Metafiction in a Phanariot Frame
Preface to the 2022 Edition by Emanuela Ilie
Now in its third edition, The Phanariot Manuscript already boasts an absolutely impressive critical record. The dozens of enthusiastic reviews devoted to it have rightly shown that it can be read in various ways: as a novel of initiation, a historical novel, a picaresque tale, a love story, an adventure novel, a mystery, an esoteric narrative, an exotic or parabolic work, and so on. Nor should its poetic (or poietic) key be overlooked, for the genesis of this book with its atypical destiny—one that seems to reveal part of its construction strategies only in order to challenge readers well versed in meta-historiographic fiction—certainly deserves to be known: the novel is based on a real late eighteenth-century manuscript, reproduced in facsimile at the end. Written in specialized language, it captures the schematic, almost implausible story of the life of a “foreigner” who, in exchange for marrying the woman he loves, agrees to share her fate. Transposed into fiction, the episode becomes the unforgettable adventure of Ioanis, the unripe Vlach from Săruna, who, seduced by the Bucharest of Selim’s Song, does not hesitate to rob his family and then abandon his homeland in search of another destiny. A destiny that will be fulfilled only through his passionate love for Maiorca, from whom he learns “the happiness of being nothing more than a rag rotting in a stranger’s wound.”
Yet on the canvas of this seemingly impossible love story between the “sudit” who becomes Leun and the slave Maiorca, there is woven a complicated but seductive fictional tapestry, in which the most diverse thematic knots are visible—from manipulation through word, body, or magic to the fascination of stories that survive; from the step-by-step construction of an individual’s fragile identity to the forging of group or even national identity.
Before anything else, with The Phanariot Manuscript, the excellent novelist Doina Ruști sets out to reconstruct and rehabilitate, through the means of fiction, an entire world—captivating in its colorfulness, dynamism, and diversity. Even when viewed through a meta-historiographic lorgnette, the late eighteenth-century world can only appear painfully contradictory, for within it are pursued with equal fervor—and sometimes mixed to the point of indecision—lofty passions and crude instincts, civilizing impulses and repellent acts. In the novel, in other words, people believe and practice both church ritual and the dark power of occult rites (spells bind or unbind destinies, transform humans into animals or birds, fortunes are told in beans, coral beads, coffee grounds…); they strive for ascent by any means (including technical, ultramodern ones—such as the helium balloon of the Brașov baron), yet they also descend into the blackest physiological or moral squalor (one need only think of the slave trade and the rare brutality inflicted upon slaves by their masters). Naturally, such contrasts—social, psychological, mental, cultural—are deftly distributed across all the levels of the world the novelist configures in the most convincing strokes of her pen, here doubled by her remarkable knowledge of the sociology of identity.
At a first reading, the dazzling universe of The Phanariot Manuscript alerts and is perceived primarily through the senses, for it rustles with figures, shapes, colors, and tempting aromas. Almost every descriptive or narrative sequence resurrects a fragment of a bygone, baroque, divergent sensory paradise—often unveiled, therefore, as a purgatory or even an existential inferno. Yet, like any major prose writer worthy of the name, Doina Ruști invites us from the outset to look beyond the deliberately deceptive film of these fictional waters, however fragrant they may be. This spectacular and disconcerting human universe, undeniably Balkan in fiber, bears the mark of a major authorial obsession: the relationship between an identity that is fundamentally fragile and an alterity that is intrinsically necessary to it. The writer authentically understands and renders in compelling detail the specific mechanisms of individual identity, while always projecting them onto the screen of a troubled collective history.
Nor should one overlook, from another perspective, the convulsions of Bucharest’s radical transformation, in whose mirror an entire nation is metonymically reflected. Revisiting it with her well-known sensitivity, Doina Ruști reconstructs it—or, if you prefer, reproduces in her own unmistakable manner its brilliance, valences, and dimensions—thus offering us the chance to discover simultaneously a picturesque and atavistic, refined and sordid, venal and (self-)destructive Bucharest, with boiling energies and dark iridescences, caught between two worlds—Oriental and Western—equally deceptive, equally multiplied in the mirror of fiction. Describing in striking detail both the beauties and the atrocities of the beloved city, the novelist lucidly juxtaposes and fruitfully confronts two geographies: the real geography, reconstituted with archival meticulousness, and the cultural geography, shaped over time through difficult sedimentations of impressions, acquired or at least mediated through books.
Last but not least, I would see The Phanariot Manuscript as an enchanting poem about words and the irrepressible fascination of the worlds born from them. For the novel repeatedly recalls the virtues of true words (or, conversely, the destructive capacities of deceptive ones), establishes relevant etymologies, comments on not only Romanian linguistic stereotypes, reflects on the way words contribute to the formation of representations (including cultural ones)—in short, it glosses on their power to make and unmake worlds.
