Gheorghe Crăciun: from the syntax of reality to the ontological solitude
The author analyzes the six keywords which define the evolution of Gheorghe Crăciun’s (one of the most important contemporary Romanian prose writers) work and thought: syntax, photography, rewriting (resemantization), body, author, loneliness. In his poems from the beginning of the 70s and in the volume “Original documents, legalized copies”, Crăciun puts
forward a new narrative and poetic syntax, permitting a more effective exploration and expression of the world in the Gutenberg Galaxy, subsequent to the generalization of scripturality. A radical poetics, excluding the use of metaphor, metonimy, symbol, of pre-existent cultural codes, through the limitation to one, also new, “morphological” support: photographic image. The next step – the resemantization of discourse – is taken with the rewriting (resemantization) of certain more or less known literary works (among which Longos’s “Daphnis and Chloe” or a poem-fairy tale by Eminescu), with the bringing forth of the body and of a new type of author (according with Rimbaud’s concept: “Je est un autre”), in “Composition with unequal parallel bars” and “The beauty with no body”. In the core of his opus magnum, “Pupa Russa”, there lies loneliness, subsuming all other keywords. The heroine of the novel, Leontina, is an icon of the postmodern woman: a phantasm, a toy for the adults, a beautiful carcass containing other carcasses, caught in the loneliness of her body, refusing herself maternity. The conclusion of Crăciun’s scriptural adventure is: the only thing connecting people today is the syntax of their loneliness.
Keywords: contemporary Romanian prose, Gheorghe Crăciun, syntax, photography, rewriting (resemantization), body, author, loneliness
