Paul Morand, a French traveler of the XIXth century, author of a book
about the Romanian capital-city, used to say that more than a city, Bucharest
was a meeting point. [Morand:1935]. Although he meant the city, his remark
recommends itself as metonimic. From a purely geopolitical point of view,
Morand’s statement also points towards the interstitial [Bhabha, 1990a;
1990b] placement of Romania as a whole, between three greedy imperial powers
(the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the imperial Russia).
As an outcome of this borderland position, one Empire or another has
been a permanent presence in Romania’s political, historical and cultural
destiny and no less in structuring the local mentality as well as collective
perceptions. The extreme closeness of the Empires and the position of a
small country, conscious of a permanent threat of being engulfed, have
been decisive in influencing the national identity and its legitimizing
devices. This very fact resulted in a series of consequences that deserve
careful consideration, before any further debate (on such issues as post-colonialism
or the post-soviet era) is entered into.
One of the very few foreign researchers specializing in Romanian history
and working in the field of mentalities, Catherine Durandin, maintains
that the Romanians never grew tired of defining their identity as a consequence,
on every possible level, of the gap between themselves and an idealized
Western Europe. [Durandin: 1995]. In this respect, the French historian
fails to draw the full necessary conclusion: the proximity of Russia, with
all its implications, has been the main measure in direct proportion with
this gap.
How was this national identity conceived and represented before, during
and after the imposed communist influence as a consequence of Romania’s
position at the crossroads of the Empires? This is the point I am going
to deal with here. My approach will be fairly general and will only point
to a few relevant issues in this matter.
* * *
The Romanian self-exiled writer Emil Cioran has placed the key issue
regarding the debatable - and highly debated - condition of Romanian identity
in an outstanding interrogation. Paraphrasing Montesquieu, his question
sounds like this: “Comment peut-on être Roumain?” Unfortunately,
as Matei Cãlinescu points out later, Montesquieu does not also consider
the case of a Persian asking himself: How can one be a Persian? [Cãlinescu.1983:
21]. In order to touch the sore spot of the Romanian national idea, we
should lay a strong emphasis on its status as an emotional Counter-reaction.
In Romania, national identity emerged by way of compensation, as retaliation
to the unhappy consciousness of being a Romanian, epitomized by Cioran’s
question.
In coping with this collective insecurity - at the same time desire
and doubt – one cannot ignore the mixed cultural heredity of Romanianness.
The Western Roman linguistic legacy, on one side, and the Eastern Orthodox
Christianity, on the other, have been the torn halves of the Romanian cultural
identity.
In the Romanian culture, the paradigmatic anxiety brought about by
the obsession with identity can be tracked down in various areas of reference.
The collective perceptions of the national idea fostered conflicting ideologies,
rhetorical devices and topoi of the social imaginary; fashioned literary
programs; forged symbolic topographies and sites of memory.
During the first half of our century, the Romanian culture fostered
various narrative scenarios relying on a total overlapping of history and
collective memory, in the evocation of deep, sacred national origins: the
holy memory of the holy nation [Norra.1989: 11]. On the agenda of the Romanian
intellectual elites, genetic anxieties such as: Where are we coming from?
And where is our symbolic cradle in Europe? Completely overshadowed the
basic question: Who are we? On the level of mainstream perceptions, the
epitome of the relationship oneself /the other was the implicit dictum:
“Tell me where you are coming from, and I will tell you who you are.”
Especially after the first World War, when The Greater Romania was
born, the process of nation building and the intellectual arguments about
identity had come to dominate the academic curricula at almost every level
and in every particular discipline: history, philosophy, ethnography, literary
history, art and so on.
This is why in the Romanian literature prestigious places, worshipped
by the popular memory, have been shaped as national moulds. The Master
tropes of nationalist literature were imperial spaces like Rome - the Western
cradle of the Romanian Latinity - or Byzantium - the eastern mould of the
Romanian orthodox Christianity. In the wake of a growing anxiety about
national identity, literature has persistently built heterotopias [Foucault:
1986] prestigious models - as a Post-Byzantine Byzantium, the Forth Rome
- , able to meet the requirements of legitimacy and to compensate for the
discomfort of being a Romanian. It is also noteworthy that this persistent
topographical leaning had been closely intertwined with an obsessive public
concern about Orient and Occident, as alternative geopolitical and cultural
horizons of the Romanian identity.
