Exoticism and2 Nostalgia in Orbitor-Blinding_.pdf

EXOTICISM AND NOSTALGIA IN MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU´S ORBITOR (BLINDING) DANA SALA [email protected]; [email protected] Reader PhD, University of Oradea Universitatii Street no 1, Oradea, Romania Article code 455-089 Abstract: In Orbitor (Blinding), Cărtărescu constructs and deconstructs the role of memory exploring memory’s relationship to immortality - mostly in the third book or father’s book, and memory in relation to creation - in the first two books, the mother’s book irrespectively the book of the self (the middle one). There is always an unescapable nostalgia from one metamorphosis to another. If Cartarescu, as a postmodernist writer, deconstructs some myths, he never does that to the allencompassing myth of the book. Nostalgia regenerates this myth. Exoticism embodies the need for another dimension. It is also interwoven in the maternal and paternal genealogies of Mircea, the alter-ego of Cartarescu himself. Exoticism appears in Cartarescu’s dreamland as the provocation, as the challenge of the Double. Through exoticism and symmetry, Mircea wants to grasp his dream being, his inner dreamer. The underlying paradigm superior/inferior attributed to exoticism is totally out of question in Blinding, because here all exotic representations are based in oneiric landscapes. A realm where exoticism is preserved in its elements without having anything to do with commodities (see Huggan)is the dreamland of Mircea Cărtărescu’s writings. Butterfly symmetry is the preservation of halves, simultaneity is androgyny. Victor, the mirror-twin of Mircea, bound to him in a Narcissus-like story of love and abhorrence, is the embodiment of symmetry at its highest potential. REM is simultaneity, not symmetry. REM is the Entrance to Blinding’s manuscript labyrinth centre and the portal to a higher "blinding” reality. For Cartarescu, eternity is simultaneity. Bizarre and familiar, exotized Bucharest and exotized faraway lands have the consistency of dreams. Cartarescu's exoticism is a chrysalis of our chimeric alter-egos. Key words: exoticism, exotized Bucharest, Romanian contemporary literature, postmodernism, Mircea Cărtărescu, alter-ego, oneiric landscapes, exotic couples, butterfly symbol, antipodes and symmetry, labyrinth, memory, mise en abyme, Monsu Desiderio in fiction. Motto: Herman (…) had tattooed Everything, and everything had my face.1 Mircea Cărtărescu, Blinding. The Left Wing 1 Emphasis mine. 37 CĂRTĂRESCU’S AMAZEMENT AT “EVERYTHING”. Simultaneity and memory can live together only in a manuscript. Cărtărescu’s trilogy, Blinding, attempts to be, first of all, a huge memory that records the life of writer’s deeper self and connects him to a universal memory. The author constructs and deconstructs the role of memory exploring memory’s relationship with immortality - mostly in the third book, the father’s book, and with creation - in the first two books, the mother’s book and the book of the self (more than the book of the son). What can bring order and simultaneity in memory? Where do all our memories go after death? All the infinite worlds opened up by memory and retraceable through the intensity of our emotions? What does our Creator do with our memories after death if the nature of our bodies changes? – are questions launched in Cărtărescu’s third volume of the trilogy.1 Orbitor (Blinding) seems to be the progress of memory towards its perfect transgression or towards non-memory. The universal memory invoked by Cărtărescu with a theosophical concept, whose expression is a Sanskrit word, Akasia,2 is a kind of home of all memories. But this memory reaches its full value when it has the capacity to de-synchronize what we have learnt as past, present or future. That is like the divine tempo. Memory and immortality. We are holders of ”sensory organs for future”, as the third book, Orbitor. Aripa dreaptă, says (:209). This phrase looks like one of the keys to the centre of this amazing labyrinth that is Blinding. With this revelation, a new question, more daring, can be formed: What if we are contemporaneous with our own immortality? Supposing we sought a visionary outlook to frame reality, we would know more about it. It is through the grace of butterfly wings and butterfly body, present as individual titles of the three novels (The Left Wing; The Body; The Right Wing), that both an escape from labyrinth and a unifying vision from above is possible. From this above level, the Godlike one, the giant labyrinth is visible. It is exactly the world of the hero, Mircea (alias Mircișor, Mircică, even Mircica as a child). Mircea Cărtărescu’s fictional alter-ego has the same name (and surname!). The giant labyrinth is made of myriads of tiny labyrinths, carved by memory, innumerable on each page. Into this pattern already incorporated in the greatest works of fiction of the world, Cărtărescu introduces his own pace, his own searches and his own scintillating paths of imagination. Thus, the slide of tiny labyrinths into the big one happens ”a billion times a second”, just like Escher’s hands drawing each other (Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă:75). Eternity is not a non-tempo, but the tempo which is a divine synthesis of everything. First of all, memory 1 2 ”La ce mi-ar folosi viața eternă dacă mi-aș pierde amintirile ?” Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa dreaptă:479. Incidentally, Akasia recalls the Romanian word for home, ”acasă”. 38 should help us break the habit to need the order of past, present, future in our time perception. „În centrul creierului, înfăşurată în sistemul limbic, în fornix şi hipocamp, corpi mamilari şi amigdală, memoria se bălăceşte în apele striate ale talamusului şi hipotalamusului, îşi modelează acolo sculpturile neuronale, înmoaie marmura minţii cu lichide fluorescente. Creează reţele uşoare ca pînza de păianjen, sucite în ele însele ca benzile lui Möbius, învălătucite ca petalele într-un trandafir incolor. Curge din real în virtual şi iarăşi în real, de parcă mâinile lui Escher s-ar desena una pe alta de miliarde de ori pe secundă.” (Cărtărescu. Orbitor. Aripa stângă: 74) In Sean Cotter’s translation: ”In the center of the brain, formed in the limbic system, in the fornix and hippocampus, the mammillary bodies and the amygdalae, memory soaks in the striated waters of the thalamus and hypothalamus, it shapes neuronal sculptures, and it wets the marble of the mind with florescent liquids. It creates nets as flimsy as spiderwebs turned on themselves like Möbius bands, and rippled like the petals of a colorless rose. It runs from the real to the virtual and back to the real, as though Escher’s hands were drawing each other a billion times a second.” (Cărtărescu. Blinding. The Left Wing: Part 1, chapter 7, paragraph 13). Orbitor. Aripa stâgă (Blinding. The Left Wing) was released in 1996, by Humanitas, Bucharest. Orbitor. Corpul (Blinding. The Body) appeared in 2002, irrespectively Orbitor. Aripa dreaptă (Blinding. The Right Wing) in 2007, all published by Humanitas. Orbitor has acquired easily the top position within Romanian literature. Nicolae Manolescu (:1348) calls the book a Romanian attempt ”in search of lost time” upon which a metanovel is jointed. The metanovel is ”as sophisticated as the Proustian one, with incursions not in socialness or mondenity, but in the archaeology of being(…)”.1 Grandiose both in project and in accomplishment, Orbitor dares to unfold itself as one of world’s greatest books of the 21st century beginnings. Like in the most thought-provoking books, the theme of Orbitor is no more, no less than God and literature. None of the known paths of fiction is taken for the exploration of this theme and none of the known dogmas. For Orbitor’s ambition is to compete with the fundamental books of the 20th century fiction. It contains many droplets from the sacred books of mankind, as Carla Baricz remarks (see Baricz). The century after Nietzsche, the 20th, was a parricidal one, in the sense of pulverising the ”paternal” stability, the centre that had begotten core values. Towards the end of this century which knew the emergence of existentialism, absurd, postmodernity, Cărtărescu writes: ”God has not died, rather he has yet to be born.”2 In the peculiar universe of Orbitor (Blinding), the model of sacrifice that connects man to God is that of nostalgia. Nostalgia is both an offering and a relinquishment. But it is also one of memory’s insertions into all universes it creates. 1 „Nimeni n-a mai scris la noi o proză atât de densă și de profundă, populată de făpturi deopotrivă reale și simbolice, de fluturi ori de păianjeni colosali, atrasă magnetic de promiscua subterană psihanalitică și luminată totodată de splendide curcubee cerești. Orbitor este atât romanul căutării timpului pierdut, cât și un metaroman la fel de sofisticat ca acela proustian, cu incursiuni nu însă în socialitate și mondenitate, ci în arheologia și anatomia ființei, comparabilă cu aceea din Întâmplările lui Blecher, într-o sexualitate obscură și flamboaiantă, liberă și interzisă, cum nu găsim în nici unul din romanele emancipate ale generației ’27, nici chiar în acela al lui Arghezi.” (Manolescu: 1348). 2 Part III, chapter 25, para.17. 