Dumitru Tsepeneag and Oneirism
Alistair Ian Blyth
Dumitru Tsepeneag’s
work spans more than five decades and two languages, Romanian and French,
and includes not only fiction written under his own name, but also a novel by
one of his characters, his fictional/oneiric alter ego and anagrammatic
authorial proxy, Ed Pastenague.
Tsepeneag’s
first short stories were “written for the desk drawer” in the late 1950s, a
period when it would have been impossible for him to publish texts which,
rather like the short stories and parables of Kafka, constructed their own
ambiguous, oneiric world, making little direct reference to the “real world,”
which is to say, the social, political, historical reality of the time, and
even less so the “socialist reality” as officially defined and prescribed by
the Stalinist ideology of the Romanian People’s Republic. In 1959, he met
then-unpublished poet Leonid Dimov (1926–1987) and together they debated and
developed the premises of what they called “structural oneirism,” a theory and
practice of writing that takes the dream as its criterion (Tsepeneag) or legislation
(Dimov), and that lucidly creates
a reality analogous to the dream.
During a period of “clandestinity” and “theoretical gestation”(1) stretching from 1959 to 1964, Tsepeneag and Dimov theorized oneirism in
opposition to the automatic writing and description of extratextual dreams
practiced by the surrealists. (It should be noted that Surrealism had been one
of the main Romanian avant-garde movements in the period up to the communist
takeover of Romania.) As Tsepeneag was later jokingly to remark, “oneirism
descended from the ape of Surrealism.”(2)
In 1965, after the death of hard-line
Stalinist Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Nicolae Ceaușescu became General Secretary of
the Romanian Workers’ Party, retitling it the Romanian Communist Party and
renaming the country the Romanian Socialist Republic. In this transition period
prior to the full-blown Ceaușescu personality cult and socialist-nationalist
dictatorship, there was a short-lived, partial, and ultimately deceptive
cultural “thaw,” which came to an abrupt end in July 1971, when the dictator
returned from a state visit to China and North Korea and issued his so-called
“July Theses,” the signal for a re-entrenchment of totalitarianism and a “mini
cultural revolution.”(3) It was during this brief “thaw” that Tsepeneag was able to publish three
collections of short stories, which, as well as new work, also included texts
dating back to the 1950s: Exerciții [Exercises] (1966), Frig [Cold] (1967), and Așteptare [Waiting] (1971).(4) The stories in the three collections contain dream images, narratives, and
situations which, subtly altered or grotesquely distorted, recur obsessively,
hauntingly, but also ironically, self-consciously, even comically, throughout
Tsepeneag’s subsequent novels, transforming his work as a whole into a single,
interconnected text intricately structured according to its own overarching
oneiric logic: anxious, bewildering journeys by streetcar; the wife who keeps
growing taller and then shorter; theriomorphic images (lion, fish, bird) that
recur with menacing insistence, acting as numinous symbols whose meaning,
however, remains opaque, impossible to determine outside the dream logic of the
text. The title story of the collection Waiting,
one of the major texts of this period, and which will form the structural and
imaginal matrix of later novels, in particular Roman de Gare [A Novel to Read on the Train] and La BelleRoumaine, is oneiric not only aesthetically (the dream reality of an
isolated railway station at the edge a forest swarming with indeterminate
creatures, on the other side of which lies a mysterious sanatorium; a place of
alternating deep snow and incessant drizzle, menaced by an eagle that grows
inexorably larger and larger), but also structurally: the sequence of events
(the arrival of an anima figure on an
express delayed by the derailment of a freight train, who speaks no known
language and brings with her an eagle in a cage; the death of old railway
worker Manolache, haunted to the end by the dream of a lion with a human grin
from his days at the circus; the disappearance of telegraph operator Lică; the
station master’s endless, objectless waiting) keeps shifting, doubling back on
itself, repeating itself in a different order. The oneiric narrative structure
of “Waiting” therefore looks forward to the dreamlike textual variations and
narrative metamorphoses of Zadarnică e arta fugii [Vain is the Art of
the Fugue],(5) which was published in French translation as Arpièges (a portmanteau of arpèges
“arpeggios” and pièges “traps”)(6) by Flammarion in 1973, but in the original Romanian not until after the fall of
the Ceaușescu regime. A shorter, earlier version of Vain Art of the Fugue was published in Luceafărul magazine in June 1969, with the title “Fuga” (“Running”
or “Fugue”).
In
addition to fiction that embodied oneirist praxis, during the “thaw” Tsepeneag
was able to publish articles in the literary press that laid out the theory of aesthetic or structural oneirism. That such articles were published at all is
indicative of the relative relaxation of hard-line control over freedom of
expression, but notwithstanding, even before the “July Theses” and the
crackdown that was to arrive a few short years later, there were still limits.
