demn de...

...luat în seamă (sorry for non-Romanian speakers):

http://atelier.liternet.ro/articol/6398/Ioan-Stanomir/Spiritul-conservator-De-la-Barbu-Catargiu-la-Nicolae-Iorga.html

A Note on Realism I

For the longest time, I hated classical literary realism. I used to consider the works of authors like Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Georges Sand, Dickens, or the Bronte sisters to embody boredom at its peak (I do realize that realism begins with the Latin novel, but I consider the afore-mentioned XIXth century authors most emblematic for the literary current.). It seemed to me as if they had wasted outrageous creative efforts along hundreds of pages, only to achieve petty nit-picking in the dull lives of ever-grey characters.

Just recently have I understood that these authors were not striving to merely amuse their readers, which is why they did not seek to pleasantly fantasize in their lengthy narratives. The true point of realism, in fact, ensues from Stendhal's reflective chapter in "Le Rouge et le Noir". There, the author responds to those who criticized the "immoral" aspects in his novels, by saying that he did no more than "carry a mirror along a road," displaying the clear sky, the passers-by, and the mundane dirt of the causeway, as well. This means that realist authors were actually working towards the lofty goal of mirroring (human) reality in writing.
Nevertheless, a writer's mind cannot capture the world and render it with the mechanic accuracy an actual mirror would. It does not suffice to bluntly describe what one observes. The readers do not recognize a book's literary universe as reflecting their own if the former just imitates the superficial details of the latter. They need to sense that the realist world functions according to the patterns of the real world, in the way they are familiar with it. This is why realism necessarily has to conceptualize reality. It must grasp and reconstruct the framework of principles that govern how individuals (inter)act in society. At this point, realist writers also have to enter the complicated inter-play between what the reader expects and is able to recognize as veracious, and the innovative, maybe even revolutionary insight they hope to offer their audience. Thus, what realist authors initially endeavoured on literary ground alone must, at least implicitly, also deepen into philosophy.

And herein is where I think a second-degree problem arises. It underlies and extends in importance beyond my initial, purely impresionist quarrel with literary realism. Does this literary current have the means to meet its high-stake goal, and reflect human reality in a fresh, meaningful manner? Or does realism remain just another ideological "-ism", and falls short of substantially exploring reality?

To be continued...

A Blog of Ideas

A good friend of mine, Chrysthynee, suggested that I write my posts in English, instead of Romanian, so that many more people could access what I have to say. I felt most thankful for her suggestion and I sought to immediately comply. Therefore, in what follows, I shall offer an English version of my blog's "starting argument", its very "theoretical foundation", if one were to concede such a potentially pompous term.

In one of his recent articles, Alex Leo Şerban (the acclaimed Romanian film critic) spoke of the "poisoned freedom of blogs". For quite a long while I had shared his perspective. It may have been because, of the entire blogosphere, I had only come in contact with self-worshiping daily logs, whose authors were ineptly bemoaning their existence's emptiness and were seeking to fill it with formulae of tasteless sentimentalism. Perhaps an intimate diary, whose content one would confide and confine to paper alone, would be far more adequate for such lyrical debouches (although, if we were to maintain sanitary rigor in what our mind begets, we would stifle such thoughts from their ideatic infancy). A blog, however, is a public diary, and, if one is to expose oneself so leisurely for the sake of vane popularity, one verges on indecency. Thus, treading on the footsteps of Mr. Şerban, I had gotten to consider that blogs could only flash their authors' juicy intimacy towards an often exceedingly eager audience.

I was, nevertheless, wrong, and I incline to believe that Mr. Şerban, himself, when he condemns blogs irrevocably and unequivocally, does so in an excessively severe manner. Although one can easily find a host of web specimens like those described above, these do not represent the norm within the blogosphere, nor do they fully probe what a blog, as an informational resource, could best offer. On the contrary, there are countless blogs which seriously (although not without humour) dedicate themselves to a richly varied array of subjects, ranging from science and technology to the humanities and arts. These often prove to be not just helpful, but also delectable, as they allow internauts to exchange most useful information (as I discovered that they can guide a neophyte such as myself through the tortuous world of software). Still, what I consider most important for the blogs' format is that they can occasion free, vivacious debates between their editors and their readers, persons who, although animated by converging interests, perhaps would never have fruitfully crossed their minds on other planes than those of the Internet.

As a consequence, I have come to realize that, if you keep it in proper check, a blog may turn into a virtual agora, where the ideas that people encounter and discuss may remain just as real and valid as in the world from our side of the pixels. This is why I have proceeded to construct my own online journal as a blog of ideas. I even dare to hope that barely this format could aspire to achieve the model of school that Constantin Noica (possibly the most significant Romanian philosopher of the XXth century) described in his own Philosophical Diary, that is, a school "where one cannot tell in advance who learns from whom". I shall strive that what I post on this blog may sustain such an intellectual environment, where everyone could help the others into "midwifing" fortunate, liberating ideas, into advancing each other.