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Nicolae Breban – Fiction, Memory and Truth

Nicolae Breban – Fiction, Memory and Truth FA C U LTA TE A D E Ș TI I N ȚE Ș I LI TE R E „P E T R U M A I O R ” Acta Marisiensis. Philologia Volume 4 (2022), Issue 1 p-ISSN: 2668-9537, e-ISSN: 2668-9596 10.2478/amph-2022-0059 Iulian Boldea Prof., PhD, ‘G.E. Palade’ University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology of Târgu Mureș, Târgu Mureș, Mureș county, 540 142, Romania Abstract: Nicolae Breban's work is characterized, as expression and narrative diction, by spontaneity and naturalness, even if, deep down, one suspects the articulations of a program that values a set of essential readings from which Dostoevsky, Nietzsche or Thomas Mann are not missing. The architecture of the work is underpinned by a tension of opposites from which its individuality is born; it is a tension between the vitality of energetic, dominating writing and the lucidity, pessimistic or sceptical, of the perception of the world. Seductive, problematic, polemical, Nicolae Breban's books reveal the qualities the prose writer has always possessed: lucidity, the fascination of storytelling, obsession with the past, the ideal and anarchy, as well as a rhetoric of the perennial truth of being fixed in the suggestive drawing of the epic. Keywords: narrativity, fiction, memory, truth, lucidity Self-portrait in palimpsest In the depths of its composition, but also in its style, expression and narrative diction, Nicolae Breban's work has imposed itself by the density and naturalness of its epic, but also by the outline of an aesthetic program, sometimes apparent, sometimes subtextual, through which the writer valorizes, with tenacity and method, a set of readings and influences from essential and shaping universal literature (Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann). The architecture of Breban's work also exhibits a tense composition, resulting from the proximity of opposites, oppositions and binary aesthetic positions that give individuality to the text, born of a robust and relevant contrast between the vitality of an energetic, dominating writing and the lucidity, often pessimistic, sceptical or convulsive, of the perception of the world. The novels Francisca, In the Absence of the Masters, Sick Animals, The Plaster Angel, The Annunciation, The Road to the Wall, Don Juan are significant creations for the evolution of post-war Romanian prose, books that have imposed themselves by the density of the epic substance, by the vigour of the style or by the robust narrative construction, situated in the tradition of the great inter-war prose, without bypassing some modern or even post-modern epic modalities and strategies. In a confessional page entitled Why do I write? from 1984, Nicolae Breban presents a brief outline of the poetics and poetics of prose, succinctly describing the role, the resorts, the strategies and the motivations of writing, as a saving and recuperating trace: "I write because I am "driven by © 2022 Published by University Press, Târgu Mureș, România, 2022. This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) ambition", but also because I cannot do otherwise. I couldn't bear it otherwise, without writing, my life (and life in general) would seem unbearable, unworthy of living. What's more: my faults, the errors I fall back on with a mysterious tenacity (indeed, how unteachable experience is!), the evil, the antipathy I produce around me (with my vanity, no doubt!) the shadow I cast on the earth, etc., I could not accept without the bridge, the saving board of writing". Breban's novels are staging of ideas and concepts, to which a fictional flesh is lent, the prose writer revealing the disproportions and discrepancies between living and writing, between verisimilitude and implausibility, revealing the anatomy and physiology of the human soul, so fragile a constitution of the human, all represented in a dynamic composition of narrative relief. It is interesting how the characters, with their diverse, paradoxical, multiple roles, are manipulated by a strong, energetic, authoritative authorial voice, assuming their own destiny subject to the fluctuations of history, rigorously traced, sometimes sinuous, sometimes labile, with imperceptible limits and contours. In Nicolae Breban's books, writing bears the imprint of corporeality, for the body seems to hold a prominent place in the universe of narrative, because in the vision of the author of the novel Sick Animals, narrative is legitimised as an assimilation of immediate perception, in a mimetic expressiveness of writing, but also as a transfiguring deity, thus combining at the level of writing the illusions of the fictional and the observation with a realist-naturalist tinge, capturing, in a text with dense architecture, the ambiguous, paradoxical and sometimes atrocious relief of the universe, the metamorphoses of everyday life and the innumerable appearances of life, the prose writer seems to be fascinated by the irregularity of existence, but also by the unfathomable relationship between corporeality and idea. This is how a resemantization of reality is achieved, whereby elements of the concrete are relativized, sometimes even through an excess of detail, the writer's horror of certainty also expressing itself through the various registers of fiction that reveal themselves as novel forms of dynamizing knowledge of the depths and surfaces of the world. Breban's novels are, for the most part, problematic, centred on the debate of ideas, they impose themselves through the register