Caius Dobrescu

University of Bucarest, Romania

caius.dobrescu@gmail.com

 

 

Legends of the Inner Frontier

Consciousness in the Romanian Literature of the post-Stalinist era: 1960-1989

 

 

Abstract: The paper is an attempt at emphasizing the inner-conscious, intra-subjective dimension of the mental and rhetorical construction of the Limit. That is why we have focused on the negotiation that takes place on the inner stage of the self (self-negotiation). At the same time, our method could be described as taxonomic or matricial intuition. It implies a supra-perspective on different perspectives that may be adopted on a given theme. In the present case, our goal is to capture the spirit the various policies of the representation of the Limit, but also to keep them in mind in a state of simultaneity. We mean to convey a sense of their co-occurrence and concomitance. Actually, this method is about mapping the network of the possible: what is the bundle of conceivable symbolic strategies of representing the Limit under the socio-cultural conditions of Communist Romania and to what extent are they distinguishable in the practice of literature? What we will provide is a descriptive matrix of model-attitudes towards the Limit (or of ways of transmuting the concept of the Limit – i.e. social interdiction – into an emotional and imaginative experience with an impact on the processes of self-understanding and self-construction).

Keywords: Romanian literature; Communism; Cultural Adaptationism; Intra-personal Relationships; Auto-negotiation; Intra-negotiation, Matricial Intuitionism.

 

 

I. Intra-subjective negotiations

 

The present essay is an attempt to rethink the notion of ‘negotiation’. With this end in view, we will try to define ‘negotiation’ as something more than a process taking place in the social world, between clearly distinct actors, implying a system of arbitration, and a display of rhetoric and resources conducing to a balance of powers. We would also try to define the notion of ‘negotiation-of-limits’ by distancing it from the apparently inescapable synonymity with negotiation-of-status.[1] In contradistinction, we will see ‘negotiation’ as a subjective process, implying inner hesitations regarding not only the estimation of material risks and opportunities, but also of the possibilities of acquiring consistency for one’s sense of selfhood. In this acceptation, ‘negotiation’ means mediation between the understanding of actual social and political limitations, generally construed as powerful interdictions and penalties, and an imaginative and gratifying representation of inner integrity as a process of free expansion and self-assertion.

The give-and-take of a process of negotiation consists here, on the one hand, in transporting the experience-bound features of social learning into the fictional/fantasmatic foci of personal identity, and, on the other hand, in construing public limitations/interdictions not simply as the hard facts of life, but as symbolical configurations, as mythical or mystical narrative conundrums.

The present approach is inspired by the phenomenological exploration of the social psyche as practiced by Peter Berger, following into the footsteps of Alfred Schütz and George Herbert Mead. In explaining the functioning of social norms, this perspective refines and deepens classical dialectical notions such as “objectivation”:

 

Thus, in the final resort, the objectivation of human activity means that man becomes capable of objectivating part of himself within his own consciousness, confronting himself within himself in figures that are generally available as objective elements of the social world. For example, the individual qua “real self” can carry on an internal conversation with himself qua archbishop (Berger, 1990: 14).

 

and “internalization”, seen as:

 

… the absorbtion into consciousness of the objectivated world in such a way that the structures of this world come to determine the subjective structures of consciousness itself. … insofar as internalization has taken place, the individual now apprehends various elements of the objectivated world as phenomena internal to his consciousness at the same time as he apprehends them as phenomena of external reality (Berger, 1990 : 15).

 

By transferring these general theoretical intimations to the filed of literary studies, we propose that literature confronts us with evidence of the processes through which the internalization of a system of interdictions is counterballanced by an imaginative effort of redesigning and transgressing the limits, of embedding them in a compensatory symbolic pattern. Internalization is not the equivalent of blind obedience: once the limits and interdictions absorbed by the imaginative, symbolic thinking, they can be completely reconfigured so as to make them compatible with one’s sense of personal pride or self-respect.

We also propose to extend the notion of ‘negotiation’ from the inter-personal to the intra-personal domain. More precisely, we will not ask for a semantic licence or for a contextual metaphor, but imply that a negotiation process necessarily comprises inter-personal and intra-personal dimensions. Accordingly, we will focus on the latter ones, the intrapersonal or, better defined, the intra-subjective. In this perspective, the notion of ‘negotiation’ becomes synonymous with Berger’s above-quoted notion of inner dialogue between the social function and the ‘real self’. At the same time, ‘negotiation’ should account for what Peter Berger terms ‘absorption’ of the structures of the objectivated social reality into the structures of the consciousness and vice versa.

