The Europe across the Ocean. On the Power of Literature for Exiled Romanian Comparatists

Adriana STAN* Keywords: exile; communism; comparative literature; transnationality; Eastern Europe

What could be referred to as the migration of academics is an area less explored than the fruitful topic of (purely) literary exile, due to a lack of leads for analysis otherwise offered by fiction proper and by the various ins and outs of literary creativity. After all, during the second half of the 20th century, intellectual nomadism became the norm, rather than a case that would draw the researcher’s attention. Nevertheless, the post-war period witnessed the internationalization of academic criticism, especially once North America became the epicenter of humanist studies, taking the umbilical position that Paris had enjoyed in literary modernism. As brilliantly explained by Pascale Casanova (2004), the literary center generates innovation, but also attracts migration. Indeed, partially responsible for the academic centrality of North America or, at the very least, for the vitality of critical debates across the Atlantic was the openness of universities there – an openness greater than that of universities in Europe – towards foreigners, exiles, and all kinds of minorities. This came as an addition to the more general fact that “America is likely the only place in the world where everyone comes from someplace else” (Spiridon 2011: 7). Particularly after 1970, the migration of intellectuals from all over the world to American universities led to “the denationalization of the great academic debates and the theorization of exile and miscegenation as a political condition of the contemporary subject” (Cusset 2008: 294). Within the vibrant network of diasporas in North America, the contribution of Eastern Europe1 did not necessarily stand out towards the end of the 20th century, when non-European intellectuals, especially from former colonies, enjoyed more visibility. Europeans, however, brought a decisive contribution to literary studies in North America, not only through the British channels of New Criticism, but particularly through their post-war input, from Roman Jakobson to the Swiss-Belgians of the Yale School. This is not to mention French poststructuralists, who found across the Ocean a public even more welcoming than in their own country.

* “Sextil Pușcariu” Institute of Linguistics and Literary History – Romanian Academy, Cluj- Napoca, . 1 The several waves of Polish, Slovak or Hungarian migrants before 1900 blend into the whole of American society, being triggered by and leading to different phenomena than those specific to the intellectual migration.

377 Adriana STAN The issue of East-European exile, together with the more pressing subject of postcolonialism, was partially rekindled against the background of the war in former . However, the academic debates of the 1990s brought about the perspectives of a transnational literary space in the larger framework of multiculturalism. Against the parameters for international mobility proposed by these theories, exile appeared to be natural, rather than an exceptional case. This made the concept lose part of its traumatic dimension which had accompanied exile, first during modernism, then in the context of European totalitarian regimes. For the theorists of transnational space, exile exemplified the relativity of the notion of belonging to a homogeneous nation, but also the innate cosmopolitan identity of exiled writers. This issue is discussed, among others, by Susan Suleiman (1998), herself a Hungarian-born Professor at Harvard University, concerning the cases of Eastern European exiles such as Victor Shklovsky, Joseph Brodsky, György Lukács, and Mikhail Bakhtin. They would remain representative of a larger phenomenon of intellectual migration, which would serve as another argument to critique nationalist perspectives in the study of humanities. Similarly, Pascale Casanova analyzed the literature of “foreigners from the small nations of Europe” (of which Emil Cioran, Milan Kundera, and Danilo Kiš were privileged examples) in relation to the system centered in Paris, a city which became a hinterland for literary emigration due to its ability to assimilate innovations from the fringes (Casanova 2004: 175–220). Marcel Corniş-Pope, the main cartographer of literatures of Central and Eastern Europe together with John Neubauer (see Corniș-Pope, Neubauer 2004–2010), relativized in a postmodern fashion the nation’s hermeneutic and identity functions in the given region: The interplay between national and Diasporic, local and global paradigms, calls into question any organic or totalizing concept of East-Central European literary and cultural evolution. The contours of this cultural region remain variable; always open to revision, to alternative mappings (Corniş-Pope, apud Török 2009: 585). In a similar manner, other researchers point out that the image of Eastern European countries constructed in the West by exile writers and artists “influences not only the Western consciousness, but also the very national identities and cultural constructs of the countries of these exiles” (Rădulescu 2001: 10). Several years earlier, Ewa Thompson had painted an even more optimistic picture, referring to the manifest “advantages” of exile in the cases of Czesław Miłos, Josef Skvorecky, or Milan Kundera, who were not only successfully integrated in their host cultures, but who also wrote their best works against the effervescence of Occidental cultural centres, where they brought to attention “the other Europe” from whence they had come (Thompson 1989: 505). The case I explore in the present paper – regarding the emigration of Toma Pavel, Virgil Nemoianu, and Matei Călinescu to North America – confirms some of the hypotheses mentioned thus far, but overturns others. On the one hand, the case accommodates a transnational vision in as much as literary theory and comparative literature are, by definition, international fields of debate. On the other hand, the national context, provided by the Romanian communism of the 1950s and 1960s, shapes and ultimately grounds most of the intellectual choices (sooner and) later

