The Immediate Unreality

Max Blecher was born on 8 September 1909 in Botoșani, a provincial town in northern Moldavia. Up until the Second World War, Botoșani was an ethnically and culturally diverse town, whose population was made up of Romanians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Roma and Lipovians (Russian Old Believers whose ancestors had fled persecution during the time of Peter the Great). At the turn of the century, Jews made up almost half of the town’s population. Max Blecher was the son of a merchant from the town’s Jewish community. While he was still a young child, Blecher’s family moved to Roman, a Moldavian town south of Botoșani, in the county of Neamț, where his father opened a porcelain shop. The petty bourgeois Jewish milieu of provincial Moldavia is memorably evoked in his autobiographical Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată (Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality) (1936), for example in the settings of Eugene’s sewing machine shop or the house and office of Blecher’s uncle and cousins, the Webers.

After finishing lycée in Roman, Blecher travelled to Paris to study medicine. It was here, in 1928, that he was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the spine, or Pott’s disease. He subsequently underwent treatment at sanatoria in France (Berck-sur-Mer), Switzerland (Leysin) and Romania (Tekirghiol), an experience which served as the inspiration for his novel Inimi cicatrizate (Cicatrised Hearts), in some ways a miniature, more naturalist counterpart to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and which is also described in Vizuina luminată: Jurnal de sanatoriu (The Illumined Burrow: Sanatorium Diary). However, treatment was of no avail, and Max Blecher was to remain bedridden until the end of his short life. After a decade of illness and suffering, he died, aged twenty-eight, on 31 May 1938.

Blecher’s literary work dates entirely from the period of his illness. Sașa Pană describes him as having been “paralysed and wracked by pain for ten years, with a few relative intermissions, but his mind voyaged through the most deeply buried mysteries, he burrowed with the tenacity of a miner into the remotest seams of his rich mind, of a body engrafted with abscesses and gangrenes.”(i) On 29 June 1930, Blecher made his literary debut with a short prose piece entitled “Herrant”, written in Berck-sur-Mer and published in Bilete de papagal (Parrot Papers)(ii). In another short prose piece published in 1934,(iii) Blecher describes Berck, home to five thousand patients suffering from tuberculosis of the spine, as a “town of immobility and plaster-casts”. Plaster is the material specific to the place, “just as steel is to Creuzot, coal to Liverpool, or petrol to Baku”. Similarly, Blecher describes the hallucinatory spectacle of a town whose inhabitants are all paralysed in a recumbent posture and encased in plaster: “Recumbent they go to the cinema, recumbent they take carriage rides, recumbent they frequent places of entertainment, recumbent they attend lectures, recumbent they pay their social visits.”(iv) Also in 1934, a slim volume of Blecher’s poems, entitled Transparent Body, was published. In the same year, Blecher published translations from Appolinaire, in Frize (Friezes) magazine. His own poetry is lyrical and surrealistic, reminiscent perhaps of Paul Eluard, as can be seen in the following strophe, for example: “Your integument / Like a bird in the nest of the heart / In rivers of blood you bathe / And you fly through my fingertips.”(v) The following year, in 1935, his parents rented a small house for him in a suburb of his hometown of Roman. Writing on a wooden board propped against his knees, which had remained paralysed in a flexed position, it was here that he finished, during interminable nights of insomnia, the books Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality (1936), Cicatrised Hearts (1937), and The Illumined Burrow (posthumously edited and published by Sașa Pană in 1971).

Blecher’s literary prose was, to a certain extent, influenced by Surrealism. As an autobiography describing the subject’s oneiric, irrational experiences, Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality (1936) has been compared with André Breton’s Nadja (1928), although Sașa Pană was of the opinion that Blecher’s novel surpassed and would ultimately outlast that of Surrealism’s founder. Blecher himself was fascinated by the controlled, lucid pictorial descriptions of delirium to be found in the work of excommunicated Surrealist outcast Salvador Dalí. In a letter to Sașa Pană, dated 7 July 1934,(vi) for example, he speaks of Dalí’s “cold, perfectly legible and essential dementia”, whose “hyper-aesthetic extravagances of adjusted irrationality” he endeavours to imitate in his own texts: “For me, the ideal in writing would be a transposition of the heightened tension that is released by the paintings of Salvador Dalí.” Like Dalí’s “paranoiac critical method”, Blecher’s “surrealism” is therefore not an unmediated, disorganised outpouring of the unconscious, such as that found in the experiments with “automatic writing” made by the doctrinaire Surrealists, but rather a controlled channelling of the irrational life of the mind: “The power of the unconscious is very great. A well-structured unconscious (…) can bring ideas which our conscious mind would never have arrived at. I may thus cite two characteristic manifestations of this power: revelation and inspiration.”(vii)”

