Romanian Literature Intoday'sworld

Journal of World Literature 3 (2018) 1–9

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Romanian Literature in Today’s World Introduction

Delia Ungureanu University of Bucharest and Harvard University [email protected]

Thomas Pavel University of Chicago [email protected]

What remains of a literature written and published for nearly half a century under a dictatorial regime? Will it turn out to be just a “‘parenthesis’ in history, meaningless in the future and unintelligible to anyone who did not live it”? So asks a major Romanian comparatist who chose exile in 1973, Matei Călinescu, quoting literary critic Alexandru George’s open letter to another preeminent figure of Romanian exile, Norman Manea. “What will last, indeed, of so many works written precisely to last, to bypass the misery and shame of an immediate nightmarish history?” (247). And how will this totalitarian legacy affect the present-day literature and its circulation and reception on the international market today? Călinescu concludes his 1991 article by placing his bet on “the young generation of Romanians, less affected by the Ceaușescu legacy than their parents,” a generation that is “spontaneously inclined toward Europe, democracy and pluralism,” and includes “the young writers who call themselves ‘postmodern.’” (248). Quoting The Levant, a major epic in verse by Mircea Cărtărescu, the lead- ing figure of this generation, Călinescu trusts that “It is on such trends—which might well coalesce into a major new style equaling in importance the phe- nomenon of magical realism of the last forty years or so—that one could base one’s fondest hopes for the cultural future of Romania and of the newly liber- ated Eastern Europe as a whole” (248). Călinescu was right to think so. The ’80s generation meant a cultural turn to the American model mixed with an interest in the “rive gauche French culture” (367) as Mircea Cărtărescu writes in his volume Romanian Postmodernism, the theoretical manifesto of this generation signed by its leader. Characterized by “light orality,” “irony and humor,” the ’80s poetry is “playful” and uses an

“artificial cartoonish imagism … The low, pop cultural style was constantly undermined by a superimposed layer of ‘a comedy of literature’ that brought metatextual echoes from strangely distorted and totally unexpected literary and cultural sources,” including “the rediscovery … of the pure pleasure of reading” (Cărtărescu 371). These characteristics are displayed in the collective debut volume Aercudiamante (DiamondsintheAir, 1981) that brought together four major poets: Mircea Cărtărescu, Traian T. Coșovei, Florin Iaru, and Ion Stratan. The ’80s poetry created “a fascinating world (which any Romanian dreamed about in the ’80s), much more colorful than the real world around … freed from the prejudice of reflecting reality” (Cărtărescu 374).The merit of this generation lies in putting the local Balkanism on the world literary map by reframing it through the English-language poetry: “The fascination of the ’80s generation poetry comes from its organic continuity with the Wallachian poetry … com- bined with the contemporary Anglo-Saxon poetry, something that opened a whole new perspective for the initial Balkanism of the ’80s poetry” (Cărtărescu 375). “Reading the Beat Generation authors and especially Ginsberg … but also Corso, Ferlinghetti and Snyder” made the poetry of the ’80s generation “torren- tial, epic, endless” (374). “Next to Aer cu diamante [Diamonds in the Air], the collective volume of short stories Desant ’83 [’83 Descent] defines a new artistic attitude and a new mode of entering the literary arena. Commando, squad, invasion—terms used by the literary critics or by the ’80s writers to define themselves—are military terms that show discipline, solidarity and aggressiveness” (Cărtărescu 404). Some of the most prominent fiction writers include Mircea Nedelciu, Gheorghe Crăciun, Ioan Groșan, Cristian Teodorescu, Sorin Preda, Alexandru Vlad, Viorel Marineasa, and Daniel Vighi. The ’80s generation preferred short fiction to the novel, and its main devices were: “denouncing the imaginative activity as illusory,” “presenting the countless possibilities for transforming reality into fiction,” “ironic distance,” “intellectual humor,” “textualism,” and “texistence” as textualizing one’s existence (Cărtărescu 405), “the picturesque kitsch,” “hallucinatory hyperrealism,” “textual microrealism” (408), “exposed authorial devices, the fragmentary, self-referentiality,” “orality, grotesque, and kitsch” as well as “parody” and “humor” (412). The local version of Romanian postmodernism renegotiated the boundaries of reality in the worst decade of the Communist regime when Ceaușescu’s dictatorship tried to monopolize and distort what passed for reality and helped Romanian literature step into the post-1989 world better prepared for a real cultural dialogue. Matei Călinescu’s question is equally important today if we wish to under- stand the background of contemporary Romanian literature. Spanning a his-

Journal of World Literature 3 (2018) 1–9