Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces

Orbis Litterarum 72:5 384–410, 2017 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces
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lin Dorian Homelands and Homecomings in Ca Florescu’s Novels Gabriela Gl
avan, West University of Timișoara, Romania In order to uncover the fictional strategies that project Florescu’s native Romania – particularly the former Habsburg region of Banat – as a homeland, an exploration of the consistency and particularities of the tropes of exile, displacement and homecoming, as revealed in his earlier novels, is an essential prerequisite. Given the relevance of autobiographical elements in this writer’s work, this paper will focus on the author’s first three novels, Wunderzeit (2001), Der kurze Weg nach Hause (2002) and Der blinde Masseur (2006), investigating the themes and dynamics of his exilic discourse. Drawing from contemporary theories concerning displacement and the search for real and imaginary homelands, the article explores the specific ways in which these issues surface as subjective reflections on the recent Eastern European past. Keywords: exile, nostalgia, homecoming, Eastern Europe, post-communism, Romania. I. Introduction The inclusion of C
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alin Dorian Florescu in the mainstream of Germanlanguage writers focusing on Eastern Europe and the historical legacies of communism after 1989 signals the growing cultural interest in the metamorphoses the region has undergone in past decades. Along with other writers such as Herta M€ uller, Richard Wagner and Andrei Codrescu, Florescu contributes to the integration of Romanian themes and motifs into a growing literature concerning the communist and postcommunist recent past of Eastern European countries. Florescu’s writing relies, to a significant extent, on biographical events from his childhood and adolescence that reverberate throughout his entire work: born in Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 385 communist Romania, he fled to Switzerland with his family in 1982, where he later studied psychology and psychopathology (in Zurich), then worked as a psychotherapist in a rehabilitation centre. Since his 2001 debut, with Wunderzeit, he has gradually consolidated his literary status and gained recognition and success. Florescu’s novels have benefited from extensive critical attention in Romania, where his books have been published in translation since 2005, his participation in numerous literary events constantly increasing his popularity. The writer’s affective connections to his native country and especially to the Banat region1 can be invoked as a profitable starting point for any approach to his novels set in Romania: I am a son of Banat, of Timișoara. It is what I know best of my native country. When I leave my Swiss ‘home’ and I enter my Romanian one, the first thing that opens before me, welcoming me, is the endless plain of Banat. More than the Carpathians or the sea, to me this means ‘I have arrived’. (Ghiț
a 2013) This emphatic affirmation of double belonging is a repetitive strategy that he reinforces in interviews and public interventions, and the division of meaning implied by the projections of the topoi of home and homecoming plays a cardinal role in his writing. However clear this might seem on a declarative level, the author’s relationship with his native homeland reactivates a chain of interrogations similar to those invoked in James Clifford’s critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism: What does it mean, at the end of the twentieth century, to speak [. . .] of a ‘native land’? What processes rather than essences are involved in present experiences of cultural identity? [. . .] From what discrete sets of cultural resources does any modern writer construct his or her discourse? (Clifford 1988, 275) Although Clifford’s analysis mainly concerns postcolonial literature at the end of the twentieth century, given the relevance of issues such as exile and homecoming in connection with a post-communist rethinking of the recent past, it may be argued that Florescu’s work favours similar interrogations. Postcolonial theory has proved to be an important critical resource for the analysis of recent Eastern European social and cultural issues. Studies in post-communism and postcolonialism share, as a constantly growing body of scholarship indicates, a consistent number 386 Gabriela Gl
avan of interests mainly related to the politics of domination and identity. The fall of communism and the end of colonial power have been perceived as events leading to a similar historical aftermath, where issues such as identity, the centre–periphery relation, the role of memory, trauma and opression, exile, migration and the relationship with one’s homeland become central to critical discourse.2 There are, up to a certain point, symmetries and equivalences that call for a more incisive analysis of the particular dynamics of colonial imagination in Eastern European, post-communist and post-soviet countries.3 This intersection might be profitable for this particular investigation of exile and displacement in the works of an author who lived in Eastern Europe and extensively uses this experience in his writing, given the rich critical vocabulary of postcolonialism targeting this issue. A German-language Swiss author of Romanian origin, who spent his childhood in communist Romania, the writer reveals, in most of his novels, the subjective boundaries of his homeland. This fictional mapping prompted the emergence of a metaphorical nexus that intersects a geographical space with its unreal double, transforming literature into a projection of memory and a means of expressing a constant existential ambivalence. The writer’s Eastern origins and Western current life allows him to experience the feelings of an exile, or, more precisely, an emigre. Florescu can be both subject and object in a complex process that lies at the core of most of his books: one of contemplating a long-lost homeland while at the same time actively remembering the time spent in it. Heavily relying on autobiographical elements, and therefore clearly belonging to the genre of autofiction, his first three novels, Wunderzeit (2001), Der kurze Weg nach Hause (2002) and Der blinde Masseur (2006), offer an accurate account of the transformations undergone by their protagonists, all of them fictional alter egos of the author himself. This process begins with Wunderzeit, where the child protagonist of Florescu’s debut novel delivers a naive, yet honest account of everyday life in a communist country stricken by poverty and dictatorial megalomania. When his parents decide to flee Romania, not without incident, his long journey in search of a sense of home begins. Der kurze Weg nach Hause (2002) and Der blinde Masseur (2006) both focus on the development and essential moments of this jouney. Now a young Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 387 man, Florescu’s protagonist, having reached an age of self-discovery, is eager to revisit his native country. The journey back home, the rather brutal contact with a country undergoing a painful transition, the difficult task of connecting memories to a bleak present time, the unescapable nostalgia, the constant need to adapt, all these elements shape the contexts that prompt the metamorphoses of the protagonist. In both novels Florescu turns homecoming into a failed return4 of the exile, as the journey reveals an imperfect, precarious version of the imaginary home. Stuart Hall argues that cultural identity ‘is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute return’ (Hall 1990, 226). From this perspective, homecomings are unavoidably challenging and incomplete, since an ‘absolute return’ is impossible. Starting with Der blinde Masseur, Florescu’s novels are significantly more elaborate than his earlier narratives, have greater analytical depth and reveal more sophisticated mechanisms of transforming biographical material into well-anchored fictions. Given the density of perspectives concerning the spectres of exile and homecoming in Der kurze Weg nach Hause and Der blinde Masseur, this critical reading will follow their development more closely, considering Wunderzeit the starting point of Florescu’s autofictional project. His latest novels, Zaira (2008) and Jacob beschliebt zu lieben (2011), although still connected to Romania, mark a narrative departure from the aesthetic style of the writer’s earlier formative stages. Distancing himself from autobiography, Florescu explores new creative boundaries, his prose writing reaching stylistic consistency and balance. In one of his most comprehensive interviews, when asked about the Romanian subjects of his novels and the personal meaning of this permanent connection, the author replied concisely: It means a part of me is still home, it means I have Romania in my blood, it means that the Romanian parts of me have more substance than the others. Perhaps this is a sign that Romania is still a strong ‘home’ in my heart. On the other hand, documentation is minimal when I write about something Romanian.5 (Chivu 2010, 63) This ‘substance’ Florescu mentions, along with the organic metaphor of having his native country in his blood, signals that the writer understands this relation in terms of an essence, not a process involving duration and change. James Clifford’s question – ‘What processes rather 388 Gabriela Gl
avan than essences are involved in present experiences of cultural identity?’ (Clifford 1988, 275) – stresses a significant opposition between ‘essences’ and ‘processes’ involved in experiences of cultural identity. Although he refers to his homeland in terms of an essence, Florescu explores this connection as a process. Nevertheless, there is a certain ‘internal competition’ among writers focusing on the Banat, and Florescu details his position in yet another interview,6 once again invoking the almost canonical place Herta M€ uller’s writings have gained since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The two authors may share, to a certain extent, a common Romanian ground, but their works project quite different perspectives. While M€ uller’s books bear the mark of the author’s political persecution in communism, Florescu’s fictional journeys back home revive a more personal dimension of the same historical interval. II. Dialects of exile and displacement In his comprehensive essay on the status of the critic in exile, Robert T. Tally Jr (2011) invokes a metaphor that captures, to a significant degree, the paradoxical nature of displacement and exile in today’s literature – ‘mundus totus exilium est’. This medieval quote from Hugh of Saint Victor transcends its evident metaphysical gravitas and pinpoints the cardinal role of exile in shaping literary expression in recent decades. Suspended between worlds, homes and identities, exiles long for a sense of belonging that remains unattainable. The failed returns of Florescu’s protagonists are symptomatic for a paradoxical state: either the world itself is a place of exile, as the ineffable representations of home and belonging survive strictly in memory, or it is a generic home without borders. Their unaccomplished homecomings signal this double reflection quite visibly. Moreover, in an essay concerning Weltliteratur, Erich Auerbach called for a transnational grounding of the modern critic, who must become aware of a new reality – his or her ‘philological home is the earth; the nation it can no longer be’ (Auerbach 1969, 17). Exiled, emigre, expatriate or displaced writers have long imagined fictional homes, avatars of an elusive homeland. A dense theoretical tradition concerning exile has repeatedly connected this concept to the nucleus of the modern Western literary canon. Terry Eagleton famously Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 389 noted that ‘the heights of modern English literature have been dominated by foreigners and emigres’ (Eagleton 1970, 9), while George Steiner’s concepts of ‘unhousedness’ (Steiner 1989, 139) and ‘extraterritorial literature’ (Steiner 1976) have become central to the critical vocabulary of exile. In discerning between the many dimensions of this complex phenomenon, critics have emphasized the role of constraint and personal will, as essential elements defining the status of exiles. Andrew Gurr drew a clear distinction between exiles and expatriates and stressed the involuntary nature of exile, as opposed to the expatriate’s (or emigre’s) choice to live outside the homeland (Gurr 1981, 23). The emigre may have hopes to return (Dahlie 1988, 14–15), but ‘the exile is involved in an irreversible process’ (Friberg in B€ oss, Gilsenan Nordin, & Olinder 2005, 236). The psychological dimension of exile has become central in the debate surrounding the cultural and literary issue of exile. In Paul Tabori’s view, there is an inherent dynamic dimension in the status of the exile, one that may turn him into an emigrant or, on the contrary, may turn an emigrant into an exile. Political and economic factors are as important as psychological ones in defining the intricate web underlying this difficult condition: ‘An exile is a person who is compelled to leave his homeland – though the forces that send him on his way may be political, economic or purely psychological. It does not make an essential difference whether he is expelled by physical force or whether he makes the decision to leave without such an immediate pressure’ (Tabori 1972, 37). However clear the boundaries between exiles, emigres and expatriates may seem from a general perspective, some specific issues arise if these notions refer to an Eastern and Central European context. In an introductory chapter to the extensive compendium dedicated to specific exilic discourses from this region, The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe, John Neubauer7 argues in favour of a clearer distinction between the conditions of European exile, due to the political and social particularities involved. A key aspect is the fact that, in this part of the European continent, ‘exiles were usually not ejected; they fled by their own volition’ (Neubauer & T€ or€ ok 2009, 8): 390 Gabriela Gl
avan In twentieth-century East-Central Europe exile usually meant a self-motivated or, occasionally, forced departure from the home country or habitual place of residence, because of a threat to the person’s freedom or dignified survival, such as an imminent arrest, sentence, forced labor, or even extermination. The departure was for an unforeseeable time irreversible. (p. 8) In light of these definitions, C
