1. His parents christened him Dimitrie, but he knew the appropriate name for himself, so he changed it to Demetru. He had said this himself, people should find names for themselves "in tune with their own personal reality, or they should change themselves, while that is still possible, changing their shapes and the roles they play, according to the only aesthetics of the names they have."He was born in 1883. His father was a doctor from Buzau; he loved science and did not love art. He sent his son to study medicine. Hypersensitive, the son could not put up with dissections and gave up medicine. He studied law, he served as a small-town judge, then he became a court clerk in Bucharest. He played the piano, he was crazy about concerts. He served in the procurement department during the war in Iasi; from a letter we find out that he was angry because they did not send him to the front. He was single. He wanted to travel a lot, but he only went to Budaki, by the end of his life. He wrote a few texts, read them to close friends, and laughed heartily. He polished, melted, made variants. He was 39 in 1922 when Tudor Arghezi published his first prose pieces. At 40, in 1923, he shot himself.His sister Eliza Vorvoreanu said: "He writes, he writes, copying files. Late at night, he sketches staves among them, with musical notes. You can tell he failed in life because he obeyed his parents blindly, and perhaps also in part due to his lack of will, his shyness, his fear of the public."When he gave up the absurd and used a rational discourse, Urmuz wrote this: "There are cases when God can only help you by giving you more and more suffering." 2. The Bizarre Pages, as the author names them, are original, avant-garde texts; they place Urmuz among the few great avant-garde writers in this country and in Europe. These pages, although few (so far 10 short texts have been discovered) have been the subject of many debates. Enthusiastic, ingenious, skeptical, rhetorical, or indecent words have been uttered about them. People used terms having to do with the literary revolutions of the 20th century: anti-literature, absurd, ludus, burlesque, angry negativism, avant-garde contempt, ambiguity, grotesque, the annulment of logic, sadism, erotic obsessions, demonism, abyssal investigation. In his pages people found themes present in all the innovating actions that gained momentum especially since 1922-1924: "mechano-morphic" man, ground-breaking space, psychological anxiety, empty transcendence, parody, scatological episodes, and, of course, the critique of the bourgeoisie, the critique of the capitalist society! All his exegetes recognize Urmuz as a forerunner. He is included in the family of great novelty promoters. He was recuperated by the history of literature. Although he would say that literature does not even exist, because it has been "consumed," "digested" in the stomach of his character Grummer. 3. When you read Urmuz' texts you see that critics were right to say so many things about them. More, you feel like adding new observations or bringing nuances to some of those already made. You feel like helping the prestigious crowd of philosophers who look for the stone cast in water. Urmuz' texts are indeed polymorphous and telling. A first reading appeals to the projective mechanisms set in motion by the act of writing. Urmuz' statements, following an analysis of the pulses encrypted in them, reveal an obsessive-anal, aggressive-phallic psychological dominant and a tendency to accumulate negative feelings. Another interesting aspect is formal, compositional: this is about ludus, the freedom to associate images, hazard, or a combining relativity.Today we know: displacing habits in formalizing one's discourse, shockingly denying the verbal mechanics are very valuable from the epistemic viewpoint. These things are seen in the communication between people (in paradoxical speech) and in some folk genres (jokes, proverbs), but literature is unable to integrate them functionally in literary species. Therefore, it shows its inability to cover the multiple registers of the being, and, at the same time, to participate in widening the gap between nature and nurture.Resorting to anti-literature may be a solution or a signal at the same time. A solution through the mental strategies it proposes, namely "black-box" thinking. A signal that the literature which ignores its impasse destroys itself. Urmuz' laughter is significant. In the belly of his grotesque character named Algazy "the ferments of the swallowed bladder had begun to awaken the thrills of the future literature."The contempt of the modernists for literature begins when writers, happy with the accessible functioning of the genres and with the acceptable organization of the literary market, no longer care about the limitations of art. And then Urmuz shows up and he is enthroned in his own right. *P.S. In Turkish the word "urmuz" means precious stone. In the Romany language, it means dejection, feces. Psychoanalysts know that gems are symbols of the feces, as both have to do with the anal complex; or, unrepressed with the appropriate laughter, they have to do with an ecclesiastical perception of things.
by Vasile Andru (b. 1942)
