University „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iaşi Doctoral School of Philology Studies Andreea Grinea Mironescu PAUL ZARIFOPOL AND THE DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY IN INTERWAR ROMANIA Doctoral Dissertation Abstract Scientific coordinator, Prof. univ. dr. Lăcrămioara Petrescu Iaşi, 2012 This doctoral disertation is centered on the work of Paul Zarifopol (1874-1934) in relation with the themes of modernity which it often engages, either polemically, or discretely, in all the five volumes published by the author in his lifetime – From the Register of Delicate Ideas (1926), On Style (1928), Romanian Artists and Literary Ideas (1930), Attempts at Literary Precision (1931), For the Art of Literature (1934) – and in the texts that were posthumously anthologized by the editors. Although his prominence was not extraordinary in that period, Paul Zarifopol was an active participant to the cultural life of his time and to its circulation of ideas. Leaving aside the public projects he lead responsibly and diligently (the critical edition of I.L. Caragiale’s work and heading the „Royal Foundations Magazine”), his involvement in the project of interwar modernity consists in the type of literature he chose to write. Zarifopol was an eminent publicist – an essayist – writinf in the genre of academic journalism, a genre well illustrated among Romanian intellectuals in the pre-war or interwar periods. Our dissertation makes a connection between Paul Zarifopol’s work and the essay as a critical discourse which emerged in modernity and stayed organically connected to this cultural phenomenon. First of all, our dissertation is the only academic monograph dedicated to this author after 1989, in a time which saw the near completion of the editorial work which republished Paul Zarifopol’s essays (the last anthology, publishing the censored articles signed by 2 Zarifopol, appeared in 1992, while the following editions merely „rephrased” older editions). The originality of our critical initiative is not, however, a simple and traditional revisiting and reappraisal in the field of Romanian literary history. Our thesis combines research done with the help of classical instruments of our discipline – discussing Paul Zarifopol’s place in the national canon established by critics like E. Lovinescu or N. Manolescu, a critical analysis of the perception of the essay in literary histories, explorations of periodicals in order to find several previously unpublished articles, that are here presented in the final section, Annexes – with research methods borrowed from the fields of essay theory and theories of modernity. We have opted for another method for exploring Zarifopol’s work than those used by his contemporaries (E. Lovinescu, G. Călinescu) or his posterity (Ov.S. Crohmălniceanu, E. Simion, Ion Vlad, C. Trandafir, Mircea Muthu), who saw in Zarifopol an atypical literary critic, one who had failed, who lacked a system and a „historical method”. The fact that Paul Zarifopol chose for his interventions the form of the critical essay, a type of writing and thinking eminently modern, as demonstrated by Georg Lukács (1910), T.W. Adorno (1958) and Christian Schärf (1999) is not an accident, but a deliberate choice, decisive for a particular profile of his work. From the inception of its tradition with Montaigne, the essay is a genre which „reflects” the outer world, filtered by the critical thinking and the subjectivity of the essayist as a „responsible subject” (Schärf) 3 towards him/herself, engaged in the continuous adventure of modernity. Discussing it in connection with the essay genre – an option that presupposes a more „open” reading of his work – Paul Zarifopol’s essays are relevant not for their intrinsic value of a commentary on literature, even though this dimension isn’t entirely negligible. But read as a work on contemporaneity (one must not forget Zarifopol was a writer of his time, that he regularily surveys in the pages of big daily papers), it becomes a reflective surface, a document suited for the analysis of the forms of Romanian modernity, together with other canonic genres such as the novel, or with genres of intimacy, such as diary or autofiction. The first chapter, For an Explanation of Paul Zarifopol, enounces and verifies this hypothesis, proposing an analysis of Zarifopol’s work confronted with the question of modernity and investigating the „antimodernity” of his writing (the answer is developped in the fourth chapter). Is Paul Zarifopol an antimodern or, to be more precise, could he have been one? The answer to this question, as the term itself, is ambivalent. From an equivalent double perspective is also conceived the second chapter, entitled The place of Paul Zarifopol and dedicated to the writer’s life and to the reception of his work. Zarifopol was a cosmopolitan who spent his qouth before the First World War in the German Empire, where the „perfect” organization of living struck him as both comfortable and frightful. 