The Discourse of Self-Representation in Literary Studies in 1980s Romania

Abstract

The Discourse of Self-Representation in Literary Studies in 1980s Romania Ana-Karina Schneider (bio) Romania's relationship to literatures in the English language has been interestingly complex. Traditionally, Romania has had an affinity to French and German, not English; nevertheless, Transylvanian collectors purchased books in English as early as the 18th century,1 and the first translation to be published after Romania adopted Latin script in the mid-19th century was Lord Byron's Don Juan, albeit rendered from a French translation. These early instances give us a good indication of the ambivalence that has pervaded Romanian-Anglophone literary relations. Literary translations of English literature through French, German, and even Greek remained common well into the 20th century, long after English became an academic discipline.2 Moreover, before the 1980s the influence of Anglo-American literature on Romanian productions was sporadic at best and remains inadequately investigated. That decade however marked a seminal shift: a new generation of writers engendered a unique and eminently well adapted brand of postmodernism, whose models were postmodern American fiction and poetry (Petrescu 148). The work of this generation of writers set a trend that continued after the 1989 uprising and was crucially aided and encouraged by the lingua franca status of English in the globalized world, such that by now Romanian translations from the English appear almost concomitantly with their originals and young poets speak [End Page 339] openly about having been influenced by John Berryman, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, or Anne Sexton. In what follows I shall analyze various narrativizations of the overde-termined relationship between Romanian and Anglophone literatures, foregrounding the particular kind of postmodernism that enabled Romanian literature in the 1980s and beyond to establish a closer relation with Anglophone, particularly American, fiction and poetry (Cǎrtǎrescu 202; Cǎlinescu, Cele cinci 287). I focus specifically on the novel, despite the general consensus that the Romanian poetry of the early 1980s is the more representative work of Romanian postmodernism. My interest in prose fiction stems from the fact that, as a genre, it is more openly referential than poetry, and, like the criticism devoted to it, was under greater pressure to conform to doctrinal notions of realism and political correctness (Spiridon 68). The communist regime's intention to turn literature into an agent of conformity rather than a stimulant of individuality contravened the very definition of the novel. Furthermore, the attempt to impose a single, state-sanctioned worldview ran counter to the novel's democratic heteroglossia, i.e., the orchestration of divergent and often conflicting discourses. Embracing textualism and formal experimentation in opposition to party-line social realism, the most enduring fiction of the 1980s remained westward looking, introspective, and adamantly resistant to communist ideology, and therefore a good illustration of the epistemological conflicts that dominated that decade and shaped the distinctive definition and periodization of postmodernism in Romania. A comparative study such as this inevitably encounters three sources of difficulty. First, it is difficult to determine in what manner and to what extent the aesthetic and ideological controversies that animated Romanian literature and critical theory informed the reception of foreign literary productions. Translation was conditioned by institutional restrictions which did not apply to the same degree to original works of literature; processes of selection were motivated as much by governmental policies as by the image the communist regime wanted to project of itself internationally. At the same time, the reception of translated work tended to be more open to the foreign fashions that had shaped a novel's reception in its source culture. Second, Romanian postmodernism had to come to terms with the fact that western postmodernism was by and large left-wing. In previous decades, such political leanings had been effectively invoked by critics and [End Page 340] reviewers to render certain western writers palatable to the communist regime. By the 1970s, however, Romanian literature had achieved a hardwon institutional autonomy from the political, which it still lay claim to in the 1980s, when political opinion was becoming increasingly radicalized, even as open dissidence was virtually suicidal. Third, unlike western cultures in which the proliferation of media resulted in a radical...