It is revelation and inspiration – what James Joyce in his autobiographical fictions of childhood and adolescence (Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man) refers to as (secular) “epiphanies” – that provide the material for Max Blecher’s own Bildungsroman of formative experiences, “occurrences” which take place almost entirely within the confines of the author’s own febrile, delirious consciousness. In childhood, Max Blecher suffered “crises” or “attacks” of unreality, in which he experienced rupture both from the outer world of objects, and from the inner world of the self. These crises, narrated in Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality, might also be likened to the haunting moments of Stimmung evoked by Giorgio de Chirico in his pittura metafisica, as well as in his oneiric novel Hebdomeros (1929), moments during which inward disquietude is experienced as outward atmosphere, submerging the world in ineffable strangeness and enigma. In psychopathology, this is the eerie atmosphere of heightened but empty significance also experienced by sufferers of dementia praecox during the so-called ‘aura’ that precedes complete rupture with reality. Psychiatrist and neurologist Klaus Conrad referred to such states of exalted dread as the “Trema”, employing a piece of German theatrical slang for stage fright.(viii). In this respect it is notable that many of de Chirico’s paintings depict the vertiginously tilted boards of theatre stages. Likewise, as we shall see below, Blecher’s occurrences in the immediate unreality are also pervaded by a menacing sense of theatricality.

During the state of Stimmung, external phenomena are thus imbued with a sense of intense but ineffable significance, which hovers tantalisingly beyond reach. Like de Chirico, who saw the world as a “vast museum of strangeness”, Blecher too locates his crises out there in the world; they are intrinsic to various places, “sickly spaces”, which thereby become menacing “invisible traps”. These crises, which Blecher defines as the “profound sentiment of the world’s pointlessness”, are thus precisely the anti-epiphany or empty transcendence of Modernism: an anxious, heightened sense of meaningfulness, but one devoid of cognisable content, like the “Anwandlungen eines Fast-Nichts” (fits or attacks of an Almost-Nothing) described by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten (Letters of Those Who Returned) (1901). Like the cast of the inner ear whose image obsesses Blecher, people and things are nothing more than the negative image of an immanent emptiness.

Although in time Blecher’s crises as such abate, they leave behind them the same “crepuscular state” that used to presage them. As in de Chirico’s cluttered paintings of his later metaphysical period, Blecher then discovers in heteroclite, seemingly insignificant objects an “essential nostalgia for the world’s pointlessness”. Such states, which oscillate between melancholy and exaltation, are also closely intertwined with the ambiguous, confusing, even dream-like, experiences of his sexual awakening as an adolescent. He experiences occurrences as disturbingly artificial and theatrical, while other people are like automatons or mannequins, oblivious that “the certitude in which we live is separated by a very fine pellicle from the world of uncertainties”. The world itself becomes an eerie stage set, and many episodes in the novel occur in settings of inherent theatrical artificiality, such as the cinema, a waxworks exhibition, or the prop-cluttered basement beneath the stage of a theatre, where Blecher finds refuge and which thus becomes a symbol of the tiers of conscious and unconscious mind. Blecher himself dreams of being an inanimate waxwork, or else he is haunted by his own photograph, which he chances to see mysteriously displayed in the booth of a travelling fairground photographer and which then takes on a life of its own, threatening to subsume his own existence. In one of the most remarkable episodes in the book, Blecher attempts to escape from the agony of his exacerbated awareness (the “Bewußstseinswelt”, as it is called by Gottfried Benn, who similarly yearns to escape the pain of consciousness by regressing to the condition of mindless protoplasm) by descending to the ontological level of amorphous, primal mud.

As a whole, Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality teems with unsettling characters and events, refracted through the prism of the author’s unique existential “illness”. It is a work that deserves recognition as one of the most remarkable texts of European modernism.

