Conceptul de „criză” în modernismul „târziu”: poezia americană a anilor ‘30 și poezia „generației războiului” în literatura română

Crisis in “late modernism”: The American poetry of the 1930s and the Romanian war poets

Abstract

A complex, intricate, and sometimes disruptive era, the first half of the 20^th century was shaken by a significant number of crises, leading to fundamental transformations in the individual’s perception of the world and the self. Wars, sudden shifts of political regimes, economic decline, and existential anxiety gave shape to different “faces of modernity”, to use a syntagm borrowed from Matei Călinescu’s well-known study. Thus, modernism can be read as originating from a historical and a cultural crisis, as many scholars have noted, which are contingent on a crisis of identity and a crisis of language, reaching its highest point in modern poetry. Art and literature of the fifth decade, in general, and poetry, in particular, constituted responses and solutions to the fragmentation, gaps, and ruptures inherent to modernism, embedding them within legitimate aesthetic structures. However, countless authors of both literary and cultural studies have approached what is widely recognised as modern poetry mostly in matters of form rather than highlighting the social, economic or political implications central to its emerging context. The proliferation of this tendency led to modernism being, almost exclusively, associated in poetry with experimentalism and innovation in language. For instance, the avant-garde is considered more specific to European aesthetic modernism than other literary directions, yet equally fruitful and valuable. Nevertheless, amid the waves of crises that profoundly pervaded the social and aesthetic structures of modernity, language seemed to lose its ability to represent society and express the turmoil of that particular period, becoming fragmented in the process. Relying on the theory of an epistemological crisis set at the core of late modernism, developed by Justin Parks in his recent important study, Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America, this article advances the idea that at the basis of the identity crisis and of the language crisis, which crossed such a substantial segment of modern poetry – and the same is the case in both Romanian and American literature – stood, first of all, a social and a cultural crisis, intertwined with a spiritual one, usually not much brought into discussion. Moreover, the current article originally proposes closeness between the poets of the Great Depression, analysed by Parks in his essay, and the Romanian insurgent “war poets” (the syntagm is believed to have been used by Emil Manu in his often cited work, Eseu despre generația războiului [Essay on the War Generation]) grouped, at least initially, around the nonconformist magazine Albatros. On the one hand, Parks’ analysis of poetry in deep connection with various aspects belonging to the cultural and artistic production of the 1930s, and with society, in general, can be effectively grafted to the study of the Romanian poets who made their debut during the outbreak of the Second World War, confronting – like the American poets of the Depression – with the chaos of a society carved out by inequities and intense political upheaval. On the other hand, between the poetry written by Louis Zukofsky, Muriel Rukeyser, George Oppen or Langston Hughes and Geo Dumitrescu, Dimitrie Stelaru, Ion Caraion, and Constant Tonegaru’s texts can be traced a series of thematic, ideological and structural similarities, together with the language’s urgency of shifting from the detachment of aestheticism and from symbolism to social and political engagement on a stern, melancholic tone. In addition to these hypotheses, the concepts of crisis and authenticity can be combined to provide a broader understanding of how the poetic discourse of the second generation of modernists incorporated both individual and collective traumatic experiences, and managed to challenge not only the poetic tradition but also the political power.