Essay - : - Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania - the Writer (IV) by lucian vasile bagiu

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Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania - the Writer (IV) :: IV. Dramaturgy

Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania - the Writer (IV)
essay [ ]
IV. Dramaturgy

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by lucian vasile bagiu [lucian v. bagiu]

2007-10-02 | |

IV. The chapter dedicated to the analysis of Valeriu Anania’s dramaturgy resorts to, as much as possible, the sometimes critical evaluation of the bibliographical sources which the author can be related or related to. Here we have the most documented and structured section of our study, fully motivated by the fact that the writer Valeriu Anania was first acknowledged as playwright, and his plays relies on the artistic valuation of some essential myths of our national culture. After a minimal and purely expository introduction, which focuses on the “avatars of a dramatic poet”, every of the five plays is analysed in an autonomous chapter, which claims the hermeneutic exhaustion of the subject. The conclusion wants to depict the categories of mythical thinking in “the pentalogy of the Romanian myth”, and is followed by a necessary addenda, in which we analyse two “style exercises” of the playwright i.e. two drawer plays published circumstantially.
IV. 2 The dramatic poem Mioriţa (1966) does not represent a schematically simplistic rewriting of the theme, motifs and conflict of the archetypal ballad, but, on the contrary, approaches aspects of several variants, and introduces into the diegesis, in an original manner, at least one new element, i.e. the eros, which is actually given the supreme actantial role, surmounting the thanatos and fatality, decisive entities in the aesthetical configuration of the drama as well. The magic pagan pre-Christian elements used by the author are relevant, as well as those specific for Christianity, in order to identify to what extent the author relates associatively (or dissociatively) to the background of pre-historical mystery specific to the ballad, as well as to what extent Valeriu Anania, a writer of Orthodox theology education, understands to render the elements specific to Christianity to the product, thus shaping a new vision of the data of the myth.
In Valeriu Anania’s vision, the Romanian people has an ethnical psychological specificity towards existence and this can be explained as the coexistence of two great elements of the paradigm: death and love. Death and love are inherent to life to the same extent: death as an inevitable and natural moment to be accepted as such, and love, without which life would be a non-sense, is a short stop between two graves, but due to which life becomes more significant than death, it transcends it. This is exactly why the overlapping of the two valences of existence through the construction of the allegory death-wedding at factual level ought not to be interpreted as tragic fatalism but rather as apollinic serenity: the shepherd Moldan does not accept death with a pessimistically terrifying passivity but with understanding and optimism, as he accomplishes himself through love, thus consuming his given time. Through this, in conformity with Mircea Eliade’s opinion, Valeriu Anania gives a new meaning to the “philosophy” of the myth, in accordance with the significance conferred to it by the “cosmic Christianity”: the shepherd in Miorita is able to cancel the apparently irreversible consequences of a tragic event, rendering to it positive values, more difficult to shape. The answer given to fate, which seems hostile and tragic, is, for the protagonist of the cultured poem, love.
IV. 3. In the dramatic poem Meşterul Manole “Master Manole” (1968), Valeriu Anania shows an interest in explaining the process of creation. Dumitru Micu’s courageous statement seems to exhaust the subject of the play: “The main theme (…) seems to be taken from a treaty of general aesthetics: art starts from reality and, by transfiguring it into a new reality organised according to the laws of beauty, cancels the pattern.” (1) In the dramatic poem, the real pattern which needs cancelling is the woman and implicitly, the eros, while the concretising art is represented by the building of the church, as well as by the painting of icons. As for the role (function) of the beauty, this is related to fatality or meaning of the disintegration of life which is to accomplish itself through aesthetics, into highly superior valences: ”When nature shapes masterly beauty/The shape itself will fade into its own bloom.” (2) Valeriu Anania’s creator does not limit himself to simply acquire the cultural, artistic experience of Western Renaissance Europe, but retains an aesthetic theory which will become the main idea of the poem. The painter Safirin, while accompanied by his complementary doubling, will assimilate the essence of the legend according to which the Italian artist fell in love not with the human model who had inspired him initially, but with his own creation, Mona Lisa, due to an ineffable fact: the smile, an expression not of reality, but of a reality aesthetically transfigured through “his masterly gift”.