39 Nostalgia is the sacrifice we must pay for being lifted above our condition as partakers of our divine nature. For Cărtărescu, nostalgia is both a state of soul and of mind. What makes Orbitor so astonishing is the author’s ability to frame and touch nostalgia in ways it has not been touched before, to transfigure it into words. With its ”cinnamon pheromones”1, nostalgia is an empire delicately woven around the body and around all our perception. At the same time, it is also mind’s desire for something unattainable, something beyond knowledge. Biology, medicine, physics, chemistry, theosophy, astronomy, genetics have never guaranteed, through their subjects, the emergence of a grandiose novel. But Orbitor’s stakes are high, the stakes of everything. ”And everything had my face”. What fuels this book to expand with the speed of an explosion is the unlimited confidence in the power of words, in the power of a book to comprise everything, even a utopia. On postmodernist grounds, many myths in Orbitor are deconstructed. Cărtărescu is the author of a well-documented critical study on Romanian postmodernism, actually a doctoral thesis. However, there is an all-encompassing myth in his fiction. Regardless how torn it may be, it is there to give unity. This is the myth of the Book. The myth of the Book appears as the most everlasting, as the unchallengeable and ultimate myth, the author relies on it. Ion Simuț frames Cărtărescu as the writer who proves ”the substantiality of Romanian postmodernism”. (Reabilitarea ficțiunii:319). The substance of the Book should not have the definite shape of a collection of printed pages glued together, but the indefinite form of a Manuscript. As long as it is a living manuscript, the message in it may be read by somebody from another universe, or it may be reached even by God. The Manuscript is a versatile palimpsest hidden under different forms: either specular surfaces of mirrors or of crystal mausoleums, therefore inorganic textures, or organic forms, such as the rose, the butterfly, Maria’s live carpet. At the same time, the paper wad written on all parts, the white sheets or even the cells with their microscopical industries making a chain of body tissues, the paintings of Monsù Desiderio, organic or mental encasements of Mircea’s body in something similar to a pupal case are other protean transformations of the manuscript. Cărtărescu’s switch of organic to inorganic at the speed of Escher’s hands is a game with the pure forms of mind and a bet on literature’s capacity to expand perceptions and hold them in something like a hologram. The imprint of the angel inside us, trapped in our body, is an inorganic one, made of precious stones: „Alcătuit din substanţă spirituală, cristal gazos circulînd prin vene de diamant şi artere de jad, prin capilare de perlă şi canalicule de porfir, prin interstiţii de peruzea şi canale limfatice de 1 „emanând din toate feromonii de scorţişoară ai nostalgiei”- Orbitor. Corpul: 100. Since only the first volume, Blinding. The Left Wing, has been translated so far, passages (longer than three words) from the the second book, Orbitor. Corpul (Blinding. The Body) and the third, Orbitor. Aripa dreaptă (Blinding. The Right Wing), are not translated. Translation mine, D. S., in all quoted passages from Romanian books of criticism. 40 opal (...)”(Aripa stângă:73). In translation: ”It’s assembled from spiritual material, gaseous crystal circulating in diamond veins and jade arteries, pearl capillaries and marble canals, turquoise interstices and opal lymph nodes ” (The Left Wing:Part I, chapter 7, para. 11). The main character of Orbitor is the manuscript of Orbitor. Only in this way Mircea can be contemporaneous with all his selves and can be in all ”mirco”-cosmoses1 simultaneously. At the same time, in a manuscript, through analepsis, - after Thomas Pynchon’s model - memory may travel along the inverted tunnels it creates. The Manuscript can be extended to inexistent places. It is part of a fractal bigger reality, it discovers its unity with otherwise impossible margins. It is this very sense of unity what allows Mircea to challenge his double, his ”unreal” twin, and to capture him as if they were on the same side of reality. „Memoria ţese un om, acolo-n adâncul chakrei cu trei petale, în ochiul din frunte. Oricât ar fi de hidos (căci timpul este infernul şi o creatură de timp este un diavol din infern, sau poate un etern osîndit), el este geamănul nostru, şi o dorinţă ciudată ne împinge unul spre altul, unul în braţele altuia. (...)Cu fiecare clipă care trece, el se desprinde mai mult de mine, (...)Iese din mine ca insecta, încă umedă şi moale, din coaja străvezie a fostei ei carcase. Memoria mea este metamorfoza vieţii mele, insecta adultă a cărei larvă e viaţa mea. Şi fără o plonjare curajoasă în abisul de lapte care onconjoară şi o ascunde în pupa minţii, nu voi şti niciodată dacă am fost, dacă sunt o călugăriţă vorace, un păianjen visător pe picioroange nesfîrşite sau un fluture de o frumuseţe suprafirească. Îmi amintesc, adică inventez. Transmut năuceala clipelor în aur ereu şi unsuros. Şi, cumva, străveziu, tot mai străveziu pe măsură ce fântâna din creier mi se adînceşte (iar eu, un schelet aplecat peste ghizdurile ei, îmi contemplu largii ochi visători reflectaţi în apa de aur). Acel hialin unde se-ntîlnesc, ca trei flori heraldice pe un scut, visul, memoria şi emoţiile, este domeniul meu, lumea mea, Lumea. Acolo-n cilindrul acela scînteietor care-mi coboară în creier.” (Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă: 76). ”Memory weaves us, there in the depths of the three-petaled chakra, the forehead’s eye. However hideous (because time is an inferno and a creature of time is a devil from the inferno, or maybe a creature foreverdamned), it is our twin, and a strange desire pushes one toward the other, one into the arms of the other.(…) Every moment that passes, my memory separates from me a little more, it becomes more daring and independent, its shadow and power grow, and it rises over me, spreading its claws and bat wings. (...) It crawls out of me like an insect, still wet and soft, from the transparent shell of its former carcass. My memory is the metamorphosis of my life. If I do not plunge bravely into the milky abyss that surrounds and hides my memory in the pupa of my mind, I will never know if I have been, if I am a voracious praying mantis, a spider dreaming upon an endless pair of stilts, or a butterfly of supernatural beauty. I remember, that is, I invent. I transmute the ghosts of moments into weighty, oily gold. And, somehow, it is also transparent, ever more transparent the deeper the fountain of my mind becomes (and I, a skeleton leaning over its walls, contemplate the wide, dreaming eyes reflected in the golden water). That hyaline cartilage, there on the shield where the three heraldic flowers meet – dream, memory, and emotion – that is my domain, my world, the World. There in that sparkling cylinder that descends through my mind. ” (Cărtărescu. Blinding. The Left Wing, part I, chapter 7, para. 14-15). At the same time, the focus of the Manuscript should not be literature. Herman is very clear in this respect. If Mircea sticks to literature, instead of choosing ”Everything”, then Mircea is not the chosen one, ”they” and Herman have been expecting the wrong guy. Herman embodies the autoreferentiality of the author. 1 If, for Mircea’s case, we may substitute ”microcosm” with the Slavic etymology of the name ”Mircea”. 41 The author desires with so much pain and dread to find the entrances of his own universe, which he creates, exudes, oozes out, secrets incessantly, together with secreting his own mythology, that the laws of fiction are totally forgotten. There is another reason (revealed by Herman) for the Book to stay a Manuscript and not turn into a finite thing, apart from the postmodern difference between the Work (the Opus) versus the Text1. The manuscript can choose its writer, therefore the manuscript contains a maze as long as it is a manuscript, once it is locked the maze becomes an ordinary space like any other2. Nostalgia is the regenerative pain of the world of the manuscript. In the absence of it, the writer’s utopia would show its ”utopian” inability to hold together the worlds. Victor, who is Mircea’s twin, has a strange insufficiency; he cannot feel pain, as if he were a paper person. In Orbitor, the liberation stage of the butterfly is the knowledge of truth. But reaching this stage means that revelations in truth are above the separation proclaimed by past, present and future. What happens to death, then? Death occurs at the passage from a metamorphosis to another. At the same time, Orbitor contains by far the most numerous terms with direct reference to creation than any other work of Romanian literature. The facets of creation are numerous and they are all (omni)present: mythical, mystical, metaphysical, teleological, psychoanalytical, scientific (genetic, intracellular and astronomic), esoteric, artistic, architectural, folkloric, fictional, fractal. Creation happens on every page in relation to a multi-stratified time of fiction. Nested in all of Cărtărescu’s other writings, very much like Rayuela for Julio Cortázar, Orbitor embodies a different time lapse. It passes from the years of previous generations, through the writer’s birth and childhood up to the years of Romanian 1989 revolution. From a postmodern perspective, a new cosmogonic flight can be taken (after that of Eminescu’s Hyperion), and memory is its medium. What is beyond memory, everything or nothing? Orbitor’ s Time is never linear. It reaches even the level of underexistence, a foetal time, so slow that its passing consists more of vibrations than of instances. Creation is so much the myth and the substance of this fiction because memory captures the very revelations that make all the obstructive patterns of mind crack. The omnipresence of walking statues is a direct reference to previous unhelpful patterns of knowledge or habitual thinking, which can make the self their prisoner. That is why they are given in the charge of a Securitatea officer (Stănilă). In the final act, the statues crack and explode. But the statues are ambivalent symbols, they hear the silences and can see inside their brain (with blind eyes). Reaching the universal memory of Akasia also means that uterus (the 1 In the age of multimedia text is anyway naturally expanded outside the medium of print. For the expansion of the notion of ”text”, author-reader interactions, rereading, re-writing, see Cornis-Pope (:18). 2 „O carte adevărată selecta mereu un singur cititor, (...) De-aceea Herman nu credea în cărţile tipărite, ci numai în manuscrise, fiecare un unicat, fiecare o Evanghelie. Căci nu tu alegeai cartea, ci cartea te alegea ca să se scrie prin tine.” (Orbitor. Corpul: 161). 