Author Archives: andreisimut

Ştefan Borbély

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Hermann Hesse’s ’Glass Bead Game’

Abstract: Analysing the purely male spiritual enclave depicted in Hermann Hesse’s novel ’The Glass Bead Game’, the author traces the possible origins of this game to Leibniz’s esoteric texts, in which the German philosopher imagined knowledge as the skill of detecting abstract and subtle correspondences between the different sciences and the divine plenitude of the cosmos, based on the art of a generalised calculus, or mathematics, which he called Characteristica Universalis. In Hesse’s independent school system of Castalia, the glass bead game is practised by its participants as a universal science (mathesis universalis) of elaborated European and Oriental cultural symbols and analogies, governed by the pure and abstract equations of mathematics and music. Since Hesse’s Castalia functions as a utopian, exclusively intellectual province, its vulnerability towards the everyday history and politics of the surrounding nations brings it inevitably to the bring of decline and future destruction. Hermann Hesse’s protagonist, the skilled Josef Knecht reaches the highest rank of ’Master of the Game’ (magister ludi), and then quits his office in an attempt to escape from collective mystification and inconsistency.

Keywords: Hermann Hesse, Swiss German literature, literature and decadence, utopia.

The Swiss German novelist Hermann Hesse’s last novel, The Glass Bead Game (1943) is a serene Bildungsroman (novel of formation) conceived in the form of an eutopia (positive, happy utopia) placed in the year 2200, somewhere in the German speaking Europe. The ideal geography of the author envisions a cloistered spiritual province, Castalia, living unharmed and protected from the vicissitudes of everyday history and politics within the borders of a wider state or nation. Its inhabitants form a highly respected male spiritual elite, governed by the strict laws of initiation within willingly obeyed intellectual hierarchies, which reflect the main disciplines of the humanities, although everybody acknowledges the serene organizational superiority of music and mathematics, as they only both combine in a comprehensive celestial harmony.

Each specialized discipline of humanities inside Castalia has as its ruler a master (or a “Magister”), who is elected by the community itself, as a sign of collective respect and as the recognition of a personal spiritual excellence. But apart from the particular disciplines, the very elite of the province gather in the community of the glass bead game players, which needs a special, interdisciplinary initiation. To play the glass bead game supposes the gift of linking apparently unrelated disciplines (like, for instance, medieval music and gardening, or Bach and mathematics) in a higher, sublime spiritual synthesis. The German philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), who beyond his famous Monadology wrote also esoteric texts, imagined knowledge as the skill of detecting abstract and subtle correspondences among the different sciences and the divine plenitude of the cosmos, based on the art of a generalized calculus, or mathematics, which he called Characteristica Universalis. Accordingly, the glass bead game is practiced by its participants as a universal science (mathesis universalis), governed by the pure and abstract equations of mathematics and music. The cast of the glass bead game players form the generally admired extreme spiritual elite of Castalia, who serve also worldly values, as the general plan of the annual festival elaborated by the master of the glass bead game – Magister Ludi – is made public by radio and the press, in order to also implicate players from outside the province, in a feast of ethereal spiritual communion.

Hermann Hesse’s novel presents the career of an outstanding glass bead game player, Josef Knecht (his name means in German “servant”), from his early classes in a grammar school up to the peak of the provincial hierarchy, as Magister Ludi. The novel of formation is paralleled by the description of the fall of a secular cultural system embodied by the spiritual province of Castalia. Meditating upon his condition of cloistered, ethereal intellectual, formed in an enclave willingly ignoring the perils of everyday life struggle and history, Josef Knecht finally decides to quit his appointment and the province itself, in order to become a teacher in a worldly, decadent aristocratic Italian family. Unfit for the outside world, he dies almost immediately, by swimming in an alpine lake. Hesse put much effort in insisting that Knecht’s sudden death, provoked by the rising sun, must be interpreted as a ritual of sacrifice, performed by nature itself against an outstanding member of a community whose spiritual formation has always had as its prerequisite an inorganic and abstract aestheticism. Indeed, the members of Castalia – all men, no women – exclude love, instincts, psychology, sufferance and even death from their cycles of formation. Within the province, nature itself is a cultural object, similar to history, politics, war, diplomatic intrigue, distraction or sport. Accordingly, Castalia is presented by the author as an extremely sophisticated and impeccable artificial society, sustained as a kind financial burden by a state which remains unnamed throughout the text. Josef Knecht’s unexpected demission is determined by the deep understanding that no society or person can live for ever outside history: in a letter addressed to the President of the Order, the quitting Magister Ludi points out that history will necessarily engulf Castalia in an unpredictable future, destroying the very sense of protected permanence and eternity which form the most cherished identity mark of the enclave.

 Two main, intermingled thematic blocks structure the book. The first one relies on Josef Knecht’s intellectual evolution, from his boyhood up to the high ranks of Castalia. The other one consists in the analysis of an enclaved cultural system challenged by a decadent crisis. Both meet in Josef Knecht’s outstanding destiny as a very gifted member of the order of the glass bead game players and in his decision to quit the artificial, cloistered life in order to meet the true rhythms of nature. As such, a main topic of the novel is the relation between eternity and time. Castalia and its members live outside time, as the vicissitudes of the surrounding politics and history come sifted to its inhabitants through the sieve of a pure and crystal-clear inner tradition. To a certain point, Knecht’s career is marked by the same certainty provided by eternity, but several of his personal experiences – like, for instance, his vivid debates about the existence of the order delivered with a visitor of Castalia, the “hospitant” Plinio Designori, or his long visit to a Benedictine monastery, in order to meet an influential Catholic figure, the historian Pater Jakobus – teach him that time cannot be swept apart in the evolution of the humanity, at least for the fact that it contains two basic elements of civilization: decadent erosion and death. Accordingly, the profound plot of the novel is built on the scheme of the archaic sacrificial rituals, by which the ferocious Time devours everything, including Eternity.

Back in the 19^th century, the educational system of Germany was built on a general school hierarchy, accessible to everyone, and on a few elite schools, which could be approached only by strict intellectual selection and invitation. One of them was Pforta, specialized in the humanities, which hosted Hölderlin, Nietzsche and other highly qualified “geniuses”. The rules said that no family was allowed to contact the gymnasium directly, but only after the student has gone through a very tough selection trial. The nomination procedure usually attracted the attention of the whole country, as they were towns (even regions) whose schooling system did not provide, for long and “shameful” years, any suitable candidate for the elite schools. Hermann Hesse described the system in an early, rather bitter novel, Unterm Rad (1906; Engl.: Beneath the Wheel), whose protagonist, the young Hans Giebenrath manages to enter the elite school but fails to meet its inhuman, extremely strict requirements, suffering a nervous breakdown followed by a collapse.

Being a rather gifted schoolboy with no parents, the young Josef Knecht is selected for the elite schooling system of Castalia by the venerable “master of music” (Magister Musicae), who pays a short visit to the student’s small town, in order to verify his outstanding local references. Gently protected by his master, but recommended by his excellent personal qualities and intellect, Knecht goes up in the spiritual hierarchy of the province, being selected for the inner cloister of the glass bead game players, who finally make him their Magister Ludi, following the venerable Thomas von der Trave, whose name is actually an innocent pun, as it secretly refers to Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse’s great friend (Trave is the river which flows through Lübeck, Thomas Mann’s native town in Northern Germany).

Becoming an outstanding glass bead game player, whose intellectual qualities go much beyond his colleagues’ psychological uncertainties, symbolized by Fritz Tegularius, Knecht’s very gifted but unruly friend, the future Magister Ludi is selected by the order as an “ambassador” for two special missions, which lead him up to the highest ranks of the hierarchy. At first he is encouraged to take up a debate with a clever visitor (“hospitant”) of Castalia, the young Plinio Designori, offspring of an old patrician Italian family, who challenges the eternity and artificial rules of the province by contrasting them to the relative and changing dialectics of the outside politics and history. Later on, after leaving Castalia, Designori becomes a highly influential politician and member of the Parliament, still favorable to Castalia even though the financial burden represented by the province proves to be more and more difficult to sustain by the nurturing surrounding political body. Plinio Designori plays a definite role in Knecht’s death too, as the dissident former Magister Ludi becomes the tutor of his unruly son, Tito, who indirectly kills Knecht by beating him in an uneven alpine swimming competition. Before entering the cold lake, Tito Designori performs an orgiastic dance honoring the rising sun; as already mentioned, Knecht dies assisted by the sun, which represents, in Hesse’s symbolical intention, the everlasting ferocious energy of nature.

The second appointment makes Josef Knecht an ambassador to the very powerful Benedictine monastery of  Mariafels, whose abbot Gervasius asked the order of Castalia to send over one of his members to initiate the monks into the mysteries of the glass bead game. Castalia is happy to fulfill the requirement, hoping to get support from the Benedictines within the high ranks of the Catholic Church in the Vatican. Knecht’s manages to complete the hidden task during his prolonged visit, by convincing the famous historian Pater Jakobus to further plead the cause of the province. The intellectual debate between the two gifted men occupy a big part of the narrative episode dedicated to Mariafels, and it has as a result a complete change in Josef Knecht’s intellectual thinking. While getting some valuable information on the glass bead game, Pater Jakobus teaches Knecht historiography and determine him to think the evolution of cultural systems as part of a wider dialectics of time, death and history. Knecht’s personal crisis concerning Castalia has its roots in the protagonist’s debate with the Benedictine monk, who makes him understand that culture is an organic, vivid flow of inspiration, maturity and decadence, deeply rooted in the evolution of society and history. As a consequence, it cannot be contained in a spiritual province of cultivating artificial values, as Castalia does, by privileging the art of endless analyses and combinations of the past despite spontaneity and fresh creation. Such a collective existence – the learned monk suggests – proves to be a glamorous, but already decadent mystification, built on extremely fragile pillars, which will be easily destroyed with every sudden move of history and politics.

The analysis of Castalia as a dying cultural system will obsess Magister Ludi Josef Knecht’s mind while in office, and it will finally determine him to resign in order to try his forces in the outside world, as the tutor of Plinio Designori’s son Tito. In Hesse’s mind, Castalia is a “pedagogical province”, as defined by Goethe in his Wilhelm Meister. On the other hand, it is a post-modern form of purely spiritual collective existence, as Hesse places his order in a period consecutive to our modernism, which is defined in the book as “the Age of the Feuilleton”, that is: the period of a sketchy and hyper-personalized, exacerbated form of culture, entirely dominated by the urge of novelty which does not allow ideas to solidify and structure into eternal and universal strata. Our modernist period – the historians of Castalia used to say – deepened the collective unrest by privileging wars, politics, sport and distraction, apart from the future province which is built on abstract, purely spiritual – that is: universal – humanistic values, concentrated in a superior but necessarily cloistered cultural body. In order to train his members, Castalia has carefully eliminated the organic turbulences living within their souls, like love, family life, psychology or fear, devoting them to a highly sophisticated science of interdisciplinary cultural associations based on numerology and music. No member of Castalia generates fresh creation, as originality is conceived only as the art of detecting magical interrelations between apparently unrelated topics, like European music and Chinese philosophy, or medieval architecture and scholastics.

One must not forget that Hesse published his work in the midst of the violent rage of WWII, presenting Castalian life as a serene spiritual alternative to collective hate, bloodshed and sufferance. But apart from being a mild political manifesto, the novel relies on the German philosopher Oswald Spengler’s famous Decline of the West (Das Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918-1923) in order to define its main categories. In his seminal work Spengler said that the history of antiquity stipulated the existence of two kinds of societies, defined by their representation of time. The so-called “happy”, “eudemonic”, a-historical  societies (like ancient Greece, for instance) understood time as a succession of present moments of energetic plenitude, which actually obliterated the sense of evolution and history. On the contrary, profoundly historical civilizations, like the Egyptians and the Jews, kept strict records of their traditions, developing a sharp sense of caducity or progress. Spengler also demonstrates that the collective sense of time has always been associated to the representation of death. For the Greeks, who mostly incinerated the corpses, the underworld was but a mere counterpart to the existing world, apart from the Egyptians who developed a sober culture of death based on the idea of continuity, or apart from the Jews, who brought into the Mediterranean culture the logic of a future coming of a Messiah, and the image of the apocalypse.

In Spengler’s terms, Castalia is conceived by its author as a a-historical, artificial society, built on the logic of the spiritual “province”. In The Decline of the West, Spengler also stipulated an antithesis between two destinies of culture, defined respectively as the culture of the city and the culture of the province. Both represented in their author’s mind a way of spiritual survival within the organic process of turning the organic “culture” into a hyper-organized “civilization”, which consists the decadent end of each culture. The culture of the city – Spengler asserted – is based on the social logic of the impulsive and faceless mob, which fixes the destiny of cultural evolution by turning it into distraction and intelligence, as contrary to the culture of the province, which keeps tradition alive, preserving its organic vividness through wisdom and originality. Spengler imagined that in a hyper-socialized, incessantly massifying Europe, the spiritual cloistered enclave can be a solution for culture, by the natural tendency of the “cultural province” to produce a highly qualified and dedicated elite. Spengler’s idea has always been very familiar with Hesse, whose other great novels – Demian, Journey to the East, Steppenwolf or Narcissus and Goldmund  – have been built on the logic of the spiritual elite. Hesse also considered that the Oriental way of serene, absolute life can save European culture from disintegration. Josef Knecht is himself attracted by the call of the East, as a chapter of his formation consists in a voluntary obeisance to a Buddhist monk, who lives outside civilization in a tiny oasis of bamboo trees planted by himself. Knecht eventually introduces the Chinese I-Ching book in his spiritual meditation, and proposes it later as the main combinatory topic of a surprisingly original annual glass bead game.

The very meaning of the glass bead games remains a mystery, although there are in the world millions of people who try to solve his logic. Initially the game was played with tokens, but later on the pure spiritual formulas prevailed. The game is an exquisite and almost magical art of combination (ars combinatorial), which was specific to the decadent phase of different cultures, seized by an aesthetic fatigue experienced as a lack of genuine creativity. In order to explain the cultural logic of the combinatory decadence, Hesse used to evoke the antique Alexandria and the fall of the Greek spirituality into magic and mysticism. Another analogy is the dawn of the Renaissance, driven into the flamboyant effervescence of the Baroque or the exquisite skill of inventing magical, unpredictable resemblances between humans, things and symbols, like the manieristic concettos. Many people also say that the functioning principles of the Internet lend to the classical glass bead game imagined by Hesse new and unexpected meanings. Therefore, by simply searching the Web, one can find a lot of sophisticated people who engage in a worldwide community of the glass bead game players. As he died in 1962, Hesse could not think, of course, about postmodernism and the WWW, but his novel still project in the future a fascination considered to be, by many, the serene, purely spiritual solution to our everyday wars, sorrows and disasters.

Corin Braga

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Utopie, récit de voyage et voyage extraordinaire

Abstract: The text explores the relationship between the travel literature (as a non-fiction genre) and the extraordinary voyages (as a fiction genre), on the one hand, and utopian literature, on the other. Using various literary samples and also previous theoretical commentaries on utopianism, it proves that utopias are symbiotically merged with voyage narrative. This cohabitation refers not only to the plot necessity of introducing utopian descriptions through a geographical travel to far away places, but also to the presence of the main character and traveler, who is also a story-teller and a raisonneur of the utopian society.

Keywords: Utopia, travel literature, extraordinary voyages, science-fiction.

L’utopie est un genre transfrontalier agglutiné qui a donné beaucoup du fil à retordre à ses théoriciens. Le nom est arrivé à désigner un hybride sémantique qui chevauche plusieurs domaines et disciplines. L’utopie a été définie par Marina Leslie, reprenant un terme de Rosalie Colie, comme un « generum mixtum », un des genres compréhensifs de la Renaissance caractérisés par l’« inclusionisme »[1]. Dans son texte inaugural, Thomas More avait en effet « inclus » plusieurs topoï littéraires : le voyage imaginaire, le « speculum principis », le « commonwealth » idéal, le dialogue, la satire, l’éloge à rebours, etc. Les successeurs de More n’ont fait que confirmer et exploiter cette ouverture alluvionnaire et cette disponibilité syncrétique de l’utopie.

Jean-Jacques Wunenburger a souligné les difficultés inextricables du théoricien :

« Qu’on ouvre trop le concept d’utopie, et on le dilue dans une activité imaginaire informe, sorte de fourre-tout des possibles rêvés ; qu’on ferme trop le concept, qu’on l’enferme dans une phase politico-littéraire […], et l’on rend incompréhensible la nature des matériaux symboliques qui en composent la texture, et qui en expliquent en même temps les effets de fascination sociale »[2].

Alain Pessin pense même que le problème de la définition pose une difficulté insurmontable ou une impossibilité de principe, à savoir que les listes des œuvres supposées exemplifier le domaine sont si larges, contradictoires et réciproquement exclusives, que finalement le mot utopie « ne possède aucune valeur classificatoire : l’utopie n’existe pas ». C’est pourquoi Alain Pessin soutient qu’à la place de l’utopie, en tant que catégorie abstraite, il est mieux parler des utopies, en tant qu’expériences singulières.

Face à cette nébuleuse qu’est l’utopie, deux attitudes sont possibles : soit d’essayer de tracer l’étendue maximale du territoire recouvert par le terme, d’en circonscrire le contour global ; soit de défaire le complexe, d’isoler ce qu’on pense être son noyau spécifique en écartant les excroissances et les masses alluvionnaires.

Une approche fondée sur une définition extensive est celle de Frank et Fritzie Manuel. Les deux auteurs ont construit leur grand compendium sur l’utopie, Utopian Thought in the Western World, adoptant une conception « libérale et oecuménique », qui les a amené à traiter indistinctement voyages extraordinaires, récits de voyages lunaires, descriptions fantaisistes de mondes perdus restés dans l’état de nature, constitutions optimales, conseils aux princes concernant le meilleur gouvernement, romans sur la vie dans une société utopienne, prophéties millénaristes, plans architecturaux pour une cité idéale, etc.[3] L’Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science fiction de Pierre Versins témoigne d’un dessein totalisant et englobant tout aussi ample[4]. Bien qu’utiles pour donner une idée de l’horizon de réverbération et du plafond atteint par le concept d’utopie, de telles démarches « ouvertes » ont le désavantage de ne pas pouvoir formuler des critères sur l’organisation interne de l’utopie et donc des différences capables de le séparer des concepts apparentés[5].

L’approche contraire réside dans la formulation d’une définition restrictive qui vise la discrimination des genres connexes et l’isolement d’une typologie unique. Cette attitude, adoptée par des théoriciens comme J. C. Davis, Raymond Trousson et Jean-Michel Racault, rappelle les définitions déductives, par des catégories de plus en plus restrictives, de la logique aristotélique-scolastique, mais aussi bien les méthodes de la phénoménologie. Par une telle démarche déductive, il est possible d’isoler successivement l’utopie du « mode utopique », du discours socio-politique, du projet législatif et du modèle des Commonwealth, du mythe et du conte de fées, des thèmes du Paradis terrestre, du Millénium, de l’Age d’Or, des Iles Fortunées, du Pays de Cocagne, de l’Arcadie, etc.

Cependant cette démarche arrive à un point mort au moment où on se propose d’isoler l’utopie du genre du récit de voyage[6]. A la première vue, il s’agirait de deux genres narratifs parfaitement séparables et indépendants, qui pourraient évidemment se combiner et donner naissance à divers hybrides, mais qui pourraient tout aussi bien fonctionner d’une manière autonome. Or une analyse plus poussée de l’utopie démontre que, de fait, elle ne peut exister que dans une osmose plus ou moins placentaire avec le voyage extraordinaire. C’est la symbiose des deux genres que je me propose d’envisager dans ce qui suit.

En ce qui concerne le récit de voyage, Pierre-François Moreau a construit une taxinomie interne du genre. Ainsi, il distribue progressivement, sur une échelle allant de la « réalité » (textuelle évidemment, et non pas ontologique) à l’imaginaire, quatre variétés: le récit de voyage réel, le voyage fictif, le voyage imaginaire et l’utopie. Les deux premières variétés, les récits des voyages réels et fictifs, ont en commun une intention de vraisemblance et de véridicité, qu’elle soit ingénue ou feinte. Les deux types d’auteurs jouent sur la convention de représentation « réaliste » qui donne aux lecteurs la sensation de « vécu ».

En contraste avec les récits de voyages, les voyages imaginaires et l’utopie changent de convention, elles sont construites sur un principe de cohérence interne différent, qui ne suit pas forcement la logique du vraisemblable, mais accepte le fantastique. Cependant, ce fantastique n’est pas le même que celui du mythe ou du conte de fées. Il n’implique pas l’existence d’une surnature et d’êtres divins ou de féerie, bien qu’il peut lui aussi faire appel au merveilleux. Il est fantastique en quelque sorte accidentellement et ne requiert pas une explication transcendante et l’existence d’un monde supérieur.

Avec la disparition du divin et du surnaturel, les voyages extraordinaires utopiques perdent aussi leur sens initiatique et anagogique. Si les quêtes médiévales, dont Pierre-François Moreau évoque le Voyage de Saint Brendan et les descentes aux enfers d’Albéric et de Dante, suivaient un itinéraire symbolique qui menait vers le salut et la transcendance, les voyages imaginaires n’impliquent plus un progrès intérieur, les voyageurs n’en sortent plus transformés ou métamorphosés. Les voyages imaginaires et utopiques sont dépourvus d’un but mystique, ils se déroulent sur le plan du monde terrestre, sans ouverture métaphysique. La séparation du sacré et du profane, puis la clôture progressive de la transcendance, a eu pour résultat la transformation des voyages initiatiques antiques en des quêtes manquées pendant le Moyen Age[7] et en des voyages imaginaires chaotiques à l’Age moderne. On pourrait désigner ce processus comme un passage de l’archétype (et des structures narratives centrées et finies) à l’anarchétype (et aux structures éclatées et hétéroclites)[8].

Enfin, pour clore sa typologie, Pierre-François Moreau doit distinguer aussi entre le voyage imaginaire et l’utopie. La différence est donnée justement par l’utilisation créatrice respectivement de l’imagination et de la raison, étant donné que le voyage fictif est « invention », alors que l’utopie est construite par « déduction ». Si le voyageur imaginaire donne libre cours à sa fantaisie pour inventer une nature étrange et merveilleuse, l’auteur utopique se concentre surtout sur l’échafaudage rationnel d’une société artificielle[9]. C’est ce « souci de présenter un univers ordonné » et rigoureux qui fait s’enliser l’utopie dans ce que Jean-Jacques Wunenburger voit comme une crise de l’imaginaire.

