TYPES OF POLITICAL NOVEL. THE ROMANIAN POLITICAL NOVEL versus THE IDEOLOGIZATION OF HAPPINESS
TYPES OF POLITICAL NOVEL. THE ROMANIAN POLITICAL NOVEL versus THE IDEOLOGIZATION OF HAPPINESS

Summary/Abstract: In the Romanian literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, we can distinguish three types of political fiction: the pre-political novel, the unalloyed political novel, and the eudaimonic novel. The pre-political novel refers to the totalitarian reality that could not be modelled by words as the expression of genuine political desiderata. Violence grabs new functions. The unalloyed political novel is the genre focused on politics as the main theme, such as the dehumanization in political settings. The eudaimonic novel is centered on political freedom as the essential condition of happiness. Under communism, the oscillation between necessity and coercion was insignificant, aiming to reduce the whole society to a one-dimensional individual: the ideologized man. Loneliness was the suspicious, subversive, anti-system state of being. Considered obsolete, outdated, weak, revolting, the political novel of the first epoch socialist realism is replaced by the political novel of communism 2.0 (after 1960). Allusions or contrastive references to the ”Bolshevik” times of the former epoch of the propaganda novel (the Romanian 1950‘s) were not only present, without fear, but became mandatory. After 1989, the political novel captures the simulacra of an alienated society. The new novels encapsulate the essence of freedom, democracy, and reality as unable to withstand the production of counterfeit values. In the vein of skepticism, these new political novels are permeated by the bitter feeling of having betrayed a historical moment.

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