Writer’s Notebook - Dan Lungu

Writer’s Notebook dan lungu (Auto)biography and empathy On no few occasions, at various readings, I have been asked how much of what I write is autobiographical. Almost every time, I hesitate to answer, not because I have anything to hide, but because before each audience you have to find the suitable nuance. Ultimately, I would answer, “Everything is autobiographical”, were I not convinced that I would be misunderstood. I don’t know why, but I cannot reconcile myself at all with a restrictive definition of the autobiographical and I am convinced that in what an author does it is his biographical experience, to a greater or lesser extent, that reverberates. This is not a plea for dry biographical readings of the literary text, but rather for a different understanding of (auto)biography. For me, biographical experience is a suitcase that is much more capacious than it seems at first sight. It is not only everyday events or “objective” occurrences that are part of my past, but also many experiences for which you can’t find the most suitable word: a sensation, a smell, a landscape, the fulguration of a thought or a fear. Then, my life is not only made up of what happens to me. I have a family, friends, neighbours, relatives, acquaintances, to all of whom things happen to which I have access as a spectator or, quite simply, things which relate to me. To the extent that an event followed from a distance or merely read about in a newspaper has shaken me or set me to thinking, it begins to be part of my life. The emotion aroused in me by a woman on the bus telling me a story about her son’s divorce was so strong that I would classify it at “unforgettable”. I wasn’t the protagonist of the event, but the amplitude of the experience drew me so close to it that I would not hesitate to say that it was an autobiographical event. The same thing happens with books that move me deeply: they are no longer merely literary experiences, but, through their effect at the time, they become concrete occurrences, events. I think that I can remember more books from childhood than what we conventionally call events. All I remember is that they moved me or marked me in some way, and here books by far surpass reality. This is as regards myself. For others, things may stand differently. Thus, I believe that (auto)biographical material is polymorphous, not to mention the fact that a socialised ‘I’ becomes plural in different contexts, which considerably multiplies the number of potential (auto)biographies. It is but a short step from saying this to saying that the novel is the geometrical locus of possible autobiographies. I would hazard to say this, especially in the case of those authors, of which I am one, who are “empathetic” to their characters. For, what else is empathy except the capacity to put yourself in another’s place? But this means viewing the world as if you had his biography behind you. Thus, the other’s biography becomes a pseudo-biography. In a way, this is the relationship between the author and the world he creates. Avatars of the generic reader Asked at a round table discussion once about whom or about what kind of reader I am thinking when I write literature, I answered without hesitation: about no one – when I write it’s a case of ferocious egoism. I have to confess that this answer took even me by surprise. But as it wasn’t the first time spontaneous sincerity has confronted me with thoughts apparently foreign to my nature, I took the subject home for further reflection. In order for you to understand me better, I must add that I am not one of those writers – writers for whom I have an especial admiration – who polish their sentences to the point of musical brilliance, and nor am I a withdrawn type of person, or, even worse, one of those blokes with an inflated and vitreous ego who think that because they know the world it is sufficient for you to see its reflection in their work. And nevertheless I was

capable of giving the answer I gave. I meditated both on the content of the answer and on the categorical manner of its delivery. Ultimately, in the process of writing as such, the psychological combustion is so intense that you cannot emerge from a world that is in the throes of genesis in order to examine it in an objective manner. At the time, you are not thinking about anything external, you are wholly absorbed by atmosphere and characters, you don’t have time even to cast a glance at yourself, the author. The “ferocious egoism” I was talking about is nothing other than total immersion in a magmatic world, a world whose landmarks are shifting; it is the temporary and creative incapacity to relate to others as persons in the flesh and blood. I don’t think that this is the moment when the author adjusts his project to others, when he relates to a generic reader. This is more likely to happen in the project’s period of gestation, and, eventually, in collaboration with the editor, after the first draft of the text is ready. As for me, I cannot identify any concrete moment in which I have asked myself about my “ideal