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alin Dorian Florescu could be regarded simultaneously as an exile and an emigre, each status corresponding to specific stages of his biography and, at the same time, to the overlapping layers of his identity-focused fictional discourse. His writing projects the status of an exile, one who, although longing to return, is unable to complete the journey and come back to his imagined home. On a concrete level, Florescu is an emigre, one who apparently left his country voluntarily. Still, the homecoming of Florescu’s young men may signal another aspect – his repetitive autofictional strategy of narrating their homecoming might signal the fact that a child does not, in fact, decide to leave, just follows his family. Florescu implicitly suggests that a young emigre might grow up into an exile. The writer’s positioning towards his biography and writing recalls the significance of a term defined by Homi K. Bhabha as a ‘beyond’, which ‘is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past’ but rather a ‘moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion’(Bhabha 2007, 1). If we agree that an external oppressive element is needed in order that someone should fit the classical profile of the exile, Florescu is a special case: as a child, he left the country with his parents, who decided that communist Romania was not an option for a decent future. The author’s in-betweenness,8 derived from the hybridization of his Romanian roots with a strong formative connection to the German language and culture, plays a key role in reuniting the underlying threads of cultural, political and social reference of his prose. In a consistent analysis of the exilic discourse of Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz, George Z. Gasyna argues that: text and bios for exiled writers are intertwined more intimately than for those who do not experience forced or voluntary displacement and separation from the homeland, its cultural history and literary (meta-)narratives and the range of social, communal, political and emotional relationships and associations that such a move necessitates. (Gasyna 2011, 4) Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 391 Moreover, Gasyna elaborates that ‘in the case of cultural emigres and exiles, the sense of linguistic otherness becomes compounded with the geographical and social, and that this existential condition does much to bring the otherness of language to the fore, especially for those who rely on language for their metier’(p. 4). Florescu’s case proves challenging to pinpoint once more: his native Romania is an overarching theme and a fictional homeland in his entire oeuvre, prompting his fictional alter egos’ long journeys back to this country unfolding in the writer’s first three novels, yet the language that connects imagination and textual form is German, and the linguistic component does not seem problematic at any point. Doubtlessly benefiting from a finely tuned East–West ambivalence, Florescu translates the dilemmas of rootlessness and homecoming into his own particularized dialect. Cultural and territorial belonging play a cardinal role in identity shaping, and this is reconfirmed by the imaginary perimeters of the author’s subjective narratives. In his first two novels, Wunderzeit and Der kurze Weg nach Hause, biographical data moulds the narrative which closely follows the chronology of his communist childhood and early adolescence, and his family’s relocation to Switzerland after their dangerous flight from Romania for the West. Florescu carefully orchestrates the trials and transformations of his protagonists in their attempts to discover and understand their personal histories, progressively weaving intricate plots, strategically distancing himself from the limited potential of confession. His main themes, constantly revisited, revolve around the radical role of memory: childhood in an Eastern communist province, homecoming and its paradoxical revelations. In his seminal essay ʻImaginary homelands’, Salman Rushdie touches upon the idea of the impossible return of writers who are ‘exiles or immigrants or expatriates’ (Rushdie 1992, 10). As he argues that their sense of loss could only be alleviated by an attempt to ‘create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands’ (p. 10), Rushdie implicitly emphasizes the role of literature as an agent of memory in shaping one’s understanding of the past. Florescu’s intentions in writing about his real and imaginary Romanian homeland seem to be connected to a subjective project of self-discovery. When he tries to evoke the Banat and Timișoara in non-biographical terms (in 392 Gabriela Gl
avan Zaira and Jacob beschliebt zu lieben) he uses personal experience as a framework for fiction, relying on the same mechanisms of memory as in his autobiographical fictions. All of Florescu’s protagonists share a strong connection to these territories, and each of them displays the generic psychological features of the exile who, in Andrew Gurr’s metaphorical terms, ‘is like a bird forced by chill weather at home to migrate, but always poised to fly back’ (Gurr 1981, 18). In his version of the Odyssean pattern,9 detailing the dramatic return of a nostalgic hero to his homeland, Florescu follows a classic rule in turning the arrival into a starting point or, as he put it, ‘the return is at the same time an end and a new beginning’.10 This could be considered a recurrent strategy in Florescu’s first four novels, as they all involve a homecoming that becomes the starting point of a new departure. It appears more visibly in Der kurze Weg nach Hause and Zaira, where the narrative reunites an autobiographical account and a third-person narrative. In both cases, the protagonist is strongly motivated in his/her return. In the first case, Ovidiu’s endeavour is fuelled by the young man’s need to adhere to some essential representations concerning his origins and identity. In the second, Zaira’s intercontinental adventure is similarly nurtured by the need to face the past and overcome its dramatic consequences. There is, however, a fine balance between the consistency of the narrative and its ‘truthfulness’: Florescu seems to rely on biography in order to give first-hand accounts of radical experiences – immigration, displacement, the search for a homeland, counting on authenticity when he attributes some of his experiences to a character that, in the case of Zaira, is not visibly an alter ego. Like many other East European writers dwelling on the region’s recent past, Florescu’s double perspective as insider/outsider cannot escape historical determinations: the communist/post-communist dichotomy takes many forms and crystallizes various meanings, simultaneously targeting different domains, from the political to the social and the anthropological. Moreover, the writer’s critical gaze is impregnated by authentic nostalgia, which generates one of his distinctive creative trademarks – the urgent search for personal meaning inside the intricate web of multiple identities. Still, the author cannot be associated with what has been conceptualized as ‘post-communist nostalgia’11 – a softened, less critical rethinking of the past, focused on Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 393 tolerable aspects of life in communism – although he deems his childhood a time of ‘wonders’. Florescu’s experience of communism is not the main focus of his immersion in memory and its fragile continents. It is his understanding of identity in relation to a problematic past that remains central to his work. III. Eastern fictional homelands A chronological overview of Florescu’s biography and works should start with his childhood and adolescence in communism and his departure from Romania, as they appear in Wunderzeit: his life as a young man in a West European country, the journey back to an imaginary ‘home’, his first visit to Romania in the early 1990s, extensively dissected in Der kurze Weg nach Hause, the elaborate account of his family fleeing the country in a series of dramatic events, his life in Switzerland, the return to Timișoara and his encounter with Ioan Palatinus in Der blinde Masseur. This subjective material also informs his latest, visibly more accomplished novels, Zaira and Jacob beschliebt zu lieben, in the sense that partially interests this present approach. Exploring the spectrum of identity in direct relation to territorial and geographical attachments, both Zaira’s and Jacob’s stories are deeply rooted in the fictional ground of the Romanian provinces, intertwined with their historical fatalities and myths. While Zaira’s return to Timișoara can be considered a valid reflection of Florescu’s version of the generic theme of homecoming, territorial belonging marks a departure from the author’s autobiographical scheme – Zaira’s homeland is not the writer’s city or the region of Banat, but, in fact, her family’s mansion in Strehaia, in Southern Romania; her recurrent memory flashes certify a deep nostalgia not only for a longlost space, but also for the irreversibly dissolved social order and ethos of the Romanian interwar period. In Jacob beschliebt zu lieben, Florescu’s detachment from biographical determinations seems definitive: here, his exploration of the Banat and its quintessential representation, the village of Triebswetter, preponderently express historical questions surrounding the troubled history of the BanatSwabians.12 394 Gabriela Gl
