“The Sporadic Journal” – an “Intimate” Insight into the Romanian Literary Milieu from the Perspective of the Assumed Exile Cover Image

„Jurnal pe sărite” – viziune „intimă” asupra mediului literar românesc din perspectiva exilului asumat
“The Sporadic Journal” – an “Intimate” Insight into the Romanian Literary Milieu from the Perspective of the Assumed Exile

Author(s): Ramona Demarcsek
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Universitatea »1 Decembrie 1918« Alba Iulia
Keywords: private diary; diarist; author-reader relationship; author-character relationship

Summary/Abstract: At a time when freedom of speech was a relatively new concept and it began to be experimented with by a generation that had been used to forced silence or, at best, with censorship controlled speech, namely in the “post-December era”, which I consider, for personal and purely subjective reasons, that it manifested itself until the turn of the millennium, the literary marketplace faced a boom of “private” writings, most of them written before 1989, most of them kept “in the drawer” because they did not correspond with the vision of those times. One such work is Paul Goma’s Journal I: By Leaps and Bounds, which covers a period of 15 years, from 1978 to 1993 and is published in 1997. Goma’s viewpoint about his peers – who had actually “exiled” him constantly, but not forever – expressed from the relative safety provided by the exile which he accepted, forced by the situation, and which he embraced, is unique within the Romanian literary environment due to the freedom with which the diarist expresses himself. That which was initially a private confession, made to oneself, was eventually printed and thus brought to the Romanian reader a novel view on certain real characters – this is what constitutes the delectability of Goma’s private writings. The current paper will explore the private aspect of these notes – namely the extent to which these are truly private and can be accepted in the category of the private diary – and from this perspective it will follow the diarist’s opinion about a few famous people from the Romanian literary environment within time span covered by the Diary.

  • Issue Year: 12/2011
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 209-224
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: Romanian