467679

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Andrei Codrescu's Mioritic Space

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Andrei Codrescu's

Mioritic

Space

Richard Collins

Xavier

University,

New

Orleans

It's

through

that

hole,

I

thought,

that

I

am

returning

to

my

birthplace.

-Andrei

Codrescu,

The

Hole in

the

Flag

In the Romanian folk

poem

Miorita,

a

shepherd boy

is warned

by

his beloved

ewe, Miorita,

that

his fellow

shepherds plan

to murder

him and take

his flock. Instead of

resisting,

he

accepts

his

fate,

asking

only

that Miorita

go

in

search

of

his mother and tell her the

story

not

of

how

he

was

betrayed,

but

of

how he

was

married to the

daughter

of a

powerful King.

Thereafter,

wherever the ewe

wanders,

she tells

the

story-not

the

true,

unadorned

facts of death and

betrayal,

but a

beautiful fiction of a transcendent wedding.

This

simple

story,

told and

retold

in

countless

versions,

is

Roma-

nia's most

enduring

cultural text.1 The

popularity

of

the Miorita can

be attributed to

the

power

and

simplicity

of its

poetry,

but even more

to its

mythic

structure. The

myth

has been

used

to

define

the Roman-

ian

character

by

several

authors,

including

Mircea

Eliade,

who has

called

the

"cosmic

marriage"

of

the

Miorita an

example

of

"cosmic

Christianity"-part

pagan,

part

Christian,

but

in

any

case

wholly

Ro-

manian-"dominated

by

a

nostalgia

for nature sanctified

by

the

pres-

ence of Jesus."2But the most controversial concept of Romanian iden-

tity

to

be derived

from the

poem

is

the

concept

of "mioritic

space"

de-

fined

by

the

Transylvanian

poet

and

philosopher

Lucian

Blaga.

For

Blaga,

the

path

of Miorita's

wandering

delineates

what he

calls

"mioritic

space,"

a

geography

of the

Romanian

poetic imagination,

or,

as one recent

historian

of

the

Romanians describes

it,

"a

philo-

sophical attempt

to

explain

the Romanian

spirit

through

the Roman-

ian

landscape,

which

[Blaga]

saw

as the

stylistic

matrix of Romanian

culture"

(Georgescu 205). Blaga's

critics

have

charged

that this

con-

cept

has become

a

liability,

nationalistic,

escapist

and fatalistic.

For

political analysts, Blaga

has

been

criticized

as

a

romantic

aesthete,

self-absorbed

and

disengaged

from

political

realities,

while

pursuing

MELUS,

Volume

23,

Number 3

(Fall 1998)

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RICHARD COLLINS

a

mystical

communion

with

nature.3

In this

view,

mioritic

space

is an

escapist

dream

of a romantic nationalist

that

encourages

political

ap-

athy.

For

ethnographers,

it

is

a

romantic distortion of the Romanian

peasantry's

connection to

the land

that

ignores political

and

histori-

cal

reality.

These

critics

suggest

that it

may

even

account

for the ten-

dency

of

the

Romanian

people

to suffer

oppression

passively:

"one

'cause'

of the

seeming passivity

of the Romanian

population may

be

the fatalistic

Weltanschaaung implicit

in

the Miorita"

(Kligman

356).

But

to

Blaga,

mioritic

space

was

simply

a

way

of

locating

the

Roman-

ian

poetic

spirit.

All

these

theories and criticisms

may

seem

like much ado

about

a

boy and his sheep, but the story has great resonance to a country long

troubled

by

internal conflicts and

external

conquerors.

It

has

often

been noted

that

Romania

is,

geographically,

"inside-out,"

its moun-

tains in the

interior,

its

plains

on the

borders,

leaving

it vulnerable to

invasion.

More than

once

has the Romanian

spirit

had to take

refuge

from the

threats

presented

to

its

exposed

borders

by

escaping

to the

mountains

and

forests of

its

interior.

When the

threat

was

institution-

alized

within its

own

borders

during

the

Turkish

and

Communist

regimes,

the Romanian

spirit

could survive

only by going

into

physi-

cal (usually political) or metaphysical exile.

One such

exile,

both

physical

and

metaphysical,

is

the

Romanian-

born

American

poet

and translator

of

Blaga,

Andrei Codrescu. Hav-

ing

fled

the

Stalinist

regime

of Nicolae Ceausescu in

the

mid-1960s,

Codrescu

traveled

to

a number of

European

countries before embrac-

ing

America,

then

in the

throes of

a

mostly

benevolent

revolution,

as

the

country

most

likely

to listen

to

what he had

to

say,

in

the

lan-

guage

that he

was most

likely

to

say

it in.

Since

then,

he

has

pub-

lished

twenty

volumes

of

poetry

(including

translations of Max

Jacob

and Lucian

Blaga),

four volumes of fiction

(including

the recent best-

seller,

The

Blood

Countess),

several

collections

of his commentaries for

National

Public

Radio's

"All

Things

Considered"

program,

and four

volumes of memoirs.

He

has also starred

in

the

documentary

cult

classic

film,

Road

Scholar,

in

which

he

wanders

across

America

in

search

of alternative

lifestyles, appeared

on the

Nightline

and David

Letterman

shows,

and become

a

Professor of

English

at

Louisiana

State

University,

where he edits the

lively literary magazine, Exquisite

Corpse. Throughout

Codrescu's

various

travels and

adventures,

and

his accounts of

them,

it is clear that

Blaga's

concept

of mioritic

space

has sustained

him in

exile: "I left the

country

and

changed

languages

but have not

stopped telling

Mioritza's tale"

(Outside 5).

Codrescu

begins

The

Disappearance f

the

Outside,

his "manifesto

for

escape,"

with

his own version of

the

Miorita,

not

as

a

philosophical

84


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ANDREI CODRESCU'S

MIORITIC SPACE

idea but as

a vivid

childhood

experience,

when it was

told

to

him

at

age

ten

by

"a

thousand-year-old shepherd wrapped

in

a cloak of

smoke."

True

to

the oral tradition of the

poem,

Codrescu

improvises

on its

details,

but the

changes

are

enough

for

him

to have

added an

apology

to

Romanian

readers

"pentru

modul oarecum

aproximativ

in

care

am

repovestit

mitul Mioritei"

[for

the

somewhat

approximate

man-

ner

in

which

I've

retold

the

myth

of

Miorita]

when the book was

translated

into Romanian.4

One

August evening

in

1956,

when

I

was ten

years

old,

I

heard

a

thousand-year-old shepherd

wrapped

in

a cloak of smoke

tell a

story

around a

Carpathian

campfire.

