REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS POST.REVISITING THE TRAUMA OF COMMUNISM IN STYLE
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS POST.REVISITING THE TRAUMA OF COMMUNISM IN STYLE

Summary/Abstract: This article is part of a larger effort to explain national identity construction as any of four available discourse types informed by as many master tropes. I am looking at Pray for Brother Alexandru, Constantin Noica’s memoirs of communist imprisonment in order to show that rhetorical irony and logical/philosophical paradox are the tropological mechanism of coping with the colonial trauma of both Western and Soviet modernization. My discourse-oriented approach (a subjective variant of constructivist theories of nationalism) rests on the premise that (post)communism has been for the Soviet republics and satellite states a “softer” and more complicated form of colonization than that of Third World countries. Noica’s use of paradox is complicated by the internal dialogism of his narrative in such a way that it can be made to voice both a radical opposition to communism, capitalism, modern civilization and all received opinion, and also a philosophical contradiction or irony which he uses in order to convert defeat into victory and passivity into action, turning colonial history’s victims into victors. Paradox is, therefore, the rhetorical tactic of withstanding the effects of cultural colonization by total acquiescence, of adopting the vocabulary and stance of the colonial oppressor only to undermine and alter its very essence.

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