(Introduction (c) Alistair Ian Blyth and University of Plymouth Press, 2009)

(i) Cu inimă lîngă M. Blecher, in Max Blecher, Vizuina luminată, Bucharest: Cartea românească, 1971, pp. 6-7, quoted in Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 409. Sașa Pană was the pen name of Alexander Binder (1902-1981), a close friend of Max Blecher and an important figure in the Romanian avant-garde. As well as being a writer in his own right, he financed, edited and published unu (one), an avant-garde magazine, and, after the War, wrote a number of studies and memoirs about the Romanian avant-garde.
(ii) Edited and published by Tudor Arghezi (1880-1967), a major Romanian poet and novelist.
(iii) “Berck, orașul damnaților” (“Berck, the Town of the Damned”), Vremea, VII, 358, 7 October 1934; Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, pp. 352-357.
(iv) Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 353.
(v) Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 335.
(vi) Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 396.
(vii) Note from an undated manuscript, quoted by Radu Țepoșu in the Preface to Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 12.
(viii) See the chapter ‘The Truth-Taking Stare’ in Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 43-74.

Max Blecher, Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth, University of Plymouth Press: Plymouth, 2009.

Regressionstendenzen

Craterium aureum

Ach, nie genug dieses einen Erlebnisses: das Leben währet vierundzwanzig Stunden und, wenn es hoch kommt, war es eine Kongestion! Ach immer wieder in diese Glut, in die Grade der plazentaren Räume, in die Vorstufe der Meere des Urgesichts: Regressionstendenzen, Zerlösung des Ich! Regressionstendenzen mit Hilfe des Worts, heuristische Schwächezustände durch Substantive – das ist der Grundvorgang, der alles interpretiert: Jedes ES das ist der Untergang, die Verwehbarkeit des Ich; jedes DU ist der Untergang, die Vermischlichkeit der Formen. ‘Komm alle Skalen tosen Spuk, Entformungsgefühl’ - das ist der Blick in die Stunde und die Glücke, wo die ,Götter fallen wie Rosen’ - Götter und Götterspiel. Schwer erklärbare Macht des Wortes, das löst und fügt.

Gottfried Benn, Lyrisches Ich (1927)

Lycogala conicum

Cribraria vulgaris

Photographs (c) The Eumycetozoan Project, 2006

Bacovia, Melancholy, Stimmung

George Bacovia (1881–1957) is widely regarded as having been one of the most important Romanian poets of the twentieth century. Although his work has its origins in and draws much of its imagery from late Symbolism, Bacovia was a modernist whose work bears comparison with the poetry of German expressionism. The poetry of George Bacovia might also be defined in terms of Stimmung, a term employed by Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to designate atmosphere in the moral or lyric sense: the inter-penetration of subjective mood and the atmosphere immanent in the external setting. The mood that is evoked in Bacovia’s work is one of isolation, neurosis, lovelessness, despair, and existential anguish. It is a subjective state that simultaneously permeates and is exuded by his poetry’s décor of muddy, provincial streets, pluvial autumn weather, deserted municipal parks, claustrophobic salons, railway sidings, abattoirs, ramshackle slum dwellings, cemeteries, and insalubrious taverns. The boards of this eerie, expressionist stage set are trodden by a cast of consumptives, suicides, alcoholics, madmen, funeral processions, the sniggering ghosts of Poe and Rollinat, and the alienated, anguished persona of the poet himself, assailed by disembodied voices boding imminent self-annihilation.

In spite of the theatrical intensity of his poetry, Bacovia’s life can be said to have been unspectacular. Although he lived through two world wars and a period of social and political upheaval, his biography is singularly lacking in incident. He was born Gheorghie Vasiliu in the Moldavian town of Bacău, which was to provide him with the pseudonym ‘Bacovia’ as well as the bleak provincial setting of much of his poetry. His entire adult life he was to be afflicted by ill health and chronic depression, which led to a number of nervous breakdowns and hospitalisation. His poor health and nervous condition also meant that he was unable to practise as a lawyer, the profession for which he had studied, with frequent interruptions, from 1903 to 1911. Instead, he led a reclusive, solitary life, eking a living variously as a clerk, supply teacher, and librarian.