The use of these two synonymyties that reconfigure semantically the notion of ‘negotiation’ is supported by the idea that the life of consciousness could and should be described in the terms of transactional cognitivity: problem solving, arbitration, tension and contention, dissimulation, ambiguity, power display, graduality/processuality etc. (Şora, 1940; Goffman, 1997; Arendt, 1978; Greenblatt, 1988; Dennett, 1991; Blachowicz, 1999: 177-200).

In the following, we will go one step further and address not simply the intra-subjective negotiation of actual social limits, but the negotiation, and eventually the construction of the very representation of the concept of Limit in an artistic (that is to say, symbolically- and expressively-oriented) consciousness. We will test this assumptions against the ‘socialist’ Romanian literature produced between 1960 and 1989. This span of time approximates an epoch when the public expression of personal feelings was to a certain degree tolerated. Which is to say that the political (‘exoteric’) negotiation of the public status of literature allowed for the publicization of the inner (‘esoteric’) negotiations regarding the meaning of the Limit (where ‘Limit’ means the corpus of ideologically-based social and political interdictions).

 

II. An exercise in matricial intuitionism

 

This being an essay on theory, our method is based on what could be described as taxonomic or matricial intuition. This implies an over-perspective on the different perspectives that can be adopted on a given theme. In the present case, it is important not only to capture the spirit of the different policies of representation-of-the-Limit, but also to keep them in mind in a state of simultaneity. We mean to convey a sense of their co-occurrence and concomitance. The method is in fact about mapping the territory of the possible in answer to the question: what is the bundle of conceivable symbolic strategies of representing the Limit under the socio-cultural conditions of Communist Romania and to what extent are they distinguishable in the practice of literature?

The underlying assumption of this methodological enterprise is that applied empirical studies should be preceded by intuitive approaches. Which (somehow unlike the traditional applications of intuitionism) do not aim to grasp some sort of ‘essence’, but to approximate the scope of the possible perspectives on and meanings ascribable to an object of investigation.

What we will provide is a descriptive matrix of model-attitudes towards the Limit (or of ways of transmuting the concept of Limit – i.e. social interdiction – into an emotional and imaginative experience with an impact on the processes of self-understanding and self-construction). This psycho-cultural typology/topology is simultaneously removed from (and thereby configured by) three ‘boarder-cases’ of symbolic behaviour: a) conformity – implying the unconditional yielding to the ‘social command’ of the official propaganda, which could be read in the present context as a non-reflective identification with the Limit; b) confrontation – consisting of attitudes of open political dissent, that is to say of overtly and articulately contesting the Limit; c) escapism – meaning the imaginary flight from the actual reality, and the fantasmatic dissolution of the Limit.

The above remarks conceal no intention of equalizing these three attitudes/strategies. We should unambiguously express our personal trust in the moral superiority of the open confrontation over all other imaginable varieties of symbolically assimilating, challenging or transgressing the theme of the Limit. It should also be clear that, by this ‘extramural’ view on confrontationalism (considering it as a landmark for and not as a natural part of our field of investigation), we do not intend to support the theory that open dissent did not produce powerful literary and intellectual works. The opposite is actually the case, this being proven by a significant bibliographical corpus (Goma, 1975; Ioanid, 1991-1996; Cornea, 1991; Petrescu & Cangiopol, 1990; Andreescu, 1992; Botez, 1993). To wit, complexity and insightfulness are also characteristics of many instances of ‘escapism’, be it literary (Colin, 1961; Stănescu, 1970; Bănulescu, 1971; Chimet, 1970; Coşovei, 1979; Cărtărescu, 1989) or scholarly (Marino, 1973; Zaciu, 1974; Manolescu, 1976; Vartic, 1982; Cistelecan, 1987).

