Products of Counterfactual Imagination:The Healing Life of Literature

Abstract

My papers investigates two of the latter volumes by Romanian author Monica Pillat, Invitație la vis (An Invitation to Dream, 2014), and Croitorul de cărți (The Book Tailor, 2019), in which the literary experience elevates and transcends life itself, as a form of rewriting/healing the past and, maybe, of projecting one’s dreams into the future. It relies on criticism of two stories from the respective volumes, which investigates the sites of memory, such as the family mansion, which is the central piece around which the fantasy world woven by the author gravitates. Since Monica Pillat descends from a whole line of literary masters, her gift for writing is in fact a form of recuperating and also compensating for the family past, in which especially her father (Dinu Pillat) was very much afflicted by political persecution during Communist times. In my paper, I will dwell upon the less factual connection between life and literature – that of a mutual mirroring and influencing – in the attempt to prove that the experience of writing can make up for the losses encountered in reality. In this sense, being a literary author may offer one the chance of re-inventing one’s self (or imaginatively amending the life of your loved ones) and – for Monica Pillat – it certainly offers the greatest reward of all: a continual dwelling inside the family lineage, in the company of the kindred spirits that have guided and protected her since she was born.