Cities, “white stone cemeteries” and “landscapes of nails”
Cities, “white stone cemeteries” and “landscapes of nails”

Urban representations in Marin Sorescu’s “American Diary”

Summary/Abstract: The starting point of my study is a provocative volume written by Marin Sorescu, one of the most important Romanian writers of the second half of the 20th century: Jurnal. Romanul călătoriilor/ Diary. A Travels Novel (1999). The volume that gathers different texts, elaborated during or immediately after traveling to various regions of the globe, has a composite aspect. It includes not only diarist pages, organized according to the topoï visited (the locality, country or continent where Sorescu arrives with socio-cultural or professional occasions: Finland, Mexico, West Berlin, Bari, Warsaw, Paris, Brăila, Cheia, etc.) The book also includes dialogues with cultural personalities encountered beyond the Romanian borders (for example, with Mircea Eliade, Dominique DeRoux, Clavo, Horia Damian, Giancarlo Vigorelli), dozens of poems most likely written during these travels and articulated around the space imaginary etc. More than that, even the texts that at a first glance could be considered strictly diaristic (since they open with usual spatial and temporal indications and rely on a certain rhetoric of the pseudo-confession), are rather hybrid, because in most of them the writer nonchalantly mixes different scriptural formulas. In my paper, I focus on one of the most remarkable diaries of its kind: the American Diary which is written in the winter and spring of 1972, when Sorescu visits several cities in the states of New York, Iowa, Illinois and Kentucky. Although he is caught up with various academic and cultural events, the writer – who recommends himself as an ”anti-traveler” – has time to leisurely explore, with an interesting mixture of fascination and ethno-identity skepticism, the American spaces that he describes thoroughly and analyzes with lucidity, in a text of real sociological interest. The concrete result of these observations is an ingenious and provocative book of travel literature, in which reflection on the faces of the American city (particularly, the big one or even the metropolis)acquires an essential role. On the one hand, in front of the confusing urban spectacle (which he perceives as contrasting, comfortable, bright, hyper-technological and consequently artificial, sterile, almost frozen), the writer feels the need to retreat, to activate his affective memory and to re-create his native village through writing. It is known that the cycle of poems La Lilieci/ At the Bats was started during Sorescu's year in the USA. But this volume must be read not only in an intertextual key, as an esthetic consequence of his discovery of Spoon River, Edgar Lee Masters 's anthology (as some Romanian critics have mistakenly claimed). In my opinion, La Lilieci/ At the Bats' manuscript – about which the diarist does not mention anything in the American Journal – is also a fertile materialization of the deep nostalgia of the writer who, at a huge distance from home, feels exiled or uprooted. Consequently, he re-transforms the harsh poetry of his native space into a splendid text in which individual memory blends, harmoniously, with the community one. On the other hand, the American Journal resists very well and deserves to be read for itself, as a remarkable travel literature, in which one can identify not only the general features of this type of narrative, but also the particular notes of a spatial and urban representation containing the marks of Marin Sorescu's originality.

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