Rodica Ilie

Transilvania” University, Braşov, Romania

rodica_m_ilie@yahoo.fr

 

 

Matei Călinescu – The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter

or the Silent Path of Liberty

 

 

Abstract: The study aims at providing a multilayered reading of Matei Călinescu’s novel, Viaţa şi opiniile lui Zacharias Lichter (The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter), by following the themes and motifs (among them, the recurrent theme of freedom), as well as the complex symbolic patterns with which the author, who is both a literary theorist and a creative writer, operates. The main character, Zacharias Lichter is responsible for the literary impact of the book, since the “prototype” is rather uncommon. Of Rimbauldian origin, he embodies the image of the interrogative mind beyond ages and historic-political contexts, being a projection of an ethical consciousness which manifest itself in atypical ways, incongruent with the norms and habitudes which define a life merged or subjugated to the public and the common and communitarist ethics. Lichter, in his singularity, may be defined only by rupture, by ironic denial towards the sociality of the world he lives in. He is the prophet who takes his role seriously, identifies with this mask and lives, beyond it, still as a misfit and as an eccentric. Read / reread today, Matei Calinescu’s book becomes an invitation to recognition / re-acknowledgement of this moment, a true revelation for anyone who hasn’t yet succeeded in seeing himself through the pain and fear of the other, through the “sins” of the other.

Keywords: Romanian Literature; Communism; Matei Calinescu; Freedom; Resistance; Revelation; Knowledge.

 

 

Published in 1969 and winner of the Romanian Writers Union’s award in the same year, Matei Călinescu’s micronovel is a book that outlives its background historical referent. The three extant revised editions of 1971, 1995 and 2004 fully testify to this. In the following, we propose to explore the question of the means, subtle or more aggressively supported by different editorial policies, whereby this book withstands models and time? A proposition we would like to advance from the outset is that it is the character, Zacharias Lichter, who ensures the book’s endurance in the field of culture, by virtue of the uncommon “prototype” it represents. A descendant of Rimbauldian origin, the character Zacharias Lichter is created to foreground the interrogative mind beyond ages and historical-political contexts; he is a projection of an ethical consciousness that undertakes atypical ways of existence, incongruent with the norms, and habitudes which define a life merged with or subjugated to the public, to the common and communitarianist ethics. In his singularity, Lichter can only be defined by rupture and an ironic denial of the sociality of the world he lives in. He is the prophet who takes his role seriously, identifies with this mask and lives beyond it, still as a misfit and as an eccentric. The existential lesson which he embodies pertains, from the very beginning, to an apophatic revealing experience, as the author himself states in the motto to the novel: “The being of prophets is negation: knowledge through ashes. After they have spoken, prophets feel the world’s ashes on their tongues; their wisdom has the taste of ashes”.

I think that another reason for the novel’s enduring quality consists of the narrative formula, which appears to endorse an alert reading, due to its modular structure, ready to atomize itself, to keep the parts’ random association free. However, the mode of articulation and reasoning in the reading consciousness is produced slowly and diffuses beyond the moment when the text is read, the movement that the reading imposes being not so much linear, but subsequent, latent, in crisscrosses which irradiate and contaminate the reader’s consciousness. Surely, a second reading, a return to the pages you have just read is organically imposed, albeit by way of skipping ahead (and in so doing, somehow reiterating the congealment of the whole, by mimicking the random construction and fortuitous juxtaposition of sequences), a process corroborated by those images which coagulate experiences, reflections of high intensity. Moreover, the paragraphs or the narrative-essayistic modules of the novel evidence a subtle internal coherence, supported by the binders of a non-dictatorial logic, a thinking architecture which rebels and turns against itself, indeed interrogates and devours itself in a state of contradiction and paradox. But these very strategies of dissolving the traditional coherence of the novelistic epos and the institution of habitual thinking involuntary ensure an echo reading modality. To readers, a series of reflective situations are opened up. Thus, they are transposed into that self-devouring cogito, invited to reach self-definition by irregular, out-of-the-ordinary and necessarily unconventional experiences.