He

said that

a

long

time

ago,

when

time was an idea whose time hadn't come, when the

pear

trees made

peaches,

and when fleas

jumped

into the

sky wearing

iron

shoes

weighing ninety-nine pounds

each,

there

lived

in

these

parts

a

sheep

called

Mioritza.

The flock to which Mioritza

belongs

is owned

by

three brothers.

One

night,

Mioritza overhears the older brothers

plotting

to

kill

the

youngest

in

the

morning,

in

order

to steal his

sheep.

The

young

broth-

er is a

dreamer,

whose 'head is

always

in

the stars.' Mioritza nestles

in

his

arms,

and warns the

boy

about

the

evil

doings

and

begs

him to run

away. But, in tones as lyrical as they are tragic, the young poet-shep-

herd

tells his

beloved Mioritza to

go

see his mother after he is

killed,

and

to tell her

that

he

didn't

really

die,

that he married the moon

in-

stead,

and that all

the stars were

at

his

wedding

[....]

Before

morning,

the older brothers

murder the

young

shepherd,

as

planned.

There is no

attempt

to

resist,

no

counterplot,

no deviousness.

Fate

unfolds

as

fore-

told. The moon

has a new

husband,

and the

story

must be known.

Mioritza

wanders,

looking

for the

boy's

mother.

But she tells

every-

one

along

the

way

the

story

as

well. The murder was

really

a

wedding,

the

boy

married the

moon,

and all

the

stars were

present

[....]

She

nev-

er tires of the

story.

She laments the death of her beloved with stories

of

the

origin

of

the

worlds.

Her

wandering

takes her across

the rivers of the

Carpathian

moun-

tains

to

the

Black

Sea,

a

path

that

describes

the natural border of

Ro-

mania. Her

migration

defines the

space

of the

people,

a

space

the Ro-

manian

poet

Lucian

Blaga

called 'mioritic.' Mioritza herself

is the

mov-

ing

border

of the

nation,

a

storytelling

border

whose

story

is

borderless

and

cosmic. She calls into

being

a

place

and a

people

that she circum-

scribes

with

narrative. She causes

geography

to

spring

from

myth,

she

contains within her space-bound body the infinity of the cosmos.

(Outside

1-2)

Actually,

Codrescu's version

differs from the

original only

at

a

few

points.

First,

Codrescu describes

the

shepherds

as "three

brothers";

in

the

original,

the

shepherd protagonist

is

from Moldavia

(consid-

85


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RICHARD

COLLINS

ered the

"true"

Romanian

heartland),

while the

other

shepherds

are

from Vrancea

and

Transylvania.

In his own

telling,

Codrescu

would

have us

identify

the

shepherd boy

with

himself

(a Transylvanian

Jew),

and the others with his Romanian

countrymen

(Communists)

who stole his

heritage

and inheritance.

Second,

in

Codrescu's

version

the

shepherd boy

is

also

a

poet,

"a

dreamer,

whose

'head

is

always

in

the stars."' This allows

us,

again,

to

sympathize

with the

visionary

who has

a

connection to

nature

against

the

(dialectical)

materialist

brothers,

for whom the

fair

Miorita is

only

property,

so

much

mutton

and wool to

be

sheared,

divided and

shared;

for the

poet-shepherd

she

is the

voice of

nature,

his confidante

and chronicler.

Third,

Co-

drescu's poet-shepherd is "married to the moon," while in earlier

versions

the

shepherd boy

marries

the

daughter

of

a

King

at

the en-

trance to

a

mountain

(or,

gura

de

rai,

literally

"the

mouth of

heaven,"

but

actually

a

beautiful

natural

setting,

like

paradise),

the

sun

and

moon

acting

as

godparents.

The

significance

of

these variants will be-

come clear

later,

but what

is

certain is that

Codrescu

is

making

the

poem

his

own,

through

these

variants,

for

purposes

of his

thesis

about

the

poet's

role

in

the modern world.

In

either

case,

however,

there is "no

attempt

to

resist,

no

counterplot,

no

new

deviousness.

Fate unfolds as foretold."

How

would

such

a

"nationalist,"

"escapist"

and

"fatalistic"

tale

empower

an exiled Romanian

writer like Codrescu to create work

that

displays

a

power

that

is

active,

even

activist,

both

poetically

and

politically beyond

the borders of his

native

country?

I will

argue

that

Blaga's

mioritic

space

not

only

sustained Codrescu

in

physical

exile

but,

in

forming

the basis

of his

poetic identity

within a

community

of

metaphysical

exiles,

allowed

him

to return

to

Romania

first

in

spirit

and,

eventually,

in

the flesh. The narrative

of

escape

and return is

variously

told and retold in his several memoirs-The

Life

and Times

of

an

Involuntary

Genius

(1975),

In

America's Shoes

(1983),

The

Disap-

pearance

of

the Outside:

A

Manifestofor

Escape

1990),

and TheHole

in the

Flag:

A

Romanian Exile's

Story

of

Return and Revolution

(1991).

In

each

of

these,

Codrescu returns almost

obsessively

to the Romania of

his

youth.

While the first two

volumes

are

concerned

with

Codrescu's

assimilation into American

culture

(In

America'sShoes concludes

with

his

becoming

a

U.S.

citizen),

the latter

two

volumes,

as indicated

by

their

subtitles,

form a set of

companion

volumes that

might

be called

"Escape

and Return." In these

books,

Codrescu more or less con-

sciously

sets

out to redeem the

concept

of

mioritic

space by

showing

how

escape

(from

the

Inside of

any

limitation

or

border of

imagina-

tion,

including

ideologies

such as communism and

capitalism)

can

actually

facilitate

a

return

(to

an

engagement

with the

reality

of the

86


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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITIC

SPACE

Outside,

where

the

threat

of

originality

resides

as

a

check and chal-

lenge

to

the

ideology

of the

Inside).

As

Codrescu

explains

in

a

"note

to the Romanian reader" n the

Romanian

translation of The

Disap-

pearanceof

the

Outside,however,

he is

actually

looking

for

a

"treia

cale,"

a

tertium

quid,

or

third

path:

"Aceasta arte

punefata

n

fata

doua

puncte

de vedere

supra

umii,

si le

critica

pe

amindoua. e va

discerne,fara

indoiala,

perspectiva

romaneasca'n

efortul

de

a

gasi

o 'a

treia

cale,'

un act

de

disperare

e

inteles,

dar

si

o solutie

poetica"

Disparitia

206).

["This

book

juxtaposes

two

world

views,

and

critiques

both

of

them.

What

we

discern

is,

no

doubt,

a

'Romanian'

perspective

in

the effort

to

dis-

cover

a 'third

path,'

an act

of

dispersing meaning,

but

also a

poetic

solution."]