As a matter of fact, all the components of the typological matrix listed bellow could be seen as combinations of the ideal-types ‘conformity, ‘confrontation’, and ‘escapism’. But it is particularly because of their impurity and eclecticism, because of their quality of (metaphorically speaking) cultural and psychological palimpsests, that they are interesting from the point of view of a transactional phenomenology, of a theory of intra-subjective (intraconsciousness) negotiation or, as we will re-define it at the proper place, of a theory of symbolic adaptationism.

In order to make such fields of inner tension and ambiguity perceivable, we took into account not the literary and intellectual careers of the authors on whom we focused, but some of their individual works. Therefore, it is important to state that, given this strategy, the reader might encounter the same author cited in order to exemplify more than a single ‘symbolism of the Limit’. At the same time, whenever we provide authors names to illustrate a certain manner of sublimating interdiction (the Limit) through inner symbolical interaction (eso- or auto-negotiation), each of them is accompanied, for reasons of economy of space, by a single bibliographical reference that we considered as most relevant. The reader, especially the one rather unacquainted with Romanian literature, should be warned that these singular references provide no clear indication of the scope of this interpretation-pattern in the context of the whole body of work of a precise author. Nevertheless, the references certify that the inner dynamics described by that pattern of interpretation of the Limit is identifiable in the consciousness of that author in a manner that is worth an attentive enquiry.

The reader should also be aware of the fact that our perspective, all-encompassing and hyper-concentrated, could not do justice to the complexities of each author’s vision. At this stage of the research, we have limited ourselves to pin up the map of the territory of the counter- or para- or meta-coercive imagination with specific references to individual literary works. This being a direct consequence of the approach that we have adopted, matricial intuitionism, in which a general perception of a matrix of possibilities could profitably precede any further ‘thicker’ and more closely focused descriptions. That is why the present approach should not be seen as aiming to a conclusion, but as attempting to open a horizon for further research and theoretical/methodological reflection.

Last, it has to be said that our notion of ‘literary work’ is centred on fiction and poetry. There are only a few mentions of plays and playwrights. But there are many more references to the cultural and literary criticism. This choice is not simply due to the historical social prestige of these domains or to the expressive quality of the language of the essays and studies we considered; rather, it mirrors the special condition of criticism in a closed society: with respect to actual fictional texts, it conveys an explanation and partake in a ‘linear’ understanding of rationality, but when seen against the official literary and political doctrine, it reveals a level of ambiguities, allusions and suggestions that function as a kind of secondary and inchoate figural language.

 

II. 1. Dialecticizing the Limit

 

We will begin by considering the theme of the Limit in the terms of the ideology claimed as foundational by all the Communist political systems: dialectical and historical materialism. Although the Communist legitimating discourse ended up into a generalized social and political ritualism (Lane, 1981) and in inescapable and self-referential mannerisms of the official rhetoric (Thom, 1987), the core values of the Communist legitimation discourse remained Change and Progress. By the time of the Soviet Thaw, a reforming faction of the Romanian party intellectuals tried to gradually recover the alleged innovative spirit of the pioneering Marxian theory and to restore the concept of ‘dialectics’ (which in the given historical context translated as ‘intellectual creativity cum disponibility’) to its initial ideologically privileged position (Crohmălniceanu, 1967; Cornea, 1972; Ianoşi, 1974).

A clear literary expression of this dialectical optimism is the dramatic monologue Iona (Jonas), by Marin Sorescu (first published in 1968), a ‘humanistic’ reassessment of the biblical myth of the stern believer that escapes imprisonment from the womb of a whale. For older-generation authors sharing explicit, interwar Marxian sympathies, this meant that every limitation contains in itself the principle of its own transgression (Bogza, 1953; Georgescu, 1975). For the so-called ‘oneirists’ of the late 1960s, who argued that a revaluation of the Romanian Surrealist tradition, dream and fantasy represented a necessary dialectical counterpoise to objective reality. They didn’t call for an orthodox Surrealist synthesis between the two realms, but rather for their tensional balance and a self-aware process of gradual mutual transgressions (Dimov & Ţepeneag, 1997).

The influence of post-Marxian French textualism was also important for this dialectical mood. Two ideas were especially productive for the creative minds of the so-called Generation of the 80s: a) that there is no ‘reality’ extricable from our linguistically-established network of meanings; and b) that eventually a critical ‘praxis’ evolving inside the language and touching on its cognitive (re)liabilities is a form of modifying the social world. The most radical practitioner of what he himself used to call ‘the textual action’ was Gheorghe Iova, other important names being Gheorghe Ene and Emil Paraschivoiu (Desant, 1983).