42 memory, the pupal case) is not needed any longer, the being has reached a new stage of life: ”We are all women, we are uteruses, and we will tear ourselves apart (…)so that in another world (…)crystalline beings can emerge(…)” (see infra). There is a difference of memory in connection to feminine creation as compared to masculine, cerebral creation. Masculine creation is the act of feeding, irrigating the manuscript with an irrepressible sadness. But memory has been the case of the self’s larva, its nutrient, its capping, and its mantel. Labyrinth becomes the matrix, at all levels of the book, in which man confronts the revelation of immortality. But, at the same time, Memory must transcend its own matrix. Dream becomes the only possibility to connect all levels. The vertical sense of motion encompasses even the subterraneous levels, since the city appears also with its maze of “underground networks” as Suceavă remarks. (see Suceavă). Memory and creation. Memory grows into the substance inhabiting the matrix of labyrinth. In Blinding, it is associated with two forms of creation. („Noi suntem creație”/”We are creation”)1. The first of them is the maternal or the feminine. This is the creation in wholeness, not in rupture. There is no light in the maternal womb, therefore foetus’s main occupation is dreaming. [Anca] „Şi am visat mult, mai mult ca oricînd, aşa cum am auzit odată la radio că embrionii visează în uterul mamelor, că visează (oare la ce?) aproape tot timpul.” In Sean Cotter’s translation: ”I heard once on the radio that embryos dream in the womb, that they are dreaming (but of what?) almost all the time.” (Cărtărescu, Blinding. The Left Wing, Part 1, Chapter 9, paragraph 6). The second type of creation is the masculine or the cerebral one. The leitmotif of the homunculus, the ”sad uterus” of the brain2, the presence of Herman are the indicators that there is a passage from the world of life to the world of the Book. Escher’ hands drawing each other, sliding from real to virtual ”a billion times a second” incessantly cross this passage as they create it. The speed of passing from virtual into real is an attempt to simultaneity. Auto-fiction has become a trend within Romanian literature, emergent with the 80’s generation, but anticipated by some post-war tendencies. Auto-fiction may rely on memory’s avidity to invent, but if memory eludes its complicated relationship to Time itself, it falls into manageable descriptions. The force of Cartarescu’s description lies in involving Time in all matrixes created by the TextActually, the book does not contain only the matrix of memory, it is at the same time an “apotheosis of remembering”, as Sharon Mesmer calls it. (see Mesmer). Matrix, etymologically, comes from the Latin word for ”mother”, assimilated to the womb3. 1 Cărtărescu, Blinding. The Left Wing, part 3, chapter 25, para. 18. ”Nu scriu o carte, ci cresc un embrion în uterul trist al ţestei şi-al camerei şi-al lumii mele. ” (Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Corpul: 19). 3 ”late 14c., "uterus, womb," from Old French matrice "womb, uterus," from Latin matrix (genitive matricis) "pregnant animal," in Late Latin "womb," also "source, origin," from mater (genitive matris) "mother" . matrix. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved November 1, 2014, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/matrix 2 43 If Maria, Mircea’s mother, is mythically sealed with the sign of the butterfly, there is nothing out-of-ordinary in this investiture. Every woman bears that sign, since, the author says, ”every birth creates a religion”(part 3, chapter 25, para. 46). „Şi fiecare naştere creează o religie, este o bunavestire. Şi religia însăşi nu are alt sens decît Naşterea.” (Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă: 406) ”And every birth creates a religion, it is an annunciation. And religion itself has no other meaning than Birth.” However, it is through literature that this investiture becomes available and Mircea is both cognizant of and the carrier of his mother’s magical symbolism. Maria’s investiture is nothing more than a reminder that the bone which protects the foetus has the form of a butterfly(the illium). And it is connected to the ”sacrum” part (bone) of the spine. Cărtărescu does not create his own mythology by putting together ready-made schemes. By reaching any symbol through memory, by re-investing it through his selfexpansion into the universe, the writer rediscovers numerous metaphorical correspondences between anatomy and his ways to create fiction through ”auto-fiction”. Cărtărescu’s mythology is at the same time archetypal and postmodern. For instance, if the butterfly bone has a shape coincidental with the writer’s symbolism, that is not enough yet. The writer must feel every symbol, the same way in which in the prose entitled REM, from the volume Nostalgia, Egor writes incessantly ”no no no no no no no” covering all the pages with this single word, the pages that make up his precious manuscript. His gesture is painstaking but not absurd, since he feels every ”no” differently and takes the effort to transcribe that into letters. In this way, by feeling every symbol differently, Cărtărescu creates a connection through dream with his whole system. Thus, dream is connected with the maternal womb, because that is the space where we used to dream more, therefore a paradisiac space. That is the time when we were closer to God, in an unknown way. What is retrievable from that state, through memory, is the state of perfect simultaneity. In the subterraneous, sepulchral world of monstrous deeds created by our unexorcised fears, Monsieur Monsù makes a collection of unusual butterflies, actually a monstrous insectary with human iliac bones (butterfly-shaped) painted in different colours. Coca reads her own name on the newest label that is awaiting its insectary exponent, thus knowing she is the next victim. (Cărtărescu. Orbitor. Corpul: 424). Coca is the kidnapper of Victor, the one who secluded him in a mother-less and hopeless world, breeding him in a brothel in Amsterdam. Another correspondence is that between the sphenoid bone of the skull and a butterfly. This bone has orbits, resembling a butterfly executing a rotation. For Herman, it is this butterfly-shaped bone of the skull that protects the dreams of his embryo1. However monstrous this may look, 1 „În țeasta lui Herman se afla, ghemuit, un copil. (...) Ocupa aproape tot interiorul cavității de os, devenită acum transparentă ca de cleștar. (...)Ghemuit în pântecul său de os, copilul visa” (Orbitor. Aripa dreaptă:129). 44 taken literally, masculine, cerebral creation has the privilege of being nested in Time, of making Time its matrix. Autoreferentiality and exotism. The most exotic couple of Orbitor is illustrated by Herman and Soile. Herman is the watchman at the gateway between reality and dream. Soile has a name which recalls Aurora Borealis. In Blinding. The Left Wing, Herman is the one who uses strange, sharp instruments, needles, similar to torture tools, to make Anca’s skull covered with tattoos. This is somehow an unexplainable act, given Herman’s bonhomie. Anca, Silvia (in Blinding), Nana (in Nostalgia) are little girls who refuse to accept femininity in full-blossom. Hard-wired in all possible ways to encapsulate beads of their childhood, the little girls are chosen to express, partially, auctorial self-references. The girls build, mentally and viscerally, a certain resistance to the fact that female destiny implies phases. Their resistance creates the premises of a more reflexive outlook on male/female polarities. Anca is chosen for the very fact that she refuses to copy her mother’s fate. Un-separating childish drives from the nubile ones, Anca is a chrysalis herself. Her mission is to encase one of the first metamorphoses of the manuscript of Orbitor (Blinding). Her connection to Herman is no surprise, under the sign of autoreferentiality. The whole ceremony of tattooing Anca’s skull has no other strange significance than the process of a birth. It is a cerebral form of creation. It results in the initiation into a new world which starts to unfold its exotic landscapes, reachable by Anca through Herman’s voice. Voice is essential in Cartarescu’s fiction, where everything happens at the verge of ”liminal and subliminal”, as Adam Segal puts it, and Cărtărescu creates a ”system” out of it(see Segal). If Anca’s tattooed skull preserves a mirror effect between reality and representation (Mircea sees his face mirrored in it), Soile, who appears in the second book of Orbitor, Corpul, is made of pure astral light. The signs (the moles) of her skin draw the map of celestial constellations. Soile’s favourite pastime is watching exotic fish in an aquarium, wishing to be one of them. This posits her as the interiority of something not yet graspable. Her strange house on Tunari Street, in Bucharest, at night becomes watertight like a spaceship and travels into cosmos. All the plants surrounding Soile’s house have no roots. Her voice is mixture of feminine and masculine. Through her Rusalka voice mixed with the inflexions of a young man’s voice, Herman discerns Soile’s story so well as if he had invented it. Born with a tarantula heart, Soile could hardly have had any chance to live. A surgeon who did the complicated operation and a little boy with no chance to live, her donor, helped Soile to survive. Otherwise, she lives under a bell glass. In the first of Innocent Eréndira collection of stories, a book on Svetlana’ s shelf, in Cărtărescu’s REM (from his book, Nostalgia1), 1 Nostalgia was initially published as a collection of short-stories. The English edition is called “a novel”. 45 Gabriel García Márquez introduces the story of the woman changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. Soile resembles that spider woman of the circus, but in an antipodean way, as a woman of the North who oozes out a mysterious natural light of celestial aurorae. Actually, she embodies the hidden interiority which retains the substance of dream. Before the trilogy Orbitor, Soile appears in REM (see the volume Nostalgia) as Egor’s grandmother of a Finish origin, the one who could read the future only by noticing the changes of her husband’s tattooed skin. She is the first ”reader” of REM, since she followed ”with her finger the bewitched contour of those three letters, my grandmother Soile, who has already given birth to my mother in But her reading evolved in insanity, that is why it was so important for Egor that Nana figured out the enigma of REM by dreaming all the seven dreams of the pink mother-of-pearl shell. If Herman is Mircea’s own autoreferentiality, Soile is the projection of a female reader, whose imagination the author needs. The end of the second book, Orbitor. Corpul(Blinding. The Body), clearly addresses to a woman with a book in her hand, a feminine reader: ”Tu, care citești acum, întinsă pe canapeaua ta, cartea asta de necitit(…)” (Corpul: 432). By turning to her as an interruption of his own story, the writer captures the virtual female reader in a mise en abyme reflection. In the second book of Orbitor, Soile appears and wears an enamelled medallion with another Soile in white lace dress in front of her cosmic house, who, in turn contains another Soile in a self-referential loop expanded to at least one thousand clear images. For the first book of Orbitor, Esposito mentions the Russian doll system (see Esposito). Herman recognises Soile because a certain roseate hue of twilight reveals her to him. 1 It is the encounter that imprints a new sense to the whole story, just like the Master intersecting Margarita in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel or just like a dumbfounded Dr. Yuri Zhivago whenever he sees Lara in Boris Pasternak’s novel. In Soile’s embrace, Herman touches, for a moment, an astral reality. This reality is Herman’s perfect exoticness, Herman being the Manuscript man. The child they beget is not a sad homunculus but a messianic little boy, whose presence proves the fecundity of imagination and punctures the burial chamber of reality. At the same time, it is the birth that literally happens in the third book, to prove the sense claimed in the first book, namely that ”religion itself has no other meaning than Birth. Recognising that Soile is the woman of his life, finding his interiority (namely embracing the internal layer of aurora, its astral interface) because his interiority is embodied by Soile, Herman has an irrepressible desire to escape from the Manuscript, to remain hidden, unknown somewhere for the rest of his paper life. He wants to flee “from the brain that has been inventing them”, moment by 1921” (Cărtărescu, Nostalgia). 