When Codrescu left Romania

at

age

nineteen,

he

by

no means left

his

birthplace

behind.

Along

with

"the

sensual

pleasure

of the

sounds"

of the Romanian

language

(Hole86),

Codrescu

also

internal-

ized

Romanian

literary

culture,

both

ancient and

modern. Aside from

his

claim

that he has not

stopped

telling

the

tale of

Miorita,

we

may

see

in

his chosen name of Codrescu

(he

was born

Andrei

Perlmutter)

the trace of another traditional Romanian

verse

form,

the

doina,

which

begins by addressing

the

forest

[codrul]

n

the

absence of other

kinship. Wemight say that by the time Codrescu left Romania,his

poetic

sensibility

(if

not his distinctive American

voice

and

style)

was

already argely

formed

in

part by

these traditional

poems,

but also

by

the modern Romanianwriters.5He

pays homage

to those

writers,

ex-

iled

like

himself

and

well-known

in

the

West,

like

Eliade,

Eugene

Ionesco

and Emil

Cioran,

or

Tristan

Tzara

and

Urmuz,

the

founder

and

presiding

spirit

of

Dada,

and

to the

Romanian surrealists

Gherasim Luca

and

Ion

Vinea.

Yet

in a

way,

more

important

than

these

were "the

invisible

writers"

banned

by

the state and still virtu-

ally

unknown in the West, such as Ion Barbu and Matei

Caragiale,

whose work disclosed

to

him

that the

"secret of modern

literature,

and

the reason

why

it

was

forbidden,

was its

autonomy"

(Outside

18).

Codrescu's

first

escape,

then,

was

metaphysical,

nto the invisible un-

derground

of literature.

He

tells

of

entering

the

house of

a

Dr.

M.,

and

finding

a new world of

books

and

ideas. "The entrance was

unpre-

possessing

and

humble,

covered with

a

trellis

of

dying

roses. But

the

inside "

Inside,

he finds

the

books

of

"the

invisible

writers,"

but

above all "the

poetry

and

philosophy

of

Lucian

Blaga,"

which made

him feel

"suddenly

transported

o

another

world,

compared

to which

the

shabby

one

we

lived

in

was but

two-dimensional

bleakness

[....]

Here once more was a sacred realm like

Mioritza's,

which made no

bargains

with the

profane"

(Outside

17-18).

Thus Codrescu's

first

es-

cape

was into

Romania,

nto a timeless realm

linking

the

autonomy

of

87


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RICHARD COLLINS

modern

literature with the

community

and

ecology

of

the

ancient

Miorita.

To

be

effective,escape-inward

or outward-had

to

be

not

merely

from

an

oppressive regime,

but from

all

oppressive

authority,

and to

autonomy

and

self-determination.So

when

Codrescu eft

Romania

n

1966,

just

four

years

after

Blaga

was allowed

to

publish

again

briefly

before

his

death,

one

piece

of the cultural

patrimony

that he

smug-

gled

into America was

Blaga's

notion

of

"mioritic

space."

Exile is

a

great

preservative.

Cut off from their native

soil,

cultural

customs,

rituals,

myths

and even dialects often

develop very differently

or

ex-

iles

than

they

do

for those

who remain behind.

This

applies

to

art

forms and philosophical notions, as well, whose glory may fade in

the

place

of

origin,

but

when

transplanted

may

take

on

an added

splendor.

Certainly,

or Codrescu

in

America,

mioritic

space

was

not

subject

to the

ideological

weather of

a

changing

Romania.

What be-

came there

a

"fatalistic

Weltanschauung"

eflectingpassivity

and de-

feat,

in

America became

Codrescu's

special

brand

of

poetic

activism,

a

poetic project

without national boundaries.

Perhaps

the notion of

mioritic

space

could be

preserved

and

developed only

in

this

way-

by

a Romanianwriter

in

exile,

whom

it in

turn

sustained.

As he refashioned his identity into that of an Americanpoet, Co-

drescu

cherished

Blaga's interpretation

of the ancient

poem,

trans-

planting

this seed into the soil of

American

poetry

and

translating

he

myth

into his new idiom. As a

political

exile,

Codrescu

rejects

he au-

thority

of

government

and

police,

but

as

a

latter-day

surrealist

he

also

rejects

he

authority

of

history

and

fact,

even

in

the events of his

per-

sonal

history.

The

"deimiurge"

of

Codrescu's creative

identity

is Lu-

cian

Blaga,

whose

purpose

was "the

enlargement

of

mystery."6

In

Blaga's

poetry

Codrescu sees "constructs or the

transport

of seeds"

(Yearning

v),

and these continue to blossom in Codrescu's

poetic

myth-making ong

after his arrival

n

America.7

Several

philosophers

and

ethnographers

have linked

the "mioritic

marriage"

of the folk

poem

with

the

Transylvanian

nunta

mortului,

r

death-wedding. According

to

Gail

Kligman

in

The

Wedding

of

the

Dead:

Ritual,

Poetics

and

Popular

Culture n

Transylvania

1988),

"Both

of these

cultural texts-the

death-wedding

and the Miorita-offer a

dramatic resolution to

threatening

circumstances

[....]

Temporarily

disordered relations between the

living

and the

dead,

and between

cultureand

nature,

as well as between the

sexes,

are

reordered

[....]

The Miorita

encourages

an

imaginative, philosophical

approach

to

the

comprehension

of

paradox,

notably

that of

sexuality

and mortali-

ty

united.

By

the conclusion

of each

of these

symbolic expressive

forms,

an 'other' is

incorporated

nto the realm

of the familiar"

(Klig-

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ANDREI

CODRESCU'S MIORITIC

SPACE

man

245).

For the

immigrant leaving

behind

one culture for

another,

the

importance

of ritual

and

myth

as

a

symbolic

"resolution to threat-

ening circumstances" should be readily apparent. For the immigrant

Romanian

writer,

the Miorita takes on

particular significance

since

it

speaks

directly

to

the

business of

storytelling.

For

Codrescu,

Miorita's

wandering

"causes

geography

to

spring

from

myth"

as she tells her

story

to

everyone

along

the

way.

In

the

progress

of her

narrative,

Miorita

takes

the center with her to the cir-

cumference,

"the

moving

border

of

a

storytelling

nation,

a

story-

telling

border

whose

story

is borderless

and

cosmic,"

calling

into be-

ing

"a

place

and a

people

that she circumscribes with narrative."

In

the same way, Codrescu takes the center of his origin with him into

the

"storytelling

nation"

of

metaphysical

exile.

