The Nightmare of History: A Look at Time in the Novels of Eliade, DeLillo, and Mitchell

Abstract

History, Stephen said, is nightmare from which I am trying to awake. (James Joyce, Ulysses)Joyce's character refers to the horrors of history in the aftermath of World War I. The novel would exert tremendous literary influence and would be regarded by many critics as the most outstanding novel of the twentieth-century. The nightmare of history did not end with World War I because of the many conflict after it, and the threat of world-wide terrorism that confronts citizens around the globe at the present time. Beyond the work of Joyce, the theme of the nightmare of history continues in the novels of Mircea Eliade, Don DeLillo, and David Mitchell. Eliade interprets Joyce's novel as a nostalgia for the myth of eternal repetition and, in the last analysis, for the abolition of time,1 an interpretation echoed in the novels of DeLillo and Mitchell.This essay proposes to compare and contrast the horrors of historical time in Eliade with similar themes in the novels of DeLillo and Mitchell, two critically acclaimed contemporary writers. Because Eliade is also an academic historian of religion, I will make use of his scholarly work, autobiography, and journals in addition to his novels, The Forbidden Forest in particular, to elucidate his grasp of the terror of history. I will call attention to the fact that this issue concerned him early in his career. Moreover, I will call attention to the problem of historical time in the novels of DeLillo and Mitchell and look for connections with Eliade' s notion of the terror of history. It is bit ironical to apply the comparative approach to Eliade' s literary works because of the importance of the comparative aspect of his method of interpretation. In contrast to the way that Eliade applied the comparative method, this essay uses what is called the comparativism.Within the context of the scholarly discussions about the possibility and viability of new comparativism, Eliade' s comparative method with its morphological classification is viewed as the old, static, and noncontextual form of comparison that seeks similar features across religious cultures. William E. Paden espouses, for instance, new comparativism that he defines as two-way process that reveals both similarities and differences.2 This quest for differences depends on the particular interests of the interpreter. According to Paden, this new comparativism is able to elucidate not only difference, but it can also expose unforeseen connections and embraces complexity, serving as heuristic device that keeps open possibilities for further discussions.3 Moreover, Paden' s conception of the new comparativism is something dynamic, using more self-control and enabling one to create generalizations. It is within the spirit of this new comparativism that I compare Eliade with DeLillo and Mitchell on specific topic.Eliade's literary career began with essays on scientific subjects as young student for newspapers, which was followed by salaried position as writer for Cuvântul (The Word), newspaper edited by Nae Ionescu. In 1933, Eliade published Maitreyi (published in the West as Bengali Nights) to critical acclaim and national literary award, recalling his fictional account of romantic involvement with member of an Indian family based on his stay in India while working on his doctoral dissertation at the home of Surendranath Dasgupta, renowned scholar of Indian philosophy. Other literary works during the 1930s included the following: Isabel si apele diavolului (Isabel and the Devil's Waters, 1930), Lumina ce se stinge (The Light that Is Failing, 1934), gantier (Building Site, 193 5), Intoarcerea din rai (The Return from Paradise, 1933), and Huliganii (The Hooligans, 1935). In 1937, two novels of fantasy appeared: Domnisoara Christina, tale about female ghost with an insatiable thirst for blood, and Saryele (The Snake), which resulted in charges of pornography that were finally dismissed by the state. …