Dialogue on the Threshold: March 2020

"Where the hell am I?"

A single point of rock, peak of a mountain range, one tooth set in the ancient jaw of a sunken world, projecting through the inconceivable vastness of the whole ocean--and how many miles from dry land? An evil pervasion, not the convulsive panic of his first struggles in the water, but a deep and generalized terror set him clawing at the rock with his blunt fingers.

William Golding, Pincher Martin, Faber and Faber, 1956; 1962, p. 30.

Christopher Hadley Martin had no belief in anything but the importance of his own life, no God. Because he was created in the image of God he had a freedom of choice which he used to centre the word on himself. He did not believe in purgatory and therefore when he died it was not presented to him in overtly theological terms. The greed for life which was the mainspring of his nature forced him to refuse the selfless act of dying. He continued to exist separately in a world composed of his own murderous nature. His drowned body lies rolling in the Atlantic but the ravenous ego invents a rock for him to endure on. It is the memory of an aching tooth. Ostensibly and rationally he is a survivor from a torpedoed destroyer: but deep down he knows the truth. He is not fighting for bodily survival but for his continuing identity in face of what will smash it and sweep it away--the black lightning, the compassion of God. For Christopher, the Christ-bearer, has become Pincher Martin who is little but greed. Just to be Pincher is purgatory; to be Pincher for eternity is hell.

William Golding,

quoted in Bernard S. Oldsey and Stanley Weintraub, The Art of William Golding,

Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1965, p. 94.

Dumitru Tsepeneag, The Bulgarian Truck

Even in the original, The Bulgarian Truck is a novel acutely conscious of its own translatedness. The narrator, who, like the author, is a Romanian émigré writer living in Paris, is still bound to his native language and culture, but knows that if his book is to stand any chance of being read by more than a handful of people on the fringes of Europe, it will have to be translated. But even as a writer in translation, he harbours no illusions as to the extent of his readership:

in Romania they’ll hardly be rushing out to read the book. Or in any other country, for that matter, in France, for example . . . How many readers have I had in France, my adopted homeland? I can count them on my fingers. Or maybe the translations have been to blame.

On the other hand, the narrator knows all too well that the average reader—or rather le grand public—is avid for a story, for that which can most readily be translated from the written to the audio-visual medium: ‘the kind of literature that is suited to film adaptations,’ he calls it. And so, although she is a writer he cannot stand, the narrator grudgingly takes inspiration from Marguerite Duras’ film Le Camion (1977) and sets about constructing a story involving a Bulgarian truck driver making his way westward across Europe.

The (generic) Bulgarian truck driver also happens to be a French political bogeyman, invented by Philippe Villiers, and thereby lends topicality to the narrator’s project for a novel. Press cuttings about nationalist discontent in Bulgaria and Bulgarian truck drivers undercutting their French counterparts are interspersed among the various other textual materials of what the narrator calls his ‘building site beneath the open sky.’ These include the unpunctuated and progressively oneiric (‘in dreams there are no commas’) narrative involving Tsvetan, the driver of the eponymous Bulgarian truck, and Beatrice, an erotic dancer, who, being literally impenetrable, as a character undermines the reading public’s demand for the inclusion of sex scenes in every novel; passages in which the narrator squabbles with his wife (a character from an earlier novel) over the telephone about the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the text in progress; and an exchange of e-mails with Milena/Mailena, the more successful Slovakian novelist with whom the narrator is having an extra-marital affair, but who ultimately turns out to be yet another textual construct.

In a way, we might also read the Bulgarian truck as a metaphor for east-European literature. Continental literary traffic is mostly one way, from West to East, with hundreds of western writers being translated in the languages of the erstwhile communist bloc annually. But like the ramshackle Bulgarian truck, with its dodgy brakes and uncategorisable, non-standard cargo, a few eastern writers still manage to make the journey in the opposite direction, even if, like Tsvetan, they don’t get to compete with the big trucks in the endurance race at Alès.

As an east-European novelist, the narrator writes both to be translated and to avoid translating, which, at the start of the novel, he compares to ‘play[ing] the part of Flea the Footman to some great writer or other (let’s see how they translate that allusion!).’ This parenthetical comment points to the insuperable untranslatability of cultural allusions when they come from ‘minor’ cultures, whose histories and stories have not entered global circulation, have not been ‘carried across’. Who outside Romania knows that Flea the Footman was a diminutive (hence the nickname) fifteenth-century Moldavian page who once famously crouched on the ground so that the heroic but equally pint-sized Stephen the Great could use him as a stool when mounting his horse? In other words, far from standing on the shoulders of giants, the writer clambers on the shoulders of midgets like himself. The translator might of course find an equivalent image to convey this meaning, but at the price of discarding the narrator’s resigned meta-textual comment on the impossibility of his original image being carried across into another language. But since The Bulgarian Truck is ‘a building site beneath the open sky’ rather than a novel, all the stages of the textual construction process are exposed to the reader’s view, even those that have been deleted, or rather placed sous rature.

