culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

DOINIŢA MILEA
The transformation of identity and spatial adherences into internal
selection criteria for literary forms makes Witold Gombrowicz cultivate the
parodic farce, as a form of poetic transgression or grotesque deformation of the
social worlds, as a projection in the world of drama and exile, as external signs
of the separation from a matrix space (the loan of historical atmosphere from
Polish medieval texts – Yvonne, princess of Burgundy).
The Polish Witold Gombrowicz, in his 1950 novel Trans-Atlantique,
organizes his fictional transgressive space in between the “lost space”, the lost
language and the troubled identity of the one who leaves behind his Polish
identity (felt like a “center”), transforming his writing into a refuge and
substitute reality during the 23 years of his exile. The solitude and distance from
his space of origin gives birth to tragically profound notes in the journal.
The parody of the Polish memory of the seventeenth century hides a selffiction,
a tension between the fictional and the authentic, the artificial and the
fabricated idioms, being a deconstruction of reality, but also an implicit reference to it.
The central European space, an eccentric territory and a cultural, historical
and identity frontier, in a permanent dialogue between the center and the
periphery, between the West and the East, records pluricentric temptations
(Vienna, Prague, Krakow) and generates myths of nostalgic identities, focused
on the condition of the assimilated Jews seeking their origin through symbolic
journeys (according to Todorov’s analysis in Nous et les autres (1989) – the
“assimilated” traveller, the “impressionist” traveller, the “migrant” traveller, the
“philosopher” traveller).
Important names from these spaces transform the text, by crossing formal
frontiers, in a slide between the essay, history and fiction: Elias Canetti, Karel
Čapek, Peter Esterházy, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw
Milosz, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi.
The space is filtered subjectively, the linking element remaining the
cultural one, which influences the “hygiene of forgetfulness” or the therapy by
writing: Karl Kraus gives an “anti-diary”, Arthur Schnitzler produces “egodocuments”,
fictional journals included in his novels and short stories, Kundera
writes an essay-novel with heroes such as Kafka, Max Brod, Gombrowicz.
From Stefan Zweig, a follower of “cultural” Vienna as opposed to the
tenacious neighboring German empire, to Robert Musil and his argument in
favour of diaries (“Diaries. A sign of these times. They are the most comfortable
and the less disciplined. As the rest becomes increasingly unbearable, maybe in
the future we will only write diaries.” – see Babeti, Ungureanu 1997), the
Central-European literature becomes a space of the confession on a real common
topos which the individual memory rebuilds by multiplying it.
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), the German language poet, novelist,
playwright and author of memoirs, born in Vienna (Orele astrale ale omenirii,
Lumea de ieri) evokes from exile a paradise of culture (Vienna) destroyed by the
Nazi violence, proposing the image of a radiating center which stays in his
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