Beyond the Nation: Mircea Cărtărescu's Europeanism and Cosmopolitanism

Author(s): Christian Moraru

Source: World Literature Today , Jul. - Aug., 2006, Vol. 80, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 2006), pp.
41-45
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40159140

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 currents
Romanian
Literature Beyond
the Nation
Mircea Cartarescu's Europeanism and Cosmopolitanism

CHRISTIAN MORARU

Born in 1956, Romanian novelist,

poet, and critic Mircea Cartarescu
teaches literature at the Univer-
sity of Bucharest. His most notable
works include such novels as Nos-
talgia, first published as Visul (The
dream) in 1989 and reissued in its
original, uncensored form in 1993,
Travesti (1994; Disguise), and Orbi-
tor (vol. 1, 1996; vol. 2, 2002; Daz-
zling); the short-story collection De Sometimes I feel that the
ce iubim femeile (2005; Why we whole world is my country
love women); the verse collections and just in Romania am I
Faruri, vitrine, fotografii (1980; among strangers. In Bucha-
Headlights, shopwindows, photos) rest, I live on exile's bitter
and Totul (1985; All); the essay fare.
collections Pururi tinar, infa§urat - Mircea C&rt&rescu,
in pixeli (2003; Forever young, "Painea amara a exilului"
wrapped in pixels) and Baroane! (Exile's bitter fare)
(2005; Yo, your highness!); and
criticism {Postmodern ism u I roma-
nesc [1999; Romanian postmod-
ernism]). His works have been
translated into many languages
and have received major inter-
national prizes. An English trans-
lation of Nostalgia was published
by New Directions in 2005.

his 2003 essay "Europa are forma creierului meu" (Europe is shaped like
my brain), Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu proclaims: "I speak for no
one but myself; the only country I represent is my writings. I could be Por-
tuguese, Estonian, or Swiss; I could be man or woman, Greek or barbarian.
Of course, my writings' texture would adjust accordingly, but their spirit
would stay the same/'1 Widely circulated in the original and in transla-
tion, the article bears witness to the cosmopolitanism on the rise in Romania after
communism's downfall. Fueling this cosmopolitan pathos is a propensity to see
oneself as other and one's place as part of a vaster geography. This predisposition is
political not because it chimes in with EU and NATO "integration," the mot d'ordre
of Romanian foreign policy since the mid-1990s, but because Cartarescu calls into
question the national imaginary "order" itself, asking - before endorsing the coun-
try's incorporation into a greater political body - how the nation has been imagined