Another highly relevant instance of the ‘dialecticization’ of the Limit has to do with what the American radical thinker C. Wright Mills used to call ‘the sociological imagination’.[2] Re-situating the inner perception of the Limit as the reasoned experience of the dynamic complexity of social determinations is a major concern for authors equally significant for their interests in the social theory (Alexandru Ivasiuc, 1972; Culcer, 1981; Dorin Tudoran, 1982; Alexandru Muşina, 1982; Stelian Tănase, 1982; Gheorghiu, 1983; Mircea Nedelciu, 1984).[3]

 

II.2. Hysterizing the Limit

 

To explain this perspective, we attempt to import and adapt Fritz Stern’s notion of ‘politics of despair’. Stern referred specifically to the radical-conservative ideologists of the 1930s Germany, but he implied the general thesis that despair could be both conceptually distillated and rhetorically instrumentalized as a means of political protest (Stern, 1961). In the context of the Romanian literature of the post-Stalinist era, the emergence of an aesthetic politics of despair equated with another form of public representation of the Limit. Since the cultural official policy was to replace manifest, openly offensive interdictions with a system of soft, implicit, internalized regulations, the act of outstepping the self-containment consensus and bringing to public expression states of negative emotional paroxysm could count as a form of symbolic protest.

‘Politics of despair’ is a label that would suit the literary works that associated a process of reflection on the actual limitations of the free expression of consciousness to a vision of the human condition as a hopeless imprisonment in an inscrutable and indifferent universe. The symbolism of the Limit emerges, in this perspective, from a negotiation between the awareness of the Communist Realpolitik and the internalization of different philosophical influences all pointing to the desolating meaninglessness of life.

The European trends illustrating an aesthetic of the Limit seen as extreme desperation that permeated the Romanian literary milieu were: German expressionism (Baconsky, 1969, Aurel Pantea, 1980), French existentialism (Titel, 1971, Ţoiu, 1987), and the literature of the grotesque and the absurd (Popescu, 1969; Vişniec, 1982).

Complementary to these instances of silent, inchoate, culturalized expressions of despair, is an apocalyptic pattern for the interpretation of the Limit. If existentialism or absurdism hint at the preordained narrowness of the human condition, the apocalyptic pattern construes the Limit as a cosmic catastrophe. The desperation poetics may acquire Christian apocalyptical overtones (Alexandru, 1966); Mălăncioiu, 1976; Ciobanu, 1968; Marinescu, 1981; Daian, 1987), or it may be distillated in the form a secular mystique (Mazilescu, 1979; Danilov, 1982; Stoiciu, 1982; Marin, 1990).

 

II. 3. Naturalizing the Limit

 

In the two abovementioned instances, the negativity of the Limit was either absorbed in the logic of a dialectical process of evolution or ontologized as the shocking evidence of an essential flaw or an original cosmic accident. But there are also strategies directed at a full conversion of the meaning of the Limit. This is to say that, instead of producing unease, fear, or despair, the Limit is enthusiastically accepted, it is tamed through a process of radical identification that could be called euphuization (with a term derived from the classical study of Gilbert Durand on the anthropology of the imaginary – Durand, 1960). The Limit is no longer conceived as a hostile limitation, the manifestation of a punitive will, as the consequence of a non-negotiable adversary fiat. The transcendent power from behind the empirical interdictions is appropriated through a process of identification with the Unknown, and the Limit is symbolically converted into a protective ‘natural’ confine or contour.

Such an experience is to a wide extent parallel with the elaboration of Romanian local communism. This legitimating theory claimed the rootedness of Marxian egalitarianism in local communitarian traditions and derived the institutions of the Romanian really-existing Socialism from an allegedly indigenous and organic process of social revolution. In literature or literary criticism, the process of the ‘retraditionalization’ of the Communist ideology is brought to its final logical consequence, that is to say, to the complete evacuation of the concepts of historical materialism and their replacing with ethnocentric self-idolization and Fascist-like mobilizationism (Tomiţă, 2007).

