Andrei Codrescu's Mioritic Space

Author(s): Richard Collins

Source: MELUS, Vol. 23, No. 3, Poetry and Poetics (Autumn, 1998), pp. 83-101
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic
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Andrei Codrescu's Mioritic Space
Richard Collins
Xavier University, New Orleans

It's throughthat hole, I thought,

that I am returning to my birthplace.
-Andrei Codrescu, TheHole in the Flag

In the Romanian folk poem Miorita, a shepherd boy is warned by

his beloved ewe, Miorita, that his fellow shepherds plan to murder
him and take his flock. Instead of resisting, he accepts his fate, asking
only that Miorita go in search of his mother and tell her the story not
of how he was betrayed, but of how he was married to the daughter
of a powerful King. Thereafter, wherever the ewe wanders, she tells
the story-not the true, unadorned facts of death and betrayal, but a
beautiful fiction of a transcendent wedding.
This simple story, told and retold in countless versions, is Roma-
nia's most enduring cultural text.1 The popularity of the Miorita can
be attributed to the power and simplicity of its poetry, but even more
to its mythic structure. The myth has been used to define the Roman-
ian character by several authors, including Mircea Eliade, who has
called the "cosmic marriage" of the Miorita an example of "cosmic
Christianity"-part pagan, part Christian, but in any case wholly Ro-
manian-"dominated by a nostalgia for nature sanctified by the pres-
ence of Jesus."2But the most controversial concept of Romanian iden-
tity to be derived from the poem is the concept of "mioritic space" de-
fined by the Transylvanian poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga.
For Blaga, the path of Miorita's wandering delineates what he calls
"mioritic space," a geography of the Romanian poetic imagination,
or, as one recent historian of the Romanians describes it, "a philo-
sophical attempt to explain the Romanian spirit through the Roman-
ian landscape, which [Blaga] saw as the stylistic matrix of Romanian
culture" (Georgescu 205). Blaga's critics have charged that this con-
cept has become a liability, nationalistic, escapist and fatalistic. For
political analysts, Blaga has been criticized as a romantic aesthete,
self-absorbed and disengaged from political realities, while pursuing

MELUS, Volume 23, Number 3 (Fall 1998)

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84 RICHARD COLLINS

a mystical communion with nature.3 In this view, mioritic space is an

escapist dream of a romantic nationalist that encourages political ap-
athy. For ethnographers, it is a romantic distortion of the Romanian
peasantry's connection to the land that ignores political and histori-
cal reality. These critics suggest that it may even account for the ten-
dency of the Romanian people to suffer oppression passively: "one
'cause' of the seeming passivity of the Romanian population may be
the fatalistic Weltanschaaung implicit in the Miorita" (Kligman 356).
But to Blaga, mioritic space was simply a way of locating the Roman-
ian poetic spirit.
All these theories and criticisms may seem like much ado about a
boy and his sheep, but the story has great resonance to a country long
troubled by internal conflicts and external conquerors. It has often
been noted that Romania is, geographically, "inside-out," its moun-
tains in the interior, its plains on the borders, leaving it vulnerable to
invasion. More than once has the Romanian spirit had to take refuge
from the threats presented to its exposed borders by escaping to the
mountains and forests of its interior. When the threat was institution-
alized within its own borders during the Turkish and Communist
regimes, the Romanian spirit could survive only by going into physi-
cal (usually political) or metaphysical exile.
One such exile, both physical and metaphysical, is the Romanian-
born American poet and translator of Blaga, Andrei Codrescu. Hav-
ing fled the Stalinist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu in the mid-1960s,
Codrescu traveled to a number of European countries before embrac-
ing America, then in the throes of a mostly benevolent revolution, as
the country most likely to listen to what he had to say, in the lan-
guage that he was most likely to say it in. Since then, he has pub-
lished twenty volumes of poetry (including translations of Max Jacob
and Lucian Blaga), four volumes of fiction (including the recent best-
seller, The BloodCountess), several collections of his commentaries for
National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program, and four
volumes of memoirs. He has also starred in the documentary cult
classic film, Road Scholar, in which he wanders across America in
search of alternative lifestyles, appeared on the Nightline and David
Letterman shows, and become a Professor of English at Louisiana
State University, where he edits the lively literary magazine, Exquisite
Corpse.Throughout Codrescu's various travels and adventures, and
his accounts of them, it is clear that Blaga's concept of mioritic space
has sustained him in exile: "I left the country and changed languages
but have not stopped telling Mioritza's tale" (Outside 5).
Codrescu begins The Disappearanceof the Outside, his "manifesto for
escape," with his own version of the Miorita, not as a philosophical

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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITIC SPACE 85

idea but as a vivid childhood experience, when it was told to him at

age ten by "a thousand-year-old shepherd wrapped in a cloak of
smoke." True to the oral tradition of the poem, Codrescu improvises
on its details, but the changes are enough for him to have added an
apology to Romanian readers "pentru modul oarecum aproximativ in
care am repovestit mitul Mioritei" [for the somewhat approximate man-
ner in which I've retold the myth of Miorita] when the book was
translated into Romanian.4

