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Introduction: Romanian ‘Hostipitalities’

The present monograph represents the first attempt to deal extensively with James Joyce’s literary heritage in Romania. At the intersection between history of literature, literary criticism, translation studies and critical theory, it offers a systematic account of the mixture of hostility and hospitality which prevailed towards the Irish writer’s work in a country that took successive turns between cultural receptiveness to foreign models and dogged isolationism, before finally reintegrating the politico-cultural European landscape after 1989.

A preliminary investigation into the ambivalent Indo-European foundations of hospitality is necessary in order to clarify the rationale for relying on such a conceptual framework in a critical study mainly concerned with reception. According to Émile Benveniste’s Indo-European Language and Society, hospitality combines both the guest to be welcomed and the host or master of the house who can impose his will as a despot and thus turn into an enemy: hostis as host and hostis as enemy were both derived from the Latin meaning of ‘stranger’, and while the notion of ‘favourable stranger’ developed into ‘guest’, the ‘hostile stranger’ turned into ‘enemy’ ─ an ambivalence still recorded in the French word hôte: at once the guest and the host. According to the French linguist, ‘hospitality’ can be ultimately traced back to hosti-pet-s, in which Latin hospes, whose literal sense is ‘the guest-master’, alternates with -pet, also appearing in the form potis, meaning originally personal identity, but then referring also to power, mastery, despotic sovereignty.1

In order to go beyond what he called ‘the naively accepted opposition between language and speech, language and discourse’, in ‘The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics’, Jacques Derrida attempted to find out to what extent and according to what modalities the discourse of philosophy depends on the constraints of language.2 Derrida’s conclusion was, as Simon Morgan

1 Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, Neam Lallot, Summaries, Table and Index, Elizabeth Palmer, trans. (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1973), 72. The French linguist analysed the cases of Sanskrit and Greek: while in the former, the senses of ‘master’ and ‘husband’ corresponded to different declensions of one and the same stem, in the latter, despotes, signifying power or mastery, is different from posis, a poetic term for ‘husband’, ‘spouse’, ‘master of the house’.

2 See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics’, in Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass, trans. and Additional Notes (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 177.

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Wortham remarked, that ‘linguistics (Benveniste’s included) remains as much in the pay of metaphysics. […] Meanwhile […] one must consider the ability of non-Indo-European languages without the linguistic resources to formulate “to be” nevertheless to think its possibility otherwise.’3 In a famous essay published in Angelaki, precisely attempting to go beyond Benveniste’s linguistic approach to hospitality, Derrida interpreted its rule as a ‘law of the household, oikonomia, the law of a place (house, hotel, hospital, hospice, family, city, nation, language, etc.), the law of identity which de-limits the very place of proffered hospitality and maintains authority over it, maintains the truth of authority, remains the place of this maintaining, which is to say, of truth, thus limiting the gift proffered and making of this limitation, namely, the being-oneself in one’s own home […]’.4 A metaphysical investigation into hospitality will reveal a permanent double movement: on the one hand, the possible guest of any host will make the host’s life brighter by giving him the possibility to offer, to welcome the guest, treating him as a member of his house, country or land. Yet the host may be tempted to keep his own authority, therefore imposing his own rules that the guest must comply with, in which case hospitality can easily turn into the prescription of despotic orders that the guest must obey. On the other hand, the guest may invade his benefactor’s place and threaten the stability of the home (as illustrated by the stock character in the works of Menander, Plautus, Terence, Molière and Ben Jonson).

For Derrida, as long as hospitality presupposes its opposite, hostility, char-acterizing either the host or the guest, it is ‘a self-contradictory concept and experience which can only self-destruct’.5 Taking his bearings on such paradoxes, Derrida coined the more appropriate notion of ‘hostipitality’ to highlight the bond of inimical alterity between hospitality and its parasite, hostility, and to radicalize the necessity of welcoming the other in the name of a more absolute ‘politics of hospitality’.

If we are to examine Joyce’s texts as guests and Romania as (inimical to friendly) host, Derrida’s deconstructive ‘hostipitality’ neatly captures the tensions and contradictions which buffeted the acclimatization of James Joyce’s works in Romania. The aim of this study is to give an account of Romanian literature and culture from the beginning of the twentieth century to the post-communist age, a

3 Simon Morgan Wortham, The Derrida Dictionary (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 94.

4 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 5/3 (December 2000), 4.

5 Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, 5.

