Romania arrived at the gates of modernity after being mostly absent from the lessons taught by the Renaissance and Enlightenment. While Transylvania maintained strong bonds with the west, the southern and eastern principalities of Wallachia and Moldova remained tied to the Ottoman Empire up until 19th century.

 

After centuries of foreign domination, themes like despair, hopelessness, skepticism, or nihilism were deeply embedded in the national psyche of Romanians. The absurd was also present. One would only need to examine the effects of the Phanariots in the development of a national identity. For more than a hundred years, between 1715 and 1821, Wallachia and Moldova were ruled by a series of Greek princes from the Phanar quarter in Istanbul, who did little to emancipate their people. At a time when the American and French Revolutions brought a renewed sense of hope for many people across the world, the Phanariots kept these two principalities mostly asleep.

 

The slumbering status quo quickly changed during the 1820s, when the Romanian bourgeoisie decided to replace its kaftans and oversized headgear with the more fashionable suits and top hats one could find in Paris and Vienna. This radical shift did not take long to catch on within the better circles of Bucharest, intellectuals and politicians included. Transforming the inner core of an entire nation would take much longer though, which is why the disparities between the west and the two principalities continued for decades. Yet, such a wide leap forward, blessed since 1866 by a series of German monarchs, led to miraculous developments in all aspects of life, including the arts. Following the unification of all Romanian provinces in 1918, a plethora of new trends and ideas sprouted in Bucharest. Under the umbrella of modernism, a few Romanian sculptors, painters, and writers eventually embraced more abstract concepts, usually inspired by western models. Surprisingly, an even smaller group of writers pushed these newly discovered boundaries even further, by toying with the unattainable and the illogical. It took just about a hundred years.

 

By the time Romanian writers became interested in absurdism, this philosophical theory was widely spread throughout Western Europe. A founder of Existentialism, the Danish philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was among the first to examine the world through this lens, followed by Beckett, Kafka, and Camus, among others. The absurdists saw the universe and life as irrational, with no possible meanings outside what we create ourselves. Romanians resonated with the absurd through a sense of hopelessness that had deeper roots, going back centuries. This was a known dimension for them. It all came naturally, intuitively, and without much reflection and soul searching.

 

The present article puts the spotlight on four eminent Romanians of the modern era: a poet, a playwright, a philosopher, and a composer, all of them enchanted by the absurd. Despite a common ground, the authors discussed in this article had to leave Romania in order to explore this theme, and when they did, they wrote in French, or they wrote music. Were these émigrés mostly driven by an immediate need to succeed in the grand capitals of Europe? Was the attraction for the absurd an older but dormant phenomenon within the Romanian psyche? Was it also about being anti-government, anti-war, and eventually anti-communism? It was likely about all these, as well as many other personal reactions and frustrations, as I shall point out below.

 

The origins of this brief study are multifaceted. After more than thirty years as an émigré myself, I am still amused that for the average ignorant of the world, Vlad Dracula and Ceaușescu continue to remain among the most notorious Romanians today. In literature and the arts, the more illustrious names come from the 20th century, and they often include writers who distinguished themselves by promoting radical and unconventional views. Romanians embraced modernism without a long history of innovation in the arts, and when they did, the most successful ones took extreme positions. Clearly, a natural progression from traditional representations to abstract concepts did not happen in a predictable way. I sensed a common theme and proceeded to further investigate.

 

Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) was among the first Romanians to achieve some notoriety in the west by taking a radical anti-establishment position. Widely known today as the father of the Dada movement, Tzara (born as Samuel Rosenstock) was mainly a poet and performance artist, but also a journalist, art critic, and composer. While in Bucharest, his work as a co-founder and editor of the short-lived Simbolul journal set the stage in 1912 for the first avant-garde movements in Romania. After some years of study at the University of Bucharest, and several publications in other short-lived Romanian journals, Tristan Tzara left for Zurich in 1915, at the beginning of World War I.

 

The birth of the Dada movement took place in early 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when Tristan Tzara appeared in front of an audience singing sentimental songs and handing crumpled paper balls to a shocked audience. Few details remain about this first Dada show. Following a few other actors walking on stilts, Tzara reappeared on stage dressed as a clown in a show that had no story, no logic, and no specific purpose besides challenging everything and everyone. From its very first days, the Dada movement ridiculed structure, categories, governments, religion, art, and all the bourgeois who created and enjoyed them. Many of these shows ended with riots and protests, sometimes even involving the police. Tzara also rebelled against his upbringing, the outdated views in provincial Moldova, and authority in general. His nihilistic views were even more radical than Hugo Ball’s, who was a co-founder of Dadaism. Two years after the first show, in “Dada Manifesto 1918” Tristan Tzara said:

 

“Dada means nothing […] Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity. Those who are with us preserve their freedom. We recognize no theory.”[1]

 

After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara’s writings on Dadaism became even more absurd:

 

“Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: self-kleptomania, man's normal condition, is Dada. But the real Dadas are against Dada.”[2]

 

While in Paris, Tzara’s views on the Dada movement led to an eventual split with André Breton and Francis Picabia, with whom he collaborated on numerous early shows. The movement eventually became linked with Surrealism, and despite Tzara’s activism up until the end of this life, Dadaism lost most of its steam by the mid 1920s. Throughout its short life, the Dada movement included performance shows, publications, public gatherings, protests, and concerts that put a spotlight on the absurdity of bourgeois life, government, and traditional art.

