Fragmented Selves, Healing Visions

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse two experimental “novels of the self”, written by two of the most innovative Jewish-Romanian writers of the ’30s: Max Blecher and H. Bonciu, stressing on those aspects they have in common with the mainstream of the twentieth-century Western literature. In both authors, inward disquietude is experienced as outward atmosphere, submerging the world in indefinable strangeness and mystery. In this context, the concept of “inner exile” and “fragmented self” may prove useful in defining the particular status of the narrators’perspective, as well as their relationship with the world (objects, settings, invisible traps, “sickly” or “healing” spaces).