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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 327-332 Monica Spiridon, ed., (Multiple) Europe: Multiple identity, multiple modernity/Europes (multiples): Identités multiples, modernités multiples. Bucharest: Ararat Publishing House / for the University of Bucharest), 2002; 312 pp.; ISBN: 9739310826; CIP call no.: 82.091(063); Monica Spiridon, Eminescu: proza jurnalistică (Eminescu: The press articles). Bucharest: Curtea Veche, 2003; 420 pp.; ISBN: 9738356814; CIP call no.: 821.135.1.09; 160.000 lei "When I wake up, I sometimes don't know where I am," resignedly acknowledges the Serbian-born (with a Jewish-Hungarian paternal ascendance), France-working languages professor and poet Danilo Ki (Verona: 60). This admittedly cosmopolitan statement might very well serve as a fitting epigraph for (Multiple) Europe: Multiple identity, multiple modernity — a volume that reunites the proceedings of the Second International Conference of the ICLA Research Committee on Eastern and South-Eastern Europe organized by Prof. Monica Spiridon in Bucharest between May 27th and 31st, 2002. The book tries to map both a convoluted historical and cultural territory and a series of complicated and sometimes stunted identities belonging to the Central and East European area: "The myth of Central Europe in its nostalgic, neo-imperial or cosmopolitan versions, is a good example of dubious multiplicity, for all its egalitarianism is often based on othering and exclusion (e.g., of some of the newly independent post-communist states and inclusion of others), when the redefining and re-mapping of borders leaves them impervious nonetheless. For the origins of the multicultural ideal "community of small homelands" are not entirely neutral ideologically, being firmly connected with the legacy of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, sharing a lot with the Russian liminal colonial power, mainly the urge to modernize any resentment of their own inferiority, together with the inability to ultimately realize their global imperial goals, and the acceptance of the grand European narrative" (Tlostanova, 48). Thematically, the eighteen essays of the volume range quite widely, but with only three exceptions[1], they all deal with roughly the same historical period, stretching from the end of the 19th century to the present day — a time, during which the map of the region was repeatedly and drastically altered, while cultural and national identities were thrown in a limbo from which many of them have yet to recover. The "case studies" are the most colorful and, perhaps the most illustrative. Nicóla Petcović's "I Don't Know Who I Am, but I Know Who I May Be if I Choose: Identity puzzle and the Balkan family ties" explores, with sometimes Monty [end page 327] Python-esque humor the often tense question of national identity in former Yugoslavia. The conflicting collective memories make this identity less a matter of historical ascendance as much as a question of willful appropriation of a fanciful and largely constructed mythology that defines individuality exclusively through opposition and exclusion. National identity is also the topic of two essays that explore Romania's rosy, and sometimes downright bizarre, present state of denial. Alexandru Călinescu's "Constructions identitaires et stratégies de la mémoire" looks at two particularly monstrous examples of Romanian post-Communist kitsch (the project for Dracula Park, now mercifully slated, and the grotesque "popular celebration" of the visa waiving for Romanian citizens in the Schengen space, which took place on New Year's Eve, 2001) and explores the unhealthy persistence of memory (Magritte dixit), the obsessive clinging to a past that is continuously reworked into a reassuring image of the present ("mémoire érigé en critère d'identité" [119]). Romaniţa Constantinescu's "Europolis — Terminus Paradis: La répréhension du mythe" is an analogous exploration of this particularly warped self-image that is so deeply steeped in denial. The essay is a lucid and insightful analysis of a much maligned film: Thomas Ciulei's 2001 Europolis — a particularly unflattering, sometimes bordering on the monstrous, look at the Danubian port of Sulina. Although projected only twice in Romania, the film was attacked for its supposedly intentional portrayal of the country as a land of aberration and despair, an act that is particularly open to attack since Romania began moving towards the membership in the European Union. Romaniţa Constantinescu ingeniously shifts perspectives and looks at Thomas Ciulei's film in its intertextual relationship with a novel of the same title written by the Romanian writer Jean Bart in 1933. Seen from this angle, the film becomes