FROM TRISTAN TZARA TO GHÉRASIM LUCA

Review par Valentina Karampagia

May 3, 2020

Nicole MANUCU, From Tristan Tzara to Ghérasim Luca: Impulses of Romanian Modernities within the European Avant-garde, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2014, 260 p. "Library of General and Comparative Literature."

In this dense essay, followed by a rich bibliography, the author attempts to carefully characterize the place of 20th-century Romanian literature in the European space, following the thread of Romanian avant-gardes and how they resonate in the French literary landscape before and after the War. The author focuses on the case of two Romanian poets writing in French, who left a mark – strange, foreign, unclassifiable – in modern French literature: Tristan Tzara and Ghérasim Luca.

A question runs throughout this historico-aesthetic study, which alone can summarize the paradox of this kaleidoscope or play of forces that is Europe and which is stated thus: "how does such a small space, perceived as deprived and backward, become the place where, episodically, novelty and modernity are also invented?" This question could fundamentally be asked in the case of other national literatures of the European "periphery" as well. It is highly relevant in a complex space, such as Europe, where the other side of the bridges between economies, cultures, and languages is the opposition between center and periphery.

Nicole Manucu addresses this question in two stages: first, she attempts to problematize the definition of the terms "modernity" and "avant-garde," emphasizing their complexity, their overlaps and dissociations, and the inadequate categorizations in which they often freeze art. All of this is anchored in a deeply historicized and contextual argumentative continent: Romania of Dada and Surrealism, presented as a land torn between tradition and innovation, belonging to the nation and openness to Europe, unitary language of a Latinizing past and plural idioms of various populations and minorities. The author argues that Romania's early 20th-century attempt to "recover its delay" compared to the "civilized" West will engender an intense confrontation between local specificity and transnational liberality, which will indistinctly marginalize the living forces of tradition. These living forces, the Romanian literary avant-gardes will rehabilitate them in language, thereby proving their unplaceable link to history and to the very notion of modernity. Indeed, if modern means "being of one's time," the Romanian avant-gardes around the magazine Urmuz, the Cabaret Voltaire, the magazine 75 H.P. and Tristan Tzara, as well as around painters like Victor Brauner and Jacques Hérold or the "Group of Five" and surrealist writers and painters like Ghérasim Luca, Gellu Naum and Dolfi Trost, defy this identification with the spirit of the times, being precisely unidentifiable, because both ahead and behind; ahead by welcoming new European aesthetics, and more particularly French ones, and behind by repopulating learned art with characteristics of popular art. The dialogue with French surrealism, the pronounced taste for Francophonie which will give rise, in Romanian avant-garde circles, to the writing of texts directly in French, participate in this heterogeneous identity of Romanian modernity, as the author demonstrates.

In a second stage, the study focuses on an interpretative approach to poems by Tristan Tzara and Gherasim Luca, two different and singular writings in themselves, in which some of the traits of the 20th-century Romanian avant-garde telescope: emancipation from national borders, cosmopolitanism, contestation of marked uses of language and institutions. If a certain distance separates the writing of the two authors chronologically and stylistically, it is by no means erased in Nicole Manucu's analysis, who makes precisely this distance the significant mark of the unclassifiable aspect of Romanian avant-gardes. Tzara and Luca, poets who chose to write in their host language, French, tearing themselves away from their land of origin and the representations that were proper to it, develop in the French language a subversive relationship to language and, thereby, to the world. In this, as the writer points out, the author of "thought is made in the mouth" meets the one of "mouth theater," both glimpsing in the plasticity of language the true vector of thought.

By dissociating the real operative modernity in Tzara's writing from the "modern" assignment of school textbooks and encyclopedias, Nicole Manucu strives to revive the non-canonical dimension of the Dada founder's work, showing that these discourses that legitimize his work end up decontextualizing it, freezing it and even depriving it of its primary meaning: a strange relationship to modernity that is in creative continuity with tradition. As for Gherasim Luca, the author sensitively emphasizes, in constant dialogue with his poems, the bias of this performative writing: to set in motion the phonic, phonetic and semantic aspect of language, to deploy its infinite capacity for transformation, to dig into its materiality to make emerge "the un-seen," "the un-known" and "the unheard" and "to turn the power of poems against the lead of discourses." These interpretations that hear in Luca's language the desire to inhabit the world differently are accompanied by a presentation of unpublished poems from the Jacques-Doucet library. Thus, by bringing together these two uprooted from soil and mother tongue, Tristan Tzara and Ghérasim Luca, Nicole Manucu attempts to grasp the propensity of avant-gardes to think of language as an experience of metamorphosis of self and conceptions of the other, as a transgression of what is given in advance.

In her conclusion, the author returns to her intentions, namely to distinguish modernity – as a quantitative and historical notion – from avant-garde, as a qualitative and aesthetic notion, to emphasize their possible overlaps and their dissonances and above all to sketch the singular portrait of Romanian literary avant-gardes, which, far from the "hieratic model of the West," still speak to us today, traversing time, about what must never be forgotten: the need to re-inhabit languages.