Fragile structures of attachment in Carmen Firan’s The Lost Shadow

Abstract

Relying on an interdisciplinary approach that blends Jungian criticism and cultural studies, this paper aims to analyze the Romanian writer’s drama, registered through the double filter of exile (Aciman, 2000; Hirsch, 1996; Hoffman, 2000; Manea, 2012) and transnational approaches to literature and identity (Basch et al., 2003; Jay, 2021; Schultermandl, 2021; Vertovec, 2009), as illustrated in the recent novel Umbra pierdută (2018) by Carmen Firan[1]. This book presents the evolution of a Romanian couple, Fred (a successful writer) and Mimi (an ambitious ballerina), relocated from communist Romania to France and eventually to the United States of America, where they are shaped differently by the values of the host country. Considering the fact that Firan settled in New York after 1989, when migration to the West was no longer prohibited, the paper aims to establish whether this novel, (first published in Romanian), advances a nostalgic perspective or a deterritorialized notion of the migrant’s identity, filtered through the dilemma of the deracinated writer. The discussion investigates the fragmentation of Fred’s subjectivity, an uprooted individual, divided by opposing forces that gradually consume him: on the one hand, the character acutely needs to express himself in Romanian, on the other hand, he is tragically constrained by the ideology of the American Dream and the logic of the market (Cullen, 2003). While Mimi is fascinated by American consumerist values, Fred seems to retreat more and more into an inner silence, a tangled thicket of feelings: nostalgia, guilt, fear, alienation. How can one interpret the character’s withdrawal into a space devoid of creative urges, as opposed to his prolific writing before emigration? In order to decipher the valences of Fred’s entrapment, the paper discusses his psychological decline through the grid of Jungian archetypes, especially persona and the shadow, whose connotations may serve to uncover the impact of exile on Fred’s creative potential. Comparing the two protagonists’ different reactions to the American realities, the discussion aims to answer a series of questions related to the status of Romanian literature and identity in the competitive context of American global capitalism. Can Fred's silence and flight be considered mechanisms of survival, resistance, or do they represent his unwillingness/inability to accept American consumerist ideologies? Can we say that The Lost Shadow outlines a diasporic or a transnational perspective on a Romanian (albeit fictional) case of transatlantic relocation? How does Carmen Firan, a writer coming from a minor culture, situate herself in the world republic of letters (Casanova, 2004) through her fictional heroes: through differentiation or assimilation?

[1] In this paper, I have used the English translation of the novel, The Lost Shadow, published in 2022.