SOURCE: "Between Minitext and Maxitext," in Romanian Review, Vol. 41, No. 6, 1987, pp. 67-77.

[In the following essay, Manolache examines Caragiale's narrative style.]

"… take me for a sea-trip, timely and wisely. "

I. L. Caragiale, "A Few Opinions" (1896)

The note which Caragiale made on the manuscript of a story ("N.B.: Great attention should be paid to whatever may be suppressed—that is as much as possible") was for a long time considered a key to his writing. Actually to our surprise we discover "two Caragiales" at this level too, for one of the many instances of the Caragiale vs. Caragiale situation lies in the author's placing himself half way between a minimum and maximum of literary expression. In this respect, Caragiale is the first Romanian writer to have left us a considerable number of theoretical pages and remarks on the main theme of the "text contour" of a play or prose piece.

By text contour we understand the recurrence rate and distribution patterns of the basic units of literary texts: plot, description, information, image, the portrait, general considerations, stage directions, the dialogue or the scene, the maxims and aphorisms, and even spells of silences and pauses.

A text contour model must start with a minitext (one using the smallest possible number of basic units (texts tending to become zero-narrative) and go as far as a maxitext (one in which all possible units are represented). The first type includes only the elements indispensable for the existence of a certain literary genre (personage, plot, scene), while the second, associates to them at least one more temporal basic element (general considerations, descriptions, maxims, etc.). The model could also be constructed as a continuous string of generative text units or as a progression whose terms are—among others—sentences, items of information, anecdotes, sketches and the ten-minute play, the short story, the novel or the drama.

The two types of texts, at the hypothetical extremities of this model range, were described by Quintillian in Chapter VIII of his On the Training of an Orator:

Undoubtedly, whoever says that a city was conquered, includes in that expression whatever happens in such cases, though this expression which is in fact a short announcement does not find its way to our feelings. If, on the contrary, he develops what is included in this expression alone, there will appear before us the flames invading houses and temples, the noise of falling roofs, the hubbub and turmoil in which shouts and shrieks of people are blended; we shall see some people running for their lives,' others embracing for the last time, women and children crying, as well as the old people who curse their fate which has kept them alive to reach that day; then, the sacking of sacred as well as lay sanctuaries, the soldiers who run for loot this way and that and those who beg not to be robbed; people bound hand and foot and driven away by the enslaver; the mother who tries to keep her baby back and, wherever the booty is tempting enough, the haggling between the conquerors themselves. Although, as we have already said, the term of "conquest" includes all this in itself, enouncing the whole, we do say less by it than by enumerating every detail.

All texts approaching the first narrative formula may be called texts of the "veni-vidi-vici type."

Starting from Boileau, the Romanian writer Ion Ghica, in a letter to his friend, the poet and dramatist Vasile Alecsandri (1819-1881) offers a comic example of an author of non-fictional texts who tends to illustrate the type of zero-narrative communication:

When writing, Boileau was in the habit of cutting off three words out of four … The late high steward Draganescu went even farther then Boileau in matter of sacrifices: he had his secretary re-read aloud so many as ten times what he had dictated to him. For instance: "It is with brotherly love that I am bowing to you, honourable steward."

"Come, quill driver, read out", Draganescu used to say when the sentence had been written. On the first reading, he asked the clerk to cross out the beginning. "It is with brotherly love", because the boyar he was addressing did not deserve brotherly love. On the second reading he ordered the clerk to cross out the words "I am bowing to you" under the pretext that it was not meet and proper for him, a high steward, to stoop to bowing before a lower boyar. And, eventually, on the third reading, he also crossed out the words "honourable steward" being still angry that the voivode had elevated that petty squire to such a lofty rank. Such was high steward Draganescu's correspondence throughout his life!

On the contrary, texts at the other extremity of our range of models risk to lose their finite character through the author's ambition to emulate the registrar's office and reality. This category of texts includes Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in which, however, the narrative proves incapable to catch up with reality although the narrator may have assumed precisely that aim. Writing in a year a novel about one day of his existence the novelist lags 364 days behind and the more he writes the more he has to recover.

