WAYS Or WRITING ABOUT ONESELF
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biography or autobiography. I wrote about communism and the Holo–
caust in a fictionalized, codified way, not only because I lived in a soci–
ety where it was difficult to do it otherwise. Borges said at some point
that censorship is the mother of metaphor. Yet I wrote in an indirect,
sometimes oblique way because it fit my literary temperament and
vision. Despite this, I put my entire fiction work there, novels and short
stories, many among them not at all connected to my life, under the title
Variations to a Self-Portrait,
considering it a literary body, my spiritual
being, transformed in letters, words, pages. Living in a closed society
under the rule of censorship may have been one reason why I didn't trust
autobiography or memoirs. Another reason probably was due to my
admiration of Proust and Kafka. And perhaps Latin literary tradition as
well made me more skeptical about this type of writing. Stillmore impor–
tant was to find the right literary expression for my very inner self.
We should never be too condescending, however, about what we
don 't know and never tried. I wouldn't have spoken today at this con–
ference if, in the end, I hadn't sinned myself.
Coming to the States, I was asked to write about my experience in a
communist society, and I started
to
publish cultural and political essays
about the communist past in Eastern Europe, particularly in Romania,
in the postwar decades. As a writer, it was not easy to go from an
almost underground life to the life on the stage. Even on this stage, I
must say.... It was difficult, also, to go from a codified way of writing
to the rhetoric of confession, from the rules of fiction to the rules of
framed social-political comments.
Predictably, I found myself dealing step by step with direct autobio–
graphical writing and I was pushed to try even the genre of memoir. A
very uncomfortable, even scary experience-also a daring feat of self–
exposure in today 's cannibalistic cultural atmosphere. However, it
turned into an unavoidable way of scrutinizing the tense relations
between me and my homeland, Romania-my confused and shattered
sense of belonging to a place and a history, during the Holocaust, dur–
ing the Byzantine communist nationalistic dictatorship, and even in the
post-communist decade-as a blamed and defamed exile in his native
country.
It
was not at all easy
to
face the limitations and the difficulties of
dealing with memory, with the rigor and approximation of remember–
ing, with reconstructing the crossroads of a biography, with real names
and real personalities (still alive), real conflicts and contradictions. Yet,
the greatest difficulty, from my point of view, was to avoid the posture
of victim transformed into prosecutor, to be able to scrutinize myself
