University of Craiova, Romania

parpala_afana@yahoo.com

Abstract

On the whole, the linear or orchestral models of communication failed to integrate the sacred, vertical dimension of human communication. Transpersonal communication (TC) designates the interaction with divine entities, with ancestors or spirits beyond man’s contingent existence and knowledge. TC could also be seen as the expansion and unification of the self through archetypal symbolic structures. The forms of metaphysical experience (the prayer, the meditation, the religious rituals, the mystic visions and representations) express the subjective need for transcendency, which is an immanent dimension of the self.

Understanding God is, according to Solomon Marcus (2009: 59), a mediating process which involves metaphor and self-reference. The semiotics of God implies the ternary relation: Nothingness, Infinity and Self-referentiality. Robert C. Neville (2002) remarked the dynamic character of the interpreters, as the religious signs are not static, but engaged in vivid symbolic interactions. Massimo Leone (2009: 190) noted the semiotic paradox of representation specific to TC: through iconic presentification, an absent entity is signaled by signs of visibility and vice versa. The visual representations of the sacred, following specific conventions and interdictions, illustrate the style a society or a certain creator confer to non-representable entities an iconic presence.

The artistic experience testifies to the affinity between TC and poetry – “a religious state of our spirit which gently affirms and lovingly receives the presence of God in the suave beauties of existence.” (Arghezi). In the present paper, we offer an inventory of the most representative strategies of TC in modern Romanian poetry: the endo-/exophoric reference, the dramatic address, the semantic-syntactic models of mediated communication, the deictic system, the “figure and ground” stylization etc. Accordingly our approach is semiotic, communicational, and cognitive.

For the direct TC, our starting point is the teophany narrated in Jacob wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32: 22-32), reinterpreted in two neomodern parodic pheno-texts, viz. Lupta lui Iacov cu îngerul sau ideea de „tu” (Jacob wrestling with the angel or the idea of “you”) by Nichita Stănescu and Minunea (Miracle) by Marin Sorescu. The concept of “type scene” (Savran 2005) is useful in this comparative analysis. We will identify in Ioan Alexandru’s hymns the values of foregrounding genearated by the figure – ground disposition (Stockwell 2003). The figuration process is centered on the attractor “light”, a symbolic metaphor specific to the Byzantine imagery. The figure overwhelms the ground, abolishes the perspective and imposes the omnipresent light, a sign (icon, index, symbol) of the sacred Logos. The principles of iconicity, the emphasis on the liturgical discourse, the esoteric symbols, the celebration of primitivism characterize the hymnographic poetry of the neo-modern Ioan Alexandru.

For the indirect TC, Tudor Arghezi’s Psalms offer the most complex semiotic system of “metonymic signs of the Sign”, transcoded in images of impressive sensoriality. (Parpală 1984).

In religious traditions, the representation of God is canonical and rigid; in poetry, the alternatives reveal a rhetorically mediated hypothetical communication; its humor and dramatic character result from ontological difference and from emotional involvement. We noticed a baroque TC in Arghezi’s psalms, a parodic one with Sorescu, a logocentric metaphysics with Stănescu, a cataphatic and expressionistic figuration with Alexandru.

1. Introduction

In the present paper, we offer an inventory of the most representative strategies of transpersonal communication (TC) in (neo)modern Romanian poetry: the endo-/exophoric reference, the parodic intertextuality, the dramatic address, the semantic-syntactic models of mediated communication, the deictic system, and the “figure and ground” stylization. We intend to correct thus the non-specific discussions on poets’ “religiosity”, common in Romanian literature studies.[1] For the (in)direct TC, Tudor Arghezi’s psalms offer the most complex semiotic system, transcoded in images of impressive sensoriality (Parpală 1984; 2009).