avan Although Florescu’s writings can hardly be considered novels of cities or particular geographies, they can be trusted as indicators of the protagonist’s attachment to his birthplace, since he repeatedly reinforces the scenarios in which his homecoming stages his existence. Moreover, Florescu uses the idea of belonging (to a homeland of the mind) as an instrument that challenges established identity prototypes: more than a tool to help retrace the protagonist’s existential trajectory, his return to his native country and his efforts to comprehend its historical metamorphoses suggest he has found comfort and balance in his vulnerable suspension between worlds.13 The life stories of his alter ego protagonists are profoundly changed by the journey home, and Florescu explores them in the classical manner of the nostos: once arrived, the exile must face the dire opposition between his idealized past and the grim, precarious present, his unquenched nostalgia sending him away once more, reinstating the tension that defines his essentially fractured condition. Despite his often professed fidelity to a Romanian hypertheme, the author does much more than constantly use Timișoara and Banat as preferred backgrounds for the quests of his protagonists: he gives an original outlook on the hardships of interpreting one’s past from the position of an insider/outsider (Swiss/Romanian), shedding new light on the process of homecoming and rediscovery of subjective mental geographies. In his first novel, suggestively entitled Wunderzeit, the narrative is assembled as a childlike account of everyday life under communism in Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s filtered through the magic lens of innocence. The novel focuses on a time of exciting revelations, rather than on a tragic moment in history, when Romanians were constant victims of the catastrophic social politics of Ceaușescu’s dictatorial regime. In this first stage of his literary career, Florescu’s interest in the geography of his homeland is politically determined. These first attempts at depicting the architecture of his native Timișoara are rendered through the voice of his young alter ego – the child protagonist describes cartoon-like urban scapes, with people queuing for food, cramped public transport and small apartments. With moral and spatial suffocation as a general motif of Romanian life, the narrator candidly reports: Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 395 €berhaupt alle eng beieinander. Das In diesem unserem Land wohnten wir u st€arkte unser sozialistisches Lebensgef€ uhl. Bestimmt. Enger w€ are es nur gegangen, wenn wir alle in der gleichen Wohnung gelebt h€ atten. [. . .] Von auben sahen unsere Wohnungen wie kleine beleuchtete W€ urfel aus, €ber weib ich aufeinandergeschachtelt. In ihrem Inneren stritten Erwachsene u was. Wenn man ihnen von der dunklen Strabe aus zuschaute, h€ orte man nichts. (Florescu 2001, 9) Alin, the author’s fictional self, apparently lives like a typical teenager, with all the ‘wonders’ of the age, if we credit the title, while his parents secretly look for a chance for all three of them to flee the country. A solution appears when father and son embark on a trip to Italy then to the United States, hoping to find a cure for the boy’s muscular condition, the Charcot-Marie syndrome. What seems like a perfect chance to flee Romania for the more prosperous West turns into the young man’s first bitter homecoming. To everybody’s mocking disbelief, Alin and his father return to Romania, exasperating his mother and raising questions among acquaintances whether the father was a member of the Securitate, the communist secret police. Normally, in those times, nobody would ever consider returning once they had crossed the border, unless they were also part of the repressive system: ‘Zu Hause’, wiederholte sie zweimal: ‘Unglaublich’. Vater tat so, als ob er nichts h€ orte. Aber ich wubte Bescheid. Das war der Stoff, aus dem die b€ osen Blicke am Wohnzimmertisch entstanden. Was sie sagte, als sie dann loslegte, war gespickt mit ‘unglaublich’, ‘Trottel’, ‘Idiot’, ‘So was Dummes’, ‘Nur Waschlappen kehren aus Amerika zur€ uck’. (Florescu 2001, 172) The woman’s anger is legitimate: in the 1980s, Romania was an impoverished, hopeless Eastern-bloc country, a place where the future was a meaningless notion corrupted by shameless propaganda. The city of Timișoara, Westernized as it was, more open to the underground traffic of goods coming from neighbouring countries such as Hungary or the former Yugoslavia, was in fact just as grey and bleak as the rest of the country. Florescu manages to capture the striking reality of those days with great precision, despite the apparently naive tone of his child protagonist. It should be noted that fleeing Romania was a decision that drastically altered the writer’s life, and it is an event that resounds through his entire work. In one of the most intense episodes of Der blinde Masseur, Teodor Moldovan, the auctorial alter ego, recounts the 396 Gabriela Gl
avan almost unreal succession of events that took him and his parents across the border to Yugoslavia and the West. Equipped for a long trip by foot, the family tries to reach the free world by slowly exiting the country through a cornfield. After a prolonged adventure that could have ended in jail (there were thin wires hidden in the grass and tripping over them could alert border police), the great disappointment comes when they reach the main road and, by checking a milestone, the father realizes they are still in Romania. A second attempt proves successful. Although they cannot be considered political works, all of Florescu’s novels reflect some powerful co-ordinates of Romanian communism, dwelling on their significance and impact. In Wunderzeit, national celebrations, such as May Day or August 23rd (the communist Liberation Day) are described in bitter terms, for they only made the persistent desolation more palpable. The city and its surroundings clearly reflect the daily misery of the population: Sommer f€ ur Sommer waren die Raben abends in der D€ ammerung von den €ber die Feldern in die Stadt zur€ uckgekehrt, und der feine Staub hatte sich u Baumbl€atter gelegt. Jahr f€ ur Jahr roch es in der Stadt im August nach Braten, und kleine Papierfahnen wurden bis vor unseren Hauseingang gewirbelt. (Florescu 2001, 227) IV. A competition of failed returns C
