Ion Luca Caragiale - Collective Characters

Collective Characters

Confessing at some point that "the world was my school", Caragiale dissimulated his background and critical eye as a means to blend into each environment he encountered, and even adopted the manners and speech patterns he later recorded in his literary work. He thus encouraged familiarity, allowing people to reveal their histories, motivations, and culture. Vianu recounted: "The man was a consummate actor and a pince-sans-rire, an ironist to the point where his partners of dialog were never sure if they were spoken to «seriously» ." In one of his pieces from 1899, he welcomed the famous actors Eleonora Duse and Jean Mounet-Sully to Bucharest, imitating the exaggerated style of other theater chroniclers—the article ended with Caragiale confessing that he had not actually seen the two perform. In one other instance, as a means to comment on plagiarism, the author also parodied his own O făclie de Paşte—which he turned into the sketch, Noaptea Învierii.

In 1907, din primăvară până în toamnă, his late and disillusioned work, Caragiale lashed out at the traditional class of political clients, with an indictment which, Tudor Vianu believed, also served to identify the main focus of his other writings:

"plebs incapable of work and lacking employment, impoverished suburban small traders and street vendors, petty dangerous agitators of the villages and of the areas adjacent to towns, bullying election agents; and then the hybrid product of all levels of schooling, semi-cultured intellectuals, lawyers and lawyerlings, professors, teachers and teacherlings, semi-illiterate and unfrocked priests, illiterate schoolteachers—all of them beer garden theorists; next come the great functionaries and the little clerks, most of them removable from office."

Direct criticism was nonetheless rare in Caragiale's fiction: Vianu believed to have found traces of it in O scrisoare pierdută ("the most cruel ") and in Grand Hotel "Victoria română" ("the most bitter"). On several occasions, Caragiale showed or even defined himself as a sentimental, and his modesty was acknowledged by several of his friends. Vianu noted that, alongside his Christian ethos, this contributed to his distant, calm and often sympathetic overall take on society. In his words:

"A wave of charm, of reconciliation with life passes above all, one which, if it only assumes light and superficial shapes, experienced by naive people with harmless manias, is a sign that the collective existence is taking place in shelter from the great trials."

In contrast with this, Poporanist critic Garabet Ibrăileanu argued that Caragiale actually hated the people who inspired his works, and claimed that the writer had made this clear during one of their conversations. His account was considered doubtful by researcher Ştefan Cazimir, who believed that Ibrăileanu was using it to back a polemic and singular overview of Caragiale's work.

According to Vianu, there is a manifest difference between Ion Luca Caragiale's comedies and his Momente şi schiţe: the former are, in his view, driven by situations and circumstances, whereas the latter sees Caragiale developing his original perspective to its fullest. This, he argues, was determined by important social changes—a move from a traditional world—awkwardly attempting to digest Westernization, modernization, and Francized culture—, to a more stable and prosperous environment. A similar division was applied by Ibrăileanu.