The stressful experience of the complex network of interdictions of the Socialist everyday life is symbolically negotiated into a vision of ethnic corporate vigilantism directed against a vast coalition of alien enemies. In the vision of the ideologists of the periodicals Luceafărul (Mihai Ungheanu, Valentin F. Mihăilescu, Ilie Bădescu) and Săptămîna (Eugen Barbu, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, Dan Claudiu Tănăsescu) the Limit becomes the natural confine of an organic collective identity. The exaltation of the ethnic solidarity against a pervasive Evil is expressed in both in novelistic (Barbu, 1969; Lăncrănjan, 1977; Anghel (1979), and in poetical forms (Gheorghe, 1984; Vadim Tudor, 1983).

A most distinctive feature of this mental makeup is its strain for tempting the political power into manifesting itself according to its totalitarian nature, into putting aside its post-Helsinki strategy of preserving a minimum of democratic appearances and acting decidedly upon the premises of a national state of emergency. With such apologists of the National-Communist status quo, the negotiation of the Limit, in political terms, paradoxically implies an effort opposite to the one of containing the political power. they explicitly call for the drastic reduction if not suppression of the fragile autonomy of the literary public scene, in the name of a programme that no matter how vague could still be described as an instigation to spiritual ethnic cleansing (Shafir, 1999).

 

II. 4. Gradualizing the Limit

 

With this perspective we depart again from a fixed representation of the Limit and recover its understanding as a moving marker. But, unlike the vision of the Limit that preserved the intellectual passion of genuine dialectics, the attitude that we try to describe at this point is much closer to a cautious and definitely un-utopian meliorism. In order to understand it and to place it in the right context it is important to bear in mind that the Romanian intellectual milieus have not been left untouched by the theory (so popular in the 1970s) of the ‘convergence of the systems’ through a ‘managerial revolution’.[4]

This intellectual atmospherics produced a stream of literary works in which the authors either identified themselves with or postured as the responsible political and technological managers of the socialist system. In fiction, we should distinguish between two levels of artistic endeavour: the level of the really complex works that picture technocrats and pragmatic politicians in manners that could be described as aesthetically and intellectually autonomous (Preda, 1968; Ivasiuc, 1970; Breban, 1973; Buzura, 1977; Dimitriu, 1982-1986); and the level of the works that depicted the complexity of decision-making in colours not significantly removed from those used by the official propaganda (Popovici, 1973; Săraru, 1974; Sălcudeanu, 1980; Popescu 1980-1982).

An interesting case in point is that of the highly influential poet, journalist and social activist Adrian Păunescu, who, under the guise of an often inflamed nationalist rhetoric and by alternating the fervent eulogy of Nicolae Ceauşescu with populist sentimentality and critical satire, actually promoted and ethos of pragmatic gradualism (Păunescu, 1976).

The managerial approach to the complex of the Limit could be described as an inner negotiation between the awareness of the inescapable interdictions of the Communist ideological orthodoxy and the creed of generating the highest possible satisfaction for the largest number possible. This pragmatic aesthetics with partly technocratic, partly populist overtones implies a piecemeal approach of the Limit and its imaginary gradualization. The process could be seen as a perpetual realistic-managerial adaptation to the world of hard facts through different strategies of pro-active rhetorical ambiguity.

 

II. 5. Gnosticizing the Limit

 

Another way of making sense of the Limit, and thereby symbolically transgressing contingency and frustration, is to insert the experience of social interdictions in an initiation scenario that would lead to some sort of superior knowledge about existence in general.

We propose that such attitudes could be unified under the notion of lucidization. The term comes from the Latin lucidus, and would be literally translated with ‘luminous’ and figuratively with ‘(self)aware’. Lucidization describes an intra-consciousness negotiation between the traumatizing awareness of social censorship and the modern tradition of praising extreme self-awareness as the epitome of personal dignity. This attitude could be detected in works of fiction that pursue aesthetic and intellectual self-consciousness to its farthest limit (Petrescu, 1970; Manea, 1969; Crăciun, 1982), in poetical works which revolve around the central symbol of the ‘brain’ and deploy a network of cognitive metaphorical references (Petreu, 1983; Ghiu, 1982; Vlasie, 1982; Lefter, 1983), or, last but not least, in the art of the critical essay (Pavel, 1968; Călinescu, 1973; Martin, 1974; Lucian Raicu, 1976; Ciocârlie, 1979; Podoabă, 1984).

