Paris–Bucharest, Bucharest–Paris: Francophone Writers from Romania ed. by Anne Quinney (review)

This volume makes a welcome shift in focus on la francophonie by examining the hybrid cultural identity developed by French writers of Romanian heritage. Since the nineteenth century, ‘Bucharest-on-the-Seine’ (that is, Paris) has attracted rebels, megalomaniacs, snobs, nostalgics, and perpetual exiles. An obsession with peripheral identity and cultural ‘belatedness’ pushed various Romanian intellectuals, often of Jewish origin, to seek out the ‘universal’ charms of the Ville Lumière, with striking results. Thus Tristan Tzara’s use of an adopted language, French, revealed itself to be particularly well suited to the energies of Dada, while Isidore Isou would take this dialectic of destruction–creation further, chiselling poetry down to letters, yet still retaining French cultural history as the universal reference. At the same time, the Surrealist Group of Bucharest, stranded behind the Iron Curtain, chose French to recompose an artistic identity that was ultimately doomed under Stalinism. Other, more tragic transcultural journeys are recounted here, notably those of Benjamin Fondane and Panait Istrati. Indeed, a sense of exile and dislocation permeates this book. Ingrid Chafee shows convincingly how Eugène Ionesco’s childhood experience of being wrenched from a French country idyll and summoned back to Bucharest after his parents’ divorce sets the scene for plays conveying irremediable alienation, where language is a strange and dangerous thing. As for the arch-nihilist Emil Cioran, his cyclic redefinition of the self seems to represent an effort to reconcile nostalgia and rage towards his native Romania: Cioran’s national origins give him a particular competence with regard to pain. However, this collection rightly nuances the Romanian love affair with all things French: Ashby Crowder explores the Ceausescu-era phenomenon of ‘proto-chronism’, which sought to combat foreign influences and celebrate Romania’s own achievements, in an ‘anti-colonial’ project that echoed those in parts of the former French Empire. There are, inevitably, gaps in this volume: it would be good to know more about Romanian exiles to France in the late Communist period, for example Dumitru Tepeneag and Virgil Tanase, as well as changing attitudes to France after the fall of the dictatorship. As regards Tzara, his brief return to Romania in 1946 deserves comment, as do recently released secret-police documents concerning Cioran. But these are paths for researchers opened up by this well conceived and well written collection of studies.