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42 Currents

and what the implications of those imaginings are. ossifying way of figuring self and other, the individual
Envisaging a post-Berlin Wall, united Europe's politi- and its community, sex, gender, and ethnicity, their
cal body that would incorporate Romania presupposes, spaces, times, and meanings.
he contends, a critical anatomy of the nation's own This is still an uphill battle, because Cartarescu's
body politic and politics in general. To step across the cosmopolitan counterproject jars with a resilient tradi-
borders into an ampler ensemble, one must first break tion both inside and outside Romania. Internally, the
the mold of inherited national self -representation - and traditional paradigms of nation and culture, obsolete as
thus break with certain prescriptions of collective iden- they may be, remain something to contend with long
tity. Accordingly, Cartarescu takes on two conventions after the official demise of communism. Externally, the
simultaneously, two equally political ways of refiguring writer must overcome expectations regarding the arts
the body politic: its space as well as its makeup. In the and cultural practices in the former communist bloc.
past, he has done it consistently in such poetry collec- In the postcommunist era, the ongoing hegemony of
tions as Totul (All); in his fiction, which took Europe the nationalist model and East European ethnic strife,
by storm following the 1993 novel Nostalgia;2 as well as in particular, have consolidated in the West a set of
in criticism. Of late, he has turned to feuilletons, op-ed assumptions about what the East European writer
pieces, and interviews for more direct ways of shaping should be like. Based on them, according to Cartarescu,
the public debate around such hot-button issues. a new division is about to replace previous walls and
As Cartarescu and other Romanian writers of the curtains and threatens to muffle his voice, put new
constraints on what he can be, and prevent others from
so-called Eighties Generation have emphasized repeat-
seeing who he truly is. Thus, he points out that a new,
edly, the nation as both geographical and political body
are burdensome legacies. Both had been aggressively
convenient "othering" of Eastern Europe is afoot. East
policed by the former socialist-nationalist regime European
and lands and people, artists like himself included,
are seen as completely determined by past and present
others before it. After 1989, a motley coalition of old-
time apparatchiks, neocommunists, nationalists,history,
and hence spatially and culturally outside "true,"
forward-moving Europe, expected as they are to convey
self-proclaimed cultural conservatives clustered around
a number of influential magazines, foundations, and
their "uniqueness" from a position of radical alterity, in
publishing houses - as well as such official agencies
idiomatic rhetorics of sectarian resentment, necessarily
as the Ministry of Culture, the Romanian Academy, "bearing witness" to communist-era unspeakable pain,
and the Romanian Cultural Institute3 - have carriedand
on so forth. Milan Kundera, Milorad Pavic, Peter Ester-
hazy, Danilo Kis, Ismail Kadare, Joseph Brodsky, and
this problematic configuration of the nation as territory
and body.4 In response, writers, artists, and criticsthe
likelike are supposed to "speak for" and come, as Philip
Cartarescu have argued that such regulatory groundingRoth notes, from this "other Europe." Following as they
are in the footsteps of Kafka and Nabokov, Bulgakov
of nationhood, of "Romanianness" in a particular place,
and "streamlined," "mainstream," "straight" bodies
and Pasternak, they nevertheless continue to be quar-
runs counter to what the nation and those embodying antined
it - with the possible exception of Kundera - on
are all about. For, on the one hand, "Romanianness" Europe's
and troubled fringes.
its expressions cannot be defined as - and are certainly We shall see momentarily that, as Cartarescu
not confined to - what is said, written, and otherwise
insists, an old-style, Cold War sort of cartography still
holds sway or is being reinstated these days by cliches
imagined inside the historically unstable national bor-
and presumptions that skew Western representations
ders by bodies "rooted" in the native soil. Nor do these
bodies, on the other hand, stereotypically replicate of
theEastern Europe. By and large, we have cast aside this
questionable approach of broad brushstrokes and hard-
fictitious matrix set up and reinforced, as systematically
and-fast binaries in other, formerly colonial zones; here,
as the frontiers, by past regimes and lingering cultural
however, things appear to be changing at a slower pace.
inertias, a bodily monolith reproducing itself obses-
sively along heterosexist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, While
and a few Central and East European writers have
been making inroads, we still perceive them as a fair-
xenophobic lines. In recent articles, Cartarescu redraws
ly undifferentiated bunch - once more a "bloc" - and
these counterimaginative lines explicitly and polemi-
lump them together as Europe's (our) "others," "out
cally by imagining an other to this territorial and cor-
poreal straightjacket, opening up and complicatingthere,"
an hopelessly hemmed in by squabbles, styles, and

