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

Ex Ponto nr. 3, 2011
Like Georg’s “suicide,” Lola’s grotesque death signals the Securitate’s
attempt to control the signification of the body. Suicide and murder converge,
making the dead appear acted upon, annihilated, by inside and outside alike,
with the signification of the body ultimately determined by the state and the
Securitate agents.
Sports, another type of exploitation of the physical body, operate on
a symbolic level, with the individual body functioning as a metonymic
representation of the communist state in a symbolic battle for ideological
influence in the world. But such insistence on athletic excellence also entails
physical, indeed sexual, exploitation - a double trauma suggested in the
novel by the fact that Lola is impregnated by the gym teacher, who also
sexually abuses her and all the other girls in grotesque masquerades of body
fitness.
As defined by Cathy Caruth in “Trauma: Exploration in Memory,” trauma
is a “response, sometimes delayed to an overwhelming event or events.” It is
located in the fact of being overwhelmed and in surviving, rather than in the
event itself. In Muller’s novels trauma is the result of such extreme experiences
as sexual exploitation and humiliation: militia men who offer signed forms for
exit visas in return for sexual favors, Securitate officers who search women’s
rooms systematically, summon them to torturous appointments and call them
whores every time a male friend visits their home. Families follow the same
practices. Windisch in Passport calls his wife a whore because while deported
to Russia she had to sleep with a cook, a doctor and a gravedigger to survive.
As a corollary, the skinner in Passport exclaims that “Jews and women are the
ruin of the world.” Particularly haunting in the list of acts of violence perpetrated
against women is the case of the Dwarf lady in The Land of Green Plums, a
woman described as having “more scalp than hair, was deaf and dumb, and
lived off the rubbish from the greengrocer’s shop. Every year, the Dwarf lady
got pregnant by the men who came off the late shift at midnight. It was dark
in the square [where she was a begging for alms], so the Dwarf lady couldn’t
run away in time because she couldn’t hear their approach. And she couldn’t
scream.”
Like the traumatic violations, hysterical symptoms are enacted in psychic
and grotesque disturbances frequently to be experienced not only by the
marginalized and the powerless in society or the disempowered ethnic
minorities. The fur man, whose children the narrator is hired to teach German
to in The Appointment, yells after having unhinged the door during a domestic
dispute when he was trying to set fire to his own apartment: “Romanian are a
pack of damn dogs. Cowards through and through, you can tell by the suicides.
Ever one dangling from ropes, no one with the balls to shoot himself. Your
Hitler didn’t trust us an inch.”
Conjuring up frequent images of personal insecurity in Communist
Romania, Muller’s narrative space foregrounds the unanchored narrator who
negotiates her personal safety staving off the alarmingly increasing terror of
imprisonment and beatings while clutching to survival. Before leaving the
country, she is summoned once more to Securitate and accused of illegal
activities: living off private lessons and common prostitution, while her male
friends are accused of bourgeois parasitism.
Muller personal stories need to be told. And what better way to tell them
than by writing a fictional account that generate abstraction, something outside
of time and space, while at the same time depicting Romania’s totalitarian
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