1 „Şi n-ar fi remarcat-o, în mod sigur, nici atunci, dacă amurgul nu ar fi avut o foarte precisă nuanţă trandafirie şi dacă Soile, inventată parcă de acea unică densitate a luminii, nu ar fi stat pe banca ei, în rochie de dantelă albă şi cu mîinile-n poală, arătînd mai neajutorată decît dacă ar fi strigat după ajutor în largul mării.” (Orbitor, Corpul:219) 46 moment”1. Exoticism is Herman’s inner urge to follow the escape outside the Manuscript. If the iliac bone is closer to the rhythms of life, to a foetal rhythm, it is through the protective butterfly bone of the skull that flights to other dimensions are possible, along with the experience of the heavens and hell which are so close to each other in human brain, only millimetres apart. Only God’s imagined brain does not need the protection of butterfly-shaped bone, like the sphenoid and the other cranial bones, because it is His light that is the purest ”blinding” light2, just like His gaze is that of ”sad, brown eyes”: „ochiul căprui, triunghiular, atoateştiutor, deschis pe imaculatul frontispiciu”. REM and the labyrinth. Entrance or Exit? In the same way, in Cărtărescu’s unique system of symbols, the butterfly is imprinted in our body. It is the very substance with which we think, we breathe, we invent worlds or integrate ourselves in the worlds outside us. Coincidently, the distribution of white and grey matter of the brain and spinal cord resembles a butterfly (or the letter H). A perfect correspondence to this unseen, internal, stratified butterfly, made of neurons, would be the mise en abyme, present at many levels in Orbitor. Just like the way in which the H butterfly configures our relation to universe and our insertion into the world, along with the coordination of all other processes indispensable to life, the mise en abyme acts like an internal cord of neurons connecting the writer to himself : „Că pînă şi el s-a cuprins pe sine în REM. Că poate pînă şi el, în lumea lui (unde eu am pătruns, asta fiind poate singura raţiune a vieţii mele), nu este decît un produs al unei minţi mult mai vastă din altă lume, ea însăşi fictivă. Şi el, da, sînt sigură acum, caută cu înfrigurare o Intrare către acea lume Superioară, căci visul nostru, al tuturor, este să ne întîlnim Creatorul, să privim în ochi fiinţa care ne-a dat viaţă.” (Cărtărescu, Nostalgia: 304). In Julian Semilian’ s precise translation: ”that we are paper heroes and that we were born in REM’s brain, in his mind and heart (…) searching feverishly for an Entrance to that superior world, because our dream, everyone’s dream, is to meet the Creator, to look in the eyes the being that gave us life. ” (Cărtărescu, Nostalgia). An example of a “neuro”-fictional mise en abyme, through a stratified butterfly, would be the scene in which Nana locks eyes with her creator, a younger, (late) twentyish/thirtyish Cărtărescu. This scene is present both in REM, where the little 12-year-old girl Nana is the main character, and in Orbitor (Blinding). The writer looks for a portal to his labyrinth, an ”Entrance to that superior world”. He finds it only through his character. He is shown the way by his 12year-old heroine, Nana. He comes across this portal accidentally, as he tries to understand the resistance to revelation built by Nana. This enables him to 1 ”O clipă-şi închipuise cum aveau să li se schimbe vieţile, cum aveau să fugă de ochiul gigantic care-i privea, inventîndu-i, moment cu moment, cum aveau, cu tenacitate, să evadeze din creierul care-i gîndea, din cartea care-i construia şi-i deconstruia,(...)”. Corpul: 246. 2 „Abia atunci, înconjurat de slava rotundă a Shahasrarei, marele fluture va zbura deodată în toate părţile, în cele patru dimensiuni vizibile şi-n cele şapte strîns înfăşurate, pînă ce puterea şi culorile lui vor umple ţeasta fără tîmple şi frunte, craniul fără etmoid, sfenoid şi occipital al Dumnezeirii.” (Orbitor. Corpul: 40) 47 annul the differences between his male outlook on existence and the female outlook, that of his character. In REM, the male/female irreducible differences are absorbed. REM is also the location of our double as the projection of our inner dreamer. Mircea-Victor antagonism would not be possible in REM, it is possible only in front of a mirror which creates the illusion of REM. REM comes from Rapid Eye Movement, the only moments within a sleep when we are dreaming, therefore when we are truly ourselves, according to Cartarescu. Nana ”sacrifices her initiation for the kiss” (Ursa: 85). The girl was only one dream short of being the chosen one, of finding for Egor (a kind of avatar of Herman) and his ancestors the gateway to the centre of the labyrinth. But finding the cipher that aligns all the worlds is not what would have made her happy. This is what would have made the writer happy. However, following her wish, the writer discovers the REM himself in a way he could not have otherwise guessed. Let us not forget that we are in a story where the narrator is an insect, following Svetlana (the thirtyish Nana) and her casual lover, Vali. The insect is there, in Svetlana’s apartment, to spy on behalf of the writer. REM is not just anywhere, but in the innermost layer of our brain which enables the ”I” to be ”cuvîntul cel mai enigmatic din lume: eu... ”, that is ”the most enigmatic word in the world: I…”, (see Orbitor. Corpul: 288). REM is no man’s land in between our most intimate layers of conciousness. Another mise en abyme is the unnamed painting turned to the reader, in opposition to the painting albums on the shelf (Tintoretto, Guardi, da Vinci, Degas, Harunobu, Pontormo, Mantegna). If Orbitor is genuinely based on the ekphrasis on Monsu Desiderio, in REM the picture is not stated, it must be recognisable. Even Egor and his Elongated mother seem to descend from this painting. It is chosen because it is in a way an image of our soul and therefore a key to REM and to accessing one’s childhood. „Doar unul este puțin întors încoace. Poți vedea pe coperta lui un fel de rulotă de lemn, cu ușile date-n lături, într-un peisaj de clădiri roșietice, cu bolți și creneluri care se pierd în perspective nesfârșite. Cred că e în amurg, dar nu prea târziu. Umbra unei fetițe care se joacă cu cercul se lungește pe macadam. “ (Nostalgia : 175). In translation : “… battlements melting into unending perspectives. It appears to be twilight but not very late. The shadow of a little girl rolling a hoop lengthens out on the macadam.” (Nostalgia-a novel. ) The painting as the main mise en abyme for REM’s story of incertitude is Giorgio de Chirico’s The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. In Orbitor, the writer has to rediscover what Nana has given up, that is why he has to resurrect his character (”Talita! kumi”). „ - şi cum uşa se deschide încet şi în cameră intră, ca o somnambulă, o fetiţă de doisprezece ani (Talita, kumi!), cum se apropie de mine şi citeşte rîndurile care ies din maşina de scris, şi înţelege că tînărul scria despre ea (...)” (Orbitor. Corpul: 111). REM provides, earlier than Orbitor, the feeling that there is a synthesis of all tempos, that simultaneity of times is possible, and that simultaneity is the precondition of finding REM. Nana discovers, at the same time with REM, the ambiguity which is the end of her childhood. It is like a prefiguration of death. It is the first time she experiences a death as a passage from a metamorphosis to another. This end comes implacable also in a biological sense (the menarche), as the beginning of adolescence, in the very night she is supposed to leave the outskirts courtyard that had been her paradisiac world of playing. The ambiguity comes in the form 48 of cheating. Her way of reaching REM has been achieved through cheating, by writing ”Ester” on ”all the pieces of paper”, so that Ester could be her makebelieve bride in the seventh game, that of the wedding. Nana has ruined the spontaneity of playing by imposing a rule which was, in fact, a guilt-inducing lie. It is not the same thing with an accidental mistake like stepping in and out of a hopscotch. The price of her REM comes at backing-off from Egor. Unlike her, he is the one who preserves his childhood, since he has the defect or gift which preserves his thymus active. ”L-am liniştit, i-am spus că voi dormi, dar Egor mi se părea în acea clipă îndepărtat, ireal. REM-ul meu fusese sărutul pe care i-l dădusem Esterei. În acea clipă avusesem Totul.” (Nostalgia: 294). In Julian Semilian’s translation: ”(…) but Egor seemed at that moment so distant, so unreal. My REM had been the kiss I had given to Ester. In that moment, I had the All.”(Nostalgia). The butterfly infra-time reminds us of a foetal rhythm. No passing from one stage to another can be forced, from larval stage to pupation and then to the liberated imago (adult butterfly). Metamorphosis would fail at an earlier splitting of pupal case. In the same way, simultaneity cannot be compelled, it comes through revelation. (see the motto of the Left Wing from the Bible, 1 Corinthians, 13: 9-12) Escher’s hands do achieve simultaneity. This is the rhythm of masculine, cerebral creation, when it is inventing the world through its dream (REM) moments, with the speed of the thought. The rhythm of feminine creation is a foetal rhythm, more stable and more similar to the infra-time of butterfly eclosion. Touching REM is like touching the Beyond without becoming a different being in time. In the third book of Orbitor, this is fully expressed through a ”perpendicular” trajectory, like that of a butterfly perpendicular on our usual horizontal dimensions, mentioned in the first book as follows: ”«Suntem aici ca să ne naştem mama. Ca să îl naştem pe cel ce ne va naşte. E drept că nouă ni se interzice Ieşirea şi că nu ne vom naşte în alte lumi. (....) Noi ne vom mîntui prin el, inventîndu-l, zămislindu-l pe el, care va creşte în aparenţă în lumea noastră, dar cu adevărat într-o lume uriaş mai înaltă, căci el, nălţîndu-se din planul nostru ca o creastă de val, în a treia, de neimaginat, dimensiune, se va curba spre noi ca să ne vadă, să ne descrie, să ne creeze silabă cu silabă şi rînd cu rînd, cum atîrnăm pe statuia de perlă a corpului său. Ce vom vedea din el vor fi doar secţiuni, căci el e perpendicular pe lumea noastră, cum se apleacă adînc asupra ei. (...)»”