What interests us in connection with these two ideal types of texts does not refer to the relation between plot and story, a ratio which is shown by the above examples to be conversely proportional (a minimal story would correspond to a maximal plot and vice-versa), but to the author's preference for certain kinds of text elements and, naturally enough, to the way in which the latter uses them with a view to giving his text a certain contour.

In Caragiale's case, the relation between minitext and maxitext decisively involves the relationship between fiction and drama, for these two genres, observing different conventions, resort to the word or to the basic elements of the text in a different manner and ascribe a different signification to the expressive role of blanks.

In point of text contour, the relation between fiction and drama may be examined either from the dramatist's angle or from that of a novelist (prosewriter), or else, more impartially, from the relatively objective angle of literary theory.

In one of the earliest European works on the modern theory of fiction (Die Rolle des Erzählers in der Epik), Käte Friedemann, Oskar Walzel's pupil, resorts to the ideal case of two texts by Zola, using the same epic material (the crime in Thérèse Raquin), in the two systems which concern us—drama and fiction—to check the different functions of description as a basic element of the literary text.

This comparison reveals a difference of genre conventions, not one of value or quality. Indeed, out of the objective differences of point of view (the most important of which is the presence or absence of the mediator in fiction and in drama, respectively) primarily results the "preference" of the two literary forms for certain basic elements of the text (description or portrait for fiction and discussion or dialogue for drama); in the second place the phenomenon of contamination or of borrowing some specific forms which change from one genre to another (dialogue in fiction and narrative in drama) in the form of the "messenger's report"—the most typical narrative elements in a play.

Closer to us in time and pursuing the prosewriter's point of view, in Die Logik der Dichtung, Käte Hamburger cites a few examples of writers for whom drama is inferior to the novel precisely because it allegedly offers us a simplified image or a summarization of life.

Thus, Hugo von Hofmannstahl imagines (in an essay of 1902) a dialogue in which the novelist Balzac reproaches the theatre with "narrowing reality"; in much the same way, Thomas Mann, in Versuch über das Theater (1908) considers that drama offers us an artificial and inaccurate image of life.

In Romania, the historian Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940) upheld at the end of the 19th century the idea that the theatre had become "a secondary genre," "doomed to perish because of the triumphant competition provided by the novel;" the same idea was expressed by the novelist Duiliu Zamfirescu (1858-1921) in his letters to the critic Titu Maiorescu (1840-1917) after the writer and philolo-gist Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu (1838-1907) in his well-known study of 1863 "The Movement of Letters in Iasi" had asserted the opposite, namely that the drama was superior to the novel and to history proper.

Without trying to demonstrate the existence of a tendency categorically underrating fiction or of some aversion of the dramatist to the novel, in Caragiale's case we can detect an obvious partiality to the theatre and to its stricter laws during the period of the great comedies, of his tragical stories and even of his comic "moments." In his "critical investigation" of 1878, this partiality took the form of a comparison between the "plan of a drama" and "the plan of a story" and concluded that drama was more concise, its parts more closely linked and that, all in all, it was the more coherent of the two:

In a story, catastrophes occur and are strung independently, having no further kinship between them than their belonging more or less to the same subject—very much like a rosary: the beads them-selves being independent of each other are only strung and brought together on the same thread; we may cut the thread wherever we like and leave as many beads drop as we like and yet, if we knot the thread again, the rosary will still be a rosary, though with fewer beads. On the other hand, the plan for a drama must be different: here, incidents hang on each other, flow out of each other, are woven into each other for the same end, that is for preparing the great catastrophe, the conclusion or the denouement—exactly as organic cells depend on each other and are woven into each other in order to make up organs of the body which all together work for the same and, i.e. for the constitution or the economy of the being: in this case we no longer can—as in the case of rosaries—cut or maim the organs wherever and whatever way we like, without thus destroying the being or at least shattering all its economy.

