New Speak Syndrome in Post-War Romanian Culture
(collective traumas & individual therapies)
This article analyses some of the main consequences of what I have called the New Speak syndrome in Romanian post-war culture. Focusing, in the first section, on some theoretical aspects of this pathological phenomenon, the paper intends to surpass the common perspective which stresses particularly on New Speak’s rhetorical particularities (propaganda’s clichés and formulae), paying attention also to its effects at a deeper level, that of the collective identity and of the community’s mental pattern. One of the most important consequences of NS’s hegemony in its Romanian version is the fact that it “inspired” some experimentalist prose-writers (such as Radu Cosaşu, Norman Manea or Mircea Nedelciu), in their attempt to creatively reconsider the arbitrary relation between objects, people, names and stories. Apart of deconstructing propaganda’s clichés, these authors invented new games (such as a different relationship with the reader, based on handling the therapeutic resources of irony, cultural memory and intertextuality). Trying to answer the question “Why were (such) books read?”, the final section of the study considers the therapeutic functions of reading, in the context of the so-called “resistance through culture”.
Keywords: New-Speak, resistance through culture, therapy, reading
1. George Orwell, Politics and English Language, in Essays, London, Penguin Books Classics, 2000, p. 359
2. Jules Monnerot, Sociologie du communisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1949, p. 287
3. Sanda Cordoş, Literatura între revoluţie şi reacţiune. Problema crizei în literatura română şi rusă a secolului XX, 2nd ed., Cluj-Napoca, Biblioteca Apostrof, 2002, p. 147
4. Paul Ricoeur, Ideologia şi utopia: două expresii ale imaginarului social, in Eseuri de hermeneutică, trans. by Vasile Tonoiu, Bucuresti, Humanitas, 1995, p. 281
5. Ibid.
6. Alain Besançon, The Soviet Syndrom, trans. by Patricia Ranum, New York/ London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 95
7. Ibid., 96
8. Mihai Zamfir, Instaurarea prin limbaj. Despre anti-nominalismul discursului comunist, în Discursul anilor ’90, Bucureşti, Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, 1997, pp. 19-20
9. Liviu Papadima, Homo duplex et le langage, in Journal of the American-Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences, California, Davis, no.16-17/1992, p. 205
10. Ibid., p.204
11. Radu Cosaşu, Suflul prozei, in România literară, no. 47/ 1980
12. Françoise Thom, Limba de lemn, trans. by Mona Antohi, Bucuresti, Humanitas, 2005, p. 152
13. Radu Cosaşu, Telefoane şi tangouri, in Ficţionarii (Supravieţuiri IV), Bucureşti, Cartea Românească, 1983, p. 88
14. Mircea Nedelciu, Zmeura de câmpie. Roman împotriva memoriei, Bucureşti, Editura Militară, 1984
15. Mircea Nedelciu, Maistrul Ilie Ilie Razachie îşi dă concursul, in Aventuri într-o curte interioară. Antologie de autor, Piteşti, Paralela 45, 1999, pp. 317-318
16. Radu Cosaşu, InSISIFicarea la noi pe Boteanu, Bucureşti, Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, 1998, p. 260; this formula contains a calambour, difficult to translate in other languages, since it is based on the similarity of the Romanian
words “umor” [humour] and “omor” [murder]
17. Jiřina Šmejkalová, Cold War Books in the “Other” and What Came After, Leiden/Boston,Brilll, 2011, p. 19
18. Sanda Cordoş, Clandestine Reading in Communist Romania: A Few Considerations, in Transylvanian Review, vol. XIX, No.2, Summer 2010, p.73; the author quotes also Al. Vlad’s opinion according to which “the assiduous reading Romanians were steeped in, up to a certain December night in 1989, must have acted as a sort of therapy… A group therapy in which we were, alternately and concurrenty objects and subjects, patients and confessors, sanitary agents and submissive guinea pigs.”
19. I.D. Sîrbu, Jurnalul unui jurnalist fără jurnal, vol. 2, Craiova, Scrisul Românesc, 1993, p. 223
20. Ibid., vol.1, Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, 1991, p. 23
21. Ibid., p. 25
22. Ibid., p. 28
23. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 212
24. Matei Călinescu, Ion Vianu, Amintiri în dialog, 2nd edition, Polirom, 1998, p. 130
25. Matei Călinescu, Mateiu I. Caragiale: recitiri, Cluj-Napoca, Biblioteca Apostrof, 2007, p. 15
26. Evidence about these therapeutic, if not “exorcising” virtues of Mateiu Caragiale’s novel, can be found also in Ion Vianu’s autobiographical account, Amor intellectualis. Romanul unei educaţii (, Polirom, 2011, 65-65), as well as in Radu Cosaşu’s autobiographical prose Ficţionarii (Supravieţuiri IV) (Bucureşti, Cartea Românească, 1983, 115-117)
27. Sîrbu, Jurnalul, 1, p. 28
28. Ibid., p. 30
29. Traversarea cortinei: corespondenţa lui I.D. Sîrbu cu Ion Negoiţescu, Virgil Nemoianu, Mariana Şora, ed. by Virgil Nemoianu, Timişoara, Editura de Vest, 1994, p. 143
30. I.D. Sîrbu, Scrisori către bunul Dumnezeu şi alte texte, ed. by Ion Vartic (Cluj Napoca: Biblioteca Apostrof, 1996), p. 60
31. Mărturii orale. Anii ‛80 şi bucureştenii, Bucureşti, Editura Paideia, 2003, p. 83
32. Ibid.
33. Paul Cernat, Cozi şi oameni de rând în anii ’80, in Viaţa cotidiană în comunism, ed. by Adrian Neculau, Iaşi, Polirom, 2004, p. 196
34. Mircea Vasilescu, Iubite cetitoriule. Lectură, public, comunicare în cultura română veche, Editura Paralela 45, 2001, p. 31
35. Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien. 1. Arts de faire, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, ed. by Luce Giard
36. Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life. Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 226
37. J.F. Lyotard, Dacă putem gândi fără corp, in Inumanul. Conversaţii despre timp, Romanian trans. by Ciprian Mihali, Cluj-Napoca, Idea Design & Print, 2002, pp. 11-24
38. Ibid., p.16
39. Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution. Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, London, Macmillan Press LTD, 2000, p. 69
40. Šmejkalová, Cold War Books, p. 104
41. Elisabeth Long, Textual Interpretation as Collective Action in The Etnography of Reading, ed. by Jonathan Boyarin, Berkely/ Los Angeles/ Oxford, University of California Press, 1993, p. 185
