Andrei Codrescu's Mioritic Space

Author(s): Richard Collins

Source: MELUS, Vol. 23, No. 3, Poetry and Poetics (Autumn, 1998), pp. 83-101
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Andrei Codrescu's Mioritic
Space
Richard Collins
Xavier
University,
New Orleans
It's
through
that
hole,
I
thought,
that I am
returning
to
my birthplace.
-Andrei
Codrescu,
The Hole 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."2
But 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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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 Blood
Countess),
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
Disappearance of
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
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.
(Outside
1-2)
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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RICHARD COLLINS
ered the "true" Romanian
heartland),
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-
pearance of
the Outside: A
Manifestofor Escape (1990),
and The Hole 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's Shoes 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
86
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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITIC SPACE
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 The
Disap-
pearance of
the
Outside, however,
he is
actually looking
for a "treia
cale,"
a tertium
quid,
or third
path:
"Aceasta carte
punefata
in
fata
doua
puncte
de vedere
asupra
lumii,
si le critica
pe
amindoua. Se va
discerne,fara
indoiala,
o
perspectiva
'romaneasca' in
efortul
de a
gasi
o 'a treia
cale,'
un act
de
disperare
de
inteles,
dar si o solutie
poetica" (Disparitia 206).
["This
book
juxtaposes
two world
views,
and
critiques
both 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 Codrescu left Romania at
age
nineteen,
he
by
no means left
his
birthplace
behind.
Along
with "the sensual
pleasure
of the
sounds" of the Romanian
language (Hole 86),
Codrescu also internal-
ized Romanian
literary
culture,
both ancient and 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 distinctive American voice and
style)
was
already largely
formed in
part by
these traditional
poems,
but also
by
the modern Romanian writers.5 He
pays homage
to those
writers,
ex-
iled like himself and well-known in the
West,
like
Eliade,
Eugene
Ionesco
and Emil
Cioran,
or Tristan Tzara 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 reason
why
it was
forbidden,
was its
autonomy" (Outside 18).
Codrescu's first
escape,
then,
was
metaphysical,
into the invisible un-
derground
of literature. He tells of
entering
the house of a Dr.
M.,
and
finding
a new world of books and ideas. "The entrance 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 Lucian
Blaga,"
which made
him feel
"suddenly transported
to another
world,
compared
to 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" (Outside 17-18).
Thus Codrescu's first es-
cape
was into
Romania,
into a timeless realm
linking
the
autonomy
of
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RICHARD COLLINS
modern literature with the
community
and
ecology
of the ancient
Miorita.
To be
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 Codrescu left Romania in
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 "mioritic
space."
Exile is a
great preservative.
Cut off from their native
soil,
cultural
customs,
rituals,
myths
and even dialects often
develop very differently
for 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 "fatalistic
Weltanschauung" reflecting passivity
and de-
feat,
in America became Codrescu's
special
brand of
poetic
activism,
a
poetic project
without national boundaries.
Perhaps
the notion of
mioritic
space
could be
preserved
and
developed only
in this
way-
by
a Romanian writer in
exile,
whom it in turn sustained.
As he refashioned his
identity
into that of an American
poet,
Co-
drescu cherished
Blaga's interpretation
of the ancient
poem,
trans-
planting
this seed into the soil of American
poetry
and
translating
the
myth
into his new idiom. As a
political
exile,
Codrescu
rejects
the au-
thority
of
government
and
police,
but as a
latter-day
surrealist he also
rejects
the
authority
of
history
and
fact,
even in the events of his
per-
sonal
history.
The
"deimiurge"
of Codrescu's creative
identity
is Lu-
cian
Blaga,
whose
purpose
was "the
enlargement
of
mystery."6
In
Blaga's poetry
Codrescu sees "constructs for the
transport
of seeds"
(Yearning xv),
and these continue to blossom in Codrescu's
poetic
myth-making long
after his arrival in America.7
Several
philosophers
and
ethnographers
have linked the "mioritic
marriage"
of the folk
poem
with the
Transylvanian
nunta
mortului,
or
death-wedding. According
to Gail
Kligman
in The
Wedding of
the
Dead:
Ritual,
Poetics and
Popular
Culture in
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 Miorita
encourages
an
imaginative, philosophical approach
to
the
comprehension
of
paradox, notably
that of
sexuality
and mortali-
ty
united.
By
the conclusion of each of these
symbolic expressive
forms,
an 'other' is
incorporated
into the realm of the familiar"
(Klig-
88
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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITIC SPACE
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"
(Yearning xvi).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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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 electric fan makes him feel
guilty
And the chair does 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
darling vegetable!
