METAMORPHOSES OF LOVE IN ELIADESCIAN PROSE
METAMORPHOSES OF LOVE IN ELIADESCIAN PROSE

Summary/Abstract: In the prose of Mircea Eliade, complex worlds are built, loaded with symbols and meanings that are revealed gradually to the discerning reader. Eliade’s narratives generally have multiple interpretation keys, obvious in the text, but through which a series of profound, surprising events and experiences are highlighted, which often redefine the way the individual understands the world around him.The theme of full love and transformations through love can be frequently identified in the writer’s work, in different forms which, however, converge towards the idea of love as a way of knowledge and self-knowledge, a gnostic love, which proposes to those involved to leave the horizontal plane and go through some transformative experiences. Eliade’s lovers leave the sphere of everyday life and could open their eyes to a mythical, eternal reality, accessible but only once a series of conditions are met.To illustrate these two poses of lovers in Eliade’s work, we will analyse two of the writer’s novels, Șarpele and Nuntă în cer, with an emphasis on how couples do or do not metamorphose into representations of the Adamic couple. The two narratives capture two different developments in the case of lovers who aspire to be saved from the human condition through love - in the case of the novel Șarpele, Andronic and Dorina, respectively the failure of the lovers in the Nuntă în cer, who miss their chance for happiness because they are, somehow, out of time.

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