In

exile,

however,

the

necessity

for

escape

is

not resolved. On the

contrary,

the freedom of

exile becomes another sort

of

limiting

enclosure to

escape

from.

The

only

solution,

for

Codrescu,

was to

forge

a

kind of

metaphysical

passport

that

would allow

him

to return to his homeland

at

will,

to

come and

go,

so to

speak, through

the

window of

imagination,

to the

(mioritic)

space

of

his

enchained

homeland,

which

is

metaphysically

exiled from itself.

It

is

not that

freedom

is

illusory,

but

that

the basis

of freedom is not to be found in any actual country, but in the "geog-

raphy

of the

poetic

imagination."

This

brings

into focus

one of the curious characteristics of Codres-

cu's

harkening

back to his Romanian

poetic

identity.

It is

almost

en-

tirely

devoid of

nostalgia,

or the

Romanian dor.

For

the

modern

Greek

wanderers

Seferis,

Elytis

and

Kazantzakis,

the

Odyssey

serves

a

centering

function similar

to the Romanian's

Miorita,

with this differ-

ence: the locus for the Greek writer's homesickness is

a

geographical

nostalgia. Nothing

less

than a

physical

return

to the

landscape

will

do. For the Alexandrian

Cavafy,

alienation is inherent in the Greek

city

on

Egyptian

soil;

return is

necessarily

ahistorical

and

metaphori-

cal.

In

this

way, Blaga

resembles

Cavafy,

for as Codrescu has

said,

"Blaga's

exile consisted

in an

acute

yearning

for the

very place

where

he

was"

(Yearning

xvi).8

But

the Greek

Odysseus

is

a

hero,

almost

su-

perhuman,

while Miorita

and

her master are

defenseless

fatalists-

poets,

in

short.

In

the transcendental

mythology

of the Romanian

Miorita,

the

poet-shepherd

marries

out

of this

world,

he does not

re-

turn

to the

nostos. He is the

emigre par excellence,leaving

the

world

without

nostalgia,

accepting

alienation

as his

fate,

and

creating

a

new

nostos

in

the

margin

between inside

and

outside. Miorita

herself

is

confined

to the

border,

a

marginalized

and

mobile

center,

whose

cen-

ter is defined

by

the

circumference,

that

is from the

outside,

or from

the

dual

identity

conferred

by

the line

separating

inside

from outside.

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RICHARD COLLINS

Codrescu's

memory

of the

tale

of Miorita becomes the

point

of

de-

parture

for the

narrative

of his

life,

the

inscribed

line

of

memory,

a

memory all the more deeply ingrained for his absence from the Ro-

manian

landscape.

Near

the end

of his

first

autobiography,

The

Life

and

Times

of

an

Involuntary

Genius

(1975),

Codrescu leaves

New

York

for California on

an

impulse,

with

his wife

Alice who is

pregnant

with

their

first

child,

and

a

German

named

Erhard. On the

way, they

compose

a

poem

together,

a

collaborative

poem

that

echoes Whit-

man,

called

"a

song

for

the

Average

Joe":

The

electric

fan

makes

him

feel

guilty

And

the chair does

too

The

sofa does

nothing except

Hold a dead

yew

But the stove smells like hair

The window

is unbearable

He'll

throw himself out of

it

Like a

darling vegetable

But

instead he'll do

a

flip

and

Throw himself

against

the

wall

The

fridge

slams on his

rocks

And his head becomesa hole.

The

poem

demonizes

the

furniture of

domesticity,

humanizes the ul-

tra-American

appliances, brings

the Outside inside and

turns the

In-

side

out,

as

though

Codrescu

has

struck a

pact

with

his

memory

of

Romania

and

the

immediacy

of the American

landscape

in the

same

way

that

the

mioritic

marriage

strikes a

pact

with

nature,

sex and

death.

Here

is

the internalized

guilt

of the Old

World married

to

the

horror of

the

Modern,

evoked

in

the

image

of the

Holocaust:

"the

stove smells like hair" (an ironic

image,

since the Romanian

Jew

and

his American wife

are

collaborating

on a

poem

with

a

German).

When the

Outside

is

revealed to

be

a

domestic

American

interior

fur-

nished with

appliances

of the Old

World,

the window

of

escape

be-

comes

"unbearably"

attractive

and

beckons to

him

to

jump;

this

is

the

interior call of

memory,

for

"The

memory

of

the

outside is also a

form

of

interiority:

the

outside resides

in

memory"

(Outside

198).

The

play

on

words

in

"The

sofa does

nothing

except

/

Hold a

dead

yew" sug-

gests

a

lost

identity (a

dead

you),

or a

lost

heritage (a

dead

Jew),

each

associated with the

storytelling sheep

who

preserves

identity

(a

dead

ewe),

while

also

conjuring

up

a lost

but remembered

tradition

in

Ro-

manian

poetry

in

which the

poet

addresses the

wood,

codrul

(a

dead

yew),

in

absence of

other

kinship.

All

of these

rhymes,

moreover,

echo the

name

Codrescu

(a

dead

Steiu,

his

first nom de

plume).

90


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SPACE

Immediately

after

composing

this

poem,

Alice and Andrei and Er-

hard cross the Sierra Nevadas into

California,

which

Andrei notes

is

"as

mythical [...]

as New

York is to the

Rumanians,

as

mythical

as

Transylvania."

As

if

to

identify

the

myth

more

specifically

as

mioritic,

they pick up

a hitchhiker who takes them to a

"moon

feast,"

actually

a

pagan

orgy

for "the last

virgin

moon before

they

send their

man

up."

Like the mioritic

marriage

that

reconciles

man and

nature,

sexu-

ality

and

death,

time and

eternity,

this

orgy

in

the name of

technolo-

gy

results

in a kind of transcendence: "Time had

disappeared. They

were

suspended.

California

had a

feeling

of

[...]

well,

postmortem

peace"

(Life

& Times

184-85).

This

spontaneous

pagan

ritual abolishes

time, just as the death-wedding, in Kligman's view, abolishes time

through

a

symbolization

of the

symbol,

which is

in

the

telling

of

the

story.9

"The old

story,"

Codrescu

writes

of

the

Miorita,

"was

a

time

machine

that

abolished

time,"

a

"mythic"

machine "that

erased

the

borders between man and

what created him"

(Outside 5).10

The next

and

penultimate

section of

Life

and

Times contains

a re-

vealing passage

on translation.

In a

pyrotechnic display

of free asso-

ciation,

Codrescu

defines translation as

"an instinct

not

an

interroga-

tion."