In June 1968, Tsepeneag began to publish a series of theoretical articles in
the weekly literary magazine Luceafărul,
under the title “In Search of a Definition.” The first three articles briefly
stated the premise of oneiric literature (“in oneiric literature, as I conceive
it, the dream is not a source, nor is it an object of study; the dream is a criterion. The difference is
fundamental: I do not narrate a dream (mine or anybody else’s), but rather I
attempt to construct a reality analogous to
the dream,”)(7),
outlined the history of the dream in literature and art—the references range
from Homer, Virgil, and Dante to Bosch, Swedenborg, Blake, Jean-Paul, Novalis,
E. T. A. Hoffmann, G. H. von Schubert, De Chirico, and, of course, the
Surrealists—and were leading up to a fuller exposition of Tsepeneag’s own
theory of structural oneirism when an anonymous voice from the wings
interrupted the text, demanding that the author cut it short and leave the
stage:
I had
hoped that this series of articles (this theoretical feuilleton!) might
stimulate pertinent debate, wherein might be abandoned the preconceived ideas,
the false or imaginary premises upon which is constructed an entire brilliant
but pointless argumentation; I would at least have liked it to have been read,
this theoretical patchwork, which in places is quite dry, because of the
sallies into literary history that I deemed necessary, and in places perhaps
not completely clear; I would in any case have liked it to be possible for a
distinction to be drawn between terms employed not exactly at random, and at
least for it to be understood that there is a difference between source, wellspring of inspiration, on
the one hand, and criterion, a term
of comparison, on the other. But the “big heat” is on and it is natural that
there not be enough goodwill or patience and, ultimately, perhaps that there
not be any interest. For this reason, although I had initially planned a much
longer sequence of theoretical investigations, precisely in order to receive
and utilize various suggestions and objections as I went along, I shall
conclude with this article.(8)
The article itself
concludes with a defense of oneirism against the implied official criticism of
delusion, illusion, hallucination, irrationality, unreality: “Oneiric
literature is a literature of infinite space and time, it is an attempt to
create a parallel world, not homologous but analogous to the ordinary world. It
is a perfectly rational literature in its modality and means, even if it
chooses as its criterion an irrational phenomenon. And in any case, oneiric
literature is not a literature of delirium or sleep, but of complete lucidity.”(9)
In the first of his “In Search of a
Definition” articles, Tsepeneag alludes to his forthcoming translation of a
work “fundamental in oneirology,”(10) Albert Béguin’s L’Âme romantique et le
rêve (1939), which was to be published two years later in the “Studii”
series issued by Editura Univers.(11) Away from the immediate public eye of the weekly literary press, the conclusion
of Tsepeneag’s preface to the translation contains perhaps one of his most
incisive statements of the poetics of oneirism:
But
the dream and also poetry must be viewed otherwise than as sources of knowledge
or instruments of metaphysical revelation in which aesthetic pleasure is merely
an adjunctive phenomenon, resulting from the ambiguity and uncertainty of revelation.
In the first place, we must take account of the fact that the nocturnal
dream, being evanescent and non-recurrent, even if it brings us a revelation of
a metaphysical order, is incommunicable. So, too, the poetic adventure: it is
individual, it cannot be conveyed with complete coherence. Neither the dream
nor the poetic state can be reconstituted. It is impossible and even pointless
to achieve once more the uniqueness that like a gas disperses throughout the
subconscious. For the purpose of an artist is to achieve, and to do so in
complete lucidity, a conveyable work,
relative to which the prototypical dream is nothing but a criterion, a distant model that provides its laws rather than
accidental and far too individual images. [. . .] the modern oneiric poet seeks
in the dream its structure and mechanism in order to transfer them analogically
to poetry, of course employing the imaginal material provided by the
surrounding reality, since none other exists. [. . .] the modern poet resorts
to the dream in order to introduce into the immediate reality—which the senses
perceive too chaotically, and the intellect too drily, too notionally—a new
organizational and at the same time germinative power, a logic other than the
