Eclecticism and classification attempts For reasons unknown, H. Bonciu refused to openly affiliate with any of the many
interwar literary factions which thrived in
Greater Romania. Writing in 2005, Simona Vasilache presented Bonciu as "a lonely dreamer, terrified by the world like a baby is of bad dreams". Researcher
Paul Cernat also presented Bonciu as isolated from the Romanian avant-garde, and as such "perhaps a
franc-tireur". According to critic Gabriela Glăvan, Bonciu's literature is "hybrid" and "borderline" in that it combines "an Expressionism with avant-garde touches" with "slides into the
oneiric and
Surrealism. [...] His fragmentary poetic devices, alongside the uncertainty of his belonging to any literary genre, are sufficient elements for Bonciu's classification as an unusual author." The same is noted by critic Florina Pîrjol, who reads in Bonciu "a strange mix of the Expressionistic grotesque and the Surrealistic tenderness." Other literary historians presume the same connections.
Dan Grigorescu suggests that Bonciu's Expressionism was mostly "exterior", spread over Jugendstil, Impressionism, Surrealism and various
eclectic mixtures; Marian Victor Buciu focuses on Bonciu as a meeting point between the "Naturalist typology" and Expressionism, noting that his Surrealism is less supplied. Such nuances notwithstanding, H. Bonciu's contribution was readily annexed to the school of Romanian Expressionism. Dan Grigorescu traces the literary phenomenon to its source: "In what concerns H. Bonciu, critics have passed a more resolute judgment than on any other Romanian writer to have ever been considered a bearer of Expressionist ideas: he was without doubt the one who generated least debate." After it became a point of reference, the definition of Bonciu's work as "Expressionist" created some debate among 20th-century scholars. The issue was notably raised by researcher
Ovidiu Cotruș, who found it improbable that Romanian Expressionism was as diverse as to reunite the mystical poetry of
Lucian Blaga and the crude language of
Bagaj.... He therefore demanded some kind of critical revision. However, according to cultural historian
Ion Pop, Bonciu remains Romania's only "integral Expressionist", although, even in this context, Bonciu's work "did not record any significant [Expressionist] shakes".
Bonciu and Trăirism With his search for "
authenticity" in subject and expression, and despite his avant-garde credentials, Bonciu is sometimes included among the younger-generation
Trăirists, alongside
Max Blecher,
Mircea Eliade,
Anton Holban or
Mihail Sebastian. Crohmălniceanu, who finds an ultimate source of literary
Trăirism in narratives by
André Gide, describes Bonciu's novels as "impressive literary documents" of the
Trăirist movement. Described as the more experimental voice of this subgenre, and opposed to Holban's conventional approach, According to reviewer Igor Mocanu, Bonciu, Blecher and Fântâneru share between them a transgression of avant-garde aesthetics and a taste for
absurdism: "These three authors would create [...] a new way of making literature, which took a tiny bit from all the currents and movements of its time. We are dealing with books where, emerging out of an evidently surreal depictions, one comes across dialogues heavily impregnated with the absurd." In Bonciu's novels and his poetry, the sexual function is a tool of apparent liberation, man's only possible flight from existential despair. Beyond the 1937 scandal, Bonciu's breach of sexual convention in his literary subjects was especially criticized by mainstream literati. According to Călinescu, Bonciu suffered from literary "
priapism", as well as being a "verbose" and "
sentimentalist" author. while Cernat suggests that Bonciu's original denunciators barely hid their politicized agenda: "a
xenophobic accusation of Jewified, anti-national, pornography". For Călinescu, one of Bonciu's interests as a storyteller is his ability to merge a
fantasy narrative and "piercing" realistic episodes; others are his "fine bitterness" and "personal note of humor", even when alternating with "sad clownings". of Romanian literary culture. Ion Simuț writes that Bonciu, a "minor writer", generally displays "the tricks and clichés of aesthetic and moral nonconformity." Florina Pîrjol defines Bonciu's forte as being his portraiture, but notes that his narratives lack "dynamism and coherence". Writing in 2005, Simuț found Bonciu "outdated" and "utterly modest" as a poet, linking his work in the field with the late-19th-century
Decadent movement. As argued by Crohmălniceanu: "Everything [here] becomes a chemical chart for the despair which his clowning is striving to keep hidden from view." He believes that the peak of such works is
Brom, where anxiety builds up at the thought of demonic forces about to "sweep us up". Reviewers have made special note of "Living Words", the artistic credo found in
Lada cu năluci: Also remembered is a poem which introduces (and is introduced by) the word
bleah, invented by Bonciu as an expression of absolute disgust. Literary columnist
Radu Cosașu had admiringly described the novel term as "a word of havoc, invented by that dark wonder, the poet Bonciu, [...] a word of enigmatic transparency, untranslatable". "I and the Orient", the title of Bonciu's collected sonnets, is likely a reflection of Bonciu's debt to
Hanns Heinz Ewers'
India and I.
