Annemarie Matthies 162
22 His first basic ideas can be found here: Jürgen Link, Elementare Literatur und generative Diskursanalyse, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 1983.
23 When asked in what way the constitution of normality and discourse are related to each other Link answered: “In that way that you don’t realise you don’t notice anything.” (Orig.:
“Dass du nicht merkst, dass du nichts merkst.” In “Konturen eines Konzepts,” kultuRRevolution, 27, 1992, p. 51). Further thoughts on the production and constitution of normality can be found in Jürgen Link, Versuch über den Normalismus. Wie Normalität produziert wird, Göttingen, Van-denhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009 (1997).
“A Shared Bedazzlement” 163
24 Interview conducted by Gabriele Eick, Executive Communications, Cultural Days Con-sultant, 2009.
25 Ibid.
26 See, for example, his essays Despre bucurie in Est şi in Vest and Tolerant-a şi intolerabilul.
Criza unui concept; in Andrei Pleşu, Despre bucurie in Est şi in Vest şi alte eseuri, Bucharest, Humanitas, 2007.
They were the most enthusiastic about joining the European Union. Now, there are fewer euro enthusiasts, but we cannot afford to be sceptical. Instead, we should be proud to be Europeans.24
His retrospective take on the 40 years under communism is much shorter: “In a way, we did not notice the outside system. We suffered, but we thought it was nor-mal to suffer.”25
Corresponding to these enouncements The Left Wing, I would argue, does not refer to the past so much but to the future – both in its composition as a triptych and in its reference to the Romanian discourse history. The teleological composition, stressing the “central panel”, symbolised by the following novel The Body (Corpul), which covers the years of the Ceauşescu-era, is obvious. The trilogy’s first part serves as the basis for this second part, as its introduction as well as its premise.
Looking back at the novel’s content, at first glance it seems surprising that Ca˘rta˘rescu, respectively the novel’s I-narrator, used the notion of revelation at all.
As in Romanian debates the idea of alien domination and two-faced dictatorial rule has been popular throughout the last twenty years, those propositions would not require the notion of revelation at all. But again: although this perspective – the quest for “truth” – is not explicitly denied in the novel, it is extended, referring to a general disposition of mind – a probable mentality.
In Romanian debates on national history the people’s disposition has not been a topic until the end of the 1990s. In the last decade however, especially in the last couple of years, shortly before Romania’s entry into the European Union and ever since then, discursive enouncements have moved towards a Romanian mentality-discourse. The central element of this public discourse is the enouncement that Ro-manians as a people had to go through a long process of being reigned over be-cause they as a people called for being reigned over; the popular notion of the
“lack of democratic consciousness,” for example, does not relate its presumption to a concrete historical setting but argues in a teleological manner – the mentality is the cause for the alleged consciousness.
The Left Wing, I would argue, is related to those debates insofar as Ca˘rta˘rescu affirms Romanian mentality as servile without contextualising this – observed – ser-vility in the present, but by explaining it as a naturally grown disposition. Regard-less of Ca˘rta˘rescu’s claim not to refer to “anything real at all” – the fictional refer-ence might not apply to reality as a factual one, but nevertheless it applies to a very real discourse that has been taken up by Romanian intellectuals such as Andrei Pleşu, who affirms a traditional distinction between an Eastern and Western men-tality in his widely read essays as real.26
Annemarie Matthies 164
27 In her essay Western Writing and the (Re)Construction of the Balkans after 1989: The garian Case, Yonka Krasteva shows how under the “western censorious gaze the nation [of Bul-garia] becomes a signifier of the feminine, waiting passively to be claimed by the normatively masculine West as its complementary part.” Yonka Krasteva, Western Writing and the (Re)Con-struction of the Balkans after 1989: The Bulgarian Case, in Andrew Hammond (ed.) The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other 1945–2003, Aldesrhot, Ashgate Publishing, pp.
97–110. This discourse does not only apply to the Bulgarian case but has been taken up by Ro-manian intellectuals.
28 Contemporary “Mental mapping” resembles the modes of differentiation Edward Said described in 1978 in more than one way. He described Orientalism as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, a Western style of domina-tion, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, Vintage Books, 1979.
3.2 Reading the Novel from the Western Point of View
Despite the references to the Romanian discourse, the much-referred-to approach to Europe can also be affirmed – not only stylistically, in comparison with Euro-pean authors or traditions of writing, but above all with regard to content. Ca˘rta˘-rescu valets the mentality-discourse on “post-socialism,” mainly led by European cultural anthropologists,27 as well as the idea of a seemingly natural historical de-velopment, without the need to analyze and to take relationships of power into consideration. By those means, the present does not necessarily resemble the best new world, but the logically consistent world.