Another strand of exorcism of the Limit through cognitive symbolism could be called ontologization. That is to say that the themes and motives of the social coercion are partially and polemically absorbed in a reflection on the very ontological (existential) status of the Limit. Highly expressive of this strategy are the statements of the influential philosopher Constantin Noica, who spoke about his political imprisonment in the 1950s as having been instrumental for his personal experience of the Being (Sein, in Heideggerian terms), and his latter attempt of creating an ontology of the limits and limitations (Noica, 1981) anticipated by the project of a ‘peratology’, a science of the limits[5], proposed by Noica’s own disciple Gabriel Liiceanu (Liiceanu, 1975). While Noica was a self-appointed disciple of the German philosophy of the Being, the philosopher Mihai Şora had a first-hand experience of French neo-Thomist thought in his student years in the 1940s Paris. An experience that, after a long silence, he distillated in the philosophical dialogues that he published beginning with the late 1970s. If Noica’s view on ‘the closure that is opening onto itself’ indirectly conveys his hopes for a transgression from within, by profoundly changing their meaning, of the limits and limitations set by the National-Communist orthodoxy, Mihai Şora’s search for the blissful ontological limitations, seen as a premises for any imaginable form of liberty, were in an implicit tension with the ‘bad’ and ‘unnatural’ limitations imposed on the human condition by the Communist totalitarianism (Şora, 1978).

A related though distinctly different way of de-historicizing the Limit and presenting it as a necessity and an opportunity for self-discovery is the strategy that we propose to call epiphanization. It is closely associated with a fascination for the classical Gnostic scenarios of cosmic fall followed by redemption.[6] Psychologically speaking, this vision can create a mechanism of balance between the despair and horror of being trapped inside a repressive totalitarian society and different sorts of homemade ‘theologies of liberation’. Gnostic scenarios interpret metaphysical Evil as the expression of the overall domination of the world by a negative force or principle, but ascribe to the human soul the status of a spark fallen into the empire of Darkness from a super-ordinate empire of the Light. This essential difference in nature provides the soul, once the proper knowledge (gnosis) acquired, with the possibility to recover its celestial origin. The modern cult of the purifying powers of poetry fitted remarkably well in this salvationist pattern – a conceptual superposition that didn’t call for a literal belief in a Manichean dualist cosmos, but rather for an intra-subjective negotiation between a) the constant awareness of a pervasive system of social surveillance and constraint and b) the more often than not self-aware psychological need for the comforting fantasy of a personal secret exit from this disciplinarian universe. Such psychological tensions are relieved on a symbolical level by the use of compensatory cultural schemes such as the salvationist mystique of Poetry. In which case, the actual limitations on civil liberties are assimilated with the mythical Limits from which the human soul is supposed to liberate itself in its effort of remembering its higher origin and of reversing the process of its alienation (Negoiţescu, 1968; Călinescu, 1968; Stănescu, 1968; Constantin, 1968; Ivănescu, 1968; Blandiana, 1969; Manolescu, 1968; Ionescu, 1979; Cărtărescu, 1985; Antonesei, 1989).

 

II. 6. Ordealing the Limit

 

A quick mention should be made to a psychological disposition that turns literature into a form of medieval-like chivalrous defiance of the intellectual and existential limitations imposed by a Communist system of government. The Limit is still perceived in a negative sense, as a detrimental restriction, but not in cosmic or metaphysical terms. It rather represents a sportive provocation to use the double- or multiple-meanings of the literary language not to cunningly circumvent the ideological censorship, but to convey a sense of proud autonomy. This represents an intimate negotiation between, so to say, sense and sensibility, between the chronic prudence acquired in the process of the Communist socialization and the lure of a literary tradition that exalts courage as the supreme moral virtue. The intra-consciousness negotiation takes in these cases the form of a quest for the full expression of psychological self-transgression. Social and political limitations are challenged by an aristocratic posturing communicating disdain for life-threatening physical actions.

In this perspective, mainly recoverable from works of fiction that deal with daring or at least potentially heroic characters (Popovici, 1972; Preda, 1980; Popescu, 1971; Nedelcovici, 1985; Băieşu, 1985; Vlad, 1985; Marineasa, 1988), the Limit is symbolically recast as an ordeal, as an initiatory test (with only vague political undertones) of one’s existential valor.