Paradoxically or not, with Valeriu Anania, the protagonist Manole is situated closer to the strict data of the creator than to the creating man (characteristic to Blaga), however not estranging from the mythical status. What distinguishes fundamentally Valeriu Anania’s dramatic poem from Lucian Blaga’s drama is exactly the softening of the protesting gestures of the master, the lack of any kind of resistance to the solution of sacrifice, which he determines and imposes to his fellows, not the unconsciousness during the sacrifice but the extreme lucidity, the almost inhuman over-solicitation of the creating lust, to which he surrenders constantly, through the sacrifice of both his wife and baby. All these considerations do nothing but bring Manole closer to the condition of the mythical hero. The “dehumanisation” performed by Valeriu Anania on his protagonist projects him completely into the mitem of creation. The myth, the ballad, Blaga’s drama offered an open ending, “limiting” to present and express the process of creation. By surmounting the limit, through the explanation of the process of creation, Anania’s poem becomes limitative. For lack of any kind of rhetorical interrogations, and through the author’s acquisition of the performance of an aesthetic theory assumed by the whole universe of the drama, Valeriu Anania’s poem becomes a closed artistic self-sufficient cosmoid, and thus, authentically orbiting in the proximity of the masterpiece.
IV. 4. In the dramatic poem Du-te vreme, vino vreme! (Go Away, Time! Come, Time!) (1969), Valeriu Anania proves high ingenuity in his modality of configuring his diegetic universe. The idea is that if Făt-Frumos has already had access to the world of fairy-tales and if this is specific to him, then his descending into this world is a veritable mistake, a useless action, lacking natural reasons, and apriorically meant to a lamentable failure, the inadaptability of the world of fiction to the “factual” one being a fundamental characteristic of narratology; the two worlds exclude each other because they have different ontological and axiological natures. We can deduce from these that Făt-Frumos is meant from the very beginning not to be able to integrate himself into this world, where he will find his existence useless, his only chance being that of returning to the world he has come from. His destiny seems thus irreversible shaped from the very beginning of the story in the dramatic poem. Făt-Frumos is a tragic hero because his aim is the accomplishment of man’s perennial aspiration to perfection, an illusory delusion to which he wants to giver concrete shape. The tragedy of the hero derives especially from the fact that he seems to know, he is aware of the ingrate role he has to perform in the history of the dramatic poem, he assumes his destiny. He thus accepts his status, understanding that, though unlikely to be victorious, his illusory fight for youth without aging and life without dying in this land is necessary to maintain, sustain and perpetuate the existential philosophy of the myth of the fairy-tale. This is, by accepting the convention of such an exegetic approach, the culminating point of the exceptional success of Valeriu Anania’s dramatic poem: the interference of the diegesis of autonomous texts: intertextuality.
In 1976 Constantin Noica said that it had not been good for man’s thinking and heart to conceive the Being as something unchangeable and everlasting and that it would be wiser to consider the being as continuous development, as it was seen in the Romanian vision: becoming into being. (3) Noica said that not having in mind Anania’s dramatic poem, but his words have an inner tacit consensus which apriorically probes essential affinities with “the Romanian philosophical expression.” The playwright gives an artistic shape exactly to the essence of Noica’s philosophical thinking: the attempt to imagine his broadness as fixed into a frame, which expresses rather an absence through its perfection. A sphere without flaws, thus eternal, will remain distant and foreign, ultimately inexistent, for the dynamic and eternally regenerative through