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 currents
frames of reference of clannish relevance. No wonder be other than aesthetic. I do not believe we, Eastern-
Pavic, Kis, Havel, Milosz, and others have been writing ers, have been lobotomized by propaganda and you,
Westerners, no less, by commercials. I do not believe
vigorously against this misperception. They have fore-
you are more hard-working than me because you are
grounded, directly and indirectly, a strong if culturallyProtestant, as much as I do not believe I am closer to
qualified sense of European belonging, of participationGod than you because I am an Orthodox Christian. No
in traditions cutting across "old" Europe's national andmatter how painful, unjust, and reckless history may
political boundaries and bespeaking an emphaticallybe, I think we should not help it cook up differences
cosmopolitan mindset, a special sensitivity to globalbetween one human being and another where there
are no differences at all or
processes - to the "big pic- blow these distinctions out
ture" of Europe and beyond. "Cartarescu, who is the undisputed chef d'ecole of of proportion where they
do exist.
Eastern Europe and East what is called both the Eighties Generation and 'Roma-
Europeans as one big freaknian postmodernism/ has argued in a series of brilliant No, the "Easterner," as
show; former communist long as the person is educat-
and cogent essays, as well as in his poetry and fiction,
countries' literature as a cul- for a place for contemporary Romanian sensibilities ed, tolerant, open-minded,
within the great conversation about literature takingis nothing unlike the West-
tural safari in Europe's irre- erner (as long as this one
vocable other - Cartarescu's
place now in Europe and the United States. A few
is also educated, tolerant,
readers may raise an eyebrow now and ask, 'What
texts decline to participate conversation?'
in and so on), regardless of
which is tant pis, as the French say,
such conventions. He implies what they have experienced
because the discussion of literature is neither at an end
in the past. No wall keeps
that the fetish of this other,
nor in the hands of specialists. Yet. . . . Unfortunately,
them apart "inherently."
projected from the outsidea -kind of specious realism has emerged now, an imagi-
and its quasi-Orientalist colo-nation-rotting pathogen that is destroying the borders Desperately as it tried,
nizing by images and con- between literature and television, making both the the former regime failed
Great Conversation and literature hard to distinguish.
structions that do little justice to rope off the body of
Perhaps now is the time for the last Europeans to put
to what this other means - is the nation, hence pre-1989
in their two cents - hard earned, I might add, through
no less damaging than thecommunist censorship. Western neglect, and post- Romania was hardly cut off
fetish of the national self communist disinterest." - Andrei Codrescu, from the from international cultural

reinforced domestically since

introduction to Nostalgia flows. In fact, the new nation-
the mid-1960s.5 The cosmo- al literature of the 1980s arose
politan reconstruction of this in cross-fertilizing dialogue
self and of the entire culture revolving around itwith texts of transnational circulation and is fundamen-
cannot
get underway, he further suggests, if the new gaptally cosmopolitan insofar as it pushes some of its most
is not
closed, if East European identity in general andvigorous
Roma- "roots" into places and topoi not local, outside
the nation.
nian identity in particular continue to be measured by Spearheaded by Cartarescu and his genera-
tion, the
the yardstick of touristlike expectations. In effect, the postmodernism of the Romanian 1980s - other-
wise
reinscription of difference, of different national the country's most grotesquely nationalistic years
bodies
since
and identities into the nation's body politic, and, the Stalinist 1950s - was also a political movement
ulti-
because it scoffed at calls for a localist, "rooted" aesthet-
mately, the nation's genuinely European "integration"
itself require a critique of this neosegregationistics, for a "chtonian" art "organically anchored" in the
mind-
set. Polemically worked out in the 1997 essay "..."motherland's"
escu," soil, as the party-line cultural weekly
Luceafarul (The morningstar) was writing at the time.
this critique tactically recycles an older "universalist,"
"humanist," and "aesthetic" argument. Instead, Borges, Grass, and Cortazar, then such "Ameri-

This is how European culture's Iron Curtain is being

can postmoderns" as Barth, Pynchon, and Coover,
have
feverishly rebuilt from both sides. . . . There is no influenced "the best Romanian fiction of the past
two decades." This is how others' books, published
question in my mind that my people did suffer dur-
ing the fifty years of dictatorship, and, unfortunately,
continents away and evoking those foreign places, lit-
the suffering goes on. Like all Romanians, I did bear erally became a new, non-"rooted" or postnative kind
and am still bearing this burden. But I do not of buytradition and as such transformed the nation's lit-
into this notion of an Easterner radically different
from or better - or worse - than a Westerner. Nor do I erature. Back then, everything seemed to go against this
believe literature, regardless of its place of origin, can "underground" cosmopolitanism, as the essayist calls it.