Bacovia published his first poem, ‘Și toate’ (‘And All’) in 1899 in Literatorul, a review edited by flamboyant Romanian symbolist poet Alexandru Macedonski (1854-1920). The poem, which concludes with the line “In my heart it is autumn”, is in itself unremarkable and, if anything, a cliché typical of the period. Notably, the year it appeared also saw the publication of the last, autumnal works of the crepuscular ‘decadent’ movement in European literature, including Ernest Dowson’s Decorations and Jean Moréas’ Les Stances. The 1890s, as Ezra Pound once put it, were a period of putrescent ‘muzziness’ (1), preliminary to that radical change in human nature which Virginia Woolf identified as having occurred “on or about December 1910”.(2) However, despite his fin-de-siècle debut, Bacovia’s first collection of poems, entitled Plumb (Lead), was not published until 1916, and was contemporaneous not only in date but also in its innovation with major modernist texts such as Ezra Pound’s Lustra and Gottfried Benn’s Gehirne. Plumb earned widespread critical praise in Romania for its originality, although it would take many decades before Bacovia’s radical newness was fully appreciated or understood. Having said that, Bacovia was compared early on to major expressionist poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914) (3), whose posthumous Sebastian im Traum had been published the year before Plumb. However, after Plumb, the work that established Bacovia’s reputation, other volumes of poetry followed only intermittently: Scîntei galbene (1926) (Yellow Sparks), Cu voi… (1930) (With you…), Comedii în fond (1936) (Comedies After All), Stanțe burgheze (1946) (Bourgeois Stanzas). Scîntei galbene and Cu voi… still included poems that had been written decades previously, in the late 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, thus producing a somewhat deceptive impression of Bacovia’s development as a poet. However, as is evident in his last published collection, Stanțe burgheze, Bacovia’s later style, which reduces verse form to elliptical, almost telegraphic utterances, is radically different from his youthful ‘symbolism’.

In the early years of the communist regime, Bacovia was viewed with official disapproval as a “decadent”. Between 1948 and 1949 he briefly held a sinecure as an adviser to the People’s Theatre in Bucharest, but the post was abolished and he subsequently entered a period of protracted obscurity. Publication of his work was officially blocked until 1956, the year in which he published three poems in two separate periodicals as well as a new collection of his pre-war poetry. In the same year, the communist state, which had decided to exploit Bacovia for his propaganda value as a ‘proletarian poet’ (4), awarded him the “Order of Labour”. The attitude of Bacovia himself to his new-found celebrity was typically ambiguous and ironic, as is evident in a poem entitled ‘Festiva’, written on the occasion of the official celebrations to mark his seventy-fifth birthday, but not published until 1961 (5):

Da, fusei în castelul
Nababilor
Cu cristale, oglinzi și marmoră…

Iată! Am venit ca Hamlet
În hainele mele
Cernite.

“Yes, I was in the castle / Of the nabobs / With crystal, mirrors and marble … // Look! I arrived like Hamlet / In my inky garb.”

When he died the following year, the reclusive poet was honoured with an official funeral ceremony, which was attended by state dignitaries.

****

Bacovia’s early critics regarded him as a minor, provincial poet and pointed to what they saw as his primitivism, describing his poetry as an authentic, albeit naïve, outpouring of raw emotion. For example, in an article published in 1916, representing one of the earliest critical reactions to Plumb, N. Davidescu interprets Bacovia’s poetry as being unaffectedly ‘sincere’. The poems in Plumb would thus represent a raw, unpolished proto-poetry, an expression of the “elementary stirrings of life, impulsively manifested through cries of pain, surprise, sadness.”(6)

The supposed ‘primitivism’ of George Bacovia’s work might be discovered even in the physical appearance of his books as objects, with their low quality paper and shoddy typography. Critic Vladimir Streinu, in particular, was appalled by the shabby aspect of Bacovia’s printed works: “All his volumes are squalid in appearance, so squalid in fact that the reader is even put off opening them… The second, third and fifth collections are truly repugnant in appearance.”(7) He contrasts this with the evident penchant of other, more pretentious, poets for elegant deluxe editions.

On the other hand, the physical neglect evident in the volumes that were published subsequent to Plumb is the natural and tangible manifestation of a “declining talent”, what Streinu defines as “resignation of spirit and moral regress”. However, although he recognises that the reading public would probably scoff at such a claim, Streinu is quick to affirm that Bacovia is a poet unique not only in Romanian letters but also in the context of universal literature. In spite of the fact that his poetic line often fails to achieve full articulation, George Bacovia is, Streinu argues, a profoundly suggestive poet, whose originality lies in his exploration of the process whereby consciousness tends to extinction and is reduced to a physiological state, a process of involution, of collapse that attains the primary state of matter.(8) In this context, we might compare Bacovia to Gottfried Benn, in whose poetry the agony provoked by the world of consciousness (Bewußtseinswelt) brings about the urge to regress to the primitive, ‘deforeheaded’ (entstirnt) condition of protoplasm. Certainly, in many of Bacovia’s poems the ‘primitive’ and the ‘barbarous’ threaten to overwhelm with elemental madness the enervated consciousness of the lyric ‘I’, such as in ‘Plouă’ (‘It’s Raining’), collected in the volume Plumb:

Oh, plînsul tălăngii cînd plouă!

