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BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS Mircea Martin. G. C�linescu �"complexele"i literaturii romane. Bucure�ti:Albatros, 1981. 258 pp. Eugen Negrici. Expresivitatea involuntara. Bucuresti: Cartea Româneosca, 1977. Eugen Negrici. Figura spiritului creator. Bucure�ti:Cartea Româneosca, 1978. LiviusCiocarlie. Mari coresponden�e.Bucure �ti:Cartea Româneosca, 1981. 274 pp. An interesting turning point is noticeable in Romanian criticism at the beginningof the 1980s. It is one that affects or will affect the deeper structures of literature, beyond the annoying static provided in the last ten years or so by increased political and ad- ministrative interferences. The changes now foreshadowed may well prove to be dur- able and significant. To explain them, a certain perspective is needed. Romanian criticism in a modern sense was established only in the 1860s by the work of Titu Maiorescu, who had been deeply influenced by Schopenhauer's aesthetic, as well as by English Victorian ideology. His conception of the autonomy of art was consolidated during his long polemic against the Marxist sociologist, C. Dobhogeanu- Gherea, during the 1880s and continued to dominate the intellectual and literary judg- ments of the country until after World War II, despite sporadic opposition from nation- alist and radical sociologists. Indeed, around 1940, Eugen Lovinescu believed he could write a history of Romanian criticism organized as a succession of post-Maiorescu generations and of variations upon the theme established by him. Lovinescu himself, together with his somewhat younger contemporary, George Calinescu (and often in opposition to him) developed the most influential and longstanding modification of the Maiorescu paradigm. They took advantage of the notable scholarly growth between 1870 and 1940 (to which both of them were prominent contributors). They allotted more space in their theories to historical, national, and particularly social factors. Most important .they introduced elements of impressionism,modern sensibility and taste, as well as subjectivity which made their critical discourse often fascinating, provocative, and intellectually stimulating. This modified model of aesthetic autonomy proved to be serviceable and resilient; it survived almost intact the massive onslaught of primitive "socialist realism" imposed by the cultural dictatorship of the 1950s. As soon as a certain degree of cultural normality was re-establishedaround 1962, Romanian criticism reverted to the approaches inherent in the Lovinescu-CaIinescumodel. (The point was made cogently by Nicolae Manolescu in Convorbinic literature, No. 8 [1983J. It is interesting that even consistently Marxist critics such as Ovidiu Cr6hmalniceanu or Paul Georgescu felt impelled to present their insights embedded in the kind of discourse patterns elaborated ny Lovinescu and Cà1inescu;I think this is the most telling evidence of their attractiveness. The most creative of the Romanian critics of the 1960s and 1970s, for instance Negoitescu and Manolescu, combined this tradition with elements of archetypal criticism, with the kind of deconstruction that we associate with Bloom or the later Barthes, as well as with the phenomenology of consciousness derived from the Geneva critics. Their exegesses, based upon this combination, belong to the best ever written in Romanian criticism and are likely to surviveas examples of sophisticated _ and complex interpretation. Nevertheless, they stand as the last flowering of a remark- able tradition, more than as figures directed towards the future. A new direction began to emerge in Romanian letters approximately around 1975. It was not entirely without precedent. In 1962, under the guidance of prominent elderly scholars (Rosetti, Vianu, M. Pop), the Circle of Stylistics and Poetics of Bucharest pooled together the rescources of several institutes and departments in fields such as 85 Comparative Literature, Linguistics and Poetics, Anthropology, and Mathematical Po- etics. A good many of the most gifted among this group soon left the country and they now work in Western Europe and North America. It may be said that many of them had been attracted toward more rigorous and scientific methods of literary analysis because they felt they could thus escape the political pressuresof the regime, which at that time still exerted a deadening control over literary criticism. An equally important motive must have been the desire of this younger generation of 1960 to change academic re- search and teaching into an alternative area to essayistic reviewingand thus challenge the traditional supremacy of the latter in Romanian intellectual life; universities and institutes were supposed to become places not of application and routine, but of creative initiative and serious intellectual endeavor. It may safely assumed that the renewal of these efforts on a broader scale after 1975 had some similar motivations. Ideological conformity became again an issue in the 1970s and the need for a scientific protection of literary research gained more urgency. Liter- ary investigation in university departments and institutes beyond sheer philological history and manuscript work requires its own methods. Additionally, the structures of Western intellectual life (American, French, English, German) exerted a clear influence. The location of serious critical debate inside academic boundaries and its subjection to academic constraints and controls is seen by many as a more desirable and efficient modern way of managing intellectual life. In fact a number of the traditionalists them- selves do hold academic positions (Manolescu,Crohmalniceanu, Simion, and a number of others). A certain impact was also exerted by the fact that in the last few years works of intellectual worth and stimulation came from individuals not involved in journal essayismand reviewing(Paul Cornea, A. Ornea). The books here reviewed do not exhaust, and perhaps do not even illustrate ade- quately, the new wave that is likely to change rather radically the scene of Romanian criticism. Mircea Martin is a relatively young critic and in many ways a transitional figure. He was close to N. Manolescu and was deeply influenced by French and Swiss criticism, about which he published a good book severalyears ago. His practical criticism was moderately influential fifteen years ago in student newspapers but has been since discontinued. The present book (perhaps the first of several volumes, as its preface seems to suggest) is coming to terms with the towering father figure of George Calinescu. It is a thorough analysis concentrated chiefly on the latter's history of Romanian liter- ature. However its essential contribution is methodological: Martin does not deal pri- marily with Calinescu's esthetics, or his style, or his criticism: rather he tries to decipher the cultural philosophy hidden in and behind the book. Martin argues that far from being a mere aestheticist, Calinescu had projected an image of Romanian culture as an original and qualified response to the perennial conflict between Westernizers and nativists in East European intellectual debate. According to this view, Calinescu had tried to sidestep the opposition by setting up Romanian literature as a valid alternative and analogy (not an antithesis) to Western developments; likewise, he tried actually to present the readers with an artistic object (the history) rather than engage in polemics. My purpose here is not to assess the merits of Martin's conclusions but rather to draw attention to the separation from Calinescu's tradition implicit in a type of judgment that avoids his declared purposes and that applies to him a semantics of suspicion, even when its results are highly laudatory. A similar procedure can be recognized in the work of Eugen Negrici. Essentially he tries to justify the criticism with a deconstructionist slant that the previous generation had practiced: freedom of interpretation, "unfaithful" readings, "creative" criticism. However his arguments are those of a tough-minded semanticist, appealing to Umberto Eco and any number of theoreticians of ambiguity, with Valery providing a philosophical background. Negrici claims that a literary text has beyond its intentional structures an .

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