Conferences

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On Sunday, 17 January 2016, 11.00 a.m., the Black Box Hall of NTB shall host the first conference of this year, held by Matei Vișniec: Theatre and Journalism (Mutual Influences).

About the Conference

It is difficult to be a writer and a journalist at the same time. As far as I am concerned, in any case, I find it increasingly difficult. Taken separately, both professions are extraordinary. When they are exercised together, they start to collide, clashing with a surprising violence.

Literature pulls you up somehow, heavenward, towards everything sublime in man. Journalism, on the contrary, especially when exercised every day, knocks you down, against reality, against timeliness. Literature gives you a shred of hope, helping you to explore man in his areas of purity, of cosmic mystery. Journalism forces you to discover the misery of reality, the lack of real hope in the future, the fact that people keep making the same historical mistakes over and over again and stay as hateful as always.

Literature also means poetry, hunger of nuances, coronation of man as a triumph of life, maybe of the entire universe. Journalism intervenes to face you daily with that news bulletin which is nothing but a list of horrors – the last list of horrors committed by man on the planet. Explored by the writer, man is a being with infinite potentialities. Depicted by the journalist, man stays forever the same brute incapable of giving up violence and satisfying his immediate desires.

The two professions are at the same time fascinating and necessary, but when they are united in the same being, they start somehow not trusting each other anymore. The writer starts mistrusting man, because the image about man rendered by the journalist is catastrophic. And the journalist starts mistrusting the writer, because everything the latter imagines around man is refuted by reality.

The image of man, as it emanates from universal literature, is generally heroic: man defies the gods, is fighting for an idea, swims against the tide, dreams of perfection, believes in progress and in the purpose of sacrifice… Even at the most pessimistic authors, for which man is an eternal prisoner of society or of history, there is a light pervading from the writer’s capacity of denouncing the existential dilemmas of the human being.

The image of man, as it emanates from the journalistic endeavour, is a completely regressive one, containing the list of scourges affecting the planet today: endless conflicts, civil wars, ethnic cleansings, massacres, sinister dictatorships, terrorism, fundamentalism, extremism, drug trafficking, prostitution, sexual tourism, pornographic industry, mafias and mob networks, illegal immigration, child exploitation, pollution and ecologic disaster, hunger in the southern hemisphere and delirious consumerism in the northern hemisphere, etc. etc. etc…

If one day some aliens came and tried to understand man by only using literature written for three thousand years as inspiration, their endeavour would be infinite, as well as the pleasure to discover the millions of strata of human psychology. If the same aliens used only what has been written in newspapers and only journalistic information as a starting material, they would immediately get the feeling that man and history are a clinical case, a sort of dead end in the vast adventure of life.

When they are faced, the journalist and writer are accusing each other of something: namely that they are deluding themselves and allowing to be manipulated in their endeavour. So what if you have succeeded, in your writings, to surprise the unbearable contradictions of man – asks the journalist the writer – man does not improve in any case, literature does not overthrow any dictatorship and does not solve any conflict. So what if you have succeeded, through your information, to unmask stupidity, evil and cruelty – asks the writer the journalist – nobody takes your truths into account, no political man leaves his place smitten with remorse, no judge starts investigating immediately on what you have exposed.

Defeated, hopeless, discouraged, the two, writer and journalist, are sometimes sharing the same table, with a single glass of beer in front of them, and are gazing into space. Someone is mocking us, they say. I know who is mocking me, says the writer, man is mocking me, the man in general, the man always escaping any definition, having too many contradictions and ambiguities to accept a final portrait. If a machine had as many contradictions as a human being, it would in no case be able to work, it would start belching smoke, spitting one’s joints and end up exploding.

And I know who is mocking me, says the journalist. The politician is mocking me, the politician in general, the one who is manipulating me including my information. I have no evidence, but I know that every evening all politicians in the world are meeting and taking the daily stock: have we succeeded, are they asking themselves, to make the journalists today as well to only write about us, to make people only think about us and give us their whole time, fill their brain with our image, our speeches and even the gossip related to our lives? And the answer is YES, every time.

