CULTURAL CODES AND MORAL REPRESENTATIONS IN POST/COMMUNIST FICTION
CULTURAL CODES AND MORAL REPRESENTATIONS IN POST/COMMUNIST FICTION

Summary/Abstract: This paper argues that in order to define what morality and immorality meant for the people who lived in the Communist regime one must abandon pre-determined frames of interpretation and must engage in an exercise of moral scaling. Seeing the world through the eyes of the social actors as they were created and represented in some of the novels written at the end of Communism helps us move from a polar, disjunctive vision of what a moral life is or should be. Making (moral) sense out of an amoral, corrupted context meant a personal effort to harmonize a confusing juxtaposition of cultural codes, of Communist ideals and rituals and their very different daily life counterparts and, at the same time, of alternative influences (Western models and expectations, humanist traditions). Some of the Romanian novels of the 80s capture this personal, non-heroic quest, of adapting and carrying on, by giving us a thick description of the Communist regime, thus helping us immerse in a universe that was still unfolding without an end in sight. In this case, morality can be best understood if we employ concepts such as marginality, living simultaneously in several worlds without being fully integrated into one of them, a condition which distorts cultural codes and molds identities in unpredictable ways. Exercising our moral faculties together with unexceptional characters, “thrown” into a world without solid roots and deprived of external systems of reference, may help us understand how someone could still try to create a meaningful life even in the direst of circumstances.

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