of an alluvial knowledge, but also through a complex narrative configuration, resulting from the re-dimensioning of the epic levels (structuring, imaginary, diction), according to the substance of the narrative, but also according to the paradoxical temperament of the writer. If we follow, even briefly, the evolution of Breban's prose, we will notice some discontinuities and meanderings, starting from the chronicle-type novel (Francisca), to atmospheric narratives with an emphasis on the symbolic imaginary (In the Absence of the Masters), or to the exploration of the abyss of being, sometimes reduced to instinct, to physiology, and sometimes to the subtle dynamics of the insensible emotion (Sick Animals). There is thus a trajectory of becoming, in which themes, visions and problems of an emblematic and problematic, emblematic and profound artistic identity are traversed, as in a palimpsest. In his commentary on the novel Sick Animals, I. Negoițescu notes the stringent realism of some details, but also the hallucinatory imprint of some heroes with ambiguous status, placed halfway between hymn and reality: "With Sick Animals, N. Breban returns [... ] to realism, in a novel with lively, thrilling action, with classically shaped characters, from detectives to prophets, a novel that does not shy away from scenes of maximum violence, brutal investigations, rapes, murders and, at the same time, subtly prefigured with softly hallucinatory elements, traces of the visionary anti-realism he had shown himself to be driven by in order to succeed in weaving, with an unusual epic vigour, into this fabric a purely hallucinatory character, of a unique identity in Romanian literature". The exploration of the psychological depths and the emotional metamorphoses of the characters takes on a bookish quality in The Gypsum Angel (1973), a picture of the degradation of the being, but also a faithful transcription of new ways of knowing and self-discovery, for the narrative style conveys the vibration of the idea and the intuition of the experience of limits. As for the novel Bunavestire, it is individualised by its naturalness and epic abundance, by its sentimental indeterminacy, but also 2 by exploring the unfathomable layers of an alluvial narrative with symbolic and ideological meanings, the novel premeditatedly placing itself under the auspices of Nietzsche's convulsive and exalted thought, glimpsing here "a mixture of Nietzscheanism and the Romanian 'trăirism' of the 1920s and 1930s, a reactionary elitism that divides people into masters and servants and dreams of building a utopian dictatorial world". The novels that followed, The Road to the Wall (with the complex effigy of the character Castor Ionescu evolving under the sign of the crisis of knowledge, a symbol, Ion Vlad observes, of "the struggle waged in the name of life and self- knowledge"), Don Juan (1981) and Stalk and Seduction (1991) again reveal the obsession with capturing the individual's relationship with his own interiority, with the universe, or with power revealed under various masks, hypostases and alienating, agonizing, atrocious forms. Ample and vigorous epic constructions, Don Juan, Amphitryon, Day and Night, Will to Power expose, in a dynamic and expressive writing, the metabolism of contemporary humanity, the writer exploiting the dynamic resources of various epic techniques in which representations of realism are brought together, structures and essayistic forms, but also an ethical breath of the narrative that is not devoid of reflections and influences of Dostoevsky's prose, by merging the mechanics of everyday life with the vocation of the spiritual and visionary projection, exposed in broad, arborescent constructions. In Breban's work, the themes of power and seduction are charged with ethical overtones referring to the universe of couples "devouring each other" (Eugen Simion), with polarized affections and impulses, derived from the sphere of archetypal antinomic dualities (male-female, master-slave, etc.). It is obvious that in Nicolae Breban's prose the refined expression, the ornate style are not to be found in the sphere of epic rhetoric, the writer imagining, through the profile of his characters (Grobei, Castor Ionescu, Rogulski, Marchievici etc.) a world of possessed people, dominated by crises, living in the heart of a paradoxical and convulsive world. We find in these texts fragile characters, or, on the contrary, dynamic, representative characters, the writer standing out for his effort to release from the tumult of writing the energies of materiality, the dynamics and tensions of the body, the instinctual depths or the soft additions of a descending transcendent. Radically and polemically contradicting the norms of the contemporary era, Nicolae Breban configures, in novels and short stories, a plural and relativizing, nonconformist and energetic writing, in which the construction and deconstruction of language and meanings are found in a relative balance of narrative discourse. Valeriu Cristea assesses the condition of Breban's prose from the angle of coherence of substance, vision and style: "We do not believe that one can establish too great differences, neither of value nor of substance, between Nicolae Breban's novels, minimal variations on the same theme. Having identical coordinates, they seem more like enormous subdivisions, born from the same obsession, of an orbital narrative, revolving around a fixed point, which is an idea. But an organic idea. In this lies Nicolae Breban's superiority over many of his younger colleagues, who hunt ideas like chaff, but end up