Powerful Eurydice: The Female Voice in Eliade’s A Spiritual Adventure

Abstract

In his novella Nineteen Roses, Mircea Eliade alluded to play about and Eurydice. He did indeed write this play in 1946. Mac L. Ricketts discovered it in the Eliade Special Collection of the University of Chicago library. In his introduction to the English translation (published here for the first time and before the Romanian original), Ricketts discusses the conception and writing of this play as it is described in Eliade's Journal. It seems that Eliade enjoyed the experience of writing it but at the same time was tormented by the inspiration for this serious drama as he calls it. Although Eliade had not found name for the female protagonist, she evidently personifies Eurydice. Eliade wrote of in his diary: Y, the woman, fascinates me. She is just as I saw her (qtd. in Ricketts).In 2005, the ambiguity around the existence of the play A Spiritual Adventure led the neo-fascist critic Claudio Mutti to interpret this then unknown play built as mise-en-abime of Eliade' s novella Nineteen Roses. In chapters from his book Mircea Eliade and the Iron Guard, Claudio Mutti surmises that the play Eliade mentions in Nineteen Roses (which turns out to be A Spiritual Adventure) is a marvellous book on the Captain (Corneliu Zelea Codreanu1). Mutti sees the play as tragedy about the Iron Guard and its leader (43). The author bases his argument on affirmations made by Eliade' s acquaintances and on the fact that 1938 was for Eliade traumatic year, due to his imprisonment in legionnaire camp in Miercurea-Ciuc, where he might have written the play Orpheus and and read it to his prison mates (Mutti 4445). Comparing Eliade' s novels The Forbidden Forest and Nineteen Roses, Mutti discovers change of attitude in the author's rendition of his historical experience:Pour reprendre la terminologie d'Eliade, Foret interdite est le roman de l'amnesie, tandis que Les Dix-neuf roses est le roman de l'anamnese. Avec le premier, l'auteur efface de sa memoire l'experience legionnaire et reporte sur Partenie-Ionesco ce qui lui appartenait lui, Eliade. Dans Les Dix-neuf roses, ecrit par Eliade quelques annees avant sa mort, le recouvrement definitif de la memoire est annonce : fut-ce dans les termes cryptiques d'un roman chiffre, Eliade revendique la periode de sa vie liee l'epopee legionnaire. (Mutti 47)To Mutti, the character Ieronim Thanase, who directs experimental theatre performances, evokes Julius Evola2 (48). Mutti can elaborate on play he has not read because of the ambiguity surrounding it and of Eliade' s long fascination with the Iron Guard movement. This capti vation with the fascist movement in Romania informs Eliade' s recurrent themes of the persecution of memory and of history. In Mircea Eliade: Le Prisonnier de l'histoire (2003), Florin Jurcanu analysed Eliade 's complicity in the fascist movement in Romania in the thirties and its consequences for his career. Eliade' s political affinities had tragic impact on his life - as can be discerned, however obliquely, in this newly discovered play.Nineteen Roses, the novella in which Eliade mentions the play A Spiritual Adventure, was inspired by the and Eurydice myth. A female character from fantastic world, Niculina, plays Eurydice in strange performances directed by an experimental theatre guru. She carries mysterious suitcase in which she hides book among two layers of veils. Anghel D. Pandele, the main protagonist, is writer who is helped by theatre performances to recover his lost memory. A young man, Laurian Serdaru, Niculina's fiance, knows lot about the play and claims to be the son of the actress and of the playwright Pandele. We learn that the actress meant to play Eurydice never managed to perform in front of audiences since the play had been cancelled. Laurian Serdaru and Niculina try to help Pandele recover his memory of events before Christmas night of 1938 through the magic performance of different play, directed by Ieronim Thanase (the name, inspired by Thanatos, bears connotation of death). …