Romanian Contributions to the European Avant-garde [Volume: 4(1985), pp. 337-350]

346
VERA CALIN
for that matter, "Par la fenetre ouverte, le silence bruilant de l'ete' entrait
comme un buffle" (Arbres, 1942) bespeak Voronca's romantic or surrealist
propensities. Nor that, in these late productions, the poet prefers the simile
to the metaphor. His imagery has remained the exteriorization of a canonbreaking poetics. In that imagery we recognize the stamp of the avantgarde, as we often recognize it in the writings of most of the poets-whatever
their ulterior explicit or implicit aesthetic commitment-who were young
in those blissful days. We identify that stamp even in the little pieces of
literary journalism written by Geo Bogza in communist Romania, in the
works of the late Miron R. Paraschivescu and in books belonging to the
innocent domain of children's literature, presently a refuge for the imagination of several Romanian former avant-gardists. And we must admit that to
this day the expression of that imagination has not lost its nonconformist
undertones.
Whether what is called the inter-war avant-garde self-destructed,
disintegrated or congealed "into the rigidities of academic avant-garde"22
is still a matter of debate. The Romanian surrealist poet Gherasim Luca,
who, back in Bucharest, had been an "habitue" of Roll's dairy in the early
thirties, and had had his poetry printed by a small publishing house programmatically called "Negation of a Negation," among them the playful
composition Un loup a travers une loupe, still enjoyed verbal jokes in the
Paris of the sixties: "La mort, la mort folle, la morphologie de la meta...
de la metamorphose de la vie; lat vie vit, la vie-vice, la vivisection de la
vie"; or, for that matter: "Je dis je je jeu jeudi sept mai, mais c'est a dire
je dis..." (Heros-limite). The capricious verbal combinations are still there,
even though they do not necessarily transcribe the stream of consciousness.
In the early fifties, when he was about to become one of the leaders
of post-World-War II avant-garde, Eugene Ionesco was a collaborator of
Avant-garde reviews, among them Medium, and was indebted at least in
his obsessions with linguistic entropy to the surrealists who directed their
disruptive action against "those words and groups of words which follow
one another and display the highest degree of solidarity."23 Did the interwar avant-garde die? Was a new postwar avant-garde about to be born?
Or was it, as Poggioli puts it "the fate of... the avant-garde... to survive
its own funeral pyre and to be reborn from its ashes phoenixlike?"24
* * *
Be that as it may, the spirit of the avant-garde was anything but dead.
In 1950, the performance of Ionesco's farce The Bald Soprano at the Parisian
Theatre des Noctambules, followed by The Lesson (1951) and The Chairs
(1952) not only baffled and scandalized the average theater-goer, but