Și ce enervare pe gînd!
Ce zi primitivă de tină!
O bolnavă fată vecină
Răcnește la ploaie rîzînd…

Oh, the sobbing of cowbells when it rains! // And such enervation of thought! / Such a primitive day of clart! / A sickly girl from next door / Is yelling at the rain laughing…

In ‘Seara tristă’ (‘Sad Evening’), for example, whose setting might be compared with Gottfried Benn’s ‘Nachtcafe’ (in the volume Fleisch, 1917), it is the ‘barbarous’ singing of a woman to the accompaniment of zithers that threatens to obliterate the intoxicated, fragile awareness of the poet. Ultimately, the poetry of Plumb is not so much the expression of a primitive awareness as that of an exacerbated self-consciousness whose hypertrophy now threatens collapse and regression to animal oblivion.

Later critics have tended to interpret Bacovia’s poetry in precisely the opposite terms to primitivism, emphasising its artificiality and almost hysterical theatricality. In Istoria literaturii române de la origini pînă în prezent (1941) (The History of Romanian Literature from its Origins until the Present), George Călinescu dismisses earlier interpretations of Bacovia as a provincial primitive: “It is curious that the poetry of Bacovia has been regarded as lacking in any poetic artifice, as a poetry that is simple and artless. For it is precisely its artifice that strikes one and ultimately constitutes its worth.”(9) Indeed, Bacovia’s work is highly stylised: the obsessive repetition of a limited number of words, images and tropes creates a monotonous, claustrophobic and almost hallucinatory effect. The seeming lack of artifice is in fact a highly artificial construct that is a response to a profound crisis of language and spirit.

Like Georg Trakl, the great modernist poet with whom he was contemporary, George Bacovia is an autumnal poet. The autumn of the modernists is, however, no ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, but rather a state of spiritual and historical crisis. It is a dissonant, dyspnoeic fugue, in which world, language and self enter into putrefaction and ultimately cave in on themselves. Certainly, in the poetry of Bacovia, autumn is the manifestation of a generalised malady, which affects mind, body and world. In this context, his work is notable for the frequent occurrence of neologisms drawn from medical and psychiatric terminology: a delira, delir, (French délirer, délire); a enerva (French énerver); a histeriza, histerie, (French hystériser, hystérie); nevroză (French névrose); paralizie (French paralysie); ftizie (French phtisie). Striking in this category is the term alcoolizat (‘alcoholised’), the past participle of a verb derived from the French alcoolizer. When, in ‘Nervi de toamnă’ (‘Autumn Nerves’), Bacovia imagines himself as an “alcoholised skeleton” lost in the rain, he does not, therefore, refer to a temporary state of inebriation, but rather to a chronic medical syndrome, that of physiological saturation with alcohol as a result of protracted abuse. Existential states become identical and interchangeable with chronic medical conditions. Nature, or rather the urban landscape, also manifests the symptoms of chronic ailment: a garden is “gangrened” (‘Poem in the Mirror’); a park is “consumed by cancer and phthisis” (‘In the park’); the town is “paralysed” (‘Autumn Notes’).

Spiritual crisis is also evident in the secularisation of external reality in Bacovia’s poems. In Plumb, for example, a park is given precisely the epithet ‘secular’ (‘Décor’), while elsewhere the snow is described as falling “secularly” (‘Winter Lead’). In the poem ‘Yellow Sparks’, from the volume of the same name, a “positivist voice” wakes the poet at a “melancholic window”, while in ‘Ballet’ white ballerinas mysteriously arouse “the organic complex”. This secularisation (or de-sacralisation) of reality is ultimately part of a process whereby humans themselves become reified: “man has become concrete” (‘Winter Lead’, in the volume Yellow Sparks).

Although man, nature and abstract qualities become reified, are reduced to things, the poems of Bacovia themselves are eerily devoid of concrete things. In the volumes Lead (1916) and Yellow Sparks (1926) the world becomes a bare stage set, like the “large, empty salon” where the histrionic action of the poem ‘Marche Funèbre’ takes place. Such objects as do appear acquire almost the function of theatrical props or costume: a coffin, an armchair, a large oval mirror, a handkerchief, funeral vestments and so on. Other things are not physically present except insofar as they are able to produce a sound effect from off-stage: the mournful clank of cowbells in the distance, a military bugle from the barracks at the edge of town, or a primaeval alpenhorn booming from the depths of a remote valley. Everywhere there is a neurasthenic hypersensitivity to sound: branches scraping against roofs, creaking woodwork, and, ubiquitously, the sound of the falling rain.