After a

poetry

reading

for the inmates

at

Folsom

Prison,

"he

knew that only one translation was possible: freedom." This instinc-

tual freedom

buries itself

within in

the

products

of

invention,

of cre-

ation,

and

of

procreation,

since

"contrary

to

[the]

expectations"

of

"the

political

barbed

wire of

his

times,

the

revolutions, etc.,

[...]

Alice

carried inside

her a fantastic

translation. Codrescu

had translated

himself

already

into

a

version of America. His

body

had

grown larg-

er.

His

memory

was

a blur"

(Life

& Times

189).

The

coherence

of Co-

drescu's vision-if

not, indeed,

his

prophecy-is

extraordinary.

For

this

passage

connects

his

past

and future

in

a

"high

moment" of au-

tobiographical

revelation. Miorita

expanded

the

poetic

geography

of

the

Romanian

imagination,

Blaga sought

"the

enlargement

of

mys-

tery,"

and Codrescu's

"body

had

grown

larger,"

as

though

in

sympa-

thy

with

his

wife's

procreative

translation,

who would

be

born

Lu-

cian Codrescu.

Fifteen

years

after the

birth

of

Lucian,

that

"fantastic

translation,"

Codrescu fulfilled the

metaphor by translating

the

poet-

ry

of his own

literary

father,

Lucian

Blaga.

Before

leaving

Bucharest,

Codrescu

had

drunkenly

orated to his

fellow students

how the curves of

wandering

could

never

be closed

to make circles: "Listen to

me,

all

you

carnivorous,

hell-bound idiots

Whoever

it was who

told

you

about

curves

becoming

circles, lied,

and

the

lie, er,

becomes,

burp,

a lot more trivial

when

one, er, looks,

burp,

at

Communism,

this

terrific, er,

burp,

idea,

burp, moving

to the

beat of

a

great

human,

burp

sweat

puddle...."

The

speech sputters

91


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RICHARD

COLLINS

into incoherence

and

maudlin

sentimentality, ending

on

a note of

lost

identity:

"I

had no

father,

burp,

and no one here did...where

is

the

gold?" (Life

& Times

97). Where,

in

one

sense,

is

his

father who

gave

him the

name of Goldmutter?11

Where,

in

another

sense,

is the

al-

chemical transformation of

the

given thing,

identical with

itself,

into

the valuable stuff of created

identity?

By

the

time

they get

to San

Francisco, however,

"Everything

came

in

circles,"

including

his

pregnant

wife Alice. He has a

dream,

and he

is

pregnant

too,

and "inside

him

there is a

big empty

bus driven

by

his

father,"

which

stops

and

picks up

various

people,

"fictions he had

created"

(Life

&

Times

188).

In the

dream,

life

and

literature

merge.

The empty bus that picks up "created"passengers is an apt figure for

the

various

poetic

personae

he had created for himself in

New

York,

and

for

the endless collaborations with

others

he had

practiced,

"in-

cessantly, obsessively,

losing

themselves

in

the new human

combina-

tions

they

invented" as

they "yielded

their identities in

favor of their

creations"

(Life

&

Times

178).

The

driver of this dream

bus is his fa-

ther,

but

which

father?

The

father of "where

is

the

gold?"

It seems

clear that the bus is a

literary

bus,

and the driver

is not his

biological

father,

who is lost to

him,

but

his

literary

father,

Lucian

Blaga,

after

whom he will name his own son. Blaga drives the magic bus, Mior-

itza,

into

new

territory

for Codrescu to

explore,

the

boundaries of

his

Romanian-American

poetic landscape.

Thus,

the effect of

Blaga's

mioritic

space

for

the

Romanian writer

in exile is to

expand

the

mystery.

Codrescu's

mioritic

space rejects

all

nationalistic,

political

or

ideological interpretations

of

it. As it is nur-

tured

in the

early picaresque autobiography Life

and

Times,

and de-

veloped

in the

memoir-essay

The

Disappearance

f

the

Outside,

not as

a

philosophical

idea,

but as

a

manifesto for

escape,

mioritic

space

de-

scribes an autonomous realm of individual and communal freedom.

Codrescu's view is not fatalistic

in the

least,

perhaps

because

he

treats

Blaga's

idea not

as

theory

but as a

survival tactic. The

Disappearance

f

the

Outside

might

have been

subtitled

a

Guidebook to Mioritic

Space.

Codrescu

exchanges

the

passivity

of the

poet-shepherd

for the travel-

ing

clothes of

Miorita

herself,

the

boy's

confidante

and

confederate.

More

importantly,

Miorita is

his creation

who

continues to recreate

him with

each

telling

of

the tale.

Just

as

poems

are the

disguise

of the

poet,

so

the

sheep

is

the

disguise

of

the

shepherd.

Thus

Codrescu,

"the sonofabitch from the woods" becomes a wolf in

sheep's

cloth-

ing, telling

the

story

of

the

fatalist who allowed

himself to be killed

only

to be

immortalized

in

the

story.

The

choice between

poetics

and

politics,

visionary

escape

versus

realistic

engagement,

sets

up

a

false

dichotomy.

For

Codrescu it

is

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ANDREI CODRESCU'S

MIORITICSPACE

simply

a matter

of

translating

romantic

self-absorption

and

aesthetic

detachment

into the

political

arena

of the

imagination,

changing

the

world not by providinga vision forthose without vision (politics,es-

sentially),

but

by

providing

a

space

in

which

everyone

is

encouraged

to

provide

his

own

vision. To

do

this,

one must be

willing

to

give

up

one

life,

one

land,

and to

go

underground,

or abroad.

It

may

be

a

symbolic

death,

like

Codrescu's,

or

literal,

ike the

shepherd-boy

who

must die

for

the

story

to be told.

The

shepherd

becomes

a

poet

in

sheep's

clothing

to

keep

the wolves

of

coercion

and

conformity

at

bay.

In

short,

poetic

activism

in

the

form of a

metaphysical

liberation

front,

a

resistancemovement

of the

imagination.12

It mightbe arguedthat Codrescu'smost significantcreationalong

these lines

is his

long-

running magazine,

Exquisite

Corpse, "journal

of books and

ideas,"

later

changed

to

the more accurate

"journal

of

letters and

life." Named for the surrealist

method of artistic

collabo-

ration,

cadavre

exquis, popular

with the Romanian surrealists

Gherasim

Luca,

Gellu

Naum,

Virgil

Teodorescu

and Paul

Paun,

Ex-

quisite

Corpse

s

a

combination

of communal

expression

and

personal

signature.

Indeed,

it is a

unique

combination

of ancient

and

modern

Romanian

influences,

combining

the

oral tradition

of the Miorita

along with the printed tradition of the Dada, Surrealist,and Mod-

ernist

movements.