with nothing (and the reader along with them)." The human being's relationship with history and the social context leads to the revelation of some extremely interesting themes: the theme of possession and abandonment, the topos of power and the fascination of paradoxical relationships with the other. All these toposes are exploited by Nicolae Breban in his novels and essays, in his confessional texts, texts on which the writer's vehement, radical, uncompromising temperament, but also his pride, together with his ability to problematize the ideas and figures of human spirituality, all of which have in their subtext, like a flat of conscience, the reflections of a subtle pedagogy, incorporated by the writer, as an essential human document, in his books. On the other hand, all of Nicolae Breban's books form a palimpsest self-portrait of the author caught in the whirlwind of an unfriendly, convulsive age in which values and moral benchmarks are disfigured, mystified or demythologised. Under the sign of memory 3 Nicolae Breban has recently published three novels that form part of a trilogy dedicated to Romanian communism in its first decade of existence (The Only Way, The Game and the Fugue, Fear), a book of essays (Betrayal of Criticism), and a book with an autobiographical profile, suggestively entitled My Life. Nicolae Breban's novels in the volume Free Act (2020) are distinguished by their particular epic style, but also by the thematic register validated by his previous works (time, memory, failure, eros, the relationship between the individual and history, the relationship between master and apprentice, master and servant, etc.). These themes are represented in dense, homogeneous narrative structures and forms, in expositions of a certain naturalness and force of imagination. The six novellas in this volume (Free Act, Banal Subject, Beachboy, Symmetry, In Defence of Dictatorship and Black Romance in a Red Country) outline problematic destinies, incoherent, paradoxical human behaviour, images of heroes tortured by dilemmas, questions and indecision, situated in provocative contexts, captured in aporetic moments of existence, constructed through revealing resources of confession, in a polychrome, playful or pathetic style, which en-scene reality, giving it a spectacular outline, with reflections of orality, parody and irony. On the other hand, in the novels the characters have the possibility of self-examination, of rediscovering themselves by confronting themselves or the past (Free Act), they have the capacity to face up to primal, aggressive instincts (Subject banal), to expose their own reveries unclouded by a wave of modelling liveness (In defence of dictatorship) or they take the chance of an inner chronology that takes the form of narrative (Symmetries). The human types outlined in the novels (the seducer in Beachboy, the idealist in Black Romance in a Red Country, etc.) are defined by their consistent relationships with time, history and memory, the avatars of temporality occupying a significant space in the narrative architecture, as time is represented by the writer mainly from the perspective of volatility and unpredictability, it is perceived as mobile, fluctuating, as an inscrutable and random flow. The characters are thus situated in several dimensions of becoming, living in the present, returning to the past, with fragmented, disjointed or distorted destinies, depending on their relationship with time, history or dislocations and metamorphoses of chronology: 'Not all people always live in the same time and the same times, some run forward, others look back or refuse the present itself and do so with undeniable charm'. The past is problematic, and the heroes are tempted to recover their own personal history, exploring the traumas of the present through recourse to the past, which facilitates access to the integrity of identity relief or the redefinition of their own consciousness. In this way, the theme of memory, configured in the banal Subject, reveals the resources of the being as a recuperative potentiality of living, rendering the heroes' interrogations about the possibilities of "contemplating the past" in suggestive figurations: "Are we, he asks, still their "owners", as we are led, with foolish conceit, to believe that we possess what "belongs to us"? Well, at the first calm contemplation of the past, it is suddenly alienated, it escapes us and, if we are still alive and sensitive, we feel with dread how an uneasiness invades us, a kind of anguish that is like nothing and, like the smell that takes us suddenly to the corridors of childhood, this dread, which seems weak at first, then more and more insistent, more and more overwhelming, awakens in us a 'child' we once were, haunted by fantasies for which we seem to have been much better prepared than we are 'today'. " The echoes of the past in the present contribute to the structuring of the characters' identities, sometimes contradicting the logic and expectations of others, as the heroes commit "gratuitous acts", freeing themselves from the tyranny of the present time through self- observation, through explorations of their own conscience. In this way, withdrawal from the present is a defensive reaction of the being against the aggressions of reality, the shaping of the self by means of anamnesis, the adaptation or non-adaptation to the real, as well as the "pathos of distance" are recurrent themes of these novels, in which the reflections on the various juxtapositions of temporality are especially revealing, as one character remarks: "We mortals, 4 he says, are beings