One August evening in 1956, when I was ten years old, I heard a
thousand-year-old shepherd wrapped in a cloak of smoke tell a story
around a Carpathian campfire. He said that a long time ago, when
time was an idea whose time hadn't come, when the pear trees made
peaches, and when fleas jumped into the sky wearing iron shoes
weighing ninety-nine pounds each, there lived in these parts a sheep
called Mioritza.
The flock to which Mioritza belongs is owned by three brothers.
One night, Mioritza overhears the older brothers plotting to kill the
youngest in the morning, in order to steal his sheep. The young broth-
er is a dreamer, whose 'head is always in the stars.' Mioritza nestles in
his arms, and warns the boy about the evil doings and begs him to run
away. But, in tones as lyrical as they are tragic, the young poet-shep-
herd tells his beloved Mioritza to go see his mother after he is killed,
and to tell her that he didn't really die, that he married the moon in-
stead, and that all the stars were at his wedding [....] Before morning,
the older brothers murder the young shepherd, as planned. There is no
attempt to resist, no counterplot, no deviousness. Fate unfolds as fore-
told. The moon has a new husband, and the story must be known.
Mioritza wanders, looking for the boy's mother. But she tells every-
one along the way the story as well. The murder was really a wedding,
the boy married the moon, and all the stars were present [....] She nev-
er tires of the story. She laments the death of her beloved with stories
of the origin of the worlds.
Her wandering takes her across the rivers of the Carpathian moun-
tains to the Black Sea, a path that describes the natural border of Ro-
mania. Her migration defines the space of the people, a space the Ro-
manian poet Lucian Blaga called 'mioritic.' Mioritza herself is the mov-
ing border of the nation, a storytelling border whose story is borderless
and cosmic. She calls into being a place and a people that she circum-
scribes with narrative. She causes geography to spring from myth, she
contains within her space-bound body the infinity of the cosmos.
(Outside1-2)

Actually, Codrescu's version differs from the original only at a few

points. First, Codrescu describes the shepherds as "three brothers";
in the original, the shepherd protagonist is from Moldavia (consid-

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86 RICHARD COLLINS

ered the "true"Romanianheartland),while the other shepherds are

from Vrancea and Transylvania. In his own telling, Codrescu would
have us identify the shepherd boy with himself (a Transylvanian
Jew), and the others with his Romanian countrymen (Communists)
who stole his heritage and inheritance. Second, in Codrescu's version
the shepherd boy is also a poet, "a dreamer, whose 'head is always in
the stars."' This allows us, again, to sympathize with the visionary
who has a connection to nature against the (dialectical) materialist
brothers, for whom the fair Miorita is only property, so much mutton
and wool to be sheared, divided and shared; for the poet-shepherd
she is the voice of nature, his confidante and chronicler. Third, Co-
drescu's poet-shepherd is "married to the moon," while in earlier
versions the shepherd boy marries the daughter of a King at the en-
trance to a mountain (or, gura de rai, literally "the mouth of heaven,"
but actually a beautiful natural setting, like paradise), the sun and
moon acting as godparents. The significance of these variants will be-
come clear later, but what is certain is that Codrescu is making the
poem his own, through these variants, for purposes of his thesis
about the poet's role in the modern world. In either case, however,
there is "no attempt to resist, no counterplot, no new deviousness.
Fate unfolds as foretold."
How would such a "nationalist," "escapist" and "fatalistic" tale
empower an exiled Romanian writer like Codrescu to create work
that displays a power that is active, even activist, both poetically and
politically beyond the borders of his native country? I will argue that
Blaga's mioritic space not only sustained Codrescu in physical exile
but, in forming the basis of his poetic identity within a community of
metaphysical exiles, allowed him to return to Romania first in spirit
and, eventually, in the flesh. The narrative of escape and return is
variously told and retold in his several memoirs-The Life and Times
of an Involuntary Genius (1975), In America's Shoes (1983), The Disap-
pearanceof the Outside:A Manifestofor Escape(1990), and TheHole in the
Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution (1991). In each
of these, Codrescu returns almost obsessively to the Romania of his
youth. While the first two volumes are concerned with Codrescu's
assimilation into American culture (In America'sShoes concludes with
his becoming a U.S. citizen), the latter two volumes, as indicated by
their subtitles, form a set of companion volumes that might be called
"Escape and Return." In these books, Codrescu more or less con-
sciously sets out to redeem the concept of mioritic space by showing
how escape (from the Inside of any limitation or border of imagina-
tion, including ideologies such as communism and capitalism) can
actually facilitate a return (to an engagement with the reality of the

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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITICSPACE 87

Outside, where the threat of originality resides as a check and chal-

lenge to the ideology of the Inside). As Codrescu explains in a "note
to the Romanian reader"in the Romanian translation of TheDisap-
pearanceof the Outside,however, he is actually looking for a "treia
cale,"a tertium quid, or third path: "Aceastacartepunefatainfata doua
punctedevedereasupralumii,si le criticape amindoua.Se va discerne,fara
indoiala,o perspectiva'romaneasca' in efortuldea gasi o 'a treiacale,'un act
de disperarede inteles, dar si o solutie poetica"(Disparitia206). ["This
book juxtaposes two world views, and critiquesboth of them. What
we discern is, no doubt, a 'Romanian'perspective in the effort to dis-
cover a 'third path,' an act of dispersing meaning, but also a poetic
solution."]
When Codresculeft Romaniaat age nineteen, he by no means left
his birthplace behind. Along with "the sensual pleasure of the
sounds" of the Romanianlanguage (Hole86), Codrescu also internal-
ized Romanianliteraryculture,both ancientand modern.Aside from
his claim that he has not stopped telling the tale of Miorita,we may
see in his chosen name of Codrescu (he was born Andrei Perlmutter)
the trace of another traditional Romanian verse form, the doina,
which begins by addressing the forest [codrul]in the absence of other
kinship. We might say that by the time Codrescu left Romania, his
poetic sensibility (if not his distinctiveAmericanvoice and style) was
alreadylargely formed in partby these traditionalpoems, but also by
the modern Romanianwriters.5He pays homage to those writers, ex-
iled like himself and well-known in the West, like Eliade, Eugene
Ionesco and Emil Cioran, or TristanTzara and Urmuz, the founder
and presiding spirit of Dada, and to the Romanian surrealists
Gherasim Luca and Ion Vinea. Yet in a way, more important than
these were "the invisible writers"banned by the state and still virtu-
ally unknown in the West, such as Ion Barbu and Matei Caragiale,
whose work disclosed to him that the "secret of modern literature,
and the reasonwhy it was forbidden,was its autonomy"(Outside18).
Codrescu'sfirst escape, then, was metaphysical,into the invisible un-
dergroundof literature.He tells of entering the house of a Dr.M., and
finding a new world of books and ideas. "Theentrance was unpre-
possessing and humble, covered with a trellis of dying roses. But the
inside!" Inside, he finds the books of "the invisible writers," but
above all "the poetry and philosophy of LucianBlaga,"which made
him feel "suddenly transportedto anotherworld, comparedto which
the shabby one we lived in was but two-dimensional bleakness [....]
Here once more was a sacred realm like Mioritza's, which made no
bargains with the profane"(Outside17-18).Thus Codrescu's first es-
cape was intoRomania,into a timeless realmlinking the autonomy of