The oral tale's

power

resides

in

the communal

recognition

of its

value,

its

repetition denying

the value of

mere

ro-

mantic

self-absorption,

while individual variations on

the

original

text

encourage creativity

within the formal or

narrativeboundaries.13

An

underground magazine,

Exquisite

Corpse

welcomes

the

voices of

the

dispossessed,

and its

popularity

and

perpetuation

depends

on

word-of-mouthadvertisement.

(Below

its

copyright

notice,

for exam-

ple,

is

the statement:

"Weforbid

reproduction

but authorize

memo-

rization"-appropriate

for a

magazine

with

aspirations

to oral im-

mortality.)

In

fact,

Exquisite

Corpse

s more "mioritic"

han surrealist

in that

the collaborative

method of

the

surrealists

s

put

to

use

less as

an

example

of

individual

psychic

automatism

than

as a

professed

"collaboration

with

culture."

In

printed

form,

and for Western

eyes,

the

communal

alternativeculture

of

Exquisite

Corpse

onverts

the

oral

tradition of Codrescu's

native Romania

into the

printed

currency

of

Western ntellectual

and

cultural

exchange,

and its

popularity

proves

that

word-of-mouth still has

a value that

approximates

that

of

oral

culture.

The

appearance

of

ExquisiteCorpse

n

1983

signaled

a

new

forum

for

an

alternative communal

utterance. Its

format,

in

the

distinctive

shape

of a

coffin,

seemed

suitable

for an

"underground"

magazine

with the name

of a

cadaver.

On one

level,

this was

an accession

to

the

93


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14/20

ANDREI

CODRESCU'S MIORITICSPACE

breed

metaphorical

exiles,

while

times of

repression

breed literal

ex-

iles"

(Outside 47).

There was

now

a

general

sense of

metaphorical

and

metaphysical exile,

and

his magazine became a place where contrib-

utors could voice their

cultural alienation and their

longing

for

"in-

ner

emigration"

(William

Levy,

in

Stiffest

123),

a

place

where one

might

even

fashion

"a

weapon

of acute

discontinuity"

(Robert

Kelly,

in

Stiffest

236).

From such a

position

of armed

marginality,

it

might

be

possible

to erode the center and

thereby

"short-circuit the

imaginary

globe,"

which

is,

as Codrescu concludes

in

his

manifesto of

escape,

the

poet's "job"

(Outside 207).

Exiles like

Codrescu,

Milan

Kundera and Salman

Rushdie

know

that poetry and narrative are not just aesthetic pastimes. All art-but

especially

art

created

in

exile-is

inherently political

because

the

imagination

recognizes

no

boundaries

and

allows

everyone's story

to

be told.18The

imaginative

reconstruction

of the

world is

ultimately

a

poetic

feat

beyond

politics.

Both

politics

and art

have an aesthetic

di-

mension

that

also

engages

the arena

of social and

political

action.

Neither art

nor

politics adequates reality,

each

being

a

competing

medium

for visions of

what

is

real.

Whereas

politics

tends to close off

avenues

of

escape

and

return, however,

art

tends

to

open

them.

Co-

drescu's escape from Romania was aesthetic and political, metaphor-

ical

as well

as

metaphysical, through

an

imagined

hole

in

the

flag.

His return

was

simply

through

the actual

hole

that he on the

outside,

along

with

other Romanians on the

inside,

had

imagined

into

being.

The

Hole

in

the

Flag:

A

Romanian Exile's

Story

of

Return

and Revolu-

tion

(1990)

was commissioned to take

advantage

of the events and af-

termath of the

sensational

fall

of

Ceausescu. Codrescu was rushed

to

Romania and

wrote

the

book

at

white heat

during

and

immediately

after the

December

Revolution of

1989,

in which

he was able to

play

a

small

part.

But it is more than an "instant

book,"

like those devoted

to

Patty

Hearst,

Saddam

Hussein,

or

O.J.

Simpson,

bundled to

mar-

ket

while

they

were still news.

Codrescu's book is an

extended,

if

somewhat

hurried,

reflection

of his

entire life

as

a

Romanian

in exile.

As

James

McNeill

Whistler said

at

the famous

art

libel

trial of

1878,

his

paintings

were

not the

product

of a few hours

labor,

pots

of

paint

flung

at the

canvas,

as Ruskin

had

claimed,

but contained

"the

knowledge

of a lifetime."

While

the book was

generally

well received in

America, negative

reactions to The

Hole

in the

Flag

in Romania come

from

two

groups,

American scholars or

diplomats

who fault the

book for

certain histor-

ical and

sometimes

geographical

inaccuracies

(since

corrected

in

the

paperback

edition),

and

Romanian intellectuals who fault

the

book

for

a

certain

sentimentality

in

Codrescu's

perception

of

their

country.

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RICHARD

COLLINS

But

The Hole in

the

Flag

does

not

pose

as an

authoritative

history

of

the

Romanian

Revolution. The

book

was

not meant as either

politics

or

journalism.

As the

subtitle

suggests,

it is

one of

Codrescu's several

autobiographies,

"A

Romanian Exile's

Story

of Return and

Revolu-

tion."

His

impressions

are

of a

country

that

is

only

partly

historical or

geographical,

and

largely,

as

Codrescu

confesses,

a

mythical

creation

of

his own mind in exile.

Codrescu is

a

poet,

first

and

always,

whether

delivering

a

commentary

on National Public

Radio,

taking

us

on

a

tour

of

Bathory's

castle in

The

Blood

Countess

(1995),

or

report-

ing

the Romanian

Revolution. He

never

pretends

to stick

to the

facts,

even when

they

are the "facts"

of

his life.19

The title refers to the space left in the Romanian flag after the Com-

munist

Party

emblem was cut

out,

first in

protest,

then

in

confirma-

tion of the fall

of

Ceausescu,

but

Codrescu sees

the

hole

in

the

flag

with

the

eyes

of a

poet.

The

political gesture

is translated

into a

poet-

ic

symbol:

an

emblem for his

escapes

and

returns. Codrescu had been

fond

of

saying

that after

he left

Romania,

he

was banned from re-en-

tering

the

country

even

through

the

squares

in

crossword

puzzles,

so

his return

through

the hole in

the

flag

has a certain

symmetry:

"It's

through

that

hole,

I

thought,

that

I

am

returning

to

my birthplace"

Hole

67).

The avenue of his

escape

was as

metaphysical

as his return was

literal.

So

when

the

new

Romanian

flags

began

to

appear

of

whole

cloth,

without the

hole

as a

reminder,

Codrescu was

troubled. Twen-

ty years

after he

had

escaped,

he

was

now able to

return,

and his

countrymen

were

already

trying

to close

up

that

symbolic

space.