. Orbitor. Aripa stângă: 388 “We are here to give birth to our mother. To give birth to the One who will give us birth. It’s true, the Exit is barred and we will not give birth to ourselves in other worlds. (…) We will save ourselves through him, inventing him, conceiving him, and he will seem to grow within our world, but in fact, he will grow within an enormous world, one much higher, because he, rising from our plane like the crest of a wave, into the third, unimaginable dimension, will curve toward us to see us, describe us, create us, syllable by syllable and turn by turn, the way we hang from the pearl statue of his body. We will see him only in sections, because he is perpendicular1 to our world, bowed deeply above it.” (Blinding. The Left Wing, Part III, chapter 25, para.20) REM is not the moment when you are the holder of the universe (as Egor and the writer could have pre-thought, in a masculine paradigm) but the moment when Time comes to you, flows through you, makes you see beyond your own mortality, even if after that you discover that ”Perhaps REM is nostalgia”. 1 Emphasis mine. 49 Cărtărescu’s El Aleph is called REM 1 . Another definition of REM, through the words of his character, the 12-year-old Nana, is All, or Everything. Her Everything is the first-time kiss. Ester is the incarnation of love in that moment, when Nana is 12, in love with the emotion of love. The pursuit of love when they are grown up, out of that moment, would have been nonsensical. Carried by the magic of the seven games paralleling the six dreams, Nana recognises the ”perpendicular” moment of her life and does everything to have it, even if it means betraying the purposelessness of playing. After that, the Entrance of Playing will be forever locked (also barred as the result of betraying her doll, Zizi, actually her younger self, to a cruel trial). She has lost her equality with her Creator. It is through playing that the girls had been recreating the world in seven days, from prehistory (Rolando’s skeleton) to a postnuclear era (the thermometer). In their games, the girls could not see the chess players watching their childish playing. ”De unde să fi ştiut atunci că acesta de fapt nu era jocul nostru, aşa cum şahul nu e jocul pionilor şi-al cailor şi al reginelor? Nu, pe atunci nu puteam vedea Şahiştii aplecaţi cu gravitate peste lumea noastră”(Nostalgia: 234) ”How could we foresee that this was not in fact our game, in the same way that chess is not the pawn’ s game or the knight’s or the queen’s game? No, at that time we could not discern the Chess Players gravely leaning over our world.”(Nostalgia). These chess players on the margins resemble very well Știutorii, Those Who Know, from the trilogy of Orbitor (Blinding). Those Who Know are the replacers of reality, among them Cărtărescu includes names like André Breton, the surrealists, Plato, Spinoza. It is not very clear what they have in common, but probably it is because of them, because of their idealism, that the world needs a full replacement with another higher reality. That is why they are ”guilty” for the perpetuation of utopias, for mental frames which are infused with idealism to make this reality bearable. The whole world is a conspiracy of the Știutori (Those Who Know) against the Văzători, Those Who See. Again, it is hard for the reader to tell the difference between them. But since there are so many references to the eyes of the unborn child resembling Buddha’s eyelids, we can figure out that Those Who See have not lost their connection with maternal creation and the visionary power of dreams. They know God even in infra-reality and in infra-time. They see the future. They do not live in the Nostalgia after a heavenly paradise and do not contaminate the others with it because they have access to a higher sense which is perpendicular on our existence. Therefore Văzătorii do not waste themselves in hunting for signs of horizontality. The Book should be a perpendicular construction; maybe Dante’s book was such an example. REM is the centre of Cărtărescu’s labyrinth. It the middle of all trials, amidst all intricacies, the centre is the kern of another nature. If the attempt to cross the labyrinth has had a negative paradigm, initially, after the reach of the centre a positive paradigm emerges. The centre defies death and is the place where a transsubstation occurs. The hero’s fate, in many universal myths, is changed once the centre has been reached. 1 In REM, published for the first time in Cărtărescu’s volume Visul, (Nostalgia for all the suceeding editions) Cărtărescu makes intertextual references to Cortazar, to Marquez’s Erendira, to The Saragosa Manuscript, to Dylan Thomas and to Borges’s El Aleph. 50 The writer’s way to access REM as a portal is only through his characters. His presence as a mise en abyme is a way to hold together all the invented worlds. Symmetry versus simultaneity. A manuscript, not a book, may retain simultaneity, because its rather organic skins contain different stages in the metamorphoses of Mircea’s selves. Another definition of ”Everything”, apart from that of REM, is that of ”Mother”. As Simona Sora rightly observes (:248), ”MAMA este TOTUL” (MOTHER is EVERYTHING) as far as the first book is concerned, Mother proves out ”the genealogy of the divine child”(Ibidem). Narcissus-type of love is, at the same time, an illusion and a rejection of memory. In Orbitor, it is expressed through the apparition of Victor, the twin ”brother” of Mircea, as a climax moment of the third book. It is only through him, through Victor, that mirror may become Mircea’s manuscript, the giant labyrinth made of tiny labyrinths. We know all about Mircea’s memories, yet we know nothing about Victor’s memory. Just like Narcissus gazing at himself, Victor is a man without memories. Memory and love ”will be one” in a state of divine transgression, which means the state of perfect simultaneity. Symmetry is the preservation of halves, simultaneity is androgyny. For Cărtărescu, eternity is simultaneity. In Cărtărescu’s giant maze which is Blinding, simultaneity is the opposite of symmetry. Dream, generated by nostalgia as its compensatory universe, achieves the de-synchronisation with the habit of the reason, namely of putting in order the past, the present and the future. In the third book, the book of paternal genealogy, Miriam, Mircea’s great-great-great-grandmother, becomes the mystical bride of a strange Polish prince, Witold Csartarowsky, poet and admirer of Monsu Desiderio’ s paintings. Their union, in the shape of a new hieroglyph but also of a Möbius band, attests once again that space is feminine, time is masculine, space is sight, time is desire (Orbitor. Aripa dreaptă: 337). As the writer says in the first book, space is a measure of paradise, time is a measure of inferno. „Spaţiul e paradisul, timpul este infernul. Şi cît de ciudat este că, la fel ca în emblema bipolarităţii, în miezul umbrei este lumină şi în lumină stă sămînţa umbrei. Căci altminteri ce este memoria, fîntîna asta otrăvită din miezul minţii, din paradis? Cu ghizdurile ei de marmură strunjită, cu apa ei clătinătoare, verde ca fierea, şi cu dragonul cu aripi de liliac care-i stă de strajă? Şi ce e dragostea, apa limpede şi răcoroasă din adîncul iadului sexual, perla cenuşie din scoica de foc şi de urlete sfîşietoare? Memoria, timpul regatului fără timp. Dragostea, spaţiul domeniului fără spaţiu. Seminţele opuse şi totuşi atît de asemănătoare ale existenţei noastre, unite peste marea simetrie, şi anulînd-o, într-un singur mare sentiment: nostalgia.” ”Space is Paradise and time is Inferno. How strange it is that, like the emblem of bipolarity, in the center of a shadow is light, and that light creates shadows. After all, what else is memory, this poisoned fountain at the center of the mind, this center of paradise? Well-shaft walls of tooled marble shaking water green as bile, and its bat-winged dragon standing guard? And what is love? A limpid, cool water from the depths of sexual hell, an ashen pearl in an oyster of fire and rending screams? Memory, the time of the timeless kingdom. Love, the space of the spaceless domain. The seeds of our existence, opposed yet so alike, unite across the great symmetry, and annul it through a single great feeling: nostalgia.” The Cărtărescian symmetry would mean a one-winged butterfly(like the memory going only backwards, unable to foresee) after it has lost its butterfly time and can no longer regain its natural frequency, which is that of an infra-time. This one –winged butterfly appears with dots instead of a complete 51 drawing of the wings before Mircea knows the cipher, the drawing of the butterfly being threatened by the drawing of the spider1. ”I circled around Anca, trying to make connections mentally, to join this spot in the shape of a wing with that line like a polyarticulate spider leg. But I didn’t have the key, and without it, everything was chaos and despair” ( Part I, chapter 10, para.3). In Travesti, Mircea Cărtărescu’s novel published in 1994 (by Humanitas), Victor appears from the very beginning under the sign of the spider, a spider inhabiting the innermost thoughts: „Am știut atunci că în creierul meu locuia un mare păianjen, că îi fusesem dat lui, pradă vie și paralizată(…).” (Cărtărescu, Travesti:81). Symmetry is what brings the fear of separation. Symmetry anchors the being in such a powerful illusion that is impossible to find a way out of it. A two-winged butterfly would understand its ”filaments” for the future. (see Suceavă). Victor, the mirror-twin of Mircea, the one bound to him in a Narcissus-like story of love and abhorrence, is the embodiment of symmetry at its highest potential of drawing the illusion. ”(…)Cu toţii avem memoria trecutului, dar cîţi dintre noi ne putem aminti viitorul? Şi