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88 RICHARD COLLINS

modern literature with the community and ecology of the ancient

Miorita.
Tobe effective, escape-inward or outward-had to be not merely
from an oppressive regime, but from all oppressive authority,and to
autonomy and self-determination.So when Codresculeft Romaniain
1966,just four years after Blaga was allowed to publish again briefly
before his death, one piece of the cultural patrimony that he smug-
gled into America was Blaga's notion of "mioriticspace." Exile is a
great preservative. Cut off from their native soil, cultural customs,
rituals,myths and even dialects often develop very differentlyfor ex-
iles than they do for those who remain behind. This applies to art
forms and philosophical notions, as well, whose glory may fade in
the place of origin, but when transplanted may take on an added
splendor. Certainly,for Codrescu in America,mioritic space was not
subject to the ideological weather of a changing Romania.What be-
came there a "fatalisticWeltanschauung"reflectingpassivity and de-
feat, in Americabecame Codrescu'sspecial brand of poetic activism,
a poetic projectwithout national boundaries. Perhaps the notion of
mioritic space could be preserved and developed only in this way-
by a Romanianwriter in exile, whom it in turn sustained.
As he refashioned his identity into that of an American poet, Co-
drescu cherished Blaga's interpretationof the ancient poem, trans-
planting this seed into the soil of Americanpoetry and translatingthe
myth into his new idiom. As a political exile, Codrescurejectsthe au-
thority of government and police, but as a latter-daysurrealisthe also
rejectsthe authorityof history and fact, even in the events of his per-
sonal history.The "deimiurge"of Codrescu'screativeidentity is Lu-
cian Blaga, whose purpose was "the enlargement of mystery."6 In
Blaga's poetry Codrescu sees "constructsfor the transportof seeds"
(Yearningxv), and these continue to blossom in Codrescu's poetic
myth-makinglong afterhis arrivalin America.7
Several philosophers and ethnographershave linked the "mioritic
marriage"of the folk poem with the Transylvaniannuntamortului,or
death-wedding. According to Gail Kligman in The Weddingof the
Dead:Ritual,Poeticsand PopularCulturein Transylvania (1988), "Both
of these cultural texts-the death-wedding and the Miorita-offer a
dramatic resolution to threatening circumstances [....] Temporarily
disordered relations between the living and the dead, and between
culture and nature, as well as between the sexes, are reordered[....]
The Mioritaencourages an imaginative, philosophical approach to
the comprehensionof paradox,notably that of sexuality and mortali-
ty united. By the conclusion of each of these symbolic expressive
forms, an 'other' is incorporatedinto the realm of the familiar"(Klig-

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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITICSPACE 89

man 245). For the immigrant leaving behind one culture for another,
the importance of ritual and myth as a symbolic "resolution to threat-
ening circumstances" should be readily apparent. For the immigrant
Romanian writer, the Miorita takes on particular significance since it
speaks directly to the business of storytelling.
For Codrescu, Miorita's wandering "causes geography to spring
from myth" as she tells her story to everyone along the way. In the
progress of her narrative, Miorita takes the center with her to the cir-
cumference, "the moving border of a storytelling nation, a story-
telling border whose story is borderless and cosmic," calling into be-
ing "a place and a people that she circumscribes with narrative." In
the same way, Codrescu takes the center of his origin with him into
the "storytelling nation" of metaphysical exile. In exile, however, the
necessity for escape is not resolved. On the contrary, the freedom of
exile becomes another sort of limiting enclosure to escape from. The
only solution, for Codrescu, was to forge a kind of metaphysical
passport that would allow him to return to his homeland at will, to
come and go, so to speak, through the window of imagination, to the
(mioritic) space of his enchained homeland, which is metaphysically
exiled from itself. It is not that freedom is illusory, but that the basis
of freedom is not to be found in any actual country, but in the "geog-
raphy of the poetic imagination."
This brings into focus one of the curious characteristics of Codres-
cu's harkening back to his Romanian poetic identity. It is almost en-
tirely devoid of nostalgia, or the Romanian dor. For the modern
Greek wanderers Seferis, Elytis and Kazantzakis, the Odyssey serves a
centering function similar to the Romanian's Miorita, with this differ-
ence: the locus for the Greek writer's homesickness is a geographical
nostalgia. Nothing less than a physical return to the landscape will
do. For the Alexandrian Cavafy, alienation is inherent in the Greek
city on Egyptian soil; return is necessarily ahistorical and metaphori-
cal. In this way, Blaga resembles Cavafy, for as Codrescu has said,
"Blaga's exile consisted in an acute yearning for the very place where
he was" (Yearningxvi).8 But the Greek Odysseus is a hero, almost su-
perhuman, while Miorita and her master are defenseless fatalists-
poets, in short. In the transcendental mythology of the Romanian
Miorita, the poet-shepherd marries out of this world, he does not re-
turn to the nostos. He is the emigre par excellence, leaving the world
without nostalgia, accepting alienation as his fate, and creating a new
nostos in the margin between inside and outside. Miorita herself is
confined to the border, a marginalized and mobile center, whose cen-
ter is defined by the circumference, that is from the outside, or from
the dual identity conferred by the line separating inside from outside.

