STRATIFICATIONS OF THE IMAGINARY IN THE CARTOGRAPHY OF THE SURREALIST SELF (“THE PATH OF THE SNAKE” BY GELLU NAUM)

Abstract

An aesthetic product of a fluid vision of existence, by erasing the boundaries between interior and exterior, the surrealist self is itself a system of communicating vessels supported by the project of totality, but a totality of a dynamic, energetic nature, unlike the synthetic totality of the romantic one. If the romantic self, with which it shares the dream of totality and centrality, is an idealistic conceptual projection (a transcendental construct), The surrealist self functions through introjection, as it internalizes the world by transfiguring it on a psychic level, through a logic of the included middle as an energetic operator (like the “psychic universe” described by Ștefan Lupașcu). In The Way of the Serpent, Gellu Naum creates a discreet cartography of the self, in an esoteric sense, in the form of an initiatory guidance through an ambivalent realm (inside-outside / intensive-extensive), driven from desire within, of intuition; this “muse” self, both immanent and transcendent (which transcends itself endlessly from the core of its own immanence) is the opposite of the expansive, totalizing romantic consciousness. Precisely because it is no longer an idealistic abstraction but a psychic infra/supra-reality, the difficulty of conceptualization determines the recourse to a stratification of imaginary registers, from the imaginary of quantum physics, logic, psychology, to the esoteric imaginary, of shamanism and mysticism. The fluidity of the surrealist vision of existence is therefore reflected in an epistemological fluidity, in a transdisciplinary transgressiveness.