 

II. 7. Gentrifying the Limit

 

Another manner of redefining the socialist limitations on the civil liberties was to interpret them as having to do with threats inherent in the randomness of historical contingency and to approach them with a middle-class[7] ethos of moderation and selective benevolence. An ethos out of each an aesthetic of sceptical subtlety and elegance was to be almost naturally derived. The magic of answering to dogmatic restraint with a finely tuned self-restraint, and a highly elaborate rhetoric of insinuating doubt is discernible equally in essays of moral reflection (N. Steinhardt, 1988; Al. Paleologu, 1972; George, 1986; Andrei Pleşu, 1988) and in actual works of poetry and fiction (Ivănescu, 1970; Cosaşu, 1973; Olăreanu, 1984; Adameşteanu, 1983; Ciocârlie, 1984; Horasangian, 1987; Vighi, 1989).

 

II. 7. Carnivalizing the Limit

 

‘Carnivalization’, the famous concept created by Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), could provide a direct access to another street of the symbolism of the Limit. To better grasp the nature of this approach, we should proceed from the distinction between, on the one side, the ‘gentrification’ strategy, which necessarily implies the sense of humour, but rather in the form of an extremely nuanced gradient of ironical effects, and, on the other side, the absorption of the political Limit into an overflow of comical rhetorical effects. Once exposed to this treatment, the official ideological limitations are exorcized into simple fluctuating contours within a general proliferation of carnivalesque forms of word play.

This ludicrous mockery that manipulates the symbolisms and rituals of power to the point of completely emptying them of intelligible content should be expected to be polymorphous, to borrow many masks and speak many (artistic) languages. It could imply a sophisticated play with the literary forms and traditions covertly calling into question the very notion of authority or the very factuality and objectivity of the ‘real’ world (Simionescu, 1969/1970; Foarţă, 1978, Romoşan, 1980), or it could replicate in exotic landscapes the conditional reflexes of the Communist power holders, the mechanics of their wooden language (Agopian, 1984; Angelescu, 1987; Groşan, 1992). ‘Carnivalization’ could be expressed in buffoonish vitality that subtly reveals a much darker self-experience (Brumaru, 1970; Bălăiţă, 1975; Dimov, 1982; Iaru, 1981; Stratan, 1982; Popescu, 1988), or it can surface in the form of brilliant speculations of a radical (even if hidden in mind-boggling rhetorical vaults) philosophical relativism and pluralism (Manolescu, 1971; Piţu, 1991; Ioan Buduca, 1988).

The ‘carnivalization’ process implies the effort towards acquiring a complete inner flexibility (i.e. the readiness for mental experiments that can put to test and potentially subvert all moral limits, all personal beliefs and persuasions) required by what we could paradoxically call the ‘ironical integrism’. It also implies a process of negotiation between an adaptive survival strategy and a ‘pro-active’ subversive intent, and between an extremely personal display of dynamic ambiguities that may continuously escape the drill of the official censorship, and a symbolic policy that might come to express the silent indignation of a latent ethical community.

 

III. Final remarks

 

Our inquiry has, inevitably, started from the powerful, and in many ways unsurpassed The Captive Mind, the survey undertook by Czeslaw Milosz (in 1953, the year of Joseph Stalin’s death) of the walks of the inner exile under a classical Stalinist dictatorship. We strongly hold that the intuitive perspective of the Polish poet is still far more insightful than the average of today’s highly formalized and specialized studies on the negotiation of status in allocative-monopolistic-ideological social systems. Nevertheless, we took into account the growing complexity of the social interplay (i.e. of both social control and political dissent policies) in the post-Stalinist era. We also had to account for a real expansion of the conceptual universe of the creative classes, for the impact of new artistic and intellectual influences, for new trends, attitudes, social styles unimaginable from the point of view of the early 1950s. The privilege of the historical distance also allowed for a more neutral and less judgmental position than the one Czeslaw Milosz, writing from the spiritual centre of the post-war East European tragedy, was actually compelled to adopt.