* * *
The 20 years between 1944 - the Soviet take over of Romania - and 1964
- Ceauºescu' s advent – can be seen as a tireless battle of Nationalism
against Marxism. [Vederey, 1991:11]. Nationalism eventually emerged the
winner and National identity became the master cultural symbol, displaying
highly structural properties. In this lapse of time, literature, history,
collective memory had performed their converging parts in an overarching
explanatory scenario. A discourse about unity and continuity (The Nation)
had overcome the one about differentiation and change (Marxism).
During Ceauºescu’s dictatorship, the virtually hegemonic force
of national ideology ended up as an aggressive complex of superiority called
Protochronism. Its main cultural statement was a boastful rejection of
any sources, models or forerunners, in almost all-intellectual areas, in
favour of a paradoxical theory of local priority, allegedly ignored, because
of the marginal status of Romania.
It is important to note that the same distressing question: How can
one be a Romanian? Should be posited as the ultimate source of Protochronism.
This time by way of compensation, being a Romanian becomes a privilege,
a miracle and bliss. In Ceauºescu’s Romania, the “pride of being born
Romanian” was the obsessive keynote of all official discourses
In attempting to identify the first roots of Protochronism it is probably
necessary to go as far back as the decades between the two world wars and
focus on Mircea Eliade, another displaced Romanian.
From this point of view, the Protochronist reaction is therefore ambiguous
and double-edged. On the one hand, it is a clear statement of a deeply
felt inferiority complex to the advanced Western Europe. On the other hand,
it is a proud rejection of the imperial model of the Soviet occupant. In
this case, the barbarity is that of the conqueror, the latter becoming
from the carrier of civilization to be exact opposite. This is the explanation
for the various elite intellectuals’ (the prestigious Edgar Papu, for instance)
brush with Protochronism.
To find the key to this delicate issue it is necessary to find appropriate
codes to interpret Alterity, to be more specific the Western versus the
Eastern Alterity. The relationship with the Soviet occupant needs explaining
in the context of the equation between the civilizing West versus the aggressive
East, barbarian, domineering so much so that it threatened to sever the
umbilical cord connected to the European matrix. This perspective must
be kept in mind when attempting to retroactively analyze the great diversity
of the cultural output during the communist era.
In the second age of the national idea (Ceauºescu’s nationalist
dictatorship), the previous cultural harmony and unity collapsed. History
and memory fell apart. The official national history was relying on an
integrated, dictatorial memory. A memory without a past - as Nora notices.
[Norra.1989: 8]. An unbridgeable gulf was growing deeper and deeper between
it and the living literary memory. The previous memory-nation, building
sites of memory - lieux de mémoire - was the last occurrence of
the joint venture memory / history.
As far as, for instance, the fictional output of the period is concerned,
especially during the eighties, the youngest generation of Romanian authors
tried by all available means to counteract the take over of memory by the
official political and historical discourse. They set out on a spontaneous
criticism of nationalist paradigms, undermining their ideological and aesthetic
foundations as well as their rhetorical devices. Along with the authors’
growing scepticism concerning older national representations, fictional
topographies became more contradictory tot he points of confusion. Romanian
writers move from the urban novel to the travel epic, which, in the European
literature, had previously offered generous opportunities for the teaming-up
of fiction and meta-literature.
The title of an original novel by Ioan Groºan: A Hundred Years
at the Gates of the Orient mixes a twist on Gabriel García Márques’s
Cien años de soledad and one Raymond Poincaré’s famous remarks
on the subject of Romania’s borderland position: “Que voulez vous, nous
sommes ici aux portes de l’Orient, où tout est pris à la
légère?” (What do you expect? We are here at the gates of
the Orient, where everything is easy-going). Moreover, in contemporary
Romania, this remark grew to become a stereotype excuse for various civic,
moral and political deficiencies.