Accordingly, our approach is semiotic, communicational, and cognitive:

a) Peircean semiotics is particularly adequate to the dynamic approach of Eastern Orthodoxy, which concentrates on experiencing, living God. By considering the pragmatic contexts, the semiotic theory of theology amends the Christian tradition, which builds symbols of deity as static and universal.

b) Communicational criticism elaborated by Roger D. Sell (2000; 2011; 2013) suggests useful concepts: “endophoric/exophoric reference”, “community making”, “mediation”, “genuineness” etc. This “idealistic pragmatism” is a response to the post-postmodern condition, for which literature is a universal way of communication.

c) Cognitive poetics/stylistics turns to account the texture of perspectivism (figure and ground theory). Cognitive poetics / stylistics explored, among other new topics, the perspectivism of the text (figure and ground theory).

2. Transpersonal communication and symbolic archetypes

Transpersonal communication designates the interaction with divine entities, with ancestors or spirits beyond man’s contingent existence and knowledge. It is considered, alongside interpersonal, intrapersonal, media and group communication, as a level or a type of human interaction.

Linear or orchestral models of communication failed to integrate the metaphysical experience of individuals.[2] The essence of communication cannot be fully grasped unless it is considered, along with the horizontal dimension of socialization, “the vertical dimension of the human connection to the hierarchies of the spirit.” (Dinu 2007: 31). The double meaning, the sacred and the profane, is part of the double etymology of the term “communication”.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, TC could also be seen as the integration, unification and expansion of the self through archetypal symbolic structures. Carl Gustav Jung (1990) noted that each of the major structures of personality (the self, the ego, the shadow, the animus and anima) is an archetype. The self is an archetype of the totality, as the ego is the center of consciousness. The unconscious expresses itself through archetypal symbols, both individual and collective; God-Father, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha are symbols of the self, of dynamic balance, opposed to disharmony and antagonisms.

As an interaction that takes place in a person’s spiritual area, TC is carried out in conjunction with the intrapersonal area. The forms of metaphysical experience (the prayer, the meditation, the religious rituals, the mystic visions and representations) express the subjective need for transcendence, which is an immanent dimension of the self.

The artistic experience attests the affinity between TC and poetry – “a religious state of our spirit which gently affirms and lovingly receives the presence of God in the suave beauties of existence.” (Arghezi 1976: 14).

3. Transcendency – a universal concept

Though transcendency is usually understood as refering to God – an entity which transcends our universe, the concept of transcendency is more extensive than the concept of Divinity. Understanding God is a mediating process which involves metaphor, myth, allegory or drama. The semiotics of God implies, according to Solomon Marcus (2009: 59), the ternary relation between Nothingness, Infinity and Self-reference. Infinity is the common denominator of transcendency in theology, philosophy, and mathematics. It contrasts with the finitude of our lives and, because we do not have a direct perception of these entities, there is a process of mediation conducted by signs that open an infinite semiosis. God is “the last indeterminate significant”, remarks a character of David Lodge’s novel Nice Work! (1997: 209).

Robert C. Neville (2002) observed the dynamic character of the interpreters, as the religious signs are not static, but engaged in vivid symbolic interactions. Thus, we can take the life of Jesus as an iconic, indexical or symbolic sign of the divine presence. Solomon Marcus (ibid.: 60) distinguishes between the metaphorical, indexical, symbolic, and iterative representations of the coreferent terms (God, the Almighty, the Creator etc).

The representation of the nonrepresentable is a semiotic paradox specific to TC. In a study about the veil in the Jewish culture of the invisible, Massimo Leone (2009: 190) noted that, through “iconic presentification”, an absent entity is signaled by signs of visibility and vice versa.

4. Direct transpersonal communication: the theophany experience

For the direct TC, our starting point is the theophany narrated in Jacob wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32: 22-32), reinterpreted in two neomodern parodic pheno-texts, viz. Lupta lui Iacov cu îngerul sau ideea de “tu” [Jacob wrestling with the angel or the idea of “you”] by Nichita Stănescu and Minunea [Miracle] by Marin Sorescu. The concept of “type scene” is useful in this comparative analysis. We will identify in Ioan Alexandru’s hymns the values of foregrounding genearated by the figure-ground disposition.

