"MIRROR WRITING" AND THE RELATION OF THE TEXT TO ITSELF IN MIRCEA ELIADE ‘ S NOVEL

Abstract

By the end of the Second World War, when Eliade began to write the
novel Noptea de S‚nziene, metatextual writing was already an outdated literary
fashion, as Eliade himself had practiced it almost 30 years earlier in his novel
Romanul adolescentului miop. However, to reflect in his mature novel the polemics of
interwar writers on the aesthetics of authenticity, as well as his attempt to create
character-myths, Eliade could not resist the temptation to introduce into the novel
character-writers who, as playwrights or prose writers, kept creative diaries. One
of these writers is the character Ciru Partenie, whose diary, confronted with the
tribulations of his life as an artist, reflects the relationship between lived and
fictionalized biography. As a character-writer, Ciru is categorically a novelistic
double of Eliade himself, and the question that arises is whether his diary,
condemned to be “the autobiography of a ghost”, is not the very formula by which
Eliade comments on his own existence.