Forced to break free from the tyranny of triviality, the quotidian itself is reinvented as a form of linear experience (situated at the limit and beyond the edge of the precipice that ensures existence in the Empire of Stupidity). The prosaic and the congruent, the ordinary and the trivial, the marginal and the liminal, the normal and the public become categories that could no longer be defined as such. The setting of the novel includes harmonics that order, orchestrate the “life and opinions” of the character; moreover, they modulate, in an irradiating manner the “life and opinions” of the reader, of that type of reader who, according to the implicit principle of the text, becomes an authentic consciousness, removed from thinking routines, from the cultural, moral, religious habitudes in which he was formed, allowing him to follow his master on the path of thinking renovation, of self-discovery, and of questioning truths,as a Nietzschean prophet who, despite being convinced that “there are no truths, only interpretations”, undergoes the experience of seeking, dissolving and abolishing old prejudices, at least for the sake of authentically practice the mechanisms of logic.

A certain sense of “guilt” stemming from the ambiguity specific to allegoric insertions, meant to save the novel from the censorship of the communist regime, makes Matei Călinescu locate his novel in the cultural conditions in which it appeared. This exculpation we believe does not affect at all the force of his visions, the mastery of his writing, the refinement that marks the character’s self-discovery process, nor does it alter the process of discovering the fundamentals of being, the process of evidencing the relativism of any ideology, dogma, and norm. In the foreword to the second edition from 1995, the author looks critically upon his work, placing the euphemistic approach and the allegorical structure of the novel in the context of the expressionist manner of that period. However, besides this stylistic aspect, which maintains the possibility of blaming the author and his own self-blaming for his “concession and cowardice from that time”[1], this manner of submission did not pass unnoticed to the censorship committee of the communist regime.

Therefore, the book did not owe its success to its circumventing the official barriers. Rather, it was due to the fact that this very formula of deliberate ambiguity and obliquity, succeeded in transcending its allegoric subversive stake, only to be seen, inappropriately perhaps, as a kind of “political” manifesto of resistance in and through culture. Later on it was also imposed as a stylistic effect or unmistakable mark, a particular aspect of literality, of the original poetry of Matei Călinescu’s writing[2]. Essayistic, poetic and, at the same time of rigorously methodic nature, the author’s personality proves, again, that a critic of ideas need not be only a cold theoretician. On the contrary, he may also be a visionary, a poet who is haunted by the effervescence of ideas, by the carnation and rhythm of concepts, the pulsation of thought which struggles to free itself from the prison of language. Like Zacharias Lichter, Matei Călinescu sees ideas, approaches their music with “ingenuity”, with the freshness of the reflection which invests new life in reasoning, irrigating it with an authentic, particular logic which exceeds conventionality, schematism and thesism. Beyond metaphysical, theosophical, scientific, and ideological systems, Matei Călinescu, the novelist, finds the pulse, the internal dynamics of the ideas modestly ascertained as “opinions”, as attitudes and feelings projected onto the character named Zacharias Lichter. Perhaps not accidentally, a Judaic name, located regressively if indeterminately, not in the contemporary period of the writer/ written work, but in another moment haunted by the ghosts of an equally ruthless dictatorship.

The theme of human freedom is recurring; it comes back in a low tone and it is sometimes resumed under the form of choruses which accompany the main character, as well as under the dialogic form of the interventions of his few friends. Regardless if expressed obliquely, in paradoxical negativity, or more directly, freedom is always ready for the particular moments out of the ordinary, the social and the historical, being supported by the state of perplexity, as the author likes to say, by illumination through the discovery of alterity, by self-discovery and the discovery of and communication with God. The condition of the prophet is of that of being ahead, of transposition in an as yet immaterialized reality, manifesting itself only in spirit; that is why, freedom, as a literally unexpressed theme[3], but only in the sourdine made by the language specific to a loxos logos, is only one of those states, realities, pre-formal, latent forms which may be identified and defined only by a mediated reading, practised as a hermeneutics of voids, absences, ultimately as a hermeneutics of implications, of elliptic and cryptic senses[4], as the author himself foreshadows in the same foreword, mentioned above.