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alin Dorian Florescu’s second novel, Der kurze Weg nach Hause extensively depicts the protagonist’s nostos to his homeland. Here, the return is disguised as a journey of self-discovery, and the details concerning spatiality are poignant and revelatory. The novel follows the formative trajectory of Ovidiu, who, as a young man living in Switzerland, increasingly feels out of place, alienated and in urgent need of understanding his past, as he probably faces his first existential crisis. The rather transparent symbolism of his name makes him the appropriate figure of an young exile in search of his homeland. His friends Luca, Lana and Toma are a representative group who reflect the troubles, challenges and experiences defining their young generation: an all-encompassing uncertainty, emotional lability, drug abuse and, on the positive side, openness to adventure, travel and encountering difference in all its forms. Although his journey starts as an attempt to follow Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 397 Luca into Budapest, Ovidiu’s destination is, in fact, Timișoara, the city where he was born. After a short erotic intermezzo in the Hungarian capital, Ovidiu heads ‘home’, to his native town. Nine years after his departure and a few months after the Revolution of December 1989, Ovidiu re-enters Romania in a way similar to that presented in Der blinde Masseur: the traveller finds his way through a crepuscular atmosphere, deadly signs appear menacingly at every step, his itinerary is plagued by bad omens, villages seem dormant in the dark, people look sadder and poorer than ever. The author has turned these initial parts of the journey back home into veritable statements of disappointment: both here and in Der blinde Masseur, upon his arrival, the exile encounters a hostile, strange world, radically different from the one his memory harbours. It is here that Florescu first signals the flagrant contrasts between the instances of subjective memory and those of objective reality. He proceeds by carefully providing detailed descriptions of places and people, weaving complex strands of social and political significance into the fabric of his prose. After crossing the border and entering the unwelcoming climate of the country, Ovidiu discovers the extent of his sentimental misrepresentations. As he drives through Arad, the second largest city of the Banat region, he sees that it fully displays the wounds of a prolonged state of decay and inner collapse. From the cracks in the pavement to the deep frowns on people’s faces, the place oozes melancholy and despair. Ovidiu is ashamed that his friend Luca finds this scenery fascinating and wants to photograph everything. For Ovidiu, the mental images of his home country are blurred, softened versions of the harsh imagery developing in front of him at the moment of his return. An earlier anticipation is now confirmed: ‘Das alles ist so erb€ armlich, und doch ist es meins. In einem urspr€ unglichen Sinn meins. Geburtsrecht sozusagen. Das alles bin ich’ (Florescu 2002, 10). This ‘f€ ur den schwarzweissen Film perfekt’ (Florescu 2002, 166) landscape is, nevertheless, familiar to the traveller, since it has remained the same since his childhood. Indeed, as critics have already pointed out,14 the object of his nostalgia is childhood itself as the age of serene security, and, deplorable as it may look, the city seems to have frozen in that desolate age: ‘Rechts also die Industrie und links Wohnh€auser wie ullt mit grosse verrottete B€auche von gestrandeten Schiffen. Sie waren gef€ 398 Gabriela Gl
avan den gl€ ucklichen Proletariern meiner Kindheit’ (Florescu 2002, 165). Almost nothing fits the unreal contours of his nostalgia-preserved homeland. In Said’s concise formulation, there is an ‘unhealable rift forced between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted’ (Said 2000, 173). The out-of-focus image resulting from overlapping memories of the past and concrete details of the present recalls Tabori’s intuition that the exile ‘inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another’ (Tabori 1972, 27). This existential fracture proves essential for understanding the source of the constant sense of dislocation experienced by Florescu’s characters. The flagrant discrepancies between memory projections and reality account for the changes occurring on deeper psychological levels once spatial and temporal distances emerge as decisive factors in the young man’s relationship with his native territories. Well aware of these inherent shifts, Florescu examines them closely: ‘Die Stadt war gross und sch€ on und magisch geblieben in meiner Erinnerung. In unserer leeren €ber dem Boden, Wohnung, an der Strasse 13. Dezember, 50 Meter u heiss im Sommer, kalt im Winter, hatte sich nichts ver€andert’ (Florescu 2002, 35). When he arrives in Timișoara and he visits his old home, its imaginary contours are shattered: Denn nichts war geblieben, wie ich es in der Erinnerung ausgeschm€ uckt hatte. Ausgeschm€ uckt. Ich hatte einfach das Sch€ onste nicht abgetragen. Weder die H€ ohe noch die Breite, die L€ange, das Licht oder die Farben waren gleich wie fr€ uher. Es war enger, tiefer, dunkler, wie ein kleiner K€ afig f€ ur Menschen. (Florescu 2002, 205) While strolling through the city, he concludes: Sie waren alle so anders, als ich sie erwartet hatte. Inzwischen war die Welt auch hier weitergekommen. Standbilder gab es nur in meinem Kopf. Ich staunte dar€ uber, dass die Frauen so sinnlich sein konnten, voller Lust unter der Haut, voller Haut und Lust unter dem Stoff. Ich hatte sie in Uniformen zur€ uckgelassen. Die Menschen des Ostens. (pp. 90–91) Although the communist regime has fallen, the permanent damage it has caused cannot be reversed. In Timișoara, Ovidiu’s aunt warmly welcomes the two young men, but her benevolence is overshadowed by her husband’s imminent death. Old, sick and bedridden, the dying uncle concentrates around him a cluster of symbolic representations relevant Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 399 for the protagonist’s nostos itself. Romania’s decades-long agony did not cease with the end of the communist era, it merely diversified its symptoms. Like the dying man Ovidiu sees again after many years, the country appears ailing and exhausted, as the old political order marks its exit and a difficult transition begins. Ovidiu’s attempt to comprehend his past is constantly undermined by a general feeling of irreversible degradation. He meets relatives and visits the places of his childhood, including his former home, and the feeling of loss is aggravated even further. The people he left behind are inevitably older, and the dark decades of communism have left an indelible mark on their lives at all levels, like a chronic disease. On a certain level, the geography of the city seems to have remained unchanged, a fact that subversively nourishes the young man’s nostalgic state of mind: Wenn man an der Kreuzung nach links abbog, kam bald jener Photoladen, wo ich f€ ur den Abschied photographiert worden war. Das Photo wurde in den Pass geklebt, der Pass in die Innentasche von Vaters Jacke gesteckt, gleich beim kleinen Herzen, das er am Zoll gehabt haben muss. [. . .] Rechts von der Kreuzung hingegen kam der Jozefin-Platz mit dem Markt und der Schule Nr. 12. Unweit von dort, an der Strasse Josef Ranghet, ruhig und abgeschieden, schattig, fast schon wie auf dem Land, wohnte Valeria, das M€ adchen, das meine Kindheit beendete. (Florescu 2002, 181) Upon closer examination, this apparent ‘freezing’ in time of the city might validate another understanding of home and its hypostases. The returned exile needs to identify those unchanged elements of his homeland in order to be able to experience a real return to the imaginary space he has been longing for. According to Gurr, ‘home is a static concept rooted in the unalterable circumstances of childhood. Insecurity [of homelessness] prompts the writer to construct static worlds, to impose order on the dynamic, to see the dynamic as chaos’ (Gurr 1981, 23–24). The present could be seen as chaotic by Florescu’s protagonist, as it tampers with the ineffable atmosphere of an irretrievable past. This ‘static home’ is, in this case, an agent of chaos, creating a dramatic clash between past and present. The city, with its appearance of being frozen in time, is but a deceptive simulacrum – it is a mere reminder of an irretrievably lost world. The same wanderings are detailed in Der blinde Masseur, this time by an older fictional alter ego, 400 Gabriela Gl
