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A Bakhtinian Poetics of Subversion:The Magical Realist Fiction of the1980s in East-Central EuropeCristina Şandru a

a University of Northampton, Northampton, EnglandPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Cristina Şandru (2008) A Bakhtinian Poetics of Subversion: The MagicalRealist Fiction of the 1980s in East-Central Europe, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction,50:1, 17-34, DOI: 10.3200/CRIT.50.1.17-34

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FALL 2008, VOL. 50, NO. 1 17

A Bakhtinian Poetics of Subversion: The Magical Realist Fiction of the 1980s in East-Central Europe

CRISTINA ŞANDRU

ABSTRACT: This article demonstrates how the specific forms of magical real-ism in East-Central European literature during the 1980s are an integral part of the larger subversive poetics of the final decades of Communist totalitarianism. It relies on Bakhtin’s invaluable conception of the polyphonic novel and the carnivalesque. The article focuses on the works of Czech writer Milan Kundera and a number of Romanian novels that metaphorically dramatize the subtle relation between cultural representation and ideological control. This study highlights an aspect seldom remarked on by scholars of East-Central European literature: namely, that “indirect” or “allegorical” literary fictions often constituted the only available form of oppositional discourse in highly Stalinized Communist regimes.

Keywords: communism, East-Central Europe, magical realism, resistance, sub-version

In reading, something happens over which I have no power. [. . .] This is the limit that even the most omnipotent police force cannot broach. We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will still be read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read. (Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller 240)

he final chapter of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller takes the reader on an obsessive hunt for the ten different books that he began but could not finish in the fictional countries of Ataguitania and Ircania,

and has him meet Arkadian Porphyrich, the Director General of the State Police Archives. Engaging in an extensive disquisition on how writing and censorship

T

Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications

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coexist and accommodate each other in autocratic states, the Director also high-lights the extent to which all written texts require the mental faculty of “bound-ary-crossing”: the white spaces between the lines invite a process of cognitive interpretation and imaginative speculation that no external authority can predict, control, or interfere with. Therein lies the power of fiction, not primarily in what it says, but in how it says it. When the external regulatory framework of literary production is imposed by coercive ideological regimes—when what is allowed to be printed is carefully laid out and relentlessly policed—the how becomes the preeminent generator of meaning and locus of interpretation. This was the case of East-Central Europe in the oppressive decades of Communist totalitarianism, when “coded” story lines, embedded symbolism, and metaphoric indirection became the staples of resistant literature.

Working within the traditions of the Central European modernist novel, with its Kafkaesque universe of excessive rationalism and absurd bureaucratization, this was a literature imbued with a sense of “grotesque magic” akin to that which had characterized certain postwar fictions that sought to articulate the violence and abjection of the continent’s recent traumatic history.1 It functioned as an illu-minating vision of unaccountable historical circumstances and, concomitantly, as a covert means of cultural resistance. In this article, I demonstrate how the specific forms of magical realism that emerged in the literature of East-Central Europe during the 1980s are an integral part of the larger arsenal of subversive poetics that marked the final decades of Communist totalitarianism. Although my interpretive framework is applicable to the literary production of the entire region, my primary textual focus is on certain magical realist aspects that infuse the otherwise lucidly intellectual novels of Czech writer Milan Kundera. I also refer to a number of Romanian novels whose stories dramatize, often in a heav-ily metaphorical format, the subtle relation between cultural representation and ideological control. They use “intricate textual filters to highlight the process that constructs symbolical systems and fantasy-worlds” (Corniş-Pope 14), cautiously treading the thin line between surface innocuousness and underlying subver-siveness. My choice of textual illustration highlights an aspect that is seldom remarked on by scholars of East-Central European literature, namely, that “indi-rect” or “allegorical” literary fictions often constituted the only available form of oppositional discourse in highly Stalinized communist regimes. In Romania in particular, resistance was more than anything else an aesthetic idea, a special kind of political poetics, textually challenging the ideological configurations of the monologic power structure (Corniş-Pope 22).

This is the historical context in which my particular interpretation of magi-cal realism is rooted. It departs from but also incorporates the “mainstream” understanding of the term (i.e., a literary discourse rooted in non-Western cultural systems), insisting on its discursive ambivalence and emphasizing its deconstructive potential at the expense of its radical ontological difference from Western systems of representation. As a mode of generic transgression,

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simultaneously foregrounding realist poetics and elements of the fantastic and the marvelous, magical realism is particularly apt to articulate ideological and geopo-litical dissent, and many writers in Central and Eastern Europe have relied on its defamiliarizing mechanisms to effect an “epistemic unhinging” (de la Campa 208) of the dominant power system. As it subverts multiple elements in the natural order of things, magical realism unsettles the ontological stability of the real and subtly undermines the hegemonic discourses that determine its contours and significance. At the same time, the uneasy conjoining of contradictory world orders that many magical realist texts feature subverts the objectifying effects of realist discourse, with its insistence on the rational and the ordinary, on that which falls within recognized and accepted limits. Moreover, “ontological disruption serves the purpose of political and cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinise accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, [and] motivation” (Zamora and Faris 3).

Magical realism can be seen, therefore, as an “oppositional” fictional practice that operates as a corrective to various kinds of power enforcement and ideologi-cal dominance.2 In their pluralist mingling of worlds, views, and voices, magical realist texts are politically enabling, testifying to a desire for narrative freedom that rejects totalizing, hegemonic, and univocal narrative stances. They stem from that literary “counter-tradition” of the carnivalesque and the grotesque,3 with its reversal of dominant value systems and polyphonic orchestration of narrative discourses, which includes writers as widely remote in time, space, and literary practice as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Gogol, Gombrowicz, Borges, and Calvino. The most inclusive theoretical blueprint of this counter-tradition, bear-ing as it does on the subversive force of laughter and the replenishing potential of a wonder-ful perspective on the world, was formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin, appropriately enough, in the Soviet Russia of the thirties.

