Matei Calinescu: The Adventure and Drama of Modernity

Marcel Cornis-Pope

symploke, Volume 17, Numbers 1-2, 2009, pp. 255-260 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: 10.1353/sym.2009.0016

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mAtEi CALinEsCU: thE AdvEntUrE And drAmA of modErnity

mArCEL Cornis-popE

Modernity, then, can be defined as the paradoxical possibility of going beyond the flow of history through the consciousness of historicity in its most concrete immediacy, in its presentness. Separated from tradition (in the sense of a body of works and procedures to be imitated), artistic creation becomes an adventure and a drama in which the artist has no ally except his imagination. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (1987)

When his 1987 book, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, was published, readers familiar with Calinescus work recognized in it a movement of imaginative revision, amplifying an earlier version of the book, Faces of Modernity (1977). In turn, this earlier book drew on his Romanian publications, before his emigration to the US: Eseuri despre literatura modern (Essays on Modern Literature, 1970) and Conceptul modern de poezie: de la romantism la avangard (The Modern Concept of Poetry: From Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, 1972). By adding a section on postmodernism, which rereads, in a retroactive movement of revision (1987, 292), the previous sections on modernism, decadence, avant-garde and kitsch, Calinescu produced in 1987 a new book. I would argue that much of his work, both creative and critical, followed a similar movement of revision and amplification. The same impulse underlies Calinescus own intellectual career as a Romanian expatriate who had to reinvent himself successively as an analyst of modernity, a literary and cultural comparatist, a theorist of rereading, a political essayist, and a creative writer. In his adventure and drama of reinvention, his faithful ally was his own prodigious imagination. Chronologically, the first facet of Calinescus reinventing impulse can be found in his literary criticism published in his native Romania, in 1960s and early 1970s. Calinescu played a significant role in the process of cultural de-Stalinization and the emergence of a new literature by setting mythopoetic fantasy and experiential subjectivity against the outworn doctrine of socialist realism. Building on the model of the interwar aesthetic criticism (especially Eugen Lovinescus emphasis on the recreative role of literary imagination),

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Calinescus essays and reviews advocated innovation and norm-breaking, perfecting a type of critical rereading that would become one of his trademarks. In addition to the two seminal books on modern literature and the modern concept of poetry, mentioned above, Calinescus Romanian criticism included an earlier study of Romanias premier romantic poet, Titanul i geniul n poezia lui Eminescu (The Figure of the Titan and the Genius in Eminescus Poetry, 1964), a book-length study of European classicism (Clasicismul european, 1971), and several collections of critical reviews that supported the emerging new writers. His critical columnslike those of several other colleagues of generationwere an important locus of revision and reformulation. The critics self-assumed role was to redraw cultural maps, fill in gaps, discover models for the new course of Romanian literature, not in Soviet but in Romanian and Western traditions. At their best, Calinescus creative rereadings performed the combined funcreative readings s unctions of applied aesthetics and revisionistic literary history. His effort was not only evaluative, but also partisan, using new works as cornerstones in a broader argument for aesthetic and ideological restructuring. Calinescu contributed to the Romanian literary revival of the 1960s his own work as a modernist poet and fiction writer. His philosophicsymbolic volumes of poetry, especially Semn (Sign, 1968) and Umbre de ap (Water Shadows, 1972), and even more so his short novel Viaa i opiniile lui Zacharias Lichter (The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter, 1969), winner of the Romanian Writers Award for fiction, introduced significant innovations in theme and form. Calinescus novel used a raisonneur from the spiritual family of the Biblical prophets and eccentric thinkers to question the conventions of rationality and of totalitarian thought. After his transplantation to the US in 1973, Calinescu became a reference point for an entire group of Romanian expatriates (Virgil Nemoianu, Andrei Codrescu, Thomas Pavel, Mihai Spariosu, Christian Moraru) engaged in rethinking the boundaries of their own Romanian culture, fractured between an internal, often-underground production, and the output of migrs to the West. My own transplantation to the new continent benefited from Calinescus often self-problematizing work. In an essay published the very year I came to the US, How Can One Be a Romanian? Modern Romanian Culture and the West (1983), Calinescu revisited E. M. Ciorans (in)famous question, Comment peut-on tre Roumain, to argue that, as late-comers to the club of the European nations, the Romanians have always been oversensitive to the complexities of this question. According to Calinescu, Romanian literature experienced its will to modernity in the nineteenth century with an acute sense of belatedness and an unhappy consciousness about its need to choose imitation to recover the lost ground (31). But this temporal lag was occasionally useful to Romanian and other East-Central European literatures, as they managed to turn the frustration of belatedness into a creative assimilation (reconstruction) of particular European trends (the Western impact of the early twentieth-century Romanian avantgardefrom Constatin Brncui to Tristan Tzaraor of the later French work

