Efectele „literaturitei”: singurătatea existenţială ireconciliabilă în romanele lui H. Bonciu
The Effects of Literaturitis: the Irreconcilable Existential Loneliness in the Novels of H. Bonciu

Summary/Abstract: H. Bonciu is an unusual interwar writer, a curious case of solitude and experiment that confused the writers, the readers and the critics. He does not belong to any literary school or movement. The aim of my study is to emphasize the artistic consequences of crossing the borders between biography and fiction in Bonciu’s writings. Indeed, the portrait of the real person of the author is ambiguous. Likewise its author, Bonciu’s prose eludes any attempt of classification, so that some critics doubt that the targeted texts – Bagaj... Strania dublă existenţă a unui om în patru labe from 1934 and Pensiunea doamnei Pipersberg, from 1936 – are indeed novels. In his experimental text he melts avant-garde with expressionist and surrealist features. The internal coherence of the text is given by the presence of Ramses Sinidis Ferdinand, who has several roles: protagonist and author of the story, but also the narrator of the Bagaj ... giving the impression of a strange autobiographic novel. Some key reading encourages the reader to identify the central character with the narrator-author, named Bonciu. Whether he talks about the torture of writing, about the propensity for self-destruction of his double caricature, or about the dispelling fascination for women and its dispossession of the soul after having contact with the protagonist, he remains a permanent solitary, caught in the expressionist conflict between the spiritual world and trivial life, that turns into a violent reality, often a surreal one. Therefore, writing is for H. Bonciu the peculiar way to ensure the preservation of identity in a stable form: the narrative, while all the other alternatives equate the decay in animality. The most interesting aspect of Bonciu’s novels, worth investigating and yet not enough clarified by the critics, is the relationship between the protagonist, prose and its author; a relationship of subtle coherence and unity.

• Details
• Contents