Review: Eliade's "The Forbidden Forest"

Last summer, watching me struggle through the symbolisms of my dreams, Sophie recommended that I look into the work of Mircea Eliade, who she had heard of in reference to a class on narrative she was taking. I immediately picked up a copy of "The Sacred and the Profane," which while presenting some interesting theories struck me as being somewhat meandering in tone and content. In the fall, during my Myth Symbol and Ritual class, I had a greater chance to look into Eliade's writing, and began to appreciate the depth of his scholarship and research into the field of comparative mythology and symbolism. However, as my teacher pointed out, while Eliade is known in America primarily for his work as the "founder" of the study of the history of religions, in Europe he is perhaps better known for his novels. In fact, some of his critics argue that Eliade's academic work is marred by a rather literary mindset, in which he seeks to present his material like a labyrinthine narrative more befitting of the magical realism of Marquez or Borges, and that his theories on mythology, and in particular the idea of the eternal return and the terror of history, were highly shaped by Eliade's youth in Romania between the World Wars. All this somewhat delighted me, and I was quite pleased to find in the school library a copy of Eliade's fictional masterpiece, "The Forbidden Forest."

Set in Romania and other parts of Europe in the years leading up to and through the second World War, this is the story of Stefan Vizeru, a man who desperately seeks to escape from the clutches of time, as his county and life are destroyed around him. Eliade presents this through startling psychological portraits of characters who all desperately attempt to live in their own personal mythologies, while furthering his own specific theories of hierophanies, the eternal return, etc. The Romanian title of the novel roughly translates as "The Night of Saint John," and the tale opens with Stefan meeting a young woman Ileana, named after a princess in Romanian folklore, who he searches for throughout the next twelve years until he meets her again on that same night in the same forbidden forest. Stefan is obsessed with finding experiences that are more real than real, such as a car that he believes the girl arrived in, or the mysterious woman Zissu whose name is mentioned while he is listening through a wall. Again and again, Stefan returns to the same characters and places, so that the whole novel, and all the historic events that take place in it, feel that they are really a dream lived between the two meetings in the forest. While many modern (or post-modern) novels try to make use of mythology, they often end up using stale tropes, whereas Eliade's exhaustive work on the subject is instead woven masterfully into his character's lives, so that they end up living out their own versions of the classic myths. Similarly, Eliade seems aware that he can only fully depict someone trying to escape from time by accurately depicting them in a historical setting, and the places where that "real world" seems to stop functioning and another time breaks through. On the whole, this novel bespeaks of a masterful grasp of symbols, storytelling, and a desire to break through the real world into a time that may indeed seem more real to those who seek to live it.