Emanuela ILIE (Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iași)
AMO, AMAS, AMAT… (1943) DE V. BENEŞ: O DISTOPIE TO¬TA¬LI-TA¬RĂ CURAJOASĂ, CU UN ROMAN ŞI MULŢI (ALŢI) BARBARI
Keywords: V. Beneș, inter-war interval, totalitarian dystopia, Roman, barbarian.
Abstract: “Amo, amas, amat…” (1943) by V. Beneș: a courageous totalitarian dystopia, with a Roman and lots of (other) barbarians. Taking into account the four modes of existence of historical fiction theorized by David Cowart in “History and the Contemporary Novel”, my study begins with a brief presentation of the Romanian historical literature from the beginning of the 20th century, to continue with an analysis of one of the most courageous texts with an antique pretext written during the Antonescu dictatorship: “Amo, amas, amat…” (1943) by V. Beneș. This short visionary prose, which illustrates the type “The Way it Will Be” from Cowart’s taxonomy, is in fact a carefully disguised totalitarian dystopia, which deviates from the dominant model of the era. Most of our writers viewed history through a lens visibly distorted by the socio-political and ideological stakes of the day. Except for the ingenious avant-garde diversions, most of the fictional exercises of returning to a more or less distant past have mostly failed: either in sad eulogies of an obsolete way of life, or in lyrical lamentations of the “ubi sunt…?” type, or in ridiculous panegyrics and transparent pleas for certain nationalist ideologies (usually extremist). By contrast, “Amo, amas, amat…” configures a dystopian universe whose meanings denounce the horrors of the totalitarian system and announce the ontological ruin, which no utopian construct can disguise.