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90 RICHARD COLLINS

Codrescu's memory of the tale of Miorita becomes the point of de-

parture for the narrative of his life, the inscribed line of memory, a
memory all the more deeply ingrained for his absence from the Ro-
manian landscape. Near the end of his first autobiography, The Life
and Times of an Involuntary Genius (1975), Codrescu leaves New York
for California on an impulse, with his wife Alice who is pregnant
with their first child, and a German named Erhard. On the way, they
compose a poem together, a collaborative poem that echoes Whit-
man, called "a song for the Average Joe":
The electricfan makes him feel guilty
And the chairdoes too
The sofa does nothing except
Hold a dead yew
But the stove smells like hair
The window is unbearable
He'll throw himself out of it
Like a darlingvegetable!
But instead he'll do a flip and
Throwhimself against the wall
The fridge slams on his rocks
And his head becomes a hole.

The poem demonizes the furniture of domesticity, humanizes the ul-

tra-American appliances, brings the Outside inside and turns the In-
side out, as though Codrescu has struck a pact with his memory of
Romania and the immediacy of the American landscape in the same
way that the mioritic marriage strikes a pact with nature, sex and
death. Here is the internalized guilt of the Old World married to the
horror of the Modern, evoked in the image of the Holocaust: "the
stove smells like hair" (an ironic image, since the Romanian Jew and
his American wife are collaborating on a poem with a German).
When the Outside is revealed to be a domestic American interior fur-
nished with appliances of the Old World, the window of escape be-
comes "unbearably" attractive and beckons to him to jump; this is the
interior call of memory, for "The memory of the outside is also a form
of interiority: the outside resides in memory" (Outside 198). The play
on words in "The sofa does nothing except / Hold a dead yew" sug-
gests a lost identity (a dead you), or a lost heritage (a dead Jew), each
associated with the storytelling sheep who preserves identity (a dead
ewe), while also conjuring up a lost but remembered tradition in Ro-
manian poetry in which the poet addresses the wood, codrul (a dead
yew), in absence of other kinship. All of these rhymes, moreover,
echo the name Codrescu (a dead Steiu, his first nom de plume).

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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITICSPACE 91

Immediately after composing this poem, Alice and Andrei and Er-
hard cross the Sierra Nevadas into California, which Andrei notes is
"as mythical [...] as New York is to the Rumanians, as mythical as
Transylvania." As if to identify the myth more specifically as mioritic,
they pick up a hitchhiker who takes them to a "moon feast," actually
a pagan orgy for "the last virgin moon before they send their man
up." Like the mioritic marriage that reconciles man and nature, sexu-
ality and death, time and eternity, this orgy in the name of technolo-
gy results in a kind of transcendence: "Time had disappeared. They
were suspended. California had a feeling of [...] well, postmortem
peace" (Life& Times184-85). This spontaneous pagan ritual abolishes
time, just as the death-wedding, in Kligman's view, abolishes time
through a symbolization of the symbol, which is in the telling of the
story.9 "The old story," Codrescu writes of the Miorita, "was a time
machine that abolished time," a "mythic" machine "that erased the
borders between man and what created him" (Outside 5).10
The next and penultimate section of Life and Times contains a re-
vealing passage on translation. In a pyrotechnic display of free asso-
ciation, Codrescu defines translation as "an instinct not an interroga-
tion." After a poetry reading for the inmates at Folsom Prison, "he
knew that only one translation was possible: freedom." This instinc-
tual freedom buries itself within in the products of invention, of cre-
ation, and of procreation, since "contrary to [the] expectations" of
"the political barbed wire of his times, the revolutions, etc., [...] Alice
carried inside her a fantastic translation. Codrescu had translated
himself already into a version of America. His body had grown larg-
er. His memory was a blur" (Life & Times 189). The coherence of Co-
drescu's vision-if not, indeed, his prophecy-is extraordinary. For
this passage connects his past and future in a "high moment" of au-
tobiographical revelation. Miorita expanded the poetic geography of
the Romanian imagination, Blaga sought "the enlargement of mys-
tery," and Codrescu's "body had grown larger," as though in sympa-
thy with his wife's procreative translation, who would be born Lu-
cian Codrescu. Fifteen years after the birth of Lucian, that "fantastic
translation," Codrescu fulfilled the metaphor by translating the poet-
ry of his own literary father, Lucian Blaga.
Before leaving Bucharest, Codrescu had drunkenly orated to his
fellow students how the curves of wandering could never be closed
to make circles: "Listen to me, all you carnivorous, hell-bound idiots!
Whoever it was who told you about curves becoming circles, lied,
and the lie, er, becomes, burp, a lot more trivial when one, er, looks,
burp, at Communism, this terrific, er, burp, idea, burp, moving to the
beat of a great human, burp sweat puddle...." The speech sputters