the vision of a distant origin through the eyes of an exile (Thomas Ciulei has left Romania at 14). "La chose la plus cruelle que l'on puisse faire aux gens dans la monde moderne, c'est de leur infliger la honte de leur propre complexité." This quote from Leon Wieseltier (Constantinescu, 165) encapsulates the spirit of a good deal of the remainder of the articles in (Multiple) Europe. Most of them attempt to find theoretical models that would accommodate the fragmented and non-homogenous national and cultural identities of the area with the monolithical image of the unified Europe. Monica Spiridon's "Le guets-apens de la géographie identitaire" radically reverses perspective and presents Europe as an Asian peninsula, in order to illustrate the inherent difficulties of border mapping (81). Thus, this speculative cartography is explored through the ideological and symbolic dimension of a constructed identity. In a similar vein, Roxana Verona in "The Cultural Landscape of the 'Other' Danube: On boundaries and bridges" tries to [end page 328] answer the same questions: how do we map the continent? Who do we exclude from a region marked by subtle interconnexions[2]? She recognizes a vital dilemma of the area, a dilemma that marks its often schizoid approach to integration: "the will to be included goes together with the will to be recognized as independent" (57). The volume ends fittingly with a lengthy article by Jüri Talvet — "Europe and the Challenge of Synthetism"; an uneven, yet erudite piece that tries to fight what is justly perceived as the excessive atomization and individualism that plague comparative studies, by, paradoxically, attempting to find within them a place for cultural studies. The essay discusses perceptively the gradual insinuation of the periphery (represented mainly by German romantics like Goethe, Herder and Hölderlin) into the excessively monolithical and idealist European philosophical discourse. Talvet wants to recuperate the ethical and moral dimensions of philosophy (in the vein of Montaigne) and, strangely finds a corresponding strain in Existentialism, which is regarded almost as a cure-all for the ails of modernity: "Quite probably the very fact that the West, after its shameful aberrations, resulting in the outbreak of two World Wars, has been able to subsist peacefully, without wars of global transcendence on its continent, has to do with the deep spread of the existentialist discourse after the Second World War. Let us remind ourselves that is was not limited to the West, but in different shades and grades has penetrated the entire world conscience" (291). Such sweeping assertions conceal an odd case of willful blindness: Talvet passes over the fact that the supposedly healed area is far from being in perfect health (the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia, while not of "global transcendence," were no less atrocious and shameful) and seems to completely ignore that Sartre, whose philosophy (together with Camus') is presented as the ray that kept the hope alive behind the Iron Curtain (290, 292) was himself a fervent supporter of Communism. On the other hand, in an even stranger volte-face, Talvet denies the synchronism of postmodern literatures in the East and the West (292) in order to map a somewhat anachronistic "existential" path for a discourse that is essentially antagonistic to that of the West: "That is why I see as exaggerated the endeavors of an influential sector of occidentalists and progressists of present-day Eastern Europe to show themselves as legitimate participants of (sic) the postmodern discourse, engendered by the Western centers above all starting from the 1970s. Our experience in Eastern Europe, the peripheral and frontier zone between the East and the West, between the occidental and orthodox Christianity, between capitalism and the real socialism, is quite different. I do not think it is out of place to assert that undervaluing this unique historical experience, we will lose our identity, while Europe and the West lose their [end page 329] inherent variety, one of the principal conditions for a new dialoguing synthesis" (292). This is a conundrum that cannot be avoided; in a region that feels its uniqueness with the same intensity that it represses its inferiority complex, such contradictory assertions of identity (while certainly offering a fertile ground for critical debates, as this volume demonstrates) will often end in such unproductive aporias. Ambiguous identities, albeit of a different nature, are also the subject of Monica Spiridon's volume Eminescu: The press articles. The book deals with an often controversial subject in Romanian literature — the numerous newspaper articles written by Mihai Eminescu (arguably the greatest Romanian