born of time, it, time, is the food of our existence, it nourishes us, it pushes us forward, always forward, and, of course, it kills us, stripping us of a worn-out, tired body and of memory, the oppressive memory that sometimes becomes our greatest enemy." Nicolae Breban's novels are under the auspices of temporality, of the play between reality and hallucination, they portray the heroes' resistance to the avatars of history, their confrontation with the intemperance of destiny, but also their relentless search for their own identity. In the substrate of the narratives one can see a Caragian germ (typical situations, textual references, irony, lines, statements, tones and linguistic tics): "You said it was a revolution, but that was what Iancu Caragiale had done. Literature, my! What do you know!"; "Just like in Caragiale's famous novella Two Lots, although the comparison is out of place"; "A great quality, the sense and organ of sarcasm! In fact, he appreciated Caragiale enormously"; "Here I am talking like Mache or Lache, the clowns of uncle Iancu!". In some texts, a Caragialian ambience is created by the abundant orality, the perception of the grotesque and the ridiculous, but also by the textual stakes of a well-tempered sarcasm. Through recurring themes, energetic epic discourse and unusual turns of phrase, Breban's novels depict the avatars of human destiny, re-enact the relationship between "servants and masters", staging a narrative regime of expectation ("Well... weren't we talking about servants and masters? Of masters and slaves? Wait, and we haven't got to... executioners and victims yet! Or master and apprentice, an idea that is on my tongue and in my heart, but... what does she know?! And... waiting, what, have I forgotten about waiting, great master of the psyche, of man, of anywhere?!"), in epic perspectives that multiply as in a labyrinth of multiplied parallel mirrors, with symmetries, immersions in the abyss of consciousness and expressive transformations of the present time. A writer character in a novel exposes a succinct ethic of writing ("We writers, but even poets, lose nothing of what we find, encounter or are offered, and however trivial or banal, we process these 'things' and then sell them at great cost and, unquestionably, accompanying them with a bloated and tiresomily colorful talk.... "), in which the discourse turns into a confession, but also into a nightmare of an encounter with history, for the writer's destiny is "to relive what he was inventing at that very moment". At the same time, the 'our history' that the narrator reveals in the novel In Defence of Dictatorship symbolises the aggravated tension between consciousness and, as a way of assuming 'possible' representations: 'We have always shown a preference for "possible" rather than "probable". Being thus in active and dramatic disagreement with the world." If the present has an elegiac, immobile aspect, as the prose writer notes, memory is placed under the auspices of the paradoxical, narratives being articulated through the ferment of ideational-speculative valuations and psychological perspectives dedicated to the infirmities of memory or the deconstructions of identity perceived as forms of unfulfillment and ontic ambiguities, through the metaphor of the mirror that is "older than its own memory". Nicolae Breban's books are problematic and dense, revealing the known and discussed qualities of the prose writer: lucidity, the fascination of the narrative, the dialectic of past and present, the ideal and anarchy binomial, through which the endowments and fissures of being are represented in an energetic, tense, nuanced and supple epic style. BIBLIOGRAPHY Boldea, Iulian, Ficţiunea ca adevăr al vieţii, în revista „Contemporanul. Ideea europeană”, nr. 2, 2019; Boldea, Iulian, De la literatură la viaţă, în revista „Apostrof”, nr. 9, 2021; Boldea, Iulian, Ipostaze și lecturi critice. Secvențe de literatură română, Ed. University Press, 2019; Boldea, Iulian, Ficţiunea şi adevărul memoriei, în revista „Vatra”, nr. 5-6, 2022; Buciu, Marian Victor, Zece prozatori exemplari. Perioada comunistă, Editura Paralela 45, Pitești, 2007; Malița, Liviu, Nicolae Breban. Monografie, Editura Aula, Brașov, 2001; Negrici, 5 Eugen, Literatura română sub comunism. Proza, Editura Fundației Pro, București, 2006; Ungureanu, Cornel, Proza românească de azi, Editura Cartea Românească, București, 1985; Glodeanu, Gheorghe, Dimensiuni ale romanului contemporan, Editura Gutinul, Baia-Mare, 1998; Holban, Ioan, Profiluri epice contemporane, Editura Cartea Românească, Bucureşti, 1987; Manolescu, Nicolae, Istoria critică a literaturii române, Editura Paralela 45, Piteşti, 2008 ; Niţescu, M., Atitudini critice, Editura Cartea Românească, Bucureşti, 1983; Pavel, Laura, Antimemoriile lui Grobei. Eseu monografic despre opera lui Nicolae Breban, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, Bucureşti, 1997; Petraş, Irina, Literatura română contemporană, Editura Ideea Europeană, Bucureşti, 2008; Regman, Cornel, Patru decenii de proză literară românească, Editura Institutului Cultural Român, Bucureşti, 2004; Simuţ, Ion, Reabilitarea ficţiunii, Editura Institutului Cultural Român, Bucureşti, 2004 ; Ştefănescu, Alex, Istoria literaturii române contemporane, Editura Maşina de scris, Bucureşti, 2005; Zaciu, Mircea, Cu cărţile pe masă, Editura Cartea Românească, Bucureşti, 1981. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Acta Marisiensis. Philologia de Gruyter

Nicolae Breban – Fiction, Memory and Truth

Acta Marisiensis. Philologia , Volume 4 (1): 6 – Sep 1, 2022