4.1. The type-scene: Jacob wrestling with the angel

Allegorical story, legend or myth, Jacob wrestling with the angel concisely narrates an enigmatic event: the patriarch Jacob[3] confronting an ambigous being, which is successively attributed a double nature: of man and God.[4] In the verses 24-27 the term man is used, which could be interpreted as Jesus foreshadowing, in the cataphatic way of God’s embodiment. After the verse 28, which displays the performative act of changing the name of Jacob in Israel, the designation is made by the term God.

In this agonic theophany, TC involves both the initiation in the human-deity partnership and the perlocutionary force of blessing in the form of a symbolic name (Israel) – the full realization of the self. The revelation of divine names, central in the Old Testament, is interpreted by Ugo Volli as an “inaugural act of knowledge”[5].

The revelation of God, repeatedly narrated in the Old Testament, evidences a common scenario described by George W. Savran (2005) as a type-scene structured in the following moments (alluding to Propp’s “functions”):

· the preparations for the theophany – the separation of the protagonist from the community, at night;

· the visual and verbal revelation of the Divinity;

· the human reaction to the asymmetric interaction;

· the transformation and the externalization, namely sharing the experience in a larger societal context.

4.2. Nichita Stănescu, Jacob wrestling with the angel or about the idea of “you”

Stănescu’s neomodern poem, published in the volume Necuvintele [The unwords], (1969), thematizes the identity – otherness opposition, which unfolds in two types of dialogic sequences:

a) on the one hand, there is the intrapersonal communication eu – tu [I – you], shaped in the dispute between the name (sign of identity) and the body / soul (signs of otherness): “Numai numelui meu nu-i spun tu;/în rest însuşi sufletul meu/este tu,/tu, suflete.” [“Only my name I don’t call ‘you’/all the rest, my soul itself/is ‘you’/you, soul.”] (Stănescu 1985: 347). Among the techniques of defamiliarization we note: the endophoric reference, the emphatic addressing and the reported discourse related to personification;

b) on the other hand, there is a transpersonal dialogue with an apathetic el [he], symbolized in the final lines by alluding to the Bible: “De ce o fi spus atunci: / te-ai luptat cu însuşi cuvîntul / şi l-ai învins! // Să fi fost el însuşi cuvîntul?” [“Why be said then: / ‘You’ve battled the word itself/and you defeated it!’ // Would it have been the word itself?”] (ibid.: 349).

The protagonists engaged in the dialogue have no names, but roles designated by personal deixis: I-you-he.[6] The authorial ethos (“I” and “you”) metaphorically assumes Jacob’s experience of redefining personal identity.

The name dispute (an empty but essential sign), placed at the break of the day, highlights the romantic (Platonian) idea of Godly inspired poetry and the self consciousness of modern art. The intrapersonal and the transpersonal communication recycle the exegi monumentum theme: the idea that the real identity (and eternity) consist in the name the poet builds in his creation. Stănescu decided in favour of the Word / word – a logophatic option which embodies both the Divinity and the poetic creative effort.

4.3. Tudor Arghezi: the sacred in the profane

Arghezi’s psalms[7] are structured on two axes – identification and communication (Parpală 1984: 104-105) and exhibit an oxymoronic ethos: “Tare sunt singur, Doamne, şi pieziş” [“So alone I am, God, and crooked!”] (Arghezi 1980: I, 24); “Eşti ca un gând, şi eşti şi nici nu eşti/Între putinţă şi-ntre amintire” [“You are like a thought, you are and you aren’t/Between willingness and memory”] (ibid.: I, 50).

Arghezi rejects the traditional Christian code, its anthropological patterns, product of a vulgar imagination, and emphasizes the contrast between seeing and understanding:

Pentru că n-au putut să te-nţeleagă / Deşertăciunea lor de vis şi lut, / Sfinţii-au lăsat cuvânt că te-au văzut / Şi că purtai toiag şi barbă-ntreagă. [Because they couldn’t understand you / Their nothingness of dream and clay, / The Saints let us know they have seen you / And that you were carrying a stick and a whole beard.] (ibid.: I, 50).

