Intertextuality as World Literature Mechanism: German and French Sources in Mircea Ivănescu’s Poetry

Abstract

While the Anglo-Saxon intertext is the most clear one in Mircea Ivănescu’s poetry, the French and German intertexts are at least as present and fertile. Proust and Camus, on the one hand, and Rilke and Goethe, on the other, represent the stellaefixae in the complicated constellations of his allusions and paraphrases; besides them, innumerable other quotations or references to the French and German cultural sphere build the consistency of his poetic universe. The significance of this rich German and French intertextuality is twofold: on the one hand, it shows that Romanian literary criticism hurriedly relegated Ivănescu’s poetry in the wake of Anglo-Saxon postmodernism exclusively - and, given the fact that his four fixed stars are three high modernist poets and a pre-modern one, it is disputable if one can labei Ivănescu as a postmodern at all; even though the respective pre-modern poet, namely Goethe, is considered by Jeremy Adler, in his recent monumental monograph, “the inventar of modernity,” one can still argue that none of Ivănescu’s most frequent intertexts is excerpted from a postmodern writer, which could be taken to indicate something meaningful regarding his postmodern affinities. On the other hand, it shows how intertextuality can function as a world-literature mechanism in accordance with Damrosch’s description: it is “a form of detached engagement” which takes the writer out of the frame of reference of his național culture and operates in his literature the “elliptical refraction” Damrosch sees as the first trăit of world literature.