Temporalitatea internă a romanului românesc (1933-1947)

Abstract

From the point of view of its internal temporality, the Romanian novel between 1933 and 1947 demonstrates an overwhelming preference for negotiating the present. After 1933 the world had already gone through a World War and a world economic crisis – so that the metabolism of the present in post-1933 Romanian novels can also be explained as a post-traumatic shock, an attempt to process the traumatic information of recent history. But the Romanian novel, in its earlier ages, had been synchronous with historical events of relatively comparable magnitude: the European Revolution of 1848, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, translated in Romania as the War of Independence, the Romanian economic crisis from 1899-1901, the peasant uprising of 1907, with its bloody repression, the Balkan wars, the Great Union of 1918, etc. And yet, this succession of historical events did not have the effect of establishing the historical present as a preferential time of the Romanian novel. Only the Romanian novelist between 1933 and 1947 clearly prefers “recognition” in the present history, in the immediate actuality; the narrative no longer means for him the construction of a patrimonial memory, but almost exclusively a construction of the historical present. Between 1933 and 1947, the Romanian novel is synchronized with its own present.