes Haines et Mon Salon, puis dans le Naturalisme au théâtre (1881) et Les Romanciers naturalistes (1881) mais surtout en 1880 dans Le Roman expérimental. Il y expose sa théorie du roman, qui, selon lui, est fondée sur la transposition de la méthode expérimentale des sciences naturelles à l’observation des faits sociaux. Le Roman expérimental n’est pas un roman, une fiction imaginative, mais une étude théorique qui définit les caractéristiques du roman naturaliste vu comme « un procès-verbal ». En outre, le contenu de ce texte a une fin pédagogique : il faut comprendre le réel pour pouvoir agir sur la société. Ce qui en résulte, c’est « une œuvre scientifique, (…), une œuvre morale » dérivée de la « libre manifestation des pensées individuelles ». [8] Zola y présente le travail du romancier en des termes scientifiques et emprunte aux médecins les méthodes d’expérimentation. Pour comprendre les comportements de l’homme dans la société, le romancier naturaliste doit observer les faits puis les expérimenter dans le cadre de l’existence humaine, sur le plan héréditaire, physiologique et social. Dans la conception de Zola, le romancier doit faire « comme s’il était absent de la création », donc il doit choisir une écriture impersonnelle, d’une stricte objectivité:

58 Eh bien ! en revenant au roman, nous voyons également que le romancier est fait d’un observateur et d’un expérimentateur. L’observateur chez lui donne les faits tels qu’ils les a observés, pose le point de départ, établit le terrain solide sur lequel vont marcher les personnages et se développer les phénomènes. Puis l’expérimentateur paraît et institue l’expérience, je veux dire fait mouvoir les personnages dans une histoire particulière, pour y montrer que la succession des faits y sera telle que l’exige le déterminisme des phénomènes mis à l’étude. C’est presque toujours ici une expérience « pour voir », comme l’appelle Claude Bernard. Le romancier part à la recherche d’une vérité. Je prendrai comme exemple la figure du baron Hulot dans La Cousine Bette, de Balzac. Le fait général observé par Balzac est le ravage que le tempérament amoureux d’un homme amène chez lui, dans sa famille et dans la société. Dès qu’il a eu choisi son sujet, il est parti des faits observés, puis il a institué son expérience en soumettant Hulot à une série d’épreuves, en le faisant passer par certains milieux, pour montrer le fonctionnement du mécanisme de sa passion. Il est donc évident qu’il n’y a pas seulement là observation, mais qu’il y a aussi expérimentation, puisque Balzac ne s’en tient pas strictement en photographe aux faits recueillis par lui, puisqu’il intervient d’une façon directe pour placer son personnage dans des conditions dont il reste le maître. Le problème est de savoir ce que telle passion, agissant dans tel milieu et dans telles circonstances, produira au point de vue de l’individu et de la société ; et un roman expérimental, La Cousine Bette par exemple, est simplement le procès-verbal de l’expérience, que le romancier répète sous les yeux du public. En somme, toute l’opération consiste à prendre des faits dans la nature, puis à étudier le mécanisme des faits, en agissant sur eux par les modifications des circonstances et des milieux, sans jamais s’écarter des lois de la nature. Au bout, il y a la connaissance de l’homme, la connaissance scientifique, dans son action individuelle et sociale. Sans doute, nous sommes loin ici des certitudes de la chimie et même de la physiologie. Nous ne connaissons point encore les réactifs qui décomposent les passions et qui permettent de les analyser. Souvent, dans cette étude, je rappellerai ainsi que le roman expérimental est plus jeune que la médecine expérimentale, laquelle pourtant est à peine née. Mais je n’entends pas constater les résultats acquis, je désire simplement exposer clairement une méthode. Si le romancier expérimental marche encore à tâtons dans la plus obscure et la plus complexe des sciences, cela n’empêche pas cette science d’exister. Il est indéniable que le roman naturaliste, tel que nous le comprenons à cette heure, est une expérience véritable que le romancier fait sur l’homme, en s’aidant de l’observation [9].

Zola veut donc faire entrer dans la littérature les méthodes des sciences de la nature et les données nouvelles apportées par les ouvrages à la mode à ce temps-là : le Traité de l’Hérédité naturelle de Lucas (1847-50), la traduction (1862) de l’Origine des Espèces de Darwin, et surtout l’Introduction à la médecine expérimentale (1865) de Claude Bernard. La méthode scientifique rigoureuse, dont le but est de « trouver les relations qui rattachent un phénomène quelconque à sa cause prochaine », doit être appliquée « à la vie passionnelle et intellectuelle ». Le roman naturaliste devient ainsi « une expérience véritable que le romancier fait sur l’homme en s’aidant de l’observation ». Cette méthode de l’observation qui porte sur « les faits de la nature » doit être doublée de l’expérimentation, qui met en lumière « le mécanisme des faits ». D’ailleurs, l’expérience scientifique est « une observation provoquée dans un but de contrôle ». Si l’observation « montre », l’expérience « instruit ». Le roman doit être une enquête ancrée dans un certain milieu. Il doit analyser l’homme entièrement expliqué par la physiologie et le milieu où il vit. Pour ce faire, Zola mène des enquêtes sur le terrain et remplit de nombreux dossiers préparatoires [10]. Ces différentes recherches illustrent la grande vitalité du genre romanesque au XIXe siècle. Les écrivains visent à rivaliser avec la science, l’histoire et le réel pour produire « à la fois un témoignage et un poème, une chronique et un mythe cosmique » [11]. Le résultat de leur démarche se matérialise dans un miroir des conditions historiques, idéologiques et techniques de cette époque tourmentée.

Notes [1] Comte, Auguste, Cours de philosophie positive, cité par ***Littérature. Textes et documents. Le XIXe siècle, coord. Henri Mitterand, Éd. Nathan, Paris, 1986, p. 322. [2] Dès 1802, il annonce dans ses Lettres d’un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains une transformation des conditions de vie grâce à la science et à l’industrie. Saint Simon contribue également, par ses publications ultérieures (Mémoire sur la science de l’homme – 1813, Réorganisation de la Société européenne – 1814, L’Industrie – 1816-1818, Le Système industriel – 1820-1822, Le Catéchisme des industriels – 1823-1824 etc.) à élaborer une science sociale rationnelle. [3] En 1815, la France est vaincue par les Anglais et les Prussiens lors de la bataille de Waterloo. Ce moment est perçu comme un désastre provoquant la chute de Napoléon Bonaparte. Les Bourbons reviennent au trône, ce qui donne à cette période historique le nom de « Restauration ». On assiste au règne de Louis XVIII, suivi par celui de Charles X, dont le

59 règne provoque de vifs mécontentements de la population parisienne, qui se révolte et dresse des barricades. Selon Comte, les aristocrates vivent dans cette période dans l’oisiveté et entravent par leur attitude le développement économique. [4] Comte, Auguste, Œuvres choisies, avec une introduction par H. Gouhier, coll. « Bibliothèque philosophique », Éd. Aubier, Paris, 1943, p. 59-61. [5] Il faut mentionner à ce niveau de notre étude le lien établi entre les idées d’Auguste Comte et la théorie positiviste de l’évolution humaine élaborée par le naturaliste anglais Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882). Dans son livre De l’origine des espèces (1859), Darwin refuse l’idée de la seule création divine, intègre l’homme dans la nature et le considère comme rattaché au milieu physique qui l’entoure. En outre, la sélection naturelle entraîne la transformation des espèces humaines. En France, Claude Bernard continue l’influence positiviste subie dans une Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865). Le physiologiste français considère que la connaissance médicale est issue de la méthode expérimentale. [6] Le naturalisme naît en réaction avec d’autres mouvements ; selon Zola, est naturaliste « tout écrivain qui emploie la forme scientifique, étudie le monde par l’observation et l’analyse en niant l’absolu, l’idéal révélé et irrationnel ». Ce type d’écriture romanesque réagit ainsi contre l’idéalisme et le romantisme, contre la primauté de l’imagination sur l’observation et de la sensibilité idéaliste sur la raison réaliste. [7] Les écrivains réalistes se réclamaient de l’observation de la nature, tandis que les naturalistes vont plus loin : ils en font l’expérimentation. Par le souci de l’observation, le naturalisme continue la doctrine réaliste (d’ailleurs, Balzac est le maître constamment avoué de Zola). L’apport de ce courant consiste dans la volonté de diriger l’observation par une hypothèse qu’il faut vérifier. [8] Philippe van Tieghem, Les grandes doctrines littéraires en France, chap. « Les théories du réalisme et du naturalisme », Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1993, pp. 232-233. [9] Emile Zola, Le roman expérimental, Éd. Garnier - Flammarion, Paris, 2006. [10] Pour Zola, l’homme est soumis au déterminisme universel, car les sentiments et les caractères sont rigoureusement prédestinés par des lois analogues à celles qui forment le support de la biologie et de la physiologie. Le roman doit être une annexe de l’histoire naturelle et de la médecine. Tout au long de sa carrière, Zola s’est comparé soit au médecin dans l’amphithéâtre, soit au chirurgien disséquant les cadavres, soit au philologue rassemblant des exercices du langage populaire. [11] Claude Abastado, Emile Zola. Germinal, profil d’une œuvre, chap. « Le titre symbolique », Éd. Hatier, Coll. « Profil d’une œuvre », Paris, 1970, p. 57.

Bibliographie Abastado, Claude, Emile Zola. Germinal, profil d’une œuvre, Éd. Hatier, Coll. « Profil d’une œuvre », Paris, 1970. Chevrel, Yves, Le Naturalisme, P.U.F., 1982. Chartier, Pierre Introduction aux grandes théories du roman, Éd. Dunod, Paris, 1998. Comte, Auguste, Œuvres choisies, avec une introduction par H. Gouhier, coll. « Bibliothèque philosophique », Éd. Aubier, Paris, 1943. ***Histoire de la littérature française, IIe tome, (coord. Angela Ion), Éd. Didactica si Pedagogica Bucarest, 1982. *** Littérature du XIXe siècle, coord. Henri Mitterand, Éd. Nathan, Paris, 1986 Mitterand, Henri, Zola et le Naturalisme, P.U.F., Paris, 1986. Van Tieghem, Philippe, Les grandes doctrines littéraires en France, P.U.F, 1993.

60 Des stéréotypes idéologiques dans les textes littéraires: La vie roumaine 1956*

Nicoleta Ifrim**

Abstract: In 1956, the articles published in Viaţa românescă focus on the „new critique” playing a dominant role in reading literary works and aesthetically judging their writers. The ideological pattern directs the literary discourse towards the rise of a new reference Centre mirroring and politically filtering the contemporary writings. Keywords: political discourse, literature, ideology, Viaţa românească - 1956

La critique littéraire de l’année 1956 se proposait, dans la revue littéraire La vie roumaine, des objectifs orientés vers la motivation politisée de tout type de discours littéraire, objectifs présentés dans des articles-programme, sous la direction du modèle de l’espace soviétique qui exigeait le développement des directives idéologiques de la dominante totalitaire. Les nombreuses études thématiques, parues dans la revue en question sont, en fait, l’écho des œuvres du premier congrès des écrivains roumains organisé en 1956, qui focalise le discours critique de la presse culturelle contemporaine. Par ailleurs, Scânteia tineretului (L’étincelle de la Jeunesse***) [1] du 19 juin publie Le mot d’ouverture de l’académicien Mihail Sadoveanulors du premier congrès des écrivains de la République Populaire Roumaine, qui se propose de décrypter « quelques problèmes sur l’art littéraire du temps ». Dans ce sens, « l’artiste de nos jours appartient à son époque ; il doit envisager dans son œuvre un monde bouleversé » ; il doit « s’adresser au peuple sauvé de la révolution, qui construit le socialisme. » « Le poète doit fournir aux gens, c’est-à-dire au peuple travailleur, une littérature de l’âme, de l’hésitation et du succès, un peuple complexé des drames sociaux associés aux désastres et aux défaites, à la lumière de l’âme des autres. » « La culture modeste des jeunes de notre confrérie », affirmait Sadoveanu dans son petit « Mot », doit être compensée par une nouvelle formation créatrice : « Le jeune écrivain doit animer tous les éléments culturels de la vie ancienne et moderne. » C’est par cela que « l’écrivain doué trouvera sa place unique dans son travail fondateur » Dans ce contexte, le premier numéro de la revue La vie roumaine, paru en 1956, met en question Le problème du typique dans la littérature et dans l’art, étude à caractère doctrinal, publié aussi dans le no 18 de la revue Komunist, en décembre 1958 ; l’étude propose un débat sur le problème de l’absence des « œuvres artistiques monumentales qui reflètent le caractère héroïque de la réalité soviétique. A vrai dire, le lecteur soviétique est mécontent car il ne trouve plus dans les œuvres littéraires les images typiques impressionnantes et pittoresques des contemporains – les fondateurs du communisme. Notre époque héroïque, qui pendule entre la nouveauté et ancienneté, n’est pas envisagée de manière complexe, avec toutes ses contradictions ; on ne dévoile ni le mal du monde ancien, ni la grandeur et la beauté du monde moderne. Cependant, il y a des œuvres monotones, sans portée artistique, qui prouvent que leurs auteurs sont les partisans des événements politiques » [2] Le canon du réalisme-socialiste d’origine soviétique est imposé comme solution unique, viable, capable de « récupérer les vraies valeurs littéraires », surtout dans l’approche du « problème du typique », « l’un des problèmes centraux de l’esthétique marxiste-léniniste, lié aux autres problèmes, ceux de la création artistique. Sa résolution est d’une grande importance théorique et pratique pour le développement avantageux de l’art du réalisme socialiste. La compréhension approfondie du problème de la spécificité nationale dans la littérature et dans l’art est très nécessaire dans la lutte pour le renforcement du niveau idéologique et artistique de la littérature et de l’art, dans la lutte contre le délai artistique, contre l’apparition de quelques œuvres insipides, sans valeur, qui modifient la réalité. Le spécifique dans l’art réaliste est la condition la plus importante du caractère artistique. C’est par cela que se réalise la vision artistique concrète de la réalité » [3]. Le contre-modèle est considéré comme « une esthétique factieuse », avec ses diverses approches des écritures « idéalistes ou qui portent la masque du matérialisme. Les théories en question ont trouvé leur expression dans une série de mouvements et de courants artistiques, à

* Cette approche est soutenue par le projet CNCSIS – PNII IDEI no 949. ** Chargée de cours, dr., Université « Dunarea de Jos », Galati *** Les titres de journaux ou d’œuvres littéraires sont traduits par l’auteur de cet article.

61 partir du romantisme factieux, révolutionnaire, jusqu’au naturalisme et aux autres manifestations de la décadence. L’esthétique marxiste-léniniste a été créée selon des théories bourgeoises de l’art et s’est appuyée sur les meilleures traditions progressistes de la pensée esthétique du passé, en étalant l’expérience de l’art réaliste mondiale. En occupant la position du matérialisme dialectique, elle a pu donner une interprétation scientifique au problème dominant de l’époque, vu comme condition fondamentale de la réflexion réaliste de la vie [4]. Tout en s’échappant aux formes « contestataires » de la typologie à laquelle on remarque une limitation à « la quintessence du phénomène social-historique », comme définition « de la manifestation de l’esprit du parti dans l’art réaliste, qui affirme que le problème dominant de l’époque est un problème politique et non pas une exagération consciente qui dévoile tout et qui expose le caractère typique des images artistiques » [5], l’article-programme marque les lignes de force d’une littérature « adéquate » qui se détache de quelques « images artistiques (…) qui n’ont rien à faire avec l’imitation mécanique de la réalité. C’est le résultat d’une amplification des meilleurs traits physiques et de caractère de l’homme spirituel soviétique, dont l’image est distincte ou typique en fonction de son importance généralisatrice. Dans l’individualité vivante et dans la destinée de tout héros des meilleures œuvres de la littérature russe se dévoile le caractère des phénomènes typiques pour notre réalité. Au contraire, le caractère monotone, usé, s’explique dans plusieurs œuvres par l’incapacité des auteurs de renoncer à jamais à la description superficielle des phénomènes et de réaliser une activité artistique profonde » [6] Dans la lignée de ce discours légitime de la « nouvelle » idéologie littéraire, Földes Laszlö parle de L’Humanisme de l’écrivain communiste contre l’objectivisme et le subjectivisme (Umanismul scriitorului comunist împotriva obiectivismului şi subiectivismului), ayant comme fondement la démonstration de quelques noyaux idéologiques fonctionnels dans un espace marqué par la (non)affectivité : « Le sort de l’homme exprime une exigence déterminée par la complexité de sa situation sociale, par son caractère, par la réflexion de ses actes dans la vie. Le destin personnel comprend, donc, une vérité sociale et des informations historiques. Dans ce destin s’entremêlent le déterminisme des conditions sociaux-historiques de l’homme – comme aspect objectif – et l’influence de ses actes sur l’histoire – comme aspect subjectif. Envisager la détermination sociale de l’homme et sa place dans l’histoire signifie faire dévoiler l’aspect subjectif de l’existence humaine. Conformément à ce critère, on va juger l’homme afin de le considérer comme ami ou ennemi. L’écrivain qui n’agira pas de la sorte, jugera l’homme de manière objective, comme le résultat passif des conditions sociales, sans avoir aucune responsabilité de ses faits. Par conséquent, il éveillera une attitude de tolérance et l’ennemi sera pardonné » [7] Dans les limites de tels préceptes théoriques, l’auteur de l’étude relit le roman de Nagy Istvan, A la plus haute tension (La cea mai înaltă tensiune), « sévèrement critiqué dans le journal L’Etincelle (Scânteia) à cause de l’aspect objectif des figures des exploiteurs » [8]. Il y identifie des déviations, des écarts des principes de l’objectivisme réaliste- socialiste: « L’écrivain a voulu envisager de manière objective maintes figures de magnats dans leurs affaires onéreuses. Et pendant qu’il observait les gens que l’histoire a exclus, il a focalisé son attention sur un autre aspect : il a vu seulement les conséquences des actions de l’histoire sur leur destinée, en même temps qu’il a limité leur position par rapport à l’histoire. De cette façon, dans le jugement moral qu’il a entrepris, il y avait des éléments de l’attitude petite-bourgeoise. L’écrivain avait de la pitié pour ses héros, considérés comme des gens corrompus par les lois de la société et condamnés à mort. Or, l’humanisme socialiste suppose l’analyse de l’origine et du mécanisme social des destins humains – et non pas le regret des anciens exploiteurs voués à l’échec par le mécanisme de la vie sociale » [9]. La dimension subjective du profile du personnage est focalisée idéologiquement sur le cas de la typologie de « l’ennemi de classe » : « L’écrivain a une tendance préconçue – celle de présenter son héros comme un personnage odieux. D’une part, c’est la haine qui l’a déterminé de s’imaginer le héros ; d’autre part, c’est sa conscience qui l’a fait décider de ne pas dévoiler aux lecteurs la source réelle de ses sentiments et la connexion entre la conscience et l’existence de l’homme digne de haine. La faute ne réside pas dans le fait qu’il a voulu le présenter comme ignoble, mais qu’il a essayé de lui projeter les traits en dehors de la nature humaine » [10]. Le plaidoyer pour « une nouvelle doctrine de la littérature » est continuée par A. Oprea dans la même parution de La vie roumaine; il signe l’étude La littérature et la contemporanéité (Literatura şi contemporaneitatea), article qui s’avère être une analyse politisée, qui commence de manière directe, avec l’opinion tranchante sur l’esthétique de Lovinescu qui « notait que la force

62 décisive dans la création et le développement de l’art étaient les personnalités prédestinées, les personnalités qui créaient des œuvres sans tenir compte de la société et sans un tel apport du milieu social (…) Il n’y a aucun doute que, dans son article, E. Lovinescu ridiculise le rôle du peuple dans la création des œuvres artistiques (…) De cette manière se révèle le côté aristocratique des parvenus, mais aussi l’esprit méprisant envers le peuple, le culte de la personnalité sur laquelle s’appuient les hérésies » [11]. En détruisant de manière virulente le modèle de Lovinescu et de ses valeurs, l’auteur de l’étude initie « la nouvelle esthétique » qui offre « de la notoriété » à la littérature : « Fondée sur la théorie matérialiste de la connaissance, l’esthétique marxiste-léniniste démontre que la valeur éternelle des grandes œuvres d’art est déterminée par leur liaison avec la base assise de la vie populaire et que la valeur d’une création d’art ne peut s’expliquer de manière unilatérale que par les qualités subjectives de l’artiste, quelle que soit l’importance des thèmes et des problèmes historiques et sociaux – comme objet du débat et de la réverbération artistique » [12]. Les notes critiques de la presse culturelle font l’objet du refus, fait qui démontre le filtre subjectif dans la perception des textes littéraires. Les exemples en sont édifiants : « Dans les notes de lecture de Georgeta Horodincă, Ecrivains et héros (Scriitori şi eroi), publiées dans Le journal littéraire (Gazeta literară), les points forts et les points faibles de quelques livres étaient expliqués par les écrivains qui avaient vécu les sentiments de leurs héros. L’échec du roman Des champs nouveaux (Ogoare noi) s’explique par l’attitude d’Aurel Mihale qui n’a pas vécu… la vie intérieure des héros. De même, Ieronim Şerbu a échoué avec son héros, l’ingénieur Moroianu » [13]. D’ailleurs, l’écrivain même est puni à cause de sa tendance subjective, car « on ne peut pas rester indifférents lorsqu’on observe le manque d’une étude approfondie de la réalité extérieure ; c’est par l’application dans la pratique artistique des théories subjectives que s’explique l’apparition, dans notre littérature, des créations hybrides, qui envisagent la vie de manière déformée » [14]. Le critique considère que le modèle du « héros de l’époque socialiste » pourrait être un repère dans le travail d’une œuvre de valeur : « Les générations de l’avenir apprendront des journaux sur les héros du travail socialiste, sur les rivalités socialistes, sur la lutte héroïque de la glorieuse classe ouvrière pendant les années du premier plan quinquennal, sur les actes historiques de notre révolution, faits sous la direction du parti. Mais à présent, on pourrait affirmer que la postérité découvrira à peine la réflexion artistique de ces thèmes d’épopée » [15]. Il y a des visions critiques révisionnistes qui s’appliquent aux textes canoniques et qui sont centrés sur la mise idéologique. D. Solomon signe l’article Le problème de l’intellectuel dans l’œuvre de Camil Petrescu (Problema intelectualului în opera lui Camil Petrescu) où il considère l’écrivain roumain comme « celui-ci qui attaque le thème de l’intellectualité, thème central, voire unique de son œuvre, qui analyse surtout l’activité intellectuelle comme action de savoir » [16]. L’attitude de révolte, de refus de la société décadente devient la coordonnée essentielle de la dynamique de son personnage : « Chaque circonstance, où Camil Petrescu envisage son héros, dévoile tel ou tels traits de celui-ci (chez Gelu Ruscanu – l’aspiration vers une justice absolue, l’intégrité et le courage moral, la force de sacrifice, chez Pietro Gralla – la tendance de découvrir l’absolu de l’amour, chez G. Dem. Ladima – le non-conformisme, la protestation contre l’ordre bourgeois etc.) La somme, pas précise, mais dialectique, de ces traits, définit un seul caractère, extrêmement profond et complexe, une âme sans égal qui représente le profil socio-psychologique de l’intellectuel appartenant à la catégorie de ceux qui ne peuvent pas s’adapter au monde bourgeois selon l’opinion de Camil Petrescu » [17]. De cette manière, « l’intellectuel de Camil Petrescu est accablé par les problèmes matériaux, en même temps que par la manque de compréhension de la part de ses contemporains et de l’ordre social bourgeois » [18]. L’interdépendance héros – milieu social impose, donc, un renversement conceptuel et, en même temps, une « séparation » définitive, mais obligatoire, des théories d’autonomie esthétique, essentiellement « révolutionnaires ». Dans ce sens, N. Tertulian publie l’étude Le caractère factieux de la théorie de « l’autonomie esthétique » (Caracterul reacţionar al teoriei „autonomiei esteticului”), qui détruit « la critique littéraire idéaliste, non-déterministe et transcendante » de type Maiorescu et des descendants dans la lignée de Lovinescu, Zarifopol, M. Dragomirescu, mais en promouvant le contre-modèle « victorieux » d’orientation marxiste-léniniste sur la direction de Gherea : « Il (Gherea) était convaincu que l’émotion esthétique n’avait rien de transcendant, que l’influence de l’art n’était pas loin d’une action gratuite, illusoire et fictive, que l’indifférence et l’équilibre contemplatif devant l’œuvre étaient incapables d’expliquer son écho affectif et

63 idéologique, que cet écho-là s’expliquait par le fait que l’art animait, réconfortait, éveillait des sentiments intenses et donnait une expression supérieure aux sentiments et aux aspirations réels, pratiques, qui existaient implicitement dans la conscience de chaque personne, que l’influence de l’art s’expliquait par la correspondance intérieure entre nos sentiments et aspirations, avec leur expression spécifique, idéale dans l’œuvre d’art » [19]. G. Ibrăileanu, « le critique progressiste et le disciple de Gherea » continue, pour Const. Ciopraga, la direction de la reconsidération critique de la nouvelle représentation littéraire ; en même temps, le roman Adela est mis sur la même place avec les grands modèles érotiques des romans russes, vu comme un exemple d’« ironie de quelques aspects de la vie bourgeoise » [20]. De tous ces points de vue, le discours critique de la Vie roumaine – 1956 est une combinaison entre les deux coordonnées de la reconversion politisée, le texte et le discours du texte, marquées par l’organisation du premier congrès des écrivains roumains, événement de référence qui amplifie les voix critiques et leurs analyses dans les pages de la revue.

Notes [1] ***, Sur le problème du typique dans la littérature et dans l’art (Cu privire la problema tipicului în literatură şi artă), La vie roumaine (Viaţa românească), no 1 /1956, p. 1985. [2] Toutes les citations sont prises du journal L’étincelle des Jeunes (Scânteia tineretului), le 19 juin/ 1956. [3] ***, Sur le problème du typique dans la littérature et dans l’art (Cu privire la problema tipicului în literatură şi artă), œuvre citée, p. 185. [4] Ibidem. [5] Ibidem., p. 186. [6] Ibidem. [7] Földes Laszlö, L’Humanisme de l’écrivain communiste contre l’objectivisme et le subjectivisme (Umanismul scriitorului comunist împotriva obiectivismului şi subiectivismului), La vie roumaine (Viaţa românească), no 1 /1956, p. 198. [8] Ibidem, p. 205. [9] Ibidem, p. 208. [10] Ibidem, p. 209. [11] Al. Oprea, La littérature et la contemporanéité (Literatura şi contemporaneitatea), La vie roumaine (Viaţa românească), no 1/ 1956, p. 227-228. [12] Ibidem, p. 228. [13] Ibidem., p. 230. [14] Ibidem, p. 231. [15] Ibidem, p. 236. [16] D. Solomon, Le problème de l’intellectuel dans l’œuvre de Camil Petrescu (Problema intelectualului în opera lui Camil Petrescu), La vie roumaine (Viaţa românească), no 2/1956, p. 196. [17] Ibidem, p. 197. [18] Ibidem, p. 205. [19] N. Tertulian, Le caractère factieux de la théorie de « l’autonomie esthétique » (Caracterul reacţionar al teoriei „autonomiei esteticului”), La vie roumaine (Viaţa românească), no 2/1956, p. 237. [20[ Const. Ciopraga, G. Ibrăileanu – créateur littéraire (G. Ibrăileanu – creator literar), La vie roumaine (Viaţa românească), no 3/ 1956, p. 220.

Bibliographie ***, Cu privire la problema tipicului în literatură şi artă, Viaţa românească, nr. 1/1956 Laszlö, Földes, Umanismul scriitorului comunist împotriva obiectivismului şi subiectivismului, Viaţa românească, nr. 1/1956 Oprea, Al., Literatura şi contemporaneitatea, Viaţa românească, nr. 1/1956 Solomon, D., Problema intelectualului în opera lui Camil Petrescu, Viaţa românească, nr. 2/1956 Tertulian, N., Caracterul reacţionar al teoriei „autonomiei esteticului”, Viaţa românească, nr .2/1956 Ciopraga, Const., G. Ibrăileanu – creator literar, Viaţa românească, nr. 3 /1956.

64 L’écriture politique de Cioran et Céline

Mara Magda Maftei*

Abstract: The article will deal with a thorny question: what are the nature and message of ideological materials throughout the writings of Cioran and Celine? The Second World War distorts the images of La Belle Époque. The political pamphlets of Celine are banned in France, they are not re-edited and nobody speaks of. Celine is almost a controversial writer. As for Cioran, lately, there are many studies that attempt to disassemble his political involvement. The political work of Cioran is gradually dismantled in order to demonstrate its commitment to the extreme right. This article insists on the similarities between Cioran and Céline starting with their childhood, youth, and continuing with their political engagement. Keywords: écriture politique, Cioran, Céline, political engagement

Le parcours similaire de Cioran et Céline L’année 2011 est une référence tant pour Emil Cioran que pour Louis Ferdinand Céline. Nous fêtons le centenaire du philosophe roumain exilé à Paris, mais aussi le cinquantenaire de Céline. En fait, nous assistons aux controverses liées à la question : fallait-il inscrire le cinquantenaire de la mort de Céline parmi les commémorations officielles de l’année 2011 ? Si Cioran a été pardonné pour ses visions extrémistes juvéniles, certains français ne pardonnent pas à Céline sa collaboration allemande pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale. Ses écrits antisémites ne peuvent pas être ignorés. Cioran, comme Céline ont renoncé à défendre leurs idées politiques après la défaite de l’Allemagne. Cioran a été disculpé, car il change de pays et la mémoire collective n’agit plus dans son cas. Une fois arrivé en France, il commence à s’excuser devant l’Occident pour ses fautes de jeunesse. Nous soupçonnons les deux écrivains de terribilisme littéraire plutôt que de vraie croyance. Mais les visions antisémites de Cioran et de Céline sont alimentées par le milieu économique international dominé à l’époque par les juifs. Le juif représentait le prototype négatif du nouveau riche, de celui qui veut s’enrichir à n’importe quel prix, une mentalité qui était en ce temps là tout à fait contradictoire à celle du roumain ou du français, pas du tout pragmatique. En conséquence, le contexte historique d'avant-guerre favorise l'antisémitisme en France tant qu’en Roumanie. En France, le gouvernement du Front Populaire, conduit par Léon Blum est accusé de vouloir pousser la France vers la guerre contre l'Allemagne d'Adolf Hitler. Céline se révolte contre les positions adoptées par ce gouvernement et propose une alliance avec l'Allemagne pour éviter le pire. En même temps, c’est difficile de trouver la vraie motivation pour laquelle Céline a rédigé ses pamphlets1, qui restent violents, même démentiels. Ils montrent soit le désespoir de Céline de voir sa nation dominée, lâche, incapable de la même force militaire que l’Allemagne, soit son effort de se faire remarquer sur le plan littéraire. De toute façon, les pamphlets nous découvrent un homme vexé. En Roumanie, l’extrémisme fut alimenté par la pauvreté de la population en majorité rurale, par l’incapacité des politiciens de gérer « le problème juif »2, par la politique profasciste de Carole le deuxième et Antonescu, même si, peut être, ni l’un ni l’autre n’étaient des fascistes convaincus, mais ils ont trouvé que le fascisme peut représenter une solution pour contrecarrer les menaces russes. Chez nous, le capitalisme fut amené par les juifs, qui prouvaient une certaine bestialité utilisée d’une manière merveilleuse dans les affaires entamées. En France, l’affaire Dreyfus nourrit beaucoup l’antisémitisme. Pareil à la Roumanie, le monde capitaliste français est aussi dominé par les juifs. Ils tenaient l’industrie, les banques, le grand commerce en ruinant les petits boutiquiers, dont faisait parti la mère de Céline, Marguerite Guillou. Dans la famille du petit Louis, l’antisémitisme fut fortement encouragé. Fils unique, Céline est élevé dans la solitude, l’obsession de la pauvreté, mais aussi la haine des juifs. Plus tard, Céline utilisera beaucoup ses mémoires d’enfant et d’adolescent dans ces romans. L’enfance de Cioran est complètement

* Chargée de cours, dr., Academie d’Etudes Economique de Bucarest

65 différente. C’est la période la plus jolie de sa vie, dont il se souviendra toujours avec regret et nostalgie. Mais, pareil que Céline, Cioran est paresseux, rêveur, pas beaucoup dédié aux études. La paresse de Céline est entretenu par ses parents, celle de Cioran par lui-même, toujours se révoltant contre la normalité de les siens. Au début, Cioran et Céline partagent tous les deux le dégout pour la guerre et l’implication politique de l’écrivain. Les deux vont évoluer dans le sens contraire. Au début de l’année 1933, Cioran publie dans la revue Calendarul, l’article Intre spiritual si politic (Entre le spirituel el le politique), où il incrimine l’implication dans la politique de sa génération : « les gens, qui ont mis des espoirs dans cette génération, doivent être très déçus. Presque toute la génération est impliquée dans la vie politique. Il y a seulement quelques collègues de la génération qui s’occupent des problèmes sérieux, mais pour eux, vivre dans un tel milieu est devenu presque impossible »3. Il se déclare contre la guerre et contre l’agressivité. Il ne fait pas la guerre, comme Céline qui participe à la première guerre mondiale, et revient blessé et marqué pour toute sa vie. Céline écrit le 11 décembre 1916 à son amie Simone Saintu : « J’éprouve un profond dégout pour tout ce qui est belliqueux. Je me demande à quel point une victoire achetée au prix de la consomption d’un pays est une victoire. Je n’ai plus d’enthousiasme que pour la paix »4. Son roman Voyage au bout de la nuit sera un cri contre la guerre, contre l’héroïsme forcé. Lutter pour défendre son pays lui semble un mauvais prétexte pour mutiler les hommes : « Une balle dans le ventre, ca ne fait pas un héros, ca fait une péritonite »5. Quand à 22 ans, Cioran se déclare expert dans le problème de la mort en partant des prémisses de l’inutilité, de l’absurde existentiel et en admettant « qu’il n’y a pas des arguments pour vivre »6, exactement au même âge, Céline revient en France après avoir passé un an au Cameroun comme médecin, protectorat allemand occupé par les anglais et les français. Il rentre déçu en déclarant encore son racisme, cette fois contre les noirs : « Jamais je n’ai été aussi sage, j’ai horreur des Noires. J’ai trop aimé les Blanches »7. Son attachement à la race blanche annonce son large estime pour Hitler, défenseur de la stratification sociale ! Céline a toujours dit que sa vrai vocation était celle de médecin, car il eut toute sa vie une sorte d’attirance pour les rebuts de la société auquel il a dédié Féerie pour une autre fois : « Aux animaux, aux malades, aux prisonniers ». Dans tous ses œuvres, il existe des références aux gens qui se trouvent en marge de la société : « J’aime mieux les rapports avec ceux qui sont malades. Ceux qui sont bien portants sont si méchants, si bêtes ; ils veulent avoir l’air si malin, aussitôt qu’ils tiennent debout, que tout rapport avec eux est presque aussitôt malheureux »8. Nous connaissons très bien l’admiration de Cioran pour les ratés, les mendiants, les malades. Tous les écrits de Cioran abondent dans des hommages rendus aux individus ignorés par la société. Pour son début en 1934 avec le volume Sur les cimes du désespoir, Cioran décroche le Prix de la Commission pour les jeunes écrivains non-édités et le prix Des Jeunes Ecrivains Roumains. Le scandale littéraire arrivera deux ans après, en 1936 avec la publication de La Transfiguration de la Roumanie, volume autocensuré dans la deuxième édition apparue dans les années 1990. Ce volume discriminatoire a été traduit en français tardivement, en 2009, traduction réalisée par Alain Paruit. Avec Céline, le scandale surgit dès le début, avec l’apparition de Voyage au bout de la nuit. Il s’agit d’un chef d’œuvre qui avait tous les qualités pour décrocher le prix Goncourt, mais Céline le perd à cause d’un complot mené par Rosny ainé, président de l’Académie, dont la voix est prépondérante, et son frère qui votent finalement pour Les loups de Guy Mazeline. L’écrivain français, Maurice-Yvan Sicard écrit dans le numéro 1 de la revue Le Huron : « Chaque année, la voix du président de l’académie Goncourt est achetée au plus offrant »9. Il sera intenté un procès. Après le désistement de Rosny ainé, le tribunal ne prononça aucune condamnation, sauf contre Voyage au bout de la nuit qui contenait, selon lui : « des expressions outrageusement triviales, grossières et intolérables, susceptibles de révolter les lecteurs non avertis, qu’une récompense littéraire devait protéger contre d’aussi désagréables surprises »10. Le volume ne lui a pas emporté un prix, mais le scandale autour de celui-ci lui a bien assuré la célébrité. Dès son début littéraire, Céline sera entouré par le tumulte. En 1936, Céline visite la Russie et il revient mortifié. Il se rend compte que le système est fissuré de partout et que la dictature du prolétariat ne fait qu’exploiter encore plus l’homme que dans les pays capitalistes. Il écrit à Jean Bonvilliers et Gen Paul le 4 septembre, horripilé : « Merde ! Si c’est ça l’avenir, il faut bien jouir de notre crasseuse condition. Quelle horreur ! mes pauvres amis ! La vie à Gonesse prend une espèce de charme en comparaison »11. Il raconte et écrit

66 à tous ses amis sur l’expérience qu’il a pu vivre en Russie. A son amie Cillie Pam il décrit : « Je suis revenu de Russie, quelle horreur ! Comme tout cela est grotesque, théorique, et criminel ! »12. Il a eu un choc. A partir de ce moment, il se transforme dans un écrivain de combat, qui averti sur le péril russe. Il est convaincu que l’Allemagne est le meilleur allié contre le bolchevisme et que les juifs, premières victimes du nazisme, poussent la France à la guerre ! Ce n’est pas le seul qui a voulu miser sur l’alliance avec l’Allemagne pour échapper au danger russe. En Roumanie, Antonescu a fait pareil. En même temps, la Garde de Fer qui se voulait anticommuniste et qui arrive au pouvoir en 1940, se prévale des démonstrations anticommunistes, ayant le support des jeunes intellectuels ; dans ce contexte, Codreanu se demande : « Qu’est ce qu’on fait si les bolchevistes envahissent la Romanie ? »13. Son crie propagandiste semblait utopique à cette époque, mais très vite, son intuition est devenu une cruelle réalité ! Pendant la période d’entre les deux guerres, tant en France qu’en Roumanie, chaque formation politique, soit libérale ou d’extrême, promouvait une politique nationaliste face à la guerre. Si en 1937, Cioran est pris par une crise religieuse et il publie Des larmes et des saints, Céline publie son pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre, suivie en 1938 par L’Ecole des cadavres et par Les Beaux Draps en 1941. Dans ses trois textes, Céline s’en prend aux juifs, considérés comme la cause principale de la deuxième guerre mondiale. Il avait collaboré avec les allemands, envoyé des lettres aux journaux collaborationnistes, comme La Gerbe, Au pilori, Je suis partout. A la fin de la guerre, il veut se faire pardonnait. Un Céline pauvre et vaincu, s’excuse finalement, comme Cioran l’avait fait aussi. Plusieurs journalistes l’interrogent, tel qu’André Parinaud en 1957, qui recueille les propos de Céline, sur sa nouvelle position : « Je me suis trompé de fil en 1940 ; rien de plus. Mais c’est quand même con. J’ai voulu faire le malin. J’aurais pu aller à Londres. Je parle l’anglais comme le français. Aujourd’hui je serais à coté du pion Mauriac à l’Académie »14. Il meurt pauvre et abandonné par tout le monde, à part sa femme et son chat ! Dans son dernier roman publié après sa mort, Rigodon, nous retrouvons un homme simple, presque fou, qui délire. Les phrases sont courtes, sans logique, elles expriment son état mental : « Je divague, je vais vous perdre, mais c’est l’instinct que je ne sais pas si je finirai jamais ce livre… »15. Cioran cherche aussi à divaguer l’attention de ses lecteurs attirés par son engagement politique. Une fois arrivé dans la France libérale, le philosophe roumain commencera à rétracter tout ce qu’il a écrit pendant sa période roumaine. Dans l’interview accordé à François Bondy, on ne trouve rien de sa grande adhésion à la Garde de Fer : « La Garde de Fer était un complexe de mouvements ; plutôt une secte folle qu’un parti politique »16. Cioran nie qu’il fut intéressé par la renaissance nationale stimulée par la Garde, par le sentiment révolutionnaire, mais il déclare que c’était surtout le culte métaphysique de la mort qui le passionnait, et en ce qui concerne sa génération, il rectifie : « nous étions un groupe des gens désespérés dans le cœur de Balkans »17, avec la mission d’un Port Royal. De plus, Cioran trouve comme motivation pour ses articles totalitaires son inclination moraliste, ses lectures philosophiques ; comme tous les hommes révoltés, alimenté par l’école de Nietzsche ou Spengler, Cioran ne pouvait pas supporter le destin humble de son pays, son inefficacité prouvée depuis des siècles, son impossibilité à sortir d’un destin médiocre, et il sentait le besoin de détruire, la méchanceté et la haine contre un ordre pétrifié. Cioran veut blanchir ses péchés de jeunesse en argumentant que pendant sa période roumaine il croyait que le libéralisme soit ravitaillé par la fatigue, et la démocratie, sa source complémentaire, par excès de raison. La démocratie signifie la construction d’une politique économique adaptée, donc la démocratie est un acte cérébral : « on n’est pas libéral à cause de la fatigue et démocrate grâce à la raison »18.

L’amour pour Hitler et l’antisémitisme de Cioran et de Céline Aujourd’hui, Céline est très connu comme écrivain antisémite et non pas comme l’auteur génial de Voyage au bout de la nuit, par exemple. Entre les pamphlets de Céline et ses romans il y a une différence énorme. Nous ne reconnaissons plus le même style. En 1937, Céline publie son premier pamphlet, Bagatelle pour un massacre, une attaque dure contre les juifs. Le livre fut assez bien reçu à une époque où les commentaires antisémites pouvaient être évoqués ouvertement et dans lequel plusieurs écrivains français partageaient plus ou moins ses visions extrémistes : Giraudoux, Gide, Cendrars, Ch. Maurras, Jouhandeau, Drieu La Rochelle, Henri Béraud, Paul Morand, etc. En 1938, la situation en Europe se dégrade et Céline publie son deuxième pamphlet,

67 L’Ecole des cadavres. Il attaque les anglais et préfère l’alliance avec l’Allemagne pour éviter la guerre. La France va s’allier en revanche avec l’Angleterre, contre les Allemands, qui prouvent finalement leur suprématie militaire. En 1941, Céline publie son troisième pamphlet Les Beaux Draps, en cherchant des responsables pour la défaite, tant l’armée française que bien sûr, les juifs. Il est certain qu’il ne pouvait pas s’imaginer la haine d’Hitler qui avait procédé à l’extermination des juifs. D’ailleurs, l’antisémitisme a pris une connotation beaucoup plus dramatique après le massacre initié par Hitler. Evidement, Céline a interdit la réédition de ses pamphlets, mais cinquante ans plus tard il reste jugé en fonction de ses idées antisémites, même s’il faut les interpréter dans le contexte dans lequel elles ont été produites. Céline refuse d’écrire des articles pour les journaux collaborationnistes, mais il adresse des lettres à La Gerbe d’Alphonse de Châteaubriant, à Je suis partout de Robert Brasillach, Au pilori, l’hebdomadaire antisémite de Jean Lestandi, ou à L’Emancipation nationale, organe du PPF de Doriot. Très illustratif pour sa virulence antisémite reste l’article publié le 4 septembre 1941, dans le journal collaborateur Notre combat pour la nouvelle France socialiste et intitulé Céline nous parle des Juifs. Ici, Céline y déclare « Pleurer, c'est le triomphe des Juifs ! Réussit admirablement ! Le monde à nous par les larmes ! 20 millions de martyrs bien entrainés c'est une force ! Les persécutés surgissent, hâves, blêmis, de la nuit des temps, des siècles de torture »19. Céline se déclare l’ennemi numéro 1 des juifs et il ne se prive pas de proférer des injures contre eux : « Les juifs, racialement, sont des monstres, des hybrides, des loupés tiraillés qui doivent disparaître. […] Dans l'élevage humain, ce ne sont, tout bluff à part, que bâtards gangréneux, ravageurs, pourrisseurs. Le juif n'a jamais été persécuté par les aryens. Il s'est persécuté lui-même. Il est le damné des tiraillements de sa viande d'hybride »20. En 1941, l’année de la publication de son troisième pamphlet, Les Beaux Draps, il montre sa déception pour le maréchal Pétain, il se prend pour le pape du racisme et il est mécontent des mesures de répression prises contre les juifs: « Cent mille fois hurlés « Vive Pétain » ne valent pas un petit « Vire les youtres !» dans la pratique »21. Et il continue « Pour recréer la France, il aurait fallu la reconstruire entièrement sur des bases racistes- communautaires. Nous nous éloignons tous les jours de cet idéal, de ce fantastique dessin »22. En 1942, il écrit à Jacques Doriot, parti se battre sur le front de l’Est avec la Légion des volontaires français : « nous assistons en ce moment à un bien répugnant travail ; le sabotage systématique du racisme en France (…) Volatiliser sa juiverie serait l’affaire d’une semaine pour une nation bien décidée. Puisse votre victoire à l’Est bouleverser le cours des choses »23. Il condamne aussi l’Eglise simplement pour être catholique : « Mort à l’Eglise, notre grande métisseuse, la maquerelle criminelle en chef, l’antiraciste par excellence (…). Je retrouve là le juif. Le diable est partout, dans le bénitier surtout ! Par les temps qui courent »24. C’est à peine en 1944, qu’il se calme et devient plus discret avec ses invectives. Cioran excelle aussi en ce qui concerne son antisémitisme. Il a rédigé deux textes sur les juifs, en se plaçant sur des positions différentes, très incriminées en 1936 (cf. le chapitre Collectivisme national du Schimbarea la fata a Romaniei, qui a été éliminé lors de la republication de son livre en 1990 à la Maison d’édition Humanitas) et le texte laudatif de 1956, Un peuple de solitaire, inclut après dans le volume édité en français, La tentation d’exister. En 1936, Cioran se trouvait lui-même très sûr que le nationalisme roumain a comme composant essentiel l’antisémitisme et que les roumains devraient se révolter contre les juifs qui occupaient des positions et qui s’intéressaient au matériel. Le nationalisme roumain était imaginé par Cioran comme étant un nationalisme messianique : il avait un but dual, éliminer les juifs et faire l’histoire : « notre nationalisme doit partir du désir de vengeance de notre sommeil historique, il doit partir d’une pensée messianique, de la volonté de faire l’histoire »25 pour écrire après d’une manière très résignée : « le problème juif est absolument indésirable. Il reste le malédiction de l’histoire »26, de chaque nation, jusqu'au moment où les juifs ont formé leur propre état, Israël. Même après, la présence des juifs dans le monde a signifié la pomme de discorde, mais aussi le moteur d’une société commerciale, mercantile, capitaliste à la fin de tout. Cioran remarque, comme Zeletin le faisait avant, que chez nous le capitalisme fut amené par les juifs, qui ont prouvé une certaine bestialité, utilisée d’une manière merveilleuse dans les affaires qu’ils entamaient ; mais très naïvement, en manquant tout à fait des connaissances économiques, Cioran se demande méthodiquement: « pourquoi dit-on que les capitalistes roumains sont meilleurs que les capitalistes juifs ? »27. Cioran continuera ses invectives contre les juifs, en écrivant que les juifs

68 sont les principaux responsables pour une unité nationale et politique tellement faible dans l’espace roumain : « les juifs se sont opposés chez nous contre n’importe quelle tentative de consolidation politique et nationale »28, mais toutes les malices des juifs ont été toujours encouragées par l’état capitaliste roumain, car celui-ci est (Cioran utilise de nouveau une opinion de Zeletin) un capitalisme partenariat entre les juifs et les apprentis roumains dans le domaine du marché libre : « le régime démocrate de la Roumanie n’a pas eu d’autre mission que de protéger les juifs et le capitalisme judéo-roumain »29. Cioran insistait à cette époque sur le thème du juif comme ennemi de la cause nationale : « le conflit latent qui existe toujours entre les juifs et un certain peuple redevient actuel dans un moment historique décisif, à un carrefour essentiel, pour placer les juifs au-delà de la sphère de la nation. De plus. Il y a des moments historiques qui transforment les juifs d’une manière fatale en des traitres »30. Le problème juif du point de vu de Cioran est indésirable et impossible à être résolu. Si en 1936 Cioran écrivait, avec beaucoup de haine, que le juif est avant tout juif, c'est-à-dire mercantile et mercenaire et après homme, vingt ans plus tard, en 1956, il déployait d’une manière hypocrite son destin, dramatique à cause de son origine biblique : « être homme est un drame ; être juif est le deuxième drame : c’est pour cette raison que le Juif a le privilège de vivre deux fois notre condition »31. En ce qui concerne le célèbre « problème juif », nous savons bien que les roumains ne souffrent pas de cette obsession de se transformer dans une race pure par éliminations des étrangers; la haine de Cioran est alimentée par la Garde de Fer et une sorte de saturation contre le monopole économique des juifs, saturation bien motivée à l’époque et conjuguée avec un milieu politique européen antisémite. A partir des années 1930, Céline se rapproche des entourages d'extrême droite français pro- nazis32. Sa sympathie dure jusqu'à 1944, donc jusqu’à la défaite de l’Allemagne nazie. Le courage de Céline commence à s’estomper brusquement après. Il n’a qu’une obsession : de s’enfuir et il trouve l’asile politique au Danemark. Il est quand même poursuivi par la justice française qui obtient son arrestation et son extradition. Il fut arrêté en décembre 1945, mais son dossier était léger. Pas de crimes de sang, seulement quelques livres et lettres d’un antisémitisme et pro-nazisme impardonnables. Apres six ans d’exil et dix-huit mois de prison, Céline rentre en France, mais il restera toute sa vie jugé en fonction de son passé déraisonnable. Il avait exprimé plusieurs fois son admiration pour Hitler comme, par exemple, dans L'École des cadavres . La publication de l'École est surtout pour Céline l'occasion d'afficher clairement ses sentiments pro-nazis : « Quel est le véritable ennemi du capitalisme ? C’est le fascisme. Le communisme est un truc de Juif, un moyen d'asservir le peuple plus vachement encore, absolument à l’œil. Quel est le véritable ami du peuple ? Le fascisme. Qui a le plus fait pour l'ouvrier ? L'U.R.S.S. ou Hitler ? C'est Hitler. (...) Qui a fait le plus pour le petit commerçant ? C’est pas Thorez, c’est Hitler ! Qui nous préserve de la Guerre ? C’est Hitler ! Les communistes (juifs ou enjuivés), ne pensent qu'à nous envoyer à la bute, à nous faire crever en croisades. Hitler est un bon éleveur de peuples, il est du côté de la Vie, il est soucieux de la vie des peuples, et même de la nôtre. C’est un aryen »33. Quand l’Angleterre et la France essaient d’éviter le conflit armé avec l’Allemagne nazie (qui menaçait d’envahir la Tchécoslovaquie) en signant avec les dirigeants allemands les accords de Munich, Céline reste bien sûr ses positions : « Je me sens très ami d'Hitler, très ami de tous les Allemands, je trouve que ce sont des frères, qu’ils ont bien raison d'être racistes. Ca me ferait énormément de peine si jamais ils étaient battus. Je trouve que nos vrais ennemis c'est les Juifs et les francs-maçons. Que la guerre c’est la guerre des Juifs et des francs-maçons, que c’est pas du tout la nôtre. Que c’est un crime qu’on nous oblige à porter les armes contre des personnes de notre race, qui nous demandent rien, que c'est juste pour faire plaisir aux détrousseurs du ghetto. Que c’est la dégringolade au dernier cran de la dégueulasserie »34. Finalement, L'école est un pamphlet dans lequel Céline recommande clairement l’alliance entre la France et l’Allemagne en se transformant ainsi dans l’un des premiers collaborationnistes: « Moi, je veux qu’on fasse une alliance avec l’Allemagne et tout de suite, et pas une petite alliance, précaire, pour rire, fragile, palliative ! (...) Une vrai alliance, solide, colossale, à chaux et à sable ! A la vie ! A la mort ! Voilà comme je cause ! (...) Ensemble on commandera l’Europe. Ca vaut bien la peine qu’on essaye. On filera une telle trouille aux Yites (NDLA : aux Juifs) qu’ils s’évaporeront de la planète. Même pas besoin de les toucher, on les flambera juste un petit peu... le bout des arpions... on se réveillera comme d'un cauchemar. Ils seront partis ! pour toujours !... »35. Cette alliance doit, comme Céline la préconise, annoncer le début d’une grande Europe « aryenne », une « confédération » reposant sur l'union de la France et

69 des États fascistes d'Europe : « Assez d'abattoirs ! Une armée franco-allemande d’abord ! Le reste viendra tout seul. L’Italie, l’Espagne par-dessus la marché, tout naturellement, rejoindront la Confédération. Confédération des États aryens d’Europe. (...) Tous nos malheurs viennent de Londres, de la Judéo-britannie »36. Céline ne sentait pas beaucoup d’affinités avec les pays qui s’entêtaient à défendre la démocratie en Europe. Il n’est pas le seul collaborationniste, mais il reste assez durement critiqué pour son antisémitisme et son pro-nazisme. En 2011, Frédéric Mitterrand (ministre de la Culture française) a pris la décision de retirer Céline des célébrations nationales de cette année. Beaucoup de chercheurs furent opposés, car ils considèrent les pamphlets de Céline grotesques, en faisant excès de terribilisme, et non pas sortis d’une véritable croyance anti-judaïque. Il ne faut pas oublier que Céline est un écrivain avec un style exceptionnel avant tout. Aussi, la motivation antisémite de Céline aurait pu être simplement liée à son désir de regagner l’attention du public. Il se remet difficilement de l'échec commercial de son roman Mort à crédit, et se lance dans ce type de littérature en espérant connaître un succès similaire à celui de Voyage au bout de la nuit. Il faut préciser que l'antisémitisme de Céline est toujours littéraire. Céline n’a jamais collaboré avec le régime nazi (qui a d’ailleurs interdit certains de ses écrits), ni soutenu le régime de Vichy (comme Cioran qui occupera la position de conseiller culturel à Vichy pendant la période avril-juin 1941). De plus, les pamphlets ne sont pas seulement des textes antisémites. Céline attaque avec haine et rage aussi le régime soviétique, le système éducatif, les Etats-Unis, etc. En ce qui concerne Cioran, nous nous demandons, pour quelle raison un homme si intelligent, a glissé vers la Garde de Fer : le désespoir, comme toute sa génération d’ailleurs, de vivre dans un pays corrompu, avec un népotisme écrasant. Dans ce contexte, la promesse de la Garde de Fer de faire une révolution nationale qui restructurerait la société anarchique, lui semblait la meilleure solution, surtout parce que le mouvement promettait la réconciliation du pays avec Dieu, donc un renouvèlement doctrinal qui ne sortait pas du cadre religieux, engagement qui s’est révélé faux. Si au début Cioran se maintient sur des positions spiritualistes, en déroulement parfait avec les élucubrations initiales du mouvement et les enseignements du professeur qui insistaient sur le caractère spirituel de la Garde, en 1933, quand il arrive en Allemagne, Cioran envoie des lettres (Des lettres d’Allemagne) à la revue Vremea, en soutenant la brutalité et la terreur, deux éléments, qui pourraient changer le destin de la Roumanie et il confesse sa sympathie pour le régime nazi, l’Italie fasciste ainsi que le bolchevisme. Il reproche à la Roumanie le compromis, et il voit comme l’unique chance pour son pays de sortir de sa misère un régime dictatorial « en Roumanie seulement la terreur, la brutalité et une inquiétude infinie pourrait changer quelque chose »37 écrit-il à Comarnescu en décembre 1933. Aussi en décembre 1933, Cioran se sent exalté par le mouvement hitlérien: « il n’y a pas homme politique aujourd’hui qui puisse m’inspirer une sympathie et une admiration plus grande que Hitler »38. Dès ses premiers articles dans lesquels il exprime son opinion politique jusqu’à la Rébellion Légionnaire de janvier 1941, Cioran partage avec la Garde de Fer l’idée de la révolution, de la dictature, de la nation, le collectivisme national et sa haine envers les juifs et les hongrois. Il soutient l’hitlérisme : « n’importe quel homme avec un minimum de compréhension historique doit reconnaître que l’hitlérisme a été un destin pour l’Allemagne »39. Il manifeste très clairement son sentiment révolutionnaire dans ses articles : Romania in fata strainatatii (La Roumanie devant l’étranger), Impresii din Munchen. Hitler in constiinta germana (Des impressions de Munich. Hitler dans la conscience allemande), Revolta satuilor (La révolte des insatisfaits), où il écrit : « qu’est ce que l’humanité a perdu si quelques imbéciles sont mort? »40. Quand il revient d’Allemagne, Cioran continuera à publier des articles dans le même style, par exemple, dans l’article intitulé In preajma dictaturii (A l’approche de la dictature), Cioran montre que la Garde de Fer favorise la mort héroïque, un desideratum transformé par Cioran dans un objectif notoire de ses discours philosophiques. Cioran découvre dans le mouvement le caractère irrationnel, l’idée de l’héroïsme très cher pour lui, mais il se rend compte plus tard que la Garde de Fer n’est pas un mouvement complètement spirituelle. Dans son fameux livre, La transfiguration de la Roumanie, publié en 1936, Cioran donne son soutien aussi au bolchevisme : « l’hitlérisme me semble être un mouvement sérieux car il a su associer d’une manière directe à la conscience de la mission historique d’une nation, les problèmes inhérents de la justice sociale. Et le bolchevisme, s’il signifie une barbarie unique dans le monde par l’affirmation absolue de la justice sociale, représente aussi un triomphe éthique unique. C’est

70 impossible de construire une révolution nationale importante fondée sur des inégalités sociales. Le collectivisme national représente l’unique solution pour la Roumanie, l’unique sortie»41. Etonnamment, même si Cioran avec son caractère anarchiste, avait soutenu par ses articles la Garde de Fer, il refusera de s’enrôler et il choisira bientôt la solution de l’exil: « qu’est ce que je ferai si je reste en Roumanie ? Du moment que je ne peux pas m’intégrer effectivement dans le mouvement nationaliste, je n’ai aucune opportunité en Roumanie »42. Après un court épisode d’exil, il reviendra en Roumanie pour soutenir la Garde de Fer à Radio Bucarest dans sa célèbre intervention Profilul interior al capitanului (Le profil intérieur du capitaine), le jour de 28 novembre 1940, jour où Nicolae Iorga et Virgil Madgearu étaient assassinés. Il regrettera son geste après. En tout cas, toute sa vie, Cioran essaiera de cacher ses idées totalitaristes, défendus avec acharnement pendant sa jeunesse. Cioran est un personnage étrange, très amoureux de ses affirmations contradictoires, terribles, mais incapable d’assumer les conséquences de ses assertions, admirateur de conjugaisons éclatantes des mots, mais largement prudent quand ses propres mots se tournent contre lui. Il se défend, en écrivant: « mon nationalisme et mon militantisme provenaient du désir de faire quelque chose pour un pays malheureux que je ne voulais pas et je ne le veux pas perdu »43. On se demande si vraiment Cioran a eu une passion pour son pays ou simplement il se laissait entrainer dans le mouvement légionnaire par Nae Ionescu et le contexte socio-économique ? Cioran considère que la démocratie n’est pas propice pour réaliser le saut historique nécessaire au peuple roumain, parce que la Roumanie avait besoin à cette époque d’un homme qui domine la scène politique. Il est obnubilé par l’idée de la nécessité de l’affirmation historique, affirmation qui peut se faire que par une force tyrannique à contrôler toutes les mesquineries politiques: « le régime démocratique, avec son système parlementaire, qui donne à chaque citoyen la possibilité de participer activement à la vie publique, a développé le coté mesquin de chaque individu politique. Le résultat fut que la démocratie a encouragé l’affirmation de beaucoup de gens de talent, mais, partout dans le monde, seulement de deux ou trois génies politiques. Un grand génie politique doit être par excellence un homme qui domine la scène politique »44. De surcroit, « le politicien démocratique, qui a une admiration divine pour l’argent et qui trouve dans sa position politique un tremplin, n’a pas les qualités d’un dictateur et il n’a pas une auréole mystique. La démocratie est très peu mystique et trop rationaliste»45, écrit Cioran, qui demandait le remplacement du destin médiocre de son pays par un destin important sur le plan international, remplacement qui peut se faire seulement à travers une révolte mystique, influence légionnaire ! Après 1937, Cioran devient encore plus impliqué dans le phénomène politique; dans l’article Renuntarea la liberatate (Le renoncement à la liberté), Cioran demande « que la dictature vienne ». On sait que Cioran a envoyé à Codreanu un exemplaire de son livre Schimbarea la fata a Romaniei (La transfiguration de la Roumanie), en espérant que le Capitaine va aimer son livre. En revanche, Codreanu, n’a pas trouvé dans le livre de Cioran les accents révolutionnaires dont il avait besoin pour promouvoir sa politique. Depuis février 1941 quand Cioran quittera définitivement la Roumanie et jusqu'à sa mort, Cioran fera tout son possible pour cacher ses sympathies légionnaires; il renoncera au chapitre le collectivisme national du Schimbarea la fata a Romaniei, où il incriminait aussi les hongrois et les juifs (pendant sa période roumaine, l’antisémitisme de Cioran, comme celui de toute sa génération, était un antisémitisme conjoncturel et pas de convictions). Il existe beaucoup de similarités entre Céline et Cioran qui se retrouvent au niveau de la vie personnelle, mais surtout à celui des textes produits par les deux. Ils se sont excusés à la fin de la deuxième guerre mondiale, quand l’antisémitisme avait pris une nouvelle dimension à cause de la persécution des juifs engendrée par Hitler. Cioran a été pardonné car il a changé de pays, donc aussi de mémoire collective, mais Céline est très ardemment critiqué même aujourd’hui. C’était lui-même qui avait interdit la republication de ses pamphlets, textes de circonstance. En 2013, c'est- à-dire soixante-dix ans après la mort de Céline, en 2013, Bagatelles pour un massacre, L'Ecole des cadavres, Les beaux draps tomberont dans le domaine public et ils seront donc réédités.

Notes: [1] Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), L'Ecole des cadavres (1938), Les beaux draps (1941) [2] « Le problème juif » devient plus grave à partir de la formation de l’état national unitaire en 1918, lorsque la politique libérale a facilité l’invasion du capital étranger sur le marché domestique. De nombreux écrivains roumains, comme V. Alecsandri, C. Negruzzi, B. P. Hasdeu, I. Slavici, V. Conta, M. Eminescu ont écrit des articles antisémites, Eminescu étant

71 même choisi comme précurseur de l’antisémitisme par C. Z. Codreanu. Par conséquent, ce n’est pas la Garde de Fer qui a inventé l’antisémitisme sur le territoire roumain nouvellement formé, elle a seulement profité de certaines exigences de la part des étrangers en ce qui concerne les droits des minorités, des exigences avec lesquelles la population roumaine n’étaient pas d’accord. Le fameux historien roumain, qui faisait à l’époque des cours à la Sorbonne, Nicolae Iorga, condamnait toujours les juifs pour leurs dominations économiques et leur esprit à contrôler les ressources nationales qui devaient appartenir aux roumains. Iorga, qui était finalement assassiné par la Garde de Fer en 1940 (après avoir éprouvé de la sympathie pour le mouvement à son début), a montré dans les pages de son journal Neamul romanesc (La nation roumaine) ses accents antisémites et il a fondé en 1910 avec A. C. Cuza le Parti National Démocrate, parti qui avait un programme antisémite. Il s’agit du même A. C. Cuza, président de la formation politique Liga Apararii Nationale Crestine (La Ligue de la Défense Nationale Chrétienne), fondée le 4 mars 1923 avec C. Z. Codreanu. [3] apud Mircea Vulcănescu, De la Nae Ionescu la „Criterion”, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2003, p. 101 [4] L.F. Céline, Lettres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, 2009, p. 115 [5] J. Morand-Deviller, Les idées politiques de Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Editions Ecriture, Paris, 2010, p. 105 [6] E. Cioran, Pe culmile disperării, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2006, p. 11 [7] L.F. Céline, lettre à ses parents, 14 septembre 1916 en Lettres, op.cit., p. 310 [8] L.F. Céline, L’Eglise, Denoël et Steele, Paris, 1933, p. 67 [9]Le Figaro, hors-série, 21 mars 2011, p. 25 [10] Ibidem [11] L.F. Céline, Lettres, op. cit., p. 378 [12] Ibidem, p. 768 [13] C. Z. Codreanu, Pentru legionari, vol. I, Editura Totul pentru ţară, Sibiu, 1936, p. 9 [14] A. Philippe, Céline entre h aine et passion, Dualpha, Paris, 2002, p. 123 [15] L.F. Céline Rigodon, Gallimard, Paris, 1969, p. 56 [16] E. Cioran, Fragmente din corespondenţă şi convorbiri, dans Ţara mea, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2001, p. 32 [17] E. Cioran, Tara mea, op.cit., p. 15 [18] Ibidem, p. 19 [19] L.F. Céline, Céline nous parle des juifs, dans Notre combat pour la nouvelle France socialiste, 4 septembre 1941, organe collaborationniste, reproduit dans le site Mémoire juive et Éducation [20] L.F. Céline, L'École des cadavres, Denoël et Steele, Paris, 1938, p. 108 [21] L.F. Céline, Les beaux draps, Nouvelles Editions Françaises, Paris, 194, p. 35 [22] Ibidem, p. 36 [23] L.F. Céline, Lettres des années noires, 1940 – 1944, Berg International, Paris, 1994, p. 98 [24] Ibidem, p.105 [25] E. Cioran, Schimbarea la faţă a României, Editura Vremea, Bucureşti, 1936, p. 110 [26] Ibidem, p. 111 [27] Ibidem, p. 113 [28] Ibidem [29] Ibidem [30] E. Cioran, Schimbarea la faţă a României, 1936, p. 131 apud Marta Petreu, Un trecut deocheat sau schimbarea la faţă a României, Editura Institutului Cultural Roman, Bucuresti, 2004, p. 181 [31] E. Cioran, Evreii – un popor de solitari dans Tesu Solomovici Romania iudaica, vol. II, Editura Teşu, Bucureşti, 2001, p. 337 [32] A se voir Jacques-Pierre Amette, Céline, lettres de la haine, sur lepoint.fr, Le Point, 5/11/2009 [33] L.F. Céline, L’Ecole des cadavres, p.108 [34] Ibidem, p. 151 [35] Ibidem, p.211 [36] Ibidem, p. 214 [37] E. Cioran, scrisoare către P. Comarnescu din 27 dec. 1933, dans Manuscriptum, année XXIX, nr. 1-2, 1998, p. 234 cité dans Marta Petreu, Un trecut deocheat sau schimbarea la faţă a României, p. 11 [38] E. Cioran, Impresii din Munchen. Hitler în conştiinţa germană, dans Vremea, annéeVII, nr. 346, 15 juillet 1934, dans Ibidem, p.14 [39] E. Cioran, Aspecte germane dans Vremea, VI, nr. 314, 19 novembre1933 [40] E. Cioran, Scrisori din Germania. Revolta sătuilor, dans Vremea, année VII, nr. 349, 5 aout 1934, p. 2 article cité dans Marta Petreu, Un trecut deocheat sau schimbarea la faţă a României, p.15 [41] E. Cioran, Schimbarea la faţă a României,1936, p. 119 [42] Mircea Eliade şi corespondenţii săi, vol. I, edité par Mircea Handoca, Editura Minerva, 1993, p. 193 [43] Convorbiri cu Cioran, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2004, p. 195 [44] E. Cioran, Schimbarea la faţă a României, Editura Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2001, p. 126 [45] Ibidem, p. 136.

Bibliographie: Livres : Céline, L.F., L’Eglise, Denoël et Steele, Paris, 1933 Céline, L.F., Bagatelles pour un massacre, Ed. Denoël et Steele, Paris, 1937 Céline, L.F., L'École des cadavres, Denoël et Steele, Paris, 1938 Céline, L.F., Les beaux draps, Nouvelles Editions Françaises, Paris, 1941 Céline, L.F., Rigodon, Gallimard, Paris, 1969

72 Céline, L.F., Lettres des années noires, 1940 – 1944, Berg International, Paris, 1994 Céline, L.F., Lettres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, 2009 Cioran, E., Schimbarea la faţă a României, Editura Vremea, Bucureşti, 1936 Cioran, E., Schimbarea la faţă a României, Editura Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2001 Cioran, E., Ţara mea, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2001 Cioran, E., Pe culmile disperării, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2006 Codreanu, C. Z., Pentru legionari, vol. I, Editura Totul pentru ţară, Sibiu, 1936 Convorbiri cu Cioran, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2004 Handoca, M., Mircea Eliade şi corespondenţii săi, vol. I, Editura Minerva, Bucuresti, 1993 Morand-Deviller, J., Les idées politiques de Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Editions Ecriture, Paris, 2010 Philippe, A., Céline entre haine et passion, Dualpha, Paris, 2002 Solomovici, T., Romania iudaica, vol. II, Editura Teşu, Bucureşti, 2001 Vulcănescu, M., De la Nae Ionescu la „Criterion”, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2003

Articles: Amette, J.-P., Céline, lettres de la haine, sur lepoint.fr, Le Point, 5/11/2009. Consulté le 21/07/2010 Céline, L. F., Céline nous parle des juifs, dans Notre combat pour la nouvelle France socialiste, 4 septembre 1941, organe collaborationniste, reproduit dans le site Mémoire juive et Éducation Cioran, E., Aspecte germane dans Vremea, VI, nr. 314, 19 novembre 1933 Cioran, E., Impresii din Munchen. Hitler în conştiinţa germană, dans Vremea, année VII, nr. 346, 15 juillet1934 Cioran, E., Scrisori din Germania. Revolta sătuilor, dans Vremea, année VII, nr. 349, 5 aout 1934 Cioran, E., scrisoare către P. Comarnescu din 27 dec. 1933, dans Manuscriptum, année XXIX, nr. 1-2, 1998 Le Figaro, hors-série, 21 mars 2011

73 Voix et espaces narratives dans l’écriture engagée. Le pouvoir formateur du discours

Doiniţa Milea*

Abstract: It is difficult to characterize an age by differences of opinion and ideological options of the literary generations, pushing the opposition of socially involved people, of those who are deeply involved in their times and those who isolate themselves in to an „ivory tower” to the extreme, even if they all could belong to the same spiritual family. Therefore, we may find writings that show how much care and attention is spent in order to suit to the defining features of their time.The author’s believe fail in front of the authorities and literature is no longer a reprezentaion of subjective creativity,but of political needs. In this respect, Solzhenitsyn’s writings prove how the vocation of freedom gives rise to another way to understand writing, beyond the political implications and circumstances. Résumé: Il est difficile à qualifier une époque par les options des générations littéraires, tout en polarisant à l’extrême l’opposition entre les engagés, les gens de l’évènement, et ces de la tour d’ivoire, qui puissent, à la limite, faire partie de la même famille d’esprit. Les textes des écrivains montrent avec quelle attention ou avec quelle passion ils correspondent à leur temps, selon le plus ou le moins de savoir d’un être contemporain de son temps. La vocation à la liberté transforme le texte de Soljenitsyne à une convocation à penser autrement l’activité d’écrire, en dépit des implications et des circonstances politiques. Mots-clés: espaces narratives, voix, écriture engagée, implications politiques

Il y a des livres qui marquent une génération. Le livre de Hannah Arendt, Le système totalitaire, lui permet en 1973, un commentaire à propos des époques totalitaires. On remarque les idées de Arendt sur les deux types de totalitarisme de l’histoire de l’humanité, la Russie de Staline et l’Allemagne de Hitler, et rapproche ces réalités violentes aux régimes totalitaires, dominés par une deuxième langue, celle idéologique, de la propagande. (1) Il y a aussi des livres qui enregistrent la vie des intellectuels engagés, leurs modèles existentiels : Soljenitsyne, Camus, les idéologies de mai 1968, (2) François Furet et la déconstruction de l’illusion communiste, le spectacle cruel de la violence communiste, dans les mémoires de Nadejda Mandelstam,qui par les désastres de sa vie, critique la dégradation morale et culturelle de l'Union soviétique. (3). L’élément le plus important quand on parle des idées qui gèrent l’espace de la fiction, reste le processus réflexif de la conscience de l’écrivain, qui transgresse les frontières de la fiction pour attribuer au narrateur et aux personnages des rôles confesseurs et des identités de vrais consciences vives, qui parlent par leurs histoires (comme celles du livre de Soljénitsyne, Une journée de la vie de Ivan Denissovitch). Il faut souligner que les textes de Soljénitsyne(Le Pavillon des Cancéreux, ou L'Archipel du Goulag), qui lui ont valu le prix Nobel, empruntent des stratégies narratives de l’authenticité qui supposent la narration de quelques journées de ses personnages. Les pages écrites par Soljenitsyne provoqueront une mise en cause radicale de l'idéologie communiste à partir de ses propres expériences, car il passa trois années, de 1950 à 1953, dans un camp au Kazakhstan. Une journée d'Ivan Denissovitch, récit qui décrit en détail la vie d'un détenu soviétique, numéro Chtch-854, ou L'Archipel du Goulag, qui en étudiant l'industrie pénitentiaire et l'évolution de la mécanique judiciaire explique les grands procès staliniens, proposent un exile dans un le récit de cette expérience, parce que le « pavillon des cancéreux »,par ses quelques hommes alités, souffrant d'un mal que l'on dit incurable,suggère la captivité dans l’espace de la non liberté. Pour la première fois, le voile et le tabou sur le monde concentrationnaire soviétique étaient levés. Quand en 1962 on autorisa la publication d'Une journée d'Ivan Denissovitch, ce premier récit d'A. Soljenitsyne sur la vie à l'intérieur d'un goulag, certains passages ont été coupés (réintroduits dans les éditions d'aujourd'hui) mais on peut tout de même s'étonner qu'un tel témoignage ait été autorisé à paraître. La beauté de ce livre réside seulement dans le récit d'une seule et journée passée au goulag « presque une bonne journée », car le personnage qui a soutenu ce récit affreux a pu survivre. Ce point de vue restrictif conduit de main de maître proposé par Soljenitsyne sur la vie au Goulag donne la force de chaque page, renforcé par le point de vue

* Professeur des universités, dr., Université « Dunărea de Jos », Galati

74 subjectif de son héros, résolu à accepter à restreindre son humanité aux besoins élémentaires de subsistance et ses espoirs à survivre jusqu'au lendemain. Ce type d’univers reflet d’un monde pris dans des pièges de l’idéologie est la partie la plus résistante de cette humanité écrasée (de Hesse, avec Le jeu des Perles, à Junger avec ses Falaises de marbre), une «encyclopédie des morts», dans la formulation réparatrice et profondément douloureuse de Danilo Kiš qui mélange l’expérience de l’exile à celle du goulag.(4) Souvent, Ismail Kadaré, chez les titres des romans transposent l’enfer totalitaire en fiction en faisant partie de l’histoire d’un système qui a transformé l’utopie en son contraire.(5) La fiction assure la condition humaine, par des constructions où l’artiste, „l’anti-héros” de G. Grass, revit les images de son propre égoïsme, de sa culpabilité sociale, de la jeunesse à la maturité. La mise en texte d’histoires réelles ou fictives par l’intermède de l’appareil textuel permet à Grass de constituer un ensemble d’interrogations fondamentales concernant le récit de fiction comme modalité de fonctionnement de la représentation de la conscience coupable, dans ses rapports avec le monde.(6) L’échec de l’art sous la pression du politique change le destin d’un artiste tel Vladimir Maïakovski, grand poète lyrique, ancien anarchiste et futuriste qui, tout en plaidant en faveur de l’art révolutionnaire, remplace la fantaisie poétique par la « théorie de l’action », transformant ainsi les poètes en « maîtres artisans », signe de toute une génération sacrifiée par le régime soviétique. Dans le même espace culturel qui a représenté l’image du cummunisme vainqueur,on peut trouver, au début de siècle, Maxime Gorki.(7) Adhérent aux thèses marxistes, est arrêté en 1905 pour ses idées révolutionnaires, a soutenu Lénine, tout en s'élevant ensuite contre la prise de pouvoir dictatoriale, après 1917. Ses désillusions successives face à l'Union soviétique l'incitèrent à émigrer en Italie. Il retourna finalement URSS, où il meurt en 1936. Les « va-nu-pieds, » les « gens inquiets, » les « ci-devant hommes» ces trois expressions reviennent sans cesse sous sa plume, dans les titres de ses récits ; et caractérisent le milieu social, ou plutôt anti-social, auquel il s’intéresse de préférence. Le paysan attaché à la terre qu’il cultive, le moujik, ne retient l’attention de Gorky que du jour où il se déracine et va flotter à l’état d’épave. La malchance, la misère, recrutent dans toutes les conditions ceux qui viennent grossir ce monde et y prennent bientôt une physionomie commune où se confondent et s’égalisent l’étudiant raté, le marchand en ribote, l’ex-fonctionnaire, l’ex-officier, comme dans Bas Fonds,1902. Dans l'atmosphère étouffante d'un asile de nuit, des êtres rejetés par la société tsariste essaient malgré tout d'exister. Mais pour eux le bonheur restera toujours hors d'atteinte. L’analyse lucide qu’ils font de leur misère morale s’achève dans le broc d’eau-de-vie où ils noient leur conscience. Par ses récits de Tableau et nouvelles, sur la vie des démunis Gorki initia un genre littéraire porte-parole des classes populaires. Acceptant de collaborer avec le nouveau pouvoir, notamment sur le volet culturel (création des Editions d’Etat), ses positions bien souvent critiques l’amènent à s’exiler jusqu’en 1928. En 1934, Gorki est élu président de l’union des écrivains. Il sera par ailleurs décoré de l'Ordre de Lénine et fut même élu membre du comité central du PCUS et de l'Académie des Sciences, bien que ses rapports restent tendus avec le pouvoir. Ses textes proposent des marginaux, des vagabonds étant loin des héros prolétaires, des types positifs que Gorki souhaite pourtant dépeindre ,parfois brutaux, guidés qu'ils sont par leurs instincts violents, et refusant de céder à la résignation. Son roman La Mère, traite de l’émergence du mouvement ouvrier en Russie. Cette oeuvre littéraire reflète l’implication politique de Gorky dans la Russie de l’époque, sous l’emprise tsariste, régime écrasant et étouffant pour le peuple russe, par le portrait de cette femme soumise à un mari violent et abusif,et de son fils,Paul,impliques de plus en plus dans le mouvement révolutionnaire russe ,en croyant en la possibilité d’un monde meilleur .La comparaison avec L’Âme enchantée de Romain Rolland s’impose pour essayer de voir en quelle mesure les textes de fictions peuvent sauver et restituer le passé tel qu’il a été gardé par les textes. Dans un entretien, Herta Müller parlait de la littérature qui puisse restituer le passé : «Seule la littérature permet de faire ressortir un individu de l’Histoire. Elle accède à sa vérité par l’invention, l’imagine à travers le langage. Mais seule la recherche historique peut documenter un événement, le présenter comme une vision d’ensemble. Elle peut examiner et, à l’aide d’analyses et de statistiques, tirer des conséquences sociales, politiques et psychologiques. Toutes les deux, la littérature ou l’historiographie, sont également nécessaires – elles se complètent ».(8)

75 L’aventure de Pablo Neruda, qui croit à un avenir de la poésie et du monde, est très bien connue, car peu à peu la poésie devient pour lui une arme. Lorsque la guerre civile espagnole éclate, il est à Madrid et s’engage aux côtés des républicains qu’il aide à émigrer au Chili, L’Espagne au cœur en étant le témoin poétique. On a beaucoup parlé de l’implication de Neruda, ainsi que d’autres intellectuels d’Amérique latine dans le mouvement communiste, car en 1949, il visite des pays communistes, voyage en Union Soviétique (il écrit Chant d’amour à Stalingrad). On lui reproche d’avoir trop louer Staline« Pablo Neruda, poète engagé… au service de Staline’’, «l'imposture de l'“anti-fascisme» au service du fascisme rouge. Les articles de Albert Camus, publiés dans les revues, ainsi que ses conférences demeurent des modèles de clarté et de perspicacité, car Albert Camus, l’inventeur romanesque de l’absurde, ne s’est pas trompé en parlant de la justice et de la liberté, dans des conditions politiques confuses, et il faudrait citer encore ses articles contre le franquisme, contre la peine de mort, dont les échos existent dans ses Carnets, car pour lui, son œuvre journalistique a la valeur d’être «acte». Camus est l’homme blessé et révolté. Il dénonce l’ordre colonial, soutient une population dont il est issu. Mais sa révolte se construit par ses limites.(9) L'œuvre d'Albert Camus associée à l'existentialisme en raison des grands thèmes abordés, comme celui de l'apparente absurdité et la futilité de la vie, de l'indifférence de l'Univers et de la nécessité de l'engagement en faveur d'une cause juste, a marqué toute une époque. Sisyphe, projection philosophique, (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942) est l’image de l’aliénation, une image de l’échec devant le destin, un dialogue intellectuel entre la lucidité, l’absurde et le tragique. La fiction de Camus, L’Étranger, 1942, l’image de la rupture avec l’univers (l’espace de l’absurde absolu) mais aussi celle du dialogue avec le monde de la « liberté intérieure de choisir » deviennent avec La Peste une tentative de réconciliation. Les existentialistes accordaient une importance capitale à l'engagement personnel dans la recherche de la vérité.La liberté de choix implique engagement et responsabilité. Par ses choix, chaque être humain crée sa propre nature, selon une formule devenue célèbre et qu’on retrouve à partir de l’article programme de Jean-Paul Sartre publié dans la revue Temps modernes, en passant par ses essais philosophique et politiques jusqu’ à ses textes litteraires.(10) En 1933, André Malraux propose par son roman La condition humaine une discussion dans le décor de la guerre, dont le sujet est le sort de tous les humains, l’approche de l'issue fatale, la mort violente, dans la solitude. Son livre construisait de destins parallèles ou convergents, de vies bouleversées et un seul lien- la souffrance. Pendant la majeure partie du XXe siècle, les listes de lauréats des prix Nobel sont un bon indicateur de l'importance du facteur idéologique, voire même de l’implication de l’idée de l’engagement dans le texte littéraire. Cet indicateur est devenu assez utile au cours des dernières décennies, car grand nombre de lauréats sont des immigrants qui ont commencé leurs carrières à l'étranger, représentants des anciennes colonies, comme Naipaul, par exemple. Le témoignage de l’exilé devient un motif essentiel, qui passe au- delà du canon esthétique. Ce prix de littérature récompense une oeuvre imprégnée d'un idéal social et politique. Le prix attribué en 1986 à Wole Soyinka a largement été perçu comme la juste reconnaissance par l'Europe de l'apport africain ou nigérian à la culture mondiale, zones marquées par leur statut colonial. Dans cet esprit, la littérature canonique , propre à ce prix littéraire, a un caractère marqué sociopolitique, tout en récupérant des thèmes récurrents comme la nation et l’éthique de l’ethnique, aspects sociaux et culturels, la politique correcte, la mise en valeur de l’identité,de la mémoire de celui qui a été impliqué dans l’Histoire. Thomas Mann, témoin privilégié des bouleversements historiques de la société, durant plus de quarante années, propose dans son livre La Montagne magique, publié en 1924, des figures solitaires à la recherche de l’harmonie individuelle, dans un monde ravagé par la guerre . En 1929, il reçoit le prix Nobel de la littérature, mais son Docteur Faustus, 1947, choit une autre vision compositionnelle, superposant les plans mythiques et politiques, esquissant peu à peu le portrait moral de l’Allemagne, sans jamais renoncer à dépeindre les splendeurs et les misères d’un artiste, qui souffre des mêmes maladies que son pays. Après la guerre, acte de la mémoire d’un témoin réel ou fictif, l’écriture de la prose captive devient une histoire subjective qui met en œuvre, autant les désastres intérieurs, que les orages qui ont jalonné l’époque. La littérature devient, de plus en plus, un jeu de la mémoire, qui refuse d’oublier.

7 6 Notes 1. Hannah Arendt, Le système totalitaire, traduit en français en 1972, mais écrit en 1949, bien avant la mort de Staline 2. François Furet, Le Passé d'une illusion. Essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe siècle, 1995, essais politiques où analyse les thèmes de la mythologie de l'URSS et du communisme. 3. Nadejda Mandelstam,la traduction francaise Contre tout espoir. Souvenirs, 1972. 4. Danilo Kiš, Encyclopédie des morts, 1983, traduction française 1985. 5. Ismail Kadaré, Le Palais de rêves, 1982, Le Grand hiver, 1973. 6. Günter Wilhelm Grass, un proche du Groupe 47, mouvement de reconstruction et de réflexion littéraire dans l'Allemagne d'après-guerre, dont l’attitude politique marque son roman- Le Tambour,1959. 7. Alekseï Maksimovitch Pechkov a choisi le pseudonyme de Gorki (l’amer), comme un reflet à l’univers de sa vie et de ses œuvres. La Mère, 1907. 8. Entretien réalisé par Lothar Schröder Le 9 octobre 2009, RP online,traduit par la Revue des ressources , www.larevuedesressources.org/spip.php?page=ispip-article&id 9. Cahiers Albert Camus.6.Albert Camus éditorialiste à l’Express, Gallimard, 1987 10. Jean Paul Sartre, La Nausée, 1938, L'Être et le Néant, 1943, Huis clos, 1945, Littérature et engagement, 1948.

Bibliographie 1. Barthes, Roland, Littérature et réalité, Paris, Seuil, 1982 2. Champion, Pierre, La littérature à la recherche de la vérité, Seuil, Paris, 1996 3.Magris, Claudio. Utopie et désenchantement: Gallimard,. Paris, 2001 4. Schlanger, Judith, La mémoire des œuvres, Nathan, Paris,1992 5.Suleiman, Susan Robin, Le Roman à thèse ou l’autorité- fictive, P.U.F., Paris, 1983 6. Todorov, Tzvetan, Face à l’Extrême. Paris : Seuil, 1991

77 Walter Benjamin. Short Notes on the Memory of Fragmentation

Simona Mitroiu*

Abstract: Walter Benjamin's work will be analyzed from the perspective of cultural memory in the context of globalization and also from the perspective of one of the negative effects of the globalization, the loss of identity references. Benjamin’s perception of the memory represents the core of his writings, and some of the most important elements of his work: collection, flâneur, experience, angel of history, stays under the sign of the memory. Keywords: Walter Benjamin, memory, angel of history, experience, fragments, collection

The globalization is not only defined as “a process of general dissemination (of merchandise, technologies, news, political influence, religious ideas) across political and cultural boundaries and of the ensuring integration of various, previously isolated zones into one system of interconnections and interdependencies, where all nations, empires, tribes and states cohere in some way or other through political, economic or cultural relations,”[1] but also as a process that affects the stability and the capacity to relate to a certain identity. When the traditional values are challenged and there are too many opportunities and there is no education regarding the methods that can be used in order to choose between different cultural approaches, the personal identity suffers from an overwhelming task, that of finding its way between different fragments of what used to be the old social and cultural context. “In smashing apart traditional national boundaries, globalization, ironically, offers people a kind of ‘absolute freedom’ to do whatever they like. The irony is that the world of ‘everything goes’ has become crippling, as the anxiety of choice floats unhinged from both practical and ethical considerations as to what is worth pursuing. (...) Instead of finding ourselves, we lose ourselves” [2]. In the context of globalization, the need for stability and the search for some limits that could offer and preserve the sense of our own identity determine the approach of memory from a very different perspective, that of the cultural memory, capable to answer to the need for finding some stable references. Jan Assmann defines the cultural memory as a form of collective memory shared by a number of people and which provides to these people a collective, cultural identity and he also proposes to frame “the realm of traditions, transmissions, and transferences” into the “cultural memory” term, without arguing for the replacement of Halbawachs’ idea of “collective memory” with “cultural memory”, but distinguishing “between both forms as two different modi memoranda, ways of remembering” [3] In this way the cultural memory is defined as an “externalization and objectivation of memory, which is individual and communicative, and evident in symbols such as texts, images, rituals, landmarks and other ‘lieux de mémoire’” [4] The cultural memory stays at the foundation of the creation and preservation of the community identity and, therefore, of the personal identity, being expressed by places and sacred texts, rituals and monuments, in a certain way through what Pierre Nora called lieux de mémoire, the place being also used in the Antiquity as a tool of the ars memoriae, which receives a quantity of information easily accessed by a person who is visiting that place in his/her mind. “For Cicero and Quintilian the loci memoriae were practical mental tools, free of ideology. Loci memoriae were not determined by social values, by historical views, or future expectations. Nora’s lieux de mémoire are also mnemotechnical devices, but extremely ideological, full of materialism, and far from being neutral or free of value judgments. Most lieux de mémoire were created, invented, or reworked to serve the nation-state” [5] Nowadays the process of reasserting the identity is sometimes materialized as a movement opposed to migration, a return to the places of memory that follows the European construction and globalization. Benjamin’s work will be regarded as a kind of place of memory, according to the definition of the European lieux de mémoire [6], to whom we can return in order to understand the European identity. The analysis of Benjamin’s work is carried out precisely in this particular frame, as a lieux de mémoire and we will try to sketch a theory of memory developed in his writings in different forms using various concepts. The present paper will only explore two concepts used by Benjamin: the collection and the experience. Benjamin was sometimes pictured as a memory explorer who

* Post-doctoral Researcher, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iasi

78 had worshipped the history too much, but also as one who had written too much [7], who advised the writers to never stop writing in order to preserve their ideas and not to destroy the canvas of memory because a recollection represented an open door to another image on the memories canvas. Benjamin’s perception of the memory has been partially approached before, but without emphasizing the theory of memory and its role in his writings, a theory that can be discussed from a whole range of perspectives: the collection as a way of completing and recovering a shattered memory, the work of the angel of memory but also the work of the historian, the fragments of memory, the personal but also the collective memory, the experience as a way to access the collective memory, the collector but also the flâneur as a collector of experiences who wanders through the city using the passages as access roads to the collective memory. Although there are countless studies dedicated to Benjamin’s life and work, a perspective that could reunite different concepts seems to be missing. The key element which will represent the starting point of this approach is offered by Walter Benjamin in his interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting named Angel of History or Angelus Novus, which Benjamin bought. What is the history of this angel? As Esther Leslie (2000) asserts, in April 1921, Benjamin went to a Klee exhibition in Berlin and the next month he went to Munich and bought this watercolour named Angelus Novus. “The new angel, affixed above his desk wherever he lived, fluttered through his life. It provided the name for a critical journal he wishes to found. He wrote about it as example of the childlike aesthetic at the core of the modernism he prized. The picture seems to detail history’s doubled capacity for progression and regression” [8]. And what is this doubled capacity if not that of a social reality that destroys itself but maintains the impression of technological progress. For Benjamin, the modern time is a time of hell [9], because the modern technological inventions, the results of the so-called “progress”, take the shape of a war consuming the world and transforming its collective and cultural memory into pieces that are difficult to be catalogued as being worth or not to be collected. This angel of history represents a paradigm of Benjamin’s thinking and some of the most discussed concepts of his work are permanently moving around it. But first of all what is Benjamin’s interpretation of this angel of history? “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” [10]. It is useless to say that this interpretation became more famous than the picture itself. The angel of history looks at the fragments left behind, the recollections that will be formed under the sign of destruction but also under the sign of memory and oblivion; the angel would like to stay and reconstruct what it was destroyed, but this is not his task. “In the profane historical world over which he watches, the angel is impotent” [11]. Neither the angel of history can remain and reconstruct things, nor the collector, but the latter can pick up the fragments and, as we shall see, and reintegrate them in the circle of cultural life, because “the collector transfigures things by divesting them of their commodity charcter” [12]. Even though the general view is that Benjamin was a naturally unsystematic man, a hero of fragmentation in line with Novalis, Schlegel and Nietzsche as Leon Wieseltier characterizes him, the fragmentary aspect of Benjamin’s work is primarily caused by the form of his writings. These writings approach a wide variety of subjects, being maybe the result of his tendency to collect, also materialized in his work, as well as the result of the fact that he needed to gain enough money to live and, in the absence of a firm source of income, he was forced to write on different subjects in order to be published [13]. On the other hand, he was surrounded by a world of destruction that began before the Second World War, and maybe that is why sometimes, without a clear meaning in this direction, he followed in his writings the notion of memory and its correlative concepts. Benjamin, just like the angel of history, witnessed the wind of destruction, surrounded by the ruined fragments crowding at his feet. The angel cannot stay and reconstruct what was destructed but it is the collector’s task to keep an eye on the cultural fragments and to try to save them from the oblivion. Benjamin was a collector in his personal life, but also in his writings, as he collected books, children toys, but also quotations; let us not forget that one of his ambitions, as Hannah Arendt mentioned in her “Introduction” to Illumination, assumption also sustained by Theodor

79 Adorno, but contradicted by others, was to produce a work entirely made out of quotations, this ambition being almost accomplished in his Arcades Project. Benjamin’s work is also a form of collection, full of various aspects that perhaps no one else could manage to assemble; for example One-Way Street, so well analyzed by Michael Jennings in “Walter Benjamin and the European avant-garde”, contains aphorisms, jokes, dream protocols, descriptive set pieces, cityscapes, landscapes, mindscapes, pieces of writing manuals, trenchant contemporary political analyses, prescient appreciations of children’s games, behavioural patterns and moods, decryptions of bourgeois fashion, living arrangements and so on, a vast collection [14]. He never stopped collecting, not even in writing. Collecting, as Benjamin asserts, is a passion of children or rich people; this is the reason why an object that is part of a collection has only an amateur value and not necessarily a pragmatic one; the collected object stops being an instrument and gains its redemption becoming part of a collection with an intrinsic value. “Benjamin could understand the collector's passion as an attitude akin to that of the revolutionary. Like the revolutionary, the collector "dreams his way not only into a remote or bygone world, but at the same time into a better one in which, to be sure, people are not provided with what they need any more than they are in the everyday world, but in which things are liberated from the drudgery of usefulness" (Schriften I, 4(6). Collecting is the redemption of things which is to complement the redemption of man” [15]. The work of the collector is that of selecting his precious fragments from a pile of debris; he doesn’t need to destroy the context anymore in order to extract the objects that will become part of his collection because the history and the “break in tradition”, as result of the “progress”, has already accomplished that. “The close affinity between the break in tradition and the seemingly whimsical figure of the collector who gathers his fragments and scraps from the debris of the past is perhaps best illustrated by the fact, astonishing only at first glance, that there probably was no period before ours in which old and ancient things, many of them long forgotten by tradition, have become general educational material which is handed to schoolboys everywhere in hundreds of thousands of copies. This amazing revival, particularly of classical culture, which since the forties has been especially noticeable in relatively traditionless America, began in Europe in the twenties” [16]. As Susan Sontag mentions his collector’s instinct served him well, and everything he did during his life was to collect in one form or another. “Learning was a form of collecting, as in the quotations and excerpts from daily reading which Benjamin accumulated in notebooks that he carried everywhere and from which he would read aloud to friends. Thinking was also a form of collecting, at least in its preliminary stages. He conscientiously logged stray ideas; developed mini-essays in letters to friends; rewrote plans for future projects; noted his dreams (several are recounted in One- Way Street); kept numbered lists of all the books he read” [17]. In cultural terms, to collect means to survive and to maintain a form of bond with the past. Wieseltier states that all the things written by Benjamin represented only a commentary, and similar to the great medieval commentators, Benjamin demonstrated that the commentary can be an instrument of originality, and in his case of redemption. The interpretation becomes a reconstruction of the memory, of the fragments seen by the angel of history. In Unpacking My Library. A Talk about Book Collecting Benjamin shows that “every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” For Benjamin, quoting means to name, bring the truth into the light, and pull out the recollection from the shadow of oblivion. To cite also means to repeat something that has already been said. To quote becomes an act of resituating the tradition, a bond with the past. “What the convention brings with it, in addition to itself, is a form of continuity. The quotation marks indicate that what is cited (and recited) is not new but is the reiteration of what has already been; an intended repetition of the Same in which the singularity of the past’s content is itself maintained” [18]. Hannah Arendt mentions that Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred during his lifetime were irreparable; for this reason Benjamin considered that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past, and he became a master when he discovered that the “transmissibility of the past could be achieved by its citability.” The quotation is a way of accessing the canvas of memory and collecting is seen as a form of practical memory (Project Arcade). “This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of despair (…) out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it; hence their power is “not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy” (Schriften II, 192). Still, the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power originally were inspired by an entirely

80 different intention, the intention to preserve; and only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professional “preservers” all around them did they finally discover that the destructive power of quotations was “the only one which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive – for no other reason than that it was torn out of it” [19]. The flâneur is also a collector, and he gathers what we can call a form of collective experience; whether he/she makes his/her way through culture or city by accessing the cultural memory and using the experience. The flâneur’s task is also to interpret the world and his/her work is relies on the remembrance because, when facing the fast changes of the city, as Howard Caygill shows in Wlater Benjamin. The Colour of Experience, “the flâneur remembers, and folds this memory into the experience of the present”, changing the experience of the city, transforming “the lived moment into a citable experience” [20]. Another side of the quotation collection appears in the Arcades Project that started in 1927 and ended in 1940 with Benjamin’s death. The Project offers a complex perspective over the places of memory as marks to which memory always returns when identity loses its stability. The work represents a collection of quotations and reflections and follows different themes: fashion, boredom, mirrors, flâneur, Baudelaire – generally named places of memory. This writing offers concepts, themes and shapes used by the author to solve problems like phantasmagoria, fetishism, dialectical image. The analysis proposed by Benjamin is one that integrates different perspectives of memory; for example the fetishism can be interpreted as a sign of memory, referring to objects and their signification, accumulations of correlative memory. And what were the arcades that occupied Benjamin’s mind in the last years of his life, if not another piece of his collection, but also key elements that can be used to find the direction in a labyrinth of memory? These passages do not have a fixed meaning and do not define a place [21], but Benjamin describes them as a residue of a dream world in which natural and social constraints were all suspended. The experience and the way it was understood by Benjamin is a direct referral to his view of the memory and its connection to the oblivion. In The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov the memory becomes the core theme that brings the story and the novel face to face, all on the background of the experience, which decreased in value starting with the First World War due to the diminishment of the oral transmission “from mouth to mouth” [22]. The shock of losing stability was fierce and thus the need for using the memory resources to increase the stability of the identity appeared. Nothing remained unchanged, said Benjamin, just the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of destructive torrents and explosions, “the tiny, fragile human body”. This is the context in which Benjamin sensed the need for collecting, recreating a shattered identity by using pieces of memory. The loss of the storyteller and of the story is the loss of the way of accessing the collective memory, the primary source of each individual memory and the source of what we call cultural memory. Benjamin’s writing mentioned above represents an indispensable source for understanding the memory, described as an epic faculty par excellence, and its value. “Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. It is the Muse-derived element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its varieties. In the first place among these is the one practiced by the storyteller. It starts the web which all stories together form in the end. (…) What announces itself in these passages is the perpetuating remembrance of the novelist as contrasted with the short-lived reminiscences of the storyteller. The first is dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle; the second, to many diffuse occurrences” [23]. The eternal memory of the novelist is opposed to the short memory of the storyteller, because a story means to the listeners an access to the collective memory. Benjamin underlines that the reader of a novel is more isolated than any other. Memory creates the chain of traditions passing from one generation to another, and here the connection with the experience, especially the collective experience, becomes obvious, as it appears in The Storyteller. As Beatrice Hansen (2004) mentions, according to the Harvard edition of “The Return of the Flâneur”, Erlebnis means a single, noteworthy period, while Erfahrung denotes a life experience acquired during an extended period. So Erlebnis, emphasizes the sense of wisdom detached and communicated out of experience, an experience developed beyond history and time. Hansen considers that the most helpful distinction between the two concepts emerges in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, where “both were securely linked to Benjamin’s theory of memory and where authentic Erfahrung was tantamount to the ability to countenance the auratic. Erfahrung in this context meant the conjunction between the individual past and the collective past” [24].

81 Passing from the individual experience to the collective one is what Benjamin aims in two of his autobiographical writings regarding his childhood: A Berlin Childhood around the Turn of the Century and Berlin Chronicle, and this process involves some sort of art of memory, because Benjamin uses a spatial map. As Susan Sontag mentions in her beautiful essay Under the Sign of Saturn, the street, the passage, the arcade, the labyrinth, are recurrent themes in his work and the reminiscences of self are the reminiscences of a place, and how he positions himself in it. In all his writings Benjamin is loyal to his passion as a collector, passion that is not strange from the family inheritance, among whose members were archaeologists and antiques traders. Therefore he assumed the task of excavating not in the earth, but in the ground of memory. For Sontag, Benjamin is not trying to recover his past, but to understand it and to condense it into its spatial forms, its premonitory structures. The flâneur and the experience of the city are also correlated with this spatiality. “The city activates the memory of the Flâneur, which then fuses with the present Erlebnis of the city into a narratable experience or Erfahrung. The footsteps of the walker provoke an ‘astounding resonance’ which is fed by memory but also evokes it” [25]. The selection criterion of Benjamin is that of the flâneur; from the personal memory to the collective one, because the memory is a space where the fragments become parts of a whole. His goal, according to Sontag, was to be a competent street-map reader who knows how to stray, and to locate himself with imaginary maps. Benjamin collected fragments but also created maps that can be used in order to find the way through the European legacy. His goal was the experience as Erfahrung. The disappearance of the story and of the storyteller is for Benjamin a sign of the collective memory disposal and the embracement of the individual memory, and for this reason Benjamin chose to collect fragments of collective memory (quotations) in order to recreate a collective experience. “If it is language that has signified unmistakably that memory is the arena for exploration of the past, rather than an instrument means to the past as a graspable end, this is because language and remembrance, while not identical, often tend to share the same turf. (…) Benjamin’s buried past is like the interred ruins of a dead city, and if his faculty of remembrance is less an excavating spade than one that buries, it is also in the power of individual memories, it would seem, to disinter” [26]. In On some motifs in Baudelaire, he specifies that when information substitutes the old narration and when the information is replaced by the sensation, this double process reflects the ongoing degradation of the experience; and the story, as one of the oldest ways of communication, does not simply report an event, but incorporates it in the life of the storyteller in order to communicate it to the listeners as its own experience. As I already mentioned, the experience is an essential concept for understanding his vision of memory, as it appears in the writing On the program of the coming philosophy (1918). For Benjamin the experience is the direct object, if not the only object of knowledge. In The Image of Proust Benjamin clearly states that not what the author experiences is important – the individual experience is necessary but not enough for the remembrance –but “the Penelope work of recollection” [27], the work of a collector who puts one piece behind another and manages to design a tapestry of collective memories. “When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting. This is why Proust finally turned his days into nights, devoting all his hours to undisturbed work in his darkened room with artificial illumination, so that none of those intricate arabesques might escape him” [28]. In his attempt to collect fragments of the collective memory Benjamin uses the space in order to find his way, he designs a map of his memories putting each information in a certain place, just as the art of memory was practiced in Antiquity, and his memory map contains, like any spatial map, arcades, passages and cross-roads, because as he shows in One-Way Street, “not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal and it requires only ignorance, but to lose oneself in a city, that calls for quite different schooling”. What we learn from Benjamin? Firstly, Benjamin teaches us to collect, to learn the art of collection, and to be capable to recover the fragments of our identity. Secondly, to draw our identity map, and to use the cultural fragments to find our way through the identity references, because “to lose oneself in a city” can be construed as a way to wander between different cultural references, knowing very well the way back.

82 Acknowledgements. This research was funded by the Human Resources CNCSIS project PD 345 and also by the Sectorial Operational Program „The Development of Human Resources” through the project “Development of the innovation capacity and increase of the research impact through postdoctoral programs POSDRU/89/1.5/S/49944. I would like to thank Dr. Anne Hogan for her help during my research at the London Metropolitan University.

Notes [1] Assman, J., “Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory.” In Aleida Assman, Sebastian Conrad (eds) Memory in a Global Age, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010, p. 121 [2] Elliot, A., Paul du Gay, Identity in question, Sage, London, 2009, p. xiv [3] Assman, J., “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Aleida Assman, Sebastian Conrad (eds) Memory in a Global Age, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010, p. 110 [4] Assman, J., “Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory.” In Aleida Assman, Sebastian Conrad (eds) Memory in a Global Age, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010, p. 122 [5] Boer, den P., “Loci memoriae – Lieux de mémoire.” In Aleida Assman, Sebastian Conrad (eds) Memory in a Global Age, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010, p. 21 [6] Ibidem, p. 23 [7 ]See Wieseltier, L., “Preface.” In Illumination. Schocken Books, New York, 2007, pp. vii-x [8] Leslie, E., Walter Benjamin. Overpowering Conformism, Pluto Press, London & Sterling, Virginia, 2000, p. 202 [9] Ibidem, p. 1 [10] Benjamin, W., Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illumination, Schocken Books, New York, 2007, pp. 257-258 [11] Osborne, P., “Small-scale victories, large-scale defeats. Walter Benjamin’s politics of time”. In Andrew Benjamin, Peter Osborne (eds) Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy. Destruction and Experience, Routledge, London and New York, 1994, p. 90 [12] Tiedemann, R., “Dialectics at a Standstil.” In Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1999, p. 939 [13] See Marx, U., Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla. Water Benjamin's Archive: Images, texts, signs. Verso, London & New York, 2007 [14] Jennings, M., “Walter Benjamin and the European avant-garde.” David S. Ferris (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 23 [15] Arendt, H., “Introduction. Walter Benjamin 1892-1940” In Illumination. Schocken Books, New York, 2007, p. 42 [16] Ibidem, p. 46) [17] Sontag, S., Under the Sign of Saturn, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, London, 1983, p. 127) [18] Benjamin, A., “Time and Task. Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present”. In David S. Ferris (ed.) Theoretical Question, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1994, pp. 242-243) [19] Arendt, H., “Introduction. Walter Benjamin 1892-1940” In Illumination. Schocken Books, New York, 2007, pp.38-39. [20] Caygyll, H., Walter Benjamin. The Colour of Experience, Routledge, London and New York, 1998, p. 68 [21] Caygyll, H., Walter Benjamin. The Colour of Experience, Routledge, London and New York, 1998, p. 132-133 [22] Benjamin, W., The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. In Illumination, Schocken Books, New York, 2007, p. 84. [23] Benjamin, W., The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. In Illumination, Schocken Books, New York, 2007, pp. 97-98 [24] Hanssen, B., “Language and mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s work”. David S. Ferris (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 70-71 [25] Caygyll, H., Walter Benjamin. The Colour of Experience, Routledge, London and New York, 1998, p. 68 [26] Jacobls, C., “Walter Benjamin: Topographically Speaking”. David S. Ferris (ed.) Theoretical Question, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996, p. 106 [27] Benjamin, W., The Image of Proust. In Illumination, Schocken Books, New York, 2007, p. 202 [28] Ibidem.

References Arendt, H., “Introduction. Walter Benjamin 1892-1940” In Illumination. Schocken Books, New York, 2007, pp. 1-58 Assman, J., “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Aleida Assman, Sebastian Conrad (eds) Memory in a Global Age, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010, p. 109-118 Assman, J., “Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory.” In In Aleida Assman, Sebastian Conrad (eds) Memory in a Global Age, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010, pp. 121-137 Benjamin, A., “Time and Task. Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present”. In David S. Ferris (ed.) Theoretical Question. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1994, pp. 216-250 Benjamin, W., The Image of Proust. In Illumination, Schocken Books, New York, 2007, pp. 201-216 Benjamin, W., The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. In Illumination, Schocken Books, New York, 2007, pp. 83-110 Benjamin, W., Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illumination, Schocken Books, New York, 2007, pp. 253-264 Benjamin, W., Unpacking My Library. A Talk about Book Collecting. In Illumination, Schocken Books, New York, 2007, pp. 59-68 Benjamin, W., Arcades Project, Belknap, Harvard, 1999 Benjamin, W., A Berlin Chronicle. In One-Way Street, NLB, London, 1979, pp. 293-348 Benjamin, W., One-Way Street. In One-Way Street and Other Writings, NLB, London, 1979, pp. 45-106

83 Boer, den P., “Loci memoriae – Lieux de mémoire.” In Aleida Assman, Sebastian Conrad (eds) Memory in a Global Age, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010, pp. 19-25 Caygyll, H., Walter Benjamin. The Colour of Experience, Routledge, London and New York, 1998 Elliot, A., Paul du Gay, Identity in question, Sage, London, 2009 Hanssen, B., “Language and mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s work”. In David S. Ferris (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 54-72 Jacobls, C., “Walter Benjamin: Topographically Speaking”. In David S. Ferris (ed.) Theoretical Question, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996, pp. 94-117 Jennings, M., “Walter Benjamin and the European avant-garde”. In David S. Ferris (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 18-34 Leslie, E., Walter Benjamin. Overpowering Conformism, Pluto Press, London & Sterling, Virginia, 2000 Marx, U., Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla. Water Benjamin's Archive: Images, texts, signs. Verso, London & New York, 2007 Osborne, P., “Small-scale victories, large-scale defeats. Walter Benjamin’s politics of time”. In Andrew Benjamin, Peter Osborne (eds) Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy. Destruction and Experience,. Routledge, London and New York, 1994, pp. 59-109 Sontag, S., Under the Sign of Saturn, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, London, 1983 Tiedemann, R., “Dialectics at a Standstil.” In Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1999, pp. 929-945 Wieseltier, L., “Preface.” In Illumination. Schocken Books, New York, 2007, pp. vii-x

84 (Post)Modernist Levels of Authority in Reflexive Fiction

Steluţa Stan*

Abstract: Most postmodernist novels cease to even pretend they believe in the direct mirroring in the text of a purely linguistic construction of reality. In metafictional writings, the focus is on the plurality of meaning due to the inherent plurality of language, effect of a plural reality, the negociation being made between the text and the reader, the (re)producer of meaning. Fictionalising the world via the media makes the “realistic” attitude of postmodernist writers presuppose acknowledgment and assumation of the constructed character of reality; thus, however paradoxical it may seem, postmodernist prose becomes mimetic but in a completely different way than the realistic prose of the 19th century. Keywords: authority, layers of fictionality, multiple identity, ontology, self-reflexive writing

Résumé: La majorité des romans postmodernistes ne prétendent mȇme plus qu’ils croient à la mise directe de la réalité dans le texte, la réalité devenant une construction purement linguistique. Dans les écritures métafictionnelles, l’accent est mis sur la pluralité de sens due à la pluralité inhérente à la langue, effet de la pluralité de la réalité. La négociation est faite alors entre le texte et le lecteur, le (re)créateur du sens. La fictionnalisation du monde par les médias remoule l’attitude «réaliste» des écrivains postmodernes qui parvient à reconnaître et assumer le caractère construit de la réalité. La prose postmoderniste devient, de la sorte, quelque paradoxale que cela puisse paraître, mimétique, mais dans un sens complétement différent de la prose réaliste du XIXe siècle. Mots-clés: autorité, couches de fiction, identités multiples, ontologie, écriture réflexive

Introduction Before going into the analysis proper of the way in which the metafictional text articulates, we consider it necessary to mention that, in our opinion there are at least two types of postmodernism that differ from one another both through organization of the narrative material and their vision: a playful, self-ironical and parodic postmodernism, the features of which are narrative discontinuity, open, even ostentatious, display of the narrative strategies and the compositional procedures, parody of the literary conventions and the challenging of the reader (as in Barth, Pynchon, Vonnegut or Barthelme); on the other hand, there is a second postmodernism, one that Carmen Muşat (2002) labels as imaginative/ anthropocentric, concentrating on the human being, in an attempt at recovering the symbolic imagination and visions (as in Fowles, Murdoch or Styron). Heterogeneity being one of the characteristics of postmodernism, most often than not the two types contaminate each other, so that none of the writers mentioned for either of the types is unfamiliar with the devices used by their “co-workers” in the other category. The distinction is necessary only if we consider the dominant of the text, the author’s preference for one series of devices or the other. Metafictional novels are the ones to overtly reveal their fictionality and reflect on their own status and narrative procedures. Within this self-reflective category, Linda Hutcheon distinguishes between overt, diegetic, metafiction that takes as a main theme its own status, rules and the very process of narration, and covert, linguistic, metafiction that suggests through language games, parody and intertextual references, the inability of language to function as a means of communication or, even more important than this, its ability to create other worlds, alternative to and more meaningful than the “real”one (Hutcheon, 1980). This second category of novels, of a bewildering type, unlike the traditional realistic one, breaks the illusion that what it tells about is an objective reality, truthfully reflected in language; instead, its purpose is to raise questions and pose problems, to tease the readers out of their easy acceptance of the traditional and pre-established modes of thinking, to invite them to take part in the literary game. As the area that explores the relationship between fiction and reality is concerned, however vigorous the post-structuralist insistence to see fiction (as well as literature, in general) as a free game of signifiers with no signifieds, the metafictional novel makes an open invitation at finding answers for a set of unexpected and startling questions:

* Associate Professor, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

85 Is there a reality ontologically separate and different from our linguistic consciousness? And if there is, can we know it without altering it by our knowledge? And if we can, can we ‘render’ it in language? And if we can, does this rendering correspond to or give a truthful view of that ontologically different reality that we have assumed to exist? Or are we fooling ourselves in believing that there is such a reality, when in reality we are locked up in the prison-house of language, in the reading gaol? (Kums in Bignami and Patey, 1996: 151)

The borders become even more fluid and obscured due to the juxtaposition of a number of possible worlds: the real, the fictitious, the fictionalised fictitious and metafiction itself, all of which seeming to fall on Baudrillard’s well-known four phases of the image. Ultimately, the central and most relevant issue, intimately and necessarily linked to this set of questions, remains that of truth.

Own-tail-chasing fiction Saying that metafiction is fiction about fiction adds nothing new to our cognitive thesaurus. Neither is saying that metafictional novels and short stories draw attention upon their own fictional status and compositional techniques, in the same funny but ever fascinating manner as own-tail-chasing dogs. Metafiction itself is not exactly a baby since it has an 18th century grandfather, Sterne’s magnus opus, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-70), where the narrator’s dialogues with imaginary readers are just one of the many ways an author, in his desire to force real readers to give up preconceived literary assumptions, uses to foreground the gap between art and life that conventional realism tries to veil. Sterne was the first to insist on the the author’s full right to do as s/he pleases, but also on the readers’ to reject predestined formulas and thus accept their complicity. Consequently, metafiction is not a modern (let alone postmodern) invention; nevertheless, what it certainly always has been is a narrative mode, particularly attractive for many contemporary writers under the pressure of their awareness that everything has probably already been said by others, their bloomian anxiety of influence that determines them to permanently try something new. From Henry James or Joseph Conrad on, metafiction has become a space writers use to theorize their literary techniques. As Barthes said, metafictional writing “[i]s both an alibi by means of which the writer can occasionally escape the constraints of traditional realism but also a central preoccupation and source of inspiration” (qtd in Lodge, 1992: 89). The postmodern author, on the other hand, is, in Vattimo’s terms, a ‘weak’ one, re-entering the stage unexpectedly and in force, many times in most unusual hypostheses. The target reader of such a writer writing such a text must be up-to-date (and updated), alert, ready and willing to be attacked by and invited to play with experiments in mode or narrative technique – multiple layers of fictional worlds, fluctuant identities of the character’s or even the author’s. Warren Beach’s Exit Author (1932), might be the modernist slogan coined to express what various innovators, such as Flaubert, James, Joyce, claimed all the time for their literary practices that the visible, ‘nosy’ authorial voice in (to take only some examples) Balzac’s, Thackeray’s or Trollope’s works had been supressed; that starting with them, the author would be invisible, allowed to exist only beyond but not in the text. Modernists always tried to efface the tracks of their presence from the surface of the text and, to this goal, they either exploited and developed different forms of texts lacking a narrator, mainly based on direct dialogues (Hemingway) or free indirect discourse (Joyce, Woolf, Dos Passos), or blurred their own subjectivity behind the subjectivity of a first person narrative or of an interior monologue. Paradoxically (or maybe not), the harder they tried, the more obvious their presence. Effacing strategies, though obliterating the author’s surface tracks, foreground him/her as the strategist. Thus, self-effacement proves, in fact, a form of self-promotion of a re-surfaced author. The analogy between the author and God is not a novel idea, also. However, postmodernist writers seem to be obsessed with it, or at least so preoccupied that they are ready to sacrifice the realist illusion in order to affirm their authority in the most elementary way, their power on the fictional universe, and/or their ontological superiority as authors. The postmodernist author wants for himself the same powers that gods always claimed they had: omnipotence and omniscience. After twelve chapters of flirtation with the historical fact anchored in the real world, of creating the

86 illusion of life only to dismantle it, John Fowles’s extra-diegetic narrator in The French Lieutenant’s Woman confronts us with an indisputable fact in a different manner: the author’s voice cuts into the text with the very intent to declare its fictionality. Fowles creates here a paradoxical situation that refers both to a reality outside the text and to the process by which that reality is fictionally constructed. In the as renowned chapter 61, the last in the novel, the author enters the world of the text in the person of an impresario the physical features of whom are not particularly pleasant, a caricature of the real John Fowles. The cycle of metafictional frame breaking is double: at the level of the fictional world and that of the author, himself proven a fiction. Through this gesture, the illusory reality of the fictional world is destroyed and instead we are offered, if not the real world, at least a possible one. The postmodern ontology sets in place. After all, what is real in the ontological structure of the novel if not the author constructing that world? He occupies an ontological level superior to that of his world; breaking the frame, the author foregrounds his own reality (existence). The metafictional gesture of breaking the frame is, in other words, a form of surrealism [1]. Meant to re-establish an absolute level of reality, this technique paradoxically relativizes reality; meant to offer an ontologically dependable fulcrum, it destabilizes ontology even more because sacrificing some illusory reality to the “more real” one of the author creates a precedent: why could not this gesture be repeated? What makes impossible the treatment of the author’s reality as an illusion to be shattered? Absolutely nothing, probably. This way, the alleged absolute reality of the author becomes yet another level of fiction, whereas the real world withdraws even more. As a matter of fact, unveiling the author’s presence inside the ontological structure does not mean that he is introduced into fiction; far from eliminating the frame, this strategy only enlarges it to include the author as fictional character. He and the reader become accomplices, aware that it is not a “slice of life” they deal with but an artifact of them both.

Factual or fictional Regarding the distinction between factual and fictional discourse, Peter Lamarque offers the following solution for the existence or inexistence of reference and truth: we either admit that the objects in fiction match the existence of objects in the real world, or consider that the only objects that exist are those of the real world, thus denying any existence to the ones in fiction. Therefore, the very ground for the distinction between fictional and factual discourse disappears: “Fiction is whatever is man-made (conceptually or linguistically). Truth is man-made (conceptually or linguistically). Therefore, truth is just a species of fiction” (Lamarque in Nash, 1994: 137). In an interview, Fowles claims that “all novelists are liars because fiction is the business of telling falsehoods about people who do not even exist” (Fowles in Ciugureanu and Vlad, 1998: 73). Through lies, stories born sometimes from the desire to embellish a monotonous, thus boring, reality, another world is born, different from the existing one, the same as Bagdhad (before the war that brought a sad fame upon it), meant the city of the “one thousand and one nights”, or, as Barth puts it in Chimera (1972), some fictions were so much more valuable than fact that in rare instances their beauty made them real. Bringing to focus the gap between art and life that conventional realism tries to conceal, metafictional discourse appears in the work of English novelists in the form of asides (from prefaces and mottoes to direct, authorially intrusive, passages) in novels primarily concentrated on traditional means of conveying the message, portraying character and describing action; such passages are considered manipulative as they use the conventions of realism and, in the same time, acknowledge their artificiality even as they employ them; they disarm criticism by anticipating it; they flatter the reader considering them their intellectual equal, a reader sophisticated enough to be familiar with the conventional fictional representation, the intricacies of weaving a text, and aware that the work of fiction is a verbal construction rather than a “slice of life”. As to metafictional writers, Lodge said that they have “a sneaky habit of incorporating potential criticism into their text and thus ‘fictionalize’ it” (Lodge, 1992: 208). From the logical point of view, fictional discourse is defined in terms of zero denotation [2]: the linguistic constituents that, in factual discourse, have a denotative function (proper names, deictics, demonstratives etc.) lack any denotation proper. The fictional statement has a meaning without having a referent. If we are to think how much, for example, we care if Ulysses existed or

87 not, we would realize that, beyond the issue of the presence or absence of the denotation of fiction in the real world, a special attention deserves the cognitive richness that fiction offers. A statement that lacks denotation because it is read literally can become true (can denote) if read metaphorically. Don Quixote never existed but his name applies metaphorically to a certain category of people. Therefore, the intrinsically literary characteristics as well as the expressive qualities of writing are part of the referential structure of both the symbolic system and the denotative one: if a piece of writing does not denote because it is fictional, it does not necessarily lose its referential dimension. With metafiction, what is non-denoted, but real-ised, is fiction itself. This way, the discussion about the construction of the text becomes the content itself. On the other hand, the same as we move in everyday life from a kind of world to another, fiction allows us free access to different and successive worlds, parallel to the ones the human being is aware of historically and socially; consequently, the structure of fiction should be understood as resembling to the one of a ladder on which, more or less real and more or less fictional worlds define human reality by inter-action and inter-reflection: “Strangely enough, […] when using the term ‘world’ one is using a space term […] But narrative fiction calls our attention to time and a sequence in time […] Literature is generally to be classed as a time-art (in distinction from painting and sculpture, space-arts)” (Wellek and Warren, 1993: 147). As a result, the world of a novel is a structure or a complex organism made up of a wide range of constitutive elements, combined to create the illusion of reality; this illusion depends on the effect it has on the reader to be assimilated as the reality of a work of fiction. It is the task of narratology to analyse these elements and establish the manner in which they contribute to the presentation of the events. The wave of metafictional novels in the ‘60s and ‘70s may have lost its force in the ‘80s, but it did not disappear as its critics, who used to see in this kind of writing just a futile attempt of the novel at postponing its own death, heralded. Those who attacked metafiction accused it of “self-flattering narcissism” (a term that Hutcheon transforms in her 1980 essay in grounds for pride), of elitism (novelists talking to themselves and to one another about how great and how utterly important their writing practices are), of narrowness, circularity and repetitivity (resembling dogs chasing their own tail as if it were the most important thing in the world). From this perspective, metafictional novels are those in which the epic respiration gives way to the self- anihilating experiment. Beyond all these accusations lies the assumption that the novel should tell about people and reality, taking over the tradition of social realism, in a clear message. Thus, metafiction becomes, to use Barth’s words in a somehow distorted interpretation, a literature of exhaustion, the last stage before its death. The reaction of rejection towards this type of literature is also triggered by its labeling, without any further distinctions, as postmodernist, even deconstructivist. Consequently, the latter’s critics transferred their accusations upon metafiction: the lack of a final, stable meaning of the text[3], its refusal of any forms of closure, the ignoring of literary tradition and of the cannon; as in the case of deconstructivism, the critics of metafiction consider it to “sin” by taking pleasure in ambiguity and contradiction, by incorporating heterogenous material (fantasy, fairytale, documents, fiction, journalism)[4], and this way, erasing the boundaries between the genres, by incorporating its own criticism and reading instructions, by toying with the printing conventions etc. In short, the novel (by the judgment of its dissenters) tends to become an unrecognizable category, downgraded to a kind of jumbled and jangled text. The exaggerations taken out, one cannot ignore such reactions, at least because they exist, even if coming from conservative positions, resistant to change.

Mimesis or diegesis It is true that, although metafiction and deconstructivism are not the same (the latter being a critical attitude, a practice of approaching any linguistic expression, literature included), what they have in common is a certain, permanent, self-search and self-questioning, and the refusal to accept existing forms and hierarchies as such and for ever. Among the critics who embarked upon offering counter-arguments, mention must be made of Patricia Waugh (Metafiction, 1984), Linda Hutcheon (Narcissistic Narrative, 1980), Steven Kellman (The Self-Begetting Novel, 1980). They showed that self-questioning in fiction is not a

88 symptom of exhaustion but a necessary and very important stage in the development of the analysis, and that the value of metafictional literature resides exactly in this self-scrutiny, sometimes playful, some other times painful. It would be absurd to suppose that metafiction sets as its goal to demonstrate its own futility and irrelevance; the “message” it carries is, nevertheless, different from that of the traditional realist novel, because, unlike this one, metafictive writings do not want to preserve the illusion that they reflect reality objectively and truthfully. However deep this undermined the fictional conventions, and however confusing the avoidance of the final meaning, the metafictional novel always has an implicit intention (even explicit many times): to challenge the reader into giving up their final formulations, and accepting that posing questions with no easy, even impossible, answers, is beneficial. As for the question about the possibility to represent the world into the literary fiction, the metafictional novel has a negative answer: “what can be represented is the discourse of that” (Waugh, 1984: 3). If the novel uses language, either to represent a world or even create it, then it becomes very clear that the fundamental theme of metafiction is the linguistic paradox: novelists are permanently confronted with the inability of language to express the richness of their visions; in consequence, they fight a constant battle with the limits/prison of language in order to achieve appropriate expressiveness. Despite all this, by the very means of this language, poor as it may be, they create the most coherent and spectacular fictional worlds and completely expose their transparency as “worlds of words”, not worlds haunted by the stubborn and rejecting resistance of reality: “What is to be acknowledged is that there are two poles of metafiction: one that finally accepts a substantial real world whose significance is not entirely composed of relationships within language; and one that suggests that there can never be an escape from the prison-house of language and either delights or dispairs in this” (Waugh, op. cit.: 53). Here is Lodge’s novelist at a crossroads! In what the British one is concerned, he chooses, most of the times, the road of the realist novel, the road to the compromise between the fictional and the empirical modes of writing, although admitting that the pressure of skepticism on the esthetic and epistemological premises of traditional realism is so intense that many novelists feel confronted with a choice, the one mentioned above, between the non-fictional novel and fabulation, as Robert Scholes names it, giving as examples Günter Grass, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon etc. What Lodge recommends, himself with a leg in the boat of criticism and one in that of literary creation, is that writers take at least the time of hesitation, or, as many already did, build that hesitation within the écriture itself, to which he attaches the following label:

[t]he novel-about-itself, the trick-novel, the game-novel, the puzzle-novel, the novel that leads the reader (who wishes, naїvely, only to be told what to believe) through a fairground of illusions and deceptions, distorting mirrors and trap-doors that open disconcertingly under his feet, leaving him ultimately not with any simple or reassuring message or meaning but with a paradox about the relation of art to life. (Lodge, 1971: 105)

Not exactly the same thing happens across the Atlantic. American novelists repeatedly approach the issue of the words as a unique system for the translation of reality into fiction in their novels, primarily in the self-reflective ones. The process of the trespassing of ontological barriers is summarized by Bellerophon in Barth’s Chimera: “Loosed at last from mortal speech, he turned into written words: Bellerophonic letters afloat between two worlds, forever betraying, in combinations and re-combinations, the man they forever represent” (Barth in Toma, 2004: 80). This growing fascination with words is part of the similar growing introversion of the postmodernist novel, being yet another mark of the fact that this one is aware of it being an invented reality, opposed to the real reality. This attitude towards language, its use to attract attention upon itself, not upon external reality, expresses, as we could expect, the refusal of the literature of our times to immortalize the symbols of reality, the loss of confidence in its stable values and the transformation of this loss into a supreme faith. Todd Andrews, the barthian character in The Floating Opera (1956), offers the only possible solution:

89 So, reader, should you ever find yourself writing about the world, take care not to nibble at the many tempting symbols she sets squarely in your path, or you’ll be baited into saying things you don’t mean and offending the people you want most to entertain. Develop, if you can, the technique of the pall-bearer and myself: smile, but walk on and say nothing, as though you hadn’t noticed. (Barth in op. cit.: 85)

The focus on fictionality becomes essential in the attempt to playfully order the (seemingly) random, the accidental, attach some significance to it or ironically ignore it. Even if sometimes and only for a while the illusion of reference to the real world is maintained, the reader is permanently “brutalised” with passages that violate the code of realism. Lodge mentions in this respect Joseph Heller’s novel Good as Gold (1979), where one of the numbered chapters begins like this:

Once again Gold found himself preparing to lunch with someone [...] and the thought arose that he was spending an awful lot of time in this book eating and talking. [...] Certainly he would soon meet a schoolteacher with four children with whom he would fall madly in love, and I would shortly hold out to him the tantalizing promise of becoming the country’s first Jewish Secretary of State, a promise I did not intend to keep. (Heller in Lodge, 1992: 42)

The above-mentioned trespassing is achieved in two ways: on the one hand, admitting that Gold is a character in a book, not someone in the real world; on the other, underlining the fact that he has no autonomy whatsoever, being, simply and completely, at the disposal of a creator who is not sure what to do with him. About the same thing happens in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, an intrusion like “This was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” being a usual one. Such “gestures” are labelled as “breaking the frame” or “revealing the device” or, more simply, “metafiction”. By itself, the procedure is not new at all and similar examples of exposure of the fictionality of fiction can be easily found in Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Thackeray or Trollope, but not in the modernist ones, because such a foregrounding of the author’s existence, the very source of diegesis, is contrary to the modernist principle of impersonality and the mimesis of consciousness. Quite paradoxically, metafictional devices might appear as a way to continue the exploration and exploitation of the sources of realism, simultaneously to the admittance of their conventionality. The more the authors reveal themselves in such texts, the more they become a voice, function of their own fiction, a rhetorical construct; not privileged authority, but object to interpretation. A possible conclusion is that postmodernist literature re-affirms diegesis; not harmoniously interweaved with mimesis (as in the classic realist text), not subordinate (as in the modernist one), but foregrounded, through contrast, by mimesis:

The stream of consciousness has turned into a stream of narration – which would be one way of summarizing the difference between the greatest modernist novelist, Joyce, and the greatest postmodernist, Beckett. When the Unnamable says to himself, ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on’, he means, on one level at least, that he must go on narrating. (Lodge, 1992: 44)

Also in reference to the British writers and their relationship with postmodernism (especially some of its attributes such as the questioning of metanarrative, the decentring of cultural authority, and the ironic disruption of the self-contained fictional world), Dominic Head (2002) agrees that their novels also convey a conviction about the moral and emotional function of narrative fiction, and its ability to make readers re-engage with the world they know. In this way, the writers offer a re-working of the realist contract, involving the reader’s willing acceptance that the text provides a bridge to reality. Much the same as Lodge, Head considers that the British authors are not postmodernist in the meaning of “experimentalist” only, but their writings should be viewed as the expression of a mode of writing capable of generating an emotional response, beyond the distractions of self-conscious trickiness; this understanding of postmodernism, as a hybrid form of expression that renegociates tradition, is the one that could make a case for British Postmodernism, and that could account for the work of practitioners such as Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis, Graham Swift,

90 Peter Ackroyd, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis or Angela Carter. As about the metafictional writing, the self-conscious fiction that underlines its own fictionality, Head says:

This degree of playfullness is self-deprecating in the sense that it has the effect of devaluing the role and function of ‘literature’. No longer capable of high seriousness, the literary object colludes in its own debunking, participating in the cultural logic that blurs the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The consequence of this is a culture of pastiche, with no vantage point from which value can be assigned with authority. [...] It is this kind of ludic postmodernism that has failed to gain a purchase in British literary culture. (Head, 2002: 229)

A further consequence, in Head’s oppinion, is a “waning of affect”, the production of self- conscious culture in which powerful emotion can no longer be communicated without mediation, qualification, or reservation. This kind of ludic postmodernism seems to have failed to gain a purchase in British literary culture, unlike in the American one.

Notes [1] Gabriel Josipovici writes about novelists who, the same as Fowles, break this frame: “First, they persuade us to take the ‘image’ as ‘reality’, consolidating our habits in order to suddenly have our attentiond attracted to the very pair of glases we are looking through and thus be forced to admit that what we took for ‘reality’ was only imposture” (1971: 297, translation mine). [2] Roland Barthes expresses in Writing Degree Zero (1967) the hope that language can be used in an utopic way and that there are cultural codes that can be trespassed. At the beginning of the ’70s, he began to see language, the same as Derrida, as a space the metaphoric character of which remains unknown. In Empire of Signs (1970), Barthes gives up any claim to describe or analyze reality., mixing cultural forms of an extreme diversity, from haikus to different machines, pieces of a sort of anti-utopic landscape in which everything is surface, nothing is form. Writing becomes a goal in itself. In his last text, Barthes by Barthes, concepts do not count for their validity or invalidity, but for their efficiency as a writing tactic. [3] The two alternative endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman are an excellent illustration of the ‘forking paths technique’ that McHale (1987: 106-10) considers to be postmodernist par excellence. [4] Arguing in favour of the metafictional novel and referring to its connections and affinities with other genres, Guido Kums says: “It is also evident that these novels all to a greater or lesser extent display this magpie tendency to collect other genres of writing: they all contain letters, diaries, documents with political, philosophical or sociological discourse, and they all parody various styles and fashions of writing” (Kums in Bignami, 1996: 153).

References Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, Annette Lavers, Collin Smith (trans.), London, Cape, 1967. Marialuisa Bignami, Caroline Patey (eds.), Moving the Borders. Milano, Edizioni Unicopli, 1996. Adina Ciugureanu, Eduard Vlad, Multiple Perspectives, Constanţa, Ex Ponto, 1998. Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction. 1950-2000, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, London, Methuen, 1980. Lodge, David (1971) The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism, Routledge, London. David Lodge, The Art of Fiction, London, Penguin Books, 1992. McHale, Brian (1987) Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge, London & New York. Carmen Muşat, Strategiile subversiunii. Descriere şi naraţiune în proza postmodernă românească, Piteşti, Paralela 45, 2002. Christopher Nash (ed.), Narrative in Culture, University of Warwick Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, Great Britain, Routledge, 1994. Josipovici, Gabriel (1971) The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction, Macmillan, London. Irina Toma, Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Iasi, Premier, 2004. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, New York & London, Methuen, 1984. René Wellek, Austin Warren, Theory of Literature. London, Penguin Books, 1993.

91 Ideological Illusionism and the Media of Illusion: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Angela Stǎnescu*

Résumé: L’article examine, dans le texte du roman Midnight’s Children de Salman Rushdie, les représentations des formes et des caractéristiques du discours idéologisé, transmis par l’intermédiaire des moyens des communication en masse les plus divers. En focalisant la charge idéologique du discours et de la communication politiques, du message propagandiste dans ses divers hypostases médiatiques, (la presse écrite, la radio, le cinéma), Rushdie exemplifie et problématise la nature des techniques de manipulation publique et de distorsion de l’information, destinées á alimenter les tensions et les divisions dans l’espace social et politique du Sous-continent Inde. L’analyse critique du discours que l’auteur pratique d’une manière comique et satirique acquiert des valences symboliques, grâce aux nombreux parallèles entre les stratégies discursives de la propagande nationaliste, communaliste ou religieuse et le monde de la magie, de l’illusion, du cirque et du carnaval. Défini souvent comme un maître du réalisme magique, Rushdie semble suggérer que les élites politiques et leur entier appareil idéologique et médiatique sont de redoutables pratiquants d’un autre type de ‘réalisme magique’, où les moyens linguistiques et para-linguistiques opérant dans les discours de la communication publique concourent dans la mystification et déformation de la réalité. Mots-clés: discours idéologisé, techniques de manipulation, communication publique, distorsion de l’information

Keywords: ideology, discourse, communication, media, manipulation

Midnight’s Children (1981), Salman Rushdie’s sweeping fictional representation of the postcolonial destiny of the Indian Subcontinent, has often been described as a dialogical narrative, epitomising the Bakhtinian concept of the dialogical or polyphonic novel, the inherent site of discursive multiplicity or heteroglossia. Rushdie’s narrative discourse is indeed an echo chamber of proliferating, competing discourses and counter-discourses engaging public communication by regulating, and often manipulating, the collective perception of history, nationhood, political and social reality. The novel becomes an anatomy of discourse in all its ideational and ideological aspects – historical, nationalistic, political, social, ethnic, religious, artistic – and its various media of propagation (or propaganda, for that matter) – written, audio-visual, pictorial, photographic, theatrical, cinematic. Rushdie’s metafictional self-reflexivity, often interrogating the ingenuity and legitimacy of his own narrative discourse, runs parallel with a sustained undermining and critique of all public discourses engaged in the construction of the meta-discourses of officialdom and the publicly sanctioned ‘truths’ which inform the meta-narratives of history and nationalism. The subliminal insidiousness of official public discourses and the sanctioning of power and ideology as discursive and meta-discursive performance can be argued to represent a major thematic strand of Midnight’s Children. The novel’s inscription of India’s narrative of nationhood focuses on the enunciation and performance of nationalistic discourse at both linguistic and paralinguistic levels. The idea of nationhood as a collective dream finds its expression not only in iterative acts or narrative constructs but is also actualised as physical performance. In Midnight’s Children, the concept of nationhood becomes actualised and literalised as the nation’s performing of its dream of itself, as a symbolic dramatic performance of multitudes enacting the discourse of nationalism about the oneness of the many. But while the traditional, iconic representations of nationhood focus on the compactness of oneness, Rushdie’s depiction of the nation’s spectacle foregrounds the numerousness of the many, as suggested by the repeated reference to the ‘many-headed monster’ in the streets and to the multiple midnight births – an image perhaps more apposite to the diversity coalesced into the new nation state. The symbolism of the childbirth scenes accompanying the moment of Independence is complemented by another image of fertility, vitality and spiritual liberation – the motley icon of carnival. The description of the streets, filled with the fertile spirit of the popular festival and its exulting crowds, illustrates the generative potential of the carnival, theorised by Bakhtin as the locus of freely assumed, fluid identities, which dislodge the status quo of

* Lecturer, PhD, “Valahia” University of Targoviste

92 received hierarchies and assert the multiplicitous discourses of dialogic diversity. Michael Gorra aptly remarks that not only do ‘those multitudes call to mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “heteroglossia” of the novel form’, but Midnight’s Children ‘enacts its heteroglossia on a thematic level as well as a stylistic one’ (Gorra 121). Rushdie’s textual heteroglossia is primarily related to the representation of the Indian nation, whose historical, ethnic and cultural diversity cannot be reduced to the monologic block of one single discourse or emblematic image. As Gorra argues,

No single member of the MCC can legitimately claim to represent India as a whole – not even Saleem, who writes…In a congress of different voices no one person can be fully identified with the truth. For the linguistic pluralism of the heteroglot novel is an ideological one as well, discrediting the belief that truth is one and absolute, and holding that it is instead multiple, overlapping, conflicting (Gorra 121).

Rushdie’s narration of the nation’s birth is also portentous of the perils awaiting the fledgling national spirit. Despite the optimistic, exultingly carnivalesque atmosphere, the recurrent image of ‘the many headed monster of the crowd…the monster in the streets’ (114) seems to anticipate the lurching monstrosity of communalism and dissent, now latent in the crowd’s monolithic fantasy of the national construct. This climactic moment of apotheosis crowning the nationalist dream is overshadowed by Rushdie’s postmodern ‘ideological suspicion of ideological certainty, an acute awareness of ideology’s deforming power’ (Gorra 121). Since nationalism itself has often been regarded as a new and equally monologic ideology displacing the dogma of colonialism, Rushdie retains an ambiguous vantage point in his ‘attempt to engage the ideologically defined discourses of both colonialism and its ideological counterparts’ (Gorra 130). Timothy Brennan sees Rushdie as the consummate ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘in perpetual flight from a fixed national or ideological identity’ and wary of any ‘radical decolonization theory’ (Brennan 142, 30). Gorra seems to agree that Rushdie’s cautionary tales ‘engage in what Brennan describes as the demythification of Third World nation-building, in a way that’s sometimes held to confirm western prejudices, showing that a new nation ’ (Gorra 130). Moreover, it seems that India’s ‘many-headed monster’ of a nation is ultimately an alien concept, a community previously imagined in geographical terms by the coloniser. Gorra examines the irrelevance of the national idea to the construction of collective cultural identity in postcolonial Africa and India:

Fanon argues that in Africa the appeal to a precolonial culture is never conceived of in national terms; indeed, the nations themselves are colonial creations. Instead the appeal becomes a racial one…In India the appeal to an essential or authentic identity at first appears to work in exactly the opposite way, for it’s couched not in terms of what is larger than the nation but in terms of what’s smaller, of one’s religious or linguistic or caste affiliations. But Fanon remains a reliable guide. In some ways India’s national form does seem a colonial construct, a creation of the British, like Kenya (Gorra 138).