totuşi stăm între trecut şi viitor ca un corp vermiform de fluture între cele două aripi ale sale. Pe una o putem folosi la zbor, căci ne-am trimis filamentele nervoase pînă către marginile ei; cealaltă ne este necunoscută, de parcă ne-ar lipsi ochiul din partea dinspre ea. Dar cum putem zbura cu o singură aripă? profeţi, iluminaţi, eretici ai simetriei prefigurează ce am putea deveni şi ce va trebui să devenim. Dar ceea ce ei văd, per speculum in aenigmate vom vedea cu toţii limpede, cel puţin atît de limpede cum vedem trecutul..” ”(...)We all have memories of the past, but none of us can remember the future. And yet, we exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings. We use one wing to fly, because we have sent our nerve filaments out to its edges, and the other is unknown, as if we were missing an eye on that side. But how can we fly with one wing? Prophets, illuminati, and heretics of symmetry foresaw what we could and must become. But what they see per speculum in aenigmate we will all see clearly, at least as clearly as we can see the past. Then, even our torturous nostalgia will be whole. ” We are prepared before birth with our vision of future, just like it is easy for memory to know the past. This vision occurs within simultaneity. We have had the sense of simultaneity ever since our life before life. Before birth, in the infra-time similar to a butterfly rhythm, our being knows no separation from God. The divine mission entrusted to us by the very act of our birth, if unfulfilled, will need symmetry as a compensatory illusion. The butterfly gives us the supreme metamorphosis of our being, it is through the butterfly than we may have access to an after-death existence. Cărtărescu takes the unusual sides of the butterfly symbol (of Psyche) and interweaves them into his fiction, a territory where he can have his own mythology. Actually, the butterfly comes as the symbol of time. Time is also the perception of a difference between us and The Other One, according to Emmanuel Lévinas. The Same cannot engulf The Other one, we are never in synchrony with our fellow being and Time is the perception of this difference, of this otherness. 2 Lévinas’ ethics of the Other, the face-to-face relation retrieves the infinity of the Other(see Totalité et infini) and forbids a reduction to Sameness. 1 See also Simona Sora, about ”metaphysical butterfly” versus ”the postmodern spider”: „un fluture metafizic își întinde aripile, iar un păianjen postmodern îl pândește pe fiecare pagină.” (Sora:250) 2 See Emmanuel Lévinas. Moartea şi Timpul. Transl by Anca Măniuţiu, Cluj: Biblioteca Apostrof, 1996, p. 40. (original title: La Mort et Le Temps). 52 EXOTIC SPACES. In all the three novels of Orbitor (Blinding), memory appears in connection to never-seen places. The reinvention of Bucharest also bears the mark of exotism and exoticism.1 Remoteness and closeness are thus neutralised. Casa Poporului in Bucharest (The People’s Palace) is the setting of the climax scene of the third volume, since it is one of the saddest buildings on earth, a chimera of all buildings erected by human haughtiness, a palace of a monstrous gigantism. Blinding is a wonderful book feeding itself with the nostalgia of visited by actually inexistent places, totally recreated by the imagination of the writer. Even Bucharest is depicted as Mircea’s twin, therefore as a chimerical space. The chimeric is a notion adopted by Cărtărescu from his literary model, Mihai Eminescu. (see also Cărtărescu’s book Visul chimeric, 1991). In Mircea Cărtărescu’s Orbitor (Blinding), exoticism embodies the need for another dimension. It is also interwoven in the maternal and paternal genealogies of Mircea. Herman does not believe in printed books, only in manuscripts, they allow inventions to set in. Through his voice which has the effect of a tunnel, but at the same time of a kaleidoscope, a new world opens to the eyes of Mircea (while listening to Anca’s story). Here ”blinding” is used in connection to exotic lands as seen in huge anamorphotic mirrors. Resembling the dream-like abstruse landscapes or buildings of Monsù Desiderio and of Piranesi, they trigger Mircea’s sensation of déjà-vu. Seeing their paintings and etchings, Mircea recognises the very rooms and palaces that have been forming into his mind. He places certain scenes from Orbitor into a picture made by Monsù Desiderio. The most interesting effect is created by human voice. All these fantastic landscapes are being built in a story, in a Tale, because there is always a voice that leads to them. Along with dream, voice is another connector with our memory before birth, since the maternal voice is the first one we must have heard. ”Titikan” becomes a magical language, known by all children before they can articulate speech. But in reality Titikan is no more than a truncated nursery rhyme. Only memory can enact it as a magical password to other worlds. The same pattern functions for Cărtărescu’s exoticism. Other than by childhood thinking it is difficult to reach the empire of the sacred, because all the learnt things will be a barrier. Exoticism is dis-placed in such a way that it loses some of its anchors in reality. Cărtărescu’s exoticism becomes a dream in another dream, more hidden that the first level. Only a double illusion, a system of Chinese boxes can retrieve it. The paradox is that Blinding bears the mark of a powerful exoticism equally accompanied by a de-exotized view. As Staszak says in „Qu’est-ce que l’exotisme?”, ”The exotization process implies the objectification and the commoditization of the Other, reduced to a stereotyped role in a picturesque show. To be de-exotized, the exotic Other has to become an alter ego.” (Staszak, 2008). Cărtărescu’s de-exotization is unintentional. In Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding, the speed of imagination parallels the speed of the biological processes of the body. The body is Mircea’s connection to reality. But, with the speed of Escher’s hands passing from real to virtual, everything happens in between 1 See Staszak (Other/otherness)for this distinction. 53 worlds, not in reality. A place can be exotized when it is not anchored. Hardships, banality of everyday activities, household necessities, institutions with their problems are minimized through exoticism. This way a space with no anchors in the banality of existence becomes interchangeable with other spaces. Orbitor’s spaces are mental spaces. The writer’s aspiration to Everything and the confidence in the myth of the Book, even if its shape is that of a Manuscript (more suitable to a fractal reality) enact a dreamland with other rules, the rules of imagination. Cărtărescu’s trilogy Orbitor (Blinding) populates the constructions of memory with imagination. Cărtărescu’s imagination is the most insatiable imagination produced by Romanian literature, ever, after that of the latest European romantic, Mihai Eminescu. Actually, Cărtărescu’s versatility of style as a vehicle to match his unparalleled imagination does not come out of nowhere. It has been well explored is his debut as a poet (Faruri, vitrine, fotografii, 1980, Cartea Românească publishing house). A peak moment was for him Levantul, in 1990, the most difficult to translate of all Cărtărescu’s books. It is written with a ludic sprightliness which explores the margins of Romanian poetry by offering a postmodernist epic (in 12 cantos) into the style of all major Romanian poets, using parody and pastiches as the vehicles of this voyage. Nostalgia, as an unremitting feeling in Mircea Cărtărescu’s prose, is our vulnerability at the awareness of being alive. The author has changed the title of his 1989 volume of proses, Visul (the Dream), actually the book which marked the triumph of his originality in Romanian literature, into Nostalgia, for all the succeeding editions. Exoticism is sometimes a compensation for nostalgia, but only the exotic landscapes retrieved from dream may offer this compensation. Exoticism, Narcissus’s mirror and the challenge of the double. It is symmetry that allows the exploration of the other self. For Cărtărescu, symmetry is the illusion of the simultaneous. This contributes to the theme of the double, to the chasing after the encounter with the chimera. Mircea feels himself gazed upon by somebody strange yet familiar from another night, someone who holds in his hands Mircea’s world. We encounter here the strangeness/familiarity duality in relationship to Mircea’s double, his mirror twin, related to him through fascination and repulsion. ”The strange” and ”the familiar” make ”the dialectics of the exotic”, as Huggan shows (see Huggan). The first movement of the self, the first conscious movement is that of a reversal of position in mother’s womb. It is the switch of the body with the head down-up, in the preparation of birth. Cărtărescu sees this preconscious movement as a communication with the double of our being, as a kind of answering to his call. „Iar apoi, așa cum în a opta lună fătul se-ntoarce cu capul în jos în uter, dublul nostru de chakras şi plexuri şi raze a făcut şi el tumba care ne face atît de paradoxali. Atît de fascinanţi. Şi poate că el e chiar fetusul care s-a răsucit presimţind naşterea. Căci toţi sîntem femei, sîntem utere ce se vor sfîşia şi vor putrezi, ca să iasă, în altă lume, sub ceruri noi, ei, cristalinii, translucizi asemenea crustaceilor(...). (Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă: 74).” ”But then, the doppelgänger of our chakras and plexuses and rays flipped over, the way that in the eighth month a child turns its head down in the uterus – the reversal that makes us so paradoxical, 54 and so fascinating. Maybe the fetus turns itself over precisely because it senses the onset of birth. We are all women, we are uteruses, and we will tear ourselves apart and we will rot, so that in another world, under a new heaven, crystalline beings can emerge, translucent as crustaceans (…).” (Cărtărescu. Blinding. The Left Wing: Part 1, chapter 7, paragraph 12). For Mircea Cărtărescu symmetry is not only a trope, it is the structuring principle in connection with knowledge. Symmetry means drawing an imaginary line along the visible and invisible, along the real and imaginary, along the specular being or the projection versus who projected it. The symmetry is the long sought after conciliation with the whole (without obtaining the totality). It makes our existence bearable. Symmetry is our consolation prize. Exoticism appears in Cărtărescu’s dreamland as the provocation, as the challenge of the Double. The symmetry