Néanmoins, selon la majorité des théoriciens, l’utopie ne peut pas être défaite de sa liaison placentaire avec le voyage imaginaire. Selon Vita Fortunati, l’utopie est indissociablement plaquée sur le schéma du voyage avec ses multiples composantes (le départ, le naufrage sur une île inconnue, les péripéties, les découvertes, le retour, etc.)[10]. Raymond Trousson estime à son tour que le voyage imaginaire et l’utopie sont unis par la logique interne du récit, toute découverte d’un continent ou d’une île idéale impliquant un trajet et des péripéties de parcours. La différence entre les deux est alors donnée par l’insistance que le récit de voyage met sur le dépaysement, l’exotisme, l’éloignement, le fantastique et le merveilleux, et l’utopie sur la description organisée des structures de l’état proposé modèle[11]. Enfin, on peut même penser, avec Christian Marouby, que les relations entre utopie et récit de voyage sont encore plus troubles, que le désir de l’utopiste de donner crédibilité à sa fiction (sur lequel il nous faudra revenir quand nous parlerons de la critique empirique de l’utopie) le pousse à exproprier les moyens narratifs du récit de voyage et à vouloir l’usurper et s’y substituer[12].

Une approche plus technique du problème de la liaison entre le voyage imaginaire et l’utopie a été produite par Georges Benrekassa dans son étude sur « Le statut du narrateur dans quelques textes dits utopiques », repris dans le volume Le concentrique et l’excentrique. Partant des différences entre les catégories narratives de « personnage », de « figure » (actant) et de « narrateur », Georges Benrekassa trouve que le placage de l’utopie sur le voyage imaginaire institue « une espèce de décalage entre les opérateurs du récit figurés dans le texte et l’idéologie du discours utopique ». Cette distance serait l’expression d’une dénégation (le Verneinung de la psychanalyse) de la part de l’auteur, qui dévoile en cachant (ou cache en dévoilant), c’est-à-dire reconnaît indirectement qu’il est « incapable de tenir directement un discours sur la réalité sociale »[13], ou qu’il ne se propose pas cette fin. En d’autres mots, c’est la double fonction d’actant et de narrateur du protagoniste du récit utopique qui assure le caractère fictionnel de l’utopie et la sépare du simple traité politique ou du projet législatif.

Cette hypothèse est appuyée et confirmée par ce qu’on sait des péripéties de la création du texte fondateur du genre, l’Utopie de Thomas More. La première impulsion de la conception du livre a apparemment été donnée par l’invitation qu’Erasme avait lancée à More d’écrire un Eloge de la sagesse, en réponse à son Eloge de la folie. En tant que tel, cet Eloge de la sagesse aurait dû être un traité philosophique et moral, tout comme l’ouvrage jumeau d’Erasme. En effet, en 1515, Thomas More rend la célèbre visite à son ami Pierre Gilles à Anvers armé de l’esquisse d’un Discours de la Sophia. Cependant, à l’essor de ces discussions avec son ami, More change de stratégie narrative, attribuant le Discours non plus à un narrateur-auteur, mais à un narrateur-personnage, Raphaël Hytlodée. Le fait que, dans le texte final, More attribue à Pierre Gilles l’occasion d’avoir rencontré Raphaël semble une manière fictionnelle de témoigner du rôle joué, dans la réalité, par Pierre Gilles dans la réorganisation de l’ouvrage.

Par cette restructuration, la présentation du « monde sage » passait de la forme de traité, utilisée par Erasme pour exposer le « monde fou », à la forme de dialogue. Bien que la formule dialogique, redevable au modèle platonicien, était plutôt conventionnelle, elle introduisait toutefois un partenaire de conversation, donc un deuxième personnage. Comme le note André Prévost, la Lettre à Pierre Gilles et les premières pages de l’Utopie « indiquent que c’est à Anvers que Hytlodée est entré dans le récit et que, par sa présence, il le transforme. Le Discours de la Sophia, la Sagesse, devenait fiction et prenait une nouvelle dimension »[14].

François Chirpaz, qui souligne à son tour le choix fait par More d’écrire son texte sur le mode de la fiction et non sur celui du traité philosophique et politique, va encore plus loin, se demandant si le personnage de Raphaël n’est pas un double de l’auteur lui permettant d’exprimer la distance qu’il prend face à son texte. « Tout se passe comme si Th. More tenait à maintenir, par la structure même du récit, une distance entre lui et lui-même, ne parvenant pas à unifier son espoir et son souhait » (allusion aux considérations finales de More sur la relation de Raphaël : « Je le souhaite plutôt que je ne l’espère »)[15].

En tout cas, la présence de Raphaël en tant qu’interlocuteur de More et que narrateur du voyage en Utopie implique que la description utopique est dès le début intimement jumelée aux genres du dialogue philosophique et du voyage imaginaire. C’est justement la présence d’un narrateur qui change le « contrat de lecture » et donne au Discours théorique la « distance » qui fait de lui une Utopie fictionnelle[16]. Et si au XVI^e siècle, surtout chez les auteurs italiens d’utopies, c’est la formule dialogique qui a prédominée, à partir du XVII^e siècle, l’utopie a basculé décisivement du côté de la formule narrative. Toutefois, Micheline Hugues prévient, suivant Alexandre Cioranescu, contre le risque d’ignorer le « noyau descriptif » dur et irréductible de l’utopie, et est de l’opinion que le héros utopique véritable, dans le sens romanesque du terme, ne fait son apparition que dans les anti-utopies, où le protagoniste devient une entité autonome (autant sur le plan idéologique que sur celui de l’action) opposée à la société décrite[17].

Le greffage de l’utopie sur le voyage extraordinaire et sur le roman d’aventures a été souligné par plusieurs théoriciens qui ont senti le besoin de qualifier le genre utopique avec des attributs renvoyant à la narrativité. Le premier de la liste, Geoffroy Atkinson a montré que le voyage extraordinaire, en tant que variété du voyage imaginaire, allie deux éléments, le récit réaliste d’un voyage aventureux et la description d’une société utopique éloignée[18]. Pierre-François Moreau parle du « récit utopique », qu’il situe entre le droit naturel et le « roman de l’Etat »[19]. Victor Dupont choisit la formule « roman utopique » pour suggérer que, pour avoir une meilleure prise sur l’imagination, le sujet « didactique » de l’utopie se fait porter par un genre narratif. Empruntant les dispositifs épiques et les charmes de la littérature, « le roman utopique est, à la philosophie et aux sciences sociales, ce que le roman historique est à la science historique »[20]. En d’autres termes, l’utopie peut être comprise comme un traité littérarisé sur l’état. Enfin, Hélène Greven-Borde utilise ensemble les termes de récit, fiction et romanesque utopique[21], alors que Micheline Hugues parle d’utopies romanesques et de romanesque utopique[22].

Pour souligner la dépendance de la description utopique de la narration de voyage et romanesque, Jean-Michel Racault a proposé le syntagme d’« utopie narrative ». L’utopie narrative est « la description détaillé, introduite par un récit ou intégrée à un récit, d’un espace imaginaire clos, géographiquement plausible et soumis aux lois physiques du monde réel, habité par une collectivité individualisée d’êtres raisonnables dont les rapports mutuels comme les relations avec l’univers matériel et spirituel sont régis par une organisation rationnellement justifiée saisie dans son fonctionnement concret »[23]. Comme le travail de Jean-Michel Racault porte surtout sur les utopies de l’Age classique et des Lumières, il est vrai que, beaucoup plus que les utopies de la Renaissance, ces textes sont massivement contaminés par l’esprit des voyages extraordinaires. Mais même faisant abstraction de la prédisposition narrative de l’époque envisagée par le théoricien, il reste que grand nombre d’auteurs, par exemple Cyrano, Foigny, Veiras, Patot, Swift, Prévost, Casanova, Sade, etc., utilisent la narration comme une sorte d’exosquelette leur permettant d’enfiler les organismes de plusieurs cités et pays utopiques ou dystopiques.

On doit reconnaître, avec Krishan Kumar, que « l’utopie a conservé tout au long de son histoire la forme basique d’une narration de voyage » et que sa définition doit nécessairement inclure l’idée d’une « fiction d’un voyage vers un monde nouveau »[24]. Ou, d’une manière plus basale encore, on peut admettre, avec Bronislaw Baczko, que « l’utopie n’est pas seulement imaginée et pensée ; elle se fait intelligible et communicable dans un discours par lequel s’effectue la réunion et l’intégration des idées-images à un langage ». Le discours utopique se serait constitué par l’intégration de deux paradigmes classiques, celui de « l’utopie de voyage imaginaire » et celui de « l’utopie – projet de législation idéale », le premier servant de véhicule et de liant au deuxième[25].

En effet, le syntagme « utopie narrative » évoque en contrepartie le syntagme « utopie descriptive ». La caractérisation d’« utopie descriptive » devrait être appliquée aux utopies dédiées exclusivement à la présentation de cités et de royaumes idéaux, comme celles des anglais More et Bacon et des italiens Patrizzi, Agostini, Zuccolo et Campanella. Néanmoins, les procédés de la description et de la narration ne sauraient délimiter deux espèces distinctes d’utopies. Ils pointent plutôt vers deux pôles du discours utopique, qui peuvent se retrouver dans un équilibre instable ou éclaté, mais ne peuvent pas s’exclure totalement sans détruire l’ensemble. Les utopies descriptives ne peuvent pas se passer d’une minime esquisse d’un cadre épique, même stéréotypé, sans tomber dans une proposition réformiste pure (sur ce bord se trouve l’Oceana de James Harrington), alors que les utopies narratives, sans la description, si sommaire qu’elle soit, d’une communauté meilleure (ou inférieure), retombent tout simplement dans le genre des romans d’aventures (sur cet autre bord se retrouvant par exemple l’Aline et Valcour de Sade). La prépondérance de l’un ou de l’autre des pôles pôles – la description et la narration utopique – peut largement varier quantitativement, mais l’osmose entre l’utopie, en tant que description, et le voyage extraordinaire, en tant que narration, ne peut pas être rompue sans détruire l’organisme symbiotique.

Le voyage extraordinaire, qui doit son nom générique à Geoffroy Atkinson[26], est un type particulier du voyage imaginaire défini par Philip Babcock Gove[27]. En fait, tous les « récits englobants » qui véhiculent les descriptions utopiques sont, selon Gove, des variantes du voyage imaginaire. Par ce trait, l’utopie narrative s’avoisine avec le roman d’aventures et le roman fantastique. Pour une meilleure distinction dans le cadre du genre romanesque, Jean-Michel Racault invoque la distinction anglo-saxonne entre « romance », le « récit non mimétique qui ne suscite pas l’effet de réel et ne requiert de la part de son lecteur aucune espèce de créance », et « novel », le roman réaliste[28]. L’utopie narrative peut être classée, du moins pour son histoire jusqu’au XVIII^e siècle, comme un type de romance, ensemble avec la prose chevaleresque, pastorale, allégorique, religieuse, héroïque et historique, dialoguée, satirique, etc.[29] Ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’elle ne partage pas aussi des traits communs avec le « novel », par exemple avec le roman picaresque et d’aventures, surtout à partir du XVIII^e siècle quand les auteurs d’utopies, pour imposer un nouveau pacte de véracité, commencent à introduire les techniques d’authentification empruntées aux récits de voyage.

Une variété romanesque proche de l’utopie est la robinsonnade[30]. Construit à partir du célèbre personnage de Daniel Defoe, le terme désigne l’entreprise civilisatrice d’un individu échoué sur une île ou un territoire sauvage. La nature y est d’habitude édénique et arcadienne, mais ce qui distingue le Robinson aménageant son île d’Adam en Eden ou du pasteur de l’Age d’Or est sa détermination de faire travailler cette nature, de la transformer en culture. On a considéré Robinson Crusoe comme le représentant de la civilisation bourgeoise en ascension, mais il est tout autant le symbole de l’humanité dans la construction « technologique » de soi. Il est le héros civilisateur de l’Age moderne, position qui implique toutes les caractéristiques de la mentalité humaniste, opposée à celle religieuse, mystique ou magique : humanisme, volontarisme, rationalisme, scientisme, technologisme, etc. Même quand il n’échoue pas accidentellement sur une île déserte mais s’y retire de sa propre volonté, suite à une névrose personnelle, à un traumatisme subi en Europe ou à une misanthropie philosophique, le « Robinson » n’oublie jamais ses dextérités civilisatrices pour transformer la nature sauvage en un microcosme domestique. C’est le cas de Philippe Quarll, « solitaire anglais », protagoniste d’un roman (M. [Edouard] Dorrington, Le solitaire anglais, ou Aventures merveilleuses de Philippe Quarll, 1729) inclus souvent dans la bibliographie de l’utopie, bien qu’il soit une robinsonnade typique.

Tous ces traits, la robinsonnade les partage avec l’utopie, à la différence que Robinson construit un microunivers paradisiaque personnel, alors que l’utopie implique l’effort et la participation de toute une collectivité (quoique, s’il avait une riche descendance, on pourrait bien voir dans Robinson l’ancêtre d’une société utopique insulaire, comme dans les romans de François Lefebvre, Relation du voyage de l’isle d’Eutopie, 1711, et de Guillaume Grivel, L’isle inconnue ou Mémoires du Chevalier des Gastines, 1783-1787). Toutefois la différence entre individualisme et collectivisme suffit, selon David Fausett, pour faire de la robinsonnade et de l’utopie deux genres séparés[31]. On pourrait prolonger cette opposition dans le conflit plus large qui a opposé, d’après William Brandon, les mentalités du Monde Ancien et du Monde Nouveau. « Dominium » et libéralisme, d’un côté, et « communitas » et autoritarisme, de l’autre[32], sont les deux projets divergents que Robinson et Utopus mettent à la base de leurs mondes respectifs, l’un de tendance « capitaliste » et l’autre « communiste ».

Si à l’Age de la raison l’utopie faisait corps commun avec le voyage extraordinaire, à partir du XIX^e siècle, avec l’ascension du positivisme et du scientisme, elle s’est tournée vers une cohabitation avec un autre genre, le roman scientifique et de science-fiction. J. O. Bailey définit la « fiction scientifique » comme le récit d’une invention imaginaire ou d’une découverte dans les sciences de la nature avec toutes les expériences et les aventures qui en découlent. L’idée que l’invention (sous-marin, aéroplane, vaisseau interplanétaire, téléphone, radio, bombe atomique, rayon laser, etc.) devance prophétiquement son époque a fait ressortir la fonction anticipative des utopies (très faible d’ailleurs, à un examen rétrospectif). La confluence entre utopisme et scientisme donne ce que J. O. Bailey nomme la « fiction scientifique-utopique » (scientific-utopian fiction)[33]. Dans ce sens, Raymond Ruyer a mis en relief la tournure utopique de beaucoup des romans « scientifiques » comme ceux de Jules Verne[34].

Caractérisant la science-fiction comme un mode littéraire « distancié », « non-mimétique » ou métaphysique, Darko Suvin la rapproche de l’utopie en tant que genre qui refuse le monde immédiat et lui oppose des mondes « radicalement différents ». Dans la « jungle des genres », l’utopie et la science-fiction apparaissent comme des parents, côtoyés de tous parts par les mêmes voisins : le mythe et le récit mythologique, le conte de fées, le récit fantastique, la pastorale, la picaresque et le voyage d’aventures, la vulgarisation scientifique, etc.[35] Il est vrai que la science-fiction déborde en plusieurs directions et formes l’utopie, à commencer par son imaginaire cosmologique et d’invention technologique, mais, dans l’opinion de Tom Moylan, elle est aussi le genre qui, dans les années 1960, a réussi a ranimer l’utopie du gouffre où l’avaient faire sombrer les dystopies antitotalitaires du XX^e siècle[36].

En changeant le point de repère, on pourrait tout aussi bien regarder les œuvres de science-fiction contemporaines comme appartenant à l’imaginaire utopique, perspective offerte par exemple par le travail de Hélène Greven-Borde sur les Formes du roman utopique en Grande-Bretagne (1918-1970)[37]. En tout cas, l’impulsion utopique ne paraît survivre à l’heure actuelle que précisément dans la pseudomorphose technologique qu’est la science-fiction, bien que sur le plan de l’imaginaire social, les dernières décennies ont nourri le « retour de l’utopie »[38].

Doru Pop

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania

Holy Advertising

Abstract: This paper is focused on the transfer of signs and connotations from the sacred to the profane as it is explicit in the Romanian media and advertising industry. Advertising is considered a religion of the post-industrial capitalism, thus advertising and marketing practices are interpreted as means of substituting religious thinking. The central hypothesis is that advertising – by means of psychological pressure and social persuasion – has integrated Christianity as a cultural product within the commercial space. The author takes into consideration three levels: the impact of advertising on commodities industry, the expressions of popular culture, and its manifestations in the mass media. These levels are observed by interpreting advertising products from the top ten companies in Romania, ranging from personal hygiene and cosmetics, alcohol and soft drinks, chemical products from cleaning, household appliances and communication technologies. The paper describes how the secularization of sacred symbols has spread fast in Romanian media and in the advertising business, discusses the process of draining significations from Christian icons, and interprets the consequences of religious metaphors exploited for commercial ends. Starting from the mercantile rhetoric of contemporary advertising and the language of commercials, the paper criticizes the materialistic idolatry and the simulacrum of spirituality.

Keywords: consumption; media; advertising industry; marketing practices; cultural analysis; popular culture; Christianity; religious metaphors.

1. In Consumption we trust!

In the postmodern world, advertising jargon consumed some of humanity’s most important religious set phrases, key figures, central symbols and icons. As a final point in the transfer of signs and connotations from the sacred to the profane, it was said that advertising has become “the very religion of late capitalism”. Advertising has pervaded the entire social body of the consumer oriented society, so as that the advertising industry has come to govern our world by the magic formula: “It’s all advertising” (Lewis, 1999, chap. The Purpose of Advertising). More so, following Sut Jhally’s thesis that advertising functions as a religion of the post-industrial capitalism, advertising and marketing practics have managed to substitute religious convinction by giving the modern man something else to believe in: the objects of consumption.

The new belief system that advertising is built upon and is developing is not one that constructed against any of the “old religions”, in any case not against Christianity. This is a mythological setting that is using religious imaginary to its own benefit, without an classical ideological background, at least it is not one that can be traced in the religious conflicts of the past. So, this is not a anti-Christian predisposition, in the “hard” Nietzschean sense, but one descending from the Feuerbach interpretation of Christianity (Feuerbach, 1841), one that is an attempt of dissolving religious spirit into the humanistic, anthropological conceived assessment of the world. Following this implication, the question in this study would not be “why” advertising is replacing religious symbols and notions, but “how” does advertising establish this connection between lifeless objects, the products of impersonal mass manufacturing processes and basic religious myths and mythological structures?

One way of interpreting this mechanism was indicated by Roland Barthes in Mythologies (Barthes, 1970). In his substantial text he explained how codes and conventions from classical myths were reassigned to advertising symbols. This semiological approach is oriented mostly towards the connexions of language and ideology, and is effectual when it comes to understanding myths. But the purpose here is mainly to illustrate the means by which advertising is using religious representations, without a search for semiotic meanings or the attempt to find the conventions used for production of meaning by using the elements of the products. Subsequently this is a discussion of the role advertising plays in incorporating religious images, a critical assessment of its traits, more than the search for ideological resources. The main line of examination follows the hypothesis that the role of advertising is awareness centered and that it is using psychological pressure and social persuasion to take apart the mind of the consumer, hence the analysis here tries to explore imaginary structures used to influence people’s behavior, attitudes and social conduct and to decode those advertising functions that are maneuvering desires.

In this study, for methodical rationale, there are only three levels taken into account: the impact of advertising on commodities industry, the expressions of popular culture, and its manifestations in the mass media (according to Leiss, 1990). The central hypothesis is that advertising produces rituals of social communication and an analysis of these rituals can provide an understanding of the general changes in the collective psyche.

As for data selection, this approach considers the exponential growth of advertising expenses in Romanian media brought into place by the continuous development of media markets. The examples were selected from the top ten brands in the Romanian advertising investments, appraised by media contracts. Due to the fact that this top was dominated in the last decade by companies from personal higene and cosmetics, alcohol and soft drinks, chemical products for cleaning, household appliances and communication technologies ( the first three in this top are international companies like Procter & Gamble, Coca Cola Co and Unilever followed by companies like Orange and Mobifon, European Drink & Food – information according to Alfacont Mediawatch report, published in M&A) the examples discussed focuses on these industries.

Although there is no contention that the examples provided below are to be considered absolute evidence for a generalized trend in the advertising industry, the question is, since brand loyalty substituted the faithfulness demanded by the traditional Church and this new God becomes a more and more demanding and jealous deity that the Old Testament’s own Yahweh shall we call this GOD Yahoo?

2. Talking to Jesus

In 1925 Bruce Barton has published a best-selling book called The Man Nobody Knows. His inspirational book presented Jesus as a succesful businessman and an advertising forefather, that has managed to create the most captivating of all selling propositions: Christianity. In the wake of the advertising culture, Christianity was seen as a cultural product that can be integrated in the commercialism of that age. It was a matter of time before advertising has integrated some of the core Christian messages, emptying them from their consistency and releasing a double meaning.

Not only Christianity, but its key figure, Jesus, was “imported” in the marketing and selling dynamic. (foto Madona) One of the most popular recent Hollywood productions, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, follows a trend in cinematographic production that includes Jesus Christ Superstar or The Last Temptation of the Christ. This trend shows the basic principle of the transfer mechanism described above, that is a cultural reading by recycling themes and motives of religious element assimilated into the secular view. The Passion of the Christ, was a movie that turned the sufferings of Christ into a block buster with more than 350 mil. dollars gross. The fact that it portrays a violent dimension the founder of Christianity is not as much a problem as the fact that it integrated this extremely sacral condition into the material exchange of images in the media. On the other hand, critical comments on Christianity, like the “The DaVinci Code” (the book followed by the movie) were equally successful in reinstating this thematic misappropriation between the secular, profit oriented world and the religious. Basically these are the two ways of transmuting Christian symbols: violent media processing and ironic dissolution of significants.

(foto Fujitsu) In this advertisment for the Fujitsu airconditiong machines, the cross and Christ himself became objects of promoting products emblematic for late capitalism. The transfer of significance is not straight forward, but a subtle one. Christian imaginary is merely re-shaped, re-packaged in order to serve different purpose. Christ sits on the cross fully dressed, in garments of his epoch, due to the fact that he is close to the equipment producing cold air. Funny as it may be, this ad proves the central argument made here.

Christian mythology and Christianity have become selling brands within the free market system, while Christian symbols were integrated in the fashion accessories of the modern pop-culture. It has been extensively analyzed (see Fiske, 1989) how Madonna’s impersonation of the Virgin Mary and the usage of crosses and other religious symbols in the music industry reproduce and re-enact social relations specific to the political economy of capitalism. Symbolic significants of Christian faith were added to the plus value of commodities and the integration of Christian images in the marketing process was done by integrating the main representations of the faith into the advertising production. At the end of this process, advertising is not only promoting whiter teeth and cleaner homes, it also reshapes fundamental religious codes. As the Levonelle campaign for condoms stated: we entered into the realm of the “Immaculate contraception”, the perfect paradox for this unholy union.