Bakhtin’s conception of the polyphonic novel and the carnivalesque provides invaluable tools for approaching contemporary magical realist novels. His book Rabelais and His World, which theorizes the carnivalesque, was written in defiance of the “official prohibition of certain kinds of laughter, irony and satire [that was] imposed upon the writers of Russia after the revolution” (Pomorska in Bakhtin, Rabelais x). It proposed a concept of “grotesque realism” that went against the central tenets of Socialist realism and fashioned a symbolic space (that of the carnival) of irreverent behavior, bodily exultation, laughter, play, and parody. Bakhtin describes the world of the carnival as “sharply distinct from the serious, official, ecclesiastical, feudal, and political cult forms and ceremonials,” for it offers “a completely different, nonofficial, extra-ecclesiastical and extra-political aspect of the world, a second life outside officialdom” (4–5). During carnival time, Bakhtin postulates, the static world of order and authority gives way tem-porarily to a chaotic but comic babble, a liberation from all rules, a proliferation of multiply voiced layers of fiction. Their subversion of authority and certainty is also a subversion of established power relations, for, as Bakhtin shows, power

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finds its concrete form in the impulse to centralize and unify language, pushing it inward, toward standardized and dominant forms that exclude ex-centric and unorthodox voices. All symbols of the carnival idiom “are filled with the pathos of change and renewal, with the sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities” (Rabelais 11). It is a world of “topsy-turvy, of heteroglot exuberance, of ceaseless overrunning and excess, where all is mixed, hybrid, ritually degraded and defiled” (Stallybrass and White 8). Irreverence and riot are therefore key concepts in magical realist novels; hence their constant parodic inversions, as well as their baroque idiom and hyperbolic aggrandizement. It is in the tradition of the carnival that many of the figures inhabiting magical realist fictions belong; grotesque realism, or supernatural realism, can accommodate characters such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s devilish trio Woland, Azzazello, and Behemoth in The Master and Margarita, Milan Kundera’s Madame Raphael and her circle of ring-dancers in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, or Melquiades in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Certain versions of East-Central European magical realism spring from a more visionary carnivalesque, heir to the surrealist tradition of objectual transfigura-tion, linguistic restraint, and figurative minimalism. Theirs is a fiction dense with philosophical musings, where preference is given to the playful and the intellectual over the sentimental, the magical, and the archetypal. The Romanian writer Mircea Horia Simionescu’s cycle of novels titled The Well-Tempered Ingenious, written over a period of fourteen years stretching from 1969 to 1983, is one such spec-tacular case of anti-mimeticism in a surrealist, intellectual vein. “A heroic-comic epic, a satire and a panorama of the errors of this century,” the tetralogy4 projects the world of Communist Romania as a deadening universe “sick with inertia and stereotype” (Simionescu in Corniş-Pope 110). Yet what also emerges among the debris of the “onomastic dictionary,” the “general bibliography” of themes, myths, and clichés, the “breviary” of real and virtual calamities, and the “toxicology” of the self is a radical poetics subverting the underlying conventions of Socialist real-ist fiction, and by extension, of the ideological order that it reflects.

Because they are generically hybrid, magical realist texts can accommodate various levels of imaginative projection, pertaining either to the structure of the fictional universe itself or to the techniques of character delineation. Their alter-native spaces and “mirror-selves” often serve to reveal those facets of reality that the official “regimes of truth” systematically occlude or rework to fit their preset ideological patterns. They form a “counter-code” that makes its presence felt in the clashes of vision and perspective that the texts accommodate, as well as in the narrative strategies that they favor (the amalgamation of fact and fiction, the blurring of ontological boundaries, metamorphosis, the doubling of characters, the literalization of metaphor, and other such defamiliarizing techniques). The functional nature of these narrative strategies may differ from novel to novel, but they have one element in common: they allow the suppressed, the silenced, the censored, or the expurgated to find their way into the text in precisely those

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interstices that the linguistic system makes possible. As a result, they become double-coded discourses, enacting fictionally the tension at the heart of an ideo-logical system predicated on erasure and coercion.

This “double vision” becomes evident in the articulation of a peculiar kind of false consciousness, discursively assumed by people in totalitarian regimes to hide the real nature of their thoughts. Their assimilation of a number of set phrases engenders a wholly new type of discourse, one used in “official” contexts and coming at constant cross-purposes with the inner language of the characters. This inner “private” language finds itself at odds with the dominant public rheto-ric, a sort of Orwellian Newspeak of which one has to have at least a smattering knowledge if one desires to go about one’s business in as inconspicuous a manner as possible. How well one can switch back and forth between the two distinct languages is often a measure of social success, or simply survival. However, one eventually reaches a stage where it becomes increasingly difficult to keep them apart, and they merge seamlessly, inducing the kind of metaphysical double vision to which I have referred.