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2022 Iulian Boldea, published by Sciendo
eISSN
2668-9596
DOI
10.2478/amph-2022-0059
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Abstract

FA C U LTA TE A D E Ș TI I N ȚE Ș I LI TE R E „P E T R U M A I O R ” Acta Marisiensis. Philologia Volume 4 (2022), Issue 1 p-ISSN: 2668-9537, e-ISSN: 2668-9596 10.2478/amph-2022-0059 Iulian Boldea Prof., PhD, ‘G.E. Palade’ University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology of Târgu Mureș, Târgu Mureș, Mureș county, 540 142, Romania Abstract: Nicolae Breban's work is characterized, as expression and narrative diction, by spontaneity and naturalness, even if, deep down, one suspects the articulations of a program that values a set of essential readings from which Dostoevsky, Nietzsche or Thomas Mann are not missing. The architecture of the work is underpinned by a tension of opposites from which its individuality is born; it is a tension between the vitality of energetic, dominating writing and the lucidity, pessimistic or sceptical, of the perception of the world. Seductive, problematic, polemical, Nicolae Breban's books reveal the qualities the prose writer has always possessed: lucidity, the fascination of storytelling, obsession with the past, the ideal and anarchy, as well as a rhetoric of the perennial truth of being fixed in the suggestive drawing of the epic. Keywords: narrativity, fiction, memory, truth, lucidity Self-portrait in palimpsest In the depths of its composition, but also in its style, expression and narrative diction, Nicolae Breban's work has imposed itself by the density and naturalness of its epic, but also by the outline of an aesthetic program, sometimes apparent, sometimes subtextual, through which the writer valorizes, with tenacity and method, a set of readings and influences from essential and shaping universal literature (Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann). The architecture of Breban's work also exhibits a tense composition, resulting from the proximity of opposites, oppositions and binary aesthetic positions that give individuality to the text, born of a robust and relevant contrast between the vitality of an energetic, dominating writing and the lucidity, often pessimistic, sceptical or convulsive, of the perception of the world. The novels Francisca, In the Absence of the Masters, Sick Animals, The Plaster Angel, The Annunciation, The Road to the Wall, Don Juan are significant creations for the evolution of post-war Romanian prose, books that have imposed themselves by the density of the epic substance, by the vigour of the style or by the robust narrative construction, situated in the tradition of the great inter-war prose, without bypassing some modern or even post-modern epic modalities and strategies. In a confessional page entitled Why do I write? from 1984, Nicolae Breban presents a brief outline of the poetics and poetics of prose, succinctly describing the role, the resorts, the strategies and the motivations of writing, as a saving and recuperating trace: "I write because I am "driven by © 2022 Published by University Press, Târgu Mureș, România, 2022. This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) ambition", but also because I cannot do otherwise. I couldn't bear it otherwise, without writing, my life (and life in general) would seem unbearable, unworthy of living. What's more: my faults, the errors I fall back on with a mysterious tenacity (indeed, how unteachable experience is!), the evil, the antipathy I produce around me (with my vanity, no doubt!) the shadow I cast on the earth, etc., I could not accept without the bridge, the saving board of writing". Breban's novels are staging of ideas and concepts, to which a fictional flesh is lent, the prose writer revealing the disproportions and discrepancies between living and writing, between verisimilitude and implausibility, revealing the anatomy and physiology of the human soul, so fragile a constitution of the human, all represented in a dynamic composition of narrative relief. It is interesting how the characters, with their diverse, paradoxical, multiple roles, are manipulated by a strong, energetic, authoritative authorial voice, assuming their own destiny subject to the fluctuations of history, rigorously traced, sometimes sinuous, sometimes labile, with imperceptible limits and contours. In Nicolae Breban's books, writing bears the imprint of corporeality, for the body seems to hold a prominent place in the universe of narrative, because in the vision of the author of the novel Sick Animals, narrative is legitimised as an assimilation of immediate perception, in a mimetic expressiveness of writing, but also as a transfiguring deity, thus combining at the level of writing the illusions of the fictional and the observation with a realist-naturalist tinge, capturing, in a text with dense architecture, the ambiguous, paradoxical and sometimes atrocious relief of the universe, the metamorphoses of everyday life and the innumerable appearances of life, the prose writer seems to be fascinated by the irregularity of existence, but also by the unfathomable relationship between corporeality and idea. This is how a resemantization of reality is achieved, whereby elements of the concrete are relativized, sometimes even through an excess of detail, the writer's horror of certainty also expressing itself through the various registers of fiction that reveal themselves as novel forms of dynamizing knowledge of the depths and surfaces of the world. Breban's novels are, for the most part, problematic, centred on the debate of ideas, they