3. How Santa Claus became an icon for capitalism?

It is unequivocal in the Coca Cola marketing strategy the manner in which the major international brands use this re-shaped Christian idiom and put it into use for the consumer oriented promotion practices. “Believing” is no longer only the attribute of the religious thinking, but a part of the marketing process. Before the FIFA World Cup 2006 (see M&A, 20 (354)), Coca Cola has launched in Romania the “Believe” campaign (campania “Crede”) under the slogan “Believe in yourself”. Obviously we can recognize here, as Paul Vitz suggests, the current narcissism and self oriented contemporary culture. A new secular cult of the self which is defined in contrast, not against, the traditional Christian concepts about the self.

This campaign provides a glimpse into the mind frame promoted by the new mythology of consumption. Developed by the McCann Erickson agency, the campaign enclosed the two main ingredients of modern day religion: football and sex. The video clip incorporated the most important messages of the “New consumer’s Gospel”. The ad goes like this: “People believe in cars… people believe in fairy tails… people believe in football… people believe in sex… find something to believe in”, followed by the Coca Cola trademark. The slogan “find something to believe in” (“găseşte ceva în care să crezi”) comprises the ideal substitution of religious belief with the belief in pleasure enclosed objects, in the revelation provided by the bottle containing the magical fluid.

Relevantly enough, “believing” is not an attribute only for consumer goods that present themselves as life elixirs, as Coca Cola does. For instance Artic, a traditional Romanian household products company, specialized in refrigerators and washing machines, has promoted its rebranding campaign in 2006 using a similar catchphrase: “Believe in yourself”.

But how has advertising associated concepts like “believing” with lifeless goods and technologies? The notion, called by Norbert Bolz (Bolz, 1995) “cult marketing”, implies that marketing and advertising approaches that incorporate religious discourses and themes have put into effect a profane version of religious communities and religious existence. The communication industries are putting forward illusions of the profound emotional space – formerly belonging to religious faith – where shopping takes the place of praying and the icons of technologies substitute the idols of the old Gods.

Some critics suggest that this process of misappropriating Christian figures by the marketing strategies has started when “The Saturday Evening Post” has published, some 75 years ago, in 1931, a creation of the Swedish artist Haddon Sundblom. A red costumed old man, with a big white beard and a red nose became the symbol of Coca Cola. (foto Santa)

Santa Claus was painlessly integrated in the consumer society, with his reindeer and his gift wraps, in one continuous process. On one hand, Santa Claus is now used to evaluate yearly profits, and is exploited by capitalism to promote increases in sales at the end of every season, total profits in retail being a confirmation of business proficiency of that year. On the other hand, capitalist media outlets have engulfed this “sign” and are using it extensively. There are dozens of Christmas movies, motion pictures that have Santa Claus as main character, or the story happens during the Christmas season, all for the benefit of commercialism.

This secularization of sacred figures is one that has spread fast in Romanian media. The model was quickly adopted by several producers and dominant media outlets in a series of promotional messages built around Santa Claus and Christmas. Pro Tv, one the most important television networks in Romania, has created a special campaign called “Santa Claus truly exists”(„Moş Crăciun există”) where the slogan went on something like this: “Santa Claus comes first on PRO TV”. In this television show children called the network and talked live with a fake Santa (together with his dwarf and wife), and Santa offered them live on television several toys and products of mass consumption. Children are trained from a very young age that prizes and gifts come from commercial networks. In this logic Connex, the mobile phone company already mentioned, used Santa Claus in a more patent way. In their ad the company boasted that they “Work for Santa”, and a small green dwarf was going to work in a platitudinous world and he creates true joys for the clients of Connex. This type of draining significants from Christian icons is relevantly set forth in another ad for a telephone company. The Ring plus telephone cards ad is build around the image of a Santa Claus with a hands free attached to his ear. This commercial Santa stands with a promise (“by the word of Santa”) that the offer is valid so that the customers can buy their merchandise. And, it should be mentioned that Santa shows up in the international Tuborg ads, the brewing company is promoting a special brand of its beer, by the name of Christmas brew. At long last Christmas was transformed into a brand name.

Another treatment for the re-branding of Santa Claus (and Christmas) is the ironic one, like the one used by Jacobs coffee to promote its Christmas offer. In this television commercial the ad agency is using a boy who lures several bogus Santa Claus with the smell from a cup of coffee, while his parents are cooking the festive dinner. But the National Lottery of Romania has hit jack pot when used Santa portraying him as a thief, who steals the little teddy bear of a sleeping girl. The slogan went on in English: “Did you have a bad year. Play Loto”. Santa Claus definitely had a very bad time in the postmodern world.

The semiologic level of the transformation described here is manifest in the competition between Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola for the colors of Santa. Because Coca Cola took possession over Santa Claus and its colors, the contender of Coke decided to create its own representation of Santa, that is a blue Santa. Since red was not available anymore, the Pepsi campaign produced a postmodern interpretation of Santa Claus. This Blue Santa comes with a dozen of semi nude elf women, all singing and dancing in a titillating way: “Oh, you Pepsi Blue, you’re the surprise of the year”, while the good old man is luring clients from a fancy car and is behaving like a pop star. Although it was intended to “change the color of Christmas”, the blue drink never was too popular in sales, so that the color or this holiday remained red: red as Coca Cola, of course.

So, although the transformation of Santa Claus into a media asset cannot be compared with the makeover of Jesus into an advertising object, Santa Claus’s substitution of “baby Jesus”, together with the shift in messages is a comprehensible example of how media production has insinuated into the theological and spiritual – while keeping the forms and shapes it evolved towards a materialistic endorsement. The birth of the Christ first turned upside down into a celebration of an old man, and later this old man became the key salesman of multinationals.

4. The new priesthood of commodities

(foto Patimi) To the classical “Sex sells” dogma of advertising, contemporary selling strategies added a new canon, that of “spirituality sells”. The representations of Christian faith and the figurative tokens of Christianity (Moore, 2005) were integrated in the mechanisms of contemporary advertising industries. After Santa Claus and Saint Valentine were enrolled in the consumption culture, the priesthood of Christianity was soon enough conscripted into the army of promoters, marketers and fashion gurus.

This self projection of the advertising “yuppie generation” is clearly stated in the ad print for the on line advertising contest Best Ads. The print, showing the hand of a possible creative copywriter as the hand of the Christ, only stabbed by a pencil, translates the secular taking over of Christianity. Advertising gurus identify their jobs with the Calvary and we all become the witnesses of this new religion.

When Donatella Versace launched in the beginning of 2007 a new concept in fashion called “clerical chick” – concept based on the charm and stylish vogue of the personal secretary of the pope Benedict the XVI^th, Georg Ganswein – this fusion of popular culture and Christianity has come to an culmination. Donatella’s autumn-winter 2007-2008 collection comes from the same set of mind that has produced the Coke Light advertisement internationally broadcast (and obviously very present in the Romanian media too). This ad shows a priest (catholic priest by garments) coming out of the waves of the sea (in a reversed mythological reference to Aphrodite, the goddess of love sprung from the froth of the sea). The priest is all wet from the waves and emerges is a very sensual posture, sees a young woman by the shore, and the young woman, admiring his bodily figures, is flirting with him in a very lascivious manner. The priest accepts this flirting game only to get the chance to sip from the woman’s Coke can, then puts his priestly necktie and leaves to her disappointment.

Since a Catholic priest could be a part of the promotion effort of an multinational company, the Romanian advertisers seem to have a predisposition of using this ability, by showing an insatiable appetite for church figures in their “stories and fables”. In a print ad for Connex, one of the most important companies in Romania selling GSM mobile services, a new product was promoted under the concept “Connex compass” (Busola Connex). This ad for magazines portrayed an Orthodox nun in a drinkery, staring between the legs of a stripper woman, who was dancing at the pole. The nun, surrounded by men with obscene gaze, was obviously scared and the logo went on saying: “Do you have orientation problems?”. If the nun was not confused enough, the slogan of this campaign demonstrates the central idea of such a transfer: ironic transformation of Christian figures for the benefit getting of customer attention. Unfortunately neither the nun could be considered a typical customer for a mobile phone, nor the drunken men around her could constitute the basis of purchasers so the target of the campaign appears to be more a symbolic social relation than the marketing task. The explanation could be found in the sociological aspect of things. In a society like the Romanian one where Christian Orthodoxy accounts for more than 90% of the credibility and trustworthiness of the general public, using signs and symbols of the Church is a no-brainer.

The passion of the Connex marketers for religious contexts and figures is even more obvious in this outdoor print (foto Connex), where the company uses the image of an Orthodox monk, mimicking the body language of young generation users of mobile phone. In this very lively depiction of Romanian spirituality, with the background of a historical monastery and with the indirect support of a couple of saints, high technologies are described as available and accessible.

Traditional depictions of faith and images of the people of faith that are shaped in funny and ironic ways are constructed so that they can be used in a subversive attention gathering, and the examples are numerous in the advertisement business in Romania. For instance Zapp, one of the three main competitors in the mobile phone market, has developed a promotional material that uses God himself for their advertising purposes. In this television ad for Internet services and data transfer we see the Good Lord as a computer hacker, using the latest technologies to perform his heavenly duties towards humanity. The connection between prayer and technologies is not just one of bad taste, it shows a predisposition for integrating spiritual activities into the commodities oriented culture. God, presented as the Old Father figure, that has accepted the blessing of new technologies becomes a promoter of trade goods, artifacts, services and manufactured objects.

The same principle can be observed in another print ad, used by Fornetti, a chain that sells a franchise for a bake shop. For their special lent products they used the picture of an Orthodox priest, staring at the customer and approving the consumption of these “fresh backed” products. The priest looks very healthy, has a red colored face and doesn’t look like somebody who has been fasting for quite some time. Pattiserie is falling from the sky, mimicking the coming of holy manna in the Bible, and church towers with the cross are the background of this secularist worship of worldly things. Adapted to the Romanian media sphere, the Christian Orthodox Church was integrated as a central endorser of mercantile exploitation of emotions because of its strong ties with people’s imaginary.

(foto Bucovina) This unholy union is more unequivocal in a social campaign that took place between December 2004 – November 2005. Bucovina Enterprises, the producer of the Bucovina mineral water, created a partnership with the Archbishop diocese of Suceava and Rădăuţi to promote their product. The mineral water owner used the endorsement of the Church and started using Orthodox sites and monasteries as the background for its television advertising. By means of sponsoring a social campaign entitled “Bucovina for Bucovina” the company not only benefited from the support of His Grace Pimen, the Archbishop of Suceava and Rădăuţi, it also used the spiritual life of their fellowmen to generat a sympathetic attitude for their liquid. The television ad showed people in prayer in monasteries, disfigured faces of saints and angels, all for the benefit of rebuilding the holiest of places in Romania, the northern monasteries. Unfortunately, while advertising industry has a tremendous impact on both our personal lives and on our imaginary existence, its role in dissolving religious symbols and images and that of creating another “spirituality” cannot be an understatement. Although it cannot be assessed by a single interpretative method, understanding this tendency in the general context of contemporary promotional practices is indispensable.

In another ad (that was never aired, but was published on the Internet and the advertising agency used it for several competitions) created for the Teletech television sets, the priesthood is portraying a similar sarcastic context. In this television ad (that features Bogdan Naumovici, one of the most important opinion leaders in Romanian advertising) two individuals, dressed like mental hospital doctors are dragging by force another man dressed like an Orthodox monk (or priest). After they reach the top of a traditional cloister, they throw the priest down and, after they check if he has reached the ground, they comment: “So you see, he wasn’t Batman”. The game and the image were taken from a popular joke, but the mental framework proves that Christianity has become not just as a source of fun and superficiality, but also a superficial conception behind it all.

In this competition for triviality, PRO Tv, has developed a promotional for their programs where the theme of faithfulness is associated with the image of the journalists that work in the above mentioned network. Some of the most popular anchors appear on the building of the network, dressed in priestly garments (an eclectic mixture of all the worlds faiths, but mostly Christian), wearing papal tiaras and priestly mitres. Then, the singing anchormen and women are turned into angels that are flying over the city, spreading joy and happiness all over the place. PRO Tv, that has its own television show called “You give and you win” (Dăruieşti şi câştigi”) a show where public display of charity is turned into a public display for generating audience, pulls the same desensitization of the common man. Hosted by an television newscaster that has theological training (Cristian Tabără), the entire show is openly a copy cat for the spirit of Christmas.

The same trivial shift can be observed in a radio ad for the Ford Fiesta, where we are witnessing a confession between a woman and a priest. The young woman is admitting that she is preparing herself for marriage and she exposes her desires to the clergyman. Her confessor hears her saying that she either wants a green car, or rather a red car. So, under the theological power given to her, the father comes to the conclusion that the woman does not want to get married, but that she desires a “Fiesta of colors”. Omitting the semiologic dimensions of this advertisement (where the relationship between the two is overtly ambivalent), this ad proves the mechanism assimilated to signs construction in advertising rhetoric: seizing spirituality and re-shaping it to the benefit of consumerism.

5. The Angels and Demons of Advertising

As religious metaphors became exploited for commercial end, the mercantile rhetoric enclosed two of the most powerful emotional messages of the Christian imaginary: apocalyptic messages (together with the enclosed demons) and their complement, heavenly imagery and icons. The reification of these sacred spaces and the transfer of the homo religiosus imaginary could not have been complete without this agglutination.

Since advertising is about selling happiness and pleasure, and because in the Christian mythology happiness is connected with eternal life, marketing strategies started promoting a new kind of eternal life and a new way of attaining eternal bliss. The discourse Coca Cola uses is, once more, archetypal for the process illustrated here. The TV spot called the Happiness Factory (“Fabrica de fericire”) is developed around the concept “happiness in a bottle”. The images of material prosperity replace the representations of spiritual happiness, and the entire figurative resource of this symbolic space is used to promote a new reality, one that is an artificial promised land. This cardboard Paradise was used by the Kent campaign, where a young woman lighted a cigarette and then threw a pack of smokes to his colleagues and invited them over, from the working space to an Eden like world, where people were sunbathing and having lots of fun.

Commodities will not only make us happy (Leiss 1976 p. 4), they will also give us a glimpse of immortality and a connection with divinity. On January 18, 2007, The National Council for Audiovisual in Romania has fined the National TV broadcaster because the station, owned by a producer of soft drinks, transmitted live a news report about the sanctification of the mineral water spring “Izvorul minunilor” (The Well of Miracles), which is the source of the product sharing the same name. The religious ritual of blessing the spring took place on one of the holy ceremonies of Christianity, the Epiphany. The network was fined because it used religious sentiments in order to promote a commercial good, but the mechanism remains into place. Epiphany or simple marketing Eureka, the producers of soft drinks seem to have an unsatisfied desire to incorporate into their products the notion of heavenly blessing.

(foto Red Bull) Using visual clichés of the Christian symbolic order and putting into action negative stereotypes or positive sentiments of the faith is a commonplace of the marketing strategies in Romanian media and advertising business. Paradise and Hell, two of the central symbolic spaces of Christianity, are extensively mimicked. The campaign for the reinvigorating beverage Red Bull integrates the angels within the meaning production, death and life after are subject to jokes. The persons dying grow white feathers and they become in the Red Bull campaign, advertised under the slogan “Red Bull gives you wings”. Murfatlar, a local producer of wines, has developed a brand called “Eden” (Rai) and they promoted this brand by a series of television campaigns where an angel comes from Heaven and takes the place of his guarded human in several accidents. The angel dies in a car crash and ends up drinking wine with two other angels in a heavenly bar, the context being disrespectfully satiric to the Holy Trinity posture of Andrei Rublev’s ikon.

This mockery of Christian sacred space, by ways of a demystyfied afterlife, is used by another European Foods campaign for the Regal tomato sauce (the producer of ketchup and other edibles belongs to the same group that owns the Spring of Wonders). The company is trying to catch the attention of their customers by the following promise, one that twists the Christian promise of the after life: “the tomatoes are fulfilled only in the life hereafter”. Of course, the fact that the tomato is squashed by a hammer does imply a derisive bloody sacrifice. Tomi, the competition of Regal, a brand owned by Orkla Foods, asked McCann-Erickson advertising agency to come up with a television ad. This series of two ads is based on the Heaven-Hell opposition, where the tenants of the two spaces change behavior by simply consuming the Tomi ketchup. So the demons are turned into lovers of classical music, while the angels in Heaven are altered into heavy metal fans.

There are also several milk products that use the heavenly syntax to position their solid food produce in this highly spiritualist marketplace. For instance Kraft Foods is selling its spread cheese Philadelphia with an ad that shows a she angel that puts her husband to work (in Heaven) while she enjoys her “heavenly” breakfast and its “divine” taste. The ambrose like characteristic of milk by-products is to be found is the Brenac dairy products campaign, and their cream cheese is also promoted as “divine food”.

(foto Lukoclean) At the other end of this process is, for instance Maxim magazine’s type of advertisements, which is promoted in Romania by the slogan “It’s the naked Devil” (“E dracu’ gol”). Its only natural that, if angels are active in this highly competitive marketplace, demons should follow closely in this race for attention. And, because the Devil is known in the Romanian popular lore as the “Unclean one”, it was a matter of time before some dry-cleaning company was going to take possession of its “dirty” characteristic.

Only when Flanco, a distribution company specialized in household appliances, launched a campaign meant to stimulate the desire of their customers to get credit, and decided to build their message around the message of Apocalypse, the association between mysticism and marketing reached its rhetorical climax. The principle of the campaign was basic and the message was straight: since the End of the World is coming anyways, at least one should enjoy the pleasures of the consumption culture while one can, because nobody really knows for how long you are going to keep on paying for the products you get. Depicting images of the world destroyed by hurricanes and invoking “specialists” that announce the probable end of times next year, the customer still has time to buy new appliances, so the story goes. Using the message: “One can never know what the next year will bring”, one of deep Christian substance, this ad uses the entire Judeo-Christian jargon: global tragedies announce the inherent coming of the Apocalypse. Except that hurricanes, floods, and even the Tsunami that killed millions of people are transformed piece by piece into stimulants of consumption. Disasters are turned into platitudes, tragedies are incentives for credits and the message of the Apocalypse is primal for the consumption civilization.

This is where the triviality of the disasters, the humanistic mimicking of the Christian spirit and the spinning of the theological into free-market consumption reach its peak. The materialistic idolatry and its simulacrum substituted the spirituality and generated a depletion of significance for the original signs.

References:

Andren, G., L. O. Ericsson, R. Ohlsson, and T. Tannsjo. Rhetoric and Ideology in Advertising, Stockholm: AB Grafiska Gruppen, 1978

Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, Paris: Seuil, 1970.

Barton, Bruce, The Man Nobody Knows. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925 (reprint, Bobbs-Merrill, 1983)

Bolz Norbert, Bosshart David: Kult-Marketing – Die neuen Götter des Marktes, Düsseldorf 1995

Cronin, Anne M., Advertising Myths: The Strange Half-lives of Images and Commodities, Routledge, 2004

Clifton Moore, Rick, “Spirituality that Sells: Religious Imagery in Magazine Advertising”, Advertising & Society Review – Volume 6, Issue 1, 2005

Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, 1841 (available on the Internet at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/index.htm)

Fiske, John, Understanding popular culture, Unwin Hyman, Boston, 1989

Goffman, Erwin, “Gender Advertisements”, in The Goffman Reader, edited and with preface and introduction by Charles Lemert and Ann Branaman, Blackwell, Cambrigde, MA, 1997

Greeley, Andrew, God in Popular Culture Chicago: The Thomas More Press, 1988

Herschell Gordon Lewis, Carol Nelson, Advertising Age Handbook of Advertising,
Lincolnwood, Ill. NTC Contemporary, 1999

Jhally, Sut, 1989. “Advertising as religion: The dialectic of technology and magic”, in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, ed. by Lan Angus and Sut Jhally, New York: Routledge, pp. 217-229

Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising: persons, products and images of well-being, London, Routledge, 1990

Leymore, Varda Langholz, Hidden Myth: Structure and Symbolism in Advertising, New York, Basic Books, 1975

“Media&Advertising” magazine, nr. 20 (354), 24 may 2006

Sheffield, Tricia, The Religious Dimensions of Advertising, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Paul Vitz, Psychology As Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship, Wm Eerdmans Publishing Co and The Paternoster Press, 2^nd ed. 1994

Williamson, Judith, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyers, 1978

Liviu Maliţa

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

The Religious Imaginary in the Romanian Post-War Dramaturgy

Abstract: The paper presents a typology of the religious imagination of the Romanian playwrights after the Second World War. The period is divided into two phases, the communist and the post-communist dramaturgy. In the first phase, Romanian drama was shaped by the pressure of the official ideology and censorship, which imposed important changes to the traditional religious symbolism. In the second phase, after 1989, Romanian drama reflected the deconstructive trend of late modernity. All in all, Romanian dramaturgy is marked by the absence of a religious tradition.

Keywords: Romanian dramaturgy; Communism; Orthodoxy; Lucian Blaga; Marin Sorescu; Alina Mungiu Pippidi.

There is no historical approach to the post war Romanian literature that may possibly avoid the social-political context within which the Romanian literature has formed and evolved, and cannot ignore the dichotomy that the fall of communism brought along – with important consequences for the arts –. That is why I will structure the following material according to two distinct periods: during communism (1948-1989) and after (1989 – present).

The Romanian dramaturgy is marked by the absence of a cult religious tradition. We did not have a mystery and miracle literature. And within the recent tradition, including the period between the two World Wars, there were only a few particular occurrences, but not a dramatic direction of religious inspiration. The representative names and titles can be ascribed either to symbolism – a symbolism with romantic reflexes -, or to expressionism.

The pitch of maximum artistic elevation was reached by Lucian Blaga (1895-1961) who, through such plays as Mesterul Manole (Manole the Craftsman), Zamolxe (Zamolxis) Tulburarea apelor (Whirling Waters), Cruciada copiilor (The Children’s Crusade), Arca lui Noe (Noah’s Ark) determined a highly exceptional mutation of the Romanian spirituality. His dramatic poems, which make use, in an expressionistic key, of the archaic symbols in Christian contexts, spring directly from the native myths and legends. They preserved intact the pagan element and they are scattered with heresies and elements of gnosis. Although it had all the premises, Lucian Blaga’s dramatic creation did not manage to institute a tradition that could include other religious plays. Nonetheless, it exerted a noticeable influence (the most illustrious example being Radu Stanca). However, the literary critics agree that the Romanian dramaturgy from between the two World Wars has a single truly mystical work, conceived as a modern “mystery”, but under the form of a comic farce: Omul cu mirtoaga (The Man with the Jade) by G. Ciprian (1927).

