Abstract:
After a brief introduction about the illness narratives in Romania, my chapter analyses one of the few appearances of this type that appeared in the eighth decade, during the communist regime. ”The Lost Book”, written by Domniţa Gherghinescu-Vania, was published after the author's death by her surviving husband. Although it was edited in the early '70s, in a period of apparent (or declared) ideological decompression, the crocheted edition of D. Gherghinescu-Vania's texts on the theme of illness and broken identity has remained, to this day, in an undeserved critical shadow. Of course, like the other cases of illness narratives that appeared in the '70s, after the death of their authors (for example, the writings signed by M. Blecher and C. Bursaci), Domnița's volume was extremely different from the norm of the communist era, in which other formative experiences were assiduously sought and promoted. By contrast, such an illness book blatantly contradicted the norm permitted by the regime for which the idea of disease was inconceivable, because it profaned the illusion of the perfect ”red body”, cultivated through an entire propaganda apparatus. But ”Lost Book” is, however, unintentionally subversive. The text explores its own limits in the most modern way possible and uses thanatography for this purpose. On one hand, the sick woman writes her death first unconsciously, then lucidly, precisely in order to capture life, however frail, between the margins of her own book. On the other hand, the consciousness of mortality visibly modifies not only the thematic substance, but also the form of the discourse. It becomes increasingly fractured, as the end of existence approaches and, from a certain point on, speaks through expressive syncopes and graphically marked gaps. In other words, when death finally bites the sick woman’s body, unable to fight anymore, the now vulnerable body of the text creates in turn the illusion of annihilation. By segmenting her final texts with numerous semicolons and ignoring the possibility of publishing her confessional notes in an era when the wooden language was rampant, the unwitting author of ”The Lost Book” must have fully felt the futility of language.