reader”. The first condition for my relationship with the text to work is for me to like it – unreservedly, if possible. If it doesn’t turn out like this, I have a serious problem of inner coherence. The fact that I have to like it doesn’t mean that I regard my taste as infallible or consummate – not in the least – but rather that I have to be responsible to myself in what I do. Otherwise, I cannot continue. So, the “ideal reader” to whom I relate when I write is myself. There is nothing haughty or egoistical in this statement. It is a matter of an “I myself” that can differ from one book to another. The trenchant way in which I answered set me to thinking. My style is usually much more nuanced. Analysing it in retrospect, I think that my assurance came from the legitimacy of the answer. I’ll explain what I mean. The existence of a “generic reader” to regulate the narrative discourse of the writer – and this above all in a society in which the after-effects of totalitarianism can still be felt – is, at least psychologically speaking, hard to accept. Under the dictatorship, which from the very start imposed on writers a so-called “creative method”, this generic, all-powerful and all-seeing reader could be likened only to the censor. The censor was the first reader, the one who tortured the writer’s conscience, who made him give up sentences before writing them or mutilate them before taking them to his editor. Thus, the presence of any authority external to creation that might conduct in one way or another the authorial discourse is still viewed with great suspicion. For writers of a certain age from Eastern Europe, the autonomy of art is much more than a mere uncoupling of creation from external conditions: it is a defensive reflex of individual freedom. Hence, probably, my categorical manner in formulating the answer. Of course, the majority of writers, creators of aesthetic jewels or imaginary worlds, often want to transform readers into faithful inhabitants of their worlds. The fascination they exert over the “other” does not leave them cold, but nor does it transform them into pragmatic managers of sensations or Machiavellian strategists of prevailing tastes. I think that most of them are capable of decrypting post factum their own strategies of persuasion, of evaluating their strong points, but any rational and planned manipulation of public response is doomed to failure from the start. At least from the viewpoint of the writer. Obviously, the editor can have wholly different plans, but he cannot make them until he has the manuscript on the table. As for me, the literature I write functions on many levels at the same time, and so it can find an echo in different social media. Obviously, this is a quality the editor prizes. Ultimately, it is one of the “tricks” of postmodernism, which, using irony, parody and pastiche, arrives at a literature which, appreciated by diverse audiences, temporarily reconciles economics and aesthetics. Of course, it is not from such reasoning that I set out when I write literature, but from the way in which I relate to “reality”. I think that it is precisely the complexity of reality and the ways in which it is constructed and unravelled before our very eyes, its dynamic and plastic character, that are the primary material of the

novel. The pluralism of viewpoints and attitudes, the polyphony of voices, the clash of mentalities, and the perverse effects are part of this fragile and at the same time durable construct we call reality, which the novel can explore for the benefit and delight of the reader. From such a perspective, reading can only be multiple. If this can reconcile the elite with the popular audience, then so much the better. “Miserabilism” or post-traumatic realism Without having set out to do so, many of the writers who came to the fore in the 1990s share a relatively common vision. Reality is tinted black, and caricature, derision, sarcasm, caustic humour, the absurd, and the bizarre are in the foreground. A critic such as Daniel Cristea Enache was inspired to classify them under the heading “post-socialist realism”, but most often they are called, more or less pejoratively, “miserabilists”. The adoption of a direct style and the cultivation of colloquial language or slang represent one piece in a larger puzzle. The literature dubbed “miserabilist” accumulates a number of characteristics: described in brief, it explores everyday misery, marginal social worlds, the periphery and provinces, places with no horizons, petty lives, and larval existence, it focuses on grotesque and repulsive details, it cultivates an oral style, slang, and crude, direct, “indecent” or even “vulgar” expression, it dwells on the subject of sexuality to the point of being accused of “pornography”. The characters are socially déclassés or anomic: labourers, the unemployed, mutants of communism, failures, pensioners, drug addicts, alcoholics, suicides, a telephone sex line worker, listless youths, the hopeless, the disillusioned, the insolent, the bored. Thus, viewed from the outside, this is a dismembered, asocial