One particularly illustrative example of the divorce between public and pri-vate discourse is provided in Milan Kundera’s 1969 novel The Joke, where even the bitterly self-aware Ludvik, who has no illusions left about the mendacious nature of Communist authority, is compelled to mouth the required responses in a mock interview staged by the local radio just before the start of the annual folk ceremony of the “Ride of the Kings.” He feels ashamed of his compliance, his “Pavlovian” instincts:

I had an impulse to tell her exactly what I thought. [. . .] That every year folk art loses more supporters. That the authorities had lost interest as well. That it was nearly dead. [. . .] What all those folk instrument bands and folk song and dance ensembles play is more like opera or operetta or light music, not folk music [. . .] What bastardisation! That is what I would have liked to disgorge into the microphone, but in the end I said something completely dif-ferent. The Ride of the Kings was splendid. The vigour of folk art. The blaze of colour. I fully share. I thank everyone who has taken part. The enthusiastic organisers and schoolchildren, whom I fully. (254)

This passage will ring true to anyone familiar with the rhetorical set phrases uttered across East-Central Europe on various public occasions in which the Party was deemed to be involved. Jaroslav, Ludvik’s childhood friend, also undergoes a painful psychological split as a result of having to constantly juggle the two dis-cursive orders battling in his head. His “slippages” become increasingly frequent, and at several points in the novel he comes close to betraying the real nature of his thoughts. Even as he mechanically repeats the prepackaged rhetoric of the official Party line, he longs to imbue the Moravian folkloric traditions, of which he feels he is the primary guardian, with the spirit of a past that the Party has successfully ousted from the public consciousness of his fellow townsfolk. He strives to inhabit the quasi-mythical realm of “authentic” folklore, surrounding

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himself with it in hopes that it will insulate him from the debasement of cultural heritage into propagandistic material. The manipulation of the past by the take-over of its symbolism and the perversion of ritual and its conversion to agitprop are magnificently rendered in the “welcoming of new citizens to life” (a mock “communist” christening) episode that Ludvik witnesses at the town hall, and whose deliberately defamiliarizing retelling only serves to enhance its absurdity (170–72).

The uncanny character of this episode of “secular baptism” is similar in effect to the irruption of the “unhomely” (unheimliche)5 into an otherwise realistic text, a programmatic artifice that is the benchmark of many magical realist fictions. In an East-Central European context, one can identify such “magical” disruptions even in the most realistically engineered of propaganda texts. As inescapably lin-guistic structures, they incorporate gaps and foreground ruptures through which the “repressed” occasionally erupts. Thus, in socialist realism, although no direct intrusion may be perceived, the textual effect is often subversive against its own will, because realism is brought to such extremes of distortion that it ceases to be “real” in the sense of giving a verisimilar representation of the extratextual world. The forceful expulsion of the Other (in this case the actual reality of the matters presented) causes an effect of disbelief similar to that induced by a work of fantasy: the “real” of socialist realism is so fantastically far from what is actually the case that, in a paradoxical twist, it subverts itself,6 engendering that quality of “uncanny laughter” that is part of the dark comic mode of much Eastern European literature.7

This particular embodiment of the comedic spirit vindicates Bakhtin’s belief that “certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter” (Rabelais 38), which is why literature registers its most poignant presence in times of massive historical trauma, when creative artists struggle against the dif-ficulty to adequately imagine and articulate horrors beyond representation. The “thin line [stretching] between the horrible and the comic” (Ionesco in Kundera, The Art of the Novel 136) is that which many of Kundera’s “fantastic episodes” brush against, imprinting a somber note on his otherwise detached fictional meditations. The shifts from the historical to the magical realist (in the “floating episodes” in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for instance, where Madame Raphael and two of her students rise in the air and disappear through the ceil-ing, joining the other ring dancers in the city square, an image superimposed on the simultaneous cremation of the recently executed “traitors” of the communist idyll) are used sparingly in his novels, marking the contrast between the stark outrages of modern history and the impossibility of adequately representing them in a non-metaphorical mode.

The boundaries between the four narrative modes that blend in Kundera’s nov-els (mimetic-realist, historiographic-metafictional, satiric-parodic, and fantastic-magical realist) are seldom explicitly marked, and the passing from one mode into another often goes unnoticed, as when Tereza’s dream on Prague’s Petrin

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Hill in his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is woven seamlessly into the fabric of the realist narration preceding it. This indeterminacy of modes is especially valid for Kundera’s “French” novels Slowness and Identity, in which the writer consistently explores the liminal spaces between reality and dream. The use of dream sequences in Kundera’s novels conforms to Bakhtin’s description of the role that they play in an otherwise realistic story: they open up “the possibili-ties of another person and another life [within]; [the individual] loses his finalized quality and ceases to mean only one thing; he ceases to coincide with himself” (Problems 114). Indeed, Tereza’s dreams function as metaphorical signifiers of metamorphosis: Tomas the strong, who commands the naked women at the pool, becomes Tomas the weak rabbit nestled in Tereza’s now strong hand at the end of the novel.

The indistinct boundary between these two fictional modes also separates the two types of laughter that Kundera’s narrative voice theorizes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (85–87): on the one hand, “demonic laughter,” fueled by skepticism and irony, an awareness of the limitations of human existence, but also a desire for what individual freedom is available within those limits; on the other, “angelic laughter”—the sign of joy at the beauty and meaningfulness of life, expressing an absolute and “categorical agreement with being” (Unbearable Lightness 1985: 248).8 This latter is the epitome of the lyrical attitude to life, the utopian dream of paradise that underlies all fundamentalism. The former is positively singular, individualistic, and idiosyncratic; the latter is collective, sub-missive, and conformist. The former is essentially lonely and tormented under the surface of cynicism; the latter is a retreat into the world of dogmatic certainties, symbolic of the unwillingness to confront one’s existential problems and recog-nize the “shit” that is an intrinsic part of the human condition. The emblematic figures of “angels” and “demons,” when positioned in relation to history, stand at the core of two diametrically opposed interpretations of existence: in the world of angels, history is ordered, teleological, and coherent, painted in the hues of grand design; the devilish vision, in contrast, sees its multicolored, carnivalesque disorder; its refusal to fit into idyllic or ideological molds; its incomprehensibility and fickleness.