This feeble tradition of the species was brutally interrupted by the new (communist) regime, which, for a certain period of time did not permit any type of preoccupation and made impossible any religious reference, irrespective of course or source. The conviction that the religious imagery can be politically dangerous stayed with the communist ideologues and politicians from Romania up to the end. That is why they reserved for it a special treatment which oscillated between interdiction / total rejection and tolerance / controlled acceptance.

Mythology was, for the party ideology, something essentially suspect. Nevertheless they gave it a differentiated treatment. Epistemologically, the myths were repudiated from strong positions of rationalism and scientific positivism. The myths were seen as expressions of ignorance and obscurantism – beliefs of the primitive man, from which the contemporary man detached. Practically, the relation was dual. To the extent to which these imaginary products could be suspected of inviting or not to (politically subversive) actions, the myths benefited, in the eyes of the political power, from an illicit or licit character. Thus, the ancient myths were generally considered harmless. They did not constitute the common ground for an active belief. Consequently the censorship afforded to treat the ancient myths as fragments of prestigious cultural heritage (signs of recognition between the intellectuals of the Renaissance and those of modernity) and admitted their presence in literary texts, as a testimony of common cultural heritage. The ancient Greek Roman myths were subjected to the political censorship only from positions similar to those of the bourgeois criticism: when they offended the secular Western humanism and / or the communist prudishness, through their visibly immoral content (incest, murder, adultery, etc), and, of course, when they became allegories or parables of the totalitarian power. On the contrary, the religious references (to emblematic Christian themes and characters) were invariably considered dangerous. Perceived as rivals, these are directly noxious for the official ideology. They are deemed, by the power, as potentially subversive because they belong to a vivid socio-cultural complex: there are active beliefs, which presuppose taboo rituals (thus difficult to control and extirpate), liturgies etc; they cumulate great tensions and can be used as a springboard for concrete actions. The censorship has never ignored them and they were permanently subjected to sever ideological and political control. The variations in attitude followed the political meanderings of P.C.R. (Romanian Communist Party) and the changes in its self-awareness. Radicalism and acute intolerance alternated with periods of supervised permissiveness – never of political freedom, which not only that it was never granted, but it was practically impossible. The political power’s interference radically modified the evolving line of the Romanian dramaturgy and conditioned its relations with the religious.

The beginning of the fifties was a period of excessive politicization of the relation. The epoch starts with a moment of radical prohibition. Assuming the most ambitious type of censorship project, the political power extirpates from the literary discourse any explicit textual reference to the religious universe, trying to ban the very possibility of conceiving such an alternative. The religious sign is not permitted not even in protests.

Gradually, one may notice some combined attitudes. The plain rejection is doubled by the polemical acceptance. The religious references are solely permitted only to be degraded and fought against in satirical or parodical texts. These become (counter) propaganda material.

Despite a sustained action of rejection of the Christian model, the communist, materialist and atheistic ideology manifested a (never acknowledged) dependence on this model. The phenomenon was described by researchers as a “return of the repressed”. The religious types, forms and symbols proved much too strong. They could not be, as it was wanted and proclaimed, abolished, but only deviated. The official ban was more often than not backed up by a disguised takeover. Communism tacitly recuperated the religious imaginary, secularized it and converted it into a political, socialist one. Communism perverted the religious imaginary structures to its own interest: it expelled the religious contents but it kept, concealed, its structures and typology. The religious forms and symbols were made to contribute to the ritual of submission to communism. Through a transparent thematic remodeling, the Christian mythology (orthodox and Western one) is gradually replaced: at the beginning with a “soviet mythology”, then, as the nationalistic discourse gains in importance, with an autochthon meditation on history, allegory, etc. An entire propagandistic literature emerges, tailored after the patterns and the instruments of the religious text, but without the latter’s participative fervor and impact force. This literature only attested that the political games were as irrational as the ones that had been unmasked, and that they had nothing in common with the pretended scientific rationalism.

After 1964, Partidul Muncitoresc Roman (Romanian Labor Party) reorients its policy and changes the priorities of propaganda, and of the censorship. The partial and inconsistent cease in the promotion of the communist ideology that follows starts up with an epoch of controlled liberalization, with beneficial effects for the arts, wherein, although the restriction strategies continue, the complete banning decisions are rarer and rarer.

Despite these obstructions, the religious topics begin, in the seventh decade, to configure their own sphere within the dramaturgy of those years. The writers resort to these topics for purposes that are intrinsic to the process of artistic creation. Thus, what in the 50s was, more often than not, a pretext for satire now becomes an instrument of meditation and of inquiry on the existence.

The tendency, obvious in this phase, to resuscitate the religious topics, is not only normal and legitimate, but also comprehensible. The Christian religion was, in the given political climate, for the artist, the only alternative to the materialist, atheist, and totalitarian ideology. Both systems aim at totality and one might expect them, in a polarized context, to attract one another. Religion proves to be an alternative center of power.

This tendency has different, but not contradictory, premises. Thus, we can group the texts and the authors that pertain to this tendency into three important categories, with flexible boundaries and numerous crossovers.

1. Approaching the religious topics in a literary manner becomes a form of defining the art as a free act. The Christian motifs, if they appear in plays, have a strict cultural usage, neutral from a religious or political point of view. They are topoi, in the sense given by Robert Ernst Curtius. The religious substratum does not receive a political value, but it is neutralized and opened towards universality. Only implicitly and secondarily do such texts express an attitude of the artist, troubled in his art by the intolerance for truth of the totalitarian regime.

Some writers detect in the association between art and religion a good pretext for reflection – which is sometimes qualitatively remarkable. The one, who, without any doubt, reached a high level of aesthetic success in this type of dramaturgy, also being the first to authentically renew the dramatic form and content, is Marin Sorescu. Through Setea muntelui de sare (The Thirst of the Salt Mountain) (1974)[1] – a trilogy made up of Iona (Jonah) (“a tragedy in four acts”, written in 1965, published in 1968), Paracliserul (The Verger) (“a tragedy in three tableaux”, 1971) and Matca (The Matrix) (“a play in two acts, six tableaux”, conceived between 1969 and 1973, published in 1974) -, the author would have recuperated, according to Corin Braga, in this space, the medieval mystery-theatre, filtered through the popular farces. His approach would be the equivalent – in modernity, to the auto sacramental species, invented during the Counter-Reformation, by Calderón de la Barca.

Marin Sorescu himself indicated the interpretative line for the three plays of the cycle in a text from the brochure of the play Matca (The Matrix) when it was performed at Teatrul Mic (1974). Marian Popescu used it as a starting point for his critical construction[2] that focused on an ascending sense of the interpretation.

The first play of the trilogy, Iona (Jonah), is a biblical narration in a loose interpretation, which develops as a metaphor for a wider human meditation on the limits of the human condition. While reflecting in a philosophical and aesthetic manner, but with unmistakable humor on the daily reality, the play reinterprets the homonymous biblical myth. However, the similarities are limited to anecdotal coincidences. Marin Sorescu does not retain the main implications – the refusal of the priesthood or the dangers of haughtiness -, but, by giving a new dimension to the text, he centers it on the drama of captivity and on the mystique of freedom: the biblical Jonah, a minor prophet, gets an exemplary punishment, but he also experiences miraculous salvation. Updated, the play explores, through limit situations, the condition of the modern man, his confrontation with the absurd of the human existence, the oscillation between the sacred and the secular, between anguish and hope, between his wish to communicate and the isolation and alienation he is condemned to.

The character’s special condition is set in the scenic indications, in which the author underlines “the ‘compliant’ character, which is split and pulled together according to the scenic indications”.

Jonah is a common fisherman and not really. Akin to Melville’s Ahab, but also to Hemingway’s “old man”, he hunts the marine monster – “the weighty”, whose “each scale he knows”: “I have it in my head for a few years, just that I cannot put it here in the trawl net[3]”.

Jonah leads a life similar to that of the hermits, but his nature stays dual, split between the aspiration to the heights (“He wants to catch the sun in the trawl net”[4]) and the telluric damnation: he has a “poisoned look”, “whatever he looks at, dies”[5].

This character – abandoned to his own anguish, invaded by questions and crushed by indecisions – is confronted with a menacing universe, symbolized at the beginning by the open mouth of a fish ready to swallow; figuratively, afterwards by the hermetic labyrinth of the fish’s belly, made up of concentric spaces that close one over the other and contain one another. Being an active hero, from the category of the protesters, Jonah starts his own questa, animated by a knowledge daemon “in a single life there is something that always escapes us. That is why we must always be re-born.”[6]

Immediately after he realizes he is trapped, Jonah brings back to life “the story of one who was swallowed by a whale”, but the (partial) remembrance of the mythical scenario does not activate the soteriological associations, since Jonah remembers the story, but forgets its ending: the meditation and God’s invocation uttered by the prophet from the whale’s belly. The memory lapse deprives him thus, of the identification with the archetypal example and forces him to imagine a personal ending to his story.

The character goes through several initiation tests and his successive exits from the fish’s belly represent as many tries of returns of the ego into its own matrix, as many consecutive births. Nonetheless, after each escape, the character is lonelier and lonelier. God is useless, He ran away from his own creation. God maximizes the anguish and increases infinitely the man’s responsibility, the latter one having to replace God (“the humans want an example of Resurrection”[7]).

The drama of (the lack of) communication is doubled by the one of knowledge. Although terrifying, the loneliness does not receive only negative connotations: it becomes a condition of introspection, offering the chance for the character, to know himself and to stand by himself.

The character’s initiation journey – unfolded gnoseologically, between unconsciousness and lucidity – ends with a firm gesture: Jonah cuts his belly. The final line – “It is the other way round, Jonah… Everything is the other way round![8]” – invites to a deciphering reading. Reactivating the metaphor of the journey, the text ends in its own circularity.

The suicide act is unequivocal. However, its significances are ambiguous and they even generated two opposite lines in interpretation.

This can suggest an enlightenment that indicates the way to follow only in the end. The suicide as ritual death assures the character’s entrance in(to a new) myth. Through stabbing, the ego penetrates into self (Jonah finds in the inside the lost way towards the outside), he heads towards the depths of his own essence and his being becomes sacred in / through death.

On the other hand, the end can be interpreted as a resignation, motivated by the existential skepticism (“The big fish swallows the small fish”[9]) and by the protagonist’s ironic consciousness, who understands that he is the victim of an evil demiurge – that confronts him.

To be highlighted, in my opinion, are the synthetic values of the play (the text simultaneously contains and claims for opposite interpretative alternatives). It can be read both as a profound meditation on the absurd tragic human condition, but also as an incendiary reflection on life and its multileveled meanings.

The second play of the trilogy, The Verger, is the only one that has an authentically religious topic. It talks about the adventure of a weak believer, but who is thirsty for faith. Probably not by pure hazard, unlike the two other plays, which were frequently performed, this one had its absolute premiere abroad (Skopje, 1971) and, in the country, it was put on only twice, in 1981, and even then in peripheral theatres from the mining zone (Petrosani and Resita).

The play is ingeniously created, the biblical references happily blending with the myth of Manole the Craftsman. However, the stress does not lie, as in the classical popular ballad Manastirea Argesului (Arges Monastery) on the constructor’s drama or on the greatness of the work, but on the avatars of faith or faithlessness. A last verger, belonging to the rare species of the “last Mohicans of an idea” (Nicolae Manolescu), deprived of an official investiture, anoints himself, and, in order to legitimate and authenticate a last cathedral, a new one, but forgotten by everybody and visited by nobody, he decides to smoke it. The toil, which lasts for the entire life, ends in auto-da-fe.

Inseparable dialectic unites the power of faith with the temptation of doubt, negation, contestation and revolt. Consumed by his own passion, the Verger refuses to surrender to the Evil (“… we entered in resonance with the darkness. […] We should not discourage…”[10]) and naively entrusts himself to the Good: “The saints get out of the yolk, as the parachutists from the plane. As long as we still have an egg, nobody will rain over us.”[11] The doubt is born in his case (too) out of lucidity. The Verger knows that the universe is a harmony of contraries and he has an undogmatic vision on Heaven where “the forbidden tree has devils directly on its branches”[12].

The steps of the enlightenment cross over the thresholds of negation – which are counterpoised by a noticeable attitude of revolt, displayed under the deceiving coat of litany.

After an ascent, in which the physical direction transparently indicates a spiritual one, the character lives through a contradictory state. He has the revelation of nothingness and of uselessness (“You pray so much to see God, and when you get next to Him, you don’t see Him anymore.”[13]), but also the satisfaction given by a well-done job.

The character anticipates his own ending, identifying himself (through a double reading: a literal and a figurative one) with the icon of the martyr and saint Sebastian. Through the chosen archetype, it is not only the way to follow that is unveiled to him, but he also gets the suggestion, beyond sacrifice, of salvation.

Still, not even in the last moment, the doubt does not leave him. The state of beatitude (“The chrism begins to scent […] over the sinful earth”[14]) is counteracted by the incertitude that he is not able to finish the cathedral. Reaching the highest point, above and beyond oppositions (“There is nothing left, not even the hell”[15]), the Verger wants to descend. However, the gesture is not possible any longer, since the guardian, who was deaf to his callings until then, enters unnoticed and, indifferently, he takes the ladders, letting the Verger suspended and forced to assume his own mission. Only then the miracle occurs and the Verger takes notice of it “(terrified) And look, I step downwards… and I glide upwards! […] Cause there is no one above me. And I float, God, on the clouds, as you do.”[16]

The dramatic tension of the end lies in its ambiguity; ambiguity that welds the possible opposite significances. The fact that the Verger sets himself on fire in the sacred space of the church vault, in front of the altar, with the last candle end, can be read initially as a challenge, but also as an apostolic consecrated form of entrusting to God. The duplicity of the gesture echoes with the development of the plot and with the entire evolution of the character, because only in the starting point and in the Verger’s pious intention, does the smoking of the church represent a deed of faith, meant to replace the disturbing lack of tradition. Otherwise, the deed is devilish, blasphemous. Even the protagonist himself exclaims in the end “Let me descend, a blacker church than this one I cannot make”[17].

However, the sense gets clearer within the last lines. The stake consisting of his ignited body throwing “fantastic lights over the dark cathedral”[18], escapes the satanic register. It does not come from a destructive fire, but from a saint one, that brings light. Correlated with the final line, repeated twice (“Thus, for my soul…”[19]), the Verger’s body, consumed by flames, becomes the symbol of a candle lit for one’s own soul, but also that of the ignited bush – epiphany of the divine, as in Moses’ vision. At the same time, it also represents the source of light, needed to halo the altar of the new church, where the icons are missing since “the blind painter did not have the time to make them”[20] and where “there is not even an aureole”[21]. The stake ignited with the Verger’s own body consecrates the last revelation, the one that separates for good sanctity from sinfulness, bringing (to) light and shading aureoles.

The vision ends in a rounded manner; closing within the Verger’s sacrificial experience the liturgical destiny of the universe, saved and sanctified by Christ – the Son of Man. Since, the character’s beatification and his acceptance in the divinity (“There is no one above me. And I float, God, on the clouds, as you do. […] And, like you, I cannot fall. The world lies to my right and to my left. And I am in the middle…”[22]) do not make reference to God – the Father of the Old Testament, but to God – the Son. God – the Son who was re-crowned – after Golgotha and after he sealed with sufferance the guarantee of salvation – in an undying glory, makes any return impossible. The stake ignited by the Verger’s body in the vault of the church metonymically invokes the paradigm of Ascension.

A subtle irony veils this text apparently so fervently mystic. If it is true that the end of the play can be read as an “Imitatio Christi”, this does not succeed however in keeping the meaning in the very strict order of the religious, offering itself simultaneously as a metaphor of laic creation. Of a creation frustrated by its own significance exactly to the extent to which it conceived itself as a replica of the great demiurgic creation.

Even if he leaves the impression that he discovered a credible guide, because superhuman, the Verger takes, in reality, guiding points that he himself chooses and dismantles.

The smoking of the church – presented as an act of maximum faith, in order to compensate the others’ lack of faith – is antipodal to the real sign of faith (humility), being in fact, a undoubted sign of haughtiness: a single man is substituting (trying to summarize) an entire tradition.

The reference to Saint Sebastian, with whom the Verger seemed to realize an archetypal identification, also contains a refusal of the mystical union: the rational option is preferred to the participation through contagiousness. The hidden reason that motivates the character is the adoption of a culturally prestigious posture.

The enlightenment to which the Verger accedes at the end of the play represents an inversed revelation: one of his own demiurgic status that attracts, through proud identification, the necessity for the victim to consolidate his work, but which, through the act of its consumption, wipes it out. The work does not survive the author.

The Matrix becomes, according to the majority of the critical commentaries on the trilogy “the keystone” of the entire cycle, the one that imprints the ascending significance. This can be totally credited, only if one ignores the occulted meaning. Thus, the miracle of birth overlaps, until its complete fusion, in the play, with the script of death. In a maximal ambiguity one can read the birth as a “throw in the world”, consequently as a death, and this latter one as a new birth.

On the eschatological myth of the flood (invocated in an ironic key by the female character, even from the introductory scene, as a “second flood” that a “future Bible” will record as an inverted one, planned by the devil, in order to correct the world that “had become too hallowed”) is grafted one of resurrection.

The ending, in a cunningly humoristic tone, announces the possible, and to a certain extent imagined, illusory salvation in the very moment of death. The real is to be denied both from a psychological and a fictional point of view. The operation of the imminent salvation can only be a deceiving apparition, produced by the overheated mind of a desperate mother who insistently still counts on hope, although her hopes are vanished. Structurally, the play ends symmetrically, re-entering into the story. The discourse itself is split, the first person narrative alternating with free indirect speech, in order to underline its fictional character and to assume thus the consistency of the possible and not of the real.

Regardless of the reading approach, the ambiguity persists (the text cultivates frequent confusions between the thanatic allusions and those related to the miracle of “birth”) and an attentive look unveils its profound source. The display of the salvation script – the Old Man builds, as the biblical Noah did, his own ark, Irina is the “Mother” of a new Messiah etc – overshadows the only certain piece of information of the text: the baby is put in a coffin, namely in the casket carved once by the Old Man in oak wood, then transformed into “cradle” and “lifeboat”. This is supported by the mother’s clenched arms which are raised over the child.

The image of the newborn child floating on waters transparently alludes, even if not explicitly, to Moses’ legend. The knitted basket, in which Moses floats, symbolizes in a psychoanalytical key – and this is the interpretation given by Freud himself – , the maternal womb. It is, at the same time, a recipient for the offering (the religious function emphasizes even more the soteriological scheme), and this corresponds with the sacral-heroic attributes of the legend. The child “taken out of the waters”, Moses, is to become not only a spiritual hero, but also a political and military leader, a ruler. On the contrary, the fact that, in Sorescu’s play – which, as Laura Pavel noticed, is marked by “the ethos of that paradoxical ‘laughter and tears’” -, the child is sent around the world in a coffin –an object pertaining to death – implicitly activates the thanatic significances. The coffin-ark underlines the fact that the salvation myth (therapeutically invocated by the character) is used in a funereal register that, in a way, undermines it.

Moreover, some previous clues sustain the hypothesis that the end of the play is performed at twilight.

Firstly, the “Goethean mothers” are at a loss, and confused by the promiscuity in which it is difficult to dissociate life from death, instead of foretelling the fate of the newborn, they are singing the funeral prayers destined to the Old Man. It is true that the somber foretelling significances of this gesture are hypothetically annihilated by the context in which it is performed – that of a carnival. However, one must say, that it was not an authentic carnival, but one that belonged to the consecrated rituals of euphemizing the death. This only prolongs the ambiguity, allowing for a double interpretation: the confusion is intended, being used not in order to anticipate, but to send away the death; yet it can also be involuntary and then, it is a sign with funereal connotations.

The dialogue with Titu Poanta, the youth from the tree with the dead fiancé in his arms – the Voice from under the stage, thus in a space of hope – starts in auspicious circumstances, but it ends in a depressing atmosphere: Irina finds out about the death of the fiancé (exactly the moment when she suggested becoming, together with her husband, the godparents of the couple); Poanta himself believes that the child is dead, etc. The transparent symbolism comes to support the thanatic significances: in the madness caused by desperation, the youth starts singing in a tree like a cuckoo. This fake dove from Ararat, that once brought the piece of news to Noah (the cuckoo is a solar symbol that announces the spring’s arrival) has an inversed function here, becoming a messenger of the death.

Then, wanting to hearten herself in the agonizing moments, Irina evocates in a visible soothing manner, the myth of the whale from Jonah’s legend. Not only the mother’s womb, but again, ambivalently, the coffin that shelters the precious gift is compared to the biblical “whale”. She “did everything. She felt responsible until the very end of the fate of the one God had seeded in her womb. She put him safe and sound on the firm ground…”[23] The tag (sign of textual irony), that the female character utters in sorrow, separating the twin symbols, completely reverses the soteriological meaning: “The firm ground was a coffin[24] (my underlining)” (p. 148).

The bipolar textual structure and the irony of the writing, allows thus, without contradictions, for a reversed reading. Not only Jonah and the Verger result in failure. The “end” Irina reached is not certitude either, but the illusion of certitude. Far from being a textual reality, the hope induced by the end of the play pertains to the projecting, thus imaginary reading, of the invincible mother.

Marin Sorescu’s trilogy belongs to a thematic constellation of plays to which works of his contemporaries also belong, such as Arca Bunei sperante (The Ark of Good Hope) by I.D. Sirbu, Jocul vietii si al mortii in desertul de cenusa (The Game of Life and Death in the Desert of Ashes) by Horia Lovinescu, Ingerul slut (The Hideous Angel) by Al. Sever, etc.

In all the mentioned works, the religious arsenal is employed to support some cultural desiderata. Taking advantage of the political opportunity, their authors took over the religious influences not in a mystical purpose, nor in a purely anti-totalitarian one, but in order to build, every and each time, through a process of pseudo-metamorphosis, a literary meaning.

2. In the second category one can include texts that either deconstruct ideologies, or they are transformed into allegories or parables of the communist utopia. The political meanings, are not, this time, attributed through derivation, but they naturally ensue, at least in the given context, from the dramatic construction. In this case the intervention of the censorship occurred not only in order to purge the religious significances that contradicted the ideological atheism, but also because these concealed an opposition to the system that could not be accepted. I mention, in this context, Ion Omescu’s try to publish, in 1970, a dramatic re-writing of Jesus’ sufferings. However, it collided against the opposition of the censorship, disturbed by what it was inferred in the text: the deconstruction of an ideology under the concealed criticism directed against Christianity. The play, titled El & Celalalt (He and the Other), will be published only in 1992. Some other plays, among which Piticul din gradina de vara (The Dwarf from the Summer Garden) by Dumitru Radu Popescu, or Ingerul batrin (The Old Angel) (1982) and Noaptea e parohia mea (The Night Is My Parish) (1984) by Al. Sever step across the censorship threshold as anti-Nazi writings. Their reading invites however to reversibility. Nazism is here only an example of totalitarian ideology, its confusion with communism being possible and justified. Both of them are apocalyptic ideologies and they are metaphysically invested, being presented as satanic forms of embodiment of the absolute evil (engendering in a compensational manner strategies and scenarios of salvation).

