Singing the Body Electric

Abstract

Moraru continuedfrom previous page construction" these days, but what Cärtärescu's novel brings to the table is a half-frightening, half-amusing testimony about identity reinforcement and this policy's miserable failure under totalitarianism, with the members of the me/you, us/them, male/female, here/there, hic/nunc, and related binaries swapping places unexpectedly, crossing repeatedly to the other side and typically revealing themselves as part of vaster ensembles and networks that spill over into boundless territories magically unfolding beneath Bucharest's godforsaken drabness. Cärtärescu offers his readers an other to the latter's cloistered and forlorn otherness, which thus projects beyond the traumatized self, community, and place; an other, too, into whose capaciously agglutinating fabric the main first-person narrator weaves those close to him—lovers and acquaintances, neighbors and neighborhood, their dreams and dramas—all ofthis yielding acosmic web oflives and unbridled passions. Weaved with desperation and nostalgia, the spiderweb is the novel's master trope: atonce the novel's multiply intertextual fabric of whose heterogeneity the writeris painfully aware and, inside it, the net of kaballah-like links among stages and levels of existence where the individual brain is plugged into others' and their projections into other worlds and the worlds beyond them, ad infinitum. As in "REM," one ofthe novel's sections, our narrator, the writer in the novel, is the spider sliding up and down the threads of his web of situations and characters. He gets in and out of his dramatis personae's minds, morphing into them as he tells us about their own changes into others (as in "The Twins"). He shows how the ontology of these individual metamorphoses —another trademark motif—rehearses a whole ontogeny, andthen awholecosmology, acosmallogy, rather, a colossaLspectacle of the all and others (see Greek alios), put up with fabulous inventiveness and an exhaustive linguistic imagination. Disappointing as the English translation may be—too wordy for my money, often awkwardly literal and lacking in idiomatic flair, downright misreading the original here and there—Cärtärescu's formidable vision hits you like a tidal wave rolling back and forth between historically recognizable nightmares and the uncharted landscapes of alluring dreams. Christian Moraru is an associateprofessor ofEnglish at UniversityofNorth Carolina, Greensboro. His latest books are Memorious Discourse (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) and Rewriting (SUNYPress). Singing the Body Electric Things in the Night Mati Unt Translated by Eric Dickens Dalkey Archive Press http://www.dalkeyarchive.com 316 pages; paper, $13.95 The Estonian writer Mati Unt published his fiction Öös on asju in 1990, and Dalkey Archive has just released an English language translation by Eric Dickens of this masterwork, Things in the Night. Ratherman a novel, the work might be described as a kind of loosely knit fictional journal covering a certain period of the author/narrator's life, his moorings in Estonian history. The central figure undergoes a series of rather unpleasant and interrelated events, all connected in some way with his secret hobby—a passion to explore any and all information relating to electricity. And, indeed, the fiction holds together much as a series of positive and negative ions may be bonded by electrostatic force. There are approximately eight "events" that make up the substance of this book. Unt begins with sections from an uncompleted novel about a young, disaffected Estonian (not unlike himself) who has decided that instead of committing suicide, he will endeavor to perform an immediate deed that will wake up the world and, possibly, make it temporarily a better place. Determined to blow up a small electrical station in Liikola, the character, we perceive, is a comic one who, recognizing his own ridiculousness, still hopes, as he puts it, to at least go out with a bang. Or at least make a fool ofmyself , such a greatfool ofmyself, such a fool that people would snicker for a'hundred years to come. . ., the man who wanted to blow up machines here in Northern Europe , wanted to become a new Luddite, a new Herostratus; naive, butjustified in his actions; crazy, but interesting; banal, but a man of his time.... The figure falls asleep instead, and on waking, realizes that the plan...