Satire Meets Critical Realism in the European Semiperiphery: A Study on Ibsen and Caragiale
Rezumat
Abstract: Henrik Ibsen and Ion Luca Caragiale seem to have nothing in common but that each is considered the “national playwright” of Norway and Romania, respectively. The present contribution seeks to draw some parallels between the two (semi)peripheral authors from the late 19th and early 20th century based on their ideological positions in the literary fields of their countries. After tracing the relationship between their dramatic output and the idea of revolution, i.e., how revolution in several of its forms is reflected in their works, I work my way towards their common preoccupation for “legalizing” the world—either through bureaucracy or finance—and how this preoccupation finds its most suitable expression. Finally, I discuss how form plays a crucial role in officializing content and how Ibsen’s seriousness reflects the more prosperous, more established Norwegian bourgeoisie, whereas Caragiale’s mockery, satire, and absurdism lays bare the “frivolousness” of the new Romanian middleclass, as aspirational as it is morally precarious.
Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.
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