La perspective temporelle dans les mémoires de la littérature roumaine du XIXe siècle. Observations sur le rapport entre «le temps vécu» et «le temps de l’évocation»

Abstract

Memorialistic texts are influenced by the time perspective, which, according to Alexandru Săndulescu, may have a selective function: it whether glorifies or criticises the past [Săndulescu, 2003: 5]. Starting from this consideration, I intend, in this paper, to analyse some fragments of three memorialistic texts belonging to 19th century Romanian literature, which I consider representative for several perspectives: the way in which they illustrate the transformation of the authors’ perception, in time, on places and people; the manner in which they emphasise the necessity and the importance of noting the events in the moments they happen; the emphasis on the possibility of recreating the past by investing it with new meanings. The
corpus of my analysis is composed of a travel memoir by Sextil Puşcariu, Călare de două veacuri, (On horseback for two centuries); an epistolary text by Barbu Delavrancea and a false intimate journal, Peregrinul transilvan (The Transylvanian Wanderer) by Ion Codru Drăguşanu - actually a travel memoir written in epistolary form after the travel was ended. The choice of these different literary species was based on the idea that, although the frontier between memorialistic texts is sometimes uncertain, from the perspective of the temporal report a higher coefficient of uncertainty was observed in the case of the memoirs, which relate events after a longer period of time than the journals, in which the chronologic precision is more accurate, and the confabulation functions less.