The Totalitarian Ideological Discourse and the Literature of the Captive Mind

Literature in the totalitarian space is placed in a dystopian register constructed in reference to a system imposing upside-down values. Marin Preda weaves a fictional pattern relating to the social-political system. Entering the memorialist pattern, a literary work like Viaţa ca o pradă (Life as a prey, 1977) marked, on the one hand, the novelist's perspective of the world and a mirror image of the genesis of the fictional text, on the other hand. The divorce between the I and the world gives birth to a new perspective upon the writing. The alienation represents a stage of the axiological perversion felt by the dilemmatic creator. Most of the times, the literary works become parables of the contemporary human's tragism, chronotopes of the abandonment before a restrictive system of ideas. The upside-down perspective upon the relationship between logos and existence manifests itself via textual strategies ranging from the parodic return to history, the un-solemnisation of the discourse, and the capitalisation of the prosaism up to the ostentatious mythologisation of the banal. In its relating to reality, fiction seems to transcend history with its preference to recompose a dystopian version of the universe, which mirrors the captive mind.