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of the Romanian expatriate E. M. Cioran are good examples of this). The promise (and drama) of self-reconstruction loomed big on my own horizon as a Romanian expatriate. Calinescu took advantage of this impulse, recreating himself as a successful American literary comparatist, writing the definitive study on the historical trajectory of literary modernity. His East-Central European roots made Calinescu suspicious of strong period theories that subordinate cultural phenomena to socioeconomic realities. His response to their violent labor of homogenization (such as in Marxist theories that posit a correspondence between modes of representation and modes of production) was to emphasize the mutable, largely metaphoric nature of period terms. Five Faces of Modernity traces the idea of modernity across several Western cultures and back to the earliest versions or the querelle des anciens et des modernes. The agonic perception of time is a major component of the historical constellation of modernity pieced together by Calinescu. His study retraces the dialogical movement of [modernitys] conflicting faces, reenacting a familiar cultural drama in which, for better or for worse, we continue to recognize ourselves (312). A later collection of essays coedited with D. W. Fokkema, Exploring Postmodernism (1988), takes this dialogic process even further, rereading postmodernism from different, often conflicting perspectives. Especially interesting is Calinescus discussion of the technique of the palinode (1987, 309-10), a common enough rhetorical strategy with the postmodernists who claim not to deal in plot details, while insinuating them nonetheless in the very act of their negation. Oftentimes, the technique of the palinode dramatizes a difficult process of narrative enunciation, as in Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987), where the traumatic event of the slave womans infanticide can be revisited only by Sethe, Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs, and Beloved herself, in silent narrations that may or may not find a resting point. Morrisons narrators circle continually this traumatic narrative core, knowing full well that they could not close the circle, pin it down for anybody who had to ask (1987 163). Calinescus own critical discourse circles around important events and ruptures in literary history, revising and amplifying them. Where linear, deterministic models of historicity fail, Calinescu proposes a critical hermeneutic coupled with an agonic understanding of temporality as repetition with unpredictable change. Against the temptations of historical teleology, which make us think of the present as a goal of previous developments (and which induce us to read history backwards from the present), Calinescu retraces the dialogical movement of modernitys conflicting faces, reenacting a cultural drama in which, for better or for worse, we continue to recognize ourselves (1987, 312). A similar desire to retrace the dialogical movement of words and cultural artifacts informs Calinescus work preoccupations with strategies of rereading. In his major study of Rereading (1993), and a host of related articles, Calinescu views rereading as a hermeneutic tool, refocusing the readers attention on the texts discursive structures and ideology usually missed in

