AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO RUTA SEPETYS’ I MUST BETRAY YOU VIA LACAN

Abstract

The XXth century, known among others as a “culture of controversial ideologies,” was a time of accelerated technology and engineering feats, for stimulating the quick recovery of post-war industries in western countries, on the one hand and, of implementing the communist ideology in eastern countries, on the other. For approaching Ruta Sepetys’ novel “I Must Betray You,” where the writer is travelling back to the period of time previous to the 1989 Revolution in Romania, Lacan’s theory based on tackling the three registers of reality: the imaginary, approached in terms of the “spectacular,” the symbolic, referred to in terms of the meanings attached to those things around us, and the real, which paradoxically represents “precisely what is excluded from our reality, the margin of what is without meaning and which we fail to situate or explore” (60) will be employed as a methodological device to decode its intricate meaning. Bohn’s quantum theory will be also employed to enrich the previously mentioned interpretative grid, due to his approach to reality built of levels, “each level being comprised between two levels of reality” (qtd. in Sandu 2011: 164, our translation). Bohn’s highlighting the duality that exists “between the apparent multiplicity and the plenitude of the world” and the concept of “wrapped up order” (in Sandu 2011: 165, our translation) and Patapievici’s opinion that “the substance of the world being identical in every part of it and at any formal level, the differences appear through the degree of the wrapping and unfolding of the plenitude” (in Sandu 2011: 165, our translation) have been addressed in our article together with Bohn’s argument that the implicit order is meaningful only in relation to conscience, having “an ontological substation” (165).