culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

MARGINAL LITERARY ELEMENTS IN CARAGIALE’S WORKS
Jarry […]. The telegrams, newspaper headlines, reports are recovered and turned
into literary material.” (Călinescu 2000: 33)
The resulting effect is made obvious by the fact that, “apart from obtaining
a new textual morphology (that can be examined descriptively) and a comical
effect based on contrasts, the most important consequence of the blend of
literary forms corresponding to different cultural levels and to different types of
readers/speakers is the accomplishment of a structure characterized by an offer
of multiple participation, within a new textual dynamics.” (Călinescu 2000: 43)
2. Parody and pastiche
The high frequency of parody and pastiche in Caragiale’s work determines
Florin Manolescu to state that “Apart from being interpreted as proof of bareness
or as an indication of a creativity crisis, the high frequency of parodies in the
work of one writer at a certain moment in the evolution of our literature
represents the definite sign of a change in literary mentality, with an efficiency
that must be compared to that of innovative aesthetic programs or
manifestations. For, in comparison with the authors of the same kind of parodies,
of travesties or pastiches, Caragiale’s intension was, by means of his most
important parodies, to set fire to literary norms and to recalibrate the discredited
system, on the grounds of a new literary contract of reading. With Caragiale,
more than with any other parody writer, a text (or a mode) used generates a
second text, a parody, that means blocking the first and which suggests, in its
turn, the system of rules for some new texts from the writer’s actual repertoire.”
(Manolescu, 2002: 11)
One of the first subjects for parody is the sentimental-romantic text
specific to the literature of around 1848. In such cases the targets are, as in the
case of O soacră, “the stereotypical nature descriptions, the unsuitable analysis
of the soul, the confusion between poetry and prose, the garland of epithets, the
repetition and all others clichés belonging to sentimental rhetoric.” Generally
speaking, Caragiale’s intention to parody is directed essentially at “two
normative levels present in the Romanian prose at the end of the 19 th century and
the beginning of the 20 th […]. The first level belongs to the Romantic
sentimental code, inaugurated by short stories such as Zoe or O alergare de cai
and consecrated in Romanian literature by the translation of some very popular
titles belonging to the romanzo d'appendìce type; the second level belongs to the
debut of ‘poporanist’ prose (as Caragiale called it), connected to the first level
by a number of clichés and by sentimentalism, but with a more definite intention
of expressing national specificity, limited to the first terms of an artificial system
of opposites: village/city, traditional/modernist, local/cosmopolitan. The origins
of this system can be found in C. Negruzzi’s short story Alexandru Lăpuşneanul,
but especially in Odobescu’s historical plays Mihnea Vodă cel Rău and Doamna
Chiajna.” Novels of the Bolintineanu type or Delavrancea’s “ethnographic”
prose are also subjected to parodic transformations, as well as the instrumentalist
poetry of the Macedonsky type. By acknowledging the major role of parody in
129