Otherwise, the world of things is reduced to amorphous, indeterminate ‘matter’, which impinges upon the awareness acoustically rather than visually or tactilely: “I hear matter weeping” (‘Lacustrine’). Similarly, colour becomes an acoustic rather than visual quality. This is nowhere more evident than in the obsessive repetition of the colour epithet ‘violet’ in numerous poems. Bacovia frequently employs the word ‘violet’ purely for its synaesthetic quality, a combination of colour, odour and sound, such as in the following lines, from ‘Nervi de Primavara’ (‘Spring Nerves’):

Primăvară…
O pictură parfumată cu vibrări de violet,
În vitrine, versuri de un nou poet;
În oraș suspină un vals în fanfară.

O nouă primăvară de visuri și păreri…

Spring… // A picture perfumed with violet vibrations, / In shop windows, verses by a new poet, / In town the brass band sobbing of a waltz. // A new spring of vagaries and views…

As the phrase “violet vibrations” and the obsessive alliteration of the consonant ‘v’ might suggest, the adjective ‘violet’ is primarily acoustic rather than chromatic. Of course, the adjective ‘violet’ and alliteration of the consonant ‘v’ situate Bacovia within a Symbolist tradition of melic language that can be traced back to Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘The City in the Sea’ and its line: “The viol, the violet and the vine.” For example, the word ‘violet’ also occurred repetitively in the work of English decadent poet Ernest Dowson, who held that that ‘v’ was the most beautiful sound and regarded his poetry as mere “sound verse, with scarcely the shadow of a sense in it”.(10) In the nineteenth century, Walter Pater had famously argued that ‘all art aspires to the condition of music’. In the context of decadence and symbolism, ‘sound verse’ was therefore another product of the spiritual crisis provoked by secularisation, a consequence, as Pater put it, of the decay of the ‘primitive power of words’, of the dissolution of the ‘natural bond between word and thing’.(11)

Nietzsche, in Der Fall Wagner (1888), defined decadence as the sovereignty of the individual word at the expense of the whole, as an ‘anarchy of atoms’. Such fragmentation of language is already present in Bacovia’s early texts, written at the end of the nineteenth century, and becomes increasingly advanced in his later work. The verse as a unit ultimately breaks down so completely that all that remain are isolated, often monosyllabic words, as in the posthumously published poem ‘Gîndiri’ (‘Thoughts’) (12):

Frumos
Vesel
Bun
Urît
Trist
Rău
Cauze din etern
Și social…

Beauteous / Joyous / Good / Ugly / Sad / Bad / Eternal and social causes …

Poetry in any traditional, technical meaning of the term has collapsed: after all, a metrical foot requires at least two syllables. For Bacovia, however, this extreme askesis of verse form was already present during the very first decades of his career as a poet and, in this respect, he was very much ahead of his time. Poet and critic Ion Caraion compared Bacovia’s poetic experiments to the later ‘poem-objects’ of Dada and Futurism, or the radical dismemberment of language practised by e.e.cummings.(13) For example, in one of Bacovia’s notebooks, dated 1906-1912, can be found the following metrical experiment, entitled ‘Bisyllable and Monosyllable’ (14):

Am fost
Prost.
Exist
Trist.
Exist
Prost.
Ce trist
Rost.

I was / Badly. / I exist / Sadly. / I exist / Badly. / What sad / Sense.

In the volume Plumb, such implosion of traditional verse form is represented by a metrical experiment entitled ‘Monosilab de toamnă’ (‘Autumn Monosyllable’), positioned, significantly, as the penultimate poem in the collection, in which ten-syllable lines alternate with monosyllables in an abab rhyme scheme:

Toamna sună-n geam frunze de metal,
Vînt.
În tăcerea grea, gînd și animal
Frînt.

Autumn sounds metallic leaves in the window, / Wind. / In the heavy silence, thought and animal / Exhausted.

Elsewhere, words themselves break down into inarticulate exclamations (‘oh’, ‘ah’, ‘ugh’ and so on). Sentences break down into isolated noun phrases; sub-clauses break down into isolated adverbs. Again, this fragmentation can reach such an extreme that an individual verse might consist entirely of isolated lexemes separated by commas, as in the following example:

O, dormi, adînc, mereu, așa.