But the most significant difference was brought by the necessity of amending the binary representation on which the ketman theory is based. Borrowed from the medieval Persian language, the notion expressed the dissociation of identity undergone by those who chose to simulate a total observance of the Muslim orthodoxy while maintaining a pristine allegiance for a dissenting form of this particular creed or for a completely different faith.

The necessity to elaborate on this model came, on the one side, from the attempt of accentuating the inner-consciousness, intra-subjective dimension of the mental and rhetorical construction of the Limit. That is why we focused on the negotiation that take place on the inner stage of the self (auto-negotiation). On the other side, it is not only the location, but also the nature of the symbolic construction of the Limit that we felt bound to re-describe. Actually, we departed from the binary, implicitly Manichean view of the ketman, and we adopted a multi-level model of intra-subjective interaction and negotiation, involving the following elements: a) the necessity of letting out one’s innermost fears, of creating a virtual (artistic) pressure valve for relieving the stress generated by a continuous ambiguity and threat; b) the rational assessment of the risks and opportunities inherent in the restrictive (statistically restrictive – that is to say, largely unpredictable) socialist social environment; c) the felt necessity of projecting one’s self into an ideal identity closely connected to the mythology and charisma of the Writer; d) the need for an ethical coherence of personal judgments and decisions; e) the impulse of connecting to sources of ‘authentic’ creativity and artistic power, sources identified within the national or universal intellectual heritage, or among the hotspots of the than-contemporary Western intellectual life.

How these different levels of concern interact and surface into rather coherent expressive patterns was succinctly shown in the previous chapter. We propose to use for the set of theoretical assumptions that generated the above-displayed matrix of auto-negotiated interpretations of the Limit the syntagm symbolic adaptationism. This label helps us assert the difference made by the notion of ‘adaptation’ in understanding the emergence and functioning of the alternative cultural elites in the Communist social systems. ‘Adaptationism’ should be understood here in a semantic opposition with both ‘compliance’ and ‘compromise’. The first notion, ‘compliance’, is central to a neo-institutionalist theory that subordinates the diversity of the personal symbolic strategies to general aspirations of conforming to a given pattern of social meanings and options.[8] The second notion, ‘compromise’, is central to a rational choice theory that allows for a larger autonomy of the subject, but bans almost all cultural and symbolic references and, especially, all intra-subjective/introspective aspects from its model of power transactions in the actually existing Socialism.[9]

As distinct and opposed to these, ‘adaptation’ is a notion that we see as embedded in a phenomenological theory that tries to do justice to the concepts of ‘free agency’ and ‘autonomous subject’. Which doesn’t simply mean to indiscriminately praise all instances in which the authors writing under Socialism have manifested a degree of freedom of conscience, but first and foremost, to underline the moral responsibility of those who, under the austere conditions of state censorship, have exercised, by privilege or by accident, certain liberties – if not of speech in its integrity, at least of self-expression. ‘Adaptation’ implies a co-articulation and an inner negotiation between self-awareness and self-invention, between the force of evidence and the power of imagination. And it is only by a continuous effort of evaluating the liberty of their moral and creative consciousness and the origins, nature, and genuineness of their fantasies of salvation that one could pass a moral judgment over the actors of the Communist literary stage.

This perspective on the political meaning of the inner experience could have different results. At one point, it could fuel up lines of research that have to do with specific literary topics, e.g. the potential investigation of the hypothesis that the manner in which an author experienced social interdictions, his or her views on the level of acceptability of coercion in general, the possible reverberation of the experience of this interdictions on his or her memories, sensitivity, personal mythology, could have predicted or determined the strategy he or she adopted in the confrontation with the censorship and propaganda machine. But at another point, this dynamics developing between the intra-subjective polylogue and the diversity of symbolic constructions of the Limit in post-Stalinist Socialism could create a theoretical basis for the more ambitious attempt of understanding the tensional diversification of the post-Communist societies, the emergence of their divergent and often conflicting value-systems.

 

 

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Studiul este un fragment dintr-o cercetare mai amplă, pe care Caius Dobrescu o derulează în 2010 în cadrul grantului CNCSIS cod ID 760, cercetare finanţată prin contractul nr 863/ 19.01.2009 pentru proiectul de cercetare ”Discursuri culturale şi forme de legitimare în literatura europeană a secolului XX”.

 

 

Notes