By comparison with the drama and with the latter's ideal economy, one may infer that fiction is characterized by prolixity and, in favour of that hypothesis one might also bring a definition of the novel given in Caragiale's lecture "The Romanian Letters and Arts in the Second Half of the 19th Century"; through rhetorical questions, overstatement and an agglomeration of contrary epithets, as marks of irony, the Romanian writer offers a definitely negative definition of a genre not yet consolidated in Romanian letters at the time: "The novel? But the novel is like itself, not of an individual but of a whole society, with its entire array of troubles, inclinations and urges, devotions, mean actions, of love, hate, wickedness, goodness, envy, admiration, of baseness, sublimity, brutality, etherealness, selfishness and selflessness, in a word, every variation of which the human soul is capable in its well-known virtuosity."

Even if we leave aside the bad impression that may have been left on truly refined readers by the amount of trash translated overnight and claiming the status of a novel, Caragiale's attitude may have been motivated by at least two states of things: the old classicist prejudice, considering the novel a minor genre, and the Romanian narrative production—rather precarious in quality up to the end of the 19th century.

Anyhow, if we confine ourselves to the theatre alone, whenever he has to choose between two dramatic texts, Caragiale prefers the short one (realistic or classical) to the loose and rambling (romantic) one; the same applies to his own plays, which he compresses (The Bane or Wrong for Wrong) deleting whole scenes or an entire act (Carnival Scenes, A Stormy Night). Out of Hernani "you may cut four fifths to the advantage of the play itself and particularly of well-trained audiences—and Hernani will remain Hernani;" the romantic drama Ruy Blas is repudiated because of its "enormous tirades" and if Shakespeare had done like Victor Hugo when Othello went desperate, then the Moor "confronting the audience … and assuming a dignified pose" would have been forced to deliver "a long tirade," first enumerating all the sufferings of his soul then all imaginable tortures by which he plans to punish the wretched Desdemona!" But then, "all comparison between the state of his soul and the Tartar's tortures, all rhetorical curses, all rhetorically ringing threats would have caused us to shrug and exclaim: 'This Moor is not jealous like a self-respecting Moor, he is only an Oriental bragadoccio!'

Even more obvious seems to be Caragiale's preference for "concision" in prose. Perhaps also under the influence of the dramatist's logic, in the phase of the "sketches" and "moments" the prosewriter reduced to a minimum—if he did not entirely eliminate—descriptions of nature, images, portraits, maxims, the narrator's general considerations or comments, which he frequently replaces by short remarks, very similar to stage directions. As his contemporary, critic Paul Zarifopol, noted, when Caragiale did make digressions, their subject is only the narrative technique and, additionally, the reader's "training" in the spirit of narrative discipline. Thus, in a spectacular theoretical digression included in his short prosepiece "A Tale", Caragiale uses the allegory of the "cross-eyed man", an image eloquent of the prolix narrator who complicates the "roads" of the story, forcing the reader to ramble at the risk of getting completely lost: "… And then, when I tell you, as far as my abilities help me do my trade, I would not like to have at least one of you go through the experience of a cross-eyed man whom a stray traveller asked one evening which way to turn in order to reach a certain place sooner, and the cross-eyed man pointed one way: but the traveller asked him 'Tell me true, man, for I am keen on arriving there before nightfall; which way shall I go? Where you point to me with your hand or where you look with your eyes? … !"

Of course, we must distinguish between prolixity itself—that is "swelling up" the plot—and the technique of multiple game strategies. For, in the latter sense, Caragiale often behaved like the "cross-eyed" man in the story, pointing to the reader one way "with his hand" and another way "with his eyes", i.e. banking on the possibility of building a system of expectation in the reader, alternatively fulfilled and frustrated. But the "cross-eyed man" in "A Tale" is the narrator who writes for the sake of writing, the "double" negative, perhaps a nightmare of Caragiale, the "cobbler" who vainly increases the size of the text only in order to put in additional "pretty" or "fanciful" seaming:

… shall I do like other story-tellers? Instead of briefly showing you what misfortune befell the woman, shall I start telling you what that misfortune of a certain empress in bygone times looks to me like nowadays? But the heart of that mother may be likened—for whoever has time to waste as a reader, paper and ink to waste as a writer—to a lofty tower which a terrible earthquake ruins at one shake turning the proud building which until a moment ago had soared up, its gilt top tearing the blue canopy into a slumped heap of broken stones, scattered without further reason than the insanity of blind chance … or shall I liken it to a poor tender and frail rose, just blossomed forth, which the hostile blizzard has cruelly wrested from its slender stem, crushing it dead, its delicate petals torn, into the rabid, tempestous, downrushing stream? … or shall I liken it rather to a bold flint rock, which the ruthless lightning split in a moment, from its brow to its root? Or, even stronger: shall I liken it to a sturdy oak-tree which the worthless axe … etc., etc.?

To which one would like me to compare the empress's heart? To one, to two of them or to all three of them? I could do it anyway, only to please you … that is for the sake of words I have tried to invent a story for you. But you shouldn't believe that. As far as I am concerned, I deliberately seek words by which to tell you the story as I imagine it, as fast and as clear as I can.

Very much as in the case of drama, where Caragiale's method appeared as a reaction to the earlier romantic current or to contemporary melodramas, in the case of his prose, narrative concision and understatement are not only a personal approach, but also an ironic comment on a literary fashion which fostered a whole "industry" of popular novels, Zolaesque novels or, specifically in Romania—sentimental, idyllic stories of rural life: "One knows the method—we are inclined to call it a mania, but for its being deliberate—of the great French writer to take a very simple frame, a commonplace plot, and to crowd upon it a colossal, would-be 'documentary' superstructure, which he keeps turning, twisting and upsetting on all sides and facets, multiplying it in such a way that, out of a story which—with all its necessary machinery—would not take more than 40 pages, he manages to produce a 400-page volume." (Caragiale's article "The Zola-Bibescu Case of Plagiarism").

With such theoretical views, the writer first reaches the formula of "moments" and "sketches," the tour de force of concision in "The Mosi Fair" ("Table of Contents") and especially in "Telegrams" with its arresting technique of "stroboscopic" sentences of the type "Prosecutor absent town nunnery binge nuns" (Caragiale's friend, professor I. Suchianu asserted that such a sentence could easily be turned into "a whole novelette of monastic manners"; in the second place, Caragiale develops a steady bantering tone in his parodies, whose main theme is precisely prolixity.

In the sketch "The Romanian Nation" (1899), the recipe for quickly drawing up press columns consists in using information from a Viennese newspaper, over which one pours "much deluted fantasy soup, then the description of the locality, historical notes and statistical data, most of it derivated from an old though excellent—in its time—conversation guide book." In "The Poet's Share" (1909) God is exasperated at the writer's consuming too much ink and paper, while in "A Christmas Chronicle …" (1907), the narrator ironically simulates envy in the face of a short-story of 100 pages "foolscape, covered with clean small handwriting … :" "Oh! why cannot my pen too run without stumbling over such vast, immense white fields? … Why can't I too overcome the candour of several reams of paper at one stroke of the pen? … Why, my cruel Weird Sisters, why is my dry hand incapable to pour so many generous torrents and cascades of prose?"

Up to a point, perfectly eloquent is also the situation of Caragiale's translations, almost invariably shorter than the original: for instance the story of "The Unrestrained Curious Man" in Cervantes' Don Quixote (with Caragiale's title being "The Curious Man Punished"). As is known, the text had been translated into Romanian by Ion Heliade Radulescu (1802-1872) after Florian's French version (in the publication Curier de ambele sexe, of February/March 1881 and in the daily Timpul of March 1881). Caragiale certainly knew the latter's complete translation, since he contributed "Theatrical Recollections" to the same issue of the Convorbiri while being still a sub-editor at the Timpul; Zarifopol assumes that in 1911, when he published "The Curious Man Punished" in the daily Românul of Arad, Caragiale made use of a French intermediate.

