The Totalitarian Ideological Discourse and the Literature of the Captive Mind

Livia Silvia Rău (Marcu)
2012 Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences  
Literature in the totalitarian space is placed in a dystopian register constructed in reference to a system imposing upside-down values. Marin Preda weaves a fictional pattern relating to the social-political system. Entering the memorialist pattern, a literary work like Via (Life as a prey, 1977) marked, on the one hand, the novelist's perspective of the world and a mirror image of the genesis of the fictional text, on the other hand. The divorce between the I and the world gives birth to a
more » ... perspective upon the writing. The alienation represents a stage of the axiological perversion felt by the dilemmatic creator. Most of the times, the literary works become parables of the contemporary human's tragism, chronotopes of the abandonment before a restrictive system of ideas. The upside-down perspective upon the relationship between logos and existence manifests itself via textual strategies ranging from the parodic return to history, the un-solemnisation of the discourse, and the capitalisation of the prosaism up to the ostentatious mythologisation of the banal. In its relating to reality, fiction seems to transcend history with its preference to recompose a dystopian version of the universe, which mirrors the captive mind. In an era of great constraints imposed by the political discourse over the cultural and especially literary one, the writers vacillated between conformity to social order and the choice for inner exile, as a form of dignity, dissidence, but also recluseness from the life of the citadel. For the Romanian literature, the period between 1971 and 1989 represents an opening for evasiveness and self-reflexivity or for the mythical dimension of existence, but also the association of the literary fiction with the biographical genre. This way, the response to topicality and, with it, the concern with the issues disturbing the existence of an individual ready to constantly relate to history, were manifest from the 60s to 80s, against the background of some radical changes in perspective in the everyday political theory and praxis, with clear ethical and aesthetical implications.
doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.10.038 fatcat:tiqqvngowradhafb3p2tnxrzxm