is the search for unity in the realms of the unreal while the double is provoked as a reencounter with the chimera. The specular and textual double, Victor, is someone who ventured through the most exotic cities of the earth. He fights in the Foreign Legion and his roots are nowhere. He appears for the first time towards the end of Blinding. The Left Wing: ”Şi imensul perete cu oase iliace al lui Victor, enigmaticul frate întunecat, marele şi necesarul şi imposibilul Victor.” In translation: ”And now, the immense wall of Victor’s ilium bones, the enigmatic dark brother, the great and necessary and impossible Victor. ” An interesting connection present in Cărtărescu’s trilogy is that between exoticism and oblivion. The exotic spaces cannot be easily forgotten since they had never been real; they are inventions of the author in a dream-like trance. Exoticism and nostalgia are the themes secretly interwoven in the myth of the book, which is the central utopia. Mircea and Victor are similar to Salman Rushdie’s pair of twins with changed destinies, Saleem and Shiva from Midnight’s Children. In Blinding they cannot meet on the same side of reality. Two men signed the paintings of Monsù Desiderio, and there is little information about them, about François de Nomé and Didier Barrá. The idea of a bicephalic artist takes in Blinding.The Left Wing the features of Monsieur Monsù and Fra Armando, like ”the hierophants of the abyss”. „Fra Armando v-a arătat calea unificării, eu pe a dezmembrării, şi nimeni nu vă spune: Alegeţi! Vom inventa fiinţa ce-o să ne inventeze, dar nu va fi din lumină pură.” (Orbitor. Aripa stângă:395) In translation: ” ‘Fra Armando has shown you the way of unification, I have shown you the way of dismemberment, and no one tells you: Choose!’ ‘ We will invent the being that will invent us, but not from pure light.’ ” Blonding. The Left Wing: Part III, chapter 25, para. 29-30). Our twin (like Victor for Mircea) could elucidate the answer to the question why we were born. Victor’s name comes from Victory. The bizarre & the familiar of Cărtărescu’s exotic dreamland. The imagined regressus ad uterum in the first volume, the saga of Maria’s genealogy, the passing of the Badislavs from an isolated Bulgarian hamlet in Rodopi Mountains to settle in Tântava, Muntenia, are all actions under the sign of maternal creation and are predominant in the Left Wing, which corresponds to Maria’s book. The Body, which is Mircea’s book, abounds in references to the masculine type of creation. This is the creation of the book. It is the passage from Existence to ”Textzistența”, as Cărtărescu calls it. The Right Wing contains the paternal genealogy, which is that of Costel, Mircea’s father. It is the book of unifying visions, of the alchemic, mystical unions and of a messianic birth. 55 Dream accompanies masculine creation because it unfolds myriads of new worlds and it retrieves the simultaneity of times. Postcolonial studies have pointed to the epistemological traps of exoticism as a larger concept. The very ambivalence of exoticism contains its seductive features, on one hand. On the other hand, exoticism has promoted ”a sanitized view” (Huggan) of the countries it was attributed to. As Huggan puts it, exoticism is not ”an inherent quality to be found in certain people, distinctive objects, specific places” (Huggan:13), therefore it is chargeable with the power of ”symbolic capital” (Bourdieu) and it can even lead to a controlled exchange of commodities (Huggan) because of this very ”production of otherness”(:13). ”Exoticism, in this context, might be described as a kind of semiotic circuit that oscillates between the opposite poles of strangeness and familiarity. Within this circuit, the strange and the familiar, as well as the relationship between them, may be receded to serve different, even contradictory, political needs and ends”(Huggan:13). In Cărtărescu’s trilogy, exoticism is abundant in occurrences. As imagination triggers, recollections of exotic lands do have an effect on expanding imagination beyond the offer of immediateness. However, there is an important distinction visible in Cărtărescu’s writing. Bucharest is exoticised to the same degree as other remote settings. Mircea Cărtărescu is surely not the first to write about remote, bizarre places (some visited, some never visited) and to reinvent them. Since the playground of each novel is the prodigious imagination of the writer, it is the oneirical space that conquers Mircea’s anamorphotic room, his ex-lodgings (reach-able in imagination at the mere sound of something to do with their street names), and a Bucharest in which we recognise real, true to life events, but spatially it has the consistency of Piranesi’s strange drawings. Postcolonial studies have discovered certain patterns beyond the idealization which accompanies the fascination with the exotic. There is however an important distinction to be made, between fiction and non-fiction. Stereotypes are easily formed in the constructions of otherness within exoticism. Exoticism can oscillate between the ideal version of the self (Todorov) and the perpetuation of the stereotype (Said). It encompasses both dimensions. They are so fused in the fascination and familiarity dialectic (see Huggan) that there is no way to separate them, to think them in proper own terms, to come to the state in which they had been before. Exoticism as a positive creative drive is inherently present in Cărtărescu’s trilogy Orbitor. In his three novels, exotic occurrences are quite abundant but the underlying paradigm superior/inferior is totally neutralised, because all representations happen in the oneiric landscapes and thus they do not occur in reality, no negotiations of identity happen here. Orbitor is like another planet which does not have the same force of gravity. For example, in a story connected with Mioara, the butterfly appears in effigy as a ring on her hand. It is sculptured in mammoth ivory. The sciencefictional character of the whole mammoth story should strike as a fantastic incident. However, it is assimilated to a fascination with the North and polar lands less explored in other writings by Cărtărescu. It is part of a dreamland where imagination is stronger than the appearances of reality: ”It was mammoth 56 hair, Mioara explained. A few years ago, she had met an Austrian who had been to Franz Joseph Land, in the frozen north, where he would have starved to death with his fellow researchers on Siberian shamanism, if he hadn’t found, in a block of ice, an entire, intact mammoth, the meat of which fed them until spring. From the fur, during the fantastical polar nights in their miserable tents, they wove sweaters, blankets and jewelry.” More meaningful than the relationship between exoticism and assimilation is, for Cărtărescu, the relationship between exoticism and initiation. The writer adopts in his dreamland certain exotic places on the basis of their fascination. Exoticism wants to take things close to the level of assimilation, but once it does that, it disappears as exoticism. In Mircea Cărtărescu’s trilogy Orbitor, exoticism obeys solely the laws of fiction. Since it always appears in contexts that are not real, but dream-like, it is always out of the inferior/superior paradigm. North Pole is an exotic setting of Orbitor. For example, one cannot make speculation about any element from the mammoth story without considering, first of all, the fact that mammoths could not have lived in Mioara’s century and could not have been found by researchers on shamanism, not even as intact frozen meat. To say nothing of the researchers’ idea to weave sweaters and blankets from the fur of the mammoth! But the ring contains a one-winged butterfly. This instantly refreshes everything in accordance with the complicate symbolism of Orbitor. It was a ring with the cipher of future, since its right wing was entire and the left was in dots: ”the right wing of the butterfly was drawn with a firm line, while the other was only outlined in points that had turned black with the passing years.” (Ibidem). Charged in this way, stuffed with the ethereal substance of dreams, no exotic place has the power to ”manufacture otherness”. The lack of occurrence of exoticism in other works by Cărtărescu is also relevant. For instance, the book De ce iubim femeile? (Why we love women?) contains mainly stories that are set in real place and are influenced by real life experiences. Some critics even claim that these texts are more of a journalistic nature and they constitute a regress. But Cărtărescu’s books should be considered as a whole (see Miheț), therefore progress/regress should be out of question. ”Cărtărescu’s oeuvre is a sum total, not the mean of some ritualic projects (…). He looks for beauty not just where it is not accessible, but where everyone can see it and no one can grip it.” (Miheț, Insule pentru un imperiu, translation mine, D.S.). The myth of the book is more graspable in terms of unity than the myth of the self, because the myth of the book may hide even in the most hidden corners or the most unanticipated. On the other hand, the myth of the book can contain the evil parts of the self. The evil takes here the form of a horrifying sexuality. The presence of a spider like on the other side of the mirror, edging the encounters between the self and the chimerical double, was manifested ever since the novel Travesti. The mirror is the best way to force the double, to conjure it. There is no knowledge of the infernal dimension of the existence without Victor. Actually, without Victor, Mircea’s feelers for the infernal dimension of existence would be reduced to mere symbols with no reality. The incarnation of Victor as the hidden, evil side would have been meaningless, something exterior, provided that Victor had been completely disconnected from Mircea. But Victor is so fascinating because he makes a unity with Mircea, not because he is completely detached. However, if we have doubts about Victor, the author tells us clearly: Maria breast-fed Victor with another kind of milk, that of ”irreality”. The term 57 is used by Cărtărescu by adopting it from Max. Blecher’s title of a book published in 1936. Cărtărescu has rediscovered Blecher, and by making him one of his models he has contributed to the rediscovery of this very interesting, meteoric interwar writer. Sean Cotter’s translation of the first novel of Blinding (so far), published in 2013, Archipelago books, is a work of art which recreates in English the same waves of language and the same explosions. Not the alternation