Aristotelian logic of so-called common sense. It is not an evasion but an
invasion, an attempt to bring into communication these strata of reality that
have for so long been kept isolated from each other;(12)
A shorter version
of the preface, titled “Under the Sign of the Grail,” was published in România Literară magazine,(13) omitting Tsepeneag’s exposition of his own theory of oneiric literature and
other passages unacceptable to the official ideology (including a reference to
Jungian psychoanalysis and a quotation from Béguin’s diary in which he argues
that “the fundamental opposition between Spirit and History [. . .] places its
seal on every act of the totalitarian states”). As Tsepeneag was later to
recall, the editor of România Literară,
novelist Nicolae Breban, invited him to write for the magazine, but on the
prior condition that he avoid all mention of the oneiric group.(14) Similarly, according to what Tsepeneag was told by Ștefan Bănulescu, the editor
of Luceafărul, the “In Search of a
Definition” series had had to be cut short because the “comrades from the
Section” were sick of studying his articles with a magnifying glass every week
lest some “unseemly” idea slip through.(15)
Meanwhile,
an “oneiric group” had formed around the two central figures of Tsepeneag and
Dimov, which included poets Virgil Mazilescu (1942–1984), Emil Brumaru (1939-2019), Daniel Turcea (1945–1979), poet and novelist Vintilă Ivănceanu
(1940–2008), and prose writers Florin Gabrea (b. 1943) and Sorin Titel
(1935–1985), the last of whom was already an established author. A joint
interview of group members Leonid Dimov, Dumitru Tsepeneag, and Daniel Turcea,(16) along with literary critic Laurențiu Ulici (1943–2000), who was sympathetic to
oneirism, was published in student magazine Amfiteatru,
No. 36, in November 1968. In the interview, the participants discuss oneirism
in relation to Surrealism, which either draws on the dream as a source external
to the text or allows authorial lucidity to be obnubilated through abandonment
to the dream state of automatic writing. As Dimov puts it, “the oneirc poet
does not describe the dream, he does not allow himself to be controlled by
hallucinations, but rather, employing the laws of the dream, he creates a lucid
work of art, the more lucid and perfect it is, the closer it approaches the
dream.”(17) Implicitly, of course, oneirism was also defined in opposition to realism in
general and, given the cultural context of the time and place, socialist
realism in particular. Tsepeneag might be said to hint at this politically
subversive view when he says that dream should not be viewed as merely “a
source of poetic inspiration, but as a second reality.”(18) On the one hand, the interview brought the oneirists greater notoriety,
including attention in the West, on the part of Radio Free Europe, for example,
which viewed the movement as a bold act of defiance against the regime’s
repressive ideology and ossified cultural policy. On the other hand, even
though the interview had been “mutilated by the censors,”(19) it was still subversive enough to provoke outrage on the part of the communist
literary establishment. There were violent attacks against the group in the
official Party newspaper, Scînteia
[The Spark], and by establishment literary critics. In the end, by the early
1970s, even the word “oneiric” would be banned, along with the works of
Tsepeneag and any reference to them, in effect erasing him as an author from
Romanian literature for the next two decades.
In the
eyes of the regime, and in the words of the “investigative organ” who in 1975
opened criminal proceedings against him for “the infraction of propaganda
against the socialist order,” Tsepeneag had since 1967 taken “a hostile stance
toward the socialist order of the Socialist Republic of Romania” and through
“the so-called ‘oneiric group’” had “propagated hostile ideas, to the effect
that the political regime of our country does not grant freedoms, is based on
hypocrisy, aims at the complete depersonalization of the individual, that
socialism is a joke, incompatible with culture and creative freedom.”(20) But since Tsepeneag was by then living in France, there was little the regime
could do to bring him to socialist justice. On April 3, 1975, the day after the
Ministry of the Interior “investigative organ” issued the procès-verbal to
begin criminal proceedings, dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu signed Decree no. 69
stripping Dumitru Tsepeneag of his Romanian citizenship, a drastic symbolic act
that was not to be extended to any other Romanian dissident in exile.
