Memory and Fiction: Trauma in Contemporary Romanian Literature

Abstract: The studies of memory (memory studies) have developed a connection to the concept of trauma (trauma studies) and its manifestations. The literary field became a proper medium of evocation and testimony of past traumatic events. Therefore, social manifestations, traumatic measures of political regimes have all been integrated into literary works as a manner of attesting both their physical and psychological implications. Talking about the traumatic events of the Holocaust, James E. Young views such literary works as “documentary narrative” or, more specific, literature of testimony. Literary (and artistic) works related to the Holocaust are also object of Marianne Hirsch’s studies. In her view, evoking and narrating traumatic events implies the usage of postmemory. Past could also be evoked, as Michel Foucault considers, through literature on the basis of counter-memory. Taking into consideration different manifestations of memory in literature, the present study aims to analyse some of the Romanian contemporary works tackling on the remembrance of the traumatic ideological intervention on the female body that the prohibition of abortions represented during the communist regime. Corporal and psychological traumas that the 770 Decree caused are related in Corina Sabău’s novel And the Crickets Were Heard and also in the testimonial collective volumes Comrades of journey. The Feminine Experience in Communism (edited by Radu Pavel Gheo and Dan Lungu) and Mihaela Miroiu’s (ed.) The Birth. Lived Stories. Thus, literary materialisations of memory would be observed, in order for the contemporary reader to understand the severe traumatic implications of an abusive ideological prohibition of abortion.

Keywords: postmemory, counter-memory, literature of testimony, documentary narrative, ideological interventions, communist regime.

Citation suggestion: Prodan, Larisa. “Memory and Fiction: Trauma in Contemporary Romanian Literature.” Transilvania, no. 11-12 (2021): 74-80.

https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2021.11-12.11.

The Poetics of Memory for Paul Celan and George Steiner: Literature and Survivor’s Guilt

Abstract: Both Paul Celan’s and George Steiner’s writings deal with the relationship between culture and barbarism; both originate in a terrible guilt of the survivor. In Paul Celan’s case, it is the guilt of surviving his own parents, exterminated in an internment camp in the Transnistria Governorate in 1942. In Steiner’s case, when he was 11 years old and on a vacation with his family in New York, his father decided that they would not return to Paris, but remain in the United States; in a few weeks, the Nazi army would occupy Paris; of Steiner’s Jewish colleagues at his elite high school in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, only one would survive (besides Steiner himself). In an autobiographical essay published in 1965 in Commentary, “A Kind of Survivor,” Steiner states directly: “I am a survivor, and not intact.” The Holocaust’s traumatic memory imbues every line in Celan’s poetry and every sentence in Steiner’s scholarly books – long before Holocaust studies became an academic discipline (he has done enormously himself in this respect). The present article documents traces of this fundamental trauma both in Celan’s poetry and in Steiner’s academic and autobiographic writing.

Keywords: George Steiner, Paul Celan, Holocaust Studies, literature and survival, culture and barbarism, survivor’s guilt, poetics of memory

Citation suggestion: Vancu, Radu. “Poeticile memoriei la Paul Celan și George Steiner: literatura și culpa supraviețuitorului” Transilvania, no. 11-12 (2021): 81-84.

https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2021.11-12.12.

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