Knowing

how

fleeting

rebellion can

be,

how short-lived

indepen-

dence,

and

how

fragile

memory,

Codrescu

wondered how

they

would

be

reminded

of

what

they

had

literally

and

figuratively gone

through?Once they closed the aperture of vision, what visible symbol

would there be to

remind

them

to

keep

open

the avenue

of

visionary

escape,

the

mioritic

space,

which is also

the

aperture

of

reconciliation

and

return?

Codrescu

prefaced

his

anthology

of

contemporary

American

poet-

ry,

American

Poetry

Since 1970:

Up

Late,

with a

poem

by

Kay

Boyle

that

begins:

Poets,

minor or

major,

hould

arrange

o remain

slender,

Cling

to their

skeletons,

not batten

on

provender,

not fatten the lean

spirit

In

its isolated

cell,

its

solitary

chains.

(17)

The

shepherd-boy

in

Miorita,

who Codrescu insists is a

poet,

is

described as

similarly

slender: "Who

knows,

/

Who has seen

/

A

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ANDREI CODRESCU'S MIORITICSPACE

proud shepherd boy

/

Slender

enough

to

slip through

a

ring?"

Boyle's poem

ends

with an

admonition to

poets,

but

it

might

be

to

all

exiles,metaphysical,metaphorical,

or literal. Codrescu

seems to have

taken

Boyle's

admonition to heart

in

all

his

work,

in

all his

mani-

festoes

for

escape

and

memoirs of

return,

as well as

in

his roles

as

edi-

tor of

ExquisiteCorpse,

nd

as

geographer

of mioritic

space:

"Poets,

re-

member

your

skeletons.

/

In

youth

or

dotage,

remain

ight

as ashes."

The

combinationof

memory

and

loss,

in

which the

outside is

inter-

nalized

to make it

portable,

is an

absolute value for

the exile and

a

dominant motif

in

Codrescu's memoirs. The

past

is

sacred,

but it

is

also

gone. Only

narrative

brings

it

back

into

being.

'Childhood

s

over,'

said

God,

looking

at him

through

his mother's

eyes,

through

he

eye

of

a

building

he

passed

on his

way

home and

through

n

eye

in the

sky.

'The

hell it

is,'

saidtheDevil. For he sake

of

prose,

ome

eyes

mustbe

mercifully

emoved.'

Life

&Times

83)

This

parable

shows us the

dialogue

between the

cosmic

transcen-

dence

in the

myth

of Mioritaand the

communist

interdiction

against

full consciousness. The vision of the young poet passes through a

window

of

escape,

"through

an

eye

in

the

sky."

But

poetry

and tran-

scendence

are not

enough,

and

may

even result

in

exile.

Every

av-

enue

of

escape

should

be

thrown

open

wide. The Devil of the

prosaic

would

have

us

close

up

avenues of

escape;

the

poet

Codrescu

wants

them left

open,

if

only

to

remind

us to

stay

slender

enough

to

slip

through

them.

Codrescu's

status as a

popular

commentatorand

best-selling

nov-

elist

in

the

Gothic

tradition should not

prevent

us from

grasping

the

importance

of his contributionas an activistin the

ongoing

process

of

cultural

politics. Addressing

different

(if

often

over-lapping)

audi-

ences

in

each

of

the

media and

genres

he works

in,

Codrescu

remains

a

delightfully

subversive influence

in

American culture. Like other

immigrant

exiles,

from the Marx

brothers to

Nabokov,

Codrescu

is

not

only

carefulnot

to

forget

where

he came

from,

he is

incapable

of

doing

so.

Haunted

by

a

notion of

freedom

that was

born

in

the mists

of

Transylvania

and bred

in

the

specific

milieu of an

underground

it-

erary community

in Communist

Romania,

he has taken the

myth

of

Miorita and

Blaga's

reading

of

it

and

retold

it

along

every

avenue of

the Americanmedia.

In

doing

so,

he enacts the redefinition

of the Ro-

manian cultural

space,

which

now

overlaps

that

of

America. Like so

many

other

valuable

contributions o the multi-ethnic

mix of Ameri-

ca,

Andrei

Codrescu's mioritic

space

reminds us of

the essential

val-

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RICHARD

COLLINS

ue of

freedom,

the

necessity

to

constantly

reaffirm

it, and,

whenever

and wherever

necessary,

to recreate

it.

Notes

1.

Mircea

Eliade

has said that

Romania has

only

two

legends

of

its

own,

Miorita

and Master

Manole,

each

preserved

in

"lyrical

and

ballad

masterpieces"

(25).

Of the

two, however,

it is

probably

Miorita that

belongs

most

specifically

to

Romania,

the Master Manole

legend having

variants

throughout

the

Balkan

region,

in

Macedonia,

Bulgaria,

and Greece. It

is,

however,

possible

that the

Miorita

legend

has

its

origins

in

the Thracian

myth

of

Orpheus.

2.

Quoted

by

Kligman

(358).

Elsewhere,

Eliade states the

idea thus: "the

shep-

herd

accepts

death

as

a

voluntary

self-sacrifice

which is also

supplied

with the

significance of a cosmic marriage, that is, the supreme value of reconciliation

with

one's

destiny

and

reintegration

into a

no

longer

'pagan'

Nature,

but

rather a

liturgical

sanctified

Cosmos"

(37).

3.

"According

to

Blaga,

the Romanian's

is

a

mystical

existence

of

reunion with

nature and

its

contemplation,

which

involves

disregarding

or

ignoring

histo-

ry's temporal

dimensions,

but

remaining

conscious

of

one's own

spiritual

eter-

nity"

(Shafir 405).

4.

Codrescu,

"Nota

pentru

cititorul

roman"

Note

for

the Romanian

Reader],

an

af-

terword

to

the Romanian

translation of The

Disappearance

of

the

Outside

(Dis-

paritia

206).

Translations from

Romanian

are

my

own,

unless

otherwise noted.

5. Codrescu has noted (somewhat disingenuously, perhaps) that he is often mis-

taken

for

a

surrealist

"by

people

who

wouldn't know a

surrealist

if

one came

steaming

out

of their mouths

at

a French

restaurant"

because of the

Romanian

echoes

in

his American

idiom. "What

people usually

mistake for

surrealism is

a different

way

of

speaking.

The

metaphorical

echoes

of Romanian into

Eng-

lish

sound surreal.

By

that

token,

anyone

sounding strange

to a

listener is a

surrealist:

we

are all

each other's

surrealists

[....]