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92 RICHARD COLLINS

into incoherence and maudlin sentimentality, ending on a note of lost

identity: "I had no father, burp, and no one here did...where is the
gold?" (Life & Times 97). Where, in one sense, is his father who gave
him the name of Goldmutter?11 Where, in another sense, is the al-
chemical transformation of the given thing, identical with itself, into
the valuable stuff of created identity?
By the time they get to San Francisco, however, "Everything came
in circles," including his pregnant wife Alice. He has a dream, and he
is pregnant too, and "inside him there is a big empty bus driven by
his father," which stops and picks up various people, "fictions he had
created" (Life & Times 188). In the dream, life and literature merge.
The empty bus that picks up "created" passengers is an apt figure for
the various poetic personae he had created for himself in New York,
and for the endless collaborations with others he had practiced, "in-
cessantly, obsessively, losing themselves in the new human combina-
tions they invented" as they "yielded their identities in favor of their
creations" (Life & Times 178). The driver of this dream bus is his fa-
ther, but which father? The father of "where is the gold?" It seems
clear that the bus is a literary bus, and the driver is not his biological
father, who is lost to him, but his literary father, Lucian Blaga, after
whom he will name his own son. Blaga drives the magic bus, Mior-
itza, into new territory for Codrescu to explore, the boundaries of his
Romanian-American poetic landscape.
Thus, the effect of Blaga's mioritic space for the Romanian writer
in exile is to expand the mystery. Codrescu's mioritic space rejects all
nationalistic, political or ideological interpretations of it. As it is nur-
tured in the early picaresque autobiography Life and Times, and de-
veloped in the memoir-essay The Disappearanceof the Outside, not as a
philosophical idea, but as a manifesto for escape, mioritic space de-
scribes an autonomous realm of individual and communal freedom.
Codrescu's view is not fatalistic in the least, perhaps because he treats
Blaga's idea not as theory but as a survival tactic. The Disappearanceof
the Outside might have been subtitled a Guidebook to Mioritic Space.
Codrescu exchanges the passivity of the poet-shepherd for the travel-
ing clothes of Miorita herself, the boy's confidante and confederate.
More importantly, Miorita is his creation who continues to recreate
him with each telling of the tale. Just as poems are the disguise of the
poet, so the sheep is the disguise of the shepherd. Thus Codrescu,
"the sonofabitch from the woods" becomes a wolf in sheep's cloth-
ing, telling the story of the fatalist who allowed himself to be killed
only to be immortalized in the story.
The choice between poetics and politics, visionary escape versus
realistic engagement, sets up a false dichotomy. For Codrescu it is

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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITICSPACE 93

simply a matter of translatingromanticself-absorptionand aesthetic

detachment into the political arena of the imagination, changing the
world not by providing a vision for those without vision (politics, es-
sentially),but by providing a space in which everyone is encouraged
to provide his own vision. To do this, one must be willing to give up
one life, one land, and to go underground, or abroad. It may be a
symbolic death, like Codrescu's,or literal,like the shepherd-boywho
must die for the story to be told. The shepherd becomes a poet in
sheep's clothing to keep the wolves of coercion and conformity at
bay. In short, poetic activism in the form of a metaphysicalliberation
front, a resistancemovement of the imagination.12
It might be argued that Codrescu'smost significant creationalong
these lines is his long- running magazine, ExquisiteCorpse,a "journal
of books and ideas," later changed to the more accurate "journalof
letters and life." Named for the surrealistmethod of artisticcollabo-
ration, cadavre exquis, popular with the Romanian surrealists
Gherasim Luca, Gellu Naum, Virgil Teodorescuand Paul Paun, Ex-
quisiteCorpseis a combinationof communal expression and personal
signature.Indeed, it is a unique combinationof ancient and modern
Romanian influences, combining the oral tradition of the Miorita
along with the printed tradition of the Dada, Surrealist, and Mod-
ernist movements. The oral tale's power resides in the communal
recognition of its value, its repetition denying the value of mere ro-
mantic self-absorption, while individual variations on the original
text encourage creativitywithin the formal or narrativeboundaries.13
An underground magazine, ExquisiteCorpsewelcomes the voices of
the dispossessed, and its popularity and perpetuation depends on
word-of-mouthadvertisement.(Below its copyrightnotice, for exam-
ple, is the statement: "Weforbid reproductionbut authorize memo-
rization"-appropriate for a magazine with aspirations to oral im-
mortality.)In fact, ExquisiteCorpseis more "mioritic"than surrealist
in that the collaborativemethod of the surrealistsis put to use less as
an example of individual psychic automatism than as a professed
"collaborationwith culture."In printed form, and for Westerneyes,
the communal alternativecultureof ExquisiteCorpseconverts the oral
tradition of Codrescu's native Romania into the printed currencyof
Westernintellectualand culturalexchange, and its popularityproves
that word-of-mouth still has a value that approximates that of oral
culture.
The appearance of ExquisiteCorpsein 1983 signaled a new forum
for an alternative communal utterance. Its format, in the distinctive
shape of a coffin, seemed suitable for an "underground"magazine
with the name of a cadaver.On one level, this was an accession to the

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94 RICHARD COLLINS

most popular Western myth about Romania, Dracula. "By naming

our baby a 'corpse,"' writes Codrescu, "we had created something
that was generically incapable of dying."14But the magazine owes its
shape less to the portable flowerbed of Transylvanian soil that Drac-
ula dreamed on, than to the Romanian Modernist poet Tudor
Arghezi and his "long skinny newspaper," Bilete de Papagal, "whose
mixture of muckraking and high tone bohemianism had brought
down two governments" (Stiffest 1).
Within this ironic format Codrescu created his own mioritic
space,15 "a moving border of a nation, a storytelling border whose
story is borderless and cosmic," each contributor calling into being "a
place and a people that she circumscribes with narrative," causing
"geography to spring from myth," while containing "within her
space-bound body the infinity of the cosmos." In the maiden issue
Codrescu declared: "We collaborate with culture" (Stiffest 3). Here, at
last, was a suitably metaphysical forum where everyone's story
could be told, and so "a Corpse community came into being" (Stiffest
3). To these writers of the metaphysical diaspora, "The issues were
not personal; culture was at stake" (Stiffest 1). Thus the oral and meta-
physical concerns of the Romanian folk tale were successfully trans-
planted into the American grain and given an American texture. Each
issue of the magazine is a chorus of voices from the grave by those
who, like the poet-shepherd who is translated into the sheep's tale,
have been translated into a state of expressive marginality.
What ExquisiteCorpseis, then, is a cultural collaboration, a commu-
nal alternative culture, an on-going anthology of metaphysical exiles,
a flock of voluble mioritic sheep. In one sense, this has been the real
work of Codrescu's life, creating a community of expression in which
everyone is his own Miorita, providing a space for the narrative con-
struction of a communal alternative utterance. In a way, Codrescu's
collaborative method is a postmodern revival of the oral tradition, a
hip marriage between the surrealist method and the mioritic myth
with the intent of reuniting the estranged brothers of the myth with-
in a narrative universe created in absentiaby the exiled young broth-
er, the dreamer with his head in the stars.
In America in the 1980s, Codrescu sensed a sort of metaphysical
diaspora, and he was right. After the communal orgy of the Sixties
came the retrenchment of the Seventies and Eighties. As he puts it in
In America'sShoes, the crack in the cosmic egg had closed up, cutting
off another channel of freedom.16 In Pe Culmile Disperarii [On the
Peaks of Despair], published in 1934, Emil Cioran had described him-
self as a "metaphysical exile."17Codrescu describes America in the
1980s as a place of "metaphorical exiles": "Times of great freedom

