„Azi este o zi bună pentru sinucigaşi.” Tematizarea morţii şi alte (in)decenţe confesive ale diaristului Eugen Simion

Abstract

According to not a few diary researchers from both Eastern and Western Europe, the journal is, of all the genres of biography, the species most threatened to turn into a savoir mourir guide. This obstinate search of the author, obsessed with discovering the best ways to get used to the „daily death” (the true catalyst of writing, the main ordering/ director of meaning, and so on), can be discovered in any journal, constituting the specific (un)hidden note of the species – this is an idea that becomes central also in the studies of some of the most important Romanian thanatologists, fully convinced, such as Adela Toplean, for example, that ”any diary betrays (or «sweats») a subtle poetic of death”. In the strict order of appearances, nothing seems farther from the spirit of Eugen Simion’s Parisian Diary than the obsessive interrogation on the edge of mortality, with all the train of anxieties and fears attached. On the one hand, this book with explicit hexagonal pretext and dialogical stake (which I would rather inscribe in the category of the so-called travel writings, although its author stubbornly recommends it as a diary and problematizes its conventions) is visibly oriented in the direction of analysing the Gallic space and spirit, as they appear to a young Romanian lecturer, in a well-determined interval. On the other hand, the general tonality of the diarist and the colours of his descriptions – be they of spaces, landscapes or people – seem to be some of the brightest, most optimistic ones. Still, on a recent re-reading, I discovered numerous passages in which the diarist seems to thematize not only death, with its multiple facets and valences, but also other hypostases of radical otherness, from „physical and mental breakdown” through illness to „the foggy small creature of loneliness.” This paper focuses on a careful analysis, from a multidisciplinary perspective, of these „nagging phantasms” that make inner history (as recorded in the diary) stand at the edge between wonder and insecurity.