Recent Romanian Criticism: Subjectivity as Social Response

Abstract

By VIRGIL NEMOIANU Between 1860 and 1945, during its most flourishing period, Romanian was essentially what a George Sterner would call diagnostic criticism a discussion of literature with a tendency toward moral judgment, essayistic philosophy, psychological description, political ideology. The three most celebrated controversies in the history of Romanian literature have a precise political and ideological significance and are, in a sense, debates about the whole orientation of Romanian public life. Dobrogeanu-Gherea (a gifted Marxist critic of the 1880s) disputed with Titu Maiorescu (the leading proponent of esthetic autonomy at the time) over the interpretation of Caragiale's plays, but the thrust of the argument was philosophical : social change versus individual worth, or historical meaning as opposed to timeless values. Similarly, around and after 1900, SemanatoruVs attack against symbolist poetic experimentation signified more than anything else the rise of a nationalist renewal, which was soon to influence a variety of historical events such as the struggle for national unity, the rise of fascism, but also the struggle for social reform and greater equality. Finally, when in the 1930s Eugen Lovinescu and his colleagues started their protracted struggle for a psychological, urban and experimental literature against the irrationalist, rural and traditionalist works promoted by Gindirea and other journals, it was really a codeword struggle of democratic versus fascist tendencies.2 As a matter of fact, there were hardly any ideological conflicts which did not appear in the pages of literary journals; those few which did occur were either clashes of practical politics or theoretical discourses with no polemical dimension. Professional academics such as Mircea Florian, Anton Dumitriu even Gusti did not really get involved in the kind of debate typical of Ralea or Crainic, who were political editors as well as critics. Significantly, figures such as C. Stere and Aurel C. Popovici (political theoreticians whose interests were merely tangential to literature) embarked on ideological controversies as editors of literary journals. Inevitably, such differs in a marked way from, say, English or American criticism. Academic research was (and is) often despised as a subordinate pursuit; interpretation is seen as an independent field, not really contingent upon university pursuits. Romanian acts as a practical or militant philosophy, an exercise in written oratory or social or, more constructively, as an ordering of cultural impulses. It may overlap with the satirical pamphlet or with moral instruction, and it may serve as a vehicle for character drawing. It offers a wide field for experimentation in ideas. What is characteristic of the work of Maiorescu, Iorga or even (ironically) Lovinescu is the consciousness of a nation-building function, the consciousness of a decisive present and future influence on the development of the intellectual structures of an emerging modern nation; this is seen in the range of their observations (language, customs, politics, ideology, national or group psychology, historical destiny et cetera), as well as in the size of their audience over the years. A genre such as the one just described may seem to be quite near to any Marxist or sociological indication of the role should ideally play, and a Herzen or a Chernyshevsky would not seem alien to the cultural climate in which such developed. But it is equally true that Romanian must be seen as an experimentation with reality a comment on reality at two removes. It belongs to a broad area in Romanian (and, more generally, East European) intellectual discourse, where metaphorical statement and distorted truth meet to cooperate or clash. (This is no place to explain the curious but rather typical fact of the emergence of such an area at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it may be useful to point to the imbalance between a rich cultural-intellectual potential and a fairly narrow range of socioeconomic options as an accompanying circumstance.) The dangers of such an exercise in terms of one's grasp of reality should be obvious; but it does provide a convenient position for generalization and a great degree of metaphorical freedom and lack of rigidity, and it does make responsive to changing social contexts, even while continuously endeavoring to influence directions of development. But there is a third, complicating factor. Throughout the period under discussion most critics were eloquent defenders of the doctrine of art for art's sake; even when they were playing it down, they would subscribe to esthetic autonomy and/or the necessity of beautiful writing as part of the critical act. In a very indirect way, this attitude must probably be seen as a strategy for survival in the Burkean sense: a technique of selfdefinition of a peculiar intellectual genre and a kind of insurance for preserving its independence and ulti-