its own characteristic of ruling within duration. Being does not mean stagnation, but a continuous process, development, inexhaustible becoming, even in disintegration, necessary so that it lately turn into regeneration. The dramatic poem offers artistic shapes to the entire philosophical complex suggested by the fairy-tale and extended by Noica. The unchangeable and the everlasting, seen through the image and representation of Făt-Frumos and of the youth without aging and the life without dying “are not good”. They determine anomalies of the being, updated through an illustration of the grotesque levelled to fundamental aesthetic category. The being as still in development i.e. what the unnatural perfection of the protagonist is trying desperately to obtain, is a permanent inner presence of the story in the poem, impossible to suppress. Ultimately, the becoming into being shapes as major theme of the poem, through the main character, Juma’ de Om (a name that could be translated as Half a Man), who performs in the story both before Făt-Frumos’s appearance and disappearance. Thus, we are suggested once more that “the ever-lasting and the changeable”, the un-Time understood as a-temporality represent transitory and illusory episodes of an eternal turning of the being into being in time.
IV. 5. In Steaua zimbrului (The Star of the Bison) (1971) we notice the extremely hazardous ambition to explain both the modality of the configuration of a myth (read of the legend) reconfiguration of the data of the historical fact and the reasonable mechanisms which determined the demythologising of another fairy-tale and its introduction into the extreme data (delimited and limitative) of the historical fact. To integrate both the rational and the irrational into a historical reality in a dramatic poem, in spite of the many inclinations towards myth, and especially to challenge the artistic expression of two totally opposed processes, birth and the suppression of “the germinal metaphor”, represents an excessive task, the author betraying himself with his own instruments.
IV. 6. In the play Greul pământului (The Sprite of the Earth) (1982), the myth of the earth is the setting for the heroes of the story. The author had manifested his belief that the Romanian people is innerly and mainly a carrier (and an expression) of a myth of the earth, even if an explicit documentary proof does not exist in the folkloric literature. Mistica pământului (The Mystique of the Earth) (4) an article previous to the drama, is the expression of the writer’s belief regarding the existence of this phenomenon in the Romanian popular culture up to even suggesting the chthonic as natural psycho-analytical feature of local ethnicity. What Valeriu Anania performs in The Sprite of the Earth is the expression of his imagination regarding what could have been atemporal, or could imponderably be the essence and shape of this mystique of the earth. Even more than in the case of “heraldic legend” from The Star of the Bison (1971) we witness the cultured creation of a pretended popular mythology, the playwright even overpassing the previous attempts, so specific to his dramaturgy, to explain “the germinal metaphor of the myth”. This is a risky bet, won only partially, but more convincing than the previous historical drama.
But Valeriu Anania proves his creative subtlety by contaminating the myth of the earth (with an immediate expression in the stories of the sprites of the earth) with the integration in the data of monadism, of virtuality, constantly suggested through the idea of the fecund germination of “the seeds”. The Sprites of the earth are not purely empty stillness in the reiteration of an a-temporal, a-historical in-human ritual, but …seeds. The maintenance of formula within pure generalities (as it happens when an answer is given regarding what will remain after the last Stâlpnic dies “remains the seed which will have no ripening but the thought that everything can ripen again”shows the wide aesthetics of the text. The Wallachians’ existence within history becomes continual in the ineffable dimension of imponderability, as they are naturally unable to disappear as existentiality as long as the idea of an eternally possible being is maintained. It is not necessary that the entity should manifest itself concretely, palpably, as long as the possibility of this manifestation is acknowledged. It is as if, by not giving up the paradigm of the myth, the entity were living within the historical facts through the means of idea – an artistic expression of the Plato’s Ideas, of Leibniz’s monad, of Blaga’s Great Tear. Ioniţă feels this fulfilment in the inextricable link with the ancient earth, from which the Wallachians cannot part ontologically.
