Romanian Literature as World Literature

Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, Andrei Terian

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501327926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Approaching Romanian literature as world literature, this book is a critical-theoretical manifesto that places its object at the crossroads of empires, regions, and influences and draws conclusions whose relevance extends beyond the Romanian, Romance, and East European cultural systems. This "intersectional" revisiting of Romanian literature is organized into three parts. Opening with a fresh look at the literary ideology of Romania's "national poet, " Mihai Eminescu, part I dwells primarily on literary-cultural history as process and discipline. Here, the focus is on cross-cultural mimesis, the role of strategic imitation in the production of a distinct literature in modern Romania, and the shortcomings marking traditional literary historiography's handling of these issues. Part II examines the ethno-linguistic and territorial complexity of Romanian literatures or "Romanian literature in the plural." Part III takes up the trans-systemic rise of Romanian, Jewish Romanian, and Romanian-European avant-garde and modernism, Socialist Realism, exile and émigré literature, and translation.

Part I

The Making and Remaking of a World Literature: Revisiting Romanian Literary and Cultural History

Romanian nationalism was further discredited in the last decades of Communism, when it joined the hollow official rhetoric of Romanian exceptionalism. During the 1970s and 1980s, the nationalist monomania of imaginary local “precursors” of major breakthroughs in the modern arts and sciences—so-called protochronism—carried on and worsened the excesses and anxieties of pre–Second World War ethnocentrism, which, in turn, had only followed in the line of nineteenth-century Romantic tendencies …. Leaving behind the Communist project in 1989, Romania turns its sights to Europe and pins its hopes on it, for the country feels that it belongs to Europe. Going to show that European cultural integration is as arduous a process as sociopolitical integration, the extensive postcommunist-era debates on “Romanian literature’s ‘Europeanism’” bespeak the resilience of older cultural complexes, as the latter usually come into play alongside cognate obsessions of being too “Balkan” or not “enough” European, as well as alongside a lack of interest in “too peripheral” neighbors such as Hungary and Bulgaria. Turning such obsessions into viable cultural form is a major urgency that has been shaping postcommunist Romania and the positions taken up by an entire spectrum of voices, from the most stick-in-the-mud nationalists to the pro-European intellectual elites.

—Mihai Iovănel, Ideologiile literaturii în postcomunismul românesc (Literary Ideologies in Romanian Postcommunism)

1

Mihai Eminescu: From National Mythology to the World Pantheon

Andrei Terian

“National poets”—what else could be more remote from world literature? Let us think about it for a moment, and perhaps ask ourselves also: If a poet belongs to a nation, then in what sense can he or she be said to belong to the entire world too? It is true that the nation is a world in and of itself. Yet, at least in the Romantic sense largely prevailing in the nineteenth century, the golden age of national poets, this world is or is seen, by itself and other national worlds, as a homogenous space, and this homogeneity—again, actual or imaginary—is not only linguistic but also ethnic and territorial. Borrowing Christian Moraru’s terminological dyad here, the nation-world tends to emerge as a “globe” rather than as a “planet,” that is, as a world actively limiting or even lacking “worldedness.”¹ And, from the standpoint of this effective or putative worldly “scarcity,” do not national poets come about and establish themselves—nationally—by turning their backs to the wide and diverse world of others, to the very domain of worldedness? Are they not, in other words, living proof that what is national and belongs to it, from collective imaginaries to sacrosanct territory, has an exclusive dimension, indeed, a nationally endemic aspect to it, and so it cannot, by its very nature, be transnational and participate in world dynamics, interchanges, and circuitries?² Further, if the answer here is “yes,” then to what extent are the same poets capable of playing in arenas larger than the nation by the rules of the game called world literature? Are they not tempted under such handicapping circumstances to throw the game or perhaps sit it out? On the other hand, if the poets themselves, whom various nations have acknowledged as their cultural pinnacles, are not represented on the world literature stage, then what else could be representative and should be there for those communities? According to Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, when national champions enter the world literature contest on behalf of their respective nations, the contestants are not automatically excluded from the game. They only have to play by other rules, for the international literary canon is not the sum of national literary canons but arguably a different and complex network, which sometimes reproduces national hierarchies and other times upsets them.³ And, given this reality, the poets’ case seems closed. After all, in the transnational sphere where the world rankings, reputations, and success obtain, nations, their promotion apparatuses, and nationally minded critics can only do so much.