4 This background opened for him wider perspectives in judging the phenomenon of modernity – wider than the „junimism” that he alegedly continued, as several critics later argued. His biological affiliation to the older, pre-war generation contrasts with the fact that he wrote his work as a daily response to the national and european postwar actuality (seen from the point of view of the writer after the first large scale war that definitively „disfigured” the face of the world). At last, the fragmentary form of his essays, many of which represent small monographs on a theme analyzed in detail is also a particularity which led to the isolation of the writer and his work in the „atypical” authors’ corner in Romanian literature. Of course, the atypical character will always raise the problem of a fixed referent, which defines it by exclusion. At this stage, we discussed critically not just the reception clichees around Paul Zarifopol (his scepticism, anticlasicism, aestheticism, „junimism” and others), but also the possibility to integrate an essayist in the „aesthetical canon” (in the terms of Sorin Alexandrescu) and in the tradition of literary criticism, observing the impropriety of the formula „essayistic criticism”, a self-contradictory phrase that features in all Romanian literary histories from the 1920s to 2008, when the last great such work, with „canonizing” value, appeared. The third chapter, Theories of the Essay. Paul Zarifopol and essayism discusses the theories on the essay, some requesting the annexation of this species of discourse to literature, as the fourth 5 literary genre (Ludwig Rohner, Karl Klaus, Dumitru Tiutiuca etc.), others, more recent, treating essay as an aspect of modern critical spirit (T.W. Adorno, Graham Good, Claire de Obaldia, Christian Schärf). Thus considered, the essay no longer represents a secondary discourse as opposed to a primary – artistic – one, but also a form of criticism aimed against „cultural artefacts” (Adorno), that it seeks to confront to their very concepts. In Adorno’s terms from Der Essay als Form, the essay is nothing other than „the critique of ideology”. This is also the meaning of phrases like „negative criticism” of „extreme polemicism” that were used by Zarifopol’s contemporaries against a writer who made his debut in a country at the confines of Europe, in the middle of a „crucial decade” (Z. Ornea) with a volume entitled From the Register of Delicate Ideas (1926). The fourth chapter, Paul Zarifopol and the Discourse of Modernity, focuses on this first published work which Zarifopol saw, as his introductions make clear, like a commentary on the postwar world and society and all their specific phenomena. Starting from contemporary theorists of modernity like Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Antoine Compagnon or, from Romania, Sorin Alexandrescu, but also other authors from the beginning of the 20th century, like Georg Simmel or Walter Benjamin, we showed, using as constant example Zarifopol’s essays, that modernity may be read as a puzzel, not only in reference with its past, but also as a simultaneour process of changing. Was Zarifopol a conservative or a champion of 6 the modern? As a watcher of his time, living and writing „on the edge of time” (a metaphor from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht), Zarifopol inevitably develops an ambivalent relationship with modernity. His scepticism towards the idea of progress blends with his optimism at the increasing specialisation of the humanistic disciplines (a reflection of the bourgeois Zarifopol’s nostalgia for the ancient trades), the artistic high modernism (marked by his adhesion to Picasso’s program) coexists with his belief in the necessity to „naturalize” culture, the enthusiasm for the emancipation of the opressed is accompanied with irony directed at the „fears” of the parvenu. But the central point of Zarifopol’s discourse on modernity is not the „junimist” examination of modernity; it is the study of man trying to understand what he is about to become. In his „furious” essays against the classics, which puzzled the whole exegesis, Zarifopol traces the crisis of modern man back to the „serene” (as seen retrospectively) time of French classicism, with a newly gained gravity which comes not from the field of social criticism, but from the „aesthetic critique of man” (as Zarifopol calls it), which is more than a moralizing discourse. Finally, the fifth chapter of our thesis, For Art and Literature, discusses the way in which the essay approaches literary works, exposing Zarifopol’s critical thinking on literature. Paul Zarifopol pleads not for an exclusively „technical” criticism of literature, but for a „suspicious” reading, that today might be called deconstructivist, of 7 the authors dealt with. But his suspicious reading does not end here. The „aesthetic critique” that Zarifopol talks about in several of his interventions may be associated with what Graham Good called „aesthetic knowledge”, describing the essayistic experience: the observing subject and the object of his cognition organize each other spontaneously, but only in a fragmentary, provisory manner, so that no system may be errected from their „configurations”.