The chronicle of a return-trip from Romania to the pontifical Rome,
in the early seventeenth century, is a mere excuse to playfully re-read,
re-write and re-live a hundred years of traditional literary stereotypes
and of collective perceptions in national identity. Highly emotional clichés
of the inter-war discourses - such as “We, the Romanians, we are the descendants
of Rome…” are being turned upside down or simply ignored.
Authors like Groºan redefine previous identity hypotheses as obsolete
scenarios of cultural memory. They grasp an essential process-taking place
in the contemporary Romanian literature: the progressive retreat of identity
paradigms into discourse. And, at the same time, they capture the passage
of the arrogant national models and of their products into literary assets
to be recycled.
From a different point of view, the literature of the eighties pays
a special attention to the virtual ghetto-structure imposed by the Bolshevik
occupation on Romania. Novelist, memoirist, historian, journalist (and,
after 1989, political analyst and member of the senate) Stelian Tãnase
is the keen chronicler of a Bucharest that communism expelled out of history
into a state of day to day survival routine: a place where any model degenerates,
and where even deliberate imitation miserably fails. Corpuri de iluminat
(Lighting Devices) 1990 is the anthology of the malformations, anomalies,
left overs of both the people and the city. As suggested by the metaphor
in the title of one of his novels - Playback -, the imaginary topography
created by the novelist is a space of mystification and of perversion,
where the technical method alluded to (a "playback") passes from the screen
to real life. A city whose history has been forged, whose face has been
disfigured by the shallow pharaonic models of the Ceauºescu’s era,
the Bucharest described by Stelian Tanase is a version of the 30ties Moscow
not unlike the Moscow imagined by Bulgakov.
For Tãnase, due to Romania’s position at the meeting point of
several agonising empires, Romanian identity is to be found in the interstitial
spaces between different ends. And this is strikingly obvious in Bucharest:
“In Bucharest – Tãnase stubbornly maintains - the end of several
great empires meet. The histories of the Byzantine Empire, of the Ottoman
Empire as well that of the Russian Empire virtually ended in Bucharest.”[Paleologu,
Tãnase, 1996: 430].
Over the last couple of years, Tãnase has been working on a
massive novel (to average about 1000 pages) set in Bucharest. As the writer
explains in his diary - Ora oficialã de iarnã (The Official
WinterTime) 1995 - the starting point of the book is 1683, the year of
the first printing of the Bible in Romanian (the so-called Bible of Bucharest).
The end of the story is set exactly three hundred years later, in 1983.
(1983 is usually seen as the most radical turning point of Ceausescu’s
cultural policy: The ideological conference of Neptun-Mangalia) These dates
are highly significant in themselves - both 1683 and 1983 simultaneously
signify a beginning as well as an end.
* * *
Catherine Durandin is right reaching the conclusion that the Roman conquest
of Dacia triggered a persistent axiological tension, later enhanced by
various circumstances and in various contexts. Nevertheless, among those
circumstances not listed, it is worth mentioning the assimilation of Romania’s
administrative and political structures by one Empire after another, from
Turkey to the later Soviet Russia. In today’s postcommunist era, Durandin
believes this tension can be identified in an overemphasized collective
aspiration towards the process of Euro-Atlantic integration.
Worth mentioning in passing is that the French historian chooses to
go against the mainstream opinion in including Russia on equal footing
with the Ottoman Empire among the pro-oriental Balkan pressures to which
the Romanian culture was intensely subjected. In doing so, she ignores
the essentially opposite nature of the Romanian historical reaction to
the Turkish and respectively the Russian occupation. To mention only one
of many, Eminescu in his articles displays a profound understanding of
the issue, in preferring the former to the latter. Time doesn’t permit
here a detail analysis of his main arguments, however well founded. Enough
evidence to support the above can be found in a few historical facts: the
Turkish Empire never fully occupied Romania, neither did the Turks transform
cities in Soviet raions, did they not impose repeated censorship on the
local religions and they were never given the right to naturalize and to
own land or properties in Romania. The Ottoman neighbours confined themselves
to initially only confirming and they’re nominating the princes of local
extraction, and subsequently to nominating Fanariot (e.g. Greek) rulers.)