378 The Europe across the Ocean. On the Power of Literature for Exiled... made by Pavel, Nemoianu and Călinescu. Such choices survive and persist in the American environment, rather than result from it in any way. The emigration of literary scholars followed other similar waves in Romanian literary history – such as the emigration of the Generation of ’27 or of the avant- garde – and occurred, in turn, in several stages: the inter-war stage (Basil Munteanu, Al. Ciorănescu), that of the Sixties Generation (Pavel, Nemoianu, Călinescu), followed by that of the Eighties Generation (Marcel Corniş-Pope, Mihai Spăriosu, Christian Moraru), and still counting. Of course, the Sixties wave also included Sorin Alexandrescu, future Professor in Amsterdam, and linguist Sanda Golopenţia, who moved to the States, but I will focus here on Pavel, Călinescu, and Nemoianu because the North American environment allows, in their case, the formulation of clearer distinctions regarding the European reference model. Toma Pavel, Matei Călinescu, and Virgil Nemoianu left Romania between 1969 and 1975, at a time when the communist regime had granted a “thaw”, but was evolving towards another “freeze”. They emigrated during the inaugural moments of their careers, when they were only beginning to confirm their critical status in Romania through published books, but before being effectively assimilated to the Romanian literary criticism of the Sixties. Certainly, the names of these authors continued to appear after their post-exile excommunication, as Romanian critics continued to quote, more or less clandestinely, already famous books like Călinescu’s The Modern Concept of Poetry or Nemoianu’s Taming . Yet this did not invalidate their status as outsiders, which, to a certain extent, remained applicable even after 1990. Although the mentioned authors, together with Sorin Alexandrescu, had similar intellectual roots, critical views and methodological options, they initially occupied uneven positions in the establishment of Romanian criticism. Matei Călinescu was the most prominent in this respect thanks to his constant activity as a literary reviewer and to his implication in the post-1964 battle for the aesthetic, both of which foreshadowed a career similar to that of Nicolae Manolescu. The principles advocated by the young critic were compatible with the literary mainstream of the Romanian Sixties, since he supported, in G. Călinescu’s fashion, the creative dimension of criticism. Nevertheless, the latter half of the 1960s found Matei Călinescu, who was, at the time, completing his PhD thesis, trying to find his place within a critical establishment that had already begun to select its local celebrities. This evolution was marked, for instance, by his involvement, together with the circle of the journal Family, in the plea for a wider understanding of the aesthetic, and was, furthermore, most notable in the studies he published after 1970 – The Modern Concept of Poetry and European Classicism. Here, Matei Călinescu reconfigured his entire critical registry, by relativizing the text-focused criticism fashionable in the Sixties in favor of a more distant reading, which was typical of his master, , and which was both embedded in the history of ideas and oriented towards an archaeology of literary notions. If Matei Călinescu was, for a while, one of the notable literary reviewers of his time, Virgil Nemoianu and especially Toma Pavel did not adjust to the critical archetype epitomized by Nicolae Manolescu, if only because they did not write reviews, but chose, at most, to publish essays during the 1960s. Of course, their

379 Adriana STAN initiatives – in press or in research, and thus including those of the linguist Pavel – targeted literary criticism, which was the central, coalescing discourse in Romanian culture during national-communism. Yet their critical programme developed from an extraterritorial position. On the one hand, the young authors employed primarily Occidental references (especially since Nemoianu and Călinescu were lecturers at English and Comparative Literature departments at the University of ). On the other hand, their comparative, cultural, and philosophical inclinations drew them outside the typical space of the Romanian criticism of the Sixties, where the critic met the text directly and was, ideally, undisturbed by anything or anyone else. Given these circumstances and the lack of affinities with many of their peers, Matei Călinescu and Virgil Nemoianu, who spent slightly more time in Romania than Toma Pavel, were already one step outside of Romanian criticism, when the opportunity arrived for them to move to North America. It was to be expected that the move itself would not result in a major cultural shock for them. Indeed, in a 1997 letter to G. Dimisianu, Matei Călinescu confessed: Following 1973, when I left Romania, I began to feel “at home” in the Comparative Literature department of a great American university […]. I did not experience a cultural shock, but rather felt a form of continuity (Călinescu 1997: 25). The successful transition was likely ensured by Pavel, Nemoianu and Călinescu’s aptitude for theory and by their mix of comparative thought and poetics, the very features which rendered them marginal within Romanian criticism of the 1960s. In a way, even before they emigrated, Pavel, Călinescu, and Nemoianu tended towards an Occident that they had built for themselves, against the Soviet background of their youth, as an alternative cultural imaginary, which could be partially described through the theory of self-colonization2. Recent researchers argued that, in communist Eastern Europe, self-colonization implied the affiliation of intellectual elites to symbols or values specific to Occidental culture as a defensive reaction to Soviet cultural colonization. This tendency which made “writers from Warsaw, Prague, Belgrad, or Bucharest know more about Paris than about neighbouring capital cities” (Csaba Kiss, apud Neubauer 2009: 16), was partially triggered by the Soviet strategy of discouraging relationships between sister nations, then later enhanced by the ethnocentric policies inaugurated in post-Stalinist governments from Eastern Europe. At any rate, the imprints of this counter-cultural (but also pro-cultural) imaginary modelled after the Occident can be traced from Toma Pavel’s autobiographical novel The Persian Mirror, from the Goethean shadow of Nemoianu’s memoirs, from “the hunger for books” described by Matei Călinescu and Ion Vianu in their wonderful Memories in Dialogue. Based on their cases, Monica Spiridon was right to oppose mostly traumatic interpretations of exile, by underlining its intellectual and moral advantages, its form of “therapy for the

2 “Enforced cultural colonization might be resisted by a voluntary self-colonization with a different culture. An often quoted example is the resistance of Soviet influence to the adoption of elements of Western culture by the inhabitants of the satellite countries or even Russians, for example by listening to British and American music or watching American films” (Mazierska, Kristensen et alii 2014: 11).

380 The Europe across the Ocean. On the Power of Literature for Exiled... cultural schizophrenia imposed by communism” (Spiridon 2004: 152). Of course, exile provided Călinescu, Nemoianu and Pavel with symbolic, but also with practical benefits and practical interpretive tools. Matei Călinescu’s hypotheses on rereading, Nemoianu’s thesis on the idyllic, and Toma Pavel’s shift from structuralism to issues of referentiality, all emerged, in more or less incipient stages, in their works elaborated in Romania, towards the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. But it is highly unlikely that such intuitions would have come to fruition and resulted in their great studies we know today, had the authors stayed in communist Romania, where both the inhibitive political climate and the text-focused Romanian criticism discouraged the speculative openness of comparative literature. On the other hand, one must not forget that Pavel, Nemoianu and Călinescu encountered a foreign epistemological climate in North America, where, as I had mentioned earlier in this paper, the study of the humanities was experiencing profound revolutions. The post-1970 import of French Theory had consequences that were even more spectacular than in France, as they triggered far-reaching debates upon identity, minorities, postcolonialism, the reformation of school curricula, and more. Cultural studies later disseminated from the stem of French Theory further relativized the traditional autonomous concept of Literature, with several political ramifications. Romanian intellectuals encountered particular difficulty in accepting Neo-Marxism, which was highly fashionable in American universities at the time. They confess as much after 1990, when they invoke, for example, the “cynicism” of Occidental leftists (who ignored Eastern of communism) or the “traumatic” feeling they had experienced when asked to hold lectures on Marxism. As Virgil Nemoianu’s essays published in the 2000s have shown, the famed comparatist managed to preserve his ideological affiliation to what he called “the centrist space of inter-war Romania” (Nemoianu 2001: 285), in spite of opposing tendencies he encountered in Occidental academia. An Eastern intellectual’s reticence to any Marxist-derived theories seems natural, given the background of post-war communism. Indeed, against the backdrop of American academia at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, which was swept by feminism, Neo-Marxism, deconstructivism, New-Historicism, cultural, and postcolonial studies, Nemoianu, Călinescu, and Pavel appear to have written their studies from within the eye of the storm, where the situation was relatively calm. Of course, their exile studies were certainly enriched by significant additions owing to an American intellectual space (for instance, in Matei Călinescu’s understanding of alterity, or Nemoianu’s assessment of the secondary). However, especially from the second part of the 1980s, their work highlights a shared, non-American view upon the function of art within society and its role for the individual. Călinescu’s The Five Faces of , Nemoianu’s A Theory of the Secondary, and Pavel’s Fictional Worlds discuss the relationships between artistic creation and the social imaginary, with its blend of scientific, philosophical, and political discourses. All three authors ultimately ascribe to art a singular position in the dynamic of a culture: as a form of the “secondary”, literature recovers that which the “primary” course leaves out; moreover, “fiction” contains its own, specific cognitive power, which cannot be reduced to language and which is not comparable

