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Review of Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005, 206 pages
Éva Forgács
Art Center College of Design, Pasadena
Kirby Olson’s book defies categories, just like its subject, the idiosyncratic author
Andrei Codrescu, who comes from the land of the originators of Dada. Olson traces the
“surrealist vein” (19) or tradition in Codrescu’s oeuvre. He tries to grasp Codrescu’s elusive
figure and the abundant work of poetry, novels, essays, and other media rich in humor,
paradoxes, piercing observations and lyrical details, in order to locate Surrealism in his
work and activities in a broad sense (21). Each chapter is an attempt to nail down one of
Codrescu’s many personae: the Monte Rio commune hipster, the Paris visitor, the Romanian
poet, the suburban Baltimore family man, the wanderer, and the National Public Radio
commentator—to mention but a few—all of whom came to this country at the age of
eighteen “seeking for an America which was born in the Eastern European imagination”
(50).
Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America is not a scholarly work. It is not a monograph,
nor an analysis. It does not walk the reader through the life and works of Codrescu in
any systematic way. Olson has written an impressionistic series of episodic mini-essays
attempting to capture Codrescu the post-surrealist Surrealist, who does not befit any cluster
of critical theory. Nevertheless, Olson makes repeated efforts to construct a theoretical
context for him.
One of Codrescu’s insights is that the matter-of-fact description of certain aspects
of life in Eastern Europe passes for Surrealism or Dada outside the region. Reality is absurd,
and absurdity is real: Codrescu, as far as he is inspired by Eastern Europe, is a realist, just
as Franz Kafka’s story of Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning as a cockroach is, in
its core, a realistic description of a mental experience. Reality and sur-reality do not clearly
separate in Eastern Europe, and Codrescu makes good use of his early experience as an
American poet and writer. After all, Eastern Europe in general, and his native Romania in
particular, are not as different from the rest of the world as most people like to think, and
Eva Forgacs: eforgacs@artcenter.edu
Copyright © 2008 (Eva Forgacs). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

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Codrescu keeps rubbing in this observation (“the whole world is Balkanized,” 40).
To drive his point home, Codrescu playfully and seductively exaggerates. He juggles
the personae and functions of the poet, the entertainer, the writer, the humorist, and the
public intellectual. In language that is often hard to separate from Codrescu’s, Olson follows
Codrescu’s multi-persona figure that keeps serving up surprising and obviously stylized,
even distorted, facts, sure that it is precisely the witty distortions which will best highlight
the actual truth. For example, Olson quotes Codrescu’s play on the myth of Dracula (37),
giving the region “Transylvania” rather than “Romania” as his native country. Codrescu
colorfully describes Count Dracula as “Satan’s chief of staff,” and identifies him as “the
chief deity” of Halloween. Halloween, he claims, has outweighed Christmas “as the nation’s
greatest holiday,” which easily leads him to the conclusion that “Dracula is replacing Jesus
Christ.” Now that, as the reader knows full well, is a stretch. However, Codrescu speaks in
a tone that excuses him for talking apparent nonsense, and he directs the reader’s attention
and imagination to some kind of lingering element of truth in all his freewheeling talk. He
addresses the clichés snugly ensconced in most people’s minds because they are the easiest
to lampoon. The horror-cliché exploits the reader’s fascination with fear while reassuring
him or her that it is fictitious. After all, what Codrescu points out in this buoyant paragraph
is that the strange and the foreign are horrifying, and you love to be horrified as long as you
know that you do not really have to be afraid.
Codrescu’s humor, essay writing, and his sense for the absurd are fundamentally
rational. He combines the voice of a lucid observer with the attitude of comedians like the
Marx brothers. He taps the same source of humor: the clash of common sense with an
actual reality that leaves one stupefied by the nonsense one runs into at every step of the
way.
Writing a book about Codrescu is a challenge. The more so, because Codrescu is
“not yet half through with [his] life” (1) nor, thus, his work, as he himself points out in the
foreword. Apart from his many personae, he is hard to nail down as a citizen, too. He is an
exile: Romanian, Jewish, and American, but none completely. He is an outsider in his native
country as well as his chosen country—a position he carefully safeguards even when shaping
America’s culture in his capacity as a public intellectual. He is also an anti-authoritarian rebel,
another position he does not surrender. Codrescu programmatically escapes categorization
of every sort, due to his deep-set desire to slip out of every bracket and to play on his own
terms.
So is he a Surrealist? A Dadaist? Or any -ist?
Kirby Olson offers a collage of tentative answers. In the introduction subtitled
“Codrescu/Benjamin: Surreal Urbanism,” he points out similarities between Walter
Benjamin’s Arcade Project as urban mythology, and Codrescu’s taste for urban life and interest
in childhood memories. Featuring light-handed statements that remain unproven, the

