A Novel to Read on the Train

Dumitru Tsepeneag, A Novel to Read on a Train, translated from the French by Alistair Ian Blyth, Dalkey Archive Press, 2021

 

A Novel to Read on a Train (Roman de gare, Éditions P.O.L, 1985) was the first novel that Dumitru Tsepeneag wrote in French, reluctantly recognising that there was no prospect of him ever again having a Romanian readership as long as his native country’s communist régime endured. Having become a stateless exile in France after his citizenship was revoked by Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1975, previous to A Novel to Read on a Train, Tsepeneag had written three novels (1) for the sole reader that was his French translator, Alain Paruit, without any hope of the Romanian originals ever being published.

In French, a roman de gare, a “railway station novel,” is a term for pulp fiction, the kind of schlock you buy on the station concourse to read on the train, the forerunner of the “airport novel,” in other words. But Tsepeneag’s novel is literally, ludically, a railway station novel, in that it is set in a railway station, where a hapless cast of actors and film crew are trying and failing to shoot an adaptation of a novella set in a railway station. Although not specifically stated in the novel, the novella in question is Tsepeneag’s “Waiting,” an “oneirist” text that describes an isolated and soon-to-be disused whistle-stop that serves a Zauberberg-like sanatorium on the other side of a mysterious forest swarming with indeterminate creatures, a place of now deep snow, now incessant drizzle that hovers between dream and reality. In the novella, the stationmaster, finally abandoned by both pointsman and telegraph operator, waits interminably, menaced by an escaped and now preternaturally huge eagle, brought there in a cage as a chick by a beautiful woman whose train had been delayed at the whistle-stop by snowdrifts on the line and who spoke no known language. These were the original oneiric matrices that would structure A Novel to Read on a Train. 

The novella “Waiting” was published in România Literară magazine in October 1970 and was included in Tsepeneag’s third collection of short stories, published in 1971. (2) Which is to say, this was the year when the slim volume (111 pages), with a black-and-white reproduction of René Magritte’s Le Mal du Pays on the cover, (3) was printed. But as Tsepeneag notes in a journal entry dated 7 June 1971, the book never left the printer’s since the necessary baksheesh had failed to be paid. (4) Not even by the beginning of the following year had the book become available: on 10 January 1972, Tsepeneag attended the opening of the new Cartea Românească bookshop in Bucharest, where all the publisher’s books were on sale, with the single, glaring exception of Waiting. (5) By March of the same year, it seems that copies were finally to be found at the Cartea Românească bookshop, (6) but they were quickly withdrawn from the shelves and the book effectively vanished, just as its author, by now a persona non grata for the communist authorities, was to vanish from Romanian literature until after the fall of the Ceaușescu régime. 

“Waiting” may be said to be the masterpiece and culmination of the “structural oneirism” that Tsepeneag had been developing throughout the 1960s with poet Leonid Dimov (1926–1987), a theory and practice of writing that took the dream as its criterion (Tsepeneag) or legislation (Dimov), lucidly constructing not a text that describes a dream but one that is structurally analogous to it: “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) “Waiting” not only represents oneiric images—the anima figure of the beautiful (Swedish?) woman on the stranded train, the inexorably growing eagle that threatens to blot out the sky, the primal, Piero di Cosimo–esque forest—but does so in a structurally oneiric way: with the (il)logic of a dream, events and situations constantly shift, double back on themselves, repeat themselves in a different, disorienting order. In A Novel to Read on a Train, “Waiting” becomes the oneiric urtext of the novel: fragments of Alain Paruit’s translation (8) of the novella are interspersed throughout the novel, gradually increasing in length, pervading the text, as the fiction within the fiction of the dream text subsumes the “reality” of the framing fiction of the actors shooting a film based on an original text whose own reality, at the time when the novel was written, had been placed sous rature, being part of a book that had been disappeared and was therefore as insubstantial as a dream. 

As Roman de gare progresses, the boundary between dream text and cinematic enactment thereof becomes blurred, and the director, who is also the author of the novella on which his film is based, increasingly loses control of his cast. Just as a dreamer has no control over the actions of the persons appearing in his dream, the director has increasingly little influence over his actors, who begin to act independently of him, in defiance of him, until finally he is reduced to a faint voice impotently crying “cut!” from the water closet, crucified by flatulence and diarrhea. In Roman de gare, the director—the author trapped within his own text like the director in the toilet cubicle—is analogous to a dreamer, who has no conscious control over his unfolding dream, while the real author, Dumitru Tsepeneag, stands outside the text, lucidly structuring it according to the principles of the dream. 