Accepting the hypothesis that the Romanian translation had proceeded from a text of the same proportions as the original, and not from an abridged translation, then his version is about one fourth of Cervantes' novella, from which Caragiale condensed or deleted adjectives, repeated qualifications and forms of address, general considerations on the philosophy of existence, together with the narrator's rhetorical and moralizing interventions, the rather numerous digressions, quotations or allusions to certain contemporary works, the fables or parables, the story-teller's mediation between the reader and the narrative, all clichés of allegorical expression (that of the besieged fortress as an equivalent of a woman's virtue, that of the navigator and the port at sea, etc.), the love sonnets and the other verses, the anticipations that may diminish the tension of the story, the lengthy dialogues similar to theatrical tirades and frequent comparisons with mythological, historical or epic heroes.

If we divide Cervantes' text into sequences considered by us "translatable units" (sentences, lines of dialogue, comments, letters and messages, verses, fables, allegories, etc.) then out of a total of about 150 such units, Caragiale eliminated approximately 50 and condensed the others in order to obtain his own much more concentrated version. To put it in a nutshell, the translator gave up only the non-temporal elements, orienting Cervantes' novella towards dialogue and action, making it the size of a minimal text based on some minor event, but with a moral attached to it.

Nevertheless, in Caragiale's œuvre one can also find the reverse situation that of preference for broad contexts, and this alternative ought not to be explained only by the relation between the primary text (as a rule an anecdote or a tall tale) and the definitive work. As a matter of fact, Caragiale himself fought shy of a possible reduction of his narrative approach to preference for the minimal context, establishing a distinction between the prosewriter's logic and the dramatist's logic on the one hand and the useless prolixity of the narrative strategy on the other hand:

"But then, would you like to cut the short-story to the proportions of a three-line news-item, and the novel to the strict form of a police inspector's report?'

'Not at all, but take me for a sea-trip timely and wisely'." ("A Few Opinions")

The earliest visible "deviations" from the controlled thrift of the theatre and from the telegraphic style of the old anecdotes and tall tales, may be recorded in Caragiale's short-story "A Taper for Easter" which critic Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea thought "too short"; also in "A Sin", which poses every problem connected with the hesitation between the short-story and the novel or between the short-story and the play. As a matter of fact, both narratives may be analysed as texts which, over the close-knit logic of the theatre, the prose-writer superposed the logic of the short-story programmer, using descriptions and collateral episodes and indulging in considerations like those about the human souls and the celestial bodies (in "A Sin") or in the digressions of a fly on the marble top of a table—an episode in which people have seen a spectacular enrichment of the narrative technique in Romanian literature.

Doubtless, however, the most obvious alternation of strategies appears in "Ker Ianulea" which, as Caragiale himself warned us, had its starting point in Machiavelli's novella "Belphegor the Arch-Devil or "The Story of the Devil Who Took a Wife to Himself." This time, the Romanian writer uses exactly the reverse method of that employed in the translation from Cervantes. Now the original is nearly four times shorter than the Romanian version, in which nearly all units of Machiavelli's text were dilated and completed with numerous new episodes, with customs specific to suburban life in the 18th century Phanariot rule in the Romanian Lands, with the two juicy anecdotes on the disease called "Hurducharisoms" and on the hag who orders the devil to stretch "a kinky hair" of hers or with the image—like a faded print of old Bucharest, in which one can barely make out Manuc's Inn, the Coltea Tower, Silverknife Street, the Metropolitan Church and the Vineyards up Filaret Hill. The tendency for "expanding" the text does not seem to come to an end even after the completion of the story, for, as we know from Caragiale's own correspondence with Zarifopol, the writer, instead of abridging the text, as he was to do with the Spanish original of "The Curious Man Punished" at a certain moment wanted to introduce exactly what he was to eliminate from Cervantes: verses in the form of a song by the early Romanian poet Costache Conachi. Nevertheless, he eventually gave up the project.

The alternative of the broad context in "Ker Ianulea" and as a matter of fact, also in "Special Pastrami" or "Abu-Hasan" was all the more spectacular as it manifested itself parallel to the new series of sketches published in the daily Universul (1909) and the stage of the short style of "moments" and the heavily cut translation from "The Curious Man Punished." That was why, the idea of transformation or evolution in Caragiale's art of a narrator ought to be taken with a grain of salt anyhow completed with the more plausible hypothesis of different or double strategies which enrich his work without requiring the integration of its various components into a hierarchic schema, with "positive" and "negative" terms.