of styles is difficult, but the preservation of the original energy and sadness. Cărtărescu finds the driest scientific words, employs them in connection to his characters’ feelings and makes the most unusual contexts their home. Sean Cotter has the merit of having given not just any translation, but the ”counterbook” of the original. Now the book is open to people from all over the world who may react to other things in the book than Romanian readers. It is as if Orbitor truly achieves its visionary nature by turning into Blinding1 and by being actually read by readers from other parts of the world, brought up with different books in mind, within different systems of education and sometimes with no connections whatsoever with childhood and adolescence under communist regimes. The butterfly can rise and fly. Conclusions. Cărtărescu’s trilogy Orbitor (Blinding) expands fiction’s known ways to concatenate the self to a giant labyrinth (perfectly overlapping the world of the hero, Mircea). Labyrinth becomes the matrix, at all levels of the book, from where the revelation of immortality emerges. It is the space where man confronts his godlike nature. At the microcosmic level of the book, it is memory that has been building the tiny labyrinths although, other than in the book, they might perish after the second of their creation. Actually, the butterfly comes as the symbol of time. The body of the book is simultaneous with its writing, but otherwise it is never fully in synchrony with its metamorphoses. The author constructs and deconstructs the role of memory exploring memory’s relationship to immortality - mostly in the third book, the father’s book, and to creation - in the first two books, the mother’s book and the book of the self There is always an unescapable longing from one metamorphosis to another. The first movement of the self, the first conscious movement is that of a reversal of position in mother’s womb. It is the switch of the body with the head down-up, in the preparation of birth. Cărtărescu sees this preconscious movement as a communication with the double of our being, as a kind of answering to his call. This double is embodied in Victor, Mircea’s twin breastfed with ”irreality”. REM is the centre of Cărtărescu’s labyrinth. The writer’s way to access REM as a portal is only through his characters. His presence as a mise en abyme is a way to hold together all the invented worlds. Symmetry is the preservation of halves, simultaneity is androgyny. For Cărtărescu, eternity is simultaneity. Victor, the mirror-twin of Mircea, the one bound to him in a Narcissus-like story of love and abhorrence, is the embodiment of symmetry at Some critics refer to the fact that the translator could have used to original word, Orbitor. It is true, but as it is now, Blinding has the strong effect of a counterbook. 1 58 its highest. Symmetry is what brings the fear of separation. Symmetry anchors the being in such a powerful illusion that is impossible to find a way out of it. The seductiveness of exoticism also lies in its ambivalence. A new vision on exoticism emerged together with the postcolonial studies. Exoticism has manifested its inability to come to terms with a known frame of life, because of the seductive powers it conveys, leading to a new hierarchy, which is not obvious but implicit. But these aspects are to be considered in real life cases. Blinding is a wonderful book feeding itself with the nostalgia of visited by actually inexistent places, totally recreated by the imagination of the writer. The reinvention of Bucharest also bears the mark of exotism. Remoteness and closeness are thus neutralised. The paradox is that Blinding bears the mark of a powerful exoticism equally accompanied by a de-exoticised view. If such an enterprise is a utopian one, how does the author take care that utopia does not collapse, how does it replenish it? If Cărtărescu, as a postmodernist writer, deconstructs some myths, he never does that to the allencompassing myth of the book. Nostalgia is what refreshes this myth. In Cărtărescu’s three novels exoticism is abundant in occurrences. As imagination triggers, recollections of exotic lands do have an effect on expanding imagination beyond the offer of immediateness. However, there is an important distinction visible in Cărtărescu’s writing. Bucharest is exoticised to the same degree as other remote settings. Things might occur differently when exoticism is totally taken out of its real life frame. The negotiations of identity present in everyday life are no longer possible. A realm where exoticism is preserved in its elements without being an imperialism of “commodities” (Huggan) is the dreamland of Mircea Cărtărescu’s writings. In Mircea Cărtărescu’s Orbitor (Blinding), exoticism embodies the need for another dimension. It is also interwoven in the maternal and paternal genealogies of Mircea, the main character of the novel, the alterego of Cărtărescu himself. Exoticism appears in Cărtărescu’s dreamland as the provocation, as the challenge of the Double. There is an inherent bond between exoticism, as a non-existent land, bearing similarities with utopia, and nostalgia. Through exoticism and symmetry, Mircea wants that magical trick which allows him to grasp his dream being, his inner dreamer. The underlying paradigm superior/inferior attributed to exoticism is totally neutralised in Blinding, because all representations are connected with the oneiric landscapes and thus they do not occur within the negotiations of real life. After all, it is through literature that we get a chance to reconfigure our dream landscapes, where our most interior worlds lie hidden. They make up the only reality which is truly ours: ”Clădiri mute, fragile, străvezii, cu faţadele încărcate de statui ciobindu-se-n înserare. Ruine melancolice îndurînd căderea definitivă a nopţii. Şi marea-n fundal, şi norii deasupra, într-un impasto neliniştit. Şi sub tablou, prinsă-n grosimea ramei, o plăcuţă de alamă cu luciul pierdut, pe care era gravat un nume: Desiderio Monsù. De unde ştiuse el peisajele carstice din adîncul somnului meu? Cum le pictase el acum patru sute de ani, cu acea acurateţe a nebuniei cu care vezi în vis fiecare detaliu, fiecare dunguliţă de nefrit şi de onix de pe acele coloane, fiecare cută din veşmîntul acelor femei? (...)Tot de-atîtea ori ciupitura mă duruse şi-atunci ştiusem că totul eadevărat, că acele spaţii vîntoase prin care rătăceam, cu creştetul ras, cu bărbia prelungă, înfăşurat într-o singură petală uriaşă de lalea bălţată, sînt de-acum lumea, singura posibilă, singura mie dată...” (Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Corpul: 326). 59 REFERENCES: CĂRTĂRESCU, Mircea. I. Orbitor. Aripa stângă. II. Orbitor. Corpul. III. Orbitor. Aripa dreaptă. București: Humanitas, 2008. Print. CĂRTĂRESCU, Mircea, Blinding. The Left Wing. Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter, Brooklyn, N.Y.:Archipelago Books, 2013. N.pag. Kindle file. CĂRTĂRESCU, Mircea. Nostalgia. București: Humanitas, 1999. CĂRTĂRESCU, Mircea. Nostalgia. Translated and with an Afterword by Julian Semilian. With an Introduction by Andrei Codrescu. N.pag.Kindle file. CORNIS-POPE, Marcel. Author-Reader Interactions in the Age of Hypertextual and Multimedia Communication. Analele Universității din Oradea Fascicula Limba și Literatura Română, nr.1/2012. 9-22. Print. JANKELEVITCH, Vladimir. Pur şi impur. (original title Le pur et l'impur).Translated by ElenaBranduşa Steiciuc. Bucureşti: Nemira, 2001. Print. HUGGAN, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins.London: Routledge, 2001. Print. LEVINAS, Emmanuel. Totalitate și infinit. Eseu despre exterioritate. (original title Totalité et infini). Translated by Marius Lazurca, postface by Virgil Ciomos, Iasi: Polirom, 1999. Print. LÉVINAS, Emmanuel. Moartea şi Timpul. Transl by Anca Măniuţiu, Cluj: Biblioteca Apostrof, 1996, p. 40. (original title: La Mort et Le Temps).Print. MANOLESCU, Nicolae. Istoria critică a literaturii române. 5 secole de literatură. Pitești, Paralela 45, 2008. SAID, Edward W. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary Edition With a New Preface of the Author. Vintage, 2003. Print. SIMUȚ, Ion. Reabilitarea ficțiunii. Bucuresti: Editura Institutului Cultural Român, 2004, pp. 317320. Print. SORA, Simona. Regăsirea intimității. Corpul în proza românească interbelică și postdecembristă. București: Cartea Românească, 2008. Print. TODOROV, Tzvetan. Noi şi ceilalţi : despre diversitate. (original title Nous et les autres. La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine).Translated by Alex. Vlad, Iaşi :Institutul European, 1999.Print. URSA, Mihaela. Optzecismul și promisiunile postmodernismului. Piteși:Paralela 45, 1999. Print. E-BIBLIOGRAPHY BARICZ, Carla. Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding. in Words without Borders, <http://wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/mircea-crtrescus-blinding#ixzz3GVkdHFqk> ESPOSITO, Scott. We Are All the Result of Chaos: Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding, in ”The Kenyon Review”,< http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2014-spring/selections/blinding-by-mirceacartarescu-738439/ > MESMER, Sharon. Elliptical Orbit: On Mircea Cărtărescu <http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/tag/bucharest/ > MIHET, Marius. Insule pentru un imperiu. in ”Romania literară”, no. 47/2012 <http://www.romlit.ro/insule_pentru_un_imperiu> SEGAL, Adam. Empires Drenched in Concupiscent Sweat: A Review of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding. in Numero Cinq, <http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2014/03/08/empires-drenched-inconcupiscent-sweat-a-review-of-mircea-cartarescus-blinding-adam-segal/ >. STASZAK, Jean François. ”Other/otherness”. 23 Apr. 2014 http://www.unige.ch/sciences societe/geo/collaborateurs/publicationsJFS/OtherOtherness.pdf STASZAK, Jean François, «Qu’est-ce que l’exotisme ? » <http://www.unige.ch/sciencessociete/geo/collaborateurs/publicationsJFS/Globe2008_Article1_.pdf> SUCEAVĂ, Bogdan. This Year's Discovery: Mircea Cărtărescu’s "Blinding". in ”Los Angeles Review of Books” <http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/this-years-discovery-mircea-cartarescus-blinding> 60 How to cite this article: Sala, Dana. ”Exoticism and Nostalgia in Cărtărescuʻs Orbitor (Blinding)”. Annals of The University of Oradea Romanian Language and Literature Fascicule (ALLRO), volume 21, 2014. 37-60. Print. ISSN 1224-7588 http://analeromana.uoradea.ro/table_of_contents.pdf http://analeromana.uoradea.ro/ 61