3. Finally, in the third category we can put together texts (the majority of them comedies) in which the Christian inspiration or allusion have an obvious political bias and the religious imaginary is used deliberately and sometimes ostentatiously. The masked criticism of the malefic communism is realized now through other means than those of the tragic. The daily communism is unveiled especially in a comic or parodic register.

One might be surprised by the recurrence of titles that use religious terms or metaphors: Micul Infern (The Small Inferno) (Mircea Stefanescu), Adam si Eva (Adam and Eve) (Aurel Baranga), Nu ponegri infernul (Don’t Run Inferno down) (Mihail Raicu), Paradisul (Paradise) (Horia Lovinescu), Infernul blind (Kind Inferno); Paradis de ocazie (Occasional Paradise); Satana cel bun si drept (Satan the Good and the Righteous) (Tudor Ionescu), Iadul si pasarea (The Hell and the Bird) (Ion Omescu), Acesti ingeri tristi (These Sad Angels) (D.R. Popescu) etc. However, not for a few times are the connections superficial (the allusions stop sometimes, at the title), the religious motifs being only some conventional pretexts that increase their prestige.

In a few cases the plays are anchored in myth so that, at its shelter, they can turn into devastating criticisms against the system. Either the Hell or the caricatured Paradise (one’s attention is drawn by the lack in descriptive and dramatic representation between the religious universes) becomes an allegory of a utopian communist society. […] The insertion of such mythical fragments functions as a myse en abyme, through which the reversed and concentrated image of the communist society itself is formed.

During the entire communist period, the censorship was especially attentive to the literary texts that conveyed religious images and themes, to their “symbolic violence” (Pierre Bourdieu). The permissiveness remained, in this sense, restricted, limited. Even when the authors inoffensively used those motifs, the censors interpreted them subversively, since the climate of generalized uncertainty invited to anticipated suspicion.

*

After 1989, the new political context generated a new communicational context; open to a plurality of contents. This allowed for meaningful propositions – which until then had been censored or suppressed – to be considered possible and plausible.

The sudden abolition of the political conditioning of the artistic use of religious imaginary did not instantly establish a normality climate in the relation. The receptiveness to religion, in a short lapse of time, met an opposite direction, that of demystification. This latter one was however founded on presuppositions whose starting points were different from those from the communist period. Several elements contributed to this phenomenon.

A certain role was played by the anti-institutional, anti-clerical criticism practiced with a certain consistency by some groups of intellectuals. They especially accused the representative orthodox church of having collaborated with the late atheistic power and they deplored its absence from the civic space and from the debates on ideas, its weak cultural performance both for the past and for the future.

Detachment and reticence, provoked by the media abuse of religious signs and practices, were also added. According to the church-state separation principle, the civil society made efforts, even legislative ones, to institute control on the use of inherent religious codifications in the public space; to ensure a correct transfer, mediated by professionals, of the religious sense towards other social symbols.

However, the modification in mentality that was operated, due to the new order of things, was significant indeed for the artistic realm (because it would mean a lot for the imaginary). The writer, the artist in general, started to assume the liberty of adopting a rebellious attitude against the religious sphere. If he/she disavowed it during the communist period, when the religious topic itself was oppressed, and consequently it arose a feeling of solidarity from the artist; now, in the climate of liberty, the rebellious attitude becomes legitimate in the artist’s eyes. More often than not, this is not a stronger reaction against the autochthonous realities, but the linkage to the Western ethos, to “postmodernism” and deconstruction, to de-structuring, parody and a certain demystifying disposition. But, since the new attitude is no longer imposed in a propagandistic manner, but freely chosen by the playwright, it has a good chance to become artistic.

Although the neo-contestation has not yet produced any exceptional literary text, it determined challenging artistic acts that stirred controversies. And, to the extent to which they touched sensitive issues, they stirred reactions from the church and from the intellectuals, as well as counter-reactions. Alina Mungiu Pippidi’s play, Evanghelistii (The Evangelists) (UNITER prize for the best play of the year 1992) is emblematic in this respect. It was published in 1997 (definitive edition in 2006[25]) and it was staged, after many hesitations, in 2005, at Tatarasi Athenaeum, in Iasi, directed by Benoit Vitse. The premiere stirred a huge scandal.

The text has promising premises, but insufficient for its artistic validation.

There are several complementary themes. A history of events (the biography of a Jewish prophet) rivaled and overshadowed by the written history. The meta-narrative plan, “the adventure of the making of a story” prevails over the story. The fiction about the past is meant to be a deconstruction of an ideology (namely, communism) and, implicitly, a criticism of fundamentalism and fanaticism, of the terrorism of ideas.

The complex typology – the strategist, the enlightened, the dialectician, the doctrinaire (out of which only three characters are memorable: Cherintos (Kerintos), Pavel (Paul) and Isus (Jesus), the rest of them being overshadowed and precariously developed from a dramatic point of view) – allows, within the criticism of Christianity – read as a propaganda -, the interlinking and the confrontation of several perspectives (for instance: the Jewish monotheism as opposed to the Hellenic eclecticism, i.e.: epicurism, stoicism and cynicism) which finally result in a definitive laudatory version.

The plot’s precariousness and the absence of an imaginative story are compensated by the dynamics of ideas, developed to the detriment of actions, but ingeniously supported by the grouping of characters in antagonistic pairs: Isus (Jesus) and Povestitorul (the Storyteller), the latter representing the historic character whereas the other one is the emblem / the prototype; or the apostles Petru (Peter) and Pavel (Paul): both of them mystify the teachings. Peter is the canonic, the mysteries keeper. He represents the rigorist aspect of faith, the one who freezes in dogma the teachings that were transmitted orally, in a more vivid, subtle and volatile manner. His consistency originates in the fact that the Church he dreams of is organic, co-substantial to faith. On the contrary, Paul assumes the role of the ideologist. Although he is visionary and fanatic, he is not devoid of lucidity and pragmatism. He is the one who builds, who weaves with limpid eyes the ideology. His vision resides in promoting, without hesitations, the political and organization-institutional sides of faith, even if they are to be separated from the spiritual one.

The Storyteller is Jesus’ coward twin brother, who cannot reach the dignity of the mission, Paul’s intervention being needed. Paul is to operate the necessary biographic corrections, so that the overlapping with the prototype could be possible.

The four students/apostles also have a double role: 1. to (tran)scribe and to re-signify Jesus’ story, writing the sacred book according to the commandments of the literary fiction and, simultaneously, subjecting it to lucid criticism (as they advance in their writing, they discover more and more inadvertences, aberrations and implausible things) and, 2. to reveal the authenticity: (psycho dramatically) playing the scenes between Judas – Caiaphas – Pilate, through this spontaneous theatricalism, they discover, behind the concealed story, the true deployment of events.

The dramatic structure, however, overuses the internal symmetries, organized with an almost mathematical precision. Nonetheless, the anecdotal end represents, probably, the strong point of the play. It has many artistic features: compositional surprise and the capacity to render the text ambiguous and to open it to interpretation, promising to save it from flatness and conventionalism. It has an antithetic end.

At a first reading, the miracle of Jesus’ Resurrection can be accepted, among other parodies that precede it, as the only authentic event. It has attributes that make it credible: there are no witnesses when it occurs (all of them are dead), so there is nothing demonstrative in it, and it invites to internalization. In a higher interpretative key, it can certify a mystical sense, opposed to the demystifying register that dominates the text: God triumphs over the tries of diverting Him to faith (Peter) or to ideology (Paul), the sacred is immune to human interference and it manifests itself imperatively through its very ambiguity.

Nonetheless, an opposite interpretation is not excluded: one that does not engage a (mystical) twist of meaning, but maintains the end in the irony area. The scene of resurrection: a theatrical blow in theatre is realized with romantic-grotesque props (too explicit for not being a cultural quotation), suitable for a horror movie:

“Jesus stands up and goes out. He walks perfectly normal only that the dagger comes out from between his shoulders. He goes to Helen, takes her in his arms and sits down.

Jesus: Don’t be afraid! Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in paradise”[26].

One cannot make anything out of this second (?!) miracle. The ambiguity is artistically fertile.

All these resources could ensure, and they even ensure to a certain extent, artistic density, thus the literary quality of the play. Yet, this is substantially diminished by some notable deficiencies.

We have already mentioned the linear dramatic construction. The play is rigorously rational, done with “the brains”, something that might prove that Alina Mungiu is an intellectual spirit, but not a playwright. Her writing has many flaws, especially at line construction level.

Moreover, she does not succeed in creating a special language, that might reconstitute the college jargon – nonchalant, having its own codes, vital -, meant to contrast with the presupposed rigor and depth of the studies (be them even mocked at under the form of some endlessly postponed seminars on Aristotle). Insufficiently articulated, from an artistic point of view, the language remains in this realm, in the incredible zone of the illustrative, being devoid of profundity.

Another inconvenient comes from the oscillation of the discourse. The familiar line, even frivolous and purposefully comic, evolves, in non-satirical contexts, to emphasis and platitude. The divergent blending of (sometimes too ostentatious) colloquialisms with a slogan-like style and didactic explanations dangerously reduces the symbolic violence of de-taboo-ization. Parodically undecided, for bits and pieces elocutionary and demonstrative, the (intellectualist) speech sometimes reminds, through its irritating fluency, of shallow rhetoric.

The hesitation among several dramatic conventions is visible not only at the linguistic level. The polemic is insufficiently incisive in diatribe (not being motivated by a truly apostate adventure). It is also devoid of the analytical component and consequently, it cannot recuperate in the depth of deconstruction a possible conceptual reconstruction. Although sometimes it resorts to a prophetic rhetoric, this is not visionary enough, not metaphorically plastic enough, in order to compensate on the artistic side. Briefly: incapable to abandon a minor register of deconstruction and demystification, oscillating between several possible options, without decisively honoring any of them, the text threatens to be devoured by reverse conventionality, as foreseeable as that of the diatribe – a conventional way of taking a stand against conventions.

Even graver are the oversimplified ideas, which are the foundations of the entire artifact. The author resorts, both when contradicting, but also when stating something, to clichés. The criticisms, far from being powerful, follow, sometimes, neighboring the ridicule (see Paul’s antifeminism) the agenda of social constructivism and of the postmodern ideology of political correctness, immersed in the ancient culture and civilization. Moreover, certain superficiality grinds the unconfessed intention, but visible behind the parody, to quote some fashionable topics, but without offering them a stylistic touch and a sufficiently personalized vision. The text is thus transformed into a literary parody (insufficiently assumed and, consequently, lacking in virulence and in impact force) made with the (approximate) means of the ideological controversy.

Consequently, the heresy is not to be criticized here, but the obedience to similar tyrannical fashions (probably more diffuse ones), the perseverance that neighbors the religiosity she denounces in her victims, perseverance in checking item by item all the points of reference on the ideological agenda of the constructivist feminist left from late modernity, an attitude that does not go together with the independence of ideas of authentic writers who feel that the bet consists, in such cases, in ”écart”, and not in conformity.

The lack of scope for the ideas of the text and its precarious artistic valor were overshadowed by the inflamed reaction of some intellectuals, and of the Church, the latter one’s great frustration seeming to be that it does not have today the Inquisition’s instruments at its disposal.

In reality, in 1992, when it came out, Evanghelistii (The Evangelists) already was a work of the past. (The statement can be understood in its literal meaning, the play being conceived before 1989). The theme of the deconstruction of secret, persuasive mechanisms, those pertaining to the ideology, manipulation and propaganda, was wreathed, in communism, with a subversive force, capable of creating trans-literary complicities. Had it come out in the 9^th decade, when it was conceived, the play would have benefited from this subversive potential. Its publishing came, however, après coup, and a reading without (new) exaggerated ideological parti pris would have probably generated a suitable literary assessment. Thus, the scandal that the publishing (and later on, the staging) produced functioned as an (involuntary) strategy of success.

The violence of rejection, which on several occasions reached sharp notes, cannot be justified. In exchange, it is worth explaining it.

Although it does interact with the communist regime, the theme arouses a considerable interest for a segment of the Romanian public, but on account of other reasons, and on a background of increased sensitivity, the adventure of The Evangelists is woven.

In its starting point, it is not clear whether the play hides a crisis or a criticism of Christianity. In the latter case, this is formulated from anti-clerical positions, pertaining to the late Enlightenment. The way in which the author speaks in her interviews about the history of the case, places the play in a literature born out of moral indignation, compensated by a lucid look and a humanitarian civism, but not by artistic excellence. The confessed intention is not programmatically heretical, even if the assumed position is agnostic. The text is simultaneously described as an “exercise of social deconstruction of a religion” (Christianity as a historical and ideological construct), but also as a warning against history’s falsification. It is a speech on liberty and an interrogation on the intellectual’s role (“a forger of genius”), a work that does not want to demolish, but to incite and to invite to meditation.

Yet, the Romanian society which maintained quasi-intact the patriarchal reflexes until the end of the second millennium was not ready to accept this challenge. The Church and religion should benefit from immunity according to the opinion of an important social segment. And this segment could not tolerate the integration of Christianity in a profane context, desacralized, and especially its questioning from outside.

The excessive stress laid on the text is justified by its (lack of) chance for having emerged on a thematic void. There is no humanist tradition of a confrontation between the civil society and the Church, nor a culture of debates in this respect; and the initiatives from the period between the two World Wars could not settle. Despite the communist experience, or, probably, just on account of it, the non-conformist attitude towards the (Christian) religion goes beyond the realm of intellectual and artistic iconoclasm in order to directly dive in that of heresy.

What for the Romanian culture is an inconvenient deficiency, for the fate of the literary work represented a chance. Both the success, and the blaming and defamation, are ascribable to this intellectual tradition. Its existence would have inserted the play in a series and would have subjected it to a normal process of literary integration. Thus, The Evangelists, occupied a cultural niche that was vacant until then. It managed to impose itself to the public attention, not through its artistic excellence, but through the scope of the challenge in a culture unaccustomed to this type of challenges.

Although unaccomplished artistically, The Evangelists is a paradigmatic play and can be professed as a series opener for a dramaturgy to be born from now on. In reality, there is no such filiation.

The change of the political context did not simultaneously engender a change in the artistic creativity. The post-revolution dramaturgy seems immune to propaganda, but not to the reactive use of the religious imaginary. The new texts often have to bear the historical burden of the relation between literature and religion. The majority of texts that are permeated with religious topics and symbols simply cannot, for the moment, find the adequate dose, tone and rhythm.

Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

The “Infernal Chemistry” of the 19th Century

The Opiates between the “Witchcraft Paradigm”

and the Development of Modern Toxicology

Abstract: During the 19^th century, in the absence of a legal interdiction and of scientific research on its effects, drug use acquired a multileveled mental representation of its positive and negative aspects. My study focuses on the change which took place during that period regarding the representation of drugs, from a mysterious, dangerous chemistry (what we call “the paradigm of witchcraft” and magic) to a scientific vision, through the birth and development of toxicology. The first section of the article deals with the evolution of the literary/cultural and social representations of poisons and drugs (opiates in particular), in parallel with the scientific developments. The main subject of discussion is the inheritance of a certain imagery regarding drugs, the „obsession” of finding a panacea in both paradigms, as well as the association of opium to a miraculous remedy and then to a „demonic” substance. The second section deals with the ambivalent relation of the modern artist to the drug, which is due to the perception of opiates as both a way of access to Paradise, and as a diabolic attraction.

Keywords: Romanticism; Witchcraft; Opiates; Laudanum; Morphine; Heroine; Addiction; Toxicology; Panacea; Poison

The tradition of a “dangerous/ infernal chemistry” was for centuries related to the mysterious techniques of witchcraft, while, by contrast, the 20th century places addiction in a medical paradigm, associated with legal prohibition. The switch from a mainly religious perspective to a scientific one, which has taken place during the 19^th century, signified that the ethical (or theological) and magical imagery and vocabulary were replaced by biological and psychiatric metaphors, such as the notion of temptation, replaced by impulses or drives[1]. In which concerns the period, the theme can be discussed at different levels, as in the 19^th century the sciences concerning the drugs were not yet strictly specialised and independent. That was still allowing drugs and poisons to be a subject of interaction between disciplines, interesting pharmacy and toxicology laboratories as well as aesthetics, literary imaginary or philosophical discourse. Toxicology as a science is born in direct connection to the evolution of organic chemistry, bringing into the light the actions (perceived before as mysterious) of drugs and poisons. Pharmacy imposed the opiates, the term referring to opium and its derivates: laudanum, morphine and heroine. Of main interest will be the way the artificial hallucination reflects in the literary and social imaginary, a reflection which fluctuates from the opiates as remedies (pharmakon) to their perception as hallucinogens and then to poisons or lethal substances (toxikon), because of the effects of addiction and overdoses. This cultural and scientific background led to a specific, multileveled rapport in the mental representation of its positive and negative aspects, especially in the absence of a legal interdiction and of actual scientific certainties on its effects.

Thomas S. Szasz, in his work on the Ceremonial chemistry (an interesting variant of the title being the French translation, Les Rituels de la drogue), acknowledged the existence of two periods from the point of view of the religious, respectively scientific perspectives on drugs. Szasz speaks of the moral implications of the narcotic use, bringing to the fore the opinion that it belongs not to the domain of health and disease, but that it is a question of Good and Evil, considering the idea of addiction as being a mental disease a form of rejection of a religious practice. He insisted especially on the 20^th century attitude towards addiction, considering the entire history of drug prohibition as the history of a manipulation. Although the premise of his study belongs to a different area of research and interest, his criteria being the prohibition of drugs no matter the system of believes, Szasz’s description and comparisons between the two attitudes is revealing for our study on the transgression from the religious/ witchcraft paradigm to a scientific one. He speaks about two systems, naming them theocratic and therapeutic[2] and placing the comparison in terms of political dominance[3]. In spite of us using the comparison in a distinct context, Szasz’s one to one correspondence between two periods and cultural perspectives (Christian/ religious and scientific) is certainly of great interest here. The author’s main concepts, which are considered equivalent in the two stages, or paradigms, as we call them, are: dominant ideologies: religious/ Christian versus scientific/ medical ideology, priests/ physicians, heretics/ sorcerers, quacks, faith/ scientific knowledge, hope/ scientific research, charity/ treatment, holy water/ therapeutic drugs, Satan/ Christian science and everything that defies the medical authority, sorcerers’ substances or chemistry/ the “hard drugs”, Inquisition/ institutional psychiatry. The researcher makes an observation which is significant for the paradoxical idea of continuity in the change of paradigms of the imaginary, that there is one thing that different religions and parties agree on: the “scientific fact” that certain substances are dangerous[4]. Szasz speaks of the 20^th century anti-addiction treatment, writing that “a religious scenario was adapted to medical terms”, but we can make use of the comparison and adapt it to the 19^th century social imaginary. The latter carried its ‘obsessions’ for miraculous or dangerous potions into the medical background, where a first age of research was interested in the discovery[5] of a messianic panacea (a remedy or treatment that can cure all diseases), while later the ‘ghost of addiction’ forced them to start a fight against the new “disease”[6].

The search for a panacea[7] seems to have always belonged to the social imaginary, especially in the first paradigm (when treatments usually consisted in mysterious potions prepared by the initiates, such as the white sorcerers[8]), but also later, when it moved into the foreground of 19^th century medical research. Christian Bachmann and Anne Coppel observe that before the second half of the century, as the therapeutic medicine was making its first “hesitating” steps, the physicians had no way of relieving pain. “Despite the inefficiency of their solutions, the panaceas were numerous: opium, alcohol, blood taking and mercury chlorate”.[9] With all the variety, researches agree that the “cure-all” of the 18^th and 19^th century this was certainly opium[10] and its derivates. 19th century physicians recommended opiates for a large variety of diseases from pain to cough, diarrhoea, dysentery and so on, based on the real therapeutic properties of the drug, which was perceived, in a period when there were no many others alternatives, as a miracle, a “G.O.M.” – “God’s own medicine” [11]. For example, laudanum[12] “was used in many patent medicines to relieve pain… to produce sleep… to allay irritation… to check excessive secretions…[…]. The limited pharmacopoeia of the day meant that opium derivatives were among the most efficacious of available treatments, and so laudanum was widely prescribed for ailments from colds to meningitis to cardiac diseases, in both adults and children. Laudanum was used during the yellow fever epidemic.”[13] The second half of the 19th century is marked by the generalisation of the use of morphine, which although isolated around 1805, was widely spread especially after 1853, due to the discovery of the hypodermic needle. “Morphine[14] was first used medicinally as a painkiller and, erroneously, as a cure for opium addiction. It quickly replaced opium as a cure-all recommended by doctors and as a recreational drug and was readily available from drugstores or through the mail”[15]. During the last decades of the century, physicians use in their fight with pain and addiction other solutions, such as the newly discovered heroin[16], which, unfortunately, was even more dangerous in its side-effects.

As we can easily observe, the negative pole in the perception and representation of miraculous/ mysterious substances (which evolve from ‘potions’ to chemical formulas) takes the image of the danger of addiction, and also that of opiates as poisons (associated with overdosing, accidental or not). The invisible, unperceivable action of such “dangerous substances” led to a survival of an older fear (inherited from the witchcraft paradigm): poison has projected itself in the social imaginary as a form of refined, atomized death[17], “a particularly disloyal and insidious homicide […which] involved the appeal to certain mysterious mixtures”[18]. In spite of the evolution of toxicology and the progress in the chemical analyses and in other tools of determining the presence of poison in a body, the results were approximate and the anxiety, the suspicion and fear (as a “real psychosis of contamination of the body”[19]) remained, although the “anguishing obsessions towards mystic associations”[20] changed into the perception of a more pragmatic sort of danger.[21] The scientists were speaking of the “demonic powers” of morphine[22], so the apparently abandoned religious paradigm returns in terms of the representation of the new danger and the anguish it arose: “In the invention of drug addiction, the first stage[23] is that of anxiety. [The enthusiastic physicians discover that] pain is demonic, but morphine is an even more harmful demon”[24]. Speaking about the historical evolution of poison, Jean de Maleissye made an observation which can illustrate very well the connections between the two poles (positive and negative): “So, from poisons to potions, from potions to remedies a transition takes place; […] the borderlines between medicine, quackery and witchcraft have always been blurry, and they are even today [25].

The diagram of the evolution of science regarding the complex drug-poison (and in particular the opiates, as the main drugs of the 19^th century) is that of a contradictory period. Real progress or development could not avoid uncertainty, oscillation or faults, some of them of great consequence, such as the treatment of many patients not with less harmful remedies, but, in spite of the good intentions, with more and more addictive substances. Still, even if delayed, the discovery of this danger is of much help in preventing the appearance of more victims and has a major consequence the legal prohibition of opiates in the 20^th century.