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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITICSPACE 95

breed metaphorical exiles, while times of repression breed literal ex-

iles" (Outside 47). There was now a general sense of metaphorical and
metaphysical exile, and his magazine became a place where contrib-
utors could voice their cultural alienation and their longing for "in-
ner emigration" (William Levy, in Stiffest 123), a place where one
might even fashion "a weapon of acute discontinuity" (Robert Kelly,
in Stiffest236). From such a position of armed marginality, it might be
possible to erode the center and thereby "short-circuit the imaginary
globe," which is, as Codrescu concludes in his manifesto of escape,
the poet's "job" (Outside 207).
Exiles like Codrescu, Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie know
that poetry and narrative are not just aesthetic pastimes. All art-but
especially art created in exile-is inherently political because the
imagination recognizes no boundaries and allows everyone's story to
be told.18The imaginative reconstruction of the world is ultimately a
poetic feat beyond politics. Both politics and art have an aesthetic di-
mension that also engages the arena of social and political action.
Neither art nor politics adequates reality, each being a competing
medium for visions of what is real. Whereas politics tends to close off
avenues of escape and return, however, art tends to open them. Co-
drescu's escape from Romania was aesthetic and political, metaphor-
ical as well as metaphysical, through an imagined hole in the flag.
His return was simply through the actual hole that he on the outside,
along with other Romanians on the inside, had imagined into being.
The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolu-
tion (1990) was commissioned to take advantage of the events and af-
termath of the sensational fall of Ceausescu. Codrescu was rushed to
Romania and wrote the book at white heat during and immediately
after the December Revolution of 1989, in which he was able to play a
small part. But it is more than an "instant book," like those devoted
to Patty Hearst, Saddam Hussein, or O.J. Simpson, bundled to mar-
ket while they were still news. Codrescu's book is an extended, if
somewhat hurried, reflection of his entire life as a Romanian in exile.
As James McNeill Whistler said at the famous art libel trial of 1878,
his paintings were not the product of a few hours labor, pots of paint
flung at the canvas, as Ruskin had claimed, but contained "the
knowledge of a lifetime."
While the book was generally well received in America, negative
reactions to The Hole in the Flag in Romania come from two groups,
American scholars or diplomats who fault the book for certain histor-
ical and sometimes geographical inaccuracies (since corrected in the
paperback edition), and Romanian intellectuals who fault the book
for a certain sentimentality in Codrescu's perception of their country.

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96 RICHARD COLLINS

But The Hole in the Flag does not pose as an authoritative history of
the Romanian Revolution. The book was not meant as either politics
or journalism. As the subtitle suggests, it is one of Codrescu's several
autobiographies, "A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolu-
tion." His impressions are of a country that is only partly historical or
geographical, and largely, as Codrescu confesses, a mythical creation
of his own mind in exile. Codrescu is a poet, first and always,
whether delivering a commentary on National Public Radio, taking
us on a tour of Bathory's castle in The BloodCountess (1995), or report-
ing the Romanian Revolution. He never pretends to stick to the facts,
even when they are the "facts" of his life.19
The title refers to the space left in the Romanian flag after the Com-
munist Party emblem was cut out, first in protest, then in confirma-
tion of the fall of Ceausescu, but Codrescu sees the hole in the flag
with the eyes of a poet. The political gesture is translated into a poet-
ic symbol: an emblem for his escapes and returns. Codrescu had been
fond of saying that after he left Romania, he was banned from re-en-
tering the country even through the squares in crossword puzzles, so
his return through the hole in the flag has a certain symmetry: "It's
through that hole, I thought, that I am returning to my birthplace"(Hole
67). The avenue of his escape was as metaphysical as his return was
literal. So when the new Romanian flags began to appear of whole
cloth, without the hole as a reminder, Codrescu was troubled. Twen-
ty years after he had escaped, he was now able to return, and his
countrymen were already trying to close up that symbolic space.
Knowing how fleeting rebellion can be, how short-lived indepen-
dence, and how fragile memory, Codrescu wondered how they
would be reminded of what they had literally and figuratively gone
through?Once they closed the aperture of vision, what visible symbol
would there be to remind them to keep open the avenue of visionary
escape, the mioritic space, which is also the aperture of reconciliation
and return?
Codrescu prefaced his anthology of contemporary American poet-
ry, AmericanPoetry Since 1970: Up Late,with a poem by Kay Boyle that
begins:
Poets, minor or major,should arrangeto remainslender,
Cling to their skeletons, not batten
on provender,not fattenthe lean spirit
In its isolated cell, its solitarychains. (17)

The shepherd-boy in Miorita, who Codrescu insists is a poet, is

described as similarly slender: "Who knows, / Who has seen / A

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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITICSPACE 97

proud shepherd boy / Slender enough to slip through a ring?"