Keeping in mind that the mentality-discourse is deeply rooted in western aca-demic discourse,28 the novel might therefore well be read as a genuinely European one. On the other hand, while the mentality-discourse is a purely academic one, in Western public discourse the enouncements have transformed into quite dif-ferent ones. The essence here reads as follows: the Eastern-European peoples have – finally, after decades of false dominance – liberated themselves. What seems con-tradictory at first glance resembles, on further consideration, the teleological com-position that can be found both in discourse as well as in its fictional comment:
ignorant servants develop from innocence to awareness.
4. Conclusion
Connecting the preliminaries with the initial questions, namely how can the differ-ence between the Western-European perspective and the Romanian point of view about the novel be explained? Does the novel itself offer such a wide range of in-terpretation – or might the different enouncements in both public and scientific discourse explain the difference of perception? The answer can only be a tentative one.
The idea of the people’s bedazzlement applies to both Western-European and Romanian discursive enouncements. But while in Romania this mentality is
imag-“A Shared Bedazzlement” 165 ined as a natural national disposition – see Ca˘rta˘rescu’s idea of the “fatalistic Ro-manian” – in Western-European thought it is a disposition that evolved politically, through false leadership. As The Left Wing’s aesthetic is mainly characterised by tropes – allegories and metaphors – the way the reasons of this mentality are ex-plained here is still open. The novel actually leaves a gap here: whether the alle-gorical references are to be understood politically or anthropologically cannot be fully answered. Only the trilogy’s last part will show whether the fictionally trans-formed history refers to the Romanian or to the European version of history – whether the fictional leadership will be terminated by a final coup or whether ser-vants will remain serser-vants.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, Death of the Author, New York, Hill and Wang, 1974.
Blumenberg, Hans, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, in Dorothee Kimmich – Rolf Günter Renner – Bernd Stiegler (eds.), Texte zur Literaturtheorie der Gegenwart, Leipzig, Reclam, 1996.
Blumenberg, Hans, Wirklichkeiten, in denen wir leben, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1981.
Ca˘rta˘rescu, Mircea, Europa are forma creierul meu, Bucharest, Humanitas, 2003.
Ca˘rta˘rescu, Mircea, Orbitor. Aripa stânga˘, Bucharest, Humanitas, 2008.
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, Paris, Pantheon, 1970.
Frazer, James, Der goldene Zweig, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1989.
Krasteva, Yonka, Western Writing and the (Re)Construction of the Balkans after 1989: The Bulgarian Case, in Andrew Hammond (ed.), The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other 1945–2003, Aldesrhot, Ashgate Publishing, pp. 97–110.
Link, Jürgen, Elementare Literatur und generative Diskursanalyse, Frankfurt/Main, Suhr-kamp, 1983.
Link, Jürgen, “Konturen eines Konzepts,” kultuRRevolution, 27, 1992, pp. 50–70.
Link, Jürgen, Versuch über den Normalismus. Wie Normalität produziert wird, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009 (1997).
Pleşu, Andrei, Despre bucurie in Est şi in Vest, in Andrei Pleşu, Despre bucurie in Est şi in Vest şi alte eseuri, Bucharest, Humanitas, 2007, pp. 7–29.
Pleşu, Andrei, Tolerant-a şi intolerabilul. Criza unui concept, in Andrei Pleşu, Despre bucurie in Est şi in Vest şi alte eseuri, Bucharest, Humanitas, 2007, pp. 69–109.
Said, Edward, Orientalism, New York, Vintage Books, 1979.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philo-sophical Occasions 1921–1951, London, Hackett Publishing, 1993, pp. 115–155.
1 Gli eventi della Seconda guerra mondiale nell’area jugoslava sarebbero incomprensibili senza la giusta conoscenza del contesto storico della Jugoslavia monarchica fra le due guerre. Mi limito a ricordare tra le numerose pubblicazioni sulla storia generale dello Stato jugoslavo:
Stephen Clissold (a cura di), Storia della Jugoslavia. Gli slavi del sud dalle origini a oggi, Torino, Einaudi, 1969; Jože Pirjevec, Il giorno di San Vito. Jugoslavia 1918–1992. Storia di una tragedia, Torino, Nuova Eri, 1993. Per quanto riguarda la questione nazionale jugoslava rimando invece allo studio di Ivo Banac dedicato ai primi tre anni di vita del Regno dei Serbi Croati Sloveni (Kraljevina Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca), Jugoslavia dal 1929: Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia. Origins, History, Politics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988. Infine, per un quadro d’insieme sull’invasione e lo smembramento della Jugoslavia da parte delle potenze dell’Asse, con particolare attenzione alle operazioni militari italiane: Stefano Bianchini – Fran-cesco Privitera, 6 aprile 1941. L’attacco italiano alla Jugoslavia, Settimo Milanese, Marzorati Editore, 1993.
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