HORTENSIA PAPADAT BENGESCU, BETWEEN MEDICINE AND LITERATURE
HORTENSIA PAPADAT BENGESCU, BETWEEN MEDICINE AND LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: Writing about the human body literature can defeat time achieving the illusion of immortality becoming a sublime space. For a lot of writers, the human body is the basis for the psyche and intelectual life. The richest medical terminology penetrates the Romanian literature with Hortensia Papadat Bengescu’s novels, each physical suffering being first of all a moral suffering, somehow anticipating the New Age theories. The last novel, “The Foreigner”, renders the most serious of all the diseases, that is the historical one. In a world doomed to extinction by all the physical, moral, social, esthetic expressions, the perpetuation of the species resides only two generations, the individuals are no longer productive and prepare themselves to ascend to a higher level, maybe that of life after death. All five novels of Hallipa’s cycle begin under the auspices of sickness and death, a leitmotiv continuously and obsessively reiterated, leitmotiv that leads to the disappearing of the entire generation. None of the characters who vanished arouses remorse, on the contrary, they live the anguish of personal deliverance and that of others. It is an incredible yet authentic universe, because sickness is the only way to ascend to being. Life as it is.

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