Between the „novel” of writing and „the imaginary of existence”: Constantin Ţoiu and his Delayed Memoirs

Abstract

Extending, in some cases, the dissident counter-mythology fictionally projected in the subversive literature of the 70s and 80s – as a reaction against the mytho-political scenarios of power – the identitary mythology configured in the Romanian post-totalitarian life stories does not only represent an instrument of symbolic legitimization or an effect of the “propensity for self celebration” (S. Hubier, 2005: 34). In a more or less witting manner, the return to myth takes up the meaning of revenge on oblivion/death, and also on History which imposes limitations on the individual, especially in totalitarian contexts. The autobiographical anamnesis whose stake is the search for a meaning—both of one’s own existential trajectory and the world—means “recovering” by writing the mythical scenarios organised around a “mytho-history” “truer than reality itself” (G. Gusdorf, 1991: 480). It is the case of the Delayed Memoirs (2009) of Constantin Ţoiu,, who illustrates, just like his novels published under the dictatorship, the “resistance” of literature brought to the rank of myth in front of the “abuses of oblivion” (Paul Ricoeur, 2000: 98).

Keywords

• life stories
• literary memory
• myths of identity
• narrative identity
• resistance through culture