NORMAN MANEA
545
I also kept in touch with her paper. In 1996, I had the opportunity to
subject her thesis to are-evaluation.
MANY THINGS HAVE CHANGED
with regard to Ionesco over the years. An
open adversary of Romanian nationalism, he was condemned immedi–
ately after the war, before Communists took complete power, for
"insults" against the State and the Nation. He had indeed expressed his
disgust for the Army, the Church, the Law, demagogy, immorality, the
tyranny of parvenu, and yet again, the "angel-like figures of Romanian
nationalism." But also for the "refined" intellectuals, fascinated with
the base nature of the Beast.
He did everything to escape his rhinocerized homeland:
"Anything
could have happened. I could have died; I could have been convicted; I
could have become a dog too; I could have been possessed by the
Legionaries' devil. When I left the country, I had the feeling I had saved
myself from fire, earthquake, ocean waves, whirlpools.
..
.It seems to
me I had not seen people for a long time. I was awakening from a night–
mare; I was escaping from hell.
...
Everything is fine when the nation–
alistic homeland is far away."
His work, which was banned during Stalinism, was briefly recovered
during the interval of "liberalization" in the mid 1960s, due to his
"humanism" and "antifascism." Later on, it was exiled again because
of its antitotalitarian subversiveness and the author's intransigence
toward the Carpathian Clown's dictatorship. Published again in their
entirety after 1989, his writings have remained a source of perplexity
and suspicion not just for any "national" institution but also for the
consumer of pop-cultural products.
Ionesco's death, in 1994, sanctioned not his return to his native coun–
try but his separation from a whole world that was no longer his.
To the very end he had been a fierce enemy of death in all its forms.
He kept dreaming of avoiding the unavoidable.
"The truth is to be found
in the imaginary,"
he repeated. While constantly reasserting his religios–
ity, he never failed to add that
"I could never believe enough.
..
.1 am
like the one who prays daily: Lord, make me believe.
...
The truth is in
the imaginary."
In the end, he resigned himself, as revealed by his will,
which
Le Figaro
published the very day he died:
"Perhaps there will be
joy afterwards.
... "
