Nr. 3 (32) anul IX / iulie-septembrie 2011 - ROMDIDAC

literatura şi comunismul
ILEANA ALEXANDRA ORLICH
Arizona State University
Incorporations:
Styling Women’s Identity and
Political Oppression in the Novels of
Herta Muller
B
Ex Ponto nr. 3, 2011
134
efore receiving the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature, Herta Muller, an ethnic
German born in Communist Romania, was the recipient of numerous literary
awards. The title of her acceptance speech for the Kleist Prize in 1994, “About
the fragile nature of this world,” expresses one of the dominant feelings
conveyed in her fiction. One may add to this sentiment Muller’s intense focus
on the feminine self in all her novels, from the early Nadirs to The Passport,
The Appointment, and The Land of Green Plums. 1 Such works narrate the
experiences of a young woman from an unnamed land (clearly identifiable as
Romania) in the years before Muller emigrated to West Germany. 2 Conceived
fictionally as a sort of rewrite of Romania’s history in the 1980s, these books
also examine ethnic and socio-political aspects of Ceausescu’s Romania
through the tropes of trauma and the grotesque. The figures of trauma,
hysteria and the grotesque connect and operate at different levels. Trauma
is the pivotal concept deriving from the latent violence and corruption in the
home and becoming symbolic for the conditions of the country. Hysteria is a
reaction to it all and the grotesque a form of resistance to the effects of trauma.
By portraying the effects of trauma, directly or as refracted in hysteria and
the grotesque, Muller’s fiction testifies to the lasting effects of the experience
of the Eastern Bloc and of the othering of the German minority within. More
importantly, her writings that bring together a series of apparently unrelated
pictures, dramatically and lyrically presented, give an impression of an
intensely modern literary consciousness which awards cultural legitimacy and
prominence to a forgotten region in the context of Communist Romania and
to the panopticon-like surveillance of all citizens by the feared Secret Police
known as “Securitate.”
Exposed to Romania’s fragmented cultural specificity, Muller grew up near
the town of Timisoara, in a German enclave, a sort of Brigadoon that followed
German customs, mostly unchanged from the days when the Austro-Hungarian