Humour as a Postmodern Weapon in a Totalitarian Regime. Ioan Groşan’s One Hundred Years at the Gates of the East

Abstract

Abstract The paper aims to show that O sută de ani de zile la Porţile Orientului [One Hundred Years at the Gates of the East], Ioan Groşan’s historical picaresque postmodern novel, can be seen – due the presence of different techniques and devices of humour – as a weapon in and against a totalitarian system. In order to do so, our approach takes into account the problem of an East European totalitarian system, the East–West antipode, the condition of the author and his possible intention in a totalitarian system, the condition of the reader and his horizon of expectations in the same system, and the sources of humour used by the author. Humour as a weapon can have a lot of roles, for example, cracking, evading, or surmounting reality, and we want to show that Ioan Groşan succeeds in doing all that. In our paper, we grouped the humour-generating incongruences and contradictions into several categories: composition, frame (space and time, situations), identity (social status, names, physical appearance, ethnic and religious belonging), and language to underline the wide range of tools used by the author.