Louis Lewin, a German pharmacologist and professor interested in poisons, is the author of one of the first works on the toxic substances and the reactions they give to the user.[26] In 1874 he writes about chronic morphine addiction, although the substance was very much used and appreciated. About 1884, he wrote against Freud’s conclusion on the benefits of cocaine in the treatment of morphine. Lewin is the author of a detailed classification[27] of the “dangerous chemistry”, still a reference in the study of this, unfortunately edited only in 1924.

“During many years the remarkable and, for that time, quasi miraculous effects of morphine would conceal the risks and inconveniences. It would require ten years more, until 1870, for certain physicians […] to perceive the danger of the new remedy and ask for a strictly controlled use. […] But the warnings of Laehr, Levinstein or certain French practitioners would do nothing. With the 1880s, morphine would become the object of a rather ordinary fashion, both for its extent, as for its literary and artistic extensions. Imprudently prescribed by physicians who had this way replaced laudanum […], this «sovereign medication» would rapidly spread”[28].

Later on, heroin became the favourite opiate; “even more in the popular imaginary, heroin replaced very soon all other substances regarding the diabolic symbol of drug addiction.[29]

Going back to the hesitations of the 19^th century scientific research on drugs, we can say that if nowadays the most accurate rapport between substances can be established, no matter if the substances are toxics or belong to usual medication, the 19th century started with the absence of a real scientific basis, toxicology being favoured afterwards by the evolution of complementary sciences such as chemistry.

“Organic chemistry was, at the beginning of the 19^th century, an almost unknown area. Of course, discoveries regarding organic bodies have accumulated from the Middle Ages. […] Still, the chemist lacked the necessary keys for the study of organic chemistry. When he would discover them, the evolution of this discipline would take place with an amazing rapidity.”[30]

The development of the field of organic chemistry starts at the beginning of the 19^th century (between 1811 and 1826) with the annulment of some previous rigid classifications (such as the belief that organic bodies were animated by a vital fluid and that they could not be isolated and studied separately) and therefore with the appliance of the same basic science to all objects.[31] “Accumulating detailed but not very useful descriptions, in spites all admirable efforts of rationalising, the science of experts meets a dark, fascinating and tragic world, which gives accessible knowledge the feeling of their imperious limits, which no voluntarism, no matter as frenetic, doesn’t reach to push forward” [32].

François-Emmanuel Fodéré represents, for example, a first period in the study of toxics, through his attempt to synthesize substances on the basis of mainly clinical observations. The type of approach is descriptive, substances are animal, vegetal and mineral, volatile or fixed, emanating a distinct smell or not and so on. In 1825, Mathieu Orfila, medical chemistry and forensic medicine professor in Paris, a significant name for the 19^th century toxicology (he was called as an expert in many trials related to empoisoning) and also the first scientist to take in consideration the importance of chemistry in criminological research[33], imposes a new classification of toxic substances. Maintaining the primary classification of substances (animal, vegetal and mineral), Orfila organizes toxics in irritating/ inflammatory poisons, narcotic or hallucinogen (opium and its derivates used at the time were considered to be part of this section), septic or inducing decomposition.

Throughout the century the dynamics is the most important feature of the research concerning what we called “dangerous chemistry”, so a new step in the evolution of the science of poisons and drugs is signalled by Ambroise Tardieu’s more detailed classification in 1867, accepted by scientist and used with no change until the end of the 1890s. As far as opiates are concerned, their classification is the same as in Orfila’s research, being considered “narcotic poisons”. In spite of the excitement caused by the scientific discoveries, which at the moment give the impression that there are no more questions without an answer in the field of toxicology, the evolution of the science in the 19^th century takes place in a sinuous manner, as studies try to discover as accurately as possible the essential facts: how substances modify under different circumstances, how they act upon the body and which is the precise lethal dose. One the most necessary answers regarded the establishing of proportions, the dosage, because, as Paracelsus observed, “All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.”[34] The science acknowledged the fact that the distinction between a remedy and a lethal substance depended of the chemical analyse and its evolution. “The gloomy and worrisome face of poison is hidden behind every medicine. Before being part of the vast therapeutic arsenal that man possesses today, many products, and not the less important, were considered among the most dangerous substances nature has created. Still, man […] managed to subdue these deadly toxics, to shape their effects in order to retain only the pharmaceutical attributes which the scientist wished to allow”. [35]

On an opposite position to this vision of science as a powerful, even messianic solution to the problems of a ‘dangerous chemistry’, Thomas Szasz observed that as the Western Christian society had once faced the problem of witchcraft, the contemporaneous scientific world confronted the problems of drugs on medical terms. He also makes an interesting observation, that both paradigms are systems of manipulating people[36]: “magic and religion remain, without a doubt the best explanations and methods of control[37], being followed, he writes, by science/ medicine, which, with the help of legislation, place the role of an Inquisition in terms of drugs. He also notices that after the recognition of pharmacy and psychiatry as modern medical disciplines in the last two decades of the 19^th century, the scientists have searched without finding it drugs which will not create addiction, which would cure pain, help the sleep or the waking. Religion and science/ medicine, Szasz writes, have played the same role: to find the significance and purpose of their lives, of their existence[38]. Outside these polemics, philosophical or scientific discourse regarding the rights of the individual versus the important discoveries of science and their effects on the 20^th century everyday life, at the level of culture and social imaginary, what toxicology did was to imposes the scientific notions and criteria to a world which had belonged previously to magic, to a dark, mysterious laboratory associated with the most intimate fears and questions.

*

While for science and the social imaginary, the image of opium oscillated between panacea and poison (the latter as a metaphor of the “diabolic” addiction, but also as a pragmatic interpretation for the effects of the overdoses[39]), for many 19^th century literary movements, opium revealed its “paysages opiacées” with important aesthetical consequences. Artists found in the drug hallucination the access to “artificial paradises” but also, as they confess, to an inferno of addiction and of weakened will (“Les chercheurs des paradis font leurs enfers, les préparent, les creusent avec un succès dont la prévision les épouvanterait peut-être”[40], as Baudelaire writes). The literary and cultural movements establish four historical stages: first, the Romanticism, secondly, Baudelaire’s and modern poetry’s (pre)avant-gardism (Rimbaud, Symbolist and Parnassian poetry), then the fin de siècle society and culture (dandyism, decadent literature). As reflected in the literary confessions of the artists attracted in this “dangerous game” (the famous De Quincey, Coleridge or Baudelaire and many others), the drug had become the instrument for applying the Romantic, then Modern or Decadent aesthetics and philosophy. For such a literature interested in the powers of the imagination, in new means of expressing the inside, irrational faces of the human being and escaping the pragmatic reality of the industrial age, the artificial hallucination was priceless.

“Through their curiosity about the Orient and their desire for the exotic, the Romantics were introduced to the various stimulating drinks and drugs from which they hoped to find a means of escape to an exciting, exotic, poetic world which would have all the charm of Paradise. It is curious that the early European concepts of the Orient from which the wondrous spices were brought was that it was a Paradise. Belevitch-Stankevitch writes that: a lot of people were convinced that fine spices, exquisite to the point of being called divine, came right from the Paradise. As it was known that they came from Alexandria on the Nile, this river was identified with Gihon[41], the river of Paradise. For the credulous the spices and the precious wood were the fruits and branches of trees […] had fallen in its water and led by the currents to Egypt where people did nothing more than fish them out. Joinville says of the Nile that it is: a river that comes from Egypt and from terrestrial Paradise; and that they fish in its water […] would fall from the tries of Paradise when the wind blows[42].

„Coleridge and de Quincey, Rabbe, Nodier, Nerval, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire. […] Some have found in the opiate substances the remedy to their physical and moral sufferance. […] Therefore, whether we speak of a cognitive experience, an aesthetic research or, on the contrary, of the drug as a purpose, the use of narcotics was not, from the perspective of the beginnings of the 19th century, a defect or an abnormality and was under no circumstance considered as a “drug”, at least not with the meaning we use the word today, filled with a certain disapproval. Guilt was associated with the harmful effects bestowed on one’s own life and creation: the drug was not yet sanctioned by the social apparatus, nor by the medicine, which prescribed it frequently. Therefore is unconceivable to speak of taboo or of transgression of values: the forbidden did not exist.”[43]

The Good and Evil, the Paradise and Hell meant for writers as Baudelaire and his followers, but as well for some of the Romantics, a problem of aesthetics and regarding one’s own inner dramas and revelations.

“It’s all about the ethics of the Creator; narcotics, assuming that they can amplify genius, the creative imagination, deteriorate the will and make impossible the effort of composition; […] the sterile fruit of hashish and opium feasts has a name: the unknown masterpiece. The ethics referred to here is an aesthetic ethics”[44].

Szasz writes that the fascination of the Romantics for dreams anticipated the psychoanalytical methods of Freud and Jung. This fascination manifested itself all through the 19^th century, from Goethe to Baudelaire, Mallarmé to Huysmans and Heine.

“The song of the mermaids of the unconsciousness, silent after the suppression of the mysteries from Eleusis, came to life again in the pagan exuberance of the Pre-Raphaelites and Romanticism, in a certain fondness for opium (Beardsley’s, Odilon Redon and Rossetti’s paintings)”[45].

The sensation of the Artist is that, under the influence of the opiates, the spirit escapes the body, allowing the drug to lead it to a superior [46] realm, where perceptions rise above the human circuit.

“The morphine euphoria comprises two elements: a. An agreeable polarization of body sensations, […] «feeling of physical imponderability and intellectual sublimity, […] a particular trouble of the sense of time (…), associated with the impression that time exists no more; one stops perceiving the succession of hours and, on the other hand, one could believe he has lived, during a few minutes, a whole eternity », b. Imagination, the second element of the exhilaration interferes: «the effortless games of associating ideas, hyper amnesia with spontaneous evocation, unexpectedly rapid of events which previously seemed forgotten, the affluence and extent of intellectual combinations, of scientific and artistic creations, of megalomaniac projects and novelistic fantasies. The happy unity of senses was producing the sensation of divine health, the freed imagination tended to give the illusion of genius»”[47]

The ego of the creator, of the Artist becomes the centre of a universe lacking the traditional axis, Divinity[48], so, the «centre of the universe». The need to fill a central position, that of the Creator becomes the same with being temped by the divine:

“the Artist […] will represent nature as perceives it, through his imagination, this subjectivity being the only realism one can aspire […] we can translate this theory in religious terms by saying that God’s imagination created the world and thus dispose of a theological pattern for an aesthetic doctrine. The inspired poet is of course like God but, we realize, that we have to end the analogy here and doubt the angelic excitation and the misleading mirrors”[49]

If he is the centre that means the whole world has no other finality than the satisfying the needs of this ego: «all these things have been created for me, for me, for me» [Baudelaire]. Being the end of things, he is also the creator of it: «nobody will be amazed that that a final thought will rise from the mind of the one who dreams[50] is: I became God. Thus, the poetic mind whose ideal is to resemble Divinity in the process of creation of the universe identifies himself with God, but the price of this ecstasy is the impossibility of creation. »”[51] The obsessive repetition, in a positive and one might say imperative form, “for me, for me, for me” seems to acknowledge, in a paradoxical manner, a certain feeling of insecurity or doubt belonging to the space of absence and frustration. At the core of illusion as it is offered by the drugs, a negative revelation takes place, as a form of acknowledging one’s limits. Quoting Jean Starobinski, when he talked about the “infernal laughter” as equivalent to “the infernal punishment of one’s distortion”,[52] we can play a re-interpretational game: the divine image revealed to the artist in the distorted mirrors of opium hallucination becomes similar to the epiphany of an unsuccessfully imitated Creator. That is why the image is closer to the picture of mocked Divinity, rather than to the absolute Ego, searched in the eternal intoxication of opiates.

The illusion is that of experiencing the absolute («on vie plusieurs vies de l’homme en l’espace d’une heure»[53]), the access to plural experiences, out of the suffocating space of human destiny, which looses its limits and material consistency during the hallucination. The human measure is changed, transcended towards the divine, as narcotics satisfy the taste of infinity / le goût de l’infini, le goût du gouffre. G. Poulet spoke about the celestial time, the eternity, the infinity, while at the opposite extremity there was the infernal time and space as absence and emptiness[54]. In relation to the universe, the Ego feels as magnified into a clear, light form of consciousness, in which reflection realizes in perfect harmony with the self and the world, the first dominating the latter from the privileged position of centrality. The inner and outer universe is reorganized in accordance with the opiate revelation, in a hallucinatory illusion of substituting the Divinity, a paradoxical relation between what we call the “infernal chemistry” and the religious imaginary.

Bibliography:

Bachmann, Christian, Anne Coppel, Le dragon domestique. Deux siècles de relations étranges entre occident et la drogue, Edition Albin Michel, Paris, 1989

Baudelaire, Charles, Le paradis artificiels, in Oeuvres complètes, Préface de Claude Roy, Notice et notes de Michel Jamet, Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1980

Butel, Paul, L’Opium, histoire d’une fascination, Editions Perrin, Paris, 1995

Chauvaud, Frédéric, Les experts du crime. La médicine légale en France au XIXe siècle, Collection historique dirigée par Alain Corbin et Jean-Claude Schmitt, Editions Aubier, Paris, 2000

Compagnon, Antoine, Baudelaire devant l’innombrable, Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, 2003

Friedrich, Hugo, Structura liricii moderne. De la mijlocul secolului al XIX-lea până la mijlocul secolului al XX-lea, În româneşte de Dieter Fuhrmann, Prefaţa de Mircea Martin, Editura Univers, Bucureşti, 1998

Liedekerke, Arnould de, La Belle époque de l’opium, [suivi d’une] Anthologie littéraire de la drogue de Charles Baudelaire à Jean Cocteau. Avant-propos de Patrick Waldberg, , Éd. de la différence, [Paris]

http://en.wikipedia.org

http://www.webwritingthatworks.com/

Jacquin, Frederic Nicolas, Affaires de poison: les crimes et leurs imaginaires au XVIIIe siècle, Belin, Paris, 2005

Maleissye, Jean de, Histoire du poison, F. Bourin, Paris, 1991

McKenna, Terence, La nourriture de dieux en quête de l’arbre de la connaissance originelle, Georg, Generve, 1999

Mickel, Emanuel J., The Artificial paradises in French literature. 1, The Influence of opium and hashish on the literature of French romanticism and Les Fleurs du mal, The University of North Carolina Press, 1969

Milligan, Barry, Pleasures and Pains : Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, University Press of Virginia, 1995

Nossintchouk, Ronald, Le crime transparent. Histoire de la preuve judiciaire, Edition Olivier Orban, Paris, 1989

Pichois, Claude, Jean Ziegler, Charles Baudelaire, Librairie Artheme Fayard, Paris, 1996

Resenzweig, Michel, Les drogues dans l’histoire : entre remède et poison : archéologie d’un savoir oublié, Editions De Boeck, Belin, Paris, 1998

Rey, Roselyne, Histoire de la douleur, Editions de la Découverte, Paris, 1993

Ronan, Colin, Histoire mondiale des sciences, Traduit de l’anglais par Claude Bonnafont, Editions Seuil, Paris, 1988

Simon, Nicolas, La poison dans l’histoire: crimes et empoisonnement par les végétaux, Thèse Pharmacie, Nancy, 2003

Starobinski, Jean, La mélancolie au miroir. Trois lectures de Baudelaire, Conférences, essais et leçons du Collège du France, Editions Julliard, Paris, 1989

Szasz, Thomas Stephen, Les Rituels de la drogue : la persécution rituelle de la drogue et des drogués, Traduction Monique Burke, Payot, Paris, 1976

Tooley, Jennifer, Demon Drugs and Holy Wars: Canadian Drug Policy as a Symbolical Action, M.A.Thesis on Anthropology, The University of New Brunswick, 1999

Wilhelm, Fabrice, Baudelaire: L’écriture du narcissisme, Editions L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999

Corin Braga

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Derniers refuges terrestres des utopies classiques :

le Continent Austral Inconnu et les pôles géographiques/

The Last Terrestrial Locations of the Classical Utopias:

Terra Australis Incognita and the Poles

Abstract: Utopias can be seen as the Modern avatars of the Christian myth of the Terrestrial Paradise. If for the people of the Middle Ages, the Garden of Eden was irrevocably hidden by God after the original sin, for the people of the classical age, Utopias were ideal cities built by men through their own forces and ingenuity. The continuity between the two topics is also marked by the locations that the medieval theologians and the classical utopists attributed to them. In this paper, I will show that some bizarre locations of the Terrestrial Paradise, the antipodes and the poles of the globe, were inherited by a series of utopias from More and Andreae to the anonymous Relation d’un voyage du Pôle Arctique au Pôle Antarctique par le Centre du Monde.

Keywords: Terrestrial Paradise; Utopia; Terra Australis Incognita; extraordinary voyages.

Plusieurs auteurs d’utopies classiques ont mis à profit leurs voyages extraordinaires pour retrouver le Paradis terrestre. Les théologiens du Moyen Age avaient situé le jardin biblique dans toutes les places imaginables de notre globe. Au XVII^e siècle, quand les érudits du nouvel âge de la raison ont commencé à faire des analyses historiques et philologiques plus serrées sur le livre de la Genèse, ils ont dû combattre, pour pouvoir resituer l’Eden dans le Moyen-Orient (Mésopotamie, Palestine, Chaldée, etc.), la vaste liste de théories précédentes sur l’emplacement du jardin divin[1].

Marmaduke Carver, par exemple, dans son Discourse of the Terrestrial Paradise, aiming at a more probable discovery of the true situation of that happy place of our First Parents Habitation (1666), rejette les systèmes qui placent le Paradis terrestre dans les Indes orientales ou dans celles occidentales, en Syrie ou en Judée, ou même en France, ou le situent sous la ligne de l’Equateur, sous le Pôle Arctique ou sous le cercle Antarctique, sur la cime d’une montagne très haute ou sur la lune, ou l’identifient à l’orbe terrestre, ou enfin imaginent un Paradis cabalistique[2]. Dans son Tractatus de Situ Paradisu Terrestris (1698), Pierre Daniel Huet réfute à son tour les théories qui mettent le Paradis dans le troisième ou le quatrième ciel, dans le ciel de la Lune ou sur la Lune, dans l’air ou sous la terre ou en dehors de la terre, sous le pôle arctique ou sous l’Equateur dans la zone de feu, dans l’Inde aux sources du Gange ou au-delà de la Chine, dans les Monts de la Lune, en Amérique ou en Asie (Arménie majeure, Perse, Syrie ou Palestine) et même en Europe[3].

Pratiquement, toutes ces localisations du Paradis terrestre ont été reprises par les utopistes de l’âge classique. Des cités idéales et des royaumes heureux se retrouvaient un peu partout sur les cartes, en Europe, en Afrique et en Asie, dans l’Océan Indien et dans l’Océan Atlantique, puis dans le Nouveau Monde et dans les archipels du Pacifique. Déjà Thomas More, qui pourtant n’avait pas la possibilité de distinguer le continent américain des Indes et pour qui l’actuel Océan Pacifique, découvert quelques années plus tôt, n’était que l’extrémité de l’Océan Indien, entourait son Utopie d’un archipel d’îles imaginaires, à connotation morale, habitées par les Anémoliens, gens vaniteux (vides ou légers comme le vent), les Zapolètes trafiquants et mercenaires, les Polylérites, « sages en état de divagation verbale » (selon André Prévost[4]) sous le protectorat des Perses, les Achoriens (sans lieu, sans place) et les Macariens, exemple de tempérance et de victoire sur la rapacité.

Après que le contour oriental de l’Amérique eut été bien dessiné, les utopistes se sont enfoncés dans le Pacifique, à la quête de nouvelles îles susceptibles de cacher la société parfaite. Le solitaire anglais, ou Aventures merveilleuses de Philippe Quarll d’Edouard Dorrington (1729) est une robinsonnade qui met en scène un petit Paradis terrestre à l’usage personnel du personnage Philippe Quarll. Sorti en mer pour pêcher dans les eaux occidentales de l’Amérique, au niveau du Mexique, le narrateur aborde une île difficilement accessible, habitée par un anglais ayant fui le monde depuis cinquante ans. L’île offre un décor édénique, avec des prairies d’une verdure charmante, des odeurs délicieuses, grands arbres de diverses espèces formant des allées, etc. En définitif, l’effet paradisiaque est une simple question de perspective, d’habitude ce sont la paix et le bonheur intérieur des personnages qui auréolent une nature, belle et exotique certes, mais non pas surnaturelle ou merveilleuse. C’est Philippe Quarll qui se donne l’impression d’être dans « un second paradis terrestre, excepté qu’il n’y a ici ni fruit défendu, ni femme qui puisse me tenter »[5]. L’île est paradisiaque parce que Quarll y vit dans un état de quiétude adamique, hors des rythmes de l’histoire et de la civilisation, bénéficiant, à soixante dix-huit ans, d’une santé et vigueur dignes de l’arbre de vie.

L’étendue immense et longtemps mal explorée du Pacifique a continué de bercer les rêves du Paradis récupéré pendant tout l’âge prémoderne. Un certain docteur Merryman (pseudonyme d’Edward Ward, mais qui, pense Gregory Claeys, pourrait cacher d’autres auteurs comme Henry Playford, John Pomfret, Thomas Brown ou James Moore Smith) soutenait avoir découvert dans les mers du Sud un « nouveau paradis », « The Island of Content », l’Ile de la satisfaction, l’Ile des plaisirs (1709). La nature y est d’une générosité de Pays de Cocagne, nourrissant même les animaux, les singes et les écureuils de délicatesses comme les amandes douces et les pastèques. La petite société de l’île jouit d’une potion importée aux îles féeriques des Celtes, un élixir de joie, distillé de rayons du soleil, rosée de mai, éclat de lune et gouttes de miel, capable de supprimer immédiatement les « vapeurs de la mélancolie ». La douceur et la tempérance du climat induit les habitants à penser que « cette île est le Paradis même perdu par Adam, mais restauré ultérieurement pour nos grands-parents »[6]. Un autre auteur, l’abbé Philippe Serane disait lui aussi de son eutopie réformiste, « découverte » grâce à un « heureux naufrage » (1789), qu’elle était située dans une île « dont le premier aspect m’offrit une image sensible du jardin de nos premiers pères »[7].

Après que la colonisation de l’Amérique eut flétri le rêve du paradis dans le Nouveau Monde, le topos sacré a été transporté dans le continent présumé de la Terra Australis Incognita. Dernier grand fantasme géographique, le Continent Austral Inconnu était, sur les cartes de Mercator, Ortelius ou La Popelinière, une grande masse de terre hypothétique couvrant le centre de l’hémisphère Sud, autour du pôle, jusqu’au niveau de l’Australie actuelle[8]. Ferdinand de Quir, explorateur se présentant comme le « découvreur de la terre australe », note dans sa relation publié dans le Mercure françois de 1617 :

« Si le succez respond aux espérances, il s’y trouvera des terres antipodales aux meilleurs de l’Afrique, à toute l’Europe et à la meilleure partie de l’Asie. Mais il faut remarquer que comme les pays que nous avons descouverts à quinze degrez de latitude sont meilleures que l’Espagne, les autres qui sont opposites à leur hauteur doivent par proportion et analogie estre quelque Paradis terrestre »[9].

Le géographe La Popelinière recommandait au roi de France de s’empresser de découvrir et de coloniser le Continent Austral Inconnu pour s’offrir une base géostratégique de richesses pour faire face aux Espagnols qui, eux, avaient investi les Amériques.

Vitale Terra Rossa, un érudit italien du XVII^e siècle qui s’était proposé de démontrer que toutes les grandes découvertes géographiques avaient été faites par des Vénitiens, considérait que les terres encore inconnues de son époque se regroupaient en deux continents : la Terra Septentrionalis Incognita, autour du pôle Nord, et la Terra Australis nondum cognita, autour du pôle Sud. Mais alors que le continent septentrional se restreignait à l’intérieur du cercle polaire,« l’Australe in ogni parte si dilarga fuori dell’Antarctico Circolo, e in due luoghi oltrepassa con lingue spaziose di Terreno anco il Tropico del Capricorno, entrando a dentro nella Zona Torrida »[10].

C’est sur le fond de ces rêveries géographiques que Henry Neville, du groupe de James Harrington et « other zealous commonwealths men », plaçait The Isle of Pines (1668) près de la Terra Australis Incognita. Comptable sur « India Merchant », George Pine aurait été surpris par une tempête près de Madagascar en 1569. Echoué sur une île inconnue et déserte, le protagoniste aurait réussi, en nouveau Robinson, non seulement à aménager l’île, mais aussi à la peupler, grâce aux quatre femmes rescapées avec lui du naufrage. Après quarante ans passés sur l’île, il pouvait compter pas moins de 565 enfants, petit-fils et petit petit-fils. En 1667, le capitaine danois qui redécouvrit l’île estimait qu’elle était habitée par dix à douze mille hommes. Cette fertilité patriarcale satisfaisait pleinement l’exhortation faite par Dieu aux hommes en Genèse 1.La robinsonnade de Neville combine des rêveries érotiques libertines et des thèmes du primitivisme dans un cadre édénique. L’Ile de Pine jouit d’un climat parfait et d’une végétation rappelant l’Age d’Or, capable de nourrir sans effort toute la population. La faune y est inoffensive, en communion avec l’homme, et la sexualité a une dimension adamique. Nus, polygames, revenus à l’état d’« hommes sauvages » dans un sens biblique, les descendants des cinq Anglais naufragés dans l’île y instaurent une société physiocrate. C’est comme si Neville proposait de voir, dans les habitants des Nouveaux Mondes découverts sur le globe, une alternative régressive à la civilisation européenne. Que serait-il si nous retournions au primitivisme adamique ? La réponse est simple : « Cette place […] s’avérerait un Paradis »[11].

Pour restaurer le Paradis sur terre, les nouveaux Adams ne peuvent néanmoins plus compter sur la miséricorde de Dieu, mais doivent s’efforcer de se redresser par leur propre besogne et génie. Comme il est facile de démontrer, le genre utopique se conçoit par l’ionisation du bien et du mal et la séparation de l’eutopie de la dystopie. Ce processus de dialyse a trouvé dans le Continent Austral Inconnu le meilleur creuset d’expérimentation imaginaire.

Un bon exemple en est l’utopie anonyme (attribuée hypothétiquement à Ambrose Philips, à Thomas Killegrew the Younger ou encore à Charles Gildon) The Fortunate Shipwreck, or a Description of New Athens (publiée dans une compilation de 1720, Miscellanea Aurea or the Golden Medley). Naufragé sur le continent austral, le narrateur y découvre un pays séparé en deux par une chaîne montagneuse. Constituant une sorte de césure géographique entre le bien et le mal, cette barrière naturelle isole d’un côté les bienheureux (« happy men ») de la Nouvelle Athènes, établissement utopique austral, et de l’autre le peuple misérable (« wretched people ») qui ne s’était pas montré digne de cette utopie. Parabole d’une colonie protestante, la Nouvelle Athènes combine la vision humaniste sur la grandeur de l’Antiquité avec le mythe biblique de la Terre de Promesse. Dans un passé indéterminé, cent mille émigrants conduits par Demophilos seraient partis d’une Athènes fictionnelle, menacée par les barbares, vers le continent austral. Après une errance de trois ans à travers des terres étranges et des vastes déserts, après avoir vaincu des tribus hostiles, les réfugiés arrivent enfin dans un pays paradisiaque traversé par un fleuve qu’ils baptisent « Rivière de l’espérance » (« River of Hope »). En bonne entente avec cent cinquante mille aborigènes, « bons sauvages », ils y construisent une utopie « classicisante », dont les centres, la Nouvelle Athènes et Romana prétendent avoir rétabli l’excellence culturelle et morale de la Grèce et de l’Empire romain. La pureté prelapsaire de la société australe est maintenue par l’exil systématique de tous les coupables d’avarice, ingratitude, irréligiosité, luxure, etc.[12]

Une autre utopie protestante (huguenote), La Relation du Royaume des Féliciens du Marquis de Lassay (1727) transporte dans le continent austral les merveilles de l’Empire mythologique du Prêtre Jean. Situé entre quarante et cinquante degrés de latitude méridionale, donc aux antipodes de l’Europe, le Royaume de Félicie est une image en miroir de la France. Si la société des Féliciens est construite par la réversion des institutions françaises de l’époque (sciences, religion, gouvernement, art militaire, législation, justice, famille, etc.), les caractéristiques naturelles du pays sont empruntées aux Indes fabuleuses. Beau ciel et air sain, climat doux, légumes et fruits excellents, vins délicieux, minéraux et pierres précieuses utilisés dans l’architecture (jaspe, agate, cristal, porphyre, albâtre, marbre, diamants, rubis, émeraudes, topazes, or et argent, perles, ambre et corail), « fontaines qui ont des propriétés différentes, & toutes admirables pour plusieurs sortes de maladies », palais « le plus magnifique, & la plus surprenante chose qu’il y ait dans le monde », rien n’y manque pour rapprocher la Relation du Marquis de Lassay à La Lettre du Prêtre Jean. D’ailleurs la dette imaginaire envers la matière d’Asie est reconnue implicitement par l’auteur, qui attribue la fondation de Félicie au Roman Lelius, ami de Scipion, enfui de Rome pendant les guerres civiles et réfugié en Inde, chez les Gymnosophistes[13].

La grandeur colossale de la Terra Australis Incognita (équivalent, pour certains géographes comme La Popelinière, de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Monde réunis) y permet la projection fantasmatique de toutes les variétés du genre utopique. De ce fait, le Continent Austral abrite autant d’eutopies et d’utopies paradisiaques que de royaumes anti-utopiques et dystopiques. Si Denis Veiras dans son Histoire des Sévarambes, peuples qui habitent une partie du troisième Continent, communément appelé la Terre Australe (1675)[14] ou le Marquis de Lassay ou l’auteur inconnu de l’utopie espagnole Description de la Sinapia, Peninsula en la Tierra Austral (~1766-1800)[15] utilisent le continent austral en tant que miroir positif de la France, de l’Espagne et de l’Europe en général, d’autres auteurs comme Gabriel de Foigny dans les Aventures de Jacques Sadeur ou La Terre australe connue (1676)[16] et Rétif de la Bretonne dans la Découverte Australe par un Homme-volant, ou le Dédale Français (1781)[17] sont beaucoup plus équivoques quant à l’eudémonisme de leurs fictions.

Continent antipodal, la Terre Australe met en marche les mécanismes de l’inversion critique et satirique, comme dans les pièces de John Fletcher, The Sea Voyage (1622), de Richard Brome, The Antipodes (1640) et dans la continuation anonyme de celle-ci, Newes in the Antipodes. Newes, True Newes, Laudable Newes… The World is Mad… especially now when in the Antipodes these things are come to passe (1642). La réversibilité du genre fait que les paradis utopiques trouvent bien vite des contrepoids importants dans des véritables enfers et des antiutopies anthropologiques et morales comme chez Joseph Hall, Mundus alter et idem (1605), Zaccaria Seriman, Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle Terre Incognite Austral, ed al paese delle Scimie (1749) ou Hildebrand Bowman, The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman, esquire, into Carnovirria, Taupiniera, Olfactaria, and Auditante, in New-Zealand ; in the Island of Bonhommica, and in the powerful Kingdom of Luxo-volupto, on the Great Southern Continent (1778).

A la fin du XVIII^e siècle, avec la « contraction » géographique drastique de la Terra Australis Incognita, l’imaginaire utopique a été obligé à son tour d’aller toujours plus loin dans l’exploration des recoins inaccessibles de la planète. Un des derniers refuges terrestres susceptibles d’accueillir des royaumes merveilleux et des cités idéales ont été les pôles de notre globe. En cela aussi, les utopistes avaient encore une fois l’occasion de s’appuyer sur les théories concernant la localisation du Paradis terrestre. En effet, les théologiens de la fin du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance n’avaient pas hésité à situer le jardin biblique sous le Pôle Arctique (Guillaume Postel) ou sous le cercle Antarctique. Au XVII^e siècle, passant en revue la littérature doctrinale, Marmaduke Carver et Pierre Daniel Huet évoquaient encore les hypothèses selon lesquelles l’Eden s’aurait trouvé de fait au Nord de la Tartarie, dans l’antique pays des Hyperboréens, ou au Sud, dans le point cardinal antipodal[18].

Le premier entre les utopistes, Johann Valentin Andreae situait déjà sa célèbre Christianopolis auprès du pôle Sud. Bien que le voyage en mer du protagoniste est traité dans un registre allégorique (l’océan est une « Academic Sea » et le navire s’appelle « Phantasy »), Andreae s’empresse toutefois de localiser l’île Caphar Salama d’une manière géographique précise, dans la zone antarctique, à 10⁰ degrés du Pôle et 20⁰ degrés du cercle équinoxial. De la forme d’un triangle de trente miles de périmètre, l’île est mouillée par des rivières et étangs, couverte par des forêts et des vignobles, pleine d’animaux, en un mot elle est « un monde en miniature ». On dirait, commente Andreae, que les cieux et la terre s’y sont unis en mariage et cohabitent dans une pais éternelle[19].

Les utopistes ultérieurs ne tarderont à envoyer leurs protagonistes vers des paradis hyperboréens, comme le fait Simon Tyssot de Patot dans La vie, les aventures et le voyage de Groenland du Révérend Père Cordelier Pierre de Mésange (1720) ou l’auteur anonyme du Passage du Pôle Arctique au Pôle Antarctique par le centre du Monde (1721). Les personnages de ce dernier récit réussissent même à joindre les deux pôles sur le même trajet, grâce à une « traversée miraculeuse » de la terre par un courant maritime souterrain suivant l’axe de rotation de notre globe. Engloutis au Pôle Arctique par un « effroyable tournant d’eau », ils émergent au Pôle Antarctique sur un continent nouveau, complètement inconnu jusqu’alors.

En conflit avec l’ancienne théorie géographique des zones qui considérait les « zonae frigidae » comme inhabitables, le narrateur du Passage constate que le climat antarctique est bien vivable et même doux. L’alternance du froid excessif avec des « fréquens intervalles où l’air se radoucit » y rend possible la cohabitation d’animaux polaires, comme les ours blancs et de gros oiseaux à plumage noir semblables à des cigognes, avec des monstres plus exotiques, comme des poissons volants à quatre ailes, carnivores, plus grands que les bœufs, ou une « bête de la couleur d’un crapaud, mais infiniment plus grosse ; elle avoit sur la tête une grande crête d’un vilain bleu pâle, & dardoit de tems en tems de sa gueule une écume jaune & verte »[20]. Au siècle suivant, de telles îles et continents inconnus deviendront, chez Arthur Conan Doyle par exemple, des écosystèmes retardés, abritant des animaux de l’âge mésozoïque.

Il est vrai que, pendant l’Antiquité déjà, Strabon et Pomponius Méla pensaient que l’Hyperborée bénéficiait d’une température supportable, et qu’à la fin du Moyen Age des érudits comme Perez de Valencia situaient le Paradis terrestre et son climat heureux dans le continent austral. L’auteur du Passage est visiblement effleuré par le souvenir culturel du jardin divin, puisqu’il y imagine une vallée paradisiaque protégée par trois chaînes de montagnes posées en amphithéâtre. Jouant le rôle de montagne cosmique sur laquelle les docteurs de l’Eglise sécurisaient l’Eden biblique, les trois rangs de monts sont, successivement, de couleur verte (grâce à la végétation), blanche (à cause de la neige) et rouge enflammé. Ce sont les trois couleurs que la tradition médiévale attribuait à l’Arbre de vie, blanc avant le péché d’Adam, vert à la naissance d’Abel et rouge au crime de Caïn[21]. La belle plaine « toute semée d’une herbe menuë & courte qui exhaloit une agréable odeur » est bien un avatar du Paradis sur terre, d’où ne manque pas la source de vie et de jeunesse : « l’émail de ces fleurs avec le vert de leurs tiges faisoient ensemble un effet charmant dans toute l’étendue de cette Vallée : un petit Rouisseau d’une eau très claire serpentoit vers le milieu »[22].

Le Paradis n’est pas le seul topos traditionnel que le Passage fait consteller dans l’imaginaire de son narrateur. En fin de compte, il est impossible de figurer l’inimaginable, toute invention doit s’appuyer sur une panoplie d’images préexistantes. Une bonne partie des étranges formations géologiques du continent antarctique rappellent les découvertes ahurissantes des héros des immrama (voyages maritimes) irlandais : le chonopeus (tour verticale diamantine au milieu de la mer), ponts suspendus, monstres marins, vortex et murs de brouillard, îles infernales et volcaniques, etc.[23].

Toutefois la description du monde polaire paraît plutôt plaquée sur la « matière d’Asie », mais traitée en repoussé, ou plutôt en creux, par un processus d’effacement et d’oubli. Au milieu du Vallon paradisiaque, près du ruisseau de jouvence, les explorateurs découvrent un « petit édifice d’une singulière structure » de pierres blanches. Ressemblant à un autel, avec une base ovale et six colonnes hautes de trois pieds supportant une grande dalle triangulaire plate, le monument est orné d’inscriptions bizarres, en caractères inconnus des Européens. Plus loin, dans un « lieu plein de sable & de gravier », gisent les restes d’une tour, de la forme d’un globe en pierre enfoncé dans la terre, « qui avoit sur la superficie trois étoiles sur une même ligne représentées en bosse », et les ruines d’une longue muraille avec les pierres jointes parfaitement, sans chaux ni ciment[24].

La description de ces vestiges n’est pas sans rappeler les monuments énigmatiques des civilisations précolombiennes. Néanmoins le récit paraît renvoyer plutôt à quelques thèmes asiatiques, comme le Paradis terrestre protégé par une enceinte montagneuse, les bornes de Dionysos, d’Alexandre et le poteau Artus, marquant les limites des expéditions en Asie, ou le mur derrière lequel Alexandre avait emprisonné les peuples apocalyptiques de Gog et Magog. La suggestion du narrateur est que le continent austral conserve les débris d’une ancienne civilisation disparue, détruite par quelque cataclysme effarant. Le paysage lunaire et les ruines effacées paraissent avoir été rasés par le déluge, par le feu de Sodome, par un « météore » atmosphérique ou par un météorite céleste.

Dans ce sens, le Passage du Pôle arctique au Pôle antarctique est une antiutopie, puisqu’il aboutit dans une région maudite. On pourrait dire que cette terre est, selon un symbolisme subliminal, la terre du Paradis perdu, dépeuplé, dévasté par le péché, ruiné par le temps. En effet, des pères comme Cosmas Indicopleustes et Moses Bar Cepha et des érudits comme Duarte Pacheco Pereira dans son Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis avaient affirmé que l’Eden biblique doit être une terre circulaire qui entoure l’oïkoumènê au-delà de l’Océan[25]. Une autre série de pères, continuée par des commentateurs protestants et catholiques comme John Salked, Marmaduke Carver, Steuchus Eugubinus, Cornelius a Lapide ou Agostino Inveges, soutenaient que le Paradis avait été détruit après la chute d’Adam[26]. Combinant ces deux hypothèses, le continent austral découvert par les personnages du Passage est un Paradis en déréliction.

Les pôles étaient les dernières places investies d’une charge magique ou mystique sur une mappemonde de plus en plus « désenchantée ». Quand la surface de la terre, scrutée dans la lumière sceptique de la mentalité empirique moderne, n’a plus pu abriter les paradis terrestres, ceux-ci ont été obligés de chercher d’autres refuges imaginaires. Ne pouvant plus être contemporaines sur le même globe avec les civilisations connues, les utopies se sont enfoncées sous la terre ou envolées dans les cieux, sur les planètes. Les pôles représentent justement les points de fuite par où la fantaisie utopique a brisé le toit de la réalité empirique et a émergé dans d’autres dimensions, qui seront reprises par la science-fiction.

Daniela Dumbravă

University of Florence, Italy

The k’ou-t’ou, a Political and Religious Ceremonial at the Court of the Ch’ing Dynasty

Brief Note about the Milescu – K’ang-hsi Case (June 1676)

Abstract: The paper makes use of a seventeenth-century European source which might be seen as giving direct evidence of Manchu court rituals, and of their diplomatic customs. As a matter of fact, in the 16^th and 17^th century European cultural perception, Eastern Asian civilization was still of a fabulous nature. K’ang-hsi had political relations with the Russians, one of the most powerful Empires at the end of the seventeenth century. It was in 1689 at Nerčinsk that the Asiatic Empire signed a peace treaty with a European power. Before that, the Manchu Emperor had met one of the first Ambassadors of the Tsar Aleksej Michajlovič in China, the Moldavian literate (notably the first translator of the Septuagint in Walachia), Nicolae Milescu Spătarul (1636-1708) and granted him an official audience (1676). Before performing the requisite ritual, Milescu, as a diplomat, questioned its religious connotation, more specifically the religious implication of the k‛ou-t‛ou or kowtow, causing a lot of problems.

Keywords: China; Confucianism; Ch’ing tributary system; Sino-European diplomacy; court rituals; Nicolae Milescu.

(…) « man is in a situation, that is, in history».

M. Eliade[1]

General context

For a long time Sino-European international trading, diplomacy and the development of foreign affairs were influenced by the Chinese perception of their own institutional and cultural superiority over the (European) “barbarians”. One of the sacred representations of the tributary system was the kowtowing ritual (cin. k‛ou-t‛ou), which literally means to knock one’s head (against the ground). This Manchu ceremony involves going down on both knees and bowing the head down to the ground. All Europeans (ambassadors, envoys, merchants, religious missionaries) used to perform it, without exception, when they were received in audience by the Emperor at Peking, as outward proof of their obedience. However, the Europeans as Christians were suspicious of the religious implications of the imperial audience rituals and of the political customs. Many European embassies (between the 17^th-19th centuries) failed just for this ”particular reason”.

All official encounters between European diplomats and the Chinese imperial court were essentially shaped by the hosts’ particular conception of emperorship. The figure of the Emperor during the Ch’ing dynasty, who requested this peculiar rite, was endowed with numerous and diverse attributes:

– firstly, he was a Manchu lord[2] of Inner Asia (Outer and Inner Mongolia) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, extending his powers over the north-eastern Asian regions of Xinjiang and Qinghai, as well as Tibet and Manchuria[3];

– secondly, the triangular relationship between Manchu, Mongol and Tibetan sacred symbols and functions gave him a sort of polymorphic religious image: as an huangchi (supreme lord), as a boγda, which means holy, divine, venerable, reverend, master, lord[4], and qaγan (cin. k’o-han), that is born in Heaven, a derivation from the Son of Heaven. The emperor happily accepted consecration from Tibetan Buddhist lamas along with various names and titles such as cakravartin king[5] (an idea which originated in India, as an essential attribute of the ideal king), and bodhisattva Mañjuśrī[6], personification of the Buddha’s intellect/wisdom.

– thirdly, he also mediated between macrocosm and microcosm, between Heaven and Earth as tsun-ch’in, “Sovereign and Father”. According to Chinese political[7] theory he was the Son of Heaven, the father of the entire human race, the “unique man” able to appeal to his ancestors for blessings or to dissipate ancestral curses that affected the state (therefore, claiming to be the Sovereign and Father of foreigners as well as of his own people). M. Waida[8] holds that in the Qin and Han period (221 BCE-220 CE) the emperor had no divine connotation and so had nothing to do with other Asiatic religious conceptions of kingship. His opinion may be correct in certain historical contexts, but from a comparative point of view, the astronomical homologation between the Son of Heaven and the Polar Star worked to widen the symbolic fear of kingship.

– fourthly, Manchu shamanism had been adopted as part of the official cults. Therefore, besides the social and political significations, it was necessary to distinguish between the Uralic – Altaic religious and cultural tradition and Manchu imperial ritualism. In this respect it might be helpful to cite from emperor Qianlong’s (1711-1799; r. 1736-1795) introduction to the Imperially Commissioned Code of Rituals and Sacrifices of the Manchus published in 1747[9]:

“The shamans of the past were all people born locally, and because they learned to speak Manchu from childhood, [in] each sacrifice, ceremony, ritual, offering of goods, preparatory offering, propitiatory offering, offering of cakes, offering of pigs against evil, and sacrifice for the harvest and sacrifice to the Horse God, they produced the right words, which fully suited the aim and circumstances [of the ritual]. Later, since the shamans learned the Manchu words by passing them down from one to another [without knowing the language], prayers and invocations uttered from mouth to mouth no longer conformed to the original language and to the original sound”[10].

According to Confucian imperial ethics[11] the recognition of the imperial authority depended on this “mandate of Heaven” and could not become a permanent possession of the ruler[12], who was expected to provide tangible proof of his election.

The complex mechanism of the imperial rites (cin. wuli) was rigidly supervised, as it helped the emperor to maintain strong and durable control over the court and government. James Hevia[13] mentions five central rites under the coordination of the Supreme Lord, the Emperor:

1) jili: the rite of sacrifices to Heaven and Earth and a sacred function of the Chinese emperor formulated in the Han period (202 B.C. – A.D. 9);

2) jiali: felicitous rites, involving the assembly of the entire official corps before the eyes of the emperor, thereby reflecting the cooperation between ruler and the bureaucrats in charge of writing the memorials[14] relating to European diplomatic missions. These were daily and accurate accounts of the European envoys’ activities from the moment they entered Chinese territory till they reached Peking, amounting to genuine surveillance reports. The Embassies’ pending status was strongly connected with the production of these official documents.