In what follows, I propose to reopen the case at the other end—not the end of national critics and literatures, but that of world literature. In so doing, I am not interested in evoking, as an alternative to the agonal metaphor above, the cheerily democratic tableau vivant of a World Parliament where each national literature dreams to be sending its envoys one day. What I want to do, instead, is to show how, in certain situations, national poets, in order to become and be acknowledged as such, take the longer, international and even intercontinental road home, to national recognition and, in our case, idolatry. As we will see, their glorious homecoming by the same token involves and, I would suggest, calls for a detour through the world archive, for deliberate and systematic formal and thematic protocols by which the poets expand their intercultural and intertextual network way beyond the nation’s geoaesthetic perimeter, in new and sometimes surprising directions.

We should note, first, that the very status of national poet is, in fact, integrated into transnational or even transcontinental institutions. Consider, for instance, the Icelander Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845), the Uruguayan Juan Zorrilla de San Martín (1855–1931), and the Angolan António Agostinho Neto (1922–1979): three continents, two centuries of history, yet basically the same mechanisms of canonization, through which each author becomes emblematic for his own culture. Second, acquiring national poet stature takes an international affiliation, which, as Alex Goldiș shows in his contribution to this collection, is most often articulated by a direct connection or comparison with a prestigious model or prototype in Western literature. For instance, it is not by accident that Karel Hynek Mácha has been called “the Czech Byron,”⁴ and that Hristo Botev has been dubbed “the Bulgarian Victor Hugo,”⁵ whereas Adam Mickiewicz was exported to the United States during the First World War sometimes as “the Polish Goethe”⁶ and sometimes as “the Polish Shakespeare.”⁷ All these authors gained legitimacy as national poets also through “at-distance” associations of various kinds with authors belonging to other cultures—if you think about it, the very granting of the title of national poet implies or, to my mind, should imply that the author in question does double duty as a transnational poet, that his or her work and his or her overall figure are a kind of business card one literature offers to the others. Third, being a national poet also requires some delimitation from other authors, whether they are national poets belonging to other cultures or transnational poets, as only such a compare-and-contrast routine can guarantee that the poets under scrutiny are “truly” national poets and not mere Czech, Bulgarian, or Polish clones of various transnational poets. The very status of national poet inevitably implies, then, a multiple if often elusive inscription into a global or, at least, transnational literary circuit.

But how can this be? How can a national poet become a transnational poet given the constraints, ties, obligations, advantages, calculations, allegiances, cultural-aesthetic decisions, political reasoning, and ideological unreasoning that keep him or her nation-bound, locally committed and meaningful? And, should the poet manage to break through his or her national aura, can then he or she represent or “typify” solely his or her own nation any longer? More importantly still perhaps, what are the literary traits preventing him or her from crossing the boundaries of his or her culture into larger regions? And what are the literary-cultural mechanisms poets need to activate to take this leap, to catch bigger worlds in their literary nets? Below, I attempt to answer these questions by turning to the work of Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889), Romania’s “national poet.”

1. An Unlikely Candidate

If exceptionalism is the opium of small literatures, then Romanian literature is a good case in point. Stronger than any other Romanian writer’s is the case provided by Eminescu, whom Romania’s critics regard as one of a kind, nonpareil, alpha, and omega of all things literary. “Eminescology” is still the name of a growth industry, and it is reputable “Eminescologists” who have proclaimed the author an absolute ending of a sublime era (“the last major European Romantic”), an absolute beginning (precursor of Symbolism, modernism, and even Existentialism),⁸ and also an irreducible exception (he is “the unparalleled poet” too).⁹ Interestingly enough, in trying to play up Eminescu’s originality in relation to major writers of Western literatures, the critics have overlooked precisely the rather atypical status of the writer not only relative to other “national poets” of his part of Europe but also within his own culture. I might note, along these lines, that, unlike most East-Central European poets—the Polish Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), the Greek Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857), the Slovenian France Prešeren (1800–1849), the Czech Karel Hynek Mácha (1810–1836), the Serbo-Montenegrin Petar II Petrović-Njegoš (1813–1851), the Hungarian Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849), and the Bulgarian Hristo Botev (1848–1876)—Eminescu lived and wrote not in the first but in the second half of the nineteenth century. But this detail is less relevant than the poet’s position within his country’s cultural–historical moment. That is, in the 1860s, when he stepped on the Romanian political and literary scene, the “national rebirth” of his country had already taken place. Unlike Solomos, Mickiewicz, Petőfi, or Botev, he did not participate in any of the armed insurgencies of his own people, nor did he carry out any revolutionary activities for that matter. No wonder he could not do that, for, by the time he reached adulthood, all the heroic moments of the rising modern Romanian State seemed to have already been occurred. Thus, Eminescu, born in 1850, could have participated neither in the national uprising of 1821, which ended the Greek-Ottoman regime and put Moldavia and Wallachia on their path to modernization, nor in the Revolution of 1848–1849, which advanced the idea of uniting the Danube Principalities and all other regions inhabited by Romanians. He was too young to have anything to do with the union of Moldavia and Wallachia when it finally happened (1859) or with the preservation of this great accomplishment under a newly arrived foreign prince (1866). The only historical turning point on which Eminescu could have left his mark was the 1877–1878 Romanian War of Independence, but at that time his attitude as a publicist for the main newspaper of the conservative opposition was predominantly critical of the liberal government, which had been accused of having neglected the Romanian army. As a result of this historical and political context, Eminescu virtually played no role, except, at most, for a critical one, in Romania’s mid-nineteenth-century “national revival.”