As Rushdie himself emphasises, British-imagined or not, and whatever the fissures of its imagination, the nation-country was ‘a dream that everyone agreed to dream. And now I think there actually is a country called India’ (quoted in Gorra 139). Despite its critical moments, the project of the Indian nation has proved its viability in the course of time, considering that it is ‘one that’s already five thousand years old’ (Gorra 139). In other words, the novel’s exposure of the inherent faultlines of the national edifice, of what Bhabha calls the ambivalent articulation of the nation, can be understood as an implicit critique of the imperial legacy. Rushdie qualifies the dream of a monolithic national consciousness by his cautionary metaphor of the many-headed monster, and of ‘the two, synchronous midnight births’, which brings to mind the twinned births of India and Pakistan. The soothsayer’s prophesy that ‘there will be two heads – but you will see only one’ (87), alludes to the nation’s two-headed religious factionalism. Thus, the symbolism of the two births points, on the one hand, to ‘the emergence of India and Pakistan, born together from a cleft womb, still as restless in relation to each other as the day they stepped into the harsh light of nationhood’ (Bhabha ix). On the other hand, it suggests the ethnic and religious fracture in the body of the newborn India. This original

93 split is further complicated by the allegorical story of changelings, uncertain parentage and confused identity, with its sustained admonition against the relativity of human perceptions and constructs. Rushdie confronts the self-willed, ideological certainty of the national construct with the ‘corresponding assumption of what Kundera describes as ’ (Gorra 121). Grant comments on the symbolic weight of the trope of confused parentage: ‘A good deal of critical attention has been lavished on the theme of problematic parentage in Rushdie, which is understandable, since it recurs in all his novels and is (he himself reminds us) an important circumstance in both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the founding epics of India’ (Grant 51). If the collective fantasy of the national idea derives its legitimacy from the founding epic of the ‘imagined community’, to use Anderson’s term for the myth of the nation, the fantasies induced with manipulative deliberation by the powers-that-be and their propagandistic apparatus are represented as the attendant mystifications of politically manoeuvred nationalism. Rushdie illustrates the symptoms of the displacement of reality by fantasy via his critique of the mass media, the ultimate manipulator of reality, a category from which the artist is not exempt. The mass-media are envisioned throughout the novel not as a means of mass communication, but rather of miscommunication and thought control, in which the demarcation between factuality and fictitiousness is fluid. To begin with, Saleem’s delusion of identity and sense of historical mission is sparked off by a newspaper’s metaphorical salutation of his arrival and by the ‘metaphorical reality’ of a statesman’s letter. His description of his telepathic powers is ‘stuck with this radio metaphor’, by virtue of which he is able ‘not only to broadcast my messages; but also…to act as a sort of national network’ (221). When, ‘consumed by the two-headed monster of revenge’ (251), Saleem schemes to scourge the ‘unobservant adulteress’ (251) Lila Sabarmati so as ‘to administer a salutary shock to [his] own mother’ (254), his modern adaptation of the Hamletian dramatisation ruse takes the form of a collage of newspaper clippings. It is tellingly ironic that his ‘first attempt at rearranging history’ resides in ‘cutting up history to suit my nefarious purposes’ (252-3). His subversive game of assembling private and public drama out of headlines ridicules the media’s tailoring of political and nationalist propaganda. Later in the novel, ‘while newspaper headlines marched towards war’ (289), we are given headline-glimpses of the contradictory interpretations of the Indo-Chinese border conflict, of fact confusingly misrepresented by either side so as to lull public opinion into self-satisfaction. In Saleem’s dystopian account of the oppressive, intellectually stagnant atmosphere of Pakistan’s politics of submission to the godly state, Rushdie illustrates the swaying power of the state policy of mystification and mind-control by surrealistic images of distorted perception. Public communication becomes a pernicious instrument for bending reality to suit the current autocracy’s nationalistic and religious propaganda, whose hold over collective consciousness is rendered by metaphors suggesting an alienating, surreal, or rather hyper-real, sense of public reality. The people’s confusion between illusion and reality and their ideological manipulation by the powers- that-be is figured through the metaphor of the desert and its mirages:

It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had not wholly succeeded in destroying the desert’s power…the hidden desert retained its ancient power of apparition- mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only the slipperiest of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to their leaders for advice on what was real and what was not. Beset by illusionary sand-dunes and the ghosts of ancient kings, and also by the knowledge that the name of the fate upon which the city stood meant ‘submission,’ my new fellow-citizens exuded the flat boiled odours of acquiescence, which were depressing to a nose which had smelt…the highly-spiced nonconformity of Bombay (299).

There is an ironic contrast between the country’s fouled ethics and its religious purity. Even Saleem begins to see his impure cultural heritage, his hybrid identity and pluralist thinking as a tainting mark of otherness in a land of officialised uniformity. His self-conscious sense of impurity resembles Naipaul’s representations of ‘tainted’ colonial subjectivity: ‘in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah’s… I was doomed to be a misfit’ (301). Saleem’s inherited humanism is at odds with the surreal bigotry of Pakistan’s young generation and their complicity with the system, inconceivable for their counterparts of the free world: ‘not even learning could make me be a part of this country devoid

94 of midnight children, in which my fellow-students took out processions to demand a stricter, more Islamic society – proving that they had contrived to become the antitheses of students everywhere on earth, by demanding more-rules-not-less’ (301). In the alternative, fabricated reality of Pakistan, the exile of factuality is complete. Saleem comments with Orwellian bitterness on the falsification of reality operated by the totalitarian rule:

Divorce between news and reality: newspapers quoted foreign economists – PAKISTAN A MODEL FOR EMERGING NATIONS – while peasants (unreported) curse the so-called ‘green revolution’…while editorials praised the probity of the nation’s leadership, rumours, thick as flies, mentioned Swiss bank accounts and the new American cars of the President’s son. The Karachi Dawn spoke of another dawn – GOOD INDO-PAK RELATIONS JUST AROUND THE CORNER? – but, in the Rann of Kutch, yet another inadequate son was discovering a different story (323).

The insubstantiality of material construction is paralleled by the shiftiness of the country’s surreal, dystopian climate of ‘mirages and lies’ (324). Pakistan’s political history is defined as a ‘story [which] does indeed end in fantasy’, since its politics invites comparison with the illusionist’s craft: ‘travesty-of-justice...electoral-jiggery-pokery…chicanery’ (324). The ‘death-of-democracy’ is inflicted by an ‘autocratic-tyranny’ (324), whose shrewd brain-washing and disinformation humbles the mystifications of the narrator: ‘thus proving to me that I had been only the humblest of jugglers with facts; and that, in a country where truth is what it is constructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case’ (324). The displacement of reality by officially validated fantasy is exemplified by the fantastic press reports about the Indo-Pak border conflict over the Rann of Kutch, in which the crude reality of corruption and manipulation ‘lies concealed beneath the doubly hazy air of unreality and make- believe which affected all goings-on in those days, and especially all events in the phantasmagoric Rann…so that the story I am going to tell…is as likely to be true as anything; as anything, that is to say except what we were officially told’ (324). The legends propounded by the state propaganda, meant to obscure the truth about illicit fortunes and phoney wars, are debunked as alleged reports of experiences of an otherworldly, supernatural ‘sorcerer’s world [where] a crazy war was fought in which each side thought it saw apparitions of devils fighting alongside its foes…[the] legends of terrible things which happened in this amphibious zone, of demonic sea-beasts with glowing eyes’ (325). The enormity of the state lie is revealed through the juxtaposition of diverging accounts of events, in which the fighters’ phantasmal visions seem less outlandish than the blatant falsifications of the headlines: ‘Hidden behind the newspaper reports – DASTARDLY INDIAN INVASION REPELLED BY OUR GALLANT BOYS – the truth about General Zulfikar became a ghostly, uncertain thing; the paying-off of border guards became, in the papers, INNOCENT SOLDERS MASSACRED BY INDIAN FAUJ’ (326). Comparing the rich potentiality of his past to the dreamlike absurdity of his present, Saleem reflects bitterly: ‘and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence – that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies’ (315). The two spatial and temporal coordinates of his young life are connected by the shared psychological reality of delusion – India is a space of both collective and individual self- delusion, shaping Saleem’s self-image as a maker of history and controller of parallel realities, while Pakistan is the space of collective delusion promoted as state policy. Pakistan assails him with the fantasies of others, thus outbidding and draining his imagination. Yet, his obsessive belief in the modes of connection between private and public history survives. Another episode concerned with the role of the media in public mystification refers to the commercialisation of ‘spiritual products’ proliferating on the avid Indian market of superstition and mysticism. For instance, ‘the meteoric rise of India’s richest guru’ (261), actually the religious fraud of his childhood friend Cyrus-the-great, is revealed to have been staged with the assistance of the press. Commenting on the parallel reality of mysticism and religious sensationalism, Saleem observes: ‘there are as many versions of India as there are Indians; and, when set beside Cyrus’s India, my own seems almost mundane’ (261). With barely concealed envy, Saleem claims to be the indirect instrument of Lord Khusro’s ascent, as he provided him with ‘that most precious of Superman comics, the one containing the frame story’, thereby enabling Cyrus’s fanatical mother ‘to

95 rework and reinvent the most potent of modern myths – the legend of the coming of the superman’ and thus have ‘hoardings trumpeting the coming of Lord Khusro Khusrovand Bhagwan’ (262). The episode farcically contradicts Saleem’s earlier contention that the midnight children ‘can be seen as the last throw of everything that is antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing, twentieth-century economy’ (197). The survival of India’s mystical gullibility is also satirised for its grotesque permeability to imported Western myths and advertising. A quintessentially Bombay novel, written by a consummate cinema lover and critic such as Rushdie, Midnight’s Children appositely dwells on the make-believe world of Bollywood and on the cinema in general as a pre-eminent medium of representation, but also of illusion and mediated reality. His experience of cinematic discourse does not only provide Saleem with his ‘filmi’- borrowed narrative gimmicks, but also constitutes the most potent metaphor for the interpenetration of fantasy and reality, discourse and image, verbal and visual discourses. As Grant opines, the cinema is also most congenial with the aspirations and hallmark of Rushdie’s art: ‘as we might expect, in a verbal art form that aspires to the pictorial; that strains, as Joseph Conrad urged it should, to make us see, it is the visual media that offer themselves most readily for metaphorical elaboration’ (Grant 49). Referring to Saleem’s cinematic use of the ‘memory of a mildewed photograph’, the critic highlights the original ploy by which the image is made to yield illusions of synaesthetic perception: ‘The photograph is not simply ‘described’; it is milked of its visuality to provide a soundtrack’ (Grant 49). While photography remains one important medium for ‘pickling memory’, Grant rightly notes that ‘it is film that provides more dynamic images for the novel…and it is the cinema above all that provides him with a reference point, an adaptable metaphor for the manipulation of point of view…and…the processes of perception and retrospection themselves are interpreted via the cinema screen’ (Grant 49-50). In a much celebrated fragment, Saleem uses the silver screen as the primary locus where truth can be defined– the illusion of reality as the reality of illusion:

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusions dissolves – or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion is reality (164).

Saleem’s satirical representation of reality and meaning as mediated by ‘more modern forms of mediation’ is sustained by references not only to the mass-media, but also to ‘telecommunications generally, both as instrument and image’ (Grant 48). The chapter relating Saleem’s ‘drainage’, or his undoing as a medium of live communication, emphasises the irony that this very undoing is effected through similar means. As Grant points out, the ‘instrumentality of telecommunication is underlined by the narrator himself’ (Grant 48), who, in a tongue-in-cheek testament to his ‘future exegetes’, offers posterity the key to interpreting his destruction:

at the very eye of the hurricane that was unleashed upon me – the sword, to switch metaphors, with which the coup de grace was applied – there lay a single unifying force. I refer to telecommunications. Telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, were my undoing; generously, however, I shall accuse nobody of conspiracy; although it would be easy to believe that the controllers of communication had resolved to regain their monopoly of the nation’s air-waves (287).

Grant rightly views Rushdie’s own brand of communication theory and practice from a primarily technical and stylistic angle, as ‘a specially important means of access to fictive plenitude…a feature that adds to the plurality of voices through which the novel is articulated’ by a narrator ‘disdaining old-fashioned omniscience’ (Grant 47-8). I would contend, however, that there is more to Rushdie’s pastiche of the communication media than mere technical innovation and diversity and that his motives are primarily parodic and satirical. His references to the fabricated images and discourses invading the public scene expose the gross mystifications and distortions of the media. Brennan fallaciously interprets Rushdie’s pastiche as a perpetration, for the benefit of the Western reader, of the very mystifications which he

96 sets out to criticise. Grant accuses Brennan of misreading the author’s emphatically parodic imitation of the media:

[Brennan] chooses to take Rushdie to task for his use of the media, suggesting that this is another instance of ideological compromise, a sell-out to Western values – as defined by ‘the media and the market’. Rushdie is accused of ‘historicizing events without processing them…in the manner of the media’ and of responding to events according to ‘the way in which the news and media desensitise our response’. He is seen by this critic as being complicit in the process whereby ‘“native” or local culture seems to be rendered meaningless by a communications network that effortlessly crosses borders and keeps an infinite stock of past artistic styles’; and – finally – as investing in that ‘crossbreeding of market and media’ which ‘produces an inhuman blob, as faceless as it is powerful’ (Grant 50).

Contesting Brennan’s view of Rushdie’s complicity from the inside, Grant expresses his agreement with Andrzej Gasiorek, who, ‘by contrast, argues that Rushdie stands outside the frame of his media references, offering a critique of rather than collaboration of their operations’ (Grant 50). Saleem, however, who evinces the inconstancy of the classic unreliable narrator, is as liable to re-arrange reality and prove as untrustworthy as the media. It is through this complicity, after all, that Saleem justifies his own claim to credibility, because in a world rendered more and more fantastic by the monstrosity of its mystifications, his fantasies become both understandable and excusable. Brennan actually acknowledges Rushdie’s offensive position when he says that ‘behind his parody of selfish civic liars is a theory about the intricate workings of an international political system…for Rushdie extends his critique to the point where ‘communications’ as a feature of contemporary political control comes to embrace fiction itself, including his own’ (Brennan 96). Brennan’s conclusion that ‘the motifs of communication and the chamcha come together’ (Brennan 97) also warns that the Third World’s neo-colonial dependence on Western technology and media translates as mimicry and indiscriminate appropriation of First World propagandistic channels and practices, often for ‘nefarious purposes’. Mass manipulation as instrumented by communication technologies constitutes a major thematic concern of most of Rushdie’s fiction, also pursued in Shame, and most penetratingly in The Satanic Verses, where not only the westernized Chamcha, but also the nativist Gibreel and the fundamentalist Mullah use telecommunications to propagate their visions. As Brennan contends, the narrator’s role in the mystification of history is demonstrated by ‘Saleem’s complicity with the media, and the importance of its forms to the national message of the novel’ (Brennan 97). Furthermore, the narrative’s farfetched hypothesis that ‘the key moments of Indian history occurred because Saleem was their agent…such that no crime within the pages of Midnight’s Children is committed without Saleem’s complicity’ (Brennan 98), makes the narrator appear a master of illusion himself. In Brennan’s view, ‘Saleem is culprit not because he fails to resist, or because he conspires for personal gain, but rather because he proliferates metaphor and masters illusion (‘dreams’)’ (Brennan 98). The critic aptly captures the protagonist’s dual role when he observes that ‘telecommunications’ are Saleem’s undoing…both as victim and as author. Far from exempting his own writing from the mind control needed to impose one’s own view of the world, he treats his novel as if it were a paradigm of the state lie’ (Brennan 98). Saleem undoubtedly qualifies as an unreliable narrator, a blame which he self-consciously assumes when he admits that ‘errors are possible, and overstatements, and jarring alterations in tone…but I remain conscious that errors have already been made, and that…the risk of unreliability grows’ (263). Flattered by Padma’s unquestioning reception of his account, he rationalises his disingenuousness by invoking the artist’s licence to recreate the world: ‘because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe’ (263). In this light, it is highly significant that his conference disintegrates because of his suppression of truth and manipulative exclusion of Shiva, which resembles precisely the modus operandi of the ‘controllers of communication…of the nation’s air-waves’ (287) whom Saleem denounces:

I was obliged to come to the conclusion that Shiva, my rival, my changeling brother, could no longer be admitted into the forum of my mind; for reasons which were, I admit, ignoble. I was afraid he would discover…the secrets of our birth. Shiva, for whom the world was things, for whom history could only be explained as the continuing struggle of oneself-against-the-crowd, would certainly

97 insist on claiming his birthright; and, aghast at the very notion of my knock-kneed antagonist replacing me in the in the blue room of my childhood while I, perforce, waked morosely off the two- storey hillock to enter the northern slums; refusing to accept that the prophecy of Ramram Seth was intended for Winkie’s boy, that it was to Shiva that the Prime Minister had written, and for Shiva that the fisherman pointed out to sea…I resolved that my destructive, violent alter ego should never again enter the increasingly fractious councils (274).

With the cynicism of the ‘apparatuses of ideological control’ (Brennan 97), Saleem banishes the truth by the mere suppression of information when he attempts ‘to erect a barrier around my new knowledge, which could deny it to the Children’ (274). Fearful of his own displacement from power, Saleem displaces Shiva’s true significance, but his authority is called into question: ‘secrecy, prevarication, high-handedness, egotism; my mind, no longer a parliament chamber, became the battleground on which they annihilated me’ (289). His banishment by the children, in a burlesque reversal, where the schemer falls in his own trap, is first of all a punishment for acting as their ‘big brother Saleem’, an Orwellian formula. Juxtaposing the Children’s desertion of the conference with the dismemberment of the Indian army by the Chinese, Saleem shuns the reality of his guilt with the same feigned innocence with which the government disclaims responsibility for the disaster: ‘Gurkhas and Rajputs fled in disarray from the Chinese army; and in the upper reaches of my mind, another army was also destroyed by things – bickerings, prejudices, boredom, selfishness – which I had believed too small, too petty to have touched them’ (290). Thus, Saleem becomes a false prophet preaching in the desert. It is symbolic that Saleem’s actual exile in Pakistan is juxtaposed with his banishment from the centre of the MCC, the metaphorical heart of the new India. Having exiled himself and others from truth, he reaps what he sowed. After denying Shiva his true identity, he is himself flung into the void of nonentity:

having exiled Shiva, I found myself hurled into an exile from which I was incapable of contacting my more-than-five-hundred colleagues: I was flung across the Partition-created frontier into Pakistan…so that, exiled once more from my home, I was also exiled from the gift which was my truest birthright: the gift of the midnight children’ (274).

Saleem feels punished for erecting barriers in the way of truth, thus displacing Shiva from his rightful position both in the real and the numinous world of the conference. This is only one of the many instances in the novel where all positive energies are drained by the sickening germ of faulty or broken communication, of partial or falsified representations of reality. Ultimately, one of the novel’s core themes remains that of human communication and media of representation in all their discursive forms. Its stories and central tropes serve to illustrate the disastrous effects of private and public miscommunication and misrepresentation of reality. Novelistic discourse is self-consciously legitimised as the pre-eminent discourse about discourse, whose authority of interpretation, assessment and judgement of the world’s discursive practices and theories resides in its critical take on the moral validity of all discursive and meta-discursive performance of public communication.

Bibliography: Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture, Routledge Classics, London, 2004 Bhabha, Homi (Ed.), Nation and Narration, Routledge, London, 1999 Brennan, Timothy, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, Macmillan, London, 1989 Gorra, Michael, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie, Chicago University Press, 1997 Grant, Damian. Salman Rushdie, Northcote House, London, 1999 Mills, Sara. Discourse, Routledge, London, 1999 Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, Jonathan Cape, London 1981

98 Malcolm Bradbury between Critic and Novelist

Andreia Irina Suciu*

Résumé: Dans la société de consommation et de l’expansion du monde des médias, la littérature et la critique sont les témoins de la reconsidération des mœurs, de la liberté de la parole, la sécularisation de la population et de l’invasion de la culture britannique par celle américaine avec les valeurs du Nouveau Monde et la manière libertine de penser. Certains sont d’avis qu’aussi bien la littérature que la critique sont arrivées dans un cul-de-sac dans leur développement, d’autres ont affirmé que le postmodernisme est un permanent processus de problématisation ou de subversion des idéologies esthétiques précédentes. Les traits généraux de ce type de littérature et critique qui suggèrent des variations majeures tout au long de la deuxième moitie du siècle sont: la préoccupation pour la validité de la représentation ; le décentrement du sujet et l’introduction de plusieurs soi fictifs ; le jeu et l’artifice ; l’interrogation sur les bases ontologiques ; l’abolition de la grande division entre la culture basse et haute ; la médiation et la construction de l’histoire ; le remplacement de la réalité par le simulacre. Tous ceux-ci s’appuient sur la nature du postmodernisme comme un enfant curieux, fasciné par le nouveau, et demande le rejet du modèle parental et l’annulation des clivages sociaux. C’est dans ce contexte que les romans académiques, la biographie littéraire, les textes critiques ou métacritiques de Malcolm Bradbury sont apparus. Ils concordant parfaitement avec l’idée de variété postmoderne déclassée par les courants de pensée tels que la critique générique, la politique du corps, la politique éthique, l’intérêt des medias. Ses romans et études critiques visent et décrivent des aspects particuliers du monde moderne, des expériences des individus sans vouloir offrir une vérité ou pensée philosophique. L’intention frauduleuse, l’illusion ou la farce utilisées par l’auteur dans son style ont le but d’assurer le passage de l’individu de l’homme réel dans un personnage littéraire comme une image de la personne et/dans la société. En ce qui concerne son discours critique, dans le contexte postmoderne nous observons des étiquettes nouvelles du critique vu non pas comme un chirurgien qui intervient dans le tissu littéraire, mais comme un analyste qui se dédouble et fait quelques pas avec et à l’extérieur du roman, réalisant ainsi un travail métacritique. Notre communication analyse la manière dont Malcolm Bradbury s’est conformé à ces exigences et la manière dont les rôles qu’il a joués en tant que romancier et critique sont combinés et complètes les uns par les autres et forment une entité complexe qui présente les principes, mœurs et dilemmes du courant postmoderne de pensée. Mots-clés : fiction, discours critique, métacritiques, subversion, réalité, métaroman

Abstract: In the newly fangled society of consumption and expansion of the media the world of fiction and criticism witnessed reconsiderations of sexual mores and freedom of speech, a secularisation of the population, and an invasion of the British culture by the American one with its “New World” values and libertinistic type of thinking. Some said that at this moment both fiction and criticism reached a cul-de-sac in its development, others have claimed that postmodernism thinking is an ongoing process of problematization or subversion of previous aesthetic ideologies. The general features of this type of fiction and criticism undergoing major variations and shifts throughout half a century are: a preoccupation with the viability of representation; the decentring of the subject and the inscription of multiple fictive selves; narrative fragmentation and reflexivity; play and artifice; interrogation of the ontological bases; an abolition of the great divide between high and low culture; a mediation and construction of history; the displacement of the real by simulacra. All these support the nature of postmodernism as an inquisitive brat fascinated by the new, and inquiring as well as rejecting the parental modern while annulling cleavages between strata of society.It is in this context that Malcolm Bradbury’s academic novel, literary biography, critical or metacritical works emerged. They fit perfectly the idea of postmodern variety triggered by such trends of thinking as gender criticism, body politics, ethnic politics, queer theory, media interest. His novels and critical studies aim at depicting particular aspects of the modern world, of individuals’ experiences, and not at seeking to offer truth or philosophical belief. The fraudulent intent or effect, the deceit and trickery that the postmodern author employs in his parodic style is meant to ensure the passage from man in reality to man in fiction as a picture of man and/ in society. As for the critical discourse, in the Po-Mo context we observe new labels of critic not as surgeon, cutting through every literary tissue, but critic as an analyst who doubles himself and steps within and outside the novel performing a critical and a metacritical act. Our paper analyzes the manner in which Malcolm Bradbury complied with these requirements and the way in which the roles that he played as novelist and critic combined and completed one another in forming a complex entity rendering the principles, mores and dilemmas of the postmodern type of thinking. Keywords: fiction, criticism, subversion, reality, metanovel

* Assistant, PhD, “Vasile Alecsandri” University of Bacau

99 1. Introduction – the context of the (Bradburyan) postmodernist fiction/ criticism The incipient fiction of postmodernism, manifest in the 1960s, seemingly the most rebellious on account probably of its novelty, sought to subvert its own structural and formal bases and implied that reality existed only in the reality that described it. The fiction of the1970s on the one hand brought a new fiction of insurgency, a type of guerrilla writing and on the other hand it “experimented with previous genres, toyed with literary theory, questioned traditional character-representations of a stable identity, and complicated narrative organizations of space and time” [1] bringing a new wave of emancipation of “the institution of the author” – he/ she lives and sells his/ her books (and himself/ herself) on an aesthetic market, or in an aesthetic supermarket, in which sometimes vocational writers are replaced by careerists. This type of fiction launches a critique against certain aspects of late capitalist society. Novels after 1980 either introduced the yuppie (young urban professional) fiction or they followed the postmodernist comeback to the tradition of history and narrative construction (see especially Bradbury’s To the Hermitage), experimenting with concepts such as discourse, metaphor, fantasy, narration, chronology, history, and (loss of) (national) identity, and contesting boundaries between biography and fiction (see Bradbury’s Unsent Letters) but in a more “reader-friendly” style. Other times they reached the realms of magic realism in an attempt to escape reality and perform a deeper individual analysis. The novels after the 1980s also brought an acute sense of loss of reality and a plunging into the cyber-punk sci-fi universe of fiction or a reconsideration of colonialism. But if this frame brought a crisis of the novel, this crisis “resulted not in ossification but in rejuvenation” [2]. Bill Buford considers that there is a total freedom in and of the new type of novel of the 1980s, a novel which

is remarkable for its detachment, its refusal to be affiliated, its suspicion of the old hierarchies and authorities. It is not modernist or pre-modernist or postmodernist or of that debate, but managing nevertheless to be both arriving and departing at once. If I am right that we are moving into a different period of creating prose, it is characterized by a writing which, freed from the middle-class monologues, is experimentation in the real sense, exploiting traditions and not being wasted by them [3].

Bradbury’s work fits perfectly the idea of postmodern variety triggered by such trends of thinking as gender criticism, body politics, ethnic politics, queer theory, media interest. His novels, pamphlets, short stories, satirical stories, parodies and television plays aim at depicting particular aspects of the modern world, of individuals’ experiences, and not at seeking to offer truth or philosophical belief, all in a fiction which deploys devices such as “contradiction, permutation of narrative line, discontinuity, randomness, excessive figural substitution, and short-circuiting of the gap between text and world” [4] and whose generic term could be “to impose”. The fraudulent intent or effect, the deceit and trickery that the postmodern author employs in his parodic style is meant to ensure the passage from man in reality to man in fiction as a picture of man and/ in society. As for the critical discourse, in the Po-Mo context

the critic-as-surgeon cutting out and analyzing diseased or damaged tissue is replaced by the critic- as-homeopath ‘shadowing’ and parallelling the signs of sickness by prescribing natural poisons which produce in the patient’s body a simulation of the original symptoms [5].

2. The novelist/ homo fabulans Motto: What is the difference between God and Malcolm Bradbury? God is everywhere and Malcolm Bradbury is everywhere but here. (Malcolm Bradbury, My Strange Quest for Mensonge, p. 91)

More or less approved of or, on the contrary disproved, the concept of “author” has been largely debated upon and has formed trends of thoughts. His/ her godlike presence or necessity of dissolution in the voices of his/her characters has lead to multiple interpretations (under the form of acceptance or rejection, repudiation or acknowledgement) and to a new “His-and-Her-Meneutics” [6] of the “new” texts. The obituary of the author and the novel alike has been written on several occasions so far, but at the same time there were moments when pulsations of a new life were also signalled and registered by criticism. The new novel brought effusions of the Amis period (both

100 Kingsley and Martin), the narratological variety of Ian McEwan, aspects of post-colonial literature, and then a freshly young literature dubbed “lad literature” (with reference to such writers as Irvine Welsh or Tony Parsons), “chick literature” (having as leading figures writers such as Helen Fielding and Sophie Kinsella), culminating with a very “young” literature for the young (see J. K. Rowling’s novels). The postmodern decades brought two criteria of judging the author. The first, analyzes the status of the artist/ writer from the point of view of his/ her confining himself/ herself to the norm and being judged according to the classical criteria or, on the contrary, stepping outside the norm and experimenting with language or the status of the novel itself or novelist himself. Jean-François Lyotard is the one who delimitated the role and the position of the postmodern writer clearly by stating that at this point he resembles a philosopher:

the text he writes, the text he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for [7].

They prefigure the techniques that they use, they explicate them overtly or they employ them in a covert manner. The second criterion regards the manner in which the writer came closer to meet the public’s expectations, the manner in which (s)he promoted a “lower” type of culture, a culture of the people, exhibiting a new manner of viewing the priorities of the contemporary world. Between these two needs to which (s)he had to submit, the writer might feel sometimes at a loss as one of Bradbury’s characters feels – James Walker, does have the lucidity to wonder at his status because on the one hand, he feels torn from the outer reality and on the other hand, he feels he does not have the power to challenge borders:

Was he a writer at all? Wasn’t he a half-writer, a man who had chanced into this as he might have gone into any profession, a man without dedication or intensity? Had he ever given anything to the imagination? Did he take chances, believe in it as a force? Where and how did literature flow into him, and in what way did it seed or grow? (Stepping Westward, p. 245).

These doubts emerge because of the denial of the writer’s authority in contemporary times (even if Bradbury was writing these in 1965 he proves to have had wonderful insight into the evolution of things), and because of the disappearance of the credibility of the subject having grand narratives as a fundamental. It is under these conditions that the concept of author has begun to be discussed not only from a narratological perspective, but also from the perspective of the “popular” nature of the fiction that (s)he wrote. The following chapter aims at presenting two major roles that the Bradbury assumed or has been attributed in relation to his work, having as a practical support both his fictional and critical work.

3. The historical becoming of the artist/ author Whether we start with the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, moving through Victorianism and modernism, we can clearly observe the central position of the writer, of the author if not as an almighty power to the end at least as a centre of interest. Malcolm Bradbury performs such a chronological presentation of the author in the study The Social Context of Modern English Literature in the chapter titled “The Writer Today” (pp. 109–168) dealing with issues such as the place of the artists in the society, their identity and roles, their origins. This is how the writers’ roles are viewed as either “priestly or menial”, performing functions of exploring their creativity, passions and neurosis, exorcising their devil. There was a time in which the writer was completely free, “the highest manifestation of the ever-active spirit”, “the universal man”, the god-like spirit offering the reader a means to escape reality. However, this degree of freedom seemed to evolve gradually towards a slippage into loneliness, self-quest and investigation. He was, nevertheless, given the opportunity of choosing between a turning inwards and a rendering of the outer history. Thus, he became involved in a fight between subjectivity and objectivity from which there was only one winner – alienation. Trying to preserve the spirit of the

101 liberal art, he sometimes shifted from culture to anti-culture. It is at this point that he seems to have been touched by “the stigmata of social consciousness” and became an outsider. His work became a protest against standardization and is less committed to the claims of art. Thus, he became a common man who had to embark on a new journey of exploration for a new status. The status of the literary profession was reconsidered, practical and imaginative forms of writing were contrasted within the limits of the cultural frames to which the writer submits. A further step was that from artist to vendor of works, or to member of an organized institution that would offer protection. Writing as a “higher trade” led to the large growth in number of professional artists after the 1800s. The education which they received was a real impetus towards such a career. This did not however degenerate into an inflation of writers for value proved a merciless sieve. This status changes drastically under the sign of Structuralism and its credo – “everything is language”. The author becomes the exponent of his own language, with its limits and possibilities, its flaws and its epiphanic inventions. More than that, the author seems to dilute, dissipate, disappear, or, as Roland Barthes argues in his essay “The Death of the Author” [8], “die” leaving language to “speak”, “act” and “perform”. It is only in “histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines” that the author still rules, continues the French critic. This is exactly the theory on which Bradbury, more ironically than otherwise, builds his “quest” for Mensonge. The book contains the principles of Barthes’ theory (“Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing” he quotes in My Strange Quest for Mensonge, p. 92) which serve perfectly Bradbury’s purposes of making a eulogy of absence. With “the removal of the Author” says Barthes, “the text is […] made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent”. In what better way could Bradbury have “proved” this theory right than making his hero, Mensonge (wonderfully anticipated by Doctor Criminale’s case), disappear in such a degree that no physical evidence of his passing in the world could easily be found. It is even his work which is in course of disappearing (or at least pages from the work seem to vanish) causing great difficulty to the monographer. Regarding the book as “a tissue of signs” into which the reader and not the (Deus-)Author breathes life, Roland Barthes announces that one type was killed and another one was created – that of the reader. From this point onwards critics and novelists alike have started questioning “not only the notion of the novelist as God, through the flaunting of the author’s godlike role, but also the authority of consciousness, of the mind” [9]. But Bradbury is again caustic and leads the reasoning further by observing that

this new method in the study of literature called creative misreading […] abolished the authors, and replaced them by readers, who turned out to need a lot of critics to help them misunderstand in the proper way (My Strange Quest for Mensonge, p. 15).

For him, the reader, the exterior source (re)writing the novel, might be a secretary, a wife, an old aunt, or language itself might do this, “the average so-called author” coming on the scene only later after he “has showered, dressed and got through his morning croissant”. (id., p. 22). Barthes’s “tissue” becomes for the seeker of Mensonge a milieu in which “the proper noun, the author, the self, the book, the object, the reader, the referent, the real, were all floating items of signification without a base” (id.. p. 23) and the author himself becomes “a totally floating signifier” (id., p. 27) or each character is seen as a “new phenomenon: the intellectual as frequent flyer” (Doctor Criminale) – a flyer between destinations and significations. Whether this disappearance is total or whether the author hides (or gets lost if he cannot make use of his craftsmanship) behind one of the voices in his own novel is still a subject of discussion. Robert A. Morace, following the same line of thought asserts that

if we accept Roland Barthes’ contention that who speaks is not who writes and who writes is not who is, we will form a clearer idea as to why it is necessary to distinguish between the author of the note and the author of The History Man. The author of, or in, the note is not Bradbury; instead, it is one of a number of voices to be heard in a dialogic novel whose own Bradburyan author is himself nothing more and nothing less than the uncertain intersection of authorial-narrative voices [10].

Therefore, the writer seems to experience a multiplication of selves with each new character that he creates thus achieving, if his technique affords it, the ideal form of dialogism. One particularly

102 interesting case is that of Professor Michel Tardieu signing the “Foreword/ Afterword” in My Strange Quest for Mensonge. Speaking with the voice of the monographer about Bradbury himself, Tardieu seems to be a second degree self of the first degree narrator who speaks with Bradbury’s voice but is not him. In this case Diderot’s paradox of the actor is perfectly applicable: “the actor must have another self to create the self he or she plays” (To the Hermitage, p. 433). In fact this happens because what we read here is a ventriloquised afterword by David Lodge, supposedly having simply translated from French Tardieu’s afterword. Another question arising at this point is not necessarily whether one will ever bring the author back to life, but what will one do with him/ her afterwards? Shall (s)he be placed on the same pedestal as before on this stage and reanointed? Shall (s)he be a victim or, on the contrary, beneficiary of cryonics? The answers are still to come. Taken to the extreme in parodic manner either in Doctor Criminale or in My Strange Quest for Mensonge, this theory is exaggerated. Thus the modern writer becomes “an excess of signs – signs of thought and sex, politics and money, fame and shame.” (Doctor Criminale, p. 242) Bradbury speaks in this latter novel of “Homo Significans, or Man the Sign-Maker” (p. 10). Everything is changed or, worse, perverted. Descartes’s famous aphorism becomes, paraphrased in turn by Lacan: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” in My Strange Quest for Mensonge (p. 14), or “I exist to argue” in The History Man (p. 98), or even more contemporary- like “I have paper, therefore I am. I have plastic, therefore I shop.” in To the Hermitage (p. 12) The perspective is enlarged by Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” [11] in which the French critic starts from the question “what does it matter who is speaking?”. The stress is now laid on the “interplay of signs”, on the game that grows beyond its rules. Writing has thus become a sacrifice. In this situation if we observe the effacement of the author and concentrate upon the work, we must ask ourselves, as the French critic does, to what degree the writer identifies with the work. The critic also analyses the problem of the name and the conclusion which imposes itself is that even if, or especially because, we witness a process of dispossession of the author by his very work, we must now take the reversed trajectory of creation and try to see how the discourse creates his maker. One further step is that of the critic transformed into author (see David Lodge, John Barth, Umberto Eco, Simone de Beauvoir or, of course, Malcolm Bradbury). It is fascinating to see the way in which “the nature and purpose of both fiction and criticism have found their way into the novels” [12]. These writers, from the position of the critic, debate, sometimes overtly and sometimes more subtly, upon typical problems of postmodernist features, devices, functions, techniques concerning the unveiling of language, the author or the contemporary world. Along with the consideration of the new values and cultures in society a new role is performed by the author. The postmodernist author has become a “tele-dumb” (Doctor Criminale, p. 12), a “post-Thatcherite cripple” (id., p. 15), a “vague and placeless creature” (id., p. 28), a character drawing on Samuel Beckett’s creation:

a hermit of thought, a tired scribe whose every written word is each day collected and taken away by some higher power, a worn lifespent soul whose every recollection and every bodily juice has somehow been squeezed out and extracted for use elsewhere. (id., p. 22).

It is for this reason that postmodern novels abound in dull creators (Henry Babbacombe, James Walker, Howard Kirk) of dull works so as to show the mental, physical and discursive fatigue of the new creator who, waking up and seeing himself in the mirror can only say: “Christ, you again.” (The History Man, p. 97). He is tired of work, tired of history, tired of theorizing, tired of life, tired of possibilities (if we are to use John Barth’s interpretation from the essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”, in Bradbury’s The Novel Today, pp 71–85). This ontological fatigue permeates his speech, thought, artistic creation, and look:

He saw that he was back, a damaged creature, with the old familiar problems of the world. […] a little ghost from the provincial past, tired, deeply out of touch […] wan, wind-blown, incomplete. (Stepping Westward, pp. 57–58).

103 The retrieving of the status of true author and the surpassing of the state of buffoon-author seems to be able to be accomplished only through a turning towards the past as in To the Hermitage where the search for Diderot is valuable because of the value of the “Ageing Sage” (p. 1) himself. That is why, it was noticed that the postmodern author “neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twenty-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back, […] he aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-modernist marvels”, he “keeps one foot always in the narrative past… and one foot in, one might say, the Parisian structuralist present”[13].

4. The critic Critical theory has been considered imperative almost for any age, but questions have arisen whether each new age could create its own criticism. Do we experience in the postmodern period a “New New Criticism” [14]? Has criticism combined with fiction in a metafictional discourse? Or has criticism become more fictionalized coming closer to a new type of pop public? After all “there is no reason why literary critics should not turn to autobiography and anecdotalism” [15]. The beginning of postmodern theory seems to have followed the tenet that critical thinking becomes possible through abandonment of universal criteria of judgment and acceptance of heterogeneity. The next two decades seem to have developed another type of grand narrative in which numerous names among which Lyotard, Hassan, Jameson, Hutcheon and McHale take an X- ray of different bodily parts of one and the same patient whose first name is “Post” and second name “modernism”. A large host of other critics gathered in line to follow a trendy occupation – theorizing the postmodern. Terry Eagleton wittily remarks that “Indeed there would no doubt soon be more bodies in literary criticism than on the fields of Waterloo” [16]. That is why a skimming through library thematic charts or a browsing on books.google or the Amazon reveals a hardly anticipated abundance. After having started with a brief, very “educative” study titled What is a Novel? in 1969, Malcolm Bradbury’s work and activity as a critic is divided in three large parts: firstly, he wrote extensive studies on the emergence of modernism (The Social Context of Modern English Novel, 1971) and its manifestation on the two sides of the Ocean (The Modern American Novel, 1983, revised in 1992 and The Modern British Novel, 1992, with a new afterword in 1993, extensively revised in 2001, Dangerous Pilgrimages. Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel, 1995) and studies of the pathway to postmodernism (From Puritanism to Postmodernism. A History of American Literature, co-authored with Richard Ruland in 1991; The Atlas of Literature); secondly, there are the studies and essays on specific authors (Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel, 1973 and The Modern World. Ten Great Writers, 1988); thirdly, there are the collections of essays (No. Not Bloomsbury, 1988). All of these bear the constant marker of Bradbury following and establishing the context for the manifestation of a certain style of thought or condition of living and of registering the direction of the thriving “traffic” in fiction between the continents. a. The Social Context of Modern English Novel received as a “splendidly written study” of the relations between literature and social studies has the merit of clarifying two issues concerning modern literature regarded as a social product or as expression of the society:

the impact of “modern” mass industrial society on the literary consciousness, on the style and substance of literary art itself; and the effect of this same society as the context for literature as a social institution, as the interlocked activities of writers and readers, publishers and critics [17].

Regarded both as a literary and as a cultural study Bradbury’s analysis manages to fix the roots of modernity, establish the causes and the frame for its subsequent development and expansion in the urban milieu, characterize the new cultural type of the artist and follow their main thematic preoccupations and technical innovation. He brings his analytical undertaking to the point of foregrounding the vitiation of a clearly defined “literary” culture and the marginalisation of the writer by identifying the social forces within the English society which led to a crisis of culture in a world which gave way to fragmentation and promotion of the media. Thus, he condemns democracy on account of the flattening of cultural distinctions and the “masses” because of their valuing of art on grounds of its saleability. Though he was accused of sometimes uselessly listing

104 names of magazines without clearly stating how this contributed to any change in the artistic field, or of not differentiating more clearly between the various stages of modernism that he enumerates, or of not establishing fully the correspondences between sociology and literature or social change and literary change, or, more gravely, of lacking a method in assembling the chapters of his study, and though we may regard the book as perhaps a bit obsolete today, the issues raised in the book were fully en vogue four decades ago, when the theory of postmodernism and postmodernity was only at the beginning. In The Modern American Novel Bradbury, in a short format of 300 pages, manages successfully to trace the evolution of the American novel from the 1890 through the time of the posts in the 1990s. The main criteria of analysis of the novel as “a fairly late (and virtually illegal) immigrant to the new and pristine America” (p. v) are the historical context “on native grounds” (p. viii) and the comparison of the interaction between the American and the continental aesthetics. Thus, organizing his analysis in chapters treating roughly speaking decades of thought and aesthetic manifestation, Bradbury aims at proving that American fiction is on the one hand, “the product of the history, the material conditions, the consciousness, the philosophical modes of perception, of the American culture and post-culture in which most but not all of it had been made” and on the other hand, “the product of a larger history of fiction in a changing international world, as well as in multicultural society which has been particularly open to foreign influence” (p. viii). Correcting in the second edition some of the flaws of the first edition (the omission or limited recognition of some female or Afro-American writers), Bradbury manages to underpin the full diversity of writers and styles of writing and to mention the historical and cultural forces generating periodic reassessments of the world of fiction. Despite some of the flaws of the first edition (which Thomas Docherty’s review [18] mercilessly registers) such as the excessive mentioning of the apocalyptic feeling brought by the advent of each new decade, the introduction of some biographical data whose relevance is not obvious, the superficiality of some critical commentaries disguised under heavily specialized jargon which makes the book a simple “annotated check-list of American novels since 1890s” [19], an obsessive and hyperinterpretative analysis of some titles of novels, some of which are corrected in the second edition and some of which are not, the study constitutes itself in a document which records the epochal becoming of the American thought. However, despite some evident constants in his study Bradbury renders a vivid picture of the new American world in a single vision of “plain and prairie, technology, science and skyscrapers” (p. 4), of the fascination of the “new American cityscape” (p. 9) and the dazzling diversity, variety and speed of “the American maelstrom” dominated by the “whirl and roar of modern machines” (p. 51) which determined the “urbanizing motion toward the modern metropolis” (p. 2). At the same time, among the achievements of his survey of the American novel we can mention the manner in which Bradbury x-rays the spirit of each new age and marks its specificities. The Modern British Novel, written in and for an age in which criticism became democratized, not restricted anymore exclusively to practitioners of literature and members of the intellectual elite, but being practised also by common readers on forums and updating sites, is a study which reaches the turn of the millennium. Bearing samples of the lexicon, mannerism and intellectual hauteur of literary theory and displaying in the titles of its chapters fashionable concepts in contemporary culture (the novel(ist) at the “crossroads”, “the floating world” and “millennial days” in which contemporary artists manifest), but generally written in a style addressing the general reader, the study displays Bradbury’s usual despondency towards an encyclopaedic-informative presentation of the British fiction. Dangerous Pilgrimages. Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel is an extensive study which, despite being composed of more essays gains coherence through the perspective that is followed in each of them – the manner in which journeys were taken from one side of the Ocean to the other, from Europe to America and the other way round. Thus, from Mark Twain to Henry James, from Charles Dickens to D. H. Lawrence, from Malcolm Lowry to Evelyn Waugh, Bradbury follows the literary destiny as it was enriched by the experience of the voyage, the way in which the European tradition and romance was replaced with the American dream and realities. From Puritanism to Postmodernism. A History of American Literature (having Richard Ruland as co-author) faces in its turn the difficulty of comprising in a one-volume format more than four centuries of literature with their trends and controversies. If works of this kind, written

105 before the 1980s, simply had to distinguish “the enduring from the ephemeral” while “providing some historical and cultural contexts for the writers and works discussed” [20], the postmodern times bringing a new view from which writers and their works have to be regarded (among which gender and ethnicity) imposed permanent reconsiderations and readjustments of the critical discourse. The risks which the authors face (and the trap in which they sometimes fall) given the limited spatial frame is sometimes a too general presentation or plain overlooking. Lacking either bibliography or notes it was judged as addressing the undergraduates’ general interest in such a topic. The Atlas of Literature that was published in 1996 and whose general editor Bradbury was, is an example of extraordinary modern thinking by using iconic representations (actual maps of (parts of) continents, (parts of) countries, regions, cities, boroughs, landscapes) so as to pinpoint physically the manner in which a writer’s mind moved and worked. The result of four years of research, The Atlas is also the perfect means to demonstrate one more time the manner in which reality is brought within the pages of novels and between the lines of poems and plays and Bradbury’s opinion that “place, travel and exploration have always been among the most fundamental elements of literature”, the fact that “literature itself is an atlas” and “our poetry, our fiction and our drama is itself a mapping of the world” (p. 8). The work is a literary, historical and geographical document all at once as it presents in eight parts (“The Middle Ages and the Renaissance”, “The Ages of Reason”, “The Romantics”, “The Age of Industrialism and Empire”, “The Age of Realism”, “The Modern World”, “After the Second World War”, “The World Today”) and 79 essays (of which Bradbury signed 24) major literary trends, figures and (sub)genres, major historical events or important geographical coordinates that influenced writers’, poets’ or playwrights’ creations being borrowed more or less obviously in their works. It pinpoints on the map the real places that have become part of literature and the imaginary ones as well as the intricate connections between them. It follows the manner in which various real places have been used and transformed in these creations but also the places that have been fictitiously created, also distinguishing the places that still exist from the ones that do not exist anymore. The work marks at the same time the existence of such locations as houses, theatres or cafés which proved elemental in some literary creations. The work passes beyond the status of a history of literature because of the strong and heavily documented visual support registering these correspondences not only through the maps but also through a series of photographs that present epitomes of certain ages and trends (from Shakespeare to Bob Marley), but also photos of architectural constructs (buildings, bridges), paintings, book covers, film frames that have become bearers of markers of the age they stem from. b. Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel opens with a chapter in which Malcolm Bradbury attempts to prove the necessity of the preservation of a permanently open view upon the form and methods of the novel. While praising the novelty of the genre he tries to impose a perspective in which the novel can still be appreciated for its realist properties – “the novel is disposed to both realism and fictiveness.” (p. 31) He underlines the need to reestablish the credit of the notions of character, plot as the novel will remain, in his opinion stated in this study from 1973 and preserved in general terms until the turn of the millennium, a liberal and moral reflection of the social reality. The selection of authors discussed in his essays (among whom Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Lowry, C. P. Snow, Iris Murdoch and John Fowles) proves the numerous ways in which the possibilities of the novel can be expanded, the way in which inner reality and outer reality can blend in a homogeneous whole this standing as a proof to the openness of this form of fictional exploitation. The study ends with a slight revision of one of Bradbury’s controversial studies first having appeared under the title “Towards a Poetic of Fiction: An Approach through Structure” in Novel (Fall, 1967). Now revised as “The Novel and Its Poetics”, the study bears however the same argument of a “structuralist” poetics – every novelist has an a priori novel in mind as he composes his verbal one. In his opinion the “prefigured” novel is not a product of language and what has precedence is a “particular complex matter” which does use words as a medium and gets verbalized because “certain things can be held logically and temporally antecedent to those words.” (p. 283) Next, though Bradbury admits that “the novel prefigured is not the same as the novel achieved” he stresses that there is “an interaction between what is prefigured and the obligations of the

106 achievement [that] ‘create’ a novel” (p. 284). The novelist, in Bradbury’s thesis, has always in mind prior obligations such as compositional commitments and rhetorical modes and devices that he is intent on using, all this guiding, conditioning and restricting him on his way towards the accomplishing of the novel’s final form. Thus, in this undertaking, structure becomes “the substantive myth of a novel”, “a plot-like compositional achievement” for this structure (comprising “the making of an action in a social-moral environment itself invented, as well as the rhetorical effects of point of view, tone, technique”) bears the novelist in the realm of persuasion

where the novelist undertakes so to shape and use the fictional transaction as to elicit, from himself and the reader, the highest sense of meaning, relevance, significance, of variation and richness, but also of concord and elegance, he can in a work of such magnitude (p. 285).

A year later from the first publication of this material (and three years later published in volume), David Lodge writes in response to Bradbury’s study a piece entitled “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Language”. Bradbury’s good friend brings a different again double perspective of critic and novelist to the matter. On the one hand, Bradbury regarded as essential that the novel should have

a chain of interlinked events unified by persuasive discourse and by coherencies arising both from materials in life and features of language which take on for the author a character of interconnectedness and thus synthesize those elements sometimes distinguished as a ‘material’, a ‘style’, and a ‘vision’ (p. 281). so as to achieve its persuasive ends. On the other hand, Lodge does not stop at pointing out that a novel’s main scaffolding is the “life-stuff” but goes beyond and states that it is language that determines its evolving interplay and shape. Bradbury’s “antecedent, referential story that controls and dictates the written work” [21] has no existence for Lodge “’outside’ language” [22]. Bradbury’s study does seem today rather narrow and almost illogical given his subsequent play with language both in fiction and in some critical essays fact which seems to prove precisely the opposite of his initial status – that we are linguistically determined beings and that language in fiction is most of the time the fulcrum of narrative (action and technique), the engine (or microchip) that gives the commands.

5. Between critic and novelist One of the dominant features of postmodernist writing is the manner in which both literature and literary theory (or critical commentaries) have responded to and were an expression of the social (political, historical, religious) and cultural movements and changes. The new aspect is that they have become interchangeable territories of theories and terminology – criticism (by turning towards the more popularly-felt aspects of life and away from the haughtiness and stiff academism of structuralism and deconstructivism) and fiction (by developing the much flaunted principle of self-reflexivity and self- analysis, that is by introducing the reader in the laboratory where the experiments of fiction are conducted) have merged and led to the emergence of a new type of writing. This process is more obvious in the case of those hybrid-creators who are both critics and novelists (or poets, satirists, pamphleteers for that matter). Their works create an interesting phenomenon of self-reflection and endorsement or, on the contrary, contradiction. Critics expound their theories in the practice of writing and writers express in metafictional language or in what was termed “theoretical fiction” [23], their theories in the creation of one novel or another. The conscious choice between the discourse of fiction and the abstractions of theoretical works takes into consideration the possibilities of expression in each field. This analysis of opportunities and advantages of expression is the reason for which many theorists prefer fiction “for its subtle mechanisms of persuasion, for its ability to explore ideas or historical forces as they are lived by individuals” [24]. Another reason for choosing fiction over criticism may be a question of image. There have been questions asked whether or not it is not more popular being a writer than a critic. One way or another the cases of such figures as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Virginia Woolf, John Barth, Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva, Iris Murdoch or Simone de Beauvoir, to mention only some names, can be long discussed in a chapter that follows the work of the writer-critic type of creator.

107 In Malcolm Bradbury’s case it can be said that his character may have adapted easier to the style of fiction for it allowed him the liberty of sarcasm and irony, parody, pastiche and pamphlet in painting a picture of contemporary life in various (usually academic) circles. At the same time this still gave him the possibility of developing a critical analysis of the literary phenomenon in general, or the creation of a specific novel in particular through the voices of his professor- characters or through his own voice transferred in the fictional universe. The critic’s contemplation of the literary phenomenon in general is also doubled by what Linda Hutcheon calls the narcissistic self-contemplation of the novel. But this is not, in fact, a limitation to a contemplation of one’s self (as is more likely the case in modernism where one “me decade” followed after another) or of one’s work exclusively – it is rather a contemplation of the logic and ideology of narrative generally and of other novels in particular. The defection from critical theory towards this type of analysis or, in other words, the export of critical expertise in the novel grants the novel a critical function which manifests within a performative process not merely under the form of constatative narratological analysis. The inescapable process that takes place in Bradbury’s works is that fiction and criticism have assimilated each other’s insights, producing a more libertinisic, canon-breaking type of criticism and a new, more theoretically credible and argumented novel. Postmodernism generated this double, reciprocal contamination and movement of the critic’s attempt to write in a more accessible, fictional style and of the writer’s aspiration to assimilate the perspectives of criticism into the narrative process. This boundary type of writing uses energy sources from both the critical and the fictional discourse and creates a more appealing type of writing for a reader who discards a grand narrative type of criticism and an opaque, hermetic type of novel. Malcolm Bradbury developed to the fullest this type of theoretical self-awareness within the novel making unhindered use of his sarcastic remarks towards some critical trends which he considered exaggerated or outdated. In the age where “the making of…” has been transformed in television shows, Thackeray’s Behind the Curtain has been resurrected in a new ingenious language. However, a definite or definitive verdict cannot be given on the issue of whose authority and personality prevails in the case of writer-critics. On the one hand, it can be considered that it is a chicken-and-egg problem and on the other hand, it can be said that the discourses are indissolubly intertwined and combined in a new type of writing which is not doubly coded, but becomes a second type of nature. The writer does his job and then involuntarily or consciously depersonalises and brings into view the critical voice. This process is not new of course – traces of self-analytical writing can be found as far back as Sterne, Fielding or Thackeray, but it is the degree of transparency that has increased and (apparently) the author’s omnipotence in controlling the fictional universe that has decreased. The illusion-breaking technique had to take a critical distance from the object-text and the main means of giving a manifestation to this conspiracy was parody. It is not sophisticated, academic, technical language that explains the making of fiction but humorous, inciting parody. David Lodge reflects this process of the critic acting as ventriloquist and speaking for the writer too, or the other way round and discussing Joyce he observes that

novelists are and always have been split between, on the one hand, the desire to claim an imaginative and representative truth for their stories, and on the other hand, the wish to guarantee and defend the truth-claim by reference to empirical facts [25].

The double status of Malcolm Bradbury as writer and critic allows him to develop a double discourse which exists through the combining of metafiction and metacriticism. They both perform a self-conscious investigation of their own development, they both simultaneously assert and subvert the authority of their referential mode. Thus, Bradbury the critic undermines the authority of the writer and Bradbury the writer mocks at the critic’s pedantry and obsession for periodizations and taxonomies fact which limits his freedom of interpretation. From this perspective it would seem that the conflation or the mutual contamination of criticism and fiction would only bring a gain for the critic by granting flexibility and popularity to his discourse. For the fine, subtle ironist and jovial parodist that Bradbury was the defection from criticism to the novel is understandable – after all he could not fully subscribe to his death as author since he considered himself very much alive. The postmodern novel was the ground for him to play

108 with the chain of cause and effect or with the principle that assessment and contradiction of that assessment can exist in one and the same work. This is the process of use and abuse, installation and subversion that Linda Hutcheon introduced in her studies. Such postmodern writings question the concept of authorial identity and the degrees of subjectivity while, of course, asserting them fully. This type of transferring the linguistic and analytical, interpretative, comparative habits of the critic into the writing of fiction “is a way of acquiring the weight of academic philosophy, theory or criticism without conceding to the boredom of those discourses – or without loss of sex appeal” [26]. If this is done intuitively (though in a highly elevated manner) in the case of purely bred writers such as James Joyce, Martin Amis, John Fowles, Ian McEwan, critics, with very bulk or very thin studies bearing their signature, are highly perceptive of these changes and use them at all levels to support their critical theories and subvert those of other critics or the other round. It was actually claimed that critical language in novels can even be perceived as intertextual use and not necessarily metafictional.

6. Conclusions Malcolm Bradbury seems to have chosen his side: even in his critical studies his interest in the novel as the ultimate species in which he could express himself fully was ubiquitous. He always declared his pleasure in writing novels (seconded by satires and short stories) fact which gave him the possibility of stepping outside the confining limits of serious, grave objective theories and enter the realm of a different type of critique of the contemporary society:

The writer privileges imaginative writing, as he must; his path outruns criticism and transgresses theory, however much, as a thinking citizen of his time, he must absorb its meanings (Saul Bellow, p. 19).

On the other hand, Bradbury also felt the incredulity into which the metanarratives or the grand narrative of/ within criticism had fallen and the commodity that the critical work had transformed into and preferred authorship as a status that would never truly disappear despite various critical theories and despite the change of philosophical, social or narratological theories. In a review to such a critical study (“The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief” [27]), Bradbury leaves aside intellectual prudishness and admits the decrepit state into which criticism fell in the age of the free access market and during globalized selling of knowledge:

We live – we’re proud to do so – in a non-judgemental, an equalising, a levelling, a willingly and articulately self-dumbing age. We won’t say elite; we’re ideologically under-critical. Criticism has left the public arena for the closets of the university; and there it has become something else. Disliking judgement in the old sense, it has now become literary theory: tribalised, compartmentalised, heavy with professionalised discourses, a variant of philosophy subservient to all the fashionable ideologies. The contemporary criticism kit, of post-Marxism, post-feminism, post-colonialism, new historicism, race and gender reading, can be ordered from any local campus. Newspaper criticism has mostly become journalism, part of the great game of listing and merchandising that passes now as ‘culture’. We have just a few large players – shall we say George Steiner, John Carey, Peter Kemp, Peter Ackroyd – who perform as public critics used to: as ideal proxies, ultimate intelligent judges and readers, displaying what we might surely expect of a critic: literary learning, comparative standards, a power of intelligent judgment, a primary belief in the worth of the literary arts.

Bradbury himself analyzed this double sidedness of his in a more direct manner in an essay (later comprised in No, Not Bloomsbury) entitled “Writer and Critic”. He regards the status as a rather peculiar combination and taking into consideration at least one aspect which we have already mentioned – the declaring by the critics of the death of the author – we understand the dilemma in which such practitioners are:

I am, I find, usually described as ‘the writer and critic’. The description is perfectly true, and I use it of myself. I am a writer of works of fiction and books of literary criticism. But latterly I have started to speculate rather more about this twosome. Aren’t they a rather odd couple? What kind of marriage or live-in relationship do they have? Is it happy or sad? Who cooks and who sews? Who does what and to whom? (p. 4).

109 Bradbury is, of course, playful even in this type of writing which is not necessarily a theoretical presentation of each profession’s advantages and disadvantages, rewarding aspects and drawbacks. This double status of writer and critic is bound to have suffered serious alterations, to have lost its “grand”, absolute credibility as long everything in the world of literature and criticism has changed: “poetry is exhausted, the drama is dying, and the novel is already dead. The word is in crisis, the signifier has lost its signified, and the battlefield is strewn with corpses of creation.” (p. 6) He had felt clearly the loss of credibility to which the critic had fallen a victim and he felt that a more realistic attitude is that of bitter scepticism that the contemporary novel allowed for. Of course he also defends the status of the critic and he admits that the new shifting of power from the writer to the reader has to have given some importance to the critic as an interpreter and re-writer of the text even if he is said to be the one who brings out the difference within the work by demonstrating that it is other than it is. Ultimately, we can say that Bradbury preferred fiction as the perfect territory in which one could contradict himself and not be asked to reconsider: “As far as my practice as a writer is concerned – which is in the end far more interesting to me than my practice as a critic – I do believe that writing is very large made out of contradiction” [28].

Notes [1] Peter Childs (2005): Contemporary Novelists. British Fiction since 1970, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 10. [2] Idem, p. 275. [3] Bill Buford, “The End of the English Novel”, in Granta, 3, 1980. [4] Peter Childs, Mike Storry (1999): Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture, Routlegde, p. 421. [5] Dick Hebdige (1988): Hiding in the Light: On Images and People, Routledge, p. 209. [6] The term is used, in highly playful manner, by Bradbury himself in My Strange Quest for Mensonge, p. 39. [7] Jean-François Lyotard (1984/ 2005): The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Foreword by Fredric Jameson, Manchester University Press, p. 81. [8] Roland Barthes (1968): The Death of the Author, in David Lodge; Nigel Wood (2000): Modern Criticism and Theory. A Reader, second edition, Longman, Pearson Education, Inc., New York, pp. 143–150. [9] Patricia Waugh (2001): Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Taylor & Francis e-library, p. 24. [10] Robert A. Morace, The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, p. 70. [11] Michel Foucault (1969): What Is an Author?, in David Lodge; Nigel Wood (2000): op. cit., pp. 173–187. [12] Robert A. Morace, op. cit, p. XIV. [13] John Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment” apud Hans Bertens (1995/ 2005): The Idea of the Postmodern. A History, Routledge, London and New York, p. 78. [14] Leslie Fiedler, The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, vol. II, Stein and Day Publishers, New York, p. 462. [15] Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell Publishing, p. 5. [16] Terry Eagleton, op. cit., p. 17. [17] Robert N. Wilson: “The Social Context of Modern English Literature by Malcolm Bradbury” in Social Forces, vol. 51, no 1, September 1972, p. 119, University of North Carolina Press. [18] Thomas Docherty: “The Modern American Novel by Malcolm Bradbury” in The Review of English Studies, vol. 36, no 144, November 1985, pp. 607–609, Oxford University Press. [19] Idem, p. 608. [20] Henry Claridge: “From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature edited by Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury – American History and the destruction of Knowledge: Innovative Writing in the Age of Epistemology” in Review of English Studies. New Series, vol. 45, no 178, May 1994, pp. 291–293, Oxford University Press, p. 291. [21] Arlen J. Hansen: “Realism and Perspectivism” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 8, no 1, Autumn 1974, pp. 93–96, Novel Corp., Brown University, p. 94. [22] David Lodge, “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Language” in David Lodge (1971): The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism, Routledge, p. 59. [23] Mark Currie (1998): Postmodern Narrative Theory, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 51. [24] Idem, p. 51. [25] David Lodge (1990): After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism, apud Mark Currie, op. cit., p. 63. [26] Mark Currie, op. cit., p. 66. [27] Malcolm Bradbury, “The Broken Estate: Essays in Literature and Belief” in New Statesman, vol. 128. [28] John, Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, Methuen, London & New York, 1985, p. 31.

Bibliography I. Malcolm Bradbury – fiction Doctor Criminale, Picador, London, 2000. My Strange Quest for Mensonge, Penguin Books, 1988. Stepping Westward, Penguin Books in association with Secker & Warburg, 1968. The History Man, Vintage, London, 1990.

110 To the Hermitage, Picador, London, 2001. Unsent Letters. Irreverent Notes from a Literary Life, second edition, Penguin Books, 1989/ 1995. II. Malcolm Bradbury – criticism Dangerous Pilgrimages. Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel, Viking, Penguin Group. From Puritanism to Postmodernism. A History of American Literature, with Richard Ruland, Penguin Books, 1992. The Modern American Novel, second edition, Oxford University press, 1992. The Modern British Novel. 1878 – 2001, Penguin Books, London, 2001. No, Not Bloomsbury, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988. Possibilities. Essays on the State of the Novel, Oxford University Press, 1973. Saul Bellow, Methuen, London and New York. The Atlas of Literature (general editor), De Agostini Editions, London, 1996. The Social Context of Modern English Literature, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971. III. Critical works Buford, Bill, The End of the English Novel, in Granta, 3, 1980. Childs, Peter, Contemporary Novelists. British Fiction since 1970, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Childs, Peter; Storry, Mike, Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture, Routledge, 1999. Claridge, Henry: ‘From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature’ edited by Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury – American History and the destruction of Knowledge: Innovative Writing in the Age of Epistemology in “Review of English Studies”, New Series, vol. 45, no 178, May 1994, pp. 291–293, Oxford University Press. Currie, Mark, Postmodern Narrative Theory, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Docherty, Thomas: ‘The Modern American Novel’ by Malcolm Bradbury in “The Review of English Studies”, vol. 36, no 144, November 1985, pp. 607–609, Oxford University Press. Eagleton, Terry, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Fiedler, Leslie, The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, vol. II, Stein and Day Publishers, New York, 1971. Haffenden, John, Novelists in Interview, Methuen, London & New York, 1985. Hansen, Arlen J., Realism and Perspectivism in “Novel: A Forum on Fiction”, vol. 8, no 1, Autumn 1974, pp. 93–96, Novel Corp., Brown University. Hebdige, Dick, Hiding in the Light: On Images and People, Routledge, 1998. Lodge, David, The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism, Routledge, 1971. Lodge, David; Wood, Nigel (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory. A Reader, second edition, Longman, Pearson Education, Inc., New York, 2000. Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Foreword by Fredric Jameson, Manchester University Press, 2005. Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Taylor & Francis e-library, 2001. Wilson, Robert N., ‘The Social Context of Modern English Literature’ by Malcolm Bradbury in “Social Forces”, vol. 51, no 1, September 1972, p. 119, University of North Carolina Press.

111 Le métadiscours dans l’écriture de soi

Roxana Udrescu*

Résumé: Cet article se propose d’explorer les marqueurs métadiscoursifs dans l’écriture de soi. Vu les limites de cet article, le corpus comporte uniquement le récit autobiographique W ou le souvenir d’enfance de Georges Perec. Ce choix se justifie par la présence de certaines particularités atypiques pour un récit, telles l’emploi de notes qui ont pour but de corriger le discours autobiographique. Ce qui est relevant c’est que ces notes n’accompagnent pas tous les chapitres. Au contraire, elles apparaissent seulement au moment où l’auteur dresse le portrait de ses parents. De plus, les fréquentes évaluations du discours dans le discours ainsi que les souvenirs présentés sur des coordonnées temporelles différentes sont signe d’une mémoire palimpseste. L’enjeu de cette recherche est de parvenir à dégager les rôles du métadiscours dans l’écriture de soi percquienne pour s’interroger sur l’influence du métadiscours dans la construction de l’identité personnelle et familiale. L’hypothèse de départ est que ces marqueurs montrent le processus de construction de l’image des parents. Mots-clés: métadiscours, écriture de soi, identité familiale, mémoire, Perec

La méthodologie Dans une première étape cette recherche se propose d’identifier les marqueurs métadiscursifs de W ou le souvenir d’enfance qui se trouve dans le corps du texte et dans les notes. Ensuite le discours et le métadiscours sont comparés pour trouver pourquoi l’écrivain revient sur son écriture sans modifier le premier jet, mais en ajoutant des notes et des remarques métadiscursives. Par une démarche analytique on va démontrer comment le métadiscours arrive à déconstruire le discours et comment les notes rendent mieux que le texte l’essentiel. Les résultats de la recherche Pour combler le manque mnésique concernant sa famille, Perec utilise dans la première partie du récit autobiographique de W ou le souvenir d’enfance les quelques photos qu’il possède de ses parents. On constate, pourtant, que ces suppléants de mémoire ne sont pas intégrés dans le récit. Le lecteur ne peut envisager les photos de famille qu’à travers les descriptions minutieuses de l’auteur. Elles ne sont pas montrées ni dans le texte, ni dans le péritexte – en annexe à la fin du récit, ce qui donne la possibilité au narrateur de s’inventer. On pourrait dire, en reprenant les mots de Ricœur que « l’imagination, libérée du service du passé, a pris la place de la mémoire » [1]. Dans le huitième chapitre, la photo du père est décrite en détails comme si l’auteur ne voulait rien laisser lui échapper : l’attitude, les vêtements, l’expression du visage :

« Sur la photo le père a l’attitude du père. Il est grand. Il a la tête nue, il tient son calot à la main. Sa capote descend très bas (1). Elle est serrée à la taille par l’un de ces ceinturons de gros cuir qui ressemblent aux sangles des vitres dans les wagons de troisième classe. On devine, entre les godillots nets de poussière – c’est dimanche – et le bas de la capote, les bandes molletières interminables. Le père sourit. C’est un simple soldat. Il est en permission à Paris, c’est la fin de l’hiver, au bois de Vincennes (2) » [2].

Bien qu’elle soit précise et minutieuse, la description ne se superpose pas aux images. Les remarques de l’auteur dépassent l’information transmise par les photos. En effet, Perec invente autour des photos de famille qu’il possède, essayant de trouver un contexte, d’établir des coordonnées spatiales et temporelles (dimanche, permission, bois de Vincennes). Dans ses propres notes, Perec se contredit et souligne certaines de ces fabulations développées à partir de cette photo :

« (1) Non, précisément, la capote de mon père ne descend pas très bas ; elle arrive aux genoux ; de plus, les pans sont relevés à mi-cuisse. On ne peut donc pas dire que l’on « devine » les bandes molletières : on les voit entièrement et l’on découvre une grande partie du pantalon. (2) Dimanche, permission, bois de Vincennes : rien ne permet de l’affirmer. La troisième photo que j’ai de ma mère – l’une de celles où je suis avec elle – a été prise au bois de Vincennes. Celle-ci, je

* Maître assistante, dr., Université « Dunărea de Jos », Galati

112 dirais plutôt aujourd’hui qu’elle a été prise à l’endroit même où mon père était cantonné ; à en juger par son seul format (15,5 x 11,5cm) ce n’est pas une photo d’amateur : mon père, dans son uniforme quasi neuf, a posé devant un des photographes ambulant qui font les Conseils de révision, les casernes, les mariages et les classes en fin d’année scolaire » [3].

En effet, certaines des informations données ne sont pas issues de l’observation des images, mais relèvent de la fiction. De plus, toutes les descriptions des photos de famille sont encombrées d’une suite de « peut-être », « je crois » ou de « il me semble » et d’autres marqueurs qui soulignent que l’auteur émet seulement des hypothèses. Ce qu’il énonce, c’est uniquement le produit de son imagination : c’est la raison pour laquelle « rien ne permet de l’affirmer » et le métadiscours prouve que Perec en a conscience. Néanmoins, c’est grâce à de telles fictions qu’il construit une image de son père. En récupérant l’image fictionnelle de son père il soude sa mémoire fracturée. La fiction y joue le rôle d’une thérapie. La photo joue un rôle important dans le travail du deuil. Perec accorde une place privilégiée au cadre de la photo de son père, qui s’est trouvé longtemps sur sa table de chevet.

« Pendant longtemps sa photo, dans un cadre de cuir qui fut l’un des premiers cadeaux que je reçus après la guerre, fut au chevet de mon lit » [4].

Le cadre de cette photo devient lui-même un objet inestimable, très cher à Perec puisqu’il le rapproche de son père. L’attachement à son père se transfère sur le cadre qui pour lui est également de grande valeur.

« C’est à cause de ce cadeau, je pense, que j’ai toujours cru que les cadres étaient des objets précieux. Aujourd’hui encore, je m’arrête devant les marchands d’articles de photos pour les regarder et je m’étonne chaque fois d’en trouver à cinq ou dix francs dans les Prisunic » [5].

Grâce à cette photo, qu’il regarde fréquemment, il peut réactualiser l’image de son père dans sa mémoire. L’unique photo que Perec possède de son père nourrit l’imaginaire de l’écrivain de sorte qu’il associe toujours son père à un soldat : « Quand je pense à lui, c’est toujours à un soldat que je pense ». En ce qui concerne l’image de la mère, celle-ci est construite également à l’aide des stratégies fictionnelles qui se dévoile à travers le métadiscours.

« Il me semble voir, lorsque je pense à elle, une rue tortueuse du ghetto, avec une lumière blafarde, de la neige peut-être, des échoppes misérables et mal éclairées devant lesquelles stagnent d’interminables queues. Et ma mère […], petite chose de rien du tout, haute comme trois pommes, enveloppée quatre fois dans un châle, tricoté, traînant derrière elle un cabas tout noir qui fait deux fois son poids […] elle était juive et pauvre» [6].

Cette description est suivie d’une analyse métadiscoursive où l’auteur cherche à trouver pourquoi il se représente sa mère de cette façon. Faute de souvenirs, la figure de la mère s’élabore à l’aide des archétypes littéraires pris dans des contes ou des romans:

« Je n’arrive pas à préciser exactement les sources de cette fabulation ; l’une d’entre elles est certainement « La petite marchande d’allumettes » d’Andersen ; une autre est peut-être l’épisode de Cosette chez les Thénardier ; mais il est probable que l’ensemble renvoie à un scénario très précis » [7].

Ce parallèle entre sa mère et des fillettes qui représentent des clichés de la misère s’appuie, d’une certaine manière, sur les conditions historiques qui caractérisent l’époque de l’enfance de sa mère. Née en 1913, elle est envisagée par Perec comme une victime des conditions atroces de la Première guerre mondiale et de la crise qui s’ensuivit. Ainsi l’écrivain l’imagine en haillons, affrontant le froid sur la neige telle la petite marchande d’allumettes, ou bien travaillant dur pour accomplir des tâches ménagères exténuantes, telle Cosette. En revenant sur son texte et en ajoutant des notes, Perec attaque et défait ses souvenirs. Par cette méthode analytique, il construit et déconstruit, en même temps, sa mémoire. La mémoire chez Perec apparaît comme une coulpe d’exister dans et par les autres. D’ici l’effort de s’en débarrasser

113 – par déconstruction, mais cela n’est pas possible que, paradoxalement par une récupération du passé, comme acceptation de la coulpe envers les souffrances des autres, envers le fait d’avoir survécu à l’Holocauste, envers le fait d’être Juif, etc.. Le portrait qu’il fait à sa mère est à deux volets – fait de notes et contre-notes – qui se chevauchent, s’entrecroisent, s’expliquent et s’obscurcissent, sans trêve. Le résultat est un mélange de livresque, de vécu et d’entendu, de supposé, qui satisfait l’écrivain :

« L’image que j’ai d’elle, arbitraire et schématique, me convient ; elle lui ressemble, elle la définit, pour moi, presque parfaitement » [8].

L’auteur construit l’identité de sa mère de la même manière que celle d’un personnage fictif, ce qui lui permet de fuir le terroir de la mémoire et le sentiment de culpabilité d’avoir survécu à l’extermination des Juifs. Il est conscient du fait qu’il s’agit uniquement d’une « fabulation », mais peu importe la véridicité des informations tant que ce portrait l’aide à dépasser son identité précaire. Car cela ne constitue pour lui qu’une évasion de sa mémoire, identique à celle des siens, du peuple juif. Il n’a donc pas besoin de bien connaître la biographie de sa mère pour faire son portrait. Par cela il rend supportable son identité présente, qui n’est jamais celle assumée. Les premières informations que Perec donne sur sa mère sont d’ordre biographique et porte sur le nom, la date et le lieu de naissance et la profession des parents.

« Cyrla Schulevitz, ma mère, dont j’appris, les rares fois où j’entendis parler d’elle, qu’on l’appelait plus communément Cécile, naquit le 20 août 1913 à Varsovie. Son père, Aaron, était artisan ; sa mère, Laja, née Klajnerer, tenait le ménage ».

Même de telles données, qui semblent être prises d’un extrait de certificat de naissance sont mises en doute par l’auteur. Les notes jettent chaque fois un doute ou apportent une information contradictoire sur le souvenir évoqué ou invoqué. Chez Perec, les notes entrecoupent la description des souvenirs maternels, qui était déjà lacunaire et nourrie de fiction. Ce qui est frappant et qu’elles dépassent en importance le récit. Les notes, qui font partie normalement du péritexte deviennent le texte principal, tandis que le récit occupe une place seconde. Non seulement, qu’elles modifient le récit, mais elles l’actualisent également au point que, comme le montre la note 18, l’auteur a une vision différente sur les événements au moment où il les a ajoutées.

[J’ai fait trois fautes d’orthographe dans la seule transcription de ce nom : Szulewicz au lieu de Schulevitz.] [9], [Je dois à ce prénom d’avoir pour ainsi dire toujours su que sainte Cécile est la patronne des musiciens et que la cathédrale d’Albi – que je n’ai vue qu’en 1971 – lui est consacrée.]. [Klajnlerer au lieu de Klajnerer.]. Cyrla était la troisième fille et le septième enfant.

Perec écrit mal, ou pense écrire mal, le nom de sa mère et celui de sa grand-mère, mais se corrige dans les notes, mettant en évidence le flou qui domine les images qu’il perçoit à travers les documents officiels ou les remémorations des autres, ce qui d’ailleurs lui « convient ». Le but de l’auteur ne semble pourtant pas celui de rectifier l’erreur, mais de la souligner, comme s’il voulait montrer son ignorance face à son identité familiale.

[On ne m’a parlé que de sa petite sœur et de deux frères, devenus maroquiniers, dont l’un est peut-être aujourd’hui encore installé à Lyon. Il me semble que vers 1946, un de mes oncles maternels est venu rue de l’Assomption – où ma tante Esther m’avait recueilli – et y a passé une nuit. Il me semble aussi que, vers cette même époque, j’ai rencontré un homme qui avait été dans le même régiment que mon père.] Sa naissance fatigua beaucoup la mère qui n’eut plus ensuite qu’une fille, d’un an la cadette de ma mère et que l’on prénomma Soura. [Il ne peut s’agir que de ma tante Fanny ; il est possible que son prénom officiel ait été Soura ; j’ai oublié de quelle source je tiens tous ces renseignements].

Perec ne se limite pas à rassembler les informations qu’il a sur sa mère et sa famille maternelle. Il procède à une analyse métadiscoursive pour essayer de se rendre compte si une source fiable était à la base de ces renseignements, ou bien si c’était une nouvelle fiction qu’il avait

114 créée. Le simple constat métadiscoursif sur l’oubli de l’origine de ces données anéantit son discours autobiographique.

Ces renseignements, quasi statistiques, et qui n’ont pour moi qu’un intérêt assez restreint, sont les seuls que je possède concernant l’enfance et la jeunesse de ma mère. Ou plutôt, pour être précis, les seuls dont je sois sûr. Les autres, bien qu’il me semble parfois qu’on me les a effectivement racontés et que je les tiens d’une source digne de foi, sont vraisemblablement à porter au compte des relations imaginaires assez extraordinaires que j’entretins régulièrement à certaine époque de ma brève existence avec ma branche maternelle… [Je ne dirais évidemment plus les choses de cette manière aujourd’hui][10].

Cette approche de l’identité de sa mère, explique pourquoi Perec ne décrit pas la photo d’identité de sa mère, mentionnée dans le petit carnet noir, comme une des sept photos de famille qu’il possédait, ne figure pas dans W ou le souvenir d’enfance. En effet, une telle photo est le résultat d’une identité de papier construite selon les standards officiels de l’administration, et ne permet à l’auteur de broder autour et d’imaginer des souvenirs potentiels. L’élaboration d’une mémoire fictive serait pour l’écrivain une manière de se transmettre à soi-même ce qui ne lui a pas été transmis par sa famille.

« La mémoire du narrateur y ressemble à une boutique bien obscure, où s’entassent et s’entremêlent souvenirs-écrans et traces sensibles que l’on a souvent trop vite fait de qualifier de réelles » [11].

L’écriture de la mémoire peut être l’occasion de procéder à des « emprunts » à l’histoire de l’autre. De ces mécanismes de déplacement de souvenirs résulte une première forme de mémoire fictive. Dans W ou le souvenir d’enfance, l’emprunt à la mémoire de l’autre semble venir à la place d’un autre emprunt, à celle des parents. Perec veut faire exister une mémoire absente, effacée : celle de son enfance, qu’il aurait comme perdue au moment de la mort de ses parents. Parmi les faux souvenirs dont le narrateur de W ou le souvenir d’enfance se révèle un inventeur particulièrement fécond, un exemple de mémoire déplacée est la blessure corporelle imaginaire qu’il se serait faite en tombant sur une patinoire à Villard-de-Lans :

« […] quelques jours auparavant, faisant du patin à glace sur la patinoire qui s’étend au bas de la piste des Bains, j’ai été renversé par une luge ; je suis tombé en arrière et je me suis cassé l’omoplate ; c’est un os que l’on ne peut plâtrer ; pour qu’il puisse se ressouder on m’a attaché le bras droit derrière le dos avec tout un système de contention m’interdisant le moindre mouvement » [12].

Ce n’est qu’une trentaine d’années plus tard qu’il apprend, grâce au témoignage de Luis Argoud-Puix, que cette fracture n’était pas la sienne, mais celle d’un de ses camarades. Autrement dit, le sujet est fictionnalisé, puisque l’auteur n’a pas été le protagoniste, mais seulement le témoin de cette scène :

« Je lui demandai s’il se souvenait de cet accident qui me serait arrivé. Il ne s’en souvenait pas d’avantage, mais cela le surprenait extrêmement car il gardait le souvenir précis d’un accident en tout point identique dans ses causes (patin à glace, choc de la luge, chute en arrière, fracture de l’omoplate) comme dans ces effets (impossibilité de plâtrer, recours à une contention d’apparence mutilante) survenu à ce même Philippe à une date qu’il ne put d’ailleurs préciser » [13]

Même si le métadiscours prouve la fictionnalisation du sujet, Perec a longuement gardé le souvenir d’avoir fracturé son bras. C’est pourquoi l’inclusion de cet événement dans le discours est essentielle pour son récit d’enfance. En effet, cette blessure imaginaire a permis à l’enfant d’exprimer une douleur tue, celle qu’il a ressentie suite à la séparation d’avec sa mère, au lien rompu avec celle-ci, « ce qui précisément avait été cassé » :

« Comme pour le bras en écharpe de la gare de Lyon, je vois bien ce que pouvaient remplacer ces factures éminemment réparables qu’une immobilisation temporaire suffisait à réduire, même si la métaphore, aujourd’hui, me semble inopérable pour décrire ce qui précisément avait été cassé et qu’il était sans doute vain d’espérer enfermer dans le simulacre d’un membre fantôme » [14].

115

Il s’agit d’une fracture symbolique, celle du triangle parental, d’une cassure irrémédiable qui laisse à jamais une blessure dans son âme. Cette fracture imaginaire est rapprochée chronologiquement de la séparation d’avec sa mère qui suivait un convoi parti en direction d’un camp de concentration. Elle représente, de façon symbolique, la rupture d’avec la mère, l’événement le plus important de son récit d’enfance, qui est pourtant indicible de façon directe et dont seule une fictionnalisation peut rendre compte :

« Plus simplement, ces thérapeutiques imaginaires, moins contraignantes que tutoriales, ces points de suspension, désignaient des douleurs nommables et venaient à point justifier des cajoleries dont les raisons réelles n’étaient données qu’à voix basse » [15].

Le système de contention, retenant le bras blessé, devient « points de suspension », autrement dit signe d’écriture, signe du langage. On ne saurait pas s’empêcher de lier ces points à d’autres, ceux qui closent la première partie du livre et qui, mis en évidence sur une feuille blanche cache le noyau du W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Il ne reste que ces points de suspension du chapitre qui aurait dû raconter la disparition de sa mère. L’indicible de cette mort et celui des émotions de l’enfant seraient ainsi symbolisés par le même signe. L’emprunt à la mémoire de son camarade d’école remplacerait ainsi celui qu’il aurait voulu faire à sa propre mémoire de sa mère, au souvenir qu’il aurait dû garder d’elle.

En guise de conclusion Les nombreux marqueurs métadiscoursifs présents dans de W ou le souvenir d’enfance sont une preuve d’une quête ardue que l’auteur entreprit pour reconstruire son identité familiale. Perec ne présente pas seulement les informations ultimes qu’il détient. Au contraire son choix d’étaler un réseau palimpseste des souvenirs ne fait que souligner le cheminement de l’écrivain dans sa quête identitaire, avec les tâtonnements, les souvenirs erronés, les pseudo- souvenirs, les fabulations et les variantes. C’est seulement au niveau métadiscursif qu’il peut rendre compte de sa quête identitaire.

Notes : [1] RICŒUR, Paul, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, p. 80. [2] PEREC, Georges, WSE, p. 46. [3] Idem, ibidem, p. 53-54. [4] Idem, ibidem, p. 46. [5] Idem, ibidem, p. 55. [6] PEREC, Georges, WSE, p. 60. [7] Idem, ibidem, p.50, passim. [8] Idem, ibidem, p.51. [9] Ce qui est écrit entre parenthèses représente la transcription des annotations de Perec. [10] Idem, ibidem, p.49-50 et 60. [11] HECK, Maryline, « La fabrique du souvenir », p. 59. [12] PEREC, Georges, WSE, p. 112. [13] Idem, ibidem, p. 113. [14] Idem, ibidem, p. 113-114. [15] Idem. Ibidem, p. 114.

Bibliographie : Perec, Georges, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, Paris, Gallimard, 2006 Monteil, Jean-Marc, Soi & le contexte, Paris, Armand Colin, 1993. Heck, Maryline, « La fabrique du souvenir : mémoire réelle et mémoire fictive dans W ou le souvenir d'enfance de Georges Perec et Dora Bruder de Patrick Modiano », in Texte n° 41/42, Toronto, 2007. Muxel, Anne, Individu et mémoire familiale, Paris, Nathan, 2002. Nannicicini Sreitberger, Chiara, La revanche de la discontinuité : Bouleversements du récit chez Bachmann, Calvino et Perec, P.I.E. Peter Lang, Bruxelles, 2009. Ramos, Elsa, L’invention des origines. Sociologie de l’ancrage identitaire, Paris, Armand Collin, 2006. Roche, Roger-Yves, Photofictions: Perec, Modiano, Duras, Goldschmidt, Barthes, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2009.

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Interferenţe şi conexiuni lingvistice

117

118 Le discours répété en tant que manifestation de l’intertextualité dans la publicité

Brînduşa-Mariana Amălăncei*

Abstract: We consider that, for the analysis of advertising discourse, the intertextuality and, implicitly, the repeated discourse, are important elements of the meaning of an advertisement. That’s why, in this paper, we intend to observe, starting from a review, on one hand, of the forms that the intertextuality can take (quotation, plagiarism, allusion, paraphrase, imitation, parody, theme with variations, “placing into the abyss”) and of the types of intertext (palimpsest and collage), and, on the other hand, of the types of phrases belonging to the repeated discourse, the way in which the two concepts act in advertising, with the mention that the specialty papers deal very sporadically with this matter. Also, we have in view Coseriu’ distinction between the “free technique of discourse and the repeated discourse, as well as their interference, in order to show that, as the speech is, according to Eugeniu Coseriu, similar to a painting with simultaneous collage, in which it is identified at same time the current technique and speech fragments that are already existent, advertisements appeal both to phrases belonging to the repeated discourse, and to canonical phrases that are intentionally changed, especially by substitution. Keywords: intertextuality, repeated discourse, palimpsest, collage, substitution

Mots-clés: intertextualité, discours répété, palimpseste, collage, substitution

Étudiée par rapport à la création littéraire, la notion d’« intertextualité » a une large applicabilité dans l’analyse de tout schéma communicatif performant s’inscrivant à la fois parmi les universaux des mentalités et les universaux linguistiques de l’organisation du discours. En se rapportant à la présence de l’intertextualité dans la publicité, Jean-Jacques Boutaud observe qu’une vraie culture publicitaire apparaît, ayant déjà ses classiques, ses auteurs, ses concepts inédits et révolutionnaires, suivis de près par l’actualité, que les codes et les références publicitaires s’installent progressivement dans le paysage médiatique et culturel (rubriques de presse, séquences et émissions télévisées, la nuit des dévorateurs de publicité) et que le contexte postmoderne déplace le jeu du message vers le code et la fonction métalinguistique d’une publicité que l’on appelle vampire (Jost), vers l’hypertexte, la parodie ou le pastiche [1].

1. Types d’intertextualité Le concept d’intertextualité a représenté un sujet d’intérêt d’abord pour les chercheurs de la littérature, mais aussi pour ceux de la linguistique. En analysant le roman de Dostoievski, Mihail Bahtin à qui l’on doit le concept de dialogisme parle de la possibilité d’un texte d’être interprété de plusieurs perspectives dans le sens qu’il y a « une pluralité de voix et de consciences indépendantes et distinctes, une polyphonie authentique des voix à part entière » [notre traduction] [2]. La notion de polyphonie sera adoptée par la narratologie française contemporaine et mise à la base du concept d’intertextualité. Pour Michel Riffaterre l’intertextualité est « un phénomène qui oriente la lecture du texte, qui en gouverne éventuellement l’interprétation et qui est le contraire de la lecture linéaire ». L’auteur cité s’approche en quelque sorte, comme nous pourrons le constater, de la conception de Genette concernant l’intertextualité par ce qu’il considère être un intertexte, à savoir « l’ensemble des textes que l’on peut rapprocher de celui que l’on a sous les yeux, l’ensemble des textes que l’on retrouve dans sa mémoire à la lecture d’un passage donné » [3]. D’après Gérard Genette, l’intertextualité est un type de relation transtextuelle, à côté de la paratextualité, de la métatextualité, de l’hypertextualité et de l’architextualité et se définie comme « une relation de coprésence entre deux ou plusieurs textes, c’est-à-dire, eidétiquement et le plus souvent, par la présence effective d’un texte dans un autre » [4]. Les formes que l’intertextualité peut prendre sont, dans la conception de Gérard Genette, la citation (entre guillemets, avec ou sens référence exacte), le plagiat et l’allusion. Dans la même direction que Gérard Genette s’inscrit Sofia Dima qui considère que l’intertextualité se présente comme un ensemble de relations explicites ou implicites qu’un texte entretient avec d’autres textes, tout en lui reconnaissant ses traits d’intertextualité implicite et

* Chargé de cours, dr, Université « Vasile Alecsandri » de Bacau

119 d’intertextualité explicite [5]. Dans la catégorie des intertextes implicites Sofia Dima inclut l’aspect général d’une œuvre, son style, les éléments nécessaires pour rapprocher deux ou plusieurs textes, les thèmes culturels, les valeurs mythiques, les sujets à la mode pendant une certaine période/dans une certaine société. Pour ce qui est des intertextes explicites, ceux-ci peuvent résulter à la suite d’un acte de réécriture, de dénomination des sources et des références ou d’imitation. D’après Sofia Dima, il y a deux types de réécriture: partielle (lorsque seulement un aspect du texte fait l’objet de cette opération: les citations, les reprises, l’ajustement d’un texte dans certaines zones, ceux-ci permettant de voir le texte original) et globale (lorsque dans un texte on reprend le sujet d’un autre texte, on le résume, on le paraphrase, on le corrige, on l’adapte à un autre moyen d’expression ou bien on l’imite par l’intermédiaire du pastiche/de la parodie). Sofia Dima introduit également dans la catégorie des intertextes explicites la bibliographie, les notes marginales, intra- et infrapaginales, la citation des sources d’inspiration de l’écrivain [6]. L’emploi des guillemets dans le plan graphique marque l’intention de l’auteur de « se démarquer de ce que sa propre personne n’est pas et ne dit pas » et laisse voir « une position idéologique, une image que l’auteur veut transmettre à travers son texte » [notre traduction] [7]. Concernant l’imitation, Sofia Dima s’appuie sur l’étude de Gérard Genette relative aux intertextes vus comme formes littéraire au second degré résultant à la suite de trois opérations: la réduction, l’adjonction et la transformation (réduction + adjonction). On obtient ainsi des intertextes de type palimpseste auxquels Sofia Dima ajoute les intertextes de type collage. La définition la plus « généreuse » de l’intertexte appartient à Roland Barthes qui désigne par ce terme « l’impossibilité de vivre hors du texte infini » [8]. On comprend donc que tout texte s’inscrit dans le texte infini qui est la production humaine dans sa totalité et entre en interaction avec celui-ci. Linguistiquement, l’intertextualité représente par exemple pour Julia Kristeva, « une permutation de textes », c’est-à-dire « dans l’espace d’un texte plusieurs énoncés, pris à d’autres textes, se croisent et se neutralisent » [9]. Étudier un texte comme une intertextualité signifie – d’après Julia Kristeva – le penser comme « le foyer dans lequel la rationalité connaissante saisit la transformation des énoncés (auxquels le texte est irréductible) en un tout (le texte), de même que les insertions de cette totalité dans le texte historique et social » [10]. Ainsi Julia Kristeva se rapproche-t-elle de Gérard Genette, tout comme Dominique Maingueneau pour qui l’intertextualité désigne « des types de relations intertextuelles que la compétence discursive définit comme légitimes » et l’intertexte est « l’ensemble des fragments qu’il cite effectivement » [11]. Aussi, Maingueneau indique-t-il la différence de fonctionnement entre l’intertextualité du discours scientifique et de celui théologique, ainsi que l’existence d’une intertextualité interne (lorsque les textes appartiennent au même champ discursif) et d’une intertextualité externe (lorsque les textes appartiennent à des champs discursifs différents) [12]. L’auteur constate que « bien des textes apparaissent ainsi comme un véritable carrefour intertextuel où la parole de l’énonciateur est constamment habitée par d’autres, tissée de leur écho » [13], en partageant ainsi les opinions de Gérard Genette pour qui « tout ce qui le met [le texte] en relation, manifeste ou secrète, avec d’autres textes » c’est la transtextualité ou « transcendance textuelle du texte » [14]. Mihaela Mancaş semble également être l’adepte des théories de Gérard Genette. Elle parle de deux acceptions de la notion d’intertextualité: d’un côté, l’intertextualité interprétée comme relation de tout texte-énoncé avec d’autres textes qu’il absorbe et transforme dans l’ensemble de la même culture littéraire; définie de cette manière, l’intertextualité est la reprise et la transformation, à l’intérieur d’un texte, d’autres textes compris dans un sens élargi (types de textes, textes concrets ou fragments de textes); de l’autre côté, l’intertextualité comme reprise directe dans le texte d’un (fragment d’) énoncé appartenant à un autre texte et un autre auteur [15]. Mihaela Mancaş mentionne quelques situations dans lesquelles la relation d’intertextualité au sens stricte du terme apparaît dans le texte littéraire à savoir la parodie, le pastiche, les thèmes à variations du langage musical, la citation, et peut prendre parfois la forme de l’allusion culturelle, étant nécessaire que certains fragments d’énoncé soient fixés dans la mémoire publique afin d’être reconnus. De toutes ces formes de manifestation de l’intertextualité, ce sont celles de Gérard Genette et de Dominique Maingueneau (certaines dans la vision de Mihaela Mancaş) que notre analyse fructifiera. Dans ce qui suit, nous essayerons à présenter, sans prétention d’exhaustivité, quelques-unes des formes que l’intertextualité peut prendre, à savoir le plagiat, l’allusion, le pastiche, la parodie, le thème à variations, la « mise en abîme », tout en précisant que même si Gérard Genette distingue

120 l’intertextualité, la paratextualité, la métatextualité, l’hypertextualité et l’architextualité, les quatre dernières, vues comme discours critique, impliquent hypothétiquement l’écriture d’un texte à partir d’un autre texte et peuvent être considérées, par conséquent, des relations d’intertextualité. Dans notre démarche, nous examinerons aussi les intertextes de type palimpseste et ceux de type collage abordés par Gérard Genette et, respectivement, par Sofia Dima. 1.1. Le plagiat L’une des formes que l’intertextualité peut prendre et que l’on rencontre dans la publicité c’est donc le plagiat qui apparaît lorsqu’un auteur copie et s’empare « de manière imméritée » [16] des fragments de l’œuvre d’un autre auteur. Le plagiat est d’ailleurs considéré par Gérard Genette « un emprunt non déclaré » [17]. Sofia Dima rappelle que le plagiat n’a pas constitué depuis toujours une fraude et qu’il a commencé à être blâmer au début du 18e siècle lorsque l’on a instauré la propriété littéraire et l’on a interdit juridiquement la reproduction publique, à son nom, d’un texte déjà publié par un autre auteur. Le plagiat se différencie du pastique car il est « une falsification inavouée » [notre traduction] [18]. Dans la publicité nous avons à faire pas mal de fois à un plagiat des formes, un exemple dans ce sens le constituant les textes des réclames de la Photo 1 – SURPRIZE, SURPRIZE et Photo 2 – MIDNIGHT, où nous pouvons reconnaître la séquence narrative d’ouverture qui présente le personnage et les motifs de son action, séquence spécifique au conte de fées [Photo 1] („A fost odată o emisiune…”[19]) et, respectivement, au conte [Photo 2] („A fost odată o prinţesă…” [20]). Photo 1 Photo 2

Avantaje, octombrie 2004 Elle, noiembrie 2005

1.2. L’allusion Définie par Gérard Genette comme « un énoncé dont la pleine intelligence suppose la perception d’un rapport entre lui et un autre énoncé auquel renvoie nécessairement telle ou telle de ses inflexions, autrement non recevable » [21], l’allusion repose sur une analogie dans laquelle un mot ou un énoncé est employé afin d’évoquer/suggérer, dans des formes diverses, une réalité à signification générale ou abstraite. On réalise ainsi « une liaison d’ordre livresque, une matérialisation des abstractions ou un parallélisme situationnel » [22]. L’allusion se rapproche parfois de la périphrase littéraire, a d’habitude une fonction évocatrice et souvent euphémistique et peut être de plusieurs types: mythologique, historique, biblique/religieuse, littéraire. Conformément à Dicţionar de ştiinţe ale limbii, l’allusion résulte parfois aussi de la reprise périphrastique de certaines locutions populaires ou de l’évocation de certaines coutumes autochtones ou classiques [23]. Les créateurs du domaine de la publicité recourent fréquemment à l’allusion en misant sur sa force évocatrice afin de rendre les textes publicitaires plus attractifs et moins faciles à retenir. Par exemple, un énoncé tel „O emisiune care a făcut fericiţi până la adânci bătrâneţi o mulţime de oameni” [24] [Photo 1 – SURPRIZE, SURPRIZE] fait allusion à la fin heureuse du conte de fées où les personnages ont fait un mariage qui a duré trois jours et trois nuits et « ont heureusement vécu jusqu’à leur vieillesse ».

121 1.3. La paraphrase Nous sommes d’avis que la paraphrase peut également être une forme d’intertextualité, définie dans Dicţionar de ştiinţe ale limbii comme une « opération métalinguistique ou linguistique, réalisée par la production d’une unité discursive sémantiquement équivalente d’une autre unité antérieurement produite » [notre traduction]. Ce sont des paraphrases les parasynonymes, la définition lexicographique ou la reformulation d’une phrase tout en gardant presque inchangé son sens (cette dernière situation est souvent rencontrée dans des réclames ayant comme but de mettre l’accent sur une idée à vouloir être retenue: „...Dacă îţi place sucul natural de fructe, în care să regăseşti aroma fructului proaspăt cules, atunci, mai mult ca sigur, vei alege Cappy.../ ... dacă îţi place ca sucul tău de portocale să fie stors din cele mai bune fructe, atunci află despre Cappy că este obţinut din portocale coapte la soare, culese şi alese cu grijă.../ ...Cappy strânge ce e mai bun din fructe într- un nou ambalaj pentru ca tu să poţi savura aici, ca oriunde în lume, gustul sucului ce-ţi place” [25] [Photo 3 – CAPPY]). Comme figure de pensée, l’allusion réside à développer et/ou reformuler dans la même phrase plusieurs idées appartenant au même noyau sémantique [26]. Photo 3

Avantaje, aprilie 2004 1.4. Pastiche et/ou parodie Le pastiche et la parodie pour lesquels la publicité manifeste une certaine prédilection, ce sont, dans l’opinion de Gérard Genette, une autre forme de transcendance textuelle, à savoir l’hypertextualité [27]. L’hypertextualité représente donc pour Genette « toute relation unissant un texte B (que j’appellerai hypertexte) à un texte antérieur A (que j’appellerai, bien sûr, hypotexte) sur lequel il se greffe d’une manière qui n’est pas celle du commentaire. […] Pour le prendre autrement, posons une notion générale de texte au second degré […] ou texte dérivé d’un autre texte préexistant » par transformation simple ou indirecte (imitation) » [28]. Gérard Genette définit le pastiche comme « l’imitation d’un style dépourvue de fonction satirique » et la parodie comme « le détournement de texte à transformation minimale » [29]. L’auteur de pastiches s’assume donc le rôle d’écrire un autre texte dans le même style, de transmettre « un autre message dans le même code » [30]; l’auteur de parodies imitera de manière satirique une œuvre, transposera son sujet de manière burlesque et modifiera le sujet « sans modifier le style et cela de deux façons possibles: soit en conservant le texte noble pour l’appliquer, le plus littéralement possible, à un sujet vulgaire (réel et d’actualité): c’est la parodie stricte » (par exemple, dans le spot publicitaire du chocolat Rom [31], diffusé sur MTV, le 25 mars 2006, nous sommes les spectateurs d’une scène typique de la période communiste: un acteur imitant l’ancien président du régime communiste roumain Nicolae Ceauşescu dit à une jeune fille qui porte une jupe très courte et mange le chocolat Rom: „Tovarăşă, nu torelăm aşa ţinută pentru tineretul comunist!” [32]; à remarquer l’emploi du verbe „tolerăm”/« tolérer » dans la variante „torelăm”/« toréler » à laquelle Ceauşescu recourait souvent dans ses discours) [33]; soit en forgeant par voie d’imitation stylistique un nouveau texte noble pour l’appliquer à un sujet vulgaire: c’est la pastiche héroï-comique » (voir, par exemple, le texte de la réclame pour l’émission Surprize, surprize [Photo 1 – SURPRIZE, SURPRIZE]) » [34]. Un acte critique peut être également identifié dans le cas de la parodie vue non pas comme simple pastiche, mais comme mimétisme de l’original, avec l’intention évidente de souligner de manière comique, par déformation, ses traits caractéristiques. La parodie se réalise généralement à partir des textes de dimensions réduites, tels les proverbes, les maximes, les aphorismes, les slogans

122 ou les titres: « Il faut battre le fer tant qu’il est chaud » devient, par déformation parodique, « Il faut battre sa mère pendant qu’elle est jeune » [35]; dans les spots publicitaires qui annonçaient des réductions de prix de 20% pour les produits des magasins Flanco, le proverbe „Cine fură azi un ou, mâine va fura un bou” [36] se transforme par l’intermédiaire de la parodie en „Cine sparge azi un ou... s-a scos, fiindcă cioburile aduc noroc” [37] (Antena 1, le 29 mars 2006, 22.44 heures); le nom de la chaîne de télévision Animal Planet est parodié en Animat Planet (Show) – le titre d’une émission de télévision diffusée sur Antena 1 [Photo 4 – ANIMAT PLANET]. Photo 4

Elle, noiembrie 2005

La conclusion qui s’impose et justifie la formulation du titre du présent sous-chapitre c’est que le pastiche et la parodie voisinent et ne se superposent que partiellement. Le pastiche emploie seulement des automatismes linguistiques d’un modèle et n’impose pas de correspondance dans l’ordre du sujet, tandis que la parodie suit le texte du modèle dont il reproduit de manière burlesque le ton et le schéma du sujet. 1.5. Le thème à variations La coexistence entre le texte d’un auteur et sa transcription dans le style d’un autre auteur/de plusieurs autres auteurs a pour effet secondaire – dans l’opinion de Gérard Genette – de placer le texte original en position de thème dont les pastiches seraient autant de variations [38]. Des variations du même thème, on en rencontre aussi dans la publicité, par exemple dans les slogans des spots publicitaires pour le cognac Unirea, „Unde-s mulţi, puterea creşte” [39] (Antena 1, le 20 janvier 2006, 23.30 heures) et pour Pepsi&Star Snaks, „Unde-s doi, plăcerea creşte” [40] (Antena 1, le 26 janvier 2006, 12.44 heures), des parodies du dire „Unde-i unu, nu-i putere, unde-s doi, puterea creşte” [41]. 1.6. La « mise en abîme » La « mise en abîme », concept gidien, peut être à son tour, à notre avis, une forme d’intertextualité. Considérée un résumé intratextuel, un récit dans le récit, la « mise en abîme » double le texte et par sa fonction réflexive conteste le déroulement chronologique des événements. La « mise en abîme » représente en fait dans l’acception de Gérard Genette un récit au second degré. Dans les réclames, la « mise en abîme » n’apparaît pas le plus souvent comme récit d’un récit, mais comme image dans l’image [Photo 5 – PANASONIC]. Photo 5

Avantaje, mai 2004

123 1.7. Les intertextes de type palimpseste; les intertextes de type collage Aux formes de type palimpseste, produites par superposition et inventoriées par Gérard Genette, Sofia Dima ajoute les intertextes de type collage résultés par juxtaposition. Dans sa vision, ces derniers « déclarent plus évidemment leur source intertextuelle et leur intention d’intertextualité » [notre traduction] [42]. Pour Gérard Genette, « l’art de faire de neuf avec du vieux a l’avantage de produire des objets plus complexes et plus savoureux que les produits faits exprès: une fonction nouvelle se superpose et s’enchevêtre à une structure ancienne, et la dissonance entre ces deux éléments coprésents donne sa saveur à l’ensemble. […] Cette duplicité de l’objet, dans l’ordre des relations textuelles, peut se figurer par la vieille image du palimpseste, où l’on voit, sur le même parchemin, un texte se superposer à un autre qu’il ne dissimule pas tout à fait, mais qu’il laisse voir par transparence » [43]. À côté du plagiat, du pastiche et de la parodie qui s’inscrivent dans la catégorie des intertextes de type palimpseste, Genette inclut l’excision, la réduction par amputation, l’auto- excision, l’expurgation, l’auto-expurgation, la concision, la condensation (par condensation on obtient le résumé et le sommaire, auxquels Sofia Dima ajoute la thématisation et la paraphrase [44]), l’augmentation par addition massive (dénommée aussi par Gérard Genette extension), l’extension thématique, l’expansion stylistique, la transmodalisation, la transposition, la transvalorisation, la transtylisation, la traduction, la traduction homophone [45]. Sofia Dima ajoute à la classification de Gérard Genette les intertextes de type collage qu’elle inventorie et décrit [46]. Ainsi, le collage proprement dit s’obtient-il par « juxtaposition sans aucune modification des fragments provenus de divers types de texte ». Sofia Dima précise qu’« en pratiquant le collage, la littérature contemporaine exige de manière démonstrative l’idée d’intertextualité (tout texte dialogue avec d’autres textes antérieurement écrits ou contemporains avec lui), mais d’une intertextualité considérée dans le sens le plus stricte du terme où les textes convoqués à la rampe gardent leur aspect initial » [notre traduction] [47]. Le terme de collage provient de la peinture et désigne la technique par laquelle les teintures sont partiellement ou totalement remplacées par des fragments de matériaux colorés, juxtaposés ou superposés. Des variantes de ce type de collage ce sont le centon (réalisé par juxtaposition de plusieurs fragments provenus des textes et des auteurs différents), l’avorton (un texte produit par juxtaposition des deux textes auxquels il ressemble inévitablement; les deux textes de base sont présentés en situation de dialogue); un type spécial de collage proprement dit c’est le texte où se superposent des fragments écrits dans des langues différentes. La conclusion à laquelle aboutit Sofia Dima est que « le phénomène d’intertextualité entraîne des conséquences qui ne sont pas des plus agréables pour le lecteur, provoquant des distorsions dans l’identification de la voix énonciatrice, indifféremment de sa nature et sa finalité » [notre traduction] [48].

2. Technique de base du discours; le discours répété et son rôle dans la communication publicitaire Nous sommes d’avis que pour l’analyse du texte publicitaire la distinction d’Eugeniu Coşeriu entre la technique libre du discours et le discours répété est bien importante. Dans l’opinion d’Eugeniu Coseriu, « la technique libre comprend les éléments constitutifs de la langue et les règles actuelles relatives à leur modification et leur combinaison, à savoir les mots, les outils et les procédés lexicaux et grammaticaux; par contre, le discours répété comprend tout ce que dans le parler d’une communauté se répète de manière plus ou moins identique sous forme de discours déjà fait ou combinaison plus ou moins fixe, comme fragment, long ou court de ce que l’on a déjà dit. […] De ce point de vue un discours concret peut être souvent analogue à un tableau réalisé partiellement comme un collage; dans le tableau, à côté des parties exécutées à la façon du peintre qui peint peuvent également exister des fragments pris d’autres tableaux, peints par d’autres peintres » [notre traduction] [49]. La technique libre du discours interfère avec le discours répété dont il faut considérer, d’après Eugeniu Coşeriu, l’immensité et la présence: « le discours est une sorte de peinture à collage simultané, c’est-à-dire, d’un côté, c’est la technique actuelle, et, de l’autre côté, ce sont des parties du discours déjà existantes et apportées, pour ainsi dire, par la tradition dans tous ces expressions, locutions figées, proverbes, citations, etc. » [notre traduction] [50].

124 Le problème du collage intervient également dans le texte publicitaire où, d’un côté, l’on recourt aux « énoncés appartenant au discours répété » et, de l’autre côté, des énoncés canoniques appartenant au discours répété sont volontairement modifiés. Pour Eugeniu Coşeriu, le discours répété peut prendre des formes différentes: une citation ou une allusion au texte (configurée parfois comme « imitation parodique d’une œuvre littéraire »), des proverbes, des locutions figées, des formules traditionnelles de comparaison, les soi-disant wellerismes (dont la dénomination provient du fait qu’un personnage célèbre de Pickwick Papers de Charles Dickens, Sam Weller, les emploie dans toute circonstance; ce sont, donc, des expressions introduites/accompagnées par des formules de type: « it. come diceva quello che, come disse colui che, sp. como decía (dijo) aquel que, etc. » qui, par conséquent, ont la prétention de faire référence à une réaction verbale de quelqu’un dans une certaine situation, même s’il s’agit fréquemment des réactions et situations imaginaires) [51], des syntagmes (combinaisons de mots) de la technique libre commutables avec/opposés à certains syntagmes, des périphrases lexicales correspondant aux unités lexématiques (mots) de la technique libre, les degrés de comparaison à fonction de morphèmes de superlatif absolu [52]. Eugeniu Coşeriu insiste sur le fait que, même si « les éléments du discours répété analogues à ceux de la technique libre (mots, outils grammaticaux) ne sont pas commutables dans leur domaine spécifique, leurs combinaisons, c’est-à-dire les unités du discours répété, correspondent fonctionnellement à des unités de niveaux différents de la technique libre et sont commutables avec celles-ci, raison pour laquelle elles peuvent être considérées des unités non analysables de la même technique, aux niveaux de structuration grammaticales où elles agissent » [notre traduction]. De cette perspective, certaines formes du discours répété correspondant à des textes entiers ou à des fragments de textes ayant un sens complet (les citations et les proverbes) ne sont pas équivalentes des unités combinatoires de la technique idiomatique et, par conséquent, ne lui appartiennent pas. Donc, dans ce cas il n’y a d’oppositions possibles qu’entre un texte et un autre texte, les oppositions à l’intérieur de la technique idiomatique étant exclues. Il s’agit en fait des formes de la littérature (au sens élargi, c’est-à-dire à la fois la morale, l’idéologie, etc.) […] qui devraient être étudiées par la linguistique du texte et par la philologie [53]. La typologie réalisée par Eugeniu Coşeriu vise donc l’appartenance à la technique idiomatique d’où les citations et les proverbes sont exclus. Sofia Dima essaie à faire une classification des énoncés appartenant au discours répété en fonction de plusieurs critères: le critère quantitatif, le critère qualitatif, le critère du lieu de manifestation, le critère historique, le critère de l’interprétation et le critère constitutif- configurationnel. L’idée que Sofia Dima désire avancer, c’est « le fait que l’ensemble de connaissances partagées par l’auteur et le lecteur, communes, donc, au contexte d’énonciation et de réception et qui rendent possible l’écriture et la lecture, repose sur des formes diverses du discours répété et que ces connaissances sont repérables comme telles, tant au niveau extralittéraire, qu’au niveau littéraire » [notre traduction] [54]. D’après Sofia Dima, les formes que le discours répété peut prendre sont: les stéréotypes linguistiques, les locutions, les lieux communs, les représentations stéréotypées, les schémas séquentiels ou génériques, la diversité des formes entraînant une complexité des critères sur lesquels reposent la délimitation et la définition du concept. Sofia Dima considère qu’à la base de l’obtention des contextes de type énoncé appartenant au discours répété il y a les opérations suivantes: la répétition des éléments lexicaux, la permutation et, respectivement, le fait d’établir et de maintenir la cohésion et les cohérences et que le code linguistique englobe ce déjà dit dont les fragments, par répétition, se fixent dans la mémoire sous la forme des unités lexicales. Même si en général quelques- unes de ces unités lexicales sont identiques ou proches quant à la formulation de celles mentionnées par Eugeniu Coşériu (à savoir les expressions parémiologiques, les locutions de divers types, les formules usuelles de comparaison), d’autres représentent, d’un côté, des genres interférents (clichés, micro-lexiques du langage du bois, lieux communs, etc.) et, de l’autre côté, des catégories pouvant être situées vers les limites de l’admissibilité fonctionnelle dans la zone du discours répété (unités lexicales composées, mais également métaphores lexicalisées) [55]. De ces catégories du discours répété, c’est la citation qui manque, son absence s’expliquant par le fait que pour l’exégète mentionnée le problème de l’intertextualité proprement dit a beaucoup d’importance.

125 L’identification de schémas structuraux dans le code linguistique, « linéaire en surface », s’associe à la possibilité de permutations, seulement dans certains contextes, des éléments par l’intermédiaire desquels elles se réalisent, l’opération présentant de l’intérêt dans la mesure où ces permutations mènent à des relations de synonymie ou de paraphrase, considérées aussi des formes de discours répété [56]. Concernant le fait d’établir et de maintenir la cohésion et les cohérences, celui-ci intervient à trois niveaux: intratextuel, extratextuel et intertextuel. La conclusion de Sofia Dima est que le discours répété, bien que soumis à des variations tout au long des siècles, a été et reste encore « le garant de la stabilité et de la durabilité », son omniprésence et son omnipotence étant révélatrices à cet égard. En analysant la modification «délibérée, consciente et occasionnelle » des énoncés appartenant au discours répété à travers la fonction essentielle qu’Eugeniu Coşeriu attribue au langage, à savoir celle de « communiquer quelque chose à quelqu’un » [notre traduction], en attribuant à l’autre la même conscience que celle du locuteur [57], Stelian Dumistrăcel montre que la modification de l’énoncé appartenant au discours répété surtout par substitution illustre bien ce « jugement de valeur », d’autant plus que la mise en pratique a trait à la confrontation des deux universaux du langage, à savoir l’homogénéité et la variété, cette dernière manifestée à travers la créativité, dimension où le langage dispose de possibilités illimitées [58]. Le problème de la substitution dans l’énoncé appartenant au discours répété quand il s’agit des citations est abordé par Stelian Dumistrăcel par rapport au concept d’intertextualité [59]. L’auteur analyse de manière comparative le discours journalistique et le discours public de la presse roumaine actuelle, tout en insistant sur le fait que « même si le texte journalistique appartenant au type d’opinion (pamphlet, éditorial, chronique, etc.) a souvent des tangences aux œuvres littéraires, il faut tenir compte que les titres des articles [référence primaire pour l’auteur] ont le but de lancer une information, mais recourent aux formules dont l’énoncé mise sur la fonction phatique du langage, dans ce cas d’établir et de maintenir le contact avec le destinataire. Or, en recourant à l’énoncé appartenant au discours répété, on crée une certaine expérience linguistique commune » [notre traduction] [60]. Ainsi, afin de modifier surtout par substitution les citations, mais aussi les autres types d’énoncés appartenant au discours répété, faut-il avoir en vue la distinction de Coşeriu déjà mentionnée entre la technique libre du discours et le discours répété. Dans les textes publicitaires et surtout dans les slogans, l’on recourt souvent à des énoncés pénétrants destinés à attirer l’attention et à être facilement retenus, qui font partie de la classe des énoncés appartenant au discours répété. Ces formules figées offrent une série d’avantages dans le sens que représentant des énoncés parémiologiques, titres d’œuvres littéraires et de films, stéréotypés du discours quotidien, peuvent être reconnus et retenus presque automatiquement, leur transformation provoquant des effets de choc comme dans le cas des schémas familiers d’action et de représentation. Cette transformation réalisée dans les énoncés publicitaires surtout par substitution peut être envisagée, dans l’opinion de Blanche Grunig, sous deux angles: du point de vue du producteur ou du point de vue du récepteur. Pour ce qui est du producteur du slogan, celui-ci dispose d’un maximum de données: une formule figée, un élément extérieur (à savoir la Fanta, quelque part: „Cherchez la Fanta!” [Photo 6 – FANTA] / « Cherchez la femme! », „Toate drumurile duc undeva” [61] [Photo 7 – PRIMA TV] / « Tous les chemins mènent à Rome ») et un contexte offert par cette formule dans laquelle le producteur doit introduire par substitution l’élément extérieur. On fournit donc au récepteur, avec le slogan obtenu, une formule figée « mutilée » et pour participer utilement au jeu proposé il devra retrouver dans sa mémoire la formule figée et faire une substitution en sens inverse de celle réalisée par le producteur du slogan [62]. Un autre procédé de déformation des formules figées dans les slogans publicitaires, c’est, d’après Blanche Grunig, la substitution multiple qui implique le maintien d’un squelette minimal commun surtout pour ce qui est de la structure syntactique: „Ziua trece, prospeţimea rămâne” [63] [Photo 8 – NIVEA] / „Apa trece, pietrele rămân” [64].

126 Photo 6 Photo 7 Photo 8

20 Ani, nr. 12, Affiche des rues Avantaje, mai 2002 septembrie 2001

En guise de conclusion, nous pouvons affirmer que le texte publicitaire recourt particulièrement aux énoncés populaires « anonymes » représentant le parler (locutions expressives, proverbes, expressions idiomatiques, formules usuelles/stéréotypes de comparaison) dans l’intention déclarée d’être spontanément reconnus par la majorité des récepteurs, qui ont des niveaux culturels différents.

Notes: [1] Jean-Jacques Boutaud, Comunicare, semiotică şi semne publicitare. Teorii, modele şi aplicaţii, Editura Tritonic, Bucureşti, 2003, p. 63. [2] Mihail Bahtin, Problemele poeticii lui Dostoievski, Editura Univers, Bucureşti, 1970, p. 8. [3] Michel Riffaterre, « L’intertexte inconnu », en « Littérature » – Intertextualité médiévales, no. 41, février 1981, pp. 4-6. [4] Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1982, p. 8. [5] Sofia Dima, Lectura literară – un model situaţional, Editura „Ars Longa”, Iaşi, 2000, p. 174. [6] Ibidem, p. 175. [7] Ibidem, p. 176. [8] Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1973, p. 59. [9] Julia Kristeva, Sèméiotikè. Recherches pour une sémanalyse, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1969, p. 52. [10] Ibidem, p. 53. [11] Dominique Maingueneau, Genèses du discours, Pierre Mardaga, Bruxelles, 1984, p. 83. [12] Ibidem, p. 84. [13] Dominique Maingueneau, Pragmatique pour le discours littéraire, Bordas, Paris, 1990, p. 22. [14] Gérard Genette, op. cit., p. 7. [15] Cf. Mihaela Mancaş, in Angela Bidu-Vrănceanu et alii, Dicţionar de ştiinţe ale limbii. Teoria limbii. Modele lingvistice. Fonetică. Fonologie. Gramatică. Vocabular. Semantică. Semiotică. Istoria limbii. Dialectologie. Pragmatică. Sociolingvistică. Stilistică. Poetică. Retorică. Versificaţie. Naratologie, Editura Nemira, Bucureşti, 2001, p. 272. [16] Sofia Dima, op. cit., p. 177. [17] Gérard Genette, op. cit., p. 8. [18] Sofia Dima, op. cit., p. 177. [19] « Il était une fois une émission… » [notre traduction]. [20] « Il était une fois une princesse… » [notre traduction]. [21] Gérard Genette, op. cit., p. 8. [22] Angela Bidu-Vrănceanu et alii, op. cit., p. 41. [23] Ibidem, p. 42. [24] « Une émission qui a rendu heureux jusqu’à leur vieillesse un grand nombre de personnes » [notre traduction]. [25] « …Si vous aimez le jus naturel de fruits dans lequel vous retrouvez l’arôme du fruit fraîchement cueilli, alors il est très sûr que vous choisissiez Cappy…/ si vous aimez que le jus d’oranges soit pressé des meilleurs fruits, alors sachez que le jus Cappy est obtenu d’oranges bien mûres, soigneusement cueillies et choisies…/… Cappy comprend les meilleurs fruits dans un nouvel emballage pour que vous puissiez savourez ici comme n’importe où dans le monde le goût du jus que vous aimez » [notre traduction]. [26] Cf. Angela Bidu-Vrănceanu et alii, op. cit., p. 370. [27] Gérard Genette, op. cit., p. 11. [28] Ibidem, pp. 11–14. [29] Ibidem, pp. 33–34. [30] Ibidem, p. 91. [31] Marque d’un chocolat roumain qui date de l’époque communiste. [32] « Ma camarade, nous ne torélons pas une telle tenue pour la jeunesse communiste! » [33] Nous précisons que cette parenthèse et la suivante, incluses dans la citation de Genette, nous appartiennent. [34] Gérard Genette, op. cit., pp. 29–30.

127 [35] Ibidem, p. 44. [36] « Qui vole un œuf aujourd’hui, demain volera un bœuf » [notre traduction]. [37] « Qui casse un œuf aujourd’hui s’en sort! car les tessons apportent de la chance » [notre traduction]. [38] Ibidem, p. 132. [39] « Où il y a plusieurs (hommes), la force s’accroît » [notre traduction]. [40] « Où il y a deux (produits), le plaisir s’accroît » [notre traduction]. [41] « Où il n’y a qu’un, il n’y a ni de force, où il y a deux, la force s’accroît » [notre traduction]. [42] Sofia Dima, op. cit., p. 177. [43] Gérard Genette, op. cit., p. 451. [44] Ibidem, p. 181. [45] Gérard Genette, op. cit., pp. 264–393. [46] Sofia Dima, op. cit., pp. 183–186. [47] Idem. [48] Ibidem, p. 188. [49] Eugeniu Coşeriu, Limba funcţională, în Lecţii de lingvistică generală, Editura „Arc”, Chişinău, 2000, pp. 258–259. [50] id., Arhitectura şi structura limbii, în Prelegeri şi conferinţe (1992–1993); Iaşi [supliment la “Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară”, t. XXXIII/1992–1993], p. 55. [51] id., Limba funcţională…, p. 261. [52] Ibidem, pp. 259–262. [53] Ibidem, p. 261. [54] Sofia Dima, op. cit., p. 191. [55] Ibidem, pp. 191–193. [56] Ibidem, p. 193. [57] Eugeniu Coşeriu, Filozofia limbajului, în Prelegeri şi conferinţe (1992–1993); Iaşi [supliment la “Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară”, t. XXXIII/1992–1993], p. 22. [58] Stelian Dumistrăcel, Discursului repetat în textul jurnalistic. Tentaţia instituirii comuniunii fatice prin mass-media, Editura Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iaşi, 2006, p. 61. [59] Idem. [60] Ibidem, p. 63. [61] « Tous les chemins mènent quelque part » [notre traduction]. [62] Blanche Grunig, Les mots de la publicité. L’architecture du slogan, CNRS Éditions, Paris, 1998, p. 120. [63] « Le jour passe, la fraîcheur reste » [notre traduction]. [64] « L’eau passe, les pierres restent » [notre traduction].

Bibliographie: Bahtin, Mihail, Problemele poeticii lui Dostoievski, Editura Univers, Bucureşti, 1970. Barthes, Roland, Le plaisir du texte, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1973. Bidu-Vrănceanu, Angela, Călăraşu, Cristina, Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, Liliana, Mancaş, Mihaela, Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela, Dicţionar de ştiinţe ale limbii. Teoria limbii. Modele lingvistice. Fonetică. Fonologie. Gramatică. Vocabular. Semantică. Semiotică. Istoria limbii. Dialectologie. Pragmatică. Sociolingvistică. Stilistică. Poetică. Retorică. Versificaţie. Naratologie, Editura Nemira, Bucureşti, 2001. Boutaud, Jean-Jacques, Comunicare, semiotică şi semne publicitare. Teorii, modele şi aplicaţii, Editura Tritonic, Bucureşti, 2003. Coşeriu, Eugeniu, Arhitectura şi structura limbii, în Prelegeri şi conferinţe (1992–1993); Iaşi [supliment la “Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară”, t. XXXIII/1992–1993], pp. 49–64. id., Competenţa lingvistică, în Prelegeri şi conferinţe (1992–1993); Iaşi [supliment la “Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară”, t. XXXIII/1992–1993], pp. 27–47. id., Deontologia şi etica limbajului, în Prelegeri şi conferinţe (1992–1993); Iaşi [supliment la “Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară”, t. XXXIII/1992–1993], pp. 163–171. id., Filozofia limbajului, în Prelegeri şi conferinţe (1992–1993); Iaşi [supliment la “Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară”, t. XXXIII/1992–1993], pp. 7–26. id., Limba funcţională, în Lecţii de lingvistică generală, Editura „Arc”, Chişinău, 2000, pp. 249–274. Dima, Sofia, Lectura literară – un model situaţional, Editura „Ars Longa”, Iaşi, 2000. Dumistrăcel, Stelian, Discursului repetat în textul jurnalistic. Tentaţia instituirii comuniunii fatice prin mass-media, Editura Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iaşi, 2006. Genette, Gérard, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1982. Grunig, Blanche, Les mots de la publicité. L’architecture du slogan, CNRS Éditions, Paris, 1998. Kristeva, Julia, Sèméiotikè. Recherches pour une sémanalyse, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1969. Maingueneau, Dominique, Genèses du discours, Pierre Mardaga, Bruxelles, 1984. id., Pragmatique pour le discours littéraire, Bordas, Paris, 1990. Riffaterre, Michel, « L’intertexte inconnu », în « Littérature » – Intertextualité médiévales, no. 41, février 1981, pp. 4–7.

128 Două încercări de sistematizare a proceselor de analogie în lingvistică. Pe marginea concepţiilor lui J. Kuryłowicz şi Witold Mańczak

Ionel Apostolatu*

Rezumat: Lucrarea ia în discuţie încercările a doi lingvişti polonezi – Jerzy Kuryłowicz şi Witold Mańczak – de a elabora, la mijlocul secolului trecut, fiecare în felul său, o teorie generală a schimbărilor prin analogie, în sensul unei formalizări a dinamicii proceselor de analogie ce ar permite stabilirea, dacă nu chiar a cauzelor ori a condiţiilor care duc la declanşarea acestor procese, măcar a tendinţelor cu caracter general pe care le-ar urma analogia, odată ce intră în acţiune. Chiar dacă ambii lingvişti au recunoscut că nu se poate prevedea când anume se produce o schimbare prin analogie, au susţinut totuşi că, odată declanşat procesul, se pot stabili direcţiile generale de desfăşurare, fapt ce i-a determinat să vorbească despre existenţa unor „legi”, respectiv „ipoteze” sau tendinţe ale schimbărilor prin analogie. Cuvinte-cheie: analogie, tendinţe, ipoteze, „legi”, schimbare lingvistică

Abstract: The present paper focuses on the individual attempts of two Polish linguists – Jerzy Kuryłowicz and Witold Mańczak – to elaborate, in the mid-20th century, a general theory of the language changes brought about by analogy. This presupposed a formalization of the analogy process dynamics that would allow the determination of not only the causes or conditions that made those analogical processes take place but also the general tendencies that analogy would follow, once it took action. Even if both linguists admitted that it could not be foretold when exactly a change by means of analogy would take place, nevertheless they claimed that, once the process had started, it was possible to establish the general development directions, which made them speak about the existence of some “laws”, namely “hypotheses” or tendencies as far as analogical changes are concerned. Keywords: analogy, tendencies, hypotheses, “laws”, linguistic change

0. Majoritatea lingviştilor din secolul al XIX-lea care au studiat problema schimbării lingvistice (şi, în special, neogramaticii) au opus analogia legilor fonetice, subliniind caracterul regulat, mecanic al acestora din urmă, tulburat, uneori, de intervenţia „capricioasă” a primeia. Dacă, pentru transformările fonetice regulate, s-au putut determina, cu precizie de „lege”, condiţiile de declanşare, căile de manifestare şi eventualele constrângeri (i.e. limitele în timp şi / sau în spaţiu), pentru analogie nu s-a putut fac nicio descriere care să precizeze ce declanşează şi când anume se declanşează acest fenomen, în ce împrejurări, pe ce căi, cu ce consecinţe sau în ce limite. Desigur, unii au încercat să subdividă analogia în mai multe tipuri, unele având caracter mai regulat, aproape sistematic (ca de pildă, cele care se produc în morfologie, unde sunt afectate, de multe ori, paradigme întregi, ca în cazul extinderii unor desinenţe sau sufixe, ori cele care privesc domeniul formării cuvintelor), iar altele, mai degrabă sporadic (ca în sintaxă ori în cazul fenomenelor de etimologie populară, contaminaţie şi hipercorectitudine). Cu toate acestea, în niciuna dintre situaţii nu putem vorbi de caracterul previzibil al analogiei. Chiar şi cele mai regulate tipuri de analogie nu ne oferă garanţia previzibilităţii, de vreme ce astfel de schimbări nu se produc cu necesitate, ci reprezintă doar una dintre reacţiile posibile ale vorbitorului într-o situaţie determinată. Caracterul imprevizibil al analogiei ne face să credem că nu se poate elabora o teorie solidă, pe deplin predictivă, a schimbărilor prin analogie. Acest lucru l-au încercat, totuşi, la mijlocul secolului trecut, doi lingvişti polonezi: Jerzy Kuryłowicz şi Witold Mańczak. Ambii au recunoscut că nu se poate prevedea când anume se produce o schimbare prin analogie, dar au susţinut că, odată declanşat procesul, se pot stabili direcţiile generale de desfăşurare. Mai exact, nimeni nu poate şti cu siguranţă dacă analogia se va declanşa sau nu în anumite împrejurări determinate, dar putem identifica anumite tendinţe cu caracter general pe care le-ar urma analogia, odată ce intră în acţiune (vezi Mc.Mahon, Language Change, p. 77).

1. Jerzy Kuryłowicz, unul dintre cei mai importanţi indo-europenişti de la mijlocul secolului XX (a fost elev al lui Meillet), acordă spaţii largi fenomenului analogiei şi rolului său în schimbările morfologice într-un studiu intitulat La nature des procès dits « analogiques » (1949). Autorul prezintă aici, pe baza, mai degrabă, a unor intuiţii la care a ajuns în urma mai multor ani de studii

* Lect. dr., Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos” din Galaţi

129 comparativ-istorice asupra limbilor indo-europene, un număr de şase „formule” sau „legi”, care, în opinia sa, guvernează dinamica şi direcţiile de manifestare a creaţiilor analogice. Aceste „legi” nu sunt menite să dispună când anume se produce o analogie, ci, mai degrabă, ce se întâmplă acolo unde o analogie devine posibilă (Hock, Principles, p. 210-211). În cele ce urmează, vom prezenta aceste „legi”(apud Lepage, De l’analogie, p. 66-67), încercând să vedem, acolo unde am considerat că e cazul, în ce măsură ele se pot proba cu material oferit de limba română: 1.1. „(I) Un morphème bipartite tend à s'assimiler un morphème isofonctionnel consistant uniquement en un des deux éléments c'est-à-dire le morphème composé replace le morphème simple”. De pildă, în română, există tendinţa cumulului de mărci pentru acelaşi conţinut gramatical. Astfel, ideea de plural, la unele substantive feminine, este marcată suplimentar, pe lângă desinenţa -i, şi prin alternanţa a – ă din radical: parte – părţi, carte – cărţi etc. După modelul acestor substantive, s-a introdus alternanţa a – ă şi la pluralele cetaţi, corabii, sabii, care au devenit cetăţi, corăbii, săbii.

Hock (Principles, p. 212) e de părere că ar trebui să luăm această primă regulă a lui Kuryłowicz mai mult în spiritul, decât în litera ei, şi o reformulează spunând că e vorba, mai degrabă, de o preferinţă pentru hiperdeterminare sau cumul de mărci, ceea ce se referă atât la situaţii ca cea din română, pe care am prezentat-o, cât şi la cazurile în care se preferă, în locul morfemului abstract zero, un morfem concret, cum e cazul, în română, al mai multor desinenţe de persoană la imperfectul indicativ, care au fost refăcute prin analogie, după ce desinenţele etimologice se pierduseră.

1.2. „(II) Les actions dites « analogiques » suivent la direction: formes de fondation → formes fondées dont le rapport découle de leurs sphères d'mploi”. Această regulă prezumează că orice inovaţie analogică porneşte de la o formă de bază ori simplă având ca rezultat o formă derivată. Această regulă se aplică, de pildă, în cazul formelor de plural, care sunt derivate în raport cu cele de singular (de exemplu, timp – timpuri, şi, prin analogie, câmpuri, vânturi etc., cu extinderea desinenţei -uri), sau în cazul derivării lexicale progresive (viluţă este faţă de vilă ceea ce este căsuţă faţă de casă sau măsuţă faţă de masă), dar nu mai e valabilă în cazul derivatelor regresive (lexicale sau morfologice) sau al trunchierilor, care pot funcţiona, la rândul lor, ca forme de bază (de exemplu, singularul copac a fost refăcut sub influenţa pluralului copaci, omonim cu vechiul singular, iar apoi şi-a creat derivatul copăcel, iar forme trunchiate se adaptează morfologic, flexionând după categoriile de gen, număr sau determinare: prof / profă / profi / profe / proful / profului / profei / profilor). 1.3. „(III) Une structure consistant en membre constitutif plus membre subordonné forme le fondement du membre constitutif isolé, mais isofonctionnel”. Este cazul, practic, al aşa-numitelor condensări lexicale sau lexico-semantice. Fenomenul, semnalat încă de Bréal, în cap. XII din Essai de sémantique (1897), constă, în esenţă, în abrevierea unei sintagme prin suprimarea şi înlocuirea determinatului prin determinant sau, mai rar, a determinantului prin determinat. Atunci când două cuvinte sunt în mod obişnuit utilizate împreună, formând o unitate de expresie, unul poate fi suprimat, partea care supravieţuieşte rămânând să ţină locul întregului. Astfel, semnul, deşi fragmentat, rămâne adecvat obiectului, şi asta deoarece sensurile celor două cuvinte s-au amalgamat într-unul singur, care, în măsura în care rămâne uşor de identificat, poate suporta scurtarea, condensarea expresiei. Fenomenul condensării lexicale este întâlnit relativ frecvent în limba română, în special în cazul sintagmelor de tipul substantiv + determinant atributiv. Dintre cele mai cunoscute exemple de acest tip, intrate de mult în circulaţie, amintim: roşii (subst.) < pătlăgele roşii; vinete (subst.) < pătlăgele vinete; rapid, accelerat (subst.) < tren rapid / accelerat; murg (subst.) < cal murg („negru-roşcat, castaniu închis sau cenuşiu”); mici / mititei (subst.) < cârnaţi mici; integrală, intermediară < pâine integrală / intermediară etc. (Apostolatu, Condensarea, p. 20). 1.4. „(IV) Quand à la suite d'une transformation morphologique une forme subit la différenciation, la forme nouvelle correspond à sa fonction primaire (de formation), la forme ancienne est réservée pour la fonction secondaire (fondée)”. Această regulă poate fi foarte bine ilustrată cu situaţia din limba română care a dus la scurtarea aşa-zisului infinitiv lung de tipul cantare, care, la un moment dat, dezvoltase două valori diferite: de verb (valoarea primară) şi de substantiv (prin conversiune). Formele lungi, cu sufixul - re, vor evolua în direcţia consolidării caracterului nominal, devenind cu timpul substantive. Ca reacţie la tendinţa de deverbalizare a infinitivului, se creează formele scurte de infinitiv, rezultate

130 prin izolarea şi eliminarea sufixului -re. Se ajunge astfel ca, din raţiuni de ordin funcţional, forma, iniţial unică, ce exprima cele două valori, să se scindeze, valoarea cea nouă exprimându-se în continuare prin forma primară, iar valoarea cea mai veche, creându-şi o formă derivată din cea etimologică. În legătură cu această situaţie, Al. Lambrior a stabilit următoarea „lege”, mult mai veche (1882) decât cea a lui Kuryłowicz: „când din una şi aceeaşi formă se nasc două categorii gramaticale deosebite, atunci forma însăşi se diferenţiază în două: şedere a rămas supt forma aceasta ca substantiv, iar ca infinitiv, spre diferenţiere, a pierdut silaba -re, « a şedea »” (Lambrior, Introducere, p. 116) [1]. Desigur, s-ar putea da şi contraexemple. De pildă, forma soră a dobândit, în timp (prin calchiere), pe lângă înţelesul primar de „rudă”, şi pe acela de „infirmieră”. Acestei diferenţieri semantice îi corespunde şi o diferenţiere în plan flexionar, respectiv în flexiunea de GD singular articulat. Numai că, de data aceasta, înţelesului primar îi corespunde flexiunea neregulată, etimologică: soră – surorii (< lat. soror, sororis), iar înţelesului derivat îi corespunde o formă regulată, analogică: soră – sorei (cf. mamă – mamei). La fel stau lucrurile şi cu situaţiile în care, la acelaşi substantiv, avem a face cu forme duble sau triple de plural (diferenţiate sau nu semantic), dintre care multe s-au creat prin analogie. 1.5. „(V) Pour établir une différence d’ordre central la langue abandonnée une différence d'ordre plus marginal”. Această „lege” statuează faptul că, în interiorul unei paradigme, anumite opoziţii funcţionale pot fi mai importante decât altele. Dacă acestea, accidental, se pierd, se manifestă tendinţa de restabilire a lor, chiar cu preţul sacrificării altor opoziţii, mai puţin importante. De pildă, în urma apocopei, în trecerea de la latină la română, se pierd desinenţele etimologice la formele de imperfect indicativ, gradul de omonimie la care se ajunge fiind atât de mare, încât patru din cele şase forme personale sunt identice. Pericolul de a nu se mai face distincţia de persoană la singular (cantabam, cantabas, cantabat > cânta) a fost înlăturat pe calea analogiei, care a refăcut desinenţele de persoana I (-m) şi a II-a (-i), chiar dacă pentru aceasta s-a ajuns la omonima de număr între persoana I singular (cântam) şi persoana I plural (cântam). Vorbitorii au considerat, probabil, că opoziţia de persoană e mult mai importantă, în acest caz, decât opoziţia de număr, pe care, în consecinţă, au sacrificat-o. Desigur, această lege „păcătuieşte” prin aceea că nu poate stabili cu precizie ce opoziţii sunt mai importante şi în ce împrejurări. Pentru că, revenind la paradigma imperfectului românesc, dacă vorbitorii nu au fost deranjaţi de omonimia de număr la persoana I, aceiaşi vorbitori au reacţionat împotriva aceleiaşi situaţii, existente multă vreme, la persoana a III-a (el cânta – ei cânta), astfel că, la un moment dat, au inovat, introducând la plural desinenţa analogică -u, inovaţie care s-a impus şi s-a generalizat începând cu secolul al XIX-lea, în special la recomandarea lui I.H. Rădulescu. 1.6. „(VI) Le premier et le second terme d'une proportion appartiennent à l'origine à des systèmes différents: l'un appartient au parler imité l'autre au parler imitant”. Această ultimă „lege” este foarte importantă şi îşi dovedeşte valabilitatea în situaţiile de hipercorectitudine, acolo unde este evident că se suprapun două forme aparţinând unor sisteme diferite sau, mai bine zis, unor norme diferite: norma proprie, a vorbitorului, şi o normă model, spre care se tinde. Astfel, o formă precum piftea devine posibilă în măsura în care vorbitorul conştientizează caracterul dialectal al unor rostiri de tipul k’iŝor, k’atrâ (caracteristice propriului grai, dar faţă de care doreşte să se distanţeze), în rândul cărora aşază şi pe k’iftea, luând ca model rostirile marcate prin „prestigiu” (pe care, de altfel, le cunoaşte foarte bine, dar care nu fac neapărat parte din norma sa): piĉor, piatră. Odată proporţia stabilită, forma piftea apare ca întemeiată, inversând, astfel, raportul etimologic cu forma pe care o evită (chiftea). Dacă, în cazul primelor cinci „legi”, posibilităţile de realizare a unei analogii ţin doar de sistemul gramatical propriu-zis, în cazul ultimei „legi” devine evidentă intervenţia factorului social. Prin urmare, Kuryłowicz atrage atenţia că interpretarea acestor formule trebuie să ţină seama, pe de o parte, de caracterul social al limbii, iar, pe de altă parte, de caracterul individal al vorbirii. Mai exact, spaţiul de desfăşurare a acţiunii analogiei (ce rezultă într-o schimbare morfologică) este, în acelaşi timp, extern (adică în interiorul unei comunităţi lingvistice) şi intern (în interiorul unui sistem gramatical). Pentru că, pe de o parte, un anumit sistem aparţine unui număr mare de indivizi, iar, pe de altă parte, individul reprezintă, la rândul lui, punctul în care se intersectează mai multe sisteme (= graiuri, dialecte, limbi). Pretenţia lui Kuryłowicz de a stabili, pentru analogie, un statut similar celui ce caracterizează legile fonetice, cel puţin din punctul de vedere al gradului de prevedere a acţiunii în

131 anumite condiţii, se loveşte de realitatea că manifestarea oricărei analogii, deşi posibilă la un moment dat, într-un anumit punct al sistemului, este dependentă de factori sociali. Dacă ea se poate produce, nu înseamnă că se produce cu necesitate.

„Somme toute les choses se présentent de la façon suivante: Il résulte d'un système grammatical concret quelles transformations « analogiques » sont possibles (formules I – V). Mais c'est le facteur social (formule VI) qui décide si et dans quelle mesure ces possibilités se réalisent. Il en est comme de l'eau de pluie qui doit prendre un chemin prévu (gouttières, égouts, conduits) une fois qu'il pleut. Mais la pluie n'est pas une nécessité. De même les actions prévues de l' « analogie » ne sont pas des nécessités. Etant obligée à compter avec ces deux facteurs différents la linguistique ne peut jamais prévoir les changements à venir A côté de la dépendance mutuelle et de la hiérarchie d'éléments linguis tiques à l'intérieur d'un système donné elle a affaire à la contingence historique de la structure sociale. Et bien que la linguistique générale penche plutôt vers l'analyse du système comme tel, les problèmes historiques concrets ne trouvent une solution satisfaisante que si l'on tient compte des deux facteurs simultanément” (apud Lepage, De l’analogie, p. 67).

2. Mai rezervat în privinţa unei teorii generale a fenomenului analogiei, Witold Mańczak aduce o serie de amendări „legilor” lui Kuryłowicz şi formulează, la rândul său, un număr de nouă „ipoteze” sau tendinţe generale ale schimbărilor prin analogie [2]. Spre deosebire de Kuryłowicz, ale cărui reguli sunt, mai degrabă, rezultatul unor intuiţii sau reflecţii proprii, Mańczak îşi întemeiază observaţiile pe analiza unui bogat material de limbă extras din numeroase manuale şi gramatici ale diferitelor limbi europene. De asemenea, spre deosebire de Kuryłowicz, care a pus accentul mai mult pe schimbările în morfologie, Mańczak are în vedere mai ales latura fonologică a cuvintelor şi morfemelor, incluzând lungimea corpului fonetic al acestora [3]. Prezentăm mai jos cele nouă tendinţe generale ale schimbărilor prin analogie stabilite de Witold Mańczak, încercând să vedem, ca şi în cazul „legilor” lui Kuryłowicz, cum pot fi ele probate cu material lingvistic românesc. 2.1. „Hypothèse I: Abstraction faite des formes d‘un paradigme, les mots plus longs sont souvent refaits d‘après les mots plus courts que vice versa“. Această „ipoteză” se confirmă, în limba română, dacă avem în vedere, de pildă, situaţia substantivelor de declinarea I de tipul stea – stele. După acest model (moştenit din latină şi întărit, ulterior, printr-o serie de împrumuturi turceşti), numeroase alte substantive împrumutate şi-au refăcut un singular în -ea: canea (< canelă), caramea (< caramelă), flanea (< flanelă), sardea (< sardelă) etc. Astfel, tipul -elă – -ele a fost înlocuit de tipul -ea – -ele. Tot aici, putem da ca exemplu şi situaţia verbelor latineşti de conjugarea a II-a, a III-a şi a IV-a care aveau la finală -eo sau -io şi care, în trecerea la limba română, au pierdut vocalele palatale e / i în hiat, prin analogie cu formele, mai numeroase, în -o (canto > cântu > cânt; duco > ducu > duc): taceo > taco > tacu > tac; facio > *faco > facu > fac; dormio > *dormo > dormu > dorm etc. 2.2. „Hypothèse II: L‘alternance du radical es plus souvent abolie qu‘introduite“. Această „ipoteză” a suscitat cele mai multe comentarii din partea specialiştilor, deoarece ea vine în contradicţie cu prima „lege” a lui Kuryłowicz. Astfel, în timp ce acesta din urmă susţine că există o preferinţă pentru marcarea suplimentară (prin flexiune internă) a opoziţiilor gramaticale, Mańczak afirmă că tendinţa este, mai degrabă, de păstrare a unităţii radicalului în interiorul unei paradigme. În realitate, cele două teorii nu sunt cu totul ireconciliabile, deoarece ele au în vedere niveluri diferite, şi anume „legea” lui Kuryłowicz se referă la nivelul morfematic, iar „tendinţa” lui Mańczak, la nivelul fonologic. Putem ilustra această „ipoteză” cu situaţia verbelor iotacizate din limba română (atât cele cu iotacizare etimologică, de tipul văz, auz, cât şi cele cu iotacizare analogică, de tipul: crez, spui), al căror radical a fost refăcut ulterior, analogic, după formele din paradigmă, care, date fiind condiţiile fonetice, păstraseră finala radicalului intactă [4]. 2.3. „Hypothèse III: Abstraction faite des cas où l‘on a affaire à un mot à désinence et à un mot sans désinence, une forme flexionnelle plus longue es plus souvent refaite d‘après une forme flexionnelle plus courte que vice versa“. A treia „ipoteză” este, până la un punct, similară cu prima, cu deosebirea că, în vreme ce aceasta din urmă se aplică cuvintelor, cealaltă are în vedere formele flexionare din interiorul aceleiaşi paradigme. Putem da ca exemplu situaţia verbelor neregulate mânca şi usca, care la indicativul prezent singular cunosc, regional, formele mânc, mânci, mâncă, respectiv usc, uşti, uscă, prin

132 analogie cu celelalte forme, care nu prezintă reduplicarea în radical (mâncăm, mâncai, mâncasem, uscăm, uscai, uscând etc.), dar şi ca o tendinţă de unificare a radicalului (vezi „ipoteza” II). 2.4. „Hypothèse IV: Les désinences zéro sont plus souvent remplacées par les désinences pleines que vice versa“. Această „ipoteză” se află în deplin acord cu prima „lege” a lui Kuryłowicz. 2.5. „Hypothèse V: Les désinences monosyllabiques sont plus souvent remplacées par les désinences polysyllabiques que vice versa“. Această ipoteză a fost probată de Mańczak cu materialul oferit de istoria limbii poloneze, însă e destul de dificil de aplicat la limba română. Un exemplu am putea, totuşi, oferi, şi anume apariţia desinenţei de plural -uri (vechi -ure) pe baza terminaţiei latineşti -ora (tempus – tempora), care a fost decupată printr-o falsă analiză a radicalului şi învestită cu valoare morfematică, în locul vechii desinenţe -a. Această desinenţă a cunoscut, în limba română, o extindere analogică foarte însemnată, dând naştere la numeroase forme duble de plural, diferenţiate sau nu semantic (vise – visuri, nivele – niveluri, chibrite – chibrituri, hotele – hoteluri, coate – coturi etc.). 2.6. „Hypothèse VI: Les formes de l‘indicatif provoquent plus souvent la réfection des formes des autres modes que vice versa“. Pentru limba română, ipoteza se confirmă în cazul influenţei indicativului asupra conjunctivului (mai puţin la persoana a III-a) sau asupra imperativului negativ. Ca un contraexemplu privitor la istoria limbii române, putem nota faptul că mai mult ca perfectul indicativului românesc continuă, în realitate, mai mult ca perfectul conjunctivului latin, fenomen care, de altfel, individualizează limba română între celelalte limbi romanice. 2.7. „Hypothèse VII: Les formes du présent provoquent plus souvent la réfection des formes des autres temps que vice versa“. Putem avea în vedere aici originea desinenţei -i de persoana a II-a, al cărei punct de plecare îl constituie indicativul prezent, persoana a II-a singular al verbelor latineşti de conjugarea a IV-a (tipul audis). De aici, această desinenţă s-a extins analogic la formele de persoana a II-a ale altor timpuri sau moduri, indiferent de conjugare. 2.8. „Hypothèse VIII: S‘il y a une différence entre la flexion d‘un nom géographique et celle d‘un nom commun, par ailleurs semblables, les cas locaux présentent en général un caractère archaïque tandis que dans les cas non locaux il y a le plus souvent des innovations“. 2.9. „Hypothèse IX: Si une forme du paradigme d‘un nom géographique subit une transformation analogique sous l‘influence d‘une autre forme du même paradigme, le point de départ du changement se trouve plus souvent dans les cas locaux que dans les cas non locaux“. Ultimele două „ipoteze” pornesc de la constatarea că numele geografice se utilizează mai frecvent în anumite contexte marcate [+ Locativ], contexte în care respectivul nume poate fi substituit prin adverbul de loc unde. În limba română, astfel de nume apar cel mai des în acuzativ, în grup prepoziţional, cu prepoziţii ca în, la, de la, până la, către, spre, înspre, care indică punctul de plecare, direcţia şi limita în spaţiu a acţiunii. Luând un exemplu concret, de pildă substantivul Galaţi, vom observa că acesta apare mai mult în contexte de tipul: Locuiesc în Galaţi, Plec din Galaţi, Mă îndrept spre Galaţi etc. (contexte în care este exclusă determinarea hotărâtă), şi mai rar în contexte de tipul: Galaţiul este un oraş poluat, Faleza Galaţiului este îngrijită (faţă de faleza din Galaţi...) etc. În legătură cu acest nume (şi altele asemănătoare, ca Bucureşti, Iaşi, Ploieşti etc.) mai trebuie notat că, în contextele locative, îşi menţine declinarea arhaică (de pluralia tantum), în timp ce, în contextele non-locative, îşi pierde această declinare, fiind asimilat numelor la singular şi flexionând prin analogie cu acestea: Galaţiul, Iaşiul (faţă de arh. Galaţii, Iaşii), Galaţiului (faţă de arh. Galaţilor, Iaşilor).

3. În încheierea prezentării teoriilor lui Kuryłowicz şi ale lui Mańczak, dorim să subliniem faptul că, în ciuda unor critici pe care le-au suscitat „legile” şi „ipoteze” lor generalizatoare, meritele celor doi lingvişti polonezi sunt remarcabile [5], iar încercările lor de formalizare a unui fenomen atât de complex precum analogia reprezintă un moment de cotitură în istoria ideilor lingvistice, în general, şi ale lingvisticii istorice, în particular.

Note: [*] Punctul de vedere formulat de Lambrior a fost mai târziu preluat şi dezvoltat de J. Byck, în studiul Originea infinitivului scurt în limba română.

133 [2] Mańczak şi-a expus teoriile cu privire la analogie în mai multe lucrări, dintre care amintim, ca mai importante, Tendances générales des changements analogiques (1958), Les lois du développement analogique (1978) şi Laws of analogy (1980). [3] O analiză pertinentă a abordărilor teoretice (inclusiv a diferenţelor dintre ele) ale celor doi lingvişti polonezi în problema analogiei găsim la Hock, Principles, p. 210-237 (vezi şi Mc.Mahon, Language Change, p. 76-80, Hock, Analogical Change, p. 445-448). [4] Desigur, formele iotacizate se mai păstrează astăzi în graiuri, însă la nivelul limbii literare ele nu sunt acceptate. [5] Un savant de talia lui Coşeriu îl citează adesea pe „marele lingvist polonez” J. Kuryłowicz, ale cărui teorii le valorifică mai ales în lucrarea Sincronie, diacronie şi istorie (în orig. Sincronia, diacronia e historia, Madrid, 1973).

Bibliografie: Apostolatu, Ionel, Condensarea lexicală în limba română, în „Actele Colocviului Internaţional Discursul intelectual la răspântiile istoriei” – Galaţi, 26-28 mai 2007, Editura Europlus, Galaţi, 2007, p. 20-26. Hock, Hans Henrik, Analogical Change, în Janda & Joseph (ed.), Historical Linguistics, p. 441-460. Hock, Hans Henrik, Principles of Historical Linguistics, second edition, Berlin & New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1991. Janda, Richard D. and Joseph, Brian D., On Language, Change, and Language Change – Or, Of History, Linguistics, and Historical Linguistics, în Joseph & Janda (ed.), Historical Linguistics, p. 3-180. Kuryłowicz, J., La nature des proces dits « analogiques », in Acta Linguistica 5, 1949, pp 121–138. Lambrior, Al., Introducere la „Carte de citire”, 1882, în Lambrior, Studii, p. 90-140. Lambrior, Al., Studii de lingvistică şi folcloristică, ediţie îngrijită şi studiu introductiv de Ion Nuţă, Junimea, Iaşi, 1976. Lepage, Yves, De l’analogie rendant compte de la commutation en linguistique, Grenoble, 2003. Mańczak, Witold, Tendances générales des changements analogiques, Lingua, volume 7, 1957–1958, pp 298-325. Mc.Mahon, April M.S., Understanding Language Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994

134 Double and Multiple Negation in English and Romanian. A Contrastive Approach

Rodica-Cristina Apostolatu*

Abstract: The status of double and multiple negation in English has long been debated on the argument that it is simply incorrect to have more than one negative element in a Standard English sentence. In non- standard English sentences such as ‘I don’t have no money’, double negation is frequently used. It has a long history in the spoken language. Crystal (1988) and Pinker (1994) point out that it was common in Middle English and had the effect of making negation more emphatic. Our paper aims at presenting double and multiple negation in contemporary Standard English and Romanian. Keywords: negation, linguistic studies, approval, disapproval, affirmation

Negation is one of the most basic conceptual devices of language. It is so fundamental that it is difficult to imagine either a natural or an artificial language that could exist without it. The uses of negation are numerous; the most obvious are in denials. Very often we know only enough about an event to be able to say what it is not; for instance, we say Mary isn’t at school because we cannot say for certain where Mary is – we only know where she is not. Double and multiple negation presupposes, alongside with predicate negation, supplementary negations, either of some other part of the sentence, as in the case of double negation:

Nu a venit nimeni. or of several parts of the sentence, as in the case of multiple negation:

Nici una dintre fete nu a făcut nicio ispravă.

If we analyze the examples above, we can say that the well-known assertion that two negatives equal an affirmative is not erroneous as far as Romanian is concerned. It is worth mentioning that double and multiple negation is very frequent in Romanian and a rarity in modern English and when it appears, it characterises uneducated speech. The existence of multiple negation may be explained by the speaker’s desire to stress the negative character of the statement, by using negation not only with the predicate but also with any other word capable of receiving it. Thus, instead of limiting negation to a single position, the speaker gives a negative colouring to the whole sentence. For instance:

El n-a făcut niciodată nimic rău nimănui.

This sentence can be translated into English in different ways:

He didn’t ever do any harm to anybody. He never did any harm to anybody. He did no harm to anybody ever. To nobody did he ever do any harm.

The examples above illustrate the fact that it is not allowed to use more than one negation in an English sentence, whereas in the Romanian sentences it is accepted the impressive number of four negative elements. There are a lot of negative non-negative [1] pairs in English that correspond to the Romanian negation, such as: nimeni (nobody – not anybody, no one – not anyone), nimic (nothing – not anything), niciodată (never – not ever) and so on. Another structural observation that derives from the analysis of the English examples mentioned above is the tendency to attach the negative element to the first word. This is especially valid when the subject is negated. Therefore, we can say:

* Assistant, PhD Candidate, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

135 Nobody ever helped her. or Never did anybody help her. but never:

Anybody never helped her. or: Ever did nobody help her.

One negative element in an English sentence automatically imposes the use of non- negative doublets wherever Romanian places supplementary reinforcing negative elements:

N-am răspuns nimănui nimic. I didn’t answer anybody anything.

Nici lui nu i-a plăcut deloc. He didn’t like it at all, either.

It is worth mentioning that if the English sentence contains the words nobody in the nominative and never, formally and obligatorily the statement becomes partially negative because the predicate remains positive, despite the fact that the meaning of the statement is wholly negative:

Nimeni nu l-a văzut venind acasă. Nobody saw him come home.

Nu am fost niciodată în străinătate. I have never been abroad.

When dealing with double and multiple negation, it is important to mention an interesting case in modern English, namely the so-called resumptive negation. It is a sort of negative supplement with an obvious emphatic role, functioning as reinforcement to a negative statement.

I didn’t like to, not after what happened. I’ll never do such a thing, not I!

As we cannot draw a rigid boundary between sentences, this supplementary negation could be considered as belonging to the main statement which would thus contain two negations. Double negation may appear in English in the case of an enumeration of things which culminates in the word nothing (Rom. nimic):

…….no paper, no pen, no ink, no nothing.

This obviously emphatic construction is colloquial. The enumeration would normally end with the words not nothing. Double negation may also appear in English when using the words hardly and scarcely. These are words with a negative meaning usually not associated with the negator not, even by well-known writers such as Shaw, Kipling etc.:

You can’t hardly tell who anyone is. (Shaw) He wasn’t changed at all hardly. (Kipling)

There are also cases in which hardly and scarcely are associated with indirect negations, of the without type, although they are considered ungrammatical:

Without scarcely hearing a word. (Thackeray)

136

In contrast with English, in Romanian the use of the correspondents of hardly (Rom. abia, cu greu) and scarcely (Rom. abia dacă) is not associated with a negative element. For instance:

Nu era deloc schimbat. Abia dacă era schimbat.

Nu ţin deloc să rămân. Cu greu s-ar spune că aş vrea să rămân.

In conclusion, the most important traits that distinguish negation in Romanian from the negation in English are the following: If in Romanian the existence of a negation within a statement does not exclude the use of other negations within the same statement, in English the use of any other negation within the same statement is excluded; In contrast with Romanian, the negative signal not (n’t) at the English predicate must obligatorily be preceded by the auxiliary do in the absence of other auxiliaries or modals; The existence of a negation in the English sentence automatically requires the use of the non-negative doublets wherever Romanian uses supplementary reinforcing negations; To the Romanian adverb nu correspond two forms in the English language, no and not, with different syntactic behaviour, the former being able to form non-analysable simple negative sentences functioning as an answer to a previously formulated question, or being able to accompany a noun within a partial negation, the latter being able to form only non-analysable subordinate negative direct object clauses or being able to accompany the predicate within an integral negation, or other parts of speech within a partial negation.

Note: [1] By “non-negative” we mean only the formal aspect of the word, as we perceive its content as negative. Non-negative terms appear either in the presence of a negated predicate or in the presence of some negative terms.

References: Gazdar, Gerald, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Ivan A. Sag (1985). Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haegeman, Liliane and Raffaella Zanuttini (1990). Negative Concord in West Flemish. University of Geneva, MS. Heim, Irene (1982). The semantics of definite and indefinite Noun Phrases. PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. Higginbotham, James and Robert May (1981). Questions, quantifiers, and crossing. The Linguistic Review 1. 41-79. Horn, Laurence R., and Yasuhiko Kato (editors) (2000). Negation and polarity: Syntactic and semantic perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klima, Edward (1964). Negation in English. in J. A. Fodor and J. J. Katz (eds.). The structure of language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Labov, William (1972). Negative attraction and negative concord. Language 48, 773-818. Ladusaw, William A. (1979). Polarity sensitivity as inherent scope relations. PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin. Laka, I. (1990). Negation in syntax: On the nature of functional categories and projections. PhD dissertation, MIT. Linebarger, Marcia (1980). The grammar of negative polarity. PhD dissertation, MIT. Progovac, Ljilijana (1988). A binding approach to polarity sensitivity. PhD dissertation, University of Southern California. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., and Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman. Zanuttini, Raffaella (1991). Syntactic Properties of Sentential Negation: A Comparative Study of Romance Languages. University of Pennsylvania, PhD dissertation.

137 On Circumstances in the English Language. A Study Case

Oana Cenac*

Abstract: With this paper, we shall tackle the issue of circumstances in the English language paying a special attention to the semantic roles of each and every type of them, together with their classification and relevance for the sentence. Keywords: semantic roles, circumstances, locative, temporal, process, respect, contingency, degree.

Rezumat: Demersul nostru vizează problema circumstanţialului în limba engleză acordând o atenţie specială rolurilor semantice ale fiecărui tip în parte cu evidenţierea tipurile de circumstanţiale şi a relevanţei acestora în ansamblul propoziţiei.

Every conversation that we may have with the member of our family or a friend might be seen as a drama with actors (or participants) who take on a particular roles and it takes place within a setting, which we may or may not choose to specify. In the example “John offered Anna a flower on the bench last night.” the participants in the drama of “offering” are John and Anna and a flower. The drama of “offering” has the cast of “offerer”, “offeree” and “thing offered”; they have the semantic roles of agentive, recipient and affected respectively. The other two elements represent the setting (or circumstances) of the drama. They indicate us where it took place (“on the bench”) and when it took place (“last night”). The participants are more or less obligatory elements in a sentence. A particular situation type, represented by a verb with a particular meaning, expects a certain cast of participants, represented by nouns with appropriate semantic roles. The situation of offering in the example above expects agentive, recipient and affected participants. Without the explicit or implicit presence of one of these participants, the sentence is incomplete. On the other hand, circumstances are usually additional information about a situation which we may include in a sentence, or not, as a matter of choice. Nevertheless, there are cases in which the circumstantial element is more or less obligatory. Eg. They are playing the Nut Cracker in the Palace Hall. I have put the vegetables on the table. I bought the fruits in the market. She lives in Bucharest. The horses galloped across the field. The circumstance in the Palace Hall may be omitted without making the sentence incomplete; the situation of “playing” does not require the expression of place. However, in the case of “buying”, the situation implies a buyer, goods bought and the source of goods. To omit the circumstance in the market makes the sentence incomplete, unless “I bought the fruits” is intended as a denial of “I stole the fruits” or “I grew the fruits”. With situation types involving movement, such as the example with gallop, there is usually an expectation of a place from, to or within which the movement occurs, besides a person or thing undertaking the movement. In the case of the second sentence, the circumstance “on the table” is obligatory; if it is omitted, the resulted construction cannot be considered as “complete”: *I’ve put the vegetables. The same situation occurs with the sentence “She lives in Bucharest.” where the omission of the circumstance “in Bucharest” turns the construction into an incomplete sentence. The distinction between participant and circumstance is not a clear-cut issue. Consider the following examples: (1) The manager sent a letter to every employee. (2) The manager sent apologies to the meeting. (3) The manager sent a substitute to the meeting. In the first case, the situation with send has the participants agentive (the manager), affected (a letter) and recipient (every employee).

* Lecturer, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

138 In the third case, the situation with send has the participants agentive (the manager), affected (a substitute) and a circumstance of place (to the meeting) referring to where the affected participant was sent. The sentence (1) may have the paraphrase “The manager has sent every employee a letter” but (3) may not have the same paraphrase. The element “to the meeting” in (2) appears to be intermediate between these two interpretations. However, it is rather difficult to indicate which question it answers: (4) Who has the manager sent his apologies to? (5) Where has the manager sent his apologies? If (4) is the appropriate question then this would point to the analysis of “to the meeting” as a recipient participant, but if (5) is the appropriate question then “to the meeting” is to be interpreted as a circumstance of place. Nevertheless, both (4) and (5) could be appropriate questions to which (2) would be an answer, though we may regard (5) as preferable.

Types of circumstances The examples John offered Anna a flower on the bench last night.” has two types of circumstance expressed: place (on the bench) and time (last night). These are given the labels locative and temporal, and they are the two most commonly occurring circumstances in sentences. There are four further types of circumstances, which we shall analyze below: process, respect, contingency, degree. Most of these, including locative and temporal, have a number of subdivisions. • Locative is a label which subsumes a number of subtypes of circumstance relating to space: position, direction and distance. Position is a static notion by contrast with the dynamic direction. It provides an answer to the question where? In the example “He sat on the edge of the bed”, the position locative is the underlined construction. Direction locatives refer to three different kinds of movement in space: movement from a source, movement to a goal, and movement along a path. In the example “The student rushed from the class without a word”, the source directional is “from the class”. The verb rush refers to movement since direction locatives are regularly associated with movement verbs, either intransitive or intransitive. At the same time, we should notice that source is associated with particular prepositions namely from, out of etc. In the following example, we provide a case of path and goal directionals: He threw himself across the floor towards the entrance. - the path directional is “across the floor” and the goal directional is “towards the entrance”. The verbs are transitive involving movement (throw, follow) and the preposition associated with path is across and with goal is towards. The third type of locative is distance which refers to space expressions answering the question “How far?”: I can walk all the way to the school. Besides referring to type of quantity (way) the distance expressions also contain a word referring to amount: many, all. • Temporal – the temporal semantic role involves a number of circumstances of time, such as: position, duration and frequency. Position in time provides an answer to the question “when?”, which places an action or event at a point of period of time. In the afternoon, we decided to go out again. The journey ended that evening. The parallel between locative and temporal position is reinforced by the fact that many prepositions may be used for both types of position. at: at home (locative) / at five o’clock (temporal) in: in the house (locative) / in the afternoon (temporal) on: on the bus (locative) / on Sundays. (temporal) For other types of position, locative and temporal circumstances use different prepositions. Compare in front of (locative) with before (temporal); behind (locative) with after (temporal).

139 The notion of duration in time may be related to orientation in time, either forward into the future or backward into the past. Duration with forward orientation corresponds to the question “until when?”, and duration with backward orientation corresponds to the question “Since when?”. Eg. He was ill for three days. She has lived here since last year. It would probably snow until the evening. The temporal expressions “for three days”, “since last year” and “until the evening” relate to duration. In the second and third examples, there is an orientation to the duration, backward in the second examples with the preposition “since”, and forward in the third example with the preposition “until”. The temporal expression of duration in the first example is of general type, with the characteristic preposition “for”. The third subtype of temporal circumstance is that of frequency and the reference is to the incidence of an event or action in time, relating to the question “How often?”; the answer to this question is represented by adverbs like frequently and often. Another typical expression of frequency involves the use of the word times. Eg. He had read the letter several times before posted it. During the summer, we spent our time sometimes with our friends but more often alone, swimming. • Process: circumstances of process relate to the question “How?”. However, it includes a number of different types of process, namely manner, means, instrument and agentive. Eg. He went furiously outside. He was able by means of a trick to win the game. She was warned by everyone that he could not be trusted. The type process-agentive is different from the other in that it refers to a person. It may be seen as an answer to the question “By whom?” or “By whose agency?”. The agentive is the person who carries out an action and the agentive process is usually introduced with the preposition by, though it may also introduce other type of process. • Respect – is a category with a fairly minor circumstantial role. It has also no subtypes and it is typically introduced by prepositional expressions such as concerning, in respect of, with respect to, so far as… is concerned etc. Eg. All human activity, as far as its final significance is concerned, is like feeding on the wind. The north of England is strong in this respect. The respect circumstances provide a point of reference for the sentence in which it is placed. • Contingency is a semantic category with an important circumstantial role, with a number of subtypes expressing various kinds of contingent circumstance, including cause, reason, purpose, result, condition and concession. Many of these types of contingency are related to each other, differing only in perspective. For example, cause, reason and purpose are all related to the question “why?” but answer it in slightly different ways. Purpose is also related to result, and condition with concession. Cause refers to a circumstance of contingency which expresses an objectively cause or motive for an action or event. Reason expresses a personal or subjective view of a contingency. Purpose includes a goal element in its expression of contingency. The following examples illustrate cause, reason and purpose contingency. Eg. The summit in September was postponed because of a crisis situation. (cause) The book publication was banned because of its religious nature. (reason) She studied very hard so that she could pass the entrance exam. (purpose) The conjunction so that may also be used to introduce a result contingency, as in The complete course takes three of these sessions, so that this year was the second year of the course. The final two types of contingency circumstance are condition and concession as illustrated below: Eg. Most farmers will not be affected if it snows in winter. Not many people change sides during an election, though a little change can mean much. • Degree is a semantic role of circumstance which relate to the expression of the degree to which something happens. There a re three broad types of degree: - amplification which refers to a greater than neutral or a “high” degree.

140 Eg. Conditions for factory workers and other trades have been greatly improved. - diminuation refers to a less than neutral or a “low” degree. Eg. The problems involved have not been adequately thought it over. - measure implies neither a high nor a low degree Eg. It is not possible to lower fares appreciably. The circumstance of degree can be viewed as an answer to the question “How much?”. The adverbs much and a little may be considered as representatives expressions of amplification and diminuation as in: Eg. I shall look forward to seeing you very much. After the quarrel, he tried to joke a little hoping that she came back. However, the adverb badly is typically used for amplification, as in the example below: She wanted badly to go on that trip.

In conclusion, we may argue that it has proved to be quite interesting to embark upon the study of the circumstances, especially from a semantic perspective, because it has been an opportunity to reveal the numerous facets that a language might have. We intended to discuss upon the participants involved in the “drama”, their semantic roles together with other elements which are important for the general context since their absence may turn the sentence into an “incomplete” one, semantically speaking.

Bibliography: Ducrot, O, Schaeffer,J., Noul dicţionar enciclopedic al ştiinţelor limbajului, Editura Babel, Bucureşti, 1996. Jackendoff, R., Semantic Structure, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Jackson, H, Grammar and Meaning, Longman, London and New York, 1990. Lyons, J., Structural Semantics, Oxford:Blackwell, 1963. Lyons, J., Introduction to the Theoretical Linguistics, Cambridge University Press, 1968. Lyons, J., Semantics, Cambridge University Press, 1977. Stern, G., Meaning and Change of Meaning, Indiana University Press, 1964. Ullmann, S., Semantics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

141 Discursul publicistic despre criză

Ştefana Ciortea-Neamţiu*

Rezumat: În lucrarea de faţă, am pornit de la „enunţurile aparţinând discursului repetat”, aşa cum au fost proiectate de Profesorul Stelian Dumistrăcel din perspectiva antropologiei culturale, de la enunţurile anonime la cele cu autori cunoscuţi, precum şi de la consideraţia că EDR sunt definitorii pentru discursul publicistic. Am analizat EDR în articolele de presă despre criza economică, un subiect ce s-a permanentizat în ultimii ani. Obiectivul principal a fost răspunsul la întrebarea dacă, în discursul publicistic, criza a generat repetiţie sau creativitate. Pentru strângerea corpusului de analizat am consultat ediţiile on-line ale câtorva ziare, „Cotidianul”, „Evenimentul zilei” şi „România liberă”, din perioada ianuarie 2009 – martie 2011. Ne-au interesat mai ales articolele de opinie, comentarii şi editoriale, acestea fiind specii în care EDR apar frecvent. Cuvinte-cheie: stil publicistic, EDR, criză economică, România, „Cotidianul”

Zusammenfassung: In der vorliegenden Studie gehe ich von den „Aussagen, die zur wiederholten Rede gehören“, aus, so wie sie Professor Stelian Dumistrăcel aus der Perspektive der Kulturanthropologie klassifiziert hat, von den anonymen Aussagen bis hin zu den Aussagen, die bekannten Autoren zugeschrieben werden. Dabei betrachte ich die Aussagen der wiederholten Rede als charakteristisch für den publizistischen Stil. Es wurden die Aussagen, die zur wiederholten Rede gehören, in den Presseartikeln über die Wirtschaftskrise analysiert, da diese seit einigen Jahren ein permanentes Thema für die Medien darstellt. Mein Anliegen war, die Frage zu beantworten, ob die Krise in der journalistischen Rede zu Wiederholungen oder zur Kreativität geführt hat. Der zur Analyse bestimmte Korpus ist den Online-Ausgabe der rumänischen Tageszeitung „Cotidianul“ aus der Zeitspanne Januar 2010 – März 2011 entnommen worden. Dabei interessierten mich die Meinungsdarstellungsformen, wie der Kommentar und der Leitartikel, weil darin die Aussagen, die zur wiederholten Rede gehören, häufig vorkommen. Stichworte: wiederholten Rede, Wirtschaftskrise, publizistischen Stil, Rumänien, Tageszeitung „Cotidianul“

0. În această lucrare, am pornit de la „enunţurile aparţinând discursului repetat” (EDR), aşa cum au fost proiectate de Profesorul Stelian Dumistrăcel din perspectiva antropologiei culturale, de la enunţurile anonime la cele cu autori cunoscuţi, precum şi de la consideraţia că EDR sunt definitorii pentru discursul publicistic. Am analizat EDR în articolele de presă despre criza economică, un subiect ce s-a permanentizat în ultimii ani. Obiectivul principal a fost răspunsul la întrebarea dacă, în discursul publicistic, criza a generat repetiţie sau creativitate. Pentru strângerea corpusului de analizat am consultat ediţia on-line a „Cotidianului”, din perioada 1 ianuarie 201009 – 31 martie 2011. Ne-au interesat articolele de opinie (comentarii şi editoriale), acestea fiind specii în care EDR apar frecvent.

1. Stilul publicistic (numit uneori şi limbaj publicistic) are, aşa cum subliniază Stelian Dumistrăcel, „statutul de componentă a «stilului comunicării publice şi private literare», ca subdiviziune a discursului public din mass-media, un limbaj cu trăsături dominante apropiate de limbajul conversaţiei şi de cel epistolar din discursul privat” şi „din punctul de vedere al mentalului exprimării, [...] se caracterizează prin enunţuri cu apariţie conjuncturală, forjate ad-hoc, euristice şi cognitive (ca demers «dialectic»)” [1]. Stelian Dumistrăcel a elaborat o clasificare exhaustivă a EDR, pornind de la „[A] enunţuri «anonime» şi [B] enunţuri cu autori cunoscuţi. Enunţurile «anonime» [A] sunt, la rândul lor, de două tipuri: [A¹] populare şi [A²] culte. În prima categorie [A¹] distingem două clase: [α] EDR reprezentând «vorbirea» şi [β] «citatele» din literatura populară. [α] Contextele de vorbire aparţin, în principal, următoarelor categorii: [a] locuţiuni expresive; [b] expresii idiomatice; [c] parimii (zicători, proverbe); [d] formule uzuale/stereotipe de comparaţie. [β] Din literatura populară sunt solicitate, cu statut de EDR, următoarele categorii de enunţuri: [a] versuri propriu-zise; [b] formule stereotipe din basme; [c] «ghicitori». [A²] Enunţurile anonime «culte» sunt reprezentate, în principal, de următoarle categorii de contexte: [a] formule din discursul religios; [b] dictoane; [c]

* Lect. dr., Universitatea de Vest din Timişoara

142 sloganuri; [d] formule tehnice din diferite texte aparţinând stilurilor funcţionale; [e] nume proprii de notorietate, categorie mai puţin importantă, inclusă aici din cauza înrudirii generale ca statut, în procesul comunicării, cu cele precedente. [B] Enunţurile cu autori (în principiu) cunoscuţi sunt reprezentate de următoarele categorii: [a] titluri de opere din diverse genuri (beletristică, istorie, eseistică, opere muzicale, filme, opere de artă plastică); [b] citate propriu-zise din oprere (scrise) din categoria precedentă; [c] cuvinte «celebre», atribuite unor personalităţi din istorie, din cultură (literatură, filozofie, arte), din diverse domenii ale ştiinţelor şi din viaţa publică” [2]. EDR sunt supuse unor modificări, cunoscute din retorică, detractio (suprimarea), adiectio (adăugarea), immutatio (substituirea) şi transmutatio (permutarea) [3]. Sursa apariţiei EDR în discursul publicistic este, aşa cum observă Stelian Dumistrăcel, accentuarea „faticităţii” ca parte a apelativului. În accepţiunea lingvistului ieşean, „faticitatea” înseamnă atât intenţia fatică cât şi actul fatic propriu-zis [4]. În publicistică, faticul este „programat, implementat după anumite reţete, urmând modelul limbajului conversaţiei” [5]. Intenţia emiţătorului este de a stabili un contact aparte cu receptorul (cititorul), prin intermediul EDR, „şi anume, situarea pe o bază comună de experienţă idiomatică, realizată prin elemente de expresivitate şi de afect” [6]. Funcţia de apel, cuprinzând şi faticul, este, aşa cum observă Stelian Dumistrăcel, „de factură manipulatoare, orientată, dincolo de instaurarea empatiei, spre seducerea şi chiar incitarea directă a receptorului” [7]. Altfel formulat, „atitudinea publicaţiei/autorului atricolului faţă de cititor (spre deosebire de alte tipuri de discursuri ce furnizează informaţii) se manifestă prin preocuparea permanentă pentru construirea unui cadru comun de interese şi postúri sociale şi culturale (în accepţiune lărgită). Mai mult, se practică «tămâierea», măgulirea cititorului [...]” [8]. Seducerea şi incitarea directă a receptorului nu se manifestă niciunde mai clar ca în articolele aparţinând speciilor de opinie. Asta şi pentru că presei nu-i este nicidecum necunoscută retorica. „Genul cel mai pregnant reflectat de mass-media este cel deliberativ, dezvoltând o oratorie ce scrutează viitorul, de «susţinere» şi «combatere», după criteriile «util» sau «vătămător», când dezbate problemele de viaţă ale «cetăţii» (noţiune prin care trebuie să înţelegem «statul»: veniturile, războiul şi pacea, diplomaţia, importul şi exportul – cu privire la alimentaţie, de exemplu – , legislaţia). Totuşi, presei nu-i sunt străine nici genul judiciar, preocupat de trecut, prin acuzaţie şi apărare, după criteriile «drept» – «nedrept», prin care o jurnalistică «justiţiară» se instituie în acuzator faţă de putere sau de organizaţii politice ori economico-financiare şi în avocat al publicului, şi nici cel demonstrativ (sau epidictic), preocupat de prezent, prin elogiu sau prin blam, după criteriile «nobil» – «ruşinos»” [9].

2. Pentru căutare, am folosit cuvântul-cheie „criză”. Am ajuns la un corpus foarte mare, acest termen regăsindu-se în circa 2500 de articole din ediţia on-line a „Cotidianului” din perioada 1 ianuarie 2010 – 31 martie 2011. 2.1. Frapantă a fost multitudinea de forme pe care le îmbracă criza în ochii jurnaliştilor precum şi folosirea acestui termen în diferite contexte. Astfel, în publicaţia analizată, se vorbeşte despre criza economică, financiară, fiscală, politică, umanitară (de care se temeau italienii la începutul războiului din Libia), criza din imobiliare, criza rachetelor (în Transnistria), criza pensiilor, criza alimentelor, a carburanţilor, criza din domeniul sanitar, din învăţământ, ba chiar şi despre „criză existenţială” şi „criză de nervi”. S-a scris despre criza din America, din UE, de la noi, din Grecia, Irlanda, Portugalia, Italia, Japonia, despre criza mondială. Pentru a dezvolta subiectul, „Cotidianul” a folosit toate speciile publicistice, foarte des ştirea, declaraţia şi faptul divers, de asemenea comentariul, editorialul, analiza şi interviul. Am restrâns căutarea la articolele de opinie (dintre care am ales comentariile şi editorialele) care fac referire la criza economică din România, înţelegând astfel să aleg articolele care nu ar fi curpins EDR numai în titlu (ca ştirea, de pildă), ci şi în corpul lor. Pentru început, m-a intereast dacă există variaţie în distribuţia temporală a articolelor ce se referă la criză. Am observat că în cele 15 luni pe care le acoperă analiza noastră, discursul despre criză a fost legat şi, prin urmare, întreţinut de anumite evenimente cum ar fi declanşarea sau acutizarea crizelor în alte state europene (făcându-se o comparaţie cu situaţia din Grecia, de pildă), împrumutul de la FMI (în toate fazele sale), majorarea TVA, reducerea pensiilor şi salariilor, gestul dramatic al lui Adrian Sobaru (de-a se arunca de la balcon în sala de şedinţe a Parlamentului),

143 anunţarea ieşirii oficiale din criză (la 1 aprilie 2011), aşadar numărul articolelor care fac referire la acest fenomen nu s-a restrâns nicidecum pe parcursul celor 15 luni. 2.2. Expresiile folosite cel mai des sunt, „a intra în criză” şi respectiv „a ieşi din criză”, care au generat şi o serie de variante, adesea combinate cu o întrebare retorică: „Când se termină criza din imobiliare? Citeşte cum îţi dai seama că a fost atins pragul de jos” (01.02.2010); „În fapt, România nu poate fi scoasă din criza cuprinzătoare de astăzi fără a schimba puterea” (06.02.2011); „Este fără îndoială eronat să considerăm că am depăşit criza” –Dominique Strauss-Kahn” (24.11.2010); „Cine opreşte rostogolirea «României lui Băsescu»?” (28.12.2010); „S-ar putea să ne lovească o altă criză?” (24.03.2011); „Gata, am ieşit din criză!”(29.03.2011); „Se termină criza sau se termină cu România” (29.03.2011); „Din recesiune poate mai ieşim, din criză mai greu,” spune Ilie Şerbănescu” (30.03.2011); „România iese din criză, ca să intre în faliment” (29.03.2011); „De ce s-ar termina criza? De mila voastră?” (30.03.2011); „Ieşirea ieşirilor din nicăieri” (31.03.2011). De altfel, întrebarea retorică (în combinaţie sau nu cu EDR) este una din figurile de stil cele mai îndrăgite în cazul acestui subiect: „Criza: de ce nu ştim ce este?” (02.03.2010); „Ne-am pregătit să scoatem cămaşa?” (16.03.2010); „Tehnocraţia salvează România?” (16.05.2010); „În ce căpăţâni se ascund ideile salvatoare?” (29.04.2010); „De ce aruncăm cu banii?” (30.11.2010); „Care ar fi ultima noastră şansă?” (27.12.2010); „Ce facem cu România?” (27.12.2010) sau „Ce ne facem cu România?” (27.12.2010); „Ce este de făcut?” (26.01.2011); „Turismul vecinilor a ieşit din criză, pe când cel românesc?” (08.03.2011); „De ce România rămâne în urmă?” (31.01.2011). 2.3. Dacă, despre criza din Grecia, jurnaliştii scriu folosind termeni religioşi (de ex.: „De Paşte, FMI va ţine lumânarea economiei greceşti” (18.03.2010), „La început a fost Grecia” (24.03.2010); „Grecia, îndatorată până la Dumnezeu” (29.03.2011), criza din România este cel mai adesea descrisă în termeni violenţi. Expresia „a se afla pe marginea prăpastiei” oferă imaginea preferată pentru descrierea situaţiei: „România, pe marginea prăpastiei încetării plăţilor” (24.11.2010); „Veşti groaznice de la FMI: iminenţa căderii în prăpastie” (25.11.2010); „Ţara noastră se află pe marginea prăpastiei şi avansează în marş forţat” (09.12.2010); „FMI, ca orice creditor, poate prelua «de facto» administrarea specială a unui debitor aflat «pe marginea prăpastiei»” (22.12.2010); „Faptul ca ai atins fundul prăpastiei nu înseamnă absolut deloc că o să reuşeşti să te mai caţeri înapoi vreodată” (30.03.2011). Imaginea crizei mai este asociată cu • loviturile: „Nu e de mirare că Uniunea Europeană a început să ne pălmuiască şi celălalt obraz întins (28.12.2010 – aici apare şi transformarea unui citat din Biblie); „bulgarii ne bat măr la turiştii străini” (08.03.2011); „au început rapid să ne bată la cap” (09.03.2011); „S- ar putea să ne lovească o altă criză?” (24.03.2011); • zgomotul (sau măcar sunetele): „În România ultimilor ani, se anunţă zgomotos reforme” (02.03.2011); „sarabanda preţurilor” (04.03.2011); „gorniştii presei româneşti au muncit de zor la prăbuşirea imobiliarelor” (12.03.2011); • nuanţele de doliu: „Situaţia în România nu e prea grozavă. Nici roz, nici tricoloră. E cenuşie spre negru” (26.01.2011) şi • nebunia: „Traian Băsescu a afirmat că Emil Boc a avut momente dificile în care i-a venit să-şi ia câmpii” (12.12.2010); „România pluteşte liniştită în derivă”, plecând de la versul „Barca, pe valuri, pluteşte uşor” (21.12.2010); „încheierea acordului cu FMI [–][...] o cămaşă de forţă” (22.12.2010); „leul ar lua-o razna” (28.12.2010); „Când profiturile din afacerile cu statul o iau razna” (14.03.2011). Dacă apar termeni religioşi, aceştia cel mai des se referă la răul absolut: „Dracii îşi arată măcar coarnele şi cozile în toată splendoarea lor drăcească” (10.01.2011); „Deci e evident ce soartă îi aşteaptă pe români, în anii care vin. Iadul? E puţin spus” (30.03.2011) şi o singură referire la Divinitate: „Acum avem o speranţă. Iar dacă vom vămui şi cerul, după ce vom termina cu vămile din interior, ne va pune Dumnezeu mâna pe cap” (09.03.2011). Alte modificări ale unor termeni religioşi sau referinţe biblice sunt „un soi de purgatoriu pentru economii lipsite de vlagă, cu ritm cardiac scăzut, dar cu ochi hipertrofici” (10.03.2010); „catedrala neamului prost” (11.12.2010) precum şi „Cele zece porunci ale lui Traian Băsescu” (21.04.2010) şi „Băsescu se spală pe mâini de sindicalişti” (11.05.2010). De asemenea, jurnaliştii apelează adesea la frazeologisme pentru a face referire la distrugerea totală, la dezastru: „Când se termină criza din imobiliare? Citeşte cum îţi dai seama că a

144 fost atins pragul de jos” (01.02.2010); „De autostrăzile lui Berceanu s-a ales praful” (19.04.2010); „Deci e evident ce soartă îi aşteaptă pe români, în anii care vin. Iadul? E puţin spus.” (30.03.2011); „Faptul ca ai atins fundul prăpastiei nu înseamnă absolut deloc ca o sa reuşeşti sa te mai caţeri înapoi” (30.03.2011). În acelaşi timp, în discursul despre criză apar des şi expresii care ne duc cu gândul la risipă: „Criză de lux pe bani publici” (14.01.2010); „Zeci de milioane de euro aruncate de guvernul Boc pe apa Jiului” (07.02.2011); „Ne furăm căciula / Arieratele umflă nota de plată” (25.05.2010); „Ţara strânge cureaua, Elena Udrea împrăştie banii publici [...])” (08.06.2010); „De ce aruncăm cu banii?” (30.11.2010) sau venituri ilicite precum „uriaşele averi nejustificate, unele transferate în Occident – acolo se află banii dvs.!” (12.05.2010); „cutia mitei” (11.12.2010) sau „Cine spune că în campanie electorală el nu va primi bani la negru de la anumite persoane?” (19.01.2011). Apar frecvent referirile la personalităţile publice cu putere de decizie, cum ar fi Traian Băsescu şi Emil Boc. Pentru conturarea imaginii preşedintelui, autorii articolelor folosesc expresii cu privire la putere: „Cele zece porunci ale lui Traian Băsescu” (21.04.2010) şi „Băsescu se spală pe mâini de sindicalişti” (11.05.2010), dar şi expresii ironice „Dacă un marinar vorbeşte în dodii, nu se pune” (24.03.2011) sau „Românii nu au scăpat nici la începutul anului de indicaţiile prezidenţiale” – referire la „indicaţiili” lui Ceauşescu (01.01.2011). Imaginea premierului este, în schimb, mai degrabă construită ironic în jurul ideii de vorbărie, flecăreală: „Moara de vorbe Emil Boc” (01.04.2010); „Boc face autostrăzi din vorbe” (31.05.2010); „Un guvern cu faţa la lună” (04.05.2010); „Ţara arde şi Micuţul se ridică pe vârfuri! Lumea de râsu-plânsu din hotărârile guvernului Boc” (05.05.2010). Instituţia amintită cel mai des în articolele despre criză este Fondul Monetar Internaţional. Referirile la FMI se fac pe tot parcursul celor 15 luni: „Puterea ştie numai de frica FMI” (28.12.2010) sau „FMI, optimist de la început până la sfârşit” (30.03.2011). De asemenea, articolele analizate comentează situaţia cetăţenilor României, care trebuie „să strângă cureaua” (24.11.2010), „să suporte jumătate din povara FMI” (se vorbeşte despre profesori) (24.02.2010) sau sunt „nişte CNP-uri nesimţite care vor numai avantaje fără muncă” (după expresia „pensii/salarii nesimţite”) (24.12.2010). Adesea, în acest context, sunt folosite expresii cuprinzând elemente de vestimentaţie: „Ne-am pregătit să scoatem cămaşa?” (16.03.2010); „Cetăţenii vor strânge şi mai mult cureaua” (24.11.2010); „Încheierea acordului cu FMI s-a dovedit mai degrabă o centură de siguranţă sau o cămaşă de forţă?” (17.12.2010). România este fie caragialesca „ţărişoară” (27.03.2011), fie „o ţară de hârtie” (aluzie, poate, la „Ţara de Piatră” a lui Geo Bogza) (24.12.2010). Jurnaliştii se întreabă „Cine opreşte rostogolirea «României lui Băsescu»” (28.12.2010). Ţara este adesea personficată: „România înglodată în datorii” (16.03.2010); „Ţara se pierde în vorbărie” (16.03.2010) sau „România a avut o reputaţie de elev mediocru” (10.01.2011) sau este considerată „codaşa Europei” (08.03.2011). Dintre cele mai inovative construcţii mi s-a părut „Ţara lui «Asta e situaţia»” (23.03.2010), modificând, astfel, „Ţara lui Papură Vodă”. O altă modalitate de a prezenta situaţia printr-o singură locuţiune este „Ca la români!” (28.05.2010). Titlul literar este transformat din Crimă şi pedeapsă în „Criză şi pedeapsă” (22.09.2010), sloganul electoral „Să trăiţi bine!” este transformat în „Să muriţi bine!” (02.02.2011), iar semnul de circulaţie „Atenţie, cad pietre!” în „Atenţie, cad oameni!” (23.12.2010). 2.4. Citatele literare sunt lungi (pentru ceea ce se preia, de regulă, în presa cotidiană). Andrei Marga recurge la un citat din Eminescu pentru a explica cititorilor „De ce România rămâne în urmă?” „Este destul să-l citim pe Eminescu, care observa adesea superficialitatea devenită obişnuinţă la Carpaţi: «Nerăbdători cum suntem, nu ne-am deprins a cunoaşte cum că lucrurile luate din temei ar fi şi mai trainice şi mai folositoare şi totodată cu mult mai ieftine decât mulţimea de forme goale care neavând înţeles şi utilitate, cer mereu muncă de Sisif de a fi recunoscut» (Eminescu, Opere, IV, Publicistică, Univers Enciclopedic, Bucureşti, 2000, p. 449). Mai târziu, Eminescu adăuga: „Ţara care, prin activitatea instituţiilor ei, încurajează ignoranţa, neconsecvenţa, lipsa de caracter, ba le decorează chiar, dovedeşte că e în descompunere» (V, p. 29)” (31.01.2011). Bedros Horasangian face referire la operele lui Albert Camus, care „spunea pe undeva prin «Mitul lui Sisif» că oamenii pot trece şi traversa multe nenorociri, şi alteori capotează la un gest banal, când un vecin nu-ţi răspunde la bună ziua” (26.12.2010). Vasile Dâncu îi citează pe Goethe „Tocmai unde lipsesc ideile, vorba vine la timp, ca să le ţină locul” (24.12.2010) şi Simion

145 Mehedinţi „Trăncănescu vorbeşte... În cuvântul lui stă de acum toată fericirea, toată nădejdea şi tot viitorul întregului neam românesc ... Cuvântul lui ţine loc de armată, justiţie, finanţe, ... mai ales loc de finanţe: e cinstea, e tăria, e viitorul întregului neam românesc” sau în citatul „Dacă politica este de vorbe, atunci ceea ce se întâmplă sunt vorbele” (24.12.2010). 2.5. Uneori, discursul despre criză capătă trăsături umoristice, ironice sau ludice, dacă expresiile sunt modificate după schiţa lui Caragiale: „Criză mare, monşer! Dar nu pentru ai noştri!” (12.02.2011), poezia lui Dimitrie Bolintineanu (plânsetul tinerei domniţe a lui Ştefan devenind o parodie politică): „Plânge cu lacrimi de crocodil deasupra bugetului de stat Traian Băsescu. Lângă el, Emil Boc, mai mic de stat şi de sfat, plânge şi el, dar cu larimi mai mici” (18.12.2010); după fabule („Greierii din România: Foamea nu vine niciodată!” sau „Ca şi greierul ne bazăm pe importul de la celelalte ţări vecine” 24.11.2010 ) sau poveşti: „În criză nu se nasc zâne precum Albă ca Zăpada” (24.02.2011); „Emil Boc a trecut de la Pinocchio la Petrică şi recesiunea” sau „«Croitoraşul cel viteaz» – varianta 2010” (12.12.2010). Umorul este evident şi în construcţia triadică „o criză pură, dură, mură-n gură” (07.07.2010).

3. Din corpusul analizat, am încercat să conturăm imaginea crizei, aşa cum este ea prezentată în viziunea jurnaliştilor de la „Cotidianul”, folosind comentariile şi editorialele. Am găsit un număr mare de EDR, extrem de variate, imaginea crizei fiind cel mai adesea tenebroasă, uneori însă jurnaliştii recurgând însă şi la umor. În acelaşi timp, am observat faptul că EDR sunt grupate pentru sublinierea unei anumite idei, în funcţie de intenţia jurnaliştilor. Putem concluziona că, pentru publicaţia analizată, criza economică a condus la creativitate.

Note: [1] În: Discursul repetat în textul jurnalistic. Tentaţia instituirii comuniunii fatice prin mass-media, Ed. Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iaşi, 2006, p. 354. [2] Ibidem, p. 156-157. [3] Ibidem, p. 166. [4] În: Revenirea la fondatori: «faticul» din perspectiva funcţiei «de apel» a limbajului şi a delimitării stilurilor «funcţionale», în: Munteanu, Cristinel (ed.), Discursul repetat între alteritate şi creativitate. Volum omagial Stelian Dumistrăcel, Institutul European, Iaşi, 2007, p. 43. [5] În: Discursul, p. 354. [6] În: Limbajul publicistic româneasc din perspectiva stilurilor funcţionale, Institutul European, Iaşi, 2006, p. 131. [7] În: Revenirea, p. 44-45. [8] Ibidem, p. 44. [9] Ibidem, p. 52.

Bibliografie: Dumistrăcel, Stelian, Discursul repetat în textul jurnalistic, Ed. Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iaşi, 2006. Id., Limbajul publicistic româneasc din perspectiva stilurilor funcţionale, Institutul European, Iaşi, 2006. Id., Revenirea la fondatori: «faticul» din perspectiva funcţiei «de apel» a limbajului şi a delimitării stilurilor «funcţionale», Munteanu, Cristinel (ed.), Discursul repetat între alteritate şi creativitate. Volum omagial Stelian Dumistrăcel, Institutul European, Iaşi, 2007, p. 33-62.

Surse mass-media „Cotidianul”, ediţia on-line, 1 ianuarie 2010 – 31 martie 2011

14 6 Aspects of Interpreting the Lexicon. Ideological Words

Gabriela Dima*

Abstract: Rich in interpretations, the term ideology is being analysed on interdisciplinary coordinates, starting from a corpus belonging to the domain of international political economy. Key words: ideology, political economy, nominalization, control verbs

Rezumat: Termen controversat prin bogăţia conotaţiilor adăugate de-a lungul timpului, cuvântul”ideologie” este analizat interdisciplinar, pe baza unui corpus aparţinând domeniului economiei politice internaţionale. Cuvinte-cheie: ideologie, terminologie, conotaţie, analiza discursului

The word ideology has been doomed to ardent controversies since its coinage in 1817 by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy who used it with the meaning of knowledge and ideas seen from within the domain of political science. Providing a positive connotation, he was the advocate of a new science meant to become “the foundation for establishing humane social policy and constructing decent law and government” (Gee 1990: 4). Since then the word has made history not only for its thorough use as a term in specific fields such as comparative politics and international political economy but also as the core builder of the conceptual background of interdisciplinary studies of various cultural areas including literature, gender analysis, linguistics, translation theory and practice. This hyponymic status can be signaled in our opinion as an imaginary or visionary theorization (i.e. the production or use of theories) of the term: “The context of culture is a large and complex knowledge system spread between the various members of a particular culture, and hence consisting of many sets of knowledges, including in particular, the institutional and ideological” (Leckie-Tarry 1995: 2). The labeling of the term ideology whose etymology comes from idéo- “of ideas” from Greek idea + logos, denoting a systematic set of ideas and doctrines as first recorded in 1909, has been changed along the centuries in connection with both historical events and personalities: “Ideas have changed because human experience about which the ideas are being formed –the whole relation between man and nature or between conscious and unconscious man – has itself been in process of change”( Barfield 1984:71). We shall here mention two of the most influential figures in political science. Napoleon used it with a pejorative connotation inventing the word ideologue to denote irrational, subversive intellectuals who focused on the beliefs themselves as object of study. Marx and his followers associated it with political ideas supporting that ideologies represented reality in a distorted way, producing and being products of a false consciousness, focussing rather on the principles of dominance and resistance within the social struggle between the ruling class and the working class: “Marx challenged liberal democratic ideology, castigating it as a rationale for class oppression” (Knight 2006: 620). With reference to the use of the word in language studies Van Dijk (1998) asserts that ideologies are (re)produced through discourse seen as any stretch of language which hangs together to make sense to some community of people who use that language. Hall (1982) views ideology as a reproduction of dominant discourse. In the same line, Fairclough interprets ideology as sets of assumptions which have been naturalized, by assuming the position of ‘common sense’ thus linking it with power, since “the nature of the ideological assumptions embedded in particular conventions, and so the nature of those conventions themselves, depends on the power relations which underlie the conventions; and because they are a means of legitimizing existing social relations and differences of power, simply through the recurrence of ordinary, familiar way of behaving which take these relations and power differences for granted” (1989:2). It has been well argued and documented by several theorists such as Kress and Hodge (1979), Martin (1985), Fairclough (1989) that the ideology within which a text is written constrains choices in discourse organization, grammar and lexis especially when it is issued by a group of

* Associate Professor, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

147 people politically joined as members of a certain party or organization. In this context the concepts of both power and ideology are best represented by the use of typical discourse markers triggered by the global context (Dima 2009). In this paper, illustrations have been taken from the domain of international political economy, regarding the world economic crisis, with special reference to the Greek financial crisis. The corpus includes an article picked up from The Guardian online where we analyzed nominalization and controllability as distinctive power markers. Nominalizations attenuate the sense of activity carried by the verb phrases, being more indirect and less explicit: “These nominalizations tend to give a sense of abstraction and generality and allow concealment especially in terms of power relations (i.e. participants involved in the process and/or writer’s attitude)”( Leonardi 2007: 271).The nominal phrases listed below underline the noun’s great capacity to collocate and build up a variety of local contexts both as head and modifier nominator, thus increasing the sense of generality: e.g. civil disobedience campaign, the civil disobedience movement, a broader campaign of civil disobedience; a new property tax, the unpopular property tax; EU/IMF austerity measures, painful cost-cutting measures; the public power corporation; a budget black hole. The recurrent use of genitives within the noun phrases, e.g. Greece's anti-tax revolt, Greece’s debt mountain, the government's dirty work have the purpose of reorienting or framing the degree of agency as well as providing resources for mitigating responsibilities for the actions described: e.g. Rather than dampen Greece's anti-tax revolt, last week's landmark decision at an EU summit to write off 50% of Greece's debt mountain while giving Athens another €130bn (£114bn) in rescue funds, appears only to have bolstered resistance; "We are not going to do the government's dirty work," railed Nikos Fotopoulos who heads the union. In the quoted examples the genitive constructions hint at different targets: the first generalizes on the revolt action without expressing possession, the second genitive focusses on the object rather than on the human initiator or cause of the event , while the third has a rezultative object representation with an opaque representation of human agency:” Hence a human actor who could be seen as the initiator of an event or action is framed as a source of a transitive act…In such cases, the speaker lets the listener infer the potentially causative relationship between the referent of the source and the action described by the predicate” (Duranti 1994: 655). Verbal phrases bring to focus openly- expressed power through controllability. Control verbs can be subcategorized semantically according to the degree of strength contained in their semantic matrix and the thematic roles they hold, in weak verbs and strong verbs as shown in the following corpus samples: a. In the first category we include weak control verbs such as verbs of encouragement, e.g. to ensure; to warn; to endorse: The finance ministry warned that failure to pay the tax…; We will do everything to ensure that...; who was expelled from the ruling Pasok party in June for refusing to endorse painful cost-cutting measures… b. In the second category we include strong verbs of control in an ascending order from strong to the strongest in expressing gradual imposition of power: e.g. to supervise; to dampen; to cede; to call on; to enforce; to threaten:… monitors would be relocated to Athens to supervise the economy; Rather than dampen Greece's anti-tax revolt…; the accord has also been harshly criticised for ceding too much sovereignty to its international creditors; How can someone who earns €500 a month suddenly be called on to pay a property tax; Many fear the deal will mean more austerity on top of wage, pension and benefit cuts already enforced by the socialist administration;… militant unionists at the public power corporation, have threatened to step up action. A subcategory of control verbs are the so- called attitudinal verbs (Dima 2003) which are discussed in connection with the nature of the controller: “We suggest that the semantic role assigned to the NP controller in the matrix clause can undergo a ‘falling ’shift’ in authority from affecting to affected due to the semantics of the infinitival complement clause, while preserving co- referentiality with the PRO in the S-theme”(Dima 2008: 80). The corpus samples selected include the following subclasses: a. prospective verbs of preparation, e.g. to brace for, meaning to prepare for something unpleasant that is going to happen: The Greek authorities are bracing for a broader campaign of civil disobedience…

148 b. preventing verbs by protection such as to stave off meaning to keep someone or something from reaching you or affecting you for a period of time: …it needs to stave off default; c. enabling verbs telling that the following predication is possible e.g. to galvanize meaning to shock or surprise so that they do something to solve a problem: Nothing has galvanized public opinion more than the unpopular property tax; e.g. to step up, meaning to increase action in order to improve: …militant unionists … have threatened to step up action. The study of the ideological words that we have presented in this paper has led to concluding that: 1. The concerns over ideology across the decades clearly reflect the press of historical and social events, but they also suggest the consensus over the core definition of ideology as a relatively stable set of interrelated ideas; 2. In point of discourse analysis, assignment of agency is done through the strategic use of grammatical forms that recurrently index participants’ institutional roles and their perceived authority.

References: Barfield, Owen, Speaker’s Meaning, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 1984 Dima, Gabriela, Outlines of English Semantics, Editura Fundatiei Universitare”Dunarea de Jos”Galati, Galati, 2003 Dima, Gabriela, Canon and Anti-canon in Subcategorizing English Control Verbs in Comunicare interculturala si literatura, Anul 1, Volum I, Numarul 1, Mai – Iunie-Iulie 2008, Colocviul International Canon si Anticanon in demersul critic actual, Editia a IIIa, Galati University Press, ISSN 1844-6965, pag. 73-78 Dima Gabriela, Words. Context. Contextualization, PIED, Universitatea” Dunarea de Jos”, Galati, 2010 Duranti, Alessandro, Politics and grammar: agency in Samoan political discourse, University of California Press, 1994 Fairclough, Norman, Language and Power, London, Longman, 1989 Gee, James Paul, Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Critical perspectives on literacy and education. London: Falmer Press, 1990 Hall, Stuart, The Rediscovery of "Ideology"; Return of the Repressed in Media Studies', in M.Gurevitch, T.Bennett, J.Curran and S.Woollacott (eds.), Culture, Society and the Media, London: Methuen, 1982 Knight, Kathleen, Transformations of the Concept of Ideology in the Twentieth Century,Political Science Review Vol. 100, No. 4 November 2006 Kress, Gunther, Robert Hodge, Language and Ideology, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1993 Leckie-Tarry, Helen, Language and Context. A Functional Linguistic Theory of Register, London and New York, Pinter, 1995 Leonardi, Vanessa, Gender and Ideology in Translation: Do Women and Men Translate Differently? A Contrastive Approach from Italian into English, Peter Lang, 2007 Martin, J.R., Factual Writing: Exploring and Challenging Social Reality. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press, 1985 Van Dijk, Teun A., Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage, 1998

Corpus Sources: The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/30/greeks-threatened-with-power-cuts

149 ‘Meta’ Modalities in a Testimonial Fiction Production

Sofia Dima*

Abstract: The article aims at highlighting the valency of the different “meta” marquers of a literary work initially prohibited in the totalitarian regime. Studied from the point of view of their orthography, phonology, morphology, lexicology, semantics and pragmatics, the “meta” marquers reveal their inner referential capacity for providing the necessary clarifications both in the cultural spaces the novel evokes and in those to which it addresses. Keywords: “meta” marquers, testimonial fiction, text production, metalanguage, metatext

About a novel and its historical meanders Written by Paul Miclău, the novel entitled Roumains déracinés (Miclău: 1995) is the work of a Romania-born French writer who lived the exile nowhere but in his fatherland. This text of a documentary value (‘chroniques’, according to the indication of the subtitle) is the offspring of a totalitarian regime and the expression of the author’s literary dissidence. The themes of the book stand proof of the deportation, the terror-inspiring pressure from the secret police, the beginning of a unique kind of censorship, the repression of the intelligentsia, a perverted outlook on life, forced labour, the so-called ‘cultural revolution’, and so forth. By enumerating these main threads of the novel, we may create the impression that the political is overpowering the aesthetic function of the writing. Far from it, Roumains déracinés is a poetical piece rare in its kind. It comes out of the mind of a writer in love with French, it comes as the work of a perfect bilingual, a militant francophone, active in his country of birth, Romania. As a matter of fact, the writing we are discussing is a perfect match to the literary atmosphere of the nineteen eighties, when what dissident writing puts at stake ceases to come from a political direction and when its testimonial role is dictated by the search of new modalities in text-production. The very historical content of the book is nothing but the expression of the uprooting experienced by peasants in the Banat zone. Inhumanly treated, they were displaced from this south- west part of the country into the barren plain called Bărăgan, somewhere towards a distant end, in the south-east. This novel written in French in 1985 cannot be published once the censor says no. The author sees himself compelled to translate it into Romanian in a purged form which can come off the press in 1989, but not under the first title of Blood Treasure (Trésor de sang). It might have been taken as hinting at the political line of the dictator Ceauşescu, with his malpractice of sweeping away whole Romanian villages. Thus, the author applies self-censorship on the title, gives up massive parts of his text and the mutilated novel gets to be known as The Treasure. Such a title no longer alludes to the tragic destiny of the Banat peasants forced to get a taste of exile in their own country. The year 1944 witnesses the publication of the integral version in Romanian, the version which puts aside the dash as a conversational mark and is still shy of using the original real names of the characters in the French version. Thus, discourse occurs like an uninterrupted tape, the words of the characters are introduced without punctuation marks, and the author’s intrusion is the more subtle as it is not graphically distinguishable from the way the characters themselves intrude upon the scene discursively. Within such a type of continuous writing, it is only for a change in the deictic system to signal every polyphonic valence. The integral version in French will not be published until a year later, in 1995, with the Publisud publishing house in Paris, and this version will be awarded the European literary prize of the Association of Writers of French Expression, one year later. This book, however, does not stage only the drama of political terror, cultural amputation, moral annihilation, uprooting. It is a fresco of the traditional values in the culture of a country with deep orthodox feeling, to which French cultural values are added, recommending its author as one of the significant Romanian and also European francophones.

* Maître de conférences, dr, Université « Dunarea de Jos », Galati

150 Partaking of a strong autobiographic nature, the novel simultaneously follows the way up in the world of a man who is none other than the author as narrator and fictional character. Home- leaving and the relegation from the world and from genuine culture come out against a background of detailed presentation of peasant morals and customs in the village called Comorîşte. This is the setting in which Paul Miclău was born. A second setting is supplied by the academic background of Romanian universities, part of which Paul Miclău is today. The author sets himself a task, namely ‘une défense et illustration’ of the Romanian language and culture within a novel worked out in French, side by side with ‘une défense et illustration’ of the French language and culture in terms of ideological pressure, secret police action and cultural perversion. Under such circumstances, both for the author and for the narrator- character, the French language and culture become a challenge and a weapon against this fast incurable sickness with scores of facets, which is, alas! called ‘cultural revolution’. One may wonder how the writer can achieve his daring goal. At the level of theme, he achieves an astoundingly harmonious fusion of the elements making the specificity of the two cultures: Romanian and French. At the level of writing techniques, he makes use of metalanguage and metatext, in order to get the French reading public (implicitly, French culture in the long run) familiar with facts, rituals, habits and customs manifest within a culture that is too little known to the French spirit.

The ‘meta’ markers and their meaning in Paul Miclău’s text The code of metalanguage and metatext must be part and parcel of the competence displayed by the two participants in interaction through writing. In his creative moments, the author is supposed to watch out for potential points of semantic tension: ambiguities, vague terms, polysemantic items. In order to achieve his purpose, the writer resorts to a number of techniques meant to neutralize the indicated tensions, thus ensuring the readability of the sequences, as well as a correct interpretation of the whole. In his turn, the reader is also expected to recognize the metatextual inserts so as to demonstrate that his reading is active and cooperative. In this way, both sides involved in the processes of writing and reading are in search of textual adjustment both to co-text and to the context of situation, to an epistemic condition, to a suitable socio-cultural code, at any moment negotiating them and then restarting negotiation. (Dima, 2000: 159-171) In their capacity of polyphony-generators, the formants and the metatextual inserts function as if a reader or a character of the book were not apt of understanding or of accepting the sense of the message. The problem is posed with even more intensity in the case of a recipient placed at a certain distance from the writing in space or/and in time. The explanation for it is that certain notions or even whole chunks of the text may be wrongly or partially received, with a huge difference from the time they reflect or the geographic and cultural realities in which they are born. To make the reading public know and understand – while in the space of France (they are contemporary with the publication of the book, but not with the events unfolding in its pages) – objects, man’s activities, communal rituals, folk customs, words and idioms from the Banat region, not to mention all the atmosphere of the communist regime with everything it entailed, Paul Miclău is additionally careful about the potential zones of semantic tension. The ensuing text has a relatively simple plot, yet it is achieved in an impressionistic and non- linear way, in which the chunks of the narrative are interrupted – and not in few cases – by passages of overflowing lyrical emotion and especially by what constitutes our focus of attention in the present analysis, namely fragments of metatextual presentation. Whether we are confronted with pure metatext or text and metatext introduced in overlap, in a fusion of styles telling of the author’s craft and talent, the number of metatextual contributions is so high as to surprise any literary critic. According to the expert opinion of Mariana Neţ (1989), in such cases a text stops being a point of reference for a sub-world of the real world and starts telling about one of its own sequences converted into a possible sub-world which is now turned into the internal referent of the text. Actually, this phenomenon is in accordance with the idea propounded by Valeria Guţu- Romalo, who asserts that, at a different level, the referential function of metalanguage is characteristically performed by an orientation of the object-language towards the represented referent (Guţu-Romalo: 1985).

151 Paul Miclău’s novel illustrates both ideas when metalanguage and metatext are handled with mastery, and this mastery marks an intention and a certain textualization skill, as long as the metatextual fragments, as already noted, are considerably more frequent than in other narrations. From now on, we will be concerned with a survey of ‘meta’markers occurring at the level of language and those going beyond this level, strictly speaking. Within the former group, we can think of metagraphic, metaphonologic, metamorphologic, metalexical and metasemantic markers, whereas the latter group is made up of metapragmatic markers.

Metagraphic markers a) [:], colon followed by explanation

“Lénine, son ‘génial’ prédécesseur, avait inventé le triple mot d’ordre: appui sur les paysans pauvres, alliance avec les ‘moyens’ et lutte acharnée contre les Koulaks”. (Miclău, 1995: 43). b) [-] dash In the uncensored Romanian version, as already shown here, the dash marking a conversational exchange is never used. In the French version, the dash is used, but we can signal another technique too, the one replacing ordinary direct discourse activity punctuated by dash or quotation marks. The text from page 285 to page 290 is arranged in two columns and a footnote explains to the reader this writing technique that manages to simultaneously orient the reading: “Lecture parallèle de colonnes, par paragraphes. L’enquête est dirigée par Flory Porcan, grand militant communiste, étudiant à l’époque. La plupart des réponses à ses attaques vient de Mamia Naé, notre collègue”. (Miclău, 1995: 285) At this point, in fact, the absence of the dash and the presence of the two columns act as a metagraphic marker, while the footnote is pure metatext which seems to point out the suggestion, by means of the two columns, of a face-to-face positioning of the inquisitor (the left hand) versus the defendants (the right hand)”. (Miclău, 1995: 285). c) [,], comma Framing an aside, an apposition, a parenthetical group of words, the sets of commas point to a comment coming from the narrator or one of the characters: “Plus tard, toujours en 1966, dans un séminaire à l’EPHE, dirigé par André Martinet, tu expliques une opposition phonologique de ton patois”. (Miclău, 1995: 10).

The three specifications above, within commas, clarify the reader upon the time, space and participant coordinates for the narrated event. d) ( ) or [ - ], ordinary brackets or the dash that are typically used for a word of explanation or motivation.

“Oravitza s’étend le long d’une vallée d’au moins sept kilomètres. Forviz, la ville d’en haut, du côté des lacs (il y en a un ‘grand’ et un ‘petit’) était assez germanisée alors que celle d’en bas est restée plutôt roumaine. Après la ville d’en haut, en 1945-1946, tu es descendu dans la ville basse – Oravitza roumaine”. (Miclău, 1995: 62). e) [=], the sign of equality marks synonymy or an explanatory comment. This graphical sign surprises us both by its presence in a literary creation and by its frequency of occurrence. We will provide only a couple of examples to be distinguished through three authorial intentions: (i) the clarification of the meaningful content of Romanian terms and their accompaniment by French synonyms within brackets and succeeding the equality sign: ‘le président (= le maire)’ (Miclău, 1995: 100) ; (ii) ‘le central (= le standard)’ (p.101); ‘cantine (= resto)’ (Miclău, 1995: 110). (iii) the typically Romanian connotation of those terms revealing to some extent the bitter irony of the author: ‘Revolution = papiers’ (Miclău, 1995: 110) .

152 (iv) the explanation of certain Romanian terms, side by side with a description of the referents: ‘sarmale = boulettes de viande hachée, enveloppée de choux – plat national)’ (Miclău, 1995: 181) As a matter of fact, all these explanations stand for a plurality of metagraphic, metalinguistic and metasemantic devices. They function as guidelines for a culture and a tradition which the author feels compelled to bring along into the Romanian area (those passages on French culture and civilization) or to enlighten French and ultimately francophone men of culture on Romanian values. f) “ “, inverted commas They bring into relief certain terms.

“Le cercueil descend la colline, entre dans l’église, monte sous la voûte et là, il tournoie lentement, tandis que le ‘parastas’ (requiem) devient cantante. Une bonne partie de l’ancienne chorale est là à psalmodier pour leur copain. Quand on soulève le plateau où se trouve la ‘coliva’ (gâteau de blé), tes jambes fléchissent: mère se fait toute petite, s’efface et l’église vorace a envie de la prendre”. (Miclău, 1995: 16)

Inverted commas also play a part in the direction of connotation, irony, double meaning.

“Sur la terre de Comorişte la lutte des classes bat son plein. Mais des fois on a l’impression que ça tourne à vide. Pourquoi? Simple: l’ennemi n’est plus sur place. Mais à l’époque la théorie selon laquelle la conscience reste ‘derrière’ l’existence avait un grand crédit. Alors il fallait se battre contre la mentalité de ceux qui sont restés sur place. Surtout qu’ils étaient des paysans moyens, et Lénine a montré combien mouvante est l’attitude du moyen: travailleur par sa condition de vie, il aspire à devenir burgeois”. (Miclău, 1995: 166)

Metaphonologic markers The difference between the language with which the writer set out, Romanian, the idiom of the narrated world, and the target language, French, into which he takes his world, lies in the fact that the former is phonetic, whereas the latter is etymological. This difference is a constant preoccupation of the author, since the sonority of anthroponyms and toponyms, alongside the sound of words themselves, cannot find a transposition into French so as to suggest what it is like in Romanian. That is why there are terms spelt ‘à la française’. By way of illustration, we can supply ‘Louca’, ‘Tzaranou’, ‘Romulus Poupou’, ‘Voiculesco’, ‘Nègrou’, ‘Kirou’, ‘Ceaucescu’ as spellings ‘à la française’ for ‘Luca’, ‘Ţăranu’, ‘Romulus Pupu’, ‘Voiculescu’, ‘Negru’, ‘Chiru’, ‘Ceauşescu’. Likewise, ‘Oravitza’ is meant for the French reader, when the town called ‘Oraviţa’ is mentioned. In the following quotation, the first and the third word between inverted commas are non-existent in French. They refer, respectively, to a permit for being allowed entrance into a canteen and a first course when having dinner, a kind of soup served in Eastern Europe. The latter is so spelt as to make the French reader pronounce like in Romanian . “- Ecoute, ça fait un bon bout de temps que tu prends les repas ici, mais tous le monde sait que t’a pas de ‘cartèle’. - Bon, tu sais, c’est pour un ‘supplément’, s’il en reste. Une assiette de ‘tchorba’ ça peut toujours se trouver pour n’importe qui, et le pain, on prend ce qui reste de la portion des filles”. (Miclău, 1995: 246)

Metamorphologic markers At the level of morphology, such operators can assume the forms of almost any part of speech. They can be adverbs (‘donc’, ‘certes’, ‘peut-être’, etc.), adverbial phrases (‘par exemple’), verbs of opinion (‘on dit’, ‘on croit’, ‘on affirme’), copular verbs (‘être’, ‘paraître’, ‘s’appeler’, ‘se nommer’) with their participial forms (‘appelé’, ‘nommé’, ‘dit’) or infinitival forms (‘à observer’, ‘à noter’), nouns (‘exemple’, ‘le fait que’, ‘genre’, ‘une sorte de’), numerals (‘le premier’, ‘le second’), demonstrative adjectives and pronouns or personal pronouns, with anaphora or cataphora

153 to confer cohesion to the statement, simple and compound conjunctions (‘c’est-à-dire’, ‘parce que’) and, last but not least, the heaping-up of devices.

“Notez bien la différence entre le maïs bouilli et le maïs cuit. Le premier tient de la culture (en Occident on le sert même comme ‘garniture’), alors que le second est du côté de la nature (Lévi-Strauss): contact direct avec le feu, la terre. On en bouffait comme des fous”. (Miclău, 1995: 23).

Due to their frequency of occurrence, the markers under analysis have been offered in a general enumeration, without indicating their presence on the respective pages.

Metasyntactic markers Like the ones above-mentioned, these markers are to be found over and over again in the book, being in fact the predicates (single or copulative), the appositions, the relative clauses, the parenthetical constructions; interrogative patterns either requiring a piece of information or putting across conspicuous facts, therefore classifying as rhetorical questions; infinitival and participial constructions (‘pour mieux dire’, ‘soi disant’, ‘ainsi dit’) etc.

“Un texte, c’est comme un être: ça naît, pousse, se développe, comme on dit, et finalement ça meurt. Dans le fond, une fois écrit, un texte est mort”. (Miclău, 1995: 23) “Il existe aussi des cas où les sons et les lettres se superposent. Mais les significations, elles, peuvent-elles se superposer comme dans un tableau cubiste? Pas exactement de la même façon, car elles ne sont pas plates. Il s’agit plutôt d’attractions magnétiques ou de combinaisons de champs”. (Miclău, 1995: 97)

Metapragmatic markers Within this class of markers, we generally conceive of operators restating the message. Virtually, they are not anything different from (self)correction, confirmation, explanation, motivation, qualification, comment, opening and closing formulae, recapitulation, repetition, illustration, comparison, argumentation, and so forth.

“La vigne aussi, c’est toute une encyclopédie. Exemple: si l’espèce est tant soit peu fine, il faut la sulfater. Une vraie mise en scène: on remplit d’eau un grand tonneau qu’on transporte là-bas”. (Miclău, 1995: 46)

… and the explanation is lengthened at the same time with the description of vine caretaking.

Metatextual markers All this set of operators is simultaneously metatextual marking, since they lead to the building of some ampler sequences of pure metatext or metatext thought out in half-technical, half-literary registers, as shown below:

“La moisson du blé approche et il nous faut des cordes pour ‘lier’ les gerbes. On peut faire aussi avec des tiges de blé [repetition]. On doit se lever très tôt le matin [explanation] ; quand on arrive au champ il faut que le blé soit mouillé par la rosée [motivation]. On le coupe à la faucille. On en prend deux poignées et on les noue l’une à l’autre, là où les tiges sont plus minces, avant les épis [explanation plus description]. Toi, tu es très spécialisé: […] C’est simple: tu cherches dessous les deux bouts de la lanière, tu appuies le genou droit, au milieu du tas de blé, pour que ça plie, tu enfonces le coude dedans et ensuite tu serres le plus fort possible. Une fois que c’est bien serré, tu fais le noeud, vite et méthodiquement. Là, c’est un art” (Miclău, 1995: 22).

If we consider the other composing codes of the novel, we will see the metatext is ever- present. We include here the components known as paratext, architext and intertext. In our case, the metatextual function of the paratext is illustrated in the foreword of the author which surveys the editorial misadventures of his writing. Everything is basically a word of self-defence, explaining to

154 the reader how the decision was born to write a novel in French: in order to offer cultural reference points to the reading francophone.

“[…] dans le document qui retrace l’exclusion politique, la déportation, l’amputation culturelle – autant de coordonnées qui marquent le contexte où un fils de paysan roumain réussit cependant à faire des études de français”. (Miclău, 1995: 7-8).

The architext also has a powerful role in metapragmatics. The second subtitle of the novel – ‘Chroniques’ – stands proof of certain communicative intentions, and the plural form of the noun announces a piece of writing that narrates history, but in a manner that comes out to be notliniarn but cubist while it unfolds before its reader. In its turn, the intertext with metatextual role is vividly felt and we will choose for illustration one of the most beautiful passages from the point of view of intertextuality. We find in it traces of the books that had an impact on the author in his intellectual growth, like Rimbaud as in the fragment bellow: “Ecrire l’écriture. Le monde comme texte. Mais la réciproque aussi. L’écriture comme monde. Comme un vœu ; L’autre a renversé les voyelles : le A et le E, le I et le U, pour pouvoir y mettre du sexe. De l’écriture peut pousser le monde : elle devient la racine de l’univers” (Miclău, 1995: 81).

Recovery of spiritual values by a cultural dualism The chronicles constituting Roumains déracinés delineate the events of the fifties going to the eighties, a span of time during which politics in Romania develops from wild forms – “la politique rôdait autour de nous comme un animal assoiffé de sang” (p. 68) – down to more subtle, yet tougher manifestations. Totalitarian nonsense and the grotesque urge of redeeming the wisdom of a whole nation from the perspective of Marxian thought have for a permanent background the pattern of the Banat spirit and culture which is extremely rich and varied. Myths, archetypal situations, symbols relating to original human experience are made familiar to the French reading public. The main character – witness, observer, actor, narrator at once – depicts, in turn, religious rituals on holy days, wedding and funeral customs, ritual gestures connected with work in the fields, magic originating in superstitions. An artisan’s craft goes into the description of such things. The reader feels the religious ardor of the farmer who lives them and the refinement of the intellectual who can pass from literalness to metaphor in a stoke of the pen, like in the following passage:

“Le pain on l’entame dans un rituel. Grand-père prend le couteau qui sert à sacrifier les cochons. Dans ses bras d’hercule le pain est une petite planète : il en tourne la face contre sa poitrine et se penche sur la partie plate. Le geste est décomposé : dominé par une attention sacrée, il dessine de la pointe du couteau le signe de la croix, après quoi il coupe d’énormes morceaux. […] Dans le calme concentré de l’homme se résume le travail fourni pour cultiver le pain et le porter dans cet état de grâce. Il y a là tout le combat contre la terre, le vent, la pluie et l’orage, contre les animaux et les hommes récalcitrants, maladroits, pour changer une corvée en art” (Miclău, 1995: 94-95).

Long chunks of metatext relate to all these traditions and symbols in a kind of polyphony featuring documentary explanatory as well as poetical intentions simultaneously. The French signifier causes the Romanian signified to be circulated in the world of great cultures. It also causes the call of the dissident to be heard and its topicality understood. Elements of French culture occasionally come to support already familiar notions. For instance, the Revolution is experienced twice: in Romania, the socialist revolution and in France the revolution of May 1968. The narrator imbued with French literature re-asserts at the same time with Baudelaire the idea of a correspondence between sounds, perfumes and colours while keeping alive exactly like the latter – the contact with the reader whom he addresses quite often and in a like manner. “Toi, lecteur, mon frère, si tu n’as pas l’habitude, regarde attentivement : la goutte se fait rosée qui embaume ton regard, te transmettant un frisson où l’opposition banale entre vie et néant est supprimée à jamais” (Miclău, 1995: 126).

155 Proust is an explicit or implicit presence. In all those parts referring to time and duration:

“… la révélation te vint tout récemment après un dialogue d’écriture. Normalement, c’est l’événement qui crée le temps. L’écriture, elle, en crée un autre, ou plutôt d’autres : subjectif, affectif, dilaté, concentré, anticipé, ‘retrouvé’, etc.” (Miclău, 1995: 63).

Montaigne survives in the memory of the author-narrator through the formula ‘Écrire c’est apprendre à mourir’ (Miclău, 1995: 75); Rombaud looms with the idea of writing which creates worlds – like in his poem The Vowels (Miclău, 1995: 81); Camus marks his presence with the Great Plague afflicting the Banat village and the whole country; Villon regretfully ascertains the passage of time – ‘Mais où sont les neiges d’antan ?’ (Miclău, 1995: 274); Brassens and Brel cast a nostalgic light upon the places provided with a special semantic and emotional load – the sea at Sète (Miclău, 1995: 55) and ‘le plat pays’(Miclău, 1995: 253). In this discussion meant to unify the two historical, geographical and spiritual planes, the language handing them becomes worthy expression of the major questions on the meaning of man’s existence in a diseased world of folly. In this world where ‘le retour au temps mort est douloureux, le vécu du présent est tragique, l’illusion de l’avenir est absurde’ (Miclău, 1995: 64). The only way out is to live your life giving full scope to your bodily temptations, fantasies, ideas and last but not least, your writing style. For it is only through love, uprightness facing political terror, while writing can build a ‘third space’ much more tolerable than the one before. It is the space drawing on memories, subjectivity, different duration, all of them re-occurring in the text like the beat of waves, the succession of seasons or the movement of scyte in the field. The narrator-character-witness is aware of the fact that although it has reached the highly poetical climax, the diction is subject to distortions af all kinds, and is found to be hollow and fake. The brilliance of metaphors turns to ash and the world sees as linguistic expression looses part of its senses, actually it crumbles down. The wooden idiom is thus frustrated of its demiurgic characteristic meant to bring forth new worlds; its own death entails the death of beings, objects memories. The last judgement itself is displaced, pulverized and, all along, pessimistic for a while the narrator foresees the impossibility of restoring light and justice. The only redeemer is ‘la maîtresse écriture’ in an intimate embrace doomed to be fulfilled in a different realm. This is a beneficial nevertheless painful rescue.

“- C’est ça, écriture blessée, bannie du monde réel, on est infirme, toi et moi, mais cela ne nous empêche pas de faire l’amour, au contraire. Cette infirmité nous libère du monde trivial pour cultiver les noyaux de l’au-delà” (Miclău, 1995: 251).

The moment the flight of time freezes the writing winds up and the blank page narrows down to a black dot: it symbolizes the end of the book.

“Drôle de sensation quand on sait que dans quelques minutes ça va être la fin. Feuille blanche qui, à force de se rétrécir, devient noire. Allez, un brin de toilette, faut être propre et fraîchement rasé pour le moment où. La plume aurait envie de continuer son vol calligraphié, mais un verdict est un verdict. Elle doit descendre à côté des racines des fleurs plantées devant la maison. À partir de là, le hasard seul pourra dire si…” (Miclău, 1995: 289).

One cannot overlook the fact that the call of despair and revolt of a whole generation finds its expression in the refugee’s language, a language which has come of a free choice: an excellent French idiom over which the writer has mastery concerning the most refined nuances and the most varied registers.

Conclusions Though the starting point is a dissident’s stance, the present book is a success from many points of view. Its author carefully trained in the French school of semiotics, approaches political issues in an original manner: fragmentary, polyphonic and poetic at the same time. His steady interest in textualization modalities could be remarked through the actualization of the multiple metalinguistic and metatextual markers whichappear constantly in the novel. This study also allowed a way of

15 6 pointing out several reading layers. The events of the envisaged period and those in the main character’s life, the blending of two cultures – Romanian and French – the self referential and postmodernist formula are keys for the reader’s access into the text and the entrance of the writing in the francophone space and, therefore, in the written memory of mankind.

References Dima Sofia (2000). Lectura literară – un model situaţional. Iaşi: Ars Longa. Guţu-Romalo, Valeria (1985). ‘În legătură cu metalimbajul’. In SCL, XXXVI, 3. Miclău Paul (1995). Roumains déracinés. Paris: Publisud. Neţ Mariana (1989). Metalimbajul textului literar. Bucureşti: TUB

157 Rolul metaforei în discursul economic şi în subtipurile acestuia

Corina Dobrotă*

Abstract: In the exploration of economic discourse, which may be divided into theoretic and mediatic discourse, the most salient issue seems to be related to the pervasive presence of the conceptual metaphorical schemes actualised in various metaphorical models, such as Adam Smith’s, Alfred Marshall’s, John Maynard Keynes’ or Mirowski’s, to quote only the most commonly acknowledged. The article examines the manner in which the economic discourse and its various subtypes are made comprehensible by means of the main conceptual metaphors used in describing economic phenomena. Keywords: conceptual metaphor, metaphorical models, economic discourse,

1. Delimitări teoretice Conform definiţiilor curente, termenul discurs este utilizat într-o varietate de sensuri, dintre care amintim cinci: - în accepţiunea cea mai largă, discurs înseamnă orice fragment de limbaj, scris sau oral, care apare în mod natural; uneori este sinonim cu termenul text; - alteori, discursul este asociat doar codului oral, iar text celui scris; -lăsând deoparte codul utilizat, discursul este deseori echivalat procesului de producere a limbajului, iar textul este produsul finit; - unii cercetători consideră discursul ca fiind o secţiune a unui text cu finalitate explicativă, uneori cu nuanţele peiorative de autoritate ex-cathedra şi în detaliu; - teoriile actuale preferă definirea discursului ca tipologiile de limbaj utilizate în contexte specifice, sau moduri de comunicare (scrisă sau orală) care implică participanţii la situaţia de comunicare în adoptarea unei anumite atitudini faţă de domeniile de activitate socio-culturală. Această ultimă definire pare să se adapteze cel mai bine scopurilor lucrării de faţă, care se focalizează pe limbajul specializat economic ca formă a discursului ştiinţific funcţionând în cadrul convenţiilor impuse de disciplina academică şi de grupurile sociale cărora li se adresează. Factorii de care depinde sunt deci cunoştinţele comune unui grup de specialişti din domeniul economic, precum şi scopurile sale implicite. Economiştii au două scopuri importante: cel de a constitui noi teorii şi de a-şi comunica descoperirile, şi cel de a-şi convinge auditoriul prin mijloace specifice. Astfel se poate vorbi de două tipuri fundamentale de discurs economic: cel de teoretizare, care apare cu precădere în manuale şi are valenţe explicative şi nu rareori argumentative, destinat specialiştilor în domeniu, şi cel de mediatizare, cu rol fundamental de popularizare şi de persuasiune a publicului larg. O menţiune aparte se cuvine desigur şi discursului publicitar, deseori considerat marginal, dar care se impune din ce în ce mai pregnant în peisajul cotidian. Acesta îmbină cele două funcţii, cea argumentativă şi cea persuasivă, dar le adaugă valenţe pragmatice explicite — acelea de a induce consumatorului dorinţa de a achiziţiona produsul subiect al reclamei.

2. Discursul de teoretizare În discursul de teoretizare din domeniul economic remarcăm câteva modele culturale de bază — scheme cognitive împărtăşite de o comunitate culturală (apud D’Andrade, 1990). Aceste modele unanim recunoscute şi vehiculate de comunitatea economică mediază existenţa cotidiană, organizează şi structurează experienţa umană în domeniu, creează orizonturi de aşteptare, motivează comportamente, oferind cadrul necesar pentru experţi şi viitori specialişti de a descrie, a recrea şi a stoca în memorie evenimente semnificative. Fără îndoială că sunt posibile multiple modele ale experienţelor socio-economice, aşa cum diverse constante axiologice pot coexista în interiorul aceloraşi sisteme culturale; totuşi, în domeniul discursului economic se constată o clară uniformitate de viziune a specialiştilor europeni, care se raliază fără drept de apel modelelor de extracţie anglo-saxonă. O posibilă explicaţie este influenţa covârşitoare exercitată de sistemele economice capitaliste din ţările vorbitoare de limbă engleză, care a impus mai ales în ultimii ani şi modelele culturale iniţiale.

* Lect. dr., Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos” din Galaţi

158 2.1. Modelul mecanistic al lui Adam Smith Unul dintre intemeietorii doctrinei economice a liberei iniţiative este Adam Smith (1723-1790) a propus în faimoasa sa carte An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) modelul economiei ca maşinărie mecanică, guvernată de propriile legi referitoare la gravitaţie şi circulatie, structurată în termenii mecanicii newtoniene.

„The earth has been sometimes compared to a vast machine[…] for the production of food and raw material; but, to make the resemblance more just… we should consider the soil as […] a great number of machines of very different original qualities and powers” (ibid:135) The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating” (id: 75) „[…] commerce, instead of running in a great number of small channels, has been taught tor un principally in one great channel” (id: 235) „[money] is the great wheel of circulation” (id: 289)

Conform viziunii sale, economia nu este doar o maşină, ci şi un organism care dictează evoluţia tuturor fenomenelor conexe. Metafora caracteristică, rămasă în terminologia economiştilor de pretutindeni este the invisible hand of the market „mâna invizibilă a pieţei” care reglementează întregul mecanism economic. Exemplu concludent de metaforă constitutivă de teorie, continuă să joace un rol crucial în imagistica economică, fiind un loc comun în manuale şi articole teoretice. Rothschild (2002:118) observă paradoxul că metafora îşi capătă statutul de emblemă a viziunii lui Smith abia la sfârşitul secolului XIX. În zilele noastre, este parte a discursului cotidian, referindu-se pe scurt la legitimizarea din punct de vedere politic al unei ordini sociale preexistente, al cărei statut benefic provine de la o autoritate exterioară. De asemenea apare cu regularitate în presă, fiind chiar inclusă în Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Hirsch et al., 2002). Cariera îndelungată a tropului pare să provină din cele două caracteristici distincte: pe de o parte, antropomorfismul care recheamă în memoria colectivă întregul simbolism al mâinii, creatoare de bogăţie materială prin excelenţă; pe de alta, invizibilitatea, aluzie destul de transparentă la filosofia liberei întreprinderi, lipsită de orice constrângeri de la o autoritate centrală,care constituie fundamentul capitalismului. Numeroşi cercetători au fost preocupaţi de interpretările posibile ale acestei metafore atât de rezistente în timp. Printre aceştia, Vaughn (1989) propune trei aspecte distincte ca fiind cruciale în comprehensiunea metaforei: 1. lipsa de intenţionalitate a consecinţelor; 2. antropomorfizarea ideii de ordine socială, care apare ca produsul unei forţe planificatoare inteligente din exterior; 3. efectele benefice în consecinţă legitimizarea unei astfel de ordini sociale. Prin urmare, a spune că un participant la procesul economic, fie el investitor, producător, lucrător sau simplu consumator, este condus de mâna invizibilă a pieţei, înseamnă în virtutea acestei triade interpretative că acţiunile sale egoiste şi lipsite de intenţionalitate pentru sistem sunt transformate într-o ordine socială benefică şi deci legitimă de către o invizibilă forţă suverană. Astfel, metafora se constituie într-o reprezentare comprehensibilă a imaginarului socio-economic. De altfel, s-a constatat că provenienţa metaforei se regăseşte în antichitatea latină, sub forma mâinii invizibile a lui Jupiter, instauratorul ordinii prin forţa intervenţiei divine într-un univers fundamental nestructurat. Interpretările contemporane ale metaforei măresc domeniul referenţial, fiind sintetizate astfel: 1. mâna invizibilă ca ordine socială spontană. Smith însuşi a sugerat această interpretare, referindu-se în mod repetat la „sistemul de libertate naturală” care se impune şi funcţionează de la sine, fără intervenţii vizibile. 2. mâna invizibilă ca disciplina mecanismului pieţei. Metafora reprezintă mecanismul preţurilor ca mijloc de reglare şi echilibrare a pieţei. 3. mâna invizibilă ca intervenţie divină („mâna Domnului”). Apare aici o versiune a religiei naturiste de inspiraţie stoică: legile din natură sunt expresia unei divinităţi providenţiale, cea în stare să imprime naturii raţiune.

159 4. mâna invizibilă ca selecţie naturală. Versiunea darwinistă a economiei ca organism apare la Khalil (2000), care reduce toate presupunerile teleologice anterioare la evoluţionism; în economie, ca şi în natură, supravieţuiesc cei puternici şi mai bine adaptaţi la mediu. 5. mâna invizibilă ca securitate naţională. Versiunea (Grampp, 2000) se sprijină pe ideea că o consecinţă neintenţionată a investiţiilor interne mai degrabă decât externe serveşte drept resursă valoroasă pentru întărirea apărării şi securităţii naţionale. La nivel textual, mâna invizibilă îşi exercită puterea mai ales prin intemediul operaţiilor discursive (Zuidhof, 2003:45), invocând valenţele pieţei ca sistem imaginar în contextul reţelei de semnificaţii care o transformă în instituţie. Manualele de economie utilizate frecvent se raliază viziunii respective, utilizând aceeaşi metaforă. Astfel, Samuelson şi Nordhaus (1998: 29) atribuie ordinea care apare pe piaţă principiului mâinii invizibile:

„This principle hold that, in selfishly pursuing only his or her personal good, every individual is led, as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for all. Smith held that in this best of all possible worlds, government interference with market competition is almost certain to be injurious”. Un alt manual important combină metafora cu schema conceptuală BUSINESS IS WAR: „The invisible hand strikes back!” (Baumol şi Blinder, 1991:50).

Se susţine ideea că ordinea inerentă şi avantajul mutual pe care le implică instituţia pieţei pot avea drept efect întărirea concurenţei.

2.2. Modelul lui Alfred Marshall Sfârşitul secolului XIX şi începutul secolului XX au fost marcate de lucrarea lui Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), Principles of Economics (publicată în 1890). Aceasta s-a constituit în cel mai important tratat teoretic al epocii, care a reuşit să transforme economia într-o disciplină ştiinţifică mult mai riguroasă decât în perioada anterioară. Multe dintre conceptele sale, precum price elasticity (elasticitatea preţurilor), the representative firm (firma reprezentativă), consumer`s surplus (surplusul consumatorului) îşi păstrează şi astăzi valabilitatea. Probabil că metafora emblematică pentru opera sa este aşa-numita foarfecă a preţurilor, folosită pentru a ilustra cum preţul unei mărfi este determinat de interacţiunea dintre două forţe şi anume cererea şi oferta. Spre deosebire de contemporanii săi, Marshall este profund influenţat de ideile lui Darwin şi astfel viziunea sa este cea a economiei ca organism cu un anumit ciclu de viaţă; astfel, conform acestui model biomedical, economia este tratată ca organism, de cele mai multe ori ca pacient care are nevoie de vindecare:

„The economist is supposed to be able to diagnose the illness and then, with luck and skill, remove it. Admittedly, economists often disagree among each other about the diagnosis and, even more frequently, about the cure; but that merely proves that the subject matter is uncommonly difficult and economists, like other humans, are fallible.” (1990:125).

Metafora conceptuală care conferă coerenţă întregului fragment citat este ECONOMIA ESTE UN ORGANISM, având ca analogii subiacente economia ca pacient, economistul ca doctor, fenomenele economiec negative ca boală, soluţia problemelor economice este vindecare. Reprezentarea antropomorfică a economiei este extrem de utilizată în discurs, fapt care se datorează tendinţei general umane de a modela fenomene abstracte pe baza asemănărilor cu propria fiinţă, mărind astfel gradul de familiaritate cu conceptul de explicat şi facilitând comprehensiunea acestuia. Utilizarea vehiculului biologic reaminteşte de locul privilegiat ocupat de specia umană în lumea înconjurătoare. Biologia, preocupată de diviziunea conceptuală între universul social şi cel natural, atrage atenţia asupra ideii că deşi oamenii sunt văzuţi ca entităţi implicate în procesul de gândire, alocare, consum, producţie, etc., ei fac totuşi parte integrantă dintr-un univers natural complex, guvernat de legi biologice. Întrega teorie neo-clasică a ştiinţelor economice este de altfel fondată pe premise biologice sau biopsihologice, mai ales că începutul secolului a adus în prim-planul cercetării stiinţifice ideea că principiile fizicii newtoniene nu mai sunt aplicabile nici măcar fizicii moderne, şi deci în nici un

160 caz potrivite pentru ştiinţele sociale. Un promotor al teoriei evoluţioniste in economie este Hodgson, care susţine:

„[…] the appropriate metaphor for economics, if one is necessary, should be biological.” (1993:21) „Real world economic phenomena have much in common with biological organisms and processes than with the mechanistic world of billiard balls and planets.”(1993:45)

Observăm disocierea clară de viziunea tradiţională a lui Adam Smith, al cărui eşafodaj de argumente se sprijinea pe metafora economiei ca mecanism autoreglat care se supune legilor de tip fizic. Un alt promotor al modelului evoluţionist în economie este Michael Rotschild, fondatorul conceptului de „bionomie” (engl. bionomics):

„By way of analogy, bionomics argues that, on a day in-day out basis, biologic and economic life are organized and operate in much the same way....Though the analogy between genetic and technologic evolution is powerful, it is not perfect." (1990:33)

Întreaga sa operă este structurată pe analogii între economia din natură şi economiile umane, considerate ca ecosisteme metaforice, cu capitalismul ca motor al evoluţiei economice:

"Avoiding head-on competition –in the wild and in the marketplace –leads to diversity, which, in turn, promotes interdependence. Mutually beneficial relationships, common among species in nature, are echoed in business, where the vast majority of affiliations are based on mutual profitability." (1990:45)

2.3. Viziunea metaforică a lui John Maynard Keynes John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) a fost unul dintre economiştii importanţi ai începutului de secol XX, sistemul fondat de el aflându-se la originea tuturor politicilor economice occidentale, eminamente caracterizate de intervenţia statului compatibilă cu menţinerea liberalismului. În lucrarea General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) găsim o explicaţie teoretică a şomajului cvasi-permanent care făcea ravagii în Anglia, precum şi bazele unei interpretări a capitalismului şi o înnoire a teoriei economice. Atacând liberalismul predecesorilor săi, Keynes demonstrează posibilitatea unui şomaj involuntar (care să nu fie motivat de refuzul de a munci din cauza salariului considerat insuficient) permanent, care să nu se poată rezolva de la sine (aşa cum susţineau teoriile mecaniciste anterioare) şi necesită prin urmare intervenţia statului. După el, nu există nici un mecanism autocorector al şomajului, astfel că statul trebuie să-şi asume responsabilitatea de a menţine nivelul optim de angajare a forţei de muncă printr-o politică adecvată. Această politică, opusă în mod direct tehnicilor deflaţioniste utilizate până atunci, este esenţial monetară, ceea ce permite intervenţia eficace a statului fără să afecteze autonomia investiţiilor particulare; aceasta constă în creşterea ratei dobânzii, mărirea investiţiilor publice, favorizarea consumerismului prin redistribuirea veniturilor către clasele lipsite de resurse şi protecţionismul vamal. În ceea ce priveşte metoda de analiză economică, inovaţia lui Keynes se referă la caracterul să „general” (în opoziţie cu facilităţile echilibrului parţial), utilizarea cantităţilor globale şi insistenţa asupra variabilelor privilegiate (investiţiile şi rata dobânzii). Ca mijloace de ilustrare a teoriei sale, distingem câteva metafore constitutive care au rămas în istoria gândirii economice. În primul rând, Keynes îşi transpune teoria privitoare la dificultăţile financiare cauzate de suprainvestiţii în termenii unei metafore atent formulate, cea a unei raţe sălbatice încurcate în plantele acvatice de pe fundul unui lac. Apoi remarcăm reorientarea viziunii mecaniciste către cea de factură neo-liberală, teoreticianul preferă să echivaleze economia cu un joc, în care spiritul liberei iniţiative este văzut ca o loterie, un joc de noroc:

„[…] businessmen paly a mixed game of skill and chance […] the game of professional investment is intolerably boring and overexciting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct” (cf. Schumacker, 1980:132).

161 De asemenea, atunci când explică funcţionarea bursei, recurge la o metaforă din aceeaşi sferă conceptuală: a paria la bursă echivalează cu a paria la un concurs de frumuseţe, atunci când decizia juriului rămâne eminamente subiectivă şi imprevizibilă.

2.4. Modele metaforice actuale În general, societatea actuală bazată pe progresul tehnologic încearcă să aplice modele mecaniciste, inginereşti şi ştiinţelor sociale precum economia. Apare astfel ceea ce Mirowski (1989) denumea „invidia faţă de fizică” resimţită acut mai ales în domeniul politico-economic. Lucrarea de referinţă a cercetătorului, More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature`s Economics, susţine chiar de la început că economia, mai ales în perioada neoclasică, a fost controlată în decursul istoriei sale de o metaforă; modelul fizic a determinat în detaliu substanţa teoriilor economice de la debut şi până în prezent. Cercetătorul consideră că economiştii au transferat direct modelele fizice actuale în categorii economice; de exemplu, noţiunea de utilitate a fost echivalată pe post de câmp vectorial cu energia ca dimensiune fizică, ceea ce permite adaptarea la domeniul economic a calculului matematic superior. De asemenea, sub influenţa antropologului M. Douglas, Mirowski consideră că atât fizica, cât şi economia utilizează concepte antropologice, prezentând o schema elaborată a acestora. În plus, în viziunea sa teoriile sunt metafore impuse asupra realităţii, cu toate că studiul nu oferă nicăieri nici o delimitare clară a termenului „metaforă”. Un continuator al acestor idei este E.T. Jaynes, care se raliază fascinaţiei manifestate de economie faţă de fizică, extinzând analogia anterioară la sistemele termodinamice şi incluzând conceptul de entropie. Premisa studiului său, How Should We Use Entropy in Economics (1991), constă în incapacitatea teoriilor precedente incomplete de a justifica evoluţia economică actuală.

„An economic system is in some ways like a mechanism, as is recognized in all theories. But it is really more like a thermodynamic system than a mechanism—an analogy also noted by others, but not yet developed sufficiently to judge the possibilities. […] On this analogy, the failure of keynesian and Monetarist mechanisms to account for recent economic behaviour would be attributed, at least in part, to their failure to recognize the entropy factors that must ultimately control economic change and equilibrium, just as they do in thermodynamics”(2).

Este demn de interes să observăm că întregul articol este prezentat într-un limbaj metaforic, deşi autorul este de formaţiune fizician la Universitatea Washington:

„At what velocity does the economic system drift up the entropy hill? How widely will it fluctuate about the deterministic path?”(ibid)

Recunoaştem cu uşurinţă în fragmentul citat metaforele conceptuale ECONOMIA ESTE O MAŞINĂ (economia are drept caracteristică viteza, prezintă fluctuaţii în funcţionare), EVOLUŢIA ECONOMICĂ ESTE DEPLASARE ÎN SPAŢIU (se înscrie în traiectoria deterministă), DIMENSIUNILE FIZICE SUNT FORME DE RELIEF (dealul/ curbura din graficul entropiei). Chiar şi ilustrarea teoriei se face in termenii unei alte metafore:

„What the theory suggests is the following. Even though a neighbouring macroeconomic state of higher entropy is available, the system does not necessarily move to it. A pile of sand does not necesarily level itself unless there is an earthquake to shake it up a little. The economic system might just stagnate where it is, unless it is shaken up by what an Englishman might call a `dither` of some sort”(3).

Fragmentul citat este un exemplu de exprimare marcată stilistic, introducând ceea ce s-ar putea numi analogii la puterea a doua: economia este un sistem termodinamic care trebuie să ajungă la starea de echilibru/ o grămadă de nisip care trebuie nivelată; evoluţia economică este un cutremur/ un `impuls`. Jaynes îşi transpune teoria în termeni extrem de familiari, aducând în prim plan imaginea extrem de concretă a unei grămezi de nisip nivelată de un cutremur, iar în fraza imediat următoare, temându-se că metafora ar putea fi greşit înţeleasă sau percepută ca exagerată în context, oferă interpretarea atenuată de întrerupere a stagnării economice printr-un `impuls`. Nu

162 este lipsit de interes să observăm că eufemismul este utilizat între ghilimele, tocmai pentru a atrage atenţia cititorului asupra valorii sale metalingvistice. De altfel, întregul articol este saturat de elemente şi definiţii fizico-matematice greu de înţeles şi de urmărit de către o persoană fără o temeinică pregătire tehnică.

3. Discursul de mediatizare Discursul de mediatizare se defineşte ca mediere între discursul prim al ştiinţei şi tehnologiei şi discursurile secunde, de vulgarizare şi popularizare. Acest tip de discurs capătă preponderenţă în anii 1980-1990, care marchează aşa-numita « turnură discursivă » occidentală, centrată exclusiv pe transmiterea informaţiei între experţii unui anumit domeniu şi publicul larg, sub pesiunea din ce in ce mai intensă de a crea limbaje de specialitate necesare pentru a înţelege, traduce sau interpreta documente de specialitate. Este momentul când se impun noi categorii de analiză, cum ar fi parafraza, metalimbajul, reformularea, enunţarea, ca de exemplu pe teritoriu francez, în Langue française, nr.53/1982, sub direcţia lui S. Mortureux (cf. Moirand, 2005, 77). Obiectivul esenţial al discursului de mediatizare este fără îndoială « reformularea discursurilor ştiinţifice şi tehnice în diverse situaţii » (Peytard et al., 1984 :3), dintre care se distinge prezentarea faptelor de factură tehnico-ştiinţifică în mass-media. Desigur, tratamentul mediatic al entităţilor, proceselor şi evenimentelor ştiinţifice are deseori coloratură socio-politică şi, mai ales în domeniul economic, preia, construieşte sau difuzează modele culturale de tipul celor menţionate în cadrul discursului de teoretizare. În acest caz se poate vorbi despre discursul de mediatizare ca reprezentare tipică a situaţiei « trilogale », în care mediatorul (jurnalistul economic) este un translator între discursul specialistului economist şi marele public. Analiza acestui tip de discurs implică luarea în calcul a dimensiunilor sale cognitive, precum referentul, reprezentarea şi/sau explicitarea acestuia, dar şi a dimensiunilor comunicative : -activitatea de nominalizare, care nu constituie doar simpla asociere a unei denumiri cu obiectul desemnat, ci şi selecţia între mai multe soluţii viabile dependente de evaluarea pe care locutorul o face situatiei date în funcţie de situaţiile anterioare şi de experienţa proprie ; -topicele enunţiative pe care discursul le construieşte pentru locutorii prezenţi sau citaţi, interlocutorii prezenţi sau virtuali, sursele citate ; -reprezentările discursurilor anterioare.

4. Concluzii Discursul economic, fie de teoretizare, fie de mediatizare, este structurat din punct de vedere cognitiv prin multiple modele metaforice provenite din opera unor economişti de seamă, precum Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall şi John Maynard Keynes, care au propus scheme cognitive precum ECONOMIA ESTE UN ORGANISM, ECONOMIA ESTE UN MECANISM/ O MAŞINĂ sau EVOLUŢIA ECONOMICĂ ESTE DEPLASARE ÎN SPAŢIU. Acestea par să se fi impus în conştiinţa culturală colectivă prin deplina lor adaptabilitate la necesităţile de prezentare, explicitare şi promovare a fenomenelor economice cu care se confruntă societatea, făcându-le astfel accesibile inclusiv publicului larg şi reuşind în acelaşi timp să reprezinte într-o manieră comprehensibilă imaginarul socio-economic.

Bibliografie Baumol, W.J., Blinder, A.S., Economics: principles and policy, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego, 1991. Brown, G., Yule, G., Discourse Analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. Charteris-Black, J., Metaphor and Vocabulary Teaching in ESP Economics, in „English for Specific Purposes”, 19, 2000, pp.149-165. D`Andrade, R., Some Propositions about the Relations between Culture and Human Cognition, în „Cultural Models in Language and Thought”, N. Quinn, D. Holland (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990. Grampp, W.D., What Did Smith Mean by the Invisible Hand, în „The Journal of Political Economy”, 108/2000, pp. 441-465. Hirsch, E.D., Kett, J.F., Trefil, J.S., The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2002. Khalil, E.L., Beyond natural selection and divine intervention: the Lamarckian implication of Adam Smith`s invisible hand, în „Journal of Evolutionary Economics”, 10/2000, pp. 373-393. Lakoff, G., Johnson, M., Metaphors We Live By, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1980. Marshall, A., Principles of Economics, Macmillan, London, 1990. Moirand, Sophie, De la médiation àla médiatisation des faits scientifiques et techniques: où en est l’analyse du discours? 2005, articol disponibil pe Internet, http://www.sorbonne/lingua/metaph.htm.

163 Peytard, J., Jacobi, D., Petroff, A., (ed), Français technique et scientifique: reformulation et enseignement, în „Langue française” 64, Larousse, Paris, 1984. Rothschild, Emma, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2001. Samuelson, P.A., Nordhaus, W.D., Miners, L., Nantz, K., Economics, Irwin, McGraw-Hill, Boston, Mass, 1998. Schumacker, E.F.,The Role of Economics, Blond and Briggs Ltd., London, 1980. Vaugh, K.I., Invisible Hand, în Eatwell, J., Milgate, M., Newman, P.K. (eds.), Invisible Hand, the NewPalgrave, Norton, New-York, 1989. Zuidhof, P., The Discourse of Markets: Fantasies of a Sovereign Power, MA thesis, 2003.

164 Competenţa expresivă şi «discursul repetat» în etno- şi sociotexte: efecte ale «cunoaşterii elocuţionale» şi ale «competenţei idiomatice»

Stelian Dumistrăcel* Doina Hreapcă**

Abstract: Certain hastily-drawn conclusions of some folklore specialists on the disappearance of the idiomatic folk expressions from the present rural environment are refuted through the appropriate research of the “dialectal” texts according to the stylistic registers of the language and the speakers’ communicative abilities, as a reflex of the elocutional knowledge and expressive competence. On the other hand, the vitality of the proverbs and sayings, as an expressive means, is rendered by the frequency of their occurrence in the (political) public discourse, the journalistic text and the funny statements of the socializing texts and messages posted on the internet by speakers from all the socio-cultural strata. Keywords: Stylistics, paremiology, repeated discourse, communication registers, elocutionary awareness, idiomatic competence, expressive competence Rezumat: Concluzii, grăbite, ale unor folclorişti, privind dispariţia parimiei din discursul mediului rural actual, sunt contrazise de cercetarea adecvată a textelor „dialectale” în funcţie de registre stilistice ale vorbirii şi de aptitudini comunicative ale locutorilor, ca reflex al cunoaşterii elocuţionale şi competenţei expresive. Pe de altă parte, vitalitatea proverbelor şi zicătorilor, ca mijloc expresiv, este ilustrată de frecvenţa apariţiei lor în discursul public (politic), în textul jurnalistic şi în enunţurile ludice din textele şi mesajele de socializare postate pe internet de vorbitori din toate categoriile socioculturale. Cuvinte-cheie: stilistică, paremiologie, discurs repetat, registre ale comunicării, cunoaştere elocuţională, competenţă idiomatică, competenţă expresivă

0.1. Textul de faţă reprezintă, de fapt, reluarea şi actualizarea, din motive pe care le considerăm justificate, a unei teme tratate în urmă cu peste 20 de ani [1]. Cel mai important motiv este invocarea, de dată relativ recentă, de către Pavel Ruxăndoiu, deşi dintr-o viziune parţial deosebită, a unei teze susţinute anterior de Cezar Tabarcea, privind prezenţa redusă, de principiu, a parimiilor în vorbirea uzuală, cu referire specială la vorbirea ţăranilor, pornind de la analiza de suprafaţă a unui volum de texte dialectale, un punct de vedere pe care l-am respins din perspectiva imperativului ca o evaluare de acest fel să ia în considerare competenţa expresivă a vorbitorilor, manifestată la nivelul idiostilului. Nici explicarea, de către Pavel Ruxăndoiu, a aceleiaşi presupuse absenţe, doar ca efect al unei scăderi, în timp, a competenţei idiomatice a vorbitorilor din mediul rural nu se justifică decât ca factor secundar. Al doilea motiv îl reprezintă faptul că, faţă de unele neclarităţi sau confuzii la nivelul exegezei şi al manualelor şcolare, se impune încercarea de a stabili contururi ale unui fond paremiologic funcţional la vorbitorii din mediul rural pentru sfârşitul secolului al XIX-lea (în consens parţial cu puncte de vedere susţinute de Pavel Ruxăndoiu), ca bază pentru menţinerea în actualitate, în sfera, difuză, a metaforei, a trăsăturilor unui limbaj funcţional de coloratură paremiologică, în cadrul stilului comunicării publice şi private; această situaţie este probată de prezenţa, deosebit de marcată şi insistentă, a parimiilor în publicistica actuală (în special în titrare, ca zonă de performanţă comunicativă), fenomen ce trebuie raportat, de asemenea, la conceptul de «idiostil». În sfârşit, reluarea temei s-a impus pentru reconsiderarea prezenţei parimiei şi a altor mijloace ale comunicării „colorate” a vorbitorilor, din perspectiva conceptului coşerian de « discurs repetat », ca o expresie a tentaţiei spontane sau a intenţiei manifeste de plasare a interlocutorilor la acelaşi nivel al competenţei expresive. Complementar acestor repere exegetice, prezentăm şi o motivaţie sentimentală: problematica articolului a constituit cadrul unor prelegeri la cursul de etnostilistică ţinut de Stelian Dumistrăcel, între anii 1997 – 1999, la Facultatea de Litere de la Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, avându-i ca studenţi sau/şi doctoranzi, printre alţii, pe Gina Necula, Ileana Alexandrescu, Cristinel Munteanu şi Ionel Apostolatu.

* Prof. univ. dr., Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iaşi ** Cercet. şt. pr. I. dr., Institutul de Filologie Română „A. Philippide”, Academia Română, Filiala Iaşi

165 0.2. În funcţie de cele expuse anterior, ne propunem, ca primă parte [I], reluarea textului iniţial al articolului publicat de Stelian Dumistrăcel în 1988, cu minime adnotări, transparente, pentru ca partea a doua [II] să reprezinte aducerea la zi a problemei abordate anterior; pornind de la critica punctului de vedere Ruxăndoiu amintit şi de la o radiografiere a situaţiei parimiei în surse de la sfârşitul secolului al XIX-lea, ne propunem o analiză a prezenţei zicătorilor şi proverbelor în discursul public actual, în diferite limbaje funcţionale, în diferite registre ale exprimării şi în diverse ipostaze, cu raportare la conceptul de «discurs repetat». I. 0. Pentru început, reluăm neschimbat (1. – 2.3) textul articolului publicat în 1988, pentru a păstra exactitatea în ceea ce priveşte faptele puse în discuţie atunci, ca viziune şi ca argumentare, în raport cu observaţiile critice faţă de punctele de vedere exprimate ulterior de alţi autori. În textul iniţial am intervenit numai în privinţa organizării grafice şi a sistemului de trimitere la exegezele şi sursele citate. Pe de altă parte, am marcat, prin plasarea în paragrafe „retrase”, scrise cu „arial”, aducerea la zi a textului în ceea ce priveşte unele informaţii complementare.

1. Legătura dintre dialectologie, ca disciplină lingvistică ce contribuie la formaţia profesorului de limba română, şi literatura naţională, ca obiect de predare în şcoală, este pusă în lumină, aşa cum a arătat prof. B. Cazacu, şi de analiza stilistică [2], printre ale cărei elemente operaţionale se află şi unele ce evidenţiază o relaţie sui-generis între limba literară şi graiuri. Ne referim la statutul formulelor paremiologice în stilul beletristic şi în vorbirea populară, din perspectiva studiilor de stilistică (cu aplicaţii în tratatele de istoria limbii române literare şi în manuale), pe de o parte, şi faţă de constatările unor folclorişti, care au urmărit f u n c ţ i o n a l i t a t e a acestor producţii ale spiritualităţii populare, pe de altă parte. 1.1. Zicătorile şi proverbele sunt considerate drept unele dintre trăsăturile prin care se manifestă oralitatea stilului, ca mijloace ale limbii sau ale vorbirii populare. Ne vom opri mai întâi la câteva aprecieri ale lui Tudor Vianu care semnala, de exemplu, „mulţimea acelor proverbe cu care se exprimă personagiile” lui Nicolae Filimon, ceea ce face din Ciocoii vechi şi noi „un adevărat repertoriu al expresiilor tipice întrebuinţate de poporul român” (Vianu 1977: 55). După acelaşi estetician (care consideră că în paginile Amintirilor, Poveştilor şi Anecdotelor a fost pusă la contribuţie „o mare parte din energia expresivă a graiului nostru”), „imaginile, metaforele, comparaţiile lui Creangă sunt proverbe sau ziceri tipice ale poporului, expresii scoase din marele rezervoriu al limbii” (ibidem, p. 101), iar „abundenţa de proverbe şi locuţiuni" dă stilului lui Odobescu „caracterul oralităţii populare” (Vianu 1957: 173, cf. p. 174, şi Vianu 1955: 91, 108, cu privire la „formele stilului vorbit” în scrierile lui Caragiale). Într-o caracterizare generală, pentru Iorgu Iordan, „citatelor literare şi ştiinţifice, caracteristice pentru limbajul oamenilor de cultură, le corespund, din punctul de vedere al expresivităţii, maximele, proverbele etc. din vorbirea populară şi familiară” (Iordan 1975: 23). La tipologia deja diversă a scriitorilor pentru care am selectat câteva caracterizări consonante referitoare la sorgintea formulelor paremiologice trebuie să adăugăm, pentru epoca veche a literaturii naţionale şi pentru a urmări începuturile acestui filon stilistic, câteva alte observaţii, culese din Istoria limbii române literare a lui Al. Rosetti, Boris Cazacu şi Liviu Onu, carte cu circulaţie printre profesorii de limba şi literatura română. Astfel, alături de alte trăsături specifice vorbirii populare ce caracterizează stilul lui Neculce, se aminteşte şi „bogăţia de expresii, maxime, proverbe” (Rosetti - Cazacu - Onu 1971: 293), după cum, analizând stilul cronicarilor munteni, se precizează că folosirea expresiilor populare aparţine stilului colocvial-familiar (ibidem, p. 343). În ceea ce priveşte naraţiunile puternic marcate de subiectivitate ce înfăţişează evenimente din istoria Ţării Româneşti, „de cele mai multe ori, caracterul popular şi caracterul oral al expunerii sunt inseparabile” (loc. cit.), printre elementele de limbă vorbită semnalându-se „folosirea, pe o scară mai redusă decât la cronicarii moldoveni, a unor proverbe, zicători, sentinţe”, cele mai multe cu caracter popular (ibidem, p. 345). Pentru perioada de tranziţie spre literatura modernă, vom aminti şi caracterizarea stilului lui I. Budai-Deleanu: „sunt numeroase în Ţiganiada expresiile specifice limbii vorbite populare”, analizate drept locuţiuni, expresii propriu-zise, proverbe şi zicători (ibidem, p. 497). Dintr-o altă lucrare cu destinaţie didactică, reţinem, cu privire la opera lui Creangă, următoarea formulare definitorie, pe baza căreia parimia poate fi considerată ca aparţinând limbii

166 vorbite: satul „a transmis limbajului rustic cuvântul sugestiv, metaforele şi formulele tipice fixate ca bunuri permanente şi comune întregii colectivităţi de la ţară” (Munteanu - Ţâra 1983: 310). 1.2. În această adevărată tradiţie a exegezei, manualele şcolare apelează, în analiza stilului operelor a doi mari prozatori, Creangă şi Sadoveanu, la caracterizări asemănătoare. 1.2.1. Despre Creangă, de exemplu, se afirmă că „a repovestit basmele în aceeaşi limbă vie a poporului, utilizând expresii dialectale, ziceri tipice, comparaţii şi metafore specifice” şi se subliniază „plăcerea scriitorului de a-şi presăra naraţiunea cu zicale, expresii populare şi vorbe de duh [...]. Creangă citează neobosit din tezaurul de înţelepciune populară” (Otobîcu 1984: 250, 253). Sugerându-ne observaţia lui Tudor Vianu, după care Sadoveanu stilizează exprimarea curentă prin „maxime intercalate în vorbire” (Vianu 1977: 229), se trage concluzia că „expresia sadoveniană pune în valoare tâlcul vorbei ţărăneşti pe care-l ridică la rang de artă”, încheiere a cărei semnificaţie poate fi dedusă şi din enunţarea unei teme pentru elevi, cărora li se cere să selecteze dintr-un fragment din povestiri „expresiile care vorbesc despre înţelepciunea populară”, identificând „formulări corespunzătoare în proverbe româneşti” (Leahu - Parfene 1985: 122 - 123). 1.2.2. Formulări asemănătoare găsim şi în manuale recente. Iată, de exemplu, într-un manual pentru clasa a X-a, referiri la Creangă, dintr-o „aplicaţie” din zona, generală, a evaluărilor privitoare la fenomenul oralităţii: „S-a constatat prezenţa în opera literară a lui Ion Creangă a unui număr mare de zicale şi proverbe populare sau create în spiritul acestora. Selectaţi din Povestea lui Harap-Alb cel puţin câte două proverbe şi zicători” (Iancu et alii 2005: 14). Sau, în alt manual, după ce se afirmă că, prin mijlocirea oralităţii, „Creangă restituie povestirea funcţiunei ei estetice primitive, care este de a se adresa nu unor cititori, ci unui auditoriu capabil de a fi cucerit prin toate elementele de sugestie ale graiului viu, cu tot ce poate transmite acesta peste înţelesul abstract al lucrurilor comunicate” (cu trimitere la Tudor Vianu), tot într-o „aplicaţie”, se cere elevilor să găsească, în textul poveştii Dănilă Prepeleac, „elemente de oralitate a stilului”, referindu-se la „forme ale graiului viu (ziceri tipice ale poporului şi particularităţi regionale sau populare ale vorbirii); ... rime şi asonanţe strecurate în expunere (de exemplu: «la vale cu proptele şi la deal cu opintele»” [atragem atenţia asupra acestei expresii]); (Crişan et alii 2000: 40). Formulări apropiate la aceiaşi autori, în ediţia din 2007 a manualului citat imediat anterior: „Oralitatea este o trăsătură pregnantă a stilului lui Ion Creangă, având, cum arată Tudor Vianu (în Arta prozatorilor români), rolul de a restitui povestirii funcţia ei estetică primitivă, aceea de a se adresa nu unor cititori, ci unui auditoriu capabil de a fi cucerit prin toate elementele de sugestie ale graiului viu. Vianu enumeră, printre mijloacele oralităţii, formele graiului viu […], onomatopeele […], rimele şi asonanţele («omul are un dar şi un amar», „când sunt zile şi noroc treci prin apă şi prin foc» etc.)” (Crişan et alii 2007: 107). Pentru referiri de aceeaşi factură în ceea ce priveşte proza sadoveniană, cf. Iancu et alii 2005: 30. 1.3. Din perspectiva precizărilor metodologice pe care ni le-am propus, se impune constatarea că, în caracterizările citate mai sus, se fac, de fapt, referinţe la două niveluri: cel al l i m b i i şi cel al v o r b i r i i. Primului nivel îi sunt atribuite formulele paremiologice prin aprecieri de tipul repertoriu al expresiilor tipice întrebuinţate de poporul român, marele rezervoriu al limbii, tezaurul de înţelepciune populară, energia expresivă a graiului nostru, în timp ce altele conduc spre recunoaşterea în proverbe şi zicători a unor elemente ale vorbirii, ale exprimării curente populare (şi familiare): stil vorbit, vorbire populară şi familiară, limbă vorbită populară, limba vie a poporului, vorba ţărănească, bunuri permanente şi comune întregii colectivităţi de la ţară. Este vorba, aşadar, pe de o parte, de apartenenţa acestor izolări la un fond general de imagini al limbii constituit în diacronie, dar comparabil, măcar în parte, cu arhaismele, la care scriitorii au recurs / recurg din motive stilistice sau, pe de altă parte, de existenţa zicătorilor şi proverbelor în vorbirea uzuală, în trecut, dar şi astăzi, prezenţa lor în limba scriitorilor, de la cronicari până în zilele noastre, reprezentând fuziunea cu un element funcţional al vorbirii populare.

167 Această distincţie prezintă o importanţă deosebită, întrucât în studiile unor folclorişti s-a remarcat raritatea, la povestitorii populari şi în textele dialectale, a zicătorilor şi proverbelor, aspect cu implicaţii în ceea ce priveşte caracterizarea de ansamblu a vorbirii populare. Astfel, Ovidiu Bîrlea, autorul unei bogate antologii de proză populară, cu o tematică variată (în care predomină totuşi basmele de tipuri diferite), observa că „povestitorii populari folosesc doar incidental un proverb sau o zicătoare, exceptând câteva snoave sau legende care au drept obiect explicarea – comică sau serioasă – a unui proverb” (Bîrlea 1967: 183). Având în vedere „textele populare”, Cezar Tabarcea confirmă această apreciere, cercetând un volum de texte dialectale (cu trimitere la Graiul din zona „Porţile de Fier”, Bucureşti, 1967 [sic! volumul respectiv a apărut în anul 1973). Pornind de la aceste fapte, autorul trage concluzia că „imaginea idilică… a ţăranului care grăieşte în pilde şi îşi presară vorbirea cu zicători” este departe de realitate şi schiţează repere limitative: „lucrul este oarecum posibil în literatura orală”, dar „este cu totul sporadic în vorbirea uzuală” (Tabarcea 1982: 52; evidenţierile prin italice ne aparţin). Constatările citate deschid o discuţie de un interes aparte pentru stilistica vorbirii populare, cu atât mai mult cu cât o cercetare propriu-zisă asupra subiectului nu s-a întreprins încă, iar aprecierea că proverbele şi zicătorile nu se întâlnesc decât sporadic în vorbirea uzuală (populară) suferă cel puţin de pe urma impreciziei, dacă ţinem seama de faptul că Cezar Tabarcea a susţinut ideea potrivit căreia stilul proverbial este în primul rând o componentă a idiostilului (ibidem, p. 207 - 208). Or, în acest caz, ne întrebăm dacă evaluarea frecvenţei se mai poate face referindu-ne la uzul unei categorii de vorbitori în ansamblul ei. De fapt, pornind şi de la propriile noastre constatări, cu caracter mai mult sau mai puţin sistematic, din cursul anchetelor pentru Noul Atlas lingvistic român, pe regiuni. Moldova şi Bucovina, considerăm că se poate dovedi existenţa unei tipologii diverse a vorbitorilor din mediul rural în legătură cu utilizarea contextelor proverbiale. 1.4. Ne propunem să verificăm această observaţie (pe bază de sondaje) în două culegeri de texte dialectale, pentru a rămâne la izvoare din categoria celor avute în vedere anterior şi pentru că nu trebuie să neglijăm faptul că majoritatea textelor din culegerile mai noi de acest tip reprezintă (adoptând clasificarea propusă de Coteanu 1973: 50) limbajul popular non-artistic, subdiviziunea nuanţat tehnic (în care mijloacele expresive sunt solicitate, de obicei, mai rar), în acord cu precizările făcute de Pavel Ruxăndoiu privitoare la relaţia text dialectal – text folkloric [3]. În astfel de culegeri se întâlnesc însă şi texte prin excelenţă narative, adesea cu caracter autobiografic sau relatări asupra unor întâmplări „senzaţionale”, aşa-zisele texte libere în clasificarea dialectologilor, culese cu scopul expres de a servi pentru studiul sintaxei şi stilisticii limbii vorbite. În cadrul acestui registru, se remarcă intenţia sensibilizării ideilor, unele dintre textele de acest fel putând fi socotite „creaţii” de factură artistică. Dar, şi în această situaţie, se manifestă diferenţele semnalate încă de Emil Petrovici: „informatori… buni povestitori” şi subiecţi „de un laconism supărător când li se cerea să povestească ceva mai pe îndelete” (Petrovici 1943: VI). De aceea, pentru aprecierea folosirii zicătorilor şi proverbelor în vorbirea populară, discuţia trebuie mutată de la caracterizările de ansamblu ce au în vedere culegeri de texte la analiza frecvenţei acestor formule la vorbitorii înregistraţi, care pot fi, la rândul lor, clasificaţi în două categorii esenţiale: – cei cărora componenta paremiologică a limbii le este mai mult sau mai puţin străină (şi aceştia sunt, şi după volumele consultate, mai numeroşi) şi – cei care recurg la zicători şi proverbe ca mijloace de plasticizare a expunerii. 1.5. Din ultima categorie se selectează însă şi adevăraţi „virtuozi” ai formulei proverbiale. Pentru o corectă evaluare a situaţiei, vom distinge, paralel, contextele ce reflectă vorbirea uzuală [A] de cele ce aparţin epicii [B], naraţiuni propriu-zise, cu o structură şi apelând la mijloace de expresie care servesc intenţia de a produce o anumită impresie asupra ascultătorilor (interlocutori). [A] Considerând ancheta lingvistică drept o situaţie specială în procesul comunicării, vom observa că, în funcţie de anumite date personale, unii informatori recurg la reflecţia paremiologică. Un caz concludent ni-l oferă Ion Turculeţ, din Vădeni – Brăila, de 63 de ani la data înregistrărilor pentru culegerea de texte Graiul nostru. Trebuie să precizăm, mai întâi, contextul socio-psihologic al anchetei, aspect ale cărui implicaţii au fost discutate de prof. Tatiana Slama-Cazacu [4]. Datorită caracterului inedit al cercetării la începutul secolului nostru, mai ales că investigatorii nu culegeau

168 (numai) folclor, interesul pentru „mărturisiri de ale ţăranilor despre traiul lor, păreri asupra unor lucruri care-i privesc” provoacă neîncredere, iar anchetatorul „e luat drept un trimis al stăpânirii să- l spioneze [pe ţăran] ori să-l încarce cu dări nouă” (Graiul 1906: VI). Această stare de spirit este reflectată de comentariul informatorului la care ne-am referit, preocupat de eventualele consecinţe (neplăcute) ale aprecierilor pe care le avansează (prezentăm textul în întregime, literarizat): [1] „Îţi spun drept, domnişorule, mai bine era pe vremuri. Ceea ce ne spun cărturarii nu leagă [subl.n.]. Vorba, că pe cât am trăit, n-am s-o mai duc, şi-apoi povestea cântecului: Nici numi pasă / Al de Nastasă, / De Nichita / Nici atâta” (Graiul 1906: 245 - 246).

Textul are un vădit caracter sentenţios, amintind compoziţiile de „gnomism pur” ale scriitorilor (Călinescu 1982: 216), însăşi structura fiind subliniată de formule introductive tipice, marcând interferenţele de cod (vorba, povestea cântecului). Se impune să adăugăm precizarea că informatorul nu are „darul” povestirii, ci este de tip „laconic”, căci el „expediază” în câteva fraze două subiecte etnografice (obiceiuri la nuntă şi caloianul; loc. cit., p. 245). Putem considera, aşadar, că formula aforistică, reflectînd o anumită forma mentis a vorbitorului, face parte din elementele idiostilului său, ale vorbirii lui uzuale. [B] Un alt rol îl îndeplineşte parimia pentru vorbitorii cu talent de povestitori, la care metafora, construcţia ritmată, expresia idiomatică ocupă un loc apreciabil. Alături de mijloacele ce „poetizează” şi „dramatizează” expunerea (Coteanu 1973: 99, 109), astfel de formule reprezintă un adevărat comentariu paremiologic al enunţului. Exemple de acest tip pot fi găsite mai ales în povestirile cu caracter autobiografic. Ilustrativ este cazul unei evocări avînd ca subiect viaţa matrimonială a unui informator (Mihu Manea Călin Stan) din Obileşti-Tătărani, jud. Vrancea, în vîrstă de 65 de ani în 1970 (la data anchetei); Anchetatorii au înregistrat o povestire dialogată şi tensionată dramatic, ce cuprinde, pe spaţiul a opt pagini (Texte Muntenia 1975: 470 - 478), numeroase mijloace expresive propriu-zise, printre care: – [α] expresii idiomatice, zicători (în unele cazuri, acestea din urmă par adaptări proprii ale unor prototipuri, dacă nu sunt chiar creaţii personale): a ţine soba în braţe; „dă-mi dreptul meu, aprinde-mi lumânarea, că eu mor” ; „[pe] femeie ai dus-o cu targa, pe noi ne duci cu braga”; „unde nu reuşeşte cinci oameni, trimite o femeie, aia reuşeşte”; „(o alintasem,) sita nouă în cui se ţine de- o dată”; „nu găseam nodu” (eliptic sau aluziv: nod în papură); „calc-aşa de zici ca iepurele”; – [β] locuţiuni, formule expresive, repetiţii, automatisme verbale: a umbla să se- nvârtească; a-şi face de cap; a lua din mers; „dă-i tămbălău, nene!”; a se pune pe treabă; a o rupe de fugă; „n-a vrut ăia să se uite la mine”; a face treabă cu cineva; a fi bun de târlă; a merge drept (pe drum); a-şi schimba conduita; de unde şi pînă unde; pe parcurs; a mai durat ce-a mai durat; „ei, s-auză, pace!”; – [γ] cuvinte cu valoare expresivă: a turna (la vânători, la grăniceri; cf. a vărsa „a repartiza un ostaş la o anumită unitate; a-l trece dintr-o unitate în alta”); a iordăni; „tărângăieşte un nomol la nuntă”; a dezalinta; a se coinări; a se cloşcări; furtunat etc. Aceste mijloace expresive aparţin unui „excelent povestitor, cu o inventivitate verbală excepţională şi cu un marcat simţ al umorului”, caracterizare a autorilor volumului (op. cit., p. LX), la care trebuie să subscriem. Întrucât povestirea a fost înregistrată în cursul unei anchete, fiind provocată de convorbirea cu anchetatorii, referirea la registrul uzual al vorbirii nu se exclude, dar apropierea ei de creaţiile aparţinând literaturii orale este evidentă prin suita de elemente anecdotice pe care le cuprinde (pentru amintire ca „practică general folclorică”, cf. Bîrlea 1967: 171) şi prin intenţionalitate (naratorul urmăreşte să provoace o anumită impresie, în vederea căreia îşi alege mijloacele).

169 2. Din preocuparea de a oferi, pentru studiul limbii vorbite, fapte comparabile, sub diverse aspecte, dialectologii înregistrează în primul rând texte tematice şi, cu toate că în ultimul timp s-a acordat o atenţie sporită textelor libere, culegerile tipărite nu reflectă nici măcar proporţional posibilităţile şi modalităţile e x p r e s i v e ale vorbirii populare. Cu această finalitate, ar putea fi concludente doar rezultatele unor anchete cu subiecţi selectaţi după criteriul „talent de narator”, dar trebuie pus în discuţie însuşi faptul dacă povestitorii care reproduc specii folclorice tradiţionale sunt indicaţi pentru o asemenea cercetare, date fiind constatările lui Ovidiu Bîrlea privind „fixitatea naraţiunilor în proză”, „stabilitatea neobişnuită” ori „schema stabilă” a poveştilor populare, ce se explică prin calităţile de memorie ale povestitorilor (Bîrlea 1966: 6, 21, 25), factori ce nu pot să nu influenţeze stilul enunţului, în general. 2.1. În perspectiva unui atare demers, putem opta pentru vorbitori a căror expunere este marcată de afect, direcţie în care textele libere publicate în culegerile dialectale recente oferă deja un câmp de observaţie fructuos, dintre contextele proverbiale cele mai des întîlnite fiind expresiile idiomatice. Iată, de exemplu, „lamentaţia” unei informatoare (B. V., 40 de ani în 1971, din Viziru, jud. Brăila), nemulţumită de căsătoria fiicei sale: [2] „...rostu i l-a cam stricat [...] el... vorba aia!, şi-a pus palma-n fund şi-a plecat [...] şi-a lăsat-o în focu meu şi-n spinarea mea, da…. ce să fac ?! Ce eram să fac ?! Făceam râs la lume şi haz la lume? Am tăcut din gură şi-am înghiţit [...] Dacă mai făceam panaramă la lume şi râs ce făceam ? Pe cine-ngrăşam? [. . .] Că cuscru să nu ne vază, nici nu i-a deschis uşa, nici c-o farfurie de-mpărţeală….” (Texte Muntenia 1975: 836).

2.2. Textele citate oferă doar avantajul concentrării formulelor (sau cuvintelor) expresive; în anchetele pentru atlasul lingvistic al Moldovei şi Bucovinei am constatat însă predilecţia unor vorbitori din mediul rural pentru contextele proverbiale propriu-zise, manifestată şi în alte împrejurări. Astfel, Anica Alec Zănoagă, din Muncelu-Glăvăneşti (jud. Bacău), o femeie dinamică şi ironică (61 de ani în 1972), comentând întrebările anchetatorilor, propriile-i răspunsuri la acestea sau în cursul înregistrărilor de texte, folosea zicale [de fapt: „formule uzuale de comparaţie” din sfera enunţului aparţinând discursului repetet] de tipul a sta ca piatra-n baltă (despre un om prost), a sta ca molia-n fundul ghemului (despre o persoană ursuză, tăcută), a se mişca ca curca-ntre lemne (cu referire la cineva neîndemânatic) etc. [5]. Mai mult, folosirea unei formule tehnice în descrierea unei vechi practici agricole, treieratul cu caii, îi provoacă unui informator sublinierea valorii figurate a enunţului ce a luat naştere în acest mediu: „Ca cum... vorba ţărănească la oameni: când moare, cică «s-a strâns frânghia la par»” (Dumistrăcel 1980: 188). Ca expresie tehnică, cf. şi „se strânge funia la steajer” (Texte Muntenia 1975: 704); pentru utilizarea figurată, în afara exemplelor citate în 1980, p. 187 - 188, vezi şi Ovidiu Bîrlea, Şteampuri fără apă, Bucureşti, 1979, p. 138; cf. p. 342 (expresia a se strânge funia pe lângă par este atribuită vorbirii unor mineri din zona Abrudului, care practică însă şi agricultura). Cu acelaşi sens, am înregistrat recent, de la medicul Vlad Bejan, originar din jud. Soroca, varianta a ajunge calul la pop. 3. Pe baza sondajelor ale căror rezultate le-am prezentat, se poate observa că, în limbajul popular, prezenţa elementelor stilului proverbial trebuie raportată la idiostiluri, ca idiolecte dezvoltate, dominate de conotaţii (Coteanu 1973: 80, 86). Chiar în stadiul actual al analizei, se poate afirma că mediul rural, ţărănesc în primul rând, în care au luat naştere numeroase zicători şi proverbe, păstrează, ca şi mediile culte (Tabarcea 1982: 55, 208), obişnuinţa şi plăcerea de a recurge la contexte proverbiale, că aceste formule nu reprezintă doar componentele unui tezaur, „cedate” beletristicii. Pentru discutarea acestui aspect, nu trebuie scăpată din vedere înregistrarea unui însemnat număr de zicători şi proverbe în răspunsurile la chestionarele lingvistic şi juridic ale lui B. P. Hasdeu (Muşlea - Bîrlea 1970: 522 - 528). Negreşit, trebuie precizată măsura în care o parte dintre ele reflectă sorgintea şi utilizarea cultă (vizibile în unele cazuri), întrucât corespondenţii au putut comunica şi formule paremiologice pe care le cunoşteau (numai) ei înşişi,

170 dar variantele şi turnurile stilistice ale unora dintre acestea reprezintă mărturii ale uzului în vorbirea curentă. Iată câteva exemple: „Cine n-a gustat amarul nu ştie ce e zaharul”; „Sărăcie, ce-ai cu mine? M-am avut cu tată-tău bine şi nu mă îndur nici de tine. – Dar eu unde te găsesc? Să mă cauţi sau în surcele la dogar, sau în vârşe la pescar, sau după cuptor la vânător” (op. cit., p. 524, 528). Depistarea formulelor paremiologice în vorbirea populară se poate face pe baza selecţiei vorbitorilor, operaţie care, în principiu, poate fi socotită un pandant al constatărilor cu privire la prezenţa (şi frecvenţa) zicătorilor şi proverbelor în stilul unor scriitori care înfăţişează mediul ţărănesc. Ne referim la Creangă, de exemplu (în scrisul căruia „zicerile tipice” sunt „mijloacele unui artist individual”; Vianu 1977: 102; cf. 161), prin comparaţie cu Liviu Rebreanu (pentru al cărui stil, cu totul deosebit, vezi ibidem, p. 319, şi Călinescu 1982: 734). Observaţia de faţă avea în vedere o anumită parcimonie, sesizată de Tudor Vianu, care notase „slaba înclinare” a lui Rebreanu „de a extrage efecte din notarea graiului viu, din adevărul şi sclipirea dialogului” (Arta prozatorilor români). Specificul expresivităţii operei prozatorului năsăudean a fost identificat de G. Călinescu în următorul contrast: „Frazele, considerate izolat, sunt incolore ca apa de mare ţinută în palmă; câteva sute de pagini au tonalitatea neagră-verde şi urletul mării” (Istoria literaturii române). S-ar putea aprecia, însă, că, mai ales în ceea ce priveşte „notarea graiului viu”, caracterizarea lui Tudor Vianu nu se susţine măcar dacă avem în vedere discursul naratorului; Rebreanu utilizează, de fapt, numeroase „frazeologisme expresive” (Munteanu Cr. 2006: 153, 155). Cercetarea dialectologică poate, fără îndoială, contribui la elucidarea acestei probleme, de interferenţă a mai multor discipline filologice în procesul didactic, furnizând texte care să permită analiza componentelor stilistice ale vorbirii populare.

