Constructed Spaces in Liviu Rebreanu's Ion
Constructed Spaces in Liviu Rebreanu's Ion

Summary/Abstract: The study offers an analysis of Liviu Rebreanu’s novel entitled Ion based on the viewpoints of the narratology of space. It examines whether a narratological approach based on distinct terms of space is capable of revealing such aspects of narration which other narratological methods fail to provide access to. As space construction (more precisely, the restructuring, thought as radical, of traditional space concepts) is also one of the central themes of the novel, the analysis provides the opportunity for the author not only to identify the different variations specified by the narratology of space and their narrative functions respectively, but also to examine the narrator’s narrative strategies from viewpoints which would remain unexplored for traditional methods of analysis. Rebreanu, who initially imagines his career of an intellectual as a Hungarian writer, but because of an affair as a military officer has to leave the country, has to be in hiding in the strongly nationalist political atmosphere experienced in Romania. His dual attitude (his powerful literary vision and his nationalism arising from the mentality of the Romanian community of the time) leads him to create a complex narrative structure, which – apart from minor contradictions – makes possible two consistently justifiable, but radically differring readings, namely a nationalist one and one which overwrites the former through irony, also reinforced by satirical elements. In this way, in the reading created with the contribution of the unbiased reader, even today an exciting and modern textual corpus unfolds from the complex relationship among the (demonstrably nationalist) empirical author, the model author (weighing things in a much more complex and objective manner) and the narrator (converting the debate of the former two into a narrative text), revealing the more profound theme of the novel, that of a narrative remapping of the ethnic, social and political spaces of Transylvania, and respectively, the author’s hidden concerns related to this.

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