Entrechat. Dramă socială şi performanţă culturală în schiţele lui Caragiale
Entrechat. Social Drama and Cultural Performance in Caragiales’s Sketch Stories

Summary/Abstract: Anthropology and literature meet every time on a very thin line. They can rarely live together, but it is impossible to separate them for good as they are often united by the author, content and characters or, as they are called in social sciences, observer and actors on specific ground. How fit for an anthropological analysis is Caragiale’s sketch stories? How much of the text is based on context and what does the ritualisation of the Romanian society from 1900 really mean? These are the questions to which we are trying to answer. The Anglo-Saxon researchers, descendents of Victor Turner, regard society as a theatre, a stage, the anthropologist’s task being reading the lines over the actor’s shoulder, the usages and the meanings. The issue of memory, the gestures, the linguistic manipulation and the meticulous observation of the other are as many arguments for such an analysis. We tend to call an oral society as being conservative both in form and content, their constant task being specifically respecting the unaltered tradition. These could be the essential features that define the eternal, present, “Caragiale effect” (Trandafir 2002) as a refined anthropologist. The accuracy of the orality of his style, is, in fact, the code in which we see ourselves now, in the old characters, in a society whose time is almost frozen, “vremuieşte” (‘zeitigen’).

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