ABSTRACT

In recent years, literary criticism has shown increased interest towards the manner in which fiction depicts (neo)extractivism as a set of practices whereby large quantities of natural resources are exploited for export. However, scholars have overlooked the manifestation of this phenomenon in areas and epochs other than post-1945 Latin America. Based on a close reading of two Romanian interwar novels – Cezar Petrescu's Pământ și cer and Mihail Sadoveanu's Nopțile de Sânziene – this article aims to demonstrate that extractive fictions played a decisive role in the emergence of magical realism as a narrative mode whereby the peripheries have left a distinctive mark on the configuration of world literature. My argument follows three consecutive steps: first, I explore how the two novels represent neoextractivism as a mechanism for the destruction of the biocoenosis and the othering of natives; then, I show that the magical, mythical, and supernatural distinguish themselves in the two works as the only instruments able to stop capitalist commodification; lastly, I show that the particular mode of representation the two novels deploy (which I label ‘proto-magical realism’) turns them into the missing link, on a transnational scale, between interwar social and regional fictions and early postwar magical realist works.

摘要

近年来，文学批评越来越显示出对小说将（新）极端主义描述为一系列习俗的方式的兴趣，由此大量自然资源被用于出口。但是，学者们忽视了这一现象在1945年后拉丁美洲以外的地区和时代的表现。基于对两部罗马尼亚两次战争期间小说的仔细阅读-塞萨尔·佩特雷斯库（Cezar Petrescu）的《帕姆塔恩·西尔》（Pământși cer）和米海尔·萨多维努亚（ Mihail Sadoveanu）的《诺佩莱·德·桑津纳》–本文旨在证明，提取小说在魔术现实主义作为一种叙事模式的出现中起了决定性作用，在这种叙事模式中，周围世界在世界文学的配置上留下了独特的印记。我的论点遵循三个连续步骤：首先，我探讨了这两种小说如何代表新极端主义作为破坏生物群落和其他人的机制。然后，我证明了魔术，神话和超自然现象在这两部作品中脱颖而出，是唯一能够阻止资本主义商品化的工具。最后，我证明了这两种小说所采用的特殊表现方式（我称之为“原始的现实主义”）使他们成为跨国规模的战间社会和区域小说与战后早期魔术现实主义作品之间的缺失环节。