Boyle's poem ends with an admonition to poets, but it might be to all
exiles, metaphysical,metaphorical,or literal.Codrescuseems to have
taken Boyle's admonition to heart in all his work, in all his mani-
festoes for escape and memoirs of return,as well as in his roles as edi-
tor of ExquisiteCorpse,and as geographerof mioriticspace: "Poets,re-
memberyour skeletons. / In youth or dotage, remainlight as ashes."
The combinationof memory and loss, in which the outside is inter-
nalized to make it portable, is an absolute value for the exile and a
dominant motif in Codrescu's memoirs. The past is sacred, but it is
also gone. Only narrativebrings it back into being.
'Childhoodis over,'said God,lookingat him throughhis mother's
eyes, throughthe eye of a buildinghe passedon his way home and
throughan eye in the sky.
'Thehellit is,' saidtheDevil.'Forthesakeof prose,someeyesmustbe
mercifullyremoved.'(Life&Times83)
This parable shows us the dialogue between the cosmic transcen-
dence in the myth of Mioritaand the communist interdictionagainst
full consciousness. The vision of the young poet passes through a
window of escape, "throughan eye in the sky."But poetry and tran-
scendence are not enough, and may even result in exile. Every av-
enue of escape should be thrown open wide. The Devil of the prosaic
would have us close up avenues of escape; the poet Codrescu wants
them left open, if only to remind us to stay slender enough to slip
through them.
Codrescu'sstatus as a popular commentatorand best-selling nov-
elist in the Gothic tradition should not prevent us from grasping the
importanceof his contributionas an activist in the ongoing process of
cultural politics. Addressing different (if often over-lapping) audi-
ences in each of the media and genres he works in, Codrescuremains
a delightfully subversive influence in American culture. Like other
immigrant exiles, from the Marx brothers to Nabokov, Codrescu is
not only carefulnot to forget where he came from, he is incapable of
doing so. Haunted by a notion of freedom that was born in the mists
of Transylvaniaand bred in the specific milieu of an undergroundlit-
erary community in Communist Romania,he has taken the myth of
Mioritaand Blaga's reading of it and retold it along every avenue of
the Americanmedia. In doing so, he enacts the redefinitionof the Ro-
manian cultural space, which now overlaps that of America. Like so
many other valuable contributionsto the multi-ethnicmix of Ameri-
ca, Andrei Codrescu'smioritic space reminds us of the essential val-

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98 RICHARD COLLINS

ue of freedom, the necessity to constantly reaffirm it, and, whenever

and wherever necessary, to recreate it.

Notes
1. Mircea Eliade has said that Romania has only two legends of its own, Miorita
and Master Manole, each preserved in "lyrical and ballad masterpieces" (25).
Of the two, however, it is probably Miorita that belongs most specifically to
Romania, the Master Manole legend having variants throughout the Balkan
region, in Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece. It is, however, possible that the
Miorita legend has its origins in the Thracian myth of Orpheus.
2. Quoted by Kligman (358). Elsewhere, Eliade states the idea thus: "the shep-
herd accepts death as a voluntary self-sacrifice which is also supplied with the
significance of a cosmic marriage, that is, the supreme value of reconciliation
with one's destiny and reintegration into a no longer 'pagan' Nature, but
rather a liturgical sanctified Cosmos" (37).
3. "According to Blaga, the Romanian's is a mystical existence of reunion with
nature and its contemplation, which involves disregarding or ignoring histo-
ry's temporal dimensions, but remaining conscious of one's own spiritual eter-
nity" (Shafir 405).
4. Codrescu, "Nota pentru cititorul roman"[Note for the Romanian Reader], an af-
terword to the Romanian translation of The Disappearanceof the Outside (Dis-
paritia 206). Translations from Romanian are my own, unless otherwise noted.
5. Codrescu has noted (somewhat disingenuously, perhaps) that he is often mis-
taken for a surrealist "by people who wouldn't know a surrealist if one came
steaming out of their mouths at a French restaurant" because of the Romanian
echoes in his American idiom. "What people usually mistake for surrealism is
a different way of speaking. The metaphorical echoes of Romanian into Eng-
lish sound surreal. By that token, anyone sounding strange to a listener is a
surrealist: we are all each other's surrealists [....] But I am not a surrealist: I am
a Romanian, in exile" (Outside 158).
6. "Our duty, when faced by a true mystery," [Blaga] writes, "is not to explain it,
but to deepen it, to transform it into a greater mystery." Quoted by Codrescu in
the introduction to his translation of Blaga's poetry (Yearningxiv).
7. Codrescu's literary allegiances are reflected in the names he gave to his sons,
the first-born Lucian (after Blaga), and the second-born Tristan (after Tzara).
Codrescu's only volume of translation from his native tongue is the poetry of
Blaga.
8. Codrescu is comparing Blaga to Rilke, "these two poets whose sensibilities lay
in a great desire to disappear in the mythic collective unconscious. Both felt
their condition as one of exile, but where Rilke was in fact an exile, Blaga's ex-
ile consisted in an acute yearning for the very place where he was. This place,
moreover, retains the imprint of myth in its vacated shell."
9. H. Stahl in Eseuri critice (1983) describes the transformational relationship be-
tween the cosmic marriage of the Miorita and that of the ritual death-wedding
as a "symbolization of the symbolic." This "symbolization of the basic symbols
elevates the general level of the verses to that of highly developed and en-
chanting poetry" (Kligman 166).
10. Codrescu echoes the time machine image in his comments on Blaga: "The
lovers who populate Blaga's woods and villages are constructs for the trans-

