HERTA MÜLLER: THE PERFORMANCE ART OF POETRY AND INTRA-FAMILIAL EXILE

At first glance, the poetry and short prose written by Herta Müller appear to be the work of two distinct authors. Poetry functions as the expression of a mental state: the collage-texts are meant to convey the imponderability of the whole through the weight concentrated at a spatial extreme. As an expression of plurality, this technique does not combine rigor and lucidity in the manner of conventional art. Only with confessional poetry does the author succeed in creating a linguistic and technical spectacle – a form of performative art. In her short prose, the stage is her native village itself, where a patriarchal community, marginalized by historical stigma, symbolically murders its own daughter simply because she dared to articulate the truth in an atypical, literary process of exorcising consciences through satire and parody. Beyond the writer’s debut, all these literary works reveal an invisible struggle of extraordinary ferocity: the dissident’s war with the Securitate, a struggle in which everything is permitted for the political police – including the ostracization of the writer by her own family – while the author herself is granted no right other than that of hope, a hope inaugurated only with her debut in Germany. The dissident’s success disrupts the mechanisms of the political police, and survival comes to mean, for Herta Müller, the overcoming of her own internal resources of femininity and identity.