DISCURSUL PUBLICISTIC ARGHEZIAN. STRATEGII POLEMICE ÎN SCRISOAREA DESCHISĂ
THE JOURNALISTIC DISCOURSE OF ARGHEZI. POLEMIC STRATEGIES IN THE OPEN LETTER

Summary/Abstract: For the majority of adept readers and interpreters of the literature written between the World Wars, Tudor Arghezi represents the pamphleteer par excellence, as his journalistic writing is a perfect embodiment of the well-known expression “I hear enormously and I feel monstrously”, a line coined by one comic character from the work of playwright I. L. Caragiale. Literarily speaking, his polemical vocation has been probed mostly through the lenses of his pamphleteer craft, taking the perspective of the “active personal invention”, a criterion established by the very author of the Paper Thorns. Unfortunately, such a perspective reduces very much the area of identification of the explicit polemic discourse that is to be found in the majority of Arghezi’s journalistic writings. Therefore, the strengths of the pamphletic craft are conditioned by the outstretch into the imaginary, by the transcending of reality and the plunging into the space of autotelic fiction, which is a space unrestricted by ethical rigors of the polemical dialogue, whose only indicator of ingenuity is the sheer creativity. With Arghezi, a significant part of his daily writing possesses a double bid, pragmatic and esthetic; the discourse, abandoning the naked aggressiveness, or, by and large, relinquishing the allegorical fiction, stays often riveted inside the normed space of polemical exchange. In these cases, Arghezi’s ingenuity resides in the strategic exploitation of irony, with its various nuances, that is the fabric of the polemists’s art of feigning the adversary while displaying an un-effaceable deferential smile on his face.

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