impose themselves through the register of an alluvial knowledge, but also through a complex narrative configuration, resulting from the re-dimensioning of the epic levels (structuring, imaginary, diction), according to the substance of the narrative, but also according to the paradoxical temperament of the writer. If we follow, even briefly, the evolution of Breban's prose, we will notice some discontinuities and meanderings, starting from the chronicle-type novel (Francisca), to atmospheric narratives with an emphasis on the symbolic imaginary (In the Absence of the Masters), or to the exploration of the abyss of being, sometimes reduced to instinct, to physiology, and sometimes to the subtle dynamics of the insensible emotion (Sick Animals). There is thus a trajectory of becoming, in which themes, visions and problems of an emblematic and problematic, emblematic and profound artistic identity are traversed, as in a palimpsest. In his commentary on the novel Sick Animals, I. Negoițescu notes the stringent realism of some details, but also the hallucinatory imprint of some heroes with ambiguous status, placed halfway between hymn and reality: "With Sick Animals, N. Breban returns [... ] to realism, in a novel with lively, thrilling action, with classically shaped characters, from detectives to prophets, a novel that does not shy away from scenes of maximum violence, brutal investigations, rapes, murders and, at the same time, subtly prefigured with softly hallucinatory elements, traces of the visionary anti-realism he had shown himself to be driven by in order to succeed in weaving, with an unusual epic vigour, into this fabric a purely hallucinatory character, of a unique identity in Romanian literature". The exploration of the psychological depths and the emotional metamorphoses of the characters takes on a bookish quality in The Gypsum Angel (1973), a picture of the degradation of the being, but also a faithful transcription of new ways of knowing and self-discovery, for the narrative style conveys the vibration of the idea and the intuition of the experience of limits. As for the novel Bunavestire, it is individualised by its naturalness and epic abundance, by its sentimental indeterminacy, but also 2 by exploring the unfathomable layers of an alluvial narrative with symbolic and ideological meanings, the novel premeditatedly placing itself under the auspices of Nietzsche's convulsive and exalted thought, glimpsing here "a mixture of Nietzscheanism and the Romanian 'trăirism' of the 1920s and 1930s, a reactionary elitism that divides people into masters and servants and dreams of building a utopian dictatorial world". The novels that followed, The Road to the Wall (with the complex effigy of the character Castor Ionescu evolving under the sign of the crisis of knowledge, a symbol, Ion Vlad observes, of "the struggle waged in the name of life and self- knowledge"), Don Juan (1981) and Stalk and Seduction (1991) again reveal the obsession with capturing the individual's relationship with his own interiority, with the universe, or with power revealed under various masks, hypostases and alienating, agonizing, atrocious forms. Ample and vigorous epic constructions, Don Juan, Amphitryon, Day and Night, Will to Power expose, in a dynamic and expressive writing, the metabolism of contemporary humanity, the writer exploiting the dynamic resources of various epic techniques in which representations of realism are brought together, structures and essayistic forms, but also an ethical breath of the narrative that is not devoid of reflections and influences of Dostoevsky's prose, by merging the mechanics of everyday life with the vocation of the spiritual and visionary projection, exposed in broad, arborescent constructions. In Breban's work, the themes of power and seduction are charged with ethical overtones referring to the universe of couples "devouring each other" (Eugen Simion), with polarized affections and impulses, derived from the sphere of archetypal antinomic dualities (male-female, master-slave, etc.). It is obvious that in Nicolae Breban's prose the refined expression, the ornate style are not to be found in the sphere of epic rhetoric, the writer imagining, through the profile of his characters (Grobei, Castor Ionescu, Rogulski, Marchievici etc.) a world of possessed people, dominated by crises, living in the heart of a paradoxical and convulsive world. We find in these texts fragile characters, or, on the contrary, dynamic, representative characters, the writer standing out for his effort to release from the tumult of writing the energies of materiality, the dynamics and tensions of the body, the instinctual depths or the soft additions of a descending transcendent. Radically and polemically contradicting the norms of the contemporary era, Nicolae Breban configures, in novels and short stories, a plural and relativizing, nonconformist and energetic writing, in which the construction and deconstruction of language and meanings are found in a relative balance of narrative discourse. Valeriu Cristea assesses the condition of Breban's prose from the angle of coherence of substance, vision and style: "We do not believe that one can establish too great differences, neither of value nor of substance, between Nicolae Breban's novels, minimal variations on the same theme. Having identical coordinates, they seem more like enormous subdivisions, born from the same obsession, of an orbital narrative, revolving around a fixed point, which is an idea. But an organic idea. In this lies Nicolae Breban's superiority over many of his younger colleagues, who