avan who revisits his school and its nearby streets with an acute feeling of yearning and alienation: Auf meinem Weg durch die Stadt kam ich an meinem alten Schulhaus vorbei € mit verwinkelten G€angen und schattigen H€ ofen. Uber den Mauern, die die Schule verteidigten, so wie fr€ uher Festungsmauern von dem Einfall der € €ber den Mauerrand T€ urken sch€ utzten, kr€ahten Raben auf Asten, die sich u bogen. (Florescu 2006, 53–54) However, Der kurze Weg nach Hause is Florescu’s first structured attempt at a fictional examination of his return to his homeland. The young man’s nostos must include the symbolic destination of his journey, the home of his childhood. His former home, now an imaginary construct, is the centre towards which Ovidiu is headed, as he seems convinced that it must reveal some essential truths concerning his identity. Earlier in the book, Florescu exposes his hero’s apparent ‘homelessness’ as an immigrant in Switzerland in a conversation with € berrascht, Zs ofia, his lover in Budapest: ‘‟So ist das bei uns”, und war u dass ich bei uns gesagt hatte. Denn mein bei uns war nie in Z€ urich gewesen’ (Florescu 2006, 106). There is more than one instance in the book where the narrator plunges into the stream of memory leading to this cardinal space. In fact, the whole issue of returning and the projections recreating his imaginary territories of Timișoara and Banat are calibrated according to the anatomy of his nostalgia. Finding his way back home should, in Vladimir Jankelevitch’s view, put an end to the protagonist’s longing, freeing him of the burden of this feeling, because ‘return is the medication for nostalgia’ (Jankelevitch 1974, 340). His vivid recollections of his young years in Timișoara have been relived numerous times before, as Ovidiu directly confesses: ‘Wenn ich die Augen schloss, konnte ich herumlaufen, ohne anzustossen. Neun Jahre schon hatte ich € Ubung darin. Emigrantenzauberei’(Florescu 2002, 181). In a Homeric sense, his return does not put an end to his longing; his odyssey remains suspended and incomplete. Precise descriptions and unexpected details abound in the hidden spaces of memory: Ich sah die Wohnung in Timisoara vor mir und bewegte mich leicht darin. Das Badezimmer. Das Waschbecken mit dem Schaum des Waschmittels Dero und die blauweissen K€ ornchen. Ich konnte das Geruch sogar in der Nase Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 401 sp€ uren. Die Waschmaschine mit dem aufklappbaren Deckel auf der Oberseite, den Mutter unter einem bestickten Makrameetuch versteckte. Mit dem €ber dem Badewannenrand hing. Den ich Darm nannte, Gummischlauch, der u weil sich dort die Waschmaschine mit furchtbaren Ger€ auschen entleerte. Ich sass auf dem Klo, h€ orte alles, war klein und hatte Angst, dass entweder die €ber mir hing, runterfiel. Waschmaschine explodierte oder der Sp€ ulkasten, der u Denn auch der machte Ger€ausche. Durchfallger€ ausche. (Florescu 2002, 57) The world seems small to the young boy and the perimeter he is allowed to roam is limited too, but that does not diminish the magical potential of the place: Die bekannte Welt umfasste die Strasse zwischen dem Bahnhof und dem Wasserkanal, die Bauruinen hinter dem Wohnblock, Hinterh€ ofe, Keller, D€acher und Unmengen an Verstecken, wo sich in jedem Augenblick etwas Magisches ereignen konnte. Es gab aber eine unsichtbare Grenze, die ich nicht €berschreiten durfte, ohne zu f€ u urchten, dass Mutter es herauskriegte. Und dass man am Abend aufpassen musste, was man sagte. Bis dann aber wucherten der Sonntag und seine M€ oglichkeiten in mir drinnen. (pp. 22–23) These memories trigger equally intense recollections of family scenes. There is a strong father–son relationship in Florescu’s first books, given their autofictional nature (especially in Wunderzeit), and this connection becomes visible in Der kurze Weg nach Hause as well. As he is packing for Romania, Ovidiu’s father (who actually prompted the family’s displacement by remaining adamant about fleeing Romania) doubts his son’s motives for returning. The young man’s vulnerable arguments are in fact memory flashes echoing in the present: ‘Erinnerst du dich, wie wir fr€ uher zu Hause im Dunkeln in unserem Wohnzimmer sassen und die Radiosendung aus dem Ausland h€ orten? Jeden Tag dasselbe: Du, ich, das Radio, die Nacht, das bekannte Radiosignet am Anfang der Sendung, die Rum€anische Rhapsodie von Enescu, die t€ anzelnden gr€ unen Punkte am Ger€at und das Rauschen. Unser Geheimnis. Deshalb fahre ich hin. Wegen der gr€ unen Punkte und der Nacht und dem Rauschen.’ ‘Du f€ahrst hin, weil die Punkte sch€ on t€anzelten? Bist du noch bei Verstand?’ ‘Weil nachts die Hunde in den Vierteln bellen und die Kornfelder gelber als anderswo und die Leute dieses m€ai anf€ ugen, wenn sie reden, und die Frauen die sch€ onsten Stimmen der Welt haben. So banal sind Gr€ unde.’ (Florescu 2002, 61–62) Ovidiu owes much of his sense of what ‘home’ means to his father and his stories. It is implicit that they have become an integral part of his 402 Gabriela Gl
avan constructed memories concerning his Romanian life, consolidating active €berall an sich: am beliefs such as these: ‘Die Menschen trugen es u K€ orper, in der Stimme, in den Blicken. Vater hatte davon erz€ahlt, Vater und meine Erinnerungen. Das Zuhause. Was, wenn es keines mehr gab?’ (Florescu 2002, 125). The writer’s articulation of the meanings of ‘home’ involves surprising details, surfacing in unexpected circumstances. For Ovidiu, the memory of home is primarily an olfactory one. Besides the intensely visual approach to Romania’s old and new faces, contact becomes complete once smell is involved, and the past is vividly recalled in the present. While his rather aseptic adoptive Switzerland emanates only subtle scents, things are quite the opposite in Romania. There is a strange familiarity even in the most repulsive street smells: ‘In Block B3 roch es €berhitzten Abfallschacht. Sonderbar, dass nach Abfall. Er g€arte im u Abfall nach zu Hause riechen konnte’ (Florescu 2002, 203). Teodor expands the observation to the whole country: ‘Dieses Land lag unter einer dichten Geruchsglocke’ (Florescu 2006, 6), as he feels under the permanent attack of an endless olfactory stimulation. There is the smell of the fields, the smell of garlic, coming from the priest in his car, or the body odour of hitchhikers by the side of the road. For Zaira, the feeling of home is present in a similarly ‘low’ register – in offensive language. The way people curse reminds her of childhood and the happy times before the war and communism. As she returns to Timișoara to meet Traian, she notices the general decay of the city and witnesses a comical scene: Vom Haus nebenan f€allt ein Ziegelstein auf die Motorhaube eines Autos, es h€ ort sich wie ein Schuss an. Der Fahrer schaut ungl€ aubig hinauf, kratzt sich im Nacken und flucht. So gr€ undlich habe ich das seit dreissig Jahren nicht mehr geh€ ort. [. . .] Die Worte des Fahrers wuchern, ich aber bin gl€ ucklich. Ich bin zu Hause. Sogar das ist ein Zuhause, wie jene schmutzigen W€ orter, die Grossmutter verbannt hatte, zuerst aus dem Landhaus, dann von unserem ganzen Landgut. (Florescu 2008, 9) Der blinde Masseur marks Florescu’s further progress in fictionalizing his autobiography, although this time the spotlight is shared with another character, a surprising and well-crafted one, the blind masseur himself. The writer resorts to another fictional alter ego, Teodor Moldovan, in order to re-enact the scenario of homecoming and identity Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 403 questioning. Following an already established pattern, the author reinforces the biographical co-ordinate once again. His protagonist is a