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44 Currents

Nevertheless, he assures us, "no line, no phrase of my itself as the neighborhood of a greater cosmop-
presents
pre-1989 writings would have sounded differently olis and, as such, is built on inclusion rather than exclu-
had
sion. As a "soft" kind of concept, this Europe is cultur-
I written them in West Germany or in the United States.
ally
. . . My generation was born free, and its language "thick," multidimensional. Its logic is "relational."
was
In fact, what the Romanian writer endorses is Europe as
the Occident's own from day one. This very language
... is our most precious common treasure, yours,relationality
my rather than as a unitary, "Eurocentric" cul-
dear Western reader, and mine. The similarities between
ture touting its rationality, its "Greek" superiority over
us, not what makes us different - "animals," "women," and "bar-
that is what I find important/' barians," as in the famous Dio-
And a no less important quali- genes Laertius passage. Finally
fier: "Once we have agreed on able to cut back and forth across

these similarities, we will have old and new rifts, the postcom-
plenty of time to tease out the munist cosmopolite, too, claims to
differences/' incarnate Whitmanian multitudes

Undoubtedly, these differ- and facets of being, to embody an

ences cannot be set aside either, entire cultural concordia discors.

unless we do so provisionally or, "I am proud," he declares, "to be

as I say above, for tactical reasons, human because I am also animal.
so as to make sure we do not I am proud to be man because I
fetishize them, do not turn them am also woman. I am proud to be
into the "essences" and walls they Greek precisely because the barbar-
have never been. Either from the ian inside me is so full of life. At

outside - as baggage the cultural- the same time, I am proud to be

safari aficionados lug around - or European. To my mind, being
from the inside - in the form of

the late-nineteenth- and early-

twentieth-century "national spe-
^^■91 European does not mean being
better than others but complex,
a complicated character, replete
cific" theory much bandied about with inner contradictions, which
by right-wing ideologues and a true European should be able to
refuted by Cartarescu himself in own up to and reconcile."
a 2005 article - these exotic or cloistral imaginings To live up to its own cosmopolitan legacy,
close off communication and exchange once again. Cartarescu maintains, Europe must seize the end of
the Cold War as a historical opportunity to become,
What Cartarescu is interested in, on the contrary, is
or re-become, an intermeshing world of possibilities
how disparate entities can dovetail with one another.
What intrigues him is how people "sentenced" by his-rather than a world apart whose fragmentation and
self-isolation within are compounded by its seclusion
tory and ideology to pseudodifference, to a one-size-
from - and apprehension of - the wider world with-
fits-all kind of differential identity, can rescue their
identities and, through them and their actual differ- out. Inside its borders, Europe must take in its Eastern
ences, speak with one another and to others outside
hinterlands and thus expunge the cultural "ghettos" of
unexamined "cliches" that East European writers are
the realm of this immediate dialogue. Thus, in "Europe
Is Shaped Like My Brain," Cartarescu's point is not
supposed to corroborate. Likewise, it must open itself
only to proclaim his "Europeanism" but to question to others outside it and thus give itself "absolutely
up
its "undifferentiated" meaning; to ask, that is, whatnecessary new blood." Insofar as East/West "mentality"
Europe itself is or may become beyond the available barriers are still in place, Cartarescu disavows Europe's
commonplaces. On the one side, his answer envisions"geopolitical,
a cultural, or religious" division. His dream
cultural identity more diverse than usually imagined,isaa "diverse," not a "schizophrenic" Europe, cut up in
"tradition weaving together a number of threads" that,zones that do not communicate and itself a zone cut off
on the other side, lead to other continents and their from the rest of the world. Rejecting such classifications
and hierarchies, refusing to stay put in his "ghetto" and
own traditions. Cartarescu's cosmopolitan Europe thus