IV. 7. In “the pentalogy of the Romanian myth” Valeriu Anania expresses mainly the conception of the consecrated spirit as dimension, through which the hero – or even the entire community represented by the protagonist – can have access to the unlimited absolute. However, if we take into consideration the fact that all the five events presented by the playwright are mythical, the space configured as such and authorised by the pentalogy is discovered as sacred by the receptor. The entire Romanian land is entirely sacred for the Romanians. The sanctification and consecration of the Romanian land does not represent, however, the single feature specific for the pentalogy, as the reversed event is also surprised i.e. the desanctification, “the secularisation of the Romanian land” from the mythical data and the entrance into the historical data. It would be more appropriate to notice that the author places himself at the interference of the making it sacred and depriving it of sacredness of the Romanian land, by making it sacred through the presentation of the modality in which the myth was born, and by making it sacred it through the revealing of the demythologisation. Generally, Valeriu Anania starts from the vision of the closed space, in which the actions of imagination are suppressed, nevertheless having the illusion of the journey full of obstacles. But the vision converges towards the expression of the closed space, in which man’s imagination rushes towards an indefinite search, which can end into nothingness, in the case of time elusion (Făt-Frumos), into death (Moldan), into artistic creation (Manole) or into initiator of politics (Dragos, Bogdan) or even into myth (Ioniţă).
In Valeriu Anania’s pentalogy, the inner aim of the dramatic text can be that of beginning the expression of a continuous, perpetual future. Nevertheless, the mythical time is a time of repeatability, ritually oriented towards the springs of spiritual creation, which gives man the possibility, the proper background to really re-live the conquests of the past in its genuine purity. (5). The possible perpetual future claims to have its origins in the archetypal pattern of primordiality, of illo tempore, and this is why, formally, the dramas of the author turn back obsessively to the origins of the myth up to the possibility of singling the myth of the eternal return (and, subsidiarily, of the nostalgia of primordiality) as integrating matrix of the entire pentalogy (and even of his entire work). The playwright aims to express the mythical time complementarily and simultaneously with the historical time. Valeriu Anania underlines the side of the historical time, up to the formal cancellation of the mythical one, the internal history in his dramas being carefully correlated with the documentary attestation of factual history (for illustration, the time in Master Manole is not mythical as with Lucian Blaga, but strictly delimited by Neagoe Basarab’s ruling; the time of the Moldavian settlings is simply anchored in historicity …). It is not a mere happening that the dramatic poem that concentrates almost exclusively on the status of the mythical time is the most accomplished one. Go Away, Time! Come, Time!, as aesthetic expression of a-temporality (or, more proper, of non-temporality), is an inner pleading, through subtext suggestions, for the strict delimitation of the historical time from the mythical one. All the other four dramas show an inconsequence of the author in choosing one of the two temporal dimensions, out of the ambition of expressing the possibility of the coexistence of both.

(1) Dumitru Micu, Meşterul Manole, quoted in Valeriu Anania, Greul pământului, o pentalogie a mitului românesc, I, Bucureşti. Editura Eminescu, 1982, p. 233.
(2) Valeriu Anania, Meşterul Manole, in Valeriu Anania, Greul pământului, quoted edition, pp. 264-265.
(3) Constantin Noica, Un înţeles românesc al fiinţei, „Steaua”, year XXVII (1976), November, no. 11, p. 50, in Constantin Noica, Istoricitate şi eternitate. Repere pentru o istorie a culturii româneşti. Foreword, bibliography and coordinated volume by Mircea Handoca, Capricorn, 1989, p. 47.
(4) Valeriu Anania, Mistica pământului, in „Credinţa”, Detroit, 4/1969, in Valeriu Anania, De dincolo de ape. Pagini de jurnal şi alte texte. Volume coordinated by Ioan-Nicu Turcan, Cluj-Napoca. Editura Dacia, 2000, pp. 45-47.
(5) Mircea Eliade, Traite d’histoire de religions, Paris, 1970, pp. 326-343, in Romulus Vulcănescu, Mitologie română, Bucureşti. Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1987, p. 19.

Lucian Bâgiu,
2006, Műhlbach, Transilvania

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