‘Serenada Muncitorului’, from Scîntei galbene (1926)

O, you sleep, deeply, always, thus. (‘The Worker’s Serenade’, from Yellow Sparks)

Moreover, punctuation no longer connects or separates, but continually decomposes into the three points that indicate suspension or interruption. In ‘Din Urmă’ (‘Latterly’), the last poem in the volume Cu voi (1930), total fragmentation is achieved, with all but two verses petering out to form an ellipsis before any verb can be articulated:

Poezie, poezie…
Galben, plumb, violet…
Și strada goală…
Ori asteptări tîrzii,
Și parcuri înghețate…
Poet, și solitar…
Galben, plumb, violet…
Odaia goală…
Și nopți tîrzii…
Îndoliat parfum
Și secular…
Pe veșnicie…

Poetry, poetry… / Yellow, lead, violet… / And the empty street… / Or else late waits, / And frozen parks… / Poet, and solitary… / Yellow, lead, violet… / The empty room… / And late nights… / Fragrance mournful / And secular… / For eternity…

It might be argued that Bacovia’s monosyllabic ‘dialogues’ are also a formal anticipation of the theatre of the absurd. In any case, they are the literary equivalent of the psychopathological symptom of echolalia, as well as a harrowing expression of the impossibility of communication in a world of alienation. Ultimately, it becomes impossible to follow which voice belongs to whom, as one repeats the other, seemingly in a void (15):

- Te-am pierdut.
- Înnebunesc.
- Înnebunesc.
- Cum?
- Cum?
- Mai bine-atunci.
- Atunci.
- În infinit.
- În infinit.
- Dar cum?
- Cum’s toate.
- Cine știe…
- Cine știe…
- Poezie.
- Poezie.
(…)
- Eu, eu, tu, tu.
- Fum.
- Fum.
- Ce-a fost asta?
- Ce să fie?…
- Poezie.
- Poezie.

“I have lost you.” / “I’m going mad.” / “I’m going mad.” / “How?” / “How?” / “Better then.” / “Then.” / “In the infinite.” / “In the infinite.” / “But how?” / “How all things are.” / “Who knows…” / “Who knows…” / “Poetry.” / “Poetry.” / (…) “I, I, you, you.” / “Smoke.” / “Smoke.” / “What was that?” / “What do you think?…” / “Poetry.” / “Poetry.”

Thus, the boundaries that define the enunciating self are dissolved once and for all; we participate in the schizophrenic inner monologue/dialogue of the fractured self. The dramatic possibilities of this kind of dialogic monologue were later successfully exploited by Romanian poet Marin Sorescu (1936-1996), whose play Jonah, for example, is a dialogue for a single actor.

The schizoid quality of Bacovia’s poems might be compared to that eerie atmosphere of heightened but empty significance experienced by sufferers of dementia praecox during the so-called ‘aura’ (which has been likened to experience of Stimmung in art (16)) that precedes complete rupture with reality. External phenomena are imbued with a sense of intense but ineffable significance. For example, in one poem the falling autumnal leaves are “like a sinister sign”. Similarly, Bacovia describes how railway signals jerk meaninglessly, “în gol” (“in a void” or “emptily”). Signs are emptied of significance and continue to function mechanically but meaninglessly. Human gestures too become alien and uncanny: passers-by gesticulate theatrically but senselessly, producing a sense of foreboding.

In many poems, the self experiences its own primal, irrational urge for self-annihilation as an insistent, persecuting voice that originates from outside itself:

Pe drumuri delirînd,
Pe vreme de toamnă,
Ma urmărește un gînd
Ce mă îndeamnă:

--Dispari mai curînd!

‘Spre toamnă’, from Plumb (1916)

Raving along the roads, / In autumn weather, / A thought pursues me, / Which urges me to: // “Get on with it, vanish!” (‘Towards Autumn’, from Lead)

This voice seemingly comes from the depths of the earth:

Ascultă cum greu, din adîncuri,
Pamîntul la dînsul ne cheamă…

‘Melancolie’, from Plumb (1916)

Listen to how, from the depths, heavily, / The earth is calling us to her…
(‘Melancholy’, from Lead)

The word fund (meaning ‘bottom, lowest part’, from Latin fundus) recurs obsessively in the poems of Bacovia. In the poem ‘Winter Twilight’, for example, “un corb încet vine din fund” (a crow comes slowly from the depths), or, in ‘Pulvis’:

Imensitate, veșnicie,
Pe cînd eu tremur în delir,
Cu ce supremă ironie
Arăți în fund un cimitir.

Immensity, eternity, / While I convulse in delirium, / With what supreme irony / You reveal a graveyard at the bottom!