 

Tristan Tzara’s work was very much admired by Eugène Ionesco (1909-1994), a younger fellow Romanian writer. Despite a prolific career as a poet and literary critic in Bucharest, Ionesco’s foremost contributions to 20th century culture came after Word War II in Paris, when at the age of 40 he began writing short plays in French. His understanding of language subtleties came from an early age. With a Romanian father and a mother of French origins, Ionesco spent much of his childhood in France, followed by high school and university studies in Bucharest. He was a great admirer of the Dada movement, the Surrealists, and was a good friend of Emil Cioran from his early years in Bucharest.

 

The first success came in 1950 when The Bald Soprano premiered in Paris, followed soon after by The Lesson, and The Chairs. Beginning in 1954 Ionesco started writing long theatre plays as well, among which The Killer and Rhinoceros are still widely staged today. These absurdist gems, which Ionesco sometimes called anti-plays underscore the futility of human communication. Despite proper grammar and syntax, the dialogue is often pointless, with characters that seem to exist in parallel worlds. In this theatre of the absurd, Ionesco’s features alienated individuals, driven by mechanical gestures and incoherent behaviors. Such illogical statements and dialogues abound in The Bald Soprano for example:

 

“Mr. Smith: A conscientious doctor must die with his patient if they can’t get well together. The captain of a ship goes down with his ship into the briny deep. He does not survive alone.

Mrs. Smith: One cannot compare a patient with a ship.

Mr. Smith: Why not? A ship has its diseases too.”[3]

 

From the very beginning of the play, Mr. Smith, described as a middle-class Englishman living in an English house with his English wife, appears to be quite a thoughtful intellectual. Through proper vocabulary and grammar, he only excels at a useless form of dialogue: “Here’s a thing I don’t understand. In the newspaper, they always give the age of deceased persons but never the age of the newly born. That doesn’t make sense.”[4]

 

Ionesco’s plays came at a time when the role of language in society was examined by many writers, among which Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett are the most prominent. Unlike Tristan Tzara, Ionesco was not a pioneer. Yet, his plays gave life to a deep sense of social alienation that permeated many layers of western culture. The absurd was now on stage, on display for everyone to examine.

 

Almost thirty years after his death, Emil Cioran (1911-1995) remains one of the more revered continental philosophers, especially within the Romanian and French circles of intellectuals. Like Ionesco, he achieved notoriety in Paris after World War II, by publishing in French. The two of them met while studying at the University of Bucharest in the late 20s and became lifelong friends.

 

The major themes in Cioran’s philosophy are pessimism, skepticism, nihilism, and failure. These themes appear in many titles of his works, from “A Short History of Decay” (1949), to “History and Utopia” (1960), and “The Trouble of Being Born” (1973). They can also be found in various aspects of his life, from his early failures as a teacher in Romania, to his life as a perpetual student in Paris until the age of 40. Cioran lived a very secluded life, without a family around, while suffering from chronic insomnia.

 

A variety of quotes and words of wisdom from Cioran have remained, many of them pointing to the absurdity of life:

 

“When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance, but which simulates an illusion of life.”[5]

 

Such deep questioning of life, the human condition, our society, and its values can also be found in Tristan Tzara’s early Dada manifestos. What Tzara attempted to point out through his cabaret shows, humor, poetry, and writings, became a lifetime mission for Cioran, infused with a strong dose of pessimism. At different times in the 20th century, and for different reasons, both Tzara and Cioran became absorbed by the absurdity of life.