Kundera’s response to the predicament of existence torn between the two poles is a playful but all too human skepticism. Laughter must not necessarily be either angelic or devilish: it can simply be human. When laughter is human, it signifies a shedding of misconstrued illusions, a willingness to admit frailty, weakness, and defeat, and a pointed and ironic eye cast on a history that repeats itself as farce, that plays uncouth pranks, but that can be resisted, if only in spirit. In the 1991 novel Immortality, Pro-fessor Avenarius utters a characteristic piece of Kunderian wisdom:

If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy. (386)

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This is the sense that we derive from many of Kundera’s stories, where laughter is as double-edged a phenomenon as anything else in totalitarian societies: on the one hand, there is the laughter of rejoicing at uncontested meaning; on the other, laugh-ter is a means of liberation from the oppressive hold of ideologies and unshake-able beliefs. Yet, because it is destructive to the illusions that human beings build to make sense of their lives, it reveals the absurdity at the heart of existence, and, as such, is nihilistic and unbearable. Tragedy and farce, idyll and cynicism are therefore dangerously close, and liberation can easily slip into destruction. There is no final answer in the stories of East-Central European writers: human existence navigates between these two extremes, and which of the two poles predominate depends greatly on chance and history rather than individual choice.

Nowhere is the presence of the uncanny in the midst of historical turmoil better revealed than in Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, where the repressed returns as an explosion of the unknown and the uncontrollable com-ing to haunt the censored, ordered, and safely expurgated Soviet reality of the 1930s. The Master and Margarita departs from the aesthetic order of modern-ist art, as many of its contemporary Central European novels did; the chapters dedicated to the Master’s narrative find their Janus-like, carnivalesque parallel in the “other” half of the novel, inhabited by the grotesque figures of Woland, Koro-viev, Behemoth, and Azzazelo. The Master himself inhabits the subversive realm of the mad in a parodic inversion of the real world of Soviet socialism, whose “soundness,” rationality, and order are disrupted and annihilated by the intrusion of devilish magic. Realistic minor characters freely intermingle with deliberately abstract and archetypal figures; the conjuring of an inverted theologian’s world constitutes both a parodic reworking of major Dostoyevskian themes (e.g., the recurrent debate over the existence of God and the Devil) and a covert attack on a self-professed atheistic society in which magic, the unexplainable, and the “irrational” are deemed ideologically suspect and potentially dangerous. The intrusion of the unexplainable reveals the irrationality at the heart of socialist hyper-rationality, its profoundly destructive nature, its layer of totalitarian mad-ness under the surface-skin of “normality.”

It is fitting, therefore, and in the tradition of Bakhtinian subversive inversion that it is the Devil who forces contemporary atheist Moscow into a recognition of supernatural forces. The devilish performance at the Moscow Variety Theatre where, to modify the expresson, all hells break loose at Satan’s grand ball is among the most “magical” of magical realist episodes, “Bulgakov’s answer to his era’s denial of imagination and its wish to strip the world of divine qualities” (Proffer 367). In many senses, Bulgakov’s novel can be seen as an Ur-magical realist text, its multilayered structure allowing it to function on several levels at once, as deconstruction of history and myth, parodic rewriting of canonical literary texts, and covert critique of its contemporary Soviet society. Yet, despite the abundant display of “magic” and the rhetorical flourishes on its surface, the same theme of individual responsibility that would recur several decades later

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in the fictions of East-Central Europe remains a unifying thread of the novel. Characteristically, Bulgakov’s response to his fear-struck era was a multifaceted “joke.” Like Kundera’s later works, it calls for skeptical but compassionate ethics that respect the individual and the values of enlightened rationalism. Pilate’s fear, based on what he knows awaits him if he fails to punish perceived dissenters, is based on the contemporaneity of a Soviet system in which disturbing examples abound of what happens when ethics is divorced from politics. The carnivalesque inversions and fantastic episodes, though structurally fundamental to Bulgakov’s novel, are functionally similar to those more sparse episodes in Kundera’s fiction that stand symbolically for a world gone awry, in which hyper-rational “really existing socialism” is revealed in its violent and absurd irrationality.

Ana Blandiana’s Drawer with Cheers, written between 1983 and 1989, is a Romanian version of Bulgakov’s masterpiece, which perhaps best exemplifies the hybrid nature of magical realist texts. Allegorical and naturalistic at the same time, the novel also contains insertions from the writer’s journal, which offer a realistic picture of Romania’s last communist decade. The members of the Secu-ritate9 who invade Alexandru Şerban’s house are degraded Bulgakovian types: the “leader” is a relatively civilized intellectual, a cynical and sly raisonneur; the other two are a fat, brutish lout, whose metaphorical hooves identify him as a demonic figure, and a slim, insolent fellow who may remind one of self- sufficient, stereotypical TV police. They act like eccentric invaders, rummaging through their victims’ intimate clothing, taking showers in their bathrooms, and sleeping in their beds, performing all manner of lascivious, grotesque, and absurd scenes. They play the part of waggish, buffoon-like devils who engage in a sys-tematic exercise of terror and humiliation to break their victims and bring them to the verge of insanity. These victims’ subsequent splits of consciousness, so pervasive in the mental atmosphere of totalitarian societies, are acted out in a sys-tem which has become more “aseptic,” yet, at the same time, more ubiquitously invasive. Written in the 1980s but unpublished until 1992, the novel features late Communism’s preferred re-education system—the psychiatric hospital that has replaced the prison and the Gulag. Physical and moral terror has been supplanted by various methods of brainwashing, whereby “antisocial” dissidents are re- educated to applaud happily, robot-like.10 Yet, the grimmest vision is that which the protagonist of the novel faces when he is released from the psychiatric ward: he escapes the narrow confines of the hospital only to find that, in the meantime, the entire country has been thoroughly “purified” and remodeled in the image of the Party. The trope of the psychiatric asylum, which harks back to Bulgakov’s initial usage in multiple ways, resurfaces in other novels of the decade (e.g., Mircea Cărtărescu’s Orbitor and Augustin Buzura’s Refugees), highlighting the linguistic and moral schizophrenia characteristic of “real-existing socialism.”11

