“Sameness and Otherness: A Synchronic and Analytical Approach to the Reception of Samuel Beckett’s and Franz Kafka’s Short Prose in Romania.”
Prolegomenon
The choice of thematic field came with the interest of the researcher recently turning towards literary reception as a social phenomenon of utmost importance. The most appealing issue in this context remains doubtlessly that of intercultural exchange, specifically that of the direct impact of Samuel Beckett’s and Franz Kafka’s short prose writings on the Romanian literary scene. Historically speaking, Beckett’s short prose received little attention from the Romanian readership – an aspect noticeable in the small amount of reviews referring to his work and the relatively scant body of translations of his short prose. Considering the fact that Beckett’s work is undoubtedly part of the international literary canon established by Harold Bloom (mainly due to works such as Murphy, Watt, The Molloy Trilogy, How It Is, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape and Waiting for Godot in 1987), this relative absence from the Romanian literary milieu gave rise to some concern. The comparative method put forth here via a pattern of deconstruction of the critical Romanian input to Beckett’s and Kafka’s oeuvres serves to highlight the major critical contributions to Beckett’s and Kafka’s writings during the period we chose to take up for discussion and analysis. We then proceed to a symmetrical analysis of the critical response to Kafka and Beckett ranging from the 1960s to the 1990s, a highly controversial time in what literature’s and criticism’s freedom of expression and development are concerned.
Furthermore, we also chose to approach the major philosophical concerns reflected by both authors’ short prose. The output of the research was fairly dissentient, as revealed by the contrastive pattern of reception in Romania and abroad during the period analyzed. The Romanian pattern of reception presented two rather divergent tendencies when compared to Western critical voices. However, after the fall of communism, Romanian critics’ opinions tended to harmonize relatively with those of Western exegetes, thus providing no real basis of further polemics.
Our preoccupation with Beckett and Kafka criticism is mainly analytical, but the organization of the material is synchronic. The analytical endeavour required readings of critical approaches to the two authors’ works all throughout the period covering the years 1960-1990. In the aftermath of the research undertaken we can safely state that, in what the Romanian readers and critics are concerned Franz Kafka remains “the more representative writer”, or, to put it differently, the one who had a long-lasting impact on the Romanian literary scene. The amount of works by Kafka translated into Romanian was considerable, his literary output being translated into Romanian almost entirely by Mircea Ivănescu. Mircea Isbăşescu and Radu Gabriel Pârvu provided a similar contribution in this sense. Given the fact that his work was received widely with much interest and appreciation, one could conclude that he is one of the most widely read writers in Romania. His widely known novellas “The Metamorphosis” and “Before the Law” brought about a long-lasting literary echo in the receptive sphere across Romania. This degree of literary success also meant a challenge for the reader, and the degree of perplexity and bafflement produced by direct contact with Kafka’s texts was one of the main reasons for the choice of this dissertation’s thematic field. In our approach we found of great help the critical editions of Franz Kafka, as for instance: Drucke zu Lebzeiten (Printings during Lifetime), Drucke aus dem Nachlass I (Posthumous Printings I), Drucke aus dem Nachlass II (Posthumous Printings II).
The theory of literary reception has gone through a series of major developments lately. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the Romanian reception of Beckett was in the beginning reduced to the ideological dimension while the objective information contained in reviews remained essentially scarce, all of this pointing at a certain degree of difficulty in properly assessing the Romanian reception of this writer. The sources that we chose to turn to proved rather unsatisfactory, because we were unable to find a satisfactory number of metacritical approaches or literary reviews of translations, especially of Beckett’s short prose. The present endeavour is rather a metacritical one, as we acknowledge the debt to the preceding Romanian critical approaches to both Beckett and Kafka. It also does not intend to be an exhaustive study, as it only focuses on the period of 1963-1993. (This particular period was chosen because it proved highly controversial in what the shift of critical perspectives is concerned – a matter that helped to gain hindsight of what the dominant literary tendency of criticism was in Romania during those years).
The historical context in which Kafka wrote was a very turbulent one, a period of social turmoil and utmost disorder, with the onset of the Habsburg monarchy leaving its mark both on Kafka’s personality and on the freedom of expression of the Jewish writer in the Czech capital, Prague. The Romanian literary context in which Kafka’s literary reception took place was a writer-friendly context, although it was a period in which the communist regime favoured the proliferation of the so-called “proletcultism”, a cultural movement based on the idea of a pure proletarian culture that rejects the existing cultural heritage1. The Romanian readership could thus form a far-reaching image of the writer’s ideological universe by resorting to the available translations of Kafka.
The questions raised by my dissertation are mainly of an ethical nature. How do we interpret a writing that engages several heterogeneous manners of interpretations and still resists the test of time? Which features of its influence are the ones that matter more to us? Which of its dimensions are more highlighted and emphasized in the critical exegeses produced by reputed Kafka and Beckett critics? How do they resonate with the ongoing flow of literary theory? These questions are of an ethical nature because they question the moral dimension of both writers’ works.
Our aim is to show how in the context of today’s literary criticism we might reconsider literary principles and critical attitudes which need to be rethought and thus made part of a new context and literary paradigm. The consideration of the artistic milieus of the two writers, Prague in Kafka’s case and Paris in Beckett’s, is of the utmost importance here. Several distorted points of view were opposed to the positively biased acts of criticism in order to shed new light on Beckett’s and Kafka’s work. Thus, what became the main focus of the dissertation was the shifting dynamics of cultural paradigms, which presented a challenge and a motive to research the circumstances that stood behind them. The motivation for undertaking such a complex and difficult approach came, as previously stated, with the awareness of a significant lack of material regarding the reception of Beckett’s short prose in Romania. This fact could be explained by the major shift of focus towards the reception of his drama. A significant reason for the choice of the short prose forms for analysis was the fact that Beckett and Kafka both launched the issue of the ultimate truths of human existence in their writings in a radical and uncompromising way.
Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka’s short-essay oeuvres presented manifold topics and a special attitude to life’s conundrums that filled and nurtured our curiosity to find a pertinent answer to life’s contradictions, perplexities and to the difficulties of spotting a valid key of interpretation. The literary presence of these two major writers in Romania conveyed an intriguing starting point. It was the reading through autochthonic lenses that proved most thought provoking and attractive. This meant primarily getting acquainted with the translations of the works of the two writers. Therefore, we decided on examining the twofold dynamics of the shifting perspectives brought about by Franz Kafka’s and Samuel Beckett’s short prose. Thus, the magic, mystery and power of expression of the two writers became another powerful reason to embark upon this rather demanding task.
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