Bagaj... posing with his fresco. 1914 photograph by
Josef Anton Trčka In his presentation of
Bagaj...,
Tudor Arghezi argued of H. Bonciu: "From a sty of crude colors, with plenty of gilded gossamer rubbed into it, his thick and greasy brush [...] paints into the fresco of our spiritual bedlam".
Felix Aderca too campaigned for the novel and its "pages of genius". although he noted that Bonciu's text was not a fully formed novel. Later revealed as Bonciu's
alter ego, the narrator of
Bagaj... focuses his attention on the more peculiar protagonist, Ramses Ferdinand Sinidis. The plot is, in fact, a
story within a story: Bonciu reads through Sinidis' "black notebook", left unopened after its author was murdered. The killer is a Man with Copper Beak (
Omul cu ciocul de aramă), whose confession to Bonciu is also rendered as a detailed story. The murder was carried out for an absurd reason, and the Man with Copper Beak is haunted by the memory. He does not regret Sinidis' death, but consumed by another, unwitting, murder: his improvised weapon has also pierced through a malevolent dwarf who lived in Sinidis' body, and whom Sinidis despised. Beyond the pretext, the "black notebook" is an ample excursion into a sordid, self-destructive and peripheral environment, where real-life events merge with the purely fantastical. Vasilache sees in it a
Wunderkammer comprising "violent initiations into the brutal life of the senses, interrupted then and now by brief mortuary rituals", According to Glăvan, the plot is "a trajectory of the ego's unraveling", with "a certified propensity toward the voluptuousness of self-annulment", and an (anti-)
Bildungsroman. Sinidis depicts his cruel adolescence and
Oedipus conflict, his erotic experiences with two partners (the virginal heartthrob Laura, and the submissive mistress on the side), the trauma of a participation in
World War I, and a cynical case of
bankruptcy. As a brief interlude in his self-destructive discourse, Sinidis makes eulogistic comments about a promised
world revolution, about "
Bolshevik" ethics and a
universal language, but has to defend his ideas against the dwarf that lives inside him. The creature then forces his host into an unloving marriage with Zitta, and Ramses' murder occurs just as he decides to end it; he and his murderer then make their way into an infernal
brothel. In the closing episode of
Bagaj..., Sinidis accepts his spiritual deconstruction, and looks to an eternity of degrading and bestial sexual acts with the "sweet-fleshed" prostitute Peppa. Sindis' recurrent obsession is death, and he prophesies in detail about being an
out-of-body witness to his funeral service and incineration, content that the flames would also consume his parasite. His tormented life is intertwined with those of desperate
anti-heroes, including a
gout-afflicted man who severs his own fingers, or a
driller who was burned alive. When read as a camouflaged record of actual events in Bonciu's life, the novel reveals his claims about having been a witness to Vienna's artistic life under the
Double Monarchy: Viennese writers such as Altenberg, Petzold, Wildgans,
Peter Hille,
Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
Arthur Schnitzler,
Stefan Zweig appear as characters, and
Endre Ady is a literary prototype. The
autofictional element in
Bagaj... was highlighted by Romania's other literati, beginning with
Anton Holban's review in
Adevărul. Holban gave praise to the work as a source of "delight", and first suggested that Bonciu belonged in the same category as
Louis-Ferdinand Céline or
Axel Munthe. Furthermore, Crohmălniceanu sees the novel as incorporating elements from a literary branch of the "
New Objectivity" movement: Klabund, but also
Erich Kästner, as authors of "atrocious, sarcastic, grotesque and brutal realism". Others see the nightmarish protagonists as cultural echoes from the
Bizarre Pages of Romanian
absurdist author
Urmuz.
Pensiunea doamnei Pipersberg In
Pensiunea doamnei Pipersberg, Bonciu preserves his narrator persona and revives Ramses Sinidis. The novel, variously read as a continuation opens with the meeting between Ramses and the storyteller; Sinidis has been afflicted by muteness, but, at the very time of this encounter, a bizarre accident forces his voice back. The two then proceed to reconstruct the missing portions of Sinidis' life, an
intertextual exercise in which protagonist advises writer how to best perform his task. The background themes are despair and solitude: Ramses is on the search for someone to share his existential burden, The plot is in large part focused on the eponymous "boarding house", in fact a brothel. There are three correspondents of the "black notebook", which obsess about the themes other than death: "Book of the Flesh", "Book of the Wine", "Book of the Soul". The sexual act is again depicted in key moments of the book, showing Sinidis' first sexual experience, with a
laundress, or his later intercourse with "a cow-woman" (according to Simuț, these scenes are passionate but not in fact obscene). The needy Lenny Pipersberg and her daydreaming prostitutes
reify the feeling of inadequacy—the girl Nora despises the natural green of her hair, and kills herself in desperation. According to Pîrjol, this is a book of "quasi-theatrical
melancholy", alternating the "cruel" and the "implausible-
bucolic", especially adept at describing "abjection". The novel, she notes, is
antifeminist, showing women piled up in Sinidis' collection of escapades, "as if in an
insect box." ==Legacy==