SOCIO-CULTURAL IMAGINARY AND LITERARY FUNCTIONS OF CREMATION IN ROMANIAN EPIGRAMS

Although, at least to some extent, death seems to be no longer "forbidden" (T. Walter "The Revival of Death", 1994), in our days, cremation - as a practice of bodily disposal, as a social discourse and underlying imaginary - is still a subject difficult to tackle. The reluctance of The Romanian Orthodox Church (that, in contradistinction to the Catholic Church, maintains the interdiction to officiate the funeral ceremonies for the person who opts for cremation) continues to reinforce cremation as a taboo. No matter how socio-culturally un-elaborated, cremation is present as a topic in Romanian literature. The epigrams written when the Western cremationist ideas have penetrated in Romania (the second half of the nineteenth century) use cremation and its related elements (fire, ashes, to burn, crematorium) as an instrument for articulating social criticism on the ethical values of contemporaneousness and upon the meaning of life and reality in general. Also, the epigrams partially discard the predominant negative imaginary of these elements and contribute to the building of a new one, an imaginary capable of metaphoric crystallisations. Irony and self-irony are amongst the main ways of constructing this ambivalent imaginary of cremation. We aim at analysing the poetic and socio-cultural mechanisms that engender the occurrences of the cremation topic in the Romanian epigrams from the last decades and at examining to what extent the classical imaginary of cremation persists and to which extent it changes.