As Brenda Cooper remarks in relation to magical realism in a postcolonial con-text, ironic distancing is a crucial feature of the magical realist narrative perspec-tive (49), because the incorporation of myth, legend, and folklore in the fictional

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fabric often serves as a point of departure in interrogating the traditions of which they are part. In the East-Central European context, it forms an integral part of the metaphysical irony characteristic of the fiction produced in the region. Like the “comedy of futility” described by Charles Eidsvick, with its Kafkaesque sense of the absurd, it has origins in a carnivalesque tradition that seeks to expose and debunk the incongruities and fundamentalism of totalizing systems. In the novels of “symbolic fictiveness” emerging in East-Central Europe in the final decades of totalitarian rule, narrative structure is heightened with the introduction of a meta-novelistic level that interrogates the relationship between fictional worlds and their author/narrator/reader (Cornis-Pope 153–4). As Adrian Otoiu suggests in his article on the Romanian fiction of the 1980s, “the narrative strategies of these texts tend to disorient readers by placing them in the liminal spaces of indecision” (88). The narrator’s position is similarly hesitant, hovering between visibility and invisibility, involvement and detachment, proximity and distance. Liminality and in-betweenness thus not only characterize the ontological structure of magi-cal realist fictional worlds but also are manifest at a discursive level, whenever “the narrator adopts the strategy of an ‘impossible’ location in the simultaneous spheres of both/and or neither/nor, outside and inside the narrative” (88). Otoiu’s observation thus extends Homi Bhabha’s conception of the liminal text from the intradiegetic level (with regard to liminal characters or locations) to the liminal-ity of the diegesis itself (i.e., of the narrative procedures that allow the story to unfold). The narrative strategies that magical realist novels use (e.g., the position-ing of the narrative voice; the use of space, time, and character) are thus revealed as hybrid and liminal, not simply the locations and identities that they project. The several levels of ambiguity that these texts incorporate, as well as their use of hybrid structures and parody, cancel certitudes and shock expectations, making confirmation and consensus impossible. Because totalitarian utopias are based on the dream of a “complete and categorical agreement with being” (Kundera, Unbearable Lightness 248), any notion of play based on difference, irony, and humor is deemed suspect and ideologically dangerous.

One central thematic element that various forms of magical realist fiction share is the “play with history,” or the redefinition and recreation of official accounts of historical events. In many respects, magical realist texts can be viewed, therefore, as distinctively “magic” versions of what Linda Hutcheon has termed “histo-riographic metafiction.”12 A particular example of this brand of historiographic magical realism is the novel The Book of Metopolis, written in 1977 by Romanian metafictionist Ştefan Bănulescu. A “Danubian saga a la Márquez” (Corniş-Pope 137), in which the traditional world of Romanian villages is infiltrated by utopian propagandists strangely resembling Communist agitators, the novel successfully blends fact and fiction, the serious and the burlesque, the parodic and the carni-valesque, requiring an intricate system of “layered readings”—simultaneously historical and symbolic, political and metaphysical—as it turns inward to ques-tion its own constructedness and the processes whereby fiction emerges.

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More important, however, such magical realist texts constantly foreground the difference between historical events (which have no meaning in themselves) and historical facts (which are given meaning in the process of textual reconstruc-tion). This is the case of many “documentary” novels in East-Central Europe, which are often fashioned out of seemingly incongruous ingredients and inhabit the typically hybrid location characteristic of magical realist fictions. Such a novel is The Woman in Red, engineered by an authorial team of three Romanian writers (Nedelciu, Babeti, and Mihaies) who all belonged in the experimental generation of the 1980s. In its superposition of “mythical permanence and ‘the illogical logic’ of fashion, Broch’s modernist gravity and Vonnegut’s postmodern gusto, box office and succès d’estime” (Otoiu 88), it self-consciously reminds the reader that, whereas events did occur in the “real,” empirical past, they are named and constituted as historical facts in the present by selection and narrative posi-tioning. Our understanding of history is grounded in the effects of representation. The competing ontologies of extratextual reality and the intratextual world coex-ist uneasily in the same fictional space, forming “a dense commingling of the improbable and the mundane” (Rushdie, Shame 4). The conflations of worlds, the multiplication of selves and ontological givens, the tendency of people and places “to leak into each other” (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 374) thus consti-tutes one of the seminal characteristics of all magical realist texts.

In his discussion of the metamorphoses of fictional space in magical realist novels, Rawdon Wilson identifies three types of fictional location: first, one roughly conforming to the coordinates and laws of the extratextual world—the fictional space of most realist novels; second, a fictional space that works according to a completely different set of rules and coordinates, producing a self- contained universe at the furthest remove from the extratextual world—the space of fantasy; and third, a fictional world that brings together two different sets of assumptions about the locality of a place—one that conforms to our sense of the extratextual world and one that does not, constituting another, self-contained kind of world, which Wilson sees as the fictional universe of most magical realist novels (217).