II. Efecte ale «cunoaşterii elocuţionale» şi ale «competenţei idiomatice» 1. Respingerea de către Cezar Tabarcea a unei imagini idilice (numai sămănătoriste?) a ţăranului „care grăieşte în pilde şi îşi presară vorbirea cu zicători” (cf. § I.1.3) este creditată de Pavel Ruxăndoiu în teza sa de doctorat, publicată în 2003 (susţinută, însă, în 1996), în capitolul intitulat, deosebit de promiţător pentru discuţia de faţă, Contextul funcţional: „Din analizele efectuate, s-a constatat, însă, că proverbele şi zicătorile apar foarte rar în textele dialectale înregistrate de lingvişti. Cezar Tabarcea face această observaţie referindu-se la antologia de texte Graiul din zona «Porţile de Fier» (Bucureşti, 1967 [atenţie: se preia, greşit, anul 1967, în loc de 1973]), în care, după o cercetare atentă, identifică cu dificultate cinci-şase proverbe la un volum de 308 pagini” (Ruxăndoiu 2003: 154). Asumându-şi riscul de a fi acuzat de lipsă de modestie, Stelian Dumitrăcel nu poate să nu-şi exprime regretul că, deşi participant la masa rotundă la care a prezentat, iniţial (în 1986), comunicarea al cărei text a fost publicat, apoi (în 1988), într-o revistă de specialitate (de la Bucureşti!), Pavel Ruxăndoiu nu a luat în considerare (eventual pentru a o contesta) critica care a fost adusă punctului de vedere al lui Cezar Tabarcea, rezultat dintr-o analiză simplistă. În aceste condiţii, în textul de faţă vor fi reluate, uneori cu noi argumente, cele mai multe din obiecţiile iniţiale.

1.1. Deşi parcurgerea mai multor volume de aşa-numite „texte dialectale” îl conduce spre descoperirea a numeroşi „povestitori talentaţi”, cu acces evident şi remarcat la paremiologie, acceptând poziţia de principiu Tabarcea, Pavel Ruxăndoiu rămâne, formal, la evaluarea… statistică: număr de formule paremiologice (respectiv enunţuri cu rezonanţă paremiologică sau formule de tip proverbial – două precizări metodologice binevenite) faţă de număr de pagini de texte (confruntare căreia îi adaugă raportarea şi la număr de informatori): „Aceeaşi constatare am făcut-o şi noi, examinând la fel de atent primele două volume ale antologiei Texte dialectale. Muntenia (Bucureşti, Editura Academiei, I – 1973; II – 1975), în care am identificat 17 proverbe, 9 zicători şi 17 formule de tip proverbial la 50 de informatori dintr-un total de 503 chestionaţi, textele înregistrate însumând 474 + 905 (deci 1.379) pagini” (ibidem).

171 În limitele acestei convenţii, autorul se dovedeşte însă extrem de precaut chiar referitor la aprecierea tipologiei textelor din volumele supuse inventarierii şi analizei; de exemplu, cu privire la presupunerea că rezultatele s-ar datora „stilului textelor înregistrate, majoritatea lor reprezentând stilul popular non-artistic, în care mijloacele expresive sunt solicitate de obicei mai rar” (Ruxăndoiu 2003: 155; acelaşi element de analiză, aproape în aceiaşi termeni, a fost invocat în textul publicat de Stelian Dumistrăcel în 1988; vezi mai sus, § I.1.4: [este vorba, după o clasificare a lui Ion Coteanu, de] „limbajul popular non-artistic, subdiviziunea nuanţat tehnic (în care mijloacele expresive sunt solicitate, de obicei, mai rar)”. În pofida a numeroase semnale de nuanţare, complexă (în special de viziune psiholingvistică), a interpretării strict stilistice, prezente în excelentele capitole precedente ale monografiei sale (Contextul genetic, Contextul generic), autorul pare a fi convins că apariţia mai redusă (ba, pe ansamblu de pagini, chiar foarte redusă!) a parimiilor în cele două volume conspectate din Texte dialectale Muntenia s-ar datora, măcar în parte, momentului din istoria limbii române pe care îl reprezintă, recurgând, iarăşi, la o statistică: „Fenomenul poate fi explicat parţial printr-o sărăcire relativ recentă a limbajului popular, inclusiv a celui expresiv, de enunţuri proverbiale, pentru că în corpusuri mai vechi de texte acestea apar cu o frecvenţă ceva mai mare. În Graiul nostru (vol. I, II, Bucureşti, 1906 – 1907 [volumul II a apărut, de fapt, în 1908]), la cca 300 de pagini de texte în proză, culese din toate zonele locuite de români, au fost identificate 34 de proverbe, 19 zicători şi 4 expresii cu statut paremiologic incert” (Ruxăndoiu 2003: 155).

Din perspectiva considerării «contextului funcţional» ca „reprezentând actele concrete de comunicare, de tip oral sau scris, în care sunt utilizate expresii paremiologice, implicând relaţii cu componentele mesajului sau situaţiei care le integrează şi în raport cu care enunţarea lor comportă o valoare semnificativă, deci în raport cu care se realizează raţiunea lor de funcţionare” (op.cit., p. 136), autorul analizează, convingător, situaţii de comunicare concludente în care apar parimii sau formule raportabile la statutul paremiologic, din cele două volume ale culegerii Graiul nostru. Printre acestea, un text scurt, din judeţul Botoşani, de la un „povestitor cu predilecţie pentru limbajul proverbial” cuprinde nu mai puţin de patru expresii specifice acestui limbaj: „capul plecat sabia nu-l taie”, „[a fi] moară stricată”; „în loc de feştilă a pus buci la lumânare” (este citată o anecdotă), „a da cinstea pe ruşine şi pacea pe gâlceavă” (op.cit., p. 168), o situaţie de comunicare perfect comparabilă cu aceea, tot din Graiul nostru, analizată anterior (cf. § I.1.5, textul [1]) şi care ilustrează, concludent, tocmai necesitatea considerării conceptului de «idiostil». Dar, în linii generale, numărarea parimiilor şi a contextelor paremiologice cuprinse într-un volum de texte poate fi o operaţie cu însemnătate redusă, şi nu doar din cauza subiectivităţii de apreciere a cercetătorului, De exemplu, Pavel Ruxăndoiu, ca bun profesionist, dă o şansă şi situaţiei, aparent defavorabile, ilustrată de cele două volume de Texte dialectale Muntenia; între p. 172 şi 177, sunt analizate „contextele funcţionale” a opt enunţuri (grupări de enunţuri) paremiologice din aceste volume, numerotate de la [a] la [h]. Deoarece tezele avansate în articolul publicat în 1988 au fost ilustrate şi cu texte din cel de la doilea volum din culegerea respectivă, cu titlul de specimene, facem două rezerve faţă de opinii/opţiuni ale lui Pavel Ruxăndoiu. Mai întâi, din textul analizat de noi în 1988 (cf. § I.1.5), din localitatea Obileşti-Tătărani, jud. Vrancea, considerat drept tipic pentru ceea ce am numit „comentariu paremiologic al enunţului” [formulă asupra căreia revenim: „comentariu paremiologic al enunţării”, dat fiind că ne confruntăm cu o adevărată orchestraţie de formule aparţinând acestui registru], Pavel Ruxăndoiu, după ce preia caracterizarea anchetatorilor („excelent povestitor, cu o inventivitate verbală excepţională şi cu un marcat simţ al umorului” [trimitem, din nou, la § I.1.5]), reţine doar „densitatea de 4 proverbe şi 3 zicători la 10 pagini de text” şi comentează enunţurile „sita nouă în cui se ţine” şi „a găsi nodu” (Ruxăndoiu 2003: 176). În al doilea rând, ne atrage atenţia faptul că autorul citat nu a sesizat densitatea de formule expresive din alt text cuprins în volumul al II-lea din Texte dialectale Muntenia, „lamentaţia” informatoarei din Viziru, judeţul Brăila (cf. § I.2.1, text [2]), o mostră de asemenea concludentă pentru definirea conceptului de «idiostil».

172 2. Rezervele formulate de Cezar Tabarcea, continuate de cele ale lui Pavel Ruxăndoiu, cu privire la neajungerea surselor disponibile dinspre zona dialectologiei la care, totuşi, recurg folcloriştii pentru a analiza prezenţa parimiei în vorbirea ţăranilor, ne apar drept cel puţin curioase, dat fiind că sunt principial nefondate: culegerile de texte publicate de dialectologi nu şi-au propus (şi nu îşi propun) ilustrarea, complexă şi proporţionată distributiv, a resurselor comunicative ale vorbitorilor din mediul rural; astfel, este regretabil faptul că s-a ajuns ca textele din acest domeniu să fie considerate „singurele care ar permite” stabilirea tipologiei contextelor funcţionale în care apar proverbele (cf. Ruxăndoiu 2003: 194; mai sus am pus în discuţie tipul de informatori de la care s-ar putea înregistra texte convenabile pentru studiul parimiilor în vorbirea curentă, dar ca o preocupare de pragmatică; cf. § I.2). 2.1. Înregistrarea de texte orale de către dialectologi urmăreşte realizarea unei baze de date necesare, în primul rând, pentru studierea sintaxei graiurilor, motiv pentru care se şi înregistrează expuneri în registre variate, finalitatea reprezentând-o cunoaşterea (eventualelor) caracteristici sintactice dialectale, aşadar una de domeniul gramaticii. Dar, din păcate, o abordare unilaterală iniţială (vezi, la noi, titlul „suplementului” la Atlasul lingvistic român II, publicat de Petrovici: 1943) şi o anumită inerţie în zona terminologiei [6] conduc spre o aparentă supracreditare, adjectivul „(texte) dialectale” fiind, se pare, interpretat ca o promisiune (eventual neonorată!), de vreme ce i s-a conferit, de cei din afara profesiei, calitatea de a reflecta, în general, vorbirea dialectofonilor! În realitate, adjectivul respectiv caracterizează doar una din trăsăturile textelor publicate în urma anchetelor dialectale. Ţinând seama de elementele de bază ale întreprinderii, suntem, de fapt, în prezenţa unor texte orale (de vreme ce înregistrează un anumit «canal», vorbirea), care trebuie recunoscute, din perspectiva «mesajului», ca etnotexte, respectiv sociotexte (ultimul aspect exemplar ilustrat, de exemplu, încă de culegerea Graiul nostru), iar, numai din punctul de vedere al «codului», ca texte dialectale, trăsături la care se poate adăuga, pentru faza publicării, caracteristica de texte transcrise fonetic (pentru discutarea acestei probleme, cf. Dumistrăcel 2002: 12 - 13). Faţă de toate aceste precizări, este destul de limpede că apariţia, în unele culegeri de texte de tipul celor ce se află la baza discuţiilor precedente, a unui număr de expuneri utile pentru studiul contextului stilistic şi pragmatic al prezenţei în vorbire a parimiei reprezintă o adevărată şansă. Dar sintagma „context funcţional” induce şi ideea de „limbaj funcţional”, care impune raportarea la un anumit moment psihologic al apariţiei parimiei şi la statutul interlocutorilor, din perspectiva contractului (virtual) de comunicare dintre emiţător şi receptor(i) [7]. 2.2. Pentru precizarea unor enunţuri din paragraful precedent, trebuie să reamintim că „regretul” faţă de neajungerea „textelor orale” în ceea ce priveşte studierea funcţionalităţii parimiei mai impune o observaţie, suplimentară, faţă de punctele de vedere ale… folcloriştilor, aceea având ca obiect utilizarea unor termeni improprii, cu efecte reducţioniste. De exemplu, Cezar Tabarcea îşi plasează discuţia privind expresivitatea vorbirii comune sub semnul „textelor populare”, referindu-se atât la „povestitorii populari” radiografiaţi de Ov. Bîrlea, cât şi la textele din volumul Graiul din zona «Porţile de Fier». Volum căruia, în studiile pe care le analizăm, nu i se indică autorii, titlul complet şi nici editura; le- am consemnat în Bibliografia de la sfârşit, sub Cohuţ - Vulpe 1973. Acelaşi vag anonimat la cei doi exegeţi şi în legătură cu volumul Graiul nostru, pentru identificarea datelor căruia, vezi titlul din bibliografia indicată, sub Graiul 1906.

Or, după Indicele tematic al acestui volum, numeroase texte publicate aici fac parte din categoria «tematice», care cuprind, aşadar, expuneri cu privire la subiecte cum sunt „preparatele din lapte” (frecvente: brânză, caş, cheag, urdă), „bulion”, „cânepă”, „cozonac”, „dulceaţă”, „fân”, „grâu”, „lână”, „mâncăruri”, „murături”, „oierit”, „pâine”, „porumb” „săpun” etc., alături de care apar şi «texte libere» din categoriile „amintiri”, „întâmplări” (acestea foarte numeroase), dar şi texte pe teme «etnofolclorice»: „credinţe bătrâneşti”, ba chiar şi „poveşti” (un total de 8 pagini!), respectiv „snoave” (tot 8 pagini; cf. Cohuţ - Vulpe 1973: 309 - 312). Aşadar, în cazul de faţă, contează prea puţin faptul că textele respective apar într-un volum cu profil de monografie dialectală; interesează, după delimitarea tematicii, caracteristicile de comunicatori ale subiecţilor înregistraţi, idiostilul acestora.

173 Pe de altă, parte, Pavel Ruxăndoiu, pentru analiza sa, porneşte de la observaţia că „proverbele şi zicătorile apar foarte rar în textele dialectale înregistrate de lingvişti” (cf. § II.1). În primul rând, este clar că rezerva respectivă poate avea în vedere statutul de specialişti, în dialectologie, al autoarelor volumului prezentat mai sus, Cornelia Cohuţ şi Magdalana Vulpe, acelaşi ca şi al autorilor volumelor I şi II din Texte dialectale Muntenia. Volume la care Pavel Ruxăndoiu trimite, iarăşi, ca la un corpus de materiale uzuale anonim. Iată şi datele „tehnice” privind primul dintre cele două volume: Texte dialectale Muntenia, vol. I, publicate sub conducerea lui Boris Cazacu, de Galina Ghiculete, Paul Lăzărescu, Maria Marin, Bogdan Marinescu, Ruxandra Pană şi Magdalena Vulpe, Centrul de Cercetări Fonetice şi Dialectale, Bucureşti, 1973; pentru cel de al doilea, vezi Bibliografia de la sfârşit, sub Texte Muntenia 1975. Rezerva în discuţie pare să nu-i privească pe cei trei autori ai culegerii Graiul nostru, deşi dintre aceştia doi sunt mari lingvişti, I.-A. Candrea şi Ov. Densusianu, ambii însă şi importanţi folclorişti; fireşte, iese din discuţie cel de al treilea autor, Theodor D. Sperantia, literat cu preocupări (şi) de etnografie, dar cunoscut mai ales ca autor al unor antologii de „anecdote” (mai mult sau mai puţin populare), pe care le-a versificat [8]. Dar, nici în acest caz, chiar dacă din cu totul altă cauză, nu calitatea autorilor este determinantă pentru culegerea realizată, ci programul de cercetare şi realizarea lui. Antologia Graiul nostru a fost proiectată, cu ocazia sărbătoririi naţionale a 40 de ani de la încoronarea regelui Carol I, ca un corpus urmărind, după declaraţia liminară, să reprezinte o „icoană a graiului nostru, o colecţiune de texte din toate părţile locuite de români” (Graiul 1906: V; evidenţierile grafice ne aparţin). De fapt, această declaraţie de intenţii lingvistice, privitoare doar la cod (ca justificare a titlului şi a subtitlului), este completată, referenţial, de precizarea, capitală, de la pagina următoare; o preocupare a anchetei a fost delimitarea de culegerea textelor folclorice: „Nu e de sigur aşa de greu să se culeagă, cum se face de obicei, poezii ori basme; de acestea, ţăranul e mai curând gata să-ţi împărtăşească. Dar în culegerea de faţă s-a căutat să se dea şi altfel de texte, mărturisiri de ale ţăranilor despre traiul lor, păreri asupra unor lucruri care-i privesc, amintiri istorice ş.a.”. Sau, mai departe: „Multe din textele care se dau în acest volum pot fi socotite ca documente sufleteşti, culturale şi, în parte, istorice, aşa că colecţiunea nu va avea numai interes linguistic” (Graiul 1906: VI; evidenţierile grafice ne aparţin; pentru consideraţii privind ancheta propriu-zisă, cf. § I.1.5). De fapt, textele referitoare la generalităţi din mediul rural, la întâmplări din viaţa cotidiană a subiecţilor sunt tot atât de numeroase ca şi evocările istorice: războaiele ruso-turce, domnia lui Cuza Vodă, războiul de la 1877. Spre deosebire de volumul al II-lea (tipărit în 1908), cuprinzând numeroase texte folclorice preluate din publicaţii anterioare, în primul volum textele folclorice propriu-zise înregistrate (basme „tipice”, snoave, versuri, urături) sunt puţin numeroase; de aici rezultă, în primul rând, profilul acestui volum din culegerea Graiul nostru, acela de a cuprinde majoritar „texte libere”, iar, în al doilea rând, aşa poate fi explicat, măcar în parte, numărul mai mare de proverbe şi zicători, uneori comentate ca atare, din acest volum. Faptul că antologia ar ilustra o altă fază din istoria limbii române (anchetele au fost făcute chiar în ajunul publicării volumului!) este, desigur, de importanţă cu totul redusă. Pe de altă parte, încheind această discuţie, surprinde faptul că, pentru a analiza adecvat statutul volumului I al culegerii de care ne ocupăm şi în funcţie de punctul de vedere al unuia dintre autori, Ov. Densusianu (căruia i se atribuie şi semnarea Prefeţei), exegeţii şi comentatorii nu au luat în considerare, măcar în treacăt, o prezentare ce cuprinde explicit viziunea acestuia privind finalitatea lingvistică complexă a publicării; este vorba de comunicarea marelui profesor bucureştean la primul Congres al Filologilor Români (Bucureşti, 1925, publicată în 1926), intitulată Vorbirea populară din puncte nouă de vedere. Noutatea preocupărilor şi a criteriilor de analiză rezultă din faptul că autorul se bazează exclusiv pe „texte tematice” din vol. I al culegerii Graiul nostru, după ironia că „scriitorii care au făcut excursii spre ruralism şi au încercat să redea graiul celor simpli nu ne-au adus până acum decât ţărănism convenţional ori diluat”. Iată, aşadar, că Cezar Tabarcea nu este primul care să fi respins o imagine „idilică” despre vorbirea tăranilor! (cf. § I.1.3 şi II.1).

174 Se precizează, în al doilea rând, că textele respective sunt „culese din popor altfel decât după şablonul folklorist predilecţionat multă vreme” (Densusianu 1926: 413; evidenţierile grafice ne aparţin). Pe aceste coordonate, sunt analizate „ticuri” ale vorbirii ţărăneşti, repetiţia, „psihologia predilecţiei pentru diminutive” „introducerea de întrebări în şirul povestirii”, dialogul şi, în linii generale, este analizată fraza (coordonare şi subordonare), dar şi ritmul vorbirii, concluzia fiind că, pe ansamblu, există „diferenţe de care trebuie să ţinem seamă, nuanţări care ne interzic să fixăm într-o formulă felul de exprimare a ţăranului nostru” (op.cit., p. 417, 419, 420). Faţă de acest avertisment metodologic extrem de clar, surprinde şi o caracterizare grăbită, probabil de dragul formulării tranşante, dar aflată tot sub semnul „demitizărilor”, a lui Ion Coteanu: „Limbajul popular nu este nici tezaur inepuizabil, nici schematismul imaginat de Caragiale, nici parataxă rudimentară cum credea Ovid Densusianu” (Coteanu 1973: 10). De obsevat, dacă referirea la Caragiale are în vedere celebrul dialog intitulat „Cum se înţeleg ţăranii”, că eticheta de schematism este departe de a reprezenta o caracterizare stilistică pertinentă; textul respectiv este, de fapt, o exemplară ilustrare a negocierii informaţiei şi angajării, din perspectiva unei „şiretenii” (să-i zicem) ţărăneşti. Dacă am stăruit asupra volumului Graiul nostru, faptul se datorează curiozităţii pe care ne- o provoacă, şi în acest caz, o anumită exegeză modernă, de pretinsă reconsiderare, fără necesara revenire la surse, la fondatori. „Recitindu-l” pe Ovid Densusianu (dar, se vede, foarte selectiv), o folcloristă care, exprimându-şi, abia mascat, regretul că textele din această antologie, cât şi cele care însoţesc monografia dialectală (aşadar lingvistică) Graiul din Ţara Haţegului (publicată în 1915) nu sunt (toate!) folclor propriu-zis, găseşte o consolare în faptul că Graiul nostru reprezintă „primul corpus românesc de folclor contemporan”, caracterizare ce derivă din calitatea textelor de a constitui „documente etnologice”; astfel, autoarea se poziţionează alături de cei care refuză „reducerea abuzivă a obiectului de studiu al etnologiei doar la faptele de folclor literar” (Hedeşan 2005: passim). Fără să subapreciem viziunea de interpretare lărgită a conceptului (în sensul termenului din limba engleză Folklore), considerăm că a evalua (şi) relatări despre conflicte mărunte între persoane, sau despre excesele unui oarecare zapciu abuziv, ca şi altele de acelaşi fel, sub semnul etnologiei este un pic prea mult. Dar meritul de f o n d a t o r al lui Ovid Densusianu trebuie recuperat din altă perspectivă: în a doua jumătate a secolului al XX-lea, sociologi, istorici şi lingvişti s-au preocupat de ceea ce avea să devină domeniul istoriei orale, prin înregistrarea de „texte de vorbire cotidiană” şi constituirea unor „arhive de sociolingvistică” (pentru Germania şi Franţa, ne-am referit la antologii şi exegeze avându-i ca autori pe Hugo Steger, Arno Ruoff, Jean- Louis Fossat; cf. Dumistrăcel et alii, 1997: 51 - 52 şi passim); textele din Graiul nostru, vol I, acoperă deja perfect cele două domenii. Nu este mai puţin important, în ordinea de idei a clasificării unor astfel de texte, să ne referim la o altă sursă, numai comparabilă, totuşi, din perspectiva nivelului cultural al emiţătorului: este vorba de cele venind dinspre scriitura populară. Respectiva sursă documentară, al cărei fericit nume a fost găsit de N. Iorga, este „istoria ţării prin cei mici”: pe spaţiile albe ale tipăriturilor şi manuscriselor, majoritatea texte de cult, ce se aflau în posesia bisericilor, a mănăstirilor sau a unor persoane particulare, proprietarii, dar mai ales preoţi sau călugări au notat cui aparţinea cartea, biografia acesteia (vândută sau chiar „robită” şi răscumpărată de cineva, dăruită unei biserici), cu a cui cheltuială a fost legată şi când, cât a costat lucrarea etc.; în lipsa cunoştinţelor despre consemnări oficiale, apar mărturii despre cele petrecute în zilele „scriitorului”, de la molime, năvăliri şi războaie, la evenimente de familie, ori la secete, ploi şi viscole năpraznice etc. Istoria ţării prin cei mici este titlul unui articol publicat în „Revista istorică”, VII, 1921, nr. 1-3, opţiune de studiu motivată cu patosul cuceritor al marelui savant: această altă istorie este aceea „care nu e compusă, ci numai însăilată, notată incidental şi sporadic de cei modeşti şi puţin cărturari uneori, cari nu se gândesc nici la un patron, nici la un public ci pun pe hârtie ce ştiu, din simplul impuls instinctiv de a nu lăsa ca faptele să se piardă ori din nevoia de a face şi pe alţii, necunoscuţi, martori ai suferinţelor, isprăvilor şi întâmplătoarelor bucurii ale lor. E istoria ţării prin cei mici” (art. cit., p. 26). Era o preocupare mai veche (şi continuată mult timp) a istoricului, preluată, prin publicaţii de mare interes, de numeroşi cercetători; vezi, de exemplu, în ultimul timp, cele trei volume de Însemnări de pe manuscrise şi cărţi vechi din Ţara Moldovei, pentru perioada 1429 – 1828, tipărite de istoricii ieşeni

175 Ioan Caproşu şi Elena Chiaburu; cf. Stelian Dumistrăcel, Dăinuirea prin cuvânt, în „Dacia literară”, 2009, nr. 3 (84), p. 33 - 34. 2.0. Încercând să răspundem atât formulărilor contradictorii privind apartenenţa parimiilor fie la un fond idiomatic arhaic (cedat generos, dar numai uneori, beletristicii), fie, prioritar, la vorbirea uzuală din mediul rural (cf. § I.3), cât şi ipotezei Ruxăndoiu referitoare la diferenţa cantitativă în cronologie a prezenţei parimiilor în vorbirea ţăranilor (cf. § II.1.1), amintim că, în articolul din 1988, a fost deja indicat un teren de verificare: înregistrarea unui însemnat număr de zicători şi proverbe în răspunsurile la chestionarele juridic şi lingvistic ale lui B. P. Hasdeu, cu trimitere la Muşlea - Bîrlea 1970: 522 - 528 şi cu citarea a două enunţuri paremiologice semnificative pentru circulaţia (respectiv, geneza) în vorbirea „populară” (cf. § I.3.). 2.1. Propunându-ne să revenim la această sursă, trebuie să amintim însă că, încă de la începutul activităţii de înregistrare ştiinţifică a enunţurilor paremiologice, a existat chiar o preocupare expresă pentru identificarea celor cu adevărat „populare” în raport cu cele apreciate drept „culte” (aforisme, biblice etc.), cea mai elocventă ilustrare constituind-o atenta delimitare, sistematic marcată grafic, a celor câteva zeci de mii de unităţi frazeologice operată de Iuliu A. Zanne în excepţionalul corpus intitulat Proverbele românilor. Inginer pasionat de folklor, în sensul etimologic al acestui termen, şi mare admirator al lui B.P. Hasdeu, Iuliu Zanne şi-a început adunarea propriului material inclus în zece volume masive, tipărite între 1895 şi 1912, în perioada imediat următoare difuzării chestionarelor Hasdeu. Antologul a excerptat surse de profil (Anton Pann, Hinţescu etc.), culegerile de folclor tipărite până atunci, operele unor scriitori (nu numai) „poporani” (printre aceştia Creangă şi Ispirescu) şi alte numeroase categorii de izvoare (publicând, aparte, în volumul al VIII-lea al Proverbelor, celebrul manuscris lui Iordache Golescu „Pilde, povăţuiri i cuvinte adevărate şi poveşti…” al lui Iordache Golescu). O asemenea bogăţie de variate surse i-a impus inginerului de căi ferate să indice apartenenţa fiecărui tip frazeologic la una din clasele delimitate astfel în prefaţa intitulată Către cititor (reproducem strict şi grafia originalului): „Prin semne deosebite, aşezate la stânga proverbului, se arată dacă proverbul este auzit sau cunoscut de mine, dacă se întrebuinţează de ţărani sau numai de scriitori, dacă este dubios. În cât priveşte proverbele săteşti, am împins scrupulozitatea atât de departe, în cât nu am însemnat ca fiind întrebuinţate de ţărani de cât acele proverbe pe cari le am auzit la ţară sau mi s-a semnalat de învăţători ca fiind săteşti. Am scos din această categorie un număr însemnat de ziceri care, de şi sunt convins că există în graiul ţărănesc, totuşi nu am avut ocazia să le culeg din gura poporului de la ţară” (Zanne 1895: XLV); semnele respective sunt date şi explicate la p. LXI, cu următoarele formulări: [*] „Proverbe cunoscute personal de autor sau culese de dânsul”; [Ì] „Proverbe săteşti”; [□] „Proverbe întrebuinţate numai de literaţi”; [●] „Proverbe dubioase sau traduse din cele străine, care însă nu s-au depărat pentru anumite motive”. Sunt deosebit de numeroase unităţile frazeologice înregistrate care poartă primele două însemne: sunt proverbe săteşti, cunoscute ca atare sau/şi culese de Zanne, folklorist care depune o mărturie importantă privind cunoaşterea sau recunoaşterea lor de către vorbitorii ţărani. Iată primele zece enunţuri din această categorie: „a sosit, a intrat alba în sat”; „de cât la anul un bou, mai bine acuma un ou”; „ce aduce ceasul n-aduce anul”; „cine a murit an, an s-a îngropat”; „până la anul câte capete rămân fără căciulă” (cu varianta „până la an multe căciuli rămân fără stăpân”), „la anul [,] cu brânză” („adică nici-odată”, explicată apoi ca membru al unei construcţii bimembre: „atâta pagubă şi la anul cu brânză”); „la anul şi la mulţi ani”; „de faci astă-zi (azi) cuiva bine, mâine de la altu-ţi vine”; „ce e astă-zi nu e mâine”; „trei zile trapădul şi un ceas praznicul” (cu trimitere şi la Creangă). O observaţie aparte în legătură cu antologia Zanne: probabil spiritul organizat al „tehnicianului” l-a condus la o sistematizare originală a materialului prezentat, deşi nu este exclus ca autorul să fi cunoscut, în perioada studiilor din Franţa, chiar lucrări de tip inovator în lexicografie, respectiv dicţionare „pe grupe de idei” realizate începând din 1852 (P.M. Roget, Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases), unele din cele care au urmat fiind intitulate concludent: cel al lui P. Robertson, Dictionnaire idéologique de la langue française (1859), respectiv Deutsche Sprachschatz (1873- 1877), al lui Daniel Sanders. Putem constata că primele mari secţiuni de prezentare a Proverbelor sunt [despre] „Natura fizică”, „Despre animale”, „Omul şi organele sale”, „Despre viaţa fizică”, „Despre viaţa socială” […], „Despre viaţa intelectuală şi morală”, o succesiune ce este uşor de raportat la una din cele mai avansate teorii lexicografice, din perspectiva conceptului de „lexicologie

17 6 structurală”, formulat de Rudolf Hallig şi Walther von Wartburg şi exemplificat, chiar lexicografic, de aceştia, din perspectiva unui „sistem raţional al conceptelor”, cu lexicul limbii franceze, în Begriffsystem als Grundlage für die Lexicographie (Berlin, ediţia a doua, 1963), după următoarele trei mari secţiuni: A. Universul, B. Omul, şi C. Omul şi Universul). Ca şi în cazul respectivei sistematizări a lexicului, structurarea proverbelor româneşti de către Zanne reflectă acest domeniu al spiritualităţii ca pe un tot organizat, pornind de la două principii din teoria asupra limbajului ale lui W. v. Humboldt, citate de Hallig şi Wartburg în prefaţa studiului lor: (1) acela ce poate fi rezumat prin formula după care vocabularul (în cazul nostru frazeologia) este o „imagine a lumii” transmisă fiecărui membru al unei comunităţi lingvistice şi (2), un principiu reluat mai ales de Saussure, acela al „articulării”, conform căruia toate mijloacele de exprimare ale unei limbi (respectiv ale unei mentalităţi) formează un ansamblu, un sistem în care fiecare parte face corp comun cu altele şi este condiţionat de acestea. Putem conchide, creditându-l pe Iuliu Zanne, că, în cazul exemplelor citate anterior ca specimen pentru alte câteva mii de enunţuri similare, nu este vorba de arhaisme, ci de elemente uzuale aparţinând limbajului figurat al vorbitorilor dotaţi aparţinând unui mediu sociocultural. 2.2. Spre o înţelegere similară a lucrurilor ne conduce recolta de proverbe şi zicători înregistrată cu ajutorul chestionarelor juridic şi lingvistic ale lui B.P. Hasdeu, intitulate Obiceiurile juridice ale poporului român (elaborat în 1877) şi Programa pentru adunarea datelor privitoare la limba română (lansat în 1884), la care ne-am referit deja. Răspunsurile la întrebările din chestionarele respective datează din anii 1884 – 1885 (excepţional, şi din anii 1886, 1888 şi 1892). După sursa deja citată, oferim, în continuare, doar o selecţie de parimii şi unităţi frazeologice care reflectă reprezentări figurate ale mediului rural, cărora li se poate uşor admite naşterea şi şansa de a avea circulaţie în acest mediu, în special cele care au statutul de „cópii ale realităţii” (cf. Dumistrăcel 1980: 137), ca indiciu pertinent al funcţionalităţii. Negreşit, pe baza unei analize amănunţite a inventarului publicat de Ion Muşlea şi Ovidiu Bîrlea, în lucrarea citată, la paginile 522 – 528 (în jur de 250 de intrări), pot fi distinse şi formulări de alte diverse inspiraţii şi surse (toate exemplele citate în continuare se găsesc în porţiunea indicată din volumul Tipologia folclorului…). Mai întâi, pot fi remarcate parimii aparţinând unui fond „pilduitor” comun („Apa trece, pietrele rămân”, „Apele line sânt adânci”, „Buturuga mică răstoarnă carul mare”, „Cap ai, minte ce-ţi mai trebuie” sau „E destul o măciucă la un car de oale”) şi nu lipsesc cele de inspiraţie religioasă, sau, în orice caz, de factură cultă, de tipul: „Când te bate D-zeu nu te mai poate milui nime”, „Când te-a scăpa D-zeu, dracu te şi-apucă”, „Pre omul rău îl înseamnă D-zeu”, „Pe dracul du-l la cruce, ori nu-l duce, om de pace nu-l vei face”, „Cine înjură de cruce – ca ea o să se usuce”, „Marea fără fund este lacomul şi cel mai înalt munte este trufaşul”, „Leul nu umblă după muşte”, dintre care unele de viziune şi expresie mai… frustă, deci asimilând modelele. Dar sunt numeroase cele care reflectă, în viziune metaforică, ocupaţii, practici, obiceiuri şi povăţuiri din mediul şi experienţa ruralului, unele inedite, iar altele numai împrospătate ca enunţ; iată câteva: „Armăsarul bun se vinde din grajd”, „Aşchia nu sare departe de butuc”, „Bate şeaua să priceapă iapa”, „Lauda de sine pute”; „Adeseori para cea bună pică-n gura porcului”, „Cerul limpede trăznete nu aduce”, „Cine cotcorozeşte, acela ouă”, „Faptele rele sânt ca păduchii, din om se fac şi tot pe el îl mănâncă” (curioasă proiecţie de generaţie spontanee!). Iată şi adevărate enunţuri de filozofie practică sau de meditaţie existenţială: „Omul cu capul mare îşi face prânzul mic”, „Fata cea mai mare mărită pe cea mai mică”, „Cine n-a gustat amarul nu ştie ce e zaharul”, „Gură dulce, c… viclean”, „Ce apucă pământul lesne se uită”, „Cine ce învaţă, moartea-l dezvaţă”. Aşadar, corpusul este deschis; unii corespondenţi (învăţători şi/sau preoţi, dar şi jurişti, a căror contribuţie este menţionată pentru fiecare enunţ înregistrat) comunică enunţuri de sursă şi inspiraţie diversă, cuprinzând neologisme, enunţuri pe care le asimilează parimiilor: „E uşor cu foalele plin a predica de post”, sau chiar „Cine la amor nu crede – n-ar mai călca iarbă verde”. 2.3. Dacă luăm în considerare inventarul de parimii şi forma în care acestea se prezintă în culegerile analizate, ilustrative pentru sfârşitul secolului al XIX-lea, putem conchide, împreună cu Pavel Ruxăndoiu, că, la începutul secolului al XX-lea, pentru exprimarea vorbitorului din mediul rural (reflectată, de exemplu, de textele din Graiul nostru) exista, în mod firesc, un izvor bogat în

177 resurse paremiologice, de natură, în principiu, să-l favorizeze pe naratorul popular. Dar este exagerat ca, pe baza comparaţiei prezentate mai sus (cf. § II.1.1) să vorbim, apoi, de o „sărăcire relativ recentă a limbajului popular, inclusiv a celui expresiv, de enunţuri proverbiale”, sau chiar de un „fenomen de sărăcire a limbajului paremiologic” (Ruxăndoiu 2003: 155). Dacă acest proces s-ar fi produs, atunci, nu putem explica prezenţa parimiei, la fel de semnificativ ilustrată, nu numai la naratori din a doua jumătate a secolului al XX-lea (exemple din textele dialectale din Muntenia; cf. § I.5), ci şi în discursul public şi în cel jurnalistic din aceeaşi epocă şi de astăzi. 3. Prezenţa zicătorilor şi proverbelor în discursul public actual: limbaje funcţionale; registre şi ipostaze ale comunicării 3.1. Vom încerca să schiţăm, mai întâi, condiţiile transmiterii, până astăzi, a genului… perimat al parimiilor, folosind ca model general metoda de reconstituire a destinului operei literare (respectiv de analiză a şanselor privind receptarea în contemporaneitate a acesteia) practicată de un Robert Escarpit în Sociologie de la literature, în sensul pe care i l-a dat titrarea unei selcţii de opere ale acestuia traduse în limba română: De la Sociologia literaturii la Teoria comunicării [9]. 3.1.1. Este neîndoielnic faptul că, în afara perpetuării în discursul public prin difuzarea directă, pe cale orală, specifică statutului iniţial de producţii folclorice (fapt dovedit şi de analizele din § I.1.5, 2.1 şi 2.2), parimiile (dar şi structurile paremiologice şi unităţile frazeologice asociate) au beneficiat de memorare şi de prestigiu ca fenomen de cultură. Desigur, pentru discuţia de faţă, trebuie să lăsăm deoparte prezenţa lor în marea literatură, ca modele de reflecţie sau ca probe de măiestrie, diferite la scriitori care au cultivat, într-un fel sau altul, genul: Negruzzi, care-şi încearcă organul sub semnul virtuozităţii asociative şi disjunctive pe acelaşi teren în „predica” Păcală şi Tândală (Scrisoarea XII), Alecsandri, cel care, cu o intuiţie lingvistică sigură, a propus un original examen, indirect, al potenţelor formulei expresive, inclusiv prin comentariul sui-generis în ceea ce priveşte intraductibilitatea acesteia, surclasând protocronist, de fapt, pe alocuri, încrederea funciară în mirajul enunţului paremiologic a unui Delavrancea sau Coşbuc. Ca să nu ne mai referim la Creangă, în textele căruia descoperim încă îndepărtate semnificaţii genuine ale enunţurilor şi care se ilustrează ca un încorporator de geniu, dacă ne raportăm la tehnica strict antologică, diferenţiată şi ea, de la Pann la Nicolae Filimon, ce pune semnificaţia diverselor capitole din Ciocoii vechi şi noi sub autoritatea unor proverbe sau zicători. Pentru un anumit nivel, interesează prezenţa, susţinută, a proverbelor şi zicătorilor, nu doar în manualele şcolare „de citire” (ca texte „De ţinut minte!”), ci şi la lecţiile de caligrafie din cursul „primar”; după învăţarea scrierii tuturor literelor, „mici şi mari”, aplicaţia se făcea prin caligrafierea (nu doar pentru performanţă, ci şi ca pedeapsă [!], în cazul ultim de un număr mare de ori) a unui set alfabetic de proverbe şi zicători, după cum urmează (grafia „Monotype Corsiva” este numai apropiată modelului „clasic” ce se practica în şcoala din România): Apa trece, pietrele rămân Buturuga mica răstoarnă carul mare Ce ţie nu-ţi place altuia nu face – până la Ziua bună de dimineaţă se cunoaşte. 3.1.2. Tot atât de importantă a fost contribuţia tipăririi, periodice, a unor culegeri tematice. În afară de numeroasele ediţii succesive ale Poveştii vorbii, a lui Anton Pann, semnalăm, de exemplu, pentru începutul secolului al XX-lea, cel puţin încă o culegere cu difuzare considerabilă, Dicţionarul de proverbe şi zicători publicat în 1912 de I.-A. Candrea, în „Biblioteca pentru toţi”, colecţie de mare tiraj şi accesibilă ca preţ de vânzare a cărţilor. Ca o probă privind prestigiul sociocultural al lui Anton Pann, trimitem la o analiză de motive literare; interpretând aluzii şi trimiteri abia mascate din textul lui Marin Preda, Stelian Dumistrăcel a identificat compoziţia O şezătoare la ţară drept pretext narativ pentru povestirea (autobiografică) O adunare liniştită şi a urmărit o matrice stilistică Anton Pann în proza de debut a lui Preda, cu reflexe până în ultimele romane ale acestuia (cf. Pre-texte antonpanneşti la Marin Preda: O ADUNARE LINIŞTITĂ, în „Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară”, XXIX, 1983-1984, B. Istorie literară, p. 93 - 106).

178 3.1.3. La factorul cultural menţionat anterior, trebuie să adăugăm un alt domeniu al comunicării ce a devenit sursă de cunoaştere a parimiei şi de apreciere a acesteia din partea unui public ce va creşte, treptat, ca număr: este vorba de publicistică. Din limbajul „publicisticii” orale, al conversaţiei de informare (şi, în general, al comunicării private interpersonale), presa a preluat, de la început, în special în articolele „de opinie”, lexic şi turnuri stilistice expresive. Analizând limba publicaţiilor periodice de la noi în secolul al XIX-lea, Al. Andriescu, în Limba presei româneşti în secolul al XIX-lea [10] evidenţiază, mai ales în textele polemice prezenţa a numeroşi termeni populari şi regionali (pentru etapa 1829 – 1860), la care se vor adăuga elemente familiare şi de jargon (între 1860 – 1900), ca şi locuţiuni, expresii, proverbe şi zicători, reflectând, în ceea ce priveşte cea de a doua categorie de fapte, „proverbializarea” limbii presei româneşti chiar de la începuturile ei, marcă stilistică păstrată, peste timp, până astăzi (cf. Dumistrăcel 2006b: 101). 3.2. O predispoziţie stilistică asemănătoare poate fi constatată în presa românească din cea de a doua jumătate a secolului trecut, dar, cu precădere, în mass-media actuală. 3.2.1. Acelaşi nivel al comunicării a fost semnalat de Cezar Tabarcea pentru discursul publicistic, în registru „mobilizator”, al presei comuniste, prin enunţuri reprezentând parafrazarea sau evocarea, în titluri de articole, a unor parimii, ca în situaţiile „Gospodarul chibzuit n-aşteaptă toamna ca să-şi facă hambar”, „Insensibilul «obraz subţire» cu cheltuială părintească se ţine”, „Până nu faci foc...”. De altfel, autorul discută existenţa aceleiaşi tentaţii discursive şi în alte culturi contemporane, trimiţând, de exemplu, la studiul unui mare specialist german, Wolfgang Mieder, Das Sprichwort in unserer Zeit (Tabarcea 1982: 54 – 55). 3.2.2. Pentru etapa de după 1989, alături de alte mijloace de expresivitate, dată fiind şi „dezinhibarea” generală în ceea ce priveşte limbajul, în textul jurnalistic, parimia este prezentă, sub forma „parafrazărilor” celor mai neaşteptate şi deosebit de... îndrăzneţe, ca un fapt cu totul remarcabil. Stelian Dumistrăcel a semnalat această nouă postură, ludică, de folosire a proverbului şi zicătorii, într-un articol publicat în 1998, intitulat În gura presei, formulare ce sugera deja procedeul substituirii unui termen dintr-o (eventuală) formulă canonică: „gura lumii – slobodă”; „a intra în gura satului (a lumii, a mahalalei)” (marcăm prioritatea în folosirea acestui enunţ, devenit, între timp, titlu de emisiune a unui canal de televiziune). Articolul la care ne-am referit a apărut în revista „Cronica” (Iaşi), nr. 5/1998, p. 14, citat, de exemplu, şi de Liviu Groza, în studiul Tendinţe ale frazeologiei româneşti actuale (2); cf. /1traducator.wordpress.com/; alte contribuţii tematice semnate de Stelian Dumistrăcel: Discursul jurnalistic şi discursul public din perspectivă ecolingvistică (radiografii), în vol. Comunicarea şi schimbarea culturală (coord. Monica Spiridon), „Ars docendi”, Bucureşti, 2001, p. 40 - 77; Textul jurnalistic: un teren experimental de ambiguitate, în vol. Identitatea limbii şi literaturii române în perspectiva globalizării, Institutul de Filologie Română „A. Philippide” al Filialei Iaşi a Academiei Române, Editura „Trinitas”, Iaşi, 2002, p. 135 - 150; O modalitate paradoxală de manifestare a apartenenţei etnoculturale: «discursul repetat», în vol. Limba şi literatura română în spaţiul etnocultural dacoromânesc şi în diaspora, Institutul de Filologie Română „A. Philippide” al Filialei Iaşi a Academiei Române, Editura „Trinitas”, Iaşi, 2003, p. 16 - 178; Repeated Discourse as a Means of «Contact» and Manipulation in Journalistic Discourse, în vol. La langue et les parlants / Language and its Users / Limba şi vorbitorii (edited by Tatiana Slama-Cazacu), Editura „Arvin- Press”, Bucureşti, 2003, p. 217 - 237. Dar modificarea, cu intenţie stilistică, a enunţului parimiei şi a altor enunţuri aparţinând discursului repetat în textul jurnalistic nu este nouă; o putem semnala deja în articole de ziar ale lui Eminescu; în demersuri de intertextualitate vizând particularizarea, acesta a remodelat diverse tipuri de astfel de formule. Putem cita, de exemplu, dubla substituire în enunţul zicătorii „nici salcia pom, nici ciocoiul om” (o construcţie bimembră), devenită „Ei, nici salcia pom, nici Caradalele români” (pornind de la numele propriu al unui adversar politic: Eugeniu Carada; cf. Eminescu, Opere, XII, p. 379). Mai mult, se pare că o primă observaţie (eventual pentru stilistica românească) referitoare la utilizarea acestei figuri de construcţie chiar în textul jurnalistic a fost consemnată de gazetarul Eminescu şi, dată fiind atitudinea acestuia faţă de fondul unei dispute, reprezintă, aşa cum era de aşteptat, acceptarea procedeului. Eminescu citează, ironizându- le, „lecţiile de franceză” pe care un periodic băcăuan le dădea altei publicaţii locale, concurente, în care apăruse formula „on revient toujours à ses pénates”, respinsă, cu gratuită pedanterie didactică, deoarece „corect” ar fi fost doar «on revient à ses amours», «on revient à ses moutons», pretenţie

179 pe care Eminescu o persiflează, cu atât mai mult cu cât el însuşi opera substituiri în textul francez al unui citat celebru: „Totul e să-şi facă trebuşoarele şi – après eux le déluge” (cf. Eminescu, Opere, XI, p. 280; evidenţierile grafice din citate ne aparţin). Pentru o asemenea intervenţie în altă specie aparţinând discursului repetat, poate fi citat următorul exemplu: în textul unei scrisori din 1877 a lui Eminescu către Titu Maiorescu, observăm substituirea de termeni în cunoscuta deviză a ordinului iezuiţilor: „ad majorem Dei gloriam” devine „ad majorem Junimea gloriam” („Ich höre, dass Sie bald nach Iaşi kommen, ~ ”; Dumistrăcel 2006a: 367 - 368). 3.2.3. În continuare, prezentăm astfel de modificări ale parimiei în textul jurnalistic contemporan. În exegeza asupra limbajului publicistic pentru perioada 1999 - 2006, întreprinsă în volumul Limbajul publicistic românesc..., Stelian Dumistrăcel a semnalat prezenţa parimiei, ca «enunţ aparţinând discursului repetat», preluată (mai rar) în formulă canonică [α], frecvent «destructurată» (şi «restructurată») [β] după cele patru figuri de construcţie ale lui Quintilian (detractio [a], adiectio [b], immutatio [c] şi transmutatio [d]) şi raportată la mijloacele de influenţare afectivă prin empatie, seducţie şi incitare, printre exemplele analizate, din titluri şi textul articolelor, aflându-se următoarele (cităm economic din punctul de vedere al spaţiului):

[α] „Când doi se ceartă, al treilea câştigă”, „Colac peste pupăză, numele scriitorilor mai este şi pocit în fel şi chip...”, „...înseamnă că nu vede pădurea din cauza copacilor”, „...[persoane care] îşi dau arama pe faţă”. [β] [a] „Vorba dulce”, „Dar din dar”, „Mai bine mai târziu...”, „Gaz pe foc” (denumirea unei formaţii muzicale), „Fă-te frate cu dracul”, „Ca ţiganul la mal”, „Lui Vasile [Radu] i-a venit mintea de pe urmă”, „Arama pe faţă”. [b] „La Helsinki, l-am prins de un picior pe Dumnezeu”, „Regele Iordaniei umblă cu ocaua lui Cuza”, „Recolta de grâu se va duce pe apa sâmbetei?”, cf. şi construcţii ce aglutinează două tipuri de enunţ aparţinând discursului repetat: „taie frunză la câini pe banii statului”, „colac peste pupăza din tei”, „o săru’ mână spală pe alta”, „la spartul târgului de carte”, „ai carte (de muncă), ai parte (de credit)”. [c] „...preferăm să ne uităm ca motanul în calendar...”, „(X a plecat din ţară) făcând-o pe maladul în păpuşoi”, „Baronii la baroni trag”, „NATO frântă”, „La Belgrad a înviat capra vecinului”; (cu multiplă substituire:) „Când PC-ul nu-i acasă, joacă mouse-ul pe masă”, „Hoţ să fii, ghinion să ai”, „Schimb Cotrocenii din mână contra Nobel de pe gard”. În ceea ce priveşte substituirea, unul din cele mai... accesate proverbe, constituindu-se într- o adevărată grilă matriceală, este „apa trece, pietrele rămân”, pentru care am notat cele mai diverse variaţii stilistice (şi de gust). Poate că modelul Caragiale, din 1902 (portretul Savantul, din ciclul „Moftangiii”), „Într-o ţară eminamente constituţională [şi aceasta o… acomodare ironică], apa trece, moftangiii rămân”, se află, în unele cazuri, la baza unor formulări cum sunt cele care urmează: „Apa trece, miasmele rămân” (titlu de articol). „Pata trece, culorile rămân” (reclama unui detergent), „La Bolta Rece, timpul trece, prietenii rămân!” (publicitate pentru un restaurant ieşean), „Módele trec, demodaţii rămân” (o interpretare a lui Augustin Buzura), „Frâna bună [furnizată de firma X] trece primejdia rea” (publicitate), „Generaţia de aur trece, M. S. rămâne” (pe teme din sport). Termenii opoziţiei pot apărea în text chiar la o distanţă apreciabilă: „… în definitiv, bârfa trece, NPC-urile pot fi convinse să te ajute (mai o şpagă, mai un serviciu), bătaia, în schimb, rămâne”; „Va trece moţiunea de cenzură?… Va rămâne T. premier?”. În construcţii de virtuozitate tehnică, în afară de structura generală de opoziţie, din enunţul canonic mai pot fi păstrate doar elemente ale unui context minim de relevanţă, cum se prezintă lucrurile în cazul reclamei pentru un unguent (folosit la masaje), „Durerea trece,

180 mobilitatea revine”, respectiv într-un context amplificat, format din trei secvenţe: „Vine Euro, pleacă marca germană, valoarea rămâne” (cu ocazia lansării noii monede europene). Vezi şi inversarea termenilor, într-un exemplu din paragraful următor. [d] „Pietrele trec, apa rămâne!”, „«Convenţia...» se agaţă... ca paiul de înecat”, „mergem la război înainte, şi la plăcinte înapoi” sau (cu substituire de termeni) „Comisionul mare doboară firma mică” (toate exemplele după Dumistrăcel 2006b: 132 - 156, 214 - 216; cf şi Dumistrăcel 2006a: 167 - 314). 3.2.4. Precedenta trecere în revistă a putut aduce în memoria cititorului frecvenţa confruntării cu astfel de enunţuri în discursul publicistic şi, nu mai puţin, în discursul public, în strânsă legătură, de altfel, cu discursul publicistic; nu mai puţin activ este, în această privinţă, limbajul conversaţiei particulare. De pe internet, preluăm doar câteva enunţuri – variaţii pe motivul „apa trece, pietrele rămân”, reprezentând diferite surse şi registre: [campania:] 'Apa trece, România rămâne'; Apa trece, cărbunii rămân; [seminarul:] „Anul trece, voluntariatul rămâne!”; [editorial:] Criza trece, pasiunea rămâne; Emisiunile trece, perlele rămâne [blog pe care se înregistrează greşeli de limbă]; Digitalul trece, piatra rămâne; Feisbucu’ trece, nesimţirea rămâne!; Timpul trece… piatra rămâne! (publicitate construcţii); Timpul trece, stilurile se schimbă, însă brandul rămâne neatins!; Moţiunea trece, taxa rămâne; Viscolul trece, problemele rămân; Dragostea trece, obişnuinţa rămâne, din păcate! Pe de altă, parte, vezi, de exemplu, tot pe internet, numărul mare de intrări în special pentru zicători sarcastice, de tipul „aceeaşi Mărie cu altă pălărie” (peste 500 000 de postări în februarie 2012); faţă de această frecvenţă, atrage atenţia faptul că apar foarte puţine modificări ale enunţului canonic când este vorba de texte din zona discursului politic, aparţinând registrului public formal. Inovaţia lexicală priveşte registrul public informal (vezi, de exemplu, o «substituire»: „aceeaşi Mărie, dar cu o pălărie mai elegantă”), dar şi registrul ludic (ilustrat prin «adăugare»: „aceeaşi Mărie, cu altă pălărie, dar fară chiloţi, în Piaţa Universităţii”). Sunt frecvente, de asemenea, enunţurile a căror modificare poate provoca o anumită ambiguitate: „unde dai şi unde crapă” (vezi „unde pupi şi unde crapă”), sau „capra sare masa, iada sare casa” (aceasta din urmă eventual cu provocarea… „capra sare ce apucă” etc.). 3.2.5. Aspecte demne de interes pentru această analiză au fost discutate şi de unii dintre cercetătorii din structura doctorală ieşeană „Tehnica liberă a vorbirii şi «discursul repetat»”. Ne vom referi, de exemplu, la Gina Necula, preocupată de stereotipuri paremiologice discriminatorii referitoare la dizabilităţi, prezente în discursul public românesc: „Pentru o babă surdă nu toacă de două ori la biserică”; „Surdul nu aude, dar le potriveşte” ; „Să te duci unde a înţărcat mutu iapa!” (Necula 2010: 185; ultimele două enunţuri au o frecvenţă deosebită în texte postate pe internet). Intenţia folosirii expresive a proverbelor şi zicătorilor este elocvent ilustrată de prezenţa acestora în discursul parlamentar. Preluând, oarecum discret, ideea utilizării parimiei, ca „enunţ aparţinând discursului repetat”, în perspectiva realizării „comuniunii fatice” (cf. subtitlul de la volumul Dumistrăcel 2006a: „Tentaţia instituirii comuniunii fatice prin mass-media”, prin care se trimite la conceptul pus în circulaţie de Bronislaw Malinowski), ca şi pe aceea a fiinţării unui „contract de comunicare”, virtual, între emiţător şi receptor(i), I. Apostolatu a semnalat prezenţa zicătorilor şi proverbelor într-un discurs ce se apropie de cel al originii şi funcţionalităţii primare ale acestor specii: este vorba de discursul dezbaterilor (publice) din Senatul României, pe baza unor stenograme datând din anul 2005. Observaţii generale care se impun, sistematizând inventarul dintr-o secţiune a studiului Apostolatu 2008, sunt acelea că, în spaţiul respectiv de comunicare, parimiile sunt reproduse frecvent în formă canonică, fapt explicabil prin registrul public formal al enunţării, şi, tot aşa, că enunţul este aproape obligatoriu însoţit de markeri de intertextualitate, după un model „clasic” al interferării acestuia cu texte ce aparţin tehnicii libere a vorbirii. De observat, de asemenea, că parlamentarii care recurg la asemenea citaţii sunt jurişti, istorici, scriitori, categorii care îşi asumă, cu dezinvoltură, statutul de „povăţuitori” publici. Iată câteva exemple (toate citaţiile care urmează au ca punct de plecare Apostolatu 2008: 27 - 29):

181 „Românul spune că «ce poţi face astăzi, nu lăsa pe mâine»”; „Este un proverb românesc care zice «Râde ciob de oală spartă»”; ,,«Prevederea este mama înţelepciunii», spune o vorbă”. În acest cadru, apare firesc şi textul „de gnomism”; colajul cumulativ se constituie prin sugerarea doar printr-un cuvânt a unei zicători (caz extrem de tipul «detractio»), urmată de citarea integrală a alteia: „Există o vorbă la noi, cu ulciorul, şi mai există alta, cu lupul. Spune românul, în înţelepciunea sa, că «Lupul îşi schimbă părul, dar năravul niciodată»” (discursul, de virtuozitate, este al unui jurist [A.I.]). Într-un mediu de cunoscători (sau măcar numai oarecum exersat), pare să fie suficientă doar evocarea unui «context minim de relevanţă» din enunţul canonic, prin «detractio»; pe de altă parte, în registru ludic, prin «immutatio», se evită expresia violentă; iată exemplele: „… mai simplu ar fi să se gândească la proverbul românesc «când doi îţi spun… », dar când mai mulţi îţi spun acest lucru, mai cinstit, mai bărbăteşte ar fi să-ţi recunoşti limitele” (prezentăm, de pe internet, enunţul canonic, particularizat prin „adiectio”: „Când doi oameni îţi spun că eşti beat, du-te şi culcă-te în alt Euroland”; /economie.hotnews.ro/), respectiv „Există o vorbă veche, pe care n-o pot spune în întreaga ei splendoare: «Cine sare pari mulţi primeşte unul dintre ei exact acolo unde îl doare»” (pe „spaţii electronice de socializare” pudoarea nu intră în discuţie: „Cine sare pari mulţi, îi intră câte unu’-n cur”; sub titlul „Cele mai recente citate amuzante”; /citate.bizi.ro/).

Imaginea specificului acestui tip de comunicare publică se completează dacă luăm în considerare manifestări ale trecerii de la un „spaţiu proverbial” propriu-zis, printr-o fază de tatonare a parimiei, la cadrul în care textul reprezentând tehnica liberă a vorbirii este „colorat” prin diferite specii ale discursului repetat. Astfel, putem nota faptul că, sub titlul-pretext al uneia dintre speciile paremiologice, se trimite, de exemplu, la un aforism al lui Dimitrie Cantemir („... vorba acelui proverb: «Unui lucru fără cale, cale dând, multe lucruri fără cale vor urma»”; evidenţierea grafică ne aparţine), ca şi la o vagă rememorare a unei lecturi şcolare („Nu au dat încă, vorba cronicarului, seama de guvernarea exercitată până în 2004” – probabil referirea este la celebrul moto negruzzian „Ai să dai sama, Doamnă”), ultima, aşadar, de sorginte cultă, ca şi evocarea patului lui Procust, probabil după titlul unui roman al lui Camil Petrescu: „[unele confederaţii sindicale consideră contractele colective de muncă] un fel de «pat al lui Procust» care restrânge iniţiativa patronală”. Tot cultisme, ca enunţuri aparţinând discursului repetat, sunt „cuvintele celebre” (trimiteri, emfatice, la Machiavelli, la „cancelarul de fier al Germaniei, Bismarck” etc.), dar, mai ales, adagiile latineşti, clasice sau profesionale: „«Sic transit gloria mundi!», domnule preşedinte”; „«Nullum crimen sine legem, nulla poena sine legem», spuneau latinii, adică nicio crimă, nicio infracţiune şi nicio sancţiune nu pot fi stabilite fără lege şi dincolo de lege” (citaţie aproximativă a principiului clasic al legalităţii: „Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine praevia lege poenali”). Studiul de caz propus este elocvent din perspectiva relativizării, fireşti, a locului şi importanţei parimiei în discursul public actual: dintr-o memorie a limbii ilustrând resurse devenite ale competenţei idiomatice, sunt convocate, într-o împrejurare tipică de manifestare a persuasunii, cu statutul de mijloace expresive, diferite specii ale enunţului aparţinând discursului repetat. Numai în treacăt, ne vom referi şi la manifestări ale tendinţei de recuperare sui-generis în grilă parodică a parimiei la scriitori care s-au remarcat prin exerciţii de virtuozitate intertextuală; este, de exemplu, şi cazul lui Ioan Groşan, în romanul O sută de ani de zile la Porţile Orientului; de la o simplă aplicaţie de adiectio în „Neobositului călător îi şade bine cu drumul”, prozatorul exersează variaţii lexicale de tip immutatio pe tema „capul plecat sabia nu-l taie”: „Capul luminat sabia nu-l taie”, eventual „Domnului linguşit sabia nu-l taie” [?], (Alexandrescu 2007: 234, 235; iată şi o replică sarcastică de pe internet: „Capul plecat… paşte iarbă!!!”; /www.google.com/; pentru utilizarea zicătorii respective la alt nivel sociocultural, cf. § II. 1.1).

182 4. De unde provin şi ce reprezintă citaţii paremiologice… aproximative de tipul celor reproduse anterior (§ 3.2.1 – 3.2.5) 4.1. Întrebarea, polemică, ce se impune, faţă de alegaţii consemnate anterior, este următoarea: dacă parimia ar fi dispărut din discursul public (indiferent de faptul că, în timp, ar fi scăzut ca importanţă expresivă), de unde, oare, îşi alimentează portofoliul de enunţuri în materie jurnaliştii şi… bloghiştii? Pentru persoane cultivate (scriitori, jurişti), sursa literară cultă este incontestabilă (deşi nici aceştia, după cum am văzut, nu stăpânesc totdeauna modelul). Dar, în cazul celorlalte categorii, recurgerea la almanahuri şi la culegeri de gen este, desigur, exclusă (Robert Escarpit, preocupat de destinul cărţii, în general, identifica, de altfel, pentru epoca modernă fenomenul numit „decăderea în nonlectură”; Dumistrăcel 2006a: 97). De aceea, avem în vedere, în primul rând, păstrarea unor asemenea enunţuri în fondul general al expresivităţii limbajului, ca echivalente, să zicem, ale utilizării metaforice a cuvintelor. În al doilea rând, nici mai înainte, nici în epoca actuală, un nivel ridicat al competenţei expresive, cu apariţia, în vorbire, a parimiei şi a altor mijloace ale exprimării figurate, nu constituie o notă comună pentru oricare vorbitor al unei limbi şi, mai ales, în orice împrejurare. Considerăm, aşadar, că pentru a răspunde, măcar în mare, întrebării formulate anterior, trebuie să pornim, mai întâi, de la conceptul coşerian de «limbi funcţionale», pentru că nu ne putem referi doar la problematica „vorbirii” în general (nivelul universal), şi nici la o „limbă concretă” (în cazul nostru, româna, ca nivel istoric), ci la „discurs” (nivelul individual), reprezentând competenţa expresivă, care se manifestă tocmai în texte. Desigur, însă, analiza parimiei cu referire la problematica vorbirii priveşte categoria „universaliilor lingvistice”, mai precis a „universaliilor frazeologice” (sub semnul metaforei), iar considerarea din perspectiva problematicii unei limbi concrete, ca nivel istoric, conduce spre evaluarea corpusurilor de profil (ca oglindă a competenţei idiomatice). Evident, din această perspectivă, în cazul unui diagnostic oarecare privitor la prezenţa parimiei, nu numai referirea la „culegeri de texte” ne apare ca irelevantă (ba chiar pare absurdă), şi nici, eventual, una referitoare la o aşa-numită categorie „vorbitori din mediul rural” (criteriu sociolingvistic vag); aprecierea viabilă funcţional trebuie să aibă în vedere, în primul rând, calităţile discursive ale fiecărui vorbitor în parte, şi, numai după aceea, situaţia şi intenţia de comunicare, din perspectiva competenţei expresive. Din această optică, interesează, aşadar, considerarea spaţiului şi a registrului comunicării, căci nu îl putem avea în vedere pe… producătorul textelor „dialectale” ca pe o simplă „maşină de vorbit”; oricând, el vorbeşte „în anumite circumstanţe” (Coşeriu). Pe de altă parte, o raportare, hazardată, la cronologie, ne arată că parimia, după cum au dovedit şi exemplele citate în secţiunea precedentă, nu poate fi socotită, în bloc, un fapt arhaic de limbă (din acest punct de vedere, oricum, unităţile inventarului se comportă diferenţiat, la fel ca şi lexicul, în primul rând atunci când enunţul încorporează arhaisme; în legătură cu frazeologismele având suport lexical marcat temporal, cf. Dumistrăcel 1980: 224 - 227). 4.2. Nici Pavel Ruxăndoiu nu se înşală, în fond, în ceea ce priveşte calităţile deosebite ale utilizatorilor parimiei, de vreme ce foloseşte, însă doar en passant, caracterizarea „vorbitor abilitat” (Ruxăndoiu 2003: 194); pentru o atare evaluare corectă, dincolo de considerarea situaţiilor speciale de comunicare, punctul de plecare este acela al competenţelor primare, în cazul de faţă gradul de cunoaştere şi de utilizare a normelor generale ale vorbirii, adică ceea ce Eugeniu Coşeriu defineşte drept «cunoaşterea elocuţională». Referindu-se la acest concept, Coşeriu impune analizei, în primul rând, importanţa culturii şi a instrucţiei: „Este cert că atât cultura cât şi instrucţia (mai mult decât condiţia socială) contribuie de asemenea la dezvoltarea cunoaşterii elocuţionale (sau, cel puţin, la o utilizare a sa mai eficientă)”. Dincolo de aceste condiţii, Coşeriu atrage atenţia, în continuare, asupra unui fapt incontestabil: „… pe de altă parte, această cunoaştere depinde totodată şi de un talent nativ: există vorbitori inculţi şi de origine socială insignifiantă care manifestă o mare abilitate în vorbire şi, invers, personae culte şi de o condiţie socială deosebită care dovedesc o cunoaştere elocuţională deficientă sau limitată” (Coşeriu 1994: 140). 4.3. Încheiem, deci, discuţia asupra importanţei datelor subiective ale utilizatorilor de zicători, proverbe şi contexte proverbiale, din toate timpurile şi din toate mediile socioculturale, sub

183 semnul acestei (şi) de mare bun-simţ învăţături şi, în continuare, ne oprim asupra statutului proverbelor din perspectiva inserării în textul reprezentând tehnica liberă a vorbirii. Într-un text devenit clasic, referitor la „limba fincţională”, Eugeniu Coşeriu enumera o parte din enunţurile ce aparţin «discursului repetat»; printre acestea figurează şi proverbele; iată formulări din texte coşeriene: «discursul repetat» reprezintă „tot ceea ce în vorbirea unei comunităţi se repetă într-o formă mai mult sau mai puţin identică sub formă de discurs deja făcut sau combinare mai mult sau mai puţin fixă, ca fragment, lung sau scurt, a «ceea ce s-a spus deja»” (Coşeriu 2000: 258 - 259, cap. Limba funcţională), speciile (pe care le enumerăm în ordinea apariţiei în textul indicat) fiind: „un «citat»: repetarea unor fragmente de texte – literare sau altele – cunoscute ca atare”; „proverbe, locuţiuni fixe, formule de comparaţie” (op.cit., p. 259; vezi şi, în acelaşi volum, cap. Arhitectura şi structura limbii, p. 55, cu cea mai largă deschidere şi cu precizări similare: „bucăţi de vorbire deja existente”, „expresii”, „locuţiuni fixe”, „proverbe”, „citate ş.a.m.d.”). 4.4. Faţă de această enumerare, în raport cu afirmaţii ale noastre de mai sus, ne-a atras atenţia o distincţie pe care o operează, în deplină cunoaştere a doctrinei coşeriene, Cristinel Munteanu; studiind tehnica utilizării frazeologismelor expresive, acesta face observaţia că, dintre tipurile de enunţuri enumerate în paragraful anterior, numai unele privesc competenţa idiomatică, din această categorie excluzându-se citatele şi proverbele, care fac obiectul lingvisticii textului „fiind «tradiţii literare inserate în tradiţia lingvistică»”. Pe de altă parte, fidel şi terminologiei coşeriene, Cristinel Munteanu contestă utilizarea sintagmei „competenţă idiomatică” pentru a numi un anumit aspect al unei „competenţe langajiere” în general, deoarece, pe terenul lingvisticii coşeriene, sintagma respectivă „desemnează cunoaşterea unei limbi (idioma, în spaniolă) la nivel istoric” (Munteanu Cr. 2006: 150). Considerăm că, sub semnul polisemiei (chiar terminologice!), dacă rezistăm tentaţiei de a crea o terminologie paralelă, nimic nu ne împiedică, totuşi, să folosim adjectivul idiomatic, chiar asociat substantivului competenţă, cu referire la diferite planuri ale analizei, mai ales când sintagme cuprinzând determinantul în discuţie au devenit de uz general. Avem în vedere şi faptul că adjectivul respectiv are, chiar la Coşeriu, o sferă mai largă de întrebuinţare în diferite construcţii; vezi, de exemplu, preocuparea acestuia, din anii ’60, pentru „corectitudinea idiomatică” (în spaniolă la corrección idiomática), referitoare la politica idiomatică – însemnând, paralel, politica lingvistică, ca şi educaţia lingvistică (cf. Coşeriu 1996: 19 - 20). Evident, lucrurile vor putea fi clarificate mai ales după editarea lucrării coşeriene El problema de la corrección idiomática, proiect în curs de realizare al lingvistului José Polo, prezentat de Cristinel Munteanu într-un articol apărut în „Limba română” (Chişinău), nr. 3-4/2011, p. 21 - 27. Extensia pe care o acceptăm se explică şi prin aceea că ne putem pune întrebarea ce trebuie să înţelegem prin „cunoaşterea unei limbi la nivel istoric”? Oare această cunoaştere să privească doar articularea conformă a sunetelor acelei limbi (ceea ce ar ţine, în fond, de competenţa elocuţională), respectarea regulilor gramaticale (ca morfologie şi sintaxă) ale acesteia, utilizarea corectă semantic a unui contingent, variabil, după categorii de vorbitori, din cuvintele aparţinând vocabularului limbii respective? Şi, mai departe, oare, în ceea ce priveşte cuvintele, ar trebui să avem în vedere doar sensul de bază şi unele (care anume?) sensuri derivate ale acestuia, reflectând rezultate, lexicalizate, ale variaţiei cronologice şi, poate, cu privire la variaţia în sincronie, rezultate ale variaţiei diatopice şi diastratice? Dacă acceptăm că atare competenţă priveşte şi cunoaşterea rezultatelor variaţiei diafazice, atunci trebuie să ţinem seama de faptul că, în dicţionare chiar, sensurile figurate sunt frecvent ilustrate atât prin citate din scriitori, cât şi prin unităţi frazeologice de diferite tipuri, printre care şi parimiile, şi numai pe baza cunoaşterii (ca posibilităţi) a unor astfel de sensuri, ca şi prin recunoaşterea acestora în discursul unui interlocutor, inclusiv în exprimări figurate, putem evalua competenţa idiomatică a vorbitorului unei limbi. Interpretăm deci «competenţa idiomatică» în viziune coşeriană din perspectiva tuturor disponibilităţilor unei limbi istorice, iar «competenţa expresivă» , în cazul de faţă, ca o adecvare a primei la vorbirea în circumstanţe, în discursuri sau texte. De altfel, definind conceptele de «competenţă elocuţională», «competenţă idiomatică» şi «competenţă expresivă», Eugeniu Coşeriu subliniază faptul că, dacă „fiecare din aceste forme ale vorbirii este autonomă la nivelul ei” (cel „universal”, „istoric” şi „individual”), „nu trebuie să le considerăm ca existând fiecare separat de celelalte” (Coşeriu 1992- 1993: 31).

184 Atribuirea, formală, a proverbului, ca şi a citatelor din scriitori, «tradiţiei literare», priveşte specificul acestor categorii de enunţuri din perspectiva genezei; în practica utilizării, dar şi ca obiect de studiu al lingvisticii textului, parimia şi citatul din scriitori devenit de uz comun nu se deosebesc, ca regim, de tratamentul (şi interpretarea) celor mai diverse unităţi frazeologice: acela, nediferenţiat, de resurse expresive, sub semnul metaforei. La rândul său, Cristinel Munteanu face o constatare similară privind „legătura proverbelor cu frazeologismele”, care „se impune” dat fiind faptul că ambele tipuri de enunţuri „fac parte din tehnica discursului repetat”, mai ales că „adeseori, nici vorbitorii nu fac deosebire între ele, considerându-le pe toate, în bloc, vorbe de un anumit specific”, afirmaţie ilustrată şi prin trimiterea la analiza întreprinsă de Stelian Dumistrăcel privind provenienţa unor expresii din enunţuri paremiologice bimembre, de tipul a strica orzul pe gâşte, cât ai zice peşte, a o pune de mămăligă (Munteanu Cr. 2006: 157). 4.5. Deosebit de important, în ceea ce priveşte rezultatul mixturii istorice, este însă un alt aspect. Ca obiect de interes din perspectiva destinului „citatelor” din scriitori, la concluzii similare au ajuns, cândva, şi Iorgu Iordan (adept al stilisticii „lingvistice”) şi Tudor Vianu (susţinător al conceptului de stilistică „generală”). Într-un capitol intitulat Izolări, primul, preocupat de originea individuală a inovaţiei lingvistice, constata asemănarea dintre enunţurile expresive „populare” şi creaţiile (de acelaşi tip) ale scriitorilor din momentul în care acestea, datorită circulaţiei, nu mai constituie „bunul personal şi alienabil al creatorului” (cf. şi § I. 1.1). În această situaţie se află expresii din diferite opere (de succes cândva, în anumite medii, sau „de valoare”); printre exemple, zicala „(a avea) pufuşor pe botişor”, dintr-o fabulă a lui Al. Donici, şi numeroase citate din Caragiale (le reproducem pentru că unele, în forma canonică sau de- structurate şi re-structurate, sunt prezente şi astăzi în discursul public şi în textul jurnalistic): „scrofulos la datorie; dacă-i anonimă, o iscălesc şi eu; să le numărăm, coane Fănică; bravos naţiune, halal să-ţi fie; pupat piaţa Independenţei; a se slăbi, Mitică”. Îi datorăm lui Iorgu Iordan o altă observaţie de interes, din perspectiva sociologiei literare: ştergerea diferenţelor dintre cele două tipuri de enunţuri se datoreşte şi faptului că expresii populare au făcut o adevărată carieră prin opera unor scriitori: „(a lăsa) vulpea bearcă” s-a impus datorită lui Odobescu (povestea vânătorească în care apare această locuţiune figura în manualele şcolare ca lectură), iar coadă de topor prin fabula lui Grigore Alexandrescu (Iordan 1975: 265 - 266). Şi mai precis este prezentată similitudinea în discuţie de Tudor Vianu, afirmaţia fiind susţinută, în mod aparent paradoxal, chiar cu unele dintre exemplele date de Iordan (prima ediţie a Stilisticii acestuia a apărut în 1944), predecesor pe care nu-l putea ignora, de vreme ce-i combate opţiunea de principiu (ar putea fi însă un caz de simplă falsă memorie). Într-un studiu al lui Vianu publicat în 1955, găsim următoarele consideraţii: „Dacă citatul se repetă în împrejurări numeroase şi destul de variate, din pricină că valoarea lui de caracterizare este foarte generală, atunci el se transformă într-o expresie a limbii populare şi amintirea autorului tinde să dispară. Aşa s-a întâmplat cu pufuşor pe botişor, cu coadă de topor, Moş Teacă, a se slăbi etc., care nu mai sunt simţite ca citate [anterior, esteticianul invocase şi enunţul „nemuritor şi rece”, din Eminescu], deşi provin, cel puţin pentru reflecţia oamenilor de azi, din operele lui Al. Donici, Gr. Alexandrescu, A. Bacalbaşa, I.L. Caragiale. Toate expresiile limbii populare sunt, desigur, citate generalizate, pentru că toate trebuie să fi apărut [aparţinut?] întâi unui creator individual de expresie” (Vianu 1955: 207). Indiferent de sorginte, situaţia de „anonimizare” este dovedită şi de tratamentul la nivelul uzului curent: citatele „de mare circulaţie” sunt utilizate, după cum a observat Rodica Zafiu, „aproape în aceeaşi manieră” în limbajul cotidian, în conversaţia „relativ cultă” şi în textul publicistic (Zafiu 2001: 7; pentru discuţia de ansamblu a fenomenului, cf. Dumistrăcel 2006a: 160 - 161). Aşadar, la această zonă difuză de expresivitate metaforică recurg astăzi scriitori, politicieni, diferite categorii de autori de texte/relizatori de emisiuni din mass-media, ca şi vorbitorii limbii comune, în comunicarea interpersonală; în această zonă se păstrează, într-o proporţie nebănuită, şi zicătorile şi proverbele. Dincolo de toate, în secvenţa naţională a comunicării din „satul global”, mass-mediei îi revine rolul, de netăgăduit, de a perpetua folosirea parimiei, ca enunţ canonic sau restructurat; în pofida contestaţiei obstinate a vechilor modele

185 culturale, şi prezenţa parimiei, ca formă a discursului repetat, este una din modalităţile, paradoxale, de manifestare a apartenenţei etnoculturale (cf. Dumistrăcel 2003: passim). Acest rol al mass-mediei a fost subliniat şi de Rodica Zafiu, într-o recenzie la volumele Dumistrăcel 2006a şi 2006b; acceptând teza privind prioritatea funcţiei fatice a limbajului în publicistică drept una de contact, care vizează relaţia performantă dintre jurnalist şi cititor, autoarea citată încadrează, pe drept cuvânt, folosirea discursului repetat între clişeele curente ale limbajului publicistic, ca una dintre caracteristicile limbajului publicistic actual (Zafiu 2007: 313). 4.6. În sfârşit, selectăm câteva consideraţii cu privire la motivele păstrării, în vorbire, a parimiei, cu variaţie a formei, pornind de la un cadru mai larg: analiza semanticii expresiilor idiomatice din limba germană, în relaţia semnificaţie – denotaţie întreprinsă de Gerturd Gréciano. Această specialistă, care va ajunge la concluzia, de interes şi pentru tema de faţă, că expresia idiomatică este un element ce „ritmează şi structurează discursul oral şi scris”, apropiindu-se de figurile de stil, de vreme ce „textul” este unicul mijloc de a umple „le fossé” dintre lingvistică şi ştiinţele literare (Gréciano 1983: 145), se referă şi la proverb, preluând de la Wolfgang Mieder opinia că tocmai variabilitatea le asigură parimiilor o deosebită frecvenţă de utilizare, o caracteristică faţă de care „fixitatea” este secundară, întrucât prima „garantează continuitatea discursului idiomatic viu”, pentru comunicarea performantă (Gréciano 1983: 80). De fapt, şi pentru Mieder (Das Sprichwort in unserer Zeit), şi pentru Gréciano, considerarea, în general, a tuturor unităţilor frazeologice drept „un corpus închis” este o teză pe care cercetarea „in vivo” o contrazice categoric; acest obstacol epistemologic poate fi (şi este) surmontat tocmai prin marea frecvenţă a cazurilor ce ilustrează variaţia corpusului, pe baza creativităţii vorbitorului, ludicul constituind cel mai important registru de manifestare a acesteia (cf. Gréciano 1983: 68). Analizele întreprinse asupra modificării enunţului canonic al proverbului şi zicătorii crediteză şi afirmaţia că tocmai fixitatea lor iniţială „cheamă” variabilitatea (ceea ce asigură şi „perpetuarea” genului), ca efect al componentei ludice a mentalului vorbitorului (Gréciano 1983: 250; pentru prezentarea contribuţiei acestei lingviste în domeniul de referinţă, cf. Dumistrăcel 2006a: 67 - 73). 5. Desigur, după analizele întreprinse, constatăm o mutaţie importantă faţă de secolele trecute: departe de a mai fi doar monopolul exprimării figurate a vorbirii populare, prin indivizii performanţi ai acestui nivel, inventarul paremiologic aparţine unei modalităţi generale a expresivităţii comunicării, cu respectarea, sui-generis, la nivelul numit, a tradiţiei lingvistice; în ceea ce priveşte discursul public, este activă tendinţa remodelării, de virtuozitate binevenit elitistă în genul oratoric, preponderent histrionică în publicistică. Dar, în oricare din aceste situaţii, nu se poate confirma influenţa determinantă a instrucţiei şcolare sau a lecturilor.

Note [1] Stelian Dumistrăcel a publicat, în 1988, articolul Cercetarea dialectologică şi analiza stilistică în procesul de învăţământ, la baza căruia s-a aflat intervenţia autorului la masa rotundă „Locul dialectologiei între celelalte discipline lingvistice şi umaniste; rolul ei în formarea profesorului de limba română”, din cadrul lucrărilor celui de al IV-lea Simpozion Naţional de Dialectologie, organizat de Societatea de Ştiinţe Filologice din România, Universitatea din Bucureşti, Inspectoratul Şcolar al judeţului Sibiu şi Filiala Sibiu a Societăţii de Ştiinţe Filologice, la Sibiu, în zilele de 31 octombrie şi 1 noiembrie 1986 (cf. „Limbă şi literatură”, 2/1988, p. 288 – 295). În textul de faţă, am păstrat ca atare trimiterile la alte intervenţii din cadrul mesei rotunde mai sus citate. [2] Aspect la care prof. B. Cazacu s-a referit în introducerea la dezbateri [la masa rotundă citată], sub titlul Probleme actuale ale cercetării şi predării dialectologiei. [3] În intervenţia sa, Dialectologie şi folclor, de la masa rotundă menţionată în nota 1; vezi şi mai jos, § 1.5. [4] Ne referim la intervenţia Dialectologia şi psiholingvistica, de la masa rotundă anterior citată. [5] Vezi şi NALR. Moldova şi Bucovina. Date despre localităţi şi informatori, Bucureşti, 1987, p. 305. [6] La publicarea, în anul 2002, a celui de al treilea volum de texte din arhiva Noului Atlas lingvistic român, pe regiuni. Moldova şi Bucovina, Secţia de Filologie de la Editura Academiei a stăruit să păstrăm titlul „Texte dialectale”; vezi discuţia care urmează. [7] Pentru funcţionaliatea parimiei în literatura cu şi despre „ţărani”, cf. Dumistrăcel 1984: passim. [8] Vezi un portet Sperantia semnat de Ionel Maftei, pe adresa /www.evenimentul.ro/. [9] De la Sociologia literaturii la Teoria comunicării. Studii şi eseuri; traducere de Sanda Chiose Crişan, Bucureşti, Editura ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, 1980. [10] Editura Junimea, Iaşi, 1979, p. 123 - 124; 166 – 170.

186 Bibliografie Exegeze Alexandrescu 2007 = Ileana Alexandrescu, Discursul repetat, cod intertextual al literaturii postmoderne. Aplicaţie pe Levantul, de Mircea Cărtărescu, Editura Alfa, Iaşi. Apostolatu 2008 = Ionel Apostolatu, Discursul politic şi politica discursului... repetat, în „Communication Interculturelle et Littérature”, I, nr. 1 (Actele Colocviului Internaţional „Canon şi anticanon în demersul critic actual”, Galaţi, 26-28 mai, 2008), GUP, p. 21 - 30. Bîrlea 1966 = Ovidiu Bîrlea, Prefaţă şi Introducere la Antologie de proză populară epică, Editura pentru Literatură, Bucureşti, vol. I, p. 5 - 105. Bîrlea 1967 = Ovidiu Bîrlea, Poveştile lui Creangă, Editura pentru Literatură, Bucureşti. Călinescu 1982 = G. Călinescu, Istoria literaturii române de la origini pînă în prezent, ediţia a II-a revăzută şi adăugită, ediţie şi prefaţă de Al. Piru, Editura Minerva, Bucureşti [ediţia I: 1941]. Coşeriu 1992-1993 = Eugeniu Coşeriu, Competenţa lingvistică, în vol. Prelegeri şi conferinţe (1992 – 1993), Supliment la „Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară” (Iaşi), t. XXXIII, seria A. Lingvistică, p. 27- 47. Coşeriu 1994 = Eugeniu Coşeriu, Socio- şi etnolingvistica. Bazele şi sarcinile lor, în vol. Lingvistică din perspectivă spaţială şi antropologică. Trei studii. Cu o prefaţă de Silviu Berejen şi un punct de vedere editorial de Stelian Dumistrăcel, Editura „Ştiinţa”, Chişinău, p. 129 - 149. Coşeriu 1996 = Eugeniu Coşeriu, Lingvistica integrală, intreviu cu Eugeniu Coşeriu, realizat de Nicolae Saramandu, Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, Bucureşti. Coşeriu 2000 = Eugeniu Coşeriu, Lecţii de lingvistică generală, traducere din spaniolă de Eugenia Bojoga, cuvânt înainte de Mircea Borcilă, Editura Arc, Chişinău. Coteanu 1973 = I. Coteanu, Stilistica funcţională a limbii române. Stil, stilistică, limbaj, Editura Academiei, Bucureşti. Densusianu 1926 = Ov. 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187 Zafiu 2007 = Rorica Zafiu, Interpretarea limbajului jurnalistic, în Discursul repetat între alteritate şi creativitate. Volum omagial Stelian Dumistrăcel (edit. Cristinel Munteanu), Institutul European Iaşi, p. 310 - 315.

Manuale şcolare Crişan et alii 2000 = Alexandru Crişan, Liviu Papadima, Ioana Pârvulescu, Florentina Sămâhăian, Rodica Zafiu, Limba şi literatura română. Manual – Clasa a X-a, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti. Crişan et alii 2007 = Alexandru Crişan, Liviu Papadima, Ioana Pârvulescu, Florentina Sămâhăian, Rodica Zafiu, Limba şi literatura română. Manual – Clasa a X-a, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti. Iancu et alii 2005 = Marin Iancu, Ion Bălu, Rodica Lăzărescu, Limba şi literatura română. Manual – Clasa a X-a, Editura Corint, Bucureşti. Leahu - Parfene 1985 = Emil Leahu, Constantin Parfene, Limba şi literatura română, manual pentru clasa a X-a, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, Bucureşti. Otobîcu 1984 = Constantin Otobîcu (coord.), Limba şi literatura română, manual pentru clasa a IX-a, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, Bucureşti.

Surse de texte Cohuţ - Vulpe 1973 = Cornelia Cohuţ, Magdalena Vulpe, Graiul din zona «Porţile de Fier». I. Texte. Sintaxă, Editura Academiei, Bucureşti. Graiul 1906 = Graiul nostru. Texte din toate părţile locuite de români, publicate de I.-A. Candrea, Ov. Densusianu, Th. D. Sperantia, vol. I, Socec & Co, Bucureşti. Muşlea - Bîrlea 1970 = Ion Muşlea, Ovidiu Bîrlea, Tipologia folclorului din răspunsurile la chestionarul lui B. P. Hasdeu, Editura Minerva, Bucureşti. Petrovici 1943 = Texte dialectale culese de Emil Petrovici, Suplement la «Atlasul linguistic român II», Muzeul Limbii Române, Sibiu – Otto Harrassowitz, Leipzig. Texte Muntenia 1975 = Texte dialectale Muntenia, publicate, sub redacţia lui B. Cazacu, de Paul Lăzărescu, Maria Marin, Bogdan Marinescu, Ruxandra Pană şi Magdalena Vulpe, vol. II, Institutul de Cercetări Etnologice şi Dialectologice, Bucureşti. Zanne 1895 = Proverbele românilor din România, Basarabia, Bucovina, Ungaria, Istria şi Macedonia…, de Iuliu A. Zanne, vol. I, Editura Librăriei Socec & Comp., Bucureşti.

188 Les verbes de parole comme caractérisants de l’énonciation originaire dans le rapport des dires

Alina Ganea*

Abstract: In the complex process of reporting, speech act verbs stand for important linguistic means used by the speaker in order to render the original message. These verbs, prototypically represented by the neutral say, translate the reporting speaker’s perception of the original discourse situation, the relation between the speaker and the hearer, and the illocutionary force of the original sentence (Authier & Meunier, 1977: 64). According to Fairclough (1995: 60), the choice of the reporting verbs reveals the speaker’s attempt to influence the interpretation of the original sentence making the object of the reporting process. This paper aims at analysing speech act verbs as meta-discourse comments which refer to the accomplishment of the original speech act and orient its interpretation in the host discourse. Keywords: reported speech, speech act verbs, meta-discourse, subjective evaluation

Introduction Le discours rapporté représente une forme d’énonciation qui réfère à une autre pour mettre en scène des dires, mais aussi tout un éventail de modalisations diverses sur le degré de vérité ou d’assomption par le locuteur des propos rapportés. Par ailleurs, la définition bakhtinienne ([1927] 1977: 161) du discours rapporté comme “le discours dans le discours, l’énonciation dans l’énonciation, mais […], en même temps, un discours sur le discours, une énonciation sur l’énonciation” renvoie aux caractéristique inhérentes à l’acte de rapporter des dires : la mise en discours de plusieurs plans discursifs dans un même acte énonciatif et le fait de caractériser, par cet acte même de rapporter des propos d’autrui, l’acte de dire initial. “La co-présence d’un discours citant et d’un discours cité” (Rosier, 2005 : 104) qu’est le discours rapporté permet “une latitude de rapports au discours d’autrui et serviront différentes stratégies suivant les contraintes de littéralité ou de concision, de l’identification, l’opacification ou la dilution de la source énonciative et de la responsabilité discursive” (ibidem). Le choix du verbe de parole est l’un des éléments lexicaux des plus explicites qui rend compte de la relation que le locuteur rapportant veut instituer entre son rapport des dires et le discours d’autrui. Outre le rôle d’introduire la séquence de discours rapporté, le verbe de parole restitue aussi le comment de ce dire, pareil à un commentaire sur l’acte de dire initial. C’est sur cet aspect réflexif du discours que nous nous concentrons dans la présente étude qui envisage d’illustrer le fonctionnement des verbes de parole en tant que moyens d’évaluation et commentaire méta-discursif concernant l’acte premier de dire. Notre analyse a en vue le verbe de parole confirmer pour les raisons suivantes: 1. ce verbe, par son sémantisme même, met en scène une architecture complexe de moments énonciatifs préalables, similaire à la mise en abîme polyphonique, ce qui pose déjà le problème de fidélité du rapport des dires ; 2. l’acte de confirmation se voit rarement exprimer par une formule performative explicite, préférant des formes implicites dont la valeur illocutionnaire confirmative n’est pas toujours nettement décelable : Il m’a fait une très bonne offre peut valoir pour une assertion, une information, une confidence, une justification et, à la rigueur, à une confirmation. Rapporter un acte d’information comme un acte de confirmation revient à donner une autre dimension illocutionnaire à l’acte, ce qui change ses valences perlocutionnaires et sa recevabilité dans le contexte du discours hôte. Utilisant les acquis de l’analyse de discours de lignée française (Maingueneau, 1996 ; Maingueneau & Charaudeau, 2002, etc.) et puisant aux études sur le discours rapporté (Brès 1996, 1997; Vincent & Dubois, 1997; Rosier, 2008), nous comptons illustrer les effets discursifs créés par l’emploi de confirmer comme verbe de parole et les types de commentaires méta-discursifs que le locuteur fait ouvertement à propos de l’acte de dire initial qu’il représente comme une confirmation. L’illustration sera faite sur des extraits de presse électronique, sélectés selon qu’ils présentent aussi l’acte de dire primaire que le locuteur rapportant reprend dans son discours, sous la forme de discours indirect ou narrativisé, et qu’il dépeint comme une confirmation. Ces extraits permettent la mise en parallèle des séquences de discours primaire et rapporté qui devraient se trouver en

* Chargée de cours, dr, Université « Dunarea de Jos », Galati

189 corrélation, révélant ainsi les (éventuelles) intrusions du locuteur rapportant et les altérations qu’il apporte au discours d’origine par la représentation qu’il choisit d’en donner.

Du choix des verbes de parole et de la littéralité dans le rapport des dires Le verbe de parole joue un rôle essentiel dans le processus de rapporter des dires. Du point de vue syntaxique, il sert à introduire les propos empruntés dans le discours hôte. Du point de vue formel, il balise les séquences de discours rapportés indirects où l’objet du discours est introduit par un conjonctif, de règle que. Du point de vue sémantico-pragmatique, il lexicalise des informations liées au contexte d’accomplissement de l’acte de dire premier et représente une marque linguistique explicite de la polyphonie inhérente à l’acte de rapporter des dires, relevant de la modalité d’attribution des dires. Authier & Meunier décrivent le verbe de parole comme un outil qui sert principalement à décrire la situation d’énonciation originaire, la nature des relations entre les interlocuteurs, et la force illocutionnaire de l’énoncé (1977 : 64). Le choix du verbe de parole dans la reproduction des propos énoncés par un locuteur est conditionné par plusieurs facteurs. Certes, sa sélection dépend, en premier lieu, de la capacité du locuteur rapportant de décrypter le sens illocutionnaire du dire du locuteur d’origine, mais elle tient, sans doute, à l’intention de (ne pas) modifier la portée illocutionnaire originelle de l’acte rapporté. Ce choix relève, donc, de l’implication personnelle de celui qui rapporte dans la sélection et le travail interprétatif des propos. La manière dont il représente le discours d’origine est censée être partielle et subjective, étant cadrée par sa propre interprétation, vu que le locuteur rapportant sélecte ce qu’il va rapporter et organise la manière dont ce qui a été sélecté va être rapporté. Ce travail métalinguistique est immanent et il tient à l’activité d’évaluation et de commentaire concernant le discours autre. Choisir un certain type de glose pour introduire son rapport, tel que Il dit / a dit que, Il riposte / a riposté que, Il gueule / a gueulé que, Il prétend que, tient à ce que le locuteur rapportant veut ‘dire’ de et sur l’acte d’énonciation premier. Selon Rosier (2008: 56), le poids donné par le locuteur à la formule introductrice est important étant donné qu’elle peut varier de la neutralité à une spécification nuancée de l’acte de dire passé. Dans le cas où le locuteur rapportant veut accentuer certains aspects, il peut avoir recours aux verbes de parole marqués quant à la caractérisation du dire premier (tels que reconnaître, prétendre, accuser, démentir, justifier, se plaindre etc.) ou il peut ajouter aux verbes des éléments circonstanciels, adverbes ou locutions, qui visent à restituer le sens complet de l’énoncé original (son rôle contextuel, sa fonction logique, sa tonalité affective, etc.) (López Muñoz, 1995 : 160). La façon dont un message est perçu dépend de la manière dont il est rapporté et le verbe de parole y intervient de manière décisive : il impose une certaine image sur le message d’origine auquel le récepteur n’a accès que via l’interprétation qu’en donne le locuteur rapportant. Par exemple, à un énoncé tel Je ne l’ai pas pris peuvent correspondre plusieurs formes rapportées qui actualisent des verbes de parole distincts :

Il a précisé qu’il ne l’avait pas pris. Il a expliqué qu’il ne l’avait pas pris. Il a insisté qu’il ne l’avait pas pris. Il a répété qu’il ne l’avait pas pris. Il a reconnu qu’il ne l’avait pas pris. Il a nié qu’il l’avait pris. Il a confirmé qu’il ne l’avait pas pris. Il a prétendu qu’il ne l’avait pas pris. Il nous a reproché qu’il ne l’avait pas pris etc.

Chacune de ces variantes présente l’énoncé source sous un autre angle et, dans chaque cas, le degré d’intervention subjective du locuteur rapportant est différent. En employant expliquer ou préciser, le locuteur met en évidence la fonction discursive de la prise de parole du locuteur d’origine ; répéter renvoie au fil chronologique de l’activité discursive du locuteur d’origine, de même que insister qui communique en outre des informations sur l’attitude du locuteur. Les verbes reconnaître, confirmer, nier, prétendre ont tous trait à l’idée de vérité ou fausseté, mais d’une manière différente : reconnaître implique l’existence d’une intention préalable de dissimulation

190 chez le locuteur d’origine qui se voit accuser et l’idée de faute reconnue, confirmer et nier qualifient comme vrai ou faux un dire préalable, prétendre traduit la prise de position du locuteur rapportant par rapport à la vérité des propos rapportés. Finalement, reprocher explicite la portée illocutionnaire de l’énoncé d’origine et fournit implicitement des informations sur la relation interpersonnelle contractée par les locuteurs dans le contexte de l’acte d’origine. Ces exemples montrent le fait que, indépendamment du contexte de l’acte d’origine, par le biais des verbes de parole qui fournissent des méta-informations sur l’énoncé d’origine, le locuteur rapportant peut reconstruire un contexte différent pour l’acte d’origine. Ces différences de représentation sont à mettre en rapport avec des stratégies d’intégration du discours rapporté dans le discours hôte et d’alignement à l’orientation argumentative générale du discours. Dans le cas du verbe de parole que nous analysons dans cette étude, le locuteur rapportant vise une monstration plus marquée de la parole étrangère dans le discours hôte, optant pour un verbe introducteur qui attribue une portée illocutionnaire plus forte au message d’origine dans le but de construire un contexte dramatique à l’acte de dire initial afin d’en créer un événement médiatique.

Il a confirmé que – rapporter une attestation de vérité Le verbe de parole qui va retenir notre attention dans cette étude relève de l’activité métalinguistique du locuteur, vu son sémantisme qui renvoie à l’idée d’évaluation (comme vrai) d’un acte préalable. Confirmer (tout comme son antonyme, infirmer) implique une évaluation du type il est vrai (faux) que X, où X peut équivaloir à un dire, un faire, un (pré)sentiment, une pensée antérieurs. Son emploi performatif dans un énoncé tel Je confirme avoir fait cette déclaration pourrait être explicité par le schéma suivant:

(T1) L1→ a1 = l’acte préalable, dont p = contenu propositionnel (T2) L1 / L2 → a2= Je confirme l’accomplissement de a1 / p est vrai / Oui, p etc.

L’acte de confirmation (a2) appartient à un locuteur qui peut coïncider avec l’auteur de l’acte préalable (a1) accompli en T1 ou non. L’accomplissement de cet acte peut se réaliser sous la forme d’un performatif explicite (Je confirme l’accomplissement de a1) ou sous le couvert d’une formulation implicite (p est vrai / Oui, p) qui peut renfermer un terme qui reflète ouvertement l’attestation de vérité accomplie par le locuteur (l’adjectif vrai, l’adverbe d’affirmation oui) concernant p. Il se peut que l’acte prenne la forme d’une simple assertion (de la forme générique J’ai accompli a1), auquel cas la valeur illocutionnaire de confirmation est à déchiffrer à partir des indices contextuels. En tant que verbe de parole, confirmer concentre des données énonciatives relatives à l’énoncé d’origine. Selon la classification des verbes de parole proposée par Maingueneau (1991 : 103-104), confirmer s’inscrit dans la classe des verbes qui présupposent la vérité ou la fausseté du discours rapporté. Il sert principalement à traduire le sens illocutionnaire du message d’origine et éveille, par son usage, toute la complexité liée à l’accomplissement d’un acte de confirmation. L’acte se trouve sous la responsabilité d’un locuteur qui peut représenter l’acte sous la forme d’une subordonnée complétive introduite par que ou sous forme narrativisée.

Le Président a confirmé qu’il avait participé aux discussions. Le Président a confirmé sa participation aux discussions.

Rapporter une confirmation correspond à l’accomplissement d’un troisième acte :

(T3) L3→ a3: L1 confirme / a confirmé (que) p.

Cette structure ternaire n’est pas complètement et distinctement actualisée dans le discours, a1 étant susceptible de manquer à l’actualisation complète de ce schéma.

(1) DALLAS - Mike Modano a confirmé mardi qu'il rejoignait les Red Wings de Detroit via un message texte à l'Associated Press.

191 La nouvelle avait d'abord été rapportée par ScoreBoard Monthly. Il avait indiqué à la revue sportive de Dallas qu'il ne voulait pas prendre sa retraite. «J'ai changé d'idée plusieurs fois, mais finalement j'ai décidé que je n'étais pas prêt à prendre ma retraite, donc je vais à Detroit», a déclaré Modano à la revue. (http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=535460)

Appliqué à l’exemple ci-dessus, le schéma devient :

(T1) L1→ acte de faire: (prendre la retraite ou rejoindre l’équipe de Detroit) (T2) L1→ a1: J'ai changé d'idée plusieurs fois, mais finalement j'ai décidé que je n'étais pas prêt à prendre ma retraite, donc je vais à Detroit (T2) L2→ a2: Mike Modano a confirmé mardi qu'il rejoignait les Red Wings de Detroit via un message texte à l'Associated Press.

La séquence en gras correspond à l’interprétation que L2 fait de a1. En employant le verbe de parole confirmer, le locuteur rapportant décrit la force illocutionnaire de a2 ou celle qu’il a pu décoder. Plusieurs conclusions se détachent de l’analyse des contextes d’emploi de confirmer en tant que verbe de parole. 1. Le verbe confirmer est employé par le locuteur rapportant comme moyen d’emphase en vue de donner une image différente du discours d’origine et de le transformer dans un événement médiatique. Dans la création du scénario concernant la production initiale de la confirmation, le locuteur rapportant invoque une certaine rumoristique existant autour l’accomplissement de l’acte d’origine, ce qui justifierait son occurrence au moment T2. Dans ce sens, le locuteur rapportant présente l’acte de confirmation comme une réaction à ce doute. Dans les exemples ci-dessous, cet aspect est à lire derrière le terme rumeur, envisagé comme ayant suscité les confirmations en cause. L’existence de ces voix supplémentaires peut rendre le schéma de représentation de l’acte de rapporter une confirmation encore plus complexe par l’occurrence d’une somme de locuteurs anonymes qui colportent, mettent en doute l’accomplissement de a1.

(2) Lors du premier Conseil des ministres de la rentrée, le 21 août dernier, le ventre inhabituellement rebondi qu'affichait Rachida Dati avait lancé les spéculations. La Garde des Sceaux aurait confirmé la rumeur mercredi : oui elle serait bien enceinte. «Je veux rester prudente, car ce n'est pas encore consolidé. Je suis encore dans une zone à risques», aurait annoncé la ministre, âgée de 42 ans devant quelques journalistes, rapporte Le Monde.fr, au grand dam de la ministre. Rachida Dati a démenti mercredi après-midi avoir tenu de tels propos. L'entourage de la garde des Sceaux a indiqué au Figaro.fr que Rachida Dati «a appelé directement» la journaliste du Monde, Raphaëlle Bacqué, «pour lui dire qu'elle a manqué au respect des principes de conversation», et qu'elle «n'a jamais évoqué un quelconque état personnel.» (http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2008/09/03/01002-20080903ARTFIG00417-rachida-dati- confirme-sa-grossesse-.php)

Les termes rumeur, nouvelle, ragot, infamie relèvent de l’évaluation du locuteur rapportant : en les utilisant, il fait montrer le cumul d’actes énonciatifs existants derrière la confirmation et évalue déjà, par les dénominations choisies, la valeur de vérité des propos colportés.

(3) Une rue discrète relie la rue Froidevaux au croisement du boulevard Edgar Quinet et du boulevard Raspail; elle coupe en son tiers, dans la largeur, le cimetière Montparnasse. Mais la quiétude dont elle jouit ne tient pas seulement au gothique de sa situation. C’est davantage à une rumeur persistante qui laisse entendre «qu’Adolphe Thiers, en 1871, durant la répression de la commune de Paris, a décidé de faire dépaver la rue Emile Richard, qu’il a, à même la rue, fait creuser une fosse commune pour y enterrer des insurgés, puis qu’il a fait repaver la rue afin que le peuple de Paris piétine lui-même, sans le savoir, la sépulture de ses camarades morts au combat ou éxécutés ». L’historien qui, dans le film La mémoire d’un ange, assis au fin fond de la Bibliothèque Mazarine, tient ces propos, les infirme aussitôt : il s’agit d’une légende populaire. (http://www.pointligneplan.com/arnaud-des-pallieres)

192 En (4), l’absence de l’étape de colportation est récupérée par le commentaire que le locuteur rapportant fait par l’intermédiaire de l’adverbe finalement qui évoque un scénario d’attente prolongée de l’accomplissement de l’acte en question. En outre, pour pédaler encore sur l’effet sensationnel de cette nouvelle, le locuteur rapportant introduit des informations supplémentaires des plus percutantes dans son rapport des dires, dans notre cas une grosse somme d’argent, qui sont absentes dans le discours d’origine.

(4) Le PDG d'EDF a finalement renoncé à son double salaire et ne touchera pas sa rémunération annuelle de 450.000 euros de président de Veolia Environnement. Finalement, il renonce. Henri Proglio a cédé à la pression et a confirmé qu'il avait décidé de ne pas toucher une rémunération annuelle de 450.000 euros qui devait lui être versé au titre de son poste de président de Veolia Environnement. «J'ai décidé de renoncer à toute rémunération en tant que président non exécutif de Veolia», a-t-il indiqué, afin de s'assurer de «mener à bien le projet industriel et social» qu'il a «forgé pour EDF». (http://www.lefigaro.fr/societes/2010/01/21/04015-20100121ARTFIG00723-henri-proglio-renonce- a-son-double-salaire-.php)

En (4), ce surplus d’information relève de la préoccupation du locuteur rapportant concernant la contextualisation de la séquence de discours rapportée de manière à construire l’histoire médiatique d’une manière incitante. 2. Le locuteur d’origine n’emploie pas le verbe confirmer dans son propre acte de confirmation, mais il a plutôt la tendance à utiliser des formules telles Il est vrai que p / Oui, p ou encore, tout simplement, p. Cette préférence de construction pourrait recevoir deux explications. D’un côté, il y a les facteurs contextuels spécifiques relatifs à une formulation du type Je confirme que. En tant que déclaration ouverte par laquelle le locuteur reconnaît avoir accompli un acte préalable, la confirmation accomplie par le biais d’une telle formule implique une certaine cérémonialité et un registre formel que les locuteurs auraient pu ressentir comme incongrus dans le contexte d’accomplissement de leur acte de dire. En outre, cette formule suppose un mode renforcé d’accomplissement de l’acte de confirmation qui devient du coup très ‘visible’, ce que le locuteur originel n’aurait pu vouloir exprimer. De l’autre côté, si l’on tient aussi compte du fait que dans tous les exemples recensés, l’acte préalable de dire ne correspond pas clairement à une confirmation, l’emploi du verbe de parole confirmer est destiné à créer un scénario autour de la transmission du message initial. Dire X a confirmé que présente un locuteur d’origine en interaction avec les lecteurs et l’opinion publique et dont l’acte de dire (souvent cité in integro dans l’article) serait une confirmation des rumeurs, des attentes, des suppositions, du doute concernant l’acte initial de dire. Par ce verbe, le locuteur rapportant transforme une prise de parole sans intérêt médiatique dans un événement de presse, créant un effet de dramatisation du discours, destiné à éveiller la curiosité des lecteurs et à créer le suspense.

(5) Frédéric Mitterrand confirme sa venue à la culture C’est en tout cas ce qu'affirme l'intéressé lui-même, alors que l'Elysée n'a toujours pas confirmé. "Je savais que j'étais dans les petits papiers de Nicolas Sarkozy", explique le neveu de l'ancien président socialiste dans une interview accordée à VSD avant d'ajouter : "Je ne suis pas tombé des nues [en apprenant la nomination]". (http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2009/06/23/frederic-mitterrand-prochain-ministre-de-la- culture_1210246_823448.html)

(6) Madonna infirme avoir versé 60 millions de dollars à son ex ! Nous vous informions hier que Madonna avait versé entre 56 et 67 millions de dollars à Guy Ritchie lors de leur divorce. Il s'agit en fait d'un pub et d'une maison de campagne ayant appartenu au couple. L'info avait été révélée dans un communiqué de presse par la porte-parole de Madonna, Liz Rosenberg. Mais un deuxième communiqué de presse, émanant cette fois de l'ancien couple, contredit le premier: "Un communiqué de presse inexact et trompeur, notamment en ce qui concerne les sommes impliquées a été diffusé par erreur en début de semaine. Les détails financiers (du divorce) resteront confidentiels, mais nous sommes tous deux satisfaits de notre accord". Génial ! Nous voici revenus au point de départ. On veut savoir combien Madonna a versé à son ex ! (http://mag.livenet.fr/post/madonna-infirme-avoir-verse-60-millions-de-dollars-a-son-ex-2817.html)

193

Dans les extraits ci-dessus, des assertifs à l’air d’un aveu en (5) et d’une information publique en (6) sont représentés comme une confirmation et, respectivement, une infirmation, dans les séquences de discours narrativisé mises dans les titres. L’intérêt tient à l’effet de saillance créé par la présence des verbes confirmer et infirmer dans le rapport des dires, des verbes qui rendent une image exacerbée de l’activité de locution déployée par le locuteur dont les dires sont rapportés. L’emploi des verbes confirmer et infirmer est bien dosé dans la construction des titres qui étalent des noms des protagonistes célèbres, auteurs dont les propos sont fondus dans la substance du discours rapportant. Ces verbes rendent le titre plus percutant, s’inscrivant dans une rhétorique de l’incitation pour saturer la soif de sensationnel du lecteur. 3. Des commentaires d’ordre méta-discursifs du locuteur rapportant peuvent se cumuler autour du verbe de parole confirmer en vue de crédibiliser ou mettre en doute la production de l’acte d’origine. Ces commentaires sont des plus divers, étant déterminés par le désir du locuteur de montrer sa prise en charge ou son détachement vis-à-vis de la vérité des propos qu’il rapporte. L’assomption de la vérité des dires est suggérée par des commentaires concernant le contexte d’accomplissement de l’acte initial de confirmation, qui laissent comprendre la participation directe du locuteur rapportant au contexte de production de l’acte et certifient par là son accomplissement. Par exemple, le locuteur peut faire référence, par des expansions circonstancielles, à la manière dont il a eu accès à l’acte de confirmation :

(7) La rumeur courait depuis quelques semaines, mais lepoint.fr est cette fois en mesure de le certifier : le haut responsable en charge de l'intelligence économique auprès du Premier ministre, Alain Juillet, quittera ses fonctions dans les prochains jours. Il ne s'agit pas d'une éviction, mais plutôt du terme logique d'une mission qui a atteint ses limites dans son organisation actuelle. L'intéressé nous l'a en personne confirmé mardi matin, sans autre commentaire que celui-ci : "Avant même l'élection du président Sarkozy, j'avais indiqué que la fonction que j'occupe depuis décembre 2003 doit évoluer, sans doute en changeant les structures. Une décision en ce sens a été prise, et je n'attends que le décret mettant fin à mes fonctions." (http://www.lepoint.fr/actualites-monde/2009-04-22/exclusif-alain-juillet-quitte-ses- fonctions/1648/0/336866)

La spécification d’ordre méta-discursif en personne que le locuteur rapportant ajoute dans la séquence introductrice du discours rapporté direct est employée pour donner plus de crédibilité aux propos tenus dans l’articles. La confirmation vient comme une preuve destinée à étayer la vérité de ces propos d’autant plus que le locuteur se tient en garant d’authenticité puisqu’il a été le récepteur direct de l’acte de confirmation. La même idée de réception directe de l’acte de confirmation ressortit de l’exemple ci-dessous où le circonstant avec dépit laisse entendre un pouvoir de profusion du locuteur rapportant qui connote plus qu’une simple présence dans le contexte d’accomplissement de l’acte.

(8) J'ai donc demandé à Michel Cointat, ancien ministre de l'Agriculture du général de" Gaulle et plutôt à gauche, de venir me remettre le prix." Lionel Poilâne a beau confier avoir "plus d'émotion devant un ciel étoilé que dans une église", il adhère un an au Cercle puis, apprenant de quoi il retourne, lui demande de ne plus se servir de son nom. Ce que le Cercle confirme avec dépit. "Il est parti vite et très violemment. Ce qui, vu son nom et sa qualité, a fait mauvais effet." (http://www.stoplarumeur.itgo.com/poilane/poilane.html)

A l’inverse, en (9), le locuteur rapportant signale n’avoir pas eu accès direct au contexte de production de l’acte de confirmation par l’emploi du conditionnel présent qui sert à mettre sous le signe du doute l’accomplissement de l’acte:

(9) Lors du premier Conseil des ministres de la rentrée, le 21 août dernier, le ventre inhabituellement rebondi qu'affichait Rachida Dati avait lancé les spéculations. La Garde des Sceaux aurait confirmé la rumeur mercredi : oui elle serait bien enceinte. «Je veux rester prudente, car ce n'est pas encore consolidé. Je suis encore dans une zone à risques», aurait annoncé la ministre, âgée de 42 ans devant quelques journalistes, rapporte Le Monde.fr, au grand dam de la ministre. Rachida Dati a démenti mercredi après-midi avoir tenu de tels propos. L'entourage de la

194 garde des Sceaux a indiqué au Figaro.fr que Rachida Dati «a appelé directement» la journaliste du Monde, Raphaëlle Bacqué, «pour lui dire qu'elle a manqué au respect des principes de conversation», et qu'elle «n'a jamais évoqué un quelconque état personnel.» (http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2008/09/03/01002-20080903ARTFIG00417-rachida-dati- confirme-sa-grossesse-.php)

En employant ce mode verbal, le locuteur rapportant trasfère la responsabilité concernant le contenu des propos à une source anonyme et indique par là la distance qu’il prend par rapport à la vérité de ces dires. Le verbe de parole donne une image en raccourci de l’acte de dire d’original qu’il dépeint en insistant sur un aspect que le locuteur rapportant perçoit ou veut montrer comme essentiel dans la représentation qu’il fait du discours d’origine. Avec confirmer, le locuteur rapportant fait une évaluation de l’acte de dire d’origine qui serait plus qu’un dire, notamment un dire qui porte sur un autre acte préalable pour le présenter comme vrai. Ce qui apparaît lors de l’analyse des extraits de presse où confirmer joue le rôle d’acte de parole est que l’acte d’origine n’est qu’un assertif dont le locuteur rapportant renforce la portée illocutionnaire pour créer ce scénario spécifique de renvoi à un acte préalable pour attester sa vérité parce que mise en doute. Ce renforcement correspond à une technique d’incitation à la lecture, alimentée par le locuteur rapportant avec d’autres détails sur le contexte de production de la confirmation pour créer l’image d’un acte de dire qui surgit sur le fond de la pression exercée par l’opinion publique qui veut connaître la vérité. La réaction verbale confirmative du locuteur d’origine de même que l’intérêt témoigné par le public au sujet de la confirmation procurent à celle-ci le statut d’événement de presse. Confirmer en tant que verbe de parole employé dans le discours de presse apparaît donc comme créateur d’un effet discursif de dramatisation grâce à la manière dont le locuteur rapportant met à profit les données semantico- pragmatiques de ce verbe.

Conclusion Le processus de rapporter des dires institue des rapports dynamiques variés entre le discours d’origine et la forme représentée, qui peuvent aller de la fidélité mimétique à la re-construction du sens du message d’origine. Le verbe de parole représente l’un des moyens par lesquels le locuteur rapportant intervient dans la représentation du discours d’origine, par ses vertus d’indiquer ce que le locuteur d’origine a dit, mais aussi comment il l’a dit. Le verbe de parole confirmer est employé dans le discours rapporté pour traduire la valeur illocutionnaire de l’acte d’origine, une confirmation de dire ou de faire. Le contexte de production d’un tel acte implique certaines coordonnées telles que l’existence d’un acte préalable, la mise en doute de son accomplissement, une prise de parole du locuteur qui qualifie comme vraie la production de l’acte initial. L’analyse des extraits de presse nous a conduite à la conclusion que, par l’emploi de ce verbe de parole, l’énoncé rapporté ne correspond pas à la forme initiale: la variante rapportée attribue une portée illocutionnaire plus forte à l’acte de dire initial qui n’équivaut qu’à une simple assertion. La motivation se trouve dans les exigences stylistiques du genre journalistique enclin à dénaturer la réalité pour obtenir un effet de sensationnel qui incite à la lecture. L’emploi du verbe de parole confirmer crée un effet de dramatisation du discours par les données pragmatiques spécifiques de l’acte de confirmation qui créent un scénario d’une mise en doute de la réalisation de l’acte d’origine. Grâce à ce verbe de parole, le locuteur rapportant, en occurrence le journaliste, transforme une prise de parole dans un événement médiatique, lui prêtant plus de visibilité et dramatisant le contexte de son accomplissement.

Bibliographie Authier-Revuz, Jacqueline, 1997, «Modalisations autonymiques et discours autre : quelques remarques», Modèles linguistiques. XVIII. fasc. 1, pp. 33-51. Authier-Revuz, Jacqueline, 1992-93, « Repères dans le champ du discours rapporté » (I) et (II), L'information grammaticale, no. 55 : pp. 38-42 et 56 : pp. 10-15. Bakhtine, Mikhaïl, [1927]1977, Le marxisme et la philosophie du langage, Paris, Editions de Minuit. Brès, Jacques, 1996, «Aspects de l'interaction rapportée dans le récit oral conversationnel », Cahiers du français contemporain, n°3: pp. 45-59. Brès, Jacques, 1997, «De l'interaction rapportée dans le récit oral ». Modèles linguistiques, vol.35, XVIII, 1, pp. 129-140.

195 Brès, Jacques & Pierre-Patrick Haillet, Sylvie Mellet, Henning Nolke, Laurence Rosier (éds.), 2005, Dialogisme et polyphonie, Approches linguistiques linguistiques, Bruxelles, De Boeck-Duculot, pp. 75-94. Fairclough, Norman, 1995, Critical Discourse Analysis, London, Longman. López-Muños, Juan Manuel, 1995, «Pour une typologie des verbs introducteurs de discours indirect», Estudios de Lengua y Literatura Francesas, no.8-9: pp. 149-167. Maingueneau, Dominique, 1991, L'Enonciation en linguistique française, Paris, Hachette. Maingueneau, Dominique, 1994, L'énonciation en linguistique française, Paris, Hachette. Maingueneau, Dominique, 1996, « L'analyse du discours en France aujourd'hui », S. Moirand (dir.), Le Discours : Enjeux et perspectives (numéro spécial Le Français dans le monde, juillet 1996), Paris, Hachette, pp. 8-15 Maingueneau, Dominique & Patrick Charaudeau, 2002, Dictionnaire d'analyse du discours, Paris, Le Seuil. Rosier, Laurence, 2005, « Le corbeau et le mouchard » , S. Mougin (éd), La médisance, Reims, Presses de l’université de Reims, pp. 145-162 Rosier, Laurence, 2008, Le discours rapporté en français, Paris, Ophrys. Tuomarla, Ulla, 2000, La citation mode d'emploi : sur le fonctionnement discursif du discours rapporté direct, Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Vincent, Diane & Sylvie Dubois, 1997, Le discours rapporté au quotidien, Québec, Nuit Blanche éditeur.

19 6 Communication and Elements of Discourse in Children’s Literature

Angelica Hobjilă*

Résumé : La littérature d’enfance, reflétée dans plusieurs études de spécialité dans les centres de recherche de tout le monde, reste un domaine plutôt périphérique chez nous. Si les théoriciens distinguent la littérature créée pour les enfants de celle qui a comme public-cible les adultes, mais peut être utilisée dans les activités déroulées avec les enfants aussi (la littérature de jeunesse ne constitue n’objet de cet article), notre démarche envisage une troisième acception de la littérature d’enfance, celle créée par les enfants mêmes (ici, par des enfants de 6-7 ans). Notre analyse est réalisée sur un corpus de 32 contes créés par des enfants de 6-7 ans (textes enregistrés et ensuite édités, représentant le produit d’un programme déroulé dans une maternelle de Iaşi par Elena Lungu, enseignante préscolaire) et a comme objectifs : identifier les principales coordonnées de la communication (dans certains textes, même interculturelle) que les enfants de 6-7 ans actualisent dans leurs contes ; distinguer les différents types d’éléments discursifs repérables dans les créations des enfants. D’ici, d’une part, l’importance du sujet – donnée par l’approche d’un domaine avec lequel la recherche n’a été, pour l’espace roumain, très généreuse – et, d’autre part, l’originalité de notre démarche, donnée par l’analyse proposé : de la perspective de la communication et de la théorie du discours – sur un corpus qui n’a plus été utilisé chez nous. Les résultats de notre analyse constitueront, en même temps, les prémisses de nos recherches ultérieures au carrefour des domaines de la communication, de la littérature d’enfance et du discours ; les coordonnées de la communication et les types d’éléments discursifs identifiés dans notre corpus pourront être confirmés ou infirmés par rapport à d’autres textes littéraire pour les enfants ou à d’autres manifestations de la communication dans la société contemporaine (par exemple, le «discours» des BD, des albums, des romans- jeu pour les lecteurs-zappeurs etc., l’alternative de la communication/ communication interculturelle dans les films pour les enfants, dans les dessins animés, les thèmes préférés dans les contes des enfants d’aujourd’hui etc.). Mots-clés : littérature d’enfance, communication, contextualisation, discours, auteurs-enfants

0. Premises of the analysis Children’s literature, despite being widely explored in specialist paper/studies worldwide, does not unfortunately attract the same level of interest in Romania. As a rather peripheral field of research in Romania [1], the issues surrounding children’s literature feature in very few theoretical works (diachronic and/or synchronic overviews of children’s Romanian and/or world literature and academic courses/papers intended in particular for initial/continuous teacher training) and – from a different, practical and applicative perspective – in a range of publications aimed at utilising children’s literature in school-based/extracurricular activities involving children of various ages, such as anthologies and collections of children’s literature where the selected texts are followed, most frequently, by teaching recommendations. In contrast, at international level, the universe of children’s literature is reflected in multiple ways in works focusing on issues such as: the various theoretical bases of research on children’s literature, illustrated by literary texts from other cultures [2]; aspects of children’s books publishing [3]; the embeddedness of children’s literature in current realities [4]; particular concerns in children’s literature (at the junction of psychology, sociology, gastronomy, theology, structuralism, etc): family, the male-female relationship, the political/social/cultural system, stereotypes, the Harry Potter phenomenon, the McDonald’s phenomenon etc. and their valorisation in various educational contexts [5]. Whereas specialised studies generally highlight the distinction between children’s literature written for children specifically (for instance, in the Romanian context, the works of Otilia Cazimir or Elena Farago) and literature whose primary target audience is comprised of adults yet is read (and recommended to be read) by children equally (the case of Romanian authors such as I.L. Caragiale, I. Creangă, M. Eminescu etc.), this paper aims to draw attention to a third accepted meaning of the term, i.e. children’s literature written by children, for children. The analysis I propose is based on a corpus of 32 texts composed by six and seven-year old children at kindergarten no. 18 in the city of Iasi, who have been participating in a project aimed at

* Lecturer, PhD, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iasi

197 developing creativity and fostering oral language expressiveness. In addition to the focus on these two classical areas of kindergarten education, the project has also emphasised interaction, creative play and interpretation. The texts were collected during activities with preschool children and subsequently transcribed by Ms. Elena Lungu (an early-childhood and primary school teacher) and now form a volume currently being prepared for publication. The research focuses on two main areas, seeking to identify, on the one hand, the key dimensions of communication, as actualised by 6 and 7-year olds in their stories, and, on the other hand, the various types of discourse elements in children’s writings (along the lines of the analysis of repeated discourse [6]).

1. Dimensions of communication actualised in texts composed by children The elements actualised in texts created by preschool children fall within the general framework of communication, complying with standards of both written discourse (by using components of literary communication) and spoken discourse (mainly as a result of the particular context for the development of the stories by the 32 children involved in the project – oral “composition” of the text, the process of “storytelling” to the instructor and the other children, who therefore serve as audience/interlocutors). Thus, on the one hand, as regards message delivery, and on the other, in terms of the relationship between a message and a particular communication situation (real – that of the “telling” of the story – or fictional – the actual content of the text), one may distinguish: (a) the children’s tendency to actualise familiar names (nouns, mostly in the diminutive form; regular and formal personal pronouns; constructions with possessive pronoun adjectives or actual pronouns etc.) whether or not implying kinship: “daddy”, “mum, dad!”, “Mommyyy!”, “baby”, “Sir!”, “little boy”, “pal”, “you, my dear”, “dear child”, “my dears”, etc; (b) constructing (or often visibly reproducing) replies that may be associated with familiar communication settings: greetings (“Good afternoon, Sir!”, “Good afternoon! Welcome!”), retorts by children who seek to make their point (“No! No! I want it today!”, “just one more minute and then I’m leaving for school”, “I will do it [the homework] later …”; parents’ replies to children (“Don’t worry, these things happen …”, “Why are you crying, my dear?”, “Hurry up! You must get to school, it’s late”, “Promise you’ll behave?”, “Be careful, you shouldn’t go there on your own!”); parents’ replies typical of particular communication situations, characterised by distinct social, cultural, etc. dimensions (“What do you think?” “Dear, I couldn’t find the baby! What should we do?”, “What a fool, he’s wasting his time. / Why does he even bother …?”); parent-parent dialogues, most often rendered as exchanges between animate characters (“You rooster had better do some work yourself, all I do is toil for you every day … You don’t do anything, just lying there, sleeping in the barn all day. Now, get to work. My wings hurt so much …, what have I done to deserve this?”, “Master, I am the Cloşcuţa-Hărnicuţa [the Tireless Little Hen] and I have ten chicks: Ghiţă, Adi, Milică, Bobiţă, Costiţă, Vasilică, Angela, Andrei, Ţaţa and Ionuţ. My rooster, Cocoşel-Lenevel [the Listless Cockerel], does nothing all day long. I’ve had enough of this! I’m thinking of moving to another yard!”); parent-child dialogues (“What are you doing with my shoesies, mommy?/I’m cleaning them up and putting them in the closet; you won’t be wearing them from now on. / Why? / Because you didn’t keep your promise.”); parents’ replies to children (“Why did you go outside? I’ve just saw your mother and she told me you may not go out until she returns. Go back in, it’s getting dark soon”, “Do as you want! What I just told you is for your own good!); children’s replies (“If you knew how much I’d like you to play with me too … just a little bit./ Look, tomorrow morning we will play, I promise!”, “Pencil, some of my classmates draw better than me, won’t you help me please? I’d like you to come with me to the kindergarten”) etc.; (c) actualisation of strategies intended to capture and hold the interlocutor’s attention/interest and to build up tension: “This is tricky …”, “When he was about to return he could not find his way back any longer …”, “she kept looking for the path in vain”; (d) employing constructions which reflect the locutor-interlocutor relationship: locutor interested in the interlocutor’s feedback (including in terms of the value – see for instance the child-narrator’s dissociation from the negative character in the created text: “Andreea is not my friend!” vs. emphasising similarity with the positive character: “I do the same when I am happy …”), attempting to clarify one’s message to the interlocutor, when necessary: “Well, I hope you

198 liked my story!”, “I forgot to tell you that the dog’s called Lăbuş and the owner’s name is Mr. Florin! That’s all.”, “And you know why?”, “I forgot to tell you that the extraterrestrials were actually trying to steal all our resources on Earth and to kill all people. But because the inhabitants of the earth were very clever, they had already planned for that …”) and the idea of a locutor- interlocutor union (“our puppy”, “our Sergiu”, “our boy”, “our little fox”); (e) spoken style, the play on creativeness and storytelling as form of communication with the other/the others: “But before that he said …”, “And that’s the end of that!”, “And so the story goes”, “And that is how it is to this day!”, “And one day, their dream came true”, “That was the extraterrestrials’ weakness and people eventually found it!”, “Well …”, “Well, what could the parents do?”. The communicative structures actualised in texts produced by children reflect, as demonstrated by the examples above, the strong impact of the everyday environment of the preschool child’s life – a point emphasised in Kristin Wardetzky’s research also („children remember motivationally neutral elements more briefly and less accurately than those which are associated with acute sociopersonal needs and requirements” – Wardetzky 1990: 159). The perspective is broadened by the focus on those discourse elements that can be traced in stories created by children, as such elements are both embedded in a particular type of context and recurrent, as they reflect the dimensions of children’s literature familiar to children.

2. Discourse elements observed in stories created by children The analysis of the texts in the corpus under review falls both within “the enunciation system which correlates a textual construction and a defined social reality” (Charaudeau, Maingueneau 2002: 43) and within the research framework of repeated discourse, which embraces “everything that in the language of a community is repeated more or less identically as ready-made discourse or a more or less fixed combination, as an extended or brief excerpt of that which has already been said” (Coşeriu 2000: 258-259).

2.1. The „story content” of texts created by preschool children involves in the corpus under review, various types of contextualisations: (a) spatial and temporal contextualisations – placing the action in a real family setting (“We do not have hazelnut trees near our block of flats”) vs. real created setting (“in a small village”) vs. unreal setting (“a planet called the Strange Planet”), dissociating the types of setting (“two peasants lived in the two houses, while the king naturally lived in the castle”), or by setting the action in a specific time unit (season, day, time of day), in the past (“Once upon a time”), present (“Then the extraterrestrial beings also contacted those on the spaceship from earth, speaking another language, their own language”) or the future (“they would find in the outer space better, peace-loving beings”); (b) contextualisations at action level, reflected in episodes which point to literary works known by children (“He feared that if he kissed her he might swallow her whole” – an allusion to Neghiniţă, a Romanian story about a puny, elf-like boy; “He [Andrei] has been through a lot and has learnt that he must work in order to succeed – as in that story…”) and, on the other hand, in scenes which re-enact customary situations in preschool childrens’ lives, such as: aspects of contemporary life (“enough with the Pet Shop food”), stereotypes of childhood (“he [the child] would just go out and play instead of doing what he claimed he was doing”, “Andrei saw a couple of boys playing with a new ball on the street and wanted one himself. So he ran to his father and asked him to buy him one too”, “without his mum’s permission”, “The two children asked their mum to buy them the little animals”, “The children each gave a little kiss to the cute animals”), aspects of the education of children of various ages, in different educational and family settings (“After some serious ear pulling, Iepurilă (“the Hare”) promised he would never do that again.”, “The teacher was very upset and called Andreea’s home”), family and friendship (“All the guests, his friends, wished him “Happy birthday!” and all started playing in the room. When mother rabbit brought the cake, Ţup-Ţup [Hopper the Bunny] blew into the candles so hard that the cream flew onto the guests and smeared them all, yet they all laughed and had fun … Everyone loved the party!”), elements of the current social environment, actualising components of the system of values to which children refer, through the prism of “rolemodels”, i.e. the adults in the family

199 environment – the problem of children whom parents leave in the care of an acquaintance (“the bird decided it was time she took a holiday. So she left for the seaside. But before that she said she should really find someone to sit with her chick so she called in their neighbour, the elephant”); irresponsible parents (“The nosey hen, instead of caring for her young, was peeping through the fence at the neighbours next door”); emigration issues (“the father rang his friend, Mihai, who worked in Italy, asking him to quickly send the gift his daughter wanted. So Mr. Mihai went to the shop in Italy, found and bought the doll and sent the package by car, to make sure it would arrive as fast as possible”); children’s wishes and the (often problematic) relations among children (“The little girl wanted a baby brother or sister to sleep with at night”, “Buburuzel [Master Ladybird] went outside to play and met a tiny ant; yet the two didn’t let Buburica [Miss Ladybird] join in their game. Buburica was weeping as she wanted to play with them, but no matter how much she begged, they would not accept her in their game”); (c) character contextualisations [7]: in terms of typology, the observed characters belong to (1) the human world (embedded in the children’s family, social and cultural environment) – e.g. “the father of a boy called Andrei”, “two children – Veronica and Tudor”, “a little girl called Ionela and a little boy called Adiţă”, “a pupil called Ionuţ”, “a girl called Andreea”, Mrs. teacher, “two children: a girl and a boy. The girl’s name was Karinuţa, and the boy’s Sebişor; (2) the animal kingdom, most frequently re-enacting human-like relations: “a bunny called Fulg de Nea [Snowflake]”, “Moş Martin [Uncle Bear], the bunny’s uncle”, “a doggie called Botic [Muzzle]”, “Aricel şi Bursucel” [Hedgehog and Badger], “a bunny and an ant”, “who were very good friends”, “the chief hen”; (3) the imaginary plane: “beings who live in outer space”, “a charmed eraser”, “there was once a pencil with amazing powers. As soon as you put it on the paper, it would draw whatever you wished, in all the colours you could dream of”. In terms of character construction, one may single out those whose traits reflect the universe of childhood (“The bunny was mighty mischievous”, “a group of people who since childhood had wanted to travel in outer space”, “the naughty bunny”, “the bragging girl, “two cute and smart little brothers”, “a restless puppy”, “Ţup- Ţup the bunny was polite and hard-working and deserved to have a party”); characters shaped on those known to children from books: “a rooster who used to crow very early and drove people angry by waking them up so early” (modelled on the woodpecker in Ion Creangă’s Amintiri), „a lazy cockerel for which even eating a wheat grain was too hard …” (the idle man in one of Ion Creangă’s stories); (d) contextualisations of magic objects most often incorporated in reality: “the beautiful red new ball”, “highly sophisticated rocket”, “radars”; (e) contextualisations of the dénouement of stories created by children, resulting in various conclusions: happy ending: as in fairy tales (“The king congratulated them on changing their ways and made them knights. They lived happily ever after.”), or patterned on fairy tales conclusions, yet with content adjusted to the child’s recognisable social context (“One year after this event, an elegant shop opened at the ground floor of the house Moş Martin, the bear, where animals could find anything they wanted”, „The two children asked their mum to buy them the cute animals. Thus Hariet and Rex finally found owners and all were happy to be a family”, „They should not have been afraid, as all the animals were well-behaved – they gave them food, welcomed them and played with them nicely. All summer long, Codiţă Albă [White Tail] and Veveriţa Lizuca [Lizuca the Squirrel] played and made lots of friends. They kept telling all the inhabitants of the forest about how fine the two children had treated them, but still, it was even better to be home, in the big forest”, “Thus all the animals could escape and were able to find their parents and … all lived happily ever after”, “Every night she would come in the little girl’s dreams, and the girl dreamt they were playing together. Thus they were both very happy”) – most often the happy ending being assimilated with the concepts of family and friendship; moral ending – actualising classical systems of values and ideas such as: the need to adapt (“The man led the young rooster to his home, and the rooster had learnt his lesson and now crowed later, with the other roosters”); respect (“What Ionuţ learnt from this was to never throw out the window any objects that had been useful, as you never know when luck might strike. Codruţ lost his eraser or perhaps someone took it away because he’s been having low grades in school …”); the importance of following parents’ advice and the problem of

200 upbringing (“The bunny’s mother thus came to learn to truth and scolded the wayward bunny. After some serious ear pulling, Iepurilă promised he would never do that again. Since then rabbits have had long ears. Rightly so. To make sure they remember …!”, “indeed he learnt his lesson, and has never upset his master since that evening”); reward, the idea of merit (“After the guests left, Ţup-Ţup cleaned his room and when he was done it looked as good as new. Ţup-Ţup was polite and hardworking and deserved to have a party”); accomplishment through work (“The red ladybird became all yellow from eating so much honey, but she was the happiest ladybird, as she had now found a purpose”); the relationship between natural and adoptive parents (“Returning from her holiday one morning, the bird looked at her nest and was taken aback and angrily asked the elephant: Where is my chick? Why didn’t you look after it? Tell me where it is. / It’s there in the nest – the elephant replied. / You lie, there is only a winged elephant calf. / Well, this is our baby. / What do you mean “our”? / Yes, it is ours. You hatched it therefore it has wings, but I looked after it and that is why he is an elephant calf now. // And nobody was now making fun of the big elephant anymore…”); upholding the spirit of justice (“This is their due punishment, because instead of asking, mice steal food from people’s homes!”, “If she [Lisa the kitten] had wanted to eat, she should have been busy catching mice; enough with Pet Shop food”); semi-open ending: “Then the three space travellers managed to destroy the Strange Planet and were appointed generals, but still they did not lose hope that they would find better, peace- loving beings in the outer space”, “Then the two friends went out for a walk”, “Nobody knows if the girl learnt anything from this event …”; (f) contextualisations at the composition level – texts created by preschool children emerge as a mixture of imagery and structures, alluding to the features of epic genres such as fairy tales, fables, legends, narratives etc. – see, for example, the introductory, intermediate and concluding formulas typical of fairy tales, outlined under section 2.2; the types of human they present – similar to fables – represented by characters in the animal and object world (bunny, elephant, bird, eraser, etc.), final formulas typical of legends (Since then rabbits have had long ears. Rightly so. To make sure they remember…!”, narratives – within the framework of the story – of everyday occurrences, reflecting life and communication situations familiar to children etc.

2.2. The „story format” of the texts included in the corpus under analysis are concrete embodiments of the various types of contextualisation laid out under 2.1, as manifestations of repeated discourse (by constant reference to elements of everyday communication – phrases, structures etc., and of fairy tale “discourse” – formulas, characters’ names etc.). One may distinguish the following: (a) introductory formulas overlapping two dimensions: (1) as means of embedding action in a shared space-time (“one summer day”, “one day”, “on a beautiful autumn day”, “one morning in spring”); (2) as reiterations of established fairy tale formulas (elements of repeated discourse: “once upon a time”, “long ago, there lived in a forest”, “once upon a time, a long time ago”, “once upon time there was”, “once upon time and twice upon time there was”, “once upon a time, and a very good time it was”, “it so happened that …”); (b) intermediate formulas, which are the hallmarks of orality and serve as strategies to delay the flow of the story (building on or replicating patterns common in familiar fairy tales): “he was lost in thoughts, thinking over and over, and suddenly said”, “he kept walking, walking, walking till he ran into …”, “as they walked on, talking about many different things”, “they kept thinking for a while”; (c) concluding formulas: summarising the story (“This is the story of Andrei the lazy boy. He has been through a lot and has learnt that he must work in order to succeed – as in that story…”), formulas from fairy tales (typical Romanian closings: “I jumped in the saddle and rode away to tell you the stories you've heard today”, “I jumped on a spoon and away I flew and you've heard all my stories, so God bless you.” “I jumped on a spindle and away I spun.”; “An' the wheel bend, an' the story end.” “That’s how it’s been to this day. And that's a true story!”); closing formulas signifying the relationship between the narrator and the listener/interlocutor (“And that's the end of that!”, “Well, I hope you enjoyed my story!”, “And so the story goes”, “And that is how

201 it is to this day”, “That’s what I do when I’m happy …”), evaluative closing formulas serving as value judgments (“What a helpful dog!”); (d) characters’ names: similar to or replicating those in stories familiar to children (Fulg de Nea [“Snow Flake”] the rabbit, Moş Martin [“uncle Bear”], Rilă Iepurilă [“Rilă the Hare”], Ţup- Ţup [“Hopper”] the rabbit) vs. names modelled on those of “famous” characters in childrens’ literature (Frunză Verde tree [“Evergreen Tree”], “Strange Planet”, „Ureche-Lungă” [“Long Ear”], Aricel şi Bursucel [Hedgehog and Badger]), vs. names acquired from the family environment (Andrei, Mr. Florin, Ionela, Adiţă, Codruţ, Andreea, Karinuţa, Sebişor) vs. names which combine the above-mentioned types (“Hariet the kitty and Rex the puppy”, Mr. Bear, Mrs. Hare, Mr. Hedgehog, “two fairies, one called Sabina, the other Georgiana”, Ţupi [“Hops”], “Mother- Ladybird, Father-Ladybird and two younger ladybirds, Master Ladybird and Miss Ladybird]); (e) phrases which reflect the children’s embeddedness in a particular linguistic context (“he came up with an idea”, “he was feeling lazy”, “in the end”, “all day long”, “they didn’t think about it too much”, “let’s find out what their weakness is”, “they took on risks”, “they learnt their lesson”, “he would have none of it”, “he tried his luck”, “he came right away”, “with all his might”, “he bumped into …”, “he took flight and ran like a scared rabbit”, “lucky that …”, “he was just about …”, “he laughing, holding his stomach, and felt like kissing his girlfriend”, “he didn’t care for it”, “all day long”, “you never know when luck might strike”, “and what’s more …”, “they said goodbye”, “they found a purpose”, “he didn’t care”, “he wasn’t ashamed”, “to take him to task”, “he acted out”, “he mustered courage and got down to work”, “what have I done to deserve all this”, “he told himself that he had better …”, “he was left aghast”, “he ran for his life” etc.), and referencing literary texts familiar to children (cf. Amintiri din copilărie, by Ion Creangă: “and they were doing so many other things …”, “the children were so drowsy they would have gone to sleep right there in the piglets’ nest”); (f) repetitions – which reflect trends in ordinary communication: “there was a precious stone rich in minerals giving them everything they needed: food, energy, light, everything, everything, everything”, “Then the people decided to lock him up in a room. And lock him up they did”, “smoke was rising, either rose or green or blue”, “all he does is lie around all day”, “poor thing, he kept looking for her, under the table, in the refrigerator, all over the place, all over …”; (g) clause/sentence substitutes (based on direct into indirect speech exercises or, conversely, as premises of such exercises): “her mother told her there two conditions: to behave and to brag less about her stuff. The little girl promised she would do so”, “Will you be a good boy? Our doggie lifted his paw as a “yes”, “Ţupi asked mother rabbit if it was indeed his birthday and she said it was.”; (h) anchor structures employed in the text (signifiers of story “telling”): “On their moon the extraterrestrials had a base where there was a precious stone rich in minerals providing them with everything they needed: food, energy, light, everything, everything, everything. Indeed, that was the extraterrestrials’ weakness and people eventually found it!”, “The extraterrestrials lived on a planet called the Strange Planet which didn’t have a moon”, “When her mother would call her to eat, she just lied in bed and ignored her. Also …”, “The fairies, seeing how nice the children were, wanted to charm them and keep them there forever. On seeing that, the parents were very scared …”; (i) lexemes typical of childhood (reflected in the high recurrence of diminutives: “kitty”, “puppy”, “little paw”, “fishies”, “little boat”, “froggies”, “little animal”, „Adiţă” (child’s name), “little kiss”, “small house”, etc.) or pointing ot contemporary realities, which cannot generally be located in older children’s fiction: “the clients have arrived!”, “the pop-up shop was taken down”, “they detected a particular substance”, “heavily protected bases”, “if they use a nuclear bomb they will influence …” etc; (j) explanatory constructions – actualised as highlights of the locutor-interlocutor relationship, aimed at delivering a highly detailed message, which the interlocutor may be able to decode based on the initial communicative intention and on the tendency of adults (preschool teachers, parents, etc.) to frequently explain to children various components of the messages delivered to them: “other beings living in space, extraterrestrials that is”, “to make up his mind right then, on the spot”, “the eraser got smaller and smaller, meaning it was worn out”, “he stretched out his trunk and gently lifted the chick from its nest, putting it under his ear. It’s always warm under an elephant’s ear!”, “he brought home Lăbuş (that was the puppy’s name)”, “he went

202 to the newsstand – that was the old man’s workplace, he was a newsagent”, “she made a string puppet dwarf, a marionette that is. And everyday the dwarf went to work, at the puppet theatre.” Conclusions The analysis proposed above – focusing on an area which so far has not been thoroughly explored in the Romanian context and based on a previously unused corpus – is part of a broader research undertaking in the field of children’s literature. The outcomes of the study serve therefore as premises for upcoming research, at the junction of the fields of communication, children’s literature and discourse analysis. The dimensions of communication and the discourse elements illustrated under 2.1 and 2.2 may be subsequently confirmed or invalidated through references to other types of literary texts for children and other manifestations of communication in contemporary society (e.g. comics, albums, video game novels etc.)

