LA FUGUE ROMANESQUE : UNE EXPÉRIENCE TRANSMÉDIALE [THE NOVELISTIC FUGUE: A TRANSMEDIAL EXPERIENCE]

Transmediality refers to a concept’s transformation across different media while retaining a recognizable core. In Dumitru Tsepeneag’s Vain Art of the Fugue (originally published as Arpièges, Paris, Flammarion, 1973), this is exemplified through a wordplay between “arpeges” (arpeggios) and “pièges” (traps), structuring the novel around the musical concept of the fugue. The fugue, a polyphonic musical genre, shapes Tsepeneag’s narrative through a rigorous, contrapuntal framework, redefining its musical origins within a literary context. Similarly, in The Bulgarian Truck, Tsepeneag employs transmediality by transitioning from real to virtual realms, using counterpoint to interweave fragmented memories and vivid imagery. These images often evoke violent realities and obsessions tied to a fugitive escaping Communist oppression. This transmedial approach creates a dynamic interplay, where music and cinema converge to explore themes of resistance, identity, and existential reflection, challenging conventional narrative structures and enriching literary expression through multifaceted artistic integration. Tsepeneag’s narratives exhibit “narrative schizophrenia,” where multiple characters experience the same events from diverse perspectives, guided by the fugue’s intricate structure. This creates a dual analytical framework: one explores captivity within cyclical time and confined space, reflecting themes of lost freedom and predetermined destinies; The other examines auto-theory, where narrative perception shifts through episodic, fragmented storytelling, fostering self-reflexivity and interpretive multiplicity. This redefines the literary process through transmedial interplay with music and cinema, creating a dynamic narrative that challenges traditional forms and enriches meaning through cross-artistic dialogues and innovative structural integration. Through these works, Tsepeneag harnesses the fugue’s musical principles to craft a transmedial narrative that engages with Romania’s socio-political context. From a transmedial perspective, literature emerges as a space of transfer and reconstruction across domains such as music and cinema, redefining itself through an interrogation of its own creative process. In the novel Vain Art of the Fugue, Dumitru Tsepeneag adopts the structure of a musical fugue, integrating musical and narratological principles. In The Bulgarian Truck, logic gives way to an intertextual dialogue with Marguerite Duras’s film Le Camion, where music and cinema become central narrative pillars. Associated with the Oniric group, Tsepeneag, alongside Leonid Dimov, proposed escapism through dreams as an act of resistance against politically imposed socialist realism. The intersection of music and literature finds precedents, such as in André Gide’s The Pastoral Symphony, where a blind character associates sounds with colors, inspired by Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Gide’s novel was adapted into a film in 1946 by Jean Delannoy. Through these works, transmediality highlights how literature absorbs and transforms elements from other arts, constituting a form of subversion through the novel. From a transmedial perspective, literature serves as a space where multiple artistic domains, such as music and cinema, converge and are reconstructed, prompting literature to reflect on its own creative process. While one might initially analyze the analogy with musical structures as intra-compositional intermediality with implicit formal imitation, Tsepeneag’s novels reveal a deeper metareferential process leading to transmediality. Transmediality in literature can be defined as the interplay of three or more instrumentalized fields, where their characteristics are transferred to literature, structuring it and encouraging self-interrogation about its creation.