The present study aims to encapsulate the emergence of the posthumanism (and of the posthuman, implicitly), seen as profoundly human, in Radu Vancu’s Transparenţa. The starting point for selecting the characteristics of such a posthumanism peculiar to Radu Vancu is represented by his literary study Elegie pentru uman: o critică a modernităţii poetice de la Pound la Cărtărescu. From his analysis upon the antihuman side of modernity’s project, I extract the four typologies through which literature has fought against (the social, political and artistic) dehumanization: corporeal, confessional, maximalist and sacred. Following at the same time Elegie pentru uman and Transparenţa I reach the conclusion that Radu Vancu uses in his novel all the aforementioned typologies in his project to restore the human. In other words, Elegie pentru uman, in its first part, is, in a way, an ars poetica, a drawing in nuce of the forthcoming novel. To this group of four typologies enlisted by Radu Vancu, I will add one more, peculiar to his writing, which emerges from the study as well as from the novel: poeticality.
The fifth category looms in the novel’s writing and in the reference to Ion Mureșan within Elegie pentru uman. Ion Mureșan described literature as the immune system, while the poets are seen as the antibodies of society. Thus, the poeticality within the novel is an immune system which helps the restoration of the human, becoming a key element of the posthuman fiction in Radu Vancu’s text.
The second part of the study will focus on the close reading of the function of some fictional objects in the posthuman narrative of Transparenţa. The selected fictional objects are the ones which are vital for the human salvation from the dehumanizing ghosts of recent history. Such fictional objects are: the body, the light, the text, the reader, Mega, Sibiu etc. Seen through the filter of a posthumanism deeply human at its core, the novel presents the story of a narrator who whishes to restore his lover and, implicitly, the whole world. To conclude in Dostoyevskian terms: humanity will save the world.