In
exile, Tsepeneag continued to write in Romanian, with his novels being
published in the French translations made by Alain Paruit. Les Noces nécessaires, the French translation of Nunțile necesare (The Necessary Nuptials),
was published by Flammarion in 1977 and is an oneiric reworking of the archaic
Romanian “Miorița” myth, in which two shepherds conspire to murder a third, who
is forewarned by a ewe lamb (mioriță) but
fatalistically accepts his death as a cosmic ceremony in which he is wedded to
Nature. Finding himself in the situation of a writer who no longer existed for
readers in his native language, without any hope of ever being published in
Romania again, as the country descended deeper into the totalitarian night of
the Ceaușescu cult of personality, Tsepeneag reluctantly began to write in
French. The transition from Romanian to French, the crossing of the border from
one language to the other, is described in Cuvîntul
nisiparniță [The Sandglass Word],(21) an anxiety dream in which a deserter
keeps running and running, trying to escape across an imaginary frontier. The
text itself mirrors the author’s desertion of his native tongue, with isolated
French words and then phrases seeping into the Romanian text, like grains of
sand through an hourglass, until by the closing chapter of the novel, the whole
text is in French. Roman de gare [Railway Novel],(22) Tsepeneag’s first novel in French, is an oneiric metatext, in which a company
of actors and film crew attempt to shoot a film based on the short story
“Waiting,” a film which, itself having coalesced into an oneiric image, recurs
in the later novels Hotel Europa, Pont des Arts, and La Belle Roumaine. Tsepeneag’s second novel in French, Pigeon vole [Pigeon Fly Away],(23) was published under the anagrammatic pseudonym Ed Pastenague (the French pastenague is the Dasyatis pastinaca or common stingray), a younger French oneiric
avatar of the author, who here asserts his independent existence as not only a
character but also an author in his own right. As Giorgio de Chirico once
remarked, “la vue en rêve d’une personne est, à certain points de vue, une
preuve de sa réalité métaphysique.”(24) But neither Tsepeneag’s French publisher, the late Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens,
nor his American publisher, the late John O’Brien, were able to accept the metaphysical
reality of Ed Pastenague as a separate, independent author within the oneiric
text of Tsepeneag’s work as a whole, and subsequent printings of the French Pigeon vole have appeared under the name
Dumitru Tsepeneag. Since Pigeon vole,
however, Pastenague has gone on to publish translations of Romanian poets in
French and a Romanian translation of Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, and he appears in the guise of
a failed and frustrated novelist in later novels by Dumitru Tsepeneag.
After the fall of the communist
regime in Romania, Tsepeneag was able to return to Romanian literary life,
publishing in their original language works that had theretofore existed only
in translation (Vain Art of the Fugue,
The Necessary Nuptials) and
translating into Romanian works he had written in French.(25) He began to write fiction in Romanian once more, embarking on a series of
novels that, for the first time in his work, included “realist” elements
reflecting the social, political, and historical changes occurring in post–Cold
War Europe, in particular the issue of migration (immigration, emigration): the
trilogy Hotel Europa (1996), Pont des Arts (1998), Maramureș (2001), and the two
interrelated novels La Belle Roumaine
(2004) and Camionul bulgar [The Bulgarian Truck] (2010),
all feature journeys back and forth across Europe, between East and West.
In an
interview for the Tageblatt newspaper
(Luxembourg) after the publication of Hotel
Europa, Tsepeneag says that in the novel he aimed to transcend both
oneirism and realism by merging them within a wider space.(26) However, some critics saw the realistic, documentary elements of Hotel Europa, Tsepeneag’s first new
novel in Romanian for almost two decades, as somehow in “contravention of
canonical oneirism,” making it the first of his books in which “oneirism no
longer lays down the law.”(27) But in fact, Hotel Europa and the
four subsequent novels bring the practice and theory of oneirism to its highest
level of structural complexity and aesthetic sophistication. As we have seen,
in the preface to his translation of Albert Béguin’s L’Âme romantique et le rêve, Tsepeneag argues for an oneiric
textual practice that would draw not on the content of actual dreams prior and
external to the text, but on “the imaginal material provided by the surrounding
reality, since none other exists,” applying to this material the structure and
mechanism of the dream in order to produce an oneiric text.
Employing
a technique first found in Pigeon vole,
the narrators of Tsepeneag’s novels published since 1996 incorporate faits divers into their narratives,
which always unfold at the moment of writing, without the first-person
authorial character having any means of telling in which direction his text
might go next, the same as a dreamer has no volitional control over his
unfolding dream (although, of course, behind the authorial character can be
found the author himself, with the latter lucidly structuring the dream of
writing a novel in which the former finds himself hopelessly entangled).
According to Tsepeneag, the Surrealists betrayed the “transcendental meaning of
the dream” by setting off into the real world like reporters in search of the
strange and unusual,(28) in search of oneiric faits divers,
rather than constructing a different, parallel world analogous to the dream. In
Nadja, for example, “the ‘facts’
precede the text, Breton presents them as already having happened, he narrates
them.”(29) But in Hotel Europa and the
subsequent oneiric novels, rather than being an account of (real or fictional)
facts that have already happened, outside the text, the narrative is always
contingent, and the faits divers are
employed structurally as a means of augmenting this sense of contingency. For
example, in Hotel Europa, the
authorial character, who has decamped to the country in the hope of finding the
peace and quiet to let him get on with his novel, nonetheless finds himself
unable to continue his narrative because his wife has failed to mail him a
folder of the newspaper clippings he claims to rely on for inspiration; in Pont des Arts, while visiting Bucharest,
the author character bumps into a schoolmate who went on to become a
sycophantic newscaster for state television during the communist period, but was
unceremoniously sacked after the fall of the regime, and this embittered old
friend insists on sending the author the sundry news items he has clipped from
the Romanian papers, many of which mysteriously echo the recurring oneiric
images found throughout Tsepeneag’s fiction (the report of an attack by a giant
eagle, for example, echoes the short story “Waiting”). The texts of the novels
therefore produce themselves from other texts, but in a contingent, oneiric
way, the way a dream produces itself working on imaginal material from the
waking world. Just as the dream digests what Freud called the Tagesreste of the dreamer’s lived
experience, the dreamwork of the oneiric novel absorbs and transforms faits divers, the scraps and leftover
texts of the daily news.