At one level, the crow and the cemetery are elements of décor, pasteboard scenery in an affected melodrama; at another level they arise from the depths of the ineffable. The fund is the abyss, the Abgrund of nothingness that gapes open as meaning caves in, fatally eroded by the ineffable.

Bacovia, as we have seen, explores extreme and limit states of consciousness: disquietude, depression, and delirium. However, these states are presented in a highly ambiguous, ironic way. The neurotic poet is a pose, a self-parodying persona, but at the same time a means of hinting at an authentic, although ineffable, existential condition. In many poems this contradiction or fissure in the self is frequently conveyed by Bacovia’s reference to himself in the third rather than first person:

Un bolnav poet, afectat
Așteaptă tușind pe la geamuri.

‘Toamnă’, from Scîntei galbene (1926)

A sick poet, affected / Waits coughing at windows. (‘Autumn’, from Yellow Sparks)

The poet’s illness is at once genuine and histrionic, authentic and affected. Notable is the peculiar sense of indeterminacy created by the use of the indefinite article (‘a poet’ rather than ‘the poet’) and, curiously, the plural ‘windows’, rather than ‘the (definite) window’ or ‘a (particular) window’. This indeterminacy is heightened when, in the poem’s penultimate line, the scene being described is referred to as a “painting” (tablou). For Bacovia, the world cannot be experienced directly, except as art and insofar as it imitates art:

Brumă, toamna literară,
Pe drum prăfăria se duce fugară.

Și-am stat singur supărat
În zavoiul decadent,
Și prin crengile-ncîlcite mi-am notat
Versuri fără de talent.

‘Vînt’, from Scîntei galbene (1926)

Hoarfrost, literary autumn, / On the road the dust-cloud goes fleeing. // And I stood alone sorrowful / In the decadent copse, / And amid the twisted branches I jotted down / Verses without talent. (‘Wind’, from Yellow Sparks)

Bacovia’s autumn is a ‘literary autumn’, a poetry about the poetry of autumn, an artificial, stylised autumn that is the reification of an ineffable state of inner crisis. Even the ubiquitous ravens in Bacovia’s work are not physical ravens perceived directly by the poet but rather “the ravens of the poet Tradem”.(17) Tradem was Traian Demetrescu (1866-1896), a minor Romanian symbolist, who died of phthisis aged thirty and whose poetry, particularly his most famous poem ‘Corbii’ (‘The Ravens’), was a source for much of Bacovia’s stylised imagery.

Ultimately, the peculiar complexity of Bacovia’s deceptively simple work lies in the fact that it is simultaneously sincere and ironic, self-parodying and in deadly earnest, authentic and artificial. It is this antinomy which makes Bacovia one of the great modernist poets.


(1) ‘Lionel Johnson’ (1915), reprinted in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London, 1954, reissued 1985), page 363.
(2)‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), reprinted in Collected Essays, volume 1 (London, 1966), page 321.
(3) By Oscar Walter Cișek in Cugetul românesc 1.6 (1922).
(4)Largely on the strength of a poem of 1914, entitled ‘The Worker’s Serenade’, which in 1956 and 1957 was reprinted in periodicals, including Steagul roșu (The Red Flag), and became a favourite in anthologies of socialist poetry.
(5) Viața românească 14.9 (1961), page 107. George Bacovia, Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), page 320.
(6) Quoted in Rodica Zafiu, Poezia simbolistă românească: Antologie, introducere, dosare critice, comentarii, note și bibliografie (Bucharest, 1996), page 242.
(7) Pagini de critică literară. Marginalia (Bucharest, 1968), pages 35-41. Quoted in George Bacovia. Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), page 973.
(8) Ibid. Quoted in George Bacovia. Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), page 974.
(9) Quoted in Rodica Zafiu, Poezia simbolistă româneascâ: Antologie, introducere, dosare critice, comentarii, note și bibliografie (Bucharest, 1996), page 243.
(10) The Letters of Ernest Dowson, edited by Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (London, 1967), page 189.
(11) Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (1885), edited by Ian Small (Oxford, 1986), page 58.
(12) George Bacovia. Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), page 266.
(13) Ion Caraion, Bacovia: Sfîrșitul continuu (Bucharest, 1977), pages 169-71.
(14) George Bacovia. Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), page 293.
(15) George Bacovia. Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), pages 297-300.
(16) See the chapter ‘The Truth-Taking Stare’ in Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
(17) ‘Amurg’ (‘Twilight’), in the volume Plumb (1916).

(C) Alistair Ian Blyth, Bucharest, 2009