poet) in the latter half of the 19th century. Profoundly rhetorical, often invective in tone, and sometimes reflecting an ideology that bordered perilously on xenophobia, Eminescu's rich journalistic prose has been severely censured by the Communist authorities,[3] and repeatedly appropriated by dubious political causes. In fact, Eminescu, as a cartographer of the symbolic space of Romanian identity, is also mentioned in Monica Spiridon's essay in (Multiple) Europe. There, she deplores the excessively ideologized and politicized reading of his work that ignores the obvious: "tout ce qu'il a produit (y compris la prose flamboyante du journaliste Eminescu) fut de la plus pure projection littéraire" (88). In this volume (which is both a critical analysis and an anthology of Eminescu's newspaper articles), Monica Spiridon opts for a "close" critical reading that, rather than making Eminescu into a proleptic proponent of present day causes, prefers to discover "in his writing a major variable of a particular intellectual context" (7). This means that the specific ideological content of the articles, content that has troubled and inflamed so many, slides into the background, sometimes even vanishing completely. This means that rather than concentrating on their thematic content, she prefers to dissect the delicate and intricate rhetorical mechanism that makes these pieces formidable examples of literature, with an ascendance stretching as far as the 18th century sermons of Antim Ivireanul, and a theoretical background that claims direct lineage from Quintillian and Cicero. In a series of detailed rhetorical analyses of various journalistic pieces, she reveals how much Eminescu was steeped into the specific literary and philosophical context of his age, and more importantly, how subtly his arguments are interlaced with, and respond to, the positions of his polemical opponents. The chapter on his polemical debate with C.A Rosetti (119-85), a famous liberal leader of the time[4] is telling in this sense, as it reveals the extravagance of Eminescu's journalistic style in both its "architectural" (122) and theatrical dimensions (124-5). [end page 330] In fact, Spiridon argues, Eminescu's journalism was in a sense "impure" — in its fabric are incorporated heterogeneous elements that connect it to his prose and poetry (187). Thus, his journalism can easily be seen from this perspective as the obverse of the rest of his literary production. Eminescu's fictional prose "betrays a distinct rhetorical vocation" (187), while in his poetry, the visionary quality combines with a clear discursive dimension. (191) Rhetoric thus becomes the basis of a unified vision of Eminescu's poetics — its most accomplished product being his, arguably, most famous poem, "Luceafărul" ("The Morning-star") (193-4). [1]. Stefan Borbély's "A Glimpse behind the Hammam Doors: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Oriental Letters" deals with a Western outlook on the East; nevertheless the essay refuses to adhere to the overbeaten feminist and postcolonial discourses that almost always seem to find their way into such a topic. Instead, he presents Lady Montagu as a philosophical traveler, firmly grounded in Locke's empiricism (29), an author who plays with the intertextual dimensions of her work by writing against the grain of the established "Orientalist" travel literature (36) and who regards Turkey as a spectacular (in the literal sense of the word) piece of artistry (39-40). Bernard Westphal's "Géocritique des extremes : Le royaume khazar dans deux romans contemporains" is an analysis of Milorad Pavić's Khazar Dictionary and Marek Halter's Le vent des Khazars seen as emblematic texts that extend Europe beyond its political borders into an imaginary, fluctuating territory (139). And, finally, Andor Horváth's "Vivre résolument. La modernité et l'espace symbolique de la tragédie" is a discussion on the symbolical space of tragedy from a Nietzschean/Heideggerian perspective. [2]. Roumiana Stantcheva looks at one such case in "Le triangle littéraire: Les relations Est-Ouest, les relations Est-Est" — namely the cultural relations between Romania and Bulgaria during the Communist regime, and the diffusion of translations from two Romanian novelists. [3]. In 1970 the two volumes of one of the editions of Complete Works that contained these articles were published in two separate prints: one, brutally censored, for sale in ordinary bookstores, and another, "confi-[end page 331]dential" but complete, for the use of the selected few who were approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. [4]. And, one may add, both the subject and proponent of several virulent polemical disputes at the time.
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