If we were to abide by the practice of an innocent reading, we would be faced with the question: “Who is Zacharias Lichter after all?” and What does his rebellion illustrate? Such a reading also leads to the level of implications, of silent senses, as the autobiographical fiber of the novel is concealed by the games of fiction, the tense nodes of ideas and the febricity of visions. Adopting the perspective of socio-critics therefore, one is able to construe the Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter as a historical document, “not so much by what it says but by what it keeps silent (…), that remains silent eloquently, by what is absent from the raging discourses of the prophet, by the omissions which shout silently his rebellion, no less intensely than his fervent speech”[5]. The sense of the assumed and of the silently acclaimed freedom becomes more profound and acute, being taken heed of, especially from inside the communist block. Built by means of that threshold of depersonalization and re-personalization in a narrative mask, the novel finally reveals the identity / the merging of the character’s identity with that of the biographer, the auctorial alter ego. Thus, the deaf experience of rebellion, “shouted” between the lines, in the sub-text, feeds the revealing experience of total silence, containing errors, traumas, frustrations which have ceased to abolish the social freedom, but haven’t succeeded in annihilating the spiritual one. The revealing silence is configured both as a theme and as a discursive modality, as an image and an event of illumination.

In locating the character beyond the inferior stages of being, Matei Călinescu rewrites the Kierkeegardian model of the ontic route, moving from the essayistic to the ethical and religious by means of the triad: circus, insanity, perplexity. Zacharias Lichter thus projects himself as a morosophic personification defined by its critic-ironical eccentricity, a possessed individual, a prophet for whom scission towards the society equals approaching a more profound reality. The character assumes and carries with him the burden of a sordid world, the burden of alienation as the negative sign of an experience negatively refound in his own being, a sign which converts, for those like him, into the sign of spiritual election: “Madmen, only madmen may fill up with content the empty notion of the pathetic. For what can be more pathetic than living in the sphere of the truth and being repudiated as alienated by a world of alienation, than living in the sphere of seriousness and being sanctioned through laughter at your ridiculousness by the world of the ridiculous?”[6]. The emphasis of the narrative discourse is very rarely generated in respect to the nature of visions; the ideatic substance of the novel and the anti-phrasal structure act only as counterpoints in the drama of the existential condition of the being personified by the Lichterian persona. His insanity, as a revealing experience (ek-stasis), doesn’t have anything pathological about it. It is a form of protest, a mask assumed organically, down to the primordiality of beings; “insanity within the spiritual implies the mythical living, the mythical chaos”, understood here as the sole possibility of restoring the moral order, as the necessary penance which prepares resurrection. The experience of insanity in the soteriological mechanism foreseen by Matei Călinescu precedes the illumination, the total manifestation of the spirit in divine, ecstatic communion, translated as perplexity and concretized in silence. As Virgil Podoabă[7] indicates, the revealing experience is produced only in the transition from the plural and the public to the particular, the personal and the singular. The experience of perplexity is produced in loneliness and concerns the singularity of the alienated, the unconditioned, of the historically, spatially, ideologically and temporally undetermined. Time is reabsorbed in a qualitatively superior duration, unmistakable through its non-reality, through the suspension and the paralysis of the contingent data. This confirms the definition given by Virgil Podoabă to the revealing experience, in his description of the specifically Lichterian plenary living:

 

Madmen can fall, but only sometimes, into perplexity. Prophetism, asceticism, prayer, great poetry are forms of spiritual folly which, consciously or not, tend to approach abysses of perplexity, but mostly without being able to lose themselves in them. In perplexity –Zacharias Lichter states – all appearances fade away, since the very organs by means of which we perceive the sensible appearances of reality remain suspended and paralyzed. From pitch-darkness, from silence, from the void, independent of time and space, the divinity absorbs the spirit, revealing itself through negation and absence.[8]

 

For the absolute prophet, for Lichter i.e., the beggar and the madman, the cynic and the mystic, the desperate and ironically-dilemmatic consciousness, cannot find peace, except within paradoxical purification through negation, and by means of exhausting “all poisons”. For that reason, the enumerative location, implicitly plural, of the experiences considered revealing doesn’t, necessarily, determine the singularity produced by perplexity. According to the Lichterian convictions, this translates, perhaps, as the singularity of the fusion with the impersonal and ubiquitous divine spirit, as dispersion, as loss of the limits of individuation (the Dionysian abolition of the principium individuationis).