Thus defined, the projected world of magical realist fiction is revealed to work in perfect conjunction with the double-coded nature of the narrative mode itself: it is an ambiguous space characterized by the interaction between the bizarre and the ordinary. Most magical realist fictions, however, though overtly foregrounding their fictionality and their imaginary and linguistic constructedness, simultaneously work toward a naturalization of the ontological incompatibilities that they project. There is always a discontinuity among the projected worlds—not a distance or a conspicuous frontier, but merely an “angle.” Magical realist fictions are not there-fore properly heterotopian in the sense that Foucault defined and Brian McHale subsequently applied to postmodernist fiction;13 rather, borrowing Lubomir Dolezel’s characterization of the Kafkian world, I describe the type of fictional space characteristic of magical realism as hybrid. In fact, it is a distorted or

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otherwise plurivalent version of the extratextual space, one that can accom-modate various axioms of what a coherent space might be in the same way that modern geometry, essentially Euclidian, accommodates the geometrical space-constructions of Lobacevski or Bolyai. What is characteristic of magical realist texts is the way in which the transition between what is experientially possible in our world and what is empirically impossible is made seamless, as if the phe-nomena described were part of a single set of rules of spatial organization.

This ontological incompatibility results in a deconstructive movement that throws doubt on the possibility of representation itself—or rather, problematizes the laws of realist representation. Magical realist texts thus function as alternative versions of rationally circumscribed reality. The “other” occulted by the hege-monic version is brought back into the text and visibly made part of the process of signification. Such alternative ontologies create subtle ruptures at the level of one’s imaginative identification with authoritarian structures and “official” realities.14 In this sense, their poetics are specifically political, because the oblique textualizations go against the grain of official representations, dramatizing the constant penetration of “natural” reality by its semioticized ideological double. In novels such as Mircea Nedelciu’s Fabling Treatment, a subsidiary theme has to do with the impossibility of extracting the “truth” from the variety of stories in which it is disseminated, the impossibility of arriving at an “original reality” before the moment of remembering and narrative. Underneath this postmodern preoccupa-tion, however, one can read the difficulty of sifting through the layers of ideologi-cally fabricated fictions of reality, in which the substance of the real is constantly displaced by constructs that masquerade as “truths” (Corniş-Pope 17).

In Nedelciu’s novel, the irruption of the extraordinary into the otherwise real-istic texture of the narrative couches an extended political and moral allegory. An unlikely combination of a realist, magical realist, and detective story, the novel’s ontology is structured on three levels: the level of the “real” world of Communist Romania, whose center in the novel is the meteorological institute Fitotron; the alternative or parallel “colony” in the midst of the Baragan plain, unmarked by maps and only known to a small number of people; and the various subworlds of the characters: Luca’s world, Gheorghe’s Borgesian world, and grandpa Marcu’s world. The unmapped “colony” is a world descended from a Márquez novel, a space in which “something is seriously wrong with time” (Nedelciu 115), and into which only “initiates” penetrate. The station itself, though part of the realistic ontology of the novel, functions as an obliquely symbolic element in a narrative in which events seem to be unleashed and controlled by unpredictable meteorologi-cal forces rather than by the strangely absent politico-ideological authority.

Luca, the disoriented character who inadvertently stumbles on this parallel time-space, finds in the “island” an alternative universe in which “some people live fifty years behind their times, some even one or two hundred” (115); in which food, though plentiful and tasty, is inconsistent; and in which drink cannot quench thirst. The overwhelming absence of words that Luca experiences most

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forcefully whenever he strays in this alternative time-space (134) is the sign of a universe that resists representation, whose ontologic status is never adequately resolved in the novel. The attempts at rationally explaining the existence of such “no man’s lands” as the result of “historical hesitations” of various kinds (121) are undercut by its simultaneous status as a projection of Luca’s delirious mind and as an empirically existing topological entity. Its very name, “The Place” (i.e., topos), connotes both specificity and vagueness. It also functions as a hybrid space, in which attributes of the “real” world mingle freely with those of an atemporal utopian space, a commingling that finds its conceptual analogy in the geometrical construct of the Möbius strip.

The novel effects subversive temporal disruptions as well. The investigation of genealogies is the main activity in which most members of the “colony” seem to be involved, to various extents. These investigations, usually occurring in the “outside world,” effectively deny the history of the present by re-enacting a past time-space. According to the proposition that individual personal time may not coincide with the historical time one happens to be born into (130), many of the characters in the novel simply refuse to live in the present. The micro-world of the antiquarian’s shop, a Borgesian fold in space-time untouched by the reality of Communist history, represents one particular form of this refusal. This is a world in which adventure occurs on a purely imaginary level, in the fictional universes of the books in the midst of which Gheorghe had chosen to live before his shop was forcefully dismantled and he took refuge in the “colony.” In fact, the guid-ing genealogical spirit of the “colony” is that of “grandpa Marcu,” an almost Faulknerian or Márquezian character, who has made a philosophy of living in a time different from the present. By living in the imaginative projection of a differ-ent time-space, he effectively annuls the consequences that the factual reality of the present (his long-term political imprisonment) might have had on his life.

One way grandpa Marcu lives this fabricated, “resuscitated” time is by writing his own supposedly noble genealogy, which similarly hovers between the “real” and the fictitious. This “strange, counter-factual, optative” writing (141) hides the truth of his own life, a truth at odds with that of a world inimical to his very being. Fictional autobiography thus functions as a potent instrument of regeneration and meaning making against an invasive and violent historical reality, a means of imaginative and moral resistance. It parallels a similar, though opposite, genea-logical movement in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, where Saleem Sinai links his life with his times to reveal the “magical” connections between History and the marginal histories it occults. The ideological underpinning and the geopoliti-cal context are different; the recuperative impulse is the same.