The fourth Romanian discussed in this article is a composer. Towards the end of the 20th century, few Romanian émigrés who managed to make waves in the Western Europe had a more controversial aura than Horațiu Rădulescu (1942-2008). Following his graduation from the Bucharest Conservatory in 1968, Rădulescu moved to France, where he started composing solo and chamber works based on a new type of sonic texture, which he called sound plasma. While the concept of plasmatic music can be explained quite easily, many of its dimensions remain intangible, not because of our inability to comprehend them, but because this is how they were meant to be. Rădulescu adored the in-between and the unattainable. Among the complex features of plasmatic music, the most important one relies upon hiding the cause-and-effect relationship. By using graphic scores, drawings, and poetic suggestions with hints of mysticism, Rădulescu sought to move beyond the traditional way of writing music with dots and lines (short versus long notes), in order to create a sonic texture that was mostly amorphous. The outcome, always fluid, in motion, was achieved by making sure the players would always fight their immediate desire to be in full control of their sound. While the concept can be grasped quite easily, the path towards breaking the cause-and-effect relationship remained mysterious. “I hide the cause-and-effect relationship through divinization”[6] he said, during an interview with fellow Romanian composer Iancu Dumitrescu, an equally fascinating figure in the world of 20th century avant-garde music.

Rădulescu’s music and world of ideas are equally fascinating and nebulous, reason for which describing them in all their complexity and richness remains a problematic task. Many contemporary composers found them at least controversial, quite bizarre, often even absurd. His works can open unseen doors to the surreal and sublime, by defying most people’s expectations of what music ought to be. Haunting concert experiences are commonplace. References to divinity, ancient rituals, Byzantine chant, and the Far East, paint a fantastic panorama of far-away places and times. Yet, one wonders why no other composer has showed any interest in writing plasmatic music, more than 50 years after Rădulescu introduced his radical ideas and works to Parisian audiences.

This brief panorama of the absurd in the 20th century captures only four portraits. Was this a unique Romanian phenomenon? Was it Parisian chic? Tzara, Ionesco, and Cioran’s writings were in French, while Rădulescu’s compositions were written mostly in Paris, always for western performers.

A few parallels and intersections can be observed between the four Romanians discussed here. Despite living in different eras, Tristan Tzara and Emil Cioran took equally wide swings at everything and everybody. Tzara ridiculed the entire structure of the modern society, including governments, religion, and art, while Cioran questioned the purpose of life itself. For us, coming into contact with such titanic missions can be amusing as well as terribly depressing, depending on which text one reads, or the time of day when that reading occurs. With a more sense of purpose, Ionesco remained focused on playing with the absurdity of language, followed decades later by Rădulescu, who introduced a new type of music language. Altogether, these four Romanians joined modernity with passion and skepticism at the same time, only to end up twisting it in radical ways.

Although faint, various political dimensions connect a few of these authors as well. Tristan Tzara moved from Bucharest to Zurich in order to escape the horrors of World War I, the authority of the state, and the army. At the end of his life, he joined the French Communist Party, became an anti-fascist, and in 1960 protested the Algerian War. On the other hand, Cioran took an interest in the Iron Guard during his youth, which was a World War II far-right nationalist movement in Romania. Horațiu Rădulescu’s father was actually a member of this organization, reason for which he was imprisoned after World War II. This happened when Horațiu was very young, but decades after, he was expelled from the Bucharest Conservatory because of his father’s activities.  We also know from Eugène Ionesco that his father was fascinated by authority: “For him, as soon as a party got the power, the party was right. Therefore, he was with the Iron Guard, he was a democrat, franc mason, a nationalist, and a Stalinist. For him, every opposition was wrong. For me, the opposition was right.”[7] At different times during the 20th century and for different reasons, these four authors rejected authoritarian movements on multiple sides of the political spectrum.

Not that long ago, we bid farewell to a century that arrived with a taste for the abstract but took us on the heights of the absurd: two world wars, communism, and so many other endless struggles. From Tzara to Cioran and Ionesco to Rădulescu, such radical questioning during a century that brought few answers may appear at times pointless. What can we build on these new foundations? Is radical questioning going to bring progress? Is there even progress in the arts? In a poetic way, these new art forms remain absurdly beautiful. Today, at a time when more and more of what we do is governed by machines and algorithms, we need not forget that life’s pleasures come and go unexpectedly, and often without a reason. Life is beautiful, with or without meaning. Every now and then, life is also absurd.

Liviu Marinescu

Los Angeles, June 2024

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Tzara Tristan “Dada Manifesto”. 1918

[2] Tzara, Tristan "VII". La Vie des Lettres (in French). Paris, 1920.

[3] Ionesco, Eugène “The Bald Soprano”, Grove Press, 1958, page 11 (translated from French by Donald M. Allen).

[4] Ionesco, Eugène “The Bald Soprano”, page 11.

[5] Cioran, Emil "On the Hights of Despair”, Editura "Fundația pentru Literatură și Artă", Bucharest 1934

[6] Iancu Dumitrescu, “Dialog cu Horațiu Rădulescu: Musique spectrale, composition, creation, vie,” (in Romanian) YouTube, accessed on July 12, 2010.

 

[7] Ionesco “Present-Past, Past-Present” (in Romanian). Editura Humanitas, Bucharest, 1993.