However, Durandin is correct in identifying a few of the main symptoms
of a malady she never names nor examines closely and systematically. In
my analyses I will call it “the imperial syndrome”, accompanied as it was
by interesting expressions in the Romanian cultural zone over decades,
including the post-soviet era.
A nation surrounded on all sides by arrogant empires strategically
organizes its identity-related history and ideology in the framework of
secure stereotypes that would legitimate its right to existence and to
public recognition. In Romania this strategy frequently became part of
the more general Orient versus Occident antinomy [Spiridon: 2000b]. Such
a process of authoritarian semantic structuring of the identity space evolved
on several stages.
To pick one example of many available, a clear line can be drawn between
the pre-soviet feverish quest for arrogant domineering models - inevitable
creating an identity confusion and a creation pathos of identity debate,
collective emotions, clichés and especially generating fierce polarization’s
– and the post-soviet occupation situation. During the communist period
to follow, the identity, be it underground or officially accepted, failed
to claim any models. The latter due to conscious rejection of any paradigmatic
patronage and to the attempt to affirm an absolute national priority legitimized
by the Protochronist dogma. As far as the underground is concerned, the
cause is to be found in the purposeful deconstruction of the literary tradition
displaying proud imperial models. See for instance Bãnulescu’s –
Cartea de la Metopolis (The Book of Metopolis) - or Sorescu’s Rãceala
(A Cold) - parodies of the Post- Byzantine imperial arrogance in the Southern
Romanian area.
At this point, I find it necessary to underline that my study is restricted
to cultural projections, and namely to literary representation. On the
ideological level, it is essential to distinguish between the two, because
(and this is particularly true for the Romanian cultural environment) they
have operated on parallel levels if not in totally opposite ways. [Spiridon:
2000a]. Apart from that, literature plays a key role in any society, a
role transmitting network, irreplaceable and constantly used by ideologies.
[Nemoianu: 1996].
* * *
A few concluding remarks.
The paragraphs above have the role of merely providing a general framework
for an ongoing analysis [Spiridon: 2000c]. In as little detail as possible,
I have tried to point out that imperial apprehensions followed by various
types of the “ post-imperial syndrome” are part of a complex series of
identity phenomena present in the Romanian cultural history.
The imperial anxiety has been present more or less at all points in
the Romanian history, as Catherine Durandin is very quick to notice. Post-imperial
reactions however have been extremely diverse, if not contrasting.
I won’t go into details here, but the mark left by imperial Rome has
been gradually included and assimilated in the Romanian legacy and tradition,
becoming one of the deepest and furthest reaching roots of the national
identity.
The Byzantine legacy has been equally incorporated within the eastern
branch of Christianity. Both have attracted a pronounced sense of pride,
promptly illustrated in literature, which was also quick to come up with
a parody of each, once the respective tradition grew obsolete.
Post-Habsburg Transilvania features a productive process of reanalysis
of the crossroads hybrid that is Central European legacy.
As far as the traces of Turkish domination are concerned, they are
subject to an extensive debate trenching on the issue of the Orient, of
the Balkans etc. In any case, theorists such as Edward Said [Said: 1979]
or Mary Louise Pratt [Pratt: 1992] are methodologically irrelevant in this
respect, seeing as the Romanian Eastern dimension was one that took particular
pride in itself. Moreover, this kind of orientalism only stretches as far
as Greece, becoming a particular European orientalism.
Last but not least, the relationship with the Soviet Union can only
be analyzed within the guidelines of this post-imperial framework, a topic
that I don’t intend to dwell on but to which the analysis I have attempted
can be useful as a starting point.
Trying to force these distinctive details into the tight conceptual
framework of post colonialism is, in conclusion, a sterile error of method.
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