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first reading; but also as a recreative-ludic tool, collaborating with the text towards new potentialities. The type of rereading advocated by Calinescu is often inquisitive, playfully ironic, skeptical of the texts own ideological and rhetorical maneuvers, throwing the reader into language, into its flow and surprises, compelling him or her to recognize that [they] are part of that flow, of that writing (Kaufer and Waller 1985, 83). Rereading foregrounds the rhetorical conventions embedded in narratives, as well as the interpretive concepts and generic expectations brought by readers to bear on texts. Ideally, the act of critical reading unfolds along an uninterrupted, double dialectic, with an active, transformative rereading already implicated in first reading. Rereading, in this perspective, must necessarily lead to (re)writing,1 that is to a self-conscious critical performance that will negotiate the texts experiential and cultural propositions in relation to those of the reader. A good model for this type of critical rereading as rewriting is Calinescus own self-conscious critical performances during his Romanian period that often conceived the interpretive process as a counter-reading, challenging the cultures hegemonic paradigms. Some of Calinescus preoccupations through the 1990s circled back to his East-Central European interests, focusing, for example, on communist censorship. In his discussion-interview with Ion Vianu, Amintiri n dialog (Recollections in Dialogue, 1994), Calinescu spoke of a form of pre-censorship, which imposed a hostage mentality on writers, forcing them to alter their approach and style; censorship proper, which prevented or altered the publication of anything considered threatening to the regime; and post-censorship, which is a state of mind induced in the published author, including a sense of futility, shame, weariness (63-65, 67). And yet, even under communism, slowly but surely, creative minds found ways to outwit [censorship]. A strong bond between writer and reader came into being, and the writer was eager to express what he was not allowed to say. The reader avidly awaited the least hint about how to read between the lines, an art perfected under communist censorship (x-xi). While not underestimating the dramatic effects of censorship on the best work written under totalitarian regimes, Calinescu still believed that an intelligent author is always more intelligent than the most intelligent censor (Ilisei 1999, 90). Calinescu spent the last few years mostly in Romania, struggling with his declining health but also witnessing a long-awaited reintegration of his work in the circuit of Romanian values. The two most important gains brought by the so-called postcommunist phase in East-Central Europe were the diversification of literary production, with unpredictable hybrid works that called into questions the pre-1989 literary categories, and the reintegration of expatriated novelists and theorists (Norman Manea, Herta Mller, Gheorghe Astalos, Matei Calinescu, Virgil Nemoianu, Thomas Pavel, Mihai Spariosu, Christian Moraru) in the discourse about the literature produced today in Romania.

See my own book, Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting (1991).

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Calinescus books on the five faces of modernity and on rereading have been translated into Romanian and have become a significant component of the theoretical reflection on the post-communist literature, more specifically on the tensions between aesthetics and cultural politics in the novel, or the limitations of realism and nationalism as narrative paradigms. Ive had the privilege to witness and write about almost all of Calinescus facets, and my own work has benefited enormously from his example and advice. I fondly remember the seminar on Romanian Culture Today: Dealing with the Totalitarian Legacy, which we co-taught at the University of Illinois in the summer of 1991. The following several years, while chairing the Romanian Studies Association of America, I tried to rekindle the interest of important Romanian-American scholars like Matei Calinescu in our annual meetings, enhancing the quality of our work and providing a form of mentorship for the younger generation. I regret all the opportunities I missed to meet him again and comment further on his work. I can only hope that he was able to discern in my own writing the constant echoes of his own path-breaking work as a transcultural scholar and writer. In his work, we continue to recognize ourselves as (un)voluntary participants in the adventure and drama of modernity. VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

References
Calinescu, Matei. Clasicismul european. Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1971. ___. Conceptul modern de poezie: de la romantism la avangard. Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1972. Second ed. Piteti: Editura Paralela 45, 2002. ___. Eseuri despre literature modern. Bucharest: Editura Emiescu, 1970. ___. Faces of Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977. ___. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism Avant-Garde Decadence Kitsch Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987. ___. How Can One Be a Romanian? Modern Romanian Culture and the West. Southeastern Europe 10.1 (1983): 31-43. ___. Semn. Bucharest: EPL, 1968. ___. Titanul i geniul n poezia lui Eminescu. Bucharest: EPL, 1964. ___. Umbre de ap. Bucharest: Cartea Romneasc, Bucureti, 1972. ___. Viaa i opiniile lui Zacharias Lichter. Bucharest: EPL, 1969. ___, and D. W. Fokkema. Exploring Postmodernism. New York and Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988. ___, and Ion Vianu. Amintiri n dialog. Bucharest: Litera, 1994. Cornis-Pope, Marcel. Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting: Narrative Interpretation in the Wake of Poststructuralism. London: Macmillan P; New York: St. Martins P, 1991. Ilisei, Grigore. Oleac de taifas (A Little Chat). Iai: Polirom, 1999.

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Kaufer, David, and Gary Waller. To Write Is to Read Is to Wright, Right? Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature. Eds. C. Douglas Atkins and Michael Johnson. Lawrence: Kansas UP, 1985. 66-92. Morrison, Tony. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.