What degree of independence from the social context can poetry reach?
When I say “social” I mean politics as well. All along the 70’s to 80’s
interval, the late phase of postmodernism, political turmoil boiled
over and few poets could stand aloof from that. In the East-European
bloc they were forced to sift their inspiration and chaff away
contemporary references. One escape was to delude censorship using
irony, as the Romanian poets did in the 80’s. The end of the second
millennium and the beginning of the third one were quasi apolitical in
what we call western civilization. The Gulf war and the Afghanistan
guerrilla war were not in our proximity. These were decades of political
correctness disturbed only by a few terrorist attacks of a dubious
nature.
Times are achangin’ now. Conflicts, revolutions and
anti-corporatist riots set afire the whole world. That is why I think
the near future of poetry is bound to be political.
In the following paragraphs I intend to offer an outlook on the
Romanian poetry of the last decades. The organizing principle will be
the literary manifestos of various groups. I have to stress the fact
that after the fall of the communist regime the first step taken by the
literati was to enlarge the scope of their vocabulary and range of
inspiration. The freshly liberated literature oscillated between two
poles: the new Russian School (of literature) and the American Beat.
Both influences contained a massive cargo of slang, violence and scary
fantasies. The uninitiated public was aghast.
Fractures
There is another angle on all these. In 1990, two young writers,
Marius Ianuș and Dumitru Crudu, concocted the Fractures Manifesto on the
night of 10 to 11 September 1998 as a consequence of a street fight.
Whence the fractures… Their aim was twofold: on the one hand they wanted
a less conventional style of writing, with harsh words and juxtaposed,
non-discursive verses, able to render the psychic and bodily torments;
on the other hand, they repelled those older writers well-accommodated
into the establishment. Writers should live as they write and the other
way round! This was their slogan. Twenty years later, Ianuș secured
himself a position at a newspaper and after being dumped by his wife (a
poetess herself) he turned to a fiery religious poetry. Crudu, in his
turn, became famous especially due to his theatrical plays and novels.
Both of them somehow ballyhoo characters.
Being written in a ferocious disposition, the manifesto throws the
blame of the full-contact situation on the institutionalization of
culture. The fake Marxist-anarchists, as they call themselves, are angry
at the people who “destroy the spiritual values of humanity”. That is
why they yell: “Down with the prize-winning poets! Down with the
‘mobsters’ who take profit of their literary victories and lay hand on
rewarding jobs! Down with the literary small bourgeoisie!” As we can
see, innovative stuff…
Wordier than ever is the rhetoric: “Fracturism won’t kill anybody,
unless necessary”. They go on with finding their ancestors between
foreign poets and they even produce a list with proselytes. The
fracturists wage an uphill war against all the political promotions
before them. They get to grips with their predecessors because these
ones are not able to feel the authenticity of the common life any longer
and mask this handicap by using a sophisticated, impenetrable language.
In the same line with Chimerism, but for different reasons, Fracturism
calls for the abolishment of postmodernism. The poetry of transitiveness
and literality will remain too-high a peak to settle on. Some poets, in
some moments, managed to conquer it, but the rash winds of imagination
and intelligence made them climb down and go for a burton. Again and
again, the theorizations included in these manifestos cannot be tracked
down to ensuing creations.
Delirionism
Another manifesto, quite different from the first one, is Ruxandra Cesereanu’s Delirionism or the Concise Textbook on how One Shouldn’t Get Stuck in Reality.
This is a neo-onirical way of escaping reality and it envisages a more
intense “alteration of reality, a much more traumatizing dream”. The
author could have acquired the “technique of delirium” from Leonid
Dimov’s “unbridled imagination”, while Angela Marinescu could have lent
her the “neurotical poetry”. From their conjunction emerge the gap and
the trance induced through shamanistic techniques. The purpose is the
“re-signifying of madness”, while “the metaphor and the image suited to
the delirious poem are those of a sunk and flooded submarine”. Later on,
Ruxandra Cesereanu collaborated over a massive poem (The Forgiven Submarine) with Andrei Codrescu.
The reference to G. C. Jung’s theory of archetypes reveals the
underlying structure of the delirium. Freud’s repressed memories,
transformed into phantasms, are also invoked. Let’s not forget that the
phantasmatic is different from phantasm. A phantasm creates the (fake)
image of reality. A demi-illusion, so to say. Enlarging upon delirium,
Jung used the term “inflation”. All these allow for an expansion of
personality up to archetypes.
The delirionism remains silent as to the artistic stimuli able to
blur lucidity: pills, mushrooms, herbs, potions. Nothing about these
intensifiers of extrasensory perception! One clue could be the musical
records played during several workshops. Indeed, delirionism seems a
trifle different from onirism: less literaturized and somehow
riskier than the surrealist movement. I think a reference point could be
Carolos Castaneda’s novels and his science of dreaming. Corin Braga,
Ruxandra Cesereanu’s hubbie, wrote about the Mexican writer’s works. A
close reading of the Forgiven Submarine would hint at the intelligence and humor substantial to the complex game which is delirionism.