More interesting still is where Eminescu fits within the Romanian ideological landscape of the era. After his debut as a teenager in a Transylvanian magazine in 1866 with a poem dedicated to the memory of his former gymnasium teacher, Eminescu would be soon noticed by Titu Maiorescu (1840–1917), the most influential Romanian critic of the time, and invited to join the Junimea (Young Generation) cultural society. Significantly, unlike many such nineteenth-century East-Central European societies, which had a liberal-progressive agenda modeled on the famous anti-Absolutist Junges Deutschland of the German Romantics, Junimea had a conservative orientation. It did not lack certain nationalist accents, but, unlike most East European nationalist movements, which regarded France as the world’s emancipation engine, Junimea was manifestly pro-German. Both ideological positions were actually worked into Maiorescu’s cultural-political theory of “forms without substance,” which doctrine rejected the “revolutionary” achievements of the previous generation—the Romantic revolutionaries of 1848, also known as the “Forty-Eighters”—in whose accomplishments he saw an expression of a hollow and phony nationalism, advocating instead a “natural evolution” and an “organic,” internally driven development of Romanian culture and society.¹⁰ I might add that not only would Eminescu adopt such view, but he would also ramp them up and develop them into a vehement wholesale critique of the young Romanian State’s modernization.

No less intriguing is, or at least was for a while, Eminescu’s place among the country’s literary greats. His quick recognition as a top literary figure and even “national poet” must have appeared odd because the position seemed to have been filled already by an elder and distinguished writer, Vasile Alecsandri (1819–1890). Alecsandri surely fit the job description. Truth be told, he was overqualified. Not only did he take part in the 1848 Revolution in Moldavia, but he also played a decisive role in the unification of the two Romanian Principalities, not to mention that, in 1859, when he had been offered the throne of Moldavia, he turned it down in order to force the appointment of the Wallachian candidate to this position, which led to the effective unification of the two Principalities. Besides, Alecsandri’s writing covered more than honorably all the literary forms of the era, checking off all the available generic boxes: comedies, historical dramas, folk-inspired poems, intimate poems, epic poems on historical themes, satirical poems, novellas, epistles, and more. In effect, in 1869, that is, the year before Eminescu published his first notable poems, Alecsandri had published his most important volume, Pasteluri (Poetic Pastels), which would make Maiorescu proclaim him the “leading poet of the past generation.”¹¹ Last but not least, let us not forget that Alecsandri’s artistic talent, which went hand in glove with his diplomatic activity, seemed to render him the kind of cultural “personality” suitable for major international recognition. And, indeed, the conditions for enjoying some substantial European prime time existed. In 1878, during the second edition of the Floral Games held in Montpellier, he had been awarded a prize by a jury chaired by Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, the 1904 Nobel Prize laureate.

Over the next two decades, however, Eminescu would make quick work of the Alecsandri in the fairly public competition for “national poet” status. Before long, “Mircești bard” would be no more than a sort of “official” poet of the Romanian nineteenth century.¹² However, the victory would prove costly, and the price paid had to do, one more time, with where Eminescu stood inside the cultural-aesthetic latticework of his time and place. This time around, the issue is the looming modern age complete with its inherited and evolving formal codes and preferred genres. As John Neubauer points out, “[a]t the center of a national poet’s work we usually find an epic verse narrative (never a prose one) that became exemplary for t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Worlds of Romanian Literature and the Geopolitics of Reading
• Part I: The Making and Remaking of a World Literature: Revisiting Romanian Literary and Cultural History
• Part II: Literature in the Plural
• Part III: Over Deep Time, Across Long Space
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint