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.

 

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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.