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

Ex Ponto nr. 3, 2011
of gender, ethnicity and totalitarian politics. As a scripted surface whose
characters must be deciphered, Muller’s novels offer a site of contested and
conflicted feminine identities projected against a disjunctive narrative that
acknowledges and establishes its political, social, and cultural specificity while
styling the narrator’s own distinctive femininity complicated by the writer’s own
ethnic othering as a German trapped in the proclamations of Ceausescu’s
strident nationalism. Thus the unnamed narrative persona in all her works,
which are auto fictional texts with the narrative persona and the other
protagonists closely resembling Muller’s own and her friends’ experiences,
positions herself in a category of women writers that exists at the intersection of
gender politics with issues surrounding ethnicity and constructions of othering
and offers a site of contested and conflicted identities projected against a
disjunctive narrative that acknowledges and establishes its political, social
and cultural specificity in 1980s Romania.
Situated at the center of Muller’s fiction, women form a cubistic portrait
comprehending various faces of feminine characters - from her mother who
tells her daughter that one day, as a corollary of her sluttish behavior, she will
bring a Romanian man on her parents’ doorstep thus shunning their ethnic
purity, to Lilli, the tragic character in The Appointment. Shot while trying to
escape by crossing the border illegally to Hungary, the beautiful young woman
is further mauled by the border guards’ dogs whose bites make her dead body
resemble a torn field of red poppies. In the novels, the transition from the
narrative Ich zum wir I to We) is achieved on an immediate level by the doubling
of female characters who are complicit in the activities of the communist
Party/state, like Lola and then Tereza (The Land of Green Plums), and who
also represent the victim-oppressor polarization. The doubling suggests the
physical incorporation of the individual by the Communist state, as in the case
of the narrator’s interrogation and surveillance by the Securitate after she
is betrayed by Tereza, the friend charged with pying on her. In the doubling
of her character, Tereza’s terminal cancer ultimately projects outwardly the
individual reduced to a body that could be controlled and potentially eliminated
by the cancer-like political surveillance, an extended metaphor reminiscent
of Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of the devastations caused by the police state in
Cancer Ward.
Muller’s focus on the female body as a scriptorial entity, as a script and
representation, features Lola, the girl from the country who joins the Communist
Party and at night lies in waiting for the factory workers to have sex in the park.
This representation of sexuality as a mode of embodiment is tied in The Land of
Green Plums to the embodied nature of the self and its political representation
as material framework and as mode of expression. When interrogated by the
Securitate officer, a certain Captain Piele, the narrator is asked “What does
a woman in bed with 3 men (her friends, Edgar, Kurt and Georg)”. And, when
she does not reply, he goes on to say: “There must be going on like at a dog’s
wedding. That’s why you folk don’t want to get married. That’s something
couples do, not packs.” On another occasion, he has the narrator strip naked
and then asks her to sing to him. Her naked body, she concludes, gives the
interrogator the illusion that she is dead and eliminates stylistic concerns:
after she is allowed to put her clothes back on, he confiscates her notebook
to secure the addresses of all her friends.
Feeling like a dead body, the traumatized narrator wants to kill herself by
jumping from 6 th floor but decides that the sky is too close; she then wants to
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