Notes: [1] Some references in Romanian literature in the field: Raţiu 2006, Cândroveanu 1988, Bârlea 2006, Mitu 2006, Bodiştean 2007, Casangiu 2007 etc. [2] For example, children’s literature viewed from a semiotic standpoint and by reference to the diagram of communication; the system of concepts, symbols, norms, types of discourse observed in literary texts for children – Ewers 2009; defining children’s literature based on how it is understood in various contexts – Klingberg 2008; children’s literature across centuries, for children of different ages; issues related to children’s and youth magazines; the history of children’s literature, with reference to literary movements – Cogan, Webb 2002; literary genres and species included in children’s literature: classical (epic works – fairy tale, story, fable, short story etc; lyrical – pastel, lullabies etc; dramatic – fairy tale play, comedy; elements of children’s folklore) and modern (comics; videogame novels; graphic novels – viewed the only genre exclusively belonging to children’s literature, combining orality, imagery and text, cf. Nières- Chevrel 2011) etc. [3] In this area, research focuses on: various aesthetic and cognitive aspects reflected in literary illustrations occurring in literary texts for children, analysed from an interdisciplinary perspective: literary theory, art history, linguistics, narratology, cognitive psychology, sociology, theory of painting, etc; difficulties encountered in translating literary texts for children; features of products targeting children (books, magazines, albums, DVDs etc.). [4] By means of the analysis of the relationship of children’s literature with other arts and with the media: cf. references in children’s literature to films/film adaptations of children’s books, drama; the image of the child in contemporary society, the sociology of reading; other expression modes whose target audience are children – albums, comics, films, TV series, video games, etc; the impact of multimedia on children’s literature, etc. [5] Main areas of focus include: the role of literature in the upbringing of children of various ages and in teacher training; the role of reading and arts classes; the image of the child in school textbooks; issues in selecting the essential literary texts for children (cf. the example of France, where the ministry has provided a list of recommended readings in schools); selecting particular texts and manners of presenting difficult themes/scenes (cf. the controversies surrounding the advisability of including certain content in textbooks or the use of certain fairy tales in activities with preschool and early school children – e.g. texts ending with the revenge/killing of a character) etc. [6] Of particular interest here is the reference to the two main types of statements in repeated discourse identified by Stelian Dumistrăcel (2006): (a) “anonymous” statements: popular (set phrases, idiomatic phrases, proverbs, set comparison formulas; verses; set fairy tale formats; riddles) and cult (sayings, slogans, formulas borrowed from religious discourse, famous proper names, technical formulas associated with various functional styles) and (b) statements by known authors (titles of books, quotations, “famous” words/sentences). For examples of these elements on a different corpus than the one proposed in this paper see Amălăncei 2007. [7] See, for instance Kristin Wardetzky’s statements: „Analysis of the content of the children's fairy tales reveals not the slightest glimmering of an effort to elaborate questions of social justice, morality, the relationship between good and evil, or power as a social category. On the other hand, the children's tales suggest a more highly differentiated and nuanced view of the characters they create than has been suggested by the often-cited good-mother/evil-witch dichotomy” (Wardetzky 1990: 172).

Bibliography: Amălăncei, Brânduşa-Mariana, Discursul repetat şi modificarea enunţurilor aparţinând discursului repetat în textele publicitare, în Limbaje şi comunicare. IX. Evoluţia şi funcţionarea limbii – perspective normative în noul context european. Partea a II-a, Editura Universităţii Suceava, 2007, pp. 101-105. Bârlea, Gheorghe Petre (coord.), Dicţionar de locuri imaginare în literatura pentru copii, Muzeul Literaturii Române, Bucureşti, 2006. Bodiştean, Florica, Literatura pentru copii şi tineret dincolo de „story”, Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, Cluj-Napoca, 2007. Casangiu, Larisa Ileana, Literatură română şi literatură pentru copii. Note de curs şi sugestii de lecturi plurale ale unor opere, Ediţia a II-a, Nautica, Constanţa, 2007. Cândroveanu, Hristu, Literatura pentru copii, Albatros, Bucureşti, 1988. Charaudeau, Patrick; Maingueneau, Dominique (ed.), Dictionnaire d’analyse du discourse, Seuil, Paris, 2002. Cogan Thacker, Deborah; Webb, Jean, Introducing Children's Literature From Romanticism to Postmodernism, Routledge, New York, 2002. Coşeriu, Eugen, Limba funcţională, în Lecţii de lingvistică generală, Arc, Chişinău, 2000.

203 Dumistrăcel, Stelian, Discursul publicistic românesc din perspectiva stilurilor funcţionale, Institutul European, Iaşi, 2006. Ewers, Hans-Heino, Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research Literary and Sociological Approaches, Routledge, New York, 2009. Klingberg, Göte, Facets of Children’s Literature Research: Collected and Revised Writings, Swedish Institute for Children’s Books, Stockholm, 2008. Mitu, Florica, Literatura pentru copii. Antologie de texte comentate, însoţite de sugestii metodice, Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2006. Nières-Chevrel, Isabelle, La littérature d’enfance et de jeunesse entre la voix, l’image et l’écrit, in „Vox Poetica”, 30 janvier, http://www.x-oetica.org/sflgc/biblio/nieres-chevrel.html, 2011. Raţiu, Iuliu, O istorie a literaturii pentru copii şi adolescenţi, Prut Internaţional, Chişinău, 2006. Wardetzky, Kristin, The Structure and Interpretation of Fairy Tales Composed by Children, in „The Journal of American Folklore”, Vol. 103, No. 408, American Folklore Society, 1990, pp. 157-176.

Corpus : Lungu, Elena, Jucării din vorbe, Iaşi, currently being prepared for publication.

204 La performativité de la propagande: qui s’agit-il de convaincre ?

Arthur Mary*

Résumé: Nous partons des conférences d’Austin (Quand dire, c’est faire, 1962) et des analyses qu’il mène sur certains énoncés. En particulier, il met en évidence le caractère performatif d’énoncés qui constituent de véritables actes de langage. Prenant notre objet de recherche (les discours sectaires) comme support de réflexion, mais plus largement aussi les discours idéologiques, nous nous intéresserons à la prédication et au témoignage de propagande (religieuse ou politique) et déploierons leurs aspects perlocutoires (comment le discours agit sur l’auditeur) et illocutoires (comment le discours agit sur l’agent énonciateur). Il s’agira ainsi de donner suite à notre travail sur les effets de subjectivité des discours idéologiques en mettant moins l’accent sur les processus intrapsychiques que sur la logique inhérente à certaines situations dialogiques (persuasion, prosélytisme, dispute, etc.). En détaillant des situations exemplaires, nous montrerons que si l’énonciateur et le destinaire n’appartiennent pas aux mêmes systèmes de référence (c’est-à-dire, soumis à des conventions langagières différentes), la prédication ou le témoignage peuvent néanmoins être « heureux » d’un certain point de vue, quand bien même le performatif aurait échoué du point de vue du destinataire. C’est qu’il ne s’agit peut-être pas de convaincre l’Autre, mais soi-même. Mots-clés: discours idéologique, performativité, persuasion, propagande, prosélytisme, dispute

Dans un précédent travail [1], adressé déjà à l’Université de Galaţi, j’avais tenté de cerner trois effets de subjectivité induits par la discursivité proprement idéologique : 1°) la « vérité historique » (Freud) des idéologies ; 2°) la dé-dialectisation du discours lui-même ; enfin 3°) la forclusion de la fonction poétique. C’était se placer dans un paradigme philosophico-clinique, à la suite d’une réflexion d’Althusser et à l’écoute de sujets pris dans des modalités particulières de discours idéologiques. Je reprendrai ici cette même question des effets de subjectivité, cette fois-ci dans la perspective austinienne des actes de langage. En effet, l’acte langagier de convaincre quelqu’un d’un énoncé ou d’une doctrine peut être saisi non pas tant sous l’angle des valeurs de vérité des énoncés de telle ou telle doctrine – sont-ils vrais ou faux ? sont-ils sincères ou mensongers ? –, mais davantage sous l’angle de leur performativité : l’acte de persuader a-t-il réussi ou a-t-il échoué ? Il nous faudra bien pour répondre déterminer le critère de réussite des actes de propagande ; et nous verrons combien le choix de ce critère structure de façon décisive notre compréhension de chacun de ces actes locutoires pris séparément. Empruntant toujours au travail d’Austin, de la façon la moins psychologisante possible, nous poursuivrons notre enquête en nous intéressant aux effets perlocutoires (comment le discours agit sur l’auditeur) et illocutoires (comment le discours agit sur l’agent énonciateur), dans ce que ces effets ont de concret. Ces effets de locution, je les conçois encore comme effets de subjectivité dans la mesure où c’est bien comme sujets de la parole que propagandistes et destinataires sont parties prenantes du jeu de langage particulier qui est mobilisé ; ou pour le dire autrement, ces effets de locution engagent éthiquement les acteurs en présence. Je rapporte quatre situations exemplaires, choisie pour ce qu’elles me permettent de les ranger très schématiquement dans quatre catégories complémentaires : une situation-réussite (où l’on obtient l’adhésion de qui affichait d’abord son désaccord), une situation-échec (où l’incrédule n’a finalement pas cru : le désaccord reste entier), une situation-homodoxe (où l’on « prêche à un converti »), et une situation-paradoxe (où l’incrédule n’a pas cru, et pourtant…).

1. Situation-réussite : témoigner de sa foi Jean-Pierre appartient à un mouvement évangéliste pour lequel le prosélytisme est un devoir moral. Il me raconte comment quelques jours plus tôt, il a fait le « témoignage de sa foi » auprès de Paule. Celle-ci, l’ayant écouté attentivement, a été très touchée et désarmée par l’authenticité de son engagement spirituel. Elle lui téléphonera quelques heures après la fin de leur entrevue pour lui demander de bien vouloir la conduire sur son lieu de culte afin qu’elle puisse

* Psychologue clinician, doctorant en psychologie clinique, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, CIRCPLES EA. 3159, attaché à l’« Equipe de Recherches Cliniques », Université Toulouse-Le Mirail

205 accéder à la même forme de grâce religieuse. Jean-Pierre m’explique la joie qui le submergea après ce coup de téléphone : « c’était un véritable bonheur, je sentais que Dieu avait touché son cœur… j’étais heureux parce que je sentais que j’avais accompli mon devoir de chrétien, que la volonté divine s’était accomplie à travers moi. Et au fond de moi, je me disais que c’était un vrai miracle. Chaque fois qu’un homme ou qu’une femme rejoint Dieu, c’est un miracle. Voilà… les miracles nous prouvent que Dieu est présent ici-bas et qu’Il nous aime… ». L’acte de convaincre Paule, du point de vue aussi bien de Jean-Pierre que de Paule, est une réussite. Elle se découvre une ferveur religieuse, c’est une révélation et elle exprimera par la suite de la gratitude. En ce sens, les propaganda, les « choses devant être propagées », ont effectivement circulé et ont touché Paule. Jean-Pierre découvre quant à lui que sa parole à des effets prodigieux quand il la met au service de son Dieu. L’enthousiasme de Jean-Pierre a néanmoins quelque chose de surprenant et d’inattendu. En effet, il semble ne réaliser qu’après-coup la force de son témoignage, et au-delà de cette puissance, sa véracité. Tout se passe comme si la foi de Jean-Pierre en Dieu n’était pas tant la cause de la conversion de Paule, que davantage une conséquence. Ainsi, la réussite manifeste, celle qui consisterait à obtenir l’adhésion de son interlocuteur, peut se doubler d’une réussite moins évidente, où s’affermit la conviction du propagandiste, et que l’on pourrait exprimer ainsi : « si l’on croit ce que je dis, c’est bien que j’ai raison de le dire ». Logique qui exige un mouvement résolument rétrograde où la causalité se cherche et s’enracine dans ses fruits. Autrement dit, le prosélytisme de Jean-Pierre a 1°) des effets perlocutoires : il obtient l’adhésion de Paule ; 2°) des effets illocutoires : la réaction de Paule le conforte dans sa foi, l’enthousiasme profondément et lui confère son autorité. Il y a un effet de confirmation. On peut toutefois s’interroger : est-ce la conviction de Jean-Pierre qui est convaincante et efficace ? ou bien, est-ce la possibilité que son témoignage reste sans effet ? Toujours est-il que ce succès repose sur un nouage en forme de chiasme (« il a la foi, donc je le crois » / « elle me croit, donc j’ai la foi »), où les rapports causaux s’anticipent l’un l’autre. Nous ne savons pas précisément ce que Jean-Pierre a dit à Paule ; seulement qu’il s’agissait de témoigner de sa foi face à elle. Le témoignage est un usage du langage qui exige l’emploi de la première personne grammaticale, je, et qui prend plus ou moins la forme de « je témoigne de/que…, je crois que…, je sais que…, j’atteste que…, je jure que…, etc. » qui sont ici moins des constatifs que des performatifs, dans la mesure où l’accent porte plus sur l’affirmation que sur le contenu affirmé. En sorte qu’il n’importe pas de savoir si ce que Jean-Pierre dit est vrai ou faux (Dieu existe-t-il ou non ?), mais si ce qu’il dit a des effets (critère de performativité). Jean-Pierre nous le dit, qui est fortifié dans sa foi par le fait que quelqu’un l’ait cru et ait agi en conséquence. La question qui traversait la série des conférences d’Austin était : en quel sens dire une chose, est-ce la faire ? Pour nous, la question serait de savoir dans quelle mesure les énoncés du témoignage témoignent. Autrement dit, qu’aurait été un témoignage qui ne témoigne pas, qui échoue comme témoignage ? Probablement, cela se mesurerait aux effets de cette locution mal accomplie : Paule n’aurait pas été enthousiaste et Jean-Pierre n’aurait pas été conforté dans l’idée que sa parole est au service d’une cause noble. Par sa nature particulière, le contenu du témoignage de Jean-Pierre – mettons : l’existence de Dieu – échappe aux valeurs de vérité habituelles (vrai, faux, non-vrai) car nulle preuve ne semble pouvoir trancher ; néanmoins, ce contenu testimonial se soumet au processus énonciatif en suscitant une réaction du destinataire (réponse, affect, émoi, acte, silence, etc.). Il semble que l’efficacité performative du témoignage (« je témoigne que… ») réside dans l’indécidabilité qui frappe sa subordonnée (« … que Dieu existe, … que j’ai la foi, … qu’il y a une vie après la mort, etc. »), subordonnée qui en toute rigueur échappe à se laisser réduire objectivement (empiriquement ou intellectuellement) au vrai ou au faux. L’efficacité symbolique de cette option énonciative, nous la situons donc dans cette structure particulière d’une proposition principale résolument performative de laquelle dépend une proposition complétive dont le contenu idéatif se dérobe quand il s’agit d’examiner sa réfutabilité.

2. Situation-échec : prêcher aux incrédules Matteo fait parti d’un mouvement politique d’extrême gauche à tendances maoïstes. Il s’adressa à Rosa (sans position politique bien définie) avec l’espoir qu’elle adhèrerait à ses idées et à son mouvement : « Marx l’avait déjà bien expliqué : c’est par l’action révolutionnaire qu’on s’en sortira ! » Rosa, à l’évocation d’une possible violence, s’opposa soudainement aux idées de Matteo

206 et à Matteo lui-même. Celui-ci m’expliquera en faisant appel à une théorisation dialectique raffinée que Rosa est le fruit de la structuration capitaliste de la société qui l’a vue naître, de l’institution familiale bourgeoise qui l’a éduquée, en sorte que Matteo voit en Rosa l’incarnation psychologique du capitaliste s’évertuant à nier la lutte des classes. Prenons une autre situation d’énonciation : Carlos est Témoin de Jéhovah. Au cours de son activité de prédication au porte-à-porte, il rencontre des personnes qui le reçoivent de façon discourtoise : « On m’insulte, on me ferme la porte au nez, on méprise mes convictions religieuses, on me joue des tours, etc ». Néanmoins, tout cela, m’explique-t-il, ne l’ébranle pas dans ses croyances car « je le sais bien que je vis dans un monde méchant… c’est écrit dans la Bible. J’attends juste que ce système de choses passe. En attendant, je m’efforce de me conduire en bon chrétien ». Ces deux situations font intervenir à chaque fois des interlocuteurs apparemment en désaccord. Mais à y regarder de plus près, Rosa n’est pas à strictement parler une « anticommuniste », du moins ne se définirait-elle pas ainsi spontanément et en dehors des circonstances particulières de sa rencontre avec Matteo. De la même façon, les gens que rencontre Carlos ne sont pas ce que l’on pourrait appeler des « anti-témoins de Jéhovah » dans la mesure où ils règleraient leurs vies sur cet anti-jéhovisme. Peut-être ont-ils quelques a priori à l’égard de ce mouvement socialement controversé, certes. Peut-on pour autant affirmer que leurs idées sont véritablement en opposition ? Si les systèmes de référence (et les jeux de langage qui leur sont liés) sont différents entre les interlocuteurs, celui de Rosa ou celui des non Témoins de Jéhovah sont indépendants des systèmes de Matteo ou de Carlos ; en revanche, les systèmes idéologiques de ces derniers sont finement articulés à et dépendants de ce qui leur est extérieur. D’emblée, force est de reconnaître que les nuances des systèmes de pensées des interlocuteurs de Matteo ou de Carlos les intéressent peu ; ils retiennent simplement qu’il s’agit de positions différentes des leurs. Le prisme d’analyse de la société de Matteo, comme le prisme de Carlos, explique a priori les réactions et oppositions intellectuelles et émotionnelles des hétérodoxes, si bien qu’être en désaccord – ou mieux : ne simplement pas être d’accord –, ne revient-il pas dès lors à confirmer leur système doctrinal ? Pour le dire autrement, on ne voit que ce que l’on veut bien voir au travers de certaines grilles pré- interprétatives. Alors, ces situations manifestement et artificiellement contradictoires ne sont-elles pas des occasions fécondes de trouver une confirmation de la Vérité que l’on défend ? La performance de « prêcher aux incrédules » pourrait bien être ainsi une activité qui vise moins à convaincre l’Autre, qu’à trouver auprès de lui les signes de son désaccord pour donner consistance à sa propre position quand celle-ci repose sur un dualisme moi / l’Autre. Perlocutoirement, si l’on peut dire, Rosa est peut-être passée d’indifférente à opposée au marxisme ; et Matteo a manifestement échoué à la convaincre. Pour autant, l’acte locutoire réussit quelque part (ironiquement, il réussit là où il échoue) car Matteo et Carlos voient leurs convictions consolidées par l’épreuve du désaccord. C’est l’idée que d’un certain point de vue, l’échec dans l’obtention de l’adhésion est aussi une réussite dans la validation intime de sa propre position. A la nuance près que c’est une position élitiste ou victimaire qui s’en déduit, en tout cas en contraste univoque avec ce qui n’est pas elle. Ainsi, en changeant la grille de lecture de l’acte locutoire et spécialement en se donnant différents critères de performativité, il est toujours possible de concevoir tout performatif sous l’angle de sa réussite. Faire varier ainsi ces critères, n’est-ce pas se rapprocher d’un pas de Freud, et en particulier de sa façon de rendre compte des actes manqués ? Pour l’inventeur de la psychanalyse, l’acte manqué est d’emblée un acte langagier – fût-il nonverbal, ça parle – et est de plus l’expression heureuse du sujet de l’inconscient précisément là où le Moi conscient déplore l’insuccès. Quand le psychanalyste se demande ce qui est gagné en terme économique à l’occasion d’une erreur ou d’un échec, il s’interroge en fait sur les effets illocutoires, mais aussi perlocutoires, de l’erreur considérée ; en supposant que l’inconscient touche juste et que, quand bien même la langue fourcherait, que le sujet s’embarrasserait et l’interlocuteur rougirait, le lapsus est toujours une réussite.

3. Situation homodoxe : prêcher à un converti On assiste parfois à d’étranges conversations : de véritables joutes oratoires, des disputes entre gens qui ont… le même avis (!). Des situations dialogiques où A et B se connaissent suffisamment pour se savoir d’accord sur le thème de la discussion. Nommons p l’objet de leur discussion – qu’il s’agisse par exemple de convaincre l’autre que le souci écologique est impératif

207 ou bien d’affirmer la supériorité politique des idées de gauche sur celles de droite. Rencontrés séparément pourtant, A affirmerait que p et B affirmerait également que p. Cependant, lorsqu’ils se rencontrent, ils mettent en place un bien curieux rituel locutoire qui consiste à argumenter et chicaner. A les entendre, nous dirions qu’ils ne sont pas vraiment d’accord ; à les écouter un peu mieux pourtant, l’on s’étonnera qu’ils sont bel et bien du même avis, et que la dispute ne porte que sur des détails et n’est finalement qu’une discorde de principe. Bien souvent, et avec un plaisir évident, A et B reprennent leur discussion houleuse, chacun essayant de faire valoir l’insignifiante nuance qu’il introduit dès que la controverse de la discussion risque de s’estomper. Nous nous abstenons de toute psychologisation de cette attitude. Disons simplement que nos deux discutants sont d’accord sur le fond (profondément d’accord) en manifestant un désaccord (désaccord apparent). Cette situation nous inspire quatre remarques : 1°) On ne peut raisonnablement pas convaincre une personne, c’est-à-dire faire en sorte qu’elle adhère à une opinion, si elle est déjà convaincue de cette opinion. On ne peut convaincre que celui qui n’est pas encore de cet avis. 2°) Par suite, on ne risque pas non plus d’échouer à le convaincre pour les mêmes raisons. Face à quelqu’un du même avis que soi, l’on ne peut ni le convaincre, ni ne pas le convaincre. Symétriquement, dans la perspective de l’illocutoire : 3°) on ne s’expose pas à une argumentation qui vise à nous faire changer d’avis sur le fond et les convictions de chacun sont relativement en sûreté ; et 4°) il se pourrait fort bien qu’une telle discussion ait pour effet de consolider les convictions des deux discutants dans la mesure où en apparence les idées paraissent soumises à une critique féroce alors qu’elles ne seront jamais véritablement remises en question. Les convitions des deux discutants ont tout l’air de sortir victorieuses d’un long procès critique à leur égard. Du point de vue de sa performativité, la discussion entre A et B réussit sans doute à asseoir mieux la doctrine chez chacun. Je crois que l’on peut rapprocher ces situations de désaccords apparents d’une certaine façon de poser des questions. En assistant à une conférence, j’ai réalisé que certaines questions que posaient les membres du public quand le conférencier eut fini de parler étaient des questions d’un genre particulier : des questions qui attendaient précisément ce que le conférencier avait dit, des questions dont les réponses précédaient. Comme il ne s’agissait pas à proprement parler d’une demande que soit redite l’information, le conférencier se trouvait un peu embêté de devoir répéter, comme si c’était la première fois, ce qu’il avait déjà dit. Ainsi, s’il avait affirmé « je pense que q » durant son intervention, les questions prenaient plus ou moins la forme « ne pensez-vous pas que q ? », et sa réponse polie et patiente : « … effectivement, il se trouve que je pense que q ». Interroger de la sorte, n’est-ce pas la façon la plus sûre de poser une question qui ne mette pas en difficulté l’intervenant et qui ne soit pas non plus une mauvaise question ? C’est en tout cas formuler une interrogation qui prend les traits d’une « bonne question », d’une question qui appelle une réponse dont le contenu aurait été digne d’être abordé par le conférencier (!) et qui ne s’expose pas au risque d’être une question hors sujet – ce qui serait un échec de l’acte d’interroger un conférencier. Ces actes de langage de situations que je range dans cette troisième catégorie sous le terme de « situations homodoxes », ces actes de langage paraissent tendre vers le moins d’effets possibles ; que ni le locuteur ni son interlocuteur ne s’en trouve changé. Etrangement, c’est à l’absence d’effets (visibles) que nous mesurerions donc leur réussite performative. On le voit, à ce stade de notre travail, tout performatif est susceptible d’être heureux ou malheureux selon la perspective envisagée ; et à présent, l’absence d’effets locutoires se trouve élevé à la dignité d’un effet « non-effet ». Abordons notre dernière catégorie :

4. Situation-paradoxe : clinique et subversion J’ai eu l’occasion de rencontrer régulièrement pendant un an, l’adepte d’un mouvement sectaire très prosélytique – nommons cet homme Tony. Au fil de nos rencontres, il me dit deux choses à propos de moi : j’écoute attentivement et respecte ce qu’il me dit de lui et de ses convictions et je ne suis vraiment pas intéressé par rejoindre son groupe pour autant. On pourra situer ma position paradoxale dans la citation que l’on attribue (à tort) à Voltaire et que j’adressai à Tony en ces termes : « je ne partage pas vos idées mais je ferai en sorte que vous puissiez les exprimer ». Nos discussions au fil de cette année tournaient autour des différences radicales qui nous séparaient et qui, par un effet de subversion, nous réunissaient dans la régularité de nos rencontres hebdomadaires. En me dérobant devant la controverse, du moins en refusant de lui

208 donner une consistance dualiste (et duelliste), je soutenais Tony dans l’énonciation de sa position doctrinale. A mesure que nos entretiens prenaient une dimension clinique et que s’imposait le mode de relation singulier qu’induit le transfert, Tony fit quelques découvertes sur les motifs de son engagement religieux et parvint à mieux asseoir son propre désir dans le discours sectaire qu’il investissait. Jusqu’à ce point de bascule paradoxal où il me remercia de l’aider à conserver sa foi intacte et cela, bien que je demeurasse un mécréant dans sa grille d’interprétation des diverses (op)positions religieuses. Généralement, lorsqu’un membre de sa communauté rencontre quelqu’un qui n’est pas d’accord (moi, en l’occurrence), l’usage est de trouver ce qui viendra confirmer une interprétation diabolisante de ce non-accord. Or, en refusant de me prêter à cette lecture, je me soustrais au jeu de langage et à la grille de lecture de la communauté de Tony. Se retrouver face à un psychologue qui atteste que son aliénation sectaire est tout à fait respectable et ne retire rien à la valeur de sa parole est une situation dont les coordonnées éthiques subvertissent le jeu de langage de la rencontre. Alors, que fait-on dans ces circonstances ? Quel est l’usage ? A ces questions, Tony ne trouve nulle réponse dans les pratiques langagières de sa communauté ; il lui faudra alors inventer et soutenir une parole inédite. Et au fond, au regard de ce qu’il dira de lui, de ce qui lui échappera, les critères de réussite de son activité de propagande importent peu. « Nous ne sommes pas d’accord, et pourtant… ». Tony ne ressort pas de nos rencontres mieux assurés des doctrines de son groupe. A dire vrai, elles sont même corrélatives d’une certaine désillusion quant aux motifs de son appartenance religieuse. Et pourtant… ni pour, ni contre, il a trouvé un interlocuteur, au hasard de son porte-à-porte, qui se laisse perlocutoirement et cliniquement affecté par sa rhétorique subjective. Cette réussite perlocutoire est co-extensive de la réussite illocutoire de Tony à parler. Le lapsus ou l’acte manqué, disions-nous, sont toujours « réussis » selon la psychanalyse. La clinique du sujet de l’inconscient est une modalité de rencontre qui recouvre nos usages langagiers de la perspective que l’inconscient parle et déborde nos énoncés et qu’il est toujours performativement heureux. Cette modalité de rencontre et d’accueil de la parole est orientée vers et désireuse d’un maximum d’effets locutoires. Les écueils langagiers – soit tout ce qui s’offre comme échec performatif sur fond de réussite – sont ici renversé en succès de l’inconscient à poursuivre son énonciation. Ainsi, à la dialectique du Moi et du Sujet de l’inconscient répond une dialectique performative de la réussite et de l’insuccès où l’accent heureux porte sur les ratages, complications et anicroches du parler. Quant à définir les critères de réussite dans cette subversion de la performativité, on comprend que les coordonnées sont ici absolument brouillées et que tout est susceptible désormais d’être performativement heureux ou non. Le critère, c’est bien dans la rencontre singulière et inédite d’un locuteur et de son interlocuteur qu’on le trouve ; car si l’on s’y affecte (per- ou illocutoirement), c’est bien que l’usage du langage s’y atteste comme acte de langage, c’est bien qu’en disant, l’on fait quelque chose.

Note [1] A. Mary, « Les effets de subjectivité induits par le discours idéologique sectaire », Comunicare interculturală şi literatură (sous la dir. de NECULA, G., APOSTOLATU, I.), actes du colloque : « Paradigma discursului ideologic », Universitatea Dunărea de Jos, Galaţi, Editura Europlus, juin 2010, pp. 389-397.

Références Austin, Quand dire, c’est faire [1962], Paris, Seuil, 1991. Castel, P.-H., Séminaire sur l’association libre, 2008/2009. Cavell, S., Dire et vouloir dire [1969], Cerf, 2009. Cavell, S., Les voix de la raison : Wittgenstein, le scepticisme, la moralité et la tragédie [1979], Paris, Seuil, 1996. Lacan, Les écrits, Seuil, Paris, 1966. Lacan, Jacques, Le séminaire livre XV, L’envers de la psychanalyse [1969-1970], Seuil, Paris, 2006. Laugier, S. (sous la dir.), Ethique, littérature, vie humaine, Paris, Puf, 2006.

209 Idiomacity vs. “Repeated Discourse”: Comparative Approaches In English and Romanian

Antoanela Marta Mardar*

Abstract: Starting from the idea that some of the terminology related to fixed lexical patterns in English has been borrowed by Romanian linguists, sometimes with their validated English meaning, some other times with confusing and rather contradictory meanings (see, for example, phraseological unit and idiom), the present paper aims at providing a comparative presentation of some of the most representative approaches to the various types of fixed lexical patterns existing in English and Romanian and of the terminology adopted by the specialists representative of these two linguistic and cultural spaces. Keywords: fixed lexical patterns, idioms, phraseological unit, phraseology

Introduction Language is traditionally agreed on to be constructed from ‘basic’ structures and a lexicon. Nevertheless, recent studies in lexicology, lexicography, lexical semantics and phraseology suggest that language is represented by sequences of words which do not always observe ‘traditional’ restrictions. In other words, language is made up of a great variety of lexical patterns which are more or less fixed in form and more or less variable in meaning. Useful as such a view might be, it surely cannot make up for the fact that the ‘names’ assigned to denote the various types of fixed lexical patterns existing in any language are quite often as numerous as confusing. Moreover, a comparative approach to such fixed lexical patterns in different languages makes things even more complicated, because the terminology used in the languages envisaged may bring to the fore a series of unexpected problems. In our case, the English and Romanian terminologies used to denote fixed lexical patterns in these languages is a source of confusion and debate, because sometimes different terms are used to describe identical or very similar fixed lexical patterns (e.g. idioms vs. collocations in English), and some other times one and the same term is used to denote significantly different word combinations (e.g. idioms, phraseological units used in English and Romanian). Bearing in mind the above-mentioned aspects, the present paper attempts to clarify some of the problematic terminology used to denote fixed lexical patterns in English and Romanian by comparing the relevant views of some specialists in the field.

1. Idiomacity: the English perspective on fixed lexical patterns The various types of fixed lexical patterns in English identified by specialists in phraseology, lexicology or lexical semantics are referred to by a wide range of terms. The traditional terminology includes terms such as: ‘composites’ (Vinogradov 1947) ‘phraseologic expressions’ (Chernuisheva 1964), ‘word combinations’ (Akhmanova 1974, Cowie 1994), ‘phraseological units’(Ginzburg et al 1979), whereas modern studies on to fixed lexical patterns make use of such terms as: ‘prefabricated routines and patterns’ (Krashen 1981), ‘sentence stems’ (Pawley and Syder 1983), ‘formulae’ (Peters 1983), or ‘fixed expressions’ (Carter 1987), ‘phrasal lexemes’ (Lipka 1991, Moon 1998), ‘lexical phrases’ (Nattinger and DeCarrico 1989, 1992), ‘composites’ (Cowie, following Mitchell in Cowie 1988), ‘gambits’ (Keller in Cowie 1988), ‘routine formulae’ (Coulmas in Cowie 1988), ‘phrasemes’ (Mel’čuk 1988, 1995), ‘formulaic language’ (Weinert 1995; Wray 1999), ‘idioms’ (Fernado 1996), ‘fixed expressions and idioms’ (FEIs) (Moon 1998), ‘collocations’, ‘colligations’ (Firth 1957, Sinclair 1998, 2001, 2004) to denote the various patterns of idiomacity in English. Unfortunately, many of these terms have limited applicability, this fact being sometimes attested by the authors themselves, who tend to choose their terminology according to the scope of their research (see for example, Fernando 1996, Moon 1998, Houston and Francis 2000). Although general, fixed expression, a term adopted from Alexander (1978, 1979, also Carter 1987), and others, is considered very convenient by some specialists and used to denote different types of phrasal lexemes, phraseological units, or multi-word lexical items: frozen

* Lecturer, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

210 collocations, grammatically ill-formed collocations, proverbs, routine formulae, sayings, similes. Nevertheless, fixed expression cannot be accepted as a satisfactory term, since many fixed expressions of these types are not actually fixed. Moreover, as Moon (1998: 2) suggests, the term fixed expression does not apply to compound nouns, adjectives, and verbs such as civil servant, self-raising, and rubber-stamp, to phrasal verbs such as make up and stick out, foreign phrases such as fait accompli, che sarà, sarà, and caveat emptor and multi-word inflectional forms of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs such as had been lying and more careful(ly) (Moon’s examples). This is due to the fact that compound words are associated with morphology, and multi-word inflectional forms are simply part of the grammar of English. The inappropriateness and misleading nature of the term fixed expression is also pointed out by Stubbs. He states that “[…] units are rarely invariant, and often not even continuous. They are idiomatic, but only rarely idioms; they have typical components, but are highly variable, with probabilistic relations between the components; they are typically realized by a sequence of several word-forms, but their boundaries do not correspond systematically to syntactic units; and indeed they do not fit into traditional concepts of either lexis or syntax “(Stubbs 2002: 59). As far as the traditional term constructions suggested by Fillmore et al. and Sinclair’s terms extended units of meaning (1998) and lexical items (Sinclair 1996) are concerned, they also have limited applicability either due to their rather general reference or to their debatable nature. As Stubbs (2002: 62) states, “it is an odd failing of linguistics that it has no convincing descriptive theory of units of meaning”. Idiom is also an ambiguous term, used in conflicting ways. On the one hand, the term idiom is used to denote a particular manner of expressing something in language, music, art, and so on, which characterizes a person or group and, on the other, it denotes a particular lexical collocation or phrasal lexeme, peculiar to a language. These uses are related to idiom as both a superordinate and a hyponymic term for a lexical combination, thus further confusing the matter. Narrower uses restrict idiom to a particular kind of fixed lexical units such as kick the bucket, spill the beans that are fixed and semantically opaque or metaphorical, or, traditionally, ‘not the sum of its parts’. Such units are sometimes called pure idioms (Cowie 1988: 133) being clearly separated from grammatically ill-formed patterns such as by and, transparent metaphors such as skate on thin ice and strings of words such as move heaven and earth which have no possible literal meaning. Quite often, idiom is a general term used for many kinds of multiword item, whether semantically opaque or not. Makkai (1972) uses the term idiom to cover non-compositional polymorphemic words such as blackbird as well as collocations and constructions that are not freely formed, whereas Hockett (1958: 171 ff.) considers that single morphemes should as well be included in this category, since their meanings cannot be deducible. Specialists focussing on the speech act theory, suggest that idiom can also be used to refer to conventionalized formulae with an illocutionary function (Sadock 1974, Morgan 1978, Fernando 1996). However, Sadock (1972) draws attention to the ambiguity of utterances which have more than one pragmatic function, this aspect leading such formulas to status as idioms. Similarly, Gibbs (1986) draws attention to ways in which some indirect speech acts are conventionalized, hence to the possibility of identifying conventionalized forms as idioms. Pointing out practical problems with this classification, Levinson (1983) and Coulthard (1985) underline the fact that formulae such as Can you pass the salt? are rarely recognized as idioms in lexicology. Fillmore et al. (1988) use the term formal idiom to refer to semigrammatical structures such as ‘NOUN 1 to NOUN 2’, which are in fact syntagmatic equivalents of phraseological collocations. In contrast with the terms mentioned so far, the label phraseological unit is used in some Slavonic and German studies as a superordinate term for multi-word lexical items (Gläser 1984: 348) in the same way as phraseme is sometimes used as a superordinate term outside Anglo- American traditions. There are, however, other uses of both terms. For example, Vinogradov (1947) restricts phraseological unit to more metaphorical items, and Amosova (1963) uses phraseme for multi-word items which are not pure idioms. Different from Amosova, Mel’čuk’s attaches the term phraseme to idioms, as well. Starting from the idea that phrasemes cannot be constructed from words or simple phrases

211 according to general rules of language, but they have to be stored and used as a whole, Mel’čuk (1998 : 24) points out the fact that phrasemes are predominant in any language, most often outnumbering words. In his opinion, phrasemes may be of two types, i.e. pragmatic and semantic. As regards the lexical patterns making up these two classes of phrasemes, the former category includes pragmatemes, whereas the latter is represented by idioms, collocations and quasi-idioms.

PHRASEMES

PRAGMATIC PHRASEMES SEMANTIC PHRASEMES

1. Pragmatemes 2. Idioms 3. Collocations 4. Quasi-idioms

Figure 1 - Classification of phrasemes (Mel’čuk 1998: 30)

Phraseological unit and phraseme can be identified with Lyons’s phrasal lexeme (1977: 23), a term also used by Moon (1998b: 80). She considers that phrasal lexemes include phrases and idioms, i.e. lexical patterns which, due to their semantic, lexico-grammatical, or pragmatic features are regarded as holistic units, rather than compositional strings. In other words, Moon uses the term phrasal lexemes to denote pure idioms, proverbs, similes, institutionalized metaphors, formulae, sayings and various other kinds of institutionalized collocation. The terminology mentioned above has been integrated in useful typologies which compare and contrast either the terms used by different specialist to denote one and the same type of lexical pattern, or the various types of lexical patterns and their formal and semantic behaviour. A good illustration of the former situation is the table suggested by Cowie (1998) in which some of the traditional Russian terminology is contrasted with the modern one, giving thus an insight into the terminological similarities and dissimilarities traceable at the levels of general, sentence-like and word-like lexical categories:

Author General category Sentence-like or Word-like or pragmatic unit semantic unit Chernuisheva (1964) Phraseological unit Phraseological - combination Zgusta (1971) Set combination Set group - Mel’čuk Phraseme or set Pragmatic phraseme, Semantic phraseme (1988 ) phrase or Pragmateme Gläser (1988) Phraseological unit Proposition Nomination Cowie (1988) Word- combination Functional expression Composite Howarth (1996) Word- combination Functional expression Composite unit

Table 1- Terms used for ‘sentence-like’ and ‘word-like combinations’ (Cowie 1998: 5)

As regards the latter situation, considering the degree of fixity of lexical patterns, Moon (1998), distinguishes between three types of so-called ‘fixed expressions’, namely: • ‘Anomalous collocations’ include examples such as by and large or through thick and thin, which cannot be analysed according to the normal rules governing English, in that a preposition (by) and an adjective (large) are not normally able to be coordinated, and adjectives such as thick and thin cannot normally occur as the completive of a preposition. Examples such as kith and kin, in which one of the components ‘is fossilised within that particular collocation’ (kith, for example, is found only in this pattern), are also included in this category.

212 • ‘Formulae’ include lexical patterns such as proverbs, slogans, quotations, gambits, and closed-set turns, (e.g. You have never had it so good and Shut your mouth) which are in no way anomalous with respect to the language as a whole. • ‘Fossilised or frozen metaphors’ include ‘pure idioms’ such as skate on thin ice or spill the beans, which are anomalous only in the sense that they cannot be manipulated grammatically. Thus, each part of the idiom (skate, thin, ice, and spill, beans, respectively) is not treated as a separate lexical item by speakers, but as part of a phrase. Similar typologies have been presented in the previous sections and will be supplemented by further typologies, which, while focussing on collocations, will compare and contrast them with other lexical patterns formally or semantically marked. Mention should be made that in her study devoted to fixed expressions and idioms, Moon (1998) also suggests a classification of such lexical patterns in terms of their text functions, i.e. according to the way in which they contribute to the content and structure of a text. She explains that although the contribution of fixed lexical patterns is instantial and bound up with context it is nevertheless possible to generalize and to chart typical functions. Moon’s categorization of such lexical patterns is made according to five functions which are related, but not identical to Halliday’s model of the semantic components of language (Halliday 1978: 116 ff.). Thus, she identifies informational, evaluative, situational, modalizing and organizational expressions and idioms, each of these categories having specific functions (see table 2 below).

Category Function Examples informational stating proposition, conveying rub shoulders with information in the running catch sight of soemthing for sale evaluative conveying speaker’s kid's stuff evaluation and attitude a different/fine kettle of fish near the knuckle it's an ill wind (that blows nobody any good) situational relating to extralinguistic Excuse me! context, responding to long time no see situation knock it off talk of the devil modalizing conveying truth values, I kid you not advice, requests, etc. you know what I mean to all intents and purposes if in doubt, do not organizational organizing text, signalling by the way discourse structure for instance talking of- be that as it may

Table 2 -Text functions of FEIs (Moon 1998: 217)

Moreover, Moon provides a classification of fixed expressions and idioms according to their discoursal functions. The model she suggests views texts in terms of their semantic stratification and distinguishes between ideational, interpersonal, and textual or textural components. Such a model is useful in the interpretation of ongoing discourse, any selection having repercussions at all levels, which are simultaneous. ideational experiential communication of ideas logical connections between ideas interpersonal interactional interrelationship between speaker and hearer mood illocution

213 personal modality attitude textual theme thematization and thematic patterning information given/new distinction cohesion cohesive structure

Table 3 - Discoursal functions of FEIs Source Halliday 1978, Morley 1985 (Moon 1998: 218)

Different from the text functions of lexical patterns, which are lower-level functions reflecting the immediate effects of such patterns within their co-texts, ideational, interpersonal, and textual components operate at the level of discourse. Moreover, the textual component is best considered in terms of the ways in which lexical patterns are placed topically and themati- cally, or contribute cohesion to their texts.

logical organizational Ideational experimental informational

Interpresonal situational evaluative modalizing

Fig. 2- Ideational and interpersonal, related to FEIs functions (source Moon 1998: 218)

The text functions of fixed lexical patterns referred to by Moon are common to the lexicon in general, but they apply to fixed lexical patterns, as well. As regards the roles that fixed lexical patterns have in real-time discourse, I agree with Moon that they are equally important as their lexical, syntactic, and semantic characteristics. “Neglecting or ignoring these roles may lead to discoursal ill-formedness in encoding and to misinterpretation in decoding”. (Moon 1998: 219) Although often confusing, such a consistent terminology proves the specialists’ constant interest in the study of lexical patterns, as well as their increasing awareness as regards the frequent use of ready-made memorized combinations in written and spoken language. It also proves the crucial part such combinations play in language acquisition, on the one hand, and in language production, on the other.

2. Repeated discourse: The Romanian perspective on fixed lexical patterns The wide circulation of certain terms related to idiomacity in English, has favoured the inclusion of some of these terms in the specific studies devoted to lexical patterns in other languages. A case in point is Romanian, a language in which the English terminology related to idiomacity has influenced many of the specialists interested in suggesting possible typologies of fixed lexical patterns in Romanian. The various patterns identified by these specialists have been integrated recently in the so-called “repeated discourse” (Dumistrăcel 2006, Munteanu 2007), which includes most idiomatic patterns in English, but also a series of word combinations which are not mentioned in the English studies. For the purpose of the present paper, special attention will be devoted only to the terminology common to the two language systems and problematic due to their referential ambiguity. Consequently, if reference is made to the studies influenced by the English tradition on phraseology, the Romanian specialists have sometimes used the English terminology related to fixed (idiomatic) lexical patterns with their validated English meanings, whereas some other times they used some of the English terms in confusing and rather contradictory ways. Two illustrative examples in this respect are phraseological units and idioms, whose Romanian equivalents do not always denote the same reality. According to Rosemarie Gläser, a phraseological unit “is a lexicalized , reproducible bilexemic or polylexemic word group in common use, which has relative syntactic and semantic stability, may be idiomatized, may carry connotations and may have an emphatic or intensifying

214 function in a text”, whereas an idiom is “a lexicalized, reproducible word group in common use, which has syntactic and semantic stability and may carry connotations, but whose meaning cannot be derived from the meanings of its constituents” (Gläser 1998: 125). To put it differently, idioms presuppose “a specific choice and combination of semantic components carried by its constituents” (Gläser 1998: 125-126). Moreover, distinction is made between word-like phraseological units and sentence-like phraseological units. The former are “nominations and designate a phenomenon, an object, an action, a process or state, a property or a relationship in the outside world”, whereas the latter are “propositions and designate a whole state of affairs in the outside world” (Gläser 1998: 126-127) as illustrated by proverbs, commonplaces, routine formulae, slogans, commandments and maxims, as well as by quotations and winged words. Both types of phraseological units include idioms and non-idioms. A similar inclusive classification is that provided by Hristea (in Bidu Vrănceanu et al. 2005: 224), who distinguishes four types of phraseological units, without explicitly stating whether they have idiomatic or non-idiomatic interpretation:

¾ phraseological syntagms (‘locuţiuni frazeologice’)– more or less compact groups of words which have a unitary meaning and function as a single part of speech, namely as a noun (e.g. bătaie de joc – “ironic”), as an adjective (e.g. întors pe dos – “supărat”) or as a verb (e.g. a se da pe brazdă – “a ceda”); ¾ phraseological expressions (‘expresii frazeologice’) - stable groups of words which may have the form and function of a sentence (e.g. a taia frunză la câini, a-şi lua inima – n dinţi, a face pe cineva cu ou şi cu oţet); ¾ international formulae and clichés (clişee) - groups of words which have an approximately similar form and are used with the same meaning in different languages (e.g. art for art’s sake - artă pentru artă - “artă pură”, apple of discord mărul discordiei - “motiv pentru ceartă”, the Gordian knot - nodul Gordian “problemă insolubilă”, sword of Damocles -sabia lui Damocles – “ameninţare iminentă”, Achilles heel - călcâiul lui Ahile- “punctul slab al cuiva”); ¾ expressive periphrases (‘perifraze expressive’) - less restricted combinations, used in affective statements specific to a certain cultural model (e.g. luceafărul poeziei româneşti, bardul de la Mirceşti).

General and useful as it may be in certain classifications, the term phraseological unitsis not always used to denote the same types of lexical patterns in English and Romanian. The same holds valid for the term phrase which is used to refer to certain lexical patterns in English (e.g. idioms or collocations) different from Romanian, where the same term denotes “a word-combination standing for a part of speech whose grammatical functions it discharges” (Leviţchi 1970: 15). Trying to justify the necessity that idioms should be listed in the lexicon, Francis Katamba (1993) refers to the existence of two classes of phrases. One seems to be the class of collocations (they are not specifically referred to as such), as it includes those phrases whose meaning can be deduced if the speakers know the meaning of the words they contain and the ways in which they are syntactically related to each other (e.g. to pass the salt). The latter class is that of idioms (called ‘listed syntactic objects’ by Di Sciullo and Williams 1987, in Katamba 1993: 295), which is made up of phrases such as to pass the buck, to eat a humble pie, to be in the red, whose meaning cannot be worked out on the basis of the meanings of the words which they contain (Katamba 1993: 296). To put it differently, the main aspect differentiating the two types of phrases is their being or not being semantically compositional. Different from Katamba’s approach, Romanian lexical studies, use the term lexical phrase to denote different lexical patterns, even whole sentences, which function as a phraseological unit enjoying structural stability (proverbs, conversational formulas, etc.). Referring to formal characteristics of phrases, Leviţchi (1970: 19) suggests that they may be classified as stable and unstable. If the phrases in the former category allow no change in the component element, unstable phrases are regarded as structures liable to change of form or to (partial) replacement. This latter category is exemplified by the lexical pattern to play a trick to somebody in which the verb may, on the one hand, take different tenses, and word order can change Æ to play somebody a

215 trick, and may be replaced by its connotational synonyms to put and to serve Æ to put a trick on somebody, to serve a trick on somebody, on the other. Furthermore, when referring to the semantic classification of phrases, Leviţchi (1970: 19) distingushes between two classes of such lexical patterns: 1) phrases which are used in a direct meaning, and 2) phrases which, partly or wholly, express figurative meanings. As regards the meaning of phrases, Leviţchi mentions that it is the sum of the meanings of the component elements as illustrated by to set at liberty Æ a pune în libertate, in other words Æ cu alte cuvinte, to be of good cheer Æ a fi bine dispus, a fi vesel, a fi plin de viaţă, safe and sound Æ teafăr, sănătos, to come into view Æ a apărea, a se zări, silence gives consent Æ tăcerea înseamnă consimţire. Contrasting phrases used in their direct meaning with phrases which are, partly or wholly, based on figures of speech (chiefly on metaphors), Leviţchi explains that the role of the latter is very active in the semantic development of a language. The phrases he selects to prove his view are to give somebody a lesson Æ a-i da cuiva o lecţie, a învăţa pe cineva minte, to carry coals to Newcastle Æ a vinde castraveţi grădinarului, a căra apa la puţ, the/a cat in gloves catches no mice Æ cine se boiereşte treabă nu face, to put a spoke in somebody's wheel Æ a-i pune cuiva beţe în roate, make hay while the sun shines and strike the iron while 'tis hot Æ bate fierul cât e cald, to give somebody the needle (slang) Æ a pune pe cineva pe jar, a face pe cineva să fiarbă; a scoate pe cineva din sărite, in which all the words are used in their direct meaning, but the whole meaning of the phrase is metaphorical. Analyzing a phrase like to break the silence Æ a sparge/a întrerupe tăcerea, Leviţchi points out that the verb to break assumes a figurative-metaphorical meaning as a result of its association with silence, but owing to the frequent use of the phrase, the metaphor is of the fading or degraded type. Last but not least, in the category of phrases, Leviţchi includes lexical patterns which are built on similes (as) red as a rose Æ roşu ca trandafirul/un trandafir, roşu ca bujorul/ un bujor, to run like a deer Æ a fugi /a alerga ca o caprioară, or on hyperboles a thousand thanks Æ mii de mulţumiri, to be a shadow of one’s former self Æ a nu mai fi decât o umbră. The important point made by Leviţchi with respect to such phrases is that “sometimes it is difficult enough to establish whether this or that word in a phrase has a direct or a figurative meaning. Language is permanently ‘on the run’ and what was new and striking and graphical yesterday may be trite and ‘matter-of-fact’ today. The problem is all the more complicated as even big-sized dictionaries do not clearly discriminate between direct and figurative meanings of words, to say nothing of words in phrases” (Leviţchi 1970: 20). In his approach to the English lexicology, Leviţchi also enlarges on Vinogradov’s semantic classification of phrases, adapted by Kunin (1955) to the realities of his time. Thus, distinction is made between phraseological fusions, phraseological unities, and traditional combinations. The first category includes indivisible and indecomposable phrases in whose general meaning one cannot detect any connection with the words the phrase is made up of. The second is represented by stable phrases, which, like idioms, have a meaning of their own, distinct from the meaning of the component elements, although these are connected logically. The category of traditional combinations is made up of words that may combine only with certain other words. As regards phraseological unities, Leviţchi explains that they are often considered to include figurative phrases such as as fresh as a daisy Æ înfloritor, plin de tinereţe şi sănătate, verde ca bradul, neither here nor there Æ nici în clin nici în mânecă, fară nici o legătură, and proverbs diamond cut diamond Æ cui pe cui se scoate. Moreover, traditional combinations, include patterns in which one or more words are used in their direct, non-figurative senses such as to pay a visit to someone Æ a face o vizită cuiva, to give/lend assistance to someone Æ a da ajutor cuiva, to strike/deal/inflict a blow to someone Æ a lovi pe cineva, a da cuiva o lovitura, thus corresponding to the category of collocations attested by later studies in the field. Besides classifying phrases from the formal and semantic points of view, Leviţchi also makes an attempt in providing a stylistic classification of such lexical patterns. He starts from the assumption that similarly to words, phrases may be classified in accordance with the domains to which the phraseological material can be referred. Thus, he identifies phrases connected with trades (e.g. to bring grist to the mill Æ a aduce câştig; a aduce apă la moară; to have too many irons in the fire Æ a se apuca de prea multe, a ţine prea mulţi iepuri într-o mină; between hammer and anvil Æ între ciocan şi nicovală; in full blast Æ în toi, în plin avânt; a chip of the old block Æ

216 leit firea lui taică-său; to screw up one's courage Æ a-şi lua inima în dinţi; one nail drives another Æ cui pe cui se scoate), phrases connected with medicine (e.g. to swallow the pill Æ a inghiţi hapul; to take the temperature of Æ a aprecia situaţia, a simţi pulsul; a dose of one's own medicine Æ păcăliciul păcălit; nu săpa groapa altuia, ca să nu cazi singur în ea), and phrases connected with rivers, etc. (e.g. to shiver on the brink Æ a dârdii, a-i fi frică, a nu mai putea de frică; to go at the deep end Æ a se arunca in apă; a se apuca cu curaj de o treabă; to make a splash Æ a face senzaţie; on thin ice Æ pe teren şubred; în primejdie; la strâmtoare). Finally, Leviţchi refers to the phrases which may be monosemantic (in full blast) or polysemantic (to be in abeyanceÆ 1. a aştepta, a fi în aşteptare; 2. a nu se manifesta, a nu apărea; 3. a nu avea stăpân sau pretendent; 4. a fi abrogat provizoriu). Observing Leviţchi’s approach to phrases, and the more recent approaches to the study of the various types of lexical patterns in English, Constanţa Avădanei (2000) embarks upon the exploration of idiomatic expressions in English and Romanian. The innovative character of her comparative-contrastive approach resides in the use of updated, English-oriented terminology, in the structuring and adapting of formal and semantic classifications, as well as in the significant and illustrative examples selected from various sources. Although made in the larger frame of English lexicology and phraseology, Leon Leviţchi’s approach to phrases, and Avădanei’s approach to idiomatic expressions in English and Romanian represent an important contribution to the study of the various types of lexical patterns traceable in the two languages, but, more importantly, in Romanian, where phraseological studies have only recently started arousing the specialists’ interests. The freshness of phraseology within the Romanian borders and its unclear status is attested by different specialists. For example, Hristea, the linguist who set the theoretical foundations of Romanian phraseology, states that phraseology does not have a clear positioning within the larger frame of Romanian language studies (Hristea 1984: 134). On the other hand, more recent studies suggest that phraseology is an independent branch of linguistics whose domain of activity is related either both to vocabulary and syntax (Colţun 2000: 13), or strictly to lexicology (Zugun 2000). Moreover, reference is made to the importance of phraseology for stylistics and semasiology, and of the studies devoted to phraseologic units for disciplines such as etymology and lexicography. As regards the areas of interest of the Romanian phraseology, the idea is shared that this borderline branch of linguistics focusses on the study of fixed lexical combinations which are most often called unităţi frazeologice or frazeologisme, and are contrasted with free word combinations which are studied by syntax. Starting from Hristea’s (1984: 139) statement that all phraseologic units in a language are fix combinations of two or more words which have a unitary meaning, Ioana Scherf (2006) defines the phraseologic unit (or frazeologism) as the fix word combination, whether idiomatic or not, which is made up of at least two words, but functions as a single semantic unit in language. She adds that phraseologic units are recorded in dictionaries as ready-made patterns and, as such, are accepted to share ‘phraseologic features’ such as polylexicalism, multiplication, stability, idiomacity, complexity and expressivity: “unitatea frazeologică este o îmbinare stabilă de cuvinte, cu sau fără idiomacitate. Ea are o întindere de cel puţin două cuvinte şi este lexicalizată, adică funcţionează în limbă ca o unitate de sine-stătătoare, relevând unitate semantică şi este consemnată în dicţionare, ca dovadă că ea nu se formează după regulile îmbinărilor libere de cuvinte, ci se ”cheamă” din memorie "de-a gata” pentru a se integra apoi, datorită valenţei proprii, în lanţul vorbirii” (Scherf 2006: 82, in Munteanu 2007: 102). Last, but not least, idioms and idiomatic expressions are analyzed and classified by Dumistrăcel (1980) in his study devoted to Romanian words, expressions and metaphors. Different from other studies on Romanian phraseologic units, Dumitrăcel’s approach to idioms and idiomatic expressions is oriented towards the stylistic value and the etymology of such lexical patterns. Instead of conclusion, mention should be made that the terminology used in the Romanian studies devoted to lexical patterns is as diverse as controversial. The first inventory of the possible terms used to denote various types of phraseologic units in Romanian is made by Dumitrescu who, enlarging on terms such as expresie and locuţiune, mentions that they function in parallel with other terms such as izolare, idiom or idiotism, locuţiune proverbială.

217 Far from having reached the development and the wide circulation of the studies devoted to the various types of lexical patterns in English, the approaches made by the Romanian specialists in the field and selectively presented in this paper are a valuable resource which should be further explored in studies on Romanian phraseology.

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219 The Discursive and Interactional Functions of Discourse Markers in Casual Conversations

Mădălina Georgiana Matei*

Resumé : Les fonctions discursives et interactionnelles des connecteurs du discours démontrent la complexité des rapports fonctionnels et pragmatiques qu’ils peuvent développer pendant la conversation. Les fonctions discursives, que les connecteurs de discours peuvent avoir, sont principalement liées de la manière d’organisation technique du texte qui implique l’assurance de la cohérence et de la cohésion, la préparation des questions et des réponses possibles, la signalisation des difficultés de construction du discours. En ce qui concerne les fonctions interactionnelles, les connecteurs de discours sont utilisés pour montrer l’attention que les participants s’accordent réciproquement, la politesse et la protection de la « manière d’être » des interlocuteurs. L’ouvrage analyse la manière où des variables comme l’âge ou le genre peuvent engendrer des variantes individuelles d’employer les connecteurs du discours. Les perspectives de travail sont fonctionnalistes, pragmatiques et d’analyse du discours. Cette approche pluridisciplinaire a comme but de découvrir les dimensions discursives et interactionnelles de l’interaction verbale non-formelle, en général, et des connecteurs du discours en particulier. Mots-clés : connecteurs de discours, analyse du discours, interaction verbale non-formelle, variables

Abstract: The discursive and meta-discursive functions of discourse markers testify to the complexity of functional and pragmatic relationships that markers can trigger within a conversational exchange. Casual conversation is the instance in which both discursive and meta-discursive dimensions of discourse markers arise due to the dynamic, spontaneous and goal-oriented nature of talk-in-interaction. Among the elements that could contribute to the existence of the meta-discursive functions of discourse markers are speaker variables such as age, gender, education or geographical area. This paper analyzes the manner in which personal variables generate individualized variants of marker use focusing mainly on the variable of gender. Especially in mixed talk, the variable of gender could influence the choice of discourse markers in instances such as narratives, arguments or gossip. The only issue that is to be determined is the extent to which gender could exert such influence. The perspectives that this article adopts are functional, pragmatic and discourse analytical. This combined approach would hopefully manage to uncover the discursive and the meta- discursive dimensions of casual conversations in general and of discourse marker use in particular. Keywords: discourse markers, casual conversation, conversational exchange, variable of gender

1. Introduction The functions of discourse markers could be situated either at the discursive level or at the interactional one. The discursive functions of markers are connected to the textual organisation of verbal exchanges to such phenomena as turn-taking mechanisms, repairs, prefacing of questions, turn-construction techniques, interactions and so forth. The interactional level is related to the attention that the participants in the conversation pay to each other. In the category of interactional functions we can include politeness strategies, expressing opinions and the provision of dispreferred or face-threatening responses. This paper discusses functions of discourse markers which are set against two of the most important speaker variables: gender and age.

2. Research Methodology The conversations that are rendered and analyzed in this research are informal. In order to make the research activity more comfortable for the respondents, they have been given a voice recorder and asked to record conversations whenever and for whatever period of time they saw fit. The participants in the research are undergraduates, graduates, academics and people with an average level of instruction (high school graduates). Out of seven hours of conversation, the most relevant fragments have been extracted in order to demonstrate some definite theoretical and practical aspects. All the verbal exchanges given as examples in this paper are rendered in the language in which they were uttered (English or Romanian) in order not to alter the semantic and pragmatic meaning of the markers in their original context but the analyzed items in Romanian are to be either translated into English (whenever possible) or their functional equivalent in English will be given.

* Assistant Lecturer, PhD, “Transilvania” University of Brasov

220 3. Age and Marker Preference When listening to the conversations recorded for this research one could notice that the young participants in the speech event have a marked preference for markers such as you know (ştii), and (şi), well (păi) and I mean. Even in formal contexts young people recur to the above mentioned markers as a familiar refuge which could simplify their communication. If these markers could also occur in institutional settings, in casual conversations they are extensively used especially to express shared knowledge and common ground between speakers, as functional elements in discourse management, with an interactive or expressive function, and to highlight cohesion and coherence relationships in discourse. (Schiffrin, 1987, 2006; Blakemore, 2006; Müller, 2005; Murar, 2008; Pons Borderia, 2006; Downing, 2006; Eggins, 2004; Cruse, 2006). In the following conversation between and Alexandru and Roman, two teenagers from the Republic of Moldova, the use of discourse marking you know (ştii) is used in its interactional function of expressing shared knowledge and common ground between speakers.

1. Alexandru:Da păi eu am văzut că ăştia cu balul ăsta ştii (inaudible) (.) asta (.) asta:: 2. eu când – mie-mi spun băieţii chiar că acolo poţi să nici nu vii să nici nu 3. faci. Poţi să te înţelegi ştii? Ca să vii şi să te-nţelegi cu oamenii ştii şi să 4. să deie pă blatu 5. Roman: [locu] 6. Alexandru: [locu]–ntâi da. 7. Alexandru: Şi eu am zis că băi nu nu ce-i aşa ceva ştii?

In this conversation, Alexandru and Roman are talking about the first year students’ ball where Alexandru takes part in a contest. His reaction to what he found out about some abnormal practices is very emotional and this is obvious especially from his first turn. In line 1, the turn is begun by the discourse marker da (yes) which is used as a discourse management marker. Da marks Alexandru’s claim for the floor as well as the abrupt start of a new topic of the first year students’ ball which was in no way connected to the previous topic of amusing situations generated by the difference between name anniversaries in their Old Style Orthodox religion and the New Style Orthodox one which is practised in Romania. Then, in the same line, Alexandru hedges his topic introduction with the discourse marking well (păi) but, as it can be noticed, he experiences difficulties in constructing his turn. Alexandru has two failed attempts to start his turn and achieve a coherent discourse unit and it is only the third attempt (mie-mi spun …) that proves to be successful. The struggle for a coherent discourse unit is marked by the discourse marking asta (that is) - uttered twice, preceded and followed by pauses and with a prolonged vowel at its second uttering - which signals the speaker’s hunt for time to construct the turn and, at the same time, to build discursive coherence. The discourse marker you know (ştii) is used in lines 1, 3 and 7 as an expression of common ground between speakers but also in its interactive or expressive function. The discourse markers fulfilling the latter function, signal the speaker’s emotional involvement in the uttered discourse unit. In line 7, in order to reclaim the floor after Roman’s brief intervention, Alexandru starts his turn with the discourse marking and (şi), a very popular turn-initiation marker among younger and older speakers alike. A very interesting marker which is very popular especially among young people is băi (a functional equivalent of look as an attention marker). An instance of its use can be seen in line 7 where Alexandru renders a fragment of direct speech bracketed by băi. In the discursive context, this marker is used to express disagreement but also to draw the attention of the interlocutor on the ensuing justification of the disagreement. The following discourse unit illustrates another very interesting use of băi:

1. Roman: eu n-am – n-am prins aşa ceva, nu. La noi – noi la Construcţii o fost, n-o fost 2. chiar pă blatu. Băi, cine-o avut mai mulţi susţinători o – de exemplu băieţi de 3. anu-ntâi care s-o îns – o venit şi cu băieţi mai mari s-o salutat, o băut o bere 4. una-alta, s-o distrat, o mai spus o gluma una-alta.

221 In this turn, băi is used as an attention marker as it warns the listeners that something important in about to be said but it also functions as an elaboration marker. Roman expands on his statement that the contest held at his faculty’s ball was not ‘staged’ and begins an explanatory narrative on the matter. It is obvious that, as any discourse marker, băi can fulfil various functions according to the discursive context in which it is used. It is very important, in such cases where there is almost no core pragmatic meaning of the marker, to look at the surrounding discourse to see what the respective marker signals. In line 4 we encounter another expression having a discourse marking function in the context: una-alta (functional equivalent of and so on or this and that) displays the orientation of the speaker towards discursive relevance and that’s the reason why the enumeration does not continue. This marker performs the above mentioned function of expressing shared knowledge and common ground between speakers and has a prominent interactive or expressive function. Apart from this marker, there several others that can be used by young people to display group membership by giving the impression that commonly shared ideas and practices are being discussed (e.g. like, y’know, cos’, etc)

4. Bracketing in Mixed Talk It has been argued that women’s speech style is facilitative, cooperative, egalitarian and personal while men’s discourse is assertive and authoritative, men’s conversation style being a form of display, of competition and hierarchy, of getting control of the interaction (Wodak, 1997: 84, Carson, 1997: 147, Sheldon, 1997:227). In point of discourse markers, the differences between female and male speech are triggered only by the discursive outcome that they pursue in conversation. Otherwise, we cannot safely claim that there are female-specific or male-specific discourse markers but only, perhaps, a different manner of using them in conversation, according to their personal discursive agenda. The conversations in this chapter are informal ones and the participants in the conversational events are George and Cristina, a married couple in their mid-thirties, both having a high level of academic instruction; in their conversations, a great number of discourse marking words and expressions can be encountered. 4.1. Narratives The following fragment illustrates Cristina’s repeated attempts to narrate an event in spite of several interruptions:

1. Cristina: povestea astăzi Mădă de Laura 2. George : mhm 3. Cristina : că: ea are şi activitatea de traducător 4. George: (talking to their son Ştefan) Gata? Bine. 5. Cristina: ştii şi: 6. Ştefan: (talking to his baby brother) Unde te uiţi, Petru? 7. George: la sticla de ceai a lu’ mama. (several turns in which both parents tend to their children) 8. Cristina : aşa şi ziceam de Laura că ea are şi activităţi independente de traducător.

The struggle to complete a narrative is always bracketed by discourse markers and, if in the first two lines the narrative is even supported by backchanneling, in line 4 George’s attention is distracted and Cristina makes other attempts to both claim and hold the floor and to get her husband’s attention. For instance, in line 5 she uses the discourse marking ştii (you know) in order to get George’s attention by establishing common ground and adds the discourse marker şi (and) to signal her intention to continue the narrative. Her attempt fails again, this time because of her son’s interruption and the ensuing events and turns that develop from this interruption (tending to their youngest son, Petru, talking to Ştefan, etc.). Finally, Cristina resumes her narrative and makes another, this time successful, attempt to continue. In line 8, the summarizing marker aşa (so) starts the turn, the discourse continuation marker şi (and) and another summarizing unit of meta-talk ziceam că (I was saying that) hedge the re-starting of the narrative. In this verbal exchange we could say that the non-facilitative nature of male talk is perfectly illustrated. But Cristina’s conversational goal was that of completing her

222 narrative and, using a highly mitigated discourse, she eventually managed to achieve her conversational goal. Women’s conversational style is described as cooperative, facilitative and personal. The following conversation illustrates the fact that Cristina verbally supports her husband’s narrative and shows emotional involvement in the story. George is narrating the fact that a repaired mechanical part was delivered to a customer who refused to pay when the courier delivered the package but, somehow, the customer managed to take the repaired part out of the package and replace it with a broken one:

1. George: Deci eu când am vazut asta a fost interesant (.) că eu am crezut că este altă 2. piesă pe care va trebui să o reparăm şi să continuăm colaborarea, ştii? 3. Cristina: Băi ce mârlani! 4. George: Am văzut-o, era diferită clar de la cer la pământ ştii? 5. Cristina: Păi şi ce puteţi face acuma? 6. George: Am refuzat pachetul. 7. Cristina: Băi da’ şi clientul ce măgar de client!

This fragment illustrates the fact that almost no mitigation for the claim of turns is necessary as the husband is allowed and even supported to complete his narrative. The discourse marker deci (so) signals the beginning of another discursive stage in which George describes his own reaction to the events that he had mentioned. George’s turns in lines 2 and 4 are ended with the listener-oriented ştii (you know) which immediately triggers supportive and emotional comments (lines 3 and 7) from his wife. Both comments are prefaced by the discourse marking băi which signals the listener’s indignation at the narrated events. The marker ştii (you know) in line 4 succeeds in its function of establishing common ground between speakers. In line 5, Cristina shows her concern but also her suspicion that nothing can be done by means of the discourse markers păi (well) and şi (and). The two conversations rendered above illustrate two different conversational styles which, coincidentally or not, belong to people of different genders. This fact might confirm the above quoted theories on gender differences in speech. But in order to have more comparison data on the matter, the next section deals with more tense verbal interactions in which the two protagonists are involved. 4.2. Arguments In arguments the importance of discourse markers increases because, on the one hand, there is constant competition for the floor among the participants in the speech event as every one of them wants to have the chance to expose their ideas in the most convincing manner in such a way as to ‘outsmart’ the other participants. On the other hand, given the fact that we are dealing with a conflicting type of exchange, the presence of discourse markers is necessary for hedging and mitigation. The following conversation between Cristina and her husband, George can serve as an example. In this fragment they are discussing the solutions they have given the fact that no television or internet provider covers their neighbourhood. George suggests that they improvise an antenna:

1. Cristina: Ei pe naiba, nu prinzi orice, [vezi-ţi de treaba] 2. George: [exagerez] 3. Cristina: Păi exagerezi, tocmai, că uite tu ai – 4. George: - dar las’ că nu televizorul este – 5. Cristina: Ba eu cred că este, tocmai, că la ţară oamenii nu:: ştiu cât stau 6. ăştia care sunt şi la şefi, ce ştiu eu, şi au la serviciu RDS şi-aşa, 7. nu ştiu dacă neapărat acasă folosesc internetul.

This conversation shows that there is an open competition both for the floor and for the defense of expressed ideas. However, the avoidance of face-threatening acts is obvious especially in line 3 when Cristina confirms George’s appreciation of his previous statements as an exaggeration by using păi (well) as a hedging device for the same appreciation which, coming from her and so becoming an other-appreciation, could have been face-threatening. In order to mark the opposition between George’s statements which she considers to be false and her own appreciation of the matter, Cristina uses the discourse marking tocmai (that’s the

223 idea), to introduce, with the help of că (cos) used in its discourse marking function of presenting an idea which is ‘disguised’ in the causal continuation of previous discourse, an exemplifying situation or an argument in favour of her discursive goal. Although she also hedges her argument with the listener-oriented uite (look), the listener does not agree to allow her to finish the turn. On the contrary, when he discovers a false transition- relevance place between two words, he interrupts by marking his opposing stance with the discourse marking dar (but). Cristina uses the same method of the false transition relevance place to interrupt George’s statement. She start her own turn with the discourse marker ba (a functional equivalent of on the contrary) signalling the fact that her ensuing discourse will be in disagreement with George’s. She again makes use of the same combination of discourse marking tocmai (that’s the idea) and că (cos) used as cause that embeds reasons (Schiffrin, 1987:193), signalling the fact that her future argument is the correct one. The two discourse markers that Cristina uses in line 6 have an interesting function in the context. Ce ştiu eu (what do I know) and şi-aşa (and so forth) are discourse management markers that help the speaker construct her turn by gaining more time for the construction of ensuing discourse. The use of discourse markers to gain more time is illustrated by another fragment of conversation between the same protagonists, on the same subject of cable providers:

1. George: Deci televizorul a fost [tot timpul da]r nu o să stea pe internet sau să = 2. Cristina: [din moment] 3. George: = vorbească la telefon. Deci nu telefonia va fi cea care va aduce greul. 4. Cristina: da’ din moment ce trag un cablu mai contează ce tragi pe el? 5. George: păi deci încă o dată zic, cel care vrea un astfel de serviciu nu-l vrea pentru 6. televizor asta încerc să-ţi spun, îl vrea pentru telefon.

The hunt for time is marked in line 1 and 5 by several discourse management markers. In line 1, for instance, deci (so) is both an attention marker signalling the fact that the ensuing discourse is an important clarification that the listener has to pay attention to and, at the same time, it has a discourse organization function. Da’ (but) in line 4 signals the fact that Cristina is about to contradict the previous statement and she does that by formulating a rhetoric question which catches George off-guard. In line 5, George uses discourse markers păi (well), deci (so) and the meta-talk expression încă o dată zic (I repeat) to gain time to construct his response. In order to get the listener’s attention to the key argument that he makes towards the end, George uses the attention-getting and, at the same time, reformulation marker asta încerc să-ţi spun (that’s what I’m trying to tell you). What this meta-talk unit also manages to do is to direct attention towards the speaker and towards what is about to be said which represents a conclusion of his prior statements. As we have seen from the discussion of arguments, the variable of gender does not contribute in a significant way to the manner in which discourse markers are used. All hedging devices, fillers, mitigating devices and meta-talk that we analyzed in this section cannot be said to be gender-specific in any way. Consequently, we could say that in this case, it is not gender that decides the choice of discourse markers but the conversational goal that speakers have. 4.3. Gossip It has been argued by Coates (1998:130) that there is an important difference between the functional goals of male and female conversation: the goal of all-woman conversations is that of maintaining good social relationships, the reaffirming and strengthening of friendship (i.e. a private discourse), whereas the goal male speakers use speech with the primary purpose of exchanging information (i.e. a public discourse). In other words, women are more prone to gossip than men. These considerations are somehow confirmed by the following conversations between George and Cristina in which they talk about their next-door neighbours: 1. Cristina: Auzi, în seara asta au venit ăştia foarte mândri de ei dragă. 2. George: Ce-au mai făcut? 3. Cristina : Nu ştiu ce-au făcut, cred că au semnat actele sau le-o fi dat ălă banii 4. n-am idee

224 5. George: Aşa

In all the hours of conversation between the two protagonists, it is always Cristina who suggests subjects of gossip. In line 1, she starts the turn with the attention-getting marker auzi (listen) and then goes right into the topic. The provision of information is ended by another very interesting discourse marker. Dragă (dear) is always used in gossip, in Romanian, especially by women, to display a sort of complicity with the listener and, at the same time, disdain for the people or for the actions of the people who are the subject of the respective gossip. Very rarely does George participate in gossip and, as it is can be noticed in the conversation above, he only supports his wife’s discourse by displaying an active ‘listenership’. The fact that George intervenes in gossip only to show attention towards the speaker’s turn, resides from the following conversation as well. Here, the same subject of gossip is continued by Cristina after several interruptions from their children:

1. Cristina: Foarte mândră doamna. Când a coborât din maşină cât pe ce să să să 2. George: Să nu găsească pământul, a? 3. Cristina: Da:: îi stătea nasul numai pe sus 4. Cristina: Băi, mult ai, nimic nu faci.

George intervenes only in line 2 when he sees that Cristina cannot find her words at the end of line 1. Consequently, in line 2 he offers a possible turn continuation bracketed by a? (a functional equivalent of right?), that Cristina immediately accepts in line 3. Cristina brackets the conclusion that she draws in line 4 with the attention seeking marker băi that we encountered in several other contexts so far. Throughout Cristina’s narration of the events, George does provide a few details and back-channelling response (mhm) from time to time. The conversations analyzed in this section have shown that gossip topics are generally introduced by women who receive a minimum listener support from men. Jennifer Coates (1998) analyzed gossip in all-female groups and her conclusion was that women actively participate in gossip that they see as an opportunity for bonding and mutual support. Discursively, gossiping means backchannelling, active listenership, provision of support in conversation and complicity. In mixed talk, gossip does not have the same characteristics. Women introduce a gossip topic but they do not get the desired response from male listeners. In the case of our participants in the conversational event, George and Cristina, this aspect is very obvious: there are times when George stops paying attention to the topic and seems willing to drop it. But it is always Cristina who reintroduces the topic. For example, in the following conversation, after several interruptions and activities around the house, Cristina reopens the topic:

1. Cristina: Da. În fine, şi-aşa, ţi-am zis, au intrat in curte, nu ştiu ce-au mai făcut că 2. doar nu:: Dar i-am văzut.

In order to be able to reintroduce the topic, Cristina uses an impressive set of discourse markers: the first one is meant to signal the up-take of the conversational floor (da- yes), the second marks the fact that the former discussion was dropped (în fine – never mind), the third one marks the comeback to a previous topic (şi-aşa – so) and the fourth reminds the listener about the topic that the speaker wants to continue (ţi-am zis – I told you). George doesn’t make any further comments and the topic is closed. Certainly, the variable of gender does influence the unfolding of a conversation on a subject of gossip. If in other instances such as arguments, narratives, talk in institutional settings, the variable of gender is believed to have little or no influence of the speech event in general and on discourse markers in particular, in gossip, the same variable has a tremendous influence. These conversations analzyed above and the conversations that Coates (1998) gives as examples, testify to the fact that, in gossip topics, women reccur to discourse markers to a greater extent than men. The role of markers could be that of introducing a topic, claiming the floor, interruptions, back-channelling, repairs as well as hedges for sensitive remarks. Other variables

225 such as age, education or geographical area do not seem to have an influence on either discoursive strategies or on the discourse markers that speakers select. In the following chapter we are going to see the manner in which variables confirm of contradict the coordinates of male and female conversational styles put forth at the beginning of this chapter.

5. Bracketing in Same-Sex Talk The coordinates of women and men talk enounced in the previous chapter, state that there are significant differences between the two conversational styles. In broad lines, women are characterized as having a more collaborative and supportive conversational style whereas men theoretically have a competitive and dominance-oriented conversational style. 5.1. Male Talk In all the conversations that I recorded, I noticed that male talk is dominated by interruptions. If a narrative is begun by a speaker, it is very difficult for him to actually finish it without numerous interruptions which are not aimed at clarifying something of vital importance for ensuing discourse. The following conversation illustrates the fact that interruptions are more of a practice that necessity. The dialogue is between the two young students Alexandru and Roman:

1. Alexandru: Da. d-apăi dimineaţă - 2. Roman: - am fost la:: 3. Alexandru: dimineaţă mă trezesc şi mă uit (.) la noi este una, o fată care doarme şi-o 4. cheamă Gabi. Şi mă [uit 5. Roman: [la voi în cameră? 6. Alexandru: da 7. Roman: cu prietenu 8. Alexandru: da da. Da n-are . N-are prieten da’ doarme la noi. 9. Roman: (laughing) Normal. 10. Alexandru: şi:: 11. Roman: n-are pat da?

Alexandru is trying to narrate an event but is constantly interrupted by Roman who is interested in getting control of the interaction. It is worth mentioning that only Alexandru’s turns are bracketed by discourse markers. Roman’s interruptions, although discursively aggressive, are not mitigated by such markers as but, and or well which normally indicate that another speaker wants to uptake. The interruptions are abrupt and irrelevant indicating the existence of a competition for the floor. In other words, Alexandru’s mitigated and politely introduced turns in lines 1 and 9, for instance, stand no chance when confronted with Roman’s aggressive discourse style. Generally, the existence of discourse markers used by all participants in a conversation event, indicate the fact that both speakers and listeners pay attention to the conversational needs of the others and, mostly, they constantly try to preserve the interlocutor’s ‘face’. In this fragment of conversation, Roman shows no such orientation especially because, after his turn in line 11, he begins a conversation with a girl who is also present but who, up to that point, had been listening to Alexandru’s narrative. Apart from gender, age and in-group status are other categories that influence the two men’s conversational styles. Alexandru is a freshman and Roman is an MA student whom Alexandru, as well as everyone else in the group, respects and looks up to. Roman is aware of his ‘senior’ status in the group and acts accordingly both discursively and otherwise. If this section has demonstrated that male talk is competitive and aggressive, in the following section we will look at the manner in which women react in casual conversation. 5.2. Women Talk Deborah Tannen (1990:42) states that feminine language is oriented towards connection and intimacy whereas masculine speech style is mainly focused of status and independence. We might add that, especially in casual conversations, women are interested in sharing personal experience or bonding and this might be the reason why their conversational style is very supportive and collaborative. In other words, since they orient discourse towards personal, intimate subjects, their discursive style couldn’t be competitive or aggressive in normal situations.

22 6 Female speakers involved in conversational events treat their interlocutors with the same attention and consideration so as to be granted the same discursive privileges when they come to share their ideas. Female speakers encourage their conversational partners to continue their turns and provide active listenership when they do not hold the floor. Back-channelling is, thus, very frequently encountered in all-women conversations. The protagonists of the following dialogue are two female students, Mădălina (23 years old) and Anda (21). The two young women are room-mates in a students’ hostel and, in order to improve their spoken English, they allocate a few minutes a day to practise conversations in this language. The topics are not decided beforehand and, that is why their conversations in English resemble interviews in which they try to find out more about each other.

1. Anda: So, your last Christmas. 2. Mădă: My last Christmas was a lonely Christmas. I was at home with nobody around. 3. Anda: [I can’t believe it] 4. Mădă: [My mother is is] gone far away in Spain. 5. Anda: OK. 6. Mădă: She couldn’t come home, my brother was with his friends out in town and I was all alone crying.

The discourse marker so in line 1 is a topic insertion marker which is used to show that the discussion of the previous topic had ended. What is interesting is that Anda introduces the topic of ‘the last Christmas’ in a very animated tone. But when Mădă starts talking about a sad personal experience connected to this event, the discursive support that she receives from Anda is substantial and the tone of the conversation is immediately adapted to the new mode. The discursive support that Anda offers is in the form of back-channelling in line 3 and the discourse marking OK in line 5. The back-channelling sentence in line 3 (I can’t believe it) displays empathy with the speaker in relation to the narrated event and the discourse marker OK signals both the reception of previous information as well as an invitation for Mădă to continue her turn which she does in line 6. Apart from back-channelling, another type of discursive support provided in all-women talk is in the form of questions and comments formulated by listeners that require the speaker’s answers and clarifications. It is a form of ‘offering’ the floor to the interlocutor as in the following example:

1. Mădă: What about the guy who entered your room yesterday. Was he a colleague of 2. yours? 3. Anda: Ye:s he: is my my my buddy, I can say that he’s my buddy and I hired him 4. there. 5. Mădă: U::: so you’re a very important person there. 6. Anda: Yeah Yeah. My boss is my boyfriend now (laughing) 7. Mădă: OH! 8. Anda: [ Ye:a:h ] 9. Mădă: [I didn’t] know that. 10. Anda: Yeah. Well he’s not quite a boss but he’s a very important person there. 11. Mădă: So you work in teams there you have - 12. Anda: Yes, of course we are all young and it’s it’s very nice 13. Mădă: Interesting. 14. Anda: Yeah.

The idea that women use a great number of discourse markers in conversation is also illustrated by this dialogue. The attention paid to correct wording is marked in line 3 by the meta- talk sentence I can say that which shows the fact that Anda has eliminated all the doubts concerning the accuracy of the description of her friend as ‘my buddy’ and, with this expression she confirms her previous characterization. The concluding marker so in line 5 is Mădă’s way of showing that she has taken the right inferential path and understood the implications of Anda’s remark ‘I hired him there’ as an indication of the fact that she has the power not to actually hire but to have someone hired in that

227 firm. But Anda cannot respond with a face-threatening act directed towards herself by giving a negative response to this comment. Instead, she uses the false confirmation marker yeah yeah (line 6) and continues with the real reason of her influence. The discourse marking Oh, uttered by Mădă in line 7 not only shows her surprise at this new information but also invites Anda to continue her turn and to offer further details. Anda doesn’t make the correct inference and uses another marker yeah as a confirmation of her previous statement. But when Mădă realizes that the correct inferential path has not been taken she insists by making another observation in which her lack of information on the subject is emphasized. This time Anda provides some clarifications about the status of her partner in the firm but her reluctance to do so is signalled by two discourse markers yeah and well which indicate the fact that she found it awkward to specify that she had provided an exaggerated description of her partner. But the attention that women pay to her conversation partners is noticeable in line 11: Mădă perceives the fact that Anda is uncomfortable with the subject and makes a topic shift bracketed by the discourse marker so. Mădă gives her friend the chance to make some positive remarks about herself. Anda’s face-saving comments in line 12 immediately receive a positive feedback from Mădă, a feedback which is acknowledged by the discourse marker yeah (line 14). The two verbal exchanges that have been given as examples for women talk have confirmed the coordinates that the literature has established for this type of talk. Therefore, the variable of gender does influence the manner in which discourse is managed. Consequently, women’s conversational style can be described as facilitative, collaborative, personal, considerate, supportive as well as oriented towards face-saving acts and bonding. Women use a considerably greater number of discourse markers than men but they also have a preference for indirectness, inferences and implicatures.

6. Conclusion The assumption from which this paper departed was that variables such as gender or age influence the main pragmatic functions that the literature has ascribed to markers. This paper has shown that, at least in the conversational contexts that have been analyzed so far, the above mentioned variables could in actual fact influence the use of discourse markers. The decision to translate the Romanian discourse markers into English was, at first, determined by the fact that the scope of this paper would be broadened so that the analysis could be accessible to both Romanians and English speaking readers. But my translation of the Romanian discourse markers (especially those which have not been ‘translated’ by the provision of a functional equivalent) has led to a very interesting discovery: the functions of the Romanian discourse markers are in most cases identical to those of their English equivalents. The variable of gender was proven to have the greatest influence of the use of discourse markers. This is why two chapters have been devoted to this aspect. First, mixed-talk was tackled from the perspective of discursive practices and innovations in discourse marker use in narratives, arguments and gossip. Then, male talk was discussed and set against some coordinates given for this type of speech in the literature. As in the case of ‘women talk’, the subject of the final chapter, the coordinates that referential authors found for these two types of discourse were fully confirmed by the conversations analyzed in both chapters. Among the most important findings of the two chapters we can mention the fact that women use far more discourse markers than men and they offer more discursive support in conversation. As listeners, women encourage their conversational partners to continue their turns and do not recur to abrupt interruptions as male speakers tend to do. In conclusion, it is the coordinates of discourse marker use that establish ‘the rule’ or a general pattern of use but it is the variables that display the individuality of the speakers.

References: Coates, Jennifer, Gossip Revisited: Language in All-female Groups.In Jenny Cheshire & Trudgill, Peter (eds.). The Sociolinguitics Reader. Volume 2.Arnold, London, 1998. Corson, David, Gender Discourse and Senior Education: Ligatures for Girls, Options for Boys? in Ruth Wodak (ed.), Gender and Discourse, SAGE Publications, London, 1997. Cruse, Alan, A Glossary of Semantics and Pragmatics, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2006.

228 Downing, Angela, The English Pragmatic Marker surely and its Functional Counterparts in Spanish, in Karin Aijmer, Simon-Vandenbergen, A.M (eds.), Pragmatic Markers in Contrast, Oxford, Elsevier, Oxford, 2006, pp.39-58. Eggins, Suzanne, An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics, Second Edition, Continuum, New York and London, 2004. Leech, Geoffrey, Principles of Pragmatics, Longman, London, 1983. Müller, Simone, Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse, John Benjamins B.V., Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2005. Murar, Ioana, The Functionality of Discourse Markers in Conversational Text. Annals of the University of Craiova, Series Philology, English, Year IX, NO.1, 2008, Editura Universitaria Craiova, Craiova, 2008, pp. 125-139 Pons Borderia, Salvador, A functional approach to the study of discourse markers in Kerstin Fischer (ed.), Approaches to discourse particles, Elsevier, Oxford, 2006. Schiffrin, Deborah, Discourse marker research and theory: revisiting and in Kerstin Fischer (ed.) Approaches to discourse particles, Elsevier, Oxford, 2006. Schiffrin, Deborah., Discourse markers, CUP, Cambridge, 1987. Sheldon, Amy, Johnson, D, (Preschool Negotiators: Linguistic Differences in How Girls and Boys Regulate the Expression of Dissent in Same-Sex Groups in Jenny Cheshire and Peter Trudgill (eds.), The Sociolinguistics Reader, vol.2: Gender and Discourse, Arnold, London, 1998. Tannen, Deborah, You Just Don’t Understand. Women and Men in Conversation, Virago Press, London, 1990. Wodak, Ruth, Introduction: Some Important Issues in the Research of Gender and Discourse. in Ruth Wodak (ed.), Gender and Discourse, SAGE Publications, London, 1997.

229 Viaţa cuvintelor şi selecţia lor naturală (sau despre influenţa biologiei asupra lingvisticii)

Cristinel Munteanu*

Abstract: In the history of linguistics influenced from an ideological point of view by the science of nature in general and especially by biology, one can distinguish two periods: a pre-Darwinist (starting with Franz Bopp) and a Darwinist one (owed mostly to August Schleicher). After having briefly characterized the two periods originating from positivism, we will also try to determine (following theoreticians such as W.D. Whitney, B.P. Hasdeu, Hermann Paul, F. de Saussure, E. Coseriu, Lucia Wald etc.) to what extent we can deal with an identification of language as an organism or simply with an analogy useful to the description of the subject-matter in question. Apart from this epistemological introduction, the main purpose of our paper is searching the use, benefits and the impact of some metaphors such as “life of words” and “natural selection of words” (frequently used in the XIXth century, found at Darmesteter, for instance) in some linguists’ language and way of thinking (including Romanian ones: Iorgu Iordan, Marius Sala et alii). Keywords: ideology, positivism, language as an organism, “life of words”, “natural selection of words”

Rezumat: În istoria lingvisticii influenţate din punct de vedere ideologic de ştiinţele naturii în general şi de ştiinţa biologiei în special, se pot distinge două etape: o fază pre-darwinistă (începând cu Franz Bopp) şi una darwinistă (datorată mai ales lui August Schleicher). Caracterizând, pe scurt, ambele perioade, vom încerca, în acelaşi timp, să determinăm (pe urmele unor teoreticieni precum W.D. Whitney, B.P. Hasdeu, Hermann Paul, F. de Saussure, E. Coşeriu, Lucia Wald etc.) în ce măsură avem de-a face cu o identificare a limbii cu un organism sau doar cu o simplă analogie utilă descrierii obiectului vizat. Scopul principal al lucrării noastre este însă acela de a cerceta utilizarea / utilitatea şi impactul unor metafore precum „viaţa cuvintelor” şi „selecţia naturală a cuvintelor” (curente în sec. XIX, de pildă, la Darmesteter) în limbajul şi concepţia unor lingvişti (chiar români: Iorgu Iordan, Marius Sala et alii). Cuvinte-cheie: ideologie, pozisitvism, limba ca organism, „viaţa cuvintelor”, „selecţia naturală a cuvintelor”

0. Ca şi în limbajul propriu-zis, există şi în ştiinţă atât « metafore ocazionale », cât şi «metafore încetăţenite», acestea din urmă având o circulaţie mai mare sau mai mică în universul de discurs specific. Într-o anume împrejurare [1], Eugeniu Coşeriu stabilea o corelaţie [2] între distincţia pe care o făcuse cândva Blaga între «metafora plasticizantă» şi «metafora revelatorie» şi deosebirea pe care o operase el însuşi, ca lingvist, între «semnificaţie» şi « sens » [3]: semnificaţia este dată exclusiv de (şi prin) limbă, în timp ce sensul apare numai în actul concret de comunicare, în discurs / text [4]. Deşi Blaga nu-şi propusese să fie un filozof sau teoretician al limbajului, se pare că acesta înţelegea metafora plasticizantă „la nivelul instrumentului lingvistic, şi nu al conţinutului de text, fiindcă el observa că poate rămâne apoi o metaforă plasticizantă, ca un fel de nume care se dă în locul altui nume” [5]. Metafora revelatorie „ţine întotdeauna de sens şi nu devine limbă. Adică mireasa lumii din Mioriţa nu înlocuieşte moartea, nu devine limbă, cum ar fi Ucigă-l toaca, această metaforă aparţine textului Mioriţei” [6]. Ceva asemănător se petrece şi cu metaforele din ştiinţă. Unele dintre ele au o apariţie singulară (ca hapax), în textul unui cercetător, care încearcă să lumineze un aspect al realităţii investigate printr-o analogie. (Desigur, şi metaforele pot fi bune sau proaste, după caz [7]). O metaforă sugestivă, revelatorie, utilă din punct de vedere epistemologic, este preluată şi de alţi oameni de ştiinţă, putând face carieră în domeniul respectiv. Fără îndoială, în funcţie de [r]evoluţiile ştiinţifice, unele metafore ajung să fie părăsite, uitate etc. Însă, spre deosebire de poezie, unde metaforele revelatorii au, cel mai adesea, o unică ocurenţă, în ştiinţă tocmai metaforele socotite revelatorii se fixează în uz şi capătă putere de circulaţie. 1. Aşa se face că sintagme precum „viaţa cuvintelor” sau „selecţia naturală a cuvintelor”, apărute în secolul al XIX-lea, se bucură în continuare de o largă răspândire, purtând cu ele, totodată, reziduuri ale unor vechi concepţii care, în lingvistică, ţin de domeniul trecutului. De pildă, semnificativ ni se pare faptul că, recent, la Editura Humanitas, Acad. Marius Sala a lansat colecţia „Viaţa cuvintelor”, deschizând-o (în 2010) cu volumul său, 101 cuvinte moştenite, împrumutate şi create. O privire rapidă la cuprinsul acestei cărţi ne dezvăluie şi alte metafore care o adâncesc pe prima: Certificatul de naştere al cuvintelor, Vieţuirea cuvintelor, Moartea cuvintelor etc. Cele trei

* Lect. dr., Universitatea „Constantin Brâncoveanu” din Piteşti

230 etape din istoria oricărui cuvânt („naşterea, vieţuirea şi moartea lui”) sunt precizate şi în prefaţă (De ce „Viaţa cuvintelor”?, op. cit., pp. 9-12), autorul propunându-şi să menţioneze, în primul rând, „criteriile în funcţie de care putem stabili originea corectă a cuvintelor, arborele lor genealogic [s.n. C.M.]” (ibid., p. 11). Indubitabil, Marius Sala foloseşte, cel mai adesea, firesc, ghilimelele de rigoare când utilizează asemenea expresii figurate. Dar în niciun caz nu ne propunem să combatem aici o atare exprimare; din contra (după cum vom încerca să arătăm mai departe). 1.1. Analogiile au valoarea lor instructivă. Totul este să nu se confunde, cognitiv vorbind, «identificarea» cu «analogia», capcană în care au căzut unii lingvişti ai secolului al XIX-lea. În acest sens, sub un subtitlu – Vârsta cuvintelor – al frumoasei sale cărţi, Lexic românesc. Cuvinte, metafore, expresii (1980, reeditată în 2011), Profesorul Stelian Dumistrăcel notează:

„Termenul vârstă, cu referire la cuvinte, aparţine aceluiaşi mod de exprimare, figurat, conform căruia putem vorbi de limbi fiice ale latinei sau, în istoria vocabularului, de viaţa cuvintelor (Darmesteter). Pe calea metaforei, cu toate riscurile pe care le prezintă această modalitate de clarificare aparţinând cu precădere etapelor, nu fără o tentă romantică, a începutului ştiinţelor şi în ceea ce priveşte terminologia, pot fi cunoscute mai uşor fapte care, prezentate în sine şi pentru sine, fie că se lasă înţelese mai greu, fie că ne-ar atrage atenţia mai puţin. De altfel, rezultatele acestei adevărate tentaţii, a metaforei, pe care unii etnologi o deduc din animism, fac parte dintre acele exprimări al căror inedit şi pitoresc originar ni-l mai reliefează doar reflecţia (Vendryes); de obicei le acceptăm în virtutea obişnuinţei de a aprecia totul în funcţie şi după măsura omului” [8].

Dar iată ce spunea, cu mai multe decenii în urmă, însuşi Ferdinand de Saussure cu privire la o anumită atitudine a neogramaticilor faţă de terminologia înaintaşilor:

„Noua şcoală, apropiindu-se mai mult de realitate, a combătut terminologia comparatiştilor şi mai ales metaforele ilogice de care ea se folosea. Din acel moment nu se mai spune: «limba face asta sau asta» şi nici nu se mai vorbeşte despre «viaţa limbii» etc., pentru că limba nu este o entitate şi pentru că ea nu există decât în subiecţii vorbitori. N-ar trebui totuşi să mergem prea departe pe această linie; este suficient să ne înţelegem între noi. Există unele imagini de care nu ne putem lipsi. A cere să nu ne folosim decât de termeni ce corespund realităţilor limbajului ar însemna să pretindem că aceste realităţi nu mai au mistere pentru noi. Or, mai e mult până acolo; de aceea nu ne vom feri să folosim, dacă se va ivi prilejul, anumite expresii care au fost blamate în acea vreme” [9].

Ferdinand de Saussure este, probabil, cel mai metaforic dintre lingvişti lumii [10], concurat în mod serios, în lingvistica românească, doar de Sextil Puşcariu [11]. Totuşi, în pofida criticilor formulate, până şi neogramaticii recunoşteau utilitatea cognitivă a unor astfel de imagini. Este şi cazul lui Hermann Paul, „teoreticianul prin excelenţă al neogramaticilor” (E. Coşeriu), care, într-o anumită măsură (dată fiind şi creativitatea care îl caracteriza în cercetare), a depăşit ideologia pozitivistă în care se încadra; astfel, a propos de cele spuse mai sus, el declară undeva:

„It is established past all doubt by Comparative Philology that several different languages have often developed out of a single essentially uniform language, and that these again have not remained uniform, but have split up into a series of dialects. It would be natural to expect that the observation of this process would, more than any other possible circumstance, force on our notice analogies which might be drawn from organic nature [s.n. C.M.]. It is surprising that Darwinian philologists have not specially thrown themselves into this view. The parallel, when not pressed beyond fixed limits, is indeed justifiable, and instructive as well. If we would carry the comparison out, we must compare the language of the individual – in other words, the entire materials of language of which he disposes – with the individual animal or plant; and the dialects, languages, families of language, etc., with the species, genera, classes, etc. of the animal and vegetable world” [12].

1.2. Despre importanţa şi beneficiile metaforei pentru ştiinţă vorbeşte foarte convingător şi Ştefan Avădanei într-un capitol (Între analogie şi model: metafora ştiinţifică) din cartea sa, La început a fost metafora (1994), apreciind că: „fiind prin definiţie o modalitate de transgresare, metafora s-ar putea dovedi (dacă nu a şi făcut-o deja), în diversele ei ipostaze, drept şansa şi condiţia interdisciplinarităţii” [13].

231 Înainte de a înfăţişa problema din perspectivă ideologică şi înainte de a discuta sintagmele anunţate în titlul comunicării noastre, fie-ne permis să mai dăm un exemplu de analogie ce implică biologia. Pornind de la Joseph Vendryes („În jurul sensului logic al fiecărui cuvânt pluteşte o atmosferă sentimentală care îl înconjoară, îl pătrunde şi îi dă, după folosinţă, coloraturi momentane.”) şi de la Tudor Vianu („Distingem deci în faptele de limbă un nucleu al comunicării şi o zonă înconjurătoare a expresiei individuale.”), Stelian Dumistrăcel încearcă să surprindă într-o reprezentare grafică (= un model) aparte raporturile, în sincronie, „dintre sensul logic (SL), sensurile figurate (SF), care au luat naştere prin generalizarea vechilor sensuri momentane (SMV), şi sensurile momentane actuale (SMA), pornind direct de la sensul logic sau de la sensuri figurate” [14].

Şi lingvistul ieşean continuă: „În această structură, sensul logic joacă rolul nucleului din celula biologică sau al particulei centrale a atomului, din fizică, purtătoare de sarcini electrice pozitive” [15]. 2. Dar de unde începe toată această istorie a comparării şi chiar a identificării limbii / limbajului cu un organism? Ei bine, într-o comunicare (la al XI-lea Congres Internaţional al Lingviştilor, din 1972, de la Bologna), Modele concrete în istoria lingvisticii, Lucia Wald observa că

„După 1800 limba a fost comparată – în ceea ce priveşte natura ei, modul de organizare sau legile ei – rând pe rând cu un fenomen fizic, mecanic, biologic, psihic, apoi cu un fenomen social, economic, artistic, fără ca un punct de vedere să înlăture obligatoriu pe celălalt” [16].

2.1. Lucia Wald, care, alături de Al. Graur, a reprezentat specialistul cel mai de seamă în istoria lingvisticii din România (dintre cei rămaşi în ţară), s-a ocupat de naturalismul lingvistic atât în Scurtă istorie a lingvisticii (ediţia I, 1961, pp. 35-41), cât şi în Tratatul de lingvistică (1971, pp. 54-58). Expunerea Domniei Sale ne va servi la evidenţierea unor faze ale naturalismului lingvistic: a) Încă de la Franz Bopp întâlnim punctul de plecare al unei concepţii naturaliste asupra limbajului. Limba este comparată cu un organism natural, ceea ce „explică folosirea, mai întâi metaforică, a unor termeni din domeniul ştiinţelor naturale” [17]. b) Analogii de acelaşi tip se întâlnesc şi la Fr. Schlegel, care „vedea în organizarea limbii germeni şi rădăcini, unele fecunde, altele sterile” [18]. c) Mai apoi, Bopp chiar şi-a formulat în mod clar punctul său de vedere naturalist, afirmând că limbile trebuie considerate corpuri organice naturale [19]. d) Şi pentru J. Grimm „viaţa limbii ar reproduce etapele vieţii vegetale: frunză, floare şi fruct. Frumuseţea limbajului uman ar fi înflorit nu la început, ci în faza de mijloc, iar fructele cele mai coapte urmează să fie culese mult mai târziu, în viitor” [20]. Însă, după cum se ştie,

„identificarea limbii cu un organism este clar exprimată de către Aug. Schleicher care, spre deosebire de predecesorii săi, nu s-a limitat la adaptarea terminologiei sau a principiilor de clasificare din zoologie sau botanică [Schleicher se specializase mai întâi în botanică, n.n. C.M.], dar, prin identificarea obiectului cu modelul, ajunge la concluzia că limbile sunt în fapt organisme naturale care se nasc, trăiesc, îmbătrânesc şi mor.”[21].

232 Aceasta se vede mai cu seamă în lucrarea sa, Die darwin’sche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft (1863), unde, influenţat de Darwin, defineşte limbile ca fiind

„organisme naturale care, fără a putea fi determinate de voinţa oamenilor, s-au născut, au crescut şi s-au dezvoltat în conformitate cu anumite legi, apoi îmbătrânesc şi mor; şi lor le este proprie acea serie de fenomene pe care obişnuim să o cuprindem sub numele de «viaţă»” [22].

Citatul de mai sus este unul celebru, frecvent vehiculat. W.D. Whitney (vezi introducerea lui Ch. Hockett [23]), autorul cărţii The Life and Growth of Language, ia atitudine împotriva acestei opinii, spunând că limba nu este un organism natural, ci un produs omenesc, o instituţie, şi subliniind, totodată, şi rolul voinţei umane în această activitate. În vremea aceea se vorbea de două mari compartimente ale ştiinţei: Naturwissenschaft (ştiinţele naturii, ale fizicii, incluzând şi biologia) şi Geisteswissenschaft (ştiinţele morale, istorice). Whitney era, în mod declarat, în cea de-a doua tabără. 2.2. Lucia Wald oferă şi un amplu citat (datând din 1891) din Georg von der Gabelentz, după care natura însăşi a limbii permite analogia ei cu un organism [24]. Dar, încă din 1875, Whitney precizase deja că „There is no branch of historical study which is so like a physical science as is linguistics” [25], savantul american având grijă să precizeze că nu trebuie greşit înţeleasă adevărata natură a limbajului, în pofida acestor analogii care sunt „reale şi izbitoare şi sunt adesea potrivit folosite ca ilustrări instructive”[26]. Pe la 1881, B.P. Hasdeu observa şi el că, deşi lingvistica foloseşte metode ale biologiei şi ale matematicii, ea nu este nici o ştiinţă naturală şi nici una matematică: „Obiectul, negreşit unul bine determinat, iar nu metoda constituă natura unei ştiinţe” [27]. În acelaşi timp, trebuie remarcat că şi Hasdeu fusese sensibil la descoperirea lui Darwin pe care o socotea „o mare lege biologică, selecţiunea naturală”: „Selecţiunea naturală odată constatată, linguistul observă cu uimire că toate fenomenele ei se regăsesc în viaţa limbii umane în genere şi în fiecare grai în parte” [28]. 3. Revenind la Schleicher, este interesantă constatarea că el a fost mai întâi hegelian şi că preluase de la Hegel (deşi distincţia este, în sine, kantiană) deosebirea dintre lumea libertăţii şi lumea necesităţii, situând corect, iniţial, limbajul în lumea libertăţii şi a finalităţii [29]. Influenţat apoi de Originea speciilor (1859) a lui Darwin, el va ajunge la exagerările amintite. Eugeniu Coşeriu este cel care va readuce în atenţie distincţia esenţială dintre cele două lumi, pornind nu doar de la Kant, ci şi de la Aristotel, de la Hegel, de la Humboldt şi, apoi, de la Husserl şi „cunoaşterea originară” teoretizată de acesta. 3.1. De altfel, graţie extraordinarei sale capacităţi de sinteză, Coşeriu a caracterizat şi ideologia pozitivistă în lingvistică, identificând cele patru principii conducătoare ale acesteia: 1) principiul individului / faptului individual (sau al atomismului); 2) principiul substanţei; 3) principiul evoluţionismului; 4) principiul naturalismului. Acestora el le va opune (desigur, după ce le-a identificat mai întâi) tot patru principii, ale antipozitivismului: 1) principiul universalităţii individului (şi al antiatomismului); 2) principiul funcţiei şi al formei; 3) principiul esenţialităţii statice; 4) principiul culturii [30]. Critica a fost făcută în capodopera coşeriană Sincronie, diacronie şi istorie (1958/1997) [31] şi adâncită în Lecţii de lingvistică generală a aceluiaşi lingvist, unde găsim şi o definiţie a noţiunii de «ideologie»:

„Prin «ideologie» înţelegem forma – redusă, schematică şi, în general, lipsită de o fundamentare deplină – în care o concepţie filozofică este adoptată de către disciplinele particulare şi de cultura curentă şi, în special, felul în care o filozofie determină modurile de abordare şi metodele unei discipline particulare, de exemplu, ale psihologiei, ale ştiinţei literaturii, ale istoriei literare sau ale lingvisticii” [32].

Comentând principiul naturalismului în cadrul ideologiei pozitiviste manifestate în lingvistică, E. Coşeriu admite că anumite exprimări, trădând influenţa biologiei, sunt metaforice, însă, în acelaşi timp, savantul atrage atenţia cu privire la substratul acestora:

„În sfârşit, în virtutea principiului naturalismului, limbile sunt considerate, mai mult sau mai puţin explicit, ca fiind obiecte sau organisme naturale, dotate cu «evoluţie proprie». Prin urmare, se vorbeşte de «viaţa» limbilor şi de «viaţa» cuvintelor, subînţelegându-se fără îndoială că aceste expresii sunt metafore, însă şi metaforele îşi au motivaţia lor şi reflectă o anumită ideologie” [33].

233 „Fără îndoială, limbile nu mai sunt considerate ca organisme naturale, dar de multe ori sistemele lingvistice se « reifică », fiind tratate nu ca tradiţii ale unei activităţi libere a omului, ci ca « lucruri », ca obiecte naturale” [34].

3.2. Dar deosebirile dintre lingvistică (văzută ca ştiinţă a culturii) şi biologie (considerată ştiinţă a naturii) devin mult mai clare dacă ţinem seama de următoarele distincţii operate de marele teoretician şi filozof al limbajului de origine română. Fructificând reflecţiile unor filozofi (precum Aristotel, G. Vico şi J. Dewey), E. Coşeriu face o clasificare a ştiinţelor, plecând de la întrebările pe care acestea le pun cu privire la esenţa (sau acel quid) a(l) lucrurilor şi a(l) fiinţelor. Astfel, la întrebarea referitoare la esenţa individului, răspunde întotdeauna (justificat şi complet) istoria, căci ea este ştiinţa individualului. La întrebarea privitoare la esenţa unei clase (adică la esenţa lucrurilor ce corespund unei noţiuni), răspunsurile sunt oferite de ştiinţele generalului, care sunt de trei tipuri, în funcţie de obiectul pe care îl cercetează [pornind de la configurarea raportului dintre formă (morphé) şi materie / substanţă (hýle), Aristotel (în Physica, II, 2) clasificase obiectele în matematice, naturale şi culturale]:

„1. ştiinţele matematice, care se ocupă cu obiectele şi relaţiile pur formale; 2. ştiinţele naturale, care se ocupă cu obiectele exterioare omului şi cu omul (considerat ca obiect exterior), cu obiecte care ni se prezintă mai întâi ca o substanţă determinată, ca o anumită materie cristalizată într-un anumit fel, substanţa fiind aceea care ia o formă; 3. ştiinţe[le] culturii sau ştiinţe[le] umaniste, care se ocupă cu obiectele create liber de om şi care sunt, în primul rând, forme în conştiinţă (au existenţă internă), care iau o anumită substanţă pentru a fi concretizate în lume, ca să poată deveni intersubiective; astfel de forme sunt limbajul, arta, religia şi alte produse ale activităţii culturale, ale activităţii spiritului, ale activităţii creatoare înseşi” [35].

Mergând în profunzime, există şi o altă ştiinţă, situată la un alt nivel, „o ştiinţă care îşi pune întrebări cu privire la esenţa esenţei, la quid-ul quid-ului” [36]. Este vorba despre filozofie sau ştiinţa universalului, care ne conduce la primele principii ale fiecărui mod de a fi. De pildă, filozofia limbajului încearcă să delimiteze limbajul faţă de alte tipuri de obiecte care prezintă anumite trăsături comune cu cele ale acestuia, cum ar fi: „arta, care se prezintă ca expresivitate, asemenea limbajului; activitatea practică, care poate întrebuinţa şi întrebuinţează limbajul ca instrument; sau gândirea raţională, care nu este posibilă fără limbaj” [37]. O gravă eroare a pozitiviştilor (ce persistă, pe alocuri, şi astăzi) a fost aceea de a identifica obiectele culturii cu cele ale naturii, aplicând metode specifice ştiinţelor naturii celor ale culturii. Or, într-o atare situaţie, abordările nu mai pot avea un caracter ştiinţific, întrucât condiţia de bază a activităţii ştiinţifice este tocmai «obiectivitatea», adică adecvarea la obiectul corespunzător. Introducând în discuţie şi distincţia lui Kant (intuită, anterior, şi de Vico) dintre „necesitate” şi „libertate”, Coşeriu precizează foarte limpede:

„Obiectele naturale aparţin lumii «necesităţii» care e guvernată de «cauze» ce produc anumite «efecte» şi unde, prin urmare, constatarea a ceea ce se întâmplă în mod regulat, în anumite condiţii, reprezintă o «lege naturală» sau o lege de necesitate empirică. Obiectele culturale, în schimb, aparţin lumii specific umane a libertăţii – activităţilor şi creaţiilor libere ale omului – , unde «faptele» create nu sunt determinate de cauze, ci se produc în vederea unei finalităţi şi, ca realizări obţinute – dacă nu este vorba de «instrumente» care au şi o finalitate exterioară – , coincid cu finalitatea lor; astfel, finalitatea Iliadei este Iliada însăşi” [38].

3.3. Pe de altă parte, trebuie remarcat că, în cadrul ştiinţelor naturale, biologia are un statut aparte, întrucât studiază viaţa, ceea ce atrage după sine caracteristici metodologice diferite de cele ale ştiinţelor fizico-chimice. Bunăoară, în opinia unor savanţi, specificul vieţii ar cere să se acorde întâietate explicaţiilor de tip teleologic în raport cu cele cauzale. Multă vreme s-a crezut (unii o mai cred şi acum) că doar ştiinţele care aspiră la explicaţii prin legi universale, cu putere predictivă, sunt „ştiinţe adevărate”, în timp ce disciplinele biologice şi sociale nu-şi merită (din acest motiv) numele de „ştiinţe” [39]. Cândva (pe la 1865), fiziologul francez Claude Bernard era convins că „nu există nicio deosebire între principiile ştiinţelor biologice şi cele ale ştiinţelor fizico-chimice” [40]. Lucrurile sunt însă mai complicate decât par. Mircea Flonta, îndelung pasionat de filozofia

234 biologiei, observă că „teza unităţii metodologice a ştiinţelor naturii va putea fi bine susţinută atâta timp cât vom considera discipline ca biofizica, biochimia, fiziologia sau biologia moleculară drept reprezentative pentru cercetarea biologică în genere” [41]. În schimb, „dacă luăm în considerare alte domenii ale cercetării biologice, care sunt consacrate studiului evoluţiei vieţii pe pământ sau comportării animalelor superioare” [42], unitatea metodologică amintită nu mai poate fi luată în discuţie [43]. De altminteri, pornind de la asemenea considerente, Mircea Flonta merge până într-acolo încât ajunge să afirme că nu se poate face o distincţie categorică între ştiinţele umaniste şi cele ale naturii:

„În realitate, explicaţiile din biologia evoluţiei nu se bazează pe legi, ci pe concepte ca suprapopulaţie, luptă pentru existenţă, selecţie naturală, adaptare, succes reproductiv şi altele. [Ernst] Mayr aprecia că, prin profilul epistemic al explicaţiilor pe care le oferă, biologia evoluţiei este mai aproape de istoria socială decât de fizica teoretică. Ceea ce arată cât de iluzorie este supoziţia persistentă că s-ar putea trasa o linie clară de despărţire între ştiinţele naturii şi disciplinele umaniste [s.n. C.M.]” [44].

O astfel de afirmaţie ni se pare exagerată. Criteriile pe care le lua în consideraţie E. Coşeriu (vezi supra, 3.2., à propos de clasificarea ştiinţelor generalului) ne apar astăzi ca fiind suficiente pentru realizarea unei delimitări riguroase între cele două tipuri de ştiinţe. 3.4. În orice caz, faptul că evoluţionismul apelează la explicaţii de tip teleologic motivează oarecum uşurinţa cu care unii lingvişti s-au lăsat influenţaţi de teoria lui Darwin, utilizând analogii ce-şi au punctul de plecare în această zonă [45]. Recent, un lingvist finlandez, Esa Itkonen (într-o încercare de reevaluare a teoriei lui Coşeriu privind schimbarea lingvistică [46]), a reluat tema aplicării evoluţionismului la problemele limbajului, apreciind că interpretarea schimbării lingvistice din perspectivă darwinistă este falsă („the Darwinist analogy is likely to be misleading”). Pentru a fi mai lesne înţeles, Itkonen dă mai întâi următorul exemplu: în noul mediul al unui oraş minier, „varianta” albă a unei specii de fluturi a dispărut, întrucât era uşor de descoperit şi de vânat de către păsări. „Varianta” gri a aceleiaşi specii a supravieţuit pentru că nu putea fi detectată. Iată, aşadar, cele două componente ale explicaţiei evoluţioniste: mutaţia întâmplătoare (de la alb la gri) şi selecţia naturală (îndeplinită de/în mediul respectiv). Noua mutaţie s-a dovedit funcţională. Acestea fiind pricepute, se poate trece, mai departe, la lingvistică: „Those who are anxious to apply Darwinism to linguistics point out that linguistic change seems to exemplify exactly the same bipartite structure: first innovation (corresponding to mutation) and then acceptance (corresponding to natural selection)” [47]. Eroarea ar fi însă cea identificată de J. Cohen (1986): „Hence no evolutionary change of any kind came about through the application of intelligence and knowledge to the solution of a problem. That was at the heart of Darwin’s idea… And that is why Darwinian evolution is so deeply inappropriate a model… for the understanding of [linguistic change]” [48]. Împotriva analogiei în cauză, Itkonen mai oferă un argument: „Finally, let us mention one more disanology between biology and linguistics: mutation and selection have different sources whereas innovation and acceptance have the same source (= the speakers themselves) as well as a common motivation: one accepts only what one might have innovated oneself” [49]. 4. Desigur că, imediat după apariţia operei capitale a lui Ch. Darwin, Originea speciilor (1859), ideea «selecţiei naturale» a fost imediat aplicată la domeniul lexicologiei: şi cuvintele se comportă exact ca şi fiinţele vii. Un asemenea caz este semnalat chiar de profesorul de filozofie Mircea Flonta: un contemporan al lui Darwin,

„episcopul Trench, o autoritate în studiul limbii engleze, a susţinut, după ce a citit Originea speciilor, că evoluţia limbajului este rezultatul unei competiţii între expresii. Unele expresii se impun, iar altele ies din uz. Supravieţuieşte cel mai bine adaptat. Bunăoară, scurtimea unei expresii poate să-i ofere un avantaj în competiţie cu altele” [50].

4.1. Însă cel care a asigurat răspândirea unor sintagme precum „viaţa cuvintelor” (îndeosebi) şi „selecţia naturală” a acestora a fost, fără îndoială, Arsène Darmesteter. Larga difuzare şi nenumăratele reeditări ale lucrării sale La vie des mots (1887) au lăsat urme şi în exprimarea unor lingvişti contemporani lui sau de după el. Deşi Darmesteter îl citise pe Whitney (la a cărui The Life and Growth of Language [în traducere franţuzească] trimite), el face dovada

235 faptului că nu a luat în seamă şi rezervele lingvistului american referitoare la anumite apropieri (nerecomandabile) de obiectul biologiei (vezi supra, 2.2.). Ca dovadă, cărticica lui A. Darmesteter, La vie des mots, se deschide cu următoarele cuvinte: „Dacă există un adevăr banal astăzi, acela este că limbile sunt organisme vii [des organismes vivants] a căror viaţă, pentru a fi de ordin pur intelectual, nu-i mai puţin reală şi se poate compara cu cea a organismelor din regnul vegetal sau din regnul animal” [51]. Lingvistul francez vorbeşte dintru început despre „naissance, vie et mort des mots” [52], apreciind imediat că „limbajul este o materie sonoră pe care gândirea umană o transformă, insensibil şi fără sfârşit, sub acţiunea inconştientă a concurenţei vitale şi a selecţiei naturale” [53]. Pe aceeaşi pagină este amintit, cum era de aşteptat, şi Darwin. „Sănătatea cuvântului” [54] ori comparaţia cuvintelor cu plantele [55] sunt şi ele teme predilecte. De altfel, Darmesteter era încredinţat că „dans la vie organique des végétaux et des animaux comme dans la vie linguistique nous retrouvons l’action des même lois” [56]. 4.2. Că astfel de idei şi de exprimări s-au bucurat de succes şi în spaţiul lingviştilor şi a oamenilor de cultură de pe la noi o demonstrează şi cazul pe care îl vom înfăţişa în cele ce urmează [57]. Referindu- se la concurenţa neologismelor dintr-o limbă, Iorgu Iordan declara, în primă instanţă, în Limba română actuală [= LRA]:

„Totdeauna şi pretutindeni au intrat din limbile străine foarte multe cuvinte inutile împreună cu cele absolut necesare. Dar sita vremii le-a cernut, eliminându-le treptat, fără zgomot şi fără trudă! Căci limbajul uman procedează, prin subiectele vorbitoare, întocmai ca un organism [s.n. C.M.]: asimilează ce-i convine şi înlătură ce-i poate strica sau nu-i foloseşte” [58].

Ulterior, după schimbarea regimului politic, în urma unui referat întocmit de către Leonte Răutu, a fost decisă, de către Iosif Chişinevschi, „Epurarea Institutului de Lingvistică al Academiei”. Alături de Al. Rosetti şi Al. Graur, a avut de suferit şi Iorgu Iordan. Se explică astfel de ce reputatul lingvist, în Limba romînă contemporană [=LRC], reconsiderându-şi vechiul punct de vedere, alege „să-i dea dreptate”, în privinţa chestiunii neologismelor, chiar lui Leonte Răutu [59] (deşi o anumită comunicare esopică poate fi sesizată printre rânduri): „Felul cum se va rezolva problema neologismelor este, cred, cel indicat, în linii generale, de către tovarăşul L. Răutu în comunicarea ([60]) făcută la sesiunea Academiei R.P.R. din martie 1951” [61]. Şi Iordan citează un amplu fragment din comunicarea în care Leonte Răutu perorează despre dezvoltarea viitoare a limbii române (redăm aici doar o frază): „În niciun caz nu putem fi de acord cu părerea exprimată într-o lucrare a sa de Acad. I. Iordan, care preconiza un fel de selecţie naturală a neologismelor” [62]. La o privire atentă asupra întregii discuţii din LRC, se va vedea că, de fapt, Iorgu Iordan nu a renunţat la ideile sale mai vechi. Dovada ar fi că se autocitează în LRC, reluând un paragraf din LRA (acela în care afirma că „limbajul uman procedează, prin subiectele vorbitoare, întocmai ca un organism” [63]), chiar dacă preia sintagma „selecţie naturală” (pe care o socoteşte „foarte potrivită”) din critica pe care i-o face L. Răutu. Istoria limbii române – susţine savantul în continuare – ne arată că idiomul nostru, în diverse etape ale dezvoltării sale, sub diverse influenţe sau stăpâniri, a fost invadat de numeroase slavonisme, turcisme, grecisme inutile care, în majoritatea cazurilor, au avut o existenţă efemeră, dispărând fără de urmă. Prin urmare, acelaşi lucru ar trebui să se întâmple şi cu „nenumăratele cuvinte franţuzeşti din vremea noastră introduse fără nevoie, numai din spirit de imitaţie şi din dorinţa de a impresiona pe cititori”. 5. Înclinaţia spre analogie (metaforă, comparaţie) pe care o dovedesc unii oameni de ştiinţă se poate datora culturii temeinice însuşite, dorinţei de a fi bine înţeleşi (majoritatea au fost şi mari profesori) sau chiar idiostilului lor, fiindcă nu toţi se pricep să creeze metafore. Ne face plăcere să încheiem cu câteva cuvinte ale nemuritorului Aristotel: „Cu drept cuvânt, metafora e singurul lucru care nu se poate lua de la altul, şi-i dovada unui dar firesc; căci a face metafore bune înseamnă a vedea bine asemănările” (Poetica, 22, 1459 a) [64]. Este şi cazul lingviştilor, ca profesori sau/şi ca oameni de ştiinţă [65].

Note: [1] Este vorba despre decernarea titlului de doctor honoris causa lui Eugeniu Coşeriu de către Universitatea „Lucian Blaga” din Sibiu, la data de 11 decembrie 1998.

236 [2] Dacă nu cumva va fi fost, la origine, chiar o influenţă subliminală, întrucât Coşeriu, în tinereţea sa italiană, tradusese (în limba lui Dante) studiul Artă şi valoare a lui Blaga (cf. Eugenio Coşeriu [sic], Prelegeri şi seminarii la Universitatea „Lucian Blaga” din Sibiu, Editura Universităţii „Lucian Blaga” din Sibiu, 2004, p. 21). [3] Precizăm că utilizăm ghilimelele unghiulare „franţuzeşti” («») pentru marcarea conceptelor, iar caracterele italice pentru evidenţierea termenilor. [4] Ibidem, p. 22. [5] Ibidem. [6] Ibidem. [7] Şi, de altfel, cum s-a observat deja în ştiinţa tropilor, aceeaşi metaforă poate fi bună sau proastă în funcţie de contextul în care apare. [8] Stelian Dumistrăcel, Lexic românesc. Cuvinte, metafore, expresii, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, Bucureşti, 1980, p. 29. [9] Ferdinand de Saussure, Curs de lingvistică generală, Editura Polirom, Iaşi, 1998, p. 32, notă de subsol. Vezi şi critica îndreptată împotriva lui Max Müller, ironizat / ridiculizat de acelaşi lingvist elveţian în ale sale postume Scrieri de lingvistică generală, Editura Polirom, Iaşi, 2004, pp. 119 şi 155. [10] Vezi, în acest scop, inventarul zecilor de metafore sau comparaţii (analogii, în sens larg) întrebuinţate de Saussure în Cursul său, inventar întocmit într-o amplă notă finală de Tullio de Mauro (pp. 324-325), care face şi următorul comentariu: „Conştient de noutatea problemelor abordate, Saussure nu numai că nu repudiază unele inocente metafore «animiste», dar şi încearcă întruna să folosească unele comparaţii care să clarifice conceptele pe care le simţea ca fiind cu totul noi.” (ibid., p. 324). [11] Stă mărturie, în acest sens, extraordinara carte a lui Sextil Puşcariu, Limba română. Vol. I: Privire generală (1940), unde se apelează foarte frecvent la analogii lămuritoare. [12] Hermann Paul, Principles of the History of Language [1890], Translation [by H. A. Strong] of Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte [Niemeyer, Halle, 1886], College Park, McGrath, Maryland, reprinted 1970, p. 20. Al. Philippide, tot neogramatic ca formaţie şi un aplicator [destul de] fidel al ideilor lui Hermann Paul pe terenul limbii române, face şi el apel la o analogie vegetală: „Vorbirea ocazională este o necontenită reproducere a cuvintelor tip. Prin alunecarea sunetului, alunecarea înţălesului, analogie, contaminaţie, imediata creare, ea se îndepărtează însă tot mai mult de dânsele şi neîncetat rădăcini pentru nouă cuvinte tip apar, nouă uzuri ies la iveală în locul celor vechi, iar aceste din urmă dispar treptat din memorie pănă în gradul de a fi cu desăvârşire uitate. Fiindcă însă schimbarea are loc numai încetul cu încetul, apoi totdeauna, alături cu vorbirea cea în vigoare, o parte din cea trecută tot mai duce o viaţă slăbănoagă, aşa după cum seva în o plantă pe jumătate uscată tot mai circulă încă [s.n. C.M.]. Aceste cuvinte tip vechi, ameninţate de azi pe mâne cu peirea, au rămas singure, izolate, fără legături cu altele. Câteodată, mai rareori, diferite cauze le insuflă o nouă putere, astfel că pot lupta contra totalei ruini cu altele mult mai tinere…” (Alexandru Philippide, Principii de istoria limbii, în Idem, Opere alese. Teoria limbii (editate de G. Ivănescu şi Carmen-Gabriela Pamfil, cu un studiu introductiv şi comentarii de G. Ivănescu), Editura Academiei R.S.R., Bucureşti, 1984, pp. 1-225, în cap. VII din Principii de istoria limbii, Izolarea, p. 70). [13] Ştefan Avădanei, La început a fost metafora, Editura Virginia, Iaşi, 1994, p. 159. [14] St. Dumistrăcel, op. cit., p. 108. [15] Ibidem. [16] Lucia Wald, Pagini de teorie şi istorie a lingvisticii, Editura All, Bucureşti, 1998, p. 52. [17] Ibidem, p. 49. [18] Ibidem. [19] De altfel, şi W. von Humboldt vorbea de organismul limbii, numai că el mutase accentul dinspre explicaţiile cauzaliste către o interpretare nu doar organicistă, ci şi finalistă (vezi Wilhelm von Humboldt, Despre diversitatea structurală a limbilor şi influenţa ei asupra dezvoltării spirituale a umanităţii, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2008, p. 13). [20] Lucia Wald, op. cit., p. 49. [21] Ibidem, p. 50. [22] Apud Al. Graur, L. Wald, Scurtă istorie a lingvisticii, Editura Ştiinţifică, Bucureşti, 1961, pp. 37-38. Vezi fragmente din opera lui August Schleicher şi în Lucia Wald, Nadia Anghelescu (redactori responsabili), Teorie şi metodă în lingvistica din secolul al XIX-lea şi de la începutul secolului al XX-lea. Texte comentate, Bucureşti, 1984, pp. 38-44. [23] William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language [1875], With a New Introduction by Charles F. Hockett, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1979, p. XII. [24] Lucia Wald, op. cit., p. 51. [25] W.D. Whitney, op. cit., p. 311. [26] Ibidem. [27] B.P. Hasdeu, Principie de linguistică, apud Cicerone Poghirc, B.P. Hasdeu. Lingvist şi filolog, Editura Ştiinţifică, Bucureşti, 1968, p. 113. Pentru considerarea (neadecvată) a limbajului ca obiect fie exclusiv natural (Bloomfield), fie exclusiv formal (Hjelmslev), vezi Eugeniu Coşeriu, Istoria filozofiei limbajului. De la începuturi până la Rousseau, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2011, pp. 32-33. [28] Apud C. Poghirc, op. cit., p. 86. [29] Acest moment al evoluţiei gândirii lui Schleicher este subliniat atât de Georges Mounin (Istoria lingvisticii, Editura Paideia, Bucureşti, 1999, p. 135), cât şi de R.H. Robins (Scurtă istorie a lingvisticii, Editura Polirom, Iaşi, 2003, p. 244). [30] Eugeniu Coşeriu, Lecţii de lingvistică generală, Editura Arc, Chişinău, 2000 (pentru tratarea in extenso, vezi pp. 20-54). [31] Eugeniu Coşeriu, Sincronie, diacronie şi istorie. Problema schimbării lingvistice, Editura Enciclopedică, Bucureşti, 1997 (vezi, îndeosebi, p. 54). [32] E. Coşeriu, Lecţii..., p. 20. [33] Ibidem, p. 30.

237 [34] Ibidem, p. 79. [35] Eugen Coşeriu, Prelegeri şi conferinţe (1992-1993), ca supliment al publicaţiei „Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară”, T. XXXIII, 1992-1993, Seria A, Lingvistică, Iaşi, 1994, p. 8.; cf. şi E. Coşeriu, Lecţii…, pp. 49-50. [36] E. Coşeriu, Prelegeri…, p. 8. [37] Ibidem, p. 9. [38] E. Coşeriu, Lecţii…, pp. 50-51. [39] În realitate, faptul că o disciplină (aşa cum este şi cea dedicată evoluţiei vieţii) apelează la explicaţii prin naraţiuni istorice nu o face mai puţin ştiinţifică decât o disciplină care oferă explicaţii ce rezultă în urma cercetărilor experimentale. [40] Apud Mircea Flonta, Darwin şi după Darwin. Studii de filozofie a biologiei, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2010, p. 276. [41] M. Flonta, op. cit., p. 282. [42] Ibidem. [43] În 1968, zoologul britanic Carl F.A. Pantin propunea distincţia ştiinţe cu caracter restrictiv vs ştiinţe cu caracter nerestrictiv. Iată ce declara în acest sens: „De fapt, tocmai bogăţia şi complexitatea fenomenelor lor este cea [sic!] care deosebeşte ştiinţe ca biologia şi geologia de ştiinţele fizice. Fizica şi chimia au putut să devină ştiinţe exacte şi să ajungă la maturitate tocmai pentru că din câmpul lor de cercetare sunt eliminate o mulţime mare de fenomene ale naturii. […] Această deosebire între ştiinţele restrictive şi cele cu caracter nerestrictiv are o legătură evidentă cu evoluţia exactităţii şi a preciziei cantitative în ştiinţe. Cu cât este mai restrictivă o ştiinţă în ceea ce priveşte clasa obiectelor ei de studiu, cu atât e mai probabil să putem construi în domeniul ei ipoteze matematice de mare anvergură, care pot fi verificate prin măsurători precise.” (apud Mircea Flonta, op. cit., p. 310). Aproape două decenii mai târziu, Richard Dawkins va judeca lucrurile în mod similar, subliniind că biologia, spre deosebire de fizică, cercetează obiecte mai complicate, ce dau impresia că au fost proiectate: „Comportamentul obiectelor fizice, nebiologice, este atât de simplu, încât poate fi descris cu ajutorul limbajului matematic existent; de aceea cărţile de fizică sunt pline de matematică.” (apud Mircea Flonta, op. cit., p. 310). [44] Ibidem, p. 300. [45] Vezi şi Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man. An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1944, pp. 115-116. [46] Esa Itkonen, On Coseriu’s Legacy, în „Energeia” (Online-Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachphilosophie und Sprachwissenschaftsgeschichte), Ausagabe III, 2011, pp. 1-29 [http://energeia-online.de/]. [47] Ibidem, p. 11. [48] Apud E. Itkonen, op. cit., p. 12. [49] Ibidem. [50] M. Flonta, op. cit., pp. 163-164. [51] Arsène Darmesteter, La vie des mots. Étudiée dans leur significations [1887], Librairie Delagrave, Paris, 1946, p. 3. Vezi şi G. Mounin, op. cit., p. 164, care prezintă acelaşi citat, considerând că A. Darmesteter a împins „până la puerilitate” folosirea metaforică a termenului organism. [52] Ibidem, p. 26. [53] Ibidem, p. 27. Despre lupta pentru existenţă din lumea lingvistică (asemeni celei din lumea organică) sau despre „concurenţa vitală” se discută şi la p. 175. [54] Ibidem, pp. 154-155. [55] Ibidem, pp. 174-175. [56] Ibidem. [57] La care ne-am referit, in extenso, din perspective diferite, în alte două lucrări (vezi Cristinel Munteanu, Problema neologismelor (ca împrumuturi) din perspectiva politicii culturii, în „Analele Universităţii «Dunărea de Jos» din Galaţi”, Fascicula XXIV, Anul III, Nr. 2 (4), Lexic comun / Lexic specializat, Editura Europlus, Galaţi, 2010, pp. 364-368 şi Idem, Influenţa ideologiei marxiste asupra concepţiei lingvistice a lui Iorgu Iordan şi a lui Al. Rosetti (cu referire la două probleme), în „Communication interculturelle et littérature”, Galaţi, nr. 2 (10) / 2010, pp. 263-265). [58] Iorgu Iordan, Limba română actuală. O gramatică a „greşelilor”, ediţia a II-a, Editura Socec & Co., S.A.R., Bucureşti [1948], p. 471. [59] Care, totuşi, spre deosebire de majoritatea politrucilor ce se îndeletniceau cu „bunul mers” al culturii româneşti, avea o pregătire în domeniu destul de solidă. [60] Este vorba despre comunicarea Problemele ştiinţelor sociale în dezbaterea Academiei R.P.R. (susţinută de L. Răutu la 25 martie 1951). [61] Iorgu Iordan, Limba romînă contemporană, ediţie nouă [ediţia I – 1954], Editura Ministerului Învăţământului [Bucureşti], 1956, p. 71. [62] Apud Iordan, ibidem, p. 79. Sublinierile din acest text (ca şi din celelalte) ne aparţin. [63] Ibidem, p. 70. [64] Aristotel, Poetica (traducere de C. Balmuş), Editura Ştiinţifică, Bucureşti, 1957, p. 75. [65] Pentru o serie de consideraţii şi exemple privitoare la lingvişti în ipostaza lor de oameni metaforizanţi, vezi Cristinel Munteanu, O problemă de lingvistică „financiară”: analogia cuvinte – bani, în „Limba română”, Chişinău, anul XVIII, nr. 1-2, 2008, pp. 137-149.

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238 Coşeriu, Eugen, Prelegeri şi conferinţe (1992-1993), ca supliment al publicaţiei „Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară”, T. XXXIII, 1992-1993, Seria A, Lingvistică, Iaşi, 1994; Coşeriu, Eugeniu, Sincronie, diacronie şi istorie. Problema schimbării lingvistice, Editura Enciclopedică, Bucureşti, 1997; Coşeriu, Eugeniu, Lecţii de lingvistică generală, Editura Arc, Chişinău, 2000; Coşeriu, Eugenio [sic], Prelegeri şi seminarii la Universitatea „Lucian Blaga” din Sibiu, Editura Universităţii „Lucian Blaga” din Sibiu, 2004; Coşeriu, Eugeniu, Istoria filozofiei limbajului. De la începuturi până la Rousseau, Ediţie nouă, augmentată de Jörn Albrecht, cu o remarcă preliminară de Jürgen Trabant, Versiune românească şi indice de Eugen Munteanu şi Mădălina Ungureanu, Cu o prefaţă la ediţia românească de Eugen Munteanu, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2011; Darmesteter, Arsène, La vie des mots. Étudiée dans leur significations [1887], Librairie Delagrave, Paris, 1946; Dumistrăcel, Stelian, Lexic românesc. Cuvinte, metafore, expresii, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, Bucureşti, 1980; Flonta, Mircea, Darwin şi după Darwin. Studii de filozofie a biologiei, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2010; Graur, Al., Wald, L., Scurtă istorie a lingvisticii, Editura Ştiinţifică, Bucureşti, 1961; Humboldt, Wilhelm von, Despre diversitatea structurală a limbilor şi influenţa ei asupra dezvoltării spirituale a umanităţii [traducere de Eugen Munteanu], Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2008; Iordan, Iorgu, Limba română actuală. O gramatică a „greşelilor”, ediţia a II-a [ediţia I – 1943], Editura Socec & Co., S.A.R., Bucureşti [1948]; Iordan, Iorgu, Limba romînă contemporană, ediţie nouă [ediţia I – 1954], Editura Ministerului Învăţământului [Bucureşti], 1956; Itkonen, Esa, On Coseriu’s Legacy, în „Energeia” (Online-Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachphilosophie und Sprachwissenschaftsgeschichte), Ausagabe III, 2011, pp. 1-29 [http://energeia-online.de/]; Mounin, Georges, Istoria lingvisticii, Editura Paideia, Bucureşti, 1999; Munteanu, Cristinel, O problemă de lingvistică „financiară”: analogia cuvinte – bani, în „Limba română”, Chişinău, anul XVIII, nr. 1-2, 2008, pp. 137-149; Munteanu, Cristinel, Problema neologismelor (ca împrumuturi) din perspectiva politicii culturii, în „Analele Universităţii «Dunărea de Jos» din Galaţi”, Fascicula XXIV, Anul III, Nr. 2 (4), Lexic comun / Lexic specializat, Editura Europlus, Galaţi, 2010, pp. 364-374; Munteanu, Cristinel, Influenţa ideologiei marxiste asupra concepţiei lingvistice a lui Iorgu Iordan şi a lui Al. Rosetti (cu referire la două probleme), în „Communication interculturelle et littérature”, Galaţi, nr. 2 (10) / 2010, pp. 258-268; Paul, Hermann, Principles of the History of Language [1890], Translation [by H. A. Strong] of Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte [Niemeyer, Halle, 1886], College Park, McGrath, Maryland, reprinted 1970; Philippide, Alexandru, Principii de istoria limbii, în Philippide, Alexandru, Opere alese. Teoria limbii (editate de G. Ivănescu şi Carmen-Gabriela Pamfil, cu un studiu introductiv şi comentarii de G. Ivănescu), Editura Academiei R.S.R., Bucureşti, 1984, pp. 1-225; Poghirc, Cicerone, B.P. Hasdeu. Lingvist şi filolog, Editura Ştiinţifică, Bucureşti, 1968; Robins, R.H., Scurtă istorie a lingvisticii, Editura Polirom, Iaşi, 2003; Sala, Marius, 101 cuvinte moştenite, împrumutate şi create, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2010; Saussure, Ferdinand de, Curs de lingvistică generală, Editura Polirom, Iaşi, 1998; Saussure, Ferdinand de, Scrieri de lingvistică generală, Editura Polirom, Iaşi, 2004; Wald, Lucia, Modele concrete în istoria lingvisticii [1972], în Wald, Lucia, Pagini de teorie şi istorie a lingvisticii, Editura All, Bucureşti, 1998, pp. 48-55; Whitney, William Dwight, The Life and Growth of Language [1875], With a New Introduction by Charles F. Hockett, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1979; *** Tratat de lingvistică generală (redactori responsabili: Al. Graur, S. Stati, Lucia Wald), Editura Academiei R.S.R., Bucureşti, 1971.

239 Ironia ca modalitate stabilire a interacţiunii fatice în discursul public Gina Necula

Abstract: Human communication is seen as a very complex reality that needs meaning negociacion,mostly needed when irony is involved. Bronislaw Malinowski is the one who identifies the phatic function of language as fundamental for understanding the communication principles. Among the first conclusions drawn from his observations Malinowski states that language is used to perform social functions; in other words, social relationships and interaction were geared to the use of linguistic expressions. One of such functions consists of what he called fatic communion. Language is used to maintain fatic communion - a feeling of belonging to a community. Fatic communion involves the maintenance of a sense of community, of solidarity with other members of the group, of a particular status within the hierarchies of the group, and at the same time a feeling of accepting others and being oneself accepted by others. The present article tries to identify the way ”fatic communion” works within literary discourse, especially within censored literary text that supposed to make use of extra means in order to communicate with its reader Key words: irony,public discourse, label, phatic communion

Primele ipostaze semnificative ale cuvântului grecesc eironeia apar în dialogurile lui Platon (BC 428-347), unde este folosit cu accepţia de simulare intenţionată pe care auditoriul trebuie să o identifice. Aristotel (384-322) foloseşte termenul în Retorica, Cartea a III-a „cel ce recurge la ironie face o glumă în vederea lui însuşi”(19 b 8) . Quintilian în De Oratore, (AD 40-95) oferă o definiţie a ironiei, ca figură prin care se spune ceva intenţionând să se exprime opusul. Ironia este un mod de exprimare contrarium ei quod dicitur intelligendum est (Institutio Oratorica 9.22.44.) Mult timp însă, funcţia retorică a ironiei nu a fost luată în considerare decât ca ornament sau ca trop în limbajul poetic. Actualmente, putem vorbi despre ironie ca fiind prăpastia dintre cuvinte şi lume care introduce în discurs semnificaţii ce depăşesc limitele a ceea ce se spune. Multe dintre dezbaterile privitoare la ironie pornesc de la o distincţie pe care o întâlnim încă din primele lucrări în care se face referire la acest fenomen. Quintilian, (Institutio Oratorica: 9.2.45-6) se întreabă dacă ironia se referă la un singur cuvânt cu implicaţii diferite (adică dacă este un trop) sau este o modalitate discursivă de exprimare (dacă este o figură). Spre deosebire de metaforă sau alegorie, care necesită şi ele suplimentarea mijloacelor de semnificare în scopul identificării sensului din structura de adâncime (ceea ce se sugerează doar fără a se exprima expres), ironia are o limită evaluativă şi reuşeşte să provoace un răspuns emoţional celor care identifică corect valoarea semantică a enunţului. Se remarcă astfel faptul că ironia presupune un aspect afectiv, cerând un grad maxim de implicare atât din partea celui care creează enunţul ironic, cât şi din partea celui care interpretează, iar lipsa implicării afective duce la decodări incorecte ale mesajului sau la ratarea ironiei. Linda Hutcheon, în Irony’s Edge, priveşte ironia atât ca trop, cât şi ca modalitate de exprimare, înglobând în prezentare ambele ipostaze subliniate de Quintilian. Această carte urmăreşte descoperirea modalităţilor şi raţionamentelor prin care ironia se produce, este interpretată sau, dimpotrivă, se ratează interpretarea ei. Hutcheon foloseşte aici teorii ale discursului pentru a aduce în atenţie, de fapt, contextul social şi dimensiunea interactivă a ironiei, iar în acest spirit , în capitolul Risky Business: The “transideological” politics of irony, afirmă: „My particular interest in the transideological politics of irony is that would treat it not as a limited rhetorical trope or as an extended attitude to life, but as a discursive strategy operating at the level of language (verbal) or form (musical, visual, textual)”*. O observaţie importantă pe care o face Linda Hutcheon este aceea că ironia nu trebuie privită ca un trop izolat ci ca o problemă de politică lingvistică deoarece trebuie analizat contextul mai amplu în care ironia se produce pentru că ea presupune relaţii de putere bazate pe strategii de comunicare, adică relaţii de tipul includerii sau excluderii, intervenţie şi eschivare.