At a number of points in the text, the narrator announces that he has deleted the sentence or paragraph we have just read. The computer has made the process of writing simpler because it has made the task of deletion simpler. As the narrator observes:

What I’ve written so far seems rather humourless. I’ve been ploughing the sands . . . If I don’t delete it, it’s because I have all the time in the world to do so. At a single click it will all vanish into nothingness. Nothingness helps us to exist. Which is to say, it helps us not to keep looking for a meaning to existence. Not to keep nit-picking.

The function of the computer is no longer to compute, to calculate, but to arrange and to organise; the writer tapping away at his computer keyboard brings order to his text, adding, expanding, embellishing, inserting, copying, pasting, annihilating where necessary: ‘That’s why the ordinateur was invented! More for deleting than for writing.’ It is also for this reason that the narrator insists on using the French ordinateur (in Romanian: ordinator, rather than the standard calculator, which is in any case steadily losing ground to computer, a loanword from English): ‘I don’t like the word computer, and not only because it comes from English: I just don’t think it’s an appropriate word for the tool in question, although maybe it used to be, long ago.’ In this context, it is significant that the term ordinateur, proposed in 1955 by Latin philologist Jacques Perret, once had a strong religious charge, having been used to describe God bringing order to the world.[1]

The narrator’s awareness of the translatedness and (un)translatability of the text he is in the process of writing is not abstract and theoretical, but intimately bound up with real translators in the real world, who are drawn into the fiction, absorbed by it, becoming characters in their own right. The narrator’s wife, who is away in New York, but whose cavilling advice on his novel under construction he seeks over the telephone, rails at him for including passages without punctuation, because, she says, they are ‘not good’: ‘Not for anybody! Neither for readers nor for critics. Not to mention the translator . . .’ And she should know, because it turns out that she has bumped into Dumitru Tsepeneag’s real-life translator, Patrick Camiller, in a bookshop. She only vaguely remembers the title of the book he has translated, however: ‘Wasn’t he the one who translated The Something-or-other Wedding?’ Such is her low opinion of her husband’s work that she only has a passing acquaintance with it and is not even sure which novels she herself appears in (‘“You are in Hotel Europa,”’ yells the narrator down the telephone in exasperation). The text of The Bulgarian Truck is therefore acutely aware of its own translatedness, but also of the fact that translations are contingent upon flesh-and-blood translators. And this is why the illness and finally the death of Alain Paruit, Tsepeneag’s French translator, cast an adumbratio over the novel. Paruit withdraws ever deeper into his own terminal illness, no longer interested in books or the world of the text, drawn into a fiction he will never translate.

Marianne herself is suffering from a mysterious, oneiric illness and has gone to New York to seek treatment. With the unassailable logic of a dream, she shrinks to the size of a schoolgirl, only then to grow so tall that she ends up too long for the conjugal bed. The illness is in fact an oneiric echo of one of Tsepeneag’s earliest short stories, ‘Confidențe’ (Confidences), published in his first collection of prose, Exerciții (Exercises) in 1966.[2] In the story, the narrator bumps into an acquaintance on the street (such chance encounters also play a part in The Bulgarian Truck). Together they go to an insalubrious tavern, where they drink vodka (oneiric echoes of Raskolnikov and Marmeladov). While the waiter stands by, idly picking his nose, the derelict acquaintance recounts how his wife has started growing shorter and then taller, but when he takes the incredulous and increasingly disgusted narrator to his grubby, evil-smelling flat to show her to him, she has disappeared. Similarly, Marianne, a strong presence throughout the first half of the novel, during which she relentlessly hectors and mocks the narrator in regard to the ineptitude of the novel he is struggling to write, slowly fades away and finally disappears. The narrator speaks to her briefly on the telephone, without knowing that it will be the last time, and then she is gone, without trace.

The two fictional protagonists that the narrator invents—Tsvetan and Beatrice—also spring from texts included in Exercises, texts which, their original punctuation having been washed away, now bob to the surface almost five decades later, as if from the depths of a dream. Tsvetan is inserted into the opening paragraphs of ‘La vizita medicală,’ an oneiric story describing the routine medical examination of pupils at a boys’ school. The oneiric element comes in the form of an understated detail at the end of the story, but which subverts the ‘reality’ of the rest of the text:

The boy groaned, no longer putting up any resistance, but his fat body quivered like a gelatinous mass. From the child’s belly button grew a white rose. The doctor raised his spectacles onto his forehead, cast a brief glance at the nurse, and then, without a word, pulled up the boy’s trousers, but with care, covering his belly. The nurse went to the window, leaning her elbows on the sill. She pressed her forehead to the pane. On the pavement, the children were playing hopscotch.[3]

Tsvetan becomes the unnamed lad earlier in the story who cracks a joke about another boy having dirty feet. Similarly, Beatrice becomes one of the children in ‘Amintire’ (Memory), the first story in the volume Exercises, which is set in a park hovering between the real and the unreal, haunted by indeterminate, elongated, distorted animals, like those which invade the re-occurring dreamlike marine landscape that foreshadows death throughout The Bulgarian Truck.