In an important text of his 1960s oneirist period, “A Stage Production,” published in the collection of short stories Cold (1967), (9) Tsepeneag had already explored the actor’s defiance of his director, the fictional character’s independence from his narrator. In the novella, the author/director enlists the habitués of a disreputable tavern, the bohemian occupants of his tenement house, and a girl inveigled to abscond from boarding school in a reenactment of the Nativity and Crucifixion, in which a bicycle pump will stand in for the Holy Ghost. The three-part novella was published in Gazeta Literară, no. 40 (779), 5 October 1967, but only the first part was subsequently included in Cold, the second and third parts having been censored in the meantime. (In the second part, “The Passion of a Playwright,” the author, who has been appealing for the institution of a “new theatre”—a new fictional dispensation, an oneiric ontology of fiction—is literally crucified by his characters during the performance of his text, egged on by the audience, and in the third part, “Epilogue,” the subsequent Ascension consists of the author escaping the country by helicopter. Neither of which themes were congenial to an atheist, closed-border, totalitarian society.) The two Marias of “A Stage Production,” representing the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, were to recur in Vain is the Art of the Fugue (1973), in the form of the oneirically interchangeable Maria and Magda, and later in a screenplay entitled The Two Marias, which Tsepeneag wrote before Roman de gare, but which was never produced or published. Fragments of the screenplay are interspersed throughout A Novel to Read on a Train, adding yet another intratextual oneiric layer—a text that exists only as a dream of itself within another text. 

At the end of Roman de gare, a first-person narrator recounts watching the very film whose failed production the novel has hitherto been representing as it is subsumed by the oneiric urtext of “Waiting.” The film will recur in Tsepeneag’s later novels Hotel Europa (1996), Pont des Arts (1998), and La Belle Roumaine (2004), where it will be watched by yet other characters who have escaped the control of their narrator and exerted their own separate metaphysical reality, like persons occurring in a dream. (10) Through A Novel to Read on a Train, “Waiting” becomes an endlessly self-replicating text, linking together the whole of Tsepeneag’s work, which may thus be read as an unfolding dream of textual dreams within dreams. And ultimately, this is the achievement of Tsepeneag’s practice as a writer and as a theorist of writing: the lucid recognition that dreams and texts are different but structurally analogous aspects of a single reality—that the two have more in common with each other than they do with the “real world.” 

 

(1) Arpièges [Vain Art of the Fugue], trans. Alain Paruit, (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1973); Les Noces nécessaires [The Necessary Nuptials], trans. Alain Paruit, (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1977); Le Mot sablier [The Sandglass Hour], trans. Alain Paruit, (Paris: Éditions P.O.L, 1984).

(2) Așteptare [Waiting], (Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1971). 

(3) The painting shows a winged man gazing over a parapet and a recumbent lion, a theriomorphic dream image to be found in “Waiting” and other stories in the collection. 

(4) Dumitru Tsepeneag, Opere 3: Un român la Paris. Jurnal, (Bucharest: Editura Tracus Arte, 2016), 161.  

(5) Un român la Paris. Jurnal, p. 280. 

(6) Dumitru Țepeneag, Prin gaura cheii. Proză scurtă, ed. Nicolae Bârna (Bucharest: Editura Allfa, 2001), 509.

(7) Dumitru Tsepeneag, “În căutarea unei definiții,” Luceafărul, no. 25 (June 22, 1968); Opere 5. Texte teoretice, interviuri, note critice, “șotroane. 1966-1989 (Bucharest, Editura Tracus Arte, 2017), 46. 

(8) Dumitru Tsepeneag, Exercices d’attente, trans. Alain Paruit (Paris: Flammarion, 1972). 

(9) Frig (Bucharest: Editura pentru Literatură, 1967). 

(10) “La vue en rêve d’une personne est, à certains points de vue, une preuve de sa réal- ité métaphysique,” Giorgio de Chirico, L’Art métaphysique, ed. Giovanni Lista (Paris: l’Échoppe, 1994), 60.

 

 

 

 

The music of hell

 The whole work [Adrian Leverkühn's Apocalypsis cum Figuris] is dominated by the paradox (if it is a paradox) that in it dissonance stands for the expression of everything lofty, solemn, pious, everything of the spirit; while consonance and firm tonality are reserved for the world of hell, in this context a world of banality and commonplace. [...] Adrian's capacity for mocking imitation, which was rooted deep in the melancholy of his being, became creative here in the parody of the different musical styles in which the insipid wantonness of hell indulges: French impressionism is burlesqued, along with bourgeois drawing-room music, Tchaikovsky, music-hall, the syncopations and rhythmic somersaults of jazz - like a tilting-ring it goes round and round, gaily glittering, above the fundamental utterance of the main orchestra, which, grave, sombre, and complex, asserts with radical severity the intellectual level of the work as a whole.

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, Chapter XXXIV, 

translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter

The People

 Here let me be bold enough to express an opinion born of the experiences of our own time. To a friend of enlightenment the word and conception 'the folk' has always something anachronistic and alarming about it; he knows that you need only tell a crowd that they are 'the folk' to stir them up to all sorts of reactionary evil. What all has not happened before our eyes - or just not quite before our eyes - in the name of 'the folk,' though it could never have happened in the name of God or humanity or the law!

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947), Chapter VI, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter

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.