Romanian immigrant living in Switzerland, who visits the country of his youth in order to find Valeria, the young love he left behind when he was a teenager and fled the country for Switzerland. He also tries to retrace some of the storytellers he used to record in his anthropological studies and so he encounters Ioan Timiș Palatinus, the blind masseur from Moneasa. The owner of an impressive library he could no longer read, as he had gone blind in his youth, the man exchanges his massage services for books on tape – he asks his clients to record themselves as they read classical literature and philosophy. This time, the return implies a certain ironic distancing from the characters and moments narrated: the protagonist finds his way to his native town and then to Moneasa, a marginal resort in the Banat, and is invariably faced with disenheartening or absurd situations. As has been noted earlier, the moment Teodor re-enters Romania (he first returned when he was a teenager, as described in Der kurze Weg nach Hause), a string of symbolic events begins to unfold. The crosses along the road are a sombre reminder of tragic accidents, there is a bizzare and talkative priest and a woman who insistently tries to marry off her daughter; all of them are in Teodor’s car as he speeds along the dangerous, bumpy road near the border. In a matter of minutes, the closeness to death creates an eerie, unsettling moment: they pass by the scene of a terrible crash that has killed a young couple rushing to their wedding. The atmosphere is permeated by a nameless fear and a feeling of deep unrest creeps in: In den Armen der Polizisten sahen die Leichen schwerelos aus, fast wie Kinder in den Armen ihrer M€ utter. Es waren zwei junge Leute, beide noch vor kurzem unscheinbar und doch lebendig, jetz aber so abwesend. Sie hatten nichts an sich, was sie auszeichnete, aber jetzt, durch ihren Tod, standen sie im Mittelpunkt. Das war ihr grober Auftritt. (Florescu 2006, 16) Again, the reasons prompting the return are exposed and questioned. When asked why he has come back to Romania, Teodor, a mature, meditative version of the young Ovidiu, ponders: Wie konnte ich ihm sagen, dass der Grund, aus dem ich hier war, weit zur€ ucklag, zwanzig Jahre zur€ uck, und dass er sich jedes Mal, wenn ich ihn festhalten wollte, verfl€ uchtigte? Diese Unruhe, die unmerklich gewachsen war, 404 Gabriela Gl
avan so wie Brotteig w€achst und aufgeht, war auch aufgegangen und hatte mich hierher getrieben. (p. 8) The same mirage of the warm, welcoming homeland, left behind years before, re-emerges: Dann wiederum f€ uhlte ich, dass ich auf keinen Fall stillstehen durfte, denn eine magnetische Anziehung ging von etwas aus, das sich noch vor uns, hinter €ffnen, mich hineinlassen, W€aldern und D€ orfern, versteckte. Es w€ urde sich o mit Ger€auschen und Farben umh€ ullen und mit Stimmen, wie ich sie zuletzt mit neunzehn Jahren geh€ ort hatte. (p. 11) In doubting the reality of these projections of his homeland, Florescu implies a justifiable dissolution of boundaries between the real and the imaginary, prompted by spatial and temporal distancing: Noch wenige Kilometer von der Grenze hatte ich gezweifelt, dass es dieses €berhaupt gab. Es war zu lange nur Einbildung und Erinnerung Land u € gewesen, und die Uberlandstrabe, die gleich nach Szeged, der letzten groben ungarischen Stadt, anfing, zog sich unendlich hin. (Florescu 2006, 9) This journey has long been prepared, and here another of Florescu’s specific modes of foregrounding displacement and nostalgia becomes relevant. The train station turns into the stage of a ritual performed weekly by the exile tempted to return to his faraway home. These moments are cultivated like a secret, forbidden pleasure: Im ersten Jahr wurde ich jeden Freitagabend unruhig. Am Wochenende ging €ber die ich morgens zum Bahnhof, studierte die Fahrpl€ ane, und weil ich u Schweiz nichts wusste, stellte ich mir vor, welche Gegend ganz nach meinem Geschmack w€are. Noch fuhr ich allerdings nirgends hin, sondern setzte mich ans Gleis und schaute, wie Z€ uge ein- und ausfuhren. Man hielt mich f€ ur verr€ uckt und lieb mich in Ruhe. Ich sah auch den Zug aus Wien kommen, €brige Osten nicht weit. Ich horchte, ob jemand und wo Wien war, war der u rum€anisch sprach, aber da war niemand. (p. 130) There is a certain melancholy surrounding the railway station in Florescu’s novels, and it can be regarded as a generic place of intersection between worlds. It is the second time the author resorts to this imagery, and it is pertinent to observe his predilection for potential escape scenarios – there is a similar scene in Der kurze Weg nach Hause, when Ovidiu accompanies his friend Luca to the station and, as he notices the name of the train, he creates an original metaphor of homecoming seen as Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 405 a gracious dance: ‘Der Zug hiess Wiener Walzer. Damit glitt man bestimmt sanft bis ins Herzen Osteuropas’ (Florescu 2002, 41). Florescu’s novels superimpose a dual representation concerning the homeland, revealing the writer’s interest in both detailing their concrete, geographical presence and also in articulating coherent considerations about their significance and impact on his subjective history. In this case, this dialectic permeates the entire novel, as Teodor constantly doubts and re-evaluates the meaning of ‘home’, his life as an immigrant and the ways in which he relates to others. At one point, Teodor has a relationship with a Romanian woman, Mihaela, who is married to a Swiss man and lives in Switzerland. Their affair is apparently prompted by their need to share a common background of displacement, but, to his disappointment, the woman’s affections lie elsewhere. Given the dense, alert narrative tone of Der blinde Masseur, the details and features of the revisited homeland emerge from the interstices of a veritable adventure. Contemplation, a reliable means of investigating the intersections between present and past in Der kurze Weg nach Hause, is replaced by rapidly shifting contexts that offer Teodor little time to adapt or adjust his reactions to often strange circumstances. Just as Ovidiu did in Der kurze Weg nach Hause, Teodor notices the dramatic changes in social dynamics, the emergence of a new work ethic and the unavoidable pitfalls of transition. In Timișoara, from the homeless teenagers washing car windows at traffic lights to the young women accompanying elderly Italian businessmen in the city centre, the country’s new realities also shape the new face of the city. It is not the first time Florescu relies on social criticism in order to add more depth to his return; similar tones are present in Der kurze Weg nach Hause. In a kind of metafictional twist, Teodor is in search of stories and storytellers himself: he tries to find the informants from the anthropological field research he carried out as a teenager, before he left Romania, and, at the same time, wants to find Valeria, his former girlfriend from those days. Stuart Hall’s observation that the past is ‘always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth’ (Hall 1990, 226) activates interesting connotations when applied to this context – Teodor wants to reconnect to his past and to those who knew its essential stories, too. His quests take him to Moneasa, where he becomes acquainted with Ioan Timiș Palatinus, the blind masseur. Although 406 Gabriela Gl
avan Moneasa cannot be directly incorporated into the real and imaginary geography of the protagonist’s homeland, it certainly adds significant weight to the general air of desolation and hopelessness defining these places in the narrative present. Teodor feels estranged and is repeatedly brutalized, beaten and robbed, and soon his adventure turns into a nightmare, a sure sign that he has failed in his return. Once again, the exile’s nostalgia remains unsatisfied, an open wound. Nostalgia has also been invoked in the context of defining diaspora in the proximity of a ‘congruence between territory, culture and identity’ (Soysal 2002, 138). V. Conclusions With Der blinde Masseur, C