In The Bulgarian Truck, the narrator himself claims not to dream. Casting around for a subject and characters for his novel, he asks his more widely read wife to give him some ideas:

— Describe a dream . . .

— A dream?

— A dream. Or two dreams, combining them both. What do I know? You’re the writer. Or at least so you claim. A writer . . .

— All right, but I don’t dream.

(…)

— How can you not dream! Everybody dreams. If you don’t dream, it means you’re abnormal. How then can you have the gall to address normal readers? Readers that dream . . .

This, in essence, was the premise of oneirism, a literary and aesthetic movement led by Dumitru Tsepeneag and Leonid Dimov, which emerged in Romania in the late 1960s: the oneirist writer does not dream, but rather he lucidly structures his texts according to the logic of the dream. The surrealist, by contrast, describes/transcribes his dreams, mines his dreams for images, even writes while in a deliberately induced dream-like state. In a theoretical text published in 1968, two years after Exercises, Tsepeneag clearly states the difference between oneirism and surrealism: ‘for oneiric literature as I conceive it, the dream is neither a source nor an object of study; the dream is a criterion. The distinction is fundamental: I do not describe a dream (mine or somebody else’s), but rather I attempt to construct a reality analogous to the dream.’[4] Realities analogous to the dream, whether textual or otherwise, were anathema in the Socialist Republic of Romania, however. Oneirism, an unconventional and highly original literary movement that defied po-faced, duplicitous socialist realism (and realism in general), was viewed very dimly indeed by the communist authorities and was finally suppressed during the cultural crackdown that ensued after the publication in 1971 of Ceaușescu’s ‘July Theses’, which were inspired by the dictator’s recent visit to Maoist China, North Korea and Mongolia.

It is from oneiric writer Leonid Dimov (1926-1987) that the epigraph to The Bulgarian Truck comes: ‘In love, Dimov used to say, you have no choice but to exaggerate. It’s the only way you can be sure of getting your message across.’ Dimov was a Romanian[5] poet, essayist, and translator—the poets he translated include Giambattista Marino, whose love sonnets are remarkable for their exaggerated concettismo. It is also to Dimov that Tsepeneag’s first book, Exercises, is dedicated, simply: ‘To Leonid Dimov.’ The epigraph is one of the many intertextual allusions to be found in The Bulgarian Truck, allusions both to Tsepeneag’s own work, which now spans five decades, and to universal literature. Among the more obvious allusions are Beatrice, who has been transplanted from Paradise to the gates of Hell, and Milena, although unlike Kafka, who wrote letters to her, the more up-to-date narrator writes e-mails. For all its oneiric irruptions and despite the author’s humorous pretence that his bumbling narrator is making it up as he goes along, The Bulgarian Truck is constructed with consummate logical rigour. With the satisfaction of solving an intricate puzzle, we become aware of the full complexity of the novel’s structure as we read its closing pages, when the final pieces of the building site fall into place. But this is what the narrator told us at the very beginning: that he is interested in structure, rather than story. Each of Tsepeneag’s novels is unique in its structure. Think of the marvellous fugue structure of Vain Art of the Fugue, for example. But taken together, they might be said to form an even more complex hyper-structure, in which an entire series of motifs, devices and symbols recur with oneiric insistence. The Bulgarian Truck is thus part of a continuum, whose origins lie in 1960s Romania, where, for an all too brief period, one of twentieth-century Europe’s most remarkable literary movements arose.

[1] Antoine Picon, “Ordinateur/Computer/Numérique/Digital”, in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Dictionary of Untranslatables. A Philosophical Lexicon, Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 628.

[2] Exerciții, Editura Pentru Literatură, Bucharest, 1966.

[3] Exerciții, p. 51.

[4] Dumitru Țepeneag, ‘În căutarea unei definiții’ (In search of a definition), Luceafărul, nos. 25-28, June-July 1968.

[5] In The Bulgarian Truck, Milena assumes, judging by his name, that Leonid Dimov must be Russian or Bulgarian. In fact, he was born in Bessarabia, then a province of Greater Romania, subsequently the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia, and now the majority Romanian-speaking Republic of Moldova. The fluidity of east-European identities is a theme of The Bulgarian Truck. Milena (or is it Mailena?) oscillates between Czech and Slovak, Prague and Bratislava. Dimov is a Romanian writer with an obviously Slavic name. And as for Tsepeneag, it may ultimately derive from Turkish, or maybe from Hungarian, but nobody is sure.