* Hutcheon, Irony, p. 17.

240 Citând afirmaţii făcute de Kerbrat-Orecchioni în L’ironie comme trope, (Poétique, 41, 108)*, Hutcheon ia în considerare faptul că ironia cere din partea cititorului o competenţă triplă: lingvistică, retorică şi ideologică. Competenţa lingvistică indică faptul că cititorul trebuie să înţeleagă ceea ce este doar sugerat prin text, fără a fi exprimat. Competenţa retorică presupune cunoaşterea unor norme retorice care constituie exerciţiul de limbaj şi de lectură, identificarea ironiei. Competenţa ideologică presupune asumarea unei experienţe în cadrul unei comunităţi lingvistice sau „comunităţi discursive” în accepţia autoarei citate. Trebuie să remarcăm că toate lucrările privitoare la ironie subliniază ca trăsătură lingvistică fundamentală dar şi impresionantă a ironiei faptul că, deşi este expusă tuturor, ea nu poate fi înţeleasă şi savurată decât de către cei care o studiază atent pentru că se bazează pe întreruperea consensului şi nu se limitează la a semnifica opusul celor exprimate, ci exprimă, în acelaşi timp, mai multe puncte de vedere, în funcţie de percepţie/interpretare. În A Rhetoric of Irony, Wayne Booth face precizarea că ironia este văzută de obicei ca ceva ce subminează claritatea, eliberează gândurile şi distruge dogmele „liberates by destroing all dogma or destroys by revealing the inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation”†. Elementele definitorii pentru ironie, identificate de autorul menţionat mai sus, sunt: - un procedeu retoric voit creat de către oameni în scopul de a fi auzită sau citită de către alţii (enunţurile ironice nu sunt simple deschideri oferite involuntar, ci au întotdeauna un scop precis); - toate enunţurile ironice sunt mascate, rolul cititorului fiind acela de a reconstrui semnificaţia atribuind enunţului alte valori decât cele exprimate de structura de suprafaţă; - apar o serie de afirmaţii pe care autorul se aşteaptă ca cititorul să le respingă; - modul în care ironia acţionează are rolul de a uni sau de a-i dezbina pe autori şi pe cititorii lor; - atât ironia cât şi ambiguitatea sunt moduri de exprimare pluralistice; - se cere reconstrucţia sensului. Trebuie făcută de la început precizarea că în cazul ironiei care apare în conversaţiile faţă în faţă există modalităţi prin care unul dintre vorbitori poate atrage atenţia asupra faptului că este ironic într-o anumită secvenţă din discurs printr-un semn discret cu cotul sau făcând cu ochiul. În cazul ironiei prezente în textul scris e nevoie de o serie de mărci suplimentare prin care autorul să poată semnaliza cititorului că e cazul să reconstruiască mesajul pentru că el intenţionează să spună altceva decât exprimă, aparent, cuvintele sale. Asemenea mărci suplimentare de semnalizare a ironiei sunt schimbarea de ritm sau prin ieşirea din stil, iar în unele cazuri invitaţia către o interpretare ironică vine chiar prin titlu. Morier‡ plasează ironia în centrul opoziţiei – situată la nivel moral – dintre cel care judecă şi cel judecat. Astfel ironia este proprietatea celui moral. Lumea din care provenim formează baza aşteptărilor, presupunerilor şi tiparelor de gândire şi exprimare pe care le dobândesc vorbitorii – limba în uz. Ironia nu presupune o simplă decodare a unui mesaj inversat, ea este mai mult un proces semantic complex de relaţionare, diferenţiere şi combinare între sensurile exprimate şi cele neexprimate. Discursul este o formă de practică socială, de interacţiune între participanţii la diverse situaţii particulare. Se afirmă în lucrările de specialitate că actul/activitatea lingvistic(ă) se supune unor norme (precizie, proprietate etc.). Scopul strategic al ironiei este de a permite locutorului să se sustragă normelor de coerenţă impuse de teoria argumentaţiei: autorul unei enunţări ironice creează un enunţ care posedă, în acelaşi timp, două valori contradictorii: defensivă şi ofensivă. Problema ironiei a fost foarte intens discutată în diverse domenii, de la lingvistică, la ştiinţele politice, de la sociologie, la istorie, estetică şi religie, filozofie şi retorică, psihologie şi antropologie. Ironia a fost localizată şi explicată în literatură, artele plastice, muzică, dans, teatru,

* Apud Hutcheon, Encoding and Decoding, p. 95. † Booth, Rhetoric, p. ix. ‡ Morier, Dictionnaire, p.155.

241 conversaţie şi lista poate continua. Fie că este privită ca figură retorică sau ca modalitate de a vedea lumea, ironia pare să fi devenit un mod de expresie al epocii moderne.

1. Accepţii ale ironiei

Având în vedere diversitatea abordărilor, considerăm necesar să prezentăm aici mai multe definiţii ale ironiei pentru a putea evidenţia complexitatea fenomenului. Definită în termenii lui Morier, ironia nu este o figură de stil, aşa cum ne-am obişnuit, ci un mijloc de măsurare a moralităţii: dacă o persoană este ironică, atunci este ridicată la statutul de judecător al celorlalţi, dacă este subiectul unei ironii, cazul este clar, persoana este infamă . Definiţiile semantice subliniază faptul că ironie înseamnă să spui ceva şi să intenţionezi altceva, fiind apreciată în multe lucrări ca o inversiune semantică (antifrază – a spune ceva şi a implica exact opusul). Ironia presupune atribuirea unei atitudini evaluative aşa că aici intervine funcţia EMOTIVĂ/EXPRESIVĂ. Înseamnă că ironia este un act perlocuţionar pentru că produce efecte supra ideilor, sentimentelor, sau acţiunilor audienţei. O semantică a ironiei arată modul în care se stabileşte o conexiune relaţională şi integratoare între ceea ce se spune şi ceea ce nu se spune. Această conexiune nu se reduce la antifrază, ci poate fi văzută ca oscilaţie între două niveluri, unde atât unul cât şi celălalt rămân active. Contextul interpretativ al ironiei trebuie înţeles ca un context integrator al mai multor dimensiuni: dimensiunea circumstanţială, dimensiunea textuală şi dimensiunea intertextuală. Rolul crucial în decodarea ironiei îi revine interpretului. Rolul acestuia depinde de tipul de comunitate lingvistică căreia acesta îi aparţine. Ironia implică necesitatea evaluării pentru că favorizează un climat de îndoială. Ironia este un mecanism retoric extrem de complex care depinde de puterea de înţelegere a cuiva, ştiind că vorbitorul exprimă altceva decât vrea să se înţeleagă, dar, de fapt, „defularea faţă de maculare se manifestă prin ironia ori sarcasmul la adresa fetişurilor lexicale şi de turnură, ce erau plasate mai mult decât derizoriu în limbajul conversaţiei din discursul privat (am auzit, de exemplu, înjurături de „statut”, de „codul familiei socialiste” sau de „retribuirea după cantitatea şi calitatea muncii”). Ce era „potrivit” în discursul public, recunoscut ca „semnal”, ca marcă pentru o retorică a consimţământului, devenea astfel ţinta respingerii organice în limbajul familiar. De altfel, la alt nivel, mostre ale unei asemenea analize empirice sui-generis au fost transcrise în vorbirea unor personaje din proze ale lui Marin Preda sau Augustin Buzura (ce înseamnă „unealtă a chiaburilor”, „duşman al poporului”, „acţiuni de subminare”, „a-şi lua angajamentul”, „a demasca” etc)”*. În capitolul Modeling Meaning, Hutcheon defineşte ironia ca fiind este un proces comunicativ† şi identifică trei caracteristici semantice ale sensului exprimării ironice: relaţional, inclusiv/de incluziune, diferenţial. Ironia este o strategie relaţională în sensul că operează atât între sensuri (cele exprese şi cele nespuse), cât şi între oameni (aflaţi în diverse ipostaze: ironişti, interpreţi, ţinte). Sensul ironic este consecinţa unei relaţii între cei care creează enunţul şi diferitele posibilităţi de interpretare/semnificare. Puterea lucrurilor nespuse de a le concura pe cele spuse este trăsătura semantică definitorie a ironiei. Prin ironie, ca strategie discursivă, Dominique Maingueneau înţelege „subvertir la frontière entre ce qui est assumé et ce qui ne l’est pas par le locuteur”‡. Iese astfel în evidenţă o altă trăsătură caracteristică ironiei şi anume aceea că ea presupune o evaluare, o judecată, o măsurătoare, o punere sub semnul întrebării, funcţionând atât ca antifrază, cât şi ca strategie evaluativă care presupune o atitudine a codificatorului de mesajul faţă de text, atitudine care, în schimb, permite şi pretinde celui care decodează mesajul o interpretare şi o evaluare a materialului primit. Din punct de vedere stilistic, ironia reprezintă „un exemplu de conotaţie prin asociaţie antonimică in absentia”§, ea grefând pe conţinutul literar valori care supradetermină denotaţia. Structura de suprafaţă a textului ironic simulează o atitudine afirmativă, în timp ce contextul o

* Dumistrăcel, Inerţii lingvistice. † Hutcheon, Irony, p. 58. ‡ Maingueneau, Hétérogénéité, p.149. § Lesovici, op. cit., p. 79.

242 demască drept negativă. În faţa textului ironic, cititorul trebuie să refacă sensurile care au fost omise sau ascunse. Mircea Doru Lesovici consideră că „ironia trage pe sfoară; înfăşoară şi desfăşoară înţelegerea; în actul comunicării, ironistul pleacă de la mai mult la puţin, iar conştiinţa provocată, de la puţin la mai mult”*. Definiţia cea mai comună a ironiei – ca figură de stil – face referire la simulare, indiferent dacă avem în vedere textele anticilor sau pe cele ale modernilor. Aşadar, ironia este legată – intrinsec – de simulare, ceea ce devine semnul ei distinctiv în raport cu alte metalogisme. Deşi tratatele de stilistică prezintă ironia în directă dependenţă de simulare, ea are mai degrabă un accent bivalent, exprimat de raportul simulare/ disimulare†. Simplu metalogism sau nu, ironia este recunoscută ca o apariţie proteică, având o insaţiabilă capacitate de a-şi apropria diverse alte strategii şi de a schimba permanent centrul de greutate în raportul simulare/ disimulare. Ironia este definită adesea ca o figură de stil, element din categoria „recuzitei” stilisticii. Prezentată ca figură de gândire sau metalogism, ironia se subordonează „textului”, care este triumfător şi se împănează din când în când cu figuri de stil. Ne aflăm în faţa hegemoniei textului gândit ca o sumă de figuri de stil sau ca un inventar al lor.

2. Participanţii. Factori care facilitează ocurenţa ironiei Ironia este, în cele din urmă, un act social la care participă ironistul şi publicul său ţintă (atât cei care înţeleg cât şi cei care nu înţeleg). Este o comunicare intersubiectivă şi interactivă. Se creează relaţii dinamice între text (şi contextul său), ironist, interpret şi contextul situaţional care (sau în care) a generat mesajul. Ironistul, deşi este cel care intenţionează să stabilească o relaţie ironică între ceea ce spune şi ceea ce nu spune, dar speră să se înţeleagă, poate să nu reuşească întotdeauna să-şi comunice intenţiile. Interpretul este cel care atribuie ironia cuiva şi apoi o interpretează: cu alte cuvinte, el este cel care decide dacă enunţul este ironic sau nu şi ce particularităţi ironice ar putea avea. Este evident în aceste condiţii că acest proces al interpretării se produce dincolo de intenţiile ironistului. Problema care se pune în acest punct este dacă rolul principal îl are cel care creează mesajul sau cel care îl interpretează, depistarea ironiei necesitând atât talentul ironistului, cât şi atenţia interpretului. În mod cert nu există nici o garanţie în ceea ce priveşte interpretarea exactă a enunţului ironic, cu alte cuvinte, creatorul ironiei nu are nici o garanţie că interpretul va primi ironia în acelaşi mod în care s-a intenţionat ca ea să semnifice. Hutcheon sugerează ca verb care să descrie mai bine acţiunea interpretului „a face/a crea” în locul lui „a primi”. Astfel, ironia apare ca un proces productiv şi activ de atribuire şi interpretare care implică un act intenţional acela al deducţiei. Interpretul atribuie atât sensurile cât şi motivaţiile ironistului. Un alt aspect care se evidenţiază este acela că ironia va conota diferit pentru interpreţi diferiţi. Din punct de vedere la interpretului, ironia este un act de voinţă care presupune reconstrucţia sensului în concordanţă cu, dar şi diferit de ceea ce s-a enunţat. Interpretarea este direcţionată de stările conflictuale din text. Din punctul de vedere al ironistului, ironia este o transmitere intenţionată de informaţii şi atitudini evaluative, altele decât cele prezente explicit. Problema majoră care apare în cazul ironiei, dar şi al parodiei este cea a interpretării. Ambele fenomene implică particularităţi de timp/perioadă, spaţiu, statut social şi de cultură generală, rasă, sex, naţionalitate, vârstă, religie, profesie (toate grupările micropolitice în care ne încadrăm prin voinţa noastră sau a societăţii). Din acest motiv se afirmă de către specialişti faptul că ironia funcţionează numai în context dialogic sau intersubiectiv, între persoane care au în comun faptul că provin din acelaşi mediu social, au aceleaşi informaţii culturale şi aceleaşi păreri despre lume şi viaţă, ceea ce face ca ironia să devină aproape un dialect. În realitate, vorbitorii trăiesc în mai multe comunităţi discursive în acelaşi timp: o comunitate de profesie , una de religie, una politică, etc. şi în felul acesta se creează ceea ce Hutcheon, Intention and Interpretation, numeşte „comunităţi discursive”‡ care pot fi definite printr-o configuraţie generală de cunoştinţe comune,

* Idem, p. 92. † D Ş L., p. 98. ‡ Hutcheon, op. cit, p. 178.

243 credinţe, valori şi strategii comunicative. Comunităţi lingvistice diferite vor interpreta diferit ironia. Aşa este şi cazul particular pe care îl avem în obiectivul lucrării, acela al limbii de lemn – generaţiile mai tinere, care nu au fost confruntate cu discursul comunist, nu vor putea atribui textului tot atâta energie subtextuală ca cei care l-au „experimentat”. Este evident că transferul de informaţie de la un membru al comunităţii la altul este parţial, incomplet, fragmentar, dar dacă se împărtăşeşte măcar o parte, destul astfel încât ironia să poată fi detectată, înseamnă că scopul comunicativ este atins. Noţiunea de comunitate lingvistică este una dinamică, presupunând transformări continui pentru că ceea ce sociolingviştii numesc „un eveniment comunicativ” presupune o diversitate de discursuri posibile care se creează într-o comunitate. Oameni diferiţi trăiesc în lumi discursive diferite şi întregul proces comunicativ este alterat şi distorsionat de existenţa acestor lumi. În conformitate cu părerea exprimată de Sperber and Wilson* în Relevance: Communication and Cognition, responsabilitatea de a garanta identificarea ironiei îi revine celui care codează mesajul, care trebuie să coordoneze presupunerile despre codurile şi informaţia contextuală la care au acces potenţialii cititori. Rolul interpretului este, de fapt, acela de a atribui intenţia, conţinutul semantic neexprimat expres, dar implicat în mesaj, precum şi sensurile posibile însă identificarea ironiei este rezultatul unui efort de interpretare care necesită aptitudini speciale. Aceste aptitudini operează la niveluri diferite. Mai întâi la nivel semantic: vorbitorul trebuie să fie capabil să identifice incongruenţele; la nivel pragmatic: vorbitorul trebuie să intuiască intenţiile creatorului de mesaj sau scopul comunicativ avut în vedere. Observăm că ironia este o modalitate de a crea o comuniune fatică între creatorul ei şi interpret. În situaţia citată, intenţia autorului de a sublinia ridicolul unei comunicări înţesată cu lozinci nu ar avea nici un impact dacă cititorul nu ar fi dispus să decodeze mesajul de la sfârşit către început, folosind drept cheie de lectură sugestia că e vorba de un singur discurs care se repetă şi la care personajul, obişnuit fiind, reacţionează tot cu un tipar. Gaunt, în Troubadours and Irony, consideră ca singură posibilitate de a fi sigur de faptul că un enunţ este voit ironic existenţa unor cunoştinţe detaliate despre sistemul de referinţe sociale, personale, lingvistice şi culturale ale vorbitorilor†. În accepţia lui W. Booth‡ etapele pe care trebuie să le parcurgă cititorul pentru a putea fi capabil să recupereze adevăratele semnificaţii ale unui enunţ: Etapa I. Cititorului i se cere să respingă sensul literal. Dacă citeşte cu atenţie, atunci este imposibil să nu observe incongruenţa unor cuvinte. Etapa a II-a. Se încearcă explicaţii alternative. Aceste alternative sunt, de obicei, incongruente cu ceea ce par a afirma enunţurile. Etapa a III-a. Trebuie luată o decizie în legătură cu convingerile autorului. Întrebându-se retoric Is there a Standard of Taste in Irony?, Booth§ stabileşte o serie de factori care pot întrerupe cooperarea/comuniunea: ignoranţa, lipsa ABILITĂŢII DE CONCENTRARE, prejudecata, lipsa exerciţiului şi inadecvarea emoţională. 1. ignoranţa: cu cât este mai departe de – epoca în care cititorul trăieşte, de ţara sa/cultura, de profesia sa, de afinităţile religioase, de generaţia sa – cu atât mai greu se va stabili contractul de lectura; 2. lipsa abilităţii de concentrare – dacă cititorul nu are experienţă de lectură şi nu se poate concentra, nu poate identifica conotaţiile; 3. prejudecata – poate opera pe o axă de valori. Fiecare cititor este victima unor prejudecăţi care nu îi permit accesul la toate semnificaţiile textului; 4. lipsa exerciţiului; 5. inadecvarea emoţională sau lipsa comuniunii fatice.

* Apud Hutcheon, op. cit. p. 120. † Apud Hutcheon, Intention and Interpretation, p. 116. ‡ Idem, p. 10. § Idem, p. 223-227.

244 Autorul face, de fapt, cititorului o invitaţie la reconstrucţie. Dacă există victime ale ironiei, atunci acestea nu sunt autorul sau cititorul, chiar dacă aceştia se includ în categoria victimelor. Totuşi, reconstrucţia ironiei este, în esenţă, variabilă. După cum arată Booth*, variabilele sunt: - gradul de deschidere – cât de multă activitate secretă pretinde autorul pentru reconstrucţia ironiei; - gradul de stabilitate al reconstrucţiei – când poate cititorul considera misiunea sa de reconstrucţie a ironiei încheiată; - scopul „dezvăluirii adevărului”, sau aria acoperită de reconstrucţie.

3. Ironia ca interacţiune fatică Scopul demersului nostru teoretic din paginile anterioare este acela de a asigura cadru loptim pentru a introduce tipul de discurs ironic supus atenţiei aici şi anume: discursul public (ironic). Acceptând faptul că discursul public este generat de dialogul social, reprezentând o modalitate de activitate discursivă de grup, un proces complex de comunicare, constând într-un schimb masiv de informaţii, adevărate sau false, de opinii şi comentarii, schimb realizat pe căi şi prin mijloace variate, la care participă grupuri sociale cu un anumit profil sociologic, trebuie să menţionăm faptul că acest dialog social este cu atât mai necesar în cazul discursului jurnalistic cu cât el depinde de interacţiunea emiţătorului cu publicul ţintă. Graniţa dintre discursul public şi cel privat este transgresată printr-o funcţie specifică - funcţia fatică, o funcţie neglijată în majoritatea lucrărilor de specialitate datorită accepţiei şi rolului secundar pe care i le acordă Roman Jakobson. Pentru a ne argumenta afirmaţiile ne întoarcem aşadar la accepţia lui Bronislaw Malinowski (The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages, p. 313) asupra faticităţii unui mesaj. Plecând de la premisa că funcţia principală a limbii nu este aceea de a exprima gândirea, Malinowschi identifică drept funcţie fundamentală a comunicării aceea de a juca un rol pragmatic în comportamentul uman. Este vorba aici despre limba folosită ca instrument de comuniune socială demonstrând că oamenii se adună şi comunică între ei pentru a arăta că fac parte dintr-un grup. Schimbul zilnic, banal de amabilităţi care se întâlneşte în comunicare este numit de autor cu termenul „sociabilities” pentru a sublinia nevoia omului de socializare. Din observaţiile lui Malinowski reiese că limba este folosită, în primul rând, pentru a îndeplini funcţii sociale, adică relaţiile şi interacţiunile sociale sunt negociate prin intermediul expresiei lingvistice. Ne referim aici la ceea ce autorul numeşte „comuniune fatică” şi pe care autorul o descrie ca fiind: „simţul apartenenţei la o comunitate”(p. 313). Comuniunea fatică implică menţinerea sentimentului apartenenţei la o comunitate, a solidarităţii între membrii grupului, dar şi un sentiment de acceptare a celorlalţi şi de acceptare de către ceilalţi. Astfel relaţiile între membrii unei comunităţi lingvistice pot fi descrise, în termenii lui Malinowski, astfel: contact / relaţii ierarhice / sentimente pozitive = comuniune fatică solidaritate comuniune fatică statut social relaţii sociale

Toţi aceşti factori definesc limba ca un fenomen dinamic pentru că interacţiunea fatică presupune acordul în privinţa semnificaţiilor, iar faticitatea poate fi negociată şi construită prin expresii. Comuniunea fatică stă la baza proceselor interpretative la care cititorul trebuie să participe în scopul identificării corecte a semnificaţiilor intenţionate de către autor dar neexprimate explicit. În cazul ironiei cu mize politice, reconstrucţia ironiei depinde atât de o utilizare corectă a informaţiilor despre autor dar şi de descoperirea unei expresii care îşi actualizează sensurile doar printr-o lectură ironică. În cazul ironiei politice trebuie luat în considerare atât contextul lingvistic cât şi cel extralingvistic. Supunem atenţiei aici două contexte care au intrat în memoria colectivă cu conotaţie ironică, dar şi cu referenţialitate directă. Primul fragment de discurs public ironic este: „Mihaela, dragostea mea, am învins!“ cuvinte rostite de Mircea Geoană înainte de anunţarea oficială a rezultatelor alegerilor prezidenţialedin

* Idem, p. 234.

245 2009. Interesant vizavi de acest exemplu este faptul că el a ajuns să fie folosit în comunicarea publică ca un frazeologism care poate fi decodat cu trimitere la ocupantul locului doi într-o competiţie, în ciuda falsei aparenţă de supremaţie. Astfel, titlul unui articol de pe www.dailycotcodac.ro este Călin Goia, dragostea mea, am învins!, iar comentariul este relevant pentru modul în care acest fragment de discurs a ajuns să fie perceput ca un exemplu de discurs repetat care poate fi modificat în funcţie de context: Băi, n-o să vă vină să credeţi, am câştigat concursul ăla de la MTV, artistul susţinut de noi a ajuns pe locul 2. Dacă istoria ne-a învăţat ceva, acel ceva e că locul doi e ca o victorie pentru noi, românii. Imaginaţi-vă doar că am lua locul doi la campionatul european de fotbal, la Eurovision sau la concursul pentru cel mai lung cârnat din lume! N-am fi cei mai buni din lume? (http://www.dailycotcodac.ro/2010/12/calin-goia-dragostea-mea-am-invins/). În felul acesta, expresia citată ajunge să fie folosită ca un clişeu ironic. Un alt exemplu de ironie generată de propagarea unui/unor clişee este titlul unei comedii, recent lansată pe piaţa artistică românească. Comedia poartă titlul: "Blonda, chiorul şi piticul" despre care autorul afirmă că nu este o piesă politică în ciuda faptului că mentalul colectiv românesc a ataşat deja cele trei epitete unor personaje din lumea politică. Spectacolul se vrea o satiră a societăţii de astăzi la care se râde foarte mult al cărei titlu este o manevră de marketing. Ambiguitatea deliberată este evidentă din faptul că autorul concepe textul astfel încât să poată fi interpretat diferit de către cei care îşi asumă clişeul, ca înregimentare, de către cei care îl resping, ca revoltă. Aşa se produce o viziune dublă asupra textului. Există situaţii în care singura posibilitate de a evada dintr-o societate meschină este ironia: un mod de exprimare prin care se poate trage un semnal de alarmă asupra pericolului reprezentat de limitarea accesului la informaţie. Situaţii de genul celor prezentate mai sunt relevă importanţa interacţiunii fatice în decodarea semnificaţiilor contextului ironic, semnificaţii care pot fi îmbogăţite prin preluarea clişeului de către receptori şi diversificarea lui sub mai multe forme.

Bibliografie: Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words 2nd edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975. Bidu-Vrănceanu, Angela, Cristina Călăraşu, Liliana Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, Mihaela Mancaş, Gabriela Pană Dindelegan, Dicţionar general de ştiinţe. Ştiinţe ale limbii, Bucureşti, Editura Ştiinţifică, 2001. Booth, Wayne, A Rhetoric of Irony, Ltd. London, The University of Chicago Press, 1975. Dâncu, Vasile Sebastian, Comunicarea simbolică. Arhitectura discursului publicitar; Editura „Dacia”, Cluj- Napoca, 2001. Dumistrăcel, Stelian, Discursul repetat în textul jurnalistic, Editura Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” Iaşi, 2006. Grice, H. P., Logic and conversation, în Cole & Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, New York, Academic Press, 1975. Hutcheon, Linda, Irony’s Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony, Routledge, London & New York, 1994. Jakobson, Roman, Essais de linguistique générale, traduit de l’anglais et préfacé par Nicolas Ruwet, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1963. Lesovici, Mircea Doru, Ironia, Iaşi, Institutul European, 1999. Maingueneau, Dominique, L’Analyse du Discours, Hachette, Paris, 1991 Malinowski, Bronislaw, The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages, în The Meaning of Meaning – A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism by C.K. Ogden & J.A. Richards with supplementary essays by B. Malinowski & F. G. Crookshank, A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Brace & Company New York, 1923. Mihai, Gheorghe, Argumentarea prin dialog, în Psiho-logica argumentării dialogale, Editura Academiei, Bucureşti, 1987. Morier, R, H., Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique, Paris, PUF, 1961:155. Roşca, Luminiţa, Producţia textului jurnalistic, Editura POLIROM, Iaşi, 2004. Rovenţa-Frumuşani, Semiotica discursului ştiinţific, Editura Ştiinţifică, Bucureşti, 1995. Searle, J. Intentionality: An Essay in the Psilosophy of Mind, Cambridge: Canbridge University Press, 1983 Slama- Cazacu, Tatiana, Stratageme comunicaţionale şi manipularea, Iaşi, Editura Polirom, 2000. Slama-Cazacu, Tatiana, Lecturi de psiholingvistică, Bucureşti, Editura Didactica şi Pedagogică, 1980. Teodorescu, Cristiana-Nicola, III Analiza discursului politic: Probleme teoretice şi metodologice, în Patologia limbajului totalitar, Editura Scrisul Românesc, Craiova, 2000. Zafiu, Rodica, Diversitate stilistică în româna actuală; Bucureşti, Editura Universităţii Bucureşti, 2001.

246 Frecvenţa eponimelor în discursul jurnalistic

Carmen Opriţ-Maftei*

Abstract: The present paper represents a subdivision of a more complex study that aims at proving that eponymy may be considered a highly productive word building process within the scope of the scientific discourse. Our intent is neither to dwell on the lexicologists’ debates regarding the status of eponymy, nor to make an exhaustive theoretical approach to the eponyms or insist on any formal or structural aspect of what will be outlined to be a general characterization. Although eponyms are to be found in most fields, little research has been done so far to their proper study. Specialists have assigned them to various compartments of linguistics and stylistics. Eponymy is regarded as the process of deriving names from eponyms, thus creating new words. Our main concern is to provide a comprehensive framework for the lexical interpretation and illustration of eponymy in journalistic discourse. The contemporary terminology has undergone transformations in various specialized fields; therefore, new concepts have been introduced, thus contributing to the enrichment of the vocabulary. The percentage held by eponyms is considerable. Keywords: eponyms, journalistic discourse, contemporary terminology, enrichment of the vocabulary

Introducere Interesul lingviştilor cu privire la cuvintele care se pot forma din nume proprii în limba română (eponime) a început să capete contur relativ recent în lingvistica românească, chiar dacă au un statut controversat şi se preferă alţi termeni (metonimii, conversiuni etc.) pentru a desemna această posibilitate lexicală. Prezenta lucrare se concentrează pe investigarea productivităţii lexicale a eponimiei în discursul jurnalistic, realizând o scurtă prezentare a modului de receptare a eponimelor în limba română, incidenţa acestora în discursul jurnalistic, posibilităţi de clasificare. Pentru analiză am pornit de la articolele semnate de N.C. Munteanu (publicate în Formula AS în perioada 26 martie 2010 – 25 martie 2011) după care am introdus eponimele astfel identificate în motoare de căutare pe internet. Ne interesează în primul rând eponimele formate în limba română de la numele unor oameni cunoscuţi în politica românească actuală dar vom face o scurtă referire şi la alte categorii de eponime care fac apar în mod frecvent în limbajul jurnalistic.

Modul de receptare a eponimelor în limba română Termenul eponim provine din limba greacă eponimos însemnând cel care dă numele şi a pătruns în limba română prin filieră franceză. Pentru a putea încadra această modalitate de formare a cuvintelor în limba română din nume proprii ne vom referi la limba engleză unde fenomenul a căpătat amploare (eponyms, eponymy) existând numeroase studii, articole şi dicţionare de eponime. În limba engleză eponimele au fost studiate din diferite perspective nu numai morfologică ori istorică ci şi semantică, pragmatică ori stilistică, dovedindu-se a fi şi în momentul actual o sursă bogată de cercetare. Primele încercări de definire a termenului sunt plasate în anii 1990 când McArthur [1] îi atribuie trei sensuri. În limba română, termenul eponim se foloseşte rar, cu precădere de către anglişti şi nu apare nici măcar în dicţionarele de specialitate. Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române [2] îl explică drept adj. 1. magistrat care, în antichitate, dădea numele său anului, 2. adj. care dă numele său unui oraş, unei regiuni etc. –din fr. éponyme. Explicaţia faptului că termenul în discuţie nu a înregistrat o evoluţie semantică în limba română este că aceasta a preluat termenul din limba franceză unde nu s-a manifestat un interes prea mare pentru această posibilitate lexicală [3]. Internetul (http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eponim) însă datorită faptului că este actualizat în permanenţă oferă o explicaţie mai amplă a termenului, propunând două categorii de explicaţii. Astfel se precizează că în lingvistica românească termenul eponim are trei sensuri diferite, şi anume: 1. personaje ale căror nume proprii ajung să desemneze o altă entitate decât cea pe care au numit-o iniţial; 2. numele proprii devenite nume comune; 3. substantive comune care îşi au sursa în nume proprii.

* Lect. dr., Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos” din Galaţi

247 A doua categorie atribuie termenul eponim o sferă mai largă de sensuri în care sunt incluse şi alte categorii lexicale cum ar fi toponimele (totalitate a numelor proprii de locuri, de ape, de munţi etc. dintr-o ţară sau dintr-o regiune, DEX) [4]. Această categorie se referă la limba română în general în care este folosit cu următoarele şase sensuri: 1. cuvânt derivat de la nume proprii – persoane, locuri geografice, personaje literare, mitologice, etc; 2. substantive iniţial proprii, care au devenit termeni comuni, desemnînd clase de obiecte, sunt propuse exemple ca atlas, macadam, etc. 3. magistrat care în antichitate dădea numele său anului (definiţie propusă şi de DEX) [5]; 4. termen pentru desemnarea unei staţiuni arheologice unde a fost cercetată pentru prima dată o cultură materială şi care a dat numele culturii; 5. semne, sindroame, boli, care poartă patronimul personalităţilor ştiinţifice (în general) care le-au realizat, observat, descris primele; 6. care dă numele său unui oraş, unei regiuni, etc. Dintre studiile recente ale lingviştilor români, dedicate acestei posibilităţi de formare a cuvintelor din nume proprii, menţionăm lucrarea lui Constantin Frâncu [6] “O nouă posibilitate lexicală a limbii române: formarea de verbe şi substantive postverbale din nume proprii de persoană” care propune o clasificare a verbelor astfel formate în trei categorii: împrumuturi moderne a căror temă conţine un nume propriu, de exemplu boicota < fr. boycotter

Frecvenţa eponimelor în discursul jurnalistic Discursul jurnalistic actual este caracterizat în general de o tendinţă exagerată a stârni interesul cititorilor prin duritatea ori dramatismul cuvintelor, de a şoca ori a capta atenţia prin jocuri de cuvinte ori alte modalităţi lexicale. Utilizarea uneori exagerată a eponimelor formate de la numele unor politicieni ori oameni de afaceri cunoscuţi se explică prin încercarea de a imprima o tentă de umor sau ironie caracterizată de lingvişti drept ”de un gust foarte îndoielnic” [8]. Se folosesc frecvent numele proprii ale unor politicieni ori oameni de afaceri ca un determinant având funcţie de identificare, de exemplu: guvernul Boc. În discursul jurnalistic numeroase eponime provenite de la nume de persoană autohtone au o nuanţă depreciativă, căpătând anumite conotaţii negative cum ar fi de exemplu eponimele care rezultă de la numele lui Marian Vanghelie, asociat în principal cu precaritatea intelectuală şi cu probleme de exprimare. Dacă introducem într-un motor de căutare pe internet numele Marian

248 Vanghelie găsim numeroase articole care abundă în eponime de genul: vanghelizare, e-Vanghelizare, anti-vanghelizare, vanghelioane, vanghelisme, vanghelizat, vanghelios etc. Verbele obţinute de la numele acestor oameni politici sunt în general tranzitive. Numeroase verbe se formează în limba română de la nume proprii româneşti cu ajutorul sufixului neologic -iza: Crin Antonescu – a criniza, Irinel Columbeanu – a columbeniza, Gigi Becali: a becaliza – a cărui explicaţie o găsim tot pe internet - „proces ipotetic de transformare a unor oameni normali în războinici ai luminii” [9], Adrian Severin- a severeniza, Corneliu Vadim Tudor – a vadimiza, Marian Vanghelie – a vangheliza („Berlusconi a vanghelizat Google în Gogol” [10], („dacă gramatica nu e studiată corect, vom avea ”succesuri” şi vom vangheliza limba română” – www.mediafax.ro) etc. Putem identifica şi o serie de substantive abstracte verbale: crinizare, becalizare, vadimizare, vanghelizare etc. Există şi numeroase substantive formate de la nume de oameni politici, cele mai frecvent întâlnite fiind: Adrian Severin: un severin („Cât valorează un Severin românesc” [11] ), Adrian Năstase: un năstase, Emil Boc: „Aşa cum Undrea e un Băsescu în fustă, Vass e un Boc în fustă” [12]), „sunt un „boc” cu creastă că-s preşedinte” [13], Mircea Geoană – (nişte) geoane, geoni şi geoane [14] , „vă îmbătaţi cu apă chioară şi faceţi geoane degeaba” [15], Elena Udrea – o „Elena Băsescu reloaded” [16], Nicolae Văcăroiu – „toţi văcăroii şi patricii” [17], „cine vrea un Vanghelie să urle în partid la UNPR” [18] etc. Se mai poate identifica şi o categorie de eponime care include împrumuturi din alte limbi a căror temă conţine un nume propriu: Marian Vanghelie – numit şi „Obama de Ferentari”< numele preşedintelui american Barack Obama – simbol al puterii; Emil Boc – „eu sunt Maradona din PD-L cu burtica un pic cam mare” [19] < Diego Maradona – cunoscut fotbalist argentinian retras din activitate etc. În funcţie de modul de alcătuire a diferitelor structuri care includ eponime se poate realiza o următoarea clasificare a eponimelor în discursul jurnalistic. Astfel sunt frecvent folosite structuri de genul: • substantiv + eponim: cabinetul Boc, cabinetul Tăriceanu, alianţa Crin Antonescu, soluţia Vadim; • substantiv + două (sau mai multe) eponime unite prin cratimă: guvernul Băsescu-Boc, alianţa Becali- Diaconescu-Oprea-Vadim, stenogramele Ghiţă-Vîntu, paralelism Vadimo- Băsescian, etc. • adjectiv provenit de la un eponim: vanghelioasă (cultură vanghelioasă, limbă vanghelioasă etc.) băsescian (tupeu băsescian, regim băsescian, curcubeu băsescian, sfat băsescian, etc) care poate apărea şi la superlativ cel mai băsescian ministru; tăricesc (stil tăricesc (< Călin Popescu Tăriceanu) etc.; • eponim – substantiv comun + adjectiv provenit de la un eponim: o nouă culme a machiavelismului (

Concluzii Studierea acestor clase de lexeme permite noi direcţii de investigare. Eponimele sunt numeroase în toate tipurile de discurs şi de limbaj. Recenzarea lor a captat interesul lingviştilor română în ultimii ani care s-a concretizat în mai multe studii şi lucrări. Discursul jurnalistic actual este caracterizat de prezenţa unui număr mare de eponime (unele facând parte din vocabularul uzual, altele nou apărute). Se remarcă tendinţa jurnaliştilor de a folosi excesiv derivate de la numele de persoană cu intenţia de a oferi o tentă de umor ori ironie. Frecvenţa utilizării lor se explică prin faptul că pot exprima printr-un singur cuvânt o gamă largă de caracteristici. Deşi nu sunt agreate în mod deosebit de lingvişti, eponimele provenite de la numele proprii ale unor oameni politici reprezintă o sursă inepuizabilă de formare de cuvinte noi în limba română.

249 Note [1] McArthur, Thomas (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pag. 350. [2] Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române, ediţia a II-a, Univers Enciclopedic, Bucureşti, 1998, pag. 345 [3] Popescu, Floriana, „Studiul eponimelor în limbile engleză şi română”, Rezultate şi perspective actuale ale lingvisticii româneşti şi străine, coord. Luminiţa Hoarţă Cărăuşu, Iaşi, 2007, pag. 307. [4] Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române, ediţia a II-a, Univers Enciclopedic, Bucureşti, 1998, pag. 1098. [5] Ibidem. [6] Frâncu, Constantin, O nouă posibilitate lexicală a limbii române: formarea de verbe şi substantive postverbale din nume proprii de persoană, în vol. Rezultate şi perspective actuale ale lingvisticii româneşti şi străine, coord. Luminiţa Hoarţă Cărăuşu, Iaşi, 2007, pag. 131 [7] www.viatamedicala.ro [8] Zafiu, www.scribd.com [9] www.123urban.ro [10] www.ziare.com [11] www.ziarero.antena3.ro [12] www.ziare.com [13] www.revista22.ro [14] www.ziare.com [15] www.think.hotnews.ro [16] www.ziare.com [17] www.romanialibera.ro [18] www.cotidianul.ro [19] http://presavspress.blogspot.com [20] www.youtube.com

Bibliografie: Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române, ediţia a II-a, Univers Enciclopedic, Bucureşti, 1998 Frâncu, Constantin, O nouă posibilitate lexicală a limbii române: formarea de verbe şi substantive postverbale din nume proprii de persoană, în vol. Rezultate şi perspective actuale ale lingvisticii româneşti şi străine, coord. Luminiţa Hoarţă Cărăuşu, Iaşi, 2007. McArthur, Thomas (ed.) (1996) The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popescu, Floriana, „Studiul eponimelor în limbile engleză şi română”, Rezultate şi perspective actuale ale lingvisticii româneşti şi străine, coord. Luminiţa Hoarţă Cărăuşu, Iaşi, 2007 Zafiu, Rodica, Diversitate stilistică în româna actuală, cap. Nume proprii şi clişee jurnalistice (www.scribd.com)

Surse internet: www.ziare.com www.cotidianul.ro www.curierulconservator.com www.123urban.ro www.ziarero.antena3.ro www.revistaflacara.ro www.revista22.ro www.think.hotnews.ro www.youtube.com http://presavspress.blogspot.com www.romanialibera.ro http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eponim www.mediafax.ro

250 Foreignisms in the Romanian Linguistic Terminology

Floriana Popescu*

Abstract: Since its crystallization, the Romanian linguistic terminology has constantly evolved either through the creation of words which imitate the patterns or the mechanisms of foreign models or through the borrowing of certain terms of different origins, such as French, English or other European languages. This evolution of the terminology was closely interrelated with the development of the scientific field in focus. The current study presents the results of an exploration of the Romanian metalanguage of linguistics. This exploration starts with the first Romanian specialist dictionaries of linguistic terminology gradually augmenting its research corpus with the lexicographic works in published quiet recently. We shall also include herein the dictionaries of the language sciences as well as the other Romanian dictionaries published recently, which have been included in the bibliographical notes. Our approach also involved a certain degree of difficulty because the dictionaries used for the compilation of our corpus have no etymological reference. In spite of this disadvantage, our results indicate the flexibility of the Romanian vocabulary, in general and that of linguistic one, in particular.

Résumé: Dès sa cristallisation, la terminologie linguistique roumaine, a évolué constamment soit par la création des mots après des modèles étrangers soit par des emprunts soit par l’adaptation des certains termes d’origine française, anglaise ou des autres langues européennes. Cette évolution terminologique a été étroitement liée par le développement du domaine scientifique en question. Notre étude présente les résultats d’une exploration du métalangage linguistique roumain. Cette exploration commence avec les premiers dictionnaires linguistiques roumains en augmentant graduellement sa base de recherche avec les œuvres lexicaux des dernières années. On y introduira aussi les dictionnaires des sciences du langage tout comme d’autres dictionnaires roumains publiés récemment. Notre démarche a impliqué un certain degré de difficulté parce que les dictionnaires qui ont utilisés pour la compilation de notre corpus ne font aucune allusion étymologique. En dépit de ce désavantage, nos résultats démontrent la flexibilité du vocabulaire roumain, en général, et du celui linguistique, en particulier. Mots-clés: la terminologie linguistique roumaine, métalangage, la création des mots, l'emprunt lexical

Introduction This study explores the vocabulary of linguistics and language sciences with a view to highlighting the words of foreign origin (foreignisms [1] from now on) implanted in Romanian. As a matter of fact this is a new stage of a broader research performed on this comprehensive terminology peculiar to scientific field. The corpus devised for this previous scrutiny [2] was so enriched as to provide answers to the following questions: (a) Are there foreignisms in the Romanian terminology of linguistics and language sciences? (b) Which are the sources of these foreign elements? (c) Are these words exclusively loans proper or have they also been recorded as “Romanianisms”? (d) Do foreignisms represent a considerable percentage within the specialist vocabulary of linguistics or more generously, language sciences? The paper concludes with a few considerations, resulting from the analysis of the corpus interpretation, which actually give the answers to the above questions.

Background The vocabulary of the Romanian language has been the object of research, description, analysis and interpretation from different perspectives. Thus, on the one hand, theoretical approaches considered specificities of the Romanian vocabulary in terms of the words belonging either to the word stock or to specialist vocabularies, (see Bidu-Vrânceanu 2002, Bidu-Vrânceanu (coord.) 2002). Within the same theoretical framework, Stoichitoiu-Ichim (2008) and Felecan (2004) described it in terms of its dynamics, influences from other languages as well as its creativity. On the other hand, both general and specialist lexicographic works have been compiled to account for the Romanian lexical heritage and to mirror the language changes of the last two decades.

* Professor, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

251 Although this literature, with many other manifestations which are not mentioned here, reflects a particular interest in the evolution of the Romanian language and the phenomenon of borrowing, aspects of the English language impact upon Romanian were also examined (Avram 1997, Stoichitoiu-Ichim 2009, Trif 2006). Nonetheless, we considered it interesting to survey recent specialist dictionaries in an attempt to notice whether terms from other languages as well have become part of the linguistic terminology, either through terminological borrowings or through other word building processes.

Work hypothesis Although the Romanian language has been lexically resourceful with its impressive amount of affixes, compounding patterns and conversions, the publications of the last twenty-five years show a certain degree of openness towards foreign lexemes and lexical formations, which is easily noticeable at dictionary entry level (see, for example, Bidu-Vrânceanu (coord.) 2002). The hospitability of the Romanian lexical heritage embraces foreignisms originating both in English and in several other languages. The current approach attempts at presenting the donour language contributing to the enrichment of the Romanian linguistic vocabulary.

Corpus presentation When an investigation of whatever specific terminology is intended, two corpus-compiling directions may be followed. The former would consider the vast specialist literature published since the first modern dictionary of linguistic terminology (Constantinescu-Dobridor 1980) and which includes not only volumes authored by Romanian academics (Ionescu 1992, Munteanu 2005) but also several of the landmarks in the literature of European linguistics which were translated into Romanian: Benveniste (1999), Humboldt (2008), Lyons (1995), Robins (2003), Saussure (1998), Saussure (2004). If the contributions collected in conference proceedings volumes, in inter/national periodicals would be considered, then the number of resources would probably double, to say the least. The latter, would consider only the lexicographic works in general, and the specialist ones, in particular. This was actually our choice, for we strongly believe in the righteousness of one the opinions expressed by the authors of the DSL (2006: 6) who say “[A]s the terminology of contemporary linguistics is extremely wide and diversified, each linguistic model being apt to provide on its own basis, enough material for an independent dictionary, the authors were in a position to make a certain selection of the terms to be included…” (our translation) [3]. As a consequence of what is said in the foregoing paragraph, our corpus-creating principle was to select only those words which do not have a Romanian spelling or ending, i.e., some of which are written in capitals irrespective of their position at the sentence level, or those whose diacritic signs or endings which are peculiar neither to our familiar declension or conjugation systems. The collection of terms especially made for the purpose of the current study was extracted from the following dictionaries: (a) Constantinescu-Dobridor’s Mic dicţionar de terminologie lingvistică (1980) (b) Constantinescu-Dobridor’s Dicţionar de termeni lingvistici (1998) (c) Ducrot, and Schaffer’s Noul dicţionar enciclopedic de ştiinţe ale limbajului, trad. de Anca Măgureanu, Viorel Vişan and Marina Păunescu (1996) (d) Bidu-Vranceanu, Angela, et. al. Dicţionar de ştiinţe ale limbajului, Bucureşti: Nemira (2001).

Research procedures In our terminological pursuit, the study unfolded in three steps, as follows: i) a list of dictionary entries describing foreign items (all of them in italics, in the case of the (d) in the corpus list above) was drawn from all our sources ii) after a minute comparison of the extracted items, a table was created for practical reasons, i.e., to include our findings and to have a synthetic presentation of the data iii) a list of concluding observations finalized the whole analysis.

Findings and discussion The total number of dictionary entries around which the whole discussion is constructed amounts to

252 54. The sum total could have been considerably richer (over 250), if the solutions presented in a glossary of German-Romanian terminological equivalence had been considered (Humboldt 2008: 391-6). Nevertheless, since this is actually a glossary at the end of a volume and they have not become ‘dictionary entries’ yet, they have been waived in this particular case study of the Romanian linguistic terminology. The tabular inventory in the annex distinguishes terms/lexical formations coming from over six languages, English, French, German, Latin and Japanese. As the marks in the table show it, the representations in the case of each donour language are rather unbalanced. With its 18 dictionary items, English seems to have been the most generous of these languages, with the French element (12 such items) closely following the first, but rather far from the German (8 dictionary elements). Latin places itself immediately after French with 11 elements, while Sanskrit and Japanese have come with scarce contributions, i.e., 5 and 1, respectively. In terms of accessibility, foreignisms fall into the following subcategories: i) foreign words with no explanation whatsoever (66 dictionary entries); ii) foreign words with a Romanian equivalent (6); iii) one French word accompanied by its English equivalent; iv) one French word with its Romanian equivalent; v) one English word accounted for by both its French and its Romanian equivalent. This final example has so evolved from the Romanian translation of Ducrot and Schaffer’s work to the Romanian-authored dictionary that the French embrayeur together with shifter, its equivalent in English have come to be described in the latter dictionary under two entries: ambreior and şifter, respectively. These two calques with two different etymologies, but which share the same meaning (or with differences so slight that they have come to be negligible) seem to have had a different history in the Romanian terminology. While the Romanian authors refer to a considerably distant publication (Manea 1968) making use of the term ambreior (DSL 2001: 43), but which remains unacknowledged or disregarded by the translators of Ducrot and Schaffer’s dictionary, şifter (DSL 2001: 526) hardly enjoys such previous experience in the terminological universe of linguistics and language sciences.

Conclusions The object of the study case presented in the foregoing was the determination of foreign elements inserted in the Romanian terminology of linguistics and language sciences. Dictionaries were selected to be exclusively our source for the corpus compilation for the simple reason that they are the most widely used repository of such information which not only gives explanation but it also provides solutions which have already undertaken the test of the host language test of acceptance. If we consider, for example, the 2008 Romanian version of Humboldt’s work, which has an annexed Romanian-German glossary, this will serve best for a comparison with our dictionary- based approach. Thus, while in the former case these terms may be applicable to a bounded literature of speciality, i.e., those works specifically referring either to the concepts or to ideas making the object of a certain subfield, the latter group of words enjoy a higher frequency of occurrence and hence, a higher need for their accurate understanding. The corpus underlying the research served our study purpose and the results indicate more English and French than German and Latin elements. All in all, the foreignisms (54 items) represent a reduced percentage (3.6%), as compared to the sum total of dictionary entries (1500 entries in the DSL 2001). Although most of the foreignisms became part of the Romanian linguistic terminology in the mid-1990s, very few of them show diacritic signs, phonetic, or morphological features peculiar to the Romanian language.

Notes [1] The term foreignism is part of the translation studies jargon, and it displays both broad and narrow meanings; we adopted it with its latter acceptance and used it as a generic referent for all the words coming from any other language but Romanian [2] The communication delivered at the international colloquium”Journees de la francophonie: Canons et rituels dans les pratiques discursives”, 8 -10 avril 2011, Galaţi, România presented a case study on the translational practices and their consequences upon the Romanian linguistic terminology [3] The excerpt in the original: [C]um terminologia lingvisticii contemporane este extreme de amplă şi diversificată, fiecare model lingvistic putând oferi el singur material suficient pentru un dicţionar independent, autorii au fost puşi în

253 situaţia de a opera o anumită selecţie a termenilor incluşi”.

Annex. Foreignisms in the Romanian linguistic terminology

Language they are accounted to originate in Foreignisms French English German Latin Sanskrit Other 1. Ablaut* x 2. Aktionsart x 3. avant-texte x 4. background x 5. Bedeutung (= denotaţii) x 6. Bedeutungslaute (= radical, element x lexical) 7. Beziehungslaute (= element radical) x 8. bhasha x 9. centum x 10. cluster(= aglomerare semantică) x 11. comment vs topic x 12. context sensitive x 13. context free x 14. cursus x 15. deixis x 16. destinateur x 17. dhvani x 18. embrayeurs* (= shifters*) x x 19. enjambement* x 20. epistème x 21. EQUI x 22. Farbe x 23. feedback x 24. frames x 25. infectum x 26. item x 27. innere Sprachform x 28. linking (=enchaînement=înlănţuire) x 29. nexus x 30. mise en abyme x 31. mise en relief x 32. morphe-portmanteau x 33. morpheme alternant x 34. morphemic segment x 35. muta cum liquida x 36. non-testimonial x 37. off-line vs on-line (analiză) x 38. perfectum x 39. phonemics x 40. phrase structure x 41. pidgin x 42. plurale tantum x 43. pose vs. présupposé x

254 44. pro-drop x 45. sabir x 46. satem x 47. sandhi x 48. Singulare tantum x 49. Sinn (= sens, la Frege) x 50. sphota x 51. stemma/stemă x 52. vagueness (= indeterminare semantică) x 53. virtuem x 54. waka x Sum total 12 18 8 12 4 1

References: Avram, Mioara, Anglicismele în limba română actuală, Editura Academiei, Bucureşti, 1997. Benveniste E., Probleme de lingvistică generală, traducere de Magdalena Dumitru, vol. I-II, Universitas, Bucureşti, 1999. Bidu-Vranceanu, Angela, Călăraşu, Cristina, Ruxăndoiu-Ionescu, Liliana, Mancaş, Mihaela, Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela, Dicţionar de ştiinţe ale limbii, Nemira, Bucureşti, 2001, (=DSL). Bidu-Vrânceanu, Angela, Lexic ştiinţnific interdisciplinar, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2002. Bidu-Vrânceanu, Angela (coord.), Lexic comun, lexic specializat, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2002. Bidu-Vrânceanu, Angela, Lexicul specializat in mişcare de la dicţionare la texte, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2007. Constantinescu-Dobridor, Gheorghe, Mic dicţionar de terminologie lingvistică, Editura Albatros, Bucureşti, 1980. Ducrot, O., Schaffer, J.-M. Noul dicţionar enciclopedic de ştiinţe ale limbajului, traducere de Anca Măgureanu, Viorel Vişan and Marina Păunescu, Editura Babel, Bucureşti, 1996. Felecan, Nicolae, Vocabularul limbii române, Editura Mega, Presa Universitară Clujeană, Cluj-Napoca, 2004. Manea-Manea, Maria, Sistematica substitutelor din româna contemporană standard, EARSR, Bucureşti, 1968. Humboldt, W. v. Despre diversitatea structurală a limbilor şi influenţa ei asupra dezvoltării spirituale a umanităţii, traducere de Eugen Munteanu, Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2008. Ionescu, Emil, Manual de lingvistică generală, Editura All, Bucureşti, 1992. Lyons, J., Introducere în lingvistica teoretică, traducere de Alexandra Cornilescu şi Ioana Ştefănescu, Editura Ştiinţifică, Bucureşti,1995. Munteanu, Eugen, Introducere în lingvistică, Polirom, Iaşi, 2005. Robins, R.H., Scurta istorie a lingvisticii, Polirom, Iaşi, 2003. Stoichitoiu-Ichim, Adriana, Vocabularul limbii române actuale, Editura All, Bucureşti, 2008 Stoichitoiu-Ichim, Adriana, Aspecte ale influenţei engleze în româna actuală, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2009. Trif, R.-N, Influenţa limbii engleze asupra limbii române in terminologia informaticii, Academia Romana, Fundatia nationala pentru stiinta si arta, Institututl de lingvistica “Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti”, Bucureşti, 2006.

255 A Typology of Cultural Aspects Underlying Romanian Eating Phrasemes [1]

Petronela Savin*

Resumé: Notre recherche envisage l’étude d’un corpus phraséologique du roumain dans une perspective culturelle, à même d’illustrer la variété et la variation du langage en fonction de la culture et de la civilisation de la société dont il participe. Dans ce context, nous avons l'intention d'identifier une typologie des aspects culturels qui sous-tendent les phrasèmes roumaines concernant l’alimentation en soulignant l’importance de ces phénomènes. Mots-clés: phraséologie roumaine, variation du langage, phrasèmes roumaines concernant l’alimentation

Abstract: This paper represents an investigation into Romanian phraseological corpus of an onomasiological field from a cultural perspective, in a context where, it is only more recently that the cultural foundation of phraseology has been duly noticed as playing an important role. We intended to identify a typology of cultural aspects underlying Romanian eating phrasemes, pointing out the necessity for modern phraseological research to turn to cultural phenomena, because it can be no adequate description of phrasemes and the way they function in a language without regard to culture, since in many cases culturally based concepts govern the inference from literal to figurative. Keywords: Romanian phraseology, cultural perspective, Romanian eating phrasemes, figurative language

Introduction Phraseology is a domain of linguistic study which, to a high degree, illustrates the correlation between language and culture. Some linguists even consider that the phraseology can be regarded as a testing ground for the anthropomorphic paradigm in linguistics, whose fundamental assumption is that the linguistic world-picture is commensurable with the mental attitudes and culture of a speech community (Teliya et al. 1998: 56). In this context, Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen (2005) consider that the most important linguistic feature of phrasemes is that they preserve relevant knowledge as part of their content plane (as image traces), including reflection of the respective culture. These linguists have developed a theory, named Conventional Figurative Language Theory, that insists on the crucial role of culture in both understanding linguistic expressions and processing knowledge. Dobrovol’skij/Piirainen (2005: 14) give the concept of figurativeness a new turn. A relation is figurative only if it contains an “image component”. “By image component we understand a specific conceptual structure mediating between the lexical structure and the actual [= phraseological] meaning of figurative units.” This means that the phraseological meaning of the relation must contain “traces of the literal meaning” which are inherited by the figurative meaning. They claim that the etymological description should be regarded as a constituent part of the motivation. It may generally be accepted that “folk etymology” is a constituent part of the motivation. Dobrovol’skij/Piirainen go one step further and include the linguistically “true” etymology in the semantic description. They describe an “etymological memory” of the lexical unit which “determines its behaviour in current discourse”. In this case, the task of the linguist would be to look for traces of this etymological memory in real contexts. Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen (2005: 214-215) distinguish between five types of cultural aspects underlying figurative units. (i) The first type is represented by figurative units whose underlying cultural knowledge can mainly be traced back to knowledge of culture based social interaction within a given community, including all aspects of social experiences and behaviour. (ii) Figurative units of the second type reveal image components that can be ascribed to material culture, primarily to artefacts of a given culture, including all aspects of material environment. (iii) The third type of figurative units can be subsumed under the label “textual dependence.” Originally they are quotations or allusions. Thus, they are related to certain texts that can be identified as their sources. This type is similar to the next two types, although they should not be confused.

* Researcher, PhD, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi

256 (iv) Type four is represented by figurative units tracing back to fictive conceptual domains, such as ancient folk theories and pre-scientific conceptions of the world (including religion, superstition, ancient beliefs etc.). (v) Type five deals with cultural symbols. In expressions of this type, the relevant cultural knowledge extends to mainly one single constituent and not to the figurative unit as a whole. The motivational link between the literal and figurative readings is established by semiotic knowledge about the symbol in question, about its meaning in culturally relevant sign systems other than language. In order to describe figurative units of this type we apply metalinguistic tools developed in the framework of cultural semiotics.

Cultural phenomena in Romanian eating phrasemes The phraseological structures whose literal level refers to the elements of everyday life like food express all dimensions of culture mentioned above. In this article, we shall attempt to analyze the way in which representations related to the food act, on which Romanian phraseological structures rely, generate different significations depending on the position that food occupy in the culture-nature relationship. The corpus of Romanian phraseological structures that is based on our study has been taken from Iuliu Zanne’s (1895-1912) monumental collection Proverbele românilor din România, Bucovina, Ungaria, Istria şi Macedonia. Proverbe, zicători, povăţuiri, cuvinte adevărate, asemănări, idiotisme şi cimilituri cu un glosar româno-frances [2], vols. I-X, together with both the old and new series of most important work of Romanian lexicography, Dicţionarul limbii române. (i) Social interaction In this sections can be integrated the phrasemes whose cultural components are ascribed to the conception of patterns of behavior and social interaction. This means that a certain shared knowledge of culture phenomena of society is involved in the processing of these expressions. To this category belongs the Romanian idiom şi-a trăit traiul, şi-a mâncat mălaiul (he has lived his life, he has eaten his millet/millet cake), which is clearly based on conceptions of social interactions. This phraseme is glossed by DLR, VI/3 and used ‘to say that somebody or something has grown old, has become out of date, has become worn out’, and framed within the phraseological uses of the millet cake. Iuliu Zanne suggests the meaning ‘he has lived and led a good life, it is not a pity that he should die; he has grown old, he is now good for nothing; he is gone’. The author believes that a possible source of the idiom would be the fact that “once, in the old times of frequent invasions and hungers, the young send the old and the weak to die into the forest and the secular woods since they were no longer able to take part in wars and labors, and gave them millet cake as food supply. When the millet cake was over, the Romanian had to die. His life lasted as long as that millet cake lasted him”. Zanne also presents legends and customs of various cultures that are related to the killing of the sick, the old and the poor (Zanne, P III, 600). Stelian Dumistrăcel (2001) applies the same anthropological approach to the idiom şi-a trăit traiul, şi-a mâncat mălaiul and brings additional arguments for the hypothesis stating that this stable word combination reflects a social, pragmatic sentence concerning the removal of the unproductive members of a society. Therefore, we tend to believe that the term mălai from this idiom displays a polysemantic character. Together with the image of the millet cake that, according to the legend, may have stood at the basis of the linguistic structure, there is also presented the image of the millet, cereal indispensable to living that constitutes itself into an image of daily life. The meaning “millet” of the term mălai in the preceding structure is also found in the idiom s-a apropiat mălaiul de traistă (the millet/corn drew close to the bag), of which Zanne argues that it has the same meaning as the preceding one, also being used when somebody ‘has thrown away all his fortune’ (P III, 601). The presence of this signification shared by the two phrasemes supports the image of millet as matter that is essential to life, image of limited resource, reflecting aspects of culture- based social interaction. (ii) Phenomena of material culture Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen (2005: 225) want to approach material culture by means of “culture-specifics”. In the case of phrasemes, the image component refers to specific physical objects of a given cultural community.

257 A food image component of phrasemes that can be ascribed to material culture, primarily to artefacts of Romanian culture, is polenta. The fundamental role of polenta is best reflected in phraseological structures which can be organized in several directions of meaning depending on the food image participating in signifying. In some phrasemes, the term mămăligă represents a metonymic image for food in general: E greu de câştigat mămăliga (polenta is hard to get) ‘food is difficult to get’ (Zanne, P III, 606). The same metonymic, but differently oriented value, can be found in the expressions a-şi scoate mămăliga (to gain one’s polenta) ‘to make a living’ (Zanne, P III, 611). The term mămăligă ‘polenta’, constitutes, on a phraseological level, a characterization tool. Image of this food also function as a mark of the social status, mămăligă-n traistă (the polenta is in the bag) ‘nickname that is mockingly given to the peasant’ (Zanne, P III, 613). In the same category there is also the appellative mămăligar (polenta eater), meaning ‘stupid, fool, dunce, bumpkin that is only good at eating polenta’ (Zanne, P III, 615), an appellative that, most often, also refers to the social condition. Associated with butter (a sign of some kind of welfare), polenta, a modest food, turns into an image for striking it rich: Decât să mănânc mămăligă cu unt, / Şi să mă uit în pământ; / Mai bine mănânc pâne cu sare/ Şi să mă uit la el (ea) ca la soare (Instead of eating polenta and butter, / And look down; / I’d rather eat bread and salt / And look at him (her) as at the sun) ‘one should seek love and not fortune in marriage’ (Zanne, P III, 607). Since polenta is the result of a process involving many factors, its image functions as a metaphor for a fact conditioned by the context. The idiom a o pune de mămăligă (fără făină/ fără apă) (he set for making polenta [with no flour/no water]) or a pus-o de mămăligă cu lemne verzi (he set for making polenta with green wood), with the meaning of ‘to be or to find oneself in a difficult, unpleasant situation, in trouble’, illustrate failure not through the act but through the circumstances that determine it. Therefore, the traditional food may serve as examples of specific objects of a given cultural community at the level of phraseological structures. A cross-linguistic and cross-cultural approach to the phrasemes of food can reveal some differences in the conception that underlie the material culture. (iii) Intertextual phenomena The cultural foundation of a large number of phraseological structures can be ascribed to “intertextual phenomena”, in a broad sense, the relation between phrasemes and certain text that can be identified as their sources. For a long time after the invention of letterpress printing, the Bible was the only book in many families, and whole passages were learnt by heart. Many biblical idioms are widespread in European languages, being so familiar that they are used without conscious reference to the original context. Besides the approximate quotations of biblical verses or some more or less vague knowledge about biblical stories, a reason for the durability of these structures is their relation with a cultural foundation already there. In the biblical context, the images of the act of feeding bring elements characteristic of the human culture at large, within the phraseological structures’ process of signification. To this category belongs the biblical proverb Părinţii mănîncă aguridă şi copiilor li se sterpezesc dinţii (the parents eat sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge), “one wrong, while others suffer the consequences” (Zanne, P I, 217; Ier., 31, 29-30, Iez. 18, 2-3). The meaning of this structure is based on the value of the food image “sour grapes”. The metaphorical motivation of the phraseology based on images of everyday live like food is founded on observation and immediate experience. One perceives the similarity between the unpleasant taste and unpleasant fact. As universals of thinking, acrid, hot or bitter are marks of negative fact, unlike sweet which defines the positive fact. Just this universal cultural foundation assures the success of the biblical phraseological structure. Another biblical example which can be integrated into the same category is the expression a se vinde pentru un blid de linte (to sell oneself for a bowl of lentils) ‘meaning, to sell oneself short’ (Zanne, P III, 596), that can be found in the Biblical text containing the story from the Old Testament about Isav’s selling his first-born right to Iacov, for a bowl of lentil (Genesis 25, 29-34). The significance of this expression is based on general metaphorical relation: the lack of nutritional quality - image of non-value. This expression can be integrated in Romanian language into a series of phrasemes in which the negative bearing of the image of a certain food is also a result of its low nutritive value.

258 These idioms and proverbs that directly or indirectly can be traced back to identifiable verses of chapters of the Bible are so familiar that they are used with no conscious reference to the original context. (iv) Fictive conceptual domains Dobrovol’ski & Piirainen (2005) understand by “fictive conceptual domain” the knowledge such folk theories of ancient times, pre-scientific conceptions of the world (including religion, superstition, common belief, etc.). These fragments of knowledge about relevant virtual cultural creation of pre- scientific “edifices of ideas” are important component of the cultural foundation of phrasemes. Many Romanian phrasemes based on the image of bread ring are part of this category of conventional figurative units with image components traceable of unreal fictive worlds. The bread ring, in Romanian colac, is marked by a connotation that is mainly ritualistic, being situated within the same positive axiology as bread. In the ceremonial context, the bread ring for the living or as offering to the gods or the ancestors is an important part of the fertility and prosperity rites, or of those of passage to the other world. According to Ion Ghinoiu (2001), by its name, shape, size, ornaments, preparation technique and time, the bread ring substitutes the man or the divinity for whom it was meant. In phraseological structures also, the bread ring is attributed to the area of the ritual but, in turn, in many contexts, the rite is situated in a dimension of the profane. As offering, the bread ring is, inevitably, an occasion for joy. Idioms such as aşa colac! (what a bread ring!) ‘what a luck!’ (cf. DA, I/II), or a umbla (sau a aştepta) după colaci calzi (to look for/wait for hot bread rings) ‘to look for ready-made good and pleasant things’ (Zanne, P III, 533) illustrate the transition of the meaning from the sobriety of the ritualistic gift to the easiness revealed by the effortless profit. The same value is also found in the saying S-a dus omul la colac / Şi-a căpătat un ciomag (He went for a bread ring / And got a clubbing instead) ‘he went into a business that he believed profitable and ended up dog-poor’ (Zanne, P X, 218). The allusion to the ritual of offering, again desecrated, is obvious in the proverb Colacul nu-i la cui se meneşte, ci al cui îl mânâncă (the bread ring does not belong to the one for which it was meant but to the one who eats it) ‘is said when a thing prepared for a certain somebody is obtained by another’ (Zanne, P III, 532). The image of this food, completely fallen into the profane, is illustrated by the structures A trecut baba cu colacii (the old woman with the bread rings has gone by or the crow ate his bread ring) ‘is said about persons that have lost an opportunity’, Pe la noi umblă câinii cu colaci în coadă (around here, dogs walk with bread rings in their tails) ‘there’s great abundance’ (cf. DA, I/II). To the same style also belongs the idiom cum e sfântul şi colacul (like saint like bread ring) ‘the gift suits the person’ (cf. DA, I/II), a structure that alludes, even if on a different register, to the bread rings that imitate the human body and that are called sfinţi ‘saints’, mucenici ‘martyrs’, a custom probably inspired by the ancient sacrifices-offerings to certain divinities (Ghinoiu, 1997). Marks of the same ritualistic vocation are kept in the structure Să dai colacul zilei c-ai scăpat (give the bread ring to the day for you are out of trouble) ‘give thanks for being out of trouble’ (cf. DA, I/II), this time the divinity being metonymically replaced by the happy day. The saying Dă-i colac şi lumânare! (give it a bread ring and a candle!)’give it up!’ (cf. DA, I/II) uses the image of the bread ring as sacrifice out of which it only selects the idea of giving something up, situating it on the level of profane relationships. The idiom nu i s-au prins colacii (the bread rings didn’t stick) ‘he did not succeed, it did not work well for him’ (cf. DA, I/II), though on the level of the profane it makes use of one of the features of the ritualistic food, namely its magical value. The bread ring is also an offering for the one who casts spells: Leac / Şi babei colac (Cure / And a bread ring to the old woman). A strong ritualistic mark can be found at the level of the phraseme colac peste pupăză (bread ring over hoopoe), glossed in DA, used ‘when somebody is dissatisfied with what he has got and wants more, or when trouble comes immediately after another trouble’. Nevertheless, relying on various sources, Stelian Dumistrăcel (2001) has reached the conclusion that the idiom evokes the unusual situation in which trouble – a funeral (represented by the bread ring) – befalls somebody after having had to attend to something else – a wedding (symbolized by the bread ring shaped as a hoopoe).

259 Therefore, the ritualistic food as image component of phrasemes is part of a pre-scientific conception of the world whose foundation was the common beliefs and the superstitions. (V) Cultural symbols The motivational link between literal and figurative readings of phrasemes is established by semiotic knowledge about the symbol in question, about its meaning in culturally relevant sign systems other than language. In order to describe figurative units of this type, Dobrovol’ski & Piirainen (2005) suggest the application of metalinguistic tools developed in the framework of cultural semiotics. The most important symbol-based type of motivation of food phrasemes is bread. The symbolic meanings of BREAD in Romanian idioms are LIVING, LIVELIHOOD, or, closely related, more general senses like WORK (SOURCE FOR EARNING ONE’S LIVING, ACTION TOOLS) and MONEY. In many of the phrasemes, bread is image for the necessary means for living which illustrate: 1) effort: Pâinea nu vine singură la tine (bread doesn’t come to you by itself), Fiecare pentru sine / Croitor de pâine (Each one for himself / Kneader of bread; Zanne, P IV, 49), Pe cât poate / Pâinea-şi scoate (As much as he can / He earns his bread; Zanne, P IV, 55); 2) wisdom: De vrei să mănânci pâine nu-ţi bate joc de tărâţe (if you want to eat bread don’t mock at the bran; Zanne, P IV, 43); 3) ignorance: a nu şti cum se face pâinea (one doesn’t know how to make his bread; Zanne, P IV, 61); 4) suffering: a mânca pâine amară (to eat bad, bitter bread; Zanne, P X, 233); 5) selfishness: a lua (cuiva) pâinea de la gură (to take the bread from somebody’s mouth) meaning ‘to leave somebody without the possibility of making a living’ (Zanne, P IV, 49), a mânca pâinea şi sarea cuiva (to eat someone else’s bread and salt) ‘to be received into somebody’s house, to enjoy somebody’s benevolence’ (Zanne, P IV, 58), 6) altruism: a mânca pâine şi sare (cu cineva), (to eat bread and salt with someone) ‘to live together’ (Zanne, P IV, 59). Bread is an image for the means that generate the living conditions, the job, the position in phrasemes, such as : a-şi pierde pâinea (to lose one’s bread) ‘to be dismissed, to be fired from a job’ (cf. DLR, VIII), a pune (sau a baga) (pe cineva) în pâine (to put or place somebody in the bread) ‘to hire (somebody) for a job’ (Zanne, P IV, 60); a scoate (pe cineva) din pâine (cf. DLR, VIII), (to take somebody out of the bread)‘to dismiss, to fire (somebody) from a job’ (cf. DLR, VIII). Bread functions as a metaphor for action tools, no matter if they are successfully used or not: a pune mâna pe pâine şi pe cuţit (to lay one’s hand on the bread and the knife) ‘to own all the means, all the power’, cu pâine şi cuţitul moare flămând (bread and knife in hand and still dying of hunger) ‘for those who do not know how to make use of what they’ve got’ (Zanne, P IV, 46-47). The fact that bread became so important in the Romanian language and other European languages is due to the central position of BREAD in Christianity and the extensive semiotic complex with which it is surrounded, cf. e. g. the “breaking bread, in the Last Supper, BREAD, in Eucharistic liturgies, the prayer verse give us daily bread. This symbolic knowledge manifests itself in language from Christian cultural areas, irrespective of particular ecclesiastical or biblical traditions: not only in languages of the Orthodox Churches but also in the language from the sphere of influences of the Roman Catholic church or the Lutheran Bible. Beyond the symbolic value of bread, Stelian Dumistrăcel (2001) puts the value of this image under the sign of the human society’s greatest fear ever, that of not starving to death, reminding the fact that Martin Luther regards the text give our daily bread from “Our Father” as a reflex of the biblical memories of the years of famine, a reality experienced by the Europe of the 16th-17th centuries as a consequence of long wars, calamities and plagues.

Conclusions Romanian eating phrasemes tend to absorb and accumulate cultural elements. In order to describe how idioms function, one has to take into account other concepts as well, above all culturally based concepts, which in many cases govern the inference from literal to figurative. If the motivation is understood as a possibility of an interpretation of the mental image in a way that makes sense of the use of phrasemes, the motivating links between the frame of FOOD and the figurative meanings of many conventional expressions of Romanian language are often provided by the “cultural knowledge” (culture-based social interaction, textual dependence, fictive conceptual domain, cultural symbols).

260 Notes: [1] Work at various stages of this article was supported in part by the project POSDRU/89/1.5/S/49944 and in part by project CNCSIS PD- 582/2010. [2] Concerning the phraseological structures taken from Iuliu Zanne’s collection, we have generally used the author’s explanations who, for his part, has frequently made use of those given by the sources he used, respectively by the references that communicated them to him. For these reasons, the explanations reflect different styles.

References: 1. Literature Coşeriu, E., Lingvistica din perspectivă spaţială şi antropologică. Trei studii, Chişinău, Editura Ştiinţa, 1994. Crăiniceanu, Gh., Igiena ţăranului român. Locuinţa, încălţămintea şi îmbrăcămintea. Alimentaţiunea în diferitele regiuni ale ţării şi în diferite timpuri ale anului, Bucureşti, Lito-tipografia Carol Göbl, 1895. Dobrovol’skij, D., On cultural component in the semantic structure of idioms, în Ďurčo, P. (ed.), Europhras 97: International Symposium. September 2-5, 1997, Liptovský Jan. Phraseology and Paremiology, Bratislava, 1998, pp. 55-61. Dobrovol’skij, D., Piirainen E., Figurative Language: Cross-cultural and Cross-linguistic Perspective, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2005. Dumistrăcel, Stelian, Până-n pânzele albe. Expresii româneşti, Iaşi, Editura Institutul European, 2001. Gibbs, R. W., Idiomaticity and human cognition, în Everaert, M. et al. (ed.), Idioms: structural and psychological perspectives, Hillsdale (New Jersey), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 1995, pp. 97-116. Niculiţă-Voronca, E., Datinile şi credinţele poporului român adunate şi aşezate în ordine mitologică, vol. I, Iaşi, Editura POLIROM, 1998 Piirainen, E., 2007, Phrasemes from a cultural semiotic perspective, în Burger, H. et al. (ed.), Phraseologie/Phraseology: Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung/An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, vol. 1, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, pp. 208-219. Teliya, Veronika, Bragina, Natalya, Oparina, Elena, Sandomirskaya, Trina, Phraseology as a Language of Culture: Its Role in the Representation of a Collective Mentality, în A. P. Cowie (ed.), Phraseology Theory, Analysis, and Applications, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998, pp. 55-79.

2. Dictionaries: DA = [Romanian Academy] Dicţionarul limbii române I/I, letters A-B, 1913; I/II, letter C, 1940; I/III, fascicle I, D -de, 1949; II/I, letters F-I, 1934; II/II, fasc. I, J -lacustru, 1937; II/III, ladă – lojniţă (unpublished), Bucureşti, Editura Academiei. DLR = [Romanian Academy] Dicţionarul limbii române (new series), tome VI, letter M (1965-1968); VII/1, letter N (1971); VII/2, letter O (1969); VIII/1-5, letter P (1972-1984); IX, letter R (1975); X/l-5, letter S (1986-1994); XI/1, letter S (1978); XI/2-3, letter T (1982-1983); XII/1, letter T (1994); XIII/1-2, letter V (V- veni; 1997; venial–vizurină; 2003); IV, letter L (L – lherzolită; 2008); V, letter L (Li-luzulă, 2008), Bucureşti, Editura Academiei. Ghinoiu, I., Obiceiuri populare de peste an. Dicţionar, Bucureşti, Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, 1997. Ghinoiu, I., Panteonul românesc. Dicţionar, Bucureşti, Editura Enciclopedică, 2001. Zanne, Iuliu, Proverbele românilor din România, Bucovina, Ungaria, Istria şi Macedonia. Proverbe, zicători, povăţuiri, cuvinte adevărate, asemănări, idiotisme şi cimilituri cu un glosar româno-frances, vol. I-X, Bucureşti, Editura Librăriei Socecu & Comp, 1895-1912.

261 Eluder la responsabilité des propos avancés: le cas de la prétérition

Gabriela Scripnic*

Abstract: Commonly defined as the figure which consists of invoking a topic by denying it should be invoked, praeteritio proves to be particularly prodigious in the field of rhetoric. Praeteritio allows the speaker to convey his point of view while avoiding taking full responsibility for his words and to reduce therefore the potential attack of the interlocutor. Drawing on the works of Fontanier (1977) and Laurent (2001), for stylistics, and the work of Snoeck Henkemans (2009), in the field of rhetoric, this study firstly aims at reviewing the linguistic means by which praeteritio becomes manifest in discourse. Furthermore, praeteritio is approached in terms of rhetorical strategy meant to impose a point of view on the audience through the pseudo cancelation of the intention to accomplish a speech act. The analysis is performed on a series of excerpts dealing with the situation of Rroma people in Romania and abroad. Keywords: praeteritio, rhetorical strategy, pseudo cancellation, speech act

Résumé: Définie d’une manière générale comme la figure qui consiste à parler de quelque chose après avoir annoncé ne pas le faire, la prétérition s’avère particulièrement prodigieuse dans le domaine de la rhétorique. La prétérition permet au sujet parlant / écrivant de transmettre son point de vue tout en évitant de prendre l’entière responsabilité de ses propos et de diminuer de la sorte les potentielles attaques de l’interlocuteur. Ayant comme point de départ les ouvrages de Fontanier (1977) et Bacry (1992), pour la stylistique, et les travaux de Snoeck Henkemans (2009), dans le domaine de la rhétorique, je me propose premièrement de passer en revue les moyens linguistiques par lesquels la prétérition s’actualise dans le discours. L’analyse est menée sur des extraits de prises de position sur la situation des Roms en Roumanie et à l’étranger. Ensuite, la prétérition est envisagée en tant que stratégie rhétorique qui sert à imposer un point de vue sur l’auditoire par la pseudo annulation de l’intention d’accomplir un acte de dire Mots-clés : prétérition, stratégie rhétorique, pseudo annulation, acte de dire

Introduction Inventoriée parmi les figures macrostructurales de pensée (Laurent, 2001: 77), la prétérition est étudiée dans le cadre de la pragma-dialectique par Snoeck Henkemans (2009) en tant qu’outil de présentation par le truchement duquel le locuteur ajuste stratégiquement la discussion afin d’imposer son point de vue sur l’auditoire. Cette étude est divisée en trois parties: premièrement, je vise à donner un bref aperçu du concept de prétérition, tel qu’il est envisagé dans les ouvrages de stylistique française; par la suite, l’étude est dirigée vers la saisie des modalités à travers lesquelles la prétérition est réalisée dans le discours; la dernière partie fait ressortir la fonction rhétorique de cette figure qui contribue à faire l’auditoire adopter le point de vue en jeu. Diverses prises de position sur la situation des Roms me permettent d’étudier le fonctionnement rhétorique de la prétérition dans un discours argumentatif où le locuteur se sert de la prétérition soit pour introduire un point de vue sous l’apparence d’une affirmation à laquelle il n’adhère pas de façon qu’il ne veut pas la communiquer, soit pour avancer un argument à l’appui d’un point de vue sous la forme d’une affirmation qu’il prétend ne pas vouloir faire.

1. La prétérition – figure stylistique et rhétorique Ayant son origine dans le latin praeterire ‘omettre’, la prétérition (connue aussi sous les noms de prétermission ou paralipse) désigne «la figure de rhétorique qui consiste à déclarer que l’on ne parle pas d’une chose, alors qu’on le fait» (Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé) ou bien «un procédé de style par lequel on déclare passer sous silence une chose dont on parle néanmoins par ce moyen» (Larousse). De surcroît, la définition offerte par le Littré insiste sur la fonction rhétorique de cette figure par la mise en évidence de l’attitude du sujet parlant / écrivant qui prétend ne pas mentionner certains aspects dans le but de les faire passer d’une manière plus efficace: «figure de rhétorique par laquelle on feint d’omettre des circonstances sur lesquelles on insiste avec beaucoup de force». (Littré) Les définitions proposées par les travaux de stylistique ou de poétique convergent quant à la portée de la prétérition. Fontanier (1977: 143) définit la prétérition comme la figure de pensée

* Chargée de cours, dr, Université « Dunarea de Jos », Galati

262 qui consiste à «feindre de ne pas vouloir dire ce que néanmoins on dit très clairement, et souvent même avec force ». Dans le Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique, Morier (1989: 878) fait écho à la définition de Fontanier, en précisant que la prétérition représente la figure par laquelle «on attire l’attention sur un sujet en feignant de ne pas s’y attarder». En ce qui concerne la place de la prétérition à l’intérieur d’une classe plus large, Laurent (2011: 77) la place parmi les figures macrostructurales de pensée qui affectent la composante énonciative du discours, à côté des figures qui portent sur l’identité du locuteur ou de l’allocutaire (l’apostrophe oratoire, la prosopopée) et de celles qui portent sur l’acte de langage: la dérivation illocutoire (l’interrogation rhétorique). (Laurent, 2001: 83-84)

Je ne vous peindrai point le tumulte et les cris, / Le sang de tous côtés ruisselant dans Paris. (Voltaire, La Henriade).

Dans le cas de la prétérition, le mécanisme du paradoxe qui vise le contenu de sens est en quelque sorte déplacé au niveau de l’énonciation elle-même. Avec cette figure, le sujet parlant / écrivant précise clairement qu’il ne va pas transmettre certaines informations, mais en le faisant, il les transmet tout de même. Aussi la prétérition s’appelle-t-elle également «fausse réticence». (Snoeck Henkemans, 2009: 341) L’auteure établit deux grandes classes de prétérition en fonction de l’intention du locuteur de ne pas vouloir dire ce qu’il finit par transmettre quand même: a) prétérition en tant qu’approche directe par laquelle le locuteur rend explicite son intention de ne pas parler d’une certaine situation; b) prétérition en tant qu’approche indirecte par laquelle le locuteur souligne qu’une ou plusieurs conditions de félicité nécessaires à l’accomplissement d’un acte de langage assertif n’est / ne sont pas réalisée(s) et donc accomplir l’acte de langage en question n’est pas possible. Ayant à la base le travail de Snoeck Henkemans (2009), j’ai identifié les schémas suivants de manifestation de la prétérition qui correspondent à chacune des classes mentionnées ci-dessus:

1.1. Prétérition – forme directe, explicite Dans ce cas, la prétérition est centrée sur un verbe de parole (le plus souvent «a spune»‘dire’) employé dans une phrase qui régit une complétive directe introduite par «că» ‘que’ : - nu spun că….(dar) / je ne dis pas que….(mais)

(1) Întrebat dacă are ce să îi reproşeze ministrului Cseke Attila, premierul a răspuns: "Eu nu spun că este perfect. Spun că s-a făcut tot ce omenşte era posibil să se facă în condiţiile date". http://www.amosnews.ro/Boc_Eu_nu_spun_ca_Cseke_este_perfect_spun_ca_s_a_facut_tot_ce_omenste_era_posibil-29-67725 A la demande s’il avait quelque chose à reprocher au ministre Cseke Attila, le premier ministre a répondu: «Je ne dis pas qu’il est parfait. Je dis que l’on a fait tout ce qui était humainement possible de faire dans les conditions données».

- nu vreau să spun că…(dar) / je ne veux pas dire que….(mais)

(2) Sigur că există o mare parte de iluzie, aşa că nu vreau să spun că modelul meu este mai bun decât al altora. Fericiţi cei ce reuşesc să le facă pe toate. În ceea ce mă priveşte, nu pot să fac treaba asta [să dau interviuri]. În plus, lucru curios pentru un profesor, îmi place mai mult să scriu decât să vorbesc. E drept, la facultate mai şi vorbesc. Dar plăcerea mea este să stau în faţa foii de hârtie, să-mi storc mintea şi să scot ceva. Nu este genul meu să mă exprim prin interviu. Din când în când, însă, cedez. http://www.romlit.ro/lucian__boia__tii_ce_istorie_tot_ncerc_eu_s_propun_o_istorie_inteligent... Bien sûr, il y a une grande partie d’illusion, donc je ne veux pas dire que mon modèle est meilleur que celui des autres. Heureux sont ceux qui réussissent à tout faire. Quant à moi, je ne peux pas le faire [donner des interviews]. De plus, chose curieuse pour un professeur, j’aime écrire plus que parler. C’est vrai, à la faculté, il m’arrive de parler. Mais mon plaisir est de m’attarder devant la feuille de papier, de travailler mon esprit et d’en extraire quelque chose. Ce n’est pas mon genre de m’exprimer par l’interview. Pourtant, de temps en temps, j’y cède.

- n-o să spun că…(dar) / je ne vais pas dire que.....(mais)

263

(3) Dar nu sunt originală şi n-o să spun că urăsc această sărbătoare, mi se pare foarte ok, atît timp cît ce “organizezi” în acea zi este “for the right reasons” Of, prea multe englezizme, cred că de la sărbătoare mi se trage. http://www.fetelespun.ro/articole/kisses/ Mais je ne suis pas originale et je ne vais pas dire que je déteste cette fête, ça me paraît très OK autant que ce que l’on «organise» ce jour-là soit «for the right reasons». Oh, trop d’anglicismes, je crois que c’est la faute à la fête.

Il en résulte que les approches directes de la prétérition comportent le verbe dire employé à la forme négative, au présent pour expliciter un acte de langage assertif qui se déroule au moment de l’énonciation, au futur pour annoncer un tel acte ou accompagné d’un verbe modal (par exemple, vouloir) pour renforcer l’intention du locuteur de «ne pas faire» l’acte assertif. La conjonction mais, bien qu’elle ne s’actualise pas toujours, traduit l’opposition que le locuteur vise à dresser entre ce qu’il feint de ne pas vouloir dire et ce qu’il dit ouvertement.

1.2. Prétérition – forme indirecte, implicite Les formes implicites de prétérition reposent, selon Snoeck Henkemans (2009: 341-342), sur la violation des conditions de félicité qui président à la réussite des actes de langage assertifs. Il s’agit plus précisément de quatre conditions établies par les fondateurs de la pragma-dialectique, à savoir van Eemeren & Houtlosser (2002: 119-130) ayant à la base les conditions antérieurement formulées par Searle and Vanderveken (1985): - Condition de sincérité: L (le locuteur) croit que le contenu propositionnel exprimé par l’acte assertif est correct et vrai; - 1ere Condition préparatoire: L croit qu’il peut présenter des preuves pour le contenu propositionnel exprimé; - 2eme Condition préparatoire: L croit que l’information contenue dans l’énoncé est dans l’intérêt de l’interlocuteur; - 3eme Condition préparatoire: L croit qu’il a le droit et qu’il est en mesure d’exprimer son adhésion à l’exactitude du contenu propositionnel véhiculé. La prétérition résulte dans ce cas de l’acte de nier la réalisation d’une de ces conditions car le locuteur annonce qu’il n’est pas prêt à accomplir un acte de langage assertif. Les possibles schémas de construction correspondant à chaque type de condition de félicité sont les suivants: - la négation de la condition de sincérité (le locuteur nie qu’il croit à la vérité et à l’exactitude du contenu propositionnel avancé) engendre des constructions du type: Nu cred că P / Je ne crois que P Ma îndoiesc că P / Je doute que P Nu am certitudinea că P / Je n’ai pas la certitude que P

(4) Ma indoiesc ca s-ar citi mai mult daca oamenii ar avea mai multi bani. Se va citi cam tot atat. Impatimitii de lectura citesc din imprumuturi sau strang cureaua si mananca mai multa fasole si mai putin caviar daca vor sa cumpere, este de parere Radu Paraschivescu. http://www.frontnews.ro/arts-si-lifestyle/arta/radu-paraschivescu-ma-indoiesc-ca-s-ar-citi-mai-mult-daca-oamenii-ar-avea-mai-multi- bani-17134 Je doute que l’on lise davantage si les gens avaient plus d’argent. On lira autant que l’on fait à présent. Les amateurs de lecture lisent des livres empruntés ou ils serrent leur ceinture et mangent plus de légumes et moins de caviar s’ils veulent en acheter, affirme Radu Paraschivescu.

- la négation de la première condition préparatoire (le locuteur nie qu’il est capable d’apporter des preuves pour le contenu propositionnel véhiculé) donne naissance à des constructions telles que: Nu am motive să afirm că P / Je n’ai aucune raison de dire que P Nu am dovadă că P / Je n’ai pas de preuve que P Nu am probe concrete că P / Je n’ai pas de preuves concrètes que P

(5) dar in privinta acestor ultimi doi fotbalisti nu am dovada ca ei jucau la pariuri, insa stateau in aceeasi camera si erau total deconectati de la partide. http://ligab.gsp.ro/stiri/2354/alin_simota_am_renuntat_sa_mai_finantez_echipa.html

264 mais en ce qui concerne les deux derniers footballeurs, je n’ai pas de preuve qu’ils ont joué aux paries, mais ils logeaient dans la même chambre et ils étaient déconnectés du match de football.

- la négation de la deuxième condition préparatoire (le locuteur nie que le contenu propositionnel est dans l’intérêt de l’interlocuteur) engendre des constructions du type: Nu interesează pe nimeni că P / Cela n’intéresse personne que P Nu este important să se afirme că P / Il n’est pas important d’affirmer que P Nu este necesar să se menţioneze că P/ Il n’est pas nécessaire de mentionner que P

(6) Nu cred ca intereseaza pe nimeni dar… … cred ca am cam intarziat si una peste alta imi e cam sila de metrou. Ce recomandati pentru Bucuresti pana in momentul cand ma voi dedica deplin (implica un calcul matematic riguros. ha ha ha.) ideii de a imi cumpara o masina? Scooter sau bicicleta? http://costin.ro/nu-cred-ca-intereseaza-pe-nimeni-dar.html Je ne crois pas que ça intéresse quelqu’un, mais...... je crois que je suis un peu en retard et somme toute j’en ai marre du métro. Qu’est-ce que vous recommandez pour Bucarest jusqu’au moment où je m’adonnerai complètement (ça implique un calcul mathématique rigoureux, ha, ha, ha) à l’idée de m’acheter une voiture? Un scooter ou un vélo?

- la négation de la troisième condition préparatoire (le locuteur nie qu’il est en mesure d’exprimer son adhésion au contenu avancé) se traduit par des constructions telles que: Nu sunt în măsură să afirm că P / Je ne suis pas en mesure d’affirmer que P Nu sunt îndreptăţit să spun că P / Je n’ai pas le droit de dire que P Ar fi nedrept din partea mea să spun că P / Il serait injuste de ma part de dire que P

(7) Nu sunt in masura sa afirm ca femeile frumoase sunt superficiale sau neserioase. Oamenii pot fi superficiali indiferent ca sunt frumosi sau nu. Superficiali in gandire si in comportament. Sa etichetez femeile frumoase ca fiind obligatoriu superficiale ar fi in primul rand o dovada de superficialitate in gandirea mea. Iar eu ma stradui sa nu fiu superficial. http://smartwoman.hotnews.ro/echilibrul-intre-viata-profesionala-si-viata-personala-in-cazul-femeilor-este-o-utopie.html Je ne suis pas en mesure d’affirmer que les belles femmes sont superficielles ou elles manquent de sérieux. Les gens peuvent être superficiels, qu’ils soient beaux ou non. Superficiels dans leur manière de penser et dans leur manière de se conduire. Etiqueter les belles femmes de superficielles serait en premier lieu une preuve de superficialité dans mon jugement. Et moi, je m’efforce à ne pas être superficiel.

Après avoir présenté quelques possibles constructions de la prétérition en tant que manifestation linguistique, je me propose en ce qui suit de faire ressortir les fonctions rhétoriques que cette figure peut accomplir afin que le locuteur parvienne à imposer son point de vue sur l’auditoire. L’analyse sera menée sur des extraits de prises de position sur la situation des Roms, extraits traduits du roumain en français par l’auteure.

2. Fonctionnement rhétorique de la prétérition Les définitions de la prétérition proposées au début de l’étude mettent en évidence que le fonctionnement rhétorique en comporte deux volets qui traduisent l’attitude du locuteur: un volet qui vise la pseudo omission d’un contenu propositionnel et un autre volet qui porte sur le renforcement du même contenu. La prétérition est une «figure de rhétorique par laquelle on feint d’omettre des circonstances sur lesquelles on insiste avec beaucoup de force». (Littré) Ces deux volets sont également surpris par Snoeck Henkenans (2009: 347) qui souligne que les effets rhétoriques de la prétérition comprennent une combinaison entre mise en valeur et dissimulation. En prenant en considération ces deux valeurs, je vais m’arrêter sur chaque type de prétérition mentionné afin d’étudier le fonctionnement de cette stratégie rhétorique selon que la prétérition sert à introduire un point de vue ou un argument ou bien qu’elle contribue à marquer ou non la distance épistémique entre le locuteur et ses propos. Prenons pour analyse les exemples suivants de prétérition directe, explicite:

265 (8) si mai lasati la o parte descriminarea [sic] asta ca tot oameni suntem si noi tiganii.Nu spun ca tiganii sunt perfecti e adevarat ca fac numai prosti [sic] pe unde merg dar nici cu romanii nu mie [sic] rusine ca macar tiganii se ocupa cu cersitul dar romanii cu altceva deci toti suntem la fel .Si nu toti tiganii sunt la fel mai exista si oameni cumsecade si cu scoala .Sper sa nu fi jicnit [sic] pe nimeni. http://www.filiera.fr/node/8606 et laissez de côté cette discrimination car nous aussi, nous sommes des humains. Je ne dis pas que les tsiganes sont parfaits, il est vrai qu’ils font des bêtises là où ils vont, mais je n’ai pas honte avec les Roumains non plus, au moins les tsiganes s’occupent à mendier, mais les Roumains s’occupent à d’autres choses, donc nous sommes tous pareils. Et tous les tsiganes ne sont pas pareils, il y a parmi eux des gens honnêtes et instruits. J’espère que je n’ai vexé personne.

(9) Pe mine m-a intrigat nonsalanta cu care Cioaba a spus ca ei nu muncesc, sau ma rog, muncesc mai putin, doar ca n-a spus clar : "noi furam, nu ca prostii care muncesc". Si nu vreau sa spun ca toti tiganii fura, dar nici nu stiu la care "noi" se referea "regele". http://www.culinar.ro/forum/index.php?showtopic=3170&mode=linearplus

Moi, j’ai été intriguée par la nonchalance avec laquelle Cioaba (le roi des tsiganes) a dit qu’ils ne travaillaient pas, ou plutôt qu’ils travaillaient moins, seulement il n’a pas dit clairement : « nous volons, non pas comme les idiots qui travaillent » Et je ne veux pas dire que tous les tsigane volent, mais je ne sais non plus à quel «nous» «le roi» faisait référence.

(10) Nu o să afirm că ţiganii sunt singura noastră problemă, in schimb reprezintă principala problemă pe care o cauzăm noi lumii. http://www.ziare.com/social/stiri-sociale/opinii-tiganii-si-europa-1012565

Je ne vais pas affirmer que les tsiganes sont notre seul problème, par contre ils représentent le problème principal que nous provoquons au monde entier.

Dans ces exemples, le locuteur rejette le fait qu’il accomplit, qu’il veut accomplir ou qu’il va accomplir un acte de langage assertif. La prétérition attire l’attention sur l’argument avancé et anticipe le point de vue qui, en général, suit la conjonction mais ou un autre connecteur adversatif. Ce que le locuteur vise à imposer sur l’auditoire c’est que les Tsiganes et les Roumains sont pareils, certains Tsiganes volent, les Tsiganes représentent le problème principal que les Roumains provoquent au reste du monde. La négation du verbe de parole, qui peut être comprise comme la négation d’un préfixe performatif, se transmet en fait au contenu propositionnel véhiculé, à savoir les Tsiganes ne sont pas parfaits, tous les Tsiganes ne volent pas, les Tsiganes ne sont pas notre seul problème. Pourtant, le locuteur préfère la forme de la prétérition pour induire chez l’auditoire certaines idées qui, pour ne pas éveiller des réactions des plus fortes, sont données sous la forme d’une dissimulation de l’acte assertif. Aussi le locuteur décline-t-il sa responsabilité pour le contenu avancé et il ne peut être accusé ni de discrimination positive, ni négative car il «ne dit pas», «ne veut pas dire» et «ne va pas dire» quelque chose de pareil. Quant à la prétérition indirecte, une illustration identifiée est celle qui implique la négation de la condition de sincérité:

(11) Tosi, ma indoiesc ca tiganii sunt motivul pentru care multe dintre magazinele de biciclete nu pun rastel in fata magazinului. http://www.biciclistul.ro/2010/12/13/promotii-la-cald-ale-magazinelor-de-biciclete/ Tosi [un appellatif], je doute que les Tsiganes soient le motif pour lequel plusieurs magasins de vélo ne mettent pas de racks devant leurs magasins.

Le locuteur prend des distances par rapport au contenu avancé par un autre participant à la discussion. Il met en évidence qu’il n’est pas prêt à adhérer à ce contenu. Cette phrase peut être également comprise comme une attaque à un autre participant qui vise à imposer son point de vue, à savoir les Tsiganes sont le motif pour lequel plusieurs magasins de vélo ne mettent pas de racks devant leurs magasins. Pour les trois derniers types de prétérition indirecte, on peut s’imaginer les contextes suivants:

26 6 Nu am motive să spun că ţiganii au dat foc acestor paie./ Je nai pas de raisons de dire que les tsiganes ont mis le feu à ces pailles. (négation de la première condition préparatoire)

Le locuteur met l’accent sur le manque de preuves qui soutiennent son affirmation tout en suggérant en même temps que cela n’est pas entièrement exclu. Il prend des précautions et n’affirme pas directement son point de vue, conscient qu’une affirmation doit être étayée par des preuves. C’est une modalité de s’éluder la responsabilité, il induit une idée tout en se protégeant contre les attaques des potentiels opposants. Nu este nevoie să spun că unii ţigani fură. / Il n’est pas nécessaire de dire que certains Tsiganes volent. (négation de la deuxième condition préparatoire)

Le locuteur transmet un contenu propositionnel tellement connu qu’il ne vaut plus la peine de le mentionner. Pourtant s’il choisit de le redire, c’est pour reconfirmer son adhésion à ce contenu.

Nu sunt în măsură să spun că ţiganii trebuie alungaţi din Franţa. / Je ne suis pas en mesure de dire que les Tsiganes doivent être chassés hors de la France. (négation de la troisième condition préparatoire)

Le locuteur admet qu’il n’est pas socialement en mesure de faire une telle affirmation. Son but est d’attirer l’attention des autres sur le contenu véhiculé, des personnes qui s’avèrent plus capables d’accomplir l’acte de dire et, peut-être, l’acte de faire.

Conclusions En adoptant la perspective bipartite avancée par Snoeck Henkemans (2009), cette étude a analysé la prétérition en tant que stratégie rhétorique qui recouvre deux valeurs fondamentales: la mise en évidence d’un contenu propositionnel et sa dissimulation. Nous avons premièrement identifié des schémas possibles de réalisation de la prétérition en roumain: prétérition directe centrée sur la négation d’un verbe de parole qui se traduit par une annulation feinte de l’acte de dire et prétérition indirecte caractérisée par la négation d’une condition de félicité de l’acte de langage assertif. Quand il emploie une prétérition directe, le locuteur joue sur deux plans: le plan de ce qu’il transmet ouvertement par son discours et le plan de qu’il veut transmettre et qu’il dissimule sous l’apparence d’une annulation de l’acte de dire. Pour la compréhension du schéma Je ne dis pas que P…mais…, il faut opérer un transfert de la négation du verbe de parole vers le contenu propositionnel P : Je dis que non P (Je ne vais pas dire que les Tsiganes sont notre seul problème peut être compris comme Je vais dire que les Tsiganes ne sont pas notre seul problème). Le sujet semble adhérer au contenu propositionnel ainsi obtenu qui vient étayer le point de vue en jeu qu’il vise à imposer sur l’auditoire / les lecteurs. De surcroît, la prétérition directe peut fonctionner comme une stratégie rhétorique par laquelle le sujet parlant / écrivant cherche à imposer le contenu P tel qu’il est donné. P représente le plus souvent un sujet délicat qui touche des aspects sociaux et humains voués aux prises de position contraires. Dans ce cas, le locuteur est conscient que P éveillera des réactions auxquelles il n’est pas prêt à faire face et il préfère dissimuler l’acte de langage assertif. En fonction de la condition de félicité qui n’est pas respectée par l’accomplissement de la prétérition indirecte, la prétérition traduit la distance épistémique entre le locuteur et ses propos et le sujet parlant / écrivant fait ressortir son manque d’adhésion au contenu propositionnel (Je doute que P), son adhésion dissimulée (Il n’est pas nécessaire de mentionner que P), ou bien il décline avoir les motifs (Je n’ai aucune raison de dire que P) ou la capacité morale (Je n’ai pas le droit de dire que P) de transmettre P.

Bibliographie Eemeren van, Frans .H., and Peter Houtlosser, Strategic manoeuvering: Maintaining a delicate balance, in F.H. van Eemeren, and P. Houtlosser (eds), „Dialectic and rhetoric: The warp and woof of argumentation analysis”, Kluwer, Boston, 2002, pp. 119-130. Fontanier, Pierre, Les figures de discours, Flammarion, Paris, 1977. Nicolas, Laurent, Initiation à la stylistique, Hachette, Paris, 2001. Morier, Henri, Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique, Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1989. Searle, John and Daniel Vanderveken, Foundations of illocutionary logic, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, 1985. Snoeck Henkemans A. Francisca, Manoeuvring Strategically with Praeteritio, in „Argumentation” 23, 2009, pp. 339–350.

267 Fraze care au fost...

Dan S. Stoica*

Abstract: Starting from the distinction between phrase and utterance (and also between text and discourse), the paper aims to point to errors comming from ignoring the context as determinant for the sens of a given tolken. Famous phrases are invoked to prove the mandatory care for the context when chosing to use one of them. Keywords: phrase, utterance, context, textem, discourse

Motto: I had always assumed that cliché was a suburb in Paris, until I discovered it was a street in Oxford. Philip Guedalla

Introducere Ascultam, zilele trecute, un interviu cu Academicianul Laurenţiu Popescu, medicul cu telocitele. Fără să fi avut vreo înţelegere cu Domnia Sa – nu ne cunoaştem – şi chiar fără să sper, îl auzeam confirmînd ceea ce încerc să induc studenţilor mei, ba chiar şi colegilor de breaslă: regula compromisului şi ideea că totul poate avea valoare de adevăr, dar numai contextual, numai într-un timp anume. Aveam dinainte un cercetător de o valoare incontestabilă, care spunea că şi adevărul ştiinţific este „o modă” – adică ceva demodabil. Mergea pînă la a spune că adevărul ştiinţific este ceva ce nu s-a demonstrat ÎNCĂ a fi fals şi adăuga că se poate observa cum fiecare epocă este cu adevărul său ştiinţific. Halucinant, nu?! Halucinant, mai ales pentru cei rigid ancoraţi în certitudini adesea vetuste şi legate de chestiuni complexe, pentru cei „încremeniţi în proiect”, pentru cei care cred că a accepta compromisul înseamnă a te compromite. Cele de mai sus îmi servesc, pentru că mi-am propus să mă ocup de fraze care au făcut epocă şi care au fost depăşite de evoluţia lumii, dar continuă să aibă ecou în sufletul celor ce par a- şi face o datorie din a căuta locuri, instanţe de comunicare, momente în care să le enunţe, iar şi iar. Nu este vorba despre principiile care guvernează vreun domeniu ori de fraze care conţin înţelepciunea concentrată a unei epoci sau a unei culturi. Sînt fraze care au fost enunţate mai ales în spaţiul unor domenii epistemologice marcate de complexitate – cum ar fi comunicarea – sau în interiorul studiilor despre fenomene complexe – cum ar fi limbajul. În circumstanţele primei lor enunţări, ele au fost justificate. Contextele au evoluat – aşa se întîmplă mereu cu contextele! – şi reluarea unor foste adevăruri poate avea rezultate dintre cele mai neaşteptate. Revenind la ceea ce mi-am propus, precizez că nu am ales să mă ocup aici şi despre acele fraze care au fost greşit traduse şi au fost propuse, forţat, ca purtătoare de sensuri total diferite decît cele pe care le aveau în limba de origine. Este suficient să ne amintim de dificultatea de a traduce în franceză sau engleză termeni în opoziţie din limba noastră, precum comunicare / comunicaţie, să traducem din franceză opoziţia langue / parole ori să jonglăm fără greş şi fără grijă cu termeni ca publicitate sau relaţii publice, pentru a înţelege că nu despre acest fenomen va fi vorba în cele ce urmează. Voi trata despre patru cazuri, toate, încadrate în domeniul comunicare.

Dar, mai întîi, să vedem de ce se spune tot mai des că trăim în era comunicării. Doar s-a comunicat dintotdeauna. De altfel, drept ar fi ca istoria umanităţii să nu fie împărţită în epoci după tipul de unelte de care s-a folosit omul de-a lungul timpului, ci, aşa cum au spus şi alţii, după modurile de comunicare caracteristice diverselor tranşe de timp. Rămîn cu ideea că şi atunci cînd spunem că trăim în era comunicării avem o traducere aproximativă a unei formule din limba engleză, eroarea venind din „confuzia” pe care această limbă o păstrează între comunicare şi comunicaţii (ambii termeni se traduc în engleză prin communication). Ceea ce se dezvoltă uluitor de mult şi de repede în secolul acesta nu este comunicarea, ci comunicaţiile. Paradoxal, se pare că, pe măsură ce comunicaţiile evoluează, comunicarea o duce tot mai rău. Ar fi, cred, mai corect să afirmăm că secolul XXI este secolul comunicaţiilor, nu al comunicării. Cu toate acestea, voi

* Conf. dr., Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iaşi

268 accepta şi formula aflată în circulaţie: trăim în era comunicării. M-a ajutat să adopt acestă poziţie şi o lectură mai recentă. Am găsit la Deborah Cameron următoarea explicaţie:

„trăim în ceea ce poate fi numit o „cultură a comunicării”. Nu înţeleg prin aceasta simplul fapt că ar fi o cultură care comunică şi nici una care pune regulă în comportamentul comunicaţional (toate culturile fac aşa ceva). Înţeleg prin aceasta mai degrabă o cultură deosebit de conştientă de sine şi deosebit de reflexivă cu privire la comunicare, iar acest lucru generează mari cantităţi de metadiscursuri despre comunicare. Pentru membrii unei astfel de culturi, „este bine să vorbeşti” e o axiomă, dar, în acelaşi timp, este normal să faci judecăţi despre care tipuri de discurs sînt bune şi care sînt mai puţin bune. Oamenii aspiră, ori cred că trebuie să aspire la a comunica „mai bine”; şi sînt deosebit de receptivi la sfatul experţilor.” (Cameron 2000, p. VIII).

Două lucruri atrag atenţia în textul citat: existenţa apetitului pentru metadiscursurile privind discursurile din diversele instanţe de comunicare şi deschiderea nespecialiştilor către sfaturile experţilor, în ideea de a comunica „mai bine”.

Înapoi la chestiune! Ceea ce aduce în discuţie prezentul studiu sînt fraze ca „O fotografie face cît o mie de cuvinte” sau chiar celebra frază a lui McLuhan, „Mediul este mesajul”. Întreprinderea nu este lipsită de riscuri: aş putea trece în ochii celor care mă vor asculta / citi drept un demolator de mituri (ceea ce mi s-ar părea grav, greu de suportat, dar şi nedrept); aş putea fi considerat drept idiosincretic exagerat, centrat pe propriile-mi idei şi încercînd să pun sub semnul dubiului ceea ce a fost şi este, pentru mulţi, chintesenţa teoriilor dintr-un domeniu drag nouă, tuturor, comunicarea. Precizez, în apărarea poziţiei mele, că mă preocupă mai cu seamă specialiştii care folosesc acele fraze fără să le (mai) înţeleagă conţinutul, sensul lor dintîi, cel acceptabil în contextul enunţării lor, ori care ignoră intenţia creatorului cîte unei fraze de a şoca printr-o figură de stil abil aleasă. Mă preocupă cei care s-au lăsat seduşi doar de genialitatea formulei în sine şi o enunţă ca pe o regulă imuabilă. Nu-i am în vedere pe aceia care, asemenea personajului interpretat de George Clooney în filmul Up in the Air, recurg la stereotipuri pentru că sînt grăbiţi şi stereotipurile scurtează expresia (personajul cu pricina spune: „I stereotype. It’s faster”). Clişeul poate fi admis ca formă a unui conţinut comunicat, dar este cel mai adesea criticabil atunci cînd este servit drept argument raţional într-o dispută de idei. În acest sens văd utilă discuţia la care invit prin acest studiu. Un tip de cazuri aparte este acela cînd semnalarea unei posibile interpretări primordiale face ca fraza să-şi deschidă conţinutul unei utilizări nesperat de actuale şi totuşi total diferită decît în clişeu. Avem, deci, şi cazuri fericite.

Cîteva fraze şi soarta lor în timp

1. The medium is the message Pentru cei care au observat în ce fel s-a tot modificat funcţionarea fiecăruia dintre canalele „tradiţionale” (între care, şi televiziunea), pentru cei care au remarcat urmările a ceea ce este cunoscut sub numele de „convergenţă media” şi pentru cei care înţeleg bine ce înseamnă multimedia, fraza lui McLuhan păstrează o valoare mai degrabă istorică, adevărul ei trebuind a fi supus unor mereu înnoite reflecţii. Cînd mai luăm în calcul faptul că mediul de transmitere este cel mai adesea parte integrantă a contextului comunicării, discuţia se mută pe importanţa pragmatică a contextului (cu mediu cu tot), iar atunci cînd vedem în comunicare o negociere intersubiectivă a realităţilor din universul înconjurător, înţelegem că sensurile toate stau în interactanţi (vezi şi Preston 2009) şi că aceştia fac ce vor cu mediul, cu contextul ori, altfel pusă problema, fac ce vor din mediu, din context etc.... Sigur că e mai greu de studiat un fenomen care se prezintă astfel spiritului nostru, dar stabilirea unor mode (cu formule fixe, clişee, stereotipuri şi prejudecăţi) nu ajută. Din perspectiva pe care o propune acest studiu, ideea existenţei apetitului pentru metadiscursurile privind discursurile din diversele instanţe de comunicare s-ar lega de activitatea specialiştilor. Ştiu că nu este aşa, dar îmi propun să las deoparte metadiscursurile din sfera interacţiunilor verbale comune. Interesant este, pentru abordarea de faţă, să văd de ce vestita frază „the medium is the message” are încă atît de mult succes, deşi s-a ajuns, între timp, la concluziile amintite mai sus. Să revenim asupra lui „Meanings are in people, not in messages [1]” (Preston

269 2009). Ivan Preston, profesor emeritus la University of Wisconsin, Madison, în Statele Unite, are un interesant mod de a se revolta contra tendinţelor de a propune viziuni simplificatoare şi simpliste asupra comunicării în programele de studiu din facultăţile de comunicare şi media: el atrage atenţia asupra diferenţei dintre specialişti şi nespecialişti (ajunşi adesea să predea în universităţi, pe motiv că au o carieră de practicieni plină de succese), diferenţă vizibilă mai ales graţie analizei metadiscursului pe care fiecare din tipurile de indivizi numite mai sus le face asupra comunicării. Nespecialiştii vor ceda clişeelor, în vreme ce specialiştii vor discuta lucrurile cu luarea în calcul a tuturor descoperirilor din domeniile care se ocupă cu studiul fenomenului complex care este comunicarea. Cu o ironie nemascată, Ivan Preston relatează cum, după 50 de ani de cînd şi-a făcut el însuşi studiile, se predau aceleaşi lucruri, cu stimuli şi canale, cu receptori şi emiţători şi cu tehnici de pregătire a ştirilor, a publicităţii etc. Autorul aici invocat nu simte ameninţarea venind dinspre adevăraţii specialişti în comunicare, ci dinspre nespecialiştii care nu şi-au actualizat viziunile. Dacă un economist, specialist în marketing – şi care crede că ştie comunicare de marketing! – se mulţumeşte cu construirea unui mesaj clar, în ideea că, la cît e de clar, mesajul său va fi înţeles de toată lumea şi va produce acelaşi efect la orice destinatar ar fi să ajungă, un specialist în comunicare – un PR-ist, să spunem – va şti că un acelaşi conţinut de mesaj va fi transformat într-o mulţime de conţinuturi comunicate, în funcţie de oamenii care interacţionează în fiecare instanţă de comunicare. Nu canalul (mediul) va decide diferenţele de receptare, ci personajele aflate în comunicare, la cîte un capăt al canalului. Ba, mai mult, acelaşi mediu de comunicare poate contribui la construirea unui sens diferit în indivizi-receptori diferiţi. Meanings are in people... Să nu se creadă că mă plasez pe o poziţie de refutare hotărîtă a formulei lui McLuhan. Mai există încă, totuşi, suficiente situaţii în care a spune „mediul este mesajul” are sens şi anume în înţelesul dat de Watzlawick observaţiei că orice instanţă de comunicare comportă un conţinut şi o relaţie, astfel încît relaţia clasifică conţinutul, constituindu-se în metacomunicare. Dacă ne gîndim, spre exemplu, la evoluţia obiceiurilor legate de transmiterea urărilor de bine (a felicitărilor, cum li se mai spune), înţelegem de ce un acelaşi conţinut („la mulţi ani”) are o anumită receptare dacă e transmis viva voce, în cadrul unei vizite, verbalul fiind însoţit, eventual, de o strîngere de mînă, de îmbrăţişări, de săruturi ori dacă e transmis în scriere olografă, pe o hîrtie atent aleasă, dacă e transmis telefonic, prin e-mail sau sms (şi, în aceste din urmă cazuri evocate, dacă apare ca un conţinut trimis automat, simultan către toate adresele selectate din agenda electronică, sau este trimis cu ţintă unică). În toate situaţiile imaginate mai sus, rolul decisiv îl vor avea participanţii la interacţiunea comunicaţională şi contextul în care aceasta se produce. Ne putem închipui indivizi dezinvolţi, de vîrste mai tinere, crescuţi într-o atmosferă în care nu s-a mai pus şi nu se mai pune preţ pe detalii, avînd chiar o dificultate mare în a găsi diferenţele dintre scenariile propuse în exemplul cu urarea de „la mulţi ani”. Fraza lui McLuhan îşi păstrează oarecum valoarea şi în enunţuri privind mass-media, dar nu mai are acel statut de adevăr absolut şi, deci, arareori mai poate servi drept argument într-o dezbatere pe vreo temă ţinînd de acest domeniu, mai ales că, aşa cum aminteam mai sus, asistăm la fenomenul de convergenţă media (ca în cazuri precum revista presei scrise făcută într-o emisiune de la televizor, imprimarea unei scene dintr-un film, ca sprijin în înţelegerea unui text de ziar etc.).

2. O fotografie face cît o mie de cuvinte Într-o logică naturală, găsim suficiente momente cînd enunţarea acestei deja celebre fraze îşi face efectul şi este chiar considerată de netăgăduit. Logica clasică, mai atentă la sofisme, near obliga să precizăm sub ce aspect poate fi acceptat adevărul frazei enunţate, din ce punct de vedere una „face” mai mult decît cealaltă. Or, odată ridicată această întrebare, dificultatea apare: este vorba despre aspectul raţional sau despre cel emoţional? Valoarea unei fotografii este de o mie de ori mai mare decît a cuvîntului în orice situaţie sau ar fi de făcut distincţia între planul raţional şi cel emoţional al unei interacţiuni comunicaţionale Discuţia pleacă de la această distincţie... Se ştie că una dintre dificultăţile înţelegerii conţinuturilor comunicate prin folosirea limbajului verbal este aceea dată de faptul că vorbirea are o desfăşurare lineară, în vreme ce gîndirea avansează în bloc. Găsim o discuţie pe această temă şi în Cursul lui Saussure (limba, ne spune lingvistul elveţain, nu este alcătuită din date şi de aceea prezenţa unui segment de limbă nu anticipă în niciun fel ceea îi va urma). Se ştie că destinatarul unui enunţ nu are mari şanse de a anticipa ceea ce va fi enunţul în întregul său înainte ca vorbitorul să fi sfîrşit ceea ce avea de

270 enunţat (experienţa de viaţă comună a interlocutorilor, anumite elemente de orientare a lecturii pot servi, dar pot fi, în multe cazuri, înşelătoare). Nici teoria fasciculelor de la Ducrot (care spune că sensul unui enunţ este totalitatea fascicolului de posibile continuări pe care le presupune acel enunţ) nu ajută prea mult, iar aici ne poate sta drept exemplu de cel mai înalt grad expresia poetică. Pentru cunoscuta formulă „foaie verde de”, folclorul nostru a reţinut o mulţime de urmări posibile, fără a epuiza fitosfera autohtonă; cine s-ar fi gîndit, însă, că e posibilă şi o continuare ca „albastru”?! Ei bine, a fost nevoie de un poet (Nichita Stănescu), pentru ca fascicolul de posibile continuări să devină de-a dreptul inepuizabil. De la acel „foaie verde de albastru” al lui Nichita încoace, eu mă pot aştepta la încă şi mai negîndite formule din seria care începe cu „foaie verde de...”.

Pornind de la acest mic preambul, se poate reafirma faptul că nu poate fi gîndit un conţinut transmis prin limbaj verbal înainte ca enunţarea/lectura frazei să fie completă, ceea ce face ca lucrurile să se petreacă în timp. De aici, efectul mai puternic pe componenta raţională a comunicării verbale şi impactul mai slab pe componenta emoţională (în timp, chiar şi cele mai reuşite construcţii îşi văd atenuată forţa de a produce instantaneu o emoţie). Pe de altă parte, percepţia vizuală a imaginii se face, într-o primă fază, în bloc, aşa cum funcţionează şi gîndirea, ceea ce face ca impresia, adică emoţia, să fie transmisă imediat, cu întreaga ei forţă. E de înţeles că, de la primul contact chiar, imaginea produce un efect puternic, uneori paralizant, blocînd uneori chiar intenţia de a analiza mai în detaliu imaginea. Din acest punct de vedere, o imagine chiar „face cît” o mie de cuvinte. Se pot face experimente simple pentru a distinge lucrurile şi pentru a înţelege ce se întîmplă în cele două tipuri de cazuri. Despre un astfel de experiment citeam undeva, cu multă vreme în urmă. Doi copii de vreo 8 ani au fost invitaţi să afle cîte ceva despre tigru. Ei au fost introduşi în două cabine separate şi li s-au proiectat două filme diferite: unuia i s-a prezentat un film în care un tigru era arătat cum se plimba prin junglă şi îşi pîndea prada, iar celuilalt i s-a prezentat o peliculă pe care era derulat un text despre tigru (cum arată, unde trăieşte, cu ce se hrăneşte etc.). La sfîrşitul proiecţiilor, celor doi copii li s-au pus întrebări. La întrebarea „cîte dungi are tigrul pe spinare?”, cel care văzuse imagini n-a ştiut să răspundă, în vreme ce copilul care citise textul despre tigru a ştiut; la întrebarea „te-ai speriat de tigru?”, cel care citise textul a spus că nu avea cum să simtă vreo emoţie, nicidecum spaimă, iar celălalt a spus că s-a simţit traversat de un fior de spaimă cînd tigrul din film s-a întors spre el şi l-a privit cu ochii aceia verzi, din stufăriş. Un alt exemplu ar putea fi extras din filmul Squid and Whale [2] (titlu tradus la noi, în mod nefericit, Cîinele şi pisica). La psiholog, un adolescent provenit dintr-o familie destrămtă, povesteşte despre vizitele la Muzeul de ştiinţe ale naturii, în compania mamei sale, demult, pe cînd era copil. Îl speriau balena şi calamarul, la care nu se putea uita decît printre degete, parcă pentru a se simţi mai în siguranţă. De fiecare dată, cînd se întorceau acasă, mama sa îi „povestea” balena şi calamarul şi – spune adolescentul – de data asta, nu-l mai speriau. Punerea în cuvinte a imaginii avea darul de a se adresa minţii în alt fel, mai aproape de raţiune şi mai departe de emoţie. Ştim cu toţii că nu putem „povesti” vreun autoportret de-al lui Van Gogh, dar ne amintim întotdeauna cum l-am privit hipnotizaţi. Ne amintim cu toţii cum ni s-a întmplat cîteodată să ne lăsăm furaţi de frumuseţea unei imagini şi, din această cauză, n-am mai fost în stare să o descriem în amănunt. Emoţia a prevalat în faţa lecturii raţionale. Ştim şi cum ni s-au format adevărate imagini mentale în urma citirii unor texte sau în urma unei povestiri ascultate şi mai ştim că emoţiile declanşate în astfel de cazuri aveau la bază analogii cu imagini deja văzute aiurea. Este de neevitat să punem lucrurile în ordine: receptarea conţinuturilor transmise prin comunicare verbală solicită mai direct raţiunea şi acordă un loc mai mic emoţiei (la un prim abord, desigur!), în vreme ce receptarea conţinuturilor transmise pe cale vizuală solicită mai puţin gîndirea raţională şi lasă mai mult loc pentru emoţii. Aşadar, o fotografie emoţionează (probabil, uneori) mai mult decît o mie de cuvinte, dar o mie de cuvinte informează raţional mai mult decît o fotografie, iar emoţia pe care o pot transmite este la fel de puternică precum cea transmisă pe cale vizuală, dar apare mai tîrziu, instalarea în timp conferindu-i şi o remanenţă superioară). Cuvintele au adesea şi capacitatea de a ne ajuta să vedem lucruri care, altfel, ar scăpa percepţiei noastre. Ar fi, poate, de ajutor să evoc aici modul în care Daniel Arasse (Arasse 2008) ne ajută să vedem pictura Marte şi Venus surprinşi de Vulcan, a lui Tintoretto (1579):

271 „De regulă, Marte şi Venus sînt goi, întinşi pe patul adulterului, prinşi în năvodul aruncat peste ei de Vulcan, avertizat de Apollo. Nimic din toate acestea în tabloul lui păstrat la München. Venus este goală, asta-i clar, frumos întinsă pe pat. Însă nu e singură. Marte s-a ascuns sub masă, în armură şi cu coiful pe cap, în timp ce Vulcan, cu un genunchi pe pat, ridică diafana pînză care ascunde sexul femeii sale. Lîngă ei, sub fereastră, într-un leagăn, Cupidon a căzut pradă somnului”.

Cu un ochi informat, te uiţi acum la scenă, unde surprinzi şi capul lui Marte (care ţi-ar fi putut scăpa!) şi-ţi imaginezi, poate, că Tintoretto va fi vrut să exalte, printr-un contraexemplu, virtuţile fidelităţii conjugale. Ceea ce ţin să pun în evidenţă aici este faptul că un comentariu în limbaj verbal articulat poate privilegia o anumită percepţie asupra unei imagini, chiar dacă aceasta este propusă de înalta artă creată de un mare mare pictor. Ideea nu este singulară şi nu cred că ne vom opri aici. Îl citez, în sprijinul acestei idei pe John Berger, cu a sa Ways of seeing, unde lucrurile stau la fel: limbajul verbal orienteză percepţia vizuală şi decide şi de clasa în care va fi încadrată imaginea percepută. În plus, asumînd ideea că mintea noastră funcţionează prin limba pe care o vorbim (cea maternă, ne spune teoria Worf-Sapir) sau, în viziunea lui Humboldt, limba este gîndire, ajungem să tragem concluzia că şi non verbalul (deci şi fotografia) este înţeles la receptare doar pentru că este „tradus”, involuntar şi instantaneu, în verbal. Non verbalul emoţionează la primul impact, dar este înţeles prin percepţia completă, cea care presupune şi acţiunea de verbalizare a conţinutului perceput. Ce ne facem cu fraza de la care a pornit discuţia? Folosirea ei în enunţări bine adecvate contextului, cu înţelegerea clară a separării după aspectul sub care trebuie înţeles enunţul, nu poate face rău. Instituirea conţinutului acestei fraze ca adevăr absolut şi imuabil nu poate fi, însă, decît o eroare. Eroare suportabilă atunci cînd este comisă de un nespecialist în comunicare, eroare gravă atunci cînd un specialist o comite cu gîndul de argumenta în vreo dispută pe baza ei.

Cazuri deosebite

Un caz jenant: 7/38/55 Ar trebui să încep cu o formulă de genul „Bietul Albert Mehrabian!”, mai ales după ce am găsit pe net propria-i lamentaţie cu privire la soarta vestitei farze – pe care chiar a spus-o! – despre procentajul de verbal, de non verbal şi de paraverbal din actele comunicaţionale. În loc să se bucure că există „mitul lui Mahrebian”, profesorul de psihologie nu încetează a explica tuturor celor care îl ascultă că a fost înţeles greşit, că nu e bine să-l citeze cei care nu au înţeles despre ce vorbea el cînd a dat vestitul său 7/38/55. Transmisă din gură în gură şi din generaţie în generaţie, chiar prin scrieri ale unor specialişti în comunicare (!), fraza „în comunicare, doar 7 este verbal, non verbalul ocupînd 38 , iar paraverbalul 55” face încă epocă. Apar, desigur şi receptori critici ai enunţării acestei fraze, iar ironia devine reacţia celor care simt că ceva nu e în regulă cu statistica asta, dar care nu merg totuşi la sursă, pentru a vedea de unde a plecat „enormitatea” cu pricina. Sînt deja cunoscute întrebări retorice de o ironie nedisimulată precum: „trebuie să înţeleg că, atunci cînd îl întreb pe un trecător cum se ajunge într-un loc anume, e mai folositor să fiu atent la inflexiunile vocii sale, la privirea sa, la haine, la postură şi mult mai puţin la cuvintele care conţin informaţia propriu-zisă?”. Sînt alţi cercetători care se gîndesc că, pe baza proastei decodări a mesajului din fraza lui Mahrebian, se construiesc la nesfîrşit vestitele „reţete” cu care sînt dopaţi cei care se pregătesc pentru interviu de angajare sau pentru alte tipuri de discursuri, adesea, publice: li se spune acestora cum să-şi privească înterlocutorul/interlocutorii, cum să ţină palmele, cum să se aşeze pe scaun sau cum să dea mîna cu celălalt, fără prea multă insistenţă pe cuvintele care ar trebui folosite pentru a se descrie pe sine sau pentru a-şi declara dorinţa de a fi acceptat de celălalt. Trist! Trist şi pentru (bietul) Mahrebian, trist şi pentru evoluţia domeniului de cercetare numit comunicare! Cum de sînt atît de puţini cei care tresar măcar cînd aud că s-a stabilit prin studii o astfel de proporţie între verbal şi rest?! Cum de sînt atît de puţini cei care încearcă să caute sursa frazei şi să afle cum s-a ajuns la astfel de procente?! Ar mai rămîne să mă întreb cum de sînt atît de puţini cei care scriu cărţi (rezultat al unei cercetări, am zice) în care construcţia argumentării se bazează pe „mitul lui Mahrebian”. Am citit cu toţii măcar o astfel de carte. Pe scurt, studiul lui Albert Mahrebian avea în vedere reacţia unor subiecţi (care au fost, pînă la urmă, numai femei, întrucît profesorul de psihologie nu a reuşit să convingă niciun bărbat să

272 participe!) la auzul unui singur cuvînt, la care li se sugerase că trebuie să arate doar cum se poziţionează în intervalul „îmi place/nu-mi place” faţă de ceea ce aud. Rezultatul a fost celebrul 7/38/55. Purtat de vînt, acest rezultat a înfierbîntat spiritele şi a ajuns să producă dezvoltări pe această temă, cu totul scăpate de sub control. Ar fi suficient să ne gîndim la faptul că paraverbalul nu poate exista în afara verbalului, el fiind modul de producere a verbalului, pentru ca să descoperim dificultatea de a „înghiţi pe nemestecate” un raport atît de straniu. Închei această parte a studiului pe care-l propun aici cu formula de la început: „Bietul Albert Mahrebian!”.

Un caz fericit La cazuri deosebite, am păstrat, pentru un final mai luminos, povestea unei vechi fraze, spusă şi ea adesea: Verba volant, scripta manent. Într-o Europă administrată de două secole după ştiinţa născută de Napoleon, scripta au fost şi rămîn sfinte. Ce e scris poate fi păstrat şi poate servi drept dovadă dacă sau cînd se iveşte nevoia. O Europă marcată de o tendinţă tot mai marcată de a se păzi de incertitudine (uncertainty avoidance, cum a numit Geert Hofstede acest criteriu de clasificare a naţiunilor/a culturilor) face ca oamenii să caute cele mai imbatabile maniere de a-şi garanta siguranţa relaţiilor cu ceilalţi. Ceea ce spui zboară şi nu poate servi la o adică drept probă în caz de litigiu. Dimpotrivă, ceea ce e scris rămîne şi constituie probă pentru orice argumentare ulterioară. Topos-ul „scris + pozitiv” (deci, „spus + negativ”) funcţionează de vreo două sute de ani şi mai bine. Ne propune, însă, profesorul Alexandru Călinescu o interpretare în care doar topoi se schimbă. Într-o conferinţă găzduită de Filiala Iaşi a Academiei, Alexandru Călinescu propune să considerăm că, în percepţia anticilor, vor fi fost mai bune verba, pentru că zboară şi, deci, se îmbogăţesc şi, mai mult decît orice, scapă fixării, în vreme ce scripta – întrucît manent – se înţepenesc şi, cu timpul, nu mai sînt la fel de valoroase. Zburînd, verba se îmbogăţesc, adună sensuri şi capătă noi valenţe. Fixate, scripta ajung, precum limba de lemn, să nu mai spună mare lucru. Disonanţa cognitivă este maximă: ni se propune, nu să nu-i ascultăm pe antici, ci să-i ascultăm, dar să-i înţelegem conform unei posibile decodări total diferite, în baza topos-ului opus celui care funcţionează de atîta vreme în spaţiul cultural european. Aş zice că una nu o elimină pe alta: putem folosi în continuare fraza Verba volant, scripta manent cu sensul cu care ne-am obişnuit de la Napoleon încoace, dar putem, deopotrivă, să acceptăm că şi al doilea topos, cel propus de profesorul Călinescu, este valabil. Putem gîndi şi la „scris + negativ” şi „spus + pozitiv”. Contextul şi paraverbalul vor putea servi la privilegierea uneia sau a alteia dintre cele două lecturi posibile ale acestei fraze. Povestea, însă, mi s-a părut nu numai seducătoare, dar şi importantă pentru studiul comunicării pe baza textemelor repetate în contexte diferite şi cu maniere diferite de enunţare.

Concluzii Frazele au viaţă în enunţuri, iar înţelesurile sînt în oameni. Contextul decide! Pe de altă parte, ceea ce le este permis nespecialiştilor – şi anume, să folosească fără discernămînt „ziceri” celebre cu referire la comunicare – nu poate fi pardonat specialiştilor, chemaţi să constituie, printr-un consens solid întemeiat, ştiinţa pe care au ales să o servească. Am văzut că specificul epocii noastre este acela de a metacomunica despre comunicare. Într-un fel e de aşteptat să o facă cei din afara domeniului, în alt fel trebuie să o facă specialiştii în comunicare. Este, poate, singura manieră prin care aceştia din urmă se vor putea oricînd distinge de cei dintîi. Aşadar, fraze care au fost enunţate cu un anumit efect în anumite circumstanţe trebuie folosite cu reţinere în contexte noi, pentru că valoarea lor – ca a oricărui segment de limbă! – ţine de enunţarea lor, care este contextuală.

Studiul de faţă pleacă de la lucruri deja bine stabilite (de un Eugeniu Coşeriu, de pildă) şi susţinute de multe alte studii, multe fiind publicate în sillage-ul Magistrului. Instanţa de comunicare este un eveniment unic, niciodată repetat, pentru că, asemenea evenimentelor, nu poate fi repetat. Orice enunţ este unic şi durează atît cît durează şi enunţarea lui. Dacă rostesc

273 (enunţ, deci), în acest moment, dinaintea acestui public, fraza „orice enunţ este unic”, tac apoi o secundă şi rostesc (din nou!) „orice enunţ este unic”, avînd grijă să folosesc acelaşi ton, aceeaşi intensitate a vocii, ba chiar şi aceleaşi gesturi însoţitoare, a doua rostire va fi un enunţ nou (şi unic, aşa cum am mai spus): ea se produce într-un context în care prima rostire se va fi produs deja! Aşadar, a doua rostire nu cere răspuns la întrebarea „ce vrea să spună vorbitorul?”, ci aşteaptă răspuns la întrebări precum „de ce repetă oare vorbitorul ceea ce tocmai a spus?” sau „o fi crezut vorbitorul că n-am auzit ceea ce a spus ori i se pare atît de important încît ţine să repete cele spuse pentru a sublinia importanţa conţinutului?”. Mai sînt posibile şi alte interpretări (cum ar fi: „cred că-i place atît de mult să se audă vorbind, încît se repetă”). Despre evenimente se poate povesti, dar ele nu pot fi repetate, fiind, fatalmente, unice, prin simplul fapt că sînt contextuale. Contextele fiind unice, evenimentele sînt unice. Discursul (ca suită de enunţuri) fiind un eveniment, este unic. Fraza (sau, după caz, textul) este o existenţă creată de enunţ (sau de discurs) şi reţinută de memoria comunităţii lingvistice căreia îi aparţine. Ea/el poate fi repetat/ă la infinit. De fiecare dată vom fi în prezenţa unui nou enunţ sau a unui nou discurs, pentru că de fiecare dată lucrurile se vor petrece într-un context nou şi irepetabil. Construirea unui context exact după tiparul altui context, X, anterior, nu va da un context identic cu X, ci doar unul similar. Acest al doilea context va conţine informaţia „copie a contextului X”. Pe de altă parte, forţa contextului este lesne de constatat şi în momentul lecturii: contextul este cel care decide de sensul unui conţinut anume, iar cînd spunem „context”, îi avem în minte şi pe protagoniştii interacţiunii comunicaţionale. Aşa se face că fraze care au avut un înţeles anume în vreun context dat îşi schimbă sensul atunci cînd sînt refolosite, pentru că „refolosire” înseamnă „folosire într-un nou context”. Dacă unele devin obsolete, altele stupide de-a dreptul, iar altele devin mai interesante poate şi decît se vor fi gîndit autorii lor dintîi, totul se datorează schimbării contextului. Cine se va fi fi putut gîndi, pe vremea lui Napoleon, că va veni un profesor de la Iaşi, pe nume Alexandru Călinescu, care să propună o posibilă lectură, radical diferită, a frazei care pare să stea la baza construcţiei administrative a Imperiului francez şi, mai tîrziu, a Europei?! În fine, dacă aducem în discuţie perceperea non verbalului, este suficient să evocăm părerea (măcar a unor) psihologi, conform căreia non verbalul este înţeles pentru că el este „tradus” în verbal, la receptare, instantaneu şi în mod involuntar. Fie îmi spun ceea ce am văzut/mirosit/simţit prin pipăit/auzit etc., fie mi se spune cam cum ar trebui să simt/văd/aud etc. Limitele lumii mele sînt limitele limbii mele materne, spunea Wittgenstein. Limitele mele, adaug eu, sînt toate cele pe care le veţi fi remarcat în expunerea celor de mai sus...

Note: [1] În rom.: Înţelesurile stau în oameni, nu în mesaje. [2] Scenariul şi regia îi aparţin lui Noah Baumbach.

Bibliografie Arasse 2008 – Daniel Arasse, Nu vedeţi nimic, Bucureşti, Editura Art, trad. din fr.: Laura Albulescu, după ediţia originală, On n’y voit rien, Paris, Editions Denoël, 2000. Berger 1972 – John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London, BBC/Penguin. Cameron 2000 – Deborah Cameron, Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture, London, Sage. Preston 2009 – Ivan Preston, „Understanding Communication Research Findings”, in The Journal of Consumer Affairs, Vol. 43, nr. 1(2009), pp. 170-173.

274 A Translator's Answer to Meta-Challenges

Daniela Ţuchel*

Abstract: This article will propose commentaries of metalinguistic interest on a variety of pieces in our own or other translators’ rendition. Our approach will argue that ‘beyond’ (the very meaning of the ‘meta’ prefix) is a number of things particularizing the translator’s undertaking: a change of perspectives, cultural diversity, reorganization of one’s own thinking, a thin line on which a translator tries to walk. Key words: meta-form and function, fidelity, projection of identity

Résumé: Cet article propose certains commentaires d’intérêt métalinguistique sur une variété de textes dans notre traduction ou dans celle d’autres traducteurs. Notre démarche soutiendra que AU-DELÀ (le sens propre du préfixe méta-) représente un nombre de choses qui particularisent la démarche du traducteur: une autre perspective, diversité culturelle, réorganisation de la pensée, une ligne fragile que le traducteur s’efforce d’affranchir. Mots-clés : méta-forme et fonction, fidélité, diversité culturelle, identité

We propose commentaries of metalinguistic interest on a variety of pieces in our own or other translators’ rendition. Our approach will argue that ‘beyond’ (the very meaning of the ‘meta’ prefix) is a number of things particularizing the translator’s undertaking and stressing the importance of consciously focusing on how form and function work. Umberto Eco concludes his book entitled Dire quasi la stessa cosa (tr. Rom. 2008: 367) with his own perception of the notion of ‘fidelity’. He says that translations do not require fidelity as an acceptable criterion leading to uniqueness of solution. Besides, the critic and semanticist recommends the review of the sexist arrogance contained in the word (as long as translations are expected to be “beautiful yet disloyal”). He urges the reader to consult any dictionary and check the fact that ‘fidelity’ for a synonym does not get ‘precision’, but rather ‘sincerity’, ‘honesty’, ‘respect’ and so on. Not quite so, we should say. We look up in WEUD (528) and find out that, actually not number one but in the fifth place, the synonyms for fidelity are ‘accuracy’ and ‘exactness’. We will turn to a few discourse analysis examples. It has been important for the translator (any translator, for all that matters) at the outset to keep several things in mind. Firstly, be it fragmentary or a self-contained whole, every piece requires a formulation of hypotheses to be later confirmed or not by the text itself. Secondly, the movement of translating has two directions, from language to context and from context to language. Thirdly, the context has to be construed or interpreted by both speakers/writers and listeners/readers. Fourthly, significant or meaningful facts are almost always signaled and not only presupposed by textual and grammatical clues even if they leave the impression of being inferred by analysts. Fifthly, the translation should take over each time precisely those identities that the participating characters are trying to enact. Lastly, it is important to find out how translators are connecting/disconnecting things, making them relevant/not relevant to each other.

1. The first translating operation is from the Greek prefix and preposition into the English language, which produces the following cumulation of meanings: beyond, behind, among, after, along with (WEUD, 900). A metainfection occurs after the infection; metabolism goes along with physical and chemical processes in an organism; a metalepsis is the metonymic replacement of a word already used figuratively; metaphysics is philosophy in its abstruse branches; to metaphrase means to translate; a metaprotein is the water-insoluble derivative of protein; metastasis is the transference of disease to other body parts; and so on. We shall deal with other meta-challenges in the course of translating the passages we have selected for further discussion. It is worth emphasizing that ‘meta’ is a very undemanding item since it goes untranslated in universal use, yet it seems successful in putting things in perspective when analytical approaches are required.

* Associate Professor, PhD, „Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

275 2. The conversational joke below can reveal some cultural issues when attempting to reach a version in Romanian. Here it is in the two languages: CHILD: Mummy, can I go out and play? MOTHER: With those holes in your trousers? CHILD: No, with the girl next door. COPILUL: Mami, pot să mă duc să mă joc? MAMA: Cum, cu pantalonii rupţi? COPILUL: Nuuu, cu copiii din vecini (our translation).