hunt ideas like chaff, but end up with nothing (and the reader along with them)." The human being's relationship with history and the social context leads to the revelation of some extremely interesting themes: the theme of possession and abandonment, the topos of power and the fascination of paradoxical relationships with the other. All these toposes are exploited by Nicolae Breban in his novels and essays, in his confessional texts, texts on which the writer's vehement, radical, uncompromising temperament, but also his pride, together with his ability to problematize the ideas and figures of human spirituality, all of which have in their subtext, like a flat of conscience, the reflections of a subtle pedagogy, incorporated by the writer, as an essential human document, in his books. On the other hand, all of Nicolae Breban's books form a palimpsest self-portrait of the author caught in the whirlwind of an unfriendly, convulsive age in which values and moral benchmarks are disfigured, mystified or demythologised. Under the sign of memory 3 Nicolae Breban has recently published three novels that form part of a trilogy dedicated to Romanian communism in its first decade of existence (The Only Way, The Game and the Fugue, Fear), a book of essays (Betrayal of Criticism), and a book with an autobiographical profile, suggestively entitled My Life. Nicolae Breban's novels in the volume Free Act (2020) are distinguished by their particular epic style, but also by the thematic register validated by his previous works (time, memory, failure, eros, the relationship between the individual and history, the relationship between master and apprentice, master and servant, etc.). These themes are represented in dense, homogeneous narrative structures and forms, in expositions of a certain naturalness and force of imagination. The six novellas in this volume (Free Act, Banal Subject, Beachboy, Symmetry, In Defence of Dictatorship and Black Romance in a Red Country) outline problematic destinies, incoherent, paradoxical human behaviour, images of heroes tortured by dilemmas, questions and indecision, situated in provocative contexts, captured in aporetic moments of existence, constructed through revealing resources of confession, in a polychrome, playful or pathetic style, which en-scene reality, giving it a spectacular outline, with reflections of orality, parody and irony. On the other hand, in the novels the characters have the possibility of self-examination, of rediscovering themselves by confronting themselves or the past (Free Act), they have the capacity to face up to primal, aggressive instincts (Subject banal), to expose their own reveries unclouded by a wave of modelling liveness (In defence of dictatorship) or they take the chance of an inner chronology that takes the form of narrative (Symmetries). The human types outlined in the novels (the seducer in Beachboy, the idealist in Black Romance in a Red Country, etc.) are defined by their consistent relationships with time, history and memory, the avatars of temporality occupying a significant space in the narrative architecture, as time is represented by the writer mainly from the perspective of volatility and unpredictability, it is perceived as mobile, fluctuating, as an inscrutable and random flow. The characters are thus situated in several dimensions of becoming, living in the present, returning to the past, with fragmented, disjointed or distorted destinies, depending on their relationship with time, history or dislocations and metamorphoses of chronology: 'Not all people always live in the same time and the same times, some run forward, others look back or refuse the present itself and do so with undeniable charm'. The past is problematic, and the heroes are tempted to recover their own personal history, exploring the traumas of the present through recourse to the past, which facilitates access to the integrity of identity relief or the redefinition of their own consciousness. In this way, the theme of memory, configured in the banal Subject, reveals the resources of the being as a recuperative potentiality of living, rendering the heroes' interrogations about the possibilities of "contemplating the past" in suggestive figurations: "Are we, he asks, still their "owners", as we are led, with foolish conceit, to believe that we possess what "belongs to us"? Well, at the first calm contemplation of the past, it is suddenly alienated, it escapes us and, if we are still alive and sensitive, we feel with dread how an uneasiness invades us, a kind of anguish that is like nothing and, like the smell that takes us suddenly to the corridors of childhood, this dread, which seems weak at first, then more and more insistent, more and more overwhelming, awakens in us a 'child' we once were, haunted by fantasies for which we seem to have been much better prepared than we are 'today'. " The echoes of the past in the present contribute to the structuring of the characters' identities, sometimes contradicting the logic and expectations of others, as the heroes commit "gratuitous acts", freeing themselves from the tyranny of the present time through self- observation, through explorations of their own conscience. In this way, withdrawal from the present is a defensive reaction of the being against the aggressions of reality, the shaping of the self by means of anamnesis, the adaptation or non-adaptation to the real, as well as the "pathos of distance" are recurrent themes of these novels, in which the reflections on the various juxtapositions of temporality are especially revealing, as one character remarks: "We mortals, 4 he says, are beings born of time, it, time, is the food of our existence, it nourishes us, it pushes us forward, always forward, and, of course, it kills us, stripping us of a worn-out, tired body and of memory, the oppressive memory that sometimes becomes our greatest enemy." Nicolae Breban's novels are under the auspices of temporality, of the play between reality and hallucination, they portray the heroes' resistance to the avatars of history, their confrontation with the intemperance of destiny, but also their relentless search for their own identity. In the substrate of the narratives one can see a Caragian germ (typical situations, textual references, irony, lines, statements, tones and linguistic tics): "You said it was a revolution, but that was what Iancu Caragiale had done. Literature, my! What do you know!"; "Just like in Caragiale's famous novella Two Lots, although the comparison is out of place"; "A great quality, the sense and organ of sarcasm! In fact, he appreciated Caragiale enormously"; "Here I am talking like Mache or Lache, the clowns of uncle Iancu!". In some texts, a Caragialian ambience is created by the abundant orality, the perception of the grotesque and the ridiculous, but also by the textual stakes of a well-tempered sarcasm. Through recurring themes, energetic epic discourse and unusual turns of phrase, Breban's novels depict the avatars of human destiny, re-enact the relationship between "servants and masters", staging a narrative regime of expectation ("Well... weren't we talking about servants and masters? Of masters and slaves? Wait, and we haven't got to... executioners and victims yet! Or master and apprentice, an idea that is on my tongue and in my heart, but... what does she know?! And... waiting, what, have I forgotten about waiting, great master of the psyche, of man, of anywhere?!"), in epic perspectives that multiply as in a labyrinth of multiplied parallel mirrors, with symmetries, immersions in the abyss of consciousness and expressive transformations of the present time. A writer character in a novel exposes a succinct ethic of writing ("We writers, but even poets, lose nothing of what we find, encounter or are offered, and however trivial or banal, we process these 'things' and then sell them at great cost and, unquestionably, accompanying them with a bloated and tiresomily colorful talk.... "), in which the discourse turns into a confession, but also into a nightmare of an encounter with history, for the writer's destiny is "to relive what he was inventing at that very moment". At the same time, the 'our history' that the narrator reveals in the novel In Defence of Dictatorship symbolises the aggravated tension between consciousness and, as a way of assuming 'possible' representations: 'We have always shown a preference for "possible" rather than "probable". Being thus in active and dramatic disagreement with the world." If the present has an elegiac, immobile aspect, as the prose writer notes, memory is placed under the auspices of the paradoxical, narratives being articulated through the ferment of ideational-speculative valuations and psychological perspectives dedicated to the infirmities of memory or the deconstructions of identity perceived as forms of unfulfillment and ontic ambiguities, through the metaphor of the mirror that is "older than its own memory". Nicolae Breban's books are problematic and dense, revealing the known and discussed qualities of the prose writer: lucidity, the fascination of the narrative, the dialectic of past and present, the ideal and anarchy binomial, through which the endowments and fissures of being are represented in an energetic, tense, nuanced and supple epic style. BIBLIOGRAPHY Boldea, Iulian, Ficţiunea ca adevăr al vieţii, în revista „Contemporanul. Ideea europeană”, nr. 2, 2019; Boldea, Iulian, De la literatură la viaţă, în revista „Apostrof”, nr. 9, 2021; Boldea, Iulian, Ipostaze și lecturi critice. Secvențe de literatură română, Ed. University Press, 2019; Boldea, Iulian, Ficţiunea şi adevărul memoriei, în revista „Vatra”, nr. 5-6, 2022; Buciu, Marian Victor, Zece prozatori exemplari. Perioada comunistă, Editura Paralela 45, Pitești, 2007; Malița, Liviu, Nicolae Breban. Monografie, Editura Aula, Brașov, 2001; Negrici, 5 Eugen, Literatura română sub comunism. Proza, Editura Fundației Pro, București, 2006; Ungureanu, Cornel, Proza românească de azi, Editura Cartea Românească, București, 1985; Glodeanu, Gheorghe, Dimensiuni ale romanului contemporan, Editura Gutinul, Baia-Mare, 1998; Holban, Ioan, Profiluri epice contemporane, Editura Cartea Românească, Bucureşti, 1987; Manolescu, Nicolae, Istoria critică a literaturii române, Editura Paralela 45, Piteşti, 2008 ; Niţescu, M., Atitudini critice, Editura Cartea Românească, Bucureşti, 1983; Pavel, Laura, Antimemoriile lui Grobei. Eseu monografic despre opera lui Nicolae Breban, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, Bucureşti, 1997; Petraş, Irina, Literatura română contemporană, Editura Ideea Europeană, Bucureşti, 2008; Regman, Cornel, Patru decenii de proză literară românească, Editura Institutului Cultural Român, Bucureşti, 2004; Simuţ, Ion, Reabilitarea ficţiunii, Editura Institutului Cultural Român, Bucureşti, 2004 ; Ştefănescu, Alex, Istoria literaturii române contemporane, Editura Maşina de scris, Bucureşti, 2005; Zaciu, Mircea, Cu cărţile pe masă, Editura Cartea Românească, Bucureşti, 1981.

Journal

Acta Marisiensis. Philologiade Gruyter

Published: Sep 1, 2022

Keywords: narrativity; fiction; memory; truth; lucidity

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