Matei Calinescu: An Independent Intellectual

Author(s): Douwe Fokkema

Source: symplokē, Vol. 17, No. 1-2 (2009), pp. 267-269
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/symploke.17.1-2.0267
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Matei Calinescu:
An Independent
Intellectual

Douwe Fokkema

Matei Calinescu was a courageous man. Perhaps everyone is who decides

to leave his or her country of origin and become an expatriate, but I wish to
refer here to his intellectual work in which he displayed a rare independence.
In the early 1980s, I came into contact with Calinescu through his Faces
of Modernity (1977), which I admired. In those days, I was writing a book on
modernism in collaboration with my wife, Elrud Ibsch, published in English
as Modernist Conjectures (1990). But my later cooperation with Calinescu was
motivated by our mutual interest in the enigmatic concept of postmodernism
rather than in the well-known contours of modernism. When Hans Bertens
and I organized a workshop on postmodernism at Utrecht University in
September 1984, Calinescu was invited as one of the main foreign speakers.
In his essay “Postmodernism and Some Paradoxes of Periodization,” he used
his enviable erudition and stylistic cunning to save the idea of literary period
from the garbage can of history. Analyzing the views of Roland Barthes
and Michel Foucault on literary history, he observed that they avoided the
familiar period terms such as romantic, realist, and symbolist, but instead
resorted to “an oversimplified model of literary evolution” (1986, 241). It was
certainly courageous in those days to criticize these avatars of literary theory.
More specifically, Calinescu argued that Foucault’s “discursive deter-
minism is unable to devise any model of change” (243), a view also held by
the German theorist Claus Uhlig in a paper read at the 10th Congress of the
International Comparative Literature Association in New York in 1982 (Uhlig
1985), but elaborated more patiently and more convincingly by Calinescu.
His criticism of the nonexistent relation between Foucault’s epistemes
cleared the way for asking the question of how change in literary production
and reception is brought about, or which factors can be held responsible for
such change. Calinescu emphasized that period terms are constructs (1986,
247), thus implying the possibility of devising a metalanguage. However, the
idea of a metalanguage was anathema to the Foucault of Les Mots et les choses
(1966) and L’Archéologie du savoir (1969) as well as to most poststructuralists,
although in the practice of their analyses they could not avoid to design their
own critical vocabulary.

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268 Forum

From a theoretical point of view, Calinescu reopened the way to literary-

historical research, which had been almost blocked by structuralism as well
as poststructuralism. How could one discuss modernism and postmodern-
ism without taking their historical dimension into account, he asks. He
saw the historical and geographic dimensions of period concepts, implying
also their social restriction to a particular group of writers and critics, most
clearly in Five Faces of Modernity (1987a). The applicability and validity of
the period term are in fact strongly reduced by its three dimensions. Critics
of period terms have always objected to their allegedly totalizing character,
but their validity is always restricted, first, of course, to a particular period of
time, second to a limited cultural space, and third to a specific social context.
Calinescu rejects the totalizing interpretation of period concepts by empha-
sizing that they are “modes of questioning” (249). It is by interrogating the
meaning and reception of texts that certain texts will yield some similarities
against a background of differences. In the same context, he refers to the
German theory of reception aesthetics.
In Five Faces of Modernity, Calinescu showed particular interest in prob-
lems of reception—for instance, in his discussion of the international dissemi-
nation of postmodernism, which “was achieved through the efforts of the
American postmoderns (including their sympathetic critics) to build a more
comprehensive frame of reference within which their rejection of modernism
could be favorably perceived” (298). Here the evolution and ramifications
of the postmodernist sociolect is seen as the work of identifiable individu-
als, whose psychological intentions and social position could be studied by
using the sophisticated instruments of other disciplines—a study that would
go beyond the confines of describing what supposedly had happened and
attempt to achieve the aim of all sciences, viz. explanation of the change that
had occurred.
Calinescu opened the way to reception studies, including the distinction
between one’s own interpretation and the judgment of other readers. He
also opened the way to sociological and psychological research of literary
communication, although he practised it himself only within the framework
of his literary-historical investigations. He could show this perspective of
literary studies because he was an independent thinker, with a firm training
in philosophy and the epistemological aspects of research.
This brings me back to his early experiences in Romania, which must
have inculcated him with certain firm convictions. Traces of those years can
be found in the “Introductory Remarks” he wrote to the volume Exploring
Postmodernism, in which papers were published that had been discussed at a
workshop held in Paris in August 1985. Here he makes a difference between
the attitude of Western Marxists towards postmodernism and the way the
“official Marxisms in communist countries” judged postmodernism (1987b,
11). He had certainly the expertise to make the differentiation, but this highly
interesting essay that could have been written only by someone with direct
experience of both Eastern and Western Marxism, also shows where the force

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 symplokeˉ 269

of his argument comes from. Convinced by Popper’s criticism of Marxism,

Calinescu resists the dogmatic (“theatrical”) attitude that makes explana-
tion of literary history “invulnerable to testability, in a word, infallible” (10).
This firm epistemological position guided him through the jungle of differ-
ent opinions about postmodernism and enabled him to criticize the icons of
postmodern and poststructuralist thinking. It was the basis of his intellectual
independence.
These “Introductory Remarks” and the earlier essay on the “Paradoxes of
Periodization,” both presented in Europe, as well as the papers of the other
contributors to these workshops found their echo in Five Faces of Modernity.
There was one more moment of intellectual cooperation when Calinescu
contributed his essay “Rewriting” to the volume International Postmodernism,
edited by Hans Bertens and myself in 1997. However, the last time we met
was probably in 1988 at the Congress of the International Comparative
Literature Association in Munich. I remember Matei sitting in one of the
coffee corners, relaxed and more interested in a casual chat than in listening
to any of the papers on the Congress program. Then I realized what I had
only surmised before, that Matei was not only a courageous man and inde-
pendent intellectual but also an amiable colleague and great friend.

UTRECHT UNIVERSITY, THE NETHERLANDS

References

Calinescu, Matei. “Postmodernism and Some Paradoxes of Periodization.” Approach-

ing Postmodernism: Papers presented at a workshop on Postmodernism, 21-23 September
1984, University of Utrecht. Eds. Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986. 239-54.
___. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism.
Durham: Duke UP, 1987a.
___. “Introductory Remarks: Postmodernism, the Mimetic and Theatrical Fallacies.”
Exploring Postmodernism: Selected papers presented at a workshop on Postmodernism at
the XIth International Comparative Literature Congress, Paris, 20-24 August 1985. Eds.
Matei Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Ben-
jamins, 1987b. 3-16.
___. “Rewriting.” International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice. Eds. Hans
Bertens and Douwe Fokkema. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997.
243-48.
Uhlig, Claus. “Forms of Time and Varieties of Change in Literary Texts.” Proceedings
of the Xth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association. Vol. 2. Ed.
Claudio Guillén. New York and London: Garland, 1985. 247-56.

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