Likewise,
the characters of Tsepeneag’s five novels of the post-communist period are more
“realistic” than those to be found in any of his previous fiction, in that they
have backgrounds that situate them within a definite social, political,
historical, geographical context: a Romanian student who is involved in the
post-Revolution protests against the Iliescu regime and then travels across
Europe to the West, haplessly getting mixed up with shady characters from the
post-communist East; an ethnic German employed by Romanian Railways, who in the
communist period emigrates to Germany, where in his old age he becomes obsessed
with philosophy, ecologist politics, and backgammon; a French doctor who takes
humanitarian aid to Romania after the collapse of communism and later to Bosnia
after the collapse of Yugoslavia; a Bulgarian truck driver who plies the route
from East to West and back.
But
existing within an oneiric text, the characters are dream persons and as such
they are independent of the authorial character or dreamer, often acting in
ways he cannot foresee and even writing him letters, as in the case of Ana, a
recurring character inscrutable even to the author. In this respect, it might
be argued that just as you have no control over your actions when you appear in
another person’s dream, so too, you have no control over the actions of other
people when they appear in your own dream. Rejecting the Freudian view that
dream persons are simulacra of their living selves created by the dreamer and
the Jungian view that they are expressions of the dreamer’s own psychic traits,
in Dream and the Underworld, James
Hillman posits that dream persons are “shadow images that fill archetypal
rôles; they are personae, masks, in the hollow of which is a numen.”(30) Like the dream person, the character in an (oneiric) fiction is a shadow image,
an insubstantial persona, visible only to the mind’s eye, perceivable only in
thought, during the act of writing or reading, but acting independently of the
perceiving mind. One such archetypal oneiric figure haunting Tsepeneag’s work
is the neither living nor dead Hunter Gracchus, whose rudderless bark is driven
by the wind that “in den untersten Regionen des Todes bläst,”(31) and whose recurrent appearances in Pont
des Arts presage the death of amateur philosopher and ecologist Fuhrmann.
Similarly,
in Pont des Arts, the late Leonid
Dimov, who together with Dumitru Tsepeneag developed the theory of structural
oneirism in the 1960s, asserts his metaphysical reality within the unfolding dream
text by telephoning the authorial character from the beyond. The telephone
itself is a recurring oneiric image in Tsepeneag’s work: it first appears as a
silent, menacing presence in “The Bird,” a short story included in Waiting; in Hotel Europa, the telephone keeps ringing, but at the other end can
be heard nothing but dissonant grating and white noise; in Pont des Arts, a voice finally makes itself heard, “from afar . . .
from the back of beyond.” Before his voice fades into a “whistling sound receding
into the distance,” Dimov recites stanzas of his oneirist poems, which have
long since sunk to the bottom of the authorial character’s memory, but whose
imagery now resurfaces throughout the unfolding dream text of the novel.
At the
beginning of “Weeping”, the opening story of the collection Waiting (1971), the narrator captures
the indeterminacy of things read and then half-remembered, as if in a dream:
I read
somewhere—or maybe I heard, I dreamed, or somebody else dreamed and told me the
dream—that a manicurist had for a long time kept an eagle in her bedside
cabinet and that a photographer reared a lion in a drawer of his desk.(32)
If a text read and
then forgotten, but whose words and gist hover at the threshold of conscious
recollection, is like a dream, indistinguishable from a dream, then the
opposite might also be argued: that a dream is like a text, and that ultimately
the two have more in common with each other than they do with “the real world.”
And this is what Tsepeneag would seem to argue in his early theoretical text
“In Search of a Definition” when he says, “Interest in the dream preceded
literature and I almost might venture to argue that it determined its
appearance.”(33) Ultimately, this is also what Tsepeneag’s work as a whole tells us, with
unfailing structural lucidity over the course of half a century: that the dream
and the text are analogous instantiations of a second, unseen reality.