381 Adriana STAN to other types of “real discourse”. Thus, literature is granted privileges that cultural studies and American anti-essentialism tended to subtract from it at the time. The same line of argument could be used to explain the Romanian comparatists’ sympathy for classicism, romanticism, and modernism, which was logically correlated with their dislike for postmodernism and a corresponding discomfort towards the postmodern overturning of values. The idea that literature acts in the moral interest of the human being permeates their studies about rereading, the secondary, fictionality or the novel, standing apart from the theoretical mainstream of American academia of the late 1980s. In itself, this was an idea with deep European roots, which could be identified in the classicism preferred by Toma Pavel, in the Mitteleuropean Romanticism recovered by Virgil Nemoianu, or in the idealist aesthetics of Tudor Vianu, Matei Călinescu’s mentor. Therefore, Romanian comparatists placed literature within a larger, almost anthropological “regime of relevance”3. This reconfirmed the type of thinking they were educated in, a space not entirely overlapped with the Romanian national culture, because it was projected and built with bookish means, but a space whose perspectives were nevertheless gradually reclaimed in the foreign North American culture. In The World, the Text and the Critic, Edward Said considers the circumstances against which Erich Auerbach wrote his famous Mimesis. Auerbach was a Jew in Nazi Germany, as well as a specialist in the study of the romance of the medieval period and the Renaissance. During the war, he was a refugee in Istanbul, where local libraries were not equipped with European books and international communication was blocked. According to Said, this drastic form of extra-European exile not only motivated, but actually made possible the imposing construction of Mimesis: In other words, the book owed its existence to the very fact of Oriental, non- Occidental exile and homelessness. And if this is so, then Mimesis itself is not, as it has so frequently been taken to be, only a massive reaffirmation of the Western cultural tradition, but also a work built upon a critically important alienation from it, a work whose conditions and circumstances of existence are not immediately derived from the culture it describes with such extraordinary insight and brilliance but built rather on an agonizing distance from it (Said 1983: 8). Auerbach himself formulated the matter even more eloquently in “Philologie der Weltliteratur”: The most priceless and indispensable part of a philologist’s heritage is still his own nation’s culture and language. Only when he is first separated from this heritage, however, and then transcends it does it become truly effective (Auerbach, apud Said 1983: 7). As they grew and shaped their vision in Romania of the late 1950s and the 1960s, Toma Pavel, Virgil Nemoianu and Matei Călinescu belonged less to a strictly national culture, which was then confined both by political taboos, and by a limiting critical tradition, than to a multicultural space they projected through reading,

3 The concept is forged and traced in the history of literatures from Central and Eastern Europe by Tihanov 2004: 61–81.

382 The Europe across the Ocean. On the Power of Literature for Exiled... research and implicit (anti)ideological views. However, only after they settled far from communist Romania, they began to slowly unravel their roots, by recovering that central position of literature which only Central and Eastern European cultures could ascribe. Bibliography

