The Dream of the Three (?) Rakes of the Old Court and Its “Reperformances”

Starting from the narrator’s dream that occurs towards the end of Mateiu Caragiale’s Craii de Curtea Veche (1929), Rakes of the Old Court in Sean Cotter’s translation (2021), I will focus on the whole novel, and in particular the dream passage, as stylistically and linguistically a prototype of lush decadence. The translated version is, in Sean Cotter’s account, a “reperformance” of Mateiu’s performance. Mateiu’s Bucharest is “aux portes de l’Orient, où tout est pris à la légère …”, so one needs to take the rakes’ comedy with a pinch of humour. At the same time, there is a crepuscular sadness and there is pathos in these mock-aristocrats’ way of living in this liminal city repeatedly ravaged by arsons, earthquakes, floods, epidemics, wars and plundering expeditions. Togetherness and greatness are in the rakes’ dreams, but in actuality the rakes are mixed-blood adventurers, whose escapades drive them to disasters, grandiose losses, a sense of futility and gnawing loneliness. In spite of the dream, nothing really coheres, and the emblem of the crass incoherence of various layers of reality is the Arnoteanus’ place, another focus of my analysis. I also argue that Bucharest has a “stratigraphic” pattern in Westphal's terms, where space is multilayered and time is asynchronic, and where the city becomes an intersection of spatial strata and temporal slices.