Chimerism
In 1999, Vasile Baghiu published in “România Literară” The First Manifesto of Chimerism. Chimerism
focuses on the social condition of writers and on their delusions of
epic grandeur. The manifesto is a remote relative of Gerard de Nerval’s Les Himeres (1854).
In a nutshell: to be a writer is the highest position in the world.
Literature is an “ailing passion, as if one would catch hepatitis or
AIDS”. Vasile Baghiu is proud of having succeeded in implementing “the
theme of sanatorium in Romanian literature”. In the interbellic period
the sanatorium was a constant presence in the art of many writers, many
of them evolving under French influence. Illness may stimulate delirium
or compensatory fantasying based on the books one read. Sanatorium bovarism
equates to imaginative wanderings in space and time. The author even
manufactured a human embodiment of this attitude: Himerus Alter. This
alter-ego loathes the postmodernist irony and parody. He dreams about
the re-instauration of magic and illusion. The Imagination of “parallel
realities” and “the taste of alienation and the Fever” needed a frame.
The chimerism contends provincialism using “the need of utopia” and
the historical and spatial evasion. Summoning it all up: a heroic
opposition to the world with the help of culture. Of course, culture is
at odds with the shallow forms of entertainment.
The story goes on with The Third Manifesto of Chimerism on the Live Experience of Fictional Reality (“Poesis”,
no. 6-7-8, 2006). The main ideas are resumed obstinately and the birth
date of the movement is boastfully retained: “about 16.30 on the 21st
of August 1988”. As in the case of delirionism, no stylistic or
narrative innovations are homologated. The only point of reference is
the irritation provoked by the postmodern parody and demythization.
The Depressive
With the inauguration of the new millennium, sprouts of fresh manifestos pop up. An interesting one is The Depressive Manifesto
by Gelu Vlașin. In a solemn voice, we are informed that poetry remains
“the personal release of a state of mind at an existential level”. He
proceeds, then, with attacking mannerism, minimalism and imitation. “The
colleaguewise writing” and “the hypocrites who manufacture poems as if
they wrote recipes for domestic wives” push Vlaşin out of his wits.
The inceptive clarity is getting hazier and hazier. First, the
depressive manifesto is endowed with a definition: “a literary movement
which branched out from the new wave zone” that is “defined by the
thematic approach of reality, based on the suppressing the concept of
individuality and on its imprisonment into a globalizing system”. The
charm dwindles and the language is getting priggish, engineer-like. To
get the full Monty we are ingratiated with some indications about form:
“The dispersion of blanks all over the space of the poem”. It is exactly
how the pages look like in Vlașin’s volume Panic Attack (Atac de Panică): anxiety and energy are made visible with the help of emphatic blank spaces between words.
Utilitarianism
Another challenging manifesto was launched by Adrian
Urmanov, who holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and who, a few years
later, converted into a monk. Presented as a foreword to The Utilitarian Poems (Poemele utilitare, Pontica Publishing House, 2003),
the manifesto envisaged the absorption into poetry of the techniques of
communication and advertising. If the Fracturism absorbed into “the
equation of communication” the context of writing, the addressee’s
perspective didn’t matter too much. Conversely, the utilitarian art will
assume the specificity of advertising slogans and it will focus on
readers. Persuading the reader means to carve the message into the
receiver’s memory. Thus, the utilitarian poetical text is not literature
any longer, but an obsessive Morse signal. It is useful to the receiver
owing to the facility with which it can be assimilated. It is a type of
poetical inoculation. The poems in the volume offer samples of
persuasion: the fluency of the text (simple, declarative and full of
compassion) is severed by brackets between which the teller confesses
his empathy with the existential torments of the receiver. The
advertising strategy is used (again between brackets) to turn the page
and read further. Beyond the programmed humbleness and empathy flickers
the temptation to manipulate. Urmanov’s enterprise is more effective in
practice than in theory. Among his literary brethren, only Andrei Peniuc
exercised a less hesitant-and-routinely-metronymic utilitarianism.
A bout de souffle
All these manifestos appeared at the delayed end of postmodernism.
Some of them wanted to shun the problems of immediate reality, others,
on the contrary, targeted exactly these ones. Communication is an
important asset for the new poetry, too. These were the golden years for
manifestos, but the iron ones for literary programs, on the other hand.
With the advent of post-post-modernist literary trends, manifestos lose
their edginess, while creativity is dismissed without much social fuss.
As Michel Foucault once insisted, nothing escaped ideology in
postmodernism.
Margento – a uOttawa Arts website, Canada,
http://artsites.uottawa.ca/margento/en/2014/04/21/felix-nicolau-on-romanian-poetry-manifestos-of-the-1990s-and-2000s/.
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