Undecided and longing for certainty, the poet himself claims material proofs of God’s existence: “Vreau să te pipăi şi să urlu: ‘Este!’” [“I want to touch you and to scream: ‘There it is!’”] (ibid.: I, 45). The state of deus absconditus is best shown in the Psalm (Nu-ţi cer un lucru prea cu neputinţă [I don’t ask of you something very difficult]), where the suffering comes from the absence of God’s signs. The poet evokes the sacred time of Scriptures, opposed to the profane context of regress concerning the dialogue man-divinity:

De când s-a întocmit Sfânta Scriptură / Tu n-ai mai pus picioru-n bătătură […] Îngerii tăi grijeau pe vremea ceea / Şi pruncul şi bărbatul şi femeea. // Doar mie, Domnul, veşnicul şi bunul, / Nu mi-a trimis, de când mă rog, / niciunul. [Ever since the Holy Bible was written / You hadn’t set foot in the yard […] Your angels used to take care in those days / Of the baby and the man, and the woman. / Only to me, the eternal and good God, / Didn’t send, since I’ve been praying, / any.]. (ibid.: I, 39).

In Cântec mut [Dumb song], God and his angels descend the Ladder of Fire to bring solace to a dying man. It is the only theophany that occurs in the profane world of Arghezi’s representations of the sacred in the profane: “La patul vecinului meu / A venit azi noapte Dumnezeu. / Cu toiag, cu îngeri şi sfinţi […] Şi odaia cu mucegai / A mirosit toată noaptea a rai” [“To my neighbor’s bedside / Last night God came / With crook, angels, and saints […] And the chamber with mildew / Smelled all night of heaven.” (ibid.: I, 138).

4.4. Minunea (Miracle) – a parodic theophany

Minunea is a parodic type-scene concentrated in the initial generative statement: “Lui Lungu i s-a arătat Dumnezeu azi-noapte” [God has been shown up to Lungu last night”] (Sorescu 1986: 19). The vision reproduces the antropomorphic representations common to the naive surrealistic icons. Community making with listeners generates comic effects based on distrust, curiosity and ambiguity:

Şi-odată, fâş! foşnea ceva în pătuiag. / Când se uită în sus – Dumnezeu! / Sta aşa în capul oaselor./ L-a întrebat: ‘Ce mai faci?’ / Şi asta fusese totul. [...] // Dar tot Lungu susţinea şi altminterea, adică Dumnezeu / Îl întrebase, / Blând şi aşezat de-acolo din pătuiag, parcă-ar fi fost pe tronul / Lui de aur, / Că sclipea totul în jur. [At once, fâs! something rustled in the haystack./ When looking above – God! / Just stands upright. / He asked: ‘How are you?’/ And that was it. [...] // But Lungu claimed otherwise, that God / asked him, / Gentle and settled there in the haystack as if it were on his golden throne / As everything around was shining.] (ibid.: 19–20.

In TC, a special emphasis is placed on affects, for proximity of incompatible ontological registers releases paroxystic emotions, euphoric or dysphoric. Discourse deconstruction takes place under the pressure of two emotions: astonishment and confusion. Emotions are expressed by metonymy and graduation:

1) by metonymy. The physiological effects substitute the emotion: “simt o-mpăcare mare” [“I feel great placation”] (ibid.: 22). In verbal enunciation, the state of dizziness is expressed by:

a) confusion and contradiction. Lungu doesn’t know to explain who asked whom – God asked him or vice versa: “Păi, eu l-am întrebat…adică…m-a întrebat…” [“Well, I asked him ... I mean ... he asked me…”] (ibid.: 22).

b) modal marks of suspension and questioning, following the intrusion of the enunciation in the utterance: “Eu nu ştiu acum…ce-o să se întâmple cu mine?” [“I do not know now ... what will happen to me?” ] (ibid.: 23).

c) “annihilation of the subject” (Greimas, Fontanille 1997: 259): “A prins un fel de transparenţă” [“He caught a kind of transparency”] (ibid.: 23). The public invests the protagonist with the role of a saint: “Şi-a pus coroană de mărăcini de roşcov în jurul gâtului / Şi-a plecat să propovăduiască în pustiu” [“He put a wreath of carob brambles around his neck / and went to preach in the wilderness” (ibid.: 23). Or, holiness is one of the most elusive phenomena thought by humanity (Visser, Wilcox 2006: x).