In the alternative universes that they project, magical realist novels often voice a longing to return to an atemporal, mythical setting, a remote, isolated, and self-contained locus amoenus15 not subject to the arbitrary intervention of history and the State. In this sense, prison may serve as a metaphorical zone where one’s individuality may be cherished and protected from outside intrusion, a space of

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inner freedom;16 similarly, a psychiatric clinic may ultimately be the place where the nonconforming liberty of spirit can take refuge,17

a place where walls may be there as much to keep those outside from getting in as to keep those inside from getting out, a place where Pirandellian riddles about the nature of form and reality, sanity and madness, seem wholly appropriate. (Impey 85–86)

In Nedelciu’s novel, the arrival of the mythicized gypsies in the colony of the Val-ley of Tears coincides with the phenomenon of pororoca, which designates the unaccountable natural phenomenon in South America when the Amazon flows against its own course one day every year, and which the native Indians celebrate (220). Both these Indians and the gypsies live in a different time-space, one that has no connection with contemporaneity; yet beneath the delightful fantasy lurks a great deal of existential solitude and despair. The retreat from the “real” world of history to a “pristine” time, untouched by the violence of totalitarianism, is revealed as deeply problematic and, ultimately, impossible. Nedelciu’s utopian “colony” goes awry because of the constant trespassing and interference of the “outside world,” because of the prevalence of fear over love, and in the end, the desire to “survive in fiction and die in reality” (196) leads to the implosion of the self-contained mythical universe.

Another significant strategy of composition, which supplements the recon-struction of narrative space and time in magical realist novels, is the use of repeti-tion as a narrative principle, which often takes the form of strange doublings and metamorphoses of characters. This use of repetition, which Freud had associated in his analysis of “The Sand-Man” with the confrontation with the unheimlich, has a defamiliarizing effect similar to that produced by the unexpected revelation of the uncanny at the heart of the “normal.” Against the claustrophobic universe of the real, individuals often find escape in fictionalized selves. Thus, Jaromil the poet, the protagonist of Kundera’s 1973 novel Life is Elsewhere, imaginatively creates his “double,” Xavier, who possesses all the attributes that Jaromil wishes to have but does not. The poetic language that Jaromil fashions in relation to this fictive double always speaks with a supplement, addressing that other within himself that he wishes to be but is not. The mirror images that such doublings project are subversive because they present a self and, by extension, a world that could be; even though the actualization of the potential self is most often thwart-ed, the possibility that they inscribe in a determined historical reality reveals this reality’s incompleteness and poverty, heralding the necessity of chance.

The device of metamorphosis functions inversely (i.e., to reveal the occulted facet of an apparently coherent and singular reality—its darker double). The pages of Bujor Nedelcovici’s and I. E. Sîrbu’s novels in the Romanian fiction of the 1980s and 1990s are populated by a symbolic bestiary of fantastic intensity—the torturers and the informers are projected as huge gastropods, batrachians, rats, hyenas, bedbugs, leeches, Ubu-esque giants, or dwarfs. The metamorphic

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process is called “rat-ification” and “indevilation,” and it gives the characteristic note of a new hell in which devils are no longer needed, because human beings willingly play a part in their own subjection (Cesereanu 164). Metamorphosis also functions as a particular form of the literalization of metaphor. In Russian folklore, for instance, there is a form of sorcery known as chertyhan’e, of which the rough equivalent would be “summoning the devil” (Ugrešić 56). Accord-ingly, in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, it is enough for the characters to simply utter the word “devil” for the creature to materialize in flesh and blood, and surrounded by a whole colorful entourage.

The Freudian “unhomely” (unheimliche) in these examples serves to unveil that “other within” that hegemonic discourse attempts to suppress, but that sur-reptitiously infiltrates the untold stories and carnivalized episodes of magical realist texts. It is, in the most proper of senses, the revelation of an alienness that is too familiar because it is repressed. The uncanny effect in such novels is there-fore not simply a matter of the mysterious, bizarre, or frightening; it also involves “a kind of duplicity (both doubling and deception) within the familiar” (Bennett and Royle 42), in full accord with the mode’s double-coded nature.

To conclude, magical realism in the East-Central European literature of the 1980s operates as the mode of an essentially subversive sensibility. Its double-coded nature in both content and style has often facilitated the expression of various forms of dissent by allowing the silenced to find its way back into the text, often in carnivalized form. Its multidimensional universe contains multiple spaces of insertion, “lines of fracture” that allow for a continuous fashioning and rewriting of memory, history, and identity, the open possibility of the recupera-tion of the “Other.” While remaining a textual strategy, trapped in its linguistic nature, magical realism operates an enlargement of vision, subversively includ-ing in its discourse those elements occulted by the “official” truth. It thus acts as a virtual corrective to a limited or censored vision of reality, most often imposed by authoritarian regimes or systems of thought. Its filiations with the counter-tradition of the carnivalesque and its constant subversion of boundaries (whether generic, ontologic, or ideological) make it best suited for the expression of a resistant and skeptical imagination.

UNIVERSITY OF NORTHAMPTON NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND

NOTES

1. Two prominent examples are Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) and Jerzy Kosincki’s The Painted Bird (1965).

2. As Zamora and Faris point out, “Magical realist texts are subversive: their in-betweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to monologic political and cultural structures” (6).