Casanova 2004: Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Călinescu 1997: Matei Călinescu, Scrisoare către G. Dimisianu, 21 noiembrie 1997 [Letter to G. Dimisianu, 21st November 1997], in “România literară”, no. 51–52, p. 25. Călinescu 2005: Matei Călinescu, Cinci feţe ale modernităţii: modernism, avangardă, decadenţă, kitsch, postmodernism [Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant- garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism], ediţia a 2-a, revăzută şi adăugită, traducere de Tatiana Pătrulescu şi Radu Ţurcanu, traducerea textelor din Addenda de Mona Antohi, postfaţă de Mircea Martin, Iaşi, Polirom. Călinescu, Vianu 1994: Matei Călinescu, Ion Vianu, Amintiri în dialog [Memories in Dialogue], Bucureşti, Litera. Cornis-Pope, Neubauer 2004–2010: Marcel Cornis-Pope, John Neubauer (eds.), History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, volumes 1–4, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John Benjamins. Cusset 2008: François Cusset, French Theory. How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the , translated by Jeff Fort, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Mazierska, Kristensen et alii 2014: Ewa Mazierska, Lars Kristensen, and Eva Näripea, “Introduction. Postcolonial Theory and the Postcommunist World”, in idem (eds.), Post-Colonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema. Portraying Neighbours On- Screen, London, New York, I.B. Tauris, p. 1–29. Neubauer 2009: John Neubauer, “Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century”, in John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (eds.), The Exile and Return of Writers from East- Central Europe. A Compendium, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, p. 4–96. Nemoianu 1997: Virgil Nemoianu, O teorie a secundarului: literatură, progres şi reacţiune [A Theory of the Secondary: Literature, Progress and Reaction], traducere de Livia Câmpeanu Szász, Bucureşti, Univers. Nemoianu 2001: Virgil Nemoianu, Tradiţie şi libertate [Tradition and Freedom], Bucureşti, Curtea Veche. Pavel 1992: Toma Pavel, Lumi ficţionale [Fictional Worlds], traducere de Maria Mociorniţa, prefaţă de Paul Cornea, Bucureşti, Minerva. Rădulescu 2001: Domnica Rădulescu (ed.) Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern European Voices, Lanham, Lexington Books. Said 1983: Edward G. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Spiridon 2001: Monica Spiridon, Europa centrală de peste Ocean. Exil şi construcţie identitară [The Central Europe beyond the Ocean. Exile and Identity Construction], Craiova, Scrisul Românesc. Spiridon 2004: Monica Spiridon, Les dillemes de l’identité aux confins de l’Europe. Le cas roumain, Paris, L’Harmattan. Suleiman 1998: Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Introduction”, in idem (ed.) Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, Durham, Duke University Press, p. 1–6.

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Tihanov 2004: Galin Tihanov, Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?), in “Common Knowledge”, vol. 10, no. 1, p. 61–81. Thompson 1989: Ewa M. Thompson, The Writer in Exile: The Good Years, in “Slavic and East European Journal”, vol. 33, no. 4, p. 499–515. Török 2009: Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, “Instead of Conclusion: East Central Literary Exile and its Representation”, in John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (eds.), The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe. A Compendium, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, p. 579–591. Abstract

The paper addresses the post-war migration of Eastern European intellectuals, by examining the 1969-1975 relocation of Romanian-born comparatists (Thomas Pavel, Matei Călinescu, Virgil Nemoianu) from a sealed, peripheric socialist culture, to North America, the epicenter of humanities research and an international migratory crossroads. Against the common view of exile as traumatic displacement, I argue that uprootedness enables Pavel, Călinescu and Nemoianu to fulfil their comparatist vocation, at distance from both their politically confined home culture, and the traditionally text-centric Romanian criticism. Further, I explore the Romanian comparatists’ European mindscape that survived their cultural-geographical shift. Forged in the aftermath of Romanian culture’s Soviet colonization, that mindscape affiliated to Western Europe’s critical-literary canon, and to Mitteleuropean (philosophical, societal) organicism. It authorized a core belief in the moral, beyond-ideologies relevance of literature, which would inform all their American work (upon fictional worlds, rereading, modernity, Romanticism). In addition to that, I correlate Pavel, Călinescu and Nemoianu’s political thought, more manifest from the 90s, to Eastern European intelligentsia’s anticommunism, which opposed an ideally cosmopolitan Europe and a self-centered subject to socialist communitarianism and nationalism.

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