and ugly world peopled by anti-heroes. Viewed from within, it is an “ordinary”, “normal” world, the world of (post)communist Romania. The phrasing is often direct, brisk, dry. The tone varies from neutral to sarcastic, from comprehensive to judgemental, from bloody-minded to disillusioned. The authors of such a literature are regarded as “minimalists”, “anti-elitists”, “antiintellectuals”, “miserabilists”, and sometimes as “uncultivated”. I have tried to draw up a list of the writers in whose books are presented, at least partly, the above-mentioned characteristics, without any claims to being exhaustive. In prose: Radu Aldulescu, Răzvan Petrescu, Petre Barbu, Cornel George Popa, Daniel Bănulescu, Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Sorin Stoica, Alexandru Vakulovski, Ioana Bradea, Cosmin Manolache, Adrian Schiop, Ionuţ Chiva, Dan Ţăranu, and, by your leave, the last in the list, I the undersigned. In poetry: Mihail Gălăţanu, O. Nimigean, Constantin Acosmei, Dumitru Crudu, Marius Ianuş, Dan Sociu, Ruxandra Novac... What we can easily observe is their relative heterogeneity. Different ages, generations and literary groups, and, not least, notable differences of style. “Miserabilism” is not the ideology of a particular group: we find the Nineties Generation, Fracturists, Club-Eight-ists, Millenarianists and “independents” here all together. What unites them is (with the exception of Răzvan Petrescu) a post-revolution debut and a shocking vision of reality. Plus a stigma. We have now seen in broad terms what and whom we are talking about when we speak of “miserabilism”. Now let’s move on to the reproaches. Besides “vulgarity” and “pornography”, in the press and in private discussions I have also met: “they describe an ugly world and reveal all that is ugliest in man,” “they reveal to us a misery which in any case we see on the street every day,” “I’m too well bred to read anything like that,” “things like that shouldn’t be included school textbooks”. There are, of course, many others. The accusation that their literature reflects in a direct way everyday misery seems to me the most serious, because it disqualifies it, either in the form of non-recognition of its artistic quality, or in that of framing it within a historically dated realism. This is why I think it deserves a wider-ranging discussion. The answer to this objection

is that the “miserabilists’” view of reality is not culturally innocent, it is guided by an aesthetic attitude, and the “miserabilist” depiction of the everyday perfectly inscribes itself in the logic and dynamic of the Romanian artistic field. The fall of censorship is a necessary condition, but not sufficient for the emergence of such a literature; it creates a context of freedom of expression, but it does not explain the succession of artistic forms. We know very well that artistic movements succeed each other according to a logic of distinction, both at the level of representation and of attitude. “Miserabilist” realism gains tautness and distinguishes itself, in various aspects, from the multiple literary forms practised during the communist period. It is opposed both to socialist realism and the literature obsessed with power relations, as well as to fabulist or stylistically escapist literature. Postcommunist realism cultivates the photographic negative of socialist realism (an ideological fiction, in fact), in which joyful, self-sacrificing people, under the paternal protection of the Party, built a luminous future for the homeland. To self-confident optimism and irreproachable morality with a whiff of propaganda are opposed despair, disgust, doubt, disillusion, moral misery. To problematising political realism, obsessed with the theme of power, in which characters integrated into the system, who master the jargon and logic of the regime, resolve various familial or social dilemmas, a good opportunity for “allusions” and “knowing winks”, the “miserabilists” oppose peripheral worlds, with undersocialised and apolitical characters, slang and direct expression. The power relations that describe the macro-social reality and order are replaced with the precarious relations of everyday life, in a micro-social reality dominated by disorder. Fabulist and cautious expression is replaced with directness, love of beauty with authenticity. To language that is literary at any cost and “beautiful” words are opposed recuperation of various everyday idioms and lexical democratisation. To the realism cultivated or allowed by the one-party state is opposed a post-socialist, post-traumatic realism stripped of ideology, but not lacking in personal attitude. And so, this is the context in which, with the suppression of censorship and in the logic of the succession of literary forms through distinction, colloquial language and slang have massively entered the literature of the younger generation. One of the great gains is the exploration of new zones of expression and aesthetics which, be it because of censorship, be it because of an aesthetic autonomy understood in a rigid way, had long remained in the shadow.