LIBRARY AND LIBRARIAN IN THE NOVEL THE FAILING LIGHT BY MIRCEA ELIADE
LIBRARY AND LIBRARIAN IN THE NOVEL THE FAILING LIGHT BY MIRCEA ELIADE

Summary/Abstract: In this paper we propose an analysis of the librarian’s figure and of the library space, as they emerge from one of Mircea Eliade’s novels, “Lumina ce se stinge…” [=The Failing Light…], published in 1934. The topic is a part of a wider research, considering the libraries and the librarians in fiction, as elements of the cultural memory. On the following, we analyse the peculiarities of Eliade’s imaginary library and his fictional librarian, taking into account the writer’s habit of giving his characters, in addition to symbolic and mythical dimensions, consistent autobiographical features. Although Eliade’s “Lumina ce se stinge…” is not a favourite novel of the Romanian critics, the work is relevant in our attempt, as it proposes an interesting variant of an imaginary library and a mysterious portrait of a librarian, as special elements of cultural memory. They enrich the series of librarians in fiction, universally known, as well as their huge creators, Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco or Elias Canetti. As we are about to notice, Eliade`s variants are different from those “standardized” by the influential writers of the following decades, both through philosophical and symbolic consistency of the character, and by its epic becoming.

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