2) by gradation. As excitement mounts, the protagonist loses the competence to verbalize his feelings. He cannot say anything intelligible; the crushed discourse reaches its lower point – the interjection. Invited by the crowd to preach, the saint articulates but “E-ei!”. Sorescu exploits this paradox: the peak of emotion correlates with the annihilation of the discourse. Interjection, a morphological class valued in emotional speech, connotes the limit of expression (Aijmer: 2004).

Sorescu wrote Minunea with a detached involvement. From one point of view, we notice the dramatic strategies generating the illusion and the comic of the situation; on the other hand, he ironically compromises the simulacrum.

5. Indirect transpersonal communication: the rhetoric of mediated transcendency

For this paradigm, the relevant samples have been excerpted from Tudor Arghezi’s psalms, displaying a communication mediated by metonymic signs of the Sign and from Ioan Alexandru’s expressionist hymns, displaying a “figure and ground” strategy of pantheistic revelation.

5.1. Tudor Arghezi: the metonymic signs of the Sign

The performance model of Psalms is simple: a human paradigm (“I”) addressing a divine paradigm (“you”), while the rhetoric of TC is complex due to the deterioration of the referential transparency. At both levels, it’s easy to remark the doubling of “I” and the opaqueness of “you”. God is the Lord, the Father; Somebody, Someone, Nobody, Who knows who – indefinite pronouns, because the concept of “God” has an opaque referent. The texts offer arguments for a type of semiotic reference through which the referent is signaled, not signified (Valesio 1971: 155–185).

As an abstract construct, divinity is not represented by following rational principles, but mythological-baroque ones (Lotman, Uspensky 1978: 220). In his pathetic hunting, the psalmist meets only indexis of the Sign. Arghezi amends God’s referential opacity derived from its abstract, fictional characteristics, by using “metonymic signs of the Sign” (Parpală 1985: 93–109). Signs of revelation and interdiction are:

a) material signs: the light, the angels, the Creation vs. locks, stone relics;

b) psychic signs: love,devotion vs. fear;

c) linguistic signs in reported speech: “Ţi-am auzit cuvântul spunând că nu se poate” [“I heard your word saying that is not allowed” ] (Arghezi 1980:.I, 17).

The Divine does not reveal as itself, hence the disappointment induced by cryptic signs: “Dar semnele, doar semne, răzleţe şi-adunate, / Nu mai mi-ajung, părute, şi nici adevărate. / Vreau tâlcul plin să-l capăt şi rostul lor întreg.” [“But signs, only signs, scattered and gathered, / Are not enough to me, apparent and not even true. / Their full meaning and whole purpose I want to get.”] (ibid.: II, 167).

5.2. Ioan Alexandru: the light as “figure and ground”

“Figure” and “ground” are crucial concepts for distinguishing, in a “texture”[8], a figure on the background on which it takes shape. In cognitive science, it concerns the theory of linguistic foregrounding, in its variant called “the theory of figure and ground organization” (Ungerer and Schmid 1996: 156–204). Peter Verdonk (2005: 241) discusses two scenarios from visual arts: while in Breughel’s painting the figures gain pronounced relief from their opposition to the background, with M.C. Escher the figure can be perceived simultaneously as the ground. In cognitive poetics/cognitive stylistics, our ability to structure mental situations and texts in various ways offers a rational explanation to the figures of speech.

Peter Stockwell (2002: 21) described stylistic prominence with the help of “attractors” – figures that channel the attention of readers or listeners; the figure is a moving trajectory with well-defined edges, while the background is vague, continuous and homogenous. Unlike the surrealist writing analyzed by Stockwell (2003: 13–26), in which the goal is achieved through literal metaphor, the expressionist image is reached through the accumulation and repetition of the generalized figure. In the Romanian neo expressionism of the late 1960s the primitivism and the celebration of the phenomenal have produced highly stylized, contemplative, monochrome visions. The celebration of the Divine, the emphasis on the liturgical discourse, the esoteric symbols and the principles of iconicity characterize Ioan Alexandru’s expressionist hymns.