But

I

am

not

a

surrealist:

I

am

a

Romanian,

in

exile"

(Outside 158).

6.

"Our

duty,

when faced

by

a

true

mystery," [Blaga]

writes,

"is not

to

explain

it,

but to

deepen

it,

to transform it

into

a

greater

mystery."

Quoted

by

Codrescu in

the

introduction to his

translation

of

Blaga's poetry (Yearningxiv).

7.

Codrescu's

literary

allegiances

are

reflected

in

the

names

he

gave

to

his

sons,

the

first-born Lucian

(after

Blaga),

and

the

second-born Tristan

(after

Tzara).

Codrescu's

only

volume

of translation

from

his

native

tongue

is

the

poetry

of

Blaga.

8. Codrescu is

comparing Blaga

to

Rilke,

"these

two

poets

whose sensibilities

lay

in a

great

desire to

disappear

in

the

mythic

collective unconscious. Both felt

their

condition

as

one of

exile,

but

where

Rilke

was

in

fact

an

exile,

Blaga's

ex-

ile

consisted in an

acute

yearning

for the

very place

where he

was.

This

place,

moreover,

retains

the

imprint

of

myth

in

its vacated shell."

9.

H.

Stahl in

Eseuri

critice

(1983)

describes

the

transformational

relationship

be-

tween the cosmic

marriage

of the Mioritaand that of the

ritual

death-wedding

as a

"symbolization

of the

symbolic."

This

"symbolization

of

the

basic

symbols

elevates

the

general

level of the

verses to that of

highly developed

and en-

chanting

poetry" (Kligman

166).

10.

Codrescu echoes the

time machine

image

in

his comments on

Blaga:

"The

lovers who

populate Blaga's

woods and

villages

are

constructs for the trans-

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RICHARD

COLLINS

seems clear

that Cioran was

a

later

discovery,

admired,

emulated,

but never

approached

with

the same

sympathy

that

Blaga inspired.

Cioran lived

long

enough

to bless

Codrescu's

magazine

as "a

full-blooded

corpse"

(Stiffest

17).

18. As Kundera puts it in his "Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe," "it is

precisely

in

losing

the

certainty

of truth and the

unanimous

agreement

of oth-

ers

that man becomes

an individual. The novel is the

imaginary paradise

of

in-

dividuals.

It is the

territory

where no one

possesses

the truth

[...]

but where

everyone

has

the

right

to be understood"

(159).

Both Kundera and

Rushdie,

the latter

in

his Herbert

Read Memorial Lecture entitled "Is

Nothing

Sacred?"

(see

Rushdie

Imaginary

Homelands),

have defined

narrative,

and

specifically

the

novel,

as the

ideally

democratic realm where

all

stories

can

be told. Mikhail

Bakhtin's

theory

of

the novel as a

space

reserved for-and

brought

into

being

by-a

cultural context of

"heteroglossia"

is

applicable

to

these exiles'

ideas

about the uses

and

importance

of

narrative, particularly

the

novel;

but these

ideas can also be

applied

to Codrescu's communal narrative

comprised

of in-

dividual voices or

"glosses"

on

culture

(in

Romanian,

voice

is

glas).

Bakhtin's

third "basic characteristic" of

the

novel,

for

example,

is defined

by

a

metaphor

of

open space:

"the new

zone

opened by

the novel

for

structuring literary

im-

ages,

namely,

the zone of maximal contact with the

present

(with

contempo-

rary reality)

in all

its

openendedness."

Bakhtin

goes

on to

say

that

the novel is

defined

by

"a

very specific rupture

in the

history

of

European

civilization: its

emergence

from

a

socially

isolated and

culturally

deaf and

semipatriarchal

so-

ciety,

and its entrance

into international

and

interlingual

contacts

and

relation-

ships"

(842).

This

may explain why

Romania,

which has

remained "a

socially

isolated and culturally deaf and semipatriarchal society," has never excelled in

the novel

form,

but

has

clung

to

poetry

as

its

national

cultural

expression,

from

the

poet

of

the Miorita to Mihai

Eminescu.

19. Codrescu

prides

himself on

keeping

his

identity

in flux.

(See

Russo

1988)

His

autobiographies

often contradict each

other,

and

not

only

in

fact.

Memories

are

blurred,

images overlap,

revelations

are

transposed.

As he

explains

in In Amer-

ica's

Shoes,

"The Romanian

layer"

of his

experience

is

"simultaneously

real

and

unreal.

Mythologized

a number of

times,

it

rested

securely

in

the

glass jars

of

historico-psychological compromise"

(36).

Creating

masks

to evade

an

author-

itarian

regime

became a

habit,

helpful

in

evading

all

regimes.

It was

a

simple

step to the proliferation of poetic personae. Authorities (critics) are notorious-

ly

literal-minded. His

security

was assured

by

their

taking

his

self-creating

myths

(armor)

at face value. In "De

Rerum

Natura,"

a

prose poem

about

con-

tributor's

notes to

magazines,

he

says

that the

publication

of

his

poems

allows

him

to create

mythical

authors,

and so

"With

this secret method of

defying

birth

controls

I

populate

the

world with

poets" (Up

Late

84-85).

Works Cited

Bakhtin,

Mikhail

M.

"Epic

and Novel:

Toward a

Methodology

for

the

Study

of the

Novel"

(c. 1930s).

In

Critical

Theory

Since

Plato,

revised ed. Ed. Hazard

Adams. Fort Worth:Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich,

1992.

Beldiman,

Alexandru and

Magda

Carneci,

eds.

Bucuresti,

anii

1920-1940: intre

avan-

garda

si modernism/Bucharest n the

1920s-1940s: betweenAvant-Gardeand

Modernism.Bucharest:

Editura

Simetria/Union

of Romanian

Architects,

1994.

Blaga,

Lucian. At the

Court

of

Yearning:

Poems

by

Lucian

Blaga.

Trans. Andrei

Codres-

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1989.

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Roy MacGregor-Hastie.

Bucharest: Editura

Eminescu,

1975.

Trilogiaculturii.Bucuresti: Editura Pentru Literatura Universala, 1969.

Cioran,

Emil.

On

the

Heights

of Despair

(1934).

Trans.

Ilinca

Zarifopol-Johnston.

Chicago:

Chicago

UP,

1994.

Codrescu,

Andrei,

trans. At the

Court

of

Yearning:

Poems

by

Lucian

Blaga.

Columbus:

Ohio State

UP,

1989.

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New

York: Simon

and

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1995.

The

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the Outside:

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Manifestofor Escape.Reading,

Mass.: Ad-

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manifest

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Eight

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1989

(2nd

ed.

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loan Petre.

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Eliade,

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Feraru,

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