Din Calidor și Ostinato: Paul Goma, trauma și fuga în limbajul unui scriitor-copil-disident

Paul Goma (1935−2020) was a prominent author of subversive literature in Romania during the communist period. Arrested several times during his life, he never bowed to the recognition of the ruling party’s power. Born in Mana, Bessarabia, the writer and his parents fled to Romania when the annexation of the region to the USSR took place in 1940. The story of this exodus, the difficulties and the historical drift that arose from the traumatic events of the war are narrated or suggested by Goma throughout his work, but especially in the novels Din Calidor and Ostinato. One of the best ways to express the sense of loss, confusion and – to use a German term, Heimatlos – is certainly the author’s strange use of language in these two novels. Right from the titles we can see how the Romanian language is contaminated from the outside: the Calidor is, in fact, according to the author himself, a modification of the French corridor, which became karidor in Russian, while ostinato is an Italian term that indicates a repetitive musical rhythm, but which also means “stubborn”. In addition to the particularity of the symbolic, broken and foreign language of these two texts, it is important to emphasize the polyphony of the narrative voice that allows the overlapping of differentiated narrative times between present and past, which are fundamental also in the composition of the message of the two novels. From the flight in the face of the Red Army’s advance and the historical and personal narration in Din Calidor, we observe the trauma of detention and intellectual repression contained in Ostinato, a book that led the famous Eugen Ionescu to define Paul Goma as the Romanian Solzhenitsyn, and the critics consecrated him as one of the most known and appreciated authors in Romanian literature and of his times in general. The two novels studied in this paper have the same trauma derived from the same source, which determined Goma to apply for asylum in France. The purpose of the current analysis is to explain – by the author’s usage of different languages, but also of encoded and broken ones – the chaotic and promiscuous situation that emerged in Romania since the 1940s and its memory in the works of the author. His traumatic memories of the events narrated in the books, which nevertheless holds many spaces of beauty and innocence, as well as an important historical chronicle which holds characteristics that can still unfortunately be applied today, are what makes the author (and these two works) of paramount importance in continuing to develop a strong resistance against any form of political violence and human arrogance.