Masterpieces of the volume Imnele bucuriei [Hymns of Joy], 1973, the poems Lumină lină [Gentle light] and Lumina neapropiată [Unapproachable light][9] glorify the divine dimension of the world. -In his hyberbolic and oxymoronic images, the poet quotes the apophatic description of God: “He lives in unapproachable light” (1 Tim. 6: 16).

Alexandru’s hymnography celebrates the values of foregrounding generated by the figure – ground disposition. The figuration process is centered on the attractor “light”, a symbolic metaphor specific to Byzantine imagery. The figure overwhelms the ground, abolishes the perspective and imposes the omnipresent light, a sign (icon, index, symbol) of the sacred Logos: “Lumină lină, lini lumini / Răsar din codrii mari de crini, / Lumină lină, cuib de ceară, / Scorburi cu miere milenară.// Lumină lină, Logos sfânt” [“Soft light, soft lights / Arise from vast thickets of lilies, / Soft light, nest of wax, / Hollows with ancient honey. // Soft light, holy Logos”] (Alexandru 1973: 122).

The poet relies on the principles of iconicity discussed by Peter Stockwell (2009: 83-85). According to the quantitative principle, the expressionist stylization corresponds to the principle of the incarnated Logos; the game of parallelisms and alliterations, the emphasis on the liquids l and r figure out the cosmic invasion of light. The reference being exoforic[10], the texture cohesion is not assured by internal references, but through the phonetic syntax: “Lumină lină lini lumini”. According to the sequential principle, the amplitude of the symbolic metaphor of light, the ecstatic contemplation, the emphasis on liturgical symbols ensure the endophoric reference and the coherence of the vision. According to the proximity principle, the deictic center of enunciation configures the hyperbolic image of transcendence descending, specific to Orthodox metaphysics.

6. Conclusion

The paper has considered the paradox of God’s representation in (neo)modern Romanian poetry, from a communicational, semiotic and cognitivist perspective. We discussed the (in)direct transpersonal communication in Tudor Arghezi’s psalms, the theophany textualized in Nichita Stănescu’s and Marin Sorescu’s intertextual poems, and Ioan Alexandru’s hymns, relevant to the “figure and ground” neo expressionism. The poetic images emphasize a baroque semiosis.

In religious traditions, the representation of God is canonical; in poetry, the alternatives reveal a hypotetical, rhetorically mediated TC; its humor and dramatic character result from ontological difference and from emotional involvement. We noticed a baroque TC in Arghezi’s psalms, a parodic one with Sorescu, a logocentric metaphysics with Stănescu, a cataphatic and expressionistic figuration with Alexandru.

Sources

***  1982. Biblia sau Sfânta Scriptură [The Bible or Holy Scripture]. Bucureşti: Editura Institutului Biblic şi de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române.

ALEXANDRU, Ioan. 1973. Imnele bucuriei [Hymns of Joy]. Bucureşti: Cartea Românească.

ARGHEZI, Tudor. 1980. Versuri [Lyrics]. I, II. Bucureşti: Cartea Românească.

SORESCU, Marin. 1986. La Lilieci [At Lilacs]. I, II, III. Bucureşti: Cartea Românească.

STĂNESCU, Nichita. 1985. Ordinea cuvintelor. Versuri. 1957-1983. Vol. I [The Words Order. Lyrics], 1957-1983. Vol. I. 345-382. Bucureşti: Cartea Românească.

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[1]  Expressions such as “religious poet” or “irreligious poet” are “non-critical, futile.” (Balotă 1977: 152).

[7] Arghezi’s psalms form an unsystematic corpus disseminated throughout his poetic work, from the volume Cuvinte potrivite [Fitting Words], 1927, until Frunzele tale [Your Leaves], 1968.