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introduction anticipates some of the features of the chapters that follow. Quick mentions
of Gilles Deleuze, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Marx, Breton, and others
alternate with citations that replace arguments, and quick-silver statements, that are not
followed by analysis. Olson seems to be so fascinated by Codrescu as a multi-ego personality,
prolific writer and poet, that he mirrors his elusiveness in his own writing. The reader
receives snippets of Codrescu’s life—some details repetitiously mentioned, like his allegedly
“Berlitz fake” accent (36), his INS problems (36, 38), his feeling of having become American
(64, 70), and quotes from various of his works without an overview of his oeuvre to date.
The fundamental issues revisited throughout the book are Codrescu’s insider/
outsider status, and his experiences of totalitarianism in Romania and capitalism in
America, and the relationship between his intellectual work and politics. Codrescu comes
across as both an insider and outsider in the spaces he has inhabited. This complex
issue could be addressed in depth and in much detail, but the reader has to put up with
statements that do not amount to either a narrative or critical analysis: “Codrescu has
been an outsider almost from birth, and yet his effervescence triumphed over his wouldbe victimizers and he can now move back and forth between inside and outside at will”
(34); “The consummate outsider, Dracula, combined with a surrealist appeal, have turned
Codrescu into a considerable cultural force” (3); “Outside of his own national boundaries,
Codrescu is extremely difficult to understand” (39); “As an outsider looking in, he has built
a reputation that may eventually make him into a member of the American canon” (39);
“Just as prisoners make the best wardens, so outsiders will make the best preservers of our
traditions” (39); “By playing the role of outsider, Codrescu has become an insider” (41);
“Politics require an inside and an outside, while poetry must play on the line between them”
(44). More citations could follow. The author writes in overarching statements that do not
transcend the commonplace, and are always left up in the air or, at best, are supported by
a quote from a theoretical work but without weaving the quote into a consistent concept.
The title of Chapter 3, “Poetry/Politics: Codrescu as Surrealist Citizen?” promises to go in
depth on the question of whether Codrescu is a Surrealist or not. The question, however,
remains unanswered. Instead, we read about Romanian intellectuals’ favorite game, “The
Exquisite Corpse,” and the journal that Codrescu edited and published with this same title;
his problems with the INS and the FBI upon his arrival to America; the early Romanian
absurdist Urmuz; Dadaist Tristan Tzara; the substantial role of Jewish intellectuals in the
culture of Romania; and that Codrescu is an American poet in the tradition of Frank
O’Hara. Olson, of course, has a plethora of reasons to categorize Codrescu as a Surrealist,
but he does so without offering, at the least, a broad definition of Surrealism as a working
frame of reference. As there is only a vague consensus about the boundaries of Surrealism,
it is puzzling to read that at some point, Codrescu “goes down and down into the middle of
surrealist America” (55). One wonders what is surrealist America? We are given several even

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more puzzling attempts at grasping it. For example, he asks:
Can we have a society that is based on playful thinking? (…) It seems more
and more that this is the new utopia that was outlined by Surrealism, one
perhaps more in keeping with the work of utopian Charles Fourier, than
Karl Marx. (…) Codrescu writes (…): ‘America is de facto surrealist. There
is no need to upset ‘reality’ here. ‘Reality is manufactured continually.’ (49)
Olson ties Codrescu to American Surrealism also because he chose to live in New Orleans,
considering, at least in hindsight, that many writers found New Orleans’ “genteel decrepitude
well suited to dreaming” (18). Although he quotes a casual remark of Codrescu’s, Olson
fails to clarify the meaning of “dream” in the context of Surrealism. André Breton
understands “dream” in the Freudian sense, a “psychic activity (…) taking into consideration
only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dream of sleep,” while Codrescu uses the word
in the sense of musing, daydreaming, or imagining things.1 All these activities are part of the
surrealist landscape, but “dream” is one of the few central technical terms of Surrealism one
cannot mess with; one has to clearly define it in a text on, or related to, Surrealism.
The question of Codrescu’s political views and experience is handled with similar
hesitation. The book includes many of his political bon mots, representing him as an anarchohipster rebel and anti-Stalinist who is unfailingly on the right side of every divide, except for
Olson’s misgivings about Codrescu’s passion for guns. There are brief paragraphs on the
importance of poetry in totalitarian dictatorships scattered all over the book (e.g., 48), but
the political landscape is not described in a coherent way. Ceausescu’s Romania is referred
to episodically in Chapter 12, “Good/Evil: Ceausescu,” and the reader only learns what
exactly happened in December 1989 from one of the appendices in excerpts from an essay
by Roxana Maria Crisan (in which the name of a key figure, Reverend László Tökés, is
consistently misspelled).
In conclusion, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America fails to deliver what it
presumably intended to accomplish. The attempt to enmesh Codrescu’s work into the fabric
of critical theory and American Surrealism remains unconvincing: to insert him credibly
into the discourse marked by the names of Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Hannah
Arendt, and many other thinkers cited in the book would take a greater effort and a more
articulate, autonomous vision by the author. The appendix includes interviews that the
author conducted with Codrescu, “On his novel Messiah,” “On Poetry,” “On Politics,” and
“On the Novel Wakefield.” They are witty, personal exchanges where the author’s theoretical
approach sometimes frontally collides with Codrescu’s anti-intellectual persona, although
at some points Codrescu concedes to reasoning through and interpreting other poets or
thinkers. However, Olson’s book is colorful and reads well, and one of its successes is

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the vivid evocation of Codrescu’s shrewd ideas, courageous life, lively voice and teasing
intonation.

1 André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), in Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans.
Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 10-11.