Semantica periferiei în Sînt o babă comunistă și Voci la distanță
Rezumat
Abstract: Representations of the periphery in contemporary Romanian literature appear in various forms. The novels I’m an Old Communist Hag by Dan Lungu (2007) and Voices from Afar by Gabriela Adameșteanu (2022) are based on a less obvious representation of two types of peripheries. Containing the reflections of two female characters on the communist period in Romania and, in the latter case, also on the pandemic situation in recent years, the structure of the two novels is configured by relating the narrative essences to peripheral frames. In Dan Lungu’s writing, the periphery suggests the self-exclusion of the female character from the natural course of post-December society due to deeply rooted beliefs in the protagonist’s mentality. The peripheral space is significant not for examining the communist regime but for shaping a complex image of the transition to another world, hindered by nostalgia for security and, ultimately, by an identity crisis. In Gabriela Adameșteanu’s text, the periphery takes on different valences: it becomes a space that offers the protagonist the opportunity to distance herself from the daily life disrupted by the pandemic, to contemplate the present and, in the second part of the novel, the last decade of communism. On the other hand, the structure of the two novels is synonymous through the identification of another common element, complementary to the peripheries. Voices constitute an important coordinate of the narrative fabric in both cases, as the protagonists dialogue with other characters from various types of distances, spatial or mental. These distances between the voices of the characters finalize the outlining of the peripheries as spaces from the midst of which the structure of the novels is built. In other words, this paper aims to draw a parallel between the two novels, considering the relationship created between their peripheral spaces and the voices that not only dialogue but become a constitutive aspect of the mechanisms through which the authors provide images of the transition and evolution of post-December Romanian society.
Keywords: periphery, transition, (post)communism, narrative voice, self-exclusion
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