In the state of perplexity – difficult to approximate by the traditional vocabulary in which Matei Călinescu confesses not to have found a perfect equivalent for, not even by the synonyms „stupor”, „ecstasy”, „mystical stupor”[9] – the boundaries of the subject are thus abolished. What is more, even the thinking of the Baudelairean hangman is exceeded, thinking which scrutinizes and self-scrutinizes, appealing to the divinity in order to help them obtain the unity of the being (the end of “Trip to Cytera” („Călătorie în Cytera”)). Lichterian self-contemplation expresses the knowledge of one’s own madness / furore, fire and flame, tension and mystical energy, and the “metaphysical revelation of this condition” of the buffoon / madman / prophet, progressively approached, is translated by the auctorial commentary. If for the buffoon language is the object of derision, of dissolution by corrosive-cynical action, for the madman the logical artistry of words, reasoning, causes and realities disappears[10]. What happens with the last stage of the authentic being? Falling into the state of perplexity (“Madmen can fall, but only seldom, into perplexity”), consciousness, “rationalized” by the exterior imperatives or interior pulsing, escapes all these determinations and reaches transfiguration by abyssal knowledge, the awareness of vertigo, the void and the trans-temporal, of pitch-darkness and relevant absence, now as presence:

 

The awareness of the extravisual, extended to an awareness of the non-visual, may generate an intuition of pitch-darkness, accessible – with a smaller or larger degree of approximation – to anybody. In the perplexity of pitch-darkness they become absolute and God himself floats in them. Similar things may be said about the essence of silence, which must not be identified with the absence of sound (an auditory phenomenon), but with what happens outside the auditory sphere and is impossible to represent in terms of hearing. Quietness is an experience of the ones who hear, silence is an experience of deafness. In perplexity, quietness also acquires an absolute and revealing character. [11]

 

In other words, the void can communicate and pitch-darkness can illuminate, silence has substance, and quietness may be green[12], the absurd makes sense… (especially in the context in which the novel was written). Revelation via negationis is a particularity of the mode of existence of the prophet Zacharias Lichter. His very creator claims it, in the immediately following paragraph. The self-commentary of the “biographer”- character / alias author makes reading frustrating.[13] Perhaps an essayistic paraphrase which emphasizes the Lichterian, or rather Matei Călinescu’s, thinking pattern, that by invalidating the categories of traditional logic is weaved through hesitant trials, by means of an apparent dispersion which analyses, up to the ultimate granulation, states, moments, ritual-like events. In all of these one finds oneself involuntarily participating, since the path of unusual problematizing thinking is surprising, in the unexpected; it comes as a show, taking down all the tracks which would lead to simple equivalences, expectations or confirmations of the logical system dimension (metaphysical, scientific, theological, etc).

Another aspect of the Lichterian revealing experience, arising from the translation into the somewhat artificial formula of depersonalized insertions, consists in the fact that it is always reflected / related, explicitly (in the etymological sense) by means of a network in which the self-commentary of the “biographer”, the authorial essayistic note appearing to dilute the hallucinating force of the experiences and the visionary tension of their expression.

Presented like a discursive impersonalized mark, the revelation is veiled, it transposes into the oblique character of the speech, from the narrator’s angle, through which it appears to us, readers, to be mediated, or through the specular nature of other characters, rather than from the intimate, organic center of the subject.

This process, however, leads to the transpersonal, extratemporal location of the revelation, moving the effects of the respective experience from the fictional, subjective, plan in the socio-historical objective plan, for what is Zacharias Lichter if not a character of cultural Memory, of a political regime’s memory, a phantasm of freedom, a tragic mask of the negative experience implied by the knowledge of freedom? Hence, its image composition mode “of an implausible ugliness”, exaggerated, transfigured by “terrors and ecstasies”, distorted by “marginal but tenacious memories, for long covered by shadow, which, however, may always come back with amazing freshness and accuracy”[14]?

The portrait of this tormented creature does not illustrate, by any means the incandescent image of the avant-garde prophetism, in its optimistic strong sense, but confirms the mute rebellion, the courage of demystification of a utopia and the responsibility of assuming this ungrateful position with all the implicit motivation. From this point onward, the cultural reverberations related to the paradigm of sorrow, the Jobian identity out of which Lichter’s personality emerges, reverberations recalling the avatars of the Rimbauldian cursed being, the monstrous consciousness that chose the path of negation, of debunking, demystifying, in order to not fall into the night and death of the spirit and in order not to lose the sense of the authentic freedom of being.

