20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

Orientalism in the prose of Ioan Petru Culianu 579as Fuga X: Apoteoza omului gotic sau cele zece zile (X Flight: Apotheosisof the Gothic Man or the Ten Commandments), Stăpânul Sunetului 2 (TheMaster of the Sound) or in the novel Hesperus 3 .With the proses of Pergamentul diafan (The Transparent Parchment),the takeover of Oriental elements in postmodern tones results in an ultimateloss of the Orient’s exotic aura, which the Romanticism had got us used with– to take one example –, and which had been present in our literature (withM. Eminescu, Al. Macedonski or M. Eliade), visibly becomingmuch more known and much more tangible: a familial term of reference,a rich and fascinating reality, vested with the power to act directly andcathartically upon the reader, and able to sublimate the fantastic reveries ithad once generated. With Culianu, the Orient does not have the usualmysterious, charming and nostalgic air any more, because it represents awell-known, well appropriated and well mastered reality. Its symbols aredecrypted, its metaphors – enlightened.The Master of the Sound carries us into the atmosphere of the ShiiteIslam of Persia, where the greatest Arab musicians, historically attestedcharacters, derive from the very books attesting for their living right intoCulianu’ s fictional world, as masters of the art of sounds, but also with adifferent meaning that the one they had in real life. It is all about Is’haqal-Mawsilî – who is given precise biographical data (using both the after-Christ chronology and the Islamic one, considering the year of the Hegira,respectively the year of emigration of the Prophet Mohammed from Meccato Medina because of persecutions), but about which the most importantthing is not mentioned, namely that he used to be the disciple of anothergreat musical innovator of the Abbasid Era, namely of Mansour Zalzal –present in the bio-bibliographic mentions of a famous Persian book, Kitabal-Fihrist, authored by the learned scholar Ibn al-Nadîm. Starting from theseimportant names in the history of Arab music, we find another sonorousname, Sa’id ibn Misjah, the first musician of Mecca and probably thegreatest in the Ummayade period, also an innovator in the Arab musical2See the story Stăpânul Sunetului (The Master of the Sound), in Culianu,Ioan Petru 1996, Pergamentul diafan. Ultimele povestiri (The Transparent Parchment.The Last Stories), Bucharest: Nemira Publishing House, 40: “When passing from one bodyto another, the bodies forget what they were able to do in the past. However, they preservecertain acquired skills and learn easily what they already knew prior to the transfer”3In the novel Hesperus, the final solution given by the masters of Art ofTransformation runs as follows: “You are the ones to populate the world. Unlike yourfellows from Hesperus, you shall be mortal. Insofar as you are doomed to die, you willhave a chance to rise again and the liberty to choose what to be, maybe not on the spot, butafter thousand of years.” (Culianu, Ioan Petru 2004, Hesperus, 197).