Seen in a perspective which is only apparently chronological, Caragiale's work seems to "evolve" between a maximum of blanks (or a minimum of text) in the case of his drama, sketches and moments and a minimum of such elements (which means a maximum of text) in the short-stories of 1909. As a matter of fact, Caragiale permanently alternated his text-plans according to necessity and genre. The idea of evolution after a while becomes irrelevant, since it cannot include a single continuous thread of experience or literary expression. For the relation between the "sketch" entitled "Telegrams" for instance and the short-story entitled "Ker lanulea" is not a relation of the type 1,2,3 … n., in which each term is quantitatively superior and has a more varied text contour than the term preceding it. Blanks in "1 " do not become full spots in "n", but on the contrary: what is missing in "1 " (for instance in "Telegrams") may be quite easily filled in by any writer, while all narrative elements in the spots that might have been left blank in "n" (for instance in "Ker lanulea")—could only be filled in by Caragiale himself. Therefore "Ker lanulea" is neither the maximum variant of Machiavelli's short-story nor a translation proper, but an "adaptation" and, in the last analysis, an original text, written on the basis of a previously drawn up plan or script.

In Caragiale's case, the succession (poetry), comedies, moments, sketches, tales and stories, or—to put it differently—the selection of different literary alternatives, with a different text contour developed along a maximal or minimal context, can be ascribed not so much to a chronological evolution of taste, of the author's own literary theories or of personal readings, as it has been asserted, but to a highly accurate knowledge of the specific features of literary genres and to his observing the principle of suiting literary means to each species or genre. In actual fact, this is a paradox of Caragiale's career, because, while the mixture of forms in the "Well-established" area with those in the "peripheral" area of a culture is accepted unreservedly, the mixture between drama and fiction and especially poetry never exceeds the proportions of what is strictly necessary.

As a matter of fact, when Caragiale was a fully mature creator and the aesthetician Mihail Dragomirescu passed criticism on him for the absence of descriptions of nature and of lyricism from his prose Caragiale answered him, in a letter of November 1907, advocating the rational utilization of nontemporal elements (which he called delectable entertainment), depending on the specific features of the genre and even on the special strategy for a class of texts.

And now please allow me to write a brief personal apology. You are accusing me that in my writings I do not show enogh love for the paysage, for the still life, or enough lyricism either. I for one (not that I should like to contradict you systematically) believe that I may not have too much, very much or much of all this, yet I believe I have enough; moreover, I believe that in art, above enough one does not need anything. The picturesqueness of animated as well as still life, very much like lyricism, in themselves—or at least that is what I think—form the object of other arts than that of story telling; and thus I only think of them as helpers to the latter, whose object is the most interesting phenomenon quant à nous: circumstance arising out of the particular way of being of so many souls and minds, on the whole similar to ours.

As a child, I read an old translation of the Theogony, where Mnemosina's daughters were described like this: 'They reside on Mount Olympus and they praise in their songs the wonderful feats of the immortal gods; and they know the past as well as the present and they tell the future, and with their masterly music they enliven the entire array of gods.' And since then all of them have remained dear to me. They are good sisters; when necessary, they lend each other their graces and attributes; and the one who has lent these attributes to one of her sisters stands aside and allows that sister of hers to sing and to dance, without tripping her cothurni: she has lent assets to her in order to help her, of course, not to trammel her up; to strengthen her particular prestige, not to usurp it. That is how they help each other; now one, now another, in turn learning or amusing themselves, amazing the mortals—each of them in her turn shines with the full charms of the entire divine choir.

Now, what shall I say without exceeding what is enough?…

I believe that in my work there are enough instances of inter-assistance of the amusement. But, of course, in order to find it somebody—an amateur, to say nothing of the critic—must seek it. Or to use the language of shoemakers, one does not easily see the seam of the sole, unless it has been sewn in white thread. Yes, my dear friends, I am but an old cobbler: I sew for the sake of the sole not for the sake of the seam.