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contextual preamble which is necessary in order to understand the long enduring history of Romanian hos(ti)pitality towards the Irish writer, a history that represents the major part of the monograph. In two subsequent chapters, translation and creative writing are dealt with in turn, showing how Romania eventually managed to shed its infix and more unconditionally welcomed Joyce as a more overt intertextual ferment for its own cultural heritage.

Arguably one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, Joyce has had a notorious influence on especially French, Italian, and German literatures, partly as a result of translations of/from his works which appeared during his lifetime, some of which he could supervise or give advice on. In other, more ‘marginal’ European countries and cultures, his impact took more time to register owing to greater cultural aloofness, and did not materialize significantly until the 1950–1960s, while being somewhat hamstrung by censorship. After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the demise of the Eastern bloc, Joyce’s literary legacy and masterpieces undoctored by political ideologies were rediscovered. The threshold beyond which the Joycean text stepped in Romanian culture became a dialectical border where a politics of inclusion/exclusion was inevitably at stake due to the different historical moments in which Joyce’s creation was aired to the Romanian public. Thus, in the 1920s, Joyce’s reception in a culturally prosperous and politically stable environment first met with hostility; after the Second World War, in the period of cultural opening that started with 1965, critics as well as writers welcomed Joyce in a thoroughly hostile political context.

The first chapter begins from the enduring habit in the first decade of the twentieth century to conflate ‘modernism’/‘modernist’ and ‘modernity’/‘modern’ in Romanian literary criticism, and focuses on Gabriela Omăt’s recent Modernismul literar românesc în date (1880–2000) şi texte (1880–1949) [Romanian Literary Modernism in Dates and Texts]6 where ‘modernism’ is perceived as an interminable movement which began once the term ‘modern’ was uttered almost obsessively between 1880 and 1889, to be ended only as late as 1980 with ‘the postmodernist insurrection against the modernist establishment’. Faced with such an arguably unconvincing, protracted timeframe, I returned to Eugen Lovinescu’s 1937 Istoria literaturii române contemporane [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature], which explained the evolution of Romanian civilization in the wake of Gabriel Tarde’s Les lois de l’imitation, in order to redefine a more convincing timeline within which something called ‘Romanian literary modernism’ could be articulated more critically.

6 All Romanian titles have been translated between square brackets in the text and in footnotes, whenever necessary. Titles are kept in the original in the Bibliography.

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Lovinescu had claimed that Romanian society started to develop once it turned its back on ‘Oriental inertia’ and borrowed new forms and ideas from the Western world. However, what he could not establish, since his study was still caught up with and within the movement it was attempting to delineate, was how and where these poles of influence came or should come from. Proust and Gide on the one hand, and, to a lesser extent, Joyce and Woolf on the other exerted an influence on those Romanian prose writers who became part of the modernist canon, even though they hardly ever entered any European mainstream. As I will explain, in a largely Francophone as well as Francophile country, the intellectual elite was often educated in Paris and had just discovered the English language and literature, therefore ‘welcoming’ such a difficult writer as Joyce mainly or only via translations in French literary journals, with suspicion and often hostility. The second part of this chapter goes beyond modernism and examines the period of political hostility after the Second World War, when, similarly to other Eastern literatures, Romanian poetry and prose were written in the wake of Radek’s proletarian manifesto. This was the time when the polit ical ‘master of the house’ decided to close the door to any foreign influence. In Derrida’s terms, ‘to be master at home (ipse, potis, potens, head of house […])’ meant ‘to be able to receive’ the one he/she liked. ‘Anyone who encroache[d] on [his] “at home”, on [his] ipseity, on [his] power of hospitality, on [his] sovereignty as host’, was regarded as ‘an undesirable foreigner, and virtually as an enemy’.7 This is precisely what happened in the Stalinist period, when foreign literature was mystified to the point of transforming Joyce into a socialist-realist writer. After Ceauşescu’s urge to give up ‘grovelling in front of everything that is foreign’, for several decades, literature was turned into an instrument to promote the image of the country leader and his socialist conquests. In the 1990s, it inverted the trend and turned back to foreign models with an intensity that compensated for so many years of cultural isolation.

The second chapter, ‘Joyce’s Critical Reception in Romania’, surveys the two extreme attitudes towards Joyce, after the initial period of ‘blind’ emulation of criticism from Joyce’s own entourage, when Larbaud’s and Jaloux’s articles were translated in several literary journals and commented on in positive terms. Imme-diately after this period, in the 1930s the Romanian literati either promoted James Joyce to the point of adulation (Ion Biberi) or, much more often, deprecated his work to the point of travestying its contents (Marcu Beza, Camil Petrescu, Dragoş

7 Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, Rachel Bowlby, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 53, 55.