3. “[. . .] a counter [tradition] in which carnivalesque laughter, discursive empowerment, and ludic

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interactiveness operate in the frame of a dialectical negation of a dominant [ideology] oriented toward ‘adjustment’ to [. . .] socio-economic dictates” (Arnaud and Garnier 39).

4. Including Dictionar onomastic [Dictionary of Names], 1969; Bibliografia generala [The Gen-eral Bibliography], 1970; Breviarul/Historia Calamitatum [Breviary/Historia Calamitatum], 1980; Toxicologia sau dincolo de bine si dincoace de rau [Toxicology or On the Other Side of Good and on This Side of Evil], 1983.

5. The German word “unheimlich” is considered untranslatable; its rough English equivalent, “uncanny,” is itself difficult to define. It is an indescribable quality that plays an integral part in the understanding of the uncanny experience, which is terrifying precisely because it cannot be adequately explained. Literature owes the most extended examination of the concept to Freud, who, in his essay “The Uncanny,” proleptically identifies in E. T. A. Hoffman’s story “The Sand-Man” a number of defamiliarizing techniques used by magical realist writers. According to Freud’s description, the uncanny “is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror,” deriving its terror not from something external, alien, or unknown, but, on the contrary, from something strangely familiar that we have suppressed and that constantly returns to “haunt” us. The uncanny thus marks the return of the repressed, for it signifies “that [which] ought to have remained [. . .] secret and hidden but has come to light” Schelling, qtd. in Freud 222.

6. The constantly televised reports on the majestic achievements of the five-year economic plan in Romania and the Eastern bloc and the textbook stories about the “heroic” dedication of the working classes are some conspicuous examples of the sort.

7. This dark comic mode, which Charles Eidsvick identifies as the pervasive narrative tonality of the Eastern European “comedy of futility” (see Eidsvick 91–109), is not the immediate offshoot of Communist totalitarianism: the sense of ridiculousness inherent in futile plans and hopes has always been an underlying streak of the region’s literature. One of its most celebrated antiheroes is, after all, the good soldier Švejk, the half-ridiculous, half-sublime creation of Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek; and the absurdly grotesque coupled with the grotesquely absurd are supremely embodied in the writ-ings of Kafka and Ionesco. Irony, skepticism, and a taste for paradox have permeated East-Central European literary consciousness. Its insistence on the determining role of external circumstances and the machinations of history and bureaucracy form a particular alliance of power and knowledge that constitutes the ideological and repressive apparatus at work in East-Central European novels.

8. As Kundera defines it, the categorical agreement with being—the belief underlying all Euro-pean faiths, religious and political, which tells us “that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply” (Unbearable Lightness 248)—is the cornerstone of kitsch. The existence of things one considers unacceptable poses a metaphysi-cal problem to the categorical agreement with being. Kundera illustrates this with reference to shit: “[E]ither shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner” (248). A vision of the world based on the “categorical agreement with being” denies the original premise (“shit exists”) altogether and rejects both Kunderian alternatives. Applied broadly, this vision (when animating social, political, or religious groups) will deny the existence of everything that it deems unacceptable. The process of kitschification induces collective emotion and prevents people from questioning the kitschified object, idea, or value, for “[w]hen the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object” (250). In other words, kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of the totalitarian state, that which underpins its ideological dominance: it asserts the power of the “same” (construed as positive, good, brotherly) over the “different” (construed as negative, bad, dan-gerous) and the familiar, predictable, and “serious” over the uncommon, paradoxical, and ironic.

9. The name of the dreaded Romanian Political Police. 10. The novel offers an entire typology of applause. Because applause formed a part of many of

the public rituals performed daily in East-Central Europe, one grew used to their various shades and nuances. Thus, there are a variety of cheering types, each subtly reflexive of the psychological state of the cheerer: there are reluctant cheers, enthusiastic cheers, acclaiming, tired, rhythmical, and pro-longed cheers.

11. “Really-existing socialism” is a generic expression frequently used by scholars and commenta-tors, usually to expose the rift between “real existing socialism” (a Leninist syntagm) and the actual reality of lived socialism.

12. A mode of writing that simultaneously flaunts its textuality by overt self-reflexivity and fore-grounds historical reference (both to the external world and to the different discursive practices in which it is embedded). See Hutcheon 285–286.

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13. In Michel Foucault’s understanding, a heterotopia is a spatially discontinuous location capable of accommodating incommensurable and mutually exclusive worlds, impossible to define according to the same set of laws and the same geometry. It is a “counter-site, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within a culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). The idea is taken up by Brian McHale in his comprehen-sive synopsis of postmodernist fiction, and his argument is that postmodern historical novels are het-erotopian, since they foreground and do not conceal “the seam between historical reality and fiction” by “making the transition from one realm to the other as jarring as possible” (90).

14. One such text is the Bulgarian semi-legal manuscript entitled Ars Simulacri, which proposed a particular understanding of Baudrillar’s concept of simulacrum. The authors of this strange collec-tion of texts propose a “virtual reality,” referring, in a refracted way, to the totalitarian world. The “totalitarian simulacra” are “the products of a ‘reality’ lived as an irrational, anti-utopian residue of the ideological procedures of the totalitarian society, and as such, these simulacra express a different, silent, and painful experience in specific allegorical, sophisticated and sometimes obscure literary forms” (Cârneci 53).

15. The Latin phrase for “pleasant place.” 16. See Marin Preda. 17. See Augustin Buzura and Bulgakov.

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ded

by [

Ohi

o U

nive

rsity

Lib

rari

es]

at 1

8:41

14

Dec

embe

r 20

13