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Absence as Metanarrative Strategy in Mircea Horia Simionescu’s The Auction: Deformations and Hermeneutic Reconfigurations

This paper aims to analyze Mircea Horia Simionescu’s novel, Licitația (The Auction), in order to investigate its metanarrative strategies. The article intends to delve into M. H. Simionescu’s volume and the way it displays the Romanian postmodern paradigm through the means of irony, fragmentation, metalepsis, trans- and intertextuality. The Romanian author switches back and forth between hypo- and hyperdiegesis, unveiling the multi-level structure of his work that allows us to explore its metafictional techniques. An analysis of the metanarrative techniques reveals a threefold structure: the non-linear and fragmentary literary discourse, marked by disintegrated syntax, the ubiquitous condition of the in absentia narrator and, finally, the attempt to recover the stories and histories that create the narrative web or, in other words, the novel’s intertextual strategies.