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 currents
express the " chunk of history" of his "exotic world"The 2004 article from which I excerpt the epigraph, "Painea
rather than the "great themes of European tradition"amara a exilului," has been reprinted in Baroane (Yo, your
highness!) (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2005), 52-54. All transla-
("refusing] to be anything else but [him]self"), are fortions from Cartarescu's Romanian texts are mine.
Cartarescu just other ways of letting people know that 1 1 quote from Cartarescu's volume of essays Pururi tinar,
he is "not an author from Eastern Europe." Nor were, infasurat in pixeli (Forever young, wrapped in pixels)
in this cosmopolitan sense, Musil a "Kakanian," Breton (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2003), 210.
a Frenchman, and Bulgakov a Russian. They were 2 Nostalgia came out initially as Visul (Bucharest: Cartea
Romaneasca, 1989). The novel has been translated into
scarcely staples - spokespersons and hostages - of a
English by Julian Semilian, with an introduction by
place, and therefore "local," but rather "outlets" for the
Andrei Codrescu (New York: New Directions, 2005).
greater "European spirit." The Romanian author can be3 See Cartarescu's critique of the Romanian Cultural
likewise. This strikes me as a reasonable bid. For it is Institute in his 2004 article "Noile 'Ctitorii'" (The new
"endowments"), in Baroane, 7-10.
precisely this spirit - and, in relation to it, any bearings
on, and membership in, Europe's cultural body - that 4 For a discussion of this political context with a focus
on Cartarescu's work as a "cultural model" opposed
has been long denied to East European writers from
to Romania's "new right," see my essay, '"Modelul
both inside and outside their former "bloc." Again,
Cartarescu' versus 'modelul Patapievici': Discursuri
this European status would have to be acquired first,
culturale si alternative politice in Romania de azi" (The
"Cartarescu model" versus the "Patapievici model":
and with it a new, truly egalitarian vision of Europe,
Cultural
a cultural syntax within which writers like Cartarescu discourses and political alternatives in today's
Romania), in Observator cultural (The cultural observer)
would enjoy more than "token" recognition. Once this
177 (July 15-21, 2003): 32. Also see Cartarescu's reply in
cosmopolitan citizenship has been granted, a discussion
"Cum ma simt ca proaspat model cultural" (How it feels
of "differences" can - and should - begin. as a newly appointed "cultural model") in LA&I (Bucha-
A European writer: no more, no less. Even better:
rest), Nov. 3, 2003, 1.
a writer pure and simple, one whose literature has5 notOn the "Orientalist" representation of Eastern Europe in
general and the Balkans in particular, see Maria Todo-
been "already read" by "omnipotent" yet mystifying
rova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford, 1997),
cliches that a true European "reunification" and cultural
especially 7-20.
coming-of-age would have to do away with.9 But does 6 Cartarescu, Pururi tinar, 201-2.
Europe stop here? Hardly. As we saw above, Cartarescu7 Cartarescu has written an entire book on the subject
does not simply reclaim Europe. He reimagines itofasRomanian postmodernism, Postmodernismul romanesc
(Bucharest: Humanitas, 1999).
much as he rethinks his nation's body politic. A true
8 Originally published in the German magazine Zeitschrift
cosmopolis does not end where continents do, is a chal-
fur Kulturaustausch in 2001, Cartarescu's essay "Refuz sa
lenge to borders and to whatever political institutions
fiu altceva decit eu insumi" (I refuse to be anything else
might reinforce and discipline them. Calling Pynchon,but myself) has been included in Pururi tinar, (213-15).
Garcia Marquez, and even Kawabata "European," 9rash "Refuz sa fiu altceva decit eu insumi," in Pururi tinar,
215.
as it may strike some, is not necessarily unwarranted
insofar as their works draw from a common, largely
Christian Moraru is Associate Professor of English at the
unconscious storehouse of themes, visions, and dreams,
University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His book-length
often - albeit not as a rule - apart from these institutions
publications include Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Repre-
sentation in Postmodernism (2005) and Rewriting: Postmodern
and subsequent bureaucracies, structures, and bound-
Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (2001).
aries. Such boundaries cut up, fragment, "balkanize"
one more time. What Cartarescu seeks, instead - in the
interstitial spaces and discourses between realpolitik
and utopianism, realism and magical realism, prose and
poetry, nonfiction and fiction - is Europe as a "whole," To read a review of Nostalgia,
and the bigger whole of which Europe is a part. see pages 64-65 in this issue

University of North Carolina, Greensboro

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