The Narrative of Clan Clustering in Two American Novels

Bruce Benderson’s The Romanian (2006) and Andrei Codrescu’s The Poetry
“Lesson” (2010) promote a somewhat clannish agenda, enduring in story telling despite the
pluralistic kind of society the North Atlantic mainstream culture pledges to build. Way too
diverse in kind and nature to be safely defined, this view of the world readily available in
Western narrative fiction accounts for much of the bias still displayed presently by the novel
genre. Explicitly, the cultural backdrop of (Eastern) otherness against which the plot unfolds
is the litmus test of the professed inclusive values of the cosmopolitan Westerner. The
metropolitan cultures’ competence in policing the civilizational divide between the many
worlds available inside and outside the American-European cultural continuum shows
through the pages of the books. For example, the two English-written novels dwell on the
marginal Romanian identity in order to narrate the world-making patterns of fictional
invention. The American Bruce Benderson employs extensively the stock language of
orientalism, while the American-naturalized Romanian Andrei Codrescu touches on the
identity narratives of his home country. Conclusively, I find that both narrators largely
exemplify the value-laden language of narration in terms of instrumentalizing the ethos of
the E. U. enlargement and the European heritage.