culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

ON THE PLURILINGUISTIC AND THE MULTIETHNIC FEATURES OF THE
CENTRAL EUROPEAN CULTURAL WORLD: A CRITICAL APPROACH
Broch, belonging to the same compensatory space Musil defines in a sort of
“Foreword”: “(…) literature offers images of meaning. It is invested with
meaning. It is a signification of life” (in Babeti, Ungureanu 1998).
In his book, L’Homme dépaysé, Tzvetan Todorov proposes a peculiar
interpretation of the intellectual, affective and social consequences of exile, from
the perspective of returning to the space of origin and of the feeling of
alienation, which he tries to define according to the dictionary, recording the
aspect of “disorientation” of the return to a space of your own (“chez soi”)
which is no longer yours (“qui n’est plus chez soi”): “Du jour au lendemain
l’exilé se découvre avoir une vue de l’intérieur de deux cultures, de deux
sociétés différentes. Je ne me sentais pas moins à l’aise en bulgare qu’en
français, et j’avais le sentiment d’appartenir aux deux cultures à la fois (...); de
retour à Paris je me sentais le plus perturbé: je ne savais plus dans quel monde je
devais entrer”. (Todorov 1996: 71) He speaks of a sensation of unease that is
born out of this cultural duplication, the coexistence of the two voices leading to
a sort of “social schizophrenia”, to a “splitting agony” also referred to by
Czeslaw Milosz (Une autre Europe): “(...) ma mythologie de l’exil, ici, là-bas.
La Pologne et la Dordogne, la Lituanie et la Savoie, les ruelles de Wilno, et
celles du Quartier latin se fondaient toutes ensemble, et je n’étais rien d’autre
qu’un Hellène ayant changé de ville. Mon Europe natale vivait en moi et je
retrouvais la possibilité de vivre dans l’immédiat, dans le présent, où l’avenir et
le passé s’enrichissaient mutuellement (...).” (1964: 92)
This sensation of mental splitting, of different keys for the perception of
reality, implies a painful decision (“la langue d’origine était clairement soumise
à la langue d’emprunt”) or practicing what Todorov calls “la parole double”: “La
parole double se révélait une fois de plus impossible et je me retrouvais scindé
en deux moitiés aussi irréelles l’une que l’autre.” (1996: 101).
Todorov, although admitting his assimilation by the French space (“ma
deuxième langue s’était installée à la place de la première sans heurt, sans
violence, au fil des années”), insists on the way in which this “parole double”
works, which is not linked to vocabulary or syntax, but to the idea of profound
incommunicability: “(...) en changeant de langue, je me suis vu changer de
destinataire imaginaire. Il m’est devenu clair à ce moment que les intellectuels
bulgares auxquels mon discours était adressé, ne pouvait pas l’entendre comme
je voulais (...). Il me restait le recours au silence.” (1996: 120)
Gândirea captivă, the 1953 book by Czeslaw Milosz (exiled Polish writer
born in Lithuania, literature Nobel-prize winner in 1980) was announced by an
article published in Paris in 1951, in the famous magazine of the Polish exile,
Kultura, with a title reminiscent of the debut novel of Eugen Ionescu, No, in
which the decision to emigrate was presented by the author as the “story of a
suicide”. Milosz’s speech was, at the same time, a painful confession and a
furious denouncement of a system in which a series of Polish intellectuals
(writers) had fallen. It was an implicit moral debate on the “ideology of
decadence” from the perspective of a writer who was educated in the idyllically
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