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Protopopescu). For most Romanians Joyce’s work was related mainly to narrative structure and techniques, to its theme and tone. After the Communist Party turned into a multi-faceted monster ready to curb any intellectual freedom and control any single form of expression, between 1948 and 1964, the Stalinist age and Romanian proletcultism brought about political hostility against any cultural hos-pitality. During that period, not only did Joyce’s reception in particular dwindle into insignificance but more generally intolerance and xenophobia dominated any critical commentaries of any foreign literary work. The ironically called ‘golden age’ (epoca de aur), which is by far the darkest epoch in Romanian history, wit-nessed two opposite forms of hos(ti)pitality: the age of liberalization and cultural opening (1964–1971), when in spite of being translated into Romanian (Frida Papadache translated Dubliners in 1967 and A Portrait in 1969), Joyce was still heavily censored and Joycean scholarship hardly existed; and the period of deg-radation, when Ceauşescu implemented a distinctly home-grown version of com-munist ideology (1971–1989), hostile to any foreign influence, but paradoxically a period in which Joyce was among the most commented upon Western writers.

The third chapter, ‘Hos(ti)pitality in Translation: Joyce into Romanian’, explores a very specific host: the Romanian translator, whose house is the Joycean text and whose guest is the Romanian reader. Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on ‘The Task of the Translator’, Antoine Berman’s and Lawrence Venuti’s theories of ‘foreigniza-tion’ versus ‘domestication’,8 as well as Derrida’s emphasis in ‘Des Tours de Babel’ on the necessity, yet impossibility ─ the necessity as impossibility ─ to translate,9 provide the theoretical ground against which I analyse what translators had to ‘give up’ (the other sense of Benjamin’s ‘task’ [Aufgabe] of the translator) in order to see their translations published. My analysis focuses mostly on those ideologically sensitive areas like religion, politics, sex and food with which translators’ often stra-tegic choices had to compromise, the sine qua non condition for their work to be publishable.

The fourth and final chapter, ‘From Translation to Re-Creation’, discusses those writers who were either influenced by Joyce or who used the Joycean intertext in

8 See Antoine Berman, La Traduction et la lettre, ou l’auberge du lointain (Paris: Seuil, 1999), and Lawrence Venuti, ‘Strategies of Translation’, in Mona Baker, ed., The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 240–4.

9 Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, Joseph F. Graham, trans., in Joseph F. Graham, ed. and intr., Difference in Translation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165–207.

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their prose. For the authors examined in this chapter, my rationale was to include their own critical assessments of Joyce’s work here, rather than in the second chapter, as most of their pronouncements on Joyce were part of their diaries and therefore connected to their respective creative workshops. The only writer whose critical works on Joyce were included in the second chapter is Biberi, whose articulate critical essays necessitated a separate sub-chapter of their own. There were two main novels influenced by Joyce in the thirties: Mircea Eliade’s Lumina ce se stinge (otherwise neglected by Romanian scholars), written with a view to creating ‘authentic’ literature, and Ion Biberi’s Proces, which, in spite of its Kafkaesque title, remains the most Joyce-influenced novel ever written in Romanian. After a period of almost fifty years, in the 1980s and in the post-communist era, several postmodernist novels were attempted in Romania in the shadow of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; in spite of being famous on their home ground, such novels never got the international attention that they would have deserved: George Bălăiţă’s Lumea în două zile [The World in Two Days], Paul Georgescu’s Mai mult ca perfectul [Pluperfect/The More Than Perfect], two novels offering a mixture of Joycean interior monologue and playful narrative, and Adrian Oţoiu’s Coaja lucrurilor sau Dansând cu jupuita [The Core of Things or Dancing with the Flayed], whose main sub-text for the protagonist’s construction of his paradoxical fate is the Joycean labyrinth of Dedalus. Gabriela Adameşteanu’s Dimineaţă pierdută [Wasted Morning] and Nora Iuga’s Săpunul lui Leopold Bloom [Leopold Bloom’s Soap] both started from a Joycean intertext, but are otherwise original literary experiments. The chapter ends with the most Wakean Romanian novel to date, Silviu Lupaşcu’s academic tour de force, Cartea de cristal [The Crystal Book], a last fictional act which implicitly offers a de facto conclusion to the book.