Reflections and Structures

Mircea Cartarescu's "The Romanian Feeling of Hysteria"

The text below is translated from an article published in Jurnalul National (7 June 2005). For those who can read Romanian, here is the text in its original language as well as one of the debates around this topic.

The Romanian Feeling of Hysteria
(Sentimentul romanesc al isteriei)

by Mircea Cartarescu

I have never believed in the national character, in the "Romanian being," in all of what philosophers of culture and mass psychologists have said distinguishes us from other people.

I do not believe that we are more hospitable than others, more hard-working or more thieving. I feel neither good, nor bad about the fact that I am Romanian. Sometimes I regret not having been born in Switzerland, but then I remember that it could just as well have been Uganda. We, Romanians, are somewhere "in between good and bad" as Ion Barbu wrote, yet another people under the sun, neither too great nor too mean.

Though we were never awarded a Nobel prize, we invented the fountain pen. Though the wall collapsed overnight, we diligently took to rebuilding it the next day, and that’s already something. We could, after all, have left it there and moved to a new place… [translator's note: a reference to the ancient Romanian legend of Mesterul Manole]

Despite all this, there is something specifically Romanian, something so deeply rooted in our nature, the nature of the people living in this land of longing, that I would go so far as to say that it is the essence of the "Romanian being" at this point in history. It is the vicious circle of hysteria caused by stress and of stress caused by hysteria. Let me explain.

If you have always lived only in Romania, it is possible that you do not realize something is wrong with your world. You are tainted by your environment and you move together with it. You are one with all the others. If you try to return to Romania after a long time spent abroad, it is impossible not to be stricken by the abnormality of life here. By how tortured the people who live here are and how mean they have become as a result.

It is impossible not to be amazed by the fact that, for instance, one of the most often-used survival strategies is aggressive insolence. In any civilized country, people try to protect themselves as much as possible. They prevent conflict with others in ways that are sometimes worthy of caricature.

They have developed social smiles and contact rituals to practically eliminate the possibility of any conflict. When someone contradicts you, you smile and say: "We agree to disagree" [English in original]. When someone steps on your toes, you hurry to apologize.

A mild and smiling hypocrisy greets you everywhere, like a balm that heals all pains and satisfies all susceptibility. This hypocrisy is called politeness and is essential to the flow of social substance.

Romanians are not like that because they cannot, objectively, be like that. Because here, if you are kind, you will be crushed. Let us imagine a young lady who becomes a sales clerk. She loves her job and sets being kind and helpful to her customers as her goal.

The professional smile, this smile which sells her merchandise, will soon be wiped off her face after five-six individuals blow her away with rude comments or scream their heads off at her like lunatics, even on her first day on the job. There is every chance that after her first month the smile will disappear completely and a year later she will have become the usual sour, disgusted sales woman who has taken her turn at giving you, the customer, a taste of her attitude.

The foul people I mention are not born that way. They are themselves just poor folks who have been screamed at and who have been humiliated ever since they can remember. They have become disgusted because they have understood that it does not pay to be nice to others. Because, faced with bureaucracy, they could only achieve things by screaming at others. Because only by being rude have they moved up socially, by walking all over the gentle.

In the military, conscript soldiers are tortured during the period of adjustment by their sergeants. When they become sergeants themselves, they torture the new recruits with even more fervour. And so it goes, throughout all strata of society and on all levels, Romanians are their own tyrants and their own victims in a society profoundly alienated psychologically, a hysterical society.

I think that’s what distinguishes us, Romanians, from others at the moment: this constant tension at the level of everyday life. The constant explosive state, leading to ulcers and strokes. The generalized conflict between everyone and everyone else. By this I do not mean to say that we are fundamentally bad.

Of course, it's poverty and the lack of a positive future horizon, it's failures in education, it's the perplexity of uprooted peasant masses dumped into big city ghettos that has led to this. Other, more objective explanations can perhaps also be found. But there is something else, darker and more subtle in all of this social chemistry. Turned mean by the world we live in, over time, we begin to enjoy being despicable.

Our sadism turns then into insult and obscenity. We begin to be proud of our insolence and, as exhibitionists of morality, we voluptuously shed character in the excited applause of the public. Soon, we become as cynical, as incapable of distinguishing good from evil as the whores, the Securitate and the nouveau riche.

Our social ascension (or mere survival) is the great prize to be won at the price of our brazenness.

And the circle of this national neurosis may not be broken except by long-term therapy which, as with any psychotherapeutic endeavour, would be long, expensive and uncertain in terms of results. I do not think we can afford it at this time.

posted by Ciprian Man @ Thursday, August 04, 2005