We presume the child’s expectations were that the mother gave a small laugh and allowed the child’s plan for playing. The effect in the original language is obtained from the apparent intention of the child (a boy? a girl?) to correct the idea behind the words of the mother, in order to cover his/her fears of rejection. The child is not a deceiver or jester: better say, this is the presence of a resourceful manipulator. Fun is built on the way a preposition is reused with shifted meaning. First the mother used ‘with’ to describe the situation circumstantially, the threat coming indirectly to her interlocutor from the succession question-to-question, the second interrogative pattern hinting at an anticipated denial. It means to insinuate that there could be a loss of dignity due to improper clothing. The child skillfully picks up the preposition ‘with’ to create a link with what has been uttered (an indirect plea through perfect cohesion), yet with the grammatical function of instrumental object instead of circumstantial object. Rhetorically, this is an inspired moment, because it can solve a conflict: the young participant wants to go out and the older participant is against the idea, wishing the other one in, because of inadequate physical details. The child must prove that a likely generalization of the case spells out that a sense of humor is apt to get someone out of the mess of unfulfilled wishes. After the punch-line, no joke continues, but we can continue speculation about the conflictive situation being solved in the near future, owing to the argumentation already made above. During the activity of translating, the linguist improves on the text due to the handiness of two plurals (pantalonii & copiii) versus a plural defective of the singular & a singular (trousers & girl). Moreover, the translator has maximized the orality of the text with simple adjoining meta-forms, two emphatic exclamatory additions (cum & nuuu). Thus, the child paves his way to pragmatic success by admitting before his mother one pattern from his experience of the world (he must have toys to play with) while knowing about the pattern of his mother’s experience of the world (he must show decorum in the way he is dressed). 3. Let us split hairs, discursively and meta-discursively, about the following generalizing remark coming from an ex-president of our country:

Beţia puterii te duce prin toate etapele: la început eşti cocoş, după aia te transformi în maimuţă, treci apoi prin faza de leu, iar la sfârşit ajungi porc. Power intoxication takes you through all stages: you start like a cock, then you become a monkey, next a lion, and you end up like a pig (our translation).

The former president’s opinion is a piece of criticism from someone angry, disagreeing with the direction of a political career in our day (or perhaps in all times). To this effect, the speaker chooses a number of animals stereotypically communicating attributes that can be applied to humans likewise: thoughtless aggressiveness (the cock); a drive for imitation in order to enjoy popularity (the monkey); proud uniqueness or royalty of a power-holder (the lion); last but not least, decay in morals (the pig). Part of the message can be read as referring to instability of conduct in politics, perhaps a more general instability in human nature, as long as a man crosses stages in life that are dissimilar and mostly discourteous. The problem here is in the grammar of the pronoun: the second person tu/you is understood as replaceable in the mind of an audience by the first person eu/I, because the historical truth is that the speaker used to be in power, he used to be a leader, and as such could be surmised to speak from experience. If he is presumed to have followed the same direction as described in the statement above, he unawares proclaims himself the disgraced animal that concludes the ‘fable’. We have been concerned with a piece of metadiscourse abounding in metamorphoses, in other words, those complete changes that look like magic or witchcraft, in order to show adaptation to a special environmental setting in the most convincing critical procedure. It is a matter of

27 6 discussing a different culture and a different function at the same time. Every ethnic will project their own identity schematization when dealing with the animal fable. To a Romanian, cocoş points to male sexuality and a fighting spirit for securing the female. To an Englishman, cock is, first of all, the male of any bird; cockerel is the young domestic bird, so a tame young age is better suggested; rooster is the cocky one among fowl and capable of conceited self-assertion in man’s world. To a Romanian, maimuţă is the species inferior to man and consequently hanging from a tree branch, whereas a fi maimuţă is the inferior man incapable of original behavior and personal decisions. To an Englishman, the monkey, if not the mammal, can be a mischievous child or a mimic; the anthropoid ape again is an imitator par excellence, and its tail is short, so it cannot suggest so well the primitivism of not climbing down trees yet. To a Romanian, lion is never a bad suggestion, never a coward, never a weakling. To an Englishman, it is the very emblem of Great Britain, it acquires strong connotations of celebrity besides physical strength and courage. To a Romanian, porc is one of the most unliked, unlovable, unaccepted conditions that cannot be mitigated in any way. To an Englishman, the similar notions of coarseness and shamelessness are contained in pig, swine and hog, the last in the series with a higher reputation for gluttony and filth. In our translation of the politician’s statement, we have attempted a sort of universal projection of the symbolic side. For the English interpretation, we testify with WEUD for the statements above.

4. It is very handy for us to illustrate what is important to grasp from discourse by making use of conversations. Here is a conversational scrap from a romance book of no particular literary prominence:

‘Do you love me?’ [turn 1] [speaker 1] ‘Yes, infinitely.’ [T 2] [S 2] ‘Not infinitely,’ said Georgie. ‘Let us be exact. Your love is a great but finite quantity.’ [T 3] [S 1] - Mă iubeşti? [intervenţia 1] [emiţătorul 1] - Da, enorm. [intervenţia 2] [emiţătorul 2] - Nu enorm, zise Georgie. Să vorbim exact. Iubirea ta e mare, dar într-o anume cantitate. [intervenţia 3] [emiţătorul 1] (our translation).

In conversational exchanges, there is an active process (which conversationalists make up on the spot) and a social process (which pushes forward parameters dictated by the affiliation with various social groups). The semantic choices to be noted above move around an intention of pinning down quantities, of measuring things that are known to be impossible to measure. Love is, by definition, immeasurable. What must be clearly transmitted is somebody’s (to be more precise, a female’s) need to obtain a statement of love. Georgie’s partner gives signs of reservation in commitment, yet without denying his love. The difference in nature between the two lovers is obvious: their dialogue may seem to misfire, yet, if they contradict each other in this exchange, one does not get the feeling that they have raised any obstacle against an emotional fulfillment. Practically, their dialogue may open the path towards a happy complementation, since people in life need both the romanticism of S2 and a strong sense of realities characterizing S1 in T3, the speaker who is not in quest of ‘sweet nothings’. In ordinary terms, S1 takes credit for not admitting ‘lies’ in her romantic tie. In semantic terms, she is opposed to ‘falsehood’. In stylistic terms, she courts terminological precision, discouraging ‘overstatements’. In pragmatic terms, she cannot comply with ‘untruth’: by her urgency that both communicators should be exact, she tries to look for Gricean cooperativeness from her partner, which reminds one of the quantity-quality maxim plus the maxim of manner. The way people converse here is deprived of any trace of metalinguistic props; there is no clue as to the likely features that incidentally accompanied the speech production, such as a facial expression or a gesture. Thus the reader does not receive a meta-description. [1] From linguistic scarcity, we derive the impression that, at least for the character called Georgie, that was not the day for amenities. We may also have the feeling that thanks to a history of routine interaction between S1and S2, they rely on ‘guessing’ meanings without much spoken stuff and without ‘breaking rules’ in Grice’s fashion for innovating new forms and functions.

5. Here is a conversation that bets on a semantic surprise, a non-conventional association of two words (a noun and a verb), homophones capable of producing a case of folk etymology.

277

‘Ten hours the first day,’ said the Mock Turtle, ‘nine the next, and so on.’ ‘What a curious plan!’ exclaimed Alice. ‘That’s the reason they are called lessons,’ the Gryphon remarked, ‘because they lessen from day to day.’ (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) - Şi cât învăţaţi pe zi? întrebă Alice, grăbindu-se să schimbe vorba. - Pe zi ce trecea, tot mai puţin, spuse imitaţia de broască ţestoasă. - Ce program ciudat ! exclamă Alice. - Păi de aceea se şi numeşte pro-gram – se amestecă zgripţorul – că învăţam tot mai puţin, pînă ajungeam la un gram de minte. Cap. IX [2].

The invention of the play upon words (lesson-lessen) is the rhetorical decision of a writer (Lewis Carroll) whose fame has grown from these witticisms. On the level of interaction in fiction, domineeringness is worth noting, as it causes the asymmetry between a knowledgeable person and a gullible one. We fully appreciate the inspiration of the translator (Elisabeta Gălăţeanu) who could catch the spirit of the English original, not exclusively in a graphic deviation (the metagraph), but in a phonic plus graphic (through the use of syllabication) ingenious formula made obvious in subsequent word repetition. Extending the area, one can consider that finding about how literature exploits the possibilities of linguistic communication is a meta-contribution. Some other striking solutions for translating the pun can be found in the translator’s range of personal experiences of the world. Here are two other felicitous presentations: (2) Păi de aceea se şi numesc lecţii, că pe zi ce trece înveţi tot mai puţin pînă nu le mai ţii, and (3) Păi de aceea se şi numeşte curs, că, pe zi ce trece, timpul s-a scurs şi cursul s-a dus. They fit the following experience: children love that sort of school which provides ever shorter periods for schooling. That is why the situated meaning of ‘lesson’ here may open a variety of directions for re-creating an accepted discourse model.

6. Again an excerpt from a book for children, even if not of note like “Alice”, the following spoken line is a manifestation of mock politeness, the very foundation of irony:

‘I think Mrs. H. would have been much happier if, instead of being a teacher, she worked in a mortuary, where no one talks back!’ - Eu cred că doamna învăţătoare ar fi fost mult mai fericită dacă, în loc să fie la şcoală, lucra la morgă; păi acolo nu-ţi mai vorbeşte nimeni! (our translation).

The line is insulting for that part of the audience that is not presumed to hear, but could easily be the over-hearer, namely the schoolmistress. She should be listening so as to understand the message correctly, as an indirect piece of criticism taking the form of an ironic shaft. The speech act is, therefore, a protest against the canonical interdiction in the classroom for students not to speak unasked. Hence, the rhetorical figure of a parallel between the classroom and the mortuary. Utterances postulate a double audience, consisting of one party that, upon hearing, will understand, and another party that is not aware of illocutionary forces and thus will not understand the message as intended by the speaker. If the situation of communication is ironical, analysts consider that the delight of irony is a secret intimacy set up between the initiated who understand and the author of the ironic shaft. The non-factual meaning existing in the if-construction above is the rhetorical option in the exchange between peers, the students not inclined to tolerate the much- too-frequent request for silence. We certainly have no evidence that the teacher would have heard the criticism of herself. The critical issue raised by the schoolchildren in the fragment would acquire substantive institutional force of a barrier to remove in future. Anyway, the audience of this line as a whole (auditors, eavesdroppers, overhearers) will decode along the lines of a low-context communication (which means attention turned more to the literal meanings), as well as a high-context communication (attention turned more to relational cues and shared understandings via inferences). We look behind us at the non-literary fragments, and we remember that there are innumerable discourses in any modern, technological, urban society. Our fragments and our

278 translations have proposed people being something with a degree of generality of reference: children in love with playing games; watchful mothers; politicians who felt the power intoxication; possessive lovers; noisy schoolchildren; exacting teachers. We recognized them through language, action and interaction, beliefs, symbols, objects. Due to the shortness of our selections, our dealing with props was limited, although they do carry meanings into any discourse. The classroom, for instance, is such a prop or the hole in one’s trousers. All meta-words needed for scholarship and explanation have covered the area of ‘figures’ in the comprehension offered by rhetoric (see TPR, p. 110). Metaplasms and metasememes look at the word or look inside the word, whereas metataxes and metalogisms concern superior units of analysis such as utterances. The force of a meta-word is generated by the degree of abnormality it proposes: the amplitude of its deviation and the variability dictated by the fixity of the material used at the starting point.

7. Instead of conclusions: What is beyond The translator’s work is founded on “the deeper meanings we are coming to believe and argue that the [source] text has” (Gee, 2005: 136), because the source-text is the basic and foremost guideline in this endeavour. We shall revert to the way we began, namely the unnecessary-now translation of ‘meta’ into English: basically ‘meta’ means ‘beyond’ something. What is beyond a translator’s undertaking? Beyond is always a change of perspectives. The area where this is to be found out is designated by the second term in a compound word headed by ‘meta’. Beyond is cultural diversity. Consequently, a translator’s main project is that of understanding another communicator, culture, ideology, and so on – actually a never-finished project as long as its endpoints change constantly. Beyond is a re-organization of one’s own thinking. It happens like in optics. In order to “see” (or understand, or interpret, for all that matters), one re-focuses the pair of “lenses” that give shape to what is to be seen. Good tools develop awareness, in all certainty. Beyond is the thin line on which a translator tries to walk so as not to be encaged by some tight restrictions of the source and yet to be faithful to the source in the culturally induced decisions he feels compelled to make. This last reflection is a perfect fit for a perfect piece of work carried out by Mihail Nasta [3] who answered the challenge launched by John Stuart Mill. The Englishman’s quote, “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard”, has become, with hard-to-match inspiration (the emphasis is ours), “elocinţa este auzită, poezia este interceptată de auz”.

Notes [1] To Nigel Fabb (Aronoff & Rees-Miller, 2003: 461) a meta-description is the use of linguistic forms so as to communicate a description about the narrative. One illustration is the form(s) adopted in order to divide the narrative into episodes. We enumerate some of the possible solutions: a variety of stylistic options; constituents moved within a sentence without significantly affecting the propositional meaning; the option for a nominal or a verbal projection; topicalization of an entity; the active or passive syntactic valency; the salience of noun phrases in clauses, and so on. [2] The splendid Romanian version is signed by Elisabeta Gălăţeanu (Ed. Tineretului, 1958) and is prefaced by S. Alexandru, who concludes with a confession to his young readers: … vă invidiez căci eu am terminat cartea pe când voi de-abia o începeţi. [3] See Mihail Nasta &Sorin Alexandrescu, Poetică şi stilistică. Orientări moderne, Editura Univers, Bucureşti, 1972, p. 312.

References Aronoff, M. & J. Rees-Miller (eds.) The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2003. Eco, U. A spune cam cam acelaşi lucru. Experienţe de traducere. Ed. Polirom, Iaşi, 2008. Gee, J. P. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. Routledge, New York and London, Second edition, 2005. TPR: Panaitescu, V. (coord.) Terminologie poetică şi retorică. Iaşi: Editura Universităţii „Al. I. Cuza”, 1994. WEUD: Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Gramercy Books, 1996.

279 ‘Our Father’: Praying Cognitively

Marius Velică*

Abstract: The paper analysis the manner in which the catholic English speakers and the orthodox Romanian ones situate themselves in relation to the well-known prayer ‘Our Father’ and tries to identify possible different cognitive perceptions of the God-worshiper relationship based on five different English variants of this prayer and the official Romanian one.

Rezumat: Lucrarea analizează maniera în care vorbitorii catolici de limbă engleză, pe de o parte, şi cei români ortodocşi, pe de altă parte, se situează în relaţia cu bine-cunoscuta rugăciune Tatăl nostru şi încearcă să identifice eventuale percepţii cognitive diferite asupra relaţiei Dumnezeu-credincios pe baza a cinci variante diferite ale acestei rugăciuni în limba engleză şi a variantei româneşti oficiale. Cuvinte-cheie: rugăciunea Tatăl nostru, percepţii cognitive, metaforă ontologică, metaforă structurală

1. Purpose The paper analysis the manner in which the catholic English speakers and the orthodox Romanian ones situate themselves in relation to the well-known prayer Our Father and tries to identify possible different cognitive perceptions of the God-worshiper relationship based on five different English variants of this prayer and the official Romanian one. Starting from the principle that “one who communicates, communicates oneself”, I placed the prayer that lies at the core of Christian faith under the scrutiny of Layoff’s cognitive view upon the ability of language to verbalize the manner in which the mind conceptualize its surrounding world. The premises I rely on is the fact that provided there were any differences in perceiving the relationship between the worshiper and God at an inner, mental level, these differences should emerge at the level of verbalization as well.

2. Corpus In order to perform such an analysis I have selected the following 5 most representative English variants of Our Father and the official Romanian orthodox variant to compare them:

1. The variant used in the Roman Catholic Mass 2. The Ecumenical variant 3. The Early Modern variant (1611) 4. The variant present in The New Testament in Modern English (1963) 5. The variant from The Book of Common Prayer (1928)

The reason behind choosing these variants was twofold: (i) the wish to have a rather extended time interval as far as the English texts are concerned in order for the selection to be relevant in terms of the evolution of the text itself; (ii) the principle of equal representation, i.e. I selected variants of the prayer from various areas of the Christian scope – from the Roman- Catholic version to the Ecumenical one.

3. The analysis The method of analysis consists of several clear steps: (i) identify the metaphors; (ii) identify the cognitive patterns; (iii) identify the target concepts; (iv) identify the source concepts; (v) establish the predominant conceptual metaphor; (vi) identify the main source concepts; (vii) isolate any unique elements that may add special significance to one of the versions; and finally (viii) organize and interpret the data. After having performed all these steps, the data have been organized in a series of tables according to various criteria that are mentioned in each of them and they go as follows:

* Lecturer, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

280 Table 1

Average 1928 Ecumenical Early Modern 1611 Romanian Orthodox Modern English 1963 Modern English Roman-Catholic Mass The New Testament in Book of Common Prayer Metaphors 16 15 13 10 16 17 14.5 Patterns 12 12 9 8 12 13 11 Target concepts 11 11 8 8 11 12 10.16 Source concepts 5 5 3 4 5 4 4.33 Predominant metaphor

(80 %) (80 %) (80 %) (80 %) (94 %) (92.3 %) (92.3 %) (81.25 %) %) (81.25 (81.25 %) %) (81.25 Ontological Ontological Ontological Ontological Ontological Ontological Unique elements - - - - - X

As one can clearly see from Table 1, the Ontological metaphor is predominant in all 6 variants. An ontological metaphor is a metaphor in which an abstraction, such as an activity, emotion, philosophical concept or idea, is represented as something concrete, such as an object, substance, container, or person. To put it differently, it seems that this prayer is primarily concerned with shifting abstract concepts such as GOD (conceptualized as OUR FATHER – a PERSON – in all versions), HEAVEN, KINGDOM, WILL, TRESPASSES, MISTAKES, TEMPTATION, GLORY, POWER and EVIL from a rather remote realm of abstract concepts to a closer area populated with concrete concepts much easier to understand, a world in which human mind can label things and, therefore, easily arrange them in clearer structures. While the ontological metaphor is offering us the ability of viewing one concept (the TARGET concept) by means of entities and substances (the SOURCE concept), the structural metaphor provides us with the necessary means to not only orient concepts, make reference to them or quantify them, but to structure, to conceptualize an abstract, maybe otherwise difficult to grasp, concept by means of another “highly structured and clearly delineated concept” [Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 61]. Keeping this difference in mind, I made an inventory of metaphors and classified them into the two types mentioned above (see Table 2). Consequently, the Romanian orthodox version displays the largest number of metaphors (17) closely followed by the Roman-Catholic version and that found in The Book of Common Prayer from 1928 (16). At the other end of the list, the smallest number of metaphors is to be found in the 1963 New Testament version (10); however, it is worth mentioning here that this version and the Early Modern one are shorter than the rest of the versions since they do not contain the final formula “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.” present in all the other 5; had this final part been present, the number of metaphors would have certainly been higher. As far as the ontological-structural ratio is concerned, the Romanian version takes again the first position in the hierarchy since 96% of the metaphors at work in this version are ontological and only 6% are structural. Why is this significant? In order to answer this question, I should first comment a little bit more upon the efficiency of this prayer seen as an instrument of clarifying the relationship between the worshiper and God. Volumes have been written on this topic from a theological perspective and the complexity of this relationship is well-known; however, I do not intend to approach this issue from a theologian’s perspective. What I am interested in is this: “Does this prayer make things less complicated for the worshiper?” Based on the definition of the ontological metaphor, one can sustain that such a metaphor is easier for someone to understand than a structural one. Therefore, the higher the ratio of ontological metaphors as compared to the structural

281 ones in a text, the clearer the message gets and easier to understand. In conclusion, in terms of efficiency, the Romanian version proves to be the best as it keeps things as simple as possible.

Table 2

Since all metaphors refer to a concept by means of another, I thought it relevant to identify the TARGET concepts, i.e. what the metaphors are trying to “explain”, and the SOURCE concepts, i.e. the concepts by means of which the TARGET ones are “explained”. After identifying these concepts, I classified them according to frequency. The results, as it can be seen in Table 3, demonstrate once more – this time from a cognitive perspective – that Our Father is about the relation between PERSON and GOD’s HEAVEN/KINGDOM. While this conclusion does not come as a surprise, an interesting element has surfaced after analysing the total inventory of both TARGET and SOURCE concepts.

Table 3

1963 Mass Ecumenical Prayer 1928 Roman-Catholic Roman-Catholic Book of Common Common of Book in Modern English Early Modern 1611 The New Testament Testament The New Romanian Orthodox Target PERSONS 4 PERSONS 3 PERSONS 4 PERSONS 3 PERSONS 4 PERSONS 3 concepts HEAVEN 2 HEAVEN 2 HEAVEN 2 NAMES HEAVEN 2 HEAVEN 2 KINGDOM 2 KINGDOM 2 KINGDOM KINGDOM KINGDOM KINGDOM NAMES NAMES WILL WILL 2 2 WILL WILL EARTH EARTH NAMES CENTURIES 2 EARTH EARTH DEBTS HEAVEN WILL NAMES TRESPASSES SINS TEMPTATION DEBTS EARTH WILL TEMPTATION TIME EVIL TEMPTATION TRESPASSES EARTH EVIL EVIL EVIL TEMPTATION MISTAKES POWER POWER EVIL TEMPTATION GLORY GLORY POWER EVIL GLORY POWER GLORY Source OBJECT 10 OBJECT 10 OBJECT 8 OBJECT 7 OBJECT 10 OBJECT 11 concepts CONTAINER 3 CONTAINER 2 CONTAINER 4 CONTAINER CONTAINER 3 CONTAINER 4 PRISON PRISON PRISON PRISON PRISON TERRITORY TERRITORY TERRITORY TERRITORY TERRITORY PERSON TARGET TARGET TARGET Main source OBJECT OBJECT OBJECT OBJECT OBJECT OBJECT concept Unique X elements

282

The uniformity and almost symmetry of all 6 versions of the prayer in terms of most frequent TARGET concepts and main SOURCE concept are significantly contradicted by an element specific only to the Romanian version. All five English versions conceptualize the target concept of EVIL by means of the source concept PRISON. The only exception is the Romanian Tatăl nostru which uses a different, unique source concept: in the Romanian cognitive perception, EVIL is a PERSON. I consider this feature of paramount importance since it personalizes the relation with evil; in the Romanian perception, evil is no longer a distant concept, an impersonal “prison” but it is a BEING. It seems to me that such a conceptualization abandons any euphemism that might be hidden in the impersonal meaning of the concept PRISON and unveils evil as an active agent among us the mortals, always paying attention to our mistakes and constantly ready to act and make the most of them.

3. Conclusion Conceptual metaphors are indispensable tools in the daily process of relating to the world around us; we could not make sense of our experience in the absence of these imaginative mechanisms. Applying a cognitive analysis to the central prayer of Christian faith has revealed that English believers perceive differently the idea/concept of EVIL than the Romanian do in spite of the fact that generally speaking this prayer uses the same set of conceptual patterns and performs more or less similar functions. The study of these differences in terms of metaphoric paradigms will highlight the manner in which we shape our reality and the result will contribute to a better intercultural understanding.

Appendix The findings presented above have been gathered when analyzing the following versions of the text under scrutiny in this paper:

Roman-Catholic Mass

Our Father, PERSONS ARE OBJECTS who art in heaven, HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER hallowed be thy name; NAMES ARE OBJECTS thy kingdom come; KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. WILL IS AN OBJECT EARTH IS A TERRITORY HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses TRESPASSES ARE OBJECTS as we forgive those who trespass against us; PERSONS ARE TARGETS and lead us not into temptation, TEMPTATION IS A CONTAINER PERSONS ARE OBJECTS but deliver us from evil. PERSONS ARE OBJECTS EVIL IS A PRISON For the kingdom, the power, KINGDOMS ARE OBJECTS and the glory are yours POWER IS AN OBJECT now and for ever. GLORY IS AN OBJECT

Metaphorical instances (16 metaphors, 12 patterns):

283 TRESPASSES ARE OBJECTS TEMPTATION IS A CONTAINER POWER IS AN OBJECT GLORY IS AN OBJECT

Main concepts: Target concepts (11) Source concepts (5) PERSONS (4) OBJECTS (10 instances) HEAVEN (2) CONTAINER (3 instances) KINGDOM (2) PRISON, TERRITORY, NAMES, WILL, EARTH, TRESPASSES, TEMPTATION, EVIL, TARGETS POWER, GLORY

Predominant metaphor: ONTOLOGICAL (81.25%), STRUCTURAL (18.75%)

Ecumenical

Our Father in heaven, PERSONS ARE OBJECTS HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER hallowed be your name, NAMES ARE OBJECTS your kingdom come, KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS your will be done, WILL IS AN OBJECT on earth as in heaven. EARTH IS A TERRITORY HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER Give us today our daily bread. - Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin SINS ARE OBJECTS against us. PERSONS ARE TARGETS Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from TIME IS AN OBJECT evil. EVIL IS A PRISON PERSONS ARE OBJECTS For the kingdom, the power, KINGDOMS ARE OBJECTS and the glory are yours, POWER IS AN OBJECT now and forever. Amen. GLORY IS AN OBJECT

Metaphorical instances (15 metaphors, 12 patterns):

Ontological metaphors Structural metaphors PERSONS ARE OBJECTS (3) EARTH IS A TERRITORY HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER (2) PERSONS ARE TARGETS KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS (2) EVIL IS A PRISON NAMES ARE OBJECTS WILL IS AN OBJECT SINS ARE OBJECTS TIME IS AN OBJECT POWER IS AN OBJECT GLORY IS AN OBJECT

Main concepts: Target concepts (11) Source concepts (5) PERSONS (3) OBJECTS (10 instances) HEAVEN (2) CONTAINER (2 instances) KINGDOM (2) PRISON, TERRITORY, NAMES, WILL, EARTH, SINS, TIME, EVIL, POWER, GLORY TARGETS

284 Predominant metaphor: ONTOLOGICAL (80%), STRUCTURAL (20%)

Early Modern 1611

Our father which art in heauen, PERSONS ARE OBJECTS HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER hallowed be thy name. NAMES ARE OBJECTS Thy kingdom come. KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS Thy will be done in earth as it is in heauen. WILL IS AN OBJECT EARTH IS A CONTAINER HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER Giue us this day our daily bread. And forgiue us our debts as we forgiue our debters. DEBTS ARE OBJECTS DEBTERS ARE OBJECTS And lead us not into temptation, TEMPTATION IS A CONTAINER PERSONS ARE OBJECTS but deliuer us from euill. Amen. EVIL IS A PRISON PERSONS ARE OBJECTS

Metaphorical instances (13 metaphors, 9 patterns):

Ontological metaphors Structural metaphors PERSONS ARE OBJECTS (4) EVIL IS A PRISON HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER (2) KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS NAMES ARE OBJECTS WILL IS AN OBJECT EARTH IS A CONTAINER DEBTS ARE OBJECTS TEMPTATION IS A CONTAINER POWER IS AN OBJECT GLORY IS AN OBJECT

Main concepts: Target concepts (8) Source concepts (3) PERSONS (4) OBJECTS (8 instances) HEAVEN (2) CONTAINER (4 instances) KINGDOM, WILL, EARTH, DEBTS, TEMPTATION, EVIL PRISON

Predominant metaphor: ONTOLOGICAL (92.3%), STRUCTURAL (7.7%)

The New Testament in Modern English 1963

Our Heavenly Father, PERSONS ARE OBJECTS may your name be honored; NAMES ARE OBJECTS May your kingdom come, KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS and your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. WILL IS AN OBJECT EARTH IS A TERRITORY HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER Give us this day the bread we need, Forgive us what we owe to you, as we have also forgiven those who owe anything to us. Keep us clear of temptation, TEMPTATION IS AN OBJECT PERSONS ARE OBJECTS

285 and save us from evil. EVIL IS A PRISON PERSONS ARE OBJECTS

Metaphorical instances (10 metaphors, 8 patterns):

Ontological metaphors Structural metaphors PERSONS ARE OBJECTS (3) EARTH IS A TERRITORY HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER EVIL IS A PRISON KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS NAMES ARE OBJECTS WILL IS AN OBJECT TEMPTATION IS AN OBJECT

Main concepts: Target concepts (8) Source concepts (4) PERSONS (3) OBJECTS (7 instances) NAMES, KINGDOM, WILL, EARTH, HEAVEN, TEMPTATION, EVIL CONTAINER, PRISON, TERRITORY

Predominant metaphor: ONTOLOGICAL (80%), STRUCTURAL (20%)

Book of Common Prayer 1928

Our Father, who art in heaven, PERSONS ARE OBJECTS HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER Hallowed be thy Name. NAMES ARE OBJECTS Thy kingdom come. KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS Thy will be done, WILL IS AN OBJECT On earth as it is in heaven. EARTH IS A TERRITORY HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, TRESPASSES ARE OBJECTS As we forgive those who trespass against us. PERSONS ARE TARGETS And lead us not into temptation, TEMPTATION IS A CONTAINER PERSONS ARE OBJECTS But deliver us from evil. EVIL IS A PRISON PERSONS ARE OBJECTS For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the KINGDOMS ARE OBJECTS glory, for ever and ever. Amen. POWER IS AN OBJECT GLORY IS AN OBJECT

Metaphorical instances (16 metaphors, 12 patterns):

Ontological metaphors Structural metaphors PERSONS ARE OBJECTS (3) EARTH IS A TERRITORY HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER (2) PERSONS ARE TARGETS KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS (2) EVIL IS A PRISON NAMES ARE OBJECTS WILL IS AN OBJECT TRESPASSES ARE OBJECTS TEMPTATION IS A CONTAINER POWER IS AN OBJECT GLORY IS AN OBJECT

286 Main concepts: Target concepts (11) Source concepts (5) PERSONS (4) OBJECTS (10 instances) HEAVEN (2) CONTAINER (3 instances) KINGDOM (2) PRISON, TERRITORY, NAMES, WILL, EARTH, TRESPASSES, TEMPTATION, EVIL, TARGETS POWER, GLORY

Predominant metaphor: ONTOLOGICAL (81.25%), STRUCTURAL (18.75%)

Romanian

Tatăl nostru care eşti în ceruri, PERSONS ARE OBJECTS HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER sfinţească-se numele Tău, NAMES ARE OBJECTS vie împărăţia Ta, facă-se voia ta, KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS precum în cer aşa şi pe pământ. WILL IS AN OBJECT HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER EARTH IS A TERRITORY Pâinea noastră cea de toate zilele, dă-ne-o nouă astăzi şi ne iartă nouă greşelile noastre MISTAKES ARE OBJECTS precum şi noi iertăm greşiţilor noştri PERSONS ARE OBJECTS şi nu ne duce pe noi în ispită PERSONS ARE OBJECTS TEMPTATION IS A CONTAINER ci ne izbăveşte de cel rău. EVIL IS A PERSON Că a Ta este împărăţia şi puterea şi slava, KINGDOMS ARE OBJECTS POWER IS AN OBJECT GLORY IS AN OBJECT Acum şi pururea şi în vecii vecilor, Amin. CENTURIES ARE OBJECTS CENTURIES ARE CONTAINERS

Metaphorical instances (17 metaphors, 13 patterns):

Ontological metaphors Structural metaphors PERSONS ARE OBJECTS (3) EARTH IS A TERRITORY HEAVEN IS A CONTAINER (2) PERSONS ARE TARGETS KINGDOMS ARE (MOVING) OBJECTS (2) EVIL IS A PERSON CENTURIES ARE OBJECTS CENTURIES ARE CONTAINERS NAMES ARE OBJECTS WILL IS AN OBJECT MISTAKES ARE OBJECTS TEMPTATION IS A CONTAINER POWER IS AN OBJECT GLORY IS AN OBJECT

Main concepts: Target concepts (12) Source concepts (4) PERSONS (3) OBJECTS (11 instances) HEAVEN (2) CONTAINER (4 instances) KINGDOM (2) TERRITORY, PERSON CENTURIES (2)

287 NAMES, WILL, EARTH, MISTAKES, TEMPTATION, EVIL, POWER, GLORY

Predominant metaphor: ONTOLOGICAL (94%), STRUCTURAL (6%)

References: Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., Metaphors We Live By, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1980.

288

Istoria mentalităţilor, comunicarea interculturală şi cultura media

290 Le discours du pouvoir politique roumain et ses formes d’expression dans les actes et les documents à caractère juridique du XVIIe siècle

Carmen Alexandrache*

Abstract: This study presents the relationship between the linguistic formulations of legal documents and the expression of prince power. In the acts of donations, the sale, the confirming of the lands, the testamentary or in the settlement of complaints, were it was repeated some linguistic expressions aimed at ensuring the will of prince. Beyond to their legal aspect reveals in this category of sources, the political involvement, but not always abuse and with the reprehensible effects. Keywords:

Si le pouvoir est acquis et maintenu grâce aux autres qui doivent le reconnaître comme tel et y obéir, le discours verbal du dirigeant est accompagné de gestes qui orientent le message vers le domaine de la sensibilité et de la persuasion. Ainsi le pouvoir central communique-t-il à «l’assistance» ses propres attributs: force, grandeur, bonté, sagesse, habileté. Certainement, en exprimant ces qualités, le dirigeant politique fait appel à divers moyens. En faisant référence aux réalités de la société roumaine pré-moderne, dans les actes à valeur juridique, parmi les problèmes litigieux, on trouve des formules linguistiques qui contiennent des codes de l’image du pouvoir. Dans cette étude, nous traiterons de ces formules et nous aurons comme point de départ des collections renommées aux suites desquelles les spécialistes travaillent encore: Documente privind istoria Românie1 (DIR) [Documents sur l’histoire de la Roumanie] et Documenta Romaniae Historica2 (DRH). Nous avons constaté que ces actes et documents ont contribué à réglementer les relations civiles et familiales; pourtant, dans les jugements et les décisions de justice, ont été insérées des formules par lesquelles le pouvoir politique affirme sa légitimité et son autorité. Il faut souligner que, quant à leur structure et signification, les actes de Moldavie et ceux de Valachie se ressemblent beaucoup, les différences sont plutôt d’ordre stylistique, géographique et onomastique. Aussi présenterons-nous nos observations d’une manière synthétique, étayées par des exemplifications plus généralisées3.

1. L’infiltration de la volonté de Dieu dans les invocations de la justice divine Dans les actes juridiques il y a de nombreuses références au pouvoir justicier de la divinité et ces références ont généralement pris la forme d’une malédiction. Bien que les imprécations introduites pour assurer le respect des décisions juridiques aient appartenu au domaine religieux car elles ont été prononcées par les représentants du haut clergé, leurs formules ont reçu aussi une connotation laïque, en devenant des moyens d’expression de l’autorité politique. Par conséquent, les imprécations ont pris de plus en plus la forme des menaces prononcées par l’autorité centrale contre ceux qui ne voulaient pas se soumettre à la volonté du souverain. A cet égard, nous mettons en évidence, dans les documents juridiques émis par la chancellerie du souverain, les formules suivantes à intérieur desquelles nous avons souligné les parties éloquentes: a. « et notre Majesté a proféré une malédiction »4 car « nous n’avons pas voulu détruire la mémoire de ces vieux fondateurs et tomber sous le coup de leur malédiction »5. Cette affirmation représente à la fois l’actualisation de la vieille malédiction, dont la force était doublée par le pouvoir du souverain, et la légitimité de la nouvelle malédiction prononcée par lui. La malédiction entre ainsi dans l’arsenal utilisé par le souverain pour assurer son autorité, et sa propre décision est renforcée par la volonté droite de ses prédécesseurs. D’une manière implicite, on soulignait ainsi l’importance, dans les actes juridiques, de la malédiction proférée par le souverain. Nous ne rejetons non plus la possibilité que, par ces formules, l’auteur exprime sa crainte de ne tomber sous le coup de la malédiction prononcée par ses prédécesseurs à force de ne pas avoir respecté leur décision.

* Asist. Drd., Universitatea ”Dunarea de Jos ” din Galati

291 b. « pour une plus grande puissance et pour renforcer tout ce qui a été écrit ci-dessus, Notre Majesté a commandé aux fidèles et aux honnêtes gens d’écrire et d’accrocher notre sceau à cet acte qui est vraiment le nôtre ». C’était une manière par laquelle on a souligné la véridicité de l’acte en question et qui a permis d’éliminer les actes plus anciens ou faux. Evidemment, la formule de malédiction finit par en évoquer les témoins de sorte que la dimension religieuse de l’imprécation soit garantie et confirmée par le pouvoir public : « selon notre commande, sans subir aucune influence, nous avons choisi comme témoins (par exemple, la foi de tous les grands et petits boyards, la foi de tous ceux qui participent au conseil du pays) ». Une autre expression employée a été « et notre parole est ferme car, voilà, nous y avons mis des témoins ». La signature et la nominalisation des témoins ont été utilisées aussi pour les actes rédigés par des civils parce qu’elles étaient nécessaires pour « une grande foi et pour témoignage ». c. [et personne d’autre ne doit intervenir dans notre décision], sinon [nous lui infligerons une grande punition devant tout notre Etat], car cela [a été prononcé à l’époque par notre oncle et renforcé par les autres souverains]. Cette affirmation met en évidence le désir de s’intégrer dans la lignée princière en accomplissant le devoir de respecter les décisions des prédécesseurs, renforcées par la malédiction. Nous assignons la même signification à la formule suivante : [par conséquent, notre Majesté a étayé la décision par cet acte, que notre parole soit respectée]. d. « que personne ne porte atteinte à notre miséricorde et à notre aumône. Et que nos paroles soient fermes », formule destinée à réaffirmer l’autorité du souverain. Nous interprétons de la même façon les formules finales des discours : « Notre Majesté a commandé », « Notre Majesté a dit ». L’étude des extraits déjà mentionnés nous permet d’observer la tentative du souverain de faire ressortir l’autorité du problème qui faisait l’objet du jugement ; cela était considéré comme nécessaire au sein des préoccupations concernant la reconnaissance de la légitimité et de l’autorité du trône où la volonté de Dieu a eu un rôle central. L’avertissement suivant suggère la même idée : « que personne n’ait rien à se plaindre quant à notre décision ». Ou bien: « que les gens ne viennent pas nombreux se plaindre auprès de notre autorité ». Aussi sommes-nous d’avis que la menace du souverain ne s’est pas imposée en tant qu’un doublement de la menace divine, comme un désir de l’assimiler, mais plutôt comme une solution pratique afin de décourager les initiatives destructives. Pourtant, la malédiction proférée par le souverain semble avoir représenté la dimension pratique et active de la sanction céleste. Nous observons également la différence entre les actes de donations faites aux monastères et les donations aux laïcs, où la présence de la menace du souverain est plus évidente, voire exclusive.

2. La visée vers l’avenir Le souverain s’est assuré une place importante dans l’existence incessante de la communauté, pour laquelle il a été souvent le déclencheur. A ce point nous mettons les expressions par lesquelles il s’adresse aux générations futures « après notre passage dans l’Au-delà, qui est-ce que Dieu choisira comme dirigeant, ce sera quelqu’un né de notre amour ou de notre lignée, ou bien, selon nos péchés, quelqu’un issu d’une autre nation »6. Parfois, on a omis l’idée de la perte du trône par « son peuple » à cause des « péchés » commis (une fois augmentée l’instabilité du règne à cause de la situation extérieure, l’association du souverain à la volonté divine affaiblit ; le fortuit a commencé à être de plus en plus présent dans la vie de l’individu au détriment de la volonté divine).

3. Le souverain en tant que représentant de la divinité La représentation du souverain comme „bras” de la volonté divine s’est avérée assez efficace dans le renforcement de son autorité. Ainsi les décisions prises par le pouvoir politique ont-elles été justifiées par son devoir envers la volonté de Dieu dans le monde car le souverain est vu comme le délégué du Ciel sur la terre. Cela a été clairement illustré dans les actes, au moins par la répétition du titre associé au souverain (« l’adorateur du Christ », « celui qui vient au nom de Christ Dieu ») et par les enseignements: « au nom de Dieu et de sa très-sainte mère, que vous deveniez plus forts avec ce que Dieu vous apprendra et avec ce que Dieu vous a donné, tout comme seul Jésus Christ a commandé et prescrit que vous soyez miséricordieux comme nous le sommes ». Par conséquent, le respect de la décision du souverain par son successeur doit être également compris comme une obligation envers la foi chrétienne.

292 4. Le souverain génère l’intervention divine La malédiction dans les actes juridiques a été précédée de bénédictions prononcées par le souverain, une sorte de récompense pour le futur souverain / habitant de l’Etat roumain prêt à respecter la décision stipulée dans l’acte en question : « s’il honore, respecte et obéit à notre décision, Dieu l’honorera et le délivrera du mal durant son règne »7. Dans d’autres actes, on insiste sur les bienfaisances que le souverain qui signe l’acte promet au nom de la divinité : « Notre Majesté élève une prière à tous les fidèles souverains chrétiens, au nom de Dieu et de sa Mère, toute-immaculée, qu’ils renforcent, qu’ils aient pitié de notre miséricorde et qu’ils renouvellent cette décision pour qu’elle ait éternelle mémoire et que le souverain se réjouisse du don de Dieu et du sauveur Jésus Christ et de sa sainte mère, toute- immaculée, et que Dieu lui offre sa miséricorde dans ce siècle et dans les siècles des siècles ». Ou bien « que Dieu lui offre les bienfaisances de sa miséricorde dans ce siècle et la protection de la Mère de Dieu ». Nous avons identifié des cas où la sanction a été présentée d’une manière positive sous la forme des récompenses promises: « celui que Dieu choisira comme souverain, nous le prions, avec son autorité, qu’il aide et appuie cette décision pour qu’il bénéficie également de l’aide de Dieu et de sa très-sainte mère lors du jugement effrayant et honnête »8. La partie la plus chargée de la formule de malédiction est la sanction, à savoir un ensemble de maux qui vont affecter le destin de celui qui ne respecte pas la décision du signataire. Evidemment, la sanction divine sera accompagnée d’une sanction sur la terre, infligée par le souverain. Ainsi la perte de la protection divine conduit-elle à la mort physique (« mais s’il n’honore pas et qu’il ne renouvelle et ne respecte pas cette décision, mais qu’il il la gâche et la foule aux pieds, il ne sera pas protégé par Dieu et son corps disparaîtra ici ») ou à la mort spirituelle et sociale : « et quiconque serait tenté de changer cette donation et décision qui nous appartient, qu’il ne soit pas pardonné par Dieu, le créateur du ciel et de la terre, par sa mère toute immaculée et par tous les saints qui ont plu à Dieu »9. Au manque du pardon céleste suit, donc, le manque du pardon de la part du souverain dont on prévoit les conséquences juridiques. Si la réputation négative acquise reste pour toujours, puisqu’elle est doublée de ressentiments chrétiens: « qu’il brise la décision et il sera frappé d’anathème et maudit par les 318 saints parents de Nichée et il aura le destin de Judith et d’Arie10], la malédiction pouvait être annulée par des pratiques religieuses. De surcroît, nous mettons en évidence que, à la crainte de perdre l’aide divine au grand jugement, à la peur provoquée par les peines de l’enfer, à la peur provoquée par l’héritage d’un nom mauvais (l’ennemi de la vraie foi et le destructeur des églises), on ajoute une autre crainte, terrestre, liée au bon nom: la crainte de ne mourir du point de vue social, par la dissolution de son peuple et la disparition de ses traces dans l’histoire. La peur des esprits et du jugement divin11, la crainte de ne partager à jamais le destin des ennemis de la foi et de l’homme, la peur de souffrance physique et de disparaître de la mémoire collective, de perdre l’autorité et l’identité, la peur de « ne pas voir le visage de notre Dieu », tout cela ne représente pas uniquement des signes de l’impuissant, mais aussi de celui qui a besoin de garanties. L’insistance sur l’image de la punition divine a constitué une source importante de sentiments de peur dont le redimensionnement a répondu à la nécessité de préserver la situation existante et d’actualiser en permanence les concepts chrétiens. Afin de résoudre les malentendus, le serment judiciaire a fait appel au même instrument d’intervention, à savoir la divinité, dont on a assuré la présence par des objets religieux ; parfois le serment signifiait également un rituel religieux : « et ils se sont réconciliés et ont juré sur l’Evangile qu’il n’y aurait aucun débat ou colère jusqu’à la fin des siècles ». La menace du souverain, en tant que variante de la malédiction (qui est à la fois une forme d’injure), a assuré à l’aspect laïc un rôle prépondérant : « que personne n’ose le faire, car Notre Majesté lui infligera beaucoup de mal. Que notre parole soit respectée comme telle et non pas autrement »12.

5. L’entrelacement des deux autorités: laïque et religieuse Bien que la malédiction religieuse (l’anathème) ne puisse être prononcée que par un grand hiérarque, le plus souvent elle a été employée par des laïcs, voire le souverain lui-même, mais uniquement par le truchement des saints parents.

293 Dans d’autres cas, la malédiction a eu le rôle de limiter l’autorité publique considérée comme discrétionnaire : « que notre souverain lui-même ne rompe et nuise à la coutume et à la miséricorde des autres feus souverains avant lui qui ont fait construire et ont fait des donations à d’autres saints monastères avant ce temps ». Le pouvoir du souverain allait être ainsi limité soit par la mémoire collective, soit par l’autorité sociale des signataires. Or, c’est par cela que le pouvoir politique s’est consolidé: l’appartenance au peuple à „bonne renommée” (à la mémoire des feus saints souverains). Afin de garantir la transmission du prestige politique sur les successeurs et pour leur maintenir le droit de succession, le souverain a choisi d’inscrire ses fils parmi ceux qui ont participé à la prise des décisions. Une autre occasion par laquelle le souverain fait connaître son autorité a été la remémorisation des moments glorieux de son propre règne. Le souverain de la Moldavie a mentionné la bataille qu’il e eue à Jijia pendant laquelle « Dieu le tout-miséricordieux a animé le sabre de Notre Majesté où se trouvent les os des ennemis comme signe éternel ». En conclusion, nous pouvons affirmer que, dans beaucoup de décisions juridiques émises par le souverain, il a été a mis en évidence le fait que le jugement s’est réalisé « selon la loi du pays », « selon le règlement », en retenant implicitement l’image d’un souverain proche de son peuple. Souvent, il a été mentionné le fait que, dans la prise des décisions, on a consulté « la loi de Dieu ». Egalement, la menace du souverain à la fin de l’acte, dirigée vers « celui qui brise » la décision établie (« Notre Majesté lui infligera une grande punition », « il vivra une grande honte ») de même que l’invitation en instance pour les mécontents (« qu’ils se présentent devant notre Majesté », « qu’ils soient ici ») sont quelques formules qui agrandissent le caractère interprétatif de l’acte justicier qui nourrit l’impression d’arbitraire. Par les formules juridiques répétées, extraites des actes juridiques du XVIIe siècle, nous pouvons démontrer que le pouvoir politique de la Moldavie, respectivement de la Valachie, communique aux sujets qu’il faut lui obéir. De même, sous l’impression d’un « bon souverain », « proche du peuple », le même pouvoir politique décourageait le dialogue avec les autres et la justice était rendue d’une manière unilatérale par le souverain, soutenu dans ses décisions par Dieu.

Notes : 1 Documente privind istoria Românie, Editura Academiei RSR, Bucureşti, A. Moldova, veacul XVII, vol. I (1601-1605), 1951; vol II (1606-1610), 1953 ; vol III (1611-1615), 1954 ; vol.IV (1616-1620), 1956 ; vol.V (1621-1625), 1957. B. Ţara Românească, Veacul al XVII-lea, vol.I (1601-1610), 1951; vol II (1611-1615), 1951; vol. III (1616-1620), 1951; vol. IV (1621-1625), 1954 2 Documenta Romaniae Historica, Seria B. Ţara Românească, Editura Academiei RSR, Bucureşti, vol. XI (1593-1600), 1975; vol.XXI (1626-1627), 1965, vol.XXII (1628-1629), 1969, vol.XXIV (1633-1634), 1974; vol.XXIV (1633-1634), 1974, vol XXV (1635-1636), 1985, vol. XXX (1645), 1998, vol.XXXI (1646), 2003, vol.XXXII (1647), 2003, vol.XXXII (1647), 2001, vol.XXXIII (1648), 2006, vol.XXXIV (1649), 2002, vol.XXXV (1650), 2003, vol.XXXVI (1651), 2006, vol.XXXVII (1652), 2006, vol. XXXVIII (1653), 2008, vol.XXXIX, (1654), 2010; A.Moldova, vol. XVIII (1623-1625), 2006, vol.XIX (1626-1628), 1969, vol. XXI (1632-1633), 1972, vol.XXII (1634), 1974, vol. XXIII (1635- 1636), 1996, vol.XXIV (1637-1638), 1998, vol.XXVI (1641-1642), 2003. .est pas nécessaire d'indiquer tous les ces documents׳J'ai cités des phrases que répétées dans les documents, donc n 3 Néanmoins, j'ai donné un exemple pour chaque cas mentionné. 4 Documente privind istoria României, veac XVII, B. Ţara Românească (1611-1615), vol. II, Ed. Academiei, Bucureşti, 1951, doc. nr, 171, p. 180, doc. nr. 89, p. 203, doc. nr. 222, p. 240 5 Ibidem, doc. nr. 250, p. 277 6 Ibidem, doc. nr. 35, p. 34 7 Documente privind istoria României, veac XVII, A. Moldova (1621-1625), vol. V, Ed. Academiei, Bucureşti, 1957, doc. nr, 153, p. 111 8 DIR, B. vol. II, doc. nr. 103, p. 98 9 Documente privind istoria României, veac XVII, A. Moldova (1611-1615), vol. III, Ed. Academiei, Bucureşti, 1954, doc. nr, 31, p. 20 10 DIR, B. vol.II, doc. nr. 12, p. 12 11 J. Delumeau, Frica în Occident (secolele XIV-XVIII). O cetate asediată, I-II, Ed. Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1986, Toader Nicoară, Sentimentul de insecuritate în societatea românească la începuturile timpurilor moderne (1600-1830), Ed. Accent, 2006, Cluj-Napoca, Philippe Ariès, Omul în faţa morţii (I, II), trad. Andrei Niculescu, Ed. Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1996, and Essai sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Mozan Age à nos jours, Paris, 1975, Violeta Barbu, “Sic moriemur: discours upon death in Wallachia during the Ancien Regime”, in RRH, t.XXXIII, 1994, nr 1-2, 12 Ibidem, doc. nr. 110, p. 105, doc. nr. 87, p. 161, doc. nr. 286, p. 327. DIR. A, vol. IV, doc. nr. 616, p. 485

294 Références: Ariès, Philippe, Omul în faţa morţii (I, II), trad. Andrei Niculescu, Ed. Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1996 Idem, Essai sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Mozan Age à nos jours, Paris, 1975 Delumeau, Jean, Frica în Occident (secolele XIV-XVIII). O cetate asediată, I-II, Ed. Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1986 Documenta Romaniae Historica, Seria B. Ţara Românească, Editura Academiei RSR, Bucureşti, vol. XI (1593-1600), 1975; vol.XXI (1626-1627), 1965, vol.XXII (1628-1629), 1969, vol.XXIV (1633-1634), 1974; vol.XXIV (1633-1634), 1974, vol XXV (1635-1636), 1985, vol. XXX (1645), 1998, vol.XXXI (1646), 2003, vol.XXXII (1647), 2003, vol.XXXII (1647), 2001, vol.XXXIII (1648), 2006, vol.XXXIV (1649), 2002, vol.XXXV (1650), 2003, vol.XXXVI (1651), 2006, vol.XXXVII (1652), 2006, vol. XXXVIII (1653), 2008, vol.XXXIX, (1654), 2010; A.Moldova, vol. XVIII (1623-1625), 2006, vol.XIX (1626-1628), 1969, vol. XXI (1632-1633), 1972, vol.XXII (1634), 1974, vol. XXIII (1635- 1636), 1996, vol.XXIV (1637-1638), 1998, vol.XXVI (1641-1642), 2003. Documente privind istoria Românie, Editura Academiei RSR, Bucureşti, A. Moldova, veacul XVII, vol. I (1601-1605), 1951; vol II (1606-1610), 1953 ; vol III (1611-1615), 1954 ; vol.IV (1616-1620), 1956 ; vol.V (1621-1625), 1957. B. Ţara Românească, Veacul al XVII-lea, vol.I (1601-1610), 1951; vol II (1611-1615), 1951; vol. III (1616-1620), 1951; vol. IV (1621-1625), 1954 Nicoară, Toader, Sentimentul de insecuritate în societatea românească la începuturile timpurilor moderne (1600-1830), Ed. Accent, Cluj-Napoca, 2006 Barbu, Violeta, Sic moriemur: discours upon death in Wallachia during the Ancien Regime, in „R.R.H.”, t.XXXIII, 1994, nr 1-2.

295 La Communication Interculturelle - Une Modalité De Prévention Des Conflits

Valerica Anghelache*

Abstract: The intercultural communication is the meeting place of the representations of the world. The success of intercultural communication depends of individuals, of their characteristics and how they structured the representations of reality. Thus it is normal to appear distortions in the encoding – decoding process of the representations. They can block the communication if occurring the values of cultural affiliation. The issue of intercultural communication in education lead to solving problems like: how teacher perceives the cultural difference, how we adapt the communicative style to the student's cultural profile, what possibilities has the teacher to understand and to capitalize different cultural potential of students, what is the contribution of teachers, students and parents at clearance of intercultural misunderstandings. Keywords: alterity, acculturation, conflict, mediation, communication

Dès le début du XX-ème siècle, les spécialistes dans le domaine de l’interculturalité manifestent un intérêt particulier pour ce phénomène. Dans l’espace culturel roumain il y a peu d’études qui traitent de cette problématique, la littérature n’étant pas le seul domaine à témoigner de ces carences. Celles-ci se rendent visibles aussi au niveau des préoccupations qui visent la question de la communication interculturelle en milieu scolaire. Se plier à la dimension de l’interculturalité est un procès qui s’inscrit dans la durée, vu les préjugés auxquels on pourrait se heurter et qui pourraient ressusciter des sentiments de haine ou de mépris accumulés le long des années. Par conséquent, l’existence d’un „degré zéro” dans nos habitudes et nos mentalités est considéré comme nécessaire. Le point de départ pourrait se constituer dans l’analyse objective des stéréotypes et des préjugés afin de changer nos propres mentalités. De même, il y a des spécialistes qui trouvent que les politiques culturelles et éducatives devraient s’ouvrir non seulement aux valeurs nationales, mais aussi à celles internationales. Faute de compréhension et de cohésion dans les domaines de l’éducation et de la culture, toute coopération s’y avérait impossible. A cet effet, s’impose une valorisation des particularités culturelles et des modèles comportementaux qui caractérisent les individus dans des situations interculturelles. Micheline Rey trouve nécessaire d’aborder le problème de l’éducation interculturelle à travers une stratégie visant: a) la réflexion sur les certitudes ego-, socio-, ethnocentristes et sur nos propres normes monoculturelles; b) la déconstruction des préjugés qui engendrent des jugements et des actions irréfléchis. c) La diversification des rapports des forces afin de permettre l’insertion d’une manière équitable de ceux défavorisés, de leurs compétences et références culturelles, ainsi que de leurs modalités d’expression. d) La prise de conscience des relations complexes existantes non seulement entre les cultures, les classes sociales, les institutions, les étapes d’enseignement, les matières scolaires etc., mais aussi entre les êtres humains quels qu’en soient l’âge, la langue, l’ethnie, la culture et la religion. e) L’apprentissage /le développement de la communication et des modalités de négociation entre des individus, des groupes, des communautés; f) L’énonciation, la clarification des responsabilités de chacun, par rapport aux communautés locales et nationales. Au début de la modernité presque tous les pays de l’espace européen ont traversé des moments d’intolérance, où la politique sociale et économique des différents pays a joué un rôle moteur, ce qui a été confirmé aussi par les spécialistes dans le domaine. Dans un travail paru en 1996, Alain Touraine trouve que le problème du multiculturalisme est de plus en plus grave, à cause du modèle politique républicain qui est en déclin. Le rationalisme froid de l’économie a remplacé les valeurs universelles, ce qui a mené à l’internationalisation de la vie économique, phénomène appelé globalisation.

* Chargée de cours, dr, Université « Dunarea de Jos » de Galati

296 Faute d’une communication interculturelle, le droit à la différence a souvent pour conséquence un relativisme culturel touché par des conflits. Tout au contraire, le pluralisme culturel vise non seulement la défense de la diversité, mais aussi celle d’un dialogue entre les cultures, où chacune reconnaisse sa contribution à l’enrichissement de l’expérience humaine. Le pluralisme culturel européen résulte d’un processus complexe qui a impliqué le long du temps, l’acceptation de l’autre, la tolérance, la coexistence plurielle, tout en gardant le privilège de s’affirmer soi-même. De nos jours, la modernité impose au niveau de toute société la coexistence des valeurs classiques et nouvelles. Le processus de modernisation, d’expansion de la modernité semble devenir le phénomène le plus important d’interculturalité, d’acculturation et d’enculturation. Plus les communautés sont cultivées (éduquées), y compris sous l’aspect interculturel, plus le succès de cette modernisation est rapide et durable. Mais cela ne signifie pas que l’expansion de la modernité est un phénomène uniforme. Tout au contraire, de différents pays, même européens, ont accédé à la modernité dans des intervalles de temps variés. Durant les processus de modernisation, il y a eu bien des hésitations et même « des dérapages dans l’extra-modernité » tels le communisme, le fascisme, l’autoritarisme, etc. En vue de remporter le succès, il est nécessaire que les valeurs de la modernité ne se rattachent pas aux lois et aux institutions, mais qu’elles soient acceptées et assimilées par les citoyens. Au delà de tout capital culturel englobé et de toute capacité d’expertise, les élites s’érigent aussi en fournisseurs de modèles culturels et comportementaux vivants. Afin que l’école contribue au processus de modernisation et que les élites fonctionnent comme des modèles culturels il est nécessaire d‘accepter les valeurs de la modernité, dans leur sens d’«universelles culturelles ». L’altérité culturelle ou la rencontre de l’autre peut produire des changements au niveau du moi, qui peut s’ouvrir ou s’enfermer du point de vue culturel, ce problème étant devenu un sujet assez souvent invoqué dans l’évolution de la société contemporaine, où le rythme des situations interculturelles est intense. La plupart des cas, l’interculturel engendre deux états contradictoires au niveau du moi: d’une part, la fascination de l’interculturel, et d’autre part, l’angoisse de l’interculturel. C’est ainsi que le moi subit des transformations qui, faute d’une maturation interculturelle, peuvent déclencher des mécanismes de défense entravant le dialogue. Dans ce contexte, la communication interculturelle constitue le fondament de l’acceptation de l’autre et de la coexistence avec celui-ci. La communication interculturelle peut être définie comme un « échange » (ou une transaction valorique) supposant la compréhension des significations adjacentes, entre des personnes ou des groupes qui appartiennent à des cultures tout à fait différentes. Ces échanges peuvent se réaliser aux niveaux idéatique, verbal, non verbal, comportemental, physique, objectuel, organisationnel et ils peuvent être implicites, explicites, inconscients ou délibérés. (C-tin Cucos, 2000). La communication interculturelle peut être conçue comme une relation entre la personne ”a”, relevant de la culture „A” et la personne „b” en tant que membre de la culture „B”, cette relation visant tant la dimension interindividuelle (a-b) que la dimension intergroupale (A-B). Le désavantage en est qu’on imagine les groupes d’appartenance comme inflexibles et bien délimités tandis que la culture est vue comme une dimension superposée à l’identité personnelle voire opposée à l’individualité. La transmission culturelle est un phénomène très complexe, qui englobe une multitude de sens. Ainsi, Berry (1992) élabore le modèle de la transmission culturelle qui en comporte trois types: a) une transmission culturelle verticale, qui correspond à une enculturation générale et à une socialisation faite par les parents ; b) une transmission culturelle oblique, réalisée par le biais de l’enculturation, de l’acculturation, et de la socialisation spécifique ; c) une transmission horizontale, qui correspond à l’influence des pairs, réalisée par l’enculturation et la socialisation. Les trois types de transmission culturelle expliquent les modalités fondamentales par lesquelles les individus entrent en contact avec les valeurs spécifiques à l’horizon culturel auquel ils se rattachent.

297 Les difficultés qui surgissent dans la communication interculturelle sont dues à l’opacité des éléments composants. Souvent, la plus grande partie de la culture ne se dévoile pas dans un premier temps aux participants à l’échange. Les aspects extérieurs de la culture (tels l’architecture, l’art, les vêtements, les rituels) se laissent facilement repérer et reconnaître, tandis que les mentalités, les conceptions et les idéaux sont presque indéterminés. Une véritable communication interculturelle exige du temps et de la patience à ces protagonistes, vu que les valeurs acquises et les antécédents culturels jouent le rôle d’un filtre de lecture et de traduction des nouveaux stimulus culturels. La communication interculturelle oppose deux tendances contradictoires: la stabilité et le changement. S’adapter à une nouvelle culture peut exiger un double effort: l’individu doit s’ouvrir au milieu et récepter à la fois les stimulus tels qu’ils sont. Il y a des situations où la pression du milieu s’accroît sur nous, ce qui nous oblige à nous transformer. Alors que les contacts entre deux cultures deviennent antagoniques, il vaut mieux assurer des conditions de compréhension et d’interconnaissance, afin de créer un espace favorable à l’échange des valeurs et au dialogue. Pour y parvenir, affirment certains spécialistes, il importe que l’individu prouve sa capacité d’interculturalité, notion définie par Nicklas (1996) comme effet de l’apprentissage. Selon lui, cette capacité a pour objectifs: L’élargissement de la capacité de perception envers tout ce qui nous est étranger (on doit être capable de s’interroger sur ses propres certitudes et de sentir l’insécurité qui débouche de ce qu’il nous est impossible d’interpréter ce qui diffère des grilles de lecture préétablies) ; La capacité d’accepter l’autre avec ses différences à lui (il y a deux types de réactions face aux autres: la négation des différences, le refus de s’accomoder de l’autre et la réception de l’altérité comme quelque chose d’obligatoire, de négatif, de nuisible). D’autres auteurs s’attaquent à certains concepts qui expriment des hypostases de la communication interculturelle. Par conséquent, Jacques Demorgon (1999) propose la notion de complexe interculturel, saisible surtout au niveau intraculturel. Il englobe un noyau spécifique à une certaine culture, étant structuré le long des années, à une autre culture. Le succès de la communication interculturelle dépend des individus concrets, de leurs traits et de la façon dont ils structurent leurs propres représentations de la réalité. Parfois, des déformations se produisent pendant le processus de codification –décodification des représentations. Celles-ci mènent à des bloquages de communication alors que, au-delà des différences interpersonnelles, des structures différentes déterminées par l’appartenance culturelle s’y font sentir. Lorsque les deux interlocuteurs limitent l’horizon de l’offre informationnelle à leurs propres particularités culturelles sans créer une voie de dialogue à travers les notions culturelles universelles le bloquage de la communication ne tarde pas à surgir. La situation interculturelle demande aux interlocuteurs appartenant à des cultures différentes la mise dans un état de coopération et un effort supplémentaire pour (re)ajuster les codes. La communication interculturelle ne se réduit pas seulement à parler la langue de l’interlocuteur, mais elle vise également tout notre comportement, tel qu’il est déterminé du point de vue psycho-socio-culturel. L’interaction avec l’autre et le contact avec de diverses valeurs culturelles, apparemment „étrangères” peuvent représenter pour chacun l’opportunité d’élargir le flux informationnel, à condition que l’esprit des interlocuteurs s’y ouvre. Il ne faut pas soumettre les valeurs culturelles aux jugements de valeurs. Elles sont le propre de l’homme. S’ouvrir à celles-ci impose une transgression des particularités, l’orientation vers l’autre. La création d’une nouvelle identité repose fondamentalement sur le milieu culturel. Nous sommes nettement déterminés du point de vue physique, mais spirituellement nous nous inscrivons dans un certain cadre dont on ne saurait pas faire abstraction. La plupart des cas, on à affaire à des situations où, par certaines raisons, on est contraint de renoncer à nos propres filtres culturels afin d’explorer des valeurs nouvelles. On connaît également le fait que l’école représente le lieu de rencontre de nombreux modèles de compréhension du monde, de valorisation des comportements et de transmission de l’expérience. L’école devient de plus en plus un espace favorable à la manifestation de la diversité culturelle, un lieu de l’échange des modèles ou des références valoriques.

298 La tentative de s’attaquer à la problématique de la diversité provoque des conflits, et nous amène à remettre en question nos propres repères identitaires. La diversité n’est pas toujours facile à gérer. Malgré notre incapacité de construire et de perpétuer la diversité, nous manifestons toujours une attitude de suffisance, étant trop liés encore à nos habitudes et à nos propres incertitudes. C’est notre instinct de conservation et de sécurité qui nous pousse à perpétuer des résistances et des stéréotypes. On sait que les inégalités et le racisme éveillent les sentiments de frustration et d’insécurité en plan individuel. Les exclusions et les marginalisations ont pour effet les conflits à l’échelle sociale et il revient à l’école de faire un effort pour les prévenir. Que pourrait faire l’école en matière de l’éducation interculturelle? C’est ici qu’apparaît le risque de la formation de tout un amalgame culturel, si les emprunts culturels sont réalisés aléatoirement. L’école doit compter parmi ses objectifs de réaliser un processus d’intégration par ce qu’elle assume les pré-acquisitions culturelles des élèves. Cette intégration suppose non seulement d’amener les élèves au niveau de la culture de la classe, mais aussi d’assimiler l’expérience culturelle du nouveau-venu dans l’expérience commune de la classe. Pour y parvenir, les élèves doivent adopter des comportements positifs envers les autres cultures, tout en intégrant le nouveau- venu dans le spécifique du groupe scolaire. Le problème de la communication interculturelle dans l’éducation tourne autour des questions suivantes: la manière dont l’enseignant perçoit la différence culturelle, les méthodes employées pour adapter son style communicatif au profil culturel de l’élève, les dangers de l’utilisation des stéréotypes de catégorisation de l’altérité dans l’éducation, la capacité de l’enseignant de comprendre et de valoriser les différents potentiels culturels des apprenants, et la contribution du professeur, des élèves, des parents à la résolution des malentendus culturels. L’école devient un espace de l’homogénéité culturelle, réunissant les connaissances et les alignant aux valeurs générales, tout en puisant en même temps dans nouvelles valeurs. L’interculturel pourrait donc signifier: L’acceptation de la diversité des représentations, des références et des valeurs multiples ; Le dialogue, l’échange entre les personnes et les groupes dont les références sont diverses, multiples; Le dialogue, l’échange et les interactions entre les différentes représentations et références; La décentration et l’interrogation sur les références égocentriques, en conformité avec les objectifs de la réciprocité; La relation dynamique, réelle ou potentielle, entre des éléments culturels ou entre des cultures comme un tout homogène(C-tin Cucos, 2000). La communication interculturelle englobe deux composantes, chacune d’entre elles dimensionnée d’une manière différente: la communication personnelle et la communication sociale. La communication personnelle suppose une augmentation des compétences communicationnelles du récepteur. Cette compétence repose sur trois dimensions: a) la compétence cognitive (la capacité de connaître la culture et la langue de l’interlocuteur, les institutions, l’histoire, les conceptions du monde, les croyances, les moeurs, et les normes de celui-ci et de maîtriser l’art de relationner avec les autres). b) la compétence affective (la disponibilité d’adaptation interculturelle à travers la vérification des capacités émotionnelles et motivationnelles, d’empathie, etc.); c) la compétence opérationnelle (la capacité de l’homme d’agir d’une certaine manière, d’expérimenter des conduites interculturelles positives etc. ) (cf. Wiseman, 1995). La communication sociale envisage deux types de communication: interpersonnelle et médiatique (d’interaction parasociale). Dans la communication interculturelle c’est au médiateur d’intervenir afin de faciliter l’accord entre deux ou plusieurs personnes. Médier c’est mettre en accord, concilier des personnes ou des groupes, gérer les difficultés par une série de démarches qui servent à favoriser l’acceptation et la connaissance de l’autre. La médiation assure le contact avec le milieu extérieur de l’espace de rencontre. Les médiations les plus fréquentes sont d’ordre linguistique. Celles-ci se réalisent entre deux ou plusieurs langues (entre les personnes qui parlent des langues différentes). Le médiateur linguistique crée un espace de dialogue

299 constructif, mettant en contact des expériences de vie et des systèmes de valeurs linguistiques et culturelles différents. Pour ce faire, le médiateur s’appuie sur des savoirs et des sens personnels. La négociation est un outil fondamental dans le processus de médiation. Négocier c’est assurer des échanges de points de vue. Il s’agit d’aboutir à un minimum d’accord ou de compromis pour éviter la violence symbolique déterminée par les codes symboliques différents. En tant que modalité de création d’un espace culturel commun, le compromis représente un processus complexe qui exige aux protagonistes de s’ouvrir à un esprit de disponibilité. La flexibilité du référentiel culturel y joue également un rôle central. Selon Cohen –Emerique (1999), les principes fondamentaux de la réceptivité dans la confrontation des valeurs sont: L’examen rationnel des logiques qui s’affrontent, sous forme de dialogue; La réalisation d’une position intercritique et le refus des vérités définitives; L’attitude d’ouverture réciproque aux représentations liées à la même réalité, la création des schémas valoriques „universels” encore négociables et non pas des codes „particuliers”, définitifs pour chacune des parties. Quels que soient leurs types, les médiations comportent aussi des limites. Lorsque les codes en conflit se situent à grandes distances l’un par rapport à l’autre, la médiation est difficile, presque impossible. Dans ce cas, il n’est pas indiqué de faire appel aux médiateurs qui sont de parti pris. Il est souhaitable d’y faire intervenir des médiateurs situés hors de cet espace symbolique. De même, il y a des limites institutionnelles; toutes nos institutions fonctionnant en système ethnocentrique (les hôpitaux, les écoles, les institutions de la communauté locale etc.). Les règles et les normes selon lesquelles fonctionnent les institutions sont déterminées par les facteurs culturels particuliers. En milieu scolaire, la médiation comporte un caractère prophylactique, de façon à éviter les éventuelles disfonctionnalités. Il s’agit d’un caractère délibéré ou même programmé. La communication interculturelle suppose une mise à jour des rapports d’échange, de réciprocité et d’interdépendances. Elle invite à la décentration, à la découverte de nouvelles formes de dialogue. L’approche interculturelle dans un cadre éducatif constitue à la fois une nouvelle manière de conception et d’implémentation du curriculum scolaire et une nouvelle attitude relationnelle entre les élèves, les professeurs et les parents. La perspective interculturelle crée de nouvelles opportunités pour le témoignage des différences et de la diversité. Celle-ci envisage non seulement la maîtrise des valeurs des autres, mais aussi le développement d’une attitude de respect et de disponibilité. Cette attitude naît d’une communication permanente et d’une décentration attentive de ses propres normes culturelles.

Référence: Cucos, C-tin (2000) – L’éducation. Dimensions culturelles et interculturelle, Éditions Polirom, Iaşi. Camilleri, C. (1988) – Pertinence d’une approche scientifique de la culture pour une formation par l’éducation interculturelle, IQRC, Paris. Cohen-Emerique, M. (1999) – « Le choc culturel, méthode de formation et outil de recherche », en Guide de l'interculturel en formation, Retz, Pais. Demorgon, J., Lipiansky, E. M. (1999) – Guide de l'interculturel en formation, Retz, Paris. Rey, M. (1999) – « De la logique „mono” a logique de type „inter”. Pistes pour une éducation interculturelle et solidaire », en L’éducation interculturelle. Expériences politiques, stratégies, Éditions Polirom, Iaşi

300 L’Orientation culturelle des Principautés Roumaines du XIXe siècle vers l’Occident

Ioana-Paula Armăsar*

Abstract: The cultural orientation of the 19th century Romanian Principalities towards the Occident, by way of the French influence, can be divided into three distinct and almost equal stages of approximately half a century each, resulting in the shaping of Romanian thinking and sensitivity, a fact which has been identified in all manifestations of Romanian spirituality, in politics, legislation, language, literature, administration or social life. Each stage is analyzed from the perspective of its transformations, the French influence replacing, definitively and swiftly, the Greek culture and the influence of the Russian politics: from the imitation of the Phanariote princes by means of the personal library fashion, to the quadrilles – brought by the Russian officers – which replaced the autochthonous dances but also from the fashionable conduct à la française to the change of the woman’s condition in society both through emancipation and by means of the greater respect bestowed upon her, to the polishing up of linguistic structure due to translations – which changed the way of thinking and of contemplating the logic of discourse and the clarity of message – to the termination of the Turkish monopole and to the entering into the international commercial circuit. In the Romanian Principalities, the 19th century is characterized by a cultural renaissance based on original culture, on the emphasis placed on national values, the development of education, of the press, of the theatre, of literature, of the critical spirit, of book commerce, all these triggering the transformation into a progressive trend which proved to be the French culture and civilization adopted as a model. Keywords: influence, imitation, transformation, model, orientation

La France a été toujours un pays ouvert au dialogue, un pays qui a appris la leçon de la tolérance. En Europe, l’histoire a accordé à la France la chance d’être le porte-drapeau des principes sociaux, moraux et politiques modernes. La langue française n’a pas été seulement un moyen de communication, mais aussi un univers bien plus complexe. La Roumanie, à partir de ses relations historiques de longue durée, s’est déclarée francophone, comme conséquence d’un long exercice d’admiration pour les valeurs spirituelles et matérielles françaises. D’ailleurs la Roumanie moderne s’est constituée à partir du modèle français au niveau de l’enseignement, des acquis politiques, du progrès technique et artistique. Même le Bucarest d’autrefois s’était inspiré dans son architecture de la capitale française, ce qui lui a valu le surnom de « Petit Paris ». L’histoire de l’influence française en Roumanie pourrait être partagée en trois étapes distincts et approximativement égales, ayant un demi siècle chacun : il y a une première étape où les Roumains et les Français ne se connaissent les uns les autres (jusque dans l’année de l’instauration de l’Empire français en 1804), mais les Roumains apprennent le français, adoptent les manières françaises, les idées et les formes extérieures de la civilisation française sur filière russe et grecque. Pendant la deuxième période (entre 1804 et 1848), les Roumains sont conscients de l’influence française dont ils bénéficient. Dans la troisième étape, commencée en 1848 cette influence est forte et reconnue consciemment. Il faut souligner ce qui va être tiré du contexte, que l’influence française a modelé pour beaucoup de temps la pensée et la sensibilité roumaine, fait identifié dans toutes les manifestations spirituelles roumaines : politiques ou législatives, littéraires ou administratives, vie sociale ou art. En ce qui suit, nous allons exemplifier les transformations de chaque période de l’influence des mentalités françaises empruntées. La période phanariote se caractérise par l’apparition des précepteurs français dans les maisons des boyards et dans les écoles grecques les élèves apprennent fréquemment l’italien et le français. Alexandre Ypsilanti c’est le prince qui introduit officiellement comme langue d’étude le français au Collège princier de Munténie, en 1766. Par l’exemple personnel, les princes phanariotes, avec leurs secrétaires et précepteurs français et avec l’intérêt pour l’école française, ont déterminé les boyards de les imiter. C’est toujours grâce aux princes phanariotes l’introduction chez nous des publications dans la langue française. Du simple esprit d’imitation ou de vanité, les boyards roumains ont constitué des bibliothèques personnelles.

* Lect. dr., Universitatea „Transilvania” din Braşov

301 En 1781, à la suite du traité de Kainargi, les Russes installent un Consulat dans les Principautés, à Bucarest. Dans leurs relations diplomatiques avec les grands dirigeants du pays, les consuls russes et leur personnel utilisaient le français comme langue officielle. Les Russes avaient été influencés profondément par les Français pendant la reine Elisabeth (1741 – 1762). Les habitants des provinces roumaines ont appris une meilleure prononciation de la langue française, à danser à la française, c’est-à-dire comment on dansait dans toute l’Europe. Les officiers russes ont trouvé dans les Principautés des jeunes hommes séduits par leur exemple et des jeunes femmes amoureuses de leurs uniformes. Les danses spécifiques roumaines (hora, brâul, bătuta) ont été remplacées avec les quadrilles. Mais la danse exigeait de la musique et des instruments. Ainsi les Russes ont introduit chez nous une conduite mondaine à la française. Les relations sociales dans le monde des boyards sont devenues plus libres, la condition de la femme dans la société a changé son caractère. Il s’agit même d’une émancipation des femmes si nous pensons au fait que la connaissance du français et la virtuosité au piano étaient les deux éléments majeurs dans l’éducation d’une jeune femme (au moins dans les familles nobles). Les femmes pouvaient dîner avec les hommes ou rendre des visites. Elles sont devenues plus respectées. Les Roumains ont introduit chez eux des modifications du mobilier à la mode en Europe et les vêtements européens ont été adoptés pleinement. La Révolution française de 1789 a eu un grand écho dans les Principautés Roumaines, le renom de Napoléon attirant l’attention de nouveau sur la France. Il est important à remarquer que les émigrants français obligés par la Révolution de s’y réfugier ont crée eux aussi un courant d’influence française. Une autre catégorie (la plus nombreuse) d’émigrants est constituée par les émigrants instituteurs venus en grande majorité d’après la proclamation de l’Empire. Malheureusement nous n’avons pas trop d’informations sur leur passé et leur formation, mais leur enseignement était supérieur à celui pratiqué pour les Roumains. L’effet immédiat a été les lectures de la littérature classique française des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. A tout cela s’ajoute le réveil du sentiment de latinité, de l’origine et de la langue, les idées des Roumains de Transylvanie, qui approchent les Roumains des Français. Si la Roumanie est restée profondément et fidèlement attachée à la France tout au long du XIXe siècle, si l’influence française a remplacé rapidement et définitivement la culture grecque et l’influence politique russe, cela a été possible aussi grâce au sentiment de l’appartenance à la même famille de latins. Du point de vue de la littérature, nous devons rappeler que le grec, sous les phanariotes, avait envahi les salons, les écoles, l’administration et le service religieux. La langue roumaine était devenue incompréhensible à cause des mots grecs, russes, turcs. Trois noms des écrivains roumains avaient survécu : Ion Neculce, Dimitrie Cantemir et Ienăchiţă Văcărescu. Si le XVIIIe siècle marquait une ère de décadence, le XIXe représente une nouvelle étape dans l’histoire de la littérature roumaine, avec ses tentatives de traduire, d’adapter, d’imiter la littérature française. Les traductions de cette période sont faibles, sans grand valeur, mais intéressantes du point de vue psychologique. La fondation du Théâtre à Iassy en 1816 et à Bucarest en 1819 rend nécessaire la traduction des pièces du français et la création d’un répertoire de pièces originales roumaines. Les traductions des écrits de n’importe quel genre littéraire ont supposé le travail avec le matériel de la langue, la recherche des correspondances, le façonnage et la précision de la phrase. Les problèmes d’ordre linguistique avec lesquels se confrontaient les traducteurs, en général, les ont déterminé de changer la manière de penser, de réfléchir à la logique du discours, à la clarté du message, et à l’expressivité de la langue. La langue française allait les aider à dépasser les inconvénients et les imperfections de la langue roumaine. En temps, les auteurs roumains vont acquérir l’instinct de la langue et ils vont se laisser influencés par la langue française lorsqu’ ils auront le besoin d’exprimer des abstractions, la langue de la pensée, des sciences et de la politique. L’acte plus significatif de diriger la société roumaine vers l’Occident s’est passé sous tutelle et modèle russe (c’est pour la deuxième fois, après l’occupation russe d’entre 1806 – 1812), pendant le Règlement Organique et l’administration du général Pavel Kiseleff (1829 – 1834), par le contacte avec une aristocratie slave qui s’exprimait en français. C’est le moment historique de la séparation des pouvoirs : exécutif, législatif et judiciaire. À la suite du traité d’Adrianopole (1829) les pays roumains acquièrent l’autonomie administrative et avec la disparition du monopole turc et

302 la libération du commerce sur le Danube et la Mer Noire, ils entrent dans le circuit commercial international. Depuis les problèmes politiques de ces années-ci, plusieurs Français y sont venus pour enseigner. Le plus connu reste Jean Vaillant, le fondateur à Bucarest d’une école française et l’auteur d’une grammaire roumaine pour les natifs de langue française, d’un petit dictionnaire français- roumain / roumain- français. Retourné en France il continue la popularisation des connaissances sur les Roumains en réalisant une étude (le meilleur de cette période – 1830) de l’histoire roumaine et de la situation du peuple roumain au début du XIXe siècle « La Roumanie » (1844). Plus tard il va traduire aussi quelque chose de la littérature roumaine en français. Dès la deuxième décennie du XIXe siècle, il devient de plus en plus de bon ton que les boyards envoient leurs fils à Paris pour étudier. Le retour les jeunes hommes « galicisés » et les voyages de plaisir intensifient l’influence littéraire et linguistique française, mais enrichit, en même temps, avec des idées novatrices et révolutionnaires l’esprit des Roumains. En se proposant la réalisation, parmi d’autres, d’une langue riche et flexible, selon le modèle français, les écrivains de la « Societatea literară» (? 1826 – 1828) (« Société littéraire ») et de la « Societatea filarmonică » (« Société philharmonique ») (1833–1837) arrivent à améliorer et enrichir la langue roumaine de sorte qu’elle devient capable de rendre divers styles de compositions littéraires. En essayant de bonne heure ce que George Călinescu allait nommer « l’ouverture vers l’universalité », Ion Heliade Rădulescu (le fondateur des sociétés mentionnées ci-dessus) conseille les jeunes écrivains à traduire (« à tout prix » et « n’importe quoi ») et lui-même traduit pour l’enrichissement de la langue et l’intégration de la culture roumaine dans le circuit des valeurs universelles. Son grand mérite est d’avoir compris exactement les nécessités de la littérature roumaine dans cette époque-là et d’avoir entrepris courageusement et passionnellement cette activité de traduire, par laquelle il essayait l’intégration de la spiritualité roumaine dans le grand circuit universel. L’orientation culturelle de la Roumanie vers l’Occident dans le sens aussi du détachement de l’influence slave, ne pouvait qu’accentuer la dévalorisation essentielle du modèle russe et les rapports avec la Russie (malgré le fait que, structurellement, la société roumaine prédominant rurale et puissamment polarisée entre une aristocratie riche et des paysans soumis, était plus proche du modèle russe que du modèle occidental). Bien que la période se caractérise par une renaissance culturelle roumaine basée sur la création originelle, la mise en évidence des valeurs nationales, le développement de l’enseignement, de la presse, du théâtre, de la littérature, de l’esprit critique, l’apparition des sociétés et des revues, l’organisation des bibliothèques et des librairies (le commerce aux livres devient une véritable préoccupation), ce qui engendre ces transformation, le courant progressiste, est la civilisation française adoptée comme modèle. Le profile de cette période est très bien relevé dans le « le tableau » exposé par Mihail Kogălniceanu dans son « Introduction » (« Introducţie ») à la revue « Dacia literară » (1840), article programme qui trace la physionomie de la culture roumaine vers la moitié du XIXe siècle. Dans l’opinion de Kogălniceanu les œuvres traduites ne doivent pas avoir le premier lieu dans une littérature, elles doivent avoir de la valeur et de stimuler la création originelle, « ne pas tuer l’esprit national ». Le grand mérite de Mihail Kogălniceanu este d’avoir compris exactement les exigences de la littérature roumaine dans cette époque-là et d’avoir entreprendre courageusement et passionnellement l’action de traduire de la littérature française particulièrement en essayant de cette manière l’intégration de la spiritualité roumaine dans le grand circuit de l’universalité. Par les traductions de Dinicu Golescu, Iordache Golescu, Barbu Paris Mumuleanu, Iancu Văcărescu, Grigore Alexandrescu, Cezar Bolliac, Vasile Cârlova, Aristia et les œuvres originelles de Gheorge Asachi, Costache Negruzzi, Mihail Kogălniceanu, Vasile Alecsandri, Alecu Russo, Gheorghe Lazăr, Nicolae Bălcescu, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, Ion Ghica, George Bariţiu, Andrei Mureşanu la littérature roumaine est mise au service de la langue, dans son processus de métamorphose et de modernisation, par l’emploi des constructions syntactiques empruntés du français, des néologismes d’origine française, par l’élargissement de l’aire sémantique des mots empruntés. Cette troisième vague d’influence française a eu comme conséquence un état d’évolution en synchronie avec l’Occident de la culture et de la civilisation roumaine. L’événement historique remarquable qui suit est l’Union des Principauté Roumaines de 1859, par l’élection du colonel Alexandru Ioan Cuza comme dirigeant des deux pays : la Moldavie

303 et la Valachie. Le nom du nouvel État sera Roumanie (1862) ayant la capitale à Bucarest, le drapeau (conçu à la Révolution de 1848) et l’alphabet latin adopté en 1863. Bénéfique comme conséquence a été aussi l’adoption du code législatif moderne dans la législation roumaine. La Constitution de 1866 a été une imitation de la constitution du Belgique de 1831, et le syntagme « Le Belgique de l’Orient » a illustré le mythe politique d’une Roumanie qui était destinée à devenir une réplique du Belgique à l’autre bout du continent européen. L’esprit d’émulation pour les valeurs françaises tout au long de l’historie moderne de la Roumanie est souligné, encore une fois, de la conviction des Roumains que la France était « notre deuxième patrie ».

Bibliographie Armăsar, I.P., Gustave Flaubert în spaţiul literar românesc, Editura Universităţii „Transilvania”, Braşov, 2005. Barna, A.P., Réception de la poésie lamartinienne dans la littérature roumaine du XIX siècle, Ed. Universităţii „Transilvania”, Braşov, 2006. Brăescu, I., Perspective şi confluenţe literare româno-franceze, Univers, Bucureşti, 1980. Lipatti, V., Valori franceze – studii şi articole, Editura de Stat pentru Literatură şi Artă, Bucureşti, 1959. Mounin, G., Les problèmes théoriques de la traduction, Gallimard, Paris, 1963. Radu, A,. Cultura franceză la românii din Transilvania până la Unire, Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1982.

304 Romanian Folk Feasts: Linguistic and Spiritual Interferences

Valeriu Bălteanu*

Abstract: Our paper focuses on a series of spiritual interferences that are present in Romanian folk feasts, namely, the intermingling of Christian and pagan elements. In order to research such elements, we shall have in view an ethnolinguistic analysis consisting of both formal and ethnological aspects (beliefs, superstitions, traditional practices, etc.). Keywords: Romanian folk feasts, beliefs, superstitions, traditional practices

The current study on folk feasts is characterized by a general tendency to emphasize their Christian side, whereas the pre-Christian basis of such feasts is either not mentioned or reduced to a single most important piece of information; thus, numerous mythical echoes are omitted, which limits considerably the possibility to grasp, at least partially, the mechanisms of folk mentality. Our paper aims to present the mythico-magical echoes preserved in folk feasts in order to ensure a better knowledge of the archaic mentality. We shall demonstrate our argument by focusing on one of the most important Romanian folk feasts: Rusaliile (Whitsunday or Pentecost). The term Rusalii, first mentioned officially in the Romanian language as far back as the 16th century, has raised a series of etymological issues; this word is used on Romanian territory in several variants: Rusalii, Rusale, Rusare (SCL. 1-4/ 1997, p. 50). In Latin, this noun is derived from rosa, “rose”; at its origin, it represented the name of a pre-Christian feast dedicated to the dead; this term was further used as the name of a fundamental Christian feast. Researchers have reached the conclusion that the Romanian literary variant, Rusalii, is of Latin origin, but via Slavic languages, whereas the variants Rusale, Rusare are inherited directly from Latin (Idem). The word in question also refers to three evil imaginary beings, ielele, but under a different form. As Christian feast, Rusaliile overlaps with major pagan manifestations related to the cult of the dead, which is usually emphasized by most researchers; commonly, no other information related to the pagan basis of the feast is mentioned. Nevertheless, there are numerous pagan echoes that have generated an entire series of Romanian traditional practices: the activity of the căluşari; the group of căluşari consisted of an odd number of members bound together by means of an oath of secrecy regarding any of their activities; the oath would remain in effect for 3,7, or 9 years. During Rusalii, the căluşari would serve various functions, such as: protecting people from the attack of the iele, treating the villagers against epilepsy, stimulating fertility and fecundity by means of their dance (R. Vulcănescu, Măştile populare, p. 169). The specific marking element is the flag of the căluşari, decorated with a black fabric meant to suggest that “their power comes from their ancestors” (L. Berdan, Totemism românesc, Polirom, Iaşi, 2001, p. 90). The character ensuring the protection of the group was the Mute (the fool), who was subjected to a total prohibition of speech during the period when the group would act. The manifestations of the căluşari originate in Thraco- Dacian rituals, namely, „in the male initiation rites” (Tr. Herseni, Forme străvechi de cultură populară românească, Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1977, p. 271); decorating the house with vegetal elements; on the day of Rusalii, lime-tree, willow, etc. boughs decorate the front door of the house, the animal cots, the vegetable garden, etc.; in some areas, green boughs would decorate the front door of the houses inhabited by young girls of marriageable age. The vegetal element served an apotropaic function and it was considered to be a substitute for the god of vegetation; this traditional practice was performed during other feasts, as well: Saint George’s Day, Palm Sunday, Easter, etc. (see M. Budiş, Microcosmosul gospodăresc, Ed. Paideia, Bucureşti, 1998, p. 88) and it was rooted in Indo-European mythology; wearing waist-girdles made of vegetable elements, placing such elements on the bed; to the effect of the above mentioned, garlic and sage brush were used in traditional apotropaic practices. They acquire a special significance in the context of several folk feasts (Saint George’s Day, May Day, etc.) and, of course, on Rusalii. Let us remember that such

* Lecturer, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

305 elements are also present among the elements attached to the flag of the căluşari. The recurrence of garlic and sage brush (which were also placed on the bed during Rusalii) used to serve an apotropaic function in many other cultures, as well, may suggest that such phenomenon is of Indo-European origin; the blessing of lime-tree boughs; in some areas, the feast of Rusalii is also referred to as the Lime-tree Festival, which is, in fact, the original name of the feast. This hints at the fact that such feast overlapped with an ancient pagan manifestation derived from an arboreal cult (see I. Evseev, Dicţionar de magie, de demonologie şi de mitologie românească, Ed. Amarcord, Timişoara, 1997, p. 458). Lime-tree boughs that have been subjected to the Christian blessing procedure would fulfil an apotropaic function; twisting head wreaths; the wreath bears special symbolic significances: it may point to the divine nature of its wearer; it is one of the solar symbols; it denotes victory (the laurel wreath); it is symbolically associated with time; it also bears feminine symbolism, etc. On the day of Rusalii head wreaths were made of wheat ears and flowers and worn by newly weds. (see I. Ghinoiu, Obiceiuri de peste an, Ed. Fundaţiei Culturale Române, Bucureşti, 1997, p. 166); such traditional practice is deemed to have originated in Indo-European mythology; performing rituals of sworn brotherhood; the said rituals were performed around a fruit tree or a fir tree, in a cemetery, etc. by children that would maintain the kinship status they have acquired by means of such rituals for the rest of their lives. According to various beliefs, the rituals of sworn brotherhood were spiritually patronized by ancestors. I. Ghinoiu mentions the fact that sworn brothers would usually meet on Rusalii. On the basis of the information gathered, researchers have reached the conclusion that the rituals of sworn brotherhood originate in Thracian mythology. There are other traditional Rusalii beliefs and practices that we shall not analyse in the present paper; however, we wish to draw attention to the fact that one of the ritualistic activities mentioned by I. Ghinoiu, i.e. collecting healing plants (see I. Ghinoiu, op. cit., p. 166), is not characteristic of the Rusalii; the researcher in question provides himself arguments to that effect, among others: “the plants collected on or around the time of the Rusalii were considered to be inefficacious” (Ibidem, p. 33). The manifestations that are truly characteristic of the Rusalii and help us understand the mythical basis of the said feast are the ones related to the cult of the ancestors; let us not forget that the Saturday preceding the Rusalii is marked in the folk calendar as another important feast dedicated to the ancestors- the Saturday of Souls. Nevertheless, in order to properly understand the pre-Christian spiritual basis of the Rusalii we should also consider the other types of ritualistic activities, most of which originate, as we have seen, either in Indo-European or Thraco-Dacian archaic mentality. Although at present the Christian content of Romanian folk feasts is generally emphasized, it is not possible to accurately grasp the traditional significances of such feasts without closely studying their pagan components, as well. From this point of view, many of the Romanian folk feasts (Saint George’s Day, Saint Basil’s Day, Saint Elijah’s Day, etc.) can provide precious pieces of information related to the intermingling of various types of mentalities.

Selective references Bălteanu, Valeriu, Dicţionar de mitologie românească, Ed. Fundaţiei Universitare „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi, 2001. Berdan, Lucia, Totemism românesc, Ed. Polirom, Iaşi, 2001. Budiş, Monica, Microcosmosul gospădăresc, Ed. Paideia, Bucureşti, 1998. Evseev, Ivan, Dicţionar de magie, de demonologie şi de mitologie românească, Ed. Amarcord, Timişoara, 1997. Ghinoiu, Ion, Obiceiuri de peste an, Ed. Fundaţiei Culturale Române, Bucureşti, 1997. Herseni, Traian, Forme străvechi de cultură poporană românească, Ed. Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1977. Marian, Simion Florea, Sărbătorile la români, I-II, Ed. Fundaţiei Culturale Române, Bucureşti, 1994. Pârvan, Vasile, Începuturile vieţii romane la gurile Dunării, Ed. Cultura Naţională, Bucureşti, 1923. SCL= Studii şi cercetări lingvistice, 1-4, 1997, Bucureşti. Taloş, Ion, Gândirea magico-religioasă la români, Ed. Enciclopediei, Bucureşti, 2001. Vulcănescu, Romulus, Măştile populare, Ed. Academiei, Bucureşti, 1970.

306 Mechanisms of Persuasion in Didactical Communication

Cristina-Corina Benţea*

Rezumat: Persuasiunea reprezintă o dimensiune esenţială a oricărui tip de comunicare umană, fiind prezentă şi în comunicarea didactică. O comunicare eficientă implică participarea unor mecanisme interne, psihologice şi externe, situaţional comunicaţionale de persuasiune.Optimizarea comunicării didactice presupune cu necesitate controlul tuturor acestor factori şi modalităţi prin care este indusă persuasiunea cu scopul de a stimula schimbarea atittudinilor şi comportamentelor ineficiente ale elevilor şi pentru realizarea achiziţiilor cognitive, afectiv-motivaţionale şi comportamentale ale acestora în învăţare. Lucrarea se centrează pe analiza diferitelor tipuri de mecanisme acţional-procesuale prin care se produce persuasiunea în relaţiile de comunicare de tip didactic. Cuvinte-cheie: comunicare didactică, persuasiune, manipulare, conflict sociocognitiv, învăţare.

Abstract: The persuasion is an important aspect for every type of human communication and for didactical communication too. The effective communication implies the participation of some persuasive, manipulative and conflict elements. So, the performing of the communication is necessary determined by the control of the ways in which persuasion is induced and by the stimulation of the socio-cognitive conflict for the purpose to achieve the cognitive, affective, motivational, relationships and behavioral acquisitions in learning activity. In this paper is analyzed the different types of processual mechanisms of the persuasion in didactical communication Keywords: didactical communication, persuasion, manipulation, socio-cognitive conflict, learning.

1. Didactic communication and persuasion The didactic communication is defined as a particular form of educational communication, “a communication tool directly involved in supporting a systematic process of learning” (L. Iacob, 1998, p. 190). According to the Dictionary of Pedagogy, didactic communication may be considered “an axiomatic principle of educational-instructional activity that involves an educational message issued on the subject of education (teacher), capable of causing reaction of the object formative education (student), evaluated in terms of external and internal feed-back” (S. Cristea, 2000). The didactic communication is the basis of the teaching-learning-assessment process, which takes place in an institutional (school, university) the between the partners with determined social statuses and roles (teachers - students). The didactic communication has its peculiarities, determined by the institutional framework and by the teaching-learning instructional process, plus other features: it is bilateral and directed, it has purposes (educational goals and objectives) and an increased explanatory dimension (aimed at the understanding of knowledge), it is structured according to a pedagogical logic (aimed at the understanding of knowledge, not just their mere enunciation), it assumes an active role of the teacher (which selects, organizes, facilitates the understanding of scientific knowledge), is customized (depending on receiver), it is focused on the student (on the students’ skills, needs, interests), it is evaluative and self evaluative (both in the case of the teacher and students), it is formative (the teacher simultaneously influences the contents and students), it is guided by rules and ritualized, it is dominated by verbal communication first and supported by teachers (60-70%) (Iacob, 1998, p. 234-236). Currently, the act of didactic communication is regarded as a unit of informational with the relational and pragmatic dimensions. In the didactic communication, teachers often appeal to persuasion. By persuasion we mean the action of convincing someone to do or to choose one thing: it is a process of guiding people to adopt certain rational or less rational ideas, attitudes or actions (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Persuasion is a “complex, continuous and interactive process in which the source and receiver are linked by verbal or nonverbal symbols and the source tries to influence the receiver (to persuade him) to adopt a change in its attitudes or behaviours, because the persuader had enlarged or changed perceptions” (O. Donnell and Kable, 1982, p. 9, apud A. Gavreliuc 2006, p. 196).

* Lecturer, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

307 Persuasion is a form of social influence by which people are convinced to adopt a certain type of thinking or attitude through techniques, such as rational or emotional ones. It can be understood as an argumentative way by which a person tries to persuade another person or group to believe or do something. Persuasion is a very broad concept, and the phrase “to be persuasive” may apply to all cases in which a change was achieved by using logical beliefs and arguments, but without using physical force. So, persuasion is based on discussions or on the attractiveness and strength of arguments, on how is the speaker able to sustain an idea. Persuasion does not contain any negative intent, but it is rather a transactional and mutually satisfactory act (Dillard and Pfau, 2002). Persuasion techniques are based on six human behavioural tendencies that lead to generating a positive response to a request from someone: reciprocity, consistency, social validation, assessment, authority and scarcity of resources (R. Cialdini). Persuasion involves the mechanisms of attitude change by moving from an idea of acceptance to its attitudinal change and then from changed attitudes to changed behaviour (J. N. Kapferer, 1990). The changing of attitudes is an important goal in education, meaning that the teacher can use the persuasive didactic communication to achieve the desired students’ behaviour. These mechanisms of creating a change in attitudes can be used by teachers themselves, in order to change their behaviour in their relationships with the students. Any successful process of didactic communication should start with clarifying what teachers want to get from their students by trying to answer some important questions: 1. What do I get from my students? 2. What do I think my students will want from me? 3. What is the least that I will expect and accept from them? 4. What problems and difficulties might occur during my didactic communication? 5. How can I solve these problems with my students by communication? This mental training can enable teachers to overcome difficulties and be more persuasive in their didactic communication.

2. Determinants and mechanisms of the persuasive didactic communication By didactic communication, teachers try to be rightly understood by students, to persuade and to cause changes in students’ attitudes and behaviours. The persuasive communication student-teacher effectiveness depends on both the internal psychological mechanisms of the persuasion and external communication mechanisms, which are linked by a series of characteristics of the source, recipient and message. Regarding the source, represented by the teacher's personality, it must satisfy two important conditions: 1. to have credibility, 2. to be authentic. Credibility refers to the prestige, authority, trust and value provided by the students of a teacher. To be credible, a teacher must have scientific and pedagogical competences, that is, to be well informed, to have the ability to formulate clear, coherent, comprehensible, accessible and empathetic knowledge and ideas. The teachers perceived as competent experts in a particular area have more credibility and they are listened to with great interest by students who accept their messages without much analysis (Maddux & Rogers, 1980; Heesacker et al., 1983 apud Dumitriu, 1998, p. 87). Such a professor’s idea can be learnt by the student, following a persuasive argument, namely that the authority had a crucial role. In the context of didactic communication the teaching authority argument is an important mechanism for achieving persuasion that causes teachers to impose their ideas in the mind of the student because they are considered an authority (“magister dixit”), which often determinates the student to accept a behavioural change because of so being asked by the teacher or so being stated in the manual or course and not because the requirement was justified or understood in its full validity and necessity. Authenticity relates to the teacher’s quality of being trustworthy, or the teacher’s ability of conveying what she knows in a sincere, genuine, accurate and unbiased manner, disregarding the personal interest or the gaining of some benefits, of impressing or changing the student’s attitudes and behaviours, at any cost. Attractiveness is another aspect source whose effectiveness of persuasive communication depends on. In many cases of direct communication, the receivers observe and judge the appearance of the source to be pleasant or unpleasant, and form their impressions even before the source delivers the verbal messages (N. Stanton, 1995 apud Dumitriu, p. 88). In the case of didactic

308 communication, attractiveness refers to how the teachers appear to the students, how they behave and what they look like, i.e., their physical appearance, the way they dress, etc. By all these metacognitive elements students create their positive or negative image of their teachers. Similarity was also shown to be a factor of success in persuasion and people are more attracted to those who are similar, therefore, similarity and the pleasant physical appearance cause attraction which increases the impact of persuasive communication (Berscheid et al., 1971). There are some situations in which credibility, authority, competence and attractiveness of the source of persuasive message becomes even more important than the content of the transmitted information massage. An important role in persuasive communication is held by a number of characteristics of the message, such as the value and meaning of the message to recipients and its intriguing character which determines the changing attitudes of the interlocutors. Thus, an important message to recipients concerning their previous life and experiences will be listened to more carefully and analyzed more thoroughly. The experiments results show that, in different communication situations, the degree of personal involvement can change the students' attitudes, based either on source credibility or on the quality of arguments from the persuasive message. Students who believed that the teacher’s proposal to give an exam would directly affect them personally paid more attention to the source than those who believed that the examination would not affect them personally and who paid more attention to the message than the source. Thus, the source credibility and quality of the speech had a different impact on students' attitudes which changed depending on their personal involvement (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981). In didactic communication the argument of force is another mechanism of persuasion that makes students be forced to assume certain ideas, conduct or change their behaviours as a result of the induced fear of punishment. The teachers’ threatening messages that induced fear and cause higher levels of anxiety in students hardly generated a major and sustainable attitudinal change because the subject tended to avoid the psychological feeling of discomfort and to leave the communication field (Janis & Feshbach, 1953). Concerning the didactic communication features, such as the amount of information, the nature and impact of ideas, novelty, originality, accessibility and intelligibility, there are a number of questions which might arise. For example, should the teacher deliver long messages with many facts and examples, or short and focused messages? Is it compulsory for the teacher to provide more information than necessary or less? Should the teachers’ messages be repeatable and predictable or should they be new and original? The answer depends on the complexity and difficulty of the informational content, the situational context, the features of the source and the students' cognitive ability to understand the message. Logical and psychologically well-based messages are more persuasive than the inconsistent ones and they have a greater impact on the students’ capacities of learning and understanding. The message is more understandable and it increases both its impact and effectiveness. The intelligibility of a message depends on variables such as: length, banality /originality, difficulty in its cognitive comprehension and expectations of the receiver. The more loaded and complicated the message, the less intelligible and effective the communication. Therefore, additional, original and difficult information presented during the didactic communication must be judiciously dosed by the teacher and related to the students’ intelligence, knowledge and understanding capacity. Finally, the emotional factors may increase the effectiveness of didactic communication, induce persuasion and increase the psychological wellbeing, the motivation for learning and changing attitudes to the students. Students may or may not agree to what the teacher said; this depends on the emotional feelings the teacher causes through the messages. In a process of didactic communication, persuasion can be induced, distributed and controlled through the means of expression. The expressiveness of the language used in the teaching communication can create powerful, deep, and persistent effects on the receivers. Thus, the expressiveness of the communication may be emphasized by intonation, accent, pauses, rhythm, voice inflections, style figures, impressive the receptors. Besides paraverbal means of expression, the nonverbal means as mimicry and pantomime increase the strength of the teachers’ message, generate emotions and feelings that can lead to the attitudinal changes expected. All these elements depend on the teaching communication style. For an effective communication process both teachers and students must to know the verbal and nonverbal messages codes and give them

309 the same meaning. Thus, appropriate encoding and decoding of the message are critical. As receptors of the teaching message the students think and understand its meanings and significance, analyze the advantages and disadvantages, anticipate the consequences, are careful, critical and selective, have favourable or unfavourable attitudes towards the message content, develop arguments and counterarguments, react differently to what the teacher said. Generally, students come to learn the content of a message if they have cognitive experience, intellectual skills, higher level of understanding, emotional availability and motivation for learning. Researchers demonstrated that the receptors process messages differently. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), developed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986), and the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM), developed by Chaiken (1980), posits two meditational routes to persuasion, the central and peripheral (Axsom, Yates, & Chaiken, 1987). These models propose that when an individual’s capacity and motivation are relatively high, the individual will carefully evaluate the available information, utilising the central or systemic route. In contrast, when capacity and motivations are low, an individual will process the information on a more common level, utilising the peripheral or heuristic route. In didactic communication, when students think carefully about the message content communicated by the teacher, they use a central route and are influenced by the strength and quality of arguments, or otherwise they use a peripheral route. Thus, the more cognitive engagement of student was, the more intense and internal processes were activated, the more persuasive effects of teaching message would be more sustainable. Also, for the persuasive teacher’s message to exercise an influence the students have to know its content and be motivated to accept and understand it (Hovland et al., 1953). Mc Guire (1969, 1985) demonstrated that intelligent subjects are more able to learn and understand a message but they are less willing to change their attitudes or behaviour. In this case, the teacher should influence the subjective assessment for the purposes of understanding the utility and necessity of the change. No matter how convincing a teacher could be there will always be students to ignore him, refuse or reject his ideas, and react to his communication with scepticism or displeasure for various reasons. These students are not willing to think and rational analyze the teacher’s communication, understand its meaning and value and prefer to evaluate it on the basis of superficial elements, because they use a peripheral route of communication and “simple heuristics” (Chaiken, 1980), and because they focus on the unimportant elements of the message (Petty & Cacioppo, 1984, 1986). Thus, if the teacher has a good reputation and speaks fluently, the students tend to believe that the teacher’s message is correct. Also, in case of a longer message who contains more arguments or statistical data is increasing tendency to believe that the message is correct. In conclusion, it is good for teachers to provide students with comprehensible, well-structured and argued messages, without too many abstract concepts, new or contradictory information to make themselves correctly understood by their students. When are concerned about the impact of communication, teachers must take into account the students’ individual features, such as personality traits, intelligence, levels of expectation and aspiration, values, beliefs, motivations, thoughts, attitudes, and so on. Some of them are considered “anchors” of persuasion that can be used to induce new attitudinal or behavioural changes. The anchors are an important resource for change, because are perceived as important by receiver (Gavreliuc, 2006, p. 199). Thus, for well-informed and intelligent students is more appropriate to provide multiple arguments, and a single, but relevant message for the less intelligent and uninformed students. However, the teacher is more convincing when presenting both arguments and counterarguments, convergent and divergent information, and students have the opportunity to know different aspects of the facts and phenomena in question. In his persuasive communication, the teacher cannot neglect his students’ natural tendency to reject new scientific information, which they do not understand and to accept the information that confirms their own opinions, attitudes, habits and their often empirical life experience. Starting this, to determine changes in the students’ behaviour, the teacher can make a reference to an effective and actual behaviour that can be stimulated in the future or can provide new behavioural models which students can acquire through observational learning (Bandura, 1986). Persuasion is achieved when a teacher shows to the student how to behave and, through positive motivation, challenges him to learn. If the student’s responses are positively motivated by the teacher, the student develops a positive attitude towards what s/he has been taught. The students’ attitudes influence the degree of reception of the persuasive messages issued by the teacher. Thus, students with predominantly affective attitudes toward a discussion topic are more inclined to rational arguments, and those with predominantly cognitive attitudes are more

310 permissive to emotional arguments (Millar & Millar, 1996 apud Gavreliuc, 2006, p. 203). The students’ beliefs have also an important role. Statements like “learn more from life than from books”, “Internet helps me to enrich my knowledge and get better results”, “the knowledge learned in school did not do anything” and so on are examples of the students’ common beliefs. In order to influence the students, to make them change their old beliefs, attitudes and opinions and develop new beliefs, attitudes and behaviours or acquire new scientific knowledge, the teacher should develop his persuasive speech by building it on the students’ existing beliefs, empirical knowledge and experience. People are hard to change their attitudes or behaviours, so he wants to change these should connect to something which the receiver is already anchored to, otherwise the effort to completely change behaviours, attitudes or beliefs are unrealistic. Not all students are resistant to the teacher’s persuasion tests, on the contrary, many will listen with interest and accept his ideas. Petty and Cacioppo (1984, 1986) demonstrated that some subjects may be more involved than others in analyzing a message, in using the central route depending on how developed their need for knowledge and the ability of cognitive effort are. The students with high cognitive motivation prefer difficult and complex messages, trying to analyze and seek solutions to problems, to differentiate between significant from insignificant information. The teacher must take account of all these aspects and provide consistent and well reasoned logical information to the students who have an increased need for knowledge (Cacioppo et al., 1983). Instead, students with a low cognitive motivation who are not willing to perform intellectual work and dislike cognitive activities are more influenced by the teacher’s competence, by his physical appearance, by their classmates’ reactions and attitudes to the teacher’s message (Cacioppo and Petty, 1984). When the group of students react through a positive feedback, the teacher’s message is more likely to be accepted, but when the others disagree, the message is more likely to be rejected (Axsom et al., 1987). Also, our actions, behaviour and role expectations are conditioning the success of the didactic persuasive communication. The achievement of role behaviours has different and deep effects on the students’ thinking, motivation, affectivity as well as on their personality. In a context of interaction through communication, people behave and react differently according to their beliefs, attitudes and expectations and to external social and situational influences.

References: Axsom, D., Yates, S., Chaiken, S., Audience response as a heuristic cue in persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53/1987, p. 30-40. Berscheid, E., Dion, K.K., Hatfield, W., Walster, G.W., Physical attractiveness and dating choice: A test of a matching hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 7/ 1971, p. 173-189. Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46/1984, p. 69-81. Chaiken, S., Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39/1980, p. 752-756. Cristea, S., Dicţionar de termeni pedagogici, EDP, Bucureşti, 1998. Dillard, J., Pfau, M., The persuasion handbook: Developments in theory and practice, New York: Sage, 2002. Dumitriu, G., Comunicare şi învăţare, EDP, Bucureşti, 1998. Gavreliuc, A., De la relaţiile interpersonale la comunicarea socială, Polirom, Iaşi, 2006. Iacob, L., Comunicarea didactică, în Psihopedagogie pentru examenele de definitivare şi grade didactice, Polirom, Iaşi, 1998. Janis, I. L.; Feshbach, S., Effects of fear-arousing communications. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 48(1), 1953, p. 78-92. Hovland, C.I., Janis, I.L., Kelley, H.H., Communication and persuasion in psychological studies of opinion change, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953. Kapferer, J. N., Căile persuasiunii. Modul de influetare al comportamentelor prin comunicare si publicitate, INI, Bucureşti, 1990. Mc Guire, W.J., Attitudes and attitude change, in G. Lindsey, E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology, vol. 2, pp. 233-246, New York: Random House, 1985. Mucchielli, A., Arta de a comunica, Polirom, Iaşi, 2005. Petty, R.E., Cacioppo, J.T., Attitudes and persuasion: Classic and contemporary approaches, Dubuque, I.A.: Brown, 1981. Petty, R.E., Cacioppo, J.T., The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion, in L. Berkovitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, vol. 19, pp. 123-205, New York: Academic Press, 1985. Petty, R.E., Cacioppo, J.T., Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change, New York: Springer Verlag, 1986. Roloff, M., Miller, G., Persuasion: New Directions in Theory and Research, Sage, Beverly Hills, CA, 1980. Sălăvăstru, D., Psihologia educaţiei, Polirom, Iaşi, 2004.

311 The Grand Tour: National Identity and Intercultural Communication

Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă*

Abstract: The paper aims at considering the historical, social and cultural context that favoured, in the eighteenth century, increased mobility of English travellers beyond national borders and the institutionalisation of the Grand Tour of Europe. Drawing on various sources that discuss the educational and/or medical advantages and disadvantages of travelling on the Continent, the investigation of this eighteenth-century cultural phenomenon focuses, in particular, on the impact of cross-cultural encounters on the English travellers’ sense of national identity and their representations of the foreign Other. Key words: Grand Tour, national identity, masculinity, cultural stereotypes.

Résumé: Ce travail se propose d’examiner le contexte historique, social et culturel qui a favorisé, pendant le dix-huitième siècle, la mobilité des Anglais au-delà de leurs frontières nationales et l’institutionalisation du Grand Tour de l’Europe. En prenant comme point de départ des ouvrages de l’époque qui considèrent les avantages et les inconvénients éducationnels et/ou médicaux du voyage sur le Continent, notre investigation de ce phénomène culturel du dix-huitième siècle vise tout particulièrement l’impact des rencontres interculturelles qui touchent à l’identité nationale et aux représentations de l’Autre chez les voyageurs anglais. Mots-clés : Grand Tour, identité nationale, masculinité, stéréotypes culturels.

Travelling across the European Continent (sometimes even further) was not a practice that the eighteenth century invented. In the Middle Ages, for instance, “pilgrimages had performed a literally crucial function in the devout believer’s life” as “the journey to Rome in the age of Bede was certainly of the same worth and significance as the Wife of Bath’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem” (Irimia, 2007: 27). As a matter of fact, such medieval travel practices displayed features that would largely anticipate those of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour; ravelers would follow “set itineraries”, visiting “pre-packaged sites”, animated by multiple, mixed motives: “Sincere devotion mingled with simple wanderlust, or the urge to escape one’s sodden, smelly cottage after a long winter”, or “the lure of worldly distractions along the way; hope of sexual adventure no doubt set more of a few pilgrims in motion.” (Bohls, 2005: xiv) Thus, the pilgrimage as a cultural phenomenon demonstrated that, as early as the Middle Ages, travel was seen as a means to “fulfil obligations and enhance status”, but also to “feed dangerous desires” (Bohls, 2005: xiv). Later on, the Renaissance opening to the (non-)Christian world further encouraged voyages and added elements to the new “spiritual geography” that was being written (Irimia, 2007: 27), while also favouring the development of “Continental tourism as an English institution”:

“The Grand Tour of Europe as a finishing school for young aristocrats originated under the Tudors. As early as the reign of Henry VIII, the diplomat Thomas Wyatt brought back from his Italian travels a novel souvenir: an exciting new poetic form, the sonnet. In 1642 the first Continental guidebook, James Howell’s Instructions for Forreine Travel, came out and was in demand for a number of years.” (Bohls, 2005: xx).

There is no wonder, then, that, when European societies embarked on a process of gradual, but major transformation at all (political, religious, social and cultural) levels of life during the last decades of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth century, travel became “a widely prevalent practice (and a bloated industry)” (Bohls, 2005: xx) that, irrespective of the travellers’ motivations, would entail more or less thorough scrutiny of (the traveller’s and the host’s) cultural frames. Considering the effects of what he called “the crisis of the European conscience” at the turn of the eighteenth century, Paul Hazard saw in the increasing mobility of people and ideas an overarching paradigm of this stage of transition from the “stability within known limits” of Classicism (Barzun, 1975: 41) to the dynamism of the Enlightenment:

«Si, avec le temps, nous voyons le goût du voyage se renforcer et se répandre; si des explorateurs sortent de leur village, de leur province, de leur pays pour savoir comment vivent et pensent les

* Associate professor, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

312 autres hommes: nous comprendrons à ce premier signe qu’un chagement s’opère dans les principes qui dirigeaient la vie. ‘Si vous êtes curieux, allez voyager...’» (1961: 16).

In this context, the English, like their European fellows, set out to discover the world and to build a sense of identity based on the observation of the self – other interaction and on cross-cultural comparison. Leaving aside the voyages overseas that were part of the great plan of the English for the development of their colonial empire, “the most institutionalised of trips [in the eighteenth century] was undoubtedly the Grand Tour of Europe” (Bohls, 2005: 104-5). With an itinerary already standardised by the late seventeenth century (Bohls, 2005: 105), the Grand Tour “involved essentially a trip to Paris and a tour of the principal Italian cities” (Black qtd. In Irimia, 2007: 28). Two passage areas defined its cultural geography: on the one hand, any Grand Tour had to start at Dover with “an eventful average three-day experience crossing the English Channel, at the end of which Calais would make all the difference.” (Irimia, 2007: 29); on the other hand, the Alps provided, especially for the travellers who, mostly towards the second half of the century, dared venture to the south, a unique experience of the mountains and of the beauties of wilderness before they could encounter another cultural space where the study of human nature could combine with the discovery of the seats of glory of the ancient Roman empire (Irimia, 2007: 30-1). Before crossing again the Channel to go back home, many English travellers opted, nonetheless, for varied return routes thus adding new destinations to the traditional ones, including Dutch, German and Austrian towns (Amsterdam, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, etc.). Nowadays, scholars unanimously acknowledge that, in the Age of Reason, the Grand Tour was, above all, a “must of the educational process, which benefited pre-eminently young wealthy aristocratic males” (Irimia, 2007: 28). Conceived of as an educational rite of passage, this modern ‘pilgrimage’ that largely lost its religious connotations was aimed at reshaping the travellers’ sense of identity through the discovery and comparison of “the multiple facets of ‘the’ other culture (…), such as the language, the history and geography, the food, clothing and housing, the architecture, arts and laws, the customs and politics of the place” (Irimia, 2007: 29). Undoubtedly, among the English aristocrats, such a tour of Europe undertaken in the company of a scholarly guide (or ‘bear- leader’/ Cicerone) passed – at least in theory – for “the finishing touch on a gentleman’s education” (Bohls, 2005: 105). In practice, though, as proven by documentary evidence (i.e., letters, diaries, etc.), the effectiveness of the Grand Tour as an instrument of education in the academic sense of the word was highly debatable. According to Paul Hazard,

«Les Anglais voyageaient, c’était le complément de leur education; les jeunes seigneurs fraîchement sortis d’Oxford et de Cambridge, bien pourvus de guinées et flanqués d’un sage précepteur, franchissaient le détroit et entreprennaient le grand tour. On en a vu de toute espèce; certains se contentaient de connaître le muscat de Frontignan et de Montfiascone, les vins d’Ay, d’Arbois, de Bordeaux, de Xérez, tandis que d’autres, avec conscience, étudiaient tous les cabinets d’histoire naturelle, toutes les collections d’antiquités » (Hazard, 1961 : 18) .

Other assessments of this cultural phenomenon go even further and, relying on the study of various eighteenth-century travel accounts, have posited that, for most of the young English aristocrats, so warmly received on the Continent precisely because of their ‘magnificent generosity’, actually their ‘amazing talent’ of wasting incredibly large sums of money (Hazard, 1961: 18),

“[u]tilitarian motives for travel were replaced by very personal, even […] psychosexual ones. Even though the Grand Tour was seen as an obligatory finishing school for the young men of powerful families, in fact, as Pope noted, the young men more often ‘sauntered Europe round,/ And gathered every vice on Christian ground.’ The appeal to duty was more often than not an excuse to acquire a veneer of European manners, make business and political contacts, and experiment sexually in a more permissive society.” (Blanton, 2002: 30-1).

As changes at the social level allowed for the gradual rise in power of the middle classes, class competition caused many of the newly enriched bourgeois to follow in the footsteps of their

313 aristocratic ‘rivals’ and to mimic their indulgence in courtly games and flattery in Paris or in the dolce far niente in Rome. Two stereotypical representations dominated the mental picture that these English travellers had of the foreign other: Paris was seen as the seat of the civilised French, while Rome was the cradle of the Golden Age of the Roman Empire. Though “it was a modern thing to complete one’s classic education with a secular pilgrimage to lands of the classic antiquity” (Irimia, 2007: 28), the ‘call of the body’ often proved stronger and that caused the aristocratic adepts of “epicurean decadence” (Irimia, 2007: 30) to feel perhaps more attracted by Paris, where they could learn about the most recent trends in fashion and significantly improve in the art of social politeness, sophisticated conversation, and seduction. As they saw the French other as enticing and congenial, these travellers smoothly underwent acculturation, in other words Frenchification. Naturally, upon their return home, they popularised the newly acquired habits which, against the background of a general feeling of admiration for the French culture (Francophilia verging actually on Francomania), entailed the Frenchification of the English aristocratic circles, so much criticised by their bourgeois counterparts. Recorded in satirical terms in fictional discourse, the latter’s dislike of cross-cultural ‘contamination’ could be relevantly exemplified by certain episodes from Tobias George Smollett’s novels The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751). For instance, Roderick’s visit to a London coffee-house is the perfect pretext for the Smolletian narrator to launch an attack on Francophile English aristocrats who admire the French political system and army organisation, while Peregrine’s interactions with Mr. Jolter (his Francophile tutor), on the one hand, and the Hornbecks (an English couple charmed by the mirage of the French beau monde), on the other, complete the caricature of the Grand Tourists who fall into the ‘trap’ of Frenchification. Literary representations of Anglo-French encounters actually confirm the coexistence in the eighteenth-century English society of different attitudes towards the French other that implicitly influenced English reactions to the Grand Tour: while the practice of Frenchified court manners, diplomatic etiquette and salon diplomacy appealed to a certain part of the English society, especially if of aristocratic extraction, throughout the eighteenth century, the rising middle-classes who benefited from the development of socio-economic relations encouraged and cultivated a different behavioural model relying on a strong sense of national identity. To put it otherwise, the national character gradually came to be considered central to Britain’s success as a political, social and economic power in Europe (Langford, 2000: 9). A new model of ‘gentlemanliness’ was forged having as an important dimension the idea that “everyone [should be] proud of being a free-born Englishman” (Trevelyan qtd. in Wexler, 2004: 9). The meaning of ‘everyone’ should, however, be clarified here as the idea of national identity was determined by the dynamics of English imperialism competing with the French or the Spanish during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1739-48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), as well as by the changing conceptions of masculinity. A new “personification of Englishness” emerged as “the result of a process of contrastive self-definition during periods of intense Gallophobia in the eighteenth century” (Spiering in Beller and Leerssen, 2007: 146-147). In 1713, The History of John Bull, John Arbuthnot’s parable about the War of the Spanish Succession opposed the English eponymous hero to the caricatures of the Dutch (Nicholas Frog) and the French (Lewis Baboon). Despite his flaws – “choleric”, “of a very unconstant temper”, “apt to quarrel with his best friends” – John Bull was appreciated for his ‘manly’ qualities – “bold”, “always ready to dust up his enemies” – set in contrast with “the flimsier or more effeminate character ascribed to the French” (Spiering in Beller and Leerssen, 2007: 146). This image of Englishness gained popularity and stereotype status, appearing in prints and cartoons or being re-invented and ‘dressed’ in new fictional ‘clothes’ in Samuel Foote’s comic plays (The Englishman in Paris, 1753; The Englishman Returned from Paris, 1756) or in Tobias George Smollett’s novels, where stress was laid on its English-specific “directness, love of freedom and dislike of all things French” (Spiering in Beller and Leerssen, 2007: 147). In addition, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the appropriation of French models of politeness as an ‘art de plaire’ caused, in certain English circles, increased concern with “that peculiarly male anxiety, effeminacy” (Cohen qtd. in Gregg, 1998: 1). Under the circumstances, English (bourgeois) ethnocentrism favoured the spreading of the stereotypical view of the French

314 society as being of the “feminine” type (Hofstede, 1991), the French language as being a “female language” (Cohen qtd. in Gregg, 1998: 1) and French refinement as too much based on contact with women, therefore emasculated, in opposition with the masculine national character the English aspired to. The shifting definitions of national identity and masculinity implicitly affected the perspective on the Grand Tour as a useful instrument in the education of the young ‘true-born Englishmen’. As Michèle Cohen remarks:

“…in fashioning themselves as polite, men risked becoming effeminate. One reason was that by pleasing and conversing with women, men might become like them. Another reason was that men also had to imitate the French because they had most developed the art of pleasing and the conversational skills at the heart of politeness and were its best models. These requirements generated a number of tensions for men that were, in complex and contradictory ways, intertwined with masculinity and national character (while contributing to shaping it). The grand tour, which played a central educational role in the eighteenth century, not only embodies these tensions and contradictions but also can usefully be contrasted with chivalry, ‘a code of conduct specified for the boy’ and a structure for his education” (2005, par. 25).

Over the second half of the century, more and more Enlightenment thinkers like the English Richard Hurd or the Scottish David Fordyce, Adam Smith, John Millar, Adam Ferguson urged their contemporaries to promote a manly, chivalric education and to reject the French servility and effeminacy. Aiming at somewhat reconciling the stereotypes of the ‘gentleman’ and his less cultivated counterpart ‘John Bull’, they advanced a new image of English national identity based on a well-balanced combination of “refined courtesy” (Ferguson qtd. in Cohen, 2005: 24) and consideration for women, manliness, chivalric honour, generosity, truthfulness, and, last but not least, “high regard for honesty and liberty” (Spiering in Beller and Leerssen, 2007: 147). A special category among the Grand Tourists was represented by philosophers and writers. Convinced that, as John Locke argued in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), “the stimuli in the external world were crucial to the development of one’s intellectual powers” (Blanton, 2002: 11), they hoped to discover, by travelling, the mechanisms behind cultural differences and to improve their knowledge of the world on the basis of which they could subsequently build, by contrast, their own systems of thought and representations of identity and alterity. At the turn of the century, they were still tributary to the ‘guidelines’ for travel accounts issued during the seventeenth century “calling for accurate observation and a sober, unadorned prose style” (Bohls, 2005: xxiii); Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705) is a good case in point, “typify[ing] the impersonality expected of travel writing throughout at least the first half of the century” (Bohls, 2005: xxiii). Yet, especially during the second part of the eighteenth century, when the Age of Reason was gradually replaced by the Age of Sentiment, perhaps more aware than the other travellers of the separation of mind and body and of the distinct ways in which they react to external stimuli, writers like James Boswell (Grand Tour Journals: Germany and Switzerland, 1764 and Italy, Corsica and France, 1765-1766), Tobias George Smollett (Travels through France and Italy, 1766) or Laurence Sterne (A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, 1768) transposed in their works what some of the rest of the Grand Tourists only had an intuition of, namely that any outer voyage is actually doubled by an inner voyage. Then travel writing came to foreground “not the conventional sights and cultural monuments visited by the tourist or connoisseur, but interpersonal encounters, the feelings they evoke and the moral development they catalyze” (Bohls, 2005: 105-6). Last but not least, medical practice seems to have contributed significantly to the evolution of the Grand Tour as a cultural phenomenon in a different direction. For many Englishmen who set out across the Continent, the basic incentive for travel was neither the urge to complete their education nor entirely the desire to experiment new forms of entertainment (here including sexual promiscuity) in a more permissive environment, but simply the doctor’s order. Actually, as early as the seventeenth century, famous ‘medical’ treatises (e.g. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621; Richard Blakemore’s Dissertation upon the Spleen, 1725; etc.) extolled the therapeutic effects of travel as change of scene for the troubled mind. And since the origins of insanity were identified in intellectual processes, writers were definitely recommended travelling as a cure for the mind. Throughout the whole eighteenth century, travel remained “a front-line cure” for

315 melancholia, hypochondria and spleen (Andrews, 2000: 32) owing to the change of air and to its agreeable ‘diversions’ like new company and variety of objects, anyway, a much more appealing alternative for both doctors and patients than the asylum or other forms of seclusion. Travel was also on the list of treatment recommendations for shock, stress, neurasthenia (as forms of mental distress) as well as consumption/tuberculosis and other forms of bodily illness. That caused medical writings to interdisciplinarily unite descriptions of symptoms and treatment procedures with a remapping of the European geography according to the climate or, as they put it, the quality of the air. (Distinction was made between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ air, the latter being responsible especially for mental affliction.) Thus, specific travels were recommended for specific diseases: for instance, the South was recommended during winter and early spring, while the mountains (the Swiss or Italian Alps) were recommended in autumn for the health-giving properties of their air and the psychological impact of the scenery (Andrews, 2000: 67). Nevertheless, the works of the medical practitioners who also assumed the role of climatologists revealed an inherent contradiction in their assessment of the benefits of travel as cure. More or less openly, they had to admit that, while the change of place and air could procure the patient physical exercise, recreation, enjoyment and release from the pressures of the home environment, it could equally become a source of additional stress and physiological discomfort because of: the too long, exhausting routes made even more irritating by the very uncomfortable transportation in the cramped spaces of stage-coaches and carriages; the new experiences which the cultural gap might render stressful and disturbing; the physiological shocks caused by the change of climate and difficulties in adapting to the local diet; or the danger of local diseases like malaria in Italy. As a matter of fact, many writings about travels to Italy in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries foreground the clash between Rome’s historical and artistic reputation and the travellers’ reaction to the shortcomings of the local government – such as lack of salubrity, agricultural neglect, demographic degeneration, decrepitude of monuments (Roman ruins, churches, old buildings, etc.) – (erroneously) seen as responsible for the proliferation of malarial fever. (See Wrigley, 2000: 207-28) Furthermore, going beyond the limits of medical sciences and following in the footsteps of philosophers like Montesquieu (De l’esprit des lois, 1748) or Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756), climatologists (like Tobias George Smollett in Travels through France and Italy, 1766) who explained cultural dissimilarities on the basis of climate differences drew the attention to the danger of destabilization implied by both self-discovery and the experience of alterity threatening the traveller’s stability and identity; hence, the abundance of metaphors of illness and disease in their texts. Two were then the consequences of the contradictory evaluation of the effects of the Grand Tour as a practice of travel tracing out the movement from the cold North to the warm South: on the one hand, deeming the negative effects of such a voyage too significant by contrast with the positive ones, ‘medical’ texts that recommended travelling as therapy suggested, against the background of a rising tide of nationalism in the bourgeois circles over the second half of the eighteenth century, that indigenous travel would be far more profitable for the patient’s health and sense of identity than the cosmopolitan experience of the Grand Tour. On the other hand, wherever s/he went, the traveller was urged “to inspect, like a doctor” the management of the land, to see the landscape as a bodily system the health of which paralleled that of the body politic, in particular, and of the whole civilisation, in general. (See Caske, 2000: 121-56) Throughout the eighteenth century, it became more and more obvious that the bulk of those who crossed the English Channel in search of new experiences deserved the name of ‘tourists’ (going through “predictable and repetitive experiences, a combination of purposelessness and certainty which results in vulgarity and ignorance”) rather than that of ‘travellers’ (“travelling for a purpose and engaging with people and place in meaningful ways which cannot be predetermined”) (Wrigley and Revill, 2000: 4). “Usually quite temperamental, if of the insular bent, and treasuring a fascination with Europe’s artistic, social, architectural, literary and historical attractions” (Irimia, 2007: 28), these ‘slaves of consumerism’ embarked on the Grand Tour because it was “a chic procedure” (Irimia, 2007: 28) and not because they thought it had any genuine educational purpose. Simultaneously, the changes in the conceptualisation of national identity and in the aesthetic paradigms encouraged travel in England/ the British Isles, hence the development of a trend of

316 nationalist tourist literature in the second half of the eighteenth century extolling the historical and social progress of the nation to the detriment of intercultural encounters.

References: Andrews, Jonathan, “Letting Madness Range. Travel and Mental Disorder c. 1700-1900”, in Wrigley, Richard and George Revill (eds.), Pathologies of Travel, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 25-88. Barzun, Jacques, Classic, Romantic and Modern, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1975. Blanton, Casey, Travel Writing. The Self and the World, Routledge, New York and London, 2002. Bohls, Elizabeth E., “Age of Peregrination: Travel Writing and the Eighteenth-century Novel”, in Backscheider, Paula R. and Catherine Ingrassia (eds.), A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2005, pp. 97-116. Bohls, Elizabeth E., “Introduction”, in Bohls, Elizabeth E. and Ian Duncan (eds.) Travel Writing 1700-1830. An Anthology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, pp. xiii-xxvii. Caske, Matthew, “Richard Jago’s Edge-Hill Revisited: A Traveller’s Prospect of the Health and Disease of a Succession of National Landscapes”, in Wrigley, Richard and George Revill (eds.), Pathologies of Travel, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 121-56. Cohen, Michèle, “‘Manners’ Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750-1830”, in Journal of British Studies, Vol. 44, Issue 2 (April), 2005, pp. 312-29. Gregg, Stephen H., “Review to Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century by Michèle Cohen”, in Prolepsis: The Heidelberg Review of English Studies, 1998, available at http://www.as.uni- hd.de/prolepsis/98_3_gre.html. Hazard, Paul, La crise de la conscience européenne 1680-1715, Fayard, Paris, 1961. Hofstede, Geert, Cultures and Organizations: Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival. Software of the Mind, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 1991. Irimia, Mihaela, “The Grand Grand Tour”, in Ciugureanu, Adina and Eduard Vlad (eds.), Travel (of) Writing, Ovidius University Press, Constanţa, 2007, pp. 25-36. Langford, Paul, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. Spiering, Menno, “The English”, in Beller Manfred and Joep Leerssen (eds.), Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2007, pp. 145-151. Wexler, Steven, “How to be an Eighteenth-Century English Gentleman”, 2004, available at http://www.louisville.edu/a- s/english/gta/wexler/643/finalpaper.html. Wrigley, Richard and George Revill, “Introduction”, in Pathologies of Travel, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 1-23. Wrigley, Richard, “Pathological Topographies and Cultural Itineraries: Mapping ‘Mal’aria’ in 18th- and 19th-century Rome”, in Wrigley, Richard and George Revill (eds.), Pathologies of Travel, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 207-28.

317 The Public Body and the Rhetoric of Status in the Early Modern Culture

Andreea-Roxana Constantinescu*

Résumé: Cet ouvrage se propose d’expliquer les mentalités, les discours et les pratiques culturels au début de l’âge moderne liés au corps prévus par le nouveau canon apparu au début de l’âge moderne et aux valeurs représentées par celui-ci. Les historiens sont tombés d’accord sur le fait que le début de l’âge moderne a marqué un changement dans la pensée, les mentalités et les valeurs, cette période étant considérée la plus importante dans la formation de la pensée moderne. Dans cet ouvrage le changement des mentalités est souligné par la comparaison entre les valeurs médiévales et celles soutenues au début de l’âge moderne. C’est dans cette période que l’homme devient conscient de ses possibilités, mais aussi le centre de son intérêt. C’est l’époque où l’individualisme devient la plus importante caractéristique de la personnalité humaine. L’individualisme introduit la préoccupation pour le moi public, pour les apparitions publiques. Les valeurs tellement louées pendant le Moyen Age ne sont plus valables; l’accent n’est plus mis sur le moi intérieur, mais sur le moi public. Au début de l’âge moderne l’homme essaie de faire de son mieux afin d’améliorer son image extérieure, de faire preuve de ses qualités et de cacher ses défauts. Par conséquent, les vertus du moi public ne représentent plus le but de l’existence humaine, mais elles deviennent une modalité par laquelle l’homme obtient l’ascension (qui au début de l’âge moderne est horizontale, pas verticale comme au Moyen Age), le succès dans le domaine publique. Le moi intérieur est mis au service du moi public. Cette nouvelle mentalité est reflétée à tous niveaux, dans tous les domaines de l’activité humaine: politique, vie sociale, économie, art, costumes et décorations. Mots-clés: public, privé, corps, individualisme, mentalités

Keywords: public, private, body, status, individualism

Introduction: Early modern material culture and mentalities In the early modern times man becomes aware of his possibilities and focuses all attention upon himself. This is the epoch when individualism emerges as a major characteristic of man’s personality. Individualism brings about the concern for one’s public self, for appearances. The most praised virtues of the Middle Ages are no longer valid; the stress no longer falls on the inner self; what matters is the public self. In the early modern times man tries his best to improve his external image, to exhibit his qualities and to hide his flaws. The virtues of the inner self, therefore, are no longer the aim of man’s existence; they become the means for man’s ascent (which in the early modernity is horizontal, not vertical as in the Middle Ages), for his success in the public realm. The inner self comes to serve the public self. This new mentality is reflected at all levels, in all fields of human activity: politics, social life, economy, art, costumes, and decorations. The social force that transformed rest into movement, inertia into activity, apathy into ambition, the force that replaced a static order with an essentially dynamic one, the force that blew up all the medieval restrictions and prejudices was capitalism. The formation of the capitalist mentality marked the beginning of the early modern times and has important, bringing about an important shift in mentalities. The medieval mentality of sustenance was replaced by a new mentality, which praised work, economy, caution, exactness (which were seen as moral values). The development of city- life, of trades and industries, of commerce led to the appearance of a new social figure – the merchant – of a new mentality – that of profit, and, as a result, of a new value – time. Time no longer belongs to God; it is no longer subordinated to the Church. The exceptional, episodic time of the Church is replaced by a regular time, the merchants’ time. Time is no longer collective, it acquires an individual dimension and value becomes increasingly obvious. Wasting time comes to be seen as a sin, a spiritual scandal. The proper and wise use of the time becomes a virtue [1]. At the end of the 15th century a new form of political organization emerges in Western Europe: the modern state, characterized by the concentration of all national forces around the monarch. Centralized monarchy puts an end to feudal anarchy, it abolishes the political rights of the nobility and the autonomy of the cities. The monarch is the vivid embodiment of the state, the representative of the nation’s will and aspirations. The English centralized monarchy reaches its

* Assistant, PhD Candidate, The National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest

318 glory during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, when a real art of power develops. This power consists in its visibility, in the visible presence of its glory. Royal power is not based on a stable army, on police forces or on bureaucracy, but on ‘theoretical celebrations of royal glory and theoretical violence visited upon the enemies of that glory’ [2]. Power thus becomes an art, which will be studied and taught in a whole series of books dedicated to princes and courtiers. However this aspect of absolute power is present not only in centralized states, but also in states like Italy. The development of tyrannies in Italy led, according to J. Burckhardt, to the development of the modern mentalities, of Italians’ self-awareness and individualism. All the political and economic changes brought about a transformation in the structure of the society and in the individuals’ approach to society. In the Middle Ages, according to Jakob Burckhardt [3], the two sides of the human consciousness – one oriented outwardly, towards the exterior world, the other – towards the inner self – were veiled in religious faith, childish naiveté and illusions. The world was seen in miraculous colours through this veil, and the individual had little self-awareness, seeing himself as part of a community, be it race, nation, corporation or family. The early modern man will tear this veil, and subjectivity and individualism will become the key ingredients of the (early-)modern mentality. The 14th century Italian doesn’t want to know about modesty and humility any longer; he eagerly seeks to catch the eye or strike the others, and, even more than that, he does his best to be different or at least to seem different from others (difference as individualism). Burckhardt attributes the emergence and rise of individualism to despotism [4]. According to him, despotism increased and rendered more visible the individuality of the tyrant, as well as the individualities of his protégés, of the private secretary, of the civil servant, of the poet. These people were forced and became accustomed to explore all their inner resources and to speculate on them in order to accumulate power and to preserve it (in the tyrant’s case), or to get the tyrant’s favours and appreciation. But, although Burckhardt speaks about the Italian tyrannies, his theory is also valid for other monarchies. Elizabethan England is one good example. Therefore, the early modern man uses both his inner and his outer resources in order to reach glory and to be a winner in the power game. He is fully aware of his own resources and exploits them, bringing them to his advantage. Typical of the early modern man is his quest for fame, since fame is no longer solely the attribute of saints and heroes, as it was the case in the Middle Ages, when glory could be equated with legend. N. Berdiaev discusses this shift in terms of the dialectics of the sacred and the profane, with the medieval times standing for the sacred and the early modern standing for the advent of the profane, brought about by individualism. In the same manner, other authors speak of representative figures or images of the two epochs. G. Duby attributes the image of the cathedral (spirituality, vertical ascent) to the Middle Ages and the image of the palace to the early modern times (Le Temps des Catedrales). Similarly, the emblematic medieval clerical figure is the monk [5], while the leading figure of the early modern religious life is the cardinal [6].

Revaluating the “public” and the “private”: the rise of individualism The changes that took place in the human consciousness and in mentalities are best illustrated by the changes in the private life and by the new approaches to “privacy”. This change in mentalities, the appearance of self-awareness, of self-centredness are consequences of the emergence of the concept of “privacy” in the late Middle Ages and of the definite, clear-cut distinction between the public and the private. This is not to say that there was no privacy in the Middle Ages. But privacy was understood in a much broader sense than later on in the early modern times. Because in the Middle Ages there was no absolute individual privacy; there was a collective privacy, the privacy of the community. The individual envisaged himself as part of the community, sharing everything with the community in which he lived. The medieval privacy is, as G. Duby [7] calls it, a “gregarious privacy”. Individuals shared a collective privacy, they were bound to the community and submitted to collective discipline, which constrained them. Even if private, individual life remained in the shadow, its secrets were soon discovered and shared by all members of the community; even if private life meant independence, that independence had a rather collective character. Any individual who tried to isolate himself was regarded with suspicion or, on the contrary, with

319 admiration. The individual was either a rebel or a hero; he was, anyway, placed in the sphere of the “strange” – as opposed to the familiar private [8]. So in the Middle Age the stress was not an individual privacy, but a form of privacy within the community. The individual had no private life as we conceive it today; he was characterized by humility, obedience, and self-effacement within the framework of the community he belonged to and was a part of. The early modern epoch marks a radical shift of perspective: this feeling of belonging to a community gradually disappears, together with the collective, “gregarious” privacy, which makes room for genuine individual privacy. The stress is laid more and more on the individual, who becomes increasingly independent and powerful. Early modernity witnesses the emergence of a new model of society. People start making the difference between the public and the private, between work and family life. They start protecting themselves from the others’ sight. Independence and privacy can be traced in the individual’s free choice of his condition and way of life and in the individual’s retreat in the middle of the family, which becomes a refuge, the centre of the private life. Ph. Aries [9] speaks about several stages in this process of individual emancipation, starting with the development of the taste for solitude and the new approach to freedom, and culminating with the emergence of the literature of civility and of the autobiographies, which are examples of individual development. The approach to and experience of the body is connected with the early modern man’s approach to the public and the private. The human body is no longer seen as a source of temptation, which should stay hidden, or as an unimportant part of the human being (as opposed to the soul), which should be neglected. The body becomes a value, which should be taken care of and made visible. The visibility of the body triggers the visibility of status. The individual, however, as David Le Breton [10] remarks, is imprisoned within the confines of this public, limited, isolated body.

