Moderaţia în Moromeții: o lectură aristoteliană

Résumé

The first volume of Marin Preda’s novel The Morometes (1955), presenting the life of a Romanian peasant family of the Danube plains in the second half of the 1930s, was greeted by the orthodox communist literary criticism of the epoch for exposing the ”illusions” and ”false consciousness” of the rural middle-class dramatically shattered by crisis-prone capitalism and the outbreak of imperialistic WWII. Later on, when the Romanian variety of the post-Stalinist Thaw allowed for a certain autonomy of literary criticism, interpretative acumen switched towards styling the father of the family and central figure of the novel, Nicolae Moromete, into a representative of a national spirit, i.e. a form of savoir vivre which paradoxically mixes cunning and playful irony to a profound sense of ethical correctness and dignity. The present paper takes a somewhat different path, elaborating on the sugestions of a minority of critics that the novel has a significant political dimension, in the sense of profoundly reflecting on the foundation of a good polis. Starting from the fact that Preda’s novel represents the triple social partition of the Romanian village, with haves and have nots and a buffer of „neither rich, nor poor”, I propose that Preda deliberatly glides form a Marxian vision of social justice centered on the dispossesed, towards an Aristotelian understanding of political righteousness as concentrated in the middle – that is, on a sociomoral class at an even distance from the greed and arrogance of wealth, and the blind resentments of blatant poverty.