at
alin Dorian Florescu renders a complex panorama of social and political change in contemporary Romania, brought about by the dramatic shift from communism to a local version of democracy and capitalism. More than any of his other novels, Florescu’s latest novel of homecoming perpetuates the tension of an ambivalent perspective: that of the long departed native, who still has intense recollections of the past, and that of the foreigner, a distant, uninvolved observer. Indeed, as Valentina Glajar points out in her study regarding German-language writers from Eastern Europe (Glajar 2004), the historical and cultural dimensions are crucial in understanding the complex experiences evoked by writers who have witnessed and written of the radical changes in the region in recent decades. They significantly contribute to the persistent in-betweenness15 where Florescu’s alter ego protagonists seem to dwell, redefining the shifting taxonomy of exile and displacement in connection to an East European experience of homecoming. Moreover, the repetitive returns of this writer’s characters, whose journeys take place at different moments in their lives, render more than a single, unified projection of the homeland; rather they portray a fluid structure that reunites multiple homelands, each corresponding to different moments of homecoming. As Brigid Haines remarks in her study concerning ‘writing from eastern and central Europe’ (Haines 2011, 218), referring to literature from Germany or written in the German language, ‘one of the commonest tropes of recent years has been the return of the exile from western Europe [. . .] to the land of their birth, in search of an authentic sense of belonging, which Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 407 inevitably fails’ (p. 218). Along with authors such as Richard Wagner, Herta M€ uller and Carmen-Francesca Banciu, Florescu places the focus in his works on the fluid consistency of cultural identity of Germanlanguage writers who have an East European experience. Moreover, Haines considers Romanian-German writers a significant group that, even before 1989, has been called ‘the “fifth” German literature (after the literatures of East and West Germany, Austria and Switzerland)’ (p. 216). After 1989, these writers have been gradually integrated into a growing critical scholarship targeting authors who lived in Romania and, having emigrated to Western countries, continued to write about their Romanian home and experience. Florescu’s writing incorporates multiple levels of discourse that coagulate a consistent, yet subjective view of Romania’s recent past. This subjectivity is not singular among Romanian writers from abroad – Andrei Codrescu, Norman Manea and Petru Popescu can be mentioned here as well. The subjective element coagulates a perspective that challenges the fixity of concepts relating to exile, migration and homecoming. While foregrounding an unavoidable nostalgia for the past, Florescu also focuses on a contrastive manner that exposes the pitfalls of post-communist transition as symptoms of a failed metamorphosis, one that could be perceived at all levels: individual or collective, simultaneously concerning both natives and exiles. Moreover, the centrality of the homeland of the Banat region in Florescu’s fictions and the nostalgic mapping of his native city are core arguments for the author’s authentic East European sensibility, one that connects individual experience to the greater framework of historical change.16 NOTES 1. See also Predoiu 2010. 2. In a recent overview of the dynamics of this rather recent connection between postcolonial theory and post-communist studies, Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, Dobrota Pucherov a and R obert G afrik argue, in an introduction to the volume, that ‘the experiences of the countries formerly belonging to the USSR and the Eastern Bloc and those previously colonized by West European powers, share a number of characteristics. These are, for example, structures of exclusion/inclusion (the center/periphery model and theorizations of the liminal and “in-between”); formations of nationalism, structures of othering and representations of difference; forms and historical realizations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience of trauma (involving issues of collective memory/amnesia and the rewriting of history); 408 Gabriela Gl
avan resistance as a complex of cultural practices; concepts such as alterity, ambivalence, self-colonization, cultural geography, dislocation, minority and subaltern cultures, neocolonialism, orientalization, transnationalism’ (Pucherov a & Gafrik 2015, 12). 3. See Glajar 2004, 5–6. 4. Cf. Haines 2011, 215–230, p. 21. 5. C
at
alin Dorian Florescu refers to his ‘in betweenness’ as a writer in an interview for Dilemateca (Chivu 2010, 63). 6. A more recent interview for the Romanian literary review Orizont details the writing process of Florescu’s latest novels (Șerban 2013, 4–5). 7. John Neubauer’s extensive argument in favour of the particularities of exile in East-Central Europe (2009) includes references to Romanian authors such as Vintil
a Horia, Eugene Ionesco, Dumitru Țepeneag, Paul Goma and Dorin Tudoran, among others; Camelia Cr
aciun’s study on Monica Lovinescu and her activity at Radio Free Europe brings forth significant elements regarding the case of Romania and its writers. However, C
at
alin Dorian Florescu’s works are not mentioned in this compendium. 8. In an interview for the Romanian literary magazine Suplimentul de cultur
a (The Cultural Supplement), Florescu declared ‘I am a traveler between worlds, a wanderer who has very few certainties’ (Romaniuc 2007). 9. See also Sarca 2011, 116–119. 10. Florescu reiterates his complex relation to his homeland in the 2010 interview for Dilemateca ‘Oriunde m
a duc, am o viaț
a cu accent’ (Wherever I go, I have a life with an accent), as he declares ʻI’m either in between or nowhere at all’, (Chivu 2010, 65). 11. With two chapters focusing on Romania (Oana Popescu Sandu, ‘‟Let’s all freeze up until the 2100 or so”: Nostalgic directions in post-communist Romania’ and Diana Georgescu, ‘‟Ceaușescu hasn’t died”: Irony as countermemory in postsocialist Romania’), Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille’s Post-Communist Nostalgia (2010) is an important research tool for the issue of nostalgia in the former Eastern bloc. 12. Herta M€ uller’s works are probably the most comprehensive exploration of this issue. 13. See also Cheie 2007, 129–141. 14. See Chivu 2006, 11. 15. For a consistent analysis on the role and function of borders in Florescu’s works see also Palimariu 2010, 97–112. 16. This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number 1/06.10.2016, within PNCDI III. BIBLIOGRAPHY Auerbach, E. 1969, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’, Centennial Review, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–17. Bhabha, H. K. 2007, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London. Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces 409 B€ oss, M., Gilsenan Nordin, I. & Olinder, B. (eds.) 2005, Re-Mapping Exile. Realities and Metaphors in Irish Literature and History, Aarhus University Press, Aarhus. Cernat, P. 2006, ‘^In c
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avan (gabriela.glavan@e-uvt.ro) is a lecturer at the West University, Timișoara, Romania, where she teaches Comparative Literature. She has a PhD in Romanian Literature and has published on modernism, the avant-garde and postcommunism.