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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITIC SPACE 99

port of seeds, quickly unraveling time machines intended to return the world
to ecstatic nonbeing" (Yearningxv-xvi).
11. Codrescu's name at birth was Perlmutter, Goldmutter being his alter-ego in
this book. One of his first pen-names in Romania was Steiu, but this was easily
mistaken for Stein, another Jewish surname. Later in the book, during another
besotted evening, he changes his name again, at the urging of a drunken heck-
ler, to Codrescu, which the drunk approximately translates as "sonofabitch
from the woods." By dropping the Jewish surname Perlmutter (or Goldmut-
ter) for the Romanian Codrescu (so close to the anti-Semitic Legionnaire's
name of Codreanu), he takes on a disguise, just as one of his literary heroes,
Sammy Rosenstock, became the mysterious Tristan Tzara. The name Codrescu
is particularly appropriate for a Romanian exile, especially a Jew, because, as
Gail Kligman notes, in Romanian literature "the forest [codrul]is often the con-
fidant of humans" in the absence of other kinship. The poet disappears into the
mythic mist of the forest. Like Miorita, the poem tells not the literal truth of the
matter but the self-created myth, the dead poet's story.
12. "If we are unable to defend our imaginations," Codrescu writes in In America's
Shoes, "we are quickly going to turn to fascism" (58). On a more humorous but
similar note, Codrescu claims to be "a member in good standing of LEV-Lib-
eration Vampire Euphoria" (Outside viii).
13. In the oral transmission of a cultural text like the Miorita, repetition binds a di-
verse community in time and space. Individual improvisation is not, however,
frowned upon. It is, in fact, encouraged, as can be seen in the many versions of
the Miorita, which is sung as a Christmas carol, as well as in the death-wed-
ding's versi, poetic recitations for the dead chanted by friends and loved ones
of the bride or groom of Death. Much of the appreciation of the cultural text is,
indeed, based on the individual's embroidery on the basic or original text.
One's depth of feeling, as well as one's understanding of the ritual, is demon-
strated in such personal touches. From within the oral culture, in fact, feeling
and understanding (personality and community) are inseparable and come to-
gether in the ritual of poetic expression.
14. Codrescu adds: "tired of its endless vitality, I wanted to run away from it. I
went as far as to purchase a stake and a silver bullet" (Stiffest 1-2).
15. Ironically, The Stiffestof the Corpsegathers together in a "best of" format notable
pieces from the magazine. It is ironic because the anthology form dampens the
spontaneous and contemporaneous spirit of the magazine by valorizing some
works as "stiffer" (more "timeless") than others, and detracts from the com-
munal character of the magazine by highlighting some authors over the en-
semble, as more "worthy" than others. The selection, then, contradicts the
premise of the magazine, which is founded on a belief in the explosive power
of the spontaneous utterance of the group. Such are the ironies of "under-
ground" successes in America, as so many rock bands have found.
16. Describing the disappearance of the spontaneity of the 1960's and the re-
trenchment of the 1980's, Codrescu writes: "those were the days of the rapidly
closing crack through which light had miraculously squeezed [....] Today the
crack is closed and you can take all the LSD in the world-there is nothing
there" (Shoes 58-59).
17. Aside from Blaga, Codrescu has claimed Cioran to be the greatest influence on
his work, with his aphoristic style and pessimistic philosophy that "signs off
the nineteenth century." He cites in particular Cioran's first book, published at
age 23, about the elation of suicide, On the Heights of Despair (1934). But it

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100 RICHARD COLLINS

seems clear that Cioran was a later discovery, admired, emulated, but never
approached with the same sympathy that Blaga inspired. Cioran lived long
enough to bless Codrescu's magazine as "a full-blooded corpse" (Stiffest 17).
18. As Kundera puts it in his "Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe," "it is
precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of oth-
ers that man becomes an individual. The novel is the imaginary paradise of in-
dividuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth [...] but where
everyone has the right to be understood" (159). Both Kundera and Rushdie,
the latter in his Herbert Read Memorial Lecture entitled "Is Nothing Sacred?"
(see Rushdie Imaginary Homelands), have defined narrative, and specifically
the novel, as the ideally democratic realm where all stories can be told. Mikhail
Bakhtin's theory of the novel as a space reserved for-and brought into being
by-a cultural context of "heteroglossia" is applicable to these exiles' ideas
about the uses and importance of narrative, particularly the novel; but these
ideas can also be applied to Codrescu's communal narrative comprised of in-
dividual voices or "glosses" on culture (in Romanian, voice is glas). Bakhtin's
third "basic characteristic" of the novel, for example, is defined by a metaphor
of open space: "the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary im-
ages, namely, the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contempo-
rary reality) in all its openendedness." Bakhtin goes on to say that the novel is
defined by "a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its
emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf and semipatriarchal so-
ciety, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relation-
ships" (842). This may explain why Romania, which has remained "a socially
isolated and culturally deaf and semipatriarchal society," has never excelled in
the novel form, but has clung to poetry as its national cultural expression, from
the poet of the Miorita to Mihai Eminescu.
19. Codrescu prides himself on keeping his identity in flux. (See Russo 1988) His
autobiographies often contradict each other, and not only in fact. Memories are
blurred, images overlap, revelations are transposed. As he explains in In Amer-
ica's Shoes, "The Romanian layer" of his experience is "simultaneously real and
unreal. Mythologized a number of times, it rested securely in the glass jars of
historico-psychological compromise" (36). Creating masks to evade an author-
itarian regime became a habit, helpful in evading all regimes. It was a simple
step to the proliferation of poetic personae. Authorities (critics) are notorious-
ly literal-minded. His security was assured by their taking his self-creating
myths (armor) at face value. In "De Rerum Natura," a prose poem about con-
tributor's notes to magazines, he says that the publication of his poems allows
him to create mythical authors, and so "With this secret method of defying
birth controls I populate the world with poets" (Up Late 84-85).

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