A character of social memory also because he lives from the collective experiences of some reversed revelations that he himself proves, the revelations of human misery, disorder of meanings, of language, and of the moral, symbolic, and religious values. This is a character that should, in its exemplarity, be transformed into a lesson of un-forgetfulness in the context of directed forgetfulness, and of the tyranny of the historical time, which swallows and erases pain by annulment and from an euphemistical point of view, distorting the truth.

In lieu of conclusions, let us leave the prophet / poet / ”biographer” of Zacharias Lichter’s history to bring forth, for who knows how long, the page where fictional experience merges with personal experience, in the ”desperate attempt to translate that which cannot be humanely translated from the experience of closeness to God: the absurd experience, full of terrors and ecstasies, excruciatingly breaking up the being, only to reunite it in an endless cycle”[15].

Cyclicity and consubstantiality reflect the very essence of this revealing experience, the character and the author finally forming a single being, and the circle closing perfectly in when at the end, Zacharias Lichter’s biographer (the heteronymic subject, turned into a culturally-prospective character of prophetic writing, becomes part of a textual insectarium, definitively caught in the (self)ironical discourse of a history (autobiographical, now confessed between the lines) which relentlessly follows its making.

 

‘I thought you loved me,’ Zacharis Lichter once said to whom he found out was writing his biography. Actually, you only love yourself: because you don’t write about me, but about you, substituting me like a liar and a non-liar; and you want to find in me all your misery and weaknesses, and ennoble them, embrace them in the hot and arid air that surrounds my being[16]

 

The revolt of the mask makes Zacharias Lichter gain not only identity but a carnal reality, born dialogically. Thus, Matei Călinescu authenticates, in a dramatic-narrative manner, the existence of the person’s reality and that of the prophet’s person, just as Fernando Pessoa authenticates the existence of the heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, by means of the volumes and the debates published under the names of these fictitious creators. Moreover, the analogy between the writing of the novel’s epilogue and the writing of the famous Pessoan letter, where the scopes of heteronymy are revealed, endorses the fact that, like the Portuguese poet, Matei Călinescu turns his work into a testament, which he signs three times: both officially, transparently, superficially (in its etymological valences), as a fictional writing of an author who does not need a pseudonym or a heteronym to publish a novel of ideological disenchantment, and existentially and spiritually, in the sense of assuming writing as a way of resistance/existence, as a revealing experience which generated the form of cultural display/expression of the traumas experienced by the creative subject.

To conclude, Călinescu’s book has now the role of an instrument of knowledge and self-knowledge by derision, self-persiflage, contradiction; support of purification, transformation, through alterity and disembarrassment of the self due to excess, linear existence, dissipation of being (e.g. begging to give beggars): “Because mocking me, you mock yourself, throwing mud at me, you throw at yourself, denying me, you deny yourself. (…) Writing, in fact, about yourself, maybe you will, eventually, come to understand at least a crumb of me: and then you will despise yourself, you will renounce at yourself and, perhaps, you will feel in your removed, frozen, dying flesh the burn of the flame of God”[17].

The guilt implied by the existence of a clear, hyperlucid conscience, of the “biographer’s” intellect which allegorically X-rays the physiology of a society, its state of decomposition, the sin of any work pre-existing in the indefinable substance of social and moral experiences generated by a certain epoch, all of these make The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter the proof of life in search of truth and the will of a behavior which could be blamed, perhaps, only subtly, not for compromise, only for refinement, not for cowardice, since the practice of blame does not always manifest itself through spectacular polemic blather. Instead it is expressed by silences which speak so much more…

When read / reread today, Matei Călinescu’s book becomes an invitation to recognition / re-acknowledgement, this moment truly being a revelation for anyone who hasn’t yet succeeded in seeing himself through pain and fear of the other, through the ”sins” of the other. An invitation to reading and re-reading, like this: “the recognition starts only the moment I become you, and you become me, the moment I start to compose your biography” / the file of a tortured existence, forged by history, imprisoned or … symbolically released, in the dimensions of a Gnostic path.

 

Acest studiu este un fragment dintr-o cercetare mai amplă, pe care Rodica Ilie o derulează în 2010, în calitate de director de proiect, 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 sec. XX”.

 

 

Notes