Gherasim Luca: Creating the No Man’s Language

JOURNAL ARTICLE

Andrea Danila

The Birch Journal, Spring 2023, pp. 48-55.

What is the no man’s language? In a 1962 notebook, the Surrealist writer Gherasim Luca expressed his estrangement from both Romanian, his maternal tongue, and French, his adopted language, seeking a departure from intelligible language entirely. Born Zolman Locker in Bucharest in 1913, Luca began his career in Romania. His family were Ashkenazi Jews, and in addition to Romanian, he spoke Yiddish, German, and French. At a young age, he established his lit- erary credentials as a founder of the Romanian Surrealist movement. But, as fascism and antisemitism took root in Romania, Luca was forced to aban- don his native tongue. Harassed and captured while trying to leave the country, he was finally able to escape in 1952 to Israel, where he lived for a short period of time before moving to Paris. There, he wrote his most prom- inent prose, poetry, and theory (pri- marily non-oedipal theory) in French. But, even up through his death in 1994, Luca refused to embrace the French language or nationality. Having spent forty years in France without offi- cial papers, Luca was evicted from his Parisian apartment. Unable to cope, he committed suicide by jumping into the Seine. Luca had spent his whole life as an “apatrid,” or a stateless person, belonging to no language, nation, or society, which reflects in his art.

Throughout his work, Luca devotes himself to the idea of not belonging or conforming, choosing to rebel against popular theories and reject conventions of writing. A revolutionary, he pioneers his own “no man’s language” through several methods that I will examine throughout this paper. My primary aim is to elucidate Luca’s methods for attacking oedipal thought. It is important to note that trademarks of the Surrealist move- ment, such as Freudian hermeneutics and a compulsion with the Oedipus complex, are noticeably absent from Luca’s prose and poetry. Instead, he is preoccupied with finding a solution to the Oedipus complex. He believed it was possible to surpass it through the development of non-oedipal thought, which he broadly defined as “revolutionary thought,” whether it was personal or political. Hence, within the scope of this paper, I focus both on his denial of Freudian con- cepts in relation to the personal––one’s psyche––and his rejection of fixed frame- works in relation to the political––oedi- pal society. Furthermore, I examine how Luca’s non-oedipal thought allows him to reach reflections about language often missed by his peers. More concretely, I analyze his critique of language as first as a means of intrapersonal communication and then as an effective social system. Lastly, I conclude with an assessment of Luca’s identity as a Jewish artist and writer and a commentary on the weapon- ization of language - or lack thereof - in relation to society, politics, and human- ity. Looking at his work through this lens, Luca’s motivation to develop such a language - the no man’s language - that was not bound by any of those elements ultimately becomes evident.