This type of dialogue between writer and journalist is generally followed by a long moment of silence. Afterwards, the writer is telling the journalist: be careful, you are starting to drift into fiction… Matei Vișniec  

About Matei Vișniec

Born on 29 January 1956 in Bucovina, Rădăuţi, fabulous city divided in half (including the cemetery) by a railroad representing for the author the symmetrical axis of the universe. His mother, Minodora, was a nursery school teacher, his father, Ioan, a clerk.

He made his debut with poetry in the fourth grade, when he versified a fable by La Fontaine. He then discovered in literature a zone of freedom and he nurtured himself with pages from Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Poe, Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, Nichita Stănescu and many other writers, not contaminated by Socialist Realism. He liked very much the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the fantastic stories, the absurd and grotesque theatre, the oneiric poetry and even the Anglo-Saxon realist theatre, in short, almost everything except the „official” literature of the Communist regime.

He studies philosophy in Bucharest and becomes very active within the 80’s generation, being a founding member of the Monday Literary Circle. He believes in cultural resistance and in the capacity of literature to overthrow totalitarianism. He especially believes that theatre and poetry may denunciate the manipulation of man through the „great ideas", as well as the brainwashing through ideological speeches.

Before 1987, he remarked himself in Romania through his purified, lucid and caustic poetry. As of 1977 he has been writing plays, which are massively circulating in the literary milieu, however they are banned from the professional stages.

In September 1987 he leaves Romania, arrives in France where he applies for political asylum, starts writing in French, works at BBC in London, and as of 1990 he has been a journalist for Radio France Internationale. He becomes a French citizen in 1993, but also keeps his Romanian citizenship, allowing him to ceaselessly build cultural bridges between the two countries, between Eastern and Western Europe, between two languages, two cultures and two sensibilities. As of 1987, since he has been living in France, his plays have transgressed the borders and his name has been on posters in approximately 40 countries. Matei Vişniec is also one of the most staged authors at the Avignon Theatre Festival (Off). But he is also the author of a prose which some critics consider atypical. A first novel, The Pass-Parol Café, written in 1983, has only been published after the fall of Communism. Panic Syndrome in the City of Lights was one of the most appreciated novels of the year 2009, receiving the award of the Observator Cultural magazine. A Merchant of Novel’s Beginnings (published in 2014 at Cartea Românească) was awarded the „Augustin Frăţilă" Prize. In 2009, he received the European Award of The French Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers. In Romania, his books were distinguished with countless prizes, among others the Award of the Romanian Academy and, repeatedly, the Writer’s Guild Drama Award (the most recent even in 2015, for the drama volume The Man from Whom the Evil was Extracted).

Recent Publications in Romania

Cartea Românească Publishing House: The Spider in the Wound (theatre), The Hole in the Ceiling (theatre),

The Human Trashcan & The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War (theatre), 2007; The Pass-Parol Café (novel) 2008; Panic Syndrome in the City of Lights (novel) 2009; The Release of Mr. K (novel) 2010; Dinner with Marx (poetry), 2011; Preventive Disorder (novel), 2012; Word Cabaret (theatre), 2013; A Merchant of Novel’s Beginnings (novel), The Man from Whom the Evil was Extracted(theatre), 2014. Paralela 45 Publishing House: The Town With a Single Inhabitant (poetry anthology), A Paris Attic Overlooking Death (theatre), 2005; The One-Winged Man (theatre), 2006; How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients (theatre), 2007; Just Imagine that You are God! (theatre), The Story of the Panda Bears told by a Saxophonist who has a Girlfriend in Frankfurt & Target-Woman and Her Ten Lovers (theatre) 2008; Occident Express & About the Sensation of Elasticity When Walking Upon Corpses(theatre), 2009; The Man in the Circle (short theatre anthology), 2011. Humanitas Publishing House: The Chekhov Machine & On the Frailty of Stuffed Seagulls (theatre) 2008; The Trial of Communism through Theatre (three plays with political topic, 2010); Love Letters to a Chinese Princess (prose – poetic theatre), 2011.

His plays and novels have been translated and published in Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Iran, and Morocco.

Translated by Simona Nichițeanu