Politics and Literature
Politics and Literature

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on two of Caragiale’s comedies – Conu’ Leonida faţă cu reacţiunea (Mr. Leonida Faces with Reaction) and O scrisoare pierdută (A Lost Letter) – as theatrical metafictions, which divulge the tragic-comical mechanisms through which the public show of political power perpetuates itself. The former is a utopian projection that perfectly illustrates the stereotypes the genre. The phantasmagoric social project, with an obvious subversive function, namely, of denouncing the imperfections of the present, Leonida’s utopia engages great imaginative energies, clearly constructing an example of incongruence between historical and social reality. Its unnamed model, turned into an object to satire, seems to have been Plato’s ideal republic. The latter comedy stages an electoral masquerade on which the democratic illusion nourishes. Blackmail and corruption –universal and atemporal political weapons – are the two infallible engines of the machinery that generates political power. The two great obsessions of Caragiale’s theater, eroticism and politics, perfidiously interpenetrate, reveal each other’s backstage, while the reduplication of the mechanisms from the provincial town to the Capital suggests possible and disturbing projection in repetition. Everything is performance, mere appearance, supported by perfidious visual and aural illusions. Electoral nonsensical discourses are pathetic monologues on the improvised stage of the electoral fair, while the strings are being pulled from the center, through the wire of the telegraph. Caragiale uses them as an occasion to dynamite language, to unveil the extreme conventionality of ossified theatrical forms. Through his theater of great modernity, Caragiale is a precursor of Eugen Ionescu, one of the first to observe the radicalism of his fictional universe.

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