THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE WITH MIRCEA NEDELCIU AND LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI: SYMBOLIC IMAGES OF COMMUNITY UNDER COMMUNISM AND ALTERNATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF MORAL IDENTITY
THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE WITH MIRCEA NEDELCIU AND LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI: SYMBOLIC IMAGES OF COMMUNITY UNDER COMMUNISM AND ALTERNATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF MORAL IDENTITY

Summary/Abstract: Starting from a comparative analysis of the symbolic representations of community in the works of two major Eastern European fiction writers of the 1980s (nationally praised Romanian prose writer Mircea Nedelciu and internationally acclaimed Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai), the present contribution brings together their fundamentally similar perspectives on community disaggregation under communist totalitarianism. The two authors’ aesthetic (re)constructions of community – favouring fantasy-like approaches and a poetics of absence often turning into actual representations of “spectrality” (in the Derridean sense of the term) – are meant to be read as (underlying) ethical standpoint(s) on the distortion of the moral component of personal and group identity under totalitarianism. Moreover, both writers are interested in exploring the possibilities (and limits) of marginal moral resistance (i.e. the possibility of moral resistance with socially marginalised individuals, marginal/uncharted communities etc.) as alternative moral identity (re)construction model(s). Nedelciu and Krasznahorkai’s “fabulatory” ways of exploring socio-cultural reality and political imagery could hereby be associated with theoretical viewpoints such as André Petitat’s approach on “secret” and social forms, Tadeusz Buksiński’s concept of “covert passive resistance”, Jacques Derrida’s take on “spectrality” or with the more general discussions concerning the concept of “moral identity”, while also proposing a particular and plausible relationship between “aesthetics and mimesis” (as recently re-defined by Beljah Mehdi-Kacem).

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