The public body and the rhetoric of status The bodily deportment and demeanour come to be regarded as significant aspects of status, and this is clear from the many texts of the time dedicated to this theme. One of the most influential texts of this kind was Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. The ideal constructed by Castiglione was one of verbal and physical grace, with rather more emphasis on the social attractiveness of the courtier than on his ethical and political substance. The book is written in the form of the dialogue, which is typical of the early modern pluralism, suggesting freedom of expression. These dialogues take place at the Court of Urbino, where the greatest personalities of the time used to gather around Duchess Elizabeth Gonzaga. The Court of Urbino is envisaged as the ideal Renaissance court, where cultivated men and women gathered and spent their time in a pleasant way, playing games, talking, exchanging opinions. The absence of prejudices makes men and women talk about all sorts of things, such as love or women’s place and role in society). Games also stand for a typically early modern attitude – the ludic one – having a double function: to provide entertainment and to challenge the intellect. In Castiglione’s book the debate, whose topic is ‘the perfect courtier’, starts from a game. The topic is debated upon for four consecutive nights, and, in the end, from the presentations and disputes on this topic, the participants construct the portraits of the perfect courtier and the perfect court-lady. The medieval values are no longer praised and new values emerge. This is obvious in the very introduction to the book, where Castiglione describes the Court of Urbino as the ideal Renaissance court and its founder, Duke Federico, as the epitome of the Renaissance courtier. The palace is the image of its founder: through its comfort, richness and aesthetic taste, it communicates status and greatness. Greatness is discussed at large in the Fourth Book of the Courtier: the prince has to show greatness in order to be loved and respected; greatness is what legitimizes him and gives him authority. However this greatness and the authority it legitimizes shouldn’t bring about the subjects’ hate, and in order to avoid such a thing, the prince should organize festivities, performances and games [11]. Festivities and performances were thus conceived as a safety valve, a form of releasing the negative social energy and the latent forms of resistance and rebellion. At the end of the four nights the image of the ideal courtier is constructed. The courtier is invested with a new set of values, which do not correspond to the medieval code. Charity, for example, which was one of the most important medieval values, disappears in the early modern

320 times. It is replaced by caution and temperance. The qualities of the warrior (strength, valiance) are preserved, but their importance is diminished, and they are gradually replaced by diplomacy and courtesy. The perfect courtier should be a diplomat and an improviser. The courtier should be of aristocratic origin, but origin alone does not make a perfect courtier. A perfect courtier should be endowed with intelligence, with a beautiful body and with charm. Appearance is again overemphasized. The appearance, the public self is important as it contributes to preserving and strengthening one’s status. The public self becomes more important than the inner self. All virtues should serve the public self, because, for the early modern man, virtues are a means of getting fame and they should be shown ostentatiously. This preoccupation with one’s public image proves the individualism, egocentricity and narcissism of the Renaissance man: all the early modern virtues – intelligence, education, knowledge, taste, beauty – are only means that serve the public self and the individual’s (horizontal) ascent. This is even more obvious if we think that one of the most important virtues praised in the book is shrewdness. Shrewdness should be present in the display of one’s virtues. In other words, virtues have no value if they are not properly displayed. This art of constructing one’s public self includes dress, gesture, demeanour. Concern with the manners of the noble or gentleman was not a new phenomenon of the sixteenth century, and it can be traced in a number of late medieval sources. Chivalric romances give some idea of the code of behaviour expected of a gentleman in love or war, but much more technical information about manners is to be found in medieval books of courtesy. Usually quite brief and written in verse form for easy memorization, fifteenth-century courtesy books were directed at the child or gentleman serving in the noble or royal household. Though this literature reconstructs some of the basic norms of bodily behaviour, it shows, however, no consistent focus on bodily courtesy as an ideal in itself. Instead, attention is overwhelmingly directed to one sort of social occasion and to the relationships which are to be expressed in the rituals of that occasion: this is the main meal or banquet, the expression of the solidarity and hierarchy of the noble household and its relation to the outside world in the obligation of hospitality. In the description of these rituals the stress is always on the relations of lordship and service dramatized in the banquet procedures. If the precepts about physical behaviour often seem to indicate a remarkable crudity to the modern man, they are embedded in complex ceremonial rules about when, how and to whom the courteous child should offer food, wine and water. Moreover, even the rules forbidding messy eating (there are stern warnings against plunging one’s hands into dishes of food, fighting at table or blowing one’s nose on the table-linen) are related less to an overt bodily aesthetic than to the need to show due deference to the lord or host [12]. By contrast, sixteenth and seventeenth century writings on gentlemanly manners show the emergence of the body as a central topic and organizing principle in the ideal of courtesy or, a significantly new term, ‘civility’. Therefore, this new regulation of the body in the early modern writings is not simply an effect of the humanist revival of rhetoric; it needs to be understood in the context of a shift in economic power and in the social and political values associated with appearance, public self and ‘civility’. The word ‘civility’, in the specialized sense of ‘good manners’, best illustrates the close connection between the ideals of personal social conduct and the values of public order and hierarchy. The sixteenth century concept of civility, while looking back towards classical definitions of civic virtue and order (for example, in the notion of ‘civil law’), increasingly acquired meanings which looked forward to the modern concept of ‘civilisation’. According to Anna Bryson, ‘the classical opposition between the ‘civil’ and the ‘barbarious’ was elaborately glossed and indeed transformed in early modern writings into a basis for asserting the wholesale superiority of European elite cultures over the ‘savage’ societies discovered elsewhere and over the barbarious thought to dwell at home or even nearby in Ireland. It was used to create not only a comparative, but an historical perspective, as writers identified ‘savagery’ of communities in Americas with the hypothetical primitive state of their own societies’ [13]. The term ‘civility’ carried with it the connotation of order based on reason, as opposed to the undisciplined animal instinct and a lawless primitive nature. But, according to Bryson, ‘the notion of the creative development of reason in the arts and sciences, which is so important a part of the modern concept of ‘civilisation’ was in the early modern image of civility somehow secondary to the notion of proper regulation and hierarchy both in the individual and in society’ [14]. Sometimes

321 civility is emphasized by contrast through the representation of savagery. The early modern representation of the savage is best illustrated by Shakespeare’s Caliban, who was defined less by simple ignorance than by’brutish’ predominance of instinct. The distinction between the ‘civil’ and the ‘savage’, especially in the definition of manners, plays an important part in the interpretation of the social hierarchy. This distinction was based on the assumption that the elite was more obliged to exemplify civility, and more responsible for civil order, than the brutish lower classes (and this is obvious in Castiglione’s approach to disguise – the courtier should conceal his identity when involved in less appropriate practices for his status and position). A hint of this assumption is given in the characterization of Caliban, whose savagery is inscribed on his deformed body and his subjection to passion, as ‘a savage and deformed slave’ (the last word being a frequent derogatory term for a servant). Alongside animal metaphors for bad behaviour, the advisers on gentlemanly manners used negative examples associating the plebeian with the brute. This conception of good manners is clearly to be related to the overall change in the pattern of aristocratic ideals and ideology. The extensive literature on proper behaviour, education and duties of the gentleman or nobleman suggests that a substantial shift was gradually taking place in the cultural values and practices whereby the elite expressed and justified its power. In the new image and education of the gentleman, which developed during the sixteenth century, one element had a peculiar relevance to the idea of deportment and demeanour as ‘representations’ of the self, designed to make a favourable impression on an audience. Therefore, alongside the concern with ceremonial deference, the early modern writings of conduct emphasize another function for the rules of manners: that of presenting or re-presenting personality, rather than simply acknowledging a relationship. All codes of manners involve the representation of idealized character traits in a general way. As the sociologist Erving Goffman states, they are ‘conventional means of communication by which the individual expresses his character or conveys his appreciation of other participants in the situation’ [15]. The presentation of self is, according to Goffman, very much staged so as to achieve the intended goal. This involves hiding the negative aspects of the personality by means of defensive and protective practices (dramaturgical loyalty, dramaturgical discipline and dramaturgical circumspection), avoiding ‘unmeant gestures, inopportune intrusions and faux pas’, which are ‘sources of embarrassment and dissonance’ [16] through self-control, and emphasizing the positive aspects of personality. An increasing concentration on rules of bodily control becomes intelligible in this context, because the body is the natural ‘object’ shared with the beasts and therefore the idea of human experience most threatened by descent. According to sociologist Mary Douglas, ‘the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society. There is a continual exchange of meanings between the two kinds of physical experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other. As a result of this interaction the body itself is a highly restricted medium of expression. The forms it adopts in movement and repose express social pressures in manifold ways’ [17]. And it is precisely during this period that the language of social hierarchy which made ‘civilised’ care and control of the body a sign of superior humanity clearly emerged. In the social milieu of the nobility and of the court personal dress, address and demeanour could become a more urgent control as the real or aspirant gentleman sought to gain social recognition. Extravagant dress (more profuse at the court) was one element in this attempt to gain social recognition; the gestures and deportment symbolizing noble ‘virtue’ were another. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the early modern codes of manners is a vocabulary that continually refers to them as ‘representations’ and makes of demeanour and deportment an almost theatrical art, or ‘staging of the self’, as Goffman calls it. Shakespeare’s plays are replete with examples of this theatrical art and with stagings of the self. In The Merchant of Venice, for instance, Graziano explains to Bassanio how the appearance of civility can be achieved by dissembling: ‘Signor Bassanio, hear me./If I do not put on a sober habit,/Talk with respect, and swear but now and then,/Wear prayer books in my pocket, look demurely - /Nay more, while grace is saying hood mine eyes/Thus with my hat, and sigh, and say ‘Amen’/Use all the observance of civility,/Like one well studied in a sad ostent/To please his

322 grandam, never trust me more.’* (II.4.182-189) Bassanio’s public self is thus a construct, an image that he created for himself, but which is not a reflection of his inner self. Bassanio’s civility is ‘well studied’, staged and performed by himself. Through his manners the gentleman was supposed to proclaim his ‘natural’ virtue or entitlement to authority, but such manners were obviously the product of education, effort and artifice. Castiglione was frank in defining the courtier’s task as that of projecting a ‘natural’ ease and grace through self-concealing artifice. ‘Renaissance writing on manners, in presenting deportment and demeanour as a rhetoric of status which ‘represented’ inner noble virtues and ‘civil’ distance from plebeians and brutes, showed the acting of ‘natural’ superiority to be the essential principle of the ‘port and countenance’ of the ideal gentleman’ [18]. Disguise is another important ingredient in the early modern approach to society. Disguise is a means of preserving one’s status and public image. Thus, if a courtier wants to get involved in activities which are not allowed by his status, he should wear disguise. Also, disguise, by concealing one’s true identity, offers a certain degree of freedom, together with the possibility for the courtier to study and to know the others without being identified by them. But disguise is also a way of having fun, of playing with identities – a theatrical performance. So disguise is a perfect combination of early modern diplomacy, wit and playfulness. Disguise is employed by the early modern individual for different purposes, as it is proved by the literature of the time. Shakespeare’s plays abound in examples of disguise: many of his characters, be they comic, tragic, or historical, choose this strategy for concealing their identity: Prince Hal in Henry IV wears disguise in order not to be recognized in the company of such ‘low’ characters as Falstaff and his crew, incompatible with his status and position; Rosalind in As You Like It pretends to be a boy named Ganymed; Portia in The Merchant of Venice plays the role of a judge in order to save Antonio; Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Viola in Twelfth Night both cross-dress as pages. It is obvious from these examples that the incidence of women disguising (and especially cross-dressing) is much higher than of men disguising. Disguise, therefore, as a form of power strategy or power game, also has a lot to do with gender. Women are associated with weakness, and in order to feel safe they have to assume male identities. This is Julia’s case, who disguises in order to travel safely, not to be attacked by ‘lascivious men’: ‘Not like a woman, for I would prevent/The loose encounters of lascivious men.’ (II.7.30-1) Masculinity however does not consist mainly in men’s physical strength, but rather in their power and authority to make decisions and profess personal opinions. Portia in The Merchant of Venice disguises as a judge in order to make herself heard and believed and thus to save Antonio: her authority depends on her judge’s robe. We may derive from these examples that the early modern canon is masculine. However, E.A.J. Honnigman argues that Shakespeare’s women are powerful and self-asserting, strong and witty: ‘In his comedies Shakespeare taught women how to sparkle: he encouraged them to see themselves as intellectually equal to men, frequently more perceptive, more quit-witted in repartee. Far from restricting woman to a single man-pleasing stereotype, he delighted in those who shatter male expectations (Kate the Shrew, Beatrice in Much Ado)…’ [19]. Other authors associate cross-dressing with the underprivileged position of women (as opposed to the male canon). Speaking of the early modern practice of using boys on stage to perform women’s role, Dympna Callaghan argues that the Renaissance canon is male, and femininity is only defined ‘in and as a relation to masculinity’: ‘A representational schema that understands sexual difference completely within the parameters of masculinity does not require women: it occurs entirely within a material economy of males. Visible and audible sexual difference, that is, femininity, on the early modern stage comprised a subspecies of masculinity’ [20]. The idea that the female identity is constructed in relation to the male identity is also advanced by S. Greenblatt: ‘If a crucial step in male individuation’, Greenblatt explains, ‘is separation from the female, this separation is enacted inversely in the rites of cross-dressing; characters like Rosalind and Viola pass through the state of being men in order to become women, [they are] the projected mirror images of masculine self- differentiation’ [21].

* All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds.), Shakespeare. The Complete Works, Oxford University Press, 1988.

323 We find an excellent description of the feminine canon in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The play offers a description of the perfect court-lady (Bianca). Bianca’s portrait is achieved by contrast: her image is opposed to her sister’s deviant character. Bianca perfectly fits the canon – modest, balanced, sweet, as Lucentio describes her: ‘Tranio, I burn, I pine, I perish, Tranio/If I achieve not this young modest girl’ (I.1.153-4); ‘Tranio, I saw her coral lips to move,/And with her breath she did perfume the air./Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her.’ (I.1.172-4). Besides beauty, Bianca is endowed with the qualities required of a court-lady, ‘mild behavior and sobriety’ (I.1.71). She respects the norms and this makes her desirable as a woman. Her sister Kate, on the other hand, does not obey any rule and doesn’t fit any standard. She is seen as a lunatic: ‘That wench is stark mad or wonderful forward.’ (I.1.69) Because of her lack of manners and civility, she is rejected by all possible suitors and even by her own father: she ‘is so curst and shrewd/That till the father rid his hands of her,/Master, your love must live a maid at home,/And therefore has he closely mewed her up/Because she will not be annoyed with suitors.’ (I.1.178-82). Thus, Bianca, the ideal, the model, the embodiment of the canon, is a treasure – desired by all men, but forbidden to marry until Kate finds a suitor willing to marry her. Kate, on the other hand, is the deviant, the embodiment of the anti-canon – rejected by everybody. However, in the end she will be defeated with her own weapons, and order will be restored: Kate will become an ideal court-lady and especially an ideal wife. A similar description of the perfect court-lady, beautiful and virtuous, belongs to Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice: ‘In Belmont is a lady richly left,/And she is fair, and, fairer than the word,/Of wondrous virtues. Sometimes from her eyes/I did receive fair speechless messages. Her name is Portia, nothing undervalued/To Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia;/Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth,/For the four winds blow in from every coast/Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks/Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,/Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchis’ strand,/And many Jasons come in quest for her.’ (I.1.161-72) Besides the Renaissance beauty canon (fair, sunny locks like golden fleece), Bassanio also mentions Portia’s virtues. Portia is not described by contrast to an anti-canonic figure, but in her case too both her beauty and her virtues bring her many ‘renowned suitors’. Therefore social inclusion and acceptance and eventually marriage are only to be achieved by observing social norms, by inscribing oneself within the confines of the canon. In Castiglione’s Courtier, too, the court-lady is the mirror image of the courtier, his feminine counterpart. I won’t insist at this point on the differences between the masculine and feminine representations, since a discussion of gender is outside the scope of the present paper. Therefore I shall insist on the differences between the public and the private body in the new, individualist early modern mentality. And the norms prescribed by this new canon equally apply to both men and women: moderation, diplomacy, emphasis on appearance(s). The typical early modern diplomatic attitude is to be found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Polonius follows the above described model in his advice to Laertes: ‘And these few precepts in thy memory/See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,/Nor any unproportioned thought his act./Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar./The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,/Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel,/But do not dull thy palm with entertainment/Of each-hatched unfledged comrade. Beware/Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,/Bear’t that th’opposed may beware of thee./Give every man thine ear but few thy voice./Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement./Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy./But not expressed in fancy; rich not gaudy;/For the apparel oft proclaims the man,/And they in France of the best rank and station/Are of all most select and generous chief in that./Neither a borrower nor a lender be./For loan oft loses both itself and friend,/And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.’ (I.2.58-77). Moderation (‘Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy’) – as opposed to the medieval generosity, diplomacy (‘Beware/Of entrance to a quarrel’, ‘reserve thy judgement’) – as opposed to the medieval taste for fighting and proving one’s valour, individualism (‘Give thy thoughts no tongue’, ‘But do not dull thy palm with entertainment/Of each-hatched unfledged comrade’) – as opposed to the medieval close link to the community, and care for appearance (‘Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar’, ‘rich not gaudy’). These are the values praised by Polonius, and they are typical of the ideal image of the courtier. This is also the image promoted by Castiglione, and it is mainly characterized by two attitudes: sprezzatura (concealing power, not being aggressively ostentatious, being graceful) and

324 desinvoltura (concealing weakness, trying to seem self-confident). Both attitudes involve the construction of the public (social) self through theatricality, dissimulation. In All’s Well, we witness the shift from the medieval value of humility to the early modern concept of grace. The term used by the King to describe Bertram’s father is ‘humility’, but its implied meaning is ‘grace’ (or sprezzatura), since ‘humility’ and ‘bowing his eminent top’ are meant to be praised by the ‘low ranks’: ‘Who were below him/He used as creatures of another place,/And bowed his eminent top to their low ranks,/Making them proud of his humility,/In their poor praised he humbled.’ (I.2.41-5) However, the King insists that ‘humility’ and ‘honour’ are values which no longer exist: ‘Such a man/Might be a copy to these younger times,/Which followed well would demonstrate them now/But goers-backward’. The new values are for the king a sign of involution, of going backwards. This idea is also expressed by Lafeu, when he characterizes Paroles as vain and lacking substance: ‘Yet the scarves and the bannerets about thee did manifoldedly dissuade me from believing thee a vessel of too great a burden.’ (II.3.204-6); ‘The soul of this man is his clothes. Trust him not in matter of heavy consequence.’ (II.5.43-5). The excessive preoccupation with and overemphasis on the exterior appearance as manifested by Paroles come to replace the medieval virtues, which are more connected to the inner self. However, Paroles is a mock-image of the Renaissance courtier, since, indeed, his interest in clothes and garments and appearance is not supported by the wit which should also be an essential feature of the perfect courtier. The dialogues between Lafeu and Paroles stand for the battle between the old (medieval) and new (early modern) values. This ‘battle’ is present in all Shakespeare’s plays, since the shift between the old and the new was a gradual one. The same battle is to be found in Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2. Hal is the typical Renaissance prince, who masters the arts of diplomacy, strategy, and calculation, as he is fully aware of the importance of self-fashioning: ‘So when this loose behaviour I throw off,/And pay the debt I never promised,/My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,/Shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes/Than that which hath no foil to set it off’ (I.2.168-75). In opposition to such calculation, Hotspur is a romantic figure, impulsive and valiant, embodying all that is glorious about feudal chivalry – its code of honour, its passion for heroic achievement in arms. Hal’s victory over Hotspur signify the victory of the new values. Theatricality is one of them, as one of power’s essential modes. In lines that anticipate Hal’s promise, the angry Henry IV tells Worcester, ‘I will from henceforth rather be myself,/Mighty and to be fear’d, than my condition’ (I.3.5-6). ‘To be oneself’ here means to perform one’s part in the scheme of power as opposed to one’s natural disposition, or what we would normally designate as the very core of the self’ [22] ‘By how much better than my words I am’, Hal declares, ‘By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes’ (I. 2. 210-11). To falsify men’s hopes is to exceed their expectations, and it is also to disappoint their expectations, to deceive men, to turn their hopes into fictions, to betray them. ‘Not only are the competing claims of Bolingbroke and Falstaff an issue but our own hopes, the fantasies continually aroused by the play of absolute friendship and trust, limitless playfulness, innate grace, plenitude’ [23]. And although both Hal and Hotspur belong to the dominant class and represent the ‘high’ discourse, each of them stands for different values. Thus, Hotspur is the epitome of the medieval values (honour, valiance), Hal is the emblem of the Renaissance prince (the values he promotes are skill, talent, reserve, improvisation, diplomacy). The same ideas about education, appearance, and the distinction between the private self and the public self are to be found in Machiavelli’s Prince: the typical Renaissance prince is described as a great diplomat, a dissembler and an improviser. The key-words, which are recurrent in Machiavelli’s discourse, are related to acting and to creating an appearance: to seem, to appear, to show, to convey an impression of himself, to gain renown, to have the reputation of, to disguise, to pretend. Both Castiglione and Machiavelli propose the same strategies and attitudes. Both the courtier and the prince should employ strategies of conquering the world and gaining power through dissimulation, obliqueness, repressing their private self in order to create a convenient public self. Both Castiglione and Machiavelli propose a new attitude – that of hiding the inner self behind a public mask – and this will characterize all early modern life, because the early modern model is public. Portraits of the Renaissance princes communicate the same thing: power and

325 authority. Henry VIII is famously portrayed by Holbein as an icon of masculinity and power. But probably the most remarkable are the portraits of Elizabeth, making up a new type of iconography. In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII we find the perfect characterization of the Renaissance prince. His image is public and publicized. The image is even more powerful and suggestive as it represents the meeting of two Renaissance princes, Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France: ‘Then you lost/The view of earthly glory. Men might say/Till this time pomp was single, but now married/To one above itself. Each following day/Became the next day’s master, till the last/Made former wonders its. Today the French,/All clinquant all in gold, like heathen gods/Shone down the English; and tomorrow they/Made Britain India. Every man that stood/Showed like a mine. Their dwarfish pages were/As cherubim, all gilt; the Mesdames, too,/Not used to toil, did almost sweat to bear/The pride upon them, that their very labour/Was to them as painting. Now this masque/Was cried incomparable, and th’ensuing night/Made it a fool and beggar. The two kings/Equal in luster, were now best, now worst,/As presence did present them. Him in eye/Still him in praise, and being present both,/‘Twas said they saw but one, and no discerner/Durst wag his tongue in censure. When these suns – /For so they phrase ‘em – by their heralds challenged/The noble spirits to arms, they did perform/Beyond throught’s compass, that former fabulous story/Being now seen possible enough, got credit/That Bevis was believed./[…]/As I belong to worship, and affect/In honour honesty, the tract of ev’rything/Would by a good discourser lose some life/Which action’s self was tongue to. All was royal./To the disposing of it naught rebelled./Order gave each thing view. The office did/Distinctly his full function.’ (I, 1, 13 – 44). The model presented in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII stands for more than mere civility and courtly manners. This model conveys the idea of power and authority. Power is represented and communicated visually, by means of an ostentatious display and by the use of artifice: the kings’ bodies, costumes and material luxury objects associated with status make up the discourse of power, imposing order and obedience. This theatre-state describes the Renaissance taste for magnificence: a ritualized form of attraction exercised over the subjects.

Conclusions The Renaissance marked the beginning of modern times, hence its more recent terming as ‘early modernity’. The Renaissance/early modernity marked a significant shift in mentalities, so that there is a huge gap between the medieval and the early modern values. This shift in mentalities affected all social, economic, and political life, all fields of human activity, all perception and experience. The new mentality was also reflected in the early modern treatment, representation, and dramatization of the body, as well as of the material objects and codes of conduct associated with it, as an element of the self in between the revaluated realms of the public and the private. In the early modern times, the bodily canon is part of the discourse of power. The new canon is public, since appearance becomes increasingly important. The body, material objects like dress and garments, as well as the norms of civility connected with the body become increasingly important for the early modern individual, since they represent the individual’s status. The models of this new epoch are the courtier and the prince – the representatives of the dominant discourse.

Notes: [1] Le Goff, Jacques, Pentru un alt ev mediu, Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1986, p. 124-129. [2] Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 64. [3] Burckhardt, Jakob, Cultura Renaşterii în Italia, Editura pentru literatură, Bucureşti, 1969, p. 161. [4] Burckhardt, Jakob, op. cit., p. 163. [5] Le Goff, Jacques (ed.), Omul medieval, Polirom, Bucureşti, 1999, p. 52. [6] Garin, Eugenio (ed.), Omul Renaşterii, Polirom, Bucureşti, 2000, p. 80-83. [7] Aries, Philippe & Duby, Georges, Istoria vieţii private, Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1995, vol. 4, p. 4. [8] Aries, Philippe & Duby, Georges, op.cit., vol. 4, p. 240-242. [9] Aries, Philippe & Duby, Georges, op. cit., vol. 5, p. 6. [10] Le Breton, David, Antropologia corpului şi modernitatea, Editura Cartier, Chişinău, 2009, p.64. [11] Castiglione, Curteanul, Editura pentru literatură, Bucureşti, 1967, p. 30. [12] Aries, Philippe & Duby, Georges, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 347-348. [13] Bryson, Anna, The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England, in Gent, L. and Llewellyn, N. (eds.), ‘Renaissance Bodies – The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660’, Reaktion Books Ltd., London, 1994, p. 148-149.

326 [14] Bryson, Anna, op. cit., p. 149. [15] Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin, London, 1990, p. 242. [16] Goffman, Erving, op. cit., p. 205. [17] Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p. 72. [18] Bryson, Anna, op. cit., p. 153. [19] Honnigman, E.A.J., Myriad-Minded Shakespeare, Macmillan Press, London, 1989, p. 130. [20] Callaghan, Dympna, Shakespeare Without Women. Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, p. 51. [21] Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 92. [22] Greenblatt, Stephen, op. cit., p. 45. [23] Greenblatt, Stephen, op. cit., p. 42.

Bibliography Aries, Philippe & Duby, Georges, Istoria vieţii private, Meridiane, Bucuresti, 1995, vol. 3-6. Berdiaev, N., Un nou ev mediu, Editura Omniscop, Craiova, 1995. Bryson, Anna, The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England, in Gent, L. and Llewellyn, N. (eds.), ‘Renaissance Bodies – The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660’, Reaktion Books Ltd., London, 1994. Burckhardt, Jakob, Cultura Renaşterii in Italia, Editura pentru literatură, Bucureşti, 1969. Callaghan, Dympna, Shakespeare Without Women. Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, Routledge, London and New York, 2000. Castiglione, Curteanul, Editura pentru literatură, Bucureşti, 1967. Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols, Routledge, London and New York, 2003. Duby, Georges, Vremea catedralelor, Editura Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1998. Garin, Eugenio (ed.), Omul Renasterii, Polirom, Bucureşti, 2000. Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin, London, 1990 Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, University of Chicago Press, 1980. Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Oxford University Press, 1990. Honnigman, E.A.J., Myriad-Minded Shakespeare, Macmillan Press, London 1989. Le Breton, David, Antropologia corpului şi modernitatea, Editura Cartier, Chişinău, 2009. Le Goff, Jacques, Pentru un alt ev mediu, Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1986. Le Goff, Jacques (ed.), Omul medieval, Polirom, Bucureşti, 1999. Machiavelli, Nicolo, The Prince, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., London, 1993.

327 La liberte, les philosophes et la creation des mentalites sociales

Ana Guţu*

Rezumat: Prezentul articol pune în valoare izotopiile-filosofeme care constituie sfera ideatică a preocupărilor filosofice-intelectuale. Autoarea examinează antinomia filosof angajat – filosof liber gânditor ca şi axă structurală a constituirii mentalităţilor sociale. Ideea motrice a articolului este primordialitatea patrimoniului spiritual în raport cu materialitate şi vanitatea lucrurilor triviale. Autoarea deplânge sărăcia spirituală a ţărilor în care aproape că nu au existat tradiţii filosofice, şi în plus, regimul sovietic a măturat orice conştiinţă identitară. Cuvinte-cheie: libertate, filosof, intelectual, regim totalitar, filosofeme.

La liberté - combien de définitions n’en citons-nous? - reste dans la perception de tous comme un grand mot, même si la notion est tout à fait aporétique et opaque au moment où nous essayons de la définir, que soit de manière succincte ou exhaustive. Un mot grand, emblématique, symbolique, mobilisateur, martyrisant, béatifiant, extravagant, vengeant, victorieux, conquérant, dévastateur, manipulateur, moralisateur, salutaire, génial… La série d’épithètes et d'isotopies ne s’arrête pas là. Chaque définition est l’expression concentrée de l’expérience humaine, cristallisée dans des chroniques, œuvres littéraires appartenant à un patrimoine universel inestimable. La liberté ne peut pas être expliquée par le prisme du métaphysique, pétrifié sur un segment de temps, la liberté peut et doit être expliquée par le prisme de l’infini, étendu en trois dimensions : espace, temps, volume ; en d’autres termes – territoire, histoire, homme. Car, on fera la distinction entre la liberté redonnée au gladiateur dans la Rome Antique, la liberté de la pensée face à l’inquisition médiévale, la liberté conquise par les révolutionnaires français en 1789 d’un côté, et la libre circulation des personnes, capitaux et marchandises dans l’Union Européenne. La notion de liberté a connu une évolution dans le temps. L’histoire des civilisations nous enseigne que la liberté spirituelle est beaucoup plus précieuse que la liberté matérielle. Un peuple est d’autant plus libre s’il est cultivé et lettré. La liberté spirituelle délivre l’économie d’un État. Cette réalité est décrite de manière détaillée par Voltaire dans ses « Lettres philosophiques », publiées lors de son exil en Grande-Bretagne.

« La philosophie et les sciences anglaises sont à l’avant-garde du mouvement intellectuel. L’Anglais s’affirme un type d’homme nouveau : libre en ses pensées comme en ses actions, ne craignant rien en ce monde ni dans l’autre » - « Filosofia şi ştiinţele englezeşti sunt în avangarda mişcării intelectuale. Englezul se afirmă drept un tip de om nou : liber atât în gândirile sale, cât şi în acţiuni, neavând frică de nimic nici pe lumea aceasta, nici în cealaltă » [1].

Voltaire s’émerveille de la Bourse de Londres, dont on dit que c’est une place plus respectable que certaines cours royales. On peut y rencontrer des députés de toutes nationalités et confessions religieuses, qui se réunissent au nom du bien et de l’unité des hommes. La liberté dans un pays où il existe trente confessions religieuses génère la tolérance. Voilà une isotopie importante de la liberté. Sans tolérance il n’y a pas de liberté – c’est la conclusion à laquelle aboutit Voltaire dans son « Traité sur la tolérance », écrit et publié suite à l’affaire Calas [2] de 1762 en France, conclusion absolument moderne, en consonance parfaite avec les valeurs générales humaines, institutionnalisées par de nombreuses résolutions et recommandations des organismes européens. Il est grand temps de reconnaître que Voltaire a jeté un regard visionnaire sur la réussite du parcours britannique vers la liberté institutionnalisée beaucoup plus tôt, glorifiant ainsi une autre vertu des Anglais telle que le courage. Bien sûr, d’autres peuples en ont fait preuve, mais ils n’ont pas pu obtenir la liberté convoitée (nous pensons aux Roumains de Bessarabie, dont on ne peut pas dire qu’ils sont libres autant spirituellement que matériellement):

« Il en a coûté sans doute pour établir la liberté en Angleterre ; c’est dans des mers de sang qu’on a noyé l’idole du pouvoir despotique ; mais les Anglais ne croient point avoir acheté trop cher de bonnes lois. Les autres nations n’ont pas eu moins de troubles, n’ont pas versé moins de sang

* Professeur universitaire, dr, Université Libre Internationale de Moldova

328 qu’eux; mais ce sang qu’elles ont répandu pour la cause de leur liberté n’a fait que cimenter leur servitude» [3].

Le désir de ne pas être contraint dans la pensée, dans l’action et les doléances tiennent de notre essence humaine. La liberté comme notion est inconcevable en dehors de l’Homme. L’Homme est le générateur de la liberté, son concepteur et la pensée nous amène au péché originel. Plus encore, la Femme a osé désobéir à Dieu, ayant goûté au fruit interdit. Même si c’est le Serpent qui à induit la Femme en tentation, nous avons l’appui du texte sacré pour affirmer que la Femme est à l’origine de la liberté, si primitive qu’elle soit – renfermée dans la membrane olfactive-gustative du fruit interdit. Les préoccupations telluriques du Créateur centré sur son Œuvre ont stigmatisé y inclus la malédiction d’Adam et Eve, qui ont été condamnés à une existence pleine de privations matérielles, mais - surtout – finie dans l’espace et dans le temps. Ayant été privés d’immortalité, Adam et Eve, et à travers eux, l’humanité tout entière, a concentré tous ses espoirs sur ce qui apparemment semble pouvoir offrir le bonheur – la Liberté. Le volume sémantique du mot Liberté ne peut aucunement être réduit à la définition proposée par le Trésor de la Langue Française : État de celui, de ce qui n'est pas soumis à une ou des contrainte(s) externe(s) ; à propos de l'homme (de ce qui le concerne) en tant qu'individu particulier ou en tant que membre d'une société politique. Condition de celui, de ce qui n'est pas soumis à la puissance contraignante d'autrui… (TLF, http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/visusel.exe?11;s=3108411240;r=1;nat=;sol=0). S’il faut étendre cette définition, il est nécessaire de faire une précision très importante qui peut prendre la forme d’une signification générique : valeur (état, nécessité) existentielle consciente de l’Homme en vertu de laquelle celui-ci pense et agit à son gré, ou, selon la définition de Rousseau, il s’agirait d’une liberté naturelle : « La liberté naturelle c’est le droit illimité à tout ce que l’homme peut atteindre [4]. Cette définition donne une signification générique d’une pureté native, qui ne prend pas en considération les contraintes d’une société organisée politiquement. Lesdites contraintes viennent avec l’institutionnalisation de l’État et du droit. L’instrument unique qui permet l’élaboration d’un système de normes et de lois est par excellence la langue. Ceux qui se sont adonnés à la mise en forme linguistique des lois de la nature et de l’homme sont les Philosophes de l’Antiquité. Aristote et Platon ont inauguré la vie des doctrines et des polémiques philosophiques. Les vérités écrites par eux ont été reprises, perfectionnées, détaillées par les intellectuels de la modernité. Les intellectuels, les tribuns, les érudits, les philosophes constituent les élites des société organisées institutionnellement. Ils comprennent le mieux l’essence des choses, transmettent la lumière de la sagesse, prédisent la marche des événements grâce à un esprit visionnaire. En termes contemporains il s’agirait des intellectuels. Les intellectuels sont les dépositaires par excellence de la liberté de pensée. Rien n’est plus libre que la pensée, la raison. Rien ne vous rend plus libre que la vérité, découverte et disséminée sans contraintes ou persécutions. La vérité suprême c’est Dieu, et la vérité sur l’existentialité humaine est à la portée du philosophe-intellectuel, du savant, capable de voir au–delà des apparences impénétrables et de discerner les antinomies conflictuelles, porteuses de mort et destruction des antinomies dialectiques, créatrices de progrès et de développement. Un Philosophe dans le sens originel du mot est l’homme qui de manière désintéressée cherche la vérité, étant guidé uniquement par sa vocation. En fait, si l'on doit croire les propos de Hegel, les vrais philosophes n’existent plus, il existe plutôt des systèmes de pensée [5]. Les philosophes de l’Antiquité ont largement contribué à la promotion des sciences et des arts afin de perpétuer l’esprit créateur, de fortifier ainsi la Cité, de pérenniser la civilisation, faisant de la place à l’édification des sociétés futures. Parfois l’histoire nous offre des exemples d’intolérance de la Cité vis-à-vis de la liberté de la pensée philosophique, l’exemple le plus illustre étant celui de Socrate, le philosophe–martyr de la Grèce antique. Socrate n’a pas écrit sa doctrine, il l’a vécue.

« Socrate, qui approcha le plus près de la connaissance du Créateur, en porta la peine et mourut martyr de la Divinité[…] on lui imputait d’inspirer aux jeunes gens des maximes contre la religion et le gouvernement […] il eut d’abord deux cent vingt voix pour lui. Le tribunal des Cinq-cents possédait deux cent vingt philosophes : c’est beaucoup, je doute qu’on les trouve ailleurs » [6].

De toute façon, les 220 voix des philosophes qui ont voté contre la peine de mort pour Socrate n’ont pas suffi à son salut. Des noms notoires de l’histoire de la pensée scientifique

329 philosophique qui ont payé de leur vie la liberté de pensée nous reviennent dans la mémoire : l’éditeur érudit et le traducteur français du XVI siècle Étienne Dolet, le traducteur de la Bible de l’hébreu, du grec et du latin vers le français l’olivétain Secondo Lancelotti, le traducteur de la Bible de l’hébreu, du grec et du latin vers l'anglais Tyndale, le philosophe réformateur Jan Huss – eux ainsi que beaucoup d’autres sont morts par empoisonnement ou ont été condamnés à mort ayant été brûlés publiquement. La liste pourrait être complétée. Ils ont été annihilés physiquement, mais la vérité ne peut pas être brûlée sur le bûcher, ni empoisonnée. Les Cités tout au long de l’histoire ont su « se procurer » des philosophes afin de justifier les guerres, les croisades ou les constructions. Préoccupés à la source par l’interprétation de la Bible et à prôner la divinité au sein du peuple, les philosophes de vocation cèdent la place aux philosophes rémunérés. « Les philosophes rémunérés » des Cités, suivant les termes de Hegel, sont les précurseurs des intellectuels modernes, engagés politiquement. Les sages de la Cour, les conseillers, les représentants des « Lumières » qui entouraient les Césars, les monarques, les princes, les tsars ou les dictateurs ont exercé une influence déterminante sur la marche de l’histoire, en domptant souvent la fureur des tyrans, en éteignant le bûcher des guerres, mais aussi en contribuant à l'épanouissement ou la chute des empires. L’humanité a parcouru un long chemin pour aboutir à l’affirmation de la liberté en tant que valeur existentielle suprême et de la vérité en tant que victoire de la raison sur l’obscurantisme. Est-ce que l’engagement du philosophe pour de l’argent aux services de la Cité est une corruption intellectuelle ? Le monde idéique du philosophe tissu de vérités pensées, de vérités absolues, dégrade le moment où lui, le philosophe, dévie de ces vérités, en livrant aux services de la Cité ou de la Politique des pseudo-vérités, dites ou écrites sur la trivialité de l’écriture corrompue.

Graphe 1. Le cercle de valeurs du philosophe intellectuel.

La Politique a envahi les sociétés antiques et modernes, devenant un phénomène supranational, issu des doctrines et idées philosophiques, mises au service des hommes du pouvoir. Dans ce sens, le philosophe-intellectuel a deux options: attendre de manière contemplative la succession naturelle ou aléatoire des événements dans la société, en restant dans son espace idéique isolé de la matérialité sociale, ou influencer directement la succession événementielle dans la société en s’impliquant activement dans la sphère politique. Depuis « Le Prince » de Machiavel jusqu’aux mémoires des ex-chefs d’État, traités de politologie, d’ores et déjà le philosophe-intellectuel n’est plus appelé à discerner entre le bien et le mal, à conseiller les hommes du pouvoir, mais à s’impliquer dans les affaires de l’État. L’implication et l’engagement ferme semblent être deux concepts différents. L’implication de l’intellectuel dans les affaires de l’État vient de son désir incontournable de changer le monde, de le perfectionner, de le rendre plus beau, plus juste, plus correct. Faire changer le monde afin de le perfectionner est un désidératif noble qui découle de l’existence même du philosophe, de sa raison d’être. L’engagement politique du philosophe suppose parfois la corruption intellectuelle et

330 n’exclut pas la trahison par lui de ses propres convictions, principes et vérités, au nom de la promotion d’une pseudo-vérité ou d’un mensonge par transfert d’autorité vers la sphère politique. Il existe des voix qui soutiennent que l’implication des philosophes dans la politique est inutile:

« Les intellectuels n’ont rien à chercher sur la même scène que les politiciens. Ce n’est pas leur affaire de se mêler du vacarme du siècle, de se dissiper sur la place publique, s’abandonner à une problématique contingente. Laisser de côté la vie contemplative, remplacer les grandes questions de l’esprit par des anxiétés triviales et conjoncturelles signifie trahir la condition d’intellectuel, scarifier le talent qui t’a été donné » [7].

Mais les préceptes « laïques » ne se font pas entendre chez les philosophes. Comme à l’époque de l’Antiquité, les philosophes veulent participer aux affaires de l’État, étant inspirés par le conflit biblique irréconciliable : le combat entre le Bien et le Mal. Le motif du crime fratricide Cain – Abel constitue la pierre philosophale de toutes les doctrines. Les philosophes sont toujours là, au devoir, la plume ou le discours prêt à convaincre, à agir, à déterminer et à remporter la victoire. Comme on le sait, l’arme parfaite des philosophes pour affirmer la vérité et faire l’éloge de la liberté de la pensée a depuis toujours été et continue d’être le mot. La Langue est une révélation quand elle se trouve au service du philosophe-intellectuel libre, mais devient une malédiction dans le cas du philosophe-intellectuel engagé politiquement. Gabriel Liiecanu va encore plus loin en affirmant que la langue est:

« Un instrument divin qui se pervertit rien qu’en devenant utilité humaine… l’Homme est libre, mais aussi déchu, il peut également bien utiliser la langue soit dans le sens de la vérité, soit dans le sens du mensonge » [8].

Graphe 2. Les isotopies du discours philosophique.

La langue est un pouvoir, la langue et le pouvoir sont inséparables, j’ai essayé de le démontrer dans certains de mes articles (Gutu, 2010, p.17-32). La langue de bois des régimes totalitaires communistes a servi d’apanage indispensable à la construction d’une société basée sur le mensonge et la haine. Le mensonge et la haine, conçus et organisés intellectuellement, en commençant par la fin du XIX siècle, institutionnalisés au début du XX-e siècle pour manipuler les peuples et les nations, se sont avérés les piliers de la doctrine communiste. Dans un régime totalitaire communiste: « …le mensonge devient la colonne vertébrale du Mal, car il est utilisé non pas contre un ennemi externe, qui menace l’existence de ta propre collectivité, mais contre cette même collectivité » [ 9].

Le mensonge prôné au sein du peuple, élevé au rang de vérité, diffusé avec insistance durant des années laisse des séquelles inguérissables pour des années dans la mentalité collective,

331 en la privant de mémoire historique et d'essence identitaire. C’est justement cela qui nous arrive, à nous les Roumains de Bessarabie, suite à la dictature communiste durant plus de cinquante ans.

« Jamais on ne corrompt un peuple, mais souvent on le trompe, et c’est alors seulement qu’il parait vouloir ce qui est mal » [10].

Liiceanu propose aussi une classification des intellectuels des régimes totalitaires- communistes : les intellectuels qui ont cru le mensonge de l’idéologie communiste, mais qui ont reconnu leur erreur (les réveillés), les intellectuels qui ont cru le mensonge communiste jusqu’à leur dernière heure, même au moment où ils ont été fusillés par leurs collègues de parti (les hypnotisés), la troisième catégorie – ce sont les intellectuels qui ont su dès le début que l’idéologie communiste était un mensonge, mais qui ont continué de la propager, ils mentaient consciemment, c’est avec eux qu’on a construit le communisme à l’échelle planétaire [11]. Les régimes totalitaires-communistes, ayant comme idéologues Marx et Lénine, qui ont été eux-mêmes transis de haine contre le genre humain (Marx pour le fait qu’il n’a jamais réussi à obtenir aucune chaire dans les universités allemandes, Lénine pour le fait qu’il avait été renvoyé de l’université et n’a jamais terminé ses études), ont institutionnalisé la haine de classe, en la redirigeant contre les intellectuels, même si c’étaient ces derniers qui avaient été les concepteurs de la révolution russe. Il n’y a jamais eu dans l’histoire des sociétés une machine plus bestiale de destruction des intellectuels que la machine du communisme. Les intellectuels ont été annihilés physiquement par extermination ou travaux dans les goulags, ou ont été réduits au silence par un asservissement moral- spirituel. Résultat – toute une littérature héritée, engagée idéologiquement [12], dépourvue d’essence et créativité.

« Du moment où la haine est dotée d’idéologie, elle devient organisée intellectuellement. … En organisant intellectuellement la haine, l’idéologie déforme fatalement la vérité et cultive systématiquement la haine. L’esprit plongé dans l’obscurité de la haine ne peut pas avoir accès à la vérité, mais seulement au mensonge, au faux » [13].

Graphe 3. La typologie des philosophes intellectuels dans la société moderne.

Dans les époques des grandes monarchies les victimes des disgrâces du peuple étaient toujours les rois, les reines. Le déferlement des révolutions européennes, inauguré par la révolution française, a fait tomber les têtes du haut des pyramides monarchiques, une réplique de cette tradition ayant été la fin des Ceausescu en Roumanie en décembre 1989. Or, la fragilité dont ont fait preuve les intellectuels engagés idéologiquement à l’époque totalitaire communiste a généré une sorte d’intolérance à l’égard des intellectuels, des philosophes, des poètes. On incrimine les

332 intellectuels poir leur manque de caractère, de conséquence, de pouvoir et de volonté, comme le mentionne Andrei Pleşu: « Une grande partie de la population autochtone est plutôt ennuyée par les intellectuels. Ils sont en général des quidams qu’on ne comprend pas, et qui ne te comprennent pas, des personnages sur lesquels on ne peut pas compter, des inutiles qui devraient s’occuper de leurs affaires s’ils peuvent toutefois servir à quelque chose » [14].

Ces attitudes persistent, les échecs et les ratés étant attribués aux intellectuels, leur contribution étant négligée et sous-appréciée surtout lors des moments de crise dans l’histoire. Dans le cas présent nous faisons référence aux événements de 1989 qui ont eu lieu en République de Moldavie, quand une véritable révolution des poètes a eu lieu, ces derniers ayant été à la source du mouvement de renaissance nationale. Il est vrai que la révolution a été volée par les ex- nomenklaturistes KGB-istes, qui sont venus au pouvoir pour s’enrichir et non pas pour rompre définitivement avec le passé communiste. Les intellectuels ont servi leur patrie en 1989 en République de Moldavie, mais ce n’était pas de leur compétence de remettre le jeune État sur les rails de la technocratie. Les intellectuels ont accompli une mission très importante : ils ont apporté la liberté de la pensée, ils ont initié la réforme dans l’éducation et la culture, fait qui a donné des fruits – l’apparition des générations jeunes, qui, à leur tour, ont contribué à la chute du régime néo- communiste en avril 2009 en déclenchant la Révolution Twitter. La démocratisation des sociétés post-totalitaires a placé au premier plan l’activisme et l’engagement politique des intellectuels. La République de Moldavie est une démocratie émergente, certains phénomènes socio-politiques sont absolument nouveaux pour notre société. Les habitudes comportementales des intellectuels de la République de Moldavie sont souvent alourdies par la mémoire des engagements idéologiques du passé. La vénalité basée exclusivement sur le facteur matériel, « sélectionne » parmi les intellectuels les plus adaptables et pragmatiques, le plus souvent le phénomène étant répandu dans les milieu journalistiques, plus rarement parmi les poètes, savants, ces derniers étant des moralistes-philosophes du style traditionnel défini par Hegel. Sans eux – les philosophes-moralistes – qui resteront à jamais en dehors du politique, qui veillent à l’intégrité spirituelle de la nation, aucun État n’a d’avenir:

« Sans la prestation des moralistes l’humanité se déboussole. Un monde dans lequel personne ne prend le parti du spirituel, dans lequel personne ne défend les valeurs de bonhomie, justesse et ne les oppose pas "aux passions laïques", c’est un monde qui glisse vers le matériel le plus pur et finit dans la bestialité » [15].

Les intellectuels vénaux qui ont toujours été engagés politiquement, indifféremment de la couleur du pouvoir, sont définis par Gabriel Liiceanu comme des « flagorneurs ». Ceux-ci se complaisent à se nommer intellectuels, ont des prétendues ambitions politiques, s’adjugent des performances intellectuelles dont ils ne sont pas les auteurs, s’auto-pilotent dans les milieux publics, en réussissant aisément à se procurer la faveur du pouvoir en recourant à des prévarications financières et à la corruption. De véritables caméléons, lesdits quidams se portent très bien, reniant sans difficulté les principes pour lesquels ils plaidaient hier au profit des principes, même contraires, qui conviennent au pouvoir aujourd’hui.

« Le mot "flagorneur" est attribué à l’individu qui, après avoir déçu ses prochains par sa prestation dans le communisme, au lieu de se retirer de la scène sociale avec un air d’excuse, persiste, métamorphosé, pour décevoir ses prochains une seconde fois. Il s’agit, donc, du flagorneur auto- potentialisé historiquement. Il se trouve en ce moment, après avoir salutairement atteint l’autre rive, dans les plus importantes institutions de l’État et dans les points cardinaux de la société roumaine » [16].

L’intégrité des principes est la condition sine qua non pour celui qui veut se nommer intellectuel. Cette intégrité, dans son expression pure, peut être sauvegardée en dehors du politique. La lucidité et l’équidistance, tant nécessaires pour générer des jugements de valeur, restent intactes dans le cas des raisonnements formulés avec détachement, le philosophe se guidant uniquement sur sa propre expérience, sagesse et intuition visionnaire. L’élan de l’intellectuel pour intervenir dans le changement du monde, le rendre meilleur par son implication dans la politique, est freiné par la

333 trivialité ludique et spéculatrice des intrigues et arrangements d’ordre conjoncturel. La décision de persévérer dépend du type de tempérament, même si les intellectuels le plus souvent sont des mélancoliques. La réalité nous confirme que les intellectuels ne renoncent jamais à leur mission de faire changer le monde et acceptent leur rôle de conseillers publics ou « de l’ombre » de ceux qui se trouvent au pouvoir.

« Entre l’intellectuel qui participe directement au jeu politique et celui qui l’ignore, le dernier temps on voit de plus en plus souvent l’intellectuel qui influence la marche des événements, restant en dehors de son vacarme » [17].

L’exemple de l’Académie Française en est une preuve éloquente. Les prises d’attitude vis- à-vis des événements ou phénomènes importants de la société française sont prophétiques et font partie du patrimoine inaliénable de la France. André Malraux a été et reste encore l’intellectuel numéro un de la France : écrivain, orateur, ministre dans différentes positions gouvernementales, il s’est engagé politiquement en faveur de la culture. Un grand pays a donné à l’humanité de grands intellectuels. Ce qu’écrivait jadis Voltaire à propos de la liberté conquise par les Anglais est parfaitement valable pour les Français. Voltaire a vanté l’expérience des Anglais par ressentiment à l’égard de la monarchie française qui l’avait exilé. Nous, nous sommes suffisamment réalistes pour apprécier le sacrifice de la France et son apport substantiel à la marche victorieuse de la Liberté au XIX-e siècle : Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Balzac, Georges Sand, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Pierre Larousse, Victor Hugo – voilà quelques noms de résonance des philosophes-intellectuels français qui ont œuvré à la gloire de l’État français. L’espace roumain a donné à l’universalité des noms notoires d'intellectuels qui ont délivré les esprits, le plus renommé étant Mihai Eminescu, le symbole de la liberté du génie créateur, poète, tribun, publiciste. Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noica, Titu Maiorescu, Emil Cioran, Bogdan Petriceicu-Haşdeu, nés en Bessarabie – voici seulement quelsues noms d’intellectuels roumains qui réellement ont contribué au changement du monde dans les temps dans lesquels ils ont vécu et activé. Sans doute, les historiographes de l’avenir vont répertorier les noms de philosophes roumains contemporains qui veillent de l’extérieur ou de l’intérieur du politique au développement correct de la société. Les philosophes constituent la richesse la plus grande d’un pays, ils prônent les valeurs idéalistes suprêmes : la liberté de la pensée et la vérité. Les philosophes-intellectuels d’un pays jettent les fondements de la raison d’être – du sens existentiel de celui-ci -, en lui assurant les prémisses nécessaires à sa modernisation. Un État sans philosophie et sans philosophes reste une entité géo-politique en dérive, incapable de déterminer le présent et l’avenir. Dites-moi qui sont vos philosophes et je vous dirai quel est votre pays.

Notes : [1] Voltaire, 2010, p.12. [2] L’affaire du protestant Jean Calas, condamné à la mort par écartèlement sur la roue, ensuite pendu et brûlé publiquement en 1762 pour le supposé meurtre de son fils Marc-Antoine, qui avait voulu se convertir au catholicisme, est connue comme un exemple représentatif d’erreur judiciaire, car les juges ont émis la sentence se basant sur des apparences et non pas sur des preuves. [3] Voltaire, 2010, p.56. [4] Rousseau, 2010, p.61. [5] « C’est seulement par déviation, et depuis que la philosophie est devenue un métier, une forme d’ "enseignement rétribué" que la notion de philosophe a perdu sa signification originaire de type exemplaire, de chercheur désintéressé, soutenu par sa seule vocation ; depuis lors il n’y a plus eu de philosophes, mais des philosophies et des systèmes de pensées ..». (Dictionnaire de Philosophie, Larousse, 1995, p.213). [6] Voltaire, 2009, p.62. [7] Pleşu, 2007, p.70. [8] Liiceanu, 2006, p.12. [9] Liiceanu, 2006, p.61. [10] Rousseau, 2010, p.68. [11] Liiceanu, 2006, pp.64-66. [12] Guţu, 2009. [13] Liiceanu, 2007, pp. 66-67. [14] Pleşu, 2007, p.67. [15] Liiceanu, 2007, p.10.

334 [16] Liiceanu, 2007, p.15. [17] Pleşu, 2007, p.72.

Sources: Guţu, Ana, La langue et le pouvoir, in: « La Francopolyphonie: langue, littératture, culture et pouvoir », Chişinău, ULIM, 2010.Pp: 17-32. Guţu, Ana, Les clichés du totalitarisme: des langues et des identités en République de Moldova, in : „Discurs critic şi literatură în epocile totalitare”, Universitatea Dunărea de Jos, Galaţi, România, 5-6 iunie 2009. Didier, Julia, Dictionnaire de la philosophie, Paris, Larousse, 1995. Liiceanu, Gabriel, Despre minciună, Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2006. Liiceanu, Gabriel, Despre ură, Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2007. Patapievici, Horia-Roman, Discernământul modernizării, Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2009. Pleşu, Andrei, Obscenitatea publică, Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2007. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Du contrat social, Flammarion, Paris, 2010. Trésor de la Langue Française. http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/visusel.exe?11;s=3108411240;r=1;nat=;sol=0 19.04.2011 Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance, Paris, Flammarion, 2009. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, Paris, Flammarion. 2010. Winock, Niceh, Vocile libertăţii, Chişinău, Cartier, 2003. http://dexonline.ro/text-dex09/libertate,

335 Terrorism in 21st Century American Cinema

Petru Iamandi*

Rezumat: America zilelor noastre se arată mai preocupată ca oricând de realitatea sumbră a terorismului. Atacurile de la 11 septembrie 2001 asupra World Trade Center şi a Pentagonului, ca şi noul război împotriva terorismului din întreaga lume, i-au înfricoşat pe majoritatea americanilor care au început să-şi imagineze cele mai exagerate şi improbabile scenarii în loc să caute explicaţii cât de cât plauzibile. Ca reacţie la această atitudine, regizori serioşi, conştienţi de gravitatea momentului, au realizat filme în ultimii zece ani care analizează cu luciditate modul în care obsesia terorismului şi particularităţile capitalismului actual se influenţează reciproc, cu consecinţe nefaste pentru viitorul naţiunii. Cuvinte-cheie: reconstituire, thriller politic, spaimă, paranoia, satiră, tineret/horror, terorism global

Abstract: Present-day America finds its citizens more preoccupied with the dreadful reality of terrorism than they have ever been. The 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the new war on terrorism around the globe have frightened most of the Americans who began to imagine the most far-flung and unlikely of scenarios instead of looking for more plausible explanations. As a reaction to this attitude, serious directors, aware of the gravity of the moment, have made films over the last decade or so that lucidly examine how the obssession of terrorism and the particularities of capitalism’s current form influence each other, with dangerous consquences for the nation’s future. Keywords: reconstruction, political thriller, dread, paranoia, satire, youth/horror, global terrorism

The tragic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001made terrorism a daily, household word, and a live, serious fear in the United States. The effects arising from the terror of 9/11 reverberated across multiple realms of cultural and political memory in politics, film, and the news media, terrorism becoming “word and deed, symbol and substance, a form of action whose sheer outrageousness may awe us into silence, but which also compels us to attempt to regain our mental balance by groping toward a narrative structure in which the tragic events can be understood, even if they still make no sense to us” (Clymer, 2003: 211). During the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror, few major terrorist films were released even though in the previous decade terrorism had generated numerous film fantasies. Indeed, the real events of 9/11 put American cinema in much the same situation as the war film during the Vietnam War: It was only after the Vietnam War was over that American film was ready to tackle the issue and its socio-cultural ramifications. American cinema rallied behind the terrorist film genre and reinvented it as “the most dynamic, exciting and relevant means of socio-political criticism” (Cettl, 2009: 1). It was not only the mechanics of terrorism that infiltrated these films but the criticism of what was increasingly seen as the circumvention of Constitutional ideals by the George W. Bush administration. Just what the Republican government had done to American ideals of democracy became the subject driving a sudden wave of post–9/11 terrorist films. Reconstruction of 9/11.While a large number of film and television documentaries dealt with 9/11, United 93 (2006) was the first major Hollywood film to deal with the catastrophe. The story recreated the hijacked flight during which the passengers allegedly stormed the cockpit and forced the plane to crash in Pennsylvania. The narrative was thus intrinsically tragic, but with a heroic conclusion that demonstrated American will and capability in a time of crisis. Using hand-held and sometimes erratic camera movements, quick editing, and tight focus on both the interior of the plane and the federal agencies monitoring air traffic control, British director Paul Greengrass deftly explored internal spaces, social relations and group activities, and how individuals responded to crisis and catastrophe. The four Muslim hijackers are introduced praying before their suicide mission, and throughout are shown fervently engaged in prayer, but they are also portrayed as conflicted and afraid. The passengers on the plane are portrayed initially as ordinary citizens, involved in the mundane rituals of everyday life, as they fidget with their cell phones, exchange banalities with each other, and eventually become aware of the disaster

* Associate Professor, PhD, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

336 unfolding. Likewise, the pilots are shown as quite ordinary people, as are the members of the federal bureaucracies and US military that react to the day’s calamity. The most critical aspect of the film is the incompetence with which the government agencies and military respond to the hijackings. While air traffic controllers overhear conversations that suggest a hijacking, they seem not to communicate effectively with the Federal Aviation Administration or the military. The different agencies fail to see the big picture, appear to have no coordination, and are depicted as powerless spectators of the catastrophe. Not only are the air traffic controllers and the military unable to communicate with each other, but they are also unable to contact the president or vice-president, who are the only ones who can ratify military action. Thus, the film shows a thoroughly dysfunctional government and air defense system which – despite all its high-tech instruments and professionals – are not able to prevent or intelligently address the catastrophe. By contrast, the passengers on United 93 evidently grasp the magnitude of the event, as they learn from cell phone conversation with friends and loved ones of the WTC crashes, and organize to overpower the hijackers and storm the cockpit to seize control of the plane. United 93 thus “operates on the terrain of everyday life and institutional space, rather than in the Hollywood space of highly individualized characters and relations, using an aesthetic of naturalism rather than melodrama” (Kellner, 2010: 103). The hijackers are portrayed as frightened but committed young Muslim men, and there is no comic-book caricature or demonization of Arabs and Muslims such as one finds in typical generic Hollywood thrillers. Likewise, it is ordinary people who stand in for their fellow citizens and take heroic action. Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) was also quite low key in its depiction of Port Authority police saving the lives of victims. The film is sentimental, focusing on the heroism, entrapment in the ruins, and rescue of two working-class policemen, who represent the ordinary people who bore the brunt of 9/11. It is conservative in following traditional Hollywood generic forms and storytelling, and in failing to deal with the political context. The intensely populist focus of the film encodes the message that the victims of 9/11 were innocent people, comprising a variety of races and ethnicities. World Trade Center suggests that terrorism, which senselessly and indiscriminately strikes at civilians, is monstrous. Its victims are ordinary people trying to get on with their lives and raise their families. The film also shows families and communities pulling together in response to the tragedy, and discovering new resources of strength and capability, conveying the message that the United States will surely pull together to fight its enemies. Stone’s drama is perhaps too understated, failing to address even minimally the political context of the attack and the existence and strategy of the perpetrators. The Port Authority policemen gather at headquarters for a typical day’s work, in this case, looking for a young runaway at a bus station. Then the catastrophe strikes. A brief shadow of an airliner passing over a building denotes the attack – Stone refrains from showing the iconic pictures of the plane hitting the WTC. Curiously, no mention is made of al Qaeda or terrorism. This omission will have sinister connotations near the end of the film when one of the characters is cited as joining the military and going to Iraq, as if Iraq were involved in the attack. The film draws on generic features of the disaster film, showing people on the street reacting to the horror and TV images of the event. Sent to Ground Zero to rescue workers, several of the Port Authority policemen are themselves trapped in the ruins and much of the film deals with how they cope with their plight, the effects on their family and friends, and their eventual rescue. The scenes of the multi-ethnic police volunteering for the mission “evoke the codes of World War II films in which ordinary soldiers become heroes or victims” (Kellner, 2010: 105). Stone’s film is thus deeply conservative. It extols the humanity and courage of ordinary Americans, but fails to explore the reasons for the attack. Moreover, Stone uses the most manipulative aspects of the family melodrama to elicit sympathy for the trapped policemen and their families, and ends with the triumphalist Hollywood ideology of heroism overcoming adversity. World Trade Center focuses on 9/11 as “the contemporary equivalent of a loss of national innocence” (Cettl, 2009: 291), an event which for Stone galvanized the country into a mix of patriotism and sentimentality, qualities which infect his treatment of the plot. Political Thriller. By 2006, terror war was a dominant subtext to the political thrillers of the epoch. Both the popular TV series 24 and the Hollywood thriller franchise Mission: Impossible

337 III (2006) had plots focusing on the dangers of catastrophic terrorist attacks and featured villains within the US government, raising questions about who could be trusted. The popular Mission: Impossible TV series (1966–1973) and the two previous M:I films frequently featured the dangers of terrorism in a global context. TV director J. J. Abrams’s Mission: Impossible III (2006) ups the threat level, depicting nefarious forces within the US government, as well as international arms dealers seeking to put weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorist organizations. In a fast paced shift of its narrative from Berlin to Rome to Shanghai and sites from the west to the east coast of the US, the film points to the global nature and amorality of the illicit arms trade and dangers of terrorism from multiple sources. M:I III’s spy operatives work as a team, demonstrating the importance of combining individual initiative with group efficiency, and features sudden reversals of fortune, as control shifts from the Bad Guys to the Good Guys. The brisk narrative moves back and forth in “a ballet of capture, escape, pursuit, action-adventure exploits, high-tech explosives, fights, and resolutions” (Kellner, 2010: 118). Most significantly, MI:III features and legitimates torture and murder in fighting evil terrorists and their accomplices. The team uses similar torture methods to the villains, presenting torture as natural and normalizing it as part of the rules of the game. The film thus legitimated torture at a time of furious debate as to whether its use by the Bush administration was really effective, whether it exposed US forces to violations of the Geneva conventions and international law, and whether the US should sacrifice higher moral values and political ground in the name of national security. In MI:III, as in many American films that followed, torture functioned as “an ethical discourse on a civilization that in the rhetoric of the War on Terror justifies the effective violation of an individual’s human rights in order to potentially protect a greater number from the terrorist intention to rob them of their right to self- determination” (Cettl, 2009: 182). Torture in fighting terrorism was also normalized in the TV series 24 (2001–2010), which featured its operatives using more and more extreme methods as terrorist threats intensified. Yet the fifth season of 24 (2006) provides one of the more radical attempts to deal with US politics and terrorism in a post-9/11 context. The first four seasons demonized a series of Muslim, Arab, Slavic, Russian, and other ethnic terrorists; the fifth season, however, featured a paranoid and warped president in league with terrorists in a never-clearly delineated attempt to control oil supplies in the former Russian republics. Thus, while providing startling allegorical visions of the criminal activities of the current US political administration, the series also legitimated torture, political assassination, and other breaches of international law. Dread and Paranoia. In Ben Rekhi’s Waterborne (2005), Los Angeles’ water supplies have been contaminated by a biological agent, people are dying, and the media create hysteria. As water supplies disappear, tensions and conflicts emerge. The film focuses on how the crisis affects three sets of characters who converge on a convenience store at the end, where a young man goes berserk and pulls out a gun to rob water when he is shot by a National Guardsman. Waterborne has an interesting subtext concerning how Sikh Americans are demonized in the crisis, drawing on real-life attacks on Sikhs after 9/11 who were mistakenly believed to be Muslims. However, despite having a disturbed white guy as the villain with no apparent motive – thus undercutting the film’s media (and perhaps audience) suspicion that it is a Muslim terror attack – the film ultimately is very conservative. A narrator intones that in such situations one comes to appreciate the little things in life, like the flow of water, and “people close to me.” Thus, ultimately, sentimentalism trumps the film’s often acute insights into how people might react during a terror crisis. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008) articulates the inchoate dread and paranoia in post-9/11 America with its tale of inexplicable mass suicides infecting first urban and then small town areas. Rumors at first accuse terrorism for the horrors, but then government, nuclear power, and even nature are blamed in the narrative. In its eco-horror genre ambience, it is as if nature itself were rebelling against humans and setting off toxic forces. Satire. The dichotomy between bad terrorists and good Americans is undercut in Uwe Boll’s savage satire, Postal (2008). This totally over-the-top post-9/11 film attacks American business, religion, commodity culture, cultural clichés, Islamic terrorists, and the director’s home country, Germany. Interspersing 9/11 jokes about airline hijacking and suicide bombing, the film presents Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush as good ole buddies, and ends with them walking into the sunset holding hands as a nuclear blast is about to destroy the earth. Full of bad taste, it

338 puts on display how deep cynicism and deranged irony have returned with a vengeance to contemporary cinema whereas irony was supposedly banned after 9/11. Youth/Horror. Contemporary fears among youth were articulated in Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield (2008). The film uses a rampaging monster scenario to provide the backdrop for an apocalyptic terrorization of New York City. Playing on post-9/11 fears, the film uses 9/11 imagery of falling skyscrapers, panic in the streets, dust and blood-soaked mobs running from the disaster, and general chaos portending social collapse. The monster is never really clearly shown, yet the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty that appears in a crowd scene in lower Manhattan suggests a broader theme of the end of innocence even for the affluent young, in an era where spectacles of terror had become part of everyday life. Global Terrorism. There have also been epic Hollywood political thrillers dealing with global terrorism, like Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005). Gaghan’s film uses political allegory to provide a complex vision of the complicity of US corporations and government with political regimes and oil barons in the Middle East, and how that involvement has produced terrorism. Syriana transcodes mistrust of oil corporations and Arab sheiks, the CIA and government agencies, and their involvement in criminal activities and terrorism. In intertwining stories about the Middle East, oil corporations contending for markets, Gulf emirs pushing competing national and US/corporate interests, Islamic terrorists and the CIA, and politicians acting with the various interests, the film comments allegorically on the nexus of powers wreaking havoc. The film’s most radical claim is that “Arab dictatorships and Islamic states could only be democratized by the development of progressive indigenous reform movements that the US had often worked hard to contain or shut down” (Holloway, 2008: 97). Another Middle Eastern political thriller, Peter Berg’s The Kingdom (2007), transcodes more conservative discourses in a conventional Hollywood format. The film tackles one of the most sensitive issues in US foreign policy: relations with Saudi Arabia and the latter’s connection to terrorism. An opening montage encapsulates US-Saudi relations, from the 1930s when oil was discovered, to 9/11, shortly after which it was revealed that 15 of the 19 alleged WTC murderers were Saudis. The film cuts to Americans in a softball game at a picnic in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where US oil workers live with their families in an American-style community. Mayhem ensues when Saudi guards are shot and terrorists posing as policemen invade the compound and begin killing Americans. Suicide bombers blow themselves up and take out more than a hundred people with them, including two FBI agents. The Kingdom combines aspects of a forensic crime drama with an action-adventure film and a political thriller. Saudi Islamicist terrorists are uncovered as perpetrators of the crime, putting on display familiar images of terrorists killing innocents, using the Internet to propagandize their deeds, recruiting children as murderers, and preparing to behead one of the captured team members. Diplomacy and negotiation with the Saudis are shown to be futile; resolute militant action is shown as necessary. The Saudi police are represented as inefficient, obstructive, and devious, but in a few days the Americans have discovered the terrorist cell responsible for the killings. In a rousing 30-minute climax, the cell is hunted down and destroyed. The Saudis themselves are pictured as either good allies of the Americans or evil terrorists devoted to murder and mayhem, just as the Americans are divided in Manichean fashion into good, aggressive, all- American men of action contrasted to liberal, do-nothing bureaucrats. The FBI agents invade a Saudi compound to blow away the terrorists, providing narrative closure with an American victory over evil terrorists. Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart (2007) provides a nuanced presentation of the impact of terrorist actions on victims while exploring the complexity of Middle Eastern politics. Recounting the kidnapping and execution of American journalist Daniel Pearl, it focuses on the efforts of his wife, Mariane, their friends and colleagues, and American and Pakistani officials to track down the perpetrators. Eschewing black and white stereotypes, it shows a variety of individuals from different cultures and backgrounds working together to solve the mystery of who kidnapped Pearl and how to save him. The story ends in tragedy, as the Jihadists beheaded Pearl and showed the killing on a video distributed on the Internet. However, unfolding the story captures the complexity of Pakistani politics, with a great diversity of people with differing views.

339 Conclusion. The first decade of the new millennium exhibited intense political struggle and infamy, and Hollywood film was right at the center of the action, offering cinematic visions that provided contemporary viewers and future audiences insight into the nightmares of the period. As we advance into the second decade, there will no doubt be further crises, struggles, and dramatic events, and it will be fascinating to see how Hollywood film develops in the emerging historical moment.

Bibliography: Cettl, Robert, Terrorism in American Cinema. An Analytical Filmography, 1960-2008, McFarland & Company, Inc., Jefferson, 2009. Clymer, Jeffory A., America’s Culture of Terrorism. Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2003. Holloway, David, 9/11 and the War on Terror, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2008. Kellner, Douglas, Cinema Wars. Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush- Cheney Era,Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, 2010.

340 Un axiome de l’espace public roumain: Politique + mythe + médias = un public manipulé

Claudia Talaşman Chiorean*

Résumé: La manipulation reste l’une des questions les plus débattues par les spécialistes des médias. C’est un thème vaste justement pour les significations qu’il peut revêtir. Pourtant, il est tout aussi intéressant, voire plus intéressant d’analyser les causes qui se trouvent à l’origine de ce phénomène. Le contexte roumain contemporain constitue une source inépuisable pour ce genre d’études, quelle que soit l’approche que l’on privilégie. Mots-clés: public, manipulation, politique, mythe, media, espace roumain, extrême contemporain

Abstract: Manipulation remains a hotly debated topic among media analysts, as well as being open to a number of possible interpretations. But it would be just as interesting, even more interesting, to examine the causes that generate this phenomenon. Contemporary Romania, and not only Romania, offers inexhaustible raw material for such research, whatever the approach may be. Keywords: public, manipulation, politics, myth, media, Romanian area, today context

Liminaire. L’analyse d’un phénomène culturel, social ou politique à l’aide du concept de mythe politique peut se faire en termes de l’importance de ce phénomène pour la société. C’est surtout pendant une période de transition prolongée que le mythe politique dévoile plus profondément toutes ses implications sociales, politiques et culturelles. On a beaucoup écrit sur le sujet du communisme et on ne cessera de le faire, tant que le néo-communisme continue à avoir une incidence sur l’existence humaine. La mythologie communiste a attiré les regards de tous ceux qui ont voulu étudier ce moment historique. Il y a pourtant une tendance, plus ou moins évidente dans les écrits sur le communisme, d’insister plutôt sur les souffrances qu’il a provoquées même si l’on sait bien que ce ne fut pas là la seule période où les injustices sociales, humaines ou spirituelles sont devenues monnaie courante et où les crimes ont constitué une forme de répression. Il est difficile de dire lequel des systèmes politiques de l’histoire a été plus dur pour ceux qui ont dû subir leurs contraintes : l’Inquisition du Moyen Âge, l’oppression tsariste, le fanatisme nazi, le totalitarisme communiste, le modernisme américain, la globalisation actuelle ou bien l’intégrisme européen ? Le communisme reste imprimé sur la rétine et dans la mémoire immédiate des gens parce qu’il continue à faire partie de notre présent historique. Une constante est à retrouver dans tous les régimes politiques : la tendance d’une minorité de se faire soumettre la majorité. Et ce, malgré le fait que la plupart des idéologies de ces régimes sont fondées sur les préceptes chrétiens du bien, du beau et du vrai et, surtout, sur le sentiment absolu de « l’amour du prochain ». L’amour chrétien reste pourtant un slogan sans contenu vu toutes les atrocités commises en son nom. La transition du communisme vers la démocratie, par exemple, représente une étape que bien des Roumains ne sont pas encore parvenus à assimiler profondément. Ici comme ailleurs, la mentalité joue un rôle essentiel. Un mot-clé, qu’il faudra tenter de définir. La mentalité d’une société ne devient visible que dans les interactions de tous les facteurs et de tous les acteurs impliqués à un moment donné sur la scène de son histoire. Mythes, utopies, symboles ou valeurs sont autant d’éléments représentatifs d’une communauté. Formées au cours du temps, les mentalités changent assez lentement à cause de l’inertie, de la résistance ou de l’immobilité somme toute normale de la société. Envisagées à partir d’un point de vue sociologique, les mentalités révèlent tout d’abord les forces permanentes qui interviennent dans le cadre d’une catégorie sociale dans laquelle ses membres agissent et interagissent. Une bonne compréhension des changements qui arrivent au sein d’une société donnée exige de notre part la prise en compte de plusieurs variables, tel que le rôle de la politique, l’aire géographique de la communauté en question, les conditions économiques ou le contexte social. Conscience collective, pratiques culturelles, attitudes, valeurs, imaginaire : voilà les éléments qui composent « l’univers mental » de cette communauté et qui donnent sa spécificité

* Assistant-chercheur, dr, Université « Babeş-Bolyai » de Cluj-Napoca

341 par rapport à d’autres communautés. Le fait de percevoir, de représenter ou d’imaginer différemment le monde peut apporter des variations dans la manière de construire des critères, d’établir des relations sociales, de prendre des décisions et même de gouverner, au sens politique du terme. Parmi les critères utilisés dans l’analyse de la mentalité collective on n’a pas encore suffisamment insisté sur le rôle des médias, et en particulier celui de la presse. La plupart des gens sont incapables de prendre contact d’une manière directe avec ce qui se passe dans leur propre société. La représentation de cette actualité dans les médias, à travers des rituels, des symboles et des stéréotypes, devient la réalité à laquelle le public a accès et en vertu de laquelle il réfléchit et il agit. La réalité objective, désormais inaccessible, est remplacée par la réalité offerte par les médias, directement et sans aucune condition. C’est en agissant comme médiateur de l’information que les médias ont acquis le pouvoir et l’importance au niveau global dont ils jouissent de nos jours. Leur rôle informatif ou formatif, en compétition avec celui des systèmes censés historiquement s’occuper de l’éducation et de la formation, montre assez clairement que la communication au niveau local de même que global serait fortement affectée, voire parfois inexistante, sans le recours aux médias. Consciente de cette évidence, la presse n’a eu qu’à tirer profit de la situation. Dans beaucoup de cas, elle a cherché à acquérir un contrôle absolu sur les choses, sans en assumer toutefois les possibles conséquences.

Les mythes politiques – quelques considérations en marge de leur présence dans l’espace roumain. Comme tout phénomène culturel ou spirituel, le mythe est perméable et ouvert à la fois aux pressions sociales et aux tensions spirituelles de l’espace d’où il émerge. Ses formes de manifestation sont particulièrement diverses. Parmi ses variantes les plus exploitées, il y a, certes, le mythe politique. Dans son ouvrage, Les mythes et les mythologies politiques, Raoul Girardet en identifie quatre types essentiels : le sauveur, la conspiration, l’âge d’or et l’unité. Le mythe fait preuve d’une versatilité extraordinaire, au-delà de toute limite imposée par le type de discours politique employé, par l’aire géographique étudiée ou par la période historique où il s’inscrit. Issu d’une réalité politique factuelle et engendré par la réalité sociale, il aide, à son tour, à l’édification de cette réalité sociale. Le mythe se présente comme un élément fondamental voire indispensable, quel que soit le système politique mis en place. Ainsi, par exemple, le mythe de l’âge d’or existe dans toute culture dans laquelle l’utopie joue un rôle significatif. La diffusion de l’écriture a provoqué une déception chez tous ceux qui croyaient fortement au pouvoir de la parole écrite. De la même manière, de nos jours, le pouvoir toujours plus accru de l’Internet et de la télévision suscite la colère de tous ceux qui croient au pouvoir de la parole écrite. La morphologie de ce mythe dépend, ainsi, de la capacité de l’être humain d’idéaliser le passé. Si nous prenons l’exemple de l’entre-deux-guerres roumain, il y a tout un tas de textes rédigés par certains intellectuels roumains dans lesquels on ressent fortement leur nostalgie pour cette période-là. Ces auteurs n’y insisteront donc pas sur les affaires de Malaxa avec la famille royale, ni sur la dictature carliste ou sur l’instabilité politique bien présente à l’époque. Par contre, ils évoqueront volontiers le charme des débats littéraires, la vie bohème des intellectuels, les chansonnettes ou l’espace idyllique des cafés littéraires. En ce qui concerne la mythologie du complot ou de la conspiration, elle repose principalement sur l’image terrifiante de l’Organisation. Son trait fondamental, c’est le secret. Le serment du silence est imposé à tous ses membres, sous la menace d’une peine terrible à être infligée au cas où ce serment est rompu. Les Roumains n’ont cessé de ressentir cette angoisse de la conspiration. Externes ou internes, les conspirations hantent l’imaginaire politique des Roumains comme, d’ailleurs, de tout peuple en proie à des changements bouleversants. Quels que soient ses noms, sa nature ou ses raisons, la conspiration s’inscrit dans un climat psychologique et social d’insécurité, de peur et d’angoisse. La diversion constitue une caractéristique spécifique et presque exclusive du discours politique avancé pendant des périodes de crise. Il n’est guère difficile d’en surprendre le mécanisme, même si sa mise en œuvre suppose des facteurs plus complexes qui résistent à la simple identification. On rédige ainsi un discours très ample, très agressif, visant de préférence une personne qu’on veut dénigrer ; ce discours (dont l’appartenance n’est pourtant redevable à personne)

342 est repris et amplifié par tous les médias, donnant naissance à des camps de partisans et d’opposants. Le discours politique contemporain en profite beaucoup. Lus dans la clé du complot, bien des événements politiques autrement inexplicables trouvent une raison d’être et une évolution paisible. Le mythe du héros fondateur, qui constitue une variante du mythe du sauveur, est identifiable chez toute nation moderne revendiquant une filiation historique (Romulus et Rémus, Trajan et Décébale). Il y a une époque de l’attente et de l’appel – pendant laquelle l’image d’un sauveur se dessine de plus en plus fortement – à laquelle répond une époque de la présence de ce même sauveur, suivie par une troisième époque, celle du souvenir et de la commémoration, pendant laquelle la figure du sauveur changera en fonction des caprices de la mémoire, avec ses mécanismes de sélection, ses refoulements et ses exagérations. Au-delà d’un paradoxe évident, bien des dictateurs et d’extrémistes politiques ont adopté cette image du Sauveur, grâce à un culte de la personnalité bâti dans le moindre détail. À son tour, le sauveur peut revêtir l’image du protecteur. Sa mission est de pacifier les esprits, de rétablir la confiance et de vaincre le mal. Il suffit de jeter un coup d’œil sur les affiches proposées par les candidats aux mairies pour se rendre compte que, grâce aux slogans avancés (« Contre le désordre et la misère », par exemple), ce mécanisme est réellement efficace. Le mythe de la création qui consume son créateur est l’un des mythes fondamentaux de l’humanité. Toutes les nations modernes y ont recouru une fois ou l’autre. La modernité n’exclut ni le Mythe ni le sacré : par contre, elle y trouve sa légitimité. Bien que le mythe fasse preuve d’une rigidité envers son Archétype, il arrive souvent qu’il se plie aux nécessités du moment et à ceux de l’aire géographique où il s’inscrit sans, pour autant, perdre son identité ni sa cohérence. C’est pourquoi aucune société, y compris les sociétés modernes et postmodernes, n’a réussi à le contourner. Le besoin du mythe découle de la difficulté de l’humain de gérer rationnellement des situations de crise. Grâce au mythe ou à la foi, l’être humain a la possibilité de se placer sur un terrain spirituel d’où il puise le sentiment vital de sécurité. Le mythe ne saurait être évacué de la société précisément à cause de son étonnante capacité de parler avec les mots de tous les jours. En association étroite avec la mythologie, la manipulation s’est transformée de nos jours dans une véritable science. Le mythe platonicien de la caverne devient actuel et très fécond et il est bien présent au sein de toute société mythifiée. De même, on parle aujourd’hui de mythes urbains, qui ne sauraient être des constructions de nos temps présents mais plutôt des mythes anciens « relookés » et rediffusés. Pour prendre l’exemple de l’underground, celui-ci n’est aucunement une invention du XXe siècle, vu que l’idée d’un monde d’en bas existe dans toutes les grandes religions du monde de même que dans les mythologies de l’Antiquité gréco-romaine. Dans la mythologie grecque, par exemple, le dieu des morts, Hadès, était le roi de l’enfer. Il y a deux voies par lesquelles le Mythe s’infiltre subrepticement dans la conscience publique. Ces deux voies sont soit le discours, c’est-à-dire la parole et la littérature, soit l’image. En politique, le concept de politique symbolique est central pour la compréhension du processus de communication. Le dédoublement des réalités politiques suppose que toutes les activités et les événements politiques comprennent à la fois une dimension nominale et une dimension expressive. La deuxième dimension possède une valeur symbolique théâtrale, grâce à la représentation des activités devant l’opinion publique. Les acteurs politiques créent pour les électeurs, inconsciemment et en fonction des rôles qu’ils se sont attribués, un monde politique irréel, s’appuyant sur des symboles et des rituels politiques repris par les médias. Tout ce processus est par la suite juxtaposé sur les valeurs principielles des actes politiques. Préférant à ignorer le travail en commun, l’élite contrôlant le pouvoir politique arrive parfois à des violences physiques (en tant que représentante unique de la force de l’État). Le plus souvent, cette violence est, pourtant, de nature symbolique et elle se sert soit de l’idéologie, soit de la spiritualité ou de la culture. Pour bien fonctionner, ces outils ont besoin d’une relation de confiance qui s’établisse entre les dirigeants et les dirigés. La légitimité symbolique du pouvoir politique est donnée précisément par son caractère sacré acquis par le rapprochement du mythe. Aussi le sacré devient-il l’une des dimensions fondamentales de la politique, cautionnant sa légitimité, et l’un des outils les plus exploités en vue de gagner la compétition politique. Le sacré a été, est et restera une source de légitimation du pouvoir.

343 La présence du sacré dans l’espace politique se fait sentir dans la persistance des motifs mythologiques dont le rôle est essentiel pour l’idéologie politique des temps modernes et contemporains. L’aura mystique qui enveloppe certains dirigeants constitue en soi un moyen indubitablement efficace pour faire exercer son influence, manipuler les autres et se faire légitimer. Dans ce contexte-là, mythes, préjugés et opinions issus de passions politiques s’avèrent, en fait, très utiles. Leur effet est certain vu que l’être humain ne vit pas seulement dans une réalité matérielle plus ou moins large, mais aussi dans un véritable univers symbolique. Le langage, le mythe, l’art et surtout la religion sont autant de composantes de cet univers symbolique. À la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, si les démocraties l’ont emporté sur les régimes totalitaires, elles l’ont fait grâce à une gestion plus efficace des émotions collectives et de la violence sociale. Leur supériorité n’est pas tellement due à leurs principes fondateurs, à un respect plus grand des droits de l’homme ou au partage des pouvoirs dans l’État, mais bien à la capacité du Pouvoir de gérer le potentiel psychoaffectif de la société. Or, l’outil le plus significatif dans ce but est le contrôle des médias de masse. Si ce contrôle vient s’associer à un régime de terreur policière, le pouvoir politique change en pouvoir totalitaire et impose à la société un modèle de pensée qui modifie les perceptions collectives. L’exemple du régime communiste en Roumanie est révélateur en ce sens puisque le modèle collectiviste de pensée continue à se faire sentir bien après le changement de régime politique survenu en 1989. Le pouvoir, en tant qu’instance absolue, exige une soumission absolue. Aussi différents régimes totalitaires (communistes ou fascistes) ont-ils insisté sur la construction de l’homme nouveau. La démocratie renoncera à ce vœu de changer l’homme. Son propre vœu est l’individualisation accrue de l’humain et elle se construit dans un milieu conflictuel au niveau symbolique. Dans les sociétés démocratiques, les hommes politiques ne s’imposent pas de force mais ils cherchent une légitimation qu’ils acquerront à la fin de la compétition électorale. Les mythes aident à créer et à renforcer cette légitimation. Le mythe est le seul à s’adresser à cette dimension du social qui est en quête de repères, de croyances politique fondatrices et de héros qui assouvissent ses désirs individuels ou de groupe. Qui est-ce qui n’a pas besoin de repères ? La fortune d’un régime politique lui est donnée par sa capacité de se faire accepter par la société. Ce type de légitimation se fonde sur des croyances politiques et sur des sentiments et des inquiétudes collectifs. Les instances du pouvoir manipulent l’humour, la violence et la peur spécifiques d’un groupe. Le système démocratique mobilisera, ainsi, les énergies ludiques de la population à l’aide d’instruments comme, par exemple, la moquerie, le coup ingrat, les affaires scandaleuses, les accusations ou les dévoilements qui ne sont faits que pour dénigrer ou porter atteinte à l’image de son adversaire. Tous ces instruments sont fonctionnels dans un contexte démocratique. Lorsque l’indifférence devient l’ordre du jour, le parti politique change en une machine cynique de chasse aux financements, d’où des réalités comme la tromperie, l’ambition, la corruption ou les moyens violents de gouverner. Si un régime totalitaire recourra aisément à la force, le système démocratique fera appel, tout d’abord, à la séduction, ensuite à la conviction et, en fin de compte, à la corruption et au chantage… Grâce à l’essor des médias, la mystique politique a acquis une force nouvelle tandis que les moyens d’expression se sont diversifiés. Tout comme le totalitarisme, la démocratie doit recourir à ces instruments afin de dissimuler ses intentions véritables. En dépit de tout cela, la démocratie reste l’espace privilégié de la démystification, de la désacralisation et de la démythisation de la politique, alors que le totalitarisme demeure dans la zone de la mystification et de la mystique généralisées. La démocratie n’est pourtant pas si loin du totalitarisme qu’il pourrait apparaître au premier abord. Ce risque menace toujours les dirigeants et les détenteurs du Pouvoir. Tant les médias que l’opinion publique changent sans cesse. Ils deviennent des indicateurs et des facteurs révélateurs pour décrire et interpréter les changements qui arrivent au sein de la société. Dans toute société moderne, la fabrication, la diffusion et la réception des informations a une valeur économique, politique et culturelle. Ainsi, certaines expressions comme « l’époque des médias » ou « le temps des médias » ne sont pas gratuites. La médiation des informations a conduit à leur interprétation par les médias et, par là, à un pouvoir accru d’influer sur le cours des choses. On a déjà constaté que, sans les médias, il n’y

344 aurait pas de communication réelle entre les différents organismes sociaux ou entre les organismes sociaux et le public au sens large. Les médias parviennent ainsi à exercer une influence presque exclusive sur l’opinion publique. La relation entre l’argent et le discours politique promu par les médias y joue à son tour un rôle très important. Pendant les campagnes électorales, la liberté de choix d’un candidat devient nettement plus réduite. En tant qu’instruments très attractifs et très efficaces pour faire parvenir un message au sein de la population, le développement des médias, tout d’abord de ceux régionaux, ensuite de ceux nationaux a permis l’acquisition par les médias d’un capital significatif. Il y a ainsi toute une série de moyens pour faire diffuser un message politique qu’aucune personne qui souhaite accéder au pouvoir ne saurait ignorer. Cette évidence conduit à une chasse acerbe à l’argent tandis qu’au niveau mental s’installe une véritable tyrannie de la presse. L’espace politique contemporain, c’est l’espace des médias. Lorsqu’on parle de la politique, on ne parle pas d’une politique au sens large, mais de la capacité des groupes de se faire rapprocher cet espace médiatique. Or, le recours aux mythes représente une garantie de réussite.

Les périodes électorales – la pointe de l’iceberg de la mythologie politique. On a souvent tendance de mettre un signe d’équivalence entre la communication politique et la communication électorale, vu que la campagne électorale est perçue comme le meilleur contexte pour examiner les mécanismes et les pratiques de communication politique. Le rapport entre les deux types de communication reste pour autant un rapport d’inclusion de l’électoral par le politique. Ce dernier est un domaine plus ample et plus complexe grâce à la variété des contextes (électoral, cérémonial, international, politique, médiatique) dans lesquels il se fait inscrire, tandis que le premier n’en est qu’une sous-division. « Mise à part l’institution de vote et d’autres cadres formels, la communication politique reste le principal moyen par lequel les électeurs participent à la décision politique. Prenant acte de celle-ci, ils parviennent à l’évaluer et à la sanctionner à l’occasion du vote. Dans ce sens, l’électorat doit établir la signification de la décision politique ou celle d’un événement dans son contexte, ce qui est rendu possible grâce à une visibilité, à savoir à une connaissance adéquate de la politique » [1]. Pour prendre l’exemple des campagnes électorales dans la Roumanie des années 1990- 2000, on remarque que tous les actants du jeu politique ont proposé des programmes de gouvernement plus ou moins réalistes, ont fait des promesses relativement raisonnables ou singulièrement irrationnelles, ont avancé des « projets d’avenir » pour la communauté plus réalistes ou très loin de la « réalité ». D’habitude, dans ce genre de campagnes, presque tout le monde exagère si l’on n’y ment pas tout simplement, en faisant des promesses entièrement infondées. Il n’y a que peu de partis politiques qui aient le courage d’affirmer ouvertement la vérité, et ce, à cause de la crainte que la vérité n’aide pas à gagner le pouvoir ou, du moins, un bon score électoral. Si, dans les démocraties matures, il y une certaine mesure dans tout cela, dans les démocraties en train de naître, comme la démocratie roumaine, ou dans celles déjà « fatiguées », c’est précisément la mesure qui fait défaut. Cela conduit, par ailleurs, à la démagogie et/ou au populisme et, comme une conséquence, à la mutation subtile ou brutale de la politique en maquignonnage politique. Certains auteurs opèrent une distinction entre la démagogie, définie comme un moyen et une technique d’accéder au pouvoir et le populisme, envisagé comme une doctrine politique. Dès leur réorganisation, pendant les premiers jours de l’année 1990, les partis politiques roumains qui avaient forgé l’unité nationale roumaine, la Roumanie moderne et l’État roumain de droit, étaient conscients des priorités nationales du moment historique et de la nécessité de l’intégration euro-atlantique. Ils ont ainsi renoncé à un discours patriotard, tenant l’appel à l’histoire pour un acte démagogique et le culte des valeurs – inclus, depuis des décennies, dans leurs programmes nationaux – pour quelque chose qui allait de soi. Tandis que les forces politiques démocratiques refusaient d’exploiter, dans des buts électoraux, l’histoire et les sentiments d’appartenance nationale des Roumains, ces éléments de spiritualité roumaine ont été repris et ressuscités par les anciennes forces politiques communistes. Par contre, l’examen de leur évolution a montré leur caractère antinational et antipatriote.

345 Ces pratiques, évoquant la propagande communiste, ont constitué le piège dans lequel les Roumains sont tombés pendant la période de renforcement du pouvoir de l’ancien dictateur. Pendant 1990-2000, les résultats en sont devenus visibles surtout dans le cas des segments sociaux moins informés et plus sujets, de la sorte, d’être incapables de discerner les buts cachés et les conséquences désastreuses du discours politique extrémiste national. Selon C. Beciu [2], un discours de propagande serait un discours politique qui se prendrait pour un discours vrai. Un critère qui sert à évaluer un discours comme un discours politique c’est la position de celui qui le lance : une position de détenteur ou d’un possible détenteur du pouvoir politique. Ce n’est que là que l’évaluation devient crédible, non pas tant du point de vue logique que du point de vue pragmatique, à savoir sa capacité de gérer les problèmes. Toutefois, concernant la vérité des faits présentés, ce critère n’est pas suffisant. Il devra être complété par la solution tenue par l’auteur du discours pour être la solution optimale. Selon la stratégie envisagée, le discours politique peut se placer sur n’importe laquelle des trois dimensions de l’axe temporel. Les nuances qu’il revêtira seront différentes en fonction de la position abstraite de celui qui le profère. Dans le cas d’un retour au passé, un politicien ayant rempli des fonctions publiques mettra en valeur les acquis de son office, tout en laissant entendre qu’à l’avenir il en y aura bien davantage, alors qu’un homme politique de l’opposition aura une démarche symétrique. Dans le cas d’une insistance sur le présent, un homme politique déjà connu mettra l’accent sur l’orientation positive de la situation, clamant la nécessité de la continuation, tandis que la même démarche sera entreprise par les politiciens de l’opposition. Se dirigeant, enfin, vers l’avenir, les politiciens de tous les camps évalueront positivement la situation potentielle selon leur possible positionnement dans une fonction publique. L’acteur politique de la période 1990-2000 a pu se présenter simultanément comme un candidat simulant déjà le pouvoir politique, comme un homme politique s’opposant contre la candidature des autres et comme un politicien disposant déjà d’un passé politique. La campagne électorale c’est la seule pratique politique qui rende possible la communication à l’horizontale entre tous ces possibles candidats, égalant ainsi leur statut symbolique. De tels acteurs politiques ont été présents dans toutes les trois campagnes électorales organisées en 1992, 1996 et 2000. On pourrait nuancer cette affirmation en remarquant que, en dépit d’une égalité formelle entre les participants à un débat politique, en réalité les rôles qu’ils se sont implicitement attribués n’ont pas été ceux de candidat ou d’opposant, ce qui modifie dès le début le schéma relationnel. Il peut arriver qu’un candidat ait déjà accès au pouvoir politique, ce qui fait que son rôle ne soit plus symétrique à celui d’un candidat qui pourrait y avoir accès (avec les possibles avantages et inconvénients qui en découlent). Les ressources et les stratégies employées seront ainsi différentes dans chaque cas. De la même manière, on peut avoir la situation où aucun candidat ne gagne effectivement la place pour laquelle il présente sa candidature : voir, par exemple, le deuxième tour des élections locales de 2000, avec S. Oprescu et T. Băsescu. Une situation similaire a eu lieu tout au début des élections générales lorsque le président en exercice, E. Constantinescu, a décliné sa candidature. De telles situations impriment aux rôles discursifs un degré plus élevé d’uniformisation par rapport à la situation la plus commune, dans laquelle celui qui occupe déjà la fonction présente sa candidature, lui aussi. Les leaders ou les candidats aux élections présidentielles ont essayé d’imposer leur propre image valorisée au maximum dans les groupes politiques créés lors des périodes électorales. L’enjeu était de gagner un plus de supériorité dans la légitimation de sa position, s’assurant de la sorte la domination du groupe. On manipule ainsi des systèmes de représentations sociales dans une logique du pouvoir, exploitant les processus psychologiques individuels, les relations interpersonnelles de même que les hiérarchies de pouvoir et de statut qui définissent la structure du groupe. Appartenir à un groupe signifie délimiter sa position par rapport aux autres membres du groupe et aux autres groupes dominants/dominés. La place gagnée est ainsi insérée dans un système de relations. Les changements dans l’attitude des autres personnes envers un individu et ses propres modifications comportementales nourrissent des craintes qui entraînent la mise en place de mécanismes défensifs de l’Ego (dissociation, projection) destinés à protéger la position menacée. Construire, adopter ou même remplacer un comportement politique (au sein du groupe) suppose l’existence de certains objets imaginaires, investis inconsciemment de pouvoir, auxquels on tient on et en fonction desquels on agit. Cet objet pourrait être aussi un sujet humain.

346 Un homme politique ajustera ses comportements politiques en fonction d’un scénario imaginaire et collectif mais, il va de soi, avantageux aussi. En franchissant l’inconscient, le social est censé traverser et structurer l’intra-psychique. Les mécanismes défensifs sont autant de moyens de faire relier la réalité psychique d’une personne à la réalité sociale (des autres), grâce à des procédés de déplacement des objets. Un rôle essentiel dans l’imposition des individus-images est rempli par le registre mythologique dont l’électorat dispose et qu’on exploite à satiété tout au long d’une période électorale. La représentation iconique des candidats joue elle aussi un rôle important. L’efficacité à long terme de la campagne, à travers les affiches électorales, dépend surtout des lois de la mémoire. La remémoration et la reproduction dépendent à leur tour de l’intensité et de la fréquence du stimulus perceptif. L’apprentissage d’un texte peut se faire plus aisé si un rythme y intervient. Lors du premier contact, une affiche n’est pas véritablement vue. La deuxième fois qu’on la voit, on la remarque sans toutefois la lire. La troisième fois on la lit mais on n’y réfléchit pas. La quatrième fois on y réfléchit brièvement, tandis que la cinquième fois on en parle avec des amis. La septième fois on prend une décision : soit on la rejette, soit on l’assimile. On se rappelle les personnes et les visages humains plus facilement que les objets ; on se rappelle les objets plus facilement que les actions. On reconnaît une forme plus aisément qu’une couleur, alors qu’on se rappelle une couleur plus facilement que des nombres. Les modifications dans la structure d’une affiche doivent être opérés de sorte que son unité téléologique reste intacte. Il y a un autre élément essentiel dans la conception et la mise en œuvre des campagnes électorales. Cet élément est représenté par les soi-disant formateurs d’opinion. Parmi ceux-ci, les médias sont les plus importants. On peut recourir aussi à une personnalité-pilote, à savoir à une célébrité du cinéma, de la musique, de la littérature ou du monde des affaires – une « étoile » qui éclairera son candidat. D’autres acteurs dans la mise en scène de cette pièce appelée « élections présidentielles » sont les spécialistes. Des spécialistes du domaine des médias (journalistes, spécialistes des sondages, consultants) commentent les événements tout en essayant de réfléchir le plus objectivement possible sur les programmes électoraux, sur les choix du public ou sur la finalité de la campagne électorale. Au cas où il y a eu des catégories de population bien délimitées, la campagne électorale était censée se décider sur le public cible : s’adresser à un public particulier ou bien à un public général ? On a opté soit pour des stratégies indifférenciées (le même message visant la totalité des électeurs potentiels, sans les différencier), soit pour des stratégies différenciées (adopter, pour chaque segment social en soi, une stratégie politique différente) ou concentrées (supposant la focalisation de l’effort sur une ou deux catégories d’électeurs potentiels). On a révoqué souvent le changement du comportement politique si celui-ci ne réussissait pas à se faire intégrer dans le système de valeurs et de croyances des électeurs. Inconséquence des affirmations, mobilité des concepts et promesses labiles : tout cela caractérise les campagnes électorales roumaines dans la période 1989-2000. Ce qui comptait avant tout dans les confrontations électorales, c’était une guerre médiatique à la fin de laquelle on perdait ou, par contre, on gagnait des segments importants de l’électorat. En s’appuyant sur le conviction que les gens se laissent influencer par des gens pareils à eux, avec des attitudes et des comportements similaires, bien des discours électoraux y ont fondé leurs stratégies conceptuelles. La mythologie du héros sauveur a beaucoup aidé à métamorphoser le candidat, quelque médiocre qu’il fût, en héros national. En ce qui concerne tous ceux qui, par contre, étaient impressionnés par des gens avec des comportements nettement différents de leurs propres comportements, dans la mesure où ils auraient aimé se conduire comme eux mais ils ne pouvaient ou n’osaient pas le faire (la complémentarité engendrant, comme on le sait, de l’attraction), on a conçu des stratégies basées sur la mythologie de la nation en danger, de l’ère nouvelle, de l’homme nouveau et de la révolution. Le pouvoir de la persuasion dépendait d’une image projetée à travers un dynamisme convaincant. Ce type de candidat communiquait de l’énergie, de l’enthousiasme et de l’autorité, tant grâce à son aspect physique, mais aussi à la rhétorique et à la grande vitesse de son discours. Ce fut le dynamisme de son discours qui a persuadé son auditoire qu’il s’agissait, en fin de compte, d’un candidat crédible.

347 Pour être persuasif, le message devait être associé à la stimulation, chez le récepteur, d’émotions positives. Si on lui avait associé des émotions négatives, comme la peur – un exemple en étant la période communiste, le message aurait perdu son efficacité. Les informations sur des expériences concrètes et les stratégies d’évitement étaient associées à des arguments psychologiques s’appuyant sur des instructions précises destinées à faire éviter une situation difficile. Ainsi, on canalisait les comportements des individus dans le sens souhaité. « On ne vend pas sa patrie ! » – voilà un cri alarmant qui a valu au Parti social-démocrate la sympathie d’un pourcentage important de l’électorat. Il est possible qu’une source très crédible parvienne à changer les opinions des électeurs même si ceux-ci se positionnaient au début différemment par rapport à la position de l’émetteur. Seul le récepteur impliqué affectivement dans un certain message ne saurait être changé dans son comportement même dans le cas d’une source crédible. Les arguments du type pour ou contre ont parfois réussi à éclaircir certains contextes mais, le plus souvent, ils n’ont fait qu’attiser les doutes de l’électorat quant à l’aura d’objectivité apparente auquel ce type de discours prétendait. Le paysage électoral roumain représente soit la variante esquissée en lignes très accentuées, soit le dessin grotesque de la vie politique autochtone. Les pulsions, les passions, les penchants, la soif de pouvoir et le désir d’ascension politique y règnent. Même si cela n’est pas devenu une caractéristique nationale, les Roumains – qu’ils soient candidats ou simples électeurs – adorent exposer leurs émotions électorales. La maturation de la vie politique roumaine est loin d’être un processus achevé. Chaque campagne électorale reprend la campagne précédente, à un détail près. Le grand absent de ce jeu entre les acteurs politiques est l’électorat, avec tout ce que cela suppose.

De quelle manière le mythe politique pourrait-il manipuler un votant? En ce qui concerne la manière de se faire approcher le public cible, il y a bien des éléments communs entre l’espace commercial et l’espace politique. Comme le potentiel acheteur, le votant a l’embarras du choix. De nombreux partis et hommes politiques proposent différentes idéologies et divers programmes promettant une vie meilleure pour les citoyens. On attribue à chaque acteur différents symboles ou emblèmes qui permettent de l’identifier plus aisément et, par là, d’influer plus ou moins légèrement sur l’électeur. Parmi les offres présentées par les candidats, on choisira celle qui vaudra aux « consommateurs » le plus de valeur. Ceux-ci maximisent cette valeur en fonction des coûts impliqués par l’élection du produit-candidat, de leurs propres savoirs, de leur système de valeurs et de leurs intérêts. Les consommateurs-votants choisiront l’entreprise-parti/homme politique qui lui offrira le plus de satisfaction-valeur. Les partis politiques sont bien conscients du fait que le succès d’une campagne dépend surtout de ce qui se passe avant la campagne. Le citoyen veut élire l’acteur politique qui assouvit le plus ses besoins. Or, le candidat pour un siège dans le système politique ou administratif sait que l’identification des peurs collectives vaut une efficacité supérieure, sinon maximale. Lorsqu’on respecte les attentes du public cible, on en dispose aussi longtemps qu’on essaye de les combler. Aussi l’acteur politique roumain fait-il, pendant la campagne, tout un tas de promesses. Des stratégies de marketing politique sont employées afin de gagner un nombre plus élevé de votes. Des études initiales sur les sondages d’opinion mettent à la disposition de l’homme politique et de son équipe électorale des renseignements précieux concernant les attentes des électeurs. Le milieu culturel actuel ne réussit, toutefois, pas à former des électeurs mieux informés et plus attentifs avec leur vote. C’est la société dans laquelle ils sont nés et éduqués qui façonne leurs convictions et leurs modèles de comportement. Nous nous approprions, le plus souvent d’une manière inconsciente, une vision du monde qui définit par la suite notre relation avec nous-mêmes, avec les autres, avec la nature et avec l’univers. On assiste de nos jours à la création de plusieurs types d’électorat. Le moins représenté, c’est l’électorat formé, éduqué, pour lequel on a créé des programmes et des idéologies plus complexes. C’est l’électorat ancien qui domine, un électorat qui ne dispose pas d’une bonne culture politique (il y a des cas, en Roumanie, où les électeurs manquent totalement d’une culture politique) soit parce qu’il n’est pas intéressé de l’acquérir soit par ce qu’il ne parvient pas à comprendre réellement et à intérioriser les événements.

348 Les convictions et les valeurs des humaines sont labiles. Elles peuvent changer d’une manière radicale du jour au lendemain. Et ce, en raison aussi du fait que la société propose chaque jour des modifications importantes. Le comportement des humains dépend ainsi d’une série de variables : culturelles, celles qui exercent le plus d’influence sur les comportements, matérielles ou sociétales. Pour convaincre l’électeur de le voter, un homme politique se servira de noms, d’emblèmes, de symboles, d’événements et d’une atmosphère auxquels le votant est sensible. C’est là que la presse joue un rôle essentiel. Le message qu’elle transmet (à la radio ou à la télévision, à travers des journaux, des brochures, de divers articles de bureau, des stylos à bille, des calendriers ou des cahiers) doit être persuasif et séduisant. Par exemple, l’arrière-fond des affiches ou des clips électoraux doit suggérer équilibre, honnêteté, sagesse, savoir-faire. La manipulation est devenue de nos jours d’une finesse somme toute ahurissante. Ses mécanismes demeurent presque insaisissables et il n’est guère difficile de tomber dans son piège. Elle peut revêtir des formes multiples. Les médias en sont l’instrument privilégié de propagation, grâce à leur rapidité de faire diffuser les « nouvelles ». La manipulation suppose tout un système à l’intérieur duquel des hommes en position-clé diffusent des informations, y répondent ou y ajoutent de nouvelles informations. Il y a toujours quelqu’un qui entretient ce flux tandis que l’opinion publique assiste à cette mascarade sans pouvoir y intervenir, sa seule réponse possible étant son vote. Il y a entre l’homme politique et le votant une relation ressemblant à celle qui se crée entre le manipulateur et le sujet manipulé. Là intervient la dimension affective de la culture politique, en relation étroite avec sa dimension mythologique. L’imaginaire politique, fait de sentiments, de croyances, de convictions et de valeurs exploite à profusion le besoin humain de sacré. L’homme décrypte la réalité en se rapportant sans cesse au système de symboles et de mythes avancé par la société où il vit. En s’appropriant les mécanismes de ces mythes, les hommes politiques s’en servent chaque fois qu’ils ont besoin du vote de la majorité. Il y a dans la société roumaine un véritable paradoxe, à savoir que, sur le marché des élections, les Roumains – élus et électeurs y compris – ont besoin de manipulation. La raison n’est pas à chercher seulement dans une inertie acquise pendant le communisme. Par contre, le public ressent cette manipulation comme quelque chose de nécessaire vu qu’il n’envisage la réalité que d’une manière indirecte, soit à travers des personnes tenues pour des autorités dans leur domaine soit à travers les symboles, les emblèmes et les interprétations des autres. « Votez-moi ! Je suis la personne dont vous avez besoin ! » Voilà ce que l’électeur souhaite croire et il parvient à le croire même. S’il se soumet à cette manipulation, c’est parce qu’il doit voter, de toute manière, quelqu’un. De plus, il faut affirmer que les régimes politiques pluralistes sont supérieurs aux régimes totalitaires en ce qui concerne la manière d’envisager l’individu et les besoins de celui-ci. Au niveau idéologique, le totalitarisme était centré sur un idéal de société, sur le vœu de l’« homme nouveau » soumis au dirigeant et/ou aux institutions politiques. À tous les niveaux de la société, la manipulation était totale. En démocratie, les agents politiques constituent autant de compétiteurs fondant la structure de leurs campagnes et de leurs messages électoraux sur la logique des mythes. Le mythe réclame la partie affective de l’humain, les émotions et les sentiments. L’examen des dimensions cognitives et psychoaffectives de la culture politique nous amène à constater que le mythe peut être un liant politique réunissant les régimes totalitaires et les régimes démocratiques. La survie d’un régime politique dépend soit de la peur qu’il inspire, soit de l’adhésion qu’il sait provoquer.

Conclusions. Trois dés sont jetés sur l’échiquier de l’histoire roumaine: les mythes, les médias et la politique. Pendant des années, les patriotes zélés du peuple roumain ont manipulé ces dés d’une façon désordonnée dans l’espoir d’un gain toujours meilleur. Ce jeu a été conçu de sorte que les règles, une fois établies, puissent en même temps être enfreintes. Même si l’on était censé se servir de deux dés, les joueurs de l’histoire ont surpris leurs adversaires en sortant à l’improviste, un sourire malsain au coin des lèvres, un troisième dé bien caché dans la manche. On ne pouvait leur résister longtemps et la conscience de l’inutilité d’un tel acte conduisait, inévitablement, au renoncement. Les enjeux d’une telle partie étaient tout à fait spectaculaires. Les joueurs étaient enclins à risquer et ils n’hésitaient pas à le faire. Le profit arrivait presque aussitôt. Malheureusement, il n’y avait qu’eux seuls pour en jouir. Au-delà de cette image métaphorique, le terme dévoile une réalité décevante. Ce qui est de plus, il ne s’agit pas là d’une réalité strictement roumaine. Cette manière de résoudre les problèmes se pratique à l’échelle mondiale. On ne doit pas attendre les nouvelles théories socio-humaines

349 pour profiter de la disponibilité de l’humain pour le mysticisme, les croyances, les mentalités et les mythes. Des arguments – scientifiques ou non – à l’appui, cette disponibilité ou cette faiblesse de l’être humain a toujours été exploitée avec succès. Il est certain que cette exploitation est et sera, de nos jours de même que dans l’avenir proche, de plus en plus nuancée et de plus en plus subtile, connaissant un succès toujours plus étonnant. À la place de Dieu il y aura les médias, avec tous ces personnages politiques qui donnent le sens de leur existence. Il ne s’agit pas là de figurer un scénario apocalyptique dans lequel les médias et la vie politique occuperaient la zone noire de l’existence. Cet état de lieux reste la conclusion générale d’un bon nombre d’études. Certes, le monde des médias et la sphère politique ne sont pas des phénomènes négatifs en soi. La négativité de ces concepts incombe aux gens qui s’y trouvent impliqués. Si, dans l’éthique chrétienne, ce n’est pas le pécheur mais le péché qui est condamné, afin de convaincre le pécheur d’y renoncer, la perception des acteurs impliqués dans les médias ou dans la vie politique ne se construit pas de la même façon. Les actions de ceux-ci infléchissent la perception du domaine tout entier dont ils font partie. Une perception négative de leurs gestes se transforme vite dans un jugement négatif porté sur toute une collectivité professionnelle. Ce sont là les principes qui régissent la formation de la perception collective. Beaucoup de ces préjugés ont des raisons bien fondées ; néanmoins, il est tout aussi vrai que certains clichés ne constituent que des exagérations et obéissent à une logique de l’augmentation. Exagérés ou non, ils interviennent dans un champ d’activité humaine qui cherche à tout prix à amortir les risques et à faire accroître les bénéfices. Ce qui n’est pas nouveau, d’ailleurs, et qui pourrait être tenu pour une constante de l’existence humaine sur cette Terre. L’expérience commune confirme pourtant le fait que l’homme a été créé bon de par sa nature et que c’est dans la nature de sa condition qu’il croie à l’existence du bien. Néanmoins, il reste encore beaucoup de choses à faire pour que ce bien devienne une présence concrète dans la société roumaine et dans n’importe quelle société.

Note: [1] Camelia Beciu, Discursul electoral în campania prezidenţială ’96. Studiu de caz, in Ioan Drăgan (dir.), Construcţia simbolică a câmpului electoral, Iaşi, Editura Institutul European, 1998, p. 19. [2] Camelia Beciu, Politica discursivă, Iaşi, Editura Polirom, 2000, pp. 42-45.

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350 L’usage des documents authentiques dans l’enseignement/apprentissage de la traduction à l’université

Angelica Vâlcu*

Abstract: The authentic documents are very important in teaching translation in a foreign language because they meet the necessities of the teaching activities, centered on present-day activities, on the motivations and needs of the learner and, at the same time, ensure a real communication. The present article presents the role and functions of immediate and authentic documents in foreign language sessions; these documents allow a better understanding of the cultural target, the daily realities, habits, attitudes and behavioural characteristics of the cultural target. Keywords: authentic documents, pedagogical translation / specialized translation, role and function of authentic documents

Résumé: Les documents authentiques ont une grande importance dans les activités d’acquisition des compétences en traduction dans une langue étrangère car leur usage répond aux exigences d’un enseignement centré sur l’actualité, sur les motivations et les besoins de l’apprenant et assure l’apprentissage d’une communication réelle. Le présent article est une réflexion sur le rôle et les fonctions des documents immédiats et authentiques dans la classe de langue, documents qui ouvrent la voie vers la culture cible par le biais des réalités quotidiennes, des habitudes, des attitudes et des comportements parvenant de la culture cible. Mots-clés: documents authentiques, traduction pédagogique/traduction spécialisée, rôle et fonctions des documents authentiques

0. La compétence de communication qui représente l’objectif essentiel des approches communicatives dans la didactique des langues étrangères, sollicite une forte requête d’authenticité dans l’usage des textes à travailler ou à traduire. Il s’agit des textes empruntés à tous les domaines de la vie quotidienne. Pour parvenir à la compétence de communication le matériel didactique doit être choisi de manière à reconstituer l’environnement culturel de la langue d’arrivée. Les documents authentiques contiennent des informations tant linguistiques que socioculturelles et selon les spécialistes, l’efficacité de l’usage du document authentique dépend « non seulement du document, mais également des « conditions de production et de réception primitivement prévues pour le document », du « degré d’authenticité de l’utilisation pédagogique du document » et de la « qualité de la réception du document par les étudiants étrangers ». En effet, l’intérêt des documents authentiques dans une classe de langue repose davantage sur la pédagogie pratiquée que sur les documents eux-mêmes » [1]. 1. Qu’est-ce qu’un document authentique ? Les documents authentiques sont des documents écrits, audio ou audio-visuels réunis par l’enseignant en vue de les exploiter dans la classe de langue. Ces documents s’appellent authentiques car ils sont utilisés tels quels sans être modifiés. Les spécialistes en didactique des langues considèrent que si l’on apporte n’importe quelle modification au texte original, (la suppression des paragraphes pour des raisons d’économie de temps ou l’ajout de marqueurs de relation entre plusieurs phrases pour faciliter la compréhension du texte, etc.), on n’a plus affaire à un document authentique mais à un document didactisé. Le document authentique est employé à des buts communicatifs tandis que le document créé par l’enseignant sert à des fins pédagogiques. Dans la classe de FLE les documents authentiques sont utilisés plutôt comme des compléments aux méthodes d’enseignement/apprentissage du français. Pour ce qui est de l’enseignement /apprentissage du français sur objectifs spécifiques l’intégration des documents authentiques dans une séquence didactique est beaucoup plus nécessaire et souvent ils servent de supports fondamentaux à ce type de cours pratique qui, couramment, n’est pas pourvu de manuel de spécialité. L’emploi de tels supports offre la possibilité à l’enseignant de concevoir des stratégies didactiques qui mènent au travail autonome des apprenants et au développement de leur compétence informationnelle.

* Maître de conférences, dr., Université « Dunarea de Jos », Galati

351 Aslim-Yetis Veda [2] repère quelques raisons qui déterminent l’emploi des documents authentiques en classe de langue : 9 l’absence des manuels qui correspondent à la stratégie d’enseignement d’une certaine particularité linguistique (comme par exemple le français sur objectifs spécifiques) ; 9 le contact avec le français utilisé de manière spontanée à la différence des manuels scolaires dont la langue française est la plus conforme que possible au français standard qui présente la langue à un niveau de langage soutenu. : « Or, le français est aussi utilisé de façon spontanée, non officiel ; les Francophones peuvent aussi parler en hésitant, en faisant des pauses, en abrégeant, en ayant recours à des répétitions inutiles, à des paraphrases, en faisant usage de différents registres langagiers. Ainsi et comme dans toutes les langues, le français est une langue non pas homogène mais variable que les documents authentiques exposent très bien lorsqu’il est question de document oral et/ou visuel.» [3]; 9 la présentation des contextes réels qui contribuent à compléter la leçon conformément aux objectifs généraux et spécifiques établis par l’enseignant ; 9 la motivation offerte à l’apprenant qui est motivé positivement lorsqu’il peut comprendre les échanges réels et lorsqu’on lui ouvre la voie vers une langue et culture étrangères ; 9 élimination de la monotonie lorsqu’on se limite seulement aux productions didactiques réalisées par l’enseignant [4] ; 9 l’opportunité offerte aux apprenants de « se livrer à une « consommation » sociale du document et non à une consommation scolaire » [5] ; la compréhension d’un document signifie comprendre les intentions de l’auteur du texte et réagir « comme on l’aurait fait dans la réalité par un comportement qui répond justement à ces intentions. » [6] La consommation scolaire consiste, par exemple, en un enregistrement sec des mots inconnus et en leur explication par l’enseignant sans mettre ces mots en connexion avec d’autres marqueurs extralinguistiques qui co-participent à l’intelligibilité du texte. Un dernier argument (mais il y en a d’autres encore), est celui que l’utilisation des documents authentiques dans la classe de langue étrangère contribue à l’autonomie du travail de l’apprenant lors de ses tâches didactiques, celui-ci étant habitué à déployer diverses activités – de décodage, de repérage des mots et des syntagmes inconnus, de compréhension, etc. – sur des documents semblables à ceux auxquels il aura affaire plus tard, (dans la vie professionnelle en milieu francophone) ou lorsqu’il sera en contact avec des Francophones. Il est bien évident que l’utilisation d’un document authentique ne pourrait pas éliminer la nécessité de la didactisation. La facilité d’accéder à de tels supports didactiques a un prix, à savoir la contrainte de répondre aux besoins modernes d’apprentissage d’une langue étrangère. 2. Traduction pédagogique/traduction spécialisée. La traduction est une opération qui exige des compétences diverses : la connaissance approfondie de la langue source et de la langue d’arrivée, le maniement naturel et aisé des langues, le savoir de rechercher l’information et de s’intéresser aux phénomènes de culture et de civilisation dans les deux langues en question. Dans l’activité de traduction, comme dans toute activité d’enseignement / apprentissage des langues, les enseignants font appel aux quatre compétences fondamentales de la didactique des langues étrangères : la compréhension écrite et orale et l’expression écrite et orale. L’approche communicative de l’enseignement des langues, telle qu’elle est décrite dans le Cadre européen commun de référence pour les langues : apprendre, enseigner, évaluer, encourage l’acquisition des compétences linguistiques appropriées aux situations de communication de la vie réelle. La traduction en tant qu’activité langagière, est un acte de communication interlinguistique dans lequel les composantes de communication linguistique, discursive, référentielle et socioculturelle sont toutes présentes [7]. Selon l’approche notionnelle/fonctionnelle en didactique, la fonctionnalité de la traduction spécialisée (utilitaire) se concrétise sur trois paliers : a) il y a plusieurs types de traduction spécialisée (traduction juridique, technique, économique, doublage des films etc.), b) la traduction dépend du destinataire auquel est adressée la traduction (traductions destinées aux hommes politiques, aux enfants, aux scientifiques, etc.) et c) « la traduction présente en elle même une

352 activité professionnelle et elle peut être, en conséquence, un domaine spécifique considéré par les apprenants comme objectif de l’apprentissage » [8]. Les travaux des spécialistes [9] en théorie de la traduction considèrent qu’il y a des distinctions importantes entre la traduction nommée pédagogique et qui est enseignée dans la classe de langue et la traduction spécialisée qui a une finalité politico-économique ou socioculturelle. Utilisée aux niveaux lexical et grammatical, la traduction pédagogique est explicative mais elle est aussi un moyen excellent d’évaluation des connaissances linguistiques de nos apprenants. Même si l’on dit que la traduction pédagogique a des conséquences incommodes sur l’apprentissage/enseignement d’une langue étrangère, nous devons reconnaitre les aspects convenables, à savoir « l’impossibilité de l’exclure totalement à cause de la traduction spontanée en langue maternelle de la part des apprenants, le gain de temps, la facilité de mise en place, le moyen de sécurisation des apprenants faibles » [11]. Elisabeth Lavault et Jean Delisle analysent la dissymétrie qui existe entre les exercices de thème et de version que nous pratiquons, tous, dans le cours pratique de traductions. Dans le cas de l’exercice de type thème on a affaire à « la compréhension écrite d’un texte en langue maternelle (LM) [qui] précède la réexpression écrite en langue étrangère » et dans le cas de l’exercice version c’est « la compréhension écrite d’un texte en langue étrangère (LE) précède la reformulation en langue maternelle » [12]. Traduire un texte professionnel oblige l’étudiant à identifier et à interpréter le texte pour établir le sens du message ou, selon M. LE Duc Quang [13], le vouloir- dire de l’auteur. 3. Rôle des documents authentiques. La traduction d’un document authentique suppose le travail simultané sur le domaine de la linguistique (grammaire, vocabulaire, types de textes, etc.) et sur le domaine de la culture et de la civilisation des deux langues source et cible. Le maniement du langage qui rend possible l’acquisition du savoir faire, est le fondement de tout enseignement de la traduction. Il faut retenir que l’emploi exclusif des documents authentiques n’assure pas du tout un enseignement/apprentissage excellent. En ce sens, l’enseignant doit équilibrer le rapport entre les documents pédagogiques et les documents authentiques et doit les utiliser en fonction de plusieurs critères : objectifs du cours, public scolaire enseigné et son propre savoir – faire en la matière enseignée. C’est pour cela que « le succès d'une traduction devra être mesuré au degré d'adéquation à la fonction du texte, au respect de sa finalité. On évaluera les erreurs dans le contexte plus large du message global, de la structure du texte et de l'effet sur le lecteur» [14]. Au cours de « Théorie et pratique de la traduction du texte spécialisé » que nous dispensons aux étudiants en mastère « Discours spécialisé. Terminologies. Traduction», nous avons proposé pour objectif spécifique instrumental applicatif l’acquisition, par l’apprenti traducteur, de la compétence traductive. Celle-ci est définie par Elisabeth Lavault comme « la capacité de répondre de manière satisfaisante à une demande de traduction faite par ce que j’appellerai un initiateur […] qui souhaite soit transmettre, soit comprendre un contenu, pour des raisons précises et dans une situation déterminée, et qui est prêt à payer ce service » [15]. Enseigner la compétence traductive représente notre réponse aux nécessites réelles de nos futurs traducteurs et de nos sociétés en voie de globalisation, en d’autres mots, une réponse aux besoins réels de communication. La compétence traductive aide les apprentis traducteurs à répondre aux besoins précis de ceux qui initient cette activité de traduction (initiateur, commanditaire, mandant), besoins qui sont ceux de communiquer un contenu à un public déterminé avec une finalité déterminée. Donc, pour mener au bout sa tâche de traduction, l’étudiant doit posséder (par une recherche approfondie) toutes les variables indispensables à l’appréciation de la situation d’énonciation du message à traduire. Une activité didactique de traduction véritable peut être réalisée en simulant les paramètres de la situation de communication, à savoir on précisera la source, la date de l’origine du texte, l’initiateur, le destinataire et on imaginera un but, fictif, mais plausible en vue de jalonner des points de repère pour sélectionner les formulations appropriées lors de la traduction. Le professeur n’est plus initiateur comme dans le cas des exercices de thème-version mais une sorte de reviseur.

353 Les apprentis traducteurs seront mis en situation de faire des traductions des textes scientifiques, professionnels, utilitaires, etc. qui sont riches pour l’enseignement de la traduction tant sur le palier des compétences linguistiques que sur celui de la formation professionnelle. La formation à la traduction spécialisée a quelque chose de particulier qui consiste en enseigner aux étudiants non pas un savoir mais un savoir faire. Les didacticiens se posent la question suivante: comment transférer la pratique professionnelle de la traduction en milieu pédagogique? La solution serait celle de simuler sélectivement, dans la classe de traduction, les conditions qui existent dans la pratique professionnelle. Au cours de l’activité de traduction le temps étant limité, les apprenants traducteurs ne pourront travailler que sur des extrais de textes ou des textes brefs. Mais pour une traduction réussie ils doivent avoir à leur disposition le texte entier ou s’il s’agit d’article de revue ils doivent lire le numéro complet de la revue. Avant de commencer la tâche de traduction nous demandons à nos étudiants « d’établir un profil du discours de départ, qui doit inclure, au minimum, les éléments suivants: caractéristiques de l’auteur (ou des auteurs), caractéristiques du (des) destinataire (s), relations entre l’auteur et le destinataire, circonstances de production et de réception du texte, intention, langue du texte, niveau de langue, genre de texte, etc. » [16]. Nous abordons la traduction du texte spécialisé non pas comme une activité de transcodage (par laquelle on peut obtenir des résultats convenables), mais comme une activité de « recodage » du message qui est possible après le décodage de l’énoncé de départ « il s’agit de passer non pas directement de la langue de départ à la langue d’arrivée, mais d’extraire le message de l’énoncé original, puis de le reformuler en langue d’arrivée » [17]. Cette démarche nous conduit à la stratégie de l’association de la langue cible avec la langue que l’apprenant connait déjà. Il s’agit d’amener l’apprenti traducteur à appréhender la langue étrangère de la même manière qu’il appréhende sa propre langue et à l’employer identiquement en tant qu’activité de communication. Ce sont des tâches didactiques qui s’intègrent au système de discours à discours (exercice suggéré par H. G. Widdowson, 1981 : 183) à savoir, on part d’un premier discours en langue cible et le deuxième discours est réalisé par l’étudiant-même par référence au premier. Toutes les activités didactiques accomplies entre les deux sont destinées à «contrôler et à établir les termes de cette référence, et ainsi à aider l’apprenant à transférer son interprétation, de son actualisation en réception (lire) à son actualisation en production (écrire) » [18]. Chaque type de tâche didactique représente pour l’étudiant une étape dans la progression du premier discours vers le second. Ce système de discours à discours est très profitable pour l’étudiant car il fournit, dans un cadre pédagogique, la garantie de la pertinence communicative de leurs activités langagières. Ce type de tâche didactique contraint les étudiants à opérer des choix dans les contenus sémantiques et de planifier leurs productions discursives à partir des effets mnésiques des processus de compréhension. Pour le traducteur, l’intelligibilité du message offre la garantie de leur statut de traducteur. Prenons l’exemple de la traduction d’un discours procédural : dans ce cas – là, compte tenu des contraintes de l’opération traduisante, le traducteur devra exécuter des choix à partir de la trame procédurale et selon son bagage cognitif disponible il regagnera les éléments informatifs les plus pertinents pour la reproduction / reformulation du message dans la langue d’arrivée. Pour transmettre le vouloir dire de l’auteur du texte, le traducteur d’un tel type de texte opérera à deux niveaux : un niveau global (l’ensemble des éléments qui constituent le processus d’utilisation du document) et un niveau local où seront traitées les instructions. La traduction du texte procédural est très ancrée dans la situation dans laquelle elle s’effectue et sa finalité fondamentale est celle de faciliter l’accomplissement d’actions. L’approche communicative dans l’enseignement des langues réhabilite la langue maternelle envisagée comme filtre qui donne accès su sens étranger. Les stratégies de la comparaison et de la traduction y sont acceptées pour faire réfléchir l’apprenant sur les systèmes des deux langues en question (roumain et français dans notre cas).

354 En conclusion, la reformulation du message d’un document authentique dans une autre langue-culture, par le biais de la traduction, n’est pas seulement linguistique, celle-ci devant avoir en vue obligatoirement : 9 le lecteur destinataire récepteur du message traduit (car le message original ne lui était pas initialement destiné) ; 9 la re-contextualisation sur divers paliers du message original: socioculturel, socio- historique, sociopolitique, etc. La confrontation entre les deux cultures, source et cible, à travers la traduction des documents authentiques représente une piste favorable pour développer chez l’apprenti traducteur la compétence communicative et interculturelle à condition de surpasser les emplois accidentels et de les faire entrer dans un programme d’enseignement bien établi.

Références bibliographiques [1] Qian, Yu. «Interculturalité et document authentiques en classe de FLE : Une expérience chinoise » Synergies Canada, No 2 (2010), http://synergies.lib.uoguelph.ca/article/viewArticle/1194 [2], [3], Aslim-Yetis, Veda. “Le document authentique : un exemple d’exploitation en classe de FLE” Synergies Canada, No 2 (2010) http://synergies.lib.uoguelph.ca/article/viewArticle/1173/1763 [4], [5], [6], Delhaye, O., Qu’appelle-t-on document authentique ? , 2003, http://gallika.net/spip.php?article42, page consultée le 3 mai 2011 [7], [13], M. Le Duc Quang, Réflexions théoriques pour une valorisation authentique des exercices de traduction en classe de langue, (cursus universitaire), http://refef.crifpe.ca/document/nhatrang/40%20%20LE%20Duc%20Quang- Hue.pdf, consulté le 3mai 2011 [8] Poiarkova Elena, La médiation comme une des composantes de la compétence communicative dans l’enseignement des langues vivantes étrangères, Laboratoire « Parole et Langage », Université Aix-Marseille I, France, http://cedill.free.fr/upload_files/184%20-%20cam.pdf [9] Delisle, Jean, L’analyse du discours comme méthode de traduction – Initiative à la traduction française de textes pragmatiques anglais, Théorie et pratique, coll. Cahiers de Traductologie, éd. de l’université d’Ottawa, Canada 1980, p.185. [11] Krastanka Bozhinova, Le document authentique en tant que support intégré dans un cours de français “de spécialité européenne” en contexte universitaire”, in Synergies, Canada, no.2 (2010) [12] Lavault, Elisabeth, Fonctions de la traduction en didactique des langues ; apprendre les langues en apprenant à traduire, coll. « Traductologie » n° 2, Didier Erudition, Paris 1985, 115 p. [14]Adab, J., Beverly, « Evaluer les traductions en fonction de la finalité des textes », in L’enseignement de la traduction et traduction dans l’enseignement, Sous la direction de Jean Delisle et Hannelore Lee-Jahnke Les Presses de 1'Universite d'Ottawa, 1997, pp.135- 127 http://books.google.com/books?id=2Ge8XCeruLQC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr#v=onepage&q&f=false [15] Lavault, Elisabeth, La traduction comme négociation, in Delisle J. et Hannelore Lee-Jahnke, Les Presses de 1'Universite d'Ottawa, 1997, p. 82 [16] Hannequin, Jean, Pour une pédagogie de la traduction inspirée de la pratique professionnelle in L’enseignement de la traduction et traduction dans l’enseignement, Sous la direction de Jean Delisle et Hannelore Lee-Jahnke Les Presses de 1'Universite d'Ottawa, 1997, p.102 [17] Gile, Daniel, La compréhension des énoncés spécialisés chez le traducteur : quelques réflexions, Meta : journal des traducteurs / Meta: Translators' Journal, vol. 31, n° 4, 1986, p. 364 http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/002906ar [18] Widdowson, H. G., Une approche communicative des langues, Collection Langue et apprentissage des langues, Hatier, CREDIF, 1981, Paris, p. 164

Bibliographie sélective Abry, D., (dir.) (2007). Le français sur objectifs spécifiques et la classe de langue. Paris : CLE International Conseil de l’Europe, CECR 2001, Cadre européen commun de référence pour les langues : apprendre, enseigner, évaluer. Paris : Les Éditions Didier Cuq, Jean-Pierre & Gruca, Isabelle (2003). Cours de didactique du français langue étrangère et seconde. Grenoble : Presses Universitaires de Grenoble. Delisle, Jean, L’analyse du discours comme méthode de traduction – Initiative à la traduction française de textes pragmatiques anglais, Théorie et pratique, coll. Cahiers de Traductologie, éd. de l’université d’Ottawa, Canada 1980, 282 p. Gile, Daniel, La compréhension des énoncés spécialisés chez le traducteur : quelques réflexions, Meta : journal des traducteurs / Meta: Translators' Journal, vol. 31, n° 4, 1986, p. 363-369, http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/002906ar Hurtado, Albir, Amparo, (1990), Notion de fidélité en traduction, coll. « Traductologie », Didier Erudition, 236 p. Lavault, Elisabeth, Fonctions de la traduction en didactique des langues ; apprendre les langues en apprenant à traduire, coll. « Traductologie » n° 2, Didier Erudition, Paris 1985, 115 p. Moirand, Sophie, (1990), Enseigner à communiquer en langue étrangère, Hachette, Paris Morlat, Jean-Marcel, Pour une approche communicative de l’enseignement du français en Turquie, http://www.edufle.net/Pour-une-approche-communicative-de , consulté le 11 mai 2011 Seleskovitch, Danica et Lederer Marianne, Interpréter pour traduire, coll. « Traductologie » n° 1, Didier Erudition 1986, 311 p. Widdowson, H. G., Une approche communicative des langues, Collection Langue et apprentissage des langues, Hatier, CREDIF, 1981, Paris

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Sites Internet consultés http://refef.crifpe.ca/document/nhatrang/40%20%20LE%20Duc%20Quang-Hue.pdf http://www.francparler.org/dossiers/lemeunier_quere2006.htm http://www.edufle.net/Pour-une-approche-communicative-de http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/002906ar

35 6

Recenzii

357

358 Eugen Simion, Ion Creangă. Cruzimile unui moralist jovial

Apărută în 2011 la editura Princeps Edit, cartea lui Eugen Simion despre Ion Creangă reprezintă, pentru critic, un act de onestitate intelectuală – se cuvenea să scrie o carte fundamentală despre acest clasic al literaturii romăne, de datorie morală împlinită dar şi, spre delectarea celor care recunosc amprenta stilistică specifică, eşafodajul argumentativ riguros şi armonia expresiei simioniene, un exerciţiu de virtuozitate critică. Demersul critic se constituie în urma unei barthesiene plăceri a textului pe care Eugen Simion o dirijează în sensul unui traseu interpretativ a cărui miză este actualitatea – sau actualizarea – scriiturii de secol XIX a unui scriitor reprezentativ pentru întreaga literatură română. Altfel spus, o lectură nouă şi, posibil, postmodernă, dar în mod cert stând la baza unui discurs dens, preocupat să arate atât etapele traseului hermeneutic în urma căruia rezultă o coerenţă anume a textelor şi a profilului auctorial pe care acestea îl construiesc, cât şi bucuria firească a (re)descoperirii unui univers de discurs inimitabil. Structura cărţii punctează, prin titlurile generos explicative ale capitolelor, componentele şi paşii grilei de analiză propuse. Totul începe cu o retrospectivă critică necesară, în cadrul căreia criticul aduce în discuţie modele de lectură cunoscute, clasicizate, unele dintre ele, ale operei lui Ion Creangă, cu insistenţă asupra Dicţionarului personajelor lui Ion Creangă, alcătuit de Valeriu Cristea, şi asupra interpretării ezoterice din Creangă şi creanga de aur, studiul lui Vasile Lovinescu. Tentat să încline spre oferta interpretativă a lui Valeriu Cristea, de care totuşi, se delimitează atunci când divergenţele de opinii sunt clare, Eugen Simion anunţă miza cărţii: raportul dintre ficţiune şi realitate în scrierile lui Creangă, apartenenţa Amintirilor din copilărie la genul de mare actualitate al autoficţiunii şi felul (sau felurile) în care opera îşi construieşte creatorul şi îi deleagă toate atributele şi funcţiile autorului empiric. Ca formulă literară, Ion Creangă sunt neîncadrabil. Jocul cu mai multe insturmente stilistice, retorice, persuasive, de construcţie a iluziei de real şi a aparenţei autobiografice este, în opinia criticului, una dintre trăsăturile fundamentale ale scrisului său. Armonia (aparent delicată, dacă nu de-a dreptul imposibilă) dintre o imago mundi de tip realist, efect al unei iluzii de real foarte puternice, schemele narative de sursă orală ale basmelor şi simbolurile fantastice incompatibile, în mod normal, cu formula realismului, este completată de expresia stilistică aparte, în care matricea limbajului ţărănesc se complică estetic, asigurând caracterul de unicat al discursului literar. Se adaugă, apoi, un profit multiplu faţetat al scriitorului – produs al discursurilor critice restauratoare, şi un personaj al Amintirilor din copilărie, a cărui autenticitate, susţinută de confuzia celor trei instanţe – autorul, naratorul şi personajul principal, produsă constant de text, este greu a fi pusă sub semnul întrebării. Destui critici au făcut-o, însă, demonstrând mecanismele textuale producătoare ale unei atât de verosimile iluzii de real. În ceea ce îl priveşte, Eugen Simion îşi concentrează atenţia asupra relativ neglijatei instanţe naratoriale şi asupra discursului acesteia, cărora li se datorează, crede criticul, amestecul inextricabil de stiluri, registre şi convenţii literare cu un efect estetic cert, îndelung verificat. Puţină deconstrucţie serveşte pentru a demonta, fie şi parţial, ingeniosul aparat textual a cărui productivitate semantică a luat de mult locul, prin eficienţa sa, acelui eşantion de realitate numit Humuleşti. Menit, printre altele, să dirijeze lectura, discursul naratorului presară, ici-acolo, pe parcursul naraţiunii, digresiuni non-narative şi deviază, astfel, încetineşte sau, uneori, provoacă rupturi în ordinea logico-semantică, la nivelul textului narativ şi al acţiunii. Aceste digresiuni funcţionează atât ca stimuli de lectură, accentuând plăcerea textului, cât şi ca ancraje permiţând corelarea planului verosimilităţii realiste cu cel al miraculosului. În termenii criticului, „Creangă este mare meşter în asemenea paranteze epice care încetinesc curgerea acţiunii, dar sunt cu folos pentru cititor pentru că parantezele particularizează spaţiul epic, ameninţat de abstracţiuni (scheme) care se repetă.” (p. 47) Dialogând, apoi, cu sine, (fals) certăreţ şi pur retoric, şi cu cititorul, luat părtaş la aventura narativă a facerii textului şi a (auto)ficţiunii, naratorul şi revendică o anumită autonomie textuală

359 care-i permite să (se) moralizeze, să se joace digresiv, să aibă păreri proprii, simpatii şi antipatii pentru personaje, într-un du-te-vino intra şi extradiegetic ce are drept efect, printre altele, „personalizarea basmului.” (p. 51) Dedulcit la plăcerea textului, criticul remarcă, încă o dată, efectul de autoritate al scriiturii literare asupra realităţii, şi al plăcerii spunerii asupra narativităţii - „Este, într-adevăr, un fel de fervoare a spunerii în Amintiri şi în basme, chiar şi atunci (cum este cazul basmelor) când ar trebui să primeze acţiunea, nu comentariile în marginea ei. « Povestariul » nu se privează însă, şi bine face, de o plăcere pe care ştie bine s-o lucreze, s-o împodobească, în fine, s-o expună cu pricepere şi haz.” (p. 52) Comentariile despre diavoli şi babele îndrăcite sunt o demonstraţie savuroasă în ea însăşi despre personajele negative care, vorba unui cunoscut personaj caragialian, au haz, în timp ce actorii pozitivi ai faptelor nu au. Iar Moş Nechifor Coţcariul, foarte abil utilizator al unei retorici a seducţiei ad-hoc, dispune de o veritabilă vocaţie creatoare – foloseşte, pe lângă un discurs seducător, şi unul calomniator, precum şi fabulosul – tot ca instrument de seducţie – face o serioasă concurenţă autorului. Altfel spus, o istorie de limbaj camuflează o ficţiune deosebit de eficientă în plan real - „o altă istorie, niciodată spusă pe faţă, ci numai insistent sugerată, deliberat ţinută în zona bănuielii.” (p. 64) În ceea ce priveşte Amintirile, criticul evaluează exegezele existente deja, cu o evidentă afinitate pentru monografia realizată de G. Calinescu, poate şi datorită similitudinii evidente la nivelul discursului : ambele, şi cel propriu-zis literar, şi cel metaliterar călinescian, construiesc un univers ficţional propriu, armonios, cu efecte estetice certe. Preocupat de facerea textului ca naraţiune – şi a naraţiunii ca facere a lumii – criticul distinge metodologic între naratorul-scriptor şi naratorul-personaj, pe fondul unei confesiuni care îşi creează, de fapt, naratorul. Ambele istorii – povestite de cei doi naratori – sunt exemplare. Cea a personajului – a copilăriei universale, cum i s-a spus deja, şi cea a aventurilor scripturale ale naratorului care „nu face decât să se îndoiască tot timpul de priceperea lui literară şi să ponegrească pe dublul său, personajul-narator, eroul unor întâmplări minunate.” Acesta este eroul de profunzime al Amintirilor, „ba elegiac, ba plin de vervă şi umor, care reinventează cu fantezia sa un copil şi o lume care nu mai există.” (p. 77) Iată, sintetic exprimată, formula narativă a Amintirilor, rod al unei deconstrucţii ingenioase, ca exerciţiu interpretativ, şi al unei imaginaţii epice care vede textul ca o sumă a proceselor narativ- semantice în derularea lor. Demonologia, babele îndrăcite – menţionate deja, precum şi cei şase tovarăşi de drum ai lui Harap-Alb, reţin de asemenea atenţia criticului care inventariază abaterile de la regulile literaturii. Instrumentele deriziunii sunt puternice şi eficiente. Parodiei din Ivan Turbincă i se adaugă demitizarea diavolilor şi pedepsirea exemplară a babelor – văzute, în conformitate cu morala sătească, drept forme agresive ale răului. În fine, povestile corozive îi dau criticului prilejul de a formula o serie de observaţii juste vizând aspecte ale scrisului lui Ion Creangă mai puţin analizate până acum. Aşa de pildă stilul, mai corect spus raportul dintre viteza narativă, digresiunile numeroase şi jocurile de limbaj construiesc un tipar stilistic unic în felul său : „Creangă dă totdeauna impresia, când îl citeşti, că nu cunoaşte sentimentul urgenţei. Şi, cum am arătat mai înainte, nu merge niciodată direct la subiect. Merge pe ocolite, stilul este ca mersul şarpelui, face bucle uriaşe fără a da însă sentimentul că povestirea trenează, că frazele sunt parazitare (este marea lui performanţă, este talentul lui superior de povestitor).” (p. 158) Ludic şi duplicitar, spunând ceva şi lăsând să se înţeleagă (şi) altceva, naratorul, mai ales în poveştile corosive, „se răsfaţă şi, diplomatic, se prosteşte ca să-ţi dovedească, atunci când îl citeşti, contrariul.” (p. 162) Concluziile studiului reunesc şi sintetizează particularităţile scriiturii şi componentele profilului auctorial pe care aceasta îl construieşte. Şi se încheie cu o parafrază după Goethe, care-l (re)situează pe Creangă între marile spirite creatoare ale canonului european: „Creangă nu-i un talent, ci aşa cum a spus Goethe despre Dante, Creangă este o natură.” (p. 173)

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