3) junli: the martial rites, in reference to the emperor as warrior;

4) binli: the emperor’s relations with other lords, which served to regulate the conduct of foreign affairs. These rites embracing the k’ou-t’ou custom constitute the primary focus of this paper.

5) and finally nongli, the funeral rites.

According to the historian Nicola Di Cosmo, Manchu court rituals during the Ch’ing dynasty make up a complex which can be the object of different topics, involving different scientific approaches (evaluated in part by other researchers), such as: the history of the Manchu language and texts and the cultural context[15], the social and political function of the Ch’ing regime[16], ethnic diversity[17], and so on. However, the subject is extremely vast, much too “specialised” and accessible only to the East-Asiatic or Inner Asiatic specialists[18], better known to historians of the modern science of Europe and Asia and addressed by the historians of religions[19] only in the light of their specific interests.

The different meanings of the imperial figure along with various issues concerning this subject are successfully analysed by James Hevia, in his extremely accurate and multi-faceted work on Lord Macartney’s British Embassy at Peking in 1793[20].

The present paper makes use of a European seventeenth-century source that might be seen as giving direct evidence of Manchu court rituals and their diplomatic customs. As a matter of fact, European cultural perception of Eastern Asian civilisation still has a fabulous nature in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. For example, for a polyhistor such as Athanasius Kircher (Oedipus Aegyptiacus) the Far East languages, Chinese and Japanese, fall in the category of languages to which the unarticulated voices of animals and birds belong, the origin of Chinese writing is connected with the immigration of the biblical tribe of Noah and Cham from Egypt to Persia and Bactria, and so on. Nevertheless, Leibniz as well as Kircher, assumed that the languages of Europe and Asia were derived from one and the same language: the “lingua Adamica”[21]. In fact, we may say that, except for Jesuit familiarity with East Asia and the Extreme-Orient, an adequate European cultural representation was lacking at the time. Most European diplomatic or foreign affairs were commercially motivated[22]: Peter van Horn (1666-1668), Vincent Paats (1685-1687) from Holland, Manoel de Saldanha (1667-1670) from Portugal, numerous Bukharan merchants, and so on. All of them accepted to “kowtow” in front of the Emperor or in front of the Altar of Heaven, but their situation differs from the one of Russian embassies at Peking.

Historical context

K’ang-hsi had political relations with the Russians, one of the most powerful Empires at the end of the seventeenth century. It was in 1689 at Nerčinsk that an Asiatic Empire signed a peace treaty with a European power for the very first time and that the Orthodox faith extended its sway as far as the shores of the Pacific. Before that, the Manchu Emperor had met one of the first Ambassadors of the Tsar Aleksej Michajlovič in China, the Moldavian literate (notably, he was the first translator of the Septuagint in Walachia), Nicolae Milescu Spathar (1636-1708) and granted him an official audience (1676). Before performing the requisite ritual, Milescu, as a diplomat, questioned its religious connotation, more specifically the religious implication of the k‛ou-t‛ou. From that moment on there arose many problems. In this regard his difficulty consisted, first of all, in setting a political precedent at Peking: the last diplomatic Russian mission (twenty years before), Baikov’s mission (1656) had failed because he refused to “kowtow”. Imperial sources[23] (cin. shih-lu) are clear as to the reasons for his dismissal, noted by the Li-fan-yüan (The Office of the Colonial Affairs):

“Since the ambassador is ignorant of our ceremonies, it is improper to grant him an audience. Their tribute is refused and he is ordered to return to his own country”.[24]

One might briefly note that Nicolae Milescu had accumulated extensive experience in the field of European diplomatic relations. He served and represented Romanian Princes (Gheorghe Ghica, Ştefăniţă Vodă, and so on) at Stockholm, Paris, Constantinople, Stettin, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow. He arrived in Moscow (1671) at the tsarist court because he had been strongly recommended by the Dosithei Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. Also a literate, he was able to gain political trust and so benefited from protection from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexei Matveev, one of the most influential persons under Aleksej Michajlovič’s reign (1648-1676). Three years after his arrival at Moscow’s tsarist court, Nicolae knew already that he ought to prepare his departure for East Asia. This moment will be a turning –point in his diplomatic career which will launch him on a different path. In fact, there is quite a difference between “Nicolao Spadario Moldavo-Lacone” (his ancestors seem to have Greek origins), “Nicolae Milescu Spătarul”, “Nikolai Gavrilovič Spafarij”, “Nicolas Garevs” and “Ni-ku-lai Han-po-li-erh-o-wai-ts’ê”, different denominations for the same person. Different denominations for different historical contexts and semantics where Milescu found himself, these also go to make up the multi-faceted biography of our protagonist.

At the imperial court in Peking in 1676 before the K’ang-hsi Emperor as Bugdychan, Mañjuśrī, Son of Heaven, Tsun-ch’in or Sovereign and Father of the entire universe, Milescu must decide whether or not to “kowtow”: here is man in a situation, in history, as M. Eliade would say. If he decides to knock his head and to perform the k’ou-t’ou before the Manchu Emperor, first, he may discredit the political institutions he represents and the sovereignty of his tsar; second, he may trespass against injunctions of the Christian Orthodox credo and be judged an idolater. If he refuses to perform this rite, he may be sent on his way back to Moscow just as Baikov was.

“At that very moment (as the moon was full) the Askaniama arrived, bringing with him head people from the Board, and stating that the Khan had given orders that the Ambassador [Nicolae Milescu Spathar] was to go the next day, an hour before dawn, to see the great Khan’s eyes and kowtow according to their custom. […] The Ambassador answered that he was ready to render all due honour to the Khan, but it was customary in all countries in the world to bow to the sovereign in the ordinary way. However, my master, knowing that your custom differs, ordered me to bow to the Great Khan as people bow to the Tsar himself, so that the former should not think that this honour was impugned. It is also a religious question, for we, ourselves, only kneel to God. […] If you don’t agree to kowtow after our fashion, we cannot present you to the Khan, and the whole business is ruined”[25].

At Peking to kowtow (cin. k‛ou-t‛ou o k‛ou-shou) means literally to knock one’s head (against the ground). This Manchu ceremony involves going down on both knees and bowing the head to the earth. Kowtow was used also by the Europeans (ambassadors, envoys, merchants) and it is referred to as a form of obeisance performed by persons when received in audience by the Emperor at Peking, when being given an imperial mandate, or for other ceremonial occasions in honour of the Emperor. The “obeisance” is called in Chinese san-huei chiu-k‛ou shou and literally means three kneelings and nine knockings of the head[26]. It is performed by going down three times on both knees and at each kneeling bowing the head three times to the ground. It is a matter of performance of this latter ceremony. The first European attestation for this Manchu custom was offered by the Jesuit Adam Schall von Bell in his Historica Relatio:

“Le Père (Adam Schall) obéit donc et, pour tant de munificence, il rendit grâces à la manière des Tartares, en s’agenouillant et en inclinant la tête jusque sur la terre à neuf reprises”[27].

Our difficulty today stems from our prior approach to this historical fact. In this particular empirical case, the actors, Milescu (Ambassador of Russia) respectively Ma-la (the Vice-President of the Li-fan-yüan), find themselves involved in a serious diplomatic controversy: first, the Manchu unchangeable ceremonial versus the European custom of bowing before the sovereign in the ordinary way, by simply bowing the head. The ceremony involved the body, but the real problem is that this gesture works as a synecdoche (as James Hevia specified): the k’ou-t’ou is a symbol of acceptance on the part of the giver or performer of the suzerainty of the Chinese emperor and a sign of submission[28]. In fact, he summarized [29] the scholarly treatment of Ch’ing imperial rites[30]:

– symbolic approach, the rite as either culturally specific or archetypal sign;

– functional approach, the rite as an instrument by which social and political structures are made legitimate.

However, he accepted that “China produced no disinterested body of law, and hence no rationalized relations between culture, political power structure, society, and the individual”[31], and he also suggested that “ritual might have been useful for maintaining internal political order”, preserving “the Chinese conception of imperial power or policy defence”, but also the “great anchor preventing traditional China from responding creatively to the West.”[32]

This multi-faceted approach to the k’ou-t’ou suggests the limitation of any postulate of a cause-effect category of thinking. Obviously, the historian is more than a narrator (Paul Veyne), he is a supervisor or an analytic third actor with a large set of tools to apply to his task: theoretical, empirical, comparative and contextual facts.

I asked myself, thinking of Milescu and of the Ch’ing imperial li: as historian, shall I place more emphasis on the religious differences or misunderstanding between Europe and Asia, or on the incompatible views of the meaning of sovereignty? I hope that my paper has managed to suggest the falsity of this question! So, summarising, we know that k’ou-t’ou is a crucial li (cin. li, ritual, ceremony, etiquette) at the Ch’ing imperial court, also forming part of religious phenomena; it is a link between the tributary system and European diplomatic rules, and so on.

I will follow the emic (the distinctive and functional value of the cultural phenomenon within its own system) or the intrinsic sense of this term (k’ou-t’ou), as Hevia suggests[33] as well. Therefore this immanent character of the term permits, according to the same source, a synecdoche (think of a part-whole type of relationship) and a homology (structural similarities); but if I want to turn back to relate the rites with the polymorphic religious function of the emperor, I really think we need a sort of “spectroscopic” vision for the same li. In other words, I would like to simply remind the reader that we are talking about binli, the set of emperor rules whereby he established his relations with other lords and shaped his foreign affairs. Hevia’s illuminating suggestion that the k’ou-t’ou is more than a postulate of the imperial power is very precious indeed, but I’m afraid that it is not enough to demonstrate how the Ch’ing emperor would have a concrete benefit in keeping his ritual order and maintaining the foreign affairs as well.

For the historian, one hermeneutic path is indeed to try to follow the “spectroscopic”[34] dimension of any symbolic and functional religious term, a method which:

– first, allows for a large interpretative variation of any kind of interaction (comparative or synecdoche);

– second, enlarges the space for any morphologic approach (an adequate approach for the emic value of any historical context, consequently, the appropriate homologies);

– third, opens up an unlimited space for interpretation because the historian really doesn’t know when the meaning of any symbolic and functional term will stop to interact with history.

However, for the history of Ch’ing foreign affairs, the historian had only one constant element: the millenarian understanding of li at the imperial court. He has lots of variables and for any interaction between East Asiatic religious or/and political systems with a different one, there resulted a specific, a distinctive and an open, not necessarily an antithetic, relationship.

Unconcluded summary

Milescu accepted to kowtow before the K’ang-hsi emperor, when he was finally granted an imperial audience, but didn’t actually comply with this same request at the reception of imperial gifts. The political terms of imperial sovereignty between Russia and China were empirically decided by a peace treaty at Nerčinsk (1689) as a result of harsh negotiations for the north oriental limes of China, near the river Argun. This treaty is still valid and is important because it is the first political treaty between a European and an East Asiatic empire, a sort of excellent exam for the first official north Eurasian frontier. The treaty has no specification concerning diplomatic ceremonial behaviour.

Selected bibliography

A. Western primary sources:

Adam SCHALL von BELL, Historica Relatio eorum quae contigerunt occasione concentrationis Calendarii Sinici facta a R.P. Joanne Adamo Schall Societatis Jesu sacerdote (translated into French: Relation historique des événements qui se produisirent à l’occasion de la correction du calendrier chinois, faite par R. P. Jean Adam Schall, prêtre de la Compagne de Jésus. Tientsin 1941) [Abrev. A. SCHALL, HR];

John F. BADDELEY, Russia, Mongolia, China. Being some Record of the Relations between them from the beginning of the XVIIth Century to the Death of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich A.D. 1602-1676. Rendered mainly in the form of Narratives dictated or written by the Envoys send by the Russian Tsars, or their Voevodas in Siberia to the Kalmuk and Mongol Khans & Princes; and to the Emperors of China. With Introductions, Historical and Geographical also a Series of Maps showing the progress of Geographical Knowledge in regard to Northern Asia, during the XVI^th, XVII^th, & early XVIII^th Centuries. The Texts taken more especially from Manuscripts in the Moskow Foreign Office Archive. The Whole by John F. Baddeley, Author of The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, Macmillan and Company, London 1919, Vol. I-II, pp. 15-ccclxv + 1 f. er. + tab. geneal. A-I, mappe, etc., xii-466, New York 1970². [Abrev. RMC]

Thomas PEREIRA (1645-1708), Relação diaria da viagem dos embaixadores da China Tumque Cam (T’ung Kuo-kang) e Somgo Tu (Songgotu), athé à povoação de Nip Chu (Nipchu o Ni-p’u-ch’u o Nercinsk) e successo das pazes entre o Imperio sinico e Moscovitico escrita pella testemunha individual dos mesmos embaixadores abaixo assinada, no anno de 1689 com todas as circunstancias e miudesas que podem os curiosos apetecer, 1689 = J. SEBES.

John NIEUHOFF, Het Gezantschap der Neerlandsche Oost-Indische Compagnie aan den Grooten Tartarischen Cham, Den Tegenwordigen Keizer van China, Amsterdam 1665; trad. Engl. An Embassy from East India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperor of China. Translated by John Ogilby, London 1669.

George Leonard STAUTON, Secretary of the Embassy and Minister Plenipotentiary in the absence of the Ambassador. An authentic account of an embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, G. Nicol, London 1797.

B. Chinese primary sources:

LO SHU FU, A Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations (1644-1820), 2 vol., Published by the Association for Asian Studies by the University of Arizona Press, Tucson 1966. [abbrev. DCSWR].

C. Secondary sources:

Robert P. BLAKE; Richard N. FRYE, “History of the Nation of the Archers (The Mongols) by Gregor of Akanc Hitherto Ascribed to Malak’ia The Monk: The Armenian Text Edited with an English Translation and Notes”, Harvard Journal for Asiatic Studies [HJAS] vol. 12, n°3/4 (Dec., 1949), pp. 269-399.

H. O. R. BRIX, Geschichte der alten russischen Heeres-Einrichtungen von den fruehesten Zeiten bis zu den von Peter dem Grossen gemachten Veränderungen, Berlin 1867.

C. R. BOWDEN, The Modern History of Mongolia, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1968.

Audrey BURTON, The Bukharans: A Dynastic, Diplomatic and Commercial History, 1550-1702, Palgrave Macmillan 1997.

Nicola Di COSMO, “Manchu shamanic ceremonies at the Qing court”, State and court ritual in China (ed. by Joseph P. McDERMOTT), Cambridge U. P., Cambridge 1999, p. 352-398.

Nicola Di COSMO, Ancient China and its enemies. The Rise of nomadic power in East Asian history, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 2002.

Francis Woodman CLEAVES, Manual of the Mongolian Astrology and Divination, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1969.

Francis W. CLEAVES, “The Mongolian Names and Terms in The History of The Nation of The Archers by Grigor of Akanc”, HJAS 12, n°3/4 (Dec. 1949), pp. 400-443.

Walter Eugene CLARK, Two Lamaistic Pantheons, Harvard University Press, vol. I-II, Cambridge Mass. 1937;

Pamela Kyle CROSSLEY, Evelyn S. RAWSKI, “A Profile of the Manchu Language in Ch’ing History”, HJAS 53 (1993), no. 1, p. 63-102.

Michael DILLON, “Dictionary of Chinese History”, Frank Cass and Company Limited, Gainsborough House, London 1979.

Mircea ELIADE, “Recent works on shamanism. A Review Article”, History of Religions 1 (1961), no. 1, p. 152-186.

Mircea ELIADE, Patterns in Comparative Religion, Meridian, New York 1963.

Mircea ELIADE, Shamanism. Archaic techniques of Ecstasy, Bollingen Series, Princeton, 1972.

J. K. FAIRBANK, S. Y. TÊNG, “On The Transmission of Ch’ing Documents”, HJAS 4 (1939), no. 1, p. 12-46.

J. K. FAIRBANK, S. Y. TÊNG, “On The Ch’ing Tributary System”, HJAS 6 (1941), no. 2, p. 135-246;

David M. FARQUHAR, “Emperor as Bodhisattva in The Governance of the Ch’ing Empire”, Harvard Journal for Asiatic Studies 38, n°1 (Jun., 1978), pp. 5-34;

Lo- shu FU, “The Two Portuguese Embassies to China during the K’ang-hsi Period”, TP 43 (1955), pp. 75-94;

Noël GOLVERS, The Astronomia Europaea of Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (Dilligen, 1687), Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, 28, Nettetal, 1993.

Noël GOLVERS, Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623-1688) and the Chinese Heaven, Leuven University Press 2003.

James L. HEVIA, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macarteny Embassy of 1793. Duke UP, Durham 1995; [Reviewed by Pamela Kyle CROSSLEY, in Harvard Journal for Asiatic Studies, vol. 57, n°2 (Dec., 1997), 597-611];

James L. HEVIA, “Lamas, Emperors and Rituals: Political Implications in Qing Imperial Ceremonies” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 16, n°2 (1993), 243-278;

James L. HEVIA, “A Multitude Lords: Qing Court Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793”, Late Imperial China 10, nr. 2 (Dec. 1989), 72-105;

James L. HEVIA, “Sovereignty and Subject: Constituting Relations of Power in Qing Guest Ritual”, in Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, Body, Subject, and Power in China, Chicago UP, Chicago 1994;

Étienne LAMOTTE, “Mañjuśrī”, T’oung Pao [TP] 48, fasc. 1-3 (1960), pp. 1-96;

Marie- Thérèse de MALLMAN, Étude iconographique sur Mañjuśrī, École française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris 1964;

Louis LIGETI, “Deux Tablettes de T’ai – tsong des Ts’ing”, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae [AOH], VIII, fasc.3 (1958), pp. 201-239.

Louis LIGETI, “Documents sino – ouigours du Bureau des Traducteurs” (I), AOH XX, fasc. 3 (1967), pp. 253-306.

Louis LIGETI, “Documents sino-ouigours du Bureau des Traducteurs” (II), AOH XXI, fasc. 1 (1968), pp. 45-108.

Michael LOWE, “The Authority of the Emperors of Ch’in and Han”, States and Law in East Asia. Festschrift Karl Bünger (eds. Dieter EIKEMER, Herbert FRANKE), Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1981.

James R. HAMILTON, Les Ouïghours à l’époque des Cinq Dynasties, Paris 1955.

Mark MANCALL, Russia and China. Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728, Harvard U.P. [Harvard East Asian Series 61], Cambridge Massachusetts, 1971.

E. Delmar MORGAN, “An Expedition through Manchuria from Pekin to Blagovestchensk in 1870 by the Arhim. Palladius, chief of the Russo-Greek Church Mission to Pekin”, JRGS 42 (1872), pp. 142-180.

James A. MILLWARD, Beyond the pass. Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864. Stanford UP, Stanford California 1998;

Joseph NEEDHAM, Science and Civilisation in China, III, Cambridge U. P., Cambridge, 1959.

Paul PELLIOT, “Neuf notes des Questions d’Asie Centrale”, TP XXVI (1929), pp. 201-265.

Paul PELLIOT, “L’Ambassade de Manuel de Saldanha a Pekin”, TP 27 (1930), pp. 421-424 ;

Luciano PETECH, “Some Remarks on the Portuguese Embassies to China in the K’ang-hsi Period”, TP 44 (1956), pp. 227-241;

Luciano PETECH et alii (ed.), Giovanni di Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, Spoleto 1989.

Earl PRITCHARD, “The Kotow in the Macartney Embassy to China in 1793”, The Far Eastern Quarterly [FEQ] vol. 2 (Feb., 1943), pp. 163-203;

Evelyn S. RAWSKI, “Presidential Address: Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in the Chinese History”, JAS 55 (1996), no. 4, p. 829-850.

Evelyn S. RAWSKY, The Last Emperors. A Social History of Qing Imperial Institution, University of California Press, Berkeley 1998;

P. Abel RÉMUSAT, Recherches sur les langues tartares, ou Mémoires sur différents points de la grammaire et de la littérature des Mandchous, des Mongols, des Ouigours et des Tibétaines, Paris 1820.

Pierre Abel – REMUSAT, Mèlanges asiatiques, I, Dondey-Dupré, Paris 1825-1826;

W.W. ROCKHILL, „Diplomatic Missions to the Court of Peking: The Kotow Question“, in American Historical Review, II (April and July 1897), pp. 427-442 (1); pp. 627-643 (2).

Jean-Paul ROUX, “L’origine céleste de la souveraineté dans les inscriptions paléo-turques de Mongolie et de Sibérie”, La regalità sacral. The Sacral Kingship, Leiden, 1959, p. 231-241.

Giorgio DE SANTILLANA, Hertha von DECHEND, “Il mulino di Amleto. Saggio sul mito e sulla struttura del tempo” (a cura di Alessandro PASSI) [Hamlet’s Mill. An Essay on myth and the frame of time 1969], Adelphi Edizioni, Milano 2000⁸.

H. F. SCHURMANN, “Mongolian Tributary Practices of the Thirteenth Century”, HJAS 19. 3/4 (1956), pp. 304-389.

J. SEBES, The Jesuits and The Sino-Russian Treaty of Nertcinsk. The Diary of Thomas Pereira S.J., Istitutum Historicum S.I. volumen XVIII, Rome 1961;

Rolf A. STEIN, “Saint et Divin, un titre tibétain et chinois des rois tibétains”, Manuscrit et inscriptions de Haute-Asie du V^e au XI^e siècle, Journal Asiatique CCLXI (1981), no. 1-2, pp. 231-275.

Lynn A. STRUVE, The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time, Harvard University Asia Centre, Harvard UP, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2004;

Gustav SCHLEGEL, “Le Koteou en Russie” in TP IV(1893), pp. 114-143;

Nathan SIVIN, „On the word Taoist as a Source of Perplexity. With special Reference to the Relation of Science and Religion in Traditional China“, History of Religions 17 (1978), no. 3-4, p. 303-330.

Boleslaw SZCZESNIAK, „The Origin of the Chinese Language According to Athanasius Kircher’s Theory“, Journal of the American Oriental Society 72, n°1 (Jan. – Mar.,1952), pp. 21-29.

Paul Veyne, “Comment on écrit l’histoire”, Seuil, Paris 1971.

Manabu WAIDA, “Symbolism of Descent in Tibetan Sacred Kingship and Some East Asian Parallels”, Numen 20 (1973), p. 60-78.

Manabu WAIDA, “Notes on the Sacral Kingship in Central Asia”, Numen 23 (1976), p. 179-190.

Manabu WAIDA, “Kingship in East Asia”, EoR 1987 e EoR 2^nd ed. 2005, p. 5178-5181.

John E. WILLS Jr., Embassies and Illusions. Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi, 1666-1687, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. 1984.

Silas H. L. WU, “The Memorial System of the Ch‘ing Dynasty, 1644-1911”, HJAS 27 (1967), 7-75.

D. Encyclopaedias:

EoR 2005², Encyclopedia of Religion (a cura di Lindsay JONES), Ed. Macmillan, Detroit 2005², vol. 1-15.