But instead he'll do a
flip
and
Throw himself
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 MIORITIC SPACE
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
& Times
184-85).
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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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
Disappearance of
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
Disappearance
of
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 MIORITIC SPACE
simply
a matter of
translating
romantic
self-absorption
and 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-boy
who
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
metaphysical
liberation
front,
a resistance movement of the
imagination.12
It
might
be
argued
that Codrescu's most
significant
creation
along
these lines is his
long- running magazine, Exquisite Corpse,
a
"journal
of books and
ideas,"
later
changed
to the more accurate
"journal
of
letters and life." Named for the surrealist method of artistic collabo-
ration,
cadavre
exquis, popular
with the Romanian surrealists
Gherasim
Luca,
Gellu
Naum,
Virgil
Teodorescu and Paul
Paun,
Ex-
quisite Corpse
is a combination of communal
expression
and
personal
signature.
Indeed,
it is a
unique
combination of 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 creativity
within the formal or narrative boundaries.13
An
underground magazine, Exquisite Corpse
welcomes the voices of
the
dispossessed,
and its
popularity
and
perpetuation depends
on
word-of-mouth advertisement.
(Below
its
copyright
notice,
for exam-
ple,
is the statement: "We forbid
reproduction
but authorize memo-
rization"-appropriate
for a
magazine
with
aspirations
to oral im-
mortality.)
In
fact,
Exquisite Corpse
is more "mioritic" than surrealist
in that the collaborative method of the surrealists is
put
to use less as
an
example
of individual
psychic
automatism than as a
professed
"collaboration with culture." In
printed
form,
and for Western
eyes,
the communal alternative culture of
Exquisite Corpse
converts the oral
tradition of Codrescu's native Romania into the
printed currency
of
Western intellectual and cultural
exchange,
and its
popularity proves
that word-of-mouth still has a value that
approximates
that of oral
culture.
The
appearance
of
Exquisite Corpse
in 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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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."14
But 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
Exquisite Corpse
is, 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 absentia
by
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's
Shoes,
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."17 Codrescu describes America in the
1980s as a
place
of
"metaphorical
exiles": "Times of
great
freedom
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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITIC SPACE
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
Stiffest 236).
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.18 The
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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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 Blood Countess
(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,
American
Poetry
Since 1970:
Up
Late,
with a
poem by Kay Boyle
that
begins:
Poets,
minor or
major,
should
arrange
to remain
slender,
Cling
to their
skeletons,
not batten
on
provender,
not fatten the lean
spirit
In its isolated
cell,
its
solitary
chains.
(17)
The
shepherd-boy
in
Miorita,
who Codrescu insists is a
poet,
is
described as
similarly
slender: "Who
knows, /
Who has seen
/
A
96
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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITIC SPACE
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. Codrescu seems 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
Exquisite Corpse,
and as
geographer
of mioritic
space:
"Poets,
re-
member
your
skeletons.
/
In
youth
or
dotage,
remain
light
as ashes."
The combination of
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
narrative
brings
it back into
being.
'Childhood is
over,'
said
God,
looking
at him
through
his mother's
eyes, through
the
eye
of a
building
he
passed
on his
way
home and
through
an
eye
in the
sky.
'The hell it
is,'
said the Devil. 'For the sake of
prose,
some
eyes
must be
mercifully
removed.'
(Life
& Times
83)
This
parable
shows us the
dialogue
between the cosmic transcen-
dence in the
myth
of Miorita and the communist interdiction
against
full consciousness. The vision of the
young poet passes through
a
window of
escape, "through
an
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's status as a
popular
commentator and
best-selling
nov-
elist in the Gothic tradition should not
prevent
us from
grasping
the
importance
of his contribution as 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,
Codrescu remains
a
delightfully
subversive influence in American culture. Like other
immigrant
exiles,
from the Marx brothers to
Nabokov,
Codrescu is
not
only
careful not 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
Transylvania
and bred in the
specific
milieu of an
underground
lit-
erary community
in Communist
Romania,
he has taken the
myth
of
Miorita and
Blaga's reading
of it and retold it
along every
avenue of
the American media. In
doing
so,
he enacts the redefinition of the Ro-
manian cultural
space,
which now
overlaps
that of America. Like so
many
other valuable contributions to the multi-ethnic mix of Ameri-
ca,
Andrei Codrescu's mioritic
space
reminds